grateful dead to the humpbacks

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘—Total waste of me being here if all I get to do is follow her around and be her punchbag.’

It's Klaski, and it doesn't seem like much has changed with Serge's team since your last visit.

Lewis is laughing.’I used to work in a hair salon,’ she said. ‘They made me sweep the floors and make coffee for six months before I got to even mix up the hair color. Apparently I was regarded as a risk to the clientele. You're a risk to yourself, Joanne. And us.You just don't know the ropes yet, and that takes time.’

She's running through your channels and checking your files from the day before to make sure nothing's been corrupted by the recharge in the Grid.

‘I'm not trying to insult you,’she adds.’But you're really green.’

‘I know already, OK?’Klaski snaps.’But I don't want to learn to be a soldier. Learning to follow orders isn't any good to someone like me.’

Lewis's lip curls but Klaski doesn't see it. She's deep in her mug of Cup O'Soup (Chicken Noodle).

'If you didn't want lo be a soldier, what are you doing here?’

'I want to study the Grid. I told my adviser that when they recruited me. I was told there were a lot of research opportunities open at X.’

Lewis smiles. She tosses you into the air; by now the group has begun to move off, Klaski sucking up the last of her noodles as she walks. ’I'd forget what they told me in the recruiting office if I were you. Just concentrate on surviving in the Grid. If you don't, you're dead.’

Klaski wipes her mouth and sticks the plastic cup in a thigh pocket of her utility suit. 'Thanks a lot.’

Lewis nods at Serge to indicate that your retrieved files have been moved to her Swatch. Serge motions to the others to precede her and then scans the material quickly, nodding. When she sees the footage of the girl-golems running for their lives and making it, she whistles softly.

‘I guess it's all going to end up academic,’ she mutters. ‘Galante's made a good job of it. She makes it look easy. Soon we'll all be home.’

She sounds like she's anticipating a prison sentence.

You rise over them. Their conversation as they move through the Grid sounds like fuzzy radio to you. You test your eyes, changing focal lengths and banking from side to side. The relative structure of this region of the Grid makes it considerably easier to track the humans moving within it.

‘The grid is like a whale,’ Lewis is telling Klaski. ’You see it as big and scary until a whaling boat sticks harpoons in it and chops it up into big chunks, and then it's pathetic. But if you get too close it's scary again, even when it's dead. It might be a whole world you could lose yourself in. It might make everything irrelevant, from 7-11 to taxes and death. Or it might just land you on your back in a military hospital reading Ladies Home Journal and eating Jell-O. Either way, you're an idiot if you don't pay attention to what it's doing, every single minute you're here.’

Klaski says, ’See, but that's my whole point! At MIT I took a course on the Grid and the professor said if the Grid is intelligent we should be able to communicate with it, but the government never tried to do that. When they found out about the logic bullets they just went in like it was the California Gold Rush.'

Lewis flaps her hands at Klaski. 'Shh! Don't talk to Serge about—'

'Too late,’ drawls Serge. 'Serge heard y'all. 'S OK. Y'all can talk to me about anything. Don't think you'd like to hear what I got to say on that topic, though, Klaski.'

Klaski clears her throat and keeps her eyes focused on where she's placing her hands and feet.

'I'd be very interested in your point of view, ma'am.'

Serge grunts. 'Yeah? Well, speaking of whales, did you ever hear about those guys who hang out piping improvisational music down to the ocean to talk to the whales? Playing the Grateful Dead to the humpbacks, asking 'em to jam. So far the whales couldn't give a shit. Now, these guys are talented and they believe in what they're doing, but they can't even communicate with a whale, which – am I right, you tell me, you're the college kid, Klaski – a whale's pretty close to a human, ain't it? At least we come from the same planet, and they do have big motherf%#king brains! If you can't get a whale to say good morning Miss Jones, how the ju-ju are you gonna talk to the Grid? How, Cousin Nellie? Tell me how.'

