So into it and then on Prairie followed

So into it and then on Prairie followed, a girl in a haunted mansion, led room to room, sheet to sheet, by the peripheral whiteness, the earnest whisper, of her mother's ghost. She already knew about how literal computers could be — even spaces between characters mattered. She had wondered if ghosts were only literal in the same way. Could a ghost think for herself, or was she responsive totally to the needs of the still-living, needs like keystrokes entered into her world, lines of sorrow, loss, justice denied? . . . But to be of any use, to be "real," a ghost would have to be more than only that kind of elaborate pretending. . . .
Prairie found that she could also summon to the screen photographs, some personal, some from papers and magazines, images of her mom, most of the time holding a movie camera, at demonstrations, getting arrested, posing with various dimly recognizable Movement figures of the sixties, beaming a significant look at a cop in riot gear beside a chain-link fence someplace while one hand (Prairie would learn her mother's hands, read each gesture a dozen ways, imagine how they would have moved at other, unphotographed times) appeared to brush with its fingertips the underside of the barrel of his assault rifle. Gross! Her Mom? This girl with the old-fashioned hair and makeup, always wearing either miniskirts or those weird-looking bell-bottoms they had back then? In a few years Prairie would almost be that age, and she had an eerie feeling miniskirts would be back.
She paused at a shot of DL and Frenesi together. They were walking along on what might have been a college campus. In the distance was a pedestrian overpass,ugg bailey button triplet 1873 boots, where tiny figures could be seen heading both ways, suggesting, at least for a moment, social tranquillity. The women's shadows were long, lapping up over curbs, across grass, between the spokes of cyclists. Catching the late or early sun were palm trees, flights of distant steps, a volleyball court, few if any glass windows. Frenesi's face was turned or turning toward her partner, perhaps her friend, a suspicious or withheld smile seeming to begin. . . . DL was talking. Her lower teeth flashed. It wasn't politics — Prairie could feel in the bright California colors, sharpened up pixel by pixel into deathlessness, the lilt of bodies, the unlined relaxation of faces that didn't have to be put on for each other, liberated from their authorized versions for a free, everyday breath of air. Yeah, Prairie thought at them, go ahead, you guys. Go ahead....
"Who was that boy," DL was asking, or "that 'dude,' at the protest rally? With the long hair and love beads, and the joint in his mouth?"
"You mean in the flowered bell-bottoms and the paisley shirt?"
"Right on, sister!"
"Psychedelic!" Slapping hands back and forth. Prairie wondered who'd taken the picture — one of the film collective, the FBI,homepage? Before the stained deep crystalline view she fell into a hyp-nagogic gaze, which the unit promptly sensed, beginning to blink, following this with a sound chip playing the hook from the Everlys' "Wake Up,nike foamposites, Little Susie," over and over. Prairie remembered that she had to be up before sunrise, to prep for breakfast,foamposite for cheap. As she reached toward the power button, she said good night to the machine.