Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [155]
Bash didn’t know. “But why?”
“Are you kidding? You’re famous on campus. The biggest kinasehead ever to emerge from these hallowed halls, even considering all the other famous names. And that’s no intronic string.”
Bash felt weird. Had he really become some kind of emblematic figure to this strange younger generation? The honor sat awkwardly on his shoulders.
“Well, that’s a major tribute, I guess. I only hope I can live up to your expectations.”
“Even if you never released anything beyond proteopape, you already have. That’s why we want to help you now. And it’s truly exonic that we managed to get a spy — me — into place for your meeting with the Dubsters. Those sugar-bags would never have lifted a pinky finger to aid you.”
Despite the worshipful talk, Bash still had his doubts about the utility and motives of the mysterious Masqueleros, but the intransigence of Cricket’s friends left him little choice. (Ms. Licklider herself, although expressing genuine sympathy, had had no solid aid of her own to offer.)
“I really appreciate your help, Tito. But I’m still a little unclear on how you guys hope to track Dagny down.”
“Cryonize your metabolism, pard. You’ll see in a minute.”
Descending a few stairs into an access well, they stopped at an innocuous basement door behind Building 54. A small square of proteopape was inset above the door handle. Harnnoy spit upon it.
“Wouldn’t the oils on your fingers have served as well?” Bash asked.
“Sure. But spitting is muy narcocorrido.”
“Oh.”
The invisible lab in the paper performed an instant DNA analysis on Harnnoy’s saliva, and the door swung open.
Inside the unlit windowless room, a flock of glowing floating heads awaited.
The faces on the heads were all famous ones: Marilyn Monroe, Stephen Hawking, Britney Spears (the teenage version, not the middle-aged spokesperson for OpiateBusters), President Winfrey, Freeman Dyson, Walt Whitman (the celebrations for his 200th birthday ten years ago had gained him renewed prominence), Woody Woodpecker, SpongeBob SquarePants, Bart Simpson’s son Homer Junior.
“Welcome to the lair of the Masqueleros,” ominously intoned a parti-faced Terminator.
Bash came to a dead stop, stunned for a moment, before he realized what he was seeing. Then he got angry.
“Okay, everybody off with the masks. We can’t have any proteopape around while we talk.”
Overhead fluorescents flicked on, and the crowd of conspirators wearing only the cowls of their camo suits stood revealed, the projected faces fading in luminescence to match the ambient light. One by one the Masqueleros doffed their headgear to reveal the grinning motley faces of teenagers of mixed heritage and gender. One member gathered up the disguises, including Harnnoy’s full suit, and stuffed the potentially treacherous proteopape into an insulated cabinet.
Briefly, Bash recapped his problem for the attentive students. They nodded knowingly, and finally one girl said, “So you need to discover this bint’s hiding place without alerting her to your presence. And since she effectively controls every piece of proteopape in the I2-verse, your only avenue of information is seemingly closed. But you haven’t reckoned with—the internet!”
“The internet!” fumed Bash. “Why don’t I just employ smoke signals or, or — the telegraph? The internet is dead as Xerox.”
A red-haired kid chimed in. “No latch, pard. Big swaths of the web are still in place, maintained by volunteers like us. We revere and cherish the kludgy old monster. The web’s virtual ecology is different now, true, more of a set of marginal biomes separated by areas of clear-cut devastation. But we still host thousands of webcams. And there’s no proteopape in the mix, it’s all antique silicon. So here’s what we do. We put a few agents out there searching, and I guarantee that in no time at