face. The cops traced the signal and found Garza with his pants full of excrement, unable to speak or even close his mouth, immobile in the middle of his kitchen. They’d seen this kind of stuff before, and ferried him to the Bionet wing of the nearest hospital where, Abby supposed, he remained to this day, undergoing a battery of physical and psychological therapies to relearn how to take charge of his own nervous system.
After the eunuchs’ dance the DJ spoke again. “Welcome to the uncharted waters of the Biological Internet. Your heart rate. Your electrolytes. The electricity that flows through your muscles. We control every part of you but your soul. Turn off your mind, children, relax and float downstream.”
Heather was in a corner having her neck massaged by a eunuch who was asking her the model numbers of her implants. Jadie stayed glued to a pillar, looking kind of terrified. And where was Megan? Abby very suddenly didn’t want to be here. She looked frantically for the exit. Some guy grabbed her bicep and spoke into her ear.
“You don’t belong here. Quick, let’s get out. The cops are on their way.”
The guy, who would have been more threatening had he been less handsome, steered her through the crowd toward the restrooms, then through a service door and up some crumbly wood stairs. Behind them, the pleasure center erupted in panicked screaming. Abby stumbled through a door onto a street of boarded-up ex-businesses. Down the block, cop cars spun their blues and reds.
“Just walk at a normal speed,” the guy said, “like we’re a couple on a date. By the way, my name’s Rocco.”
Abby shook his hand reluctantly. “What about my friends? We should go back and help them.”
“They’re probably getting cuffed right now.”
“Why’d you pull me out of there?”
“I could tell you were just checking it out, not into the whole scene. And I think I recognize you. We get our coffee around the same time at Lumiere’s.”
They passed beneath a streetlight, giving Abby a better look. Skin the color of an Idaho potato, scruffy jet- black stubble, a pair of dark eyes squinting in the half-light. Abby said, “You’re the guy who got the last Asiago bagel when I was there a couple days ago.”
“Sounds like me,” Rocco said.
“How’d you know the cops were coming?”
“I’m an informant. I do it sort of on the side while I’m getting my Bionetics doctorate. Plus it’s good for me to see what kinds of applications are being developed at a grass-roots level. Pretty impressed by that guy who supported his whole body weight on one finger. But those DJs are amateurs. They know enough to encode the implants but have no clue—or just don’t give a shit—about dendrite deintegration or channel-flow erosion. It pisses me off. You just don’t muck around with the human brain like that. I hope that guy spends his life in the slammer.”
“Why do you trust me with this information?” Abby said.
“It gives me an excuse to ask if you’d be interested in getting a drink somewhere.”
They traversed patches of stink and bubbling urban lava, then found a cab back to the more or less healthy interior of Vancouver, where the city sort of shook them a while until they settled at a cafe decorated with posters from Italian movies. Which gave Abby a perfect entry point into her area of expertise. She would have normally evaded the topic of Italian neorealism in the company of a dude, had seen too many boyfriends’ faces glaze over, but this guy seemed interesting enough that she’d test his endurance for twentieth-century cinema trivia. If he stared into space and nodded politely she’d relegate him to that category of men who’d passed through her life burdened by their passions for full-immersion video games and the bracketeering of college basketball. The only guys she’d met who shared her love of Brakhage and Jodorowsky and Maddin and the Brothers Quay tended to hide in clouds of their own flatulence in the netherworld of the university library.
“
Rocco paused a sec, stared at the salt and pepper as if listening to a distant voice, then nodded. “
“I’ve never met anyone else who’s actually seen it.”
“I haven’t seen it,” Rocco said, “but I know it
Abby looked over her shoulder. “Where are you reading that?”
Rocco sipped his au lait. “It came to me.”
“No, really. How’d you know the summary?”
“I’ll tell you, but I can’t tell you here. The only place safe enough to tell you is my apartment.”
“That’s a new one.”
“That sounded bad. What I mean is, I know my apartment is free of surveillance. We can’t be sure about this restaurant. Come back to my place and I’ll fill you in on the details. I’m not asking you to sleep with me.”
You’re not? Abby thought.
Rocco’s apartment wasn’t far, and he spent the interim five blocks warning and preparing Abby for the wretched state of the living space. The kitchen hadn’t been cleaned in some time, he warned, and there might be a spaghetti-type situation in one of the sinks. The apartment was on the fifth floor of a tree-ringed, green-built, post- FUS building, with windows overlooking the retinal-rape neon of a takeout Szechuan hole-in-the-wall.
And good thing he’d prepped her for the disaster of his personal living space. He’d actually oversold the sloppiness of the pad, so now it didn’t look
“Sorry about the cloak-and-dagger cheesiness,” Rocco said. “I’ll just get really busted if they find out I helped someone escape from the sting. Worse, that I’ve told you as much as I have. The deal with my line of study is we test a lot of our own applications on ourselves. You know how the Bionet works, right?”
“Not really. I have an emergency implant, that’s about it. I know 911 will be called with a GPS signal if I have a heart attack.”
“Right, so that’s basically where the Bionet started. For years people chipped their dogs and cats so if they ran off the Humane Society could scan them and get an address and a phone number. That was the beginning, pretty much. Then when the baby boomers started going into retirement homes, a few of them got chipped with files including their whole medical histories. Better than wearing a bracelet with all that info engraved on it. Then the next wave of innovation went down and these implants, still incredibly crude by today’s standards, got networked using the rudimentary Wi-Fi and Internet of the day. Pretty easy to monitor heart rate and transmit the data via the Web. Then, like you said, all this GPS-enabled, vitals-monitoring software went into the implants and now you can get hit by a truck and two seconds later your body calls an ambulance for you. The Bionet’s saved lives. That’s why I wanted to get into it in the first place. Now we can download hormones, enzymes, and antigens remotely through implants and upload our immunities for other people to share.”
“What’s that have to do with you knowing about
“We’re on to the next stage, Bionet 2.0. Neurology. The development of this stuff hasn’t been all that smooth. For years we’ve stuck these implants in volunteers’ heads that make them hear voices in other languages, pick up phone transmissions, radio stations. We’ve been trying to wire the frontal lobes into the Internet so everyone can eventually become their own Wikipedia or, rather, share the Wikipedia with others who are logged in. The software itself has improved by several orders of magnitude, for sure, but for the past ten years or so the industry has been driving test subjects crazy, paying out huge lawsuits. It’s been a disaster.
“Three, four years ago a group of neuroscientists and Bioneticists at the University of Montreal published a paper that changed
