Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [144]
Imagine Bash’s surprise to witness Dagny Winsome standing impatiently before his front door. After a short flummoxed moment, Bash threw wide the door.
“Dag – Dagny? But how –?”
Ten years onward from graduation, Dagny Winsome retained her collegiate looks and informality. She wore one of her trademark horizontally striped shirts, red and black. Her clunky eyeglasses incorporated enough plastic to form a car bumper. Her long near-platinum hair had been pulled back and secured by a jeweled crab, one of the fashionable ornamental redactors that metabolized human sweat and dead skin cells. Black jeans and a pair of NeetFeets completed her outfit.
Dagny said with some irritation, “Well, aren’t you going to invite your old fellow alumna inside?”
“But how did you get past my security?”
Dagny snorted. “You call that gimcrack setup a security system? I had it hacked while my car was still five miles outside of town. And I only drove from Boston.”
Bash made a mental note to install some hardware and software upgrades. But he could not, upon reflection, manufacture any ire against either his deficient cyberwards or Dagny herself. He was pleased to see her.
“Uh, sorry about my manners. Sure, come on in. I was just having breakfast. Want something?”
Dagny stepped briskly inside. “Green tea and a poppy-seed muffin, some Canadian bacon on the side.”
Bash reviewed the contents of his large freezer. “Uh, can do.”
Seated in the kitchen, sipping their drinks while bacon microwaved, neither one spoke for some time. Dagny focused a dubious look on the decorative strip of proteopape wallpaper running around the upper quarter of the kitchen walls. A living frieze, the accent strip displayed a constantly shifting video of this year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit models, at play in the Sino-Hindu space station, Maohatma. Embarrassed, Bash decided that to change the contents now would only accentuate the original bachelor’s choice, so he fussed with the microwave while admiring Dagny out the corner of his eye.
Serving his guest her muffin and bacon, Bash was taken aback by her sudden confrontational question.
“So, how long are you going to vegetate here like some kind of anaerobe?”
Bash dropped into his seat. “Huh? What do you mean?”
Dagny waved a braceleted arm to sweep in the whole house. “Just look around. You’ve fashioned yourself a perfect little womb here. First you go and drop the biggest conceptual bombshell into the information society that the world has ever seen. Intelligent paper! Then you crawl into a hole with all your riches and pull the hole in after yourself.”
“That’s ridiculous. I — I’m still engaged with the world. Why, just last year I filed five patents — ”
“All piddling little refinements on proteopape. Face it, you’re just dicking around with bells and whistles now. You’ve lost your edge. You don’t really care about the biz or its potential to change the world anymore.”
Bash tried to consider Dagny’s accusations objectively. His life was still full of interests and passions, wasn’t it? He ran a big A-life colony that had kicked some butt in the annual Conway Wars; he composed songs on his full-body SymphonySuit, and downloads from his music website had hit an all-time high last week (53); and he was the biggest pear-orchard owner in Oregon’s Rogue River Valley (the holding corporation was run by York and Adelaide). Didn’t all those hobbies and several others speak to his continuing involvement in the world at large? Yet suddenly Bash was unsure of his own worth and meaning. Did his life really look trivial to an outsider?
Irked by these novel sensations, Bash sought to counterattack. “What about you? I don’t see where you’ve been exactly burning up the I2 landscape. How have you been improving the world since school?”
Dagny was unflustered. “You never would have heard of anything I’ve done, even