As Freddie managed the four interleaving sets of messages, he kept up a fifth conversation with her. She was too rapt with the information on the screen, however, and murmured unfocused answers as she watched.
A prompt box that read Special J came up, and Freddy said, "Hello. Here's someone I haven't met before." He sent out a message introducing himself. The response came back: You mean you're ME!? I've been trying to find myself for years!
"Heard that one a million times," said Freddie tiredly, but responded with another ME joke. They sparred like this for a few exchanges.
"The ME thing is always good for a couple of minutes," he said. "I've got all the jokes hard-coded in my brain. Easy money."
"Easy money?"
"Real easy. Subscribers pay fifteen cents a minute to stay on-line. When I'm animating them, I get thirty percent of that for the time they spend chatting to me."
"That's how you get paid?"
"Yep. Six or seven at once and it's good money. These days, text-only is the boutique market, so the bastards who own this place really clean up." To emphasize his point, he paused to wave an arm at the dozens of computers assembled. At his gesture, a few random characters popped on-screen like a censored curse in the comics. She looked up at the rows of flickering screens and imagined an animator at each one, adopting multiple personalities as they flitted among conversations with unknowing strangers. She felt vaguely nauseated by the promiscuous enormity of it all. Another anarchists' motto, which she'd seen painted on the aluminum-only dumpster behind her building, occurred to her: It's been said before: Any god's a whore.
She sat down on the spindly ergonomic chair next to him. Her eyes ached from hurriedly reading the phosphorescent text. The dry air and fluorescent lighting of the office were starting to take a toll on her energy. The small clock in the corner of his screen said 04:26. Normally, she would be leaving Payday now for an after-hours club.
He noticed her detachment and said, "There's coffee."
In a tiny kitchen near the front, she poured a cup of water from the red spigot on the refrigerator. She stirred in coffee and experimented with a white powder that she hoped was cream. In the bright light of the kitchen, the blood under her fingernails was evident. She picked them clean absently, Freddie's qwerting clattering in the distance like a light rain.
When the coffee was cool enough to drink, she bolted it down. It was mundanely awful. She concentrated on putting the caffeine to work without delay. She found the switch for the kitchen overhead lights, turned them off, and sat for a moment in the indirect glow of the office lights outside. The caffeine and the remains of the night's adrenaline moved through her limbs as she relaxed her muscles and performed a few superhuman stretches.
When she returned, Freddie looked up and smiled. He was sitting awkwardly in the small chair, shoulders hunched a little. His eyes were steady as they looked into hers, his fingers pausing for a moment. She moved behind him and pushed her fingers deep into the knots in his shoulders. The muscles were rock hard. He relaxed, hit a function key, and stopped qwerting. He groaned as she roughened her massage. He pointed at the key he had just struck.
"I just sent them all the same long joke. I macroed it earlier today. It's a good way to buy a few minutes and get them all on the same subject for a while. It's an all-purpose joke. Want to hear it?"
"No." She experimented with her new hands. The radically opposed thumbs provided extra leverage, and could push under the shoulder blades hard and tirelessly. He was a good subject, appreciating a fierce, uncompromising massage. She idly wondered if someone with hands like hers would need special qwerty bracelets.
As she kneaded his shoulders, he unlocked the brace on his arm with the loud rip of new Velcro. The skin on the forearm was a sun-starved white, and he flexed the wrist tenderly.
"Hurts like shit," he said, tentatively spreading the fingers. "The brace keeps me from bending it all day."
"What's it for?" she asked.
"Carpal Tunnel. It's an RSD."
"A what?"
"Repetitive Stress Disorder."
"Ah. You get it from qwerting, right?"
"Anything like that: typing, assembly-line work, pushing a mouse. It's neural damage from doing the same damn thing all day."
"Why don't you use speech recognition?"
"Too slow," he said. "With SRT you can't manage more than sixty words a minute. I can qwert almost two hundred. Besides, my voice'd give out in two hours. Probably just get carpal of the throat."
"Speaking of speech, don't these people ever use voice and visual? It's cheaper."
"Anonymity is bliss; you can say what you want. AcNet may be more expensive than a regular on-line, but it's cheaper than a shrink."
A thought came forcefully to her: He understands. It was the incorporeality of text that let him transform himself, that gave him his power.
She said, "Well, if you get carpal from doing the same thing for too long, let's do something else."
He grinned, tilting his head back to catch her eye. "Anything you like."
"I'll show you . . . what I like." She strengthened her grip on his shoulders, rotating them in their sockets. Then she slowly extended her massage down his arms. He resisted a moment when she knelt and took the damaged arm in both hands. As she gingerly probed it, he relaxed, but not completely. Maybe his arm felt vulnerable out of the brace, or perhaps he was still uncomfortable with the bare touch of her mutant hands. She kneaded the forearm carefully to avoid hurting the under-used flexor carpi radialis and tendons. The bones and muscles were fine. Whatever damage he had sustained was in the nervous tissue. Helping him would have to wait. She stood up.
"Let's go."
There was another taxi ride, very short. The driver, also Eastern European, followed Freddie's directions to Chelsea. Freddie didn't want to walk the ten blocks at this time of night. She smiled and let him pay.
A large and tattered CONDOS FOR SALE banner was draped across his building. The sign bore the logo of a bank that had crashed explosively the year before. The buzzers were ripped out and the hall lights were dark. Freddie didn't bother to wait for the elevator. He took out a small flashlight and started up the crumbling stairs. He explained that the building's electric bill hadn't been paid for months. The building was stalled in its second generation of co-dominium. The original tenant group had folded, and while the guaranty bank was selling off the empty apartments, the bank had folded too. Freddie's ownership of his apartment remained in some under-regulated limbo. He shrugged it off. "I bought it in the waning days. They didn't make me put too much down."