Synners

by Pat Cadigan

  She sighed and looked at the nav screen. The map display vanished, to be replaced with a basic, abbreviated dataline menu. Good old GridLid. Gosh, folks, sorry we didn't warn vou about the clog, but since you're already sitting in it, you can enjoy some minor diversion, courtesy of the city.

  The offerings were limited to the most popular items off several of the networks, text and/or sound only, including, she saw with some amusement, The Stars, Crystals, and You Show and Dear Mrs. Troubles from FolkNet. If you couldn't pre-guess GridLid with stars and crystals, maybe Mrs. Troubles could help you change your miserable life at two miles an hour.

  She pressed the scroll button on the keyboard between the seats, and the categories began a slow roll upward. Business: Local, Regional, National, International; Sporting Events; Lunar Installation Report; Peccadillo Update-that was tempting; famous people throw up in public and other gossip to die for-CrimeTime; The World of Medicine; L.A. Rox, Including!Latest! Video Releases.

  She pressed for the last, feeling slightly mollified. She wouldn't be able to see any videos on the cheap-assed monitor, but at least she'd be able to listen to some new music, maybe find a few good encryption vehicles. Encryption was fun; play this sideways, kiddies, and hear a message from the devil. Keely would certainly have approved.

  Keely hated speed-thrash.

  Unbidden, the thought came to her and sat in her mind, waiting for her to make something of it. Keely had sent her the information encrypted in speed-thrash, and he hated speed-thrash. If the Good Lord had really meant speed-thrash to exist, he would have made me deaf.

  Well, so what? He knew she liked speed-thrash; he'd probably figured he'd zap her something she could appreciate.

  She made a face. That didn't feel right. Keely had been in a hurry; he'd had plenty of other encryption vehicles to choose from, anything from the Brandenburg Concertos to one of those Edgar Varese things he was so crazy about, and any of those probably far more available to him than a piece of speed-thrash. A new piece of speed-thrash.

  She pushed for the new speed-thrash listings, tapping the steering wheel impatiently while GridLid's access to the dataline pondered her choice and made a laborious search. The Age of Fast Information, sure, she thought sourly.

  A full ten seconds later, the screen delivered the page. For once she was lucky; it was the very first item she selected for audio excerpt. Mechanists Run Loco, by Scattershot. The credit line for the video made her blink: created by Aiesil EyeTraxx, acq. by Diversifications, Inc.

  EyeTraxx acquired by Diversifications? Since when, and how had that gotten by her? She topped back to the L.A. Rox general menu and selected the news.

  There was nothing but the usual collection of gossipy items on which artists were doing what outrageous or dull things. (General Industry News, sub-subheading Rock Videos gave her nothing but snippets on rights reversions, what artists were signing with what video companies, who had died, and who wasn't doing anything at all.

  Rock Video: Acquisitions was just a rerun of who was signing with who, nothing she hadn't been getting in her edition of The Daily You back in the Ozarks.

  She slid back the sunroof panel and stood up on the seat carefully. There was nothing but an unbroken sea of rentals interspersed with a few private cars in all directions, and no sign of movement. Sam clambered down behind the wheel again and blew out a disgusted breath. "Shit."

  "It's awful, isn't it?"

  The driver in the car on her left was smiling at her sympathetically. She nodded. "It's worse than that."

  "I think we all ought to file a class-action suit against GridLid, force them to clean up their program," he went on. "Or at least provide full dataline access for the rentals. I can't get anything I want."

  "Me, neither." Sam looked at him speculatively. "Say, you wouldn't happen to follow rock-video news, would you?"

  He managed to look apologetic and bored at the same time. "Sorry. I get Casting Call and Daily Variety, and the rest of the world can go hang as far as I'm concerned." He looked around at the clog. "Right now I really wish it would. Why aren't all these people home with their families?"

  "'Scuse me? Hey, you there?" A woman about her own age was waving at her from another rental directly behind the man. "I follow rock video."

  Except for the long pink hair, she looked more like a folkie than a thrasher, but Sam wasn't feeling choosy. "I just saw this item on the dataline," she called to the woman, twisting around to lean out the window. "It said EyeTraxx had been acquired by Diversifications, Inc. You know anything about that?"

