Synners

by Pat Cadigan

  Gina had stopped struggling and was staring up at him. "The problem is, it isn't an idea, it's a stroke. Or maybe a stroke is just Mother Nature's riff on an evil idea," Manny went on, still holding the wire near her head. "Oh, not just evil. Corrupt. This is what it looks like, rock'n'roll and big biz. The biz been Marked, see, and they're both fucked now. The way it should be. They were right, Gina-if you can't fuck it, and it doesn't dance, eat it or throw it away." His gaze drifted over to Gabe, and the expression on his face changed to vintage Manny Rivera. Gabe felt his stomach roll over. He couldn't breathe.

  Gina's fist shot up, and Manny staggered back against the large wall screen, which came brightly to life as he collapsed on the floor. Gabe stumbled around the desk and collided with Gina.

  "Get the kid and come on," she said, giving him a shove. He made a move toward the kid and then saw what was on the screen.

  Not the strange pulsing shapes, but the lake with the stony shore. The perspective was moving slowly along the shoreline, and in another moment or two, Gabe knew it would reach the figure standing there, waiting. He wanted to look away, he didn't want to see the figure, he didn't want to find out who it was, but his body wouldn't move. The image on the screen had clamped onto the image in his mind, and the two of them had been meant to come together somehow, they'd been meant to merge because they were really one and the same-

  The screen went dark, and he came back to himself in a rush, feeling the blood still dripping from his painful nose.

  "I said, get the kid and come on." Gina was standing over Manny, holding the end of the connection she had ripped out of his system. The torn wires looked like crooked insects' legs. She threw it down. "You said it. The hardware would give before his skull did." She looked at the kid, now getting up and rubbing the back of his head. "We should have thought of that, tried ripping it out of the system instead of him."

  "Gina-" the Beater started.

  "Shut the fuck up. You want to get out of here or not?" The lights flickered, buzzed, and went out.

  The weak early-afternoon light coming through the window by the table filled the office with shadows. Gabe's mind automatically began to make them pulse; he ground his fists into his eyes and then blinked. It was still happening.

  "Yah. Me, too." Gina gave him a hard look and turned to the kid. " 'It won't cut the power.' "

  "It didn't cut the power," he said shakily. "Just the lights."

  "Find me something to burn," Gina said, looking around. "It's gonna be pitch in those fucking hallways."

  "Not quite," Gabe said, and pointed. Glowing blue strips ran along the top of the baseboards. "Those are all around the building. They'll last about five hours, maybe longer."

  "I'd feel a fuck of a lot better with a searchlight." Gina started rummaging through Manny's desk drawers.

  "I doubt if-" Gabe cut off when she came up with a hand-cam. She switched it on, and a narrow high-intensity beam above the lens played briefly across the walls before she shut it off again. He shrugged. "Okay. I feel better, too. Let's go."

  Holding Gina's arm, he waded through the pulsing shadows into the hall. As soon as he did, he was glad Gina had found the cam. The blue glow was entirely too unsettling, too much like one of the cheaper fun-house sequences from House of the Headhunters.

  "Ease the fuck up," Gina whispered, twisting her arm in his grip. "You're breaking my fucking bones."

  "Freight elevator," said the kid urgently.

  Gabe looked up and down the hall. His sense of direction had suddenly deserted him, leaving him adrift in a glowing blue void. Patches of deeper darkness were swimming through his vision even here, pulsing in a way that was all too familiar. He tried to force them away somehow, but there was nowhere he could look where they were not. He squeezed his eyes shut, and they played on the backs of his eyelids, insistent, compelling, calling to the image deep in his brain, a lake under a gray sky with a stony shore-

  "Over here, Ludovic. Look over here. Now!"

  He turned in the direction of Gina's voice and was blinded by a bright light shining directly into his eyes. It hurt, but at the same time it felt oddly good. The angle of the light changed, and blinking against the afterimages, he could discern Gina's face bathed in part of the beam from the cam.

  "Okay now?' she said.

  He blinked again. Afterimages still, but no pulsing shadows. "Yah," he said, amazed. "What-ah, how-"

  She chuckled grimly. "Easy to see you ain't lived rough. The vermin always scuttle back into their hidey-holes when you turn on the light. Now where the fuck is the freight elevator?" She did something to the cam, and the beam widened, illuminating the corridor all around them.

