Free Video Star (Voice of the Whirlwind) by Walter Jon Williams Page A

stop in Flagstaff, Ric was still screaming, unable to stop himself. Jacob had poisoned him, using a neurotoxin that stripped away the myelin sheathing on his nerves, leaving them raw cords of agonized fiber. Ric had been in a hurry to finish his business and had only taken a single sip of his wine: that was the only thing that had saved him.

2
    He was months in the hospital in Flagstaff, staring out of a glass wall at a maze of other glass walls— office buildings and condecologies stacked halfway to Phoenix, flanking the silver alloy ribbon of an expressway. The snows fell heavily that winter, then in the spring melted away except for patches of white in the shadows. For the first three months he was completely immobile, his brain chemically isolated from his body to keep the pain away while he took an endless series of nerve grafts, drugs to encourage nerve replication and healing. Finally there was physical therapy that had him screaming in agony at the searing pain in his reawakened limbs.
    At the end there was a new treatment, a new drug. It dripped into his arm slowly via an IV and he could feel a lightness in his nerves, a humming in his mind. Even the air seemed to taste better. The pain was no worse than usual and he felt better than he had since walking out of the meeting back in Granada with the money spike in his pocket.
    “What’s in the IV?” he asked, next time he saw the nurse.
    The nurse smiled. “Everyone asks that,” he said. “Genesios Three. We’re one of the few hospitals that has the security to distribute the stuff.”
    “You don’t say.”
    He’d heard of the drug while watching the news. Genesios Three was a new neurohormone, developed by the orbital Pink Blossom policorp, that could repair almost any amount of nerve damage. As a side effect it built additional neural connections in the brain, raised the IQ, and made people high. The hormone was rare because it was very complex and expensive to synthesize, though the gangs were trying. On the west coast lots of people had died in a war for control of the new black labs. On the street it was called Black Thunder.
    “Not bad,” said Ric.
    The treatment and the humming in Ric’s brain went on for a week. When it was over he missed it. He was also more or less healed.

3
    The week of Genesios therapy took fifteen thousand dollars out of Ric’s spike. The previous months of treatment had accounted for another sixty-two thousand. What Ric didn’t know was that Genesios therapy could have been started at once and saved him most of his funds, but that the artificial intelligences working for the hospital had tagged him as a suspect character, an alien of no particular standing, with no work history, no policorporate citizenship, and a large amount of cash in his breast pocket. The AIs concluded that Ric was in no position to complain, and they were right.
    Computers can’t be sued for malpractice. The doctors and administrators followed their advice.
    All that remained of Ric’s money was three thousand SM dollars. Ric could live off of that for a few years, but it wasn’t much of a retirement.
    The hospital was nice enough to schedule an appointment for him with a career counselor, a woman who would find him a job. She worked in the basement of the vast glass hospital building, and her name was Marlene.

4
    Marlene worked behind a desk littered with the artifacts of other people’s lives. There were no windows in the office, two ashtrays, both full, and on the walls there were travel posters that showed long stretches of emptiness, white beaches, blue ocean, faraway clouds. Nothing alive.
    Her green eyes had an opaque quality, as if she was watching a private video screen somewhere in her mind. She wore a lot of silver jewelry on her fingers and forearms and a grey rollneck sweater with cigarette burn marks. Her eyes bore elaborate makeup that looked like the wings of a Red Admiral. Her hair was almost blond. The only job she could find