Diane Duane

(back to pp 77-82)

[scrippet]INT. ORMONDE HOTEL BREAKFAST ROOM — MORNING

The aftermath of breakfast. Tables are pulled together. Joy and Harry sit over cups of tea with Gunter, Lorna and Pario. Joy’s cellphone and room key lie on the table. Doris moves by in b.g., carrying breakfast things, looking distressed. Joy looks after her sympathetically.

JOY
Still no George.

GUNTER
We must assume they have him.

LORNA
This is so horrible. Think of it — our people being snatched off the streets and stuffed into the chips that go into these.

HARRY
No wonder we manage to pack so much processing power into the things. We’re stuffing whole human minds into the electronics.

PARIO
I for one do not want to spend eternity running somebody’s apps!

JOY
Or in a landfill when the rest of the hardware wears out.

HARRY
(guilty)
No landfills. The chip’s recyclable.

LORNA
But what can we do?[/scrippet]

(back to pp 71-76)

[scrippet]EXT. LONDON STREETS — NIGHT

Chase scene. Gunter veers along like the worst kind of student driver, narrowly avoiding crashing into things and people… sometimes very narrowly.

INT. LONDON BUS — NIGHT

Gunter is scared, but also laughing, as exhilarated as a young hotshot pilot who’s been given a new and difficult plane in which he can’t possibly get killed. Sarah hangs on with an excited look on her face. Joy, though, is actively afraid for her life as Gunter just misses another car.

JOY
Oh, look out!

GUNTER
It’s all right! It handles just like a J U Eighty-eight!

JOY
No wonder we won the war.

They have a close scrape with another bus, SHOOT PAST. In a cross street, a POLICE CAR notices, swings into PURSUIT.

JOY
Oh God, we’re all going to be thrown in jail forever. Not that you care!

Another NEAR MISS in the traffic as Gunter CORNERS insanely.

JOY
Will you take it easy?! Some of us here aren’t dead yet and we like it that way!

GUNTER
(cheerful)
Chickennnn.[/scrippet]

(Back to pages 65-70)

[scrippet]INT. ERICKSON COMPUTERS — NIGHT

Gunter makes his way THROUGH THE BUILDING cautiously. Before entering a given space, he puts just enough of his FACE THROUGH A WALL to see in without being seen himself — a humorous but spooky effect. In this way he PASSES THROUGH several dark and unoccupied OFFICES: then PUTS HIS FACE THROUGH A GIRLIE CALENDAR on the wall of the downstairs security office and sees that it’s OCCUPIED. Gunter PULLS BACK quickly. NB: These through-matter passages make a tiny soft SOUND like an intake of breath, which can alert someone to them in a quiet place.

The GUARD in the office HEARS this little sound, GLANCES UP, sees nothing: goes back to his work. Note that most of the people working in this building have no knowledge of their company’s traffic in “residuals”, and so will be as frightened by ghosts as anyone normally would.

Gunter BACKS OFF and tries another way, heading toward the side of the building where the vans were entering. He passes through more OFFICES, a CLOSET full of janitorial equipment, a LADIES’ ROOM (with slight embarrassment): comes into a stairwell: listens — hears nothing in the stairwell itself, but downstairs, the sound of VOICES, faint.

Gunter goes down the stairs, then has to throw himself hastily through a wall to avoid being seen/run into by two TECHS throwing the “basement level” stairwell door open and going up the stairs.

TECH 3
Nah, it doesn’t bother me, it’s just the shapes they had when they were alive. They’re just sort of an ectoplasmic tape recording that plays itself over and over where they used to hang out. They can’t think, or feel anything.

TECH 4
I guess you’re right. It’s just the way they look, sometimes. That little girl…

TECH 3
I know…you hear them yelling, you feel bad at first. But it’s like lobsters when you drop ’em in boiling water, they can’t really feel pain as such…

Gunter’s head appears from the wall on hearing the line about the “little girl”. He looks angry. His face vanishes again.[/scrippet]

(back to pages 48-56)

[scrippet]INT. NEARBY OLD LONDON PUB — NIGHT

A quiet place, leaded-glass windows, dark wood paneling, worn plank floor, empty: “fruit machine” video-gambling console DINGING forlornly in b.g. Harry and Carlyle sit at the empty bar. Each has a half-finished pint, empty glasses of the previous round off to one side. Harry takes a drink.

HARRY
It’s really not bad for warm beer.

CARLYLE
Barbarian.

HARRY
That’s “mister” barbarian to you. You were really his tutor?

CARLYLE
Every great university has some bloom of ancient students about it, degreed and undegree’d people who can’t bear to leave, but stay on to learn, and damn the sheepskin. I was one. Like many others of my kind, I took on younger students of other schools for pay and coached them for exams.

HARRY
And you coached Erickson.

CARLYLE
(mild)
I wish I’d slammed the door in his earnest spotty face the first day I saw him. He was no mathematician, though before God I tried to make him one. A gift for engineering he did have. But none at all for languages.
(grim beat)
And therein lay my downfall.[/scrippet]