Love Minus Eighty by Will McIntosh Page B

find the Winkle Systems outlet. I know it’s around here somewhere.” She three-sixtied her screen, then faced him again.
    Rob gave her a puzzled look. “Can’t you query your system? I don’t have one.”
    “I noticed,” she said. “I was wondering why.”
    He shrugged, trying to look carefree but feeling like a turd that needed to be washed into the sewer, like the turds that seemed to be everywhere now that his system wasn’t filtering out all but the ones in his immediate path. “I don’t know, I guess I’ve got other priorities for my money right now.”
    “You know, you can get a basic one for almost nothing. Why don’t you come to Winkle with me? I can show you—”
    An ad. It wasn’t a woman, it was a Goddamned ad. “Oh,you’re kidding me. Get lost, you lousy shit-screen.” He walked away. The screen followed, launching into a flat-out sales pitch now that it had been outed. Out of habit he reached for his system to block the damned thing, but his fingers found nothing but his shirt. Without a system he had no way to block it (if he’d been wearing one, it would have filtered the damned thing out to begin with), so all he could do was ignore it as it rattled on. He broke into a jog, but the ad kept pace, speeding up its pitch, talking faster than any human could.
    Mindlessly, he reached for his system
again
, trying to open a screen to escape the thing. He barked a curse. How long would it be before he finally stopped instinctively reaching for his system?
    In his first break of the day, a micro-T glided down, wrapped around the outside of a tube like a butterfly clinging to a branch. Rob ran to catch it, hopped in behind the old women who had flagged it. He headed for a seat, leaving the ad on the outside looking in, its beautiful face frowning. From his seat he watched it glide away in search of another defenseless sucker.
    “Sir? Please pay six dollars.” The micro-T’s drone operator startled him; its head was rotated one hundred eighty degrees, looking back at Rob with its big, round, lidless eyes. The micro-T wasn’t moving; he’d forgotten that the old handheld he’d salvaged from a discard site didn’t have automatic debit capability. It wasn’t much more than a toy, really. He couldn’t pop a screen with it, couldn’t block anyone, couldn’t alter what he saw or smelled or felt. Sheepishly Rob stepped up front, pressed the handheld’s screen to the micro-T’s interface.
    As they pulled away, rising up, the shell twisting and turning but the passenger compartments constantly rotating toremain level with the ground, Rob noticed the old woman looking at the handheld wrapped around his knuckles. He slid it into his pocket like a dirty secret. When he’d picked it out of a ten-buck clearance bin it had been caked with dust; it had probably been dumped down a High Town recycling tube ten years earlier, and had sat on the shelves ever since.
    A black despair settled over Rob as they headed toward the suburbs, the sun rising behind them. Without his system he felt slow and stupid. And
empty
. It was like he didn’t recognize himself. Rob was gone, and this other guy—this
loser
—was in his place. For the hundredth time, he reminded himself that this was only temporary, that what mattered was making things right with Winter.
    The micro-T cleared a ridge and the Manhattan skyline rose outside Rob’s window. It was dominated by the towers of High Town—the Second Life Building, CDC Headquarters, Porter Rise—porous, colorful spirals reaching toward the clouds, caught in a vast web of bridges and platforms and tubes. Rob smiled wistfully, remembering how as a child he’d referred to them by their colors—the green building, the orange building, the pink building. Lemieux Bridge burst from the east side of High Town and touched down on the New Jersey side of the Hudson like a chrome rainbow, while light copters, flitting like silent mosquitoes, peppered the sky. Private islands