Dervish Is Digital Part 18

Konstantin made a disgusted noise. "How did you figure that out?"

"I'd like to tell you I calculated it all from watching his vital signs over a long period of time but the truth is, I've got an old buddy who works on the island, and she pointed me at a service employee who was open to financial encouragement to talk."

Konstantin made an even more disgusted noise. "I think I know her. She wouldn't do that for me."

"She wouldn't have done it for me, either, if I'd asked her in the capacity of a law enforcement officer looking for information on Hastings Dervish."

"Did she show you that squirt-gun?"

"I'm the one she took it from. Anyway, Dervish doesn't bother trying to tinker with his own online time data. He just stays plugged in and because it's Key West, he can go to h.e.l.l in his own way. Which, of course, he would."

Konstantin took a long, thoughtful breath. "What if he isn't actually conscious?"

"You mean a fugue state or a trance?"

"Or he's been brainwashed himself. What if he's just a front for a mob operation?"

Goku looked as nauseated as she felt.

"Think about it. How else could he get away with it? He's not some rich family's pampered golden boy, he's a placeholder. Who would allow a placeholder to indulge himself like that? Maybe he got the position because he was willing to wire up twenty-four/seven. And they told him he could have some fun with his ex on the side." Konstantin stared at the fetus on the screen. "Brainwas.h.i.+ng a cop, that would be a good experiment. And if it went wrong, there'd just be Hastings Dervish, the lone gunman. For all we know, he might really believe he is a lone gunman." She paused. "Just how was he going to brainwash me anyway?"

"They started the process after you went into room 909. All those falling intervals in between periods of relatively normal activity. About half a day of that and most people would be a quiveringmess."

"Well, it wouldn't have worked," Konstantin said. "I was getting used to it. If I ever had even a mild fear of falling, it's gone now. When this is over, I'll probably take up skydiving just to relax."

"After that would have come the jamming, while the boost was still in your bloodstream. How well do you think you'd have come out of that?"

Before she could answer, he stood up and aimed the remote at a screen in the center of the wall, which turned into a small window.

"Grace period's over. Dervish found us. Time for the next step."

"Which is?"

He picked her up easily and flipped her over so that she was stretched out over his arms face down, as if he were going to teach her how to swim. "You dive through the center s.p.a.ce."

"And then?" Konstantin asked.

But he had already hurled her forward and she discovered that the window in the center was not actually small but very far away.

Konstantin had been prepared for another long flying fall once she finally reached the window.

Instead, she found herself back in the secret pa.s.sage she had first discovered wearing the child persona from You (Not You), staring into a darkness interrupted by pinp.r.i.c.ks of light from the many peepholes along the wall. Had Goku meant to put her here specifically, or had she just fallen through the nearest back door?

The back door, she realized. The back door for all of the casino, and possibly a good part of lowdown Hong Kong as well. If you were going to make what was essentially a virtual theme park, it made sense to utilize a.n.a.log versions of certain theme park maintenance methods. Maybe it was clumsier and slower in some ways, but it was probably a lot easier than stripping everything down to code whenever you needed to-- Her heart gave a sudden irregular flutter in her chest as she realized she wasn't alone.

Come on, she told herself. You might have had a minor fear of falling, but you've never been that spooked by the dark.

Something moved, briefly blocking out the light from a number of peepholes; a person, she realized, and closer than she had thought.

It's not the dark -- it's what's in the dark. That's not fear, that's being a cop. Remember?

You were a cop once, before someone got the bright idea to turn you into a cartoon character.

She felt a sudden intense surge of loss and regret. h.e.l.l with it. When she was done with this case, she'd let Celestine and DiPietro handle technocrime and loan herself to Auto Theft. She needed something real.

Something slightly more substantial than moving air touched her face, sending chills up the back of her neck into her scalp. She held perfectly still, waiting for whatever might come next. The waiting stretched from a few moments into half a minute. Konstantin felt her apprehension turn to annoyance.

G.o.d d.a.m.n it, she thought, why is everything dragged out until you sweat blood, what is this suspense fetish?

Something about the darkness changed and she knew that whatever had been there with her was now gone. She sighed. It was probably nothing more than the venality of billable time at work. Drag everything to the last possible moment so the mark finds it impossible not to stay in AR to see what happens next.

Never chalk up to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity or greed or both. Who had said that? In AR, it was doubly true, she thought and started to move along the pa.s.sageway. Being adult-sized now, she had a much wider choice of peepholes this time. Would there be a much wider choice of sights as well, or just a greater number of kinky rooms? More spiky hair, more slit skirts, moreexecutioners and willing victims. Why on earth would you go into AR simply to stand in line for your own execution? Even if someone could tell her, she doubted that she'd have understood.