'Uh, there could be some flawed logic in—' Klaski slips and falls, the wide branch she was walking on catching her in the crotch. She gasps a bit. 'Um, whales might have big brains but maybe the Grid is a brain.'

'Then where's its body, chitlin?' Serge laughs. 'I sure wouldn't want to know.'

She stops and looks back at Klaski struggling to her feet. 'I'm just an old soldier, kid. And by the way, I ain't Japanese. Just in case you was thinking I knew your boyfriend.' She winked, then turned and scrambled up a net of sparking filaments to get to the next wide branch.

Hendricks had dropped back to give Klaski a hand. 'l told you she was smart. She sees right through you, Jojo.'

Serge gets the call then from Dante, asking if Major Galante can borrow you a second time. Paranoia grips you. Has Galante figured out that you nearly sold out your own side yesterday? Does she know you overlooked the children? Do they all know you are losing your nerve?

You wonder if you have to go. Maybe Serge will refuse to release you. She needs you to find Gonzalez, after all.

But Serge nods soberly and gestures to you to take off, then continues to climb.

Maybe she knows, too. Maybe everybody is in on it.

As you take Gossamer up and away, you follow Klaski's stare fixing on Serge's strange body from behind. Serge looks like a chunky spider missing four legs as she swarms up the side of the Grid.

'She has a dominance complex,' pronounces Klaski, sniffing.

 

When you reach the logic mines, a short, slim woman with a Major's rank-insignia on her shoulder comes to greet you. She has dark hair, blunt features and sapphire-blue eyes. Her hands as they reach to catch Gossamer from the air are stitched with silver scar tissue like a patchwork quilt. Your first thought is that Major Galante doesn't seem angry with you. So she doesn't know about Gossamer's behavior yesterday.

'Hello, my friend. I'm just in the middle of an argument with Machine Front – what else is new? Hang on. I may need you to back me up.'

Persia Galante knows perfectly well that you can't reply, but she always behaves as if you and Goss are a person. She flashes you a smile and turns back to the holographic cigar-smoking zebra projected above her Swatch – her personalized exit portal for the collective wisdom of Machine Front. You've often wondered what it says about her that she has a zebra where Serge has Dante. It's almost as if Serge wants to date Machine Front, and Major Galante wants to make sure she never takes it too seriously.

It's pretty obvious from her first words what the argument's about.

'There are no logic bullets in the mine perimeter. It's that simple. You want to come up here with a metal detector and check it out? Oh, I forgot, you're just a bunch of statistics – you can't actually walk. Well, I can tell you because I was there. The logic bullets are gone. They're not in the mines, they're not in the processing units, they're not in the storage facilities and they're not in the transports. They're not in the cafeteria or the barracks, either. We checked everywhere. We checked the damn latrines. There isn't one single logic bullet in the entire area.'

'You haven't looked hard enough,' barked the zebra. 'Nothing passed the perimeter between the time that the MaxFact missile was launched and the arrival of your convoy that sealed off the mines. The Gossamer has ample records to indicate that no golems escaped during that interval.'

On cue you call up Gossamer's visual memories associated with the golem raid from two weeks ago and confirm that this is true. There was a brief period of chaos at the beginning of the golems' assault, but once the MaxFact failed to strike its target all personnel in the mines were obliged to automatically self-immolate to prevent themselves becoming golems. The marauding golems then set about dismantling superficial equipment and dragging it into the Grid, but within a very short time Galante's convoy had surrounded the camp perimeter and prevented most of them escaping. The golems subsequently besieged in the camp might very well have entered the mines after that, but there was no way out of the camp without crossing the perimeter fence, and Galante's blockade ensured that didn't happen.

'Then they must have been removed beforehand,’ Galante says.

'There is no evidence to indicate that they were. You need to make a more complete search. Take the Gossamer and crosscheck all the reference files with what you can see now. We need to find out what's changed since the raid began.'

Galante blows out through her lips like a horse.

