"Guy I heard about one time...friend of a friend...all his life, he wants to 
drive one of those racecars. Not these ethanol bugs that putt past you in 
the street, bleepin' their little horns at you. I'm talking about the kind 
they used to have, you know? Big metal machines, vaROOM! 
200 kilometers in an hour. The kind you see on old CD-ROMS 
every once in a while.

"So, he's a smart guy, he studies 'em. He takes a couple 
of MechEng classes through the Factory, figures he knows how to 
build one. He gets a couple hundred chips of steel, some decent parts--
for a price--couple of tanks of methane, some rubber wheels, and voila! 
The son of a bitch had done it. He made the fastest goddam machine 
you've ever seen."

Ido chuckled, empathizing with his patient. "So what became of him?"

"Died." Lee laughed out loud. "He snuck it onto the Motorball track. 
Got a couple of runs in before a Netman lazed him. The thing is...he'd 
done it, but he'd done it too good. He'd always wanted to create the 
machine, but he didn't think, 'Well, who'm I gonna race against? 
Where'll we race?' Heh." He shook his head sadly. "So how 
much longer do I have, Doc?"

"Huh? B-but I wasn't..."

Lee held up his hand. "One of the virtues of being a junkie is you get to 
be able to read other people's emotions pretty good. Sometimes you
get a little paranoid, 'cause people don't always think pretty things.
But right now, Doc..."

He looked squarely into Ido's face. Ido found himself 
sucked into those 
deep, deep eyes
where masculine blackness danced eternal
there wedged between the green pupils
iridescent starlight iris
and blood vessels, tiny pulsing serpents
dart back forth
...and then Lee blinked.

"...you're hiding something from me."

Ido was shaken to the core, more scared than he had ever 
been in his adult life. His mind darted back to the night Alita had 
defended him from the mutant in the alleyway. 
That long-ago night, he had known that a battle would take place; 
he had never expected to be ambushed by the look in a grown man's 
eyes.

He ran his tongue across his lips and began. "A couple of 
months ago, you somehow or another contracted a retrovirus.
That's a kind of virus that actually rewrites your genetic code. Now, 
normally, a retrovirus will take its time, perhaps a year or two,
before any symptoms appear. At that point, we can still treat it with 
antiviral medications, clean your blood, give you some cybernetics..."

"Doc, please...have some respect for me. I'd just like 
the plain cold truth."

"Lee, this--this viral infection is very strange. It's going berserk.
That blood sample that I took from you? Half of the cells 
showed some kind of infection. HALF! Viri are normally very 
particular, but this one was attacking red blood cells, T-cells, even an
E. coli bacterium that made it into your blood stream." Ido slumped 
back in his chair. Where was Doc Ido, the man who had been able
to comfort patients through entire CNS transplants? This person who 
was speaking was almost blunt. "To be honest,
I don't know why your whole body isn't lysing. You should 
be a puddle of endoplasm at this point."

Those terrible eyes were wandering around the room, 
across the examining table, the diagnostic scanner, Ido's computers. 
They came to rest on a stack of trade magazines. Very quietly, Lee 
asked, "Am I contagious?"

Ido shrugged. "Considering your lifestyle--which, in 
perfect honesty, I rather hold against you--"

"I know."

Ido stopped, flustered. Why had he said that? He took a 
deep breath and finished the sentence. "It's probably only passed 
through bodily fluid. If you've--"

"Yes, Doc." Lee pulled himself to his feet. He was tall and very
lanky. His fingers were long and narrow. His dark hair and pale 
skin gave his eyes a fitting backdrop. "Yes, I've been using heroin 
without bleaching the needle, and yes, I've had unprotected sex
with just about everyone in the whole Scrapyard over the past few 
months." He rubbed his temples, wincing as he touched 
a bruise. "Leave me alone for a little bit...and you'd 
better break it to Alita."

Ido scurried for the door.
--
Alita was sitting by a chair at the large kitchen window. 
A cup of something was sitting at her elbow, another--for Ido, of 
course--was beside it. Ido approached her from behind, seeing her 
silhouette against the grey afternoon mist.

"What are we drinking?"

"Tea."

"I think I need something stronger." For the first time in months
Ido took a shot glass and the first bottle he could grab from 
the liquor cabinet. He managed to pour with a steady hand, and he 
took a deep swallow of the alcohol. It wasn't until it was in his 
mouth that Ido realized he had taken Gonzu's cooking sherry. He 
gagged.

Alita smiled weakly. He realized that she wasn't dressed 
like normal--she wore a blue silk blouse with a high collar and a 
clasp at the neck, and a long black skirt draped to the ground. Ido 
examined her clothing carefully. "Alita, why...why are you all
dressed up like this?"

"Because I wanted to...and it seemed appropriate." She 
turned to face him. She was smiling, but there was sadness very
clearly masked in the smile. "He's very captivating, isn't he?"

