In a dark old burnt-out on the downside of Nantsuba, Trim crouches in a corner and lights her little pipe. In- she -hales deeply and feels the salty burn in the center of her chest. The nipples on her small breasts stand alert and she sinks to the floor. Her lids drop heavily and she coughs.
In comes Fletcher, low-res. The ghost stands a couple meters from her and looks around. Once solid-wood floors now rot under old coffee grounds, hex dust, plaster chips and styrofoam. Fletcher folds his virtual arms across his virtual chest and sneers, stares at the little woman slacked out in the grime.
The image is a white man in his late twenties, with dark hair combed backward and a short beard. His simulation leather covers a black sweater. He has American jeans, and white high- tops. If his clothes covered other than a simulated body, he would soon collapse of heat exhaustion in the hot Nantsuba night.
"Trim!" he calls. She sleeps. "Little girl, get up!"
Trim's eyes grog slowly to open and she unfocuses the ghost. "PissoffFletchlemmesleep." Slurred.
"If your pipe catches the hex dust, baby, you'll end your today in flames. None of my business 'cept I gotta go with you."
Snore. Trim slips off to lala, the pipe still lit.
OK, thinks Fletcher. I'll see you on the inside.
And Trim flips out on the inside. Bad trip, she realizes. Horror. Ugly ugly scene. The bastard ghost is haunting my trip, sonuvabitch. Too late -- darkness, cold and black as slate, now fog, now flame, now -- fear. Like falling into blackness, vast and deadly. Shit, she thinks, then screams. OK ok ok ok so wake me up and I'll do what you say.
Fletcher slaps Trim's cheek. "Up, little girl!"
Up she comes and finishes the scream on the outside. The ghost takes her head and turns her to face the pipe smoldering in her left hand. "There it is, Trim. Now put it out." Trim stops screaming. She puts her thumb in the bowl, pressing it against the red coal of heat. Fletcher wishes her pain-system were healthier.
"OK it's out now you prick. Leave me alone or I'll dive out the window head first."
"Sorry Trim. You aren't all big to live, I know, but you haven't the balls to do us both in ... except slow-like through that pipe..." Besides, thinks the spook, we're ground-floor.
. . .
In the backroom darkness of an upside Nantsuba puppet house, old walls lit red and purple in low light, Trim met Fletcher for the first time. The Man had told her not to worry: "Promise you little girl, the ghost comes in before you even have to smell john's breath." Man grinned the rodent grin that made the other girls call him Rat behind his back.
Trim was fourteen, small and thin (though maybe ten kilos heavier than she is now) and she shivered desperately despite the moist warmth of the parlor. Grandfather had indentured her to The Man for growing out of the preteen body he'd stroked the past two years.
The Man turned her out, hurt like crazy. The painted old lady gave her clothes like she'd seen in Grandfather's magazines, and the house slotted her head as she slept, slipped Fletcher under cortex and sealed her back up. Trim slept two days, while the implant fed-back from her system, shaping its look to her feel.
Trim's eyes were blue and she blushed easily. Grandfather was a namvet, a white man who still wandered easily in Nantsuba's streets. Mother and Father had looked like her, half-Asian street urchins slipping with the tides of night city commerce. They died or disappeared. Grandfather never said which, but he raised her if you could call it that, kept her small-changing on the street, while he slept in the abandoned coffins of a downside hotel.
A week after implant, Man walked little Trim to one of the pro-rooms on a long corridor, her thin neck held awkwardly immobile in the crook of his equally thin elbow. Man's hand rubbed her shoulder as it had when they'd first met. Now she sat shaking on the bed, uncomfortable in the black and red lace teddy the old lady with too much interact makeup had pushed at her when she arrived.
Credit chip slotted outside the door. Bolt clicked free, and in swayed the client, smiling sloppily. Nipponese suit, Trim thought, Tokyo corporate clone. Suit straightened himself, leaned left a second and belched. Off came the jacket, tie and hat. Two steps to the bed. Creaked under his ass. His hair plastered his head and smelled of old sweat. Sitting, he looked fatter. He kissed Trim's mouth. The Man had lied. His breath smelled of fish and grease.
Now, thought Trim, squinching her eyes tight, holding her breath and trying to move her lips in fear and feigned passion, Please take me now --
and out she went -- or in -- to a virtual vidi-room, holo-arcade, flashing neon full-view pit with booming bombs and static thunder under a dodecahedradome. Sino-Dub soundtrack, purple rose pyro show. Unicorns raging under low-lit neon rainbows, CyberFunk dance-bands and cloud-bound pegasi. Neo-Bogart, Retro-Rambo, many old-time comic toons, autotanks, bomber squads, cruise-missile launch pads, swords of light and rods of power. Solo-running share games play themselves through loops, flashing high-res heroes under storming starry skies.
Center stood Fletch, half in shadow, smiling, virtual hand extended. "Welcome to wonderland, Trim. What makes you happy?"
. . .
The sunlight hurts her eyes. Fletcher has to fight the hex to deflate her pupils. Fletcher has to fight the hex on many levels.
Trim hasn't been out by light in many days, and her fair, Eurasian skin has become almost translucent and cadaverous. Fletcher is pleading with her to get back inside: "It isn't safe on daylight streets," implores the ghost, his image keeping pace with her quick, directed steps. "If a raider doesn't spot you first, the bulls will haul you in, lose you on the way. Either way, you're meat." Trim ignores the spook at her side, saying nothing, no longer bothering with the slurred curses Fletcher has learned to hear as background noise. "Listen, girl, if I end up as merchandise for some Hong Kong fence, that means your parts are black market medical, hon, spawning cells for mixed-blood skin jobs, or shipped to the Caribbean to fertilize cannabis.