'My people have just successfully raided a golem camp that was said to be impenetrable. We have not lost a single soldier. We haven't even lost a major piece of equipment. And now you want me to go on a research hunt?'

'We need the logic bullets. You know very well that the effectiveness of the Third Wave depends on close pursuit. Close pursuit is impossible without the logic that predicts how the Grid will behave. Until the logic has been recovered, your mission remains open.'

Galante slams her Swatch shut and punches the air. She opens the Swatch again and shouts into it.

'Gossamer saw the raid. We have footage. No golems escaped my equipment. How could they have removed the logic, then? I'll tell you what happened. We've been stuck up here waiting for the right moment to go in and get the logic bullets, and all the time they were never here. They were removed weeks ago. And I bet I know who removed them.'

Machine Front is implacable. 'You will double-check every inch of the perimeter. You will check all flier records and you will do a detailed forensic analysis on the mine shafts themselves. The possibility that the logic was removed earlier will be explored by us. But don't rely on it being true.'

And so you end up spending six hours combing the air, and your own records, for some indication of where and when the logic bullets went missing. A distinct mood of disappointment, followed by anger, settles over Galante's guys.

'There's no end to what they want,' one of the elite soldiers grumbles as she fits a miner's lamp on to her helmet. 'Next thing they're going to say there's a fuel shortage and ask us to fly home powered by our own farts.'

'We'll get home, Hotchkiss,' Galante reassures her. 'lt won't be long now. Did you see the videos of the Third Wave tanks? Poetry in motion. We'll get the logic and we'll all be having a barbecue in no time.'

You wish you could always work with Galante. You can't imagine Serge at a barbecue, that's for sure.

 

_______

Arla Gonzalez is hanging out with golems these days. It's not clear to you what their relationship is. You don't witness them talking. But they seem to follow her, and her wishes and their actions seem somehow causally connected; but it's hard to be sure exactly what's going on.

You have seen golems disembowel soldiers with their own weapons, or with Grid-generated versions thereof. You have seen them butcher a man and toss his body parts in the Grid, like Horus into the Nile. An you have seen the hands and arms rise from the well in multiples of nine, groping blindly: the Grid always makes nine copies of everything. You have seen heads rise, eighteen eyes look around, only to sink again. But mostly the golems leave bodies intact – that's the only way to get more fully functioning golems. The best soldiers make the most dangerous golems.

Why have they not simply killed Arla Gonzalez?

Serge has got to be wondering the same thing. Again she has located Gonzalez, but the presence of so many golems lurking around her like spidery bodyguards prohibits Serge from making a capture. Gonzalez is pleasant and soft-spoken as always. She looks emaciated.

'There's something you should see before you bring me in,' Gonzalez says. And she leads Serge to the gap where you first spotted Gonzalez, the gap that holds the MaxFact missile (and suddenly you remember that you never reported that to anyone, and you wonder if you forgot by accident or if, as Mom would have said, you forgot by accident-on-purpose).

Serge beckons you down, into the dead Grid. It's not at all nice.

Now that you see the blackened, rigid forms of what once had been branches and boles and roots, the live Grid compares as a kind of Disneyland, a moving panoply of pastel happiness and life-affirming energy. The dead Grid makes a sound like thunder, and the patterns of shadow in its wasted skeleton write on your animal cortex in a terrible, primeval script. It has no smell. And you can't help but suspect that it has no weight, either – no integrity. Judging by Serge's behavior, she has the same intuition. She creeps near to the edge of the living, throbbing Grid, but stops a few paces clear of the gray region. She can't seem to bring herself to go any closer to the gap, and her voice trembles when she sends instructions to MF.

'No one else is to come over here,' she tells Dante. 'Under any circumstances. Gossamer: you come down here with me. I don't want you going directly over it, just in case something happens to you.'

No problem there. Gossamer has no intention of going near the wound in the Grid; in fact, she seems to be physically repelled by it, like a magnet of the same charge. You come in among the upper branches, sinking faster as Goss picks up more mass in the form of Grid pollen, until you hit a branch near Serge and stick there.

