Mirror Space - Marianne de Pierres [81]
Most importantly though, did his body still exist, and was it still alive?
Somewhere inside his mind, deep, deep below the level of the neurons that struggled to organise the crashing noise pollution into something acceptable, came an emphatic retort.
It better fucking well be, or. . .
Or what? What was he gonna do about it? Really?
Make a giant fucking nuisance of myself .
Feeling better for that conclusion, he turned his full attention back to the spinning wall of sound. There had to be a way to interpret it.
He recalled his Ferris wheel image and tried to refine it a little; not a Ferris wheel, perhaps, but a colour wheel like the ones sold to kids at fairs. In the wind they became a blur but when they were still the colours were well-defined, individual blades. He needed to slow the spinning noise right down to find the solitary voices.
It was a long time since Jo-Jo Rasterovich had practised meditation, and even then it had been part of his ploy to convince a nun at the Kanada Monastery on Kanada Keys to have sex with him. Still, he’d worked at it for a time (until, in fact, the Mother Superior had caught them at it and had him ejected from the city) and the mindset came back easily enough.
He picked out the blue sounds, listening carefully to them, much as though he was staring at the tip of his own nose, with a kind of defocused concentration. But his mind wandered all too quickly and he lost the threads.
He restarted the process, over and over, until his concentration span increased a little. The solid blue turned into shades of blue. He picked one of them and applied the same method.
Suddenly, as with his pursuit of Rast’s voice, he dropped into a clear audio space.
‘Cipher?’ asked a voice. A single word spoken but it seeded and grew into multiple responses in Jo-Jo’s mind. ^what’s your name?||you’ve never been here before||have you heard the news?||everyone’s talking about it||^
‘You m-mean me?’ asked Jo-Jo.
‘Answer.’ Again the single word blossomed into a deluge of replies and questions. ^you first||it’s not polite to crash in without introduction||are you one of the monitors?||^
Jo-Jo took one of his imaginary deep breaths. ‘OK, I’m new around here. Just been transformed or whatever the frick you call it. Having a hell of a time navigating the noise.’
‘Transformed?’ ^impossible!||where from?||no transformation allowed when Medium is travelling||^
‘Medium? Is that what this thing is called?’ asked Jo-Jo. ‘My name is Jo.’
‘Cipher.’ ^names?||what are they?||did you skip the orientation stage?||weird stuff!||JO??||^
Jo-Jo let the many responses rattle around his head for a while before he spoke again.
‘I didn’t get any orientation. Tell me, are you one consciousness, or many?’ he ventured.
‘Question.’ ^cute question||send him back to O||weird stuff||^
‘Does that mean you don’t know?’
‘Alert.’ ^An aberrant!||monitor should know||enemy perhaps?||too obvious for that||cute||^
‘I’m not your enemy, I’m here . . . accidentally,’ said Jo-Jo. ‘Can you tell me how this works? What’s this monitor thing?’
‘Aberrant.’ ^Vote||Tally||30,000,132 say yes to Jo||l7,128,003 say notify monitor||^
‘Thirty million say yes? Nearly fifty million of you are listening to me? Frickin’ impossible! But... I can only hear a few,’ Jo-Jo finished limply.
‘Account.’ ^Medium is conduit to billions||Jo speaks with Minority Social||^
Even though the odd speech pattern was becoming easier to follow with each interchange, Jo-Jo wasn’t sure that he was making correct, even vaguely correct, interpretations. As long as they didn’t summon the monitor. . . ‘So you’re a Social Minority group? You mean like ... a gossip group?’
‘Gossip?’ ^Revote||abuse||confront—^
‘Whoa,’ Jo-Jo interjected. ‘Steady, steady. I meant...is your group swapping information?’
‘Travel.’ ^Medium travels||quick quick||^
‘Travels where?’
‘Time.’ ^Secure the future||Leah system||tell Jo nothing||^
Leah system. Jo-Jo searched his memory. Araldis was in the Leah system. ‘You mean Araldis?’ If he could have, he would have spluttered,