The Floating Spirit 14 April 2003

Installment for 14 April 2003

Nelle walked down the stairs - the stairs to her apartment, her office.
"Not the place, Mister Purple," she called out. "Nothing but memory."
"Patience. We will find him."
"Roger, dodger, my purple friend."
Nelle felt both thighs rub-rib-brush against both walls. She shook her butt up and down and felt the concrete walls on her bare skin.
"Data state changes," Mister Purple told her - his voice all fuzzy. "You approach the tracer." Nelle wiggled her butt again, drawing in the feedback. "Don't over-focus," Mister Purple told her.
"Yes, yes, got it," she said, giving her right cheek a final brush against the wall.
The words "After Hours Club" glowed in the air in front of her for a moment, then she was inside.
Inside the bar. Loud. Dark. Techno-music draped over -
"Hey, baby, you're hot."
Nelle didn't look at him, didn't wonder if he was human or real or -
She kept moving, turning away from the man/woman/fragment trying to get her attention.
"Signal very faint," Mister Purple told her. "Try to stay still for a while."
Nelle looked for a booth - none. She turned all the way around twice, letting her data feeds slip out of focus.
A new wall with a row of booths.
"I would not describe that as staying still," Mister Purple told her as she walked over to a booth.
"Hey, baby," he said as Nelle sat down.
She looked around, kept her focus from forming.
"The Baron?" she asked after she formed a picture of her table-mate.
Dark glasses. Brush cut. Minor hacker. She made the booth comfortable for her size - bigger than usual in this frame - and he failed to compensate. When he leaned back, she could hardly see his face in the darkness. When he leaned forward against the table, he looked like a child in a family restaurant.
He leaned forward now.
"Maybe I'm the Baron," he said. "Tell me your story. Some kind of AV prog out for a romp? Or should I tell Heaven to look for an angel."
"Not real," she told him, looking around the bar for something out of place.
"Who says?" he asked, trying to slide around the booth to sit next to her. She turned the booth under him, keeping her position and keeping him on the other side.
"Real guys don't say stuff like that," she said.
"Maybe you hang with the wrong guys. Anyhow, I can tell an angel when I see one."
Captain Coyote jumped up on the table.
"Doesn't that terrify you?" he asked, standing up in brush-cut boy's face.
"Will you trace the damn coyote, Mister Purple?" Nelle called out.
"What? No. I almost have the link to the Baron established. I cannot even see your coyote."
"After all," Captain Coyote went on, "in Christian theology, the Creator created Heaven, Earth, and Hell in a rigid hierarchy. Evil things ended up in Hell. Mortals lived on Earth. Angels and spirits dwelled in Heaven."
"So, what?" brush-cut boy asked.
Something about the music.
"So," Captain Coyote continued. He walked in a little circle on the table sat down in front of Nelle. "Good creatures go up, bad creatures go down. The Creator made angels for Heaven. So, if our ample Angel of Perfection came to Earth, why? To go all Old Testament on everybody? Or has she fallen, discovered pride and sin?"
"Sounds good to me," brush-cut boy said, scooting up on the padded naugahyde to be closer to Nelle.
"Something about the music," Nelle said aloud.
Captain Coyote looked over his shoulder at her.
"You're near the Grid," he told her. She watched his mouth with fascination as it produced words no real coyote could form. "This place occupies the buffer of a Grid encapsulation station."
"There," she said, reaching across the table to grab brush-boy's tongue. She pulled it out to look at the blue dot tattooed on its top. "Yours?" she asked.
"No," he said. "That's not my dot."
He dissipated as she focused on the tongue.
"Got him," Mister Purple said.
"The Duke," she said.
A bearded man sat across from her in the booth now. He went for a Peter O'Toole Lion in Winter kind of thing, but came closer to Richard Burton Anne of a Thousand Days.
Captain Coyote jumped off the table to sit next to her. She didn't dare look away or let touch of his fur on her thigh distract her.
"Baron, if you please."
"One of your boys?" she asked, holding up the tongue - now without the blue dot.
"No, just a passer by," the Baron answered. "Such a shame, you know. How dissapative people choose to live. Don't you think?"
"Uso killed four people that I know of."
"He killed hundreds. An assassin kills people. He kills people."