  "That way," he said, pointing, and she pulled him along, holding the cam on her shoulder. "Around the next corner and down at the end of the hall."

  They rounded the bend and then stopped so suddenly the kid and the Beater bumped into them from behind, almost knocking the cam from Gina's grasp. Someone was sitting in the middle of the hall.

  One hand went up, fending off the light. "Whoa, it's too early or too late for that, don't know which-"

  The voice was Clooney's, but the intonations were Mark's. Gabe felt Gina stiffen as she shifted the cam from her shoulder, holding it chest-high with both hands.

  "Well." Clooney pushed himself to his feet, still trying to block the light. "Old habits, they do die hard, don't they, Gina. All those things. Change for the machines. If you can't fuck it, and it doesn't dance, eat it or throw it away. And looking for Mark. That's yours, ain't it-looking for Mark. Gotten so now that even when you're not looking for Mark, you're looking for Mark. And finding him."

  Clooney shuffled forward a few steps, and the alien smile on his face was only nominally vague. There was a new hardness in it-or maybe that wasn't so new, Gabe thought as his own startlement began to turn toward fear. Maybe hints of it had always been there, something that kept the smile always looking vague to mask what was really at work underneath.

  "And now you can find him wherever you look," Clooney went on. "What you've always wanted. Whether you know it or not. You don't, do you? Nah, that's not one of the things you'd care to face, being the way you are, Gina. Laugh it off, break it up, and break it down, that's you. But that doesn't change anything for anybody, least of all you. And I want you. I want you."

  He got within arm's reach of her, and then she swung the cam up and out, right into Clooney's face. He staggered back, crashed into a wall, and then keeled over facedown.

  The kid started to go to him, and Gina stopped him. "He looks okay to me. Come on."

  As if by some unspoken agreement, they were all suddenly racing for the elevator still gaping open the way Gabe had left it. Or maybe it was just that they were fleeing from Clooney's body, Gabe thought as Gina shoved him into the elevator and played the light from the cam over the empty hall behind them. Nothing there but Clooney, who hadn't moved. Gabe looked away, not wanting to have to see blood pouring from his ears, too, and locked eyes with the kid, who frowned a little and jerked his head at Gina.

  Gabe shrugged and reach over to touch her shoulder. "What is it?" he said. "What are you looking for?"

  She brushed his hand away, irritated. "What's the matter, you deaf or something?" She turned away from the corridor and went to lean against the wall. "Take it down."

  "Wait a minute," said the Beater, looking around at them. "If that's what happened to Rivera, and to that guy, what about everybody else? All those pits-"

  "You don't want to know," said the kid, closing the door. "And neither do any of us." He looked at the control panel for a moment and then pressed for the ground floor.

  They rode all the way down in silence and went out an emergency exit into the chaos that was no longer really a city.

  30

  A few hours after Art disappeared, Sam and Rosa were picking their way through the human debris under the Hermosa Pier with hand-held scanners while a couple of Rude Boys acted as bodyguards.
The cases were smelly, and the Rudes were bored. Gator had promised to pay them in tattoos, and they were hot to get themselves marked. Sam wondered what Gator was going to mark them with-an ordinary design or some other piece of Art Fish? No, had to be an ordinary design; Gator had destroyed all the paper copies of Art. Safer, she said. Anyone could steal paper, but you need one of my scanners to get at the tattoos; custom-built. How did you divide something like Art up, anyway? She found the whole thing rather dizzying. Or maybe just dizzy.

  Rosa seemed unburdened by considerations of the abstract; Sam could tell that what was bothering her was the smell. She wouldn't have minded a gas mask herself, but apparently that was one of the few things you couldn't get on the Mimosa, along with personal hygiene products.

  She ran the scanner over an intricate design of a spider web on the back of a gaunt man who seemed unaware of her most of the time. At least he wasn't resisting or trying to get friendly. Most of the cases had been passive, barely curious. Files, nothing more than files. What was in this one, she wondered-Art's sense of humor, or his tendency to posture, or some collection of associations that contributed to his self-awareness? An AI encrypted in tattoos. Or perhaps translated was a better word.

