A Song Called Youth (112 page)

“And it was Dr. Cooper who rented this, um, brain-time?” Barrabas asked.

“Yeah.”

“That’s odd . . . ” Cooper had a budget for access to a major-league mainframe. Why go to one of these cheapo brain-rental outfits? “Um—do you remember what sort of work your brain was used for?”

“I had a semester of molecular biology a few years ago. I recognize stuff from that. It
looks
like the models we saw of genetic engineering for microorganisms. Build-your-own-virus stuff. Except it’s not the same kind of viruses, if that’s what they are . . . ” She shrugged. But the shrug wasn’t really one of indifference. Somehow, he sensed she had an inkling what the research might be, and it worried her.

Barrabas felt a chill. The program she was talking about had to be the Second Alliance’s biowarfare work. Not Cooper’s project per se—its provenance was the molecular biology team—but Cooper was Head of Research, and all major computer time was approved by him. They’d have brought him the work, asked him to authorize it. Cooper had evidently decided to run it himself on another system. The one they usually accessed was secure—the SAISC used it for virtually everything. Dotty old bugger.

And now the stuff was churning around in this woman’s head. The molecular breakdowns, indices, models. If she recited some of it to the wrong people—or had it read out on an extractor—it would all come out in the wash.

Barrabas shook his head silently. Personally, he was frightened of the whole project. He didn’t know exactly what sort of biological warfare it was—a viral attack of some sort. He was only on the periphery, but still, he could be held accountable by a war crimes commission. He’d told himself they wouldn’t really
use
a virus, it was just a deterrent device, just a club to hold over the heads of the enemy once the SA took power. That’s what Cooper had hinted.

But the Second Alliance wasn’t in power in England yet. They were close, but they still didn’t have the reins. In the meantime, if this thing broke . . . 

What the bloody hell had Cooper been thinking of? Why had he used a nonsecure calculation device? The brain of an American expatriate artist, yet.

“Do you think you could fone him?” she asked again. “Or maybe get authorization somewhere else to pay to have this stuff taken out?”

“Um . . . no. It’d have to be Dr. Cooper. I’ll see if I can get him. Have a seat.”

He smiled at her, saw her face soften a little as he agreed to try to help her. The softening let something else shine through: the attraction was there. She felt it too. What was it about this woman?

He went into the comm room, was relieved to find everyone else had already gone for the day. The duty officer was on break. He sat at the console and tapped out Cooper’s “Find and Notify” code. Somewhere in France, Cooper’s fone would be going off. He was probably in the HQ, not far from a fone.

The console’s respond light flashed green. Barrabas sat back within clear range of the camera that would transmit his image to Cooper, and hit the receive button. Cooper’s face, looking like an irritated ghost, appeared on the little screen. “Yes? Oh it’s you, ah, Barrabas. What is it?”

He told Cooper what Jo Ann had told him. Barrabas wouldn’t have thought it possible for the albino’s face to go paler, but what little color there was in Cooper’s cheeks made itself noticeable with a sudden absence. “Oh, Lord, it would have to happen this once,” he muttered. He said something else, but a shash of static and snow blotted it out.

“I didn’t get that, sir, there was interference. What did you say?”

“Nothing, never mind. Listen—I don’t want anyone else taking care of this. All right? I’ll do it myself. I’ll be back in a couple of days. Tell her stiff upper lip, I’m on my way.”

“But—”

“No!” Cooper’s vehemence was startling. “No . . . I’ll have to handle it myself, in person. You’re to say nothing to anyone else about it. You work for me—show some loyalty, man!”

“As you say, Doctor.”

“In the meantime—keep an eye on the girl. I don’t care how you do it. Romance her if you have to. But make sure she doesn’t talk to anyone else about this.”

“Um—I’d have to take the rest of the day off in order to—”

“Yes yes, fine fine, just see to it!” And he rang off.

Barrabas returned to the waiting room to find Jo Ann staring into space, squinting as if trying to see something better.

Distract her. “
The doctor will attend to the matter personally when he gets back. In a couple of days.”

She blinked, then frowned at him. “A couple of days! I can’t live with this stuff.” She shook her head incredulously.

“Isn’t there anything that, um, suppresses it?”