"Killed," she said. "Past tense. I killed him on Burnday. You must know that."
He shook his head. "I suppose I guessed when he failed to contact me for three days. I suppose Murasaki filled your head with lies about me. He can't listen to this part of our conversation."
"Don't care," she said. "You want the Floating Spirit and so does he. He pays me. You try to kill me. When do we get to the lies?"
"Funny you should talk about wanting things. I can catch the Floating Spirit because I have something it wants. Remarkable, no? A collection of symbols in an old computer language cobbled together a hundred years ago by a school teacher and for the very first time in history, a created thing has its own desires."
"Second time," Captain Coyote said. "He - " Captain Coyote shook his head, like a puppy-dog sneeze. "Trying to kill you."
"I know that he'll try to kill me again, as soon as he can," she answered, keeping her eyes on the Baron. Fixing him with her stare.
"Now," Captain Coyote said.
"Correct," the Baron said. "I know you came here to try to hold me long enough for Murasaki to trace me with his ridiculous old-fashioned equipment. He might get the trace, but after you die, he'll have to find someone else to help him find me."
"Get out," Captain Coyote told her.
The Baron smiled.
"No danger," she told the captain. "You can't kill someone in a computer. This isn't an old movie."
"What kind of sen-dep chamber are you in? He bought five old ones on the Bay. That model lacks an emergency drain. Suppose an epileptic fit takes you and you bite through your air tube? Or rip it out of its socke? Is Murasaki in the room with you? Can he get you out in time? Before you drown?"
"Get out," Captain Coyote told her. "I have to leave. Get out while you can."
The coyote disappeared. She could still feel his body against her -
"I knew it," the Baron told her.
"The Grid," she said.
He nodded and smiled graciously. "You meant to fix me here, but I've fixed you instead. The bar is already gone." He shook his head. "People think that just because our existence in the Grid is not physical - "
"Shut up," she told him. "Tell me about the Floating Spirit. Is Murasaki telling me the truth about that?"
She had to manage it. She did it before, on the staircase.
"I suppose," he told her. "Written in the 1960s by a young woman studying to be a teacher. She had an interest in folklore and Murasaki has very quaint ideas about how that manifested in the program. You really think you're going to survive this, don't you? Shall I tell you the details of my plan?"
Captain Coyote - when he rested up against her leg, it - Not a cyber-sensation.
"Why do you want the Floating Spirit?" she asked.
She could still feel Captain Coyote against her leg. She could feel the - the wall of the tube. Not the coyote. Wall of the tube.
"Not to set it free, if that's what Murasaki wants. That is what he wants, no? Here it comes. Goodbye."
A torrent of data washed over them. She lost sight of him as every cell in her brain fired in response to sensory overload.
Only the feeling on her right leg - nothing real. Feeling on her right leg. Rub against the wall. Remember the real. Remember the -

"What happened?" Murasaki asked. "You had an incident. Hold still. Draining fluids now."
The harness took up more of her weight as the brine emptied out of the tube. Nelle grabbed her mouth piece and pulled it out.
"Tried to kill me," she said. "Induced seizure from information overload."
"You cannot die from an overload," Murasaki said, pacing nervously in front of the tube, waiting for the while colloid to drain. The surface had reached her hips. The straps under her arms pulled against her.
"Does this model tube have an emergency drain?"
"It drains quickly enough. Oh. I see what you mean." Murasaki paused, looking up and to the right as if he heard some sound beyond human range. "A desperate gambit," he said finally. "It might have worked."
"He says he has something the Floating Spirit wants. True?" Murasaki said nothing.
She stood up, brushing her right thigh against the wall of the tube. The tube only accommodated her fat butt with a few centimeters on each side.
She opened the door and stepped out. Murasaki averted his eyes as he offered her a towel from the work bench. She shoved it back at him and continued to drip colloid fluid.
"You're going to tell me the rest of the truth. What does the Floating Spirit want?"

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