Installment for 19 May 2003

Nelle sat her butt on the barstool and looked at the bartender wiping glasses with his bar towel. Behind her, the beach powdery sand of the beach spread out. She heard the low rumble of the ocean.
She started humming a tune.
"Do you think that'll help?" the bartender asked, not looking up from his wiping.
"Maybe," she said. Nelle tried to form up her thoughts. The noise from the ocean here -
"Is it hard to do?" the bartender asked.
She focused on his hands, not wanting the rest of him to form up any more than necessary.
"It is hard."
"So, why do it?" he asked.
Something took up station behind her. She ignored it.
"Important," she told him. "Very important. Besides, any excuse to get out of that crate. I don't know how Mister Purple stands living there all the time."
"That sounds rough," the bartender agreed. "So, why not just leave? Get a hotel room. Get a votel room."
Nelle shook her head.
A clam shell lay on the bar. She looked for the blue dot. It had blue markings near the hinge of its shell. It must have been farther down the bar than she though - it was half a meter across.
She stared at it in fascination, unable to -
it started to open, making a haunted house creak - a rusty hinge creak - a killer on the stairway creak -
She leaned down toward the bar, toward the opening clam. Didn't pearls come in clams?
She shoved back against the bar, landed hard on her lower back, rolled to the side, but the thing was on her - the black thing inside the clam, snaking its tendrils up her nose. She grabbed -

"Ow," she said. "Ow. Ow. Ow."
"Nelle, you need to calm down."
"Shut up," she yelled.
"It was tweaking your fear chemicals."
A seemingly logical explanation, but Nelle knew better. Murasaki was monitoring her brain-chems. He was making her heart beat and the bad taste in her mouth. He was -
"I'm trying to normalize them. Is your interface damaged?"
"It's fide," she told him
The base of the interface was designed to break off rather than pull the tendrils out of her sinus cavities - possibly damaging the connections or the soft tissue there. She reconnected the leads.
Can you feel it, too? Are you afraid, too, in the dark, quiet hell of my spine?
"I'b goid back id," she told him.
"Very well," he said. "Be careful. There will be other traps."

Nelle looked around and the building looked at her.

"If it's so hard for you to do," he asked, "why are you doing it?"
"Important."
Nelle rubbed her head. A bar. Nautical theme. The beach behind her.
Nell looked at the bartender. She could almost remember -
"Looking for something?" he asked.
"Are you asking or telling?" She demanded - draw him out. Make him give something away.
Was she looking for something?
Nelle looked around, trying to focus -
A display of an anchor propped against the wall. Scraps of fishing net hung on it. Sitting in a pile of beach pebbles. Shells scatted on the pebbles.
Looking for something.
"Blue dot," she told the bartender.
"Say what?"
No, they were clams. Dozens of clams. Bigger than she thought.
Big as a head of lettuce the size of a basket ball inflated to a beach ball.
They were opening.
She looked inside to see something there, moving.
Crawling out, over the rocks, over the railing onto the floor, coming at her.
Nelle watched as herself run out the open wall onto the veranda, watched the slug dash after. Fangs - she knew - to drive into her flesh. Eat her or plant eggs or suck blood or -


Her eyes opened.
"You lost it," Murasaki told her. "Didn't you find the dot?"
"Do."
She panted, not even trying to restrain her fear.
"I'm tamping down your fear responses now," he told her.
Sinister in implication. He controlled her brain with ish primitive keyboard and mouse. Decided wither she reared or raged or lusted or -
"Levels coming down, the fear response came up too fast for me to compensate. Did you stare at something too long?"
"Shud up. Ready do go agai."
"Not yet. You should rest."
"I said, ready do go agaid."

