Free Midnight Lamp by Gwyneth Jones Page B

quit, not if there’s another one. This is our business. We’ll have to go to Hollywood, and promote the virtual movie. That’ll be our cover, while we f-figure out what’s going on.’
    ‘Sounds good to me,’ Sage rocked her like a baby, giving Ax the message over her head. Softly. One step forward, two steps back… ‘Okay, we’ll do that.’
    They became aware of a strange sound. Ax shone a flashlight on the Rugrat. It was moving, bouncing and quivering on its mars-buggy axles.
    ‘What’s going on there? More weird phenomena?’
    Fiorinda shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’
    ‘The car is scared,’ Sage informed them.
    ‘How can in be anything?’ protested Fiorinda, ‘Everything’s switched off.’
    ‘You can’t switch off an AI, you’d have to re-install. They’re on permanent standby, it’s never totally unconscious.’
    The Rugrat’s security package had the capacity to ‘recognise threatening behaviour’ directed against itself or its personalised owners. It had shields it could raise, heightened responses and of course a siren. Ax and Sage had disabled the lot, forseeing incessant false positives. When they looked up ‘shaking’ in the manual, they discovered that the car might ‘experience an analogue of disappointment’, if it felt it had failed in its duty.
    ‘It saw us attacked and it couldn’t do anything,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Oh God .’
    ‘We better let it have its siren back,’ sighed Ax.
    The car, warning functions restored, calmed down. They applied First Aid to Ax’s scratches, and crawled into the double bed that could be deployed in the back section: in the same bed together for the first time since Ax had made his grand gesture, and disappeared into his hostage situation. The epoch went unmarked. Sage slept like a warm rock: Ax and Fiorinda dozed, woken every few minutes when the Rugrat was startled by an owl, or alarmed by the malicious creaking of a branch. The bears didn’t come back.
    In the morning they drove to Tecate, found a hotel and smartened up, making the best of the shopping in a small, dignified pueblo town. Ax visited London via b-loc from their hotel room, talked to Allie and confirmed the Few would be in Hollywood in a couple of weeks. The next day they called Harry.
    Driving to the border felt like making a video, something brash, raggedy and retro about breaking through a screen: from the real world of deranged, bizarre decay to a dreamland where everything was still fine. It would have been full of irony, this video, finding fear in the heart of plenty, regretting refuge in the disaster zone. Shame no one had the cameras running.
    They hit the approach road singing, Flew in from Miami beach BOAC—
    The Mexican guards at Mesa de Otay waved them through. On the US side Ax offered his passport without comment, as he’d been instructed, and they were flagged into a concrete bay. They were dressed like rockstars: Sage and Ax in pastel gangster-suits, sharp shirts, string ties; the babe in a slim, vivid yellow dress and slingbacks, her messy hair forced into a yellow-ribboned braid.
    ‘We should say goodbye,’ said Fiorinda. ‘From here on, it’s a performance.’ She kissed them, turning from one to the other: the first natural, freely offered kisses she had given them for a long time. ‘See you on the other side.’
    ‘No goodbye, I’m going over the top with you, stupid brat,’ said Sage, as they got out of the car. ‘So is Ax.’
    They waited, alone in a room like any room of the kind, anywhere in the world: dusty windows, slick upholstered benches, a vending machine, strip lights peppered with dead insects. A counter, with silent, shadowed regions of officialdom beyond. The aircon was frosty. Sage sat on one of the benches, long legs stretched out, his hands in his pockets from ancient habit, eyes closed. Fiorinda and Ax paced, staring at notices. They had plenty of time to remember that Harry had not, in fact, explained how the visa