Synners

by Pat Cadigan

  And a big ball of fire lands right in front of you, blows up in your face, and you see the way things never were, like there was someplace else you'd been going instead of here.

  If you go fast enough, fire won't burn, not that fire. Besides, what were you going to do, back then? You couldn't take that trip any more than he could, you with yours, him with his. You got what you got, and what the fuck, you've still got it, it still lives, it didn't get worn away by what might have happened. That's more than a lot are left with when the smoking lamp starts to burn low.

  Who-

  They want you, but they part like the Red Sea anyway, those reaching hands falling back against the darkness. Who do-

  He struggles on the sand, trying to get up, and it hangs on, dragging at him. Who do you-

  Some others hold you back, but you push against the barrier of their arms. You can break through, but only if you want to. And the question is

  Who do you love?

  Do you still want to?

  Who do you love?

  Do you still want to?

  Who do you love?

  You tell me, doll.

  Who do…

  Do you…

  … you love?

  … still want to?

  He gets up, and that's when you rush into him.

  Who do you still want to love?

  It's him. But you know, they all were.

  The sound of laughter fades away in the dark.

  Theo took off the headmount and looked at her, filling his lungs with a big breath and letting it out slowly. "You're fuckin' dangerous."

  Gina flipped off the flatscreen she'd been watching. "That mean you like it?"

  He dug his blocky fingers in his squared-off orange beard ("Burnt sienna, not orange. Don't you call it fucking 'orange,' I paid for burnt sienna, not fucking 'orange.' "), looking glassy-eyed. "It'll probably kill somebody, and we'll all get sued over it, but-" He shrugged and then started to peel off the hotsuit. "Get this off me before it squeezes me to death."

  She stripped him quickly and tossed his clothes at him, keeping her back to him while he dressed.

  "What's this?" he said jovially. "I only used to walk naked through EyeTraxx several times a week."

  "Had it for lunch," she muttered.

  "It's too early for lunch."

  "So I had it for breakfast, then."

  "You sure didn't eat breakfast here."

  She busied herself with the console, setting it to make copies of Theo's video, zapping one into the release sequence. Apparently it had to make several stops before it actually made it to the release pipe; every second assistant's mother's brother had to screen it and put their okay on it, including Rivera. He could chew on this one awhile, see how it went with his diet of commercials.

  "Did you hear what I said? I said, you didn't eat breakfast here."

  "No shit."

  "It scared me."

  She frowned at him over her shoulder.

  "The video," he added, slipping his vest on over his shirt. "It really fuckin' scared me."

  "Everything scares you, Theo. You're the biggest chicken-ass I know."

  He went over to her, smiling. "You want to try my ass out? See if you can really put the fear of God into it?"

  She looked up at him. Theo was all of twenty-six and looked like somebody's video idea of the farmer's son, even with the stupid orange beard. The Beater had caught him in a theme club, jamming his own improvs into nostalgia covers, and she'd almost caught him herself in a weak moment. She patted his butt. "Take a number and wait. I got videos backed up like GridLid's day off."

  A few minutes after she threw him out, the door buzzed. She pressed the release, and Valjean swirled in with his ever-changing cape. "Everybody wants to know," he said.

  "No, I don't have your fall."

  Moray appeared next to him, the closed keyboard hanging from her shoulder by a braided strap. Ecklestone was already pressing for the lift. "Nice place," he said. He'd gone 1940s zoot again. It didn't go with the dark blue frizz that trailed down his back.

  Valjean showed off by straddling the ladder and sliding down. "There," he said, taking a bow. "That's one way."

  "You're so hot, you do it," Gina said.

  He noticed the flying harness tied up near the ceiling. "Give me that, I probably could."

  "What do you want another fall for? You've had falls in your last six videos."

  "Signature image," said Moray, wiggling down the ladder in her tight red rubber dress. Her hair was combed back and lacquered down hard.

