Virtual Light

He and Kevin were sharing one of two bedrooms in a sixties house in Mar Vista, which meant Sea View but there wasn’t any. Someone had rigged up a couple of sheets of drywall down the middle of the room. On Rydell’s side, the drywall was covered with those same big self-adhesive daisies and a collection of souvenir bumper-stickers from places like Magic Mountain, Nissan County, Disneyland, and Skywalker Park. There were two other people sharing the house, three if you counted the Chinese girl out in the garage (but she had her own bathroom in there).

Rydell had bought a futon with most of his first month’s pay from IntenSecure. He’d bought it at this stall in the market; they were cheaper there, and the stall was called Futon Mouth, which Rydell thought was pretty fu

Lately, waiting to take the cast off, he’d spent a lot of time on that futon, staring up at those bumper-stickers. He wondered if whoever had put them there had actually bothered to go to all those places. Hernandez had once offered him work at Nissan County. IntenSecure had the rentacop franchise there. His parents had honeymooned at Disneyland. Skywalker Park was up in San Francisco; it had been called Golden Gate, before, and he remembered a couple of fairly low-key riots on television when they’d privatized it.

“You on line to any of the job-search nets, Berry?”

Rydell shook his head.

“This one’s on me” Kevin said, passing Rydell the helmet. It wasn’t anything like Karen’s slick little goggles; just a white plastic rig like kids used for games. “Put it on. I’ll dial for you.”

“Well” Rydell said, “this is nice, Kevin, but you don’t have to go to all this trouble.”

Kevin touched the bone in his nose. “Well, there’s the rent.”

There was that. Rydell put the helmet on.

“Now” Sonya said, just as perky as could be, “we’re showing that you did graduate from this post-secondary training program—”

“Academy” Rydell corrected. “Police.”

“Yes, Berry, but we’re showing that you were then employed for a total of eighteen days, before being placed on suspension.” Sonya looked like a cartoon of a pretty girl. No pores. No texture anywhere. Her teeth were very white and looked like a single unit, something that could be snapped out intact for closer inspection. But not for cleaning, because there was no need; cartoons didn’t eat. She had wonderful tits, though; she had the tits Rydell would have drawn for her if he’d been a talented cartoonist.

“Well” Rydell said, thinking of Turvey, “I got into some trouble after they assigned me to Patrol.”

Sonya nodded brightly. “I see, Berry.” Rydell wondered what she did see. Or what the expert system that used her as a hand-puppet could see. Or how it saw. What did someone like Rydell look like to an employment agency’s computer system? Not like much, he decided.

“Then you moved to Los Angeles, Berry, and we show ten weeks of employment with the IntenSecure Corporation’s residential armed-response branch. Driver with experience of weapons.”

Rydell thought of the rocket-pods slung under the LAPD chopper. Probably they’d had one of those CHAIN guns in there, too. “Yep” he agreed.

“And you’ve resigned your position with IntenSecure.”

“Guess so.”

Sonya beamed at Rydell as though he’d just admitted, shyly, to a congressional appointment or a post-doctoral degree. “Well, Berry” she said, “let me put my thinking cap on for just a second!” She winked, then closed her big cartoon eyes.

Jesus, Rydebl thought. He tried to glance sideways, but Kevin’s helmet didn’t have any peripherals, so there was nothing there. Just Sonya, the empty rectangle of her desk, sketchy details suggesting an office, and the employment agency’s logo behind her on the wall. The logo made her look like the anchorwoman on a cha

Sonya opened her eyes. Her smile became incandescent. “You’re from the South” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Plantations, Berry. Magnolias. Tradition. But a certain darkness as well. A Gothic quality. Faulkner.”

Fawk—? “Huh?”

“Nightmare Folk Art, Berry. Ventura Boulevard, Sherman Oaks.”

Kevin watched as Rydell removed the helmet and wrote an address and telephone number on the back of last week’s People. The magazine belonged to Monica, the Chinese girl in the garage; she always got hers printed out so there was never any mention of scandal or disaster, but with a triple helping of celebrity romance, particularly anything to do with the British royal family.

“Something for you, Berry?” Kevin looked hopeful.

“Maybe” Rydell said. “This place in Sherman Oaks. I’ll call ’em up, check it out.”

Kevin fiddled with his nose-bone. “I can give you a lift” he said.

There was a big painting of the Rapture in the window of Nightmare Folk Art. Rydell knew paintings like that from the sides of Christian vans parked beside shopping centers. Lots of bloody car-wrecks and disasters, with all the Saved souls flying up to meet Jesus, whose eyes were a little too bright for comfort. This one was a lot more detailed than the ones he remembered. Each one of those Saved souls had its own individual face, like it actually represented somebody, and a few of them reminded him of famous people. But it still looked like it had been painted by either a fifteen-year-old or an old lady.

Kevin had let him off at the corner of Sepulveda and he’d walked back two blocks, looking for the place, past a crew in wide-brim hardhats who were pouring the foundations for a palm tree. Rydell wondered if Ventura had had real ones before the virus; the replacements were so popular now, people wanted them put in everywhere.

Ventura was one of those Los Angeles streets that just went on forever. He knew he must’ve driven Gunhead past Nightmare Folk Art more times than he could count, but these streets looked completely different when you walked them. For one thing, you were pretty much alone; for another, you could see how cracked and dusty a lot of the buildings were. Empty spaces behind dirty glass, with a yellowing pile of junk-mail on the floor inside and maybe a puddle of what couldn’t be rainwater, so you sort of wondered what it was. You’d pass a couple of those, then a place selling sunglasses for six times the rent Rydell paid for his half of the room in Mar Vista. The sunglasses place would have some kind of rentacop inside, to buzz you in.

Nightmare Folk Art was like that, sandwiched between a dead hair-extension franchise and some kind of failing real estate place that sold insurance on the side. NIGHTMARE FOLK ART-SOUTHERN GOTHIC, the letters hand-painted all lumpy and hairy, like mosquito legs in a cartoon, white on black. But with a couple of expensive cars parked out front: a silver-gray Range Rover, looking like Gunhead dressed up for the prom, and one of those little antique Porsche two-seaters that always looked to Rydell like the wind-up key had fallen off. He gave the Porsche a wide berth; cars like that tended to have hypersensitive anti-theft systems, not to mention hyper-aggressive.

There was a rentacop looking at him through the armored glass of the door; not IntenSecure, but some off brand. Rydell had borrowed a pair of pressed chinos from Kevin. They were a little tight in the waist, but they beat hell out of the orange trunks. He had on a black IntenSecure uniform-shirt with the patches ripped off, his Stetson, and his SWAT shoes. He wasn’t sure black really made it with khaki. He pushed the button. The rentacop buzzed him in.

“Got an appointment with Justine Cooper” he said, taking his sunglasses off.

“With a client” the rentacop said. He looked about thirty, and like he should’ve been out on a farm in Kansas or somewhere. Rydell looked over and saw a ski