Meal-break. Brother Mike sits across from me. He's chowing down on some sort of chunky stew, the wine-filled inkwell sits by his elbow. The bowl of mealgrub is letting off its rank aroma from where I've just now shoved it to the side. My hands rest on the softwood table and underneath the tempopted virtual image I fact my keyboard sits under my fingertips. The timing of what I'm about to do must be pure snake.
Brother Mike, noticing I've melted into his world again, chokes on the stew and spits to the side, gagging for a few moments before glaring over at me with his puffy, hate-dripping eyes. He says, his throat all gritty, "I've been cut off from the land of the living, assigned a mass grave with the wicked, but I have done no violence, held no deceit in my mouth." Whoa. Something must have crept into the stew and crawled down Brother Mike's throat. He's more upset than usual. This isn't the perturbed priest I've come to fact and love. No, this is a new animal; darker, pointedly more pissed off, maddened but focused. I realize he'd just whispered that last disclosure. But it'd actually been a whisper. He pulls a chunk of something from his bowl and holds it up so I can give it a look-see as it dribbles grease onto the tabletop. He growls, "Rancid meat," and then he plops it back into the stew, and then he throws the whole bowl from the table. He pushes up off the bench, and he paces around the table, and I can only watch him in awe. I've never seen him function this way. Perhaps it's a glitch in the program or maybe a hardware mishap, a cup of steaming, spilled coffee. Or could it be that Brother Mike has some random variable routine picking his bad days? Hell, everybody has a bad day now and then. He comes up to me now, a composed fury roiling in his obese belly, fury I can actually hear now that he's standing so close, closer than he's ever dared approach before, and then he sits beside me, nearly knocking my hands from where they must remain if I'm to key correctly. I decide to hell with timing. I quick-key my new exec code, and then I key in some homebrew commands that will link my rigged God-detector to this virtual tempopted image and trace, verify and identify what database this program is reading from, using one of my screens back in the cube as an output. I'll be amazed if this works.
Snake-luck must be riding shotgun, because it would appear I made the right call. Brother Mike grabs my hand just as I key in the last command. I'm hoping everything in my cube is purring along nicely. The monk's grip stings and vibrates like live electricity, a mild dose.
Brother Mike is twisting me around so our eyes meet, and he's spitting at me, "What are you doing, boy?" His eyes are crazy and dripping and they're rotating in his skull like two tiny planets, and his face is blotchy, and he's really fucking pissed off at me. What's new? I tell him, "It's a nervous habit. I tap tables when I'm nervous. A person could have worse habits, eh?" Let go of me, I want to tell him, but I won't let him believe he's scaring me. I need to get him to answer a question, just one question that'll make him link up with his god, and I've got to do it quick, but he's vising his electric grip on my wrist, and he's pushing his fat, sweaty face into mine. Cocksucker, I want to scream at him, back off before I murder you, but I can't. I just need to get him to answer one goddamn question. "Do you fear me," he rumbles. Something's gone wrong here, I've this anxious idea I should just pull out my tempopts. I tell him, "I fear one thing, and it ain't you, Mike. I fear rotting in my cube," and he tells me, "The scripture decries the whole world a prisoner of sin," and he's talking really loud now, yelling, and I'm forcing my free hand to stay where it is. One goddamn question. Why can't I think of a question? I tell him, "The Bible's nothing but a weak man's crutch." "Is that so, you miserable little —""Tell me, Brother Mike," and a thought comes to me, a rather unfacted thought (like I've ever seriously studied the Holy Bible!), but a thought none the less, and he's forcing his stank-breath up my nostrils, so I talk fast, a desperate edge knifing into my delivery. "Who's the wife of Cain then, if you fact it all tight and nice, tell me that, Mike." That did it. Hell, I gotta tell you I don't fact where that came from. Cain killed somebody, right? Murdered his brother?
Brother Mike scowls and his eyes unfocus and I can almost hear the whirring of the mother computer somewhere in the underground; Brother Mike is in conference with God. He's relaxed his grip so I tear my wrist free and scoot along the bench a few meters, out of his reach, and I watch him closely. I can't pull out my temopts just yet, that would kill this entire virtual brainscape, but as soon as he comes around I plan on getting back to my cozy cube and downloading my screen to whatever memory strip I can find, wiping everything, and then laying low for a good, long while.
I stand up and back away from the table. I step back into the shadows. I wait. I watch Brother Mike and I wait. A slight fizzle begins to separate the fat-folds of his face. His eyes, I'm watching his eyes real close, his eyes start smoking and smoldering like lava pizza toppings. Christ. His robes burst apart and fade away to zero, and he becomes very animated, stumbling along the long hall's flagstones, his naked legs surprisingly thin for a fat man, his breasts bouncing, his eyes leaking down his cheeks, and he's screaming as he runs away from me, his bare feet slapping the stones, screaming something about me being naked and not facting it and who told me, a looped, digitized audio track triggered by the dying of the syntho-light fantastic. This must be some dullard's twisted idea of a program termination cinematic. Before he reaches the shadows at the end of the hall, his whole body fizzles out and he pops out of sight, leaving behind a blip of white light. The blip stretches horizontally, thinning till it's gone.
I pull the tempopts, and I'm back in my cube. The black screen's white script reads "VERIFIED LOCATION OF DATABASE:" followed by a blinking white cursor. It didn't download the source? What the hell? A second cursor appears, beside the first cursor. Two eyes blinking at me. I can hear somebody or something messing with the locking mechanism outside my cube. Some angel come to chastise me. I hear a distant siren. No point in trying to find a memory strip. I punch at the keyboard with my fingertips, and I dump everything. Then I smell some sort of way uncool smell. My eyes start to throb and my brain freaks and my body starts to—
