kinds of scar tissue.
How can anyone get excited by a woman who’s sewn together like a Frankenstein monster?
She lets her mind catch the edges of memory, and she realizes they are in no better shape than she. Quaz has scar tissue visible on his neck from all the biting, and his back, clawed so often by Synthi (and Flame and Tawnee and Giselle … ), looks like he’s been whipped. Rock, Stride, and Quaz all have penises mangled in a way analogous to cauliflower ear. The needle marks from the muscle stimulators are visible all over their arms, chests, and abs.
She has a vision of the Bride of Frankenstein, of sewn-together corpses thrusting and tearing at each other, falling into heaps of mangled parts, and she thinks she may just lose that fine breakfast, but then she draws a deep breath and says, “I am going to demand a vacation, and if they fire me, I will just have to content myself with being richer than I ever thought I could be. But I am not going to do this even once more until they tell me when I get time off, and it’s going to be soon, because I can’t go on doing this. Not until I’m a lot more rested and feel a lot better.”
At that, she breaks down, sobbing so hard that she can feel her Mary Ann Waterhouse muscles wrenching and twisting against her Synthi Venture tummy sheath.
John Klieg is awake early, as always, and by the time dawn is washing over the old Kennedy Space Center spread out below his control tower, he’s rubbing his hands together and chuckling. A naive visitor might think that all the flashing screens around him are part of his pleasure because he is so thoroughly on top of the operations of GateTech, but in fact they are just decorations. Klieg doesn’t even look at them—he pays people to look at
them and to think about what’s on them, and for every screen you see here (and for thousands more that are too dull to make good decorations), there are at least a couple of employees who know much more about it than Klieg ever will.
There are also more than a hundred employees who know more about all the screens than Klieg does. If he were his own employee, he’d have to fire himself, he supposes, and the thought makes him smile.
They make a good decoration because most people who’ve been to Kennedy just came out to look at the big plaque that says various lunatics allowed themselves to be shot into orbit on top of barely controlled bombs from here. A few more determined sorts will go out and look at the little plaques on the crumbling concrete or by the partially collapsed gantries and the towers with the DANGER—UNSTABLE STRUCTURE signs, the small plaques that mention names and dates.
But most people don’t come out here at all. To the extent that they know about it, they look, a few times, at the video clips in their history lessons, and what they see, besides rockets rising into the sky on long pyramids of fire, are immense rooms full of screens, screens that somehow, by their sheer numbers, gave the impression that everything was under control and everything was being taken care of. (It must have been an interesting problem in PR, keeping people from thinking of every screen as something that was liable to go wrong and had to be watched all the time, Klieg thinks.) So as the Man Who Bought Cape Canaveral, he has this row of screens here as a sort of trophy, and he puts what he wants on it—and that’s the data that flows through his empire.
“Empire” is not a bad term for it, either, Klieg thinks—and why is he getting so philosophical today? Not that he undervalues getting philosophical either. One advantage he has always had over the competition has been a certain rigorousness of thought that keeps him focused on what he’s actually doing, not on some image of it. He knows in his bones that he is not a captain of industry (in that nothing he does is very much like what the captain of a ship, an infantry company, or a basketball team does), nor a
How can anyone get excited by a woman who’s sewn together like a Frankenstein monster?
She lets her mind catch the edges of memory, and she realizes they are in no better shape than she. Quaz has scar tissue visible on his neck from all the biting, and his back, clawed so often by Synthi (and Flame and Tawnee and Giselle … ), looks like he’s been whipped. Rock, Stride, and Quaz all have penises mangled in a way analogous to cauliflower ear. The needle marks from the muscle stimulators are visible all over their arms, chests, and abs.
She has a vision of the Bride of Frankenstein, of sewn-together corpses thrusting and tearing at each other, falling into heaps of mangled parts, and she thinks she may just lose that fine breakfast, but then she draws a deep breath and says, “I am going to demand a vacation, and if they fire me, I will just have to content myself with being richer than I ever thought I could be. But I am not going to do this even once more until they tell me when I get time off, and it’s going to be soon, because I can’t go on doing this. Not until I’m a lot more rested and feel a lot better.”
At that, she breaks down, sobbing so hard that she can feel her Mary Ann Waterhouse muscles wrenching and twisting against her Synthi Venture tummy sheath.
John Klieg is awake early, as always, and by the time dawn is washing over the old Kennedy Space Center spread out below his control tower, he’s rubbing his hands together and chuckling. A naive visitor might think that all the flashing screens around him are part of his pleasure because he is so thoroughly on top of the operations of GateTech, but in fact they are just decorations. Klieg doesn’t even look at them—he pays people to look at
them and to think about what’s on them, and for every screen you see here (and for thousands more that are too dull to make good decorations), there are at least a couple of employees who know much more about it than Klieg ever will.
There are also more than a hundred employees who know more about all the screens than Klieg does. If he were his own employee, he’d have to fire himself, he supposes, and the thought makes him smile.
They make a good decoration because most people who’ve been to Kennedy just came out to look at the big plaque that says various lunatics allowed themselves to be shot into orbit on top of barely controlled bombs from here. A few more determined sorts will go out and look at the little plaques on the crumbling concrete or by the partially collapsed gantries and the towers with the DANGER—UNSTABLE STRUCTURE signs, the small plaques that mention names and dates.
But most people don’t come out here at all. To the extent that they know about it, they look, a few times, at the video clips in their history lessons, and what they see, besides rockets rising into the sky on long pyramids of fire, are immense rooms full of screens, screens that somehow, by their sheer numbers, gave the impression that everything was under control and everything was being taken care of. (It must have been an interesting problem in PR, keeping people from thinking of every screen as something that was liable to go wrong and had to be watched all the time, Klieg thinks.) So as the Man Who Bought Cape Canaveral, he has this row of screens here as a sort of trophy, and he puts what he wants on it—and that’s the data that flows through his empire.
“Empire” is not a bad term for it, either, Klieg thinks—and why is he getting so philosophical today? Not that he undervalues getting philosophical either. One advantage he has always had over the competition has been a certain rigorousness of thought that keeps him focused on what he’s actually doing, not on some image of it. He knows in his bones that he is not a captain of industry (in that nothing he does is very much like what the captain of a ship, an infantry company, or a basketball team does), nor a
Similar Books
