Synners

by Pat Cadigan

  Lying on a padded slab; going with it now as the slab begins to move and the ceiling begins to move; head goes into a box; a short wait and the fast insect sting of needles, very deep, sinking far, far in and suddenly fading to a sensation of distant cold; murmur of voices, saying they are mapping this and mapping that, and the brain feels no pain, the brain feels no pain, the brain feels nothing at all-

  But this brain feels something.

  Something is there; something has come in and something is still coming in and

  The pictures flashed quickly, one after another. She touched her head again, but it still didn't feel any different. Except for each small bump that marked the locations of the sockets. Bet I look pretty fucking drop-dead with wires in my skull. Medusa's ugly sister.

  Mark.

  She got up and tried the door, thinking she would find it locked and then she'd have to trash the place till alarms went off. But the door swung open, and she found herself in a long hallway. Down at the very end, a light was on in some kind of alcove.

  Gina hesitated. No guards-excuse me, nurses-keeping watch? She scanned the light-track running the length of the ceiling. The light was damped down, either for night or for her and Mark's benefit, after their long sleep, but she saw nothing other than the unbroken strip of illumination. Fuck it, they wouldn't have been that obvious, to stick eyes where anyone could just look up and see them. And on the other hand, who did they think they were fooling? Did they really think she'd believe she was moving around unobserved after fucking brain surgery?

  Fuck 'em. Take a good look at the walking, talking rock'n'roll animal. She went down the hall.

  Mark was sitting at a table off to one side in the dormitory-style kitchenette set up in the alcove, eating something unidentifiable out of a plastic dish. She jerked her chin at it.

  He held up his dripping spoon. "Fuck if I know, but it's supposed to boost your neurotransmitter production. Brain glop. Tastes a little fishy."

  She pulled up the sleeves of the stretchy white jumpsuit or pajama or whatever it was. Mark was wearing the same thing; it made them look like a couple of overgrown kids sneaking a midnight snack while the adults were asleep.

  "Is it what you wanted?" she asked.

  His head jerked slightly. "Well, it's not what I didn't want, put it that way."

  She moved behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. They felt bony and frail. Like always. Abruptly she thought of Gabe Ludovic. The image of him lying on the ground with his face bloody and confused came to her out of nowhere, as intense as one of those inserted images.

  Mark put a hand on one of hers, twining their fingers. "I know what I'd like to do right now."

  She held very still. He twisted around and looked up at her. He really didn't look too bad. Better than he had in ages, as if a great deal of trouble had dropped away from him. Maybe it was not having to worry anymore. He could just stick a socket in his head and out it would come, essence de V. Mark. Video on tap.

  He stood up then and wrapped his arms around her. This was never the easy part. They weren't smooch-faces, it didn't work that way, for her or for him. In twenty-some-odd years she hadn't stopped too often to wonder how it could have gone.

  One time, though…one time, three-four-five years into the madness, there'd been a space where they'd come together one night, and it had been different. Hadn't been the first time or the last, but it had definitely been different. Might've just been time for it, time to find out, or try to find out. He'd been reaching, and she'd been reaching, and for a little while there, they'd gotten through. Maybe that had been the night when the little overlapping space called their life had come into existence.

  And as if to make the point, as if to make absolutely sure they both understood, he'd put on this music, straight audio, very old stuff, guy named Dylan. I Want You. Very old, very big; maybe too big for either one of them. She remembered being unable to move or talk, or do anything but listen, and at the same time some part of her wanting to laugh her old laugh to break it up and break it down-hey, jellyroll, let's us just sit down and read our profiles in the entrails of popular culture, whaddaya say, but another part of her, the bigger part, got it right away, and that was the part that kept her from laughing. Because if you didn't speak your truth, there was always something that would speak it for you that much louder.

  Maybe there'd been a little too much truth in the room with them. Something had almost turned there, but the night ended, and after that they just couldn't ever get it right.