  Now the woman stared at her as if she were crazy. "God, no. That sounds like biz news to me. Snore, snore."

  "Oh. Yah," Sam said faintly, pulling her head back in. Business news. Christ, business-fucking-news, what in hell else would it have been. Feeling sheepish, she topped all the way back to the main menu and selected Business News. Then she stared at the screen while it asked her which subheading she wanted, Local, Regional, National, or International? There was nothing more specific. Which figured. Hard-core biz types didn't register as a target market for GridLid; they wouldn't be in a clog like this. They'd be in their offices doing everything by net and email. Like her mother. Give up, she told herself. At least until you light somewhere with halfway decent capability.

  Fifteen minutes later traffic had moved forward a good fifty feet only to halt again, but she finally had something, a small item under Markets-at-a-Glance/NYSE Most Active. The listing for Diversifications was footnoted with a comparison box, giving the trading before and after its acquisition of EyeTraxx. The date given was roughly two weeks before; nothing about a topic thread to follow.

  Frustrated, Sam sat back, stretching her arms overhead through the open sunroof. She still didn't know what it meant, if anything. If it don't mean a thing, it ain't information, as Fez would say.

  "Fez, you talk too much," she muttered. She went back to listening to excerpts from new speed-thrash releases as the sun climbed higher in the sky.

  GridLid finally saw fit to deliver a bulletin about an accident half a mile from where she was; by then traffic was advancing regularly in twenty-foot spurts. A few food vendors had materialized to work the clog until the cops appeared and chased them out. Couldn't redirect traffic fast enough to avoid a clog, Sam thought sourly, but moved at the speed of light if someone was out making a profit. Her stomach growled. The cops had jogged back from the site of the wreck just before one of the vendors would have reached her.

  She had meant to head straight for the Mimosa from the airport, but she knew if she didn't get something to eat, she was going to faint. Feeling shaky, she detoured onto Artesia and cruised until she found a quickie with fewer than five cars in the drive-thru lane. Quickies were not her cuisine of choice, but at least she'd had the luck to find one with a decent vegetarian offering.

  The big menu screen was just out of her reach, and she had to hang out the window to touch the square next to "Sushi rice in seaweed cone." Her order appeared in red letters in the middle section of the screen; a moment later the words !Good Choice! flashed on and off. Cute, she thought. What else would it say-!Lousy Choice! or !No Good For You!? Maybe the burger-gobblers got !Slow Death!

  She selected "Coffee, caffeinated, pot" from the drink menu, and this time the message was unblinking. The Surgeons General wish you to be aware that caffeine is associated with chromosome breakage, headaches, tension, anxiety, and impaired motor coordination when taken to excess. In pregnant women birth defects can result in those prone to certain inimical chemistries. Abstinence may be advisable; consult your doctor.

  Sam stared. A pretentious quickie; that was new. She slapped her palm against the endit square with a defiant flourish. Too late; she had the guilts over the coffee even as she couldn't wait to drink half of it at one gulp. Modern life was making her sick by trying not to make her sick.

  "That's some menu," she said to the guy in the window as she stretched out of the open sunroof to pass him a fe
w crumpled bills.

  "Yah, better living through technology," he said, glancing at her without interest. He was tall and good-looking, with icy white hair and luminous green contact lenses, most likely another member of the latest generation of aspiring actors. That may have been the biggest reason simulation hadn't shut down Old Hollywood, Sam thought a little light-headedly. If they stopped taping from live action, who would staff the quickies? "Be a minute," he added as he leaned out to hand her the change. "Just opened a fresh pot of rice."

  "Glad to know this place cares so much," she said. "I especially enjoyed the lecture on what caffeine would do to me."

  "Oh, hell. George!" he roared over his shoulder. "That goddamn virus is back!"

  Sam laughed aloud. She should have realized as soon as she'd seen it. A Dr. Fish, no doubt, making a house call with unsolicited health advice. Characteristic of the Dr. Fish strain – almost no destructiveness, just unexpected messages taking up space and slowing things down.