'Record this,' Serge says, ’But don't try to send it yet. We'll have to test the air waves first.'

She takes a few steps across the gray foundation like a nervous ice-skater. She lightens her goggles by one setting, and you take the corresponding restraints away from Goss's machine eyes. The Grid starts to boogie and shake, but you edit that out and focus on the dead zone. The branches are flashing alternately black and white; then they change to ultraviolet; then everything goes dark.The strobe pattern makes Serge grab her head, and she takes the opacity on her goggles back up a notch.

'I hope you're getting this, Goss, because I can't even look at it.'

You can see everything in the clipped instants between flashes. There are shining parcels wedged in the cruxes of branches and dangling from cords. There are tools and snake skeletons. There are casette-tape casings with what your zoom function tells you are rodent guts in the place of audio tape. There are oil paintings of human faces and human body parts, rendered with a technique referred to by art historians as photographic; but no photograph could make a human elbow look so gorgeous and disgusting at the same time – the body parts are almost appetizing.

Most of what you see is metal. Stereo components and gun fittings.

Surrounding what's left of the well is a dust bath. Its surface stirs like vapor from dry ice. Rising from this is a weird tower of heterogeneous components: stereo woofers, antennae. Barbie dolls like little totem figures strung on the cat's cradle of the Grid. The tower looks like a satellite receiver as might be envisaged by a Pink Floyd album-cover designer.

Serge looks at this scene for a while without touching anything or venturing too near the dust bath.Then she goes into the live Grid again and stands there, looking silently at the dead zone.

'I think it's just a freak-out,' Serge says after a while. 'Psychological warfare. It's just another game.'

Arla answers her; Serge must have forgotten that she was there, because she startles at the sound and then looks resentful.

'You saw the structure in the Grid. Lewis doesn't know what to make of it, does she?'

'Yeah, so? It looks like some friggin lost temple of the Jungle Ungawungabungas,' says Serge. 'Place is ripe for a wanna-be alien archaeologist. That ain't what I'm here to be.'

She turns away from the dead zone and starts moving back into the gleaming Grid lattice with a purposeful air. She's missed the real point of coming here; you swiftly send a message.

Machine Front will probably tell you off for not informing them first.

MAJOR LOOK IN THE WELL. THE MAX FACT LANDED HERE.

Serge doesn't break stride. Gonzalez is following her, talking. 'The altered Grid isn't an ancient artifact. We both know that. It's been built more recently.'

'Yeah? By who?'

'Ah. The question you should ask isn't by whom, it's for whom?'

'I got a war on here,' says Serge, swinging herself up off the foundation and into the Grid proper. You sense that she just wants to get away from the dead zone, and Gossamer's only too glad to lead her. After a while Serge stops and scratches the back of her neck. She's lost. You send her the camp coordinates, and she immediately sets off again, following your directions without acknowledging your presence. 'I'm gonna be needing a real good reason not to torch this whole sector.'

'I can show you a reason.'

Before Serge can retort, you both hear a voice. It comes from your dorsal side, behind Serge's back. It's a light voice; a young voice. But it doesn't speak with words. It makes an utterance derived from playgrounds and mental wards: long, guttural, with tongue waggling around ineffectually in mouth, and ending in spittle.

By the time you locate the position of the speaker, the utterance has changed into something perfectly recognizable – familiar, even.

It's a child, and she's laughing.

'Don't run this time, Bonny,' Arla says softly.

'I ain't got no intention of running. I already decided what I'm gonna do if you call up your baby goons again.' And out comes Serge's trusty spiderwhip.

She peers down into the shadows that drape the well.

'I know you're down there,' she says loudly. 'Come on and try to kill me. Come on! I'm not afraid of you turkeys.'

Down below, the surface of the well stirs. Serge stiffens and you can see the muscles in her body coiling. You can smell her excitement.

