It was the sound of Milo's blip that woke Layme up in the morning, groggy but not hungover. It seemed that he'd been right about the Chröm not having an after-lull, but that did nothing about the lack of sleep she'd sustained during her programming spree and her second encounter with Spelter. She almost ignored the ping and went back to sleep, but before she did, a seed of logic wormed itself into her thoughts. He thinks you're still on Chröm. He'll be flipping out. Still, the idea of going back to sleep seemed lovely. The adrenaline and anger at Spelter that had filled her the night before had left her feeling oddly empty.
Answer the goddamn blip, Layme, she scolded herself, and with a resigned sort of groan she forced herself to open her eyes and call her drive up on her wall. After so many hours working from her cons the day before, the feed on her wall seemed unreal and far away. She forced her tired eyes to focus, and sure enough, the blip that had awakened her was flashing with Milo's call number. She opened it and his voice rose and fell along the spectrum on the wall.
“Hey, Lay, just blipping to be sure you're awake. The deadline for registering for class is noon today, so you've got about an hour to drop that off.” Layme swore under her breath as Milo spoke. The classes she had narrowed her choices down to were on one of the many touchpads she'd been working on at Milo's the day of their fight—had it really only been two mornings ago?—and she didn't remember where she had put it. More likely than not, it was still in the pile in Milo's room, mixed up with dec-specs and lighting programs for Zink and Shylo.
“Also!” Milo's voice continued through the hidden surround-sound in her walls. “No frizzing. Your reg sheet is in your rec. I sent it down this morning. Get in touch when you're back on Earth, and remember to eat something—Chröm takes a lot out of you. Ice out.”
Layme felt a rush of affection for him as the bars of the equalizer fell flat. There were times he knew her so well, she was positive he must be reading her mind. Sometimes that bothered her, made her feel vulnerable and less, somehow; but this morning it made her smile, and she made a mental note to do something special for him soon, just to remind him that she loved him.
She retrieved her reg sheet from where it sat in her rec panel, just like Milo had promised, and hastily made the last few decisions she needed in order to have the required number of classes on her schedule. She wondered with a small pang of regret if she should have chosen a specialization after all. It would have narrowed her options overall, true, but she would have had more choices in that spec to pick from. She could have taken a Technology specification with a Development focus... could have learned things about programming that she had only dreamed of... things that would have Spelter on his technological knees...
And declared herself a law-breaker, in essence; because who would want a Tech spec with a devo-focus if they weren't already interested in the programming that lay within it? It was a daunting thing to contemplate learning from scratch, though that's what any Tech-devo would be doing—in theory, of course, if they had kept to the unwritten rules and not touched a program before signing up for the spec—and the Dorm people, or at least the Govlies they must be required to report to, would know that. When stripped down the the bare bones of intuition and common sense, any Tech-devo was declaring that they had been programming for months, or even years. Who knew what that would do to you once you hit your twenty-ones?
“It'd jag you up is what it would do,” Layme said to herself as she put some perfunctory make-up on and ran a hand through her hair in preparation for leaving her room. “They'd have you then, wouldn't they?”
But who were they, anyway? And why would they want her?
“You're a nut-case,” she told herself under her breath, actually laughing out loud as she emerged into the hallway and began the trek down the spiral staircase. “You're not a wanted woman, tragger. They couldn't care less what you know or don't know, or what classes you're taking.”
They care enough to make you a Dragon, a voice in her head whispered, and she recognized it as the bitter voice that had guilted her into programming again. She actually rolled her eyes in frustration—apparently every time she pushed it out of her mind, it came back doubly persistent—but she had to admit, the annoying little know-it-all voice had a point. She was here, she was a Dragon. That must mean something.
She was immersed in her thoughts and reaching the bottom of the stairs that led into the commons when a hand fell on her shoulder. She was so surprised she nearly shrieked, but caught herself when she turned and saw Zink behind her.
“Hey, Ray. Ice, it's just me.”
“What did you call me just there?” she asked once she played back his greeting in her head, her eyes widening as she attempted to get her heart to slow down and her thoughts to fall back into some semblance of order.
“Your name?” Zink said, raising a skeptical eyebrow and laughing. “Trag, chick, what were you on last night? Rabbits?”
“You'd just love that,” Layme said nonsensically, rolling her eyes. In truth, she was hardly aware of what she was saying. She was still in the grip of a momentary panic. She could have sworn he'd called her Rayme, and if Zink had her handle, who knew what he would do with it? He'd probably turn me in, she thought with uncharacteristic meanness. If he can't handle a little alc, he's probably just waiting to turn someone in for something that actually matters.