  Now she let herself relax into him for the first time in a long time, resting her head on his hard, bony chest and slipping her arms around his waist. Her mind began to drift, unreeling a series of wordless memories and pictures in no particular order, scenes from the old days, from all the days before this one: Mark bending over a screen, his prematurely old face lit by the glow of the rough cut he was previewing for final editing; the Beater sitting at the permanently closed synthesizer, unmoving and unmoved, and Mark standing on the other side, trying to get his mind around it and having a bad time; Mark on the courthouse steps; the Beater facing her with it; the lake with the stony shore-

  It came to her like a paper flower unfolding to reveal a secret center. The lake scene was the area where Mark had grown up in New England. She had seen it before, but she had never been there, until now. Whenever now had been.

  Gingerly she concentrated, trying to detect a difference of feeling in her mind.

  "It's good," he said suddenly, his voice low and easy but too much as if he'd been reading her thoughts-too much by fucking half-and yet she could not move even to look up at him. "I mean, I don't know if it's good, I don't know if it's right, but it sure is good. And I was born to do it, I've been trying to do it all my life, and I never knew it. Someday you're gonna come into a room, and you're gonna see this funny-looking thing, a piece of flesh clutching into naked console, and you're gonna stop and stare, because you won't be sure where the flesh stops and the chips and the circuits begin. They'll be, like, melted into each other, and some of the console'll be as alive as flesh and some of the flesh'll be dead as console, and that'll be me. All of that'll be me."

  Gina said nothing. Her hands pressed into his back.

  "I don't know if it's what I want," he added, "but it's what I'm supposed to be." He paused. "I'm sorry."

  "What are you sorry for," Gina said quietly. "If it's for me, you're sorrying down the wrong fucking rain barrel." She felt him stiffen just slightly, and she suppressed a smile as she pulled her head back to look up at him. "You're the one who's always needed something to grab onto, someone to throw you a rope outa the deep water." Her mouth twitched. "I was always in it for the music."

  His eyes lit up. "You wanna hear some music? Program director's got 'em cued up to the end of the night. There's some stuff in my room. Connection things, a monitor. We got the rest of the equipment."

  They walked back to his room with their arms around each other and studied the rig together while she waited, with one part of her mind, to hear someone come down the hall and barge in and explain that they couldn't be doing that now.

  But no one came, and eventually Mark was lying down on the narrow bed while she examined the slender wires to be put up against each target area, all of the latter still standing out as shaved areas on his scalp. Just like her own.

  The first connection she made threw a green 3-D sketch of Mark's head up on the monitor, with the connection point highlighted amber. More amber points lit up in response to each connection she made, stars winking into existence in a new man-made constellation. You're hot with the poetry tonight, kid, she thought, looking from the monitor to Mark lying on the bed with his eyes closed and a shade of a smile on his lips and the wires flowing from his head in graceful lines. She had a sudden impulse to bend over and kiss him. It would be the first time in she didn't know how long. And maybe the last.

  She considered this, looking at the simulation of Mark's brain on th
e monitor. Her hands were moving idly, palms sliding against each other. Got you a twenty-first-century human person here; maybe twenty-first-century human doesn't kiss. Like, doesn't have to. An image of the lake flashed in the mind and faded. Yah, we got something here a little more lasting than a kiss.

  But he's hooked up to the machine, isn't he.

  She rubbed a hand over her mouth as if trying to wipe away something; wasn't necessary. The impulse had passed without her doing anything about it. Just as well. It wasn't too cool to kiss someone while he was making love with someone else.

  Abruptly he was groping with one hand in the semidark; wanting to hold hers. She reached over and touched his fingers. He grabbed and held on, but she worked her hand out of his grasp.

  "I think I need two hands for this," she said, unsure of whether he would actually hear her or not. "You know where I am, though." His hand went back to rest on his stomach; he hadn't opened his eyes.

  The image on the monitor gave a jump and disappeared; in its place came a muddy, out-of-focus scene that might have been the lake in an overcast twilight. Two figures moved in the scene, never coming clear before it whited out.

