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was difficult to sort out one from the other. It got so bad that we had to
break off, and things got so dizzy that I felt myself passing out. When we
both awoke again, it was morning.
We were Joshua and Angel again, but now we had Cory and Riki present, too, in
a background sort of way. We were Joshua and Angel; we spoke, behaved, and
generally felt comfortable as those two. But now, in back, we also knew more
than we should, and, in a pinch, we could act on that knowledge even though it
seemed as distant as two people we'd seen in a movie once long ago.
This, then, was translation, except that instead of progress-ing to a new and
different Sim via the rabbit hole, we'd re-turned to this one. Angel still had
lousy vision and couldn't read or write, and I still was more comfortable with
her in that situation and in using brawn with the others than in thinking of
myself as a hotshot hardware designer and programmer.
But when we were close, such as in bed together, holding hands, anything
of that sort, we could force our old selves to the fore. It became a
discussion on the future.
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"Have you found out where we are?"
I asked, having been less than successful at that myself.
"Oregon someplace. Never heard of the towns. A good hundred miles to
Portland, though, around Mount Hood."
"Hours, not days, from Yakima."
"I guess. Cory, those places are so vague to me now I can't really make use of
them in my own mind. Have I lost too much?"
"We've both lost some," I told her. "We aren't Cory and Riki anymore. We
really are Joshua and Angel and we might as well get used to that. We know
it's done by a big machine, but it's kinda like some religions. We're not
them, we're us, but we got their souls inside drivin' us, and most of their
ex-perience. We may as well face facts. Cory and Riki are dead. Let's not let
'em have died for nothin'."
"But are we trapped here? Or are them others still goin' at each other's
throats?"
"I dunno, but I don't think we're cut off here. Why'd the caterpillar bother
with this if we were? Figure we ain't the threats we used to be, and we can't
just waltz in there no more, but we got one big advantage. We know them and
their layout and all the rest. They don't know us. We don't look the same, we
don't act the same, we got no records, we don't exist. Close to all that power
of theirs, though, we can make real use of it. Maybe this time we can start
spookin' that redheaded broad! And Cory might be history, but I still got his
memory of that bastard wastin' them kids. You game?"
"Wither thou goest, there I shall also go."
She paused a moment
. "I really mean that! I guess I am Angel, Joshua. Ain't no way Riki woulda
even thought that for a minute, let alone said it. I love you whoever you are,
and there don't seem to be no future in runnin', anyways."
In another week and a half, tops, the project would be end-ing. It was already
getting into late August, and in this area and these mountains that meant
almost anything, including the possibility of cold and even snow without much
warning. At that point I could easily have two grand in my pocket, and that
might be enough to at least get us where we had to go, with maybe a stop for
some glasses.
They took us down to Bend when the work was over, and with the money we got,
there were a few things that I figured just had to be taken care of first. I
checked us into a motel not anything fancy, mind you, just one of those budget
places, but it had real beds and real baths and showers and it didn't smell. I
hoped we wouldn't be there long, but it was something we could afford to do
for a couple of days and badly needed as well.
Even if we had the money, buying any kind of car was out of the question since
we didn't have licenses, and, with no address or family name, it wasn't likely
we could get tags in any event. On the other hand, at the
Unocal station just across and down a little from the motel, one of the guys
there, who looked maybe nineteen or twenty, had a For Sale sign on this old
and beat-up Kawasaki motorcycle. He said he was going off to college back east
and didn't have any way to get it any-where, and I let him sucker me into
buying the thing for five hundred bucks, more than a quarter of what we had
left. He just handed over the title and took my word that I'd register
everything with the DMV and he didn't even think to get his old tags off.
I got to tell you, it ran real rough and smoky, needed a paint job and even
some body work, and we really got took on it, but now we had some cheap wheels
and, I figured, it would take a while for anybody in the bureaucracy to really
catch up so long as I didn't get hauled over by the cops. I also needed a
little practice on the thing, since while my old memories said that
I'd ridden the things at one time or another, I sure couldn't remember when.
It did take some getting used to, and I almost cracked up a couple of times on
back roads, but it came to me, or came back to me, pretty fast.
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The need to be very legal meant picking up some helmets, which turned out to
be outrageously priced, and then making sure we had at least some traveling
clothes. That meant, whether Angel liked it or not, picking up some jeans and
tee shirts for her to wear and, at least for now, light jackets, all of which
I was able to get from a thrift store. We had a real argument over it, but she
eventually relented when I offered to take her into a glasses place.
She hugged the hell out of me when we started off on that bike, and I
practically had to pry her off when I got to this strip mall with a Glasses In
An Hour sign and an optometrist on duty. Trouble is, it didn't help.
Now, the optometrist tried hard not to use big words, but he basically said
that Angel's problem was due to cataracts, the kind only old people usually
get but which anybody can get. He said that the only way to help with them was
to get them taken off, a simple procedure no worse than the den-tist now, and
he also urged her to see a doctor for blood tests since cataracts in folks
that young often accompanied diabetes.
Well, we thanked him and left, but the fact was, you needed an eye doctor, you
waited for an appointment and paid through the nose, and the operation, which
I did check by phone, was a couple of thousand dollars for just one eye. Since
we didn't have any insurance or any legal existence at all, it would be tough
to get it done, and hospitals didn't see it as an
"emergency" but as "elective," like plastic surgery. Why keeping from going
blind was seen as no more serious than a nose job was beyond both of us.
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