Mona Lisa Overdrive

21 - The Aleph

As the sun rose, still no power for the 100-watt bulbs, Gentry's loft filled with a new light. Winter sunlight softened the outlines of the consoles and the holo table, brought out the texture of the ancient books that lined sagging chipboard shelves along the west wall. As Gentry paced and talked, his blond roostertail bobbing each time he spun on a black bootheel, his excitement seemed to counter the lingering effects of Cherry's sleep-derms. Cherry sat on the edge of the bed, watching Gentry but glancing occasionally at the battery telltale on the stretcher's superstructure. Slick sat in a broken-down chair scrounged from the Solitude and recushioned with transparent plastic over wadded pads of discarded clothing.

To Slick's relief, Gentry had skipped the whole business of the Shape and launched straight into his theory about the aleph thing. As always, once Gentry got going, he used words and constructions that Slick had trouble understanding, but Slick knew from experience that it was easier not to interrupt him; the trick was in pulling some kind of meaning out of the overall flow, skipping over the parts you didn't understand.

Gentry said that the Count was jacked into what amounted to a mother-huge microsoft; he thought the slab was a single solid lump of biochip. If that was true, the thing's storage capacity was virtually infinite; it would've been unthinkably expensive to manufacture. It was, Gentry said, a fairly strange thing for anyone to have built at all, although such things were rumored to exist and to have their uses, most particularly in the storage of vast amounts of confidential data. With no link to the global matrix, the data was immune to every kind of attack via cyberspace. The catch, of course, was that you couldn't access it via the matrix; it was dead storage.

"He could have anything in there," Gentry said, pausing to look down at the unconscious face. He spun on his heel and began his pacing again. "A world. Worlds. Any number of personality-constructs ... "

"Like he's living a stim?" Cherry asked. "That why he's always in REM?"

"No," Gentry said, "it's not simstim. It's completely interactive. And it's a matter of scale. If this is aleph-class biosoft, he literally could have anything at all in there. In a sense, he could have an approximation of everything ... "

"I gotta feeling off Kid Afrika," Cherry said, "that this guy was paying to stay this way. Kinda wirehead action but different. And anyway, wirehead's don't REM like that ... "

"But when you tried to put it out through your stuff," Slick ventured, "you got that ... thing." He saw Gentry's shoulders tense beneath black-beaded leather.

"Yes," Gentry said, "and now I have to reconstruct our account with the Fission Authority." He pointed at the permanent storage batteries stacked beneath the steel table. "Get those out for me."

"Yeah," Cherry said, "it's about time. I'm freezing my ass."

They left Gentry bent over a cyberspace deck and went back to Slick's room. Cherry had insisted they rig Gentry's electric blanket to one of the batteries so she could drape it over the stretcher. There was cold coffee left on the butane stove; Slick drank it without bothering to reheat it, while Cherry stared out the window at the snow-streaked plain of the Solitude.

"How'd it get like this?" she asked.

"Gentry says it was a landfill operation a hundred years ago. Then they laid down a lot of topsoil, but stuff wouldn't grow. A lot of the fill was toxic. Rain washed the cover off. Guess they just gave up and started dumping more shit on it. Can't drink the water out there; fulla PCBs and everything else."

"What about those rabbits Bird-boy goes hunting for?"

"They're west of here. You don't see 'em on the Solitude. Not even rats. Anyway, you gotta test any meat you take around here."

"There's birds, though."

"Just roost here, go somewhere else to feed."

"What is it with you 'n' Gentry?" She was still looking out the window.

"How do you mean?"

"My first idea was maybe you were gay. Together, I mean."

"No."

"But it's kind of like you need each other some way ... "

"It's his place, Factory. Lets me live here. I ... need to live here. To do my work."

"To build those things downstairs?"

The bulb in the yellow cone of fax came on; the fan in the heater kicked in.

"Well," Cherry said, squatting in front of the heater and unzipping one jacket after another, "he may be crazy but he just did something right."

Gentry was slouched in the old office chair when Slick entered the loft, staring at the little flip-up monitor on his deck.

"Robert Newmark," Gentry said.

"Huh?"

"Retinal identification. Either this is Robert Newmark or someone who bought his eyes."

"How'd you get that?" Slick bent to peer at the screen of basic birth stats.

Gentry ignored the question. "This is it. Push it and you run into something else entirely."

"How's that?"

"Someone wants to know if anyone asks any questions about Mr. Newmark."

"Who?"

"I don't know." Gentry drummed his fingers on his black leather thighs. "Look at this: nothing. Born in Barrytown. Mother: Marsha Newmark. We've got his SIN, but it's definitely been tagged." He shoved the chair back on its casters and swung around so that he could see the Count's still face. "How about it, Newmark? Is that your name?" He stood up and went to the holo table.

"Don't," Slick said.

Gentry touched the power stud on the holo table.

And the gray thing was there again, for an instant, but this time it dived toward the core of the hemispherical display, dwindled, and was gone. No. It was there, a minute gray sphere at the very center of the glowing projection field.

Gentry's crazy smile had returned. "Good," he said.

"What's good?"

"I see what it is. A kind of ice. A security program."

"That monkey?"

"Someone has a sense of humor. If the monkey doesn't scare you off, it turns into a pea ... " He crossed to the table and began to root through one of the panniers. "I doubt if they'll be able to do that with a direct sensory link." He held something in his hand now. A trode-net.

"Gentry, don't do it! Look at him!"

"I'm not going to do it," Gentry said. "You are."