A head breaks the surface, then a body. Serge's hand tightens on the spiderwhip. She is going to release it any second now. The creature surges out of the well, moving from shadow into light, shaking its head and opening its eyes.

But Serge doesn't do anything. With the swelling music has come augmented Grid-light. A clear ray now streams down on the golem, though Serge herself is in deep shadow. It reveals a small body belonging to a child no older than five or six. The child is a girl, with straight black hair and eyes elongated by epicanthical folds, and ears that stick out like a leprechaun's. She holds up a hand.

It has six fingers.

Serge staggers back as though struck.

'Arla, you sonuvabitch,' Serge says. She's just clinging to her branch, trembling like a plucked piano wire. 'Nol'

'You didn't get a good look at them before this, did you? Are you frightened?'

Serge's trembling resolves into smooth, aggressive action. She whirls and lunges for Gonzalez, taking the other woman by surprise. She gets Gonzalez by the throat and presses her up against the bright webbing. The Grid is still playing its horrible symphony.

'I see them all right, but what I'm seeing can't be right. It's just some nightmare shit.'

Arla smiles.

'Nightmares by definition aren't real.'

'How did that thing get in the well?' Serge snarls. Her nails snap against the alloy of Arla's collar.

'You know that I used to run the medical facility at X. Your very own Corporal Hendricks worked on my team in those days. We handled all kinds of problems. Including sexual-health matters.'

'Go on.'

'Paper waste and anything that might contain data useful to the Grid was incinerated within the compound at X, to prevent verbal and conceptual contamination. But sewage and the like was routed directly into the well. So were the contents of the biological waste-disposal system at the clinic.'

'That's a nice thought.' Serge makes a face.

Gonzalez shrugs. 'lt's a matter of practicality. As you know, the well has never shown any reaction to human bodily fluids or tissues in isolation, only to actual corpses, and these need to be fairly intact from a structural point of view in order for the well to make golems out of them. Considering that we had no other way of disposing of waste, the well was the logical dumping ground for inert materials.'

'Inert materials.' Serge says it with an edge sharpened by irony. She is shaking her head back and forth.

'Yeah. Now, in certain cases involving reproductive health, we used special sealed containers to hold waste. Just to be safe. But there was a seal malfunction in the lab, and some of the materials leaked into the well.'

'Materials.' Again: the dead voice. You've never heard Serge like this before. She looks on the verge of tears.

'During the crossover period, when the majority of the male forces were being replaced by female soldiers, my staff recorded terminations of seventeen pregnancies, most of them in the very early stages.'

Serge's face is on fast-twitch. You can hear her panting.

'I don't believe this. I don't believe what I'm hearing. Are there others, then? Other children?'

Arla shrugs. 'Maybe. But I don't think so. Even the Grid has limits. Thirteen of the terminations were performed very early. Only four happened after twelve weeks – and I think it's one of those that we're looking at.'

'But that can't be right.' Serge has a fervent air, and she shakes Gonzalez as she says it, as if the force of her conviction can make her words true. 'That was only four years ago. These kids are older than that'

'I never actually said it was four years.'

'These kids are older than that,' repeats Serge.

'How did you know it was four?'

'You know how I know,' says Serge. 'Quit playing me like I'm a dumb bunny.'

Suddenly she lets go of Arla, who stumbles and goes down on her butt on the foundation. The children scatter into the Grid like spiders.

Serge's teeth are chattering.

'What the hell are they, Gonzalez? They can't be human. If you know what's going on, you better tell me right now.'

'I don't know what they are. But I know what they aren't.They can't be picked up by scanners while they're alive, so you're right: they're not human.They aren't golems, either. Because they also don't disintegrate on death. They can die, for real.'

'How do you know this? What evidence have you got?'

'I know they can die because I killed one of them,' Gonzalez says softly. The way she says it somehow manages to make her sound graceful, even saintly.

You want to go home.

