Fish Swim in the Lake

Part 4.1 | Living on nerves

Vlad's "cottage" was Willson House, on a bluff overlooking Meech Lake, flanked by Lawless Bay and the only scrap of public sand, O'Brien Beach. It was, was, a historic landmark, built by Thomas 'Carbide' Willson and host to princes, but as with the rest of the Gatineaus, now it was just someone's summer residence.

Tony drove up a bit and parked as best he could amid haphazard clusters of cars parked by drivers unused to sharing space. alphaDana slammed the car door hard just for the sensation and followed Tony and Lola up the hundred year old stone steps. Willson House was a shock of light above dark rocks and darker water.

"You'll turn that off, please," said the man at the door wearing a tuxedo and a silvered skullcap with ruby goggles. He pointed to alphaDana's plant plug. "This is a private function."

alphaDana peered around him, into the house, but couldn't sense anything more than three steps ahead of her anyhow. The house was hemispherically shielded, probably from the basement up. There would be no uplinking or transmitting or probably even old style telephoning. Common vloggers and other scene recorders wouldn't function, though the specially made anti-shielding ones probably would. Not that alphaDana had anything so expensive or elaborate.

She nodded, smiled, switched off, and stepped into the house.

The shielding surrounded her like waves of cobwebs. She couldn't vog, she couldn't vlog, she couldn't even use basic sensors. Even though she had suspected she'd have to switch off if she came out here she hadn't thought much about the implications. She hadn't switched off in maybe a year, not in the police headquarters, not even during sex.

She leaned against a stony wall covered with hologrammic paint and closed her eyes. It was dark. It was dark when she closed her eyes! How extraordinary! No dataflow, no reports, just a little blinking status bar in the bottom right of her right eye. She laid her hands against the disguised bare stone and tipped her head back and breathed like she'd been taught to breathe.

Someone took her hand, wrapped her fingers around a cool round glass, real glass, with condensation on the ripples, and raised the glass to her mouth. She drank and sputtered; orange juice? Or was it grape juice, she couldn't remember which was purple and which was, oh yes, orange. That's right. She opened her eyes and looked and sighed in exasperation. She reached for the net, to find out, how, why, but it wasn't there, and she shut her eyes again to shut out the growing panic of isolation, the cold sense of drowning.

"Oh," she said, forcing her voice steady. "What are you doing here."

Posted by gtaylor at April 29, 2002 07:14 AM