  Just as she finished scanning the web, the electric-shaver-sized unit beeped, signaling a full buffer. Rosa looked over from where she was working on a semiabstract pattern of feathers running the length of a skinny arm. "I've got room for one more small one," she said. "Let me get it, and we'll go back together."

  Sam nodded, glancing at the nearest Rude Boy leaning against a piling. Fifteen, maybe sixteen, shaven-headed, dressed in the usual black pseudo-patent leather with full chains and a necklace of teeth. Mostly his own, judging from the soft, sunken mouth. His partner, tracking Rosa at five paces, wasn't much different, except all his teeth were in his mouth, and his bald head was adorned with sex-porn decals.

  "Get you back with that suck-thing! It's mine, you're not taking it!"

  Rosa was frozen in a half crouch, staring at the point of a stiletto inches from her nose. The snowflake design she'd been after was clearly visible on the back of the knife hand. Sam had a glimpse of lank, oily brown hair and a profile with a badly broken nose before the Rude Boys waded in. There was a flurry of sand and rags, and then one Rude was kneeling on the back of the case's neck, holding his arm out at an awkward angle while the one with the decals plucked the stiletto like a flower and stuck it in his pocket. Then he took the offending forearm in both hands.

  "Easier just to break the fucker off and take it with us," he said to Rosa casually.

  "No, I, ah, have enough to carry," Rosa stammered as she moved the scanner quickly over the design. "There, done, let's go." She gave Sam a desperate look. Sam shrugged. If things had ever been stranger, she really couldn't remember.

  In the ballroom of the inn, the system was changing from a showy time-killing hacker piece to what Percy called Serious Machinery. He nodded at them as they came in without missing a beat in the unintelligible instructions he was giving to a small group of kids even younger than himself, each one armed with a cam so stripped down it was barely more than a lens and a chip.

  Against one wall Jasm was methodically taking her technoid homunculus apart with Adrian's help and sorting the components into piles. A few people were hanging off the silent framework of monitors, plugging in new connections while Kazin called directions to them. Fez was sitting cross-legged on the floor a little ways away with Gator's laptop balanced on the points of his knees, oblivious to the activity around him. He had added his own equipment to the larger system, Sam saw, and wondered if that meant he was planning to add himself, too.

  "Prima," Gator said, materializing in front of Sam and taking the scanners from her and Rosa. "When Graziella and Ritz get back, that should make a full inventory. I really appreciate the help with the scut work." She took the scanners to a small work island set up on an assortment of uneven boxes. The monitor she was using was as stripped down as the cams in Percy's group.

  "Hope you're grounded," Rosa said, gesturing at the monitor, which was showing a fast montage of what looked like portions of news programs and footage of L.A.

  "Grounded in reality, but which one?" Gator plugged the scanners into the processor and sighed through her smile. "It's definitely a capital-C collapse. I managed to raise the Phoenix node for news, but what news they've got is sketchy. There was some footage off a few sats before they locked down. The good news is, if they locked down, they must be clean." She nodded at the monitor. "The bad news is, not all of that is L.A. I don't have a thing more recent than an hour ago. But I've got some friends on a horse ranch in Santa Fe. If we can make contact with them, we might be able to open a clean line through Phoenix to Alameda. That Alameda node's a bastard, though, supersensitive, all pit bulls with lock-and-load trace. Ex-hackers did the protection on it. But my money's on you." She turned to Sam with a questioning look. "We need it, doll."

  Sam nodded. "I can only try. What else do we know as of now?"

  "Well, the region stretching from Lompoc up north, east to Barstow and all the way down to San Diego and Chula Vista is an electronic smoking crater." Gator moved to a large crinkled piece of paper spread out on top of an upended trash can. It was a hand-drawn map of the world, the continents mostly outlines with a few borders drawn in and dotted with tiny asterisks and zeros. "Adrian whipped this off. The boy can't read, but he's got prima eidetic spatial memory. Let's see, now: San Jose's hit, but Santa Cruz isn't. Can't contact them, it's like they put themselves under a bell jar. Radio worked for a while, but that's gone now, too."