The dog next to her said, "Hi there, my name's Captain Coyote."
"Nelle."
She looked around the office. Clock. TV. Poster. Chairs. Nurse.
"You can't come in," the nurse said. "No appointment."
Floor. Tiling. Old. Dirty.
"Who is Captain Coyote?" she asked the nurse.
"I'm Captain Coyote."
Nelle looked to her right. The coyote was Errol Flynn in a twentieth flying jacket and leather helmet.
"Did you bomb the Nazis?" she asked, looking away.
"Wrong war," he said. "The Kaiser. You twenty-first century folk don't have the proper appreciation for history. And you don't make any of your own movies any more."
"People make movies." She stood up.
"You can't come in."
She didn't look at the nurse. She looked around the office again, posters on the wall, warnings about health and safety and one about prolonged exposure to the wrong brain chemicals and one was about and egg only it was about drugs.
"I need to make an appointment."
"The doctor does not treat fat cowboys with brain chemical problems."
She looked at the nurse. "I need to go in there." She looked the nurse in the eye. The nurse's smile broadened and her teeth sharpened and her eyes -
Her left eye was blue.
Her whole face was a blue dot.
8:30 by the clock on the wall.
Supposed to be somewhere.
Penelope looked down. A pile of scrambled eggs on her plate.
Was she trying to put on weight? Did she have to gain thirty centimeter before she should be -
The cafeteria. It didn't look the same. It took up the whole basement floor, round tables and plastic chairs. Breakfast or lunch here. She never ate here, but she could.
She stood near the door. Ready to try to go to work. She missed tow hours. She'd think of some excuse. Maybe they wouldn't notice.
No. They always printed out the reports for her monthly evaluations.
She had to get to work now.
She went up the stairs and to the right and into the lobby. The receptionist was there, lean and pretty, perfect Japanese face on the twentieth body.
She gave Nell the fat-girl look.
"It's not the twentieth century anymore," Nelle said.
"Of course not, sweetie," she answered in Nelle's mother's voice.
Nelle walked to the swinging doors but the receptionist shook her head.
Nell was outside again.
Not as late as she though - only 7:30. Researching that hard problem she ran into yesterday - something about the Floating Spirit. Exception for research.
She looked around the cafeteria again. Tables, gray patterned tops. Chairs. Plastic on metal tubing. Dead coyote carcass in front of her, "Meat is Murder" shaved in the hair on the side.
"You can talk."
"Of course," said Captain Coyote. "I can be a spirit guide, but this is the wrong mythology."
"You are Captain Coyote. You tried to sell me out to the Baron."
"If you like."
"Were you an animate spirit before?" she asked. "Before people made up stories about you?"
"Use the second storey walkway," Captain Coyote turned to bone.
Nell started up the cement stairs looking for the second storey walkway. It would take her over the receptionist's head. She wouldn't see Nelle.
Only this building had only one storey. Only she never used a walkway. Only one other door would be open only open only only open -
"My badge." She held her hand between her breasts. "I forgot my badge. I better not be naked."
Fat and in her skin suit. Black syntho-skin tight over her body.
Ready for work.
In the lobby. The receptionist and her mother and a girl she knew from boarding school all stood around in front of the doors.
"You can't go in," they all said without speaking. "You are too fat to fit through the door."
Captain Coyote jumped up on the desk and barked. He put his snout done the receptionist's plunging neckline.
She giggled. "Boys don't do that to you," she said.
Nell looked away, not wanting to stare. Staring was bad.
"You were ugly before you were fat," her school friend said.
"No," her mother said. "You were always fat."
They all giggled, the receptionist giving squeals of ticklish laughter as Captain Coyote licked her breasts.
Nelle looked down. Her body was fat. Fatter than before. The second skin stretched and -
"I can still fit though the door," she said, looking up at the door.
But saying that only made them laugh harder.
"What's that?" Nelle asked, now standing right next to the big swinging doors. "It's a spot." She explained to the others - now gone. She bent down. Blue.
"You're getting there," Captain Coyote said.
"Are you Mister Purple? Did he send me a guide?"
"Maay-be. Maybe not," Captain Coyote told her.
"This isn't the twentieth century. I can be Miss Twiggy tomorrow for a couple thousand bucks. I can have a new heart and liver and stomach and gizzard. Twentieth is over."
She looked out over a field of wild grasses and knew there were poisonous snakes in their millions on the ground.
No fear.
She looked down at the raised island, a metal dias where she stood with Captain Coyote.
"It is the Twentieth," he said. "You are frozen here, all of you. Encased. Encapsulated. Paladin saw to that."
"Paladin is dead. It's over."
"It's never over," Captain Coyote told her.
Madonna dressed as Marilyn Monroe playing Eva Peron.
"They were right, of course. We all knew it back then, in the Twentieth. You're always fat, you're always homely, you're always poor, you're always weak, you're always stupid. You're just lying to yourself."
She looked around. All around the dais the brown dead weeds came up - would come up to - her knees. Underneath their cover, snakes and little rabbits with sharp teeth and something else.