“If you say so,” Zink agreed mellowly, and she instantly regretted her mental accusation. Zink really was alright, once you got past his idiosyncrasies—if you could get past them.
“Sorry. Just a little tired,” she said, turning towards the academic wing, but before she even finished her sentence, she saw Zink's jaw crack into a yawn that was big enough to remind her of the old crocodiles she'd seen in her old science feeds. “And I guess I'm not the only one,” she noted dryly. “What were you doing last night, Zinker?”
She waited him to flinch at the nickname—it was something he had mentioned hating in passing once upon a time, and she couldn't resist ribbing him with it—but he only grinned, his smile seeming smug while his eyelids tiredly slipped to half-mast. “Not sleeping” was his reply, and Layme knew it would be pointless to try and get anything more out of him. Excessive secrecy was one of Zink's specialties. Sometimes she found it oddly endearing; other times it frustrated her so much she wanted to tear his grass-green hair out.
“If you're so tired,” he asked, still tailing her as she searched the ed wing for where her reg sheet was supposed to go, “why aren't you asleep?” It was the kind of question he was always asking, as if he was trying to dismantle people by using annoying amounts of basic, kid-like logic.
“Because I have to drop this off—“ Layme held up the touchpad in one hand. “—in the next hour, or they'll ice me from the Dorm. Or something like that. I don't think they'd let me stay if I wasn't being an obedient little class-attending Dragon, what do you think?”
Zink shrugged, and that was all. Layme found herself rolling her eyes again; there really wasn't ever a chance for normal conversation with him. She found the panel in the wall with the words Registration Drop glowing a mellow purple above it. “This is where I drop this off then?” she asked absently, not really asking but unwilling to part with the thing that would possibly determine the rest of her life. What an inconvenient moment for that truth to sink in.
“You are—” Zink started, and then seemed to change what he was saying. “Yeah. This is where I put mine, anyway, and it does say reg drop on it.” Layme nodded, forced herself to take a deep breath, scanned her eye, and slid the touch into the panel, which made a series of muted whirring sounds, presumably as it verified her identity.
“Thank you,” a generic mellow voice said, and there was a small clunk as her reg sheet was deposited in with the others.
“Well, then!” she said, not sure if she was trying to sound cheerful or sardonic. “Food sounds good. You?”
“Sure,” Zink agreed, mellow as usual. “Food sounds fine.”
The two of them made their way through the commons again, to a door opposite that of the party hall with its bowl floor, and into the dining room without speaking. Layme decided that Zink might really get on her nerves sometimes, but at least she didn't have to talk when he was around, and that definitely earned him a okay-to-be-around point or two. As the two of them scanned their retina prints on the req screens and chose their food, Layme asked him, “So what am I?”
“Hm?” he asked distractedly, apparently entirely immersed in his late-breakfast options.
“When I dropped my reg off, you said 'you are' and then stopped. So what am I?”
She saw something in his eyes brighten for a second, and thought maybe there was a split-second pause in the way they were scanning the req screen. You're going psycho, Ray, she thought, giving herself a mental shake. She felt a stab of anger at Spelter—he was turning her into a paranoid tweak, and she'd only “talked” to him twice. How was that for being a choke?
“Nothing,” Zink said, but he was grinning.
“Trag. Spill it,” Layme demanded, but she was smiling too. She had a feeling that Zink could really rip into her—into anyone, really—if he wanted to, but she had never seen him do it. His teasing had always been light-hearted, almost brotherly.
“What I was going to say was that you're a Dragon, but the idea of simple signs confuses you? I knew there must be a reason you're staying general.”
“Oh, shut up!” she protested, poking him hard in the arm. They had reached the end of the row, where their food waited for them, tagged with their call numbers. Layme grabbed her plate—eggs, toast, and a tall glass of juice—and turned back to Zink again. “Eat here or upstairs?” she asked.
“Here's fine,” he said, and started towards an empty table. When they sat down she saw what was on his plate: a single roll, usually used as the outer part of a sandwich.
“Is that all you're eating?” she asked him, digging in to her own eggs. She was glad Milo had reminded her to eat. The Chröm had really wiped her out.
“All I need,” Zink said, shrugging. He picked a piece of the roll off from the rest and popped it into his mouth; he seemed determined to let it dissolve there.
“I have no idea how you survive,” Layme said, and in truth she was only half joking. She didn't think she had seen Zink eat a substantial meal in the two months she'd known him. “Seriously. You're bone-thin already, Zink. And I know you don't care about being thin to get girls, or guys, or whatever. Why don't you eat?”
