Trouble and Her Friends

“Six.”

“Seven?”

Huu hesitated, then nodded. “Seven.” She turned back to the table, and Trouble heard the whine of an electric razor. “Tilt your head again.”

Trouble looked down again, and a moment later the razor’s tip tingled against her neck, hair dropping away from around the dollie-slot and down the back of her neck. Huu brushed away the last stray pieces and picked up an injector the size of her thumb.

“This is going to sting,” she said, and put the tip against Trouble’s skin.

Trouble hissed at the touch—it was more than a sting, it was a definite jab, a deep stab of pain right through to the bone—but didn’t pull away. The pain was followed by an immense cold, and then a numbness, spreading out from the dollie-slot. It crept up her scalp, tingling at the top of her head, wrapped around her neck, and took in her whole right ear.

“Jesus,” she said, and couldn’t feel her jaw moving in the right-hand socket. “That was quick.”

“That’s how it’s supposed to be,” Huu said. She set an instrument tray—also hazed with purplish light—on the back of the toilet, and turned Trouble’s head into position. “Keep still.”

Trouble froze, and felt the distant pressure of Huu’s arm, her left forearm, against the back of her scalp. Something tickled near the dollie-slot, and, it seemed a long time later, she felt something damp on her back just below the knob of her spine. Metal clashed once behind her head, then again in the instrument tray. She slanted her eyes sideways without moving her head—she couldn’t have moved her head if she’d wanted to; Huu’s weight held her steady as a rock— and saw something like a piece of raw meat, tossed beside the bloodied scalpel. A moment later, Huu’s hand came into sight, laid the thick wafer of the old chip into the tray, and Trouble realized that she had been looking at a piece of her own scalp. There was another brief moment of pressure, and Huu grunted softly.

“All in. Now I have to attach it. You know the drill, it’s going to hurt, but it’ll be over in a second.”

Trouble winced—she did indeed know the drill, had done this twice before without it getting any easier— and braced her hands against her knees, digging her nails into the denim as though the extra pain would help.

“Now,” Huu said, and Trouble felt a fat snap like a giant static charge at the back of her head. She jerked in spite of herself, and the pain ebbed to a dull, distant ache. It throbbed slightly, in tune to her heartbeat.

“In and on,” Huu said. She took her hand away, and Trouble lifted her head cautiously. The anesthetic was starting to fade; her neck hurt, but not too badly, yet. Huu held out a towel that smelled strongly of antiseptic. Trouble took it, dabbed gently at her head and neck, and brought it away spotted with blood.

“Calibration next,” Huu said, her voice perfectly neutral, and slipped the head of a datacord into the sterilizer’s field. Trouble looked back over her shoulder, and saw the instrument bag gaping open to reveal the square black shape of an output box, all its telltales lit and the display screen glowing pale grey. “Ready?”

Not really, Trouble thought, but nodded. “Let’s get it over with.”

“Right. Look away, please,” Huu said.

Trouble took a deep breath, and swung around so that she was sitting with her back to Huu. She leaned forward, bracing her forearms against her thighs, and felt Huu’s fingers cold on her neck

“I’m beginning now,” Huu said, and Trouble took another deep breath—

and sprawls out into darkness, like but not the net, blind and deaf and dumb and insensate The worm in her brain lies dead, and she is nowhere, nothing—and then light sparks, brilliant red and gold explosions across her eyes, surrounding her. The feeling comes next, hot wind and then more, sheer heat, slamming against her body with the hot smell of gunpowder, fireworks, and sound follows, a great inchoate roar that fills her ears to bursting and then reverberates, soundless, in her bones. She would cry out, turn away, but the explosions are already fading to a drab landscape, light grey plane under dark grey sky.

Stand up, a voice says, and she does as she’s told, the flat grey ground spongy under her feet. She hears a snatch of song as she moves, harsh and incongruous—*got nipples on my titties big as the end of my thumb, got something ’tween my legs make a dead man come*—but the memory-music fades as Huu tunes the system tighter Walk.

