"That's extraordinary." He said it with simple awe.
"You only just noticed?" ,
He didn't answer, splaying her fingers and staring at the hand like a child with a strange animal. He looked at the other hand. "It's the same."
"It's the opposite," she said, grinning.
He didn't smile.
A waitperson came by and Freddie bought a pair of shots. She saw that the edges of Freddie's smartcard glinted with optical circuitry. It was probably from one, of the more upscale companies. He whisked it through the waitperson's hand-held reader with great care, as if the card were new and prized.
They did the shots and were silent for a few moments. She felt her stomachs roil as the tequila hit them. Her stomachs were quite small, but she had crenulated their walls to increase their surface area. They absorbed alcohol very quickly. She took a deep breath as the tequila hit her bloodstream.
She heard the chirp of Freddie's phone in his pocket. Freddie looked at his watch and bit his lip. He took the call, for a moment turning toward the water. He spoke for a few moments and pocketed the phone.
One of his pauses passed.
He said, "I've got to go to work." Another pause, in which she found herself disappointed. Then, to her surprise, he added: "You want to come?"
"What do you do?"
"I'm an animator."
"OK." She had no idea what he meant.
It was still dark out, with nothing in the sky except the orange glow of mercury-vapor streetlights. Only a few cabs were queued up outside. She picked a taxi whose driver was pirating electricity from a lamppost that stretched over the freeway. The cab was one of the new Croatian ones that the Times said weren't safe. The driver pulled the recharge cable from the lamppost and let it reel back into the trunk with a rude snap. Freddie opened the door and pulled himself to the other side. She got in, her tall frame cramped in the little car.
The cab's card reader was broken, and the driver had to type in Freddie's number on a dashboard keypad, propping his door open to keep the light on. The driver, whose Slavic name crowded the license card posted on the dashboard, listened disinterestedly to Freddie's directions, then nodded vigorously. The little car accelerated onto the freeway quickly, with the eerie silence of foreign electrics. The driver said, "Hot," and the windows slid down with a whine. The cab was suddenly filled with a warm, chaotic wind. Her hair whipped annoyingly and she cursed it. It was the one part of her body she had no control over.
Her limbs still rang with echoes of Payday's dancebeat. They sat in silence. She reached out and grasped Freddie's right arm. A flash of desire struck her as she felt the hardness of the brace through the jacket. The metal inside the bandage ran from elbow to palm, on the underside only. His arm was bound tightly to it with three Velcro straps so that the wrist couldn't bend. She moved down the length of the brace until her fingers touched his.
************************************
Freddie worked in one of the long warehouses of the old meatpacking district on the West Side. Many of the old buildings had been converted to living coops in the early nineties, before the crashes, and now they stood empty and desolate. A few prostitutes haunted the old truck-loading docks, tall and gaunt. Most of them were dressed as women, but all were men. Her grip tightened as she watched their faces, collecting any nuances she could from this errant margin of desire.
Freddie misinterpreted her excitement. "Don't worry. It's safer than it looks around here."
He guided the cabbie down a side street. They stopped before a lamplit stairwell. While Freddie verified the tip, she climbed the stairs and read the buzzer plates:
ICON TACT LEGAL SEARCH SERVICES
HIRACHI INT.
ACNET
VERITY CORP.
She had no idea which would need the services of an animator.
Freddie came up behind her and ran his card through the door's reader. The door buzzed and swung open easily at her push. A tiny camera hummed as it tracked them across the lobby. The elevator doors opened. The building was sparse and efficient, finished in the direct and shiny style of the information industry. Inside the elevator, Freddie pushed 3. The button bore the AcNet logo.
The elevator doors opened directly into an office occupying the entire floor. She counted fifteen ranks of six desks each, stretching back along huge industrial windows that overlooked the street. Each desk had identical hardware: a flatscreen monitor on a swivel mount, a desk lamp, qwerty bracelets, and a handrest inlaid at a slight angle. No one was there. The only movement came from a small cleaning robot rolling slowly and aimlessly in one corner.
Freddie led her toward the rear of the office. Each desk bore a personal touch: a tea-stained and illustrated mug, a cartoon pixelated by fax transmission, a set of small photographs in Lucite frames, a fuzzy animal with suction-pad feet stuck to one monitor - the various effluvia of quiet desperation. The monitors were on. Each showed intermittent bursts of color that exploded like tiny fireworks from random corners of the screen. From Freddie's desk in the last rank, all the monitors were visible. The combined effect of the pyrotechnic display was spectacular.
"What the hell is all that? Are those the animations you do?" she asked.
He laughed. "That's just the screen saver."
"Don't you ever turn the monitors off?"
"They're part of the System, and the System is designed to stay on all the time." He said it with respectful finality.
Freddie put on his qwerty bracelets, winding the fingerclips around his brace expertly. The explosions on his screen cleared away. A small menu appeared. Four names: Turbo, Action Jackson, C.C., and Cosmo.
"What the hell do you do for a living, Freddie?"
"I animate." He peeled off his jacket, selected one of the names by touch, and began qwerting. The brace was beautiful against his pale skin. He qwerted in short, nervous spurts. He was incredibly quick. As he talked, his fingers kept up their dancing in the air. "AcNet started out as a database for actors and other theater types. Casting calls and what productions were running. We had biographical data about directors, producers, whoever. There was also a chat line, where people could type in messages to each other in real time. That was a big deal twenty years ago, and it was the only part of the service that made money."
His sudden bursts of qwerting flew by as text on the screen, each character corresponding to a different position of his fingers. There was a small snick of sound from the monitor confirming each letter. He had the capslock key down. He made errors in every line and didn't bother to correct them. "So they forgot about the database and made the chat line national. Actors used it to gossip, bitch about being actors, and talk about whatever. 'Cause actors don't have money, it was cheap. So when the net went voice and visual, AcNet didn't really have the cash to upgrade; it stayed text-only."