Zink shrugged again. “Maybe I'll tell you sometime. But I've been meaning to ask you, how's the voice filter coming?”
Layme cursed mentally, effectively distracted from the topic of Zink's body weight.. She had completely forgotten she was supposed to have finished the filter hack for the local network the night of the masquerade. The idea was to create a generic voice that would attach itself to everybody's words, enforcing the anonymity of the party. “I haven't really done much with it since last time,” she admitted. “And there's still the issue of everyone's calls being attached to feeds and stuff anyway.”
“Leave that to me.” Zink waved a hand dismissively. “There just needs to be a blanket fluff-reassign on the room.”
“Explain this one to me again,” Layme said, trying and failing to keep the eagerness out of her voice. She and Zink never specifically sat down to talk shop about progging, but she had to admit, much of the knowledge she had tried to use against Spelter was gleaned from her conversations with Zink about masquerade details. She looked up to see an eager expression on Zink's face that must be a reflection of her own.
“It's pretty simple, actually. We can set something up that would blanket the room, fluff over each person's call, and assign them a temporary alias. So, let's say we set it up, and you were the first person to walk into the room. You call number would stop being what it is and turn to, oh, let's say a row of six ones. The next person might be five ones and a two. Something generic like that. That way, people could still direct-connect feeds so they can hear each other or whatever, but if they give themselves away, it won't be because of that.”
“How do you fluff out a call number though?” Layme asked, an eyebrow raised. “I thought your call was how you could function in any feed system.”
Zink was shaking his head before she finished. “Wrong. Let me ask you something—when you connect to a local sound feed, what are you using to connect with?”
“My call. Didn't I just say that?” she asked, confused.
Zink leveled a finger at her, almost like he was accusing her. “Yes, but you're wrong. You're not using your call to do anything. Think about it. Where does your call come from?” He waited a second or two for her to answer, but apparently realized she was lost, because he continued. “Your call number comes from your drive, Layme. From the System. You have a call so your data and medical records and all that trag won't get mixed up with anyone else's, true, but we had numbers like that before the System. Your number doesn't do a damn thing. It's your soft-drive that's making those local connections and registering on feeds.”
“But I don't have to be on my drive to be absorbed into a room's macro-local. I just have to walk in. And people can still tap my feed if I'm not online. Trag, Milo does it all the time.”
Zink shook his head again. “Just because you're not on the interface doesn't mean your drive's not online. Whenever you have a piece of technology on you that hooks up to anything else—cons, traguses, jaw-chips, touchpads, anything—it all uses your soft-drive's presence within the System to work. That's what does the sending and receiving. Without your drive, your number is useless. Without your drive, which is connected to your call number, you could walk in to a local feed broadcasting pulse-tracks and not hear a damn thing.” Zink smiled in a satisfied sort of way and tore off another piece of bread.
Layme sat in silence for a moment, finishing the last of her food as she tried to wrap her mind around the concept. She was always connected, that was what Zink was saying. Always online, in some way or another. Always open for communication. And for hacking. Was that how Spelter had managed to get in without her noticing? Had he struck when she was off the interface, but, as Zink put it, still sending and receiving?
“Is there ever a time where someone's drive is completely offline?” she asked finally.
“I'm not sure,” he admitted, shrugging one shoulder. “Maybe if there's someone with no techrings and no integrated tech—no cons, no embedded feeds, no jaw-chips, nothing—then maybe their drive would be offline when they weren't 'facing. But only until they were retina-scanned for something.”
Layme was about to ask what a retina scan had to do with it when she heard Milo's voice calling her name from across the room. She shut her mouth so abruptly that she thought if her tongue had been in the way of her teeth, she might have drawn blood. By the time Milo reached their table she had managed to drag a smile onto her face, but it felt fake and transparent there, as if he could look behind it and see the words that had been about to come from her mouth; words about programming, which she had promised to stop doing.
“Hey Milo,” she said, and she was glad that, to her at least, her voice sounded normal. “Thanks for the blip this morning, I would have been jagged without it.”
He pulled a chair up beside her and sat with his arm around her shoulders. It was something he did all the time, but something—perhaps it was her guilt—made it seem off, like maybe he was holding her more tightly than usual, and maybe if she looked at his face it would be angry and possessive, instead of good-natured and smiling like his voice. “No problem, love,” he said. “I figured you would be here when you weren't upstairs. You're ice after last night then?” The hand that was wrapped around her shoulder squeezed, and she knew Milo well enough to catch the meaning in that gesture—don't say anything about the Chröm in front of Zink.
