「Holographic TV is Satan』s jukebox,」 Caldwell heard one of the intoxicated men at the bar say to Ram, the bartehe other men at the bar were still transfixed by the glimmering hologram that gyrated before them to blaring music. Ram, who was busy wiping the table adjat to where Caldwell was sitting with a gray cloth, stopped mid-wipe and smiled, revealing a row of surgically carved white teeth. They were the imported kind you could get for peanuts in the alleyways of East Ham. Teeth made to order, in any material you want, ivory, pearl, marble, even diamonds if you wao put your money where your mouth was. Caldwell had a funny feeling that Ram had been looking ily at his knapsack. Had he been listening to their versation? Did he know about the sole? Publis were notoriously famous for stig their noses in gigs that were no of theirs.
「Better the devil you know, better the devil you know,」 Ram replied somewhat illogically to the drunk, his eyes shifting away, arms tinuing to swipe frantically with the cloth.
Glyph was still in the men』s room, probably emptying his bowels through some mea of teology or acrobatics, or both. Caldwell wondered how someoh no legs went to the toilet. ly the kind of thing you』d want to talk about if you were in his shoes. You even had to be careful with your puns or turns of phrase as Glyph would probably never ever wear shoes again.
Caldwell resorted to trivia, to avoid fag the truth of his current situation. Glyph could rig the wheelchair with its own sewage system, like they have on those space flights, allowing him to vely go and be sed, all with one meism. A vacuum er su device that extracted the waste, chemically treated it into something eco-friendly and stored it for recyg. Food for the plants.
There』s was a whole se of the wheelchair, below the seat, that looked like it could process and store anic matter.
「Same thing the astronauts and tourists use in space, It』s on the blink though. Must be the inhibited British side of you my friend.」 Glyph had returned while Caldwell reoccupied with the meics of the hacker』s personal hygiene.
Glyph had alossessed an uny ability to mind read even via eleiversations. That』s what had made him su outstanding hacker and leader of The HUB. It was almost as though he could read the minds of the sysops whose lives he made a misery on a daily basis and whose jobs he placed at risk with his brash system exploits. The wheelchair settled behind the table and lowered itself so that Glyph wasn』t t above Caldwell, who had turned a funny shade of red.
「I think I may have seen them on the platform at Aation. The Yakuza I mean. A massive disfigured guy with a face like a car wreck,」 Caldwell said.
「They probably just missed you. You could hang out at mine for a while or even safer, disappear until this blows over. I figure it won』t be long before my name es up on the Yakuza』s To Do list anyway.」
Glyph pulled out a scroll-like touch s from the wheelchair』s armrest and his big brown hands unfurled it across the table. He started tapping frantically on the s. Caldwell was thinking about his options. Lying low with Kat in the shadow of Waterle was a good idea. They would never find him there in that eclectigle of cardboard, Styrofoam and filth. He would fehe sole and weigh his options. Besides he hadn』t seen her in a while. Glyph』s tapping at his keyboard had bee increasingly frantic.
「Is this the guy you saw?」 Glyph asked, poi