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kept going with this life and left it.
She'd kept her hog and an outfit and look all ready, though, and even knew
where to find the old gang this many years later. Find them and have them not
even be surprised that she knew and showed up, although there were several
little tricks she knew that nobody else did for avoiding questions.
Well, we had a few tricks now, too.
And I was just itching to try that wonder of a classic Harley of hers.
Cynthia, who the other women all seemed to know as Sug-ar, a name rather than
a term of affection or friendship, looked at her too-expensive watch and said,
"Look, Ah'm gonna hav'ta go track this bastahd down, looks
like. Ah can't stay heah. They'ah on my tail and Ah don't wanta bring 'em down
on y'all heah. Ah think too much of y'all from the old days."
"If ya gotta, ya gotta," Pam, the leader and the one who'd shot up, commented.
"Just don't stay away so long next time, huh?"
"Oh, Ah promise you Ah'm not easy to get," she as-sured them.
There were the usual good-byes, which we patiently waited for Angel no longer
seemed to have any urgency or sense of diminishing power and then she left
into the night.
We didn't merge with her this time, just rode along on the back of the
Harley like some irreverent ghost. Angel had sense enough not to try to
communicate with Matalon while going seventy down a dark freeway, but she was
no longer to be denied.
You feel a little dizzy and need to pull over
, Angel shot to her with those same little yellow dots she'd used on Alvarez.
You just need a couple minutes. Besides, you got to pee out some of that beer.
She went on for a couple of minutes, then saw a wide shoulder area and pulled
over and slowed to a stop, easing the Harley down out of sight of routine
traffic headlights and just inside the trees. She cut the engine, then sat
there a min-ute, as if getting hold of herself. Finally, she slid off, went a
bit further into the woods, did a squat, and took a frontier woman's piss.
As she turned, she suddenly seemed to see something, something indistinct,
green, and living, materializing almost in front of her. We could see the fear
in her eyes, and she in-voluntarily reached for her gun, then thought better
of it, see-ing the futility of shooting solid bullets at a ball of energy.
Just sit down in the grass and relax
, Angel commanded, and the woman obeyed, almost like an automaton.
"Joshua, Wilma, I ain't got what's needed to ask the right stuff!"
Angel complained, at least realizing her limitations
. "Joshua, you need to ask her all that stuff, not me."
"But how do I get through? It's hard just to do this!"
I complained.
"Look, there's only one thing we can do. Ain't nobody home in any of our
bodies right now. Suppose I stick her in my body, so she'll be blind, pretty
helpless, and right there with you, Joshua. You can ask away. Wilma can take
her place here and drive this fancy bike in. I'll go into Wilma back at the
nasty place."
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Both Wilma and I were appalled, and forced a near-simultaneous
"No!"
through.
"Don't worry. We're all just sorta fakes anyways, right? So it ain't like I'm
doin' anything weird 'cause this is all weird. This'll put me in a body where
I can see but I'll be bathed in the energy field. I can't be hurt there. Wilma
can."
But Wilma's body wasn't like ours; she couldn't see or use that energy on her
own. Worse, Matalon might wind up with it. I didn't like it, but it was
impossible to talk Angel out of these things once she got her mind up, and she
had all the power right now.
It was crazy, too, to even just do this like you'd change shirts, but it made
sense. We weren't really these people; we were programs
, independent to an extent but child programs within a parent/master
virtual-reality program.
Breaking off an operative part and patching it to another should in theory be
easy, providing all parts are prepared for this. The trick would be to get
things back.
Before we could argue or protest further, there was a sud-den sensation of
being flung around through the air and spinning in random directions all at
once, and suddenly I was back in my body in the apartment in Yakima.
Angel was be-side me, but most of that green brilliance was faded. She
stirred, then sat up and shook her head, then opened her eyes.
"Wha ?"
The voice was Angel's, but not the moves or the tones.
"You're blind," I told her. "Cynthia Matalon, I suppose?"
She started at the name. "But how? Wheah? Who...?"
"My name is Joshua. For now, that's all you need to know. 'Scuse my
less-than-fancy speech, too, 'cause I ain't the world's most sophisticated man
right now. Let's just say we stuck you here, in that body, and we're gonna
keep you just like that until we get a ton of questions answered."
She tried to stand up, fell to her knees, then reached out, found a table, and
pulled herself to her feet. "This ain't possible," she muttered. "Ain't nobody
can do this once a Sim's been foahmed!
Cain't be done!"
"It can, if you get into the right rabbit hole with the right programmer," I
told her. "We left alive, and we come back as two different folks. Here, but
not of here. But that's already too much about me. Don't try walking on your
own! You don't know the layout here!"
"Just tuhn on the goddamn lights
!" she almost screamed.
I got up, walked over to her, and brought a table lamp over that was already
on when we'd come back here and gone on our trip. "Feel the lamp,"
I told her. "Burn your hand on the bulb, for all I care. It's on. I can see
you.
Them eyes ain't gonna see nobody again, though."
She stopped, felt the lamp but only got close to the heat of the bulb, and
pulled back as if it were a snake. "Ah ah b'lieve you. Can you can you git me
a chaiah?"
I grabbed her and pushed her down on the couch. The idea was to convince her
of the hopelessness of her situation and the fact that she either played ball
or she was absolutely stuck and totally dependent on me.
"I didn't want to do this," I snarled at her. "I didn't even know it could be
done, 'though it's kinda logical. To do this, we put two people I really care
about in real danger. One of 'em is now in Stark's holding cell under the big
house over there, and you know where I'm talkin' about. The other cur-rently
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looks like you, or the punk you. Where were you when we picked you up?"
"I uh, noath of Salem."
"Oregon? Okay. So at least she'll get here."
"If y'all don't mind just wheah is 'heah?' '
"Yakima. Maybe a half mile from you-know-where."
She didn't like that at all. Still, she sat there, thinking for a moment.
"Somethin' 'bout you is familiah," she said, frowning. "Ah dunno what or why,
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