“Yeah, I'm feeling better now,” she replied, her false smile widening. She thought that if she faked a smile any bigger, her cheeks would split. “Some sleep and some food, that was all I needed.”
“Good deal,” Milo approved. “So where are we with the masque, Zink? What else needs to happen? It's only a week away, you know.”
“Two weeks,” Layme corrected a little more harshly than she might have normally. Milo didn't seem to notice.
“Lay and I were just talking about that, actually,” Zink said. “Dec-specs are pretty much taken care of; they're not that different than anything else we do. What we need to figure out in the next week and a half or so is how to make it so that everyone is completely anonymous to each other. The masks will help, and so will the voice filter Layme and Rye are working on, but the last trick is to get everyone's calls to show up as something generic so feed-hacks can't give you away. Also, there's something to be said about recognizing people even with their masks on,” he added as an afterthought, sparing a glance at Layme's blue pixie cut.
“I can't help much when it comes to the calls, but for the rest of it, what if we just suggest that everyone hit Morpho? We can mass-blip the guest list today and everyone should have enough time to plan what they want. How many pods are there, twenty? And with an hour or two per person, assuming they all go in shifts sort of, everyone should be able to go through the day before the masque if they want.”
Zink was nodding. “Not a bad idea. I'm sure not everyone will go, but it's definitely a good plan to throw the idea out to people. I also think you two should definitely do it. I mean, it's your pulse, everyone will be looking for you. It would add a little drama if no one knew where to look.”
Layme grinned mischievously. “Wicked,” she agreed, “I love it!” Milo, however, was looking mutinous.
“It's our pulse. Shouldn't everyone know how to find us?”
“Aw, c'mon, Milo,” Layme begged, turning to look at him. “The point of a masquerade is to be anonymous! Plus, can you imagine what we could do with a Morpho stint and our theme?” She and Milo had decided to base their costumes and masks around the idea of Milo's Red Death—or, more aptly, Zink's idea, since he had been the one to name it. In truth, the idea of being anonymous even to Milo excited her. It would be like a challenge for him; he would have to find her.
Milo sighed grudgingly and relented, like she knew he would. “Alright, fine. But only because you want me to.”
“Of course,” Layme agreed, laughing and kissing him briefly. “Now, shouldn't you be cooking up with Ell? You have a trag-ton of Red Death and Deception to get right before the masque.”
“Rye claimed him for the day,” Milo grumbled. “Come on, Lay, we've been busting ass for this thing for weeks. Can't you just take a day off?”
Layme started to say yes, then shot half a glance at Zink. A day with Milo meant another day of stifling her inner programmer. If she told him no, that she and Zink had things to work out—
“Alright, fine,” she sighed jokingly, stomping a mental foot down to squelch the tech geek trying to fight for her time. She rolled her eyes at Milo and kissed him again. Maybe a day off wouldn't be that bad... Still, she felt a pang of regret when Zink rose from the table.
“I'll leave you two to it, then,” he said, flashing a smile and turning to go. Layme couldn't help one more pang of regret—but you never told me what retina scans mean, what do they mean—and then Milo's arm was squeezing around her shoulders again, and she was brought back to the present by a mix of annoyance and pain. He really was squeezing harder than usual.
“Ouch, Milo,” she protested, trying to squirm away from him.
“Little bastard,” Milo muttered, and Layme realized he wasn't looking at her, but across the room in the direction Zink had left.
“What's your problem, Milo?” finally succeeding in squirming free so she could turn to look at him. “He's helping us! The masque is actually going to happen because of him and his team.” Milo had begun calling Zink, Shylo, Edda, Ren, and the others Zink's “team” as a joke, but Layme had picked it up seriously, a fact which bothered him to no end.
“There are three dozen Tech Dragons who could do the same trag he does. I don't see why he gets a monopoly on it. It's not like he's some fucking celebrity. He's a dry-ass kill-joy is what he is, and the only thing he can understand is a soft drive and his goddamn Surge. I hope it fries his fucking brain.”
“Milo, stop!” Layme protested. “You know that no one else could integrate our specs into the ballroom like he can. He's talking about a blanket-fluff on all the audio feeds for the night. Stop worrying about your jagging prejudices for a second and use your brain. Who else do you know who would even think of people's voices giving them away, let alone of finding a way to fix it?”
“Use your brain, Layme!” he countered. “You have some... some God complex about this kid. Just because he can prog doesn't mean he's some jagging special snowflake for Chrissake! He's some paranoid tweak. There's a reason the kid stayed general, he couldn't handle being normal for fucking ten seconds.”
