February 1995


Nicky never had any money, and while Veda didn't have much either, she did have an apartment. Nicky was happy to take advantage of that instead.

Since Undine Spragg would have never permitted him to move in, he and Veda worked out a system. He stayed out all night, doing God knows what, and then waited outside until he saw Veda and Undine leave for work in the morning. Then he'd go upstairs, smoky and disheveled, and sleep the day away in Veda's bed. He set her alarm clock for 5:30 pm, a half-hour before Undine was due home.

Most of the time, the arrangement worked well. Once, Nicky had run into Undine on the staircase, but she seemed to assume that he lived on an upper floor of the building, and said hello.

Veda actually saw very little of him, although occasionally she would be on her way to work and catch him sitting on a bench outside the apartment. On those days, Nicky and Veda sat there with coffee she bought them, bundled against the cold, talking about her job and Undine's love life and movie stars.

After nearly six months in New York, Nicky was still her only friend.
  
Veda, to her own surprise, had been able to keep her job, and was even doing reasonably well at it. She was able to punch the numbers into the machine much faster now, and when she was able to punch a number indicating an unusually high oil shipment, she could watch prices drop precipitously, and know that it was her reporting that had done it. It was amazing, the way technology allowed people who had no idea what they were talking about to have an effect on the prices of real things.

Her characters were developing nicely, as well. The angry feminist had fallen in love and mellowed a little; the elderly widow had bursitis, which made her cranky at times. The dumb football player had gotten a job with the sanitation department and had been replaced with a new character, a drunken cabaret singer down on her luck. The days progressed bearably, if not quickly.

"You know," Oysterette told her, "there are so many prices for you to put in these days, what with the market doing so well. Maybe we'll hire someone else to do your more simple tasks. Like loading the Xerox machine with paper, which needs to be done right now."

Veda stood up to refill the Xerox machine. It was menial, maybe, but she could do it as the elderly widow might do it. At any rate, it was not the worst thing she'd done for money.

When Gemma Guimard needed money, she worked as a novelty psychic for parties. She hated it. There were so many people, and so many predictions, and she couldn't recycle them the way she usually did because they all talked to each other. Inevitably there were long lines outside her "Fun Psychic" booth, but it got hard to feign a sense of enthusiasm about it all. After a while, every palm looked the same. The whole experience made her sympathize with hookers, or with strippers working bachelor parties.

Still, here she was at the Software Singles Valentine Ball, mostly because she had failed to predict quite how fast interest could compound on a Visa card. The next man in line was a nervous type, with thick glasses and a nametag that said "Rolf."

"I was wondering," he said. "where this industry was going. I mean, I've been working off a UNIX platform. Should I convert?"

"You have an affinity with things German...," Gemma began.

But she put his odd question in the back of her mind, as something to think about later. This computer business seemed to involve a lot of uncertainty, and uncertainty meant insecurity, and for Gemma, insecurity meant opportunity - it meant business.
 
  
When Veda left work that night, she got in the elevator with the same man she rode up with every morning, the man with the baby voice.

"Hello," she said.

She had made kind of a sport out of saying hello to him, because it would make him turn pink, and then red, and then jiggle with a silent laugh.

Today he seemed serious, or perhaps morose.

"Can I show you something?" he said. "I would like to show you something. In the basement."

Veda flinched. It was like the first scenes of a horror movie: this very odd, large man, white like a potato that had never seen the sun, taking her to the cellar of a mostly vacant office building. She tried to think of an excuse, then quickly realized she hadn't pushed the button for the lobby floor, and the elevator was already speeding underground.

"You work with screens, don't you?" he asked her.

"Yes, I put oil prices on them."

"A lot of girls are afraid of screens," said Frederic Baby archly.
Veda decided it was better not to get him mad. In the basement, she followed him through stacks and stacks of dusty computer paper and computers dismembered for parts, their monitors dark, their motherboards protruding.

A moment later they arrived at their destination, an Apple computer Frederic had set up apart from his DOS-controlled database. Frederic clicked his mouse, and the computer played a few bouncy notes. Connecting at 2400 bpm, it said on the screen.

"Look at this," he said. "It's called Mosaic."

Veda saw a gray screen.

"It's like little bulletin boards all over the world, which you look at with special computer glasses, called a browser. The little bulletin boards are called sites. This is the Louvre site."

Very slowly, line by line, emerged a teeny-tiny Mona Lisa, in the upper left-hand corner of a vast gray background.

"This is coming from France," he said. "Right now."

"What is this?" she asked him.

"It's the World Wide Web," he said. "Here's another site."

Poetry. Photos of My Cat, it said on the screen.

"Here's another one." He clicked again.

Porno Pam, it said.

"Well, that's just one of them," he said, a little embarrassed.

"Thank you," Veda said. "Thank you. That was very interesting," she said, and she meant it. "I'm going to go home now. Are you leaving, too?"

"No, I'll stay," said Frederic Baby.

When she had left, he started work on another story, starring Veda Bierce and a very large bucket of fried chicken.
 

Library of Congress Copyright TXu 875-975