'When the raid started, I shot one of them off the perimeter fence, and then I went to check for damages and I found it lying there. It was still alive. I took it inside. I'm a doctor. I know a living thing when I see it. I know a human being when I see her – even if the cameras don't. I put her in quarantine and tried to medicate her, but she died. I couldn't allocate surgical resources because we were under golem attack. I told MF what I'd found, and I sent the body back to X. Hours later, MF launched a Maximum missile. It was supposed to wipe out the surface of the camp but leave the mines intact so that the logic bullets could be recovered afterward. MF would then come in and take care of any remaining golems. It was our worst-case-scenario plan. We would all die: we knew that. But at least we wouldn't be killed and dragged into the well by golems.'

'But the missile never hit, doc. It was a misfire.'

'It wasn't a misfire. They pulled it down outside the perimeter. The well grabbed it and it didn't explode, but little by little it killed the Grid all the same. You can see the destruction gradually working its way towards the mine.'

'Who pulled it down? MF?'

'They did.These children. Your children.' She pauses. Serge has not flinched. Gonzalez adds, 'They pulled it into the well. With that apparatus you were looking at.'

Serge turns back toward the dead zone and the impossible quasi-machine tower made of body parts and stereo components. 'They built that!'

'They appear to have a great deal of mechanical aptitude. I've watched them.'

As the two of them are talking, the children flit among the Grid's branches with monkey grace. Again you notice a curious disjointed aspect to their movement. They look like badly spliced film. Serge must be able to see them in the periphery of her vision, but she doesn't let herself be distracted.

'Why don't Machine Front know about this?'

'Because I didn't tell them,' answers Arla.

'You f%*king traitor. You're crazy, all right – crazy like a coyote. No wonder you're still alive. You're on their side. You're helping the golems.'

'Hey, what do you want from me, Captain? I took a physician's oath long before I came here. When I told Machine Front I had a specimen of a human born in the Grid, they didn't change their tactics to take that fact into account. Instead, they went even more hard-ass and tried to blow up everybody in the mines.'

'Yet you said yourself it was a worst-case scenario . . .'

'You just don't get it, do you? Everything is alive here. Everything. The Grid is nothing less than miraculous. Our orders are bulls*%t.'

'That's not for you to say.' Serge is swinging her head from side to side like a bull getting ready to charge. 'You don't know enough to make that judgment.'

'I don't have to be able to lay an egg to know when one's rotten.'

'What do you mean by that, Major?'

'I mean what kind of crazy s*%t it is!' Gonzalez's neighborhood accent comes shining through. Her voice rises to a squeak. 'Mining for logic bullets. Fighting with the indigenes. Taking samples of organic molecules for study. What about understanding the Grid? Nobody's trying to do that.'

'It's too soon. There are stages, steps to be taken.'

'Baloney. You don't just march in and invade. That's where all our civilization went wrong. Just watch StarTrek.'

'StarTrek, Jesus Christ, Arla . . .'

'This thing is smart,' Arla says, slapping the Grid with her palm like she's complimenting a horse. 'Machine Front is playing games with you. The Grid isn't your enemy, Machine Front is.'

'You're sick. You need help. Don't you realize that without machines we'd be dead?'

'Would we?'

'I don't follow you and I'm not sure I want to.'

'Let's take the concept of the ArtlQ test,' Arla says. 'lt's easy to get an ArtlQ to duplicate an image – to make a photograph, say. But ask an ArtlQ to create a painting and it can't do anything but copy. It can't put its own interpretation in. It doesn't have that creativity. Now, people have compared the Grid to a highly sophisticated computer. It takes dead bodies and reproduces them, synthesizes them, and animates them. It even manipulates their neural structures so that they can function with a modicum of intelligence. So far, so good. But what about an embryo? Something in an early state of gestation has been torn from its human host and dropped in the well, and somehow the Grid has grown this thing, developed it, and taken it past the point of what would have been birth and into its childhood. How is that possible? How could it know what to do? It's an extraordinary leap, and I would argue that the only way it's possible is if the Grid is able to actually identify with the developing embryo and sense its wants and needs, and then provide them. If the Grid is identifying with us to that degree, why are we fighting with it and not talking to it? If it is coming to us in the form of our own people, shouldn't we see that as a bridge to communication, and shouldn't we cross that bridge?'