Layme was taken aback. “Zink doesn't have a spec?”
“Of course not,” Milo said, with an air of impatience. “He's a choke. A fluke. He won't even take one drink at a pulse, not even the ones he plans, did you—” He stopped then, having turned back to Layme and seen the stricken look on her face. He seemed to replay his last few sentences in hs head, then, realizing what he'd said, backpedaled hastily.
“Oh trag, Lay, I didn't mean—”
“Didn't mean to call me a choke?” she asked, and her voice was shaking.
“Lay, I didn't—”
“Stop, Milo, just stop, okay?” Now she was the one staring into space, clenching her fists and trying not to let him see the other half of her reaction. She could use the anger. All the hurt would do was make her cry in front of him and half the Dorm. Her voice had risen at this last, and she was acutely aware of people in the dining room stealing half-glances in their direction. She tried to get up, and when Milo grabbed at her to try and get her to sit back down, she lost the last hold she had on her emotions. Tears spilled from her eyes even as she shoved him.
“Get the fuck off of me,” she demanded in a trembling voice, turning to look him straight in the face. “Next time you decide to climb on your jagging high horse, Milo, think of the people you're trampling.” Before he could answer, she said, “I have things to do. I'll talk to you later.” She spun on her heel and half ran from the room, trying to think of where she might go. The last thing she wanted was to have Milo track her down and force her to listen to him. She knew that in an hour or so, when he had waited and decided it was proper to come looking for her, she would have lost the last of her anger, and when he tried to reason with her, her argument in Zink's favor would seem flimsy and wrong. She would relent, and right now she didn't want that. She felt like her anger was justified, and she wanted to hang on to it. Layme racked her brains for a destination as she reached the foot of the stairs. Her mind, still feeling stretched out from the Chrom the night before, succeeded only in replaying part of her conversation from earlier.
Maybe their drive would be offline when they weren't 'facing. But only until they were retina-scanned for something.
Acting on anger and hurt more than any sort of reason, Layme pulled Zink's call number up through her sound feed, and when the two-tone sound that meant he was open for calls came through her traguses, she dialed him.
“Zink,” she said when he had picked up. “Do you want a hand with that fluff program?”
“Sure,” he said, sounding bewildered. “I was just about to open up what you sent me last. But weren't you taking a day with Milo?”
“Don't worry about it,” she said, hoping her voice wasn't shaking as badly as the rest of her was. “Just tell me how to get to your room from the stairs.” She had never actually been up to his room, nor he to hers, in the entire time they'd been working together for the pulse. It had never seemed strange to her before, but confronted with the realization that she had no idea where it was, it seemed almost impossible that she wouldn't know.
And why? That small, bitter voice asked her, then spared her the trouble of answering. Because Milo told you not to, didn't he?
She was also spared the trouble of shoving the voice away again by Zink's voice coming over her feed, giving her directions with a confused but willing voice. When she reached his door, she was not at all surprised to find that it wasn't covered in eye-catchers and random movement like most Dragons, but instead a large Asian dragon that stretched from the upper left to coil around itself. It was quite stationary, and its red eye was the room's retina scan.
“Here,” she told Zink over the call, and a moment later the door slid open, hiding the dragon and its red gaze.
“Hey,” Zink greeted her, and she was absurdly pleased to see that he still had his vis feed up on his cons. She could see the shimmering in them that meant he was looking through his feed to see her. “did something happen with—?” he began, but Layme held up one hand in a stop gesture, and he fell silent amiably enough.
“Don't worry about it, okay?” She waited until he nodded and shrugged—she had noticed that a shrug was a characteristic gesture for him, uneven and fluid—before she walked in. “Okay,” she repeated, and she turned to face him as the door slid shut.
“So. Are you going to show me how to prog a blanket-fluff bounce, or what?”
Zink's concerned expression cracked into a smug grin.
“Gladly. There's an unused set of cons in the bathroom. Grab them, and make sure they're calibrated before you some back out. You're going to want to work without distractions, and that includes not being able to see right.”
She did what he asked, anger at Milo still thrumming through her, but before long, the shaky feeling faded. In fact, she forgot that she was angry at him at all. She forgot everything but Zink's instructions, and the lines of code building up on her screen.
I can't believe I told him I'd stop progging, she thought at one point. The thought wasn't angry, but almost skeptical. I can't believe he thought I was telling the truth! How could he think I'd stop this? I love this!
Then she forgot about Milo all over again.
She had better things to think about.
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