  Zigzags were marching across the cape in rigid formation. "See that?" he said, holding both arms out and doing a turn. The zigzags rounded and bulged briefly at the points as they moved. "That's it in cape. The new release. I had a kid on the Mimosa translate it into line display."

  "Shit, you're making me cross-eyed."

  "Anything to help. Want that fall."

  She brought the flying harness down from the ceiling and put on the hotsuit, but she couldn't seem to fall far enough or fast enough to raise a blip of sensation. Even having Valjean push her off the catwalk railing wouldn't do it.

  They went back to the original house wearing Gilding Body Shields. Gabe's didn't do much to soften the landing at the bottom of the chute, but Marly's handled the laser shot without even a scorch mark. Probably not true, Gabe thought, but Gilding didn't ask for cinema verite. For good measure he let Caritha's shot graze his ribs.

  "You're okay, hotwire," she said, examining him. "But can't you do this without making me look like Deadeye Dork?"

  The response gave him more of a jolt than the shot; the program was getting smarter on him again. "It's just for ideas," he whispered. "Don't worry, I'll leave you out of the final cut."

  They made it through the ward, into the pseudo-elevator that dumped them in the alley.

  "This registers us as outdoors for real," Caritha said, looking at a lighted meter on the back of the cam.

  Marly looked around. "It sure got dark quick." She moved forward, keeping low. Gabe was right behind her when the shape dropped down from somewhere in the shadows above. He got a whiff of machine oil mixed with sweat and hesitated; he didn't remember requisitioning any smells.

  Two strong arms grabbed him around the waist from behind and tried to lift him. There was a red glow and a sizzling noise, and the arms fell away from him. Almost immediately someone else rushed him; he saw the glint of a knife blade and fell backwards, leaving himself wide open. The knife came down, bounced harmlessly off his breastbone and out of his attacker's hand. Caritha swung the cam, bashing the figure in the head, and Gabe scrambled up again to help Marly, who was struggling between two others. He pulled one away, smashing his forearm down on the back of an exposed neck. The body armor stiffened in response to the impact, making the blow harder. Gabe winced a little, feeling the shock all the way up to his armpit. The sensors were really responsive today. Marly had already taken care of the other one; Gabe thought she'd punched him, but when he looked again, he saw the knife in her hand.

  She wiped the blade on her arm and then showed him the stains. "Washable, I hope?"

  He stared at the knife still in her other hand. There was something strange looking about it, but in the dim light he couldn't tell exactly what it was. Maybe it was the fact that it was in her hand at all, he thought a little dazedly; the Marly program had never before picked up a knife to stab with.

  "That's all of them," Caritha said, sounding satisfied. "Unless you want to wait around here for more."

  The knife in Marly's hand shimmered and changed. She didn't react.

  "Pause!" he yelled, and pulled himself back a level from the simulation so that he was observing the alley on the screen inside the headmount without being in it.

  "Status report," he said.

  The lower third of the screen gave him the first five lines of figures on the simulation program. Everything looked normal.

  "Scroll," he told it, and th
e next five lines rolled up from the bottom. He saw nothing out of the ordinary until he reached the twentieth line, which began an inventory of the storage items he was drawing on; the specs for the knife had both positive and negative values.

  "Isolate knife, with detail." The knife filled half the screen, while the other half listed the figures defining measurement, appearance, and perceived weight and textures. The last figure was the negative value. There was a hole in the knife. Like a window, or a door. Someone was watching.

  For one wild moment he thought it might be Sam; if anyone could have cracked him so decisively, it had to be Sam. But Sam would have announced herself, she wouldn't have just spied on him. Wouldn't she?

  He plunged himself back into the simulation. Still holding the knife, Marly started to say something.

  "Put the knife down," he told her. "Put it down and walk away from it."

  "Can 't do that, hotwire," she said. Standing next to him, Caritha looked up at him and shook her head.

  "You have to, Marly. I'll take a look at it myself, but please, put it down before it does something to you."

