From: dmr@medicated.Corp.Sun.COM (Daniel M. Rosenberg)
Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo
Subject: The Castle [ part 2 ]
Date: 6 Oct 92 23:38:56 GMT
Reply-To: dmr@medicated.Corp.Sun.COM
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
NNTP-Posting-Host: medicated.corp.sun.com



Tara grew up in the city, first in Alameda, then San Francisco.
She went to school in the City, and found Noah there. They met
through a mutual friend who brought Tara
to Noah's place in Noe Valley for dinner.

They were all sitting around in Noah's living room,
the college station turned on, eating shrimp toast --
Noah's specialty. It seemed exotic, but all you had
to do to make it was pound the hell out of some shrimp,
put the paste on some French bread, and fry it in olive
oil with garlic. Shrimp toast made for fun meal
preparation: as you ripped the crustaceans apart, and pounded
them out, you could pretend they were professors,
politicians, or former housemates.

Tara had been making a big deal of one large shrimp which
she named for a former classmate who had apparently sold
his soul to a big company. She bit its head off and spat
it into sink.

"Jeez, who's that?"
"Marko -- guy I used to date." She ripped the shrimp's feet off.
"Handsome fella."
"Well, yeah, all of the guys who've sold their souls are."
The shrimp went down on the cutting board, and was followed
by Tara's well-aimed clenched fist.

"Where's he now?"
"FuckifIknow. Maybe still raping sorority chicks on the side
while stepping on the heads of those around him." Tara
mashed her palm back and forth on the cutting board.

"Fun while it lasted, heh?"
"You bet."
"Sorry -- I mean, I didn't mean to be flip."
"S'okay. I like you."

Noah developed a hopeless crush on Tara by the time coffee
was served.

The determined look on her oval face, her expressions punctuated
by the physical effort of her motions -- including the
earlier impassioned destruction of hapless shrimp
representing an endless parade of the curtly-described slimy 
characters in her life -- burned her image in his mind.

The setting sun shone across her, the angle of light becoming
steadily more dramatic, driving deep Noah's infatuation. She
talked animatedly to Noah about school, weather, buses,
politicians, magazine articles, her eyes fixed on his.
That was just over the course of the afternoon. Tara stayed
the night.

Noah woke up the next morning, still entranced. He pressed his
face into the nape of Tara's neck. She sighed, stuck
an arm straight up into the air, and turned over toward him,
smiling with her eyes. She laid her forearm to rest
against his temple. Noah, scarcely believing his good
fortune, closed his eyes, just to test the reality--

"Shit!" Tara shot up out of the bed.
"What!?" Noah laughed.
"I'm not... I'm supposed to be at work. I've got to--"
"--Hey, it's six a.m."
Tara huffed.
"Who do you work for that makes you show up at 6am?"
"Consulting firm."
"Mean mothers. Lunch?"
"Can't. Special project. I'll call you."
"Umm."
"No, really!"
"Good."

			.	.	.


Noah followed Tara from San Francisco to Montreal to
Baltimore. She claimed, sarcastically, that her employer
promised each relocation would be the last.

Who was Noah to complain? All these cities, soot and clouds,
wet streets and stained granite, had their charm. *His*
employer didn't particularly care where he worked; the
documents he worked on wended their way across the Matrix
from one coast as easily as the next. They both regretted
leaving friends behind, but they met new ones -- although
the couple talked about how deeply entangled they were
getting with each other.

Tara never talked about her job in detail. It was medical
consulting work. She kept a septych of head CAT scans
of a datajacked subject, which she said she'd kept from
a research project her firm had taken for a law suit --
but that was as specific as she'd ever gotten about her work.

The scans were set in a row in a glass and aluminum frame,
five lateral views and two more from the top and bottom.
The datajack showed up as a bright spindle behind the left
ear, terminating in a net of crosshatched lines. A wide
area of the spindle had the legend "SENDAI 20" on it in tiny
letters, visible from the front.

Noah found himself looking at the pictures again and again
over two years. They had an eerie quality, the glowing white
of bone against a black void. He'd asked, once, "What happened
to this guy?" Tara had answered, "He died." Then she
changed the subject. Tara, after that, never even give a hint
of noticing the display.


			.	.	.


"Good morning, San Francisco."
"Bonjour, Montreal. What've ya got?"
"Head case, Sendai 20, postal examiner."
"And?"
"Dropped, 0400, at home, in bed. Gendarmerie called
 immediately, and our guy at the hospital informed us. One
 of our docs scored some CAT scans. Nothing obvious we can
 see, but they're headed your way."
"Whaddaya think?"
"Government beta-test."
"Jesus. ...Later."

			.	.	.


When Tara was growing up in Alameda, she'd heard about
voluntary medical experimentation on prisoners in San
Quentin. The research was all government sponsored, but
that got complicated once the government contracted out work --
including prisons.

The publicity surrounding the experiments program in
the local paper was made up of fluff pieces about how
new medicines could undergo final testing on human
subjects, and about how much the inmates and their
relatives could get for participating in such harmless
research. And, of course, how happy everyone from the
mayor to the local former mass murderers were with the
program.

Tara's older brother was going to medical school at UCSF
when Tara was in high school, and he used to mutter
frequently about what a load of crap the publicity was.

"Tara, lookit this."
"Yeah?"
"They're doing brain tissue resistivity tests on these guys at
 the prison."
"So?"
"They claim it's to find out more about brain diseases.
 Bullshit. It's weapons shit, or somethin'. If they
 wanted to know more about brain diseases, they'd look
 at dead *brains* for chrissake. No brain disease you
 can imitate by popping juiced trodes in those poor fuckers'
 skulls."
"You're such a conspiracy freak."
"*You're* such a fuckin' sheep!"
"Oh, Daniel, I love you, but you can be so difficult when
 you're strung out and sleep-deprived."
"Yeah, just wait 'til they start jamming frayed extension
 cords into *your* cranium."
"Ooh! That sounds like a turn-on!"
He sighed. "My kid sister."

By the time Tara graduated from high school, the fluff
pieces were gone, but there was no word from the prison
that the program had ended. There were new fluff pieces,
however, about how San Quentin was a much more orderly place
under its new management.

Tara went off to college. She expressed no interest
in medicine.


[ Administrative note: the use of the name Tara was wholly
  coincidence; as far as I know, this isn't the same one. ]

[ Your comments are sincerely appreciated. ]



---
# Daniel M. Rosenberg        Dan.Rosenberg@Corp.Sun.COM   +1 415 688 9580
# Opinions expressed above aren't Sun's.