Mona Lisa Overdrive

Then he got into bed with her and it wasn't really great, like the fun was gone and she might as well have been with a trick, how she just lay there thinking he was recording it all so he could play it back when he wanted, and how many others did he have in there anyway?

So she lay there beside him, afterward, listening to him breathe, until the wiz started turning tight little circles down on the floor of her skull, flipping her the same sequence of unco

So she went out into the room and pulled her dress on because she was cold. She sat on the silver couch. The red shade turned the gray of the skylight pink, as it got lighter outside. She wondered what a place like this cost.

Now that she couldn't see him, she had trouble remembering what he looked like. Well, she thought, he won't have any trouble remembering me, but thinking that made her feel hit or hurt or jerked around, like she wished she'd stayed at the hotel and stimmed Angie.

The gray-pink light was filling up the room, pooling, starting to curdle at the edges. Something about it reminded her of Lanette and the stories that she'd OD'd. Sometimes people OD'd in other people's places, and the easiest thing was just to toss them out the window, so the cops couldn't tell where they came from.

But she wasn't going to think about that, so she went into the kitchen and looked through the fridge and the cabinets. There was a bag of coffee beans in the freezer, but coffee gave you the shakes on wiz. There were a lot of little foil packets with Japanese labels, freeze-dried stuff. She found a package of teabags and tore the seal from one of the bottles of water in the fridge. She put some of the water in a pan and fiddled with the cooker until she got it to heat up. The elements were white circles printed on the black countertop; you put the pan in the center of a circle and touched a red dot printed beside it. When the water was hot, she tossed one of the teabags in and moved the pan off the element.

She leaned over the pan, inhaling herb-scented steam.

She never forgot how Eddy looked, when he wasn't around. Maybe he wasn't much, but whatever he was, he was there. You have to have one face around that doesn't change. But thinking about Eddy now maybe wasn't such a good idea either. Pretty soon the crash would come on, and before then she'd have to figure out a way to get back to the hotel, and suddenly it seemed like everything was too complicated, too many things to do, angles to figure, and that was the crash, when you had to start worrying about putting the day side together again.

She didn't think Prior was going to let Eddy hit her, though, because whatever he wanted had something to do with her looks. She turned around to get a cup.

Prior was there in a black coat. She heard her throat make a weird little noise all by itself.

She'd seen things before, crashing on wiz; if you looked at them hard enough, they went away. She tried it on Prior but it didn't work.

He just stood there, with a kind of plastic gun in his hand, not pointing it at her, just holding it. He was wearing gloves like the ones Gerald had worn for the examination. He didn't look mad but for once he wasn't smiling. And for a long time he didn't say anything at all, and Mona didn't either.

"Who's here?" Like you'd ask at a party.

"Michael."

"Where?"

She pointed toward the sleeping space.

"Get your shoes."

She walked past him, out of the kitchen, bending automatically to hook her underwear up from the carpet. Her shoes were by the couch.

He followed and watched her put on her shoes. He still had the gun in his hand. With his other hand, he took Michael's leather jacket from the back of the couch and tossed it to her. "Put it on," he said. She did, and tucked her underwear into one of its pockets.

He picked up the torn white raincoat, wadded it into a ball, and put it into his coat pocket.

Michael was snoring. Maybe he'd wake up soon and play it all back. With the gear he had, he didn't really need anybody there.

In the corridor, she watched Prior relock the door with a gray box. The gun was gone, but she hadn't seen him put it away. The box had a length of red flex sticking out of it with an ordinary-looking magnetic key on the end.

Out in the street was cold. He took her down the block and opened the door of a little white three-wheeler. She got in. He got in the driver's side and peeled off the gloves. He started the car; she watched a blowing cloud reflected in the copper-mirrored side of a business tower.

"He'll think I stole it," she said, looking down at the jacket.

Then the wiz flashed a final card, ragged cascade of neurons across her synapses: Cleveland in the rain and a good feeling she had once, walking.

Silver.

16 - Filament in Strata

I 'm your ideal audience, Hans -- as the recording began for the second time. How could you have a more attentive viewer? And you did capture her, Hans: I know, because I dream her memories. I see how close you came.

Yes, you captured them. The journey out, the building of walls, the long spiral in. They were about walls, weren't they? The labyrinth of blood, of family. The maze hung against the void, saying, We are that within, that without is other, here forever shall we dwell. And the darkness was there from the begi

The second viewing solidified their history for her, allowed her to slot Becker's shards along a time line that began with the marriage of Tessier and Ashpool, a union commented upon, in its day, primarily in the media of corporate finance. Each was heir to a more than modest empire, Tessier to a family fortune founded on nine basic patents in applied biochemistry and Ashpool to the great Melbourne-based engineering firm that bore his father's name. It was marriage as merger, to the journalists, though the resulting corporate entity was viewed by most as ungainly, a chimera with two wildly dissimilar heads.

But it was possible, then, in photographs of Ashpool, to see the boredom vanish, and in its place a complete surety of purpose. The effect was unflattering -- indeed, frightening: the hard, beautiful face grew harder still, merciless in its intent.