harmless reek rather like ripe bananas. Life was a lot easier when you came to proper terms with your microscopic flora.
Back at his workbench, Lyle plugged in the hot plate and boiled some Thai noodles with flaked sardines. He packed down breakfast with 400 cc’s of Dr. Breasaire’s Bioactive Bowel Putty. Then he checked last night’s enamel job on the clamped frame in the workstand. The frame looked good. At three in the morning, Lyle was able to get into painted detail work with just the right kind of hallucinatory clarity.
Enameling paid well, and he needed the money bad. But this wasn’t real bike work. It lacked authenticity. Enameling was all about the owner’s ego — that was what really stank about enameling. There were a few rich kids up in the penthouse levels who were way into “street aesthetic,” and would pay good money to have some treadhead decorate their machine. But flash art didn’t help the bike. What helped the bike was frame alignment and sound cable-housings and proper tension in the derailleurs.
Lyle fitted the chain of his stationary bike to the shop’s flywheel, straddled up, strapped on his gloves and virching helmet, and did half an hour on the 2033 Tour de France. He stayed back in the pack for the uphill grind, and then, for three glorious minutes, he broke free from the domestiques in the peloton and came right up at the shoulder of Aldo Cipollini. The champion was a monster, posthuman. Calves like cinderblocks. Even in a cheap simulation with no full-impact bodysuit, Lyle knew better than to try to take Cipollini.
Lyle devirched, checked his heart-rate record on the chronometer, then dismounted from his stationary trainer and drained a half-liter squeezebottle of antioxidant carbo refresher. Life had been easier when he’d had a partner in crime. The shop’s flywheel was slowly losing its storage of inertia power these days, with just one zude pumping it.
Lyle’s disastrous second roommate had come from the biking crowd. She was a criterium racer from Kentucky named Brigitte Rohannon. Lyle himself had been a wannabe criterium racer for a while, before he’d blown out a kidney on steroids. He hadn’t expected any trouble from Brigitte, because Brigitte knew about bikes, and she needed his technical help for her racer, and she wouldn’t mind pumping the flywheel, and besides, Brigitte was lesbian. In the training gym and out at racing events, Brigitte came across as a quiet and disciplined little politicized treadhead person.
Life inside the zone, though, massively fertilized Brigitte’s eccentricities. First, she started breaking training. Then she stopped eating right. Pretty soon the shop was creaking and rocking with all-night girl-on-girl hot-oil sessions, which degenerated into hooting pill-orgies with heavily tattooed zone chyx who played klaxonized bongo music and beat each other up, and stole Lyle’s tools. It had been a big relief when Brigitte finally left the zone to shack up with some well-to-do admirer on Floor 37. The debacle had left Lyle’s tenuous finances in ruin.
Lyle laid down a new tracery of scarlet enamel on the bike’s chainstay, seat post, and stem. He had to wait for the work to cure, so he left the workbench, picked up Eddy’s settopper and popped the shell with a hexkey. Lyle was no electrician, but the insides looked harmless enough: lots of bit-eating caterpillars and cheap Algerian silicon.
He flicked on Eddy’s mediator, to boot the wallscreen. Before he could try anything with the cablebox, his mother’s mook pounced upon the screen. On Eddy’s giant wallscreen, the mook’s waxy, computer-generated face looked like a plump satin pillowcase. Its bowtie was as big as a racing shoe.
“Please hold for an incoming vidcall from Andrea Schweik of Carnac Instruments,” the mook uttered unctuously.
Lyle cordially despised all low-down, phone-tagging, artificially intelligent mooks. For a while, in his teenage years, Lyle himself had owned a mook, an off-the-shelf shareware job that he’d installed in the condo’s phone. Like most mooks, Lyle’s mook had one primary role: dealing with unsolicited phone calls from other people’s mooks. In Lyle’s case these were the creepy mooks of career counselors, school psychiatrists, truancy cops, and other official hindrances. When Lyle’s mook launched and ran, it appeared online as a sly warty dwarf that drooled green ichor and talked in a basso grumble.
But Lyle hadn’t given his mook the properly meticulous care and debugging that such fragile little constructs demanded, and eventually his cheap mook had collapsed into artificial insanity.
Once Lyle had escaped his mom’s place to the squat, he had gone for the low-tech gambit and simply left his phone unplugged most of the time. But that was no real solution. He couldn’t hide from his mother’s capable and well-financed corporate mook, which watched with sleepless mechanical patience for the least flicker of video dialtone off Lyle’s number.
Lyle sighed and wiped the dust from the video nozzle on Eddy’s mediator.
“Your mother is coming online right away,” the mook assured him.
“Yeah, sure,” Lyle muttered, smearing his hair into some semblance of order.
“She specifically instructed me to page her remotely at any time for an immediate response. She really wants to chat with you, Lyle.”
“That’s just great.” Lyle couldn’t remember what his mother’s mook called itself. “Mr. Billy,” or “Mr. Ripley,” or something else really stupid.
“Did you know that Marco Cengialta has just won the Liege Summer Classic?”
Lyle blinked and sat up in the beanbag. “Yeah?”
“Mr. Cengialta used a three-spoked ceramic wheel with internal liquid weighting and buckyball hubshocks.” The mook paused, politely awaiting a possible conversational response. “He wore breathe-thru kevlar microlock cleatshoes,” it added.
Lyle hated the way a mook cataloged your personal interests and then generated relevant conversation. The machine-made intercourse was completely unhuman and yet perversely interesting, like being grabbed and buttonholed by a glossy magazine ad. It had probably taken his mother’s mook all of three seconds to snag and download every conceivable statistic about the summer race in Liege.
His mother came on. She’d caught him during lunch in her office. “Lyle?”
“Hi, Mom.” Lyle sternly reminded himself that this was the one person in the world who might conceivably put up bail for him. “What’s on your mind?”
“Oh, nothing much, just the usual.” Lyle’s mother shoved aside her platter of sprouts and tilapia. “I was idly wondering if you were still alive.”
“Mom, it’s a lot less dangerous in a squat than landlords and cops would have you believe. I’m perfectly fine. You can see that for yourself.”
His mother lifted a pair of secretarial half-spex on a neckchain, and gave Lyle the computer-assisted once- over.
Lyle pointed the mediator’s lens at the shop’s aluminum door. “See over there, Mom? I got myself a shock- baton in here. If I get any trouble from anybody, I’ll just yank that club off the doormount and give the guy fifteen thousand volts!”
“Is that legal, Lyle?”
“Sure. The voltage won’t kill you or anything, it just knocks you out a good long time. I traded a good bike for that shock-baton, it’s got a lot of useful defensive features.”
“That sounds really dreadful.”
“The baton’s harmless, Mom. You should see what the cops carry nowadays.”
“Are you still taking those injections, Lyle?”
“Which injections?”
She frowned. “You know which ones.”
Lyle shrugged. “The treatments are perfectly safe. They’re a lot safer than a lifestyle of cruising for dates, that’s for sure.”
“Especially dates with the kind of girls who live down there in the riot zone, I suppose.” His mother winced. “I had some hopes when you took up with that nice bike-racer girl. Brigitte, wasn’t it? Whatever happened to her?”
Lyle shook his head. “Someone with your gender and background oughta understand how important the treatments are, Mom. It’s a basic reproductive-freedom issue. Antilibidinals give you real freedom, freedom from the urge to reproduce. You should be glad I’m not sexually involved.”
“I don’t mind that you’re not involved, Lyle, it’s just that it seems like a real cheat that you’re not even
“But, Mom, nobody’s interested in me, either. Nobody. No woman is banging at my door to have sex with a