“Well . . . loud music. Drink. Stimulus of different kind . . . ”

“Look, I feel responsible for you. I mean, it was our fault, and we really should be doing more to help you. How about if I . . . ” He hesitated. This sounded pretty phony. But maybe she’d play along. “If I took you out to some places to ease it. Some clubs, maybe. Do you like minimono or angst or retro or bonerock or House Dada or what?”

She smiled ruefully, looked at him for a full five seconds. He felt his cheeks flush. Finally, she said, “Bonerock and House Dada, mostly. Minimonos are so reactionary. Can’t stand ’em. I heard Jerome-X is in town. His first tour. Just doing a few dates.”

“I don’t know his stuff.”

“He’s pretty obscure. He had a kind of college-radio bonerock hit called ‘Six Kinds of Darkness.’ He was on the edge of hot in the underground for a while, and he was ‘big in Korea,’ and then he disappeared. Just now resurfaced. He only had one album, but I’m kind of a fan. I have some files of video graffiti he did, too.”

“Oh, yes?” He tried to sound neutral, though he didn’t approve of video graffiti. The bloody wog radicals used it. Never mind. “Right. It’s my solemn duty to take you to see this Jerome-X cove. Tonight?”

“Okay. Tonight.”

A nightclub among the dock warehouses in London, England.

“Sure, Brit Customs believed it,” Jerome-X said. “But if the Second Alliance or M15 take an interest in us, we’re fucked. They know we came overseas on a private jet. They know most of the jetlines aren’t open yet. They know that some of the biggest bands in the US couldn’t get over here and I’m like a
nobody
in the bone scene—”

“Hell no, boy, dey
don’t
know that,” Bettina said. They were sitting in his dressing room on the sagging, cigarette-charred sofa, waiting for his cue. They were in the London club,
Acid Burn,
once an Acid House nightclub now basically gone bonerocker. In the background, filtered by the cracked concrete walls, was the rumble, rattle, and hum as a band cranked on the stage, from here sounding like a thunderstorm approaching across a mountain range. “Yo’ bein’ paranoid.” Her accent seemed to have thickened since coming to England, as if in defense. She was a three-hundred-pound New Orleans black woman; she was Jerome’s contact in the Resistance; she was Jerome’s lover; she was his computer-systems guru; she was the Sage. “You think dese cock-biting English prigs know anything about American rock?”

“Lots of ’em do, actually, but—You really think I’m just being paranoid?”

“You bet yo’ skinny white butt. De jet was loaned to us by a guy who admires yo’ music, is all. Dat’s our line. A fan, is what we telling people. He got it registered under a different name. Ain’t nobody knows it Witcher.”

“I’m nervous, I guess.”

She slapped his rump. “Boy, I guess so. Relax, kid!” She took his head in a playful armlock.

“Don’t be doing this shit in public!” he wheezed.

“Just playin’, son, don’t get all—”

“Hey, I’m in charge of the stage biz, we agreed that, Bettina! Don’t be doin’ that shit to me here!” he protested, pulling free.

“We backstage now. Gimme a kiss.” She crushed him to her, and he gave in. She broke it off herself, looking him in the eye, almost nose to nose. “You know de protocols?”

“I know the UNIX protocols. I know the systems call code to log on as a superuser. I know how to evoke the debug function. If they haven’t changed the debug function.”

“Dey probable haven’t, ’cause dey using a rented system. High security, but rented. If dey have changed it, fuck ’em, we log off and dey won’t be able to trace it to an aug chip. I think de back gate is still open on dis system—”

“Where’d you get it from?”

“De anarchist underground. Plateau subsystem bulletin board.”

“Some of those Wolves’ll give you fake codes just to get their rivals in trouble.”

“Dese ain’t Plateau Wolves, these are Plateau Rads. About de only people I met on the Plateau I trust. Dey got a guy used to be a hacker for SAISC till he found out what dey were into. He knows de system’s back gates.”

“The anarchist underground cooperates with the resistance? You’d think they’d say fuck off. The NR wants to re-establish the old European republics. That’s not very anarchist.”