I'm in the dark and I don't understand much of what's going on. Almost like being in love.

The thought gave her pause and then she kept moving, wondering what she could find here that would be useful in proving her case against Dervish. Probably an exit-- Probably? This was the back door. From here, she could find Dervish's main node, she realized.

She wouldn't be able to interfere with the connection between the node and Key West, but she could log his use of the jamming program from the node and prove it that way.

All she had to do was figure out what his node would look like and then figure out how to activate a logging program. Or, as her ex used to say, If we had some eggs, we could have some ham and eggs if we had some ham. Yeah, that was almost like being in love, too.

No, everything was there. She just had to identify it. And this time, she reminded herself, she was on a faster level, with access to more information. Things wouldn't necessarily look the way they had when she'd been here in her kid outfit. She put her eye to the nearest peephole.

And then again, she thought as she looked at the woman in the slit skirt lying on the bed, she could be wrong about that.

No kid with hair spikes, though; she looked around the room as well as she could, but the woman was the only one there, and she seemed to be asleep. Or comatose. Or, Konstantin thought, after watching to see if her torso would move even a little, non-dead. No breathing, none at all.

Cutting corners? Just a case of just having so many different things to control that certain details got left off? Dervish was digital and digits didn't breathe?

She put a hand on her chest, feeling her own respiration. You've got to turbo-charge the boost, Goku had said. But how -- by hyperventilating?

No... by being quick enough to act between one breath and another.

The image of the fractal clouds Goku had blown around them came to her almost like a cloud itself. Breathing techniques, meditation -- not the nap-on-a-pallet-under-the-desk stuff but the mystical control of yogis and fakirs. She knew nothing about any of that.

Then it looks like you'll be getting on-the-job training.

Oh, sure thing -- she could simply take up, on the fly, practices it took a lifetime to master, a.s.suming you could even learn them at all, just because she was in AR. h.e.l.l, she didn't even know if she was right about-- You're right. You know you're right because it's easy for Dervish and practically impossible for you, and that's how these things usually work. You're right because you have to be faster than you ever have been and that's as fast as you can be. And even if you're wrong, it's more right than standing in the dark doing nothing.

She drew back from the peephole, her hand still pressed against her chest. So how did you even start? Did you first slow down your breathing while you tried to figure out what it meant to exist fast?

Pray, and fast.

She'd thought it was a joke, a bad pun, and it was... but that wasn't all it was. Pray: concentrate.

Fast: abstain. But abstain from what?

Deep inside her mind, she felt a sensation like diving through very deep water, deeper than was usually safe without some kind of protection against the pressure. It was an odd sensation but at the same time there was something familiar about it, as if she were discovering some talent she'd been aware of only on a subconscious level, something she'd been born with but had never used until now. A sense-memory for something she had no conscious memory of?

Come on, boost yourself up out of that elevator. You're the one who said Tarzan was a girl.

She was afraid she'd blown it by mixing the idea of lifting herself up with the sensation of diving, but somehow, it seemed to be the right thing. Suddenly, she felt less confined in some way, as if the limitation of acting between breaths had actually countered the whole idea of limits altogether, canceling it completely.

Contradiction can also mean balance, stability. Come on, Tarzan, let's swing. There was a fast flash of light, an image that pa.s.sed just that much too quickly for her to register, followed by another, and then another.

One at a time won't do the job. You can't get a whole picture one pixel at a time.

One room with an executioner. One with an expensive wh.o.r.e. One filled with impossibly fabulous things to eat that no one would ever taste. One where the characters go to rest between demands. One with an eye looking back at you, but this time, not fast enough to catch you. And one, and one, and one, and one, and one-- She stood back from the peepholes in the darkness, looking at the constellation they made. Was her vision not big enough, or still too slow?

The wall behind her was soft. Or she was soft. Both, yes. And she was getting... not bigger, exactly, but that was the only word she could think of to describe it.

You know how time is there to keep everything from happening all at once?

Someone, she realized dreamily, was talking to her. Someone she had known once. s.p.a.ce has its equivalent barrier.

Definitely coming from outside herself. This was not the sort of thing she ever had on her own mind.

But when you're digital, those boundaries don't exist. Not in the same way.

Konstantin felt the familiar impact of the mental speed b.u.mp, but she was going too quickly for it to matter. What did the Buddha say when he met the hot dog vendor in the park?

Make me one with everything.

For once, panic worked for her. She leaped the chasm to her next breath and inhaled.

