Mental note: Next time just jump off a fucking bridge. That way there’s no question of getting an invisible cholla shoved up your nose.
She whips around a corner, heeled over so far she could lick the yellow line, and her Knight Visions reveal all in a blaze of multispectral radiation. On infrared, the Falabala encampment is a turbulating aurora of pink fog punctuated by the white-hot bursts of campfires. All of it rests on dim bluish pavement, which means, in the false-color scheme of things, that it’s cold. Behind everything is the jagged horizon line of that funky improvised barrier technology that the Falabalas are so good at. A barrier that has been completely spurned, snubbed, and confounded by Y.T., who dropped out of the sky into the middle of the camp like a Stealth fighter with an inferiority complex.
Once you’re into the actual encampment, people don’t really notice or care who you are. A couple people see her, watch her slide on by, don’t get all hairy about it. They probably get a lot of Kouriers coming through here. A lot of dippy, gullible, Kool-Aid-drinking couriers. And these people aren’t hip enough to tell Y.T. apart from that breed. But that’s okay, she’ll pass for now, as long as they don’t check out the detailing on her new plank.
The campfires provide enough plain old regular visible light to show this sorry affair for what it is: a bunch of demented Boy Scouts, a jamboree without merit badges or hygiene. With the IR supered on top of the visible, she can also see vague, spectral red faces out in the shadows where her unassisted eyes would only see darkness. These new Knight Visions cost her a big wad of her Mob drug-running money. Just the kind of thing Mom had in mind when she insisted Y.T. get a part-time job.
Some of the people who were here last time are gone now, and there’s a few new ones she doesn’t recognize. There’s a couple of people actually wearing duct-tape straitjackets. That’s a fashion statement reserved for the ones who are totally out of control, rolling and thrashing around on the ground. And there’s a few more who are spazzing out, but not as bad, and one or two who are just plain messed up, like plain old derelicts that you might see at the Snooze ’n’ Cruise.
“Hey, look!” someone says. “It’s our friend the Kourier! Welcome, friend!”
She’s got her Liquid Knuckles uncapped, available, and shaken well before use. She’s got high-voltage, high-fashion metallic cuffs around her wrists in case someone tries to grab her by same. And a bundy stunner up her sleeve. Only the most tubular throwbacks carry guns. Guns take a long time to work (you have to wait for the victim to bleed to death), but paradoxically they end up killing people pretty often. But nobody hassles you after you’ve hit them with a bundy stunner. At least that’s what the ads say.
So it’s not like she exactly feels vulnerable or anything. But still, she’d like to pick her target. So she maintains escape velocity until she’s found the woman who seemed friendly—the bald chick in the torn-up Chanel knockoff—and then zeroes in on her.
“Let’s get off into the woods, man,” Y.T. says, “I want to talk to you about what’s going on with what’s left of your brain.”
The woman smiles, struggles to her feet with the good-natured awkwardness of a retarded person in a good mood. “I like to talk about that,” she says. “Because I believe in it.”
Y.T. doesn’t stop to do a lot of talking, just grabs the woman by the hand, starts leading her uphill, into the scrubby little trees, away from the road. She doesn’t see any pink faces lurking up here in the infrared, it ought to be safe. But there are a couple behind her, just ambling along pleasantly, not looking directly at her, like they just decided it was time to go for a stroll in the woods in the middle of the night. One of them is the High Priest.
The woman’s probably in her mid-twenties, she’s a tall gangly type, nice-but not good-looking, probably was a spunky but low-scoring forward on her high school basketball team. Y.T. sits her down on a rock out in the darkness.
“Do you have any idea where you are?” Y.T. says.
“In the park,” the woman says, “with my friends. We’re helping to spread the Word.”
“How’d you get here?”
“From the Enterprise. That’s where we go to learn things.”
“You mean, like, the Raft? The Enterprise Raft? Is that where you guys all came from?”
“I don’t know where we came from,” the woman says. “Sometimes it’s hard to remember stuff. But that’s not important.”
“Where were you before? You didn’t grow up on the Raft, did you?”
“I was a systems programmer for 3verse Systems in Mountain View, California,” the woman says, suddenly whipping off a string of perfect, normal-sounding English.
“Then how did you get to be on the Raft?”
“I don’t know. My old life stopped. My new life started. Now I’m here.” Back to baby talk.
“What’s the last thing you remember before your old life stopped?”
“I was working late. My computer was having problems.”
“That’s it? That’s the last normal thing that happened to you?”
“My system crashed,” she said. “I saw static. And then I became very sick. I went to the hospital. And there in the hospital, I met a man who explained everything to me. He explained that I had been washed in the blood. That I belonged to the Word now. And suddenly it all made sense. And then I decided to go to the Raft.”
“You decided, or someone decided for you?”
“I just wanted to. That’s where we go.”
“Who else was on the Raft with you?”
“More people like me.”
“Like you how?”
“All programmers. Like me. Who had seen the Word.”
“Seen it on their computers?”
“Yes. Or sometimes on TV.”
“What did you do on the Raft?”
The woman pushes up one sleeve of her raggedy sweatshirt to expose a needle-pocked arm.
“You took drugs?”
“No. We gave blood.”
“They sucked your blood out?”