Carved names and slogans had been added over the years; otherwise the desk hadn’t changed since Jillian’s seventh birthday.
Seated in it, awaiting her, was Beverly.
Beverly wore a frilly white sundress, barely ruffled by the tide. Her high cheekbones were those of Lilith Shomer, Jillian’s mother. Her heavy brows and strong mouth were mapped from Gregory Shomer, Jillian’s father. Her hair was blond with a gleam of fine copper threads. Her eyes were a deep and tranquil brown.
Beverly smiled. “Jillian, darling. What do we need today?” Her voice was honeyed with a Carolina lilt.
Jillian’s accessing of Beverly took the external form of a conversation, a conversation that existed out of ordinary time. Her talks with Beverly seemed to last for hours or days, but upon emerging from trance she invariably learned that only minutes had passed, minutes during which a vastness of information had entered her long-term memory.
Jillian sat down opposite. Emblazoned on the desk was a fifteen-year-old carving. It read: JILLIAN LOVES. Jillian kept changing the name following “loves.” She’d finally left it open.
She was home. She relaxed to a degree inaccessible in her waking state.
Where to start? “I need to know about Donny Crawford.”
Beverly smiled tolerantly. “The same Donny Crawford you’ve been mooning over for four years?”
“The same. We finally met. He went through some kind of fit this morning during his exercise up on the mountain. He said strange things, babbled about ‘war.’ He cautioned me not to tell anyone. My first guess is that his Link with the satellite broke.”
Beverly’s eyes dropped to her desk. A moment later she said, “Satellites EE23 and EEO8 both went off line at five fifty-two local. Energy is blaming both events on random meteoric debris. EE23 will have to be replaced.”
“Is Donny that dependent on satellite Links?” It was something she’d suspected; it was one argument against Boost. Donny had won. Even if Jillian won gold, she’d be a hybrid, a cyborg, magnificent but fragile.
Beverly’s mouth opened to speak, then closed. Jillian felt something like a vast, compulsive yawn rack her body, and Jillian stood before an ancient and barnacle-encrusted reef. In front of her was the door, the entrance Beverly had created for her fifteen years before. What?
A power outage? An industrial accident?
Something serious, if Beverly had been forced to reboot. Jillian blinked twice, calmed herself, and stepped through the doorway.
Beverly smiled at her, “Hello, sugar. What can I do for you?” Her voice sounded hollow, as if she were speaking from the bottom of a well.
Jillian felt something that she had never before experienced when in the Void. Sleepy. Headachy. She straightened herself with an effort.
Beverly leaned forward, concern sparkling in her bottomless dark eyes. “I think you could use a little nap, darling.”
“I want information. Why would Donny Crawford need to conceal a satellite interrupt?”
Beverly’s mouth opened, and her lips moved soundlessly. The water shifted and blurred. Beverly’s face became indistinct, and started to fade— And Jillian woke up.
Chapter 6
She was sweating. What in the hell was going on? Jillian tore the tabs away from her eyes and temples, and stared at them. That had never happened before.
A superstitious person might set such things down to bad luck, and quit.
Jillian couldn’t quit. She reattached the headset and closed her eyes.
Jillian walked along the ocean floor toward a ring of shattered coral reefs. There was motion around her: blurs of pastel color instead of fish. In the middle of the ring of blurred wreckage stood a chair and a desk. The door still stood, unsupported… featureless, a cartoon. Beverly sat at a cartoon desk.
This… place, this environment: it was a collaboration worked out over the fifteen years in which she and Beverly had been programming each other. It was a visual/auditory/kinesthetic feedback loop, Jillian and Beverly taking cues from each other so quickly that the illusion of continuity and depth were almost flawless. But it lived in Beverly’s mind; it was Beverly’s landscape. Had Beverly altered it? Or had her memory been damaged?
Jillian walked through the door as through a dream. Beverly stared straight ahead. She barely acknowledged Jillian’s presence. Beverly looked twodimensional, flat and lifeless. The white sundress was a surreal fog struggling to condense into muslin.
In old-style flat holos, “flicks,” a critical number of frames per second was needed to preserve the illusion of motion. Below that threshold, the eye could see individual pictures flash against a darkened screen. The images became jerky and artificial.
Maintaining the Void became nightmarishly difficult. Data was slowed, stalled, corrupted. And the images and sensations were deteriorating, slowly consumed by static.
“Beverly,” Jillian said gently, “I want unclassified material.”
“I’ll help you if I can, Jillian.” Beverly’s mouth was out of synch with her words. Her index fingernail, elegantly manicured, traced the JILLIAN LOVES carving.
Beverly’s nail left a wisp of smoke. Now the letters read: JILLIAN, STOP.
The ocean around them became a sea of disparate voices, fishy mouths lipping her gently, strange swirling smells and tastes.
“Beverly,” Jillian said. “Maybe the interference is coming from the main lobe. Can you partition off? Can you give us some privacy here?”
“I can shield us.” There was a distinct clicking sensation, and the weird and inexplicable feeling that she and everything around her had suddenly been reduced in size. But Beverly was clearer, sharper. When she spoke her voice was distinct again.
“This is better, darling, but if I try to access data they can get to me. They might be able to get to me here. Are you sure you know what you’re asking?”
“I’ve got to know about Donny Crawford.” Donny had been attacked. Somebody… Council members?… had used him as a puppet to make a point.
“All right, darling.” Beverly’s dark eyes were huge and luminescent, bottomless, and Jillian felt herself fall into them, Alice-down-the-Rabbit-Hole.
A flood of sensation: pictures, sound, kinesthetic measurements. She felt Donny in motion. It was a formidable learning tool, and even more powerful because of Donny’s physical dynamism. She was inside his body as he performed a flawless routine on the uneven parallel bars.
The sensations of his effort triggered an explosion of sexual images: maternal, sensual, emotional. A catalog of experience and fantasy. Sean’s body with Donny’s face. Remembered tastes and smells and touches, subtly altered to fit Donny Crawford.
So beautiful, so beautiful.
Donny’s image always did this to her. Now she wrenched herself from the seething erotic fantasies.
“Not this… Beverly. I need information on Donny’s relationship with the Council.”
“The Council”—Beverly’s voice crackled with static—“is composed of approximately two dozen of the most powerful Linked—”
“Approximately?”
Sparks crackled, tiny lightnings that disrupted the illusion. “The exact number is classified.”
“Help me, Beverly.” Jillian whispered it. “Donny Crawford was almost killed because of something someone named McFairlaine wanted from Energy. Why would anyone want to hurt Donny? Just who is this McFairlaine?”
“Carter Crombie McFairlaine is the chairman of Transportation. He’s known to be a Council member.”
“And what does ‘two points’ mean?” Hastily, she added, “If you can tell me without accessing the main lobe.”
Beverly’s voice was becoming too formal, had lost all of its musical quality. “Analysis of current news
