Fish Swim in the Lake

Part 2.2 | If you loved me, you'd let me eat your brain

The more alphaDana looked around the local cop net, the angrier she got. It was clearly a fishing expedition and maybe simple harrassment -- maybe she'd turned down a date with a cop and this was an oblique revenge, maybe she'd vlogged somebody on the take and neither noticed nor cared.

Pijai's orders called for her whole afternoon, but there were no major crimes recorded within three blocks of anywhere she'd been. It wasn't as if there'd been a hit and run at 3:17 and they hoped she'd seen the driver pull up or fly away. There wasn't even a jaywalking tag. Nothing.

Clearly it wasn't worth five hundred nallars even if her rent was due, not when she considered all the reconfiguration she'd have to do after a low-level scrub. She deleted that part of Pijai's order and was considering what to do with the rest when the door next to the desk rattled. alphaDana unlinked and lunged across to cover her face with a dusty paper magazine.

"Are you the mentech?" she said loudly to the man that entered. He was about six feet tall, balding, with a crooked Roman nose and transparent blond hair. "I should send you guys a goddamn bill. Some of us freelance, you know? Some of us don't have a regular fucking job?"

The mentech swivelled around and she saw his nametag, Colin Michaels. He snapped, "oh, sorry, I just spent the last three hours downloading a fucking head, okay? A fucking decapitated head. OK? It was frozen when I got it so I had to thaw it and wire it up before it started to rot. Heads don't keep well! Then it fell off my desk and cracked when I was unlinking it and now I've got fucking brains in my shoe treads, OK? So don't talk to me about a fucking job!"

"You get paid all the time. I know guys who'd kill to dump a frozen head every day so their kids can go to university."

"You have to have time off to get kids. I get 80 percent of a vacation day per month and I've got three months saved up because every time I book it, there's some emergency and oh no, Colin, not this time. I don't even get sick days off. If I'm sick they animate me. You try it sometime."

"You try... Anyhow, the sooner we get this over with the sooner I can get out of here. What am I here for?"

The mentech jacked in to the daten's console. alphaDana looked studiously downward at her magazine and fidgeted her toes invisibly in her shoes.

"All afternoon?" the mentech yelled, and jacked out. alphaDana relaxed her spine and forced a dismayed look. "He wants me to dump your whole afternoon. That inbred idiot. The transmat's booked solid until Thursday."

"But it's only Tuesday," alphaDana said, her dismay solidifying. "I can't keep it in mem that long -- I won't be able to work!"

Posted by gtaylor at April 16, 2002 07:57 AM