Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [150]
Now Dagny could commandeer every uniquely identifiable scrap of the ether-driven miracle medium and turn it to her own purposes. For the moment, her only motivation to tamper appeared to consist of expressing her displeasure with Bash. For that small blessing, Bash was grateful. But how long would it take before Dagny’s congenital impishness seduced her into broader culture jamming? This was the woman, after all, who had drugged one of MIT’S deans as he slept, and brought him to awaken in a scrupulously exact mockup of his entire apartment exactly three-quarters scale.
Bash felt like diving into bed and pulling the covers over his head. But a moment’s reflection stiffened his resolve. No one was going to mess with his proteopape and get away with it! Too much of the world’s economy and culture relied on the medium just to abandon it. He would simply have to track Dagny down and attempt to reason with her.
As his first move, Bash took out his telephone. His telephone was simply a stiffened strip of proteopape. His defunct newspaper would once have served the purpose as well, but most people kept a dedicated phone on their persons, if for nothing else than to receive incoming calls when they were out of reach of other proteopape surfaces, and also to serve as their unique intelligent tag identifying them to I2 entities.
Bash folded the phone into a little hollow pyramid and stood it on the table. The GlobeSpeak logo appeared instantly: a goofy anthropomorphic chatting globe inked by Robert Crumb, every appearance of which earned the heirs of the artist one milli-cent. (Given the volume of world communication, Sophie Crumb now owned most of southern France.) Bash ordered the phone to search for Cricket Licklider. Within a few seconds her face replaced the logo, while the cameras in Bash’s phone reciprocated with his image.
Cricket grinned. “I knew you’d come looking for some of the good stuff eventually, Bashie-boy.”
“No, it’s not like that. I appreciate your attention, really I do, but I need to find Dagny.”
Frowning, Cricket said, “You lost your girlfriend? Too bad. Why should I help you find her?”
“Because she’s going to destroy proteopape if I don’t stop her. Where would that leave you and your fellow Dubsters? Where would that leave any of us for that matter?”
This dire news secured Cricket’s interest, widening her iguana eyes. “Holy shit! Well, Christ, I don’t know what to say. I haven’t seen her since the Woodies. She might not even be in town anymore.”
“Can you get the rest of your crew together? Maybe one of them knows something useful.”
“I’ll do my best. Meet us at the clubhouse in an hour.”
Cricket cut the transmission, but not before uploading the relevant address to Bash’s phone.
Bash decided that a shave and a shower would help settle his nerves.
In the bathroom, Bash lathered up his face in the proteopape mirror: a sheet that digitized his image in real time and displayed it unreversed. The mirror also ran a small window in which a live newscast streamed. As Bash listened intently for any bulletins regarding the public malfunctioning of proteopape, he took his antique Mach3 razor down from the wall cabinet’s shelf and then sudsed his face from a spray can. Having been raised in a simple-living household, Bash still retained many old-fashioned habits, such as actually shaving. He drew the first swath through the foam up his neck and under his chin.
Without warning, his mirror suddenly hosted the leering face of Charles Laughton as the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Bash yelped and cut himself. The Hunchback chortled, then vanished. And now his mirror was as dead as his newspaper.
Cursing Dagny,