Glimmering

Nellie sighed. “We should be so lucky. Listen, Trip, I’m not going to pressure you. And maybe you need to think some more about all of this. Mustard Seed’s been good to you. Your sales are solid, you got a nice little fan base. Maybe you should stay there, maybe we should talk again in a couple months, you know? Maybe in a year GFI buys out your whole fucking company and all our problems are solved.”

Her voice grew faint and staticky. A shaft of fear ran through him—he had no number for the blond girl, nothing to bind her to him save this little voice chirping in his head, distinctly less cheerful than it had been a few minutes ago.

“…so we’ll just—”

“No! No, it’s okay, I’ll do it, I’ll do it. But you’ve got to tell me how to find this place—”

She told him. “And listen, sweetie, don’t worry, it’ll be great, you are going to be so happy you did this. Leonard’s a sweetheart, all that other stuff is mostly just PR, you know that, right? Go on now, I’m gonna call Ray and tell him you’re—”

Her voice crackled out. Trip shook the receiver. Silence. He stuck the phone in his pocket. Nellie had told him one o’clock. It was 11:30, which meant people would be gathering soon for lunch. If he left now, someone would be bound to come looking for him. But if he stuck around for lunch and then tried to sneak out, he might not have time to find the MIT campus, let alone some mysterious basement studio. He decided to leave. He pulled his worn pea coat over his old fisherman’s sweater and hurried downstairs and out the back door.

Finding the MIT campus didn’t take as long as he’d feared. Once there he saw students everywhere. Black-clad, intense-looking young men and women, and more Asians than Trip had ever seen in his life, carrying backpacks and looking as though it would take much more than an East Coast blackout to disrupt their studies. Trip wondered if classes had even been canceled. Probably not, he decided, watching two blond girls with blinking placebits in their eyebrows hunched over a palmtop. They glanced up at him, then went back to their work. Trip observed them with a mixture of wistfulness and disdain. He read at a sixth-grade level: even simple algebra and the most basic computing skills were remote as astrophysics. But he had a remarkable memory: he could quote Scripture and even Shakespeare if only he could be made to understand the words on the screen in front of him, or if someone were to read them aloud.

He could, fortunately, read the words MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY on a metal sign glazed with ice. He stopped in front of the sign, shivering in the lurid orange glow of midday. He was too embarrassed to ask a student for directions. They all looked so expensive. Dressed in black, or wrapped in cardboard and rags like the fellahin, they would betray themselves by smiling, showing even white teeth and glinting placebits. Except for the cranks, whose eyes within shrouds of spun acrylic were uniformly silver-gray; what hair they had was glossy and flecked with light. Like Trip himself, few of the students wore masks—this, along with The Last Generation’s continued sexual and pharmacological indulgences, was a constant source of head-shaking and hand-wringing for parents. Overhead the sky shimmered from green to gold to blue. He felt awkward and out of place, no longer the nascent Xian supernova but trailer trash from Moody’s Island. For a miserable quarter hour he wandered around, before getting up the courage to stop an older man in a worn overcoat.

“’Scuse me, I’m looking for the divit lab?”

The man shrugged. He pointed, at a very thin middle-aged woman with a shaved head and a bright red faux-mink coat. “Sorry. Ask Sonya there, she’s in computer dialectics—”

Trip crossed to her. “Uh—excuse me—”

The woman looked at him curiously. A transparent silken web covered her vividly lipsticked mouth.

“Are you one of my students?” Her scalp had been neatly incised with paragraphs of text, not tattooed but scarified black lines fine as drypoint. On her right temple scowled Ignatz Mouse, a word balloon hovering above his mouth.

Trip looked away.

“N-no,” he said. “I mean, I don’t think so. But—”

She smiled. “That’s okay. You just looked familiar, that’s all. You want the Bloembergen Lab—”

Trip shook his head. “She said divit. I mean the lady who sent me, she said the divit lab, or something like that.”

“That’s Bloembergen. DVI-IT technologies; they call it divit. Come on. I’m heading that way, I’ll make sure you don’t get lost.”

He walked beside her. The wind sent eddies of dust and grit flying up into their faces. The woman coughed, tugged a heavy woolen scarf from the collar of her coat, and swept it across her face.

“Doesn’t that get cold?” Trip asked. The icy wind made him shudder. “Your head like that?”

“This?” She patted her scalp, and Ignatz winked at him. “No. Feel it—central heating.”

He gave her a dubious look. “Go ahead,” she urged, stopping. “Colar implants. You’ve never seen them?”