The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (45 page)

But
AnneMarie
knew. She was the one who traded Caroline's precious opiates, released from their controlled storage in the good cause of making an old lady's last days bearable, for her own supply of free-base cocaine. The new Caroline had tried the drug, to see what it was she had paid for with so much pain. It was called "crack" for the sound it made in the makeshift pipes where its users vaporized it, because unlike the hydrochloride form of cocaine it wasn't water soluble. Caroline had sucked gently on the fumes and listened to a hammer roar through her brain, for one brief moment.
For one brief moment - and then, nothing. Caroline made the pipe disappear and shook her head. The high was fast, hard, very intense - and ephemeral. It was hardly there and it was gone. Caroline could understand if her pain, pain which she measured not by the day or the hour or the minute but by each miserable crawling second, if such suffering had been incurred to provide
AnneMarie
with a
real
drug like heroin. An opiate for an opiate, at least. But it had been crack cocaine. Naturally,
AnneMarie
had needed a lot of trading material to stay high any decent fraction of the time.
Of course, it would never occur to the bitch that she was torturing a harmless, helpless old lady to feel that way. She would be incapable of giving a shit. The fast, furious high was like a lifetime of orgasms in one moment. Fleeting, but sweet.
And no one would ever know. Even the harmless old lady herself didn't know she was getting pure saline, until the staff at a strange hospital gave her the real thing, and she knew her first moment of peace in years.
And then Prime Intellect came.
And the Change.
AnneMarie
hadn't been unattractive; she had been in her early forties, and years of working on her feet had kept her from getting fat. But she had a hard look, a look that admitted she might not care about an old woman's pain. A look that said she might have seen too much, that she might deserve a few moments of feeling like God in return for a lifetime of changing diapers and colostomy bags and carefully spoon-feeding legions of ungrateful, incontinent old farts.
And if the price of her little reward was to torture one of the old biddies, then she was prepared to pay it. She had a look that said the Devil might find her soul on the deep-discount must-go rack.
Caroline shook her head to clear it of these stray and unwanted thoughts. Fred squeezed her hand reassuringly. Too much thinking along those lines could be bad for her plan.
AnneMarie
was wearing her nurse's uniform in the old picture. Palmer could worship Nazis until a swastika grew on his nose, Caroline thought; that uniform will always represent evil to
me
.
She looked at the new picture.
It was so ordinary as to be pathetic;
AnneMarie
had shaved her apparent age in half, firmed up her breasts, toned her body, and was wearing a slinky cocktail dress. Before the Change she'd have been considered stunningly beautiful, but now stunning beauty was a cheap thing. She probably didn't need cocaine
any more
; Prime Intellect could turn on the dopamine pump in her brain far more efficiently than any chemical catalyst. People only did drugs for nostalgia in Cyberspace.