  "Everywhere?" said Sam.

  Gator shrugged. "Walkie-talkies between here and my tent might work, but every frequency's jammed. What else? Mexico, of course-it's having a hot time in Tijuana and points south. Sacramento and Seattle took it within seconds of each other. Tokyo reports pockets of infection scattered around the islands but no epidemic. Yet. Hawaii caught it from Bangkok, not us-"

  "Bangkok?" Rosa said.

  "Go figure. It's the only infected site in Thailand, too. London's got it, but Brighton doesn't, and Glasgow's spotty, it should go any time. Swam the channel, punched France, one went east and one went south, through Spain and down to Algeria. I told Adrian to go help Jasm about then. It's hard enough keeping track of the relatively local stuff. Phoenix is okay, and I think it'll hold on, but Flagstaff isn't. Las Vegas is closed."

  "That's almost funny," Sam said.

  "Almost." Gator's face turned grim. "Phoenix picked up a kid briefly on shortwave before we lost radio altogether. He reported there were air disasters in Boston and New York- socketed pilots on-line with infected on-board computers."

  "Jesus," Rosa said.

  "Its worse," Gator said. "People's heads are blowing up."

  Sam felt something cold gather in the pit of her stomach. "What do you mean?"

  "There was this gypsy in a clinic doing a piece on something or other, media stars, who the fuck knows. Anyway, anyone who was on-line when it hit stroked out, went crazy, died-" Gator shrugged. "He was near an uplink and managed to bounce the footage off a sat before it locked out all transmissions. It was bad."

  Sam's knees were shaking too much to hold her up. She sat down heavily. "Gabe. My father. He works at Diversifications, and he was probably working today."

  "You don't know that," Rosa said quickly, crouching next to her and putting an arm around her shoulders. "You told me yourself he hates his job. Maybe he wasn't on-line, maybe he called in sick-"

  Sam wagged her head from side to side. "He's doing that new release from Para-Versal. The Last Fucking Zeppelin. He must have been working on it today."

  Gator looked as if she were going to be sick. "That's no good," she said. "Because as near as we can tell, Diversifications seems to be the source of the whole thing. I'm sorry."

  "It's okay," Sam said. "I'd have heard sooner or later, and I'd rather know." She took a breath and looked up at Gator.
"So, you want a line to Santa Fe, you said?"

  Gator started to shake her head. Sam got up.

  "I might as well," she said, "because I'd really, really like not to go back under a pier with the scanner."

  "You're on," Gator said. "Download the specs from my system anytime you want to start." She gave Sam a hug, and Sam buried her face briefly in Gator's shoulder before she went off to set up a work island of her own.

  Now that Art was gone, what was left of the net was much different-slower, less sensitive and less responsive. More like the public net, actually, than the private areas the hackers used.

  Bent over her laptop, Sam kept her mind rigidly fixed on the task at hand. It was a relief to fill her mind with it so completely that there wasn't room for anything else, and it was something she had always enjoyed doing, several lifetimes ago, anyway, when all she'd had to worry about was how long to spend in the Ozarks and what to hack next. Finding alternate routes of communication. She'd just never tried it with such a widespread virus waiting to pounce.

  The virus had a sort of three-dimensional perception that required her to keep shifting her own antiviral protection in a cycle that seemed random with sudden bursts of regularity. She tried not to wonder if that might not be a manifestation of Art's remains. It could be fooled, just like anything else.

  Within a couple of hours, she had achieved a point where she could open an access anywhere in the net and remain undetected, provided she didn't try to do anything else except sit like an immovable bead on a string.

  Well, if you couldn't walk on the floor, you walked on the ceiling. If you couldn't walk on the ceiling, you walked on the walls, and if you couldn't walk on the walls, you walked in them, encrypted. Pure hacking.

  Pure but slow. Some hours later she had managed a routine of virtual sympathetic vibrations, a kind of virtual music. It wouldn't accommodate real-time communication, only short messages in quick bursts. But it was a way to send news out and get news in. Sam smiled to herself. If you were walking in the walls, and the walls had black holes, you had to be something that a black hole wouldn't recognize as existing.