  Music came up-she gave a surprised laugh. Very old piece, Lou for-chrissakes-Reed, "Coney Island Baby"; only the two of them would have placed it. The program director was on another nostalgia kick.

  What faded back in wasn't Coney Island, a freaky spot that she had been to but the program director had not. Instead, the point of view was traveling low and slow over a terrain she recognized as hypermagnified carpet, pausing occasionally at odd cast-aside items: a shoe, a shirt, some loose change. It reached the side of a rumpled, unmade bed and rose, still moving as slowly as the music, to a shape under the sheets.

  Gina made herself keep watching as the pov tracked along the shape, seeming to study the twists and dips in the bedclothes that concealed it. Abruptly the scene cut to an aerial view of a ragged gathering of people in a parking lot at night, and then the pov was tracking the folds in the covers again, winding along.

  She swallowed, rubbing her hands together, as the pov moved sideways, showing there was more than one shape under the covers. It began to track along that one, inserting another brief view of the nighttime parking lot, closer this time so that the faces of the people, the crazy, thrown-together clothes, the wild, dancing movements, were clearly visible before the scene cut back to the bed and Mark's sleeping face. It wasn't a peaceful face; drained, if anything, worn out, a preview of a more final sort of rest.

  The pov was excruciatingly slow as it moved across Mark's face to her own, lingering on the texture of her dreadlocks next to his pale, drawn flesh, finally moving on to the contrast of her deep brown skin, taking a lot of time to show that both her eyes were closed, but beneath the lids the eyes were moving back and forth restlessly.

  Cut back to the hit-and-run in the parking lot, at ground level now: a frantic blond woman with multicolored feathers fighting the storm of her hair pulled the pov along, beckoning with one hand as she backed farther into the party. A young guy with waist-length dreadlocks and flip-aside lenses on his sunglasses joined the woman, grinning widely.

  Cut back to the bed: the pov studied how their heads were leaning one on another, just where they touched, going slowly back up along his own face to show that his closed eyes were also in motion. Sliding over to her face again.

  Cut: the pov was in the center of an enormous group of people now, trying to pull it every which way under the hard white lights swaying a little on their framework. Looking up at the lights now, the pov began to turn around and around, occasionally glimpsing some of the people around it, spinning faster and faster until the focus blurred and snapped back to the bed.

  The pov cruised along her shoulder and down her arm hidden under the covers; then it was suddenly moving along a sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard under glaring sunlight, taking a good look at the signs on the wannabee parlors and the video joints, pausing to look back at the Chinese Theatre, where the tourists were trying on the footprints in the pavement and posing for pictures. A kid dressed in a red garbage bag with HAZARDOUS WASTE stenciled all over it flew into the frame and started batting her hands frantically at the pov, her mouth working angrily. The pov turned aside in imitation of a human ducking the blows, took in a few more of the street regulars coming to see what was going on, more and more faces, all crowded together, becoming smaller and smaller as the pov receded steadily, until the faces were all stones. The pov traveled upward to the grey-white sky, where the faint shadows of the clouds hinted at the twists and folds and dips of sheets before whiting out completely as the music faded.

  The schematic of Mark's head, the amber points glowing, reappeared on the screen.

  "I'm done," Mark's voice said clearly, coming through the speaker. "Pull 'em out for me, will you?"

  He'd already given the command for disconnect. She leaned over and removed the wires from his head. For a moment she thought he wasn't going to move. Then he took a deep breath and sat up, grinning at her. "Pretty coherent, huh?"

  "Great," she said. "If anyone wanted a video of some old music with some old people in it."

  "The way we're actually gonna do it, the Beater says, is we're gonna take stuff provided by the bands-images, pictures, shit like that-and work it around into some form." He wiggled his eyebrows. "We're real synthesizers now. Real synners."

  She looked at him. The question You wanna talk it over? was right behind her lips, just waiting for her voice, but her voice wouldn't come.

  "You wanna try it" he asked.

  "There's only one rig."

  "We'll get yours. There's one in your room."

