Spacetime Donuts

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Book: Read Spacetime Donuts for Free Online
Authors: Rudy Rucker
Tags: Science-Fiction
through the rest of the song and into the next. When one song ended the accompanying images would disappear, and a new set of Hollows would be beamed out by the Hollowjuke.
    The image for the new song was two-dimensional, not that Vernor, in his state, could tell the difference. It was a classical recording, the Rolling Stones doing "Gimme Shelter." The surf music introduction seemed to last several minutes. Vernor was dancing hard. The wild power of the main part of the song came on and the room faded, the singer's voice fatalistic over the god-like and authoritative surge of the guitar. In the background, a girl was screaming, "It's just a shot away, shot away, shot away, shot away," the sound dwindling like someone falling off a cliff...Alice? Vernor danced harder, eyes open, eyes closed. The song drove to its conclusion, "It's just a kiss away, kiss away, kiss away, kiss away." A shot or a kiss?
    The drug wore off as quickly as it had come on. He was looking into Mick Turner's face. "You're the craziest of us all," said Mick, "We need you."
    Too disoriented to form a question about the last few minutes' events, Vernor followed Mick back to the bar. "Is Alice here?" he asked finally.
    "I saw her a while ago," Mick said. "She gave me this for you." He handed Vernor a suitcase. His stuff. The Angels were all he had now. "You want to sleep at my place?" Mick was asking.
    Vernor shook his head, "I'm going to move back to the library. Starting tomorrow I've got to get myself back together." He felt shaky and frightened. The shot or the kiss?
    "Have you seen Andy?" Mick asked.
    "No," Vernor answered. "It's been awhile. I thought he was staying with Professor Kurtowski."
    "Yeah," Mick said, "but I was just over at Kurtowski's. He hasn't seen Andy in a week."
    Moto-O had wandered over, "Last week I see Andy at EM building," he put in. "He say he prepare for biggest trip."
    Mick Turner shook his head slowly. "That's what I was thinking he did. We better go look for him."
    "What do you mean?" Vernor said, looking from one to the other. "You think he took an over-dose?"
    "No," Mick answered. "It's the machine, not the dope. Every time Andy was going a little farther into Phizwhiz. He had the idea that he could stay inside the machine and take over . . . live there as 'a stable energy configuration circulating freely among the memory banks and work spaces'!" He had said this last phrase in a sarcastically precise intonation, but the next sentence came straight from the heart. "He was getting tired of coming down."
    "We must go to EM building and look for him," said Moto-O.
    The three of them hurried out and rode uptown in a robot taxi. The door of the EM building was programmed to recognize the individual Angels' voiceprints, and it let them in. They hurried upstairs, checking all the places where Andy Silver might have installed a private hook-up to Phizwhiz. Finally they found it.
    It was a spare room of the cybernetics lab. Vernor was the one who opened the door, and he saw Silver's body lying on the floor, a thick cable leading from his head to the panel of a Phizwhiz implementation. Apparently he had been plugged in for several days. His body was completely inert, and it seemed certain that he was dead.
    Mick rushed forward to unplug his old friend, but to his amazement his hand went right through Silver's lifeless form. It seemed to be a ghost, no, a Hollow of Andy Silver. Suddenly the image moved to turn its face towards them, and it spoke, fading as they stood there.
    "Tell them I was a martyr for the Revolution," the voice said. By the end of the sentence, the image of Andy Silver before them had dwindled up into the cable to Phizwhiz, leaving only a slowly dying chuckle behind.
     

Chapter 5: Vision
    Mick Turner took over as the head of the Angels. Silver had left him his stash of ZZ-74, and Turner seemed to know how to find the mysterious Professor Kurtowski to get more of the stuff whenever it was needed. Vernor was

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