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

him was for a legal firm, something called assistant data evaluator.
    Before Ric left Marlene’s office he asked her to dinner. She turned him down without even changing expression. Ric had the feeling he wasn’t quite real to her.
    The job of assistant data evaluator consisted of spending the day walking up and down a four-story spiral staircase in the law firm, moving files from one office to another. The files were supposedly sensitive and not committed to the firm’s computer lest someone steal them. The salary was insulting. Ric told the law firm that the job was just what he was looking for. They told him to start in two days.
    Ric stopped into Marlene’s office to tell her he got the job and to ask her to dinner again. She laughed, for what reason he couldn’t tell, and said yes.
    A slow spring snowfall dropped onto the streets while they ate dinner. With her food Marlene took two red capsules and a yellow pill, grew lively, drank a lot of wine. He walked her home through the snow to her apartment on the seventh floor of an old fourth-rate condeco, a place with water stains on the ceiling and bare bulbs hanging in the halls, the only home she could afford. In the hallway Ric brushed snow from her shoulders and hair and kissed her. He took Marlene to bed and tried to prove to her that he was real.
    The next day he checked out of the hospital and moved in.

5
    Ric hadn’t bothered to show up on his first day as an assistant data evaluator. Instead he’d spent the day in Marlene’s condeco, asking her home comp to search library files and print out everything relating to what the scansheets in their willful ignorance called “Juvecrime.” Before Marlene came home Ric called the most expensive restaurant he could find and told them to deliver a five-course meal to the apartment.
    The remains of the meal were stacked in the kitchen. Ric paced back and forth across the small space, his mind humming with the information he’d absorbed. Marlene sat on an adobe-colored couch and watched, a wine glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other, silhouetted by the glass self-polarizing wall that showed the bright aluminum-alloy expressway cutting south across melting piles of snow. Plans were vibrating in Ric’s mind, nothing firm yet, just neurons stirring on the edge of his awareness, forming fast-mutating combinations. He could feel the tingle, the high, the half-formed ideas as they flickered across neural circuits.
    Marlene reached into a dispenser and took out a red pill and a green capsule with orange stripes. Ric looked at her. “How much of that stuff do you take, anyway? Is it medication, or what?”
    “I’ve got anxieties.” She put the pills into her mouth, and with a shake of her head dry-swallowed them.
    “How big a dose?”
    “It’s not the dose that matters. It’s the proper combination of doses. Get it right and the world feels like a lovely warm swimming pool. It’s like floating underwater and still being able to breathe. It’s wonderful.”
    “If you say so.” He resumed his pacing. Fabric scratched his bare feet. His mind hummed, a blur of ideas that hadn’t yet taken shape, flickering, assembling, dissolving without his conscious thought.
    “You didn’t show up for work,” Marlene said. “They gave me a call about that.”
    “Sorry.”
    “How are you gonna afford this taste you have for expensive food?” Marlene asked. “Without working, I mean.”
    “Do something illegal,” Ric said. “Most likely.”
    “That’s what I thought.” She looked up at him, sideways. “You gonna let me play?”
    “If you want.”
    Marlene swallowed half her wine, looked at the littered apartment, shrugged.
    “Only if you really want,” Ric said. “It has to be a thing you decide.”
    “What else is there for me to do?” she said.
    “I’m going to have to do some research, first,” he said. “Spend a few days accessing the library.”
    Marlene was looking at him again. “Boredom,”