And Trouble walks, steps out across the endless and unchanging plane. A wind touches her, gentle at first, caressing her naked body, then harder, stinging slaps against back and thigh and breast. She tastes sand, smells heat and rubber. She keeps walking, and walks out of the wind, the plane tilting underfoot so that she is now going uphill. She lengthens her stride, enjoying the challenge, and the ground gets steeper, so that she’s breathing hard and finally leans forward into the slope, pulling herself up with hands as well. Her fingers sink for an instant into the grey mass, a sensation like dust or fog between them, and she feels the shock of panic, as though she will fall through a barrier that is solid to her feet and legs. Then the slope steadies, first to soft mud and then to the same smooth rubber that she feels under her feet, and she keeps climbing, until at last she tops the hill and stands upright again.

The plane steadies around her, takes on color and three dimensions. Grass grows underfoot, cool and tickling, and she laughs in spite of herself, feels warmth on one side of her body, and turns to blink up into blue sky and the blinding disk of the sun. She looks down again, and sees a table in the distance, an ordinary picnic table, the kind you see in children’s books. There is a box on it, black, one side open into empty darkness. The pleasure fades, seeing it, and she is tempted, as always, to turn and walk away, ignore that last step, but she knows better. She takes another deep breath, walks toward the table, the sun warm along her right side, the grass cool and dew-damp underfoot, smelling of spring and acrid growth

This is the last step, the thing that all the rest leads to, the final tuning of body and brain wire. She looks down at the box—there is always the option to stop now, the cybermeds always give you that choice, but it’s a choice to live half-aware, half-blind, clumsy and grotesque on the net. She’s been on the wire too long to live like that, and she reaches for the box before she can think too long. She slips her hand into the opening, and the world vanishes in a sheer rush of sensation, pure feeling filling every nerve in her body. She throws back her head, and the feeling turns to pain, pins-and-needles swelling to racking cramp to pure fire, an agony swirling through her until she’s nothing but pain. And then it peaks and vanishes, leaving her gasping for an instant before the pleasure starts, rising from the tickle of desire to soaked arousal to racking, orgasmic delight.

She leaned forward further, pressing her elbows into her thighs, not yet ready to look up and meet Huu’s eyes. The blood-spotted towel lay between her feet, where she’d dropped it, and she fixed her eyes on it as though it was something important. Her crotch was hot and wet, body lagging behind her brain, and she smelled of sex. She could hear the sucking sound of Huu peeling off the rubber gloves, and wanted for a painful instant to feel the other woman’s hands between her legs, gloved fingers pressing into her clit— She took a deep breath, shook that thought away.

“You’re likely to be sore tomorrow,” Huu went on, heedless, or, more likely, Trouble thought, diplomatically blind and deaf, “and you should run at quarter power for a couple of days, let yourself get used to the new interface before you try to go at it full on—but you know the drill, you shouldn’t have to worry about it The calibration’s good—”

Trouble snorted and stretched to pick up the towel. It ought to have been good, the way she was feeling.

“—perfect to four decimal places, so you shouldn’t feel too much difference from your old system, except the speed. Pickup should be a little more precise, too, so you might want to spend some time playing with your precision tools before you actually use them. Swab the incision with alcohol a couple times a day for the next month—I’ll give you a dummy plug, if you don’t have one.”

“Thanks,” Trouble said, and accepted the flesh-colored plug, larger and broader-headed than the usual jacks, that Huu held out to her.

“It’s a good system,” Huu went on, and dumped the contents of the instrument tray into van Liesvelt’s sink. “I think you’ll like the way it’ll run now.”

“Thanks,” Trouble said again, and pushed herself to her feet. Her jeans were damp between her legs, flesh swollen and unsatisfied. Over Huu’s shoulder, she could see the water in the basin tinted faintly pink, the piece of scalp sticking to the side just below the waterline. “I think I want a drink.”

She had several. Van Liesvelt had defrosted several entrees, his usual prodigal generosity, and she had