Trim moves past the loading docks, the warehouse gates, the city blocks of rubble. Gynoids smoke under the empty monorail bridge, only half-looking at the half-breed Nippo girl, plodding through the trash. Fletcher fades.
Trim finds the hex-lady playing solitaire on a cloth-covered car hood. Lady doesn't look up. Trim puts the pocket-picked credit chip next to the queen of hearts. The hex lady flips a card, palms the chip and drops hex on the hood. The package thuds softly on the rusting steel. Hex lady plays her game and Trim walks away, bringing out her little pipe.
Trim sits in garbage, gomi playground in the valley. She hales in the hot spice of hex smoke. Smiles. Sleeps. Deep, she thinks.
Yes, deep agrees the ghost.
Then, suddenly, he comprehends the depth.
The bad drug hits too fast. Fletcher flows --
screams through Trim's system, trying to hold it together, quickly patching sub- routines to maintain her pulse while he builds a temporary re-breather. His sub-processes loop the body animated, but Trim's brain is going. Fletcher dilates adrenal glands, pumps her body full of its own uppers, races her pulse to normal, filters an increase of oxygen to the virtual respirator, but it is no good. The connection is already lost. Here pumps her body without a master, and here sits her brain, boosted alive but not awake. Never again awake.
The sub-programs can loop for an eternity, but her nervous system is fraying, the metapatterns unraveling. Without the upper spine, Fletcher's implant will whir down on its internal batteries and die. Or maybe sleep. The center of his soul, the source of his consciousness and higher-level decisions will remain preserved in the hard-RAM core of the implant. But so much of what Fletcher has become, so many of his memories of Trim, of her girlish smile, the pitch of her laugh, his memory of the puppet house, and the body hell he'd kept her mind hidden from, so much of his personal history is stored in Trim's brain, in the sections of her nervous system available to him as peripheral storage and processing. As she'd slowly died of the drug, long before today, he'd begun to lose his own processors. Now he'd lose them all.
The memories unwind, disintegrate. Sensual streams of images, thoughts, emotions, flow past the chip as they are abandoned to entropy. The Man, the house, the johns, the dreams. Virtual dreams composed for Trim's consciousness. Fletcher's own creations play past him on fast forward. On erase. Vague and forgotten. Most of them. For now, Fletcher's own retention is intact, but when his battery goes, so will the distributed representations of his biosoft neuro-nets. For now at least, one remains strong. Too strong. It plays itself for him:
The night they left the puppet house . . .
"I don't have to stay here in this dream-world bullshit." She waved her arms around, their arc taking in the virtual cafe surrounding them. "This is not real."
"It's no dream, Trim, I explained that already." But she wasn't listening.
"You think this is real!?" she said throwing her Coke bottle at the waiter's head. The virtual Frenchman ducked. The bottle crashed and shattered against the pavement behind him. The other cafe patrons fluttered up and left the scene. Only Fletcher, Trim and the waiter remained in the cafe. The waiter cleared their table. Trim screamed "They're not real god damn! This isn't real!" She slashed the table knife against her wrist. Virtual blood poured from above the image of her hand. What if I kill myself here? Do I die out there? Do I just wake up?" Trim shot her good hand across the table and seized Fletcher's coke bottle. Fletcher caught her by the wrist. The waiter tried to take the bottle from her. Trim screamed and beat her head against the cafe table. The waiter retreated with the table settings and Fletcher stood back in horror. The entire cafe scene seemed to suddenly take him by surprise as if he had just happened upon it unexpectedly.
The cafe lost resolution, television snow taking over the visual surroundings. Reality faded, frayed, and left them back in the pro-room with a coming client. Trim's passion had translated with her and the john responded. Trim pushed his fat body off her and the man rolled to the floor, a confusion of pain and orgasm.
"You're the whore!" Trim cried up at the ghost. This time, she did not cover her nakedness from him. "You bribe me with your dreams and hide me from my body, but you are here all the time -you take care of the client, you stupid spook fuck, not me!"
The john struggled his pants on, trying to tuck his belly in under his belt. To this sense- overloaded man, it looked as if Trim were screaming to the air, her red, wet eyes focused on nothing. Down the hall he ran barking "Bitch is crazy!" and disappeared. Unseen hands and feet pounded behind walls and muffled voices called "shut up!" and there was hoarse laughter.
Fletcher stared hard at Trim. "The Man will be pissed," said the ghost. "He doesn't punish his girls, Trim. We have to leave. Now!" His voice raised in its own sudden shout. It was the first and only time he would lose control of volume with her.
"You're the whore," she repeated quietly, still sobbing. But she followed him out down secret doors and passages, thinking You could have gotten me out when I wanted, you bastard -- knowing she didn't have to say it aloud.
. . .
And this is where it ends, thinks Fletcher. His programs still loop, but the biometers are at zero.
Trim is dead. Beyond Fletcher's control, the implant releases its homing signal, hard-wired to trigger at the death of the host. The raiders and the bulls both carry finders, tuned to ghost-implant frequency. The puppet house is monitoring for the beacon constantly. Fletcher knows that each is racing toward him now.
Without Trim's eyes and ears, Fletcher is blind. Without her body, he can feel no rage, no fury, no fear. The technospectral patterns unravel in darkness, and Fletcher wonders coldly who will find him first.