Synners

by Pat Cadigan

  Ludovic dropped the first chip into his palm. He flipped open a drive-slot and pushed the chip into it. Stealthy's numbers doubled as it accepted the data, adjusted its range, and told it what the situation was and what it had to do now. In his mind's eye he could practically see the simulated ladies taking it all in, pumping themselves up.

  A new line appeared at the bottom of the screen suddenly. The numbers were going too fast for even Keely's practiced eye to follow, racing left to right, but he recognized them the way he recognized his own face in the mirror.

  "Stone the fucking crows at home!" he shouted. "This stuff s infectedl"

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Ludovic go pale and look at Gina.

  "Whoa, not that way," he added quickly. "You got a dose of the Fish here. Didn't you know that? Guess not. God, no wonder your program was so goddamn beautiful. How come I couldn't see that when I hacked you