"Not reason."
"Trying not to listen to me won't help. We knew it back then. Everybody puts up their false faces and looks brave and pretty and rich and smart. The ones who were worthwhile were superstars like me. We didn't have to lie about anything. But neither did anyone else but you. You should know that. You're the only one weak and ugly and stupid and fat."
"You're one of them. Grid Guardian." She looked the projection right in the eye. She fell into the Grid Guardian's eye, glimpsed the Grid.
Madonna Marilyn Peron dissipated into thick, sexy fog, her eyes falling to the dias and bouncing off into the weeds.
Nelle looked out at the sea of dead weeds. What she took for the wind was the rustle of the creatures there. Now they seemed maddened - rabbits ran hither and yon, jumping up over out of the weed sea only to be bitten by snakes leaping up from the ground. Eagles and red tail hawks skimmed the top of the weeds, reaching down to grab a rabbit now and then and eat it in mid-flight. Some of the rabbits had litters as they hung in the bird's claws.
"I can walk though you all and be unharmed," Nelle called out. "We were here before you. We built this place."
The frenzy of predation increased with only one spot of stillness - from the distance, a spot ten meters across approached. In the quiet zone, nothing leaped and nothing slithered and nothing chirped or screamed or hissed.
"Captain Coyote, I presume," Nelle said as the quiet place approached the dias. She looked for a spot of blue.
"Nelle! How good it is to see you," the coyote said as it put its front paws up on the dias. "It's been weeks. May I show you the way?"
"I don't need your help," she said, looking up at the sun.
"Are you sore because I tried to kill you? I have my own reasons. I'll help you now."
The sun turned blue.
She stood on plain ground. She faced the tall, grand wise man. Behind the tall, grand, wise man - nothing.
Not white or black or shiny. Nothing.
"I have to find the blue dot," she told the tall, grand, wise man.
He shook his head. "No. Your mind now perceives the way though the barriers. It was never an intellectual puzzle. You had to learn."
"I have to find the Floating Spirit."
Again, he shook his head. "There may be uncontrolled programs on the Grid capable of hiding from us, but it changes nothing. Your presence on the Grid would disrupt the orderly exchange of information."
She sidestepped him and faced - nothing. "We made this. Human hands laid the cable. Human hands drew the plans for the computers. Human hands learned to count. We made this."
"You may not enter the Grid. An unencapsulated mind will be damaged. The information overload is real. The damage is permanent."
"No encapsulation."
She stepped forward.
Every light in the city was a sound was a letter was a note was a thought was a plan about a plan and every light in the city shown right on her brain. No thought of her own could form. A cascade of water washed away even the tiniest thought.
Words formed. Not hers. The tall, grand, wise man.
"Step back. You will never find the Floating Spirit."
"That's better. Mister Purple has damped down my brain chemicals."
"It won't help for long. Your wetware will be damaged. The Grid loses efficiency. Fifteen percent down - just from avoiding your chaos."
"Then help me find the Floating Spirit and I'll go."
"No."
"Everything is available right here," she said. "The Floating Spirit is in a Grid encapsulation. It is available now, here."
"Hidden from us. Especially from us."
"Give me your eyes. This won't take long."
She snagged the shell talking to her and pulled up the Inventory. She cut it in half and fed each half though a checksum, once for herself, once for the shell.
The half that differed must have the location of the Floating Spirit.
Bother differed.
"There are hundreds of programs that hid from Inventory. Most exist for only a few seconds."
"Nelle," Murasaki said. "I'm pulling you out. You'll lose awareness in a moment. It has to be now."
"Store both Inventories," she said.

Nelle lay on the floor of the container. She'd waved off Murasaki as he tried to help her. She breathed through her mouth, not ready to pull out the mass of tubes snaked up her nose into their connections in her brain.
She felt the floor move. The container was being loaded onto a train or perhaps a barge.
After a few minutes - hours? - she licked the retract button on the base of the interface plug and felt the tubes retract.
It always sent shivers down her spine and she wondered if the shivers were real. Could she feel them, in the dark? Did she feel terror and overload, in the dark of Nelle's spine?
She heard the metal door clanging.
"Nelle, glad to see you're up. We just got a delivery. We're ready to ride down to the coast."
Nelle nodded. She got up and watched as Murasaki opened the chest and sorted through the powered food and other supplies.
He held a box - plain plasti-board - for a long moment and handed it to Nelle. She looked down at the box and up to Murasaki's face as he looked at her in astonishment.
The box was addressed to Penelope Gideon, Cowboy extra ordinaire, Care of Mister Purple. Nelle pulled on the tab.
Inside were three black slips. Nelle thought they would fit her well.
Around the waistline, in subtle white printing: "100% Spider Silk."

The Floating Spirit © 2003 Tim D. Sherer

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