"Like Rasputin." Ido took a moment to pour himself 
something palatable, then returned to the table. "He must have
been quite a singer while he still had his health."

Alita nodded. "We'd jam for hours. Sometimes, we'd do two 
or three chords, and he'd improvise around them. He wouldn't
say anything, but...he'd trill, or growl, or just let out these war 
whoops, and we'd be having so much fun, we'd all stop playing
and let him go. He'd keep 
the beat for minutes on end, we could pick it up right 
where we stopped at."

Ido prompted her to go on. Alita rested her arms on the 
table and continued. "After practice, he'd hang out with us. I...I 
tagged along as often as I could. He'd talk about things I'd never
heard anyone else talk about, like why people do the things they
do, and what we should do to be happier. Sometimes I think he
wanted to be a revolutionary, but other times he was just being a
poet.There was this one time...we went to a cafe after practice.
We sat at the counter, and there was a napkin 
dispenser right in front of him. He took a napkin out, 
and...he held it up to the light, and talked about how white it was.
He put it flat on the countertop, and he ran his fingers
over it, and he talked about how it felt. He blew it, and just
watched it fall onto the floor..."

"And then, something happened."

Alita came back to her senses, to find herself standing 
right beside Ido. She sat down, blushing. "Yeah. Something
happened."

Silence.

"He asked me out on a date, just the two of us. It was after practice,
my speaker had been acting up and
he had been playing around with the 
wiring. It was sounding better, so he sat down on the 
speaker, and I was sitting on the floor next to him, and he started 
talking about how all the parts of a speaker were the
parts of one greater whole, and that you 
shouldn't think of it as just a speaker, you should feel 
the impulses as they travel into the box, move the oscillator,
create the sound...and I was just nodding my head,
and it was all so confusing, but it's stuff I know, it's how he
said it, it sounded so clear, so obvious, like he was 
pointing it out to me, and then he was giving me a quick 
kiss on the cheek and saying 'I'll see you at 2000,' and then I was 
alone."

She rested her forehead on the palm of her hands. She 
didn't dare look at Ido. "I honestly think...it was the closest I've
ever come to having an orgasm."

Silence.

"I got home that night, and I went straight to bed. I 
wanted to laugh, because it felt so good, but...I was sad, too, because I 
didn't want it to stop. Ever."

"So why didn't you stay with the band?"

"It was that I didn't want to touch it. I wanted to hold 
that feeling in my heart forever. I felt like, if anything ever happened
to us, either good or 
bad, that one time of just sitting there and letting my soul be touched 
wouldn't be sacred anymore. I--I had a glance of who I am, or who I 
could be, or somebody. Sometimes, it feels like every second I live I
lose sight of that person more and more."

Ido waited a moment before he said, "Lee is going to 
die." As she burst into tears, he braced himself, and caught her head
as she fell onto his chest. He wrapped his arms around
her and went on, saying "Lee is going to die, and he will die soon,
and it will be painful. There's nothing I can do, there's nothing 
anyone..."

"IT'S MY FAULT!"

"Alita, please..."

"IT'S MY FAULT, GOD DAMN IT!!!" she screamed, she roared, 
slamming her fist onto--and through--the table. "I'M SO 
FUCKING GREEDY! IT DIDN'T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS! WHAT THE 
HELL HAVE I done..." She was choking as a spasm made her 
throat convulse, and she dropped to the floor, clutching at Ido like
moss hanging from a willow tree. He wrapped his arms around
her and lifted her into her 
seat. He stood beside her and pulled the hair from her eyes and
mouth, and he dabbed at her tearmarks with a tissue paper. She 
looked at him as if to say, "Dear God, cast me out and smite this 
wretch for her sins now".

"Alita, I'm your father. I've seen you grow up and become 
the woman you are today. I know you about as well as anyone in this 
world. The only way that you're going to forgive yourself is by 
walking in and telling Lee how you felt, and how you feel now, about 
him. He'll be honest with you, and that's painful, but you owe it to 
him to be honest in return. OK?"

sniff..."OK."

"Good. He's been waiting for you." He kissed her on her 
forehead, marking where he in turn wore the Stamp. He watched
her go out of the room, seeming to float towards
her friend in the operating room.

Alita...you've always been attracted to the unknown. You 
see it in yourself, and you search your own heart. You see it in 
the world around you, and you read voraciously. You see it in
others, and you make 
friends and hunt enemies. Where will the years from now 
find you, angel? What does the future hold for you?
--
Copyright 1997 Daniel Snyder. Permission granted to 
distribute in any 
binary/digital/e-mail format; however, any physical 
reproduction is 
prohibited. Based on characters created by Yukito 
Kishiro. Any 
resemblance to persons living or dead is purely 
coincidental.