Tara held the second cable in her hand as she crept behind her husband in the dim light of the den; but he was already jacked in, impervious to all distractions.
Chandler lay slouched back in his battered college-salvage chair like a marionette with severed strings, his face slack, eyes REMing behind the translucent sheaths of his lids as he wrestled with his commissioned VR art. From his sighs, fidgety spasms, and general restlessness, she could tell he was blocked again.
Chandler always kept his art to himself, reluctant to talk about it until he finished, even when she offered herself as a soundingboard for ideas. But this time Tara would surprise him--or piss him off. Either way, she hoped Chandler would get out from under the creative block that had been smothering him. If she could just help him get over the hump...
Without his knowledge, Tara had installed the black-market splitter behind the wall plate. Now she could jack into the same data stream and help him directly, a true meeting of minds.
She stared at the viper-prongs of the cable in her hand, then mounted it in the socket at the base of her skull. Still moving quietly, she pried off the wall plate and squinted to see the bright silver end of the splitter's input port, a shunt piggybacked onto the main cable. She had never used a splitter before, never even seen one. But Fizzwilly had promised it would work.
Chandler's fingers twitched on the worn maroon fabric of the overstuffed chair, as if searching for something to clench.
By jacking in, Tara could see what was bugging him, help him work through the problem. She had purchased the illegal device from her former friend Fizzwilly, who was technically still on the run. It was still prototype hardware, he said, not completely certified, but that didn't mean the splitter wasn't useful. She decided to take the risk, if only to get closer to her husband.
Chandler, unaware of her presence in the dim workroom, continued breathing fast and shallow, butterfly wings in his lungs. His eyes looked sunken, lost in a nest of shadows, and his milky skin seemed paler than usual. His red-gold hair hung lank over the interface cable. In her mind, Tara caught a glimpse of what he would look like as an unhappy middle-aged man.
Before marrying Chandler two years before, Tara had spent plenty of time jacked into virtual environments. Her friends, "the wrong crowd," had sharpened their claws by rerouting legal shipments to illegal chop-shops, altering financial transactions out to many decimal places. Tara had held herself on the fringe, amusing herself by diddling with her own grades and records at the Virtual University, not because she was unable to complete the classes herself, but because she was impatient to begin doing the "real stuff." She'd had her heart set on a career as an architect or an archaeologist, not as an electronic scam artist.
But when the heat came down and they all got caught, Tara had been stripped of her degree, barred from ever working as anything higher than a grunt at a sprawling architectural firm, and denied all access to genuine archaeological sites; the others stumbled into jail, and Fizzwilly became a fugitive.
Chandler had saved her, dragged her back onto the straight-and-narrow; and now, with her own future as an architect slammed shut in her face, Tara felt like an outsider watching Chandler's career explode as he created virtual worlds for purchase by anyone rich enough to own a simulation chamber.
But Tara still knew how to find Fizzwilly, and he had gotten the splitter for her. No questions asked.
Right now Chandler needed her. She plugged the second cable into the splitter.
With a sigh, she felt herself being dragged down, vanishing with a virtual echo into a whirlpool where Chandler was working. She would join him in his mind, in his imaginary universe.
)
