A Blink of the Screen

you know, subliminally what the time is. Only mine kept resetting to Tuesday, 1 January, 1980, every time I blinked, so I took it back, and the salesman tried to sell me one that could show the time in twelve different capitals plus stock market reports and that. All kinds of other stuff, too. It’s getting so you can get these new units and you go to have a slash, excuse my French, and all these little red numbers scroll up with range and position details and a vector-graphics lavvy swims across your vision, beepbeepbeep, lock-on, fire …
    She’s around somewhere. You might of even seen her. Or him. It’s like immortality.
    Can’t abide machines in people. Never could, never will.
    I mention this because, when I got to the flat, the copper on the door had that panicky look in his eye they have when they’re listening to their internal radio.
    I mean, probably it looked a great idea on paper. Whole banks of crime statistics and that, delivered straight to the inside of your head. Only they get headaches from all the noise. And what good is it, every time a cab goes by, they get this impulse to pick up a fare from Flat 27, Rushdie Road? My joke.
    I went in and there was this smell.
    Not from the body, though. They’d got rid of that smell, first thing.
    No. This smell, it was just staleness. The kind of smell old plastic makes. It was the kind of smell a place gets that ought to be dirty, only there’s not enough dirt around, so what you get is ground-in cleanness. When you leave home, say, and your mum keeps the room just like it was for ten years, that’s the kind of smell you get. The whole flat was like that, although there were no aeroplanes hanging from the ceiling.
    So I get called into the main room and immediately I spot the Seagem, because I’m trained, you notice things like that. It was a series Five, which in my opinion were a big mistake. The Fours were pretty near ideal, so why tinker? It’s like saying, hey, we’ve invented the perfect bicycle so, next thing we’ll do, we’ll put thirteen more wheels on it – like, for example, they replaced the S-2030s with the S-4060, not a good move in my opinion.
    This one was dead. I mean, the power light was on and it was warm, but if it was operating you’d expect to see lights moving on the panel. Also, there was this really big 4711 unit on top, which you don’t expect to see in a private house. It’s a lab tool. It was a dual model, too. Smell and taste. I could see by the model number it was one of the ones you use a tongue glove with, which is actually quite okay. Never could understand the spray-on polymers. People say, hey, isn’t it like having a condom in your mouth, but it’s better than having to scrape gunk off your tongue at bedtime.
    Lots of other stuff had been hooked in, too, and half a dozen phone lines into a patch unit. There was a 1MT memory sink, big as a freezer.
    Someone who knew what they wanted to buy had really been spending some money here.
    And, oh yes, in the middle of it, like they’d told me on the phone, the old guy. He was dead, too. Sitting on a chair. They weren’t going to do anything to him until I’d been, they said.
    Because of viruses, you see. People get funny ideas about viruses.
    They’d taken his helmet off and you could see the calluses where the nose plugs had been. And his face was white, I mean, yes, he was dead and everything, but it had been like something under a stone even before, and his hair was all long and crinkly and horrible where it had been growing under the helmet. And he didn’t have a beard, what he had was just long, long chin hair, never had a blade to it in years. He looked like God would look if he was on really serious drugs. And dead, of course.
    Actually, he was not that old at all. Thirty-eight. Younger than me. Of course, I jog.
    This other copper was standing by the window, trying to pick up HQ through the microwave mush. He looked bored. All the first-wave scene-of-crime types had long been and gone. He just nodded to the Seagem and said, ‘You know how to fix these things?’
    That was just to establish, you know, that there was them and us, and I was a them. But they always call me in. Reliable, see. Dependable. You can’t trust the big boys, they’re all dealers and agents for the afer companies, they’re locked in. Me, I could go back to repairing microswatch players tomorrow. Darren Thompson, Artificial Realities repaired, washing-machine motors rewound. I