  "Already has." She held out her hand and he saw how her fingers had melted together into the handle and how the blade, still sharp and dangerous looking, had changed from simulated metal to simulated flesh.

  It was a maneuver worthy of Dr. Fish, Keely thought with grim satisfaction. The guy's vitals were all over the place. He was stone-home panicked, and Keely couldn't blame him. His fingers hovered over the keyboard while he thought about what he wanted to input. Hell of a great program; the guy probably didn't even realize how great it was. Fast pickup, perfect handling and maneuverability, stopped on a dime and gave you a nickel change, as Sam would have said.

  In a small area at the bottom of the screen, the prompt from the program waited, blinking on and off. Keely glanced at the right upper corner of the screen. The guy's vitals were starting to come down a little. Get ready to shoot off the charts again, homeboy. Keely wished he could have seen him, but all he was getting from the woman's pov was a flat fill-in graphic. Your name here. He typed new instructions to the program and waited impatiently while the program inegrated them with its format. It seemed like an hour before he heard the woman's voice again. He turned up the audio.

  "Hotwire, I hate to have to be the one to tell you this, but we've been cracked."

  "Is it Manny?" he asked. "Or someone higher?"

  The program grabbed an answer before Keely could input.

  "No ID. All I can say for sure is, it's in-house, but comparing the technique to information from the databases, it's not an official auditor. Not using official protocols."

  Keely's fingers danced on the keyboard.

  "Ah, okay. Spyhole from the storage." The expression in the woman's voice was flattening. Her simulation was starting to wobble; too much demand. Keely instructed the program to transfer access to the clock-calendar. He'd have a better view of the entire simulation but at the risk of being cut off if the guy moved too fast. There were a few seconds of transfer blackout, and then he was looking down on the alley from an elevated spot on a wall.

  Up here, Keely typed, wishing for voice input. A new status line appeared at the top of the screen, telling him the communication was successful and the words were appearing on the wall within the calendar subroutine. The woman dropped the knife, which must have stoned the guy's crows.

  "Marly?" he said.

  She pointed wordlessly at the wall. Not just a great program, but an obliging one, too, Keely thought, typing as fast as he could.

  Now that I have your attention, Number One: I'm on your side.

  That status line blinked an OK. Keely waited while the words rolled themselves out. Number Two: This programs a stone-home banger. "Sam?" the guy said. "Is that you?"

  Keely felt his stomach drop precipitously. How do you know about Sam? he typed.

  "Tell me who you are and what you want," the guy said after the lag, "and I'll tell you how I know Sam."

  Keely started to type again and felt the keyboard go briefly dead under his fingers. The program specs at the bottom of the screen were rearranging themselves rapidly. He should have figured; the clock calendar had never been meant for this type of communication. The program probably thought it had a glitch. He redid his own access figures and keyed them to shift along with the clock-calendar specs. That would keep him on-line for a while longer, but when the program's defenses figured it out, there'd be another move to cut him off. He had to go quickly.

  No time for chat. Me: busted hacker, work for Div now. You: busted too.

  The status line blinked OK and then changed to give him an error count. Keely pressed for a redisplay of the line he had just typed.

  No time for chat. Me: busted hacker, work for Disliy2o @2r2 {{#@ irl›.

  "God, perfect," Keely muttered. He called up an inventory of notes left in the calendar memory and put it on the other screen.

  Wait, he typed. Being jammed. He scrolled through the notes, looking for words he could cut and paste together to make a coherent message. The calendar would be less disposed to jam something out of its own inventory.

  "Hello?" called the guy anxiously. "Are you still there?"

  Keely sent an affirmative signal, tagging words as quickly as he could out of the chunks rolling up from the bottom of the screen.

  "Program interrupt imminent," said the tall woman quietly. "Abort, reboot, ignore?"

  "Ignore!" the guy shouted. "Hello? Are you still on-line?"