At the top of her breath, everything slowed again. No, she thought and tried to exhale.

You let time pa.s.s. Maybe more time than you can afford. Now you'll have to be even faster.

She was about to protest that that was impossible, but she was already doing it. She was faster than her own shadow, faster than her own pixels -- they appeared to her now like pebbles. They multiplied, enveloping her so that even the smallest movement on her part had her swimming through them. They struck sparks against each other trying to make a coherent picture for her but she was too fast to see it, too fast for it to catch up with her and hold onto her, nail her down and keep her there.

She reached through the fire opals, into the densest part where they would have appeared to her to be all jammed together if she had been any slower, and found Goku. As soon as she touched him, he was out and she had something else in her grip.

You can't jam someone who's dosed the same way you are.

Your problem, however, is that old chestnut about how when you have the bear, the bear also has you.

If she ever saw real daylight again, she was going to swear off metaphors, especially the ones her ex had left lying around with the in-jokes.

You can swear off right now. Dervish is digital. That's no metaphor. He forms, he re-forms.

He morphs, he torques, he crawls on his belly like a reptile and he's both commutative and a.s.sociative. He can be Dervish-plus, or even Dervish-minus, though Dervish-plus is better.

He pa.s.sed through her, their components occupying the same area, but without touching because she was moving as fast as he was.

Oh, come on. Konstantin-plus would be an improvement. You'd like it. You owe it to yourself to try it.

Not Konstantin-plus-Dervish, no thanks.

Afraid you'll like it too much? You are, aren't you?

Something somewhere hurt. She wasn't sure whether it was her pain or his, or something else entirely. Maybe it was just some d.a.m.ned metaphor.

It's a different kind of pleasure. Bypa.s.s those unreliable body parts, go straight to the good stuff.

This time, the mental speed b.u.mp would have rattled Konstantin's teeth, she thought. That was it?The whole thing, for Dervish, had been about nothing more than achieving a better method of gratification? That was the sum total of his ambition?

You know what they say about the ba.n.a.lity of evil.

Konstantin willed herself higher, pus.h.i.+ng her way up out of the elevator again. There was a new presence, or rather an additional one, and she was almost going fast enough to sense it in full now, almost...

You have to stop. You can't come here. Or rather, you can, but once you do, there's no going back. Not in the usual way.

It was the same presence she had felt in the dark hallway, she realized. Except it hadn't actually been there as much as it had just been looking in on her. Sort of. Now she was almost to where it was-- Where she was.

And will remain.

The realization that flooded in on Konstantin brought with it a feeling of new weight, or old weight having returned, a heaviness, a burden that began to slow her down. And something somewhere definitely hurt.

You can come out now, Konstantin told her.

I am out. Never mind, I'll wait till you get back. And by the way, detective-- People on the sh.o.r.e of the fire opal lake were shouting something to her, but Konstantin was reasonably sure there was no race involved. At least, she wasn't going very fast.

The opals diminished to sparks, little tiny points of light in the darkness. And then the darkness turned inside out and resolved itself into white with black dots. The black dots were in the ceiling tiles in her cubicle.

Taliaferro was cheering her on. He was yelling anyway. She watched, amazed, as he raised his fist and brought it down hard on her chest.

--you can breathe now.

It's too soon, Dervish is digital, Dervish is still digital, she kept saying as they did things to her, moving quickly, although nowhere near as quickly as she had been moving before Taliaferro had come in and started punching her down like a bowl of rising bread dough.

Thought you were off metaphors.

That's a simile.

Dervish is digital, and that's literal.

She kept telling them and telling them. Sometimes she could hear her own voice saying it aloud, so she knew she wasn't talking too quickly to be understood. Or too slowly, for that matter. Her voice was okay. It was everything else that was a shambles. Spatial barriers were back, but they felt funny, as if they'd been rearranged. Time was also in force, keeping everything from happening at once, but things were happening in the wrong order, out of sequence. It was difficult, but she finally managed to make someone understand that. And someone responded by telling her that it would all look better tomorrow morning.

"It does look better," she told Taliaferro. "But it feels a lot worse. You cracked one of my ribs, you big brute."

Taliaferro's face in the monitor next to her hospital bed was solemn. "You got off easy."

"Which makes me luckier than Hastings Dervish, I can tell you that. Call East/West, ask for Goku what's-his-name--"

"Mura," supplied Taliaferro.

"Right, Goku Mura. Mura got him dead bang. He had anti-jamming software, we can prove in a court of law that Hastings Dervish did willfully defraud--" Taliaferro sighed. "You've been saying that in your sleep. Did it, did it, already. Got in touch with Mura, everything."