  An older man who was definitely not an aspiring actor appeared in the window next to the younger guy. "If it's not asking so terribly much of you, Harmon, could you not screech our troubles to the entire world?"

  The young guy gestured at Sam. "She says she got the caffeine message."

  "It was just one of those health warnings from the Surgeons General," she said, shrugging. "I thought it was supposed to be there."

  The older man frowned at her as if she were somehow responsible. "Great. We're never going to get rid of that thing. Every time I think it's cleaned out, it pops up somewhere else."

  "Just because of the way it reproduces," Sam told him. "Cleaning it out won't take care of any data carrying the infection dormantly. You've got herpes, not cholera."

  His expression took on a revolted tinge. "Excuse me?"

  Sam glanced at the younger guy, who was grinning behind his hand. "Cholera is a disease you treat by treating the symptoms. Herpes lesions can be treated so they go away, but the infection itself remains in the nerves, waiting to activate again."

  "Well, thank you so much, Miz Med School, that was just what I've been waiting all day to hear."

  "It's contagious," Sam couldn't help adding. "It can be passed on without being active."

  There was a short honk from the rental behind her. "Think it's taking long enough?" called the driver, leaning her head out the window.

  "It's coming, lady," the older man called back, and leaned out the window a little more. 'You sound like you know a lot about this."

  Sam shrugged again. If he was so off-line he didn't know about Dr. Fish, she wasn't going to enlighten him. "Anyone with computer equipment ought to know a lot about it."

  "I just manage this place. And hire and fire the help." He gave the younger guy a sidelong glance. "You want a free meal?"

  Sam drew back, leaning her elbows on the roof of the rental and folding her hands. "Why?"

  "For services rendered. If you know so much, you must know how to take care of it. It'll save me another service call."

  "You can do it yourself," she said.

  "Me? I don't know dick about computers."

  "You know where the off switch is?"

  He nodded. "So?"

  "So flip it. That'll kill it bang. No matter what your service has been tolling you, that's the only way to kill a virus. Cut off the power."

  The man rolled his eyes. "Forget about it. The menu's out of a closed-area network so they can monitor our volume; we got nothing here but dumb terminals. I cut us off, they'll be down here with an auditor and a warrant to bust me on suspicion of embezzlement."

  Standing behind the man, the young guy was making a familiar up-and-down motion with a fist. Sam bit her lips together to keep from laughing.

  "Hey, you don't want a free meal, honey, it's fine by me, but you sure look like you could use one. More than one."

  "You only offered one," Sam said evenly, "and for what it would cost you to have someone do the work legally, I should get a free meal here every day for a year."

  "Offer's closed." He pulled his head back inside the window and turned to the young guy, who was suddenly scratching the side of his head vigorously. "The virus can stay in there, people can live with a warning about coffee, I don't care. We gotta sell more herbal tea anyway." He marched off.

  The young guy grinned at Sam, who shook her head. "Probably wouldn't have worked, at that. The virus is most likely dug in at the node, so as soon as you turned on again, it would be right back here."

  "Nobody cares as long as it doesn't actually destroy anything," he said, shrugging a bony shoulder. "It's like graffiti to them, the cheap-asses."

  The rental behind Sam honked again. "I said, is it taking long enough?" the driver called, louder.

  "Not quite, but we're working on it!" Sam called back. The guy at the window handed her a small bag and a tall covered thermo-cup. She thanked him and pulled up far enough to allow the woman to reach the window before she tore the bag open and attacked her food. The ball of rice sitting on top of the seaweed cone tipped into her lap and shattered on impact, leaving her with a mostly empty seaweed wrapper. "Fuck it," she muttered, and drove back down Artesia toward the Mimosa, scooping rice out of her lap with one hand.

  "Where's Gator?" she asked the kid in the tent. He must have been all of fifteen, with a funny-chubby cherub's face and thick, fuzzy dark hair that was tangling itself into dreadlocks.

  "At services," he said, hitching up his pants. Hospital surplus; they made him look like an underaged, homeless surgeon.

  "Services?"