  "Are you sure you want to do that, hotwire? Ignore can cause partial or full system crash. Please reply wire n."

  Wire n. Keely glanced at the simulation, confused, and then got it. Y or n, of course. Very obliging program. Maybe he should have stuck with the woman, even if he'd ended up crashing her. The guy had to have copies stashed away-

  There. Message composed. He flicked it into the send queue and transmitted.

  The status line wavered, started to blink an OK, wavered again. Keely had a last look at the alley before the program spat him out and the screen blanked.

  A moment later the status line came back to give him a full OK. Just to double-check, he punched for redisplay, not really expecting to get anything. There was a short delay, and then the message he had cobbled together popped onto the screen.

  Deadline ‹ month; Rivera spot you meeting; planning new program; run Personnel run.

  He sat back in the chair and let his breath out in a rush. He'd have done a lot better if he'd had more time, but if the guy was as smart as his program, the last phrase should have been pretty damned clear.

  17

  The overdone Arabian-Nights-type tent, complete with tassled pillows and Persian rugs overlapping each other in calculated disarray, was bit-by-bit perfect. No details had been lost or muddied anywhere. For the first twenty minutes after she'd put on the head-mounted monitor, Sam had kept looking quickly to one side or another, trying to catch blank spots. There weren't any; you could even look out through the partly open tent flap and see mountains, great humps of dark green that reminded her more of the Poconos than the Middle East, veiled by a sparkling mistiness that was too wet to be fog and too light to be rain.

  Coaxing that kind of detailed perfection into a simulation required stone-home dedication. Or complete obsession. Sam couldn't decide what she wanted to say to the simulated person sitting across from her-Congratulations, or Get a life.

  The simulated person's appearance was most likely pure wish-fulfillment fantasy. It was a composition of subtle and charming androgyny, the long dark hair, the classically sculpted features, the amber eyes so light in color they were luminous, the deep brown skin-definitely not one of the stock compositions you could get from Wear-Ware or some wannabee program. But he-Sam was calling it "he" on no basis other than arbitrary-had to have spent hours mixing palettes. Even the tasteful silks he was wearing were original. The calculation wasn't lost on her.

  But then, any hacker this g
ood wouldn't be artless on any level. Which was a little bit funny, since he'd told her his name was Art. (There, she decided, a male name. Like Sam? She started to wonder again.) She hadn't given him a name, not even a phony, and pressing him for information was futile. The only thing she'd gotten out of him after she'd agreed to put on the headmount was how he'd done the trick with Fez's monitor.

  He'd made her work for it, though; he wanted banter, and he wanted jokes, and he wanted the hacker news of the world, which he already seemed to know in more detail than she did, before he finally gave it up.

  "Just a little rewiring trick with the hardware," he told her at last. "I gave Fez the specs to rig it, with a program dedicated to the screens. So I can pop one whenever I have something to tell him, without waiting for him to come to me."

  "Very fancy," she said, which was understating it; it should have been impossible. "But why don't you just call him on the phone?"

  "Call him on the phone," he mused, the smooth forehead wrinkling slightly. He seemed to taste the idea, as if she had suggested something rare and exotic and perhaps a little improper in some way. The expression made him look suddenly more female than male, and she felt her mild confusion return.

  "Don't you trust the telephone? Or aren't you local?" Maybe, she thought uneasily, he was a total paraplegic and incapable of speech. "Or, uh, I mean, if there's a problem…" She winced, glad he couldn't actually see it.

  He grinned. "Don't make faces, it's okay. I probably could do that now. Wouldn't Fez just go wild if he heard me on the phone. Where is the phone, anyway?" He froze; after a few moments a phantom twin rose up out of his image and walked around behind her. She followed with her eyes, and the view on the screen shifted as if she were turning her head. There was a moment of vertigo; it felt a little as if her eyes had suddenly floated around the side of her head, a feature of headmount screens that she could never get used to. Through a small gap between some India-print curtains, she could see there was another room beyond.