Chapter 4
I frowned at the screen. There was no current LINK site listed for the company, Jordan River Health Institute, that had been so insistent that Daniel and I crack their tech-theft case. I keyed in a search of business archives for any listing of a merger, claim for bankruptcy, anything.
The processors started to whir, and I settled back in my chair to wait. I reached into the bottom drawer of my desk and pulled out my battered romance.
Even before I was cut off from the LINK, I had a yen for the luxury of a printed page. The smell of fresh ink on newsprint always sent a shiver down my spine. Though most people got their entertainment from the LINK, there were enough of us sensualists left to keep a few small presses in business. I flipped open the book and held it to my nose. As I breathed in the odor, I consciously tried to relax. I picked up the thread of the story easily, but my mind wandered.
Less than ten minutes ago, Michael took off to make arrangements with a contact. He said if things went well, he'd be back at the office by ten-thirty. Then, we'd go to this tech friend of his to get me rehooked. Just like that. I rubbed my head; the ache was back. My fingers traced the outline of the receiver. The flesh it raised was almond-shaped and about that size. From that hub, microscopic threads spun out deep into my brain. Though it was impossible, I swore I felt the throbbing pain begin to creep deeper, following that internal web.
Laying the book down, I rummaged around in my desk until I found some aspirin. I swallowed them dry, but they went down easily. More junkie mannerisms, I thought ruefully. Daniel would be horrified to see me now; there didn't seem to be much difference between me and the wireheads we used to bust.
I thought I'd get used to the emptiness in my head, but I didn't. I think that's part of why I loved this office. With the squeaky chair, the creaking hardwood, rattling windows, clanking of the radiator, and all the other tenants' muffled noises, it was never truly quiet here.
Sometime in the last hour it started raining. I strolled over to the window, my stocking feet sliding across the hardwood. The office was dark except for the clip-on desk lamp that hung precariously over the monitor.
After I'd been disconnected, it had been difficult even to find a desktop version of the computer. I'd had to construct much of it from scraps in the junkyard, rummage sales, and antique shops. I'd say I was lucky that the building my office occupied still had a hardwired data jack, but, the truth was, this place was so old it still had the remnants of the gas fixtures and a coal bin in the basement.
Human beings were funny that way: exceedingly inventive and lazy as hell. Old things remained built over, built around. Living literally in the shadow and underneath the shiny new skyscrapers in Manhattan, ancient crotchety buildings like my office still stood, mostly unchanged since the nineteenth century.
While some technology raced ahead, like wetware, pockets of low tech survived all over. As a species, we tended not to clean up after ourselves. When we redesigned the LINK, we left vestiges of the old system to haunt the hard lines like cobwebs.
The war machine fueled most of the dramatic changes in tech. Wetware was invented so that we could have soldiers who could receive electronic commands sent from headquarters to the battlefield. The war had started in the Middle East over the shrinking oil resources, so in order to win, America finally implemented the electric-vehicle plans it had kicking around since the last oil crisis. Of course, once the Medusa bomb got dropped, scientific advancement ground to a halt except, of course, in the area of entertainment. If there was a way to make a holo-vid more virtually realistic, then the tech appeared overnight, only to be replaced by something better the next day.
I shivered and pulled my arms closer around my chest. Despite the draftiness, there was a certain comfort in the way the wind howled around the gables of the old building. Reaching along the wall, my fingers searched for the thermostat. When I found the ancient contraption, I lightly touched the wheel in the direction of warmer. Not that it did much good in this rickety place. I smiled and shook my head. Moving away from the window, I felt for the coffeemaker in the dark. I fumbled along the side of the smooth plastic until my fingers found the switch and flicked it on. The orange brewing light glowed. I waited for the telltale gurgling sounds before I headed back to my desk.
With any luck, the information-retrieval programs would have turned up something on Jordan Institute by now. Scootching the chair closer to the monitor, I peered at the message: "No matches
found."
"Nothing?" I muttered out loud. I looked at my romance novel. I might be a sensualist and Neanderthal in my attitudes toward the printed word, but at least paper-and-ink information could not be altered. The LINK refreshed its information stream so often that archiving became unmanageable. There were companies that tried to save information, but, because of sheer volume, they were forced to narrow their fields of interest. Most of yesterday's news vanished into the ether.