Vacumn Flowers

They walked forward. This was the ultimate form ofostentation among technology freaks—to have a system so complete and sophisticated that nothing showed; no machines, no wires, no controls. The room would be laced with an invisible tracery of trigger-beams, directional mikes and subvocal pickups. There was power here, for one who knew its geography.

The woman raised her head, fixed Rebel with cold snakelike eyes. Her skull was white as marble, and her face was painted in a hexangular pattern suggestive of starbursts and ice crystals. “What have you stolen for me this time, Jerzy?”

The color was back in Heisen’s face. He showed teeth again, and flamboyantly threw back his cloak to allow himself a sweeping, mocking bow. “May I present,” he said, “the only clean copy in existence of next month’s lead release from Deutsche Nakasone.”

The woman did not move. “How did this happen?”

“What a pleasure it is to see you, Jerzy, won’t you have a chair?” The little man gri

Snow moved her head slightly, the sort of movement a lizard might make on a cold morning after prolonged stasis. “Behind you.” Rebel turned and almost stumbled into a Queen A

Reflexively she stepped back. Heisen, too, looked u

They sat, and there was an odd glint in Snow’s eyes as they faced her again. Was it amusement, Rebel wondered?

If so, it was buried deep, Heisen cleared his throat and said, “This is Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark. Two days ago she was a persona bum, name of Eucrasia Walsh. Eucrasia was doing prelim on a string of optioned wetsets when she burned on the Mudlark wafer and popped her base.

Wound up in Our Lady of Roses, and—”

“Hold it right there, chucko!” Rebel said angrily. “Reel it back and give it to me without the gobbledegook.”

Heisen glanced at Snow and she nodded slightly. He began again, this time directing his speech at Rebel.

“Deutsche Nakasone reviews a lot of wetware every day.

Most of it is never used, but it all has to be evaluated. They hire persona bums to do the first screening. Not much to it. They wire you up, suppress your base personality—that’s Eucrasia—program in a new persona, test it, deprogram it, then program you back to your base self. And start all over again. Sound familiar?”

“I… think I remember now,” Rebel said. Then, urgently,

“But it doesn’t feel like anything I’ve done. It’s like it all happened to somebody else.”

“I’m coming to that,” Heisen said. “The thing is that persona bums are all notoriously unstable. They’re all suicidally unhappy types—that’s how they end up with that kind of job, you see? They’re looking to be Mister Right.

But the joke is that they have such miserable experience structures they’re never happy as anyone. Experience always dominates, as we say.” He paused a beat and looked triumphantly at Snow. “Only this time it didn’t.”

Snow said nothing. After an uncomfortable pause, Heisen said, “Yeah. We’ve got the exception that disproves the rule. Our Eucrasia powered on, tried the persona—and she liked it. She liked it so much that she poured a glass of water into the programmer and shorted it out. Thus destroying not only the safe-copy of her own persona, but also the only copy in existence of the Mudlark program.”

Again, that small lizard-movement. “Then…” Snow said.

“Yes. Yes I see. Interesting.” With the small, electric thrill of remembering something she couldn’t possibly know, Rebel realized that Snow was accessing her system, that a tightly-aimed sonic mike or subcortical implant was feeding her data. “How did you manage to lift her?” Snowasked.

Heisen shrugged. “Blind luck. She broke herself out, and I happened by.” He told what he knew of her escape.

“Now that is interesting.” The woman stood. She was tall and impossibly, ethereally thin. A wraith in white, she kept her cloak clutched tight. Two long, fleshless fingers ghosted out to touch Rebel’s forehead. They were hard and dry as parchment, and Rebel shivered at their touch.

“What kind of mind are we dealing with here?” Snow fell silent.

“Take a look at her specs.” Heisen yanked a briefcase from a cloak pocket and punched up a holographic branching-limb wetware diagram. It hung in the air, a convoluted green sphere, looking for all the world like a tumbleweed. Or like a faraway globular tree… It looked exactly like Rebel’s home dyson world, and the image hit her hard. “Okay, this is a crude representation,” Heisen said eagerly. “But look—see where the n-branch trines?

You’ve got a very strong—”

The green sphere burned in the air like a vision of the grail, and Rebel flashed to that light-filled instant when her persona had flooded her skull, and she had picked up a glass and upended it over the programmer. The water writhed in the air, sparkling, and the supervising wettech twisted around in horror, mouth falling open, panic in her eyes as Rebel threw back her head, feeling the rich, full laughter form in her throat. It felt good to be alive, to sense the thoughts warming the brain like sunshine, and to know what she had to do. But then, even as the water splashed into the wafer’s cradle and the tech shrieked,

“What are—” she realized that the programming wires were still jacked into her cortex. The wafer went up with a sizzle as she reached, catching the stench of burning plastic as she tried, random static leaping up the wires to smash her sideways, hand yanking out the leads an instant too late as the universe whited out into oblivion…

The memory cut off, and Rebel trembled. Where was she? Hospitalized? Recaptured? Heisen and Snow were still talking, the tall, slim woman looking down impassively at the fierce little man, and then Rebel remembered who they were. Neither had noticed her snapping out; it must have been a brief episode.

“I’m taking points on this one,” Heisen said. “You hear me, Snow? I want points.”

“Maybe it’s too big for us?” Snow communed with herself for a long moment. “Well, let’s try.” She addressed Rebel directly. “Let me put a hypothetical case to you.

Imagine that you were approached by a small firm that does knock-offs of commercial personas. Suppose you were offered—” she cocked her head slightly—“three points for your help in making a clean recording. This would spoil your value to Deutsche Nakasone. No value, no interest—they’d leave you alone. Now, keeping in mind that without this deal they’ll hunt you down and wipe you out of your own brain… what would you say?”

The episode had left a bad aftertaste in Rebel’s mind. Or possibly it was just the day’s events catching up with her.

It was hard to concentrate. She shook her head. “I don’t understand… knock-offs?”

“Well, let’s say the current best-seller is…”—Snow listened— “a young man with the improbable name of Angelus. He is… sensitive, romantic, shy. The publicity wheels grind and suddenly every fourteen-year-old in the Kluster wants to be sensitive, romantic, shy. There’s a big market for that persona. We lift an early copy, make enough changes to foil legal action, and dump a hundred thousand wafers on the grey market. These personas are not exactly Angelus, but they are sensitive, romantic, and shy. And cheap. The big kids make their big profit, and we tag along for a taste.”

“Only this time,” Heisen said, “we’ll be on the market first, riding all that publicity free. They’ll have to pick upon our wafer, and they’re just not geared for speed the way we are. We can skim off the top profit for a good week before…”

Rebel’s skin crawled at the thought of a hundred thousand strangers sharing her thoughts, her face, her soul. Experiencing her i