  "Yah. She said to tell you she's off praying for God to forgive you."

  Sam blinked. "I'm in hell," she said wonderingly. "The world ended when I wasn't looking, and now I'm in hell." She rubbed her forehead with one hand, trying to think. At least the kid was speaking English. "Gator really told you to tell me that?"

  Now the kid looked embarrassed. "Well, actually, that's what she told me I should say to anyone who came by for a tattoo."

  Sam laughed and kept laughing as she made her way over to Gator's old barber chair and plumped down in it, alarming the kid.

  "Hey, you better not. She said she'd kill me if anyone fucked around in here."

  "I'm not fucking, I'm laughing," Sam said wearily. "Can't you tell the difference?" She swiveled around. The printer was in its usual spot in the corner, but Gator had taken the laptop with her. To services. At the St. Dismas Infirmary for the Incurably Informed, of course, wherever that was now.

  Abruptly she remembered the ex-pump in her pocket.

  "Hey," said the kid, following her over to the corner. "I know she wouldn't want you screwing around with that."

  "I'm not screwing, I'm hooking," Sam said, unrolling the wires that had been discreetly tucked behind a table leg. "Hooking up, that is." She found the communications jack and plugged it into the ex-pump, then connected it to both the sunglasses and the chip-player. "If Gator comes back, I won't let her kill you more than you deserve."

  She settled down on the sand and put on the sunglasses. The screen in the left lens lit up, blurring for a moment before it settled on her focal length. There was a tap on her knee, and she looked over the top of the glasses at the kid.

  "Hey, you know you got lice?" he said, pointing at her pants.

  "That's not lice, it's rice," she told him. "Now don't bother me, I'm calling Dial-a-Prayer."

  "You older women sure are religious," he muttered.

  In a few moments she was inside the public net system, flashing through the menus until she reached the listing for the St. Dismas Infirmary for the Incurably Informed. She ignored the public posts and punched for the conference area.

  ›You have been misinformed, said the screen. No conference area exists on this board. If you wish to pray, please make an offering. If not, please exit. ‹

  She had to peer under the glasses to watch her fingers work the tiny keyboard on the face of the pump.

  ›Are services in
progress?‹ she asked.

  ›Prayer services require an offering. ‹

  She summoned the basic schematic for the adapted insulin pump system and uploaded it. There was a short pause before the screen said, ›The doctor will see you now.‹

  Sam frowned. The doctor? Christ, was St. Diz siccing a virus on anyone they didn't trust? She started to tap the little keyboard again when a new message appeared on the screen.

  ›Wonderful to hear from you, Sam! Go to Fez and learn all. ‹ Abruptly she was disconnected, not just back in the main menu area but off-line.

  She took off the sunglasses and rubbed her eyes. Fez. It figured. She probably should have headed straight for his place to begin with. He knew everything, or almost everything. Maybe he knew what had happened to Keely. Or how Diversifications' acquisition of a video-production company corresponded to the schematic drawing of a neuron from a human brain that Keely had zapped to her encrypted in music he couldn't stand. Maybe Fez would know. Somebody had to.

  4

  The house looked quiet enough, but then the whole street was quiet, and Gabe knew that was all wrong.

  On his left Marly nudged him. "It's a lot weirder inside than it is outside," she said in a low voice. "Costa says a guy starved to death in there looking for a way out."

  Gabe shook his head. "You believe everything Costa tells you?"

  "I'd believe this. Since he's been in, and we haven't." She looked past him to Caritha standing on his right. Caritha held up the handcam projector, her half smile confident. Gabe felt a little more dubious. The projector was the best they could do on short notice, but it was awfully small. Like Caritha herself. The late-afternoon sun seemed to strike sparks in the black hair cropped close to her skull. By contrast, Marly's thick, honey-colored mane hung loose and wild.

  As if reading his mind, she suddenly gathered it between her hands and wound it into a knot at the back of her head. Gabe stared, fascinated. He had no idea what was keeping it up there. The force of Marly's will, perhaps. He wouldn't have been surprised. She smiled down at him and threw a muscular arm around his shoulders. "Don't tell me you want to live forever."