  "There wasn't when I woke up."

  "I bet there is now." He looked at her steadily.

  "Yah? I bet we could figure out how to hook them together."

  "Yah?" His eyes glittered. "Do you want that?"

  "No." She bit the inside of her cheek, wondering if he knew she was lying.

  He pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around them. "Why do you think they let us get away with this?"

  She laughed suddenly. "What makes you think we got away with anything?" She looked at the now-dark monitor. "I think they watched the whole thing." It hit her just as she said it that she believed that; they would be watching, listening, just as they would after any other kind of surgery. They just weren't being obvious about it. She leaned forward, putting her face close to his. "You wanna do any kind of funny experiments, maybe you oughta wait."

  He reached out and put a hand on her cheek, then gathered her into his arms, pulling her onto the narrow bed with him.

  She wasn't sure at first what he was doing, or even if he was sure. Then she was helping him strip away his jumpsuit, tearing off her own. Her urgency surprised her, and his surprised her even more. They might have been two frantic kids, hurrying to steal a moment in some space of uncertain privacy.

  A feeling of intense familiarity swept through her, body and mind, warming her to him; there was nothing of each other they didn't know, it seemed, as if they had never had separate lives at all.

  Manny watched the new video, if that was what it really was, twice through, paying no attention to Travis's running commentary about the clarity and the reality and all that shit.

  He was still put out about Travis's failure to install full surveillance in the rooms.

  It was every bit as good as Travis was saying it was. He just hoped he'd be able to get the burnout case it had come from focused in the right direction after they got back to the States.

  21

  On one of the many screens set into the wall in Rana Copperthwait's office, an actress with wild black hair crossed her arms and looked petulant. "Couldn't we at least get a couple of German shepherds or something?"

  "Not a chance," said Rana Copperthwait. "Now, die. And this time, make it look like death, not a multiple orgasm." She stabbed at the console on her desk, turning off the sound, and let out a tired
breath. "She knows she's supposed to be freezing to death in the wilderness with wolves all around her, waiting to gobble her up, she knows it's all going to be put in later, during the finish. What could be clearer? I have to watch these productions constantly to make sure they're all doing what they're supposed to do, not what they think they want to do."

  She gestured at the other screens showing different features in various stages of production and then flicked on her million-watt smile again. Gabe felt blinded. "I love what you've done. Just the little bit I've seen is enough to let me know you've got a winning combination in those women. How soon do you suppose you could work up a treatment for a feature?"

  Gabe swallowed. "I don't know. I don't really, uh, work that way with them. With the program, I mean."

  "With them," Copperthwait corrected him. "Look, you don't have to pretend with me, I know they're real to you. I told you, I understand artistic people." Her smile faded a bit. "Just how do you work?"

  He glanced at Manny from the corner of his eye. There were no secrets now, nothing to hide, but he still felt uncomfortable talking about it in front of Manny. "Well, I just, uh, put on the programs, and then the RNG-"

  "Orange E?" Copperthwait blinked her overdone eyes at him.

  "Uh, R-N-G. Random number generator. It, uh, selects situations and prompts from a random pool of choices-"

  "But surely you have produced results you've desired?"

  Gabe shifted in the too-comfortable chair, bumping his foot against the front of her desk. Manny was frowning at him again. "Even then I try to leave room for some random elements. So it's more like a real experience. If you see what I mean."

  "I'm sure I do." Copperthwait kept her smile on him as if she were pinning him to the chair with it. "Is an outline just completely out of the question?"

  He opened his mouth to answer, and she suddenly sat up straight. "Maybe it is," she said, staring at him thoughtfully. "Maybe I'm missing the point here, maybe I'm missing the very thing that gives your creation the charm that captivates me and will captivate the whole country. Orange E. Orange E. Like life. You cant know exactly what's going to happen, not exactly." She rubbed her fingers delicately against each other. "All right, how about this-you give me some locales, a basic situation as a starting point, and that's all. Bare bones. Make it something like, oh…" She made a painful, thinking-hard face.