'But they're not talking to you. Doctor, are they?'

'Not yet, not as such. But the situation raises the question: if a dead embryo could be brought to life by the Grid, what about a live person? Could a live person become a conduit, a—'

'—Channel? A psychic medium? Gypsy Rose Lee, Fortunes one dollar. . .'

'You can laugh about it, but the only way forward that I can see, Captain, is for a living human to go in the well and see what it does to her. Meet it halfway.'

'And is that going to be you?'

'I'm working on it,' says Arla.

'Ho,' says Serge. 'l see a pattern here. Weren't you supposed to suicide up at N-Ridge with all your subordinates? And if you were gonna jump in the well for thrills, haven't you had enough time to work up the nerve? You know the way I see it? I think you like the romance of committing suicide but you don't got the necessary pumping action. You can't do it.'

'We'll see what happens,' says Arla in her sweet voice.

Serge grunts, 'l doubt it. I know your type.'

'And I know your type, Captain Serge. I know your type all too well.'

'So then you know what I'm gonna have to do about this.' Serge gestures to the well without looking at it, as if afraid that she might meet the gazes of one of the children.

'And I don't think you have the requisite pumping action, Captain.'

Serge swallows.

'Why don't you tell me about my. . . offspring. Go on, then. I'm listening.'

Arla's voice drops to a whisper.

'You're shaking, Captain. It's a good front, but I can see you shaking from here.'

Serge's eyes flare. She gropes in her pocket. 'Want a Snickers?'

You are getting too close. You can see the poison in Gonzalez's eyes. You have to bring Gossamer around in the air and take her higher, or risk getting entangled in the Grid. And in doing so you lose sight of them, just for a few moments. Just as Gossamer goes into a banking turn, the golems come.

It's very fast.

You use the Swatch to shriek a warning at Serge. She springs back from the nearest golem with a curse.

'You don't need friggin'rescuing,' she hisses at Gonzalez. 'What are you doing? Are you controlling them?'

Gonzalez shakes her head sadly.

'No, I'm not controlling them. That's your job.'

'What the skunk you talking about?'

'Machine Front are just using us. Always have been. They need us to die, Captain Serge. Without us, no golems. Without the golems, no one to take apart the machines.'

Serge snorts. 'That's bass-fishing-ackwards, Gonzalez.'

'You go up to N-Ridge and look around, Captain. Then you can tell me about bass fishing or fly fishing or any other kind of redneck killtime you can think of.'

'I can't buy into this paranoid fantasy crap,' she said. 'A f!*kup's a f!*kup's a f!*kup. And this is one, I can feel it right down in my toes. Because if I believe that some disposal-seal malfunction resulted in the dead embryo going into the well, and the kid that resulted from it was hell-bent on putting machines into the well to make them alive. .  .well, it could be true but if I was to follow this popcorn trail of logic to its natural end, I gotta be believing that the machines done it all on purpose. That they want to be alive. And that's just too Frankenstein for this Kansas girl, Toto.'

Gonzalez doesn't say anything for a moment. Actually, she looks like she's going to cry.

'Maybe when Machine Front have manipulated you the way they've done me, then maybe you'll understand. If you can still think, which I'm starting to realize I can't.'

And she retreats into the webbing, leaving Serge with her spi-derwhip and her Swatch, surrounded by golems.

'Is she a downer or what?' mutters Serge.

You start to call Lewis for help, but Serge stops you.

'They're going,' she says.

And the golems do leave once Gonzalez is out of sight. But you can still make out the children, half-secreted in the Grid's netting, watching Serge.