“Anarchists hate de Fascists worse den de Social Democrats, worse eben den de Republicists. Dey scared, like ever’body else out in de cold, boy. One of my braid’s comin’ loose, can you—Ow! Don’t be doing it so tight! De NR’s got anarchists in it, along with everything else. Just get rid of de Fascists and den fight over de bones, I guess is—”

The rest was drowned out in a tidal-wave magnification of the careening noise from the stage as the door opened and the club’s manager looked through. He was a weakchinned rocker with sections of his depilated scalp shaped into three-dimensional figures like those on ESP testing cards: wavy lines, star shapes, squares, circles—like little flesh antennae on his head, made of transplanted skin and collagen. “Scalping up” hadn’t hit the States yet, and Bettina found the fashion disconcerting. Whenever the guy came in, she stared at his head, which pleased him enormously.

“Are you ready, then?” the scalp-up asked.

“Yeah,” Jerome said, standing up, so the guy would think he was coming right that second. So he’d leave, thinking Jerome was going to follow. He left, and Jerome turned to his shaving kit, took out his shaver, took off the rotary heads and found the plastic-wrapped aug chip. Bettina got hers from a tube she carried in her vagina. At her size, she had to wrestle with herself to get it out.

Jerome took the chip from the plastic; wet it, opened the flap of skin on his head, and inserted the chip, activating it with his thumbnail mouse. In a way, it was like doing a hit of speed, only it was isolated in you; one part of you hummed with restrained power, and the rest paced itself normally.

He ran through the password code, ran a quick program to check that the chip had gone through Customs without being magnetically scrambled, and then, nodding to himself, headed for the stage, Bettina coming along behind him, moving like a sailing ship in high seas. “I’m not that much into the concert part today,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m, like, totally out of practice, and I was forgetting about performing anyway when you guys thought this shit up . . . ”

“Oh, yo’ love it, yo’ little ham.”

“Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. I was never in a band much. I used to do little concerts with digital and maybe one player, and the recording was all electronic, except for a couple of musicians I used in the studio and never saw after that. A band is such a hassle, it’s like babysitting, I’m not really into it. But you can’t get up enough crowd energy just using purely electronic backup, you got to have some other people, live . . . ”

He was already picking his way over the gear on the stage, looking to see that everything was in place.

Bones was there, waiting, at the synthesizer. They called him Bones, but he couldn’t stand Bone Music normally, calling it “neurological masturbation for bored middle-class white kids,” and he could barely play the keyboards. It didn’t matter much that he couldn’t play well, though Bones didn’t understand that. He was as nervous as a kid auditioning, running through the simple keyboard lines over and over, behind the polarized screen that was the stage’s curtain. Club roadies moved equipment to either side of him.

Andrea, the guitarist, was dialing her tuner, and the wire dancer, a faggy Spanish guy named Aspaorto, was taping his wireless transers to the electrodes on Jerome’s thighs and arms and calves and hips—Jerome-X used
some
of the minimono techniques—and the mikes were whining with feedback as the soundman turned them up. It was a live, noisy, electrically charged space, and that would help mask the aug signals, Jerome thought.

He sighed, and shook himself. His hands were damp. He wasn’t in the mood for the music part. He wanted to break into the system, do the work, get it over with. Only, the way it was set up, it wouldn’t be over with, in a sense, for a long time. A long, long time. Because they were infecting the system for now. Not destroying it. Bones had gone all stress case over this approach.
We oughta wipe it out while we got the chance, not fuck around,
he’d said.
It’s taking a dumb chance.

Steinfeld wanted it done this way, though. Slow infection.

Steinfeld could plan, long-term, Bettina said. That’s why he was going to kick ass, she said, when the time came.

Jerome took a headset mike off its stand and slipped it on over his head. Heard his own breathing come back to him on the monitors.

Get into the mood, he told himself. These people paid their money, and there ain’t much of that around London nowadays.

He was still invisible to the audience behind the black plastic screen, but he shouted over the mike to see if he could prod them in advance a little. “Maybe we shouldn’t
bother
playing, nobody fucking
cares
anymore what
anybody
does!”

“Sod off, ya barstads!” someone shrieked in gleeful reply, and the audience set to whooping and howling. He could see them in foggy silhouette through the translucent screen, a gallery of faceless busts from here, joggling up and down. Some of them, he could see by their outlines, had scalped up: tombstones of cemeteries atop their heads was a favorite. Others were still in flare hairstyle variations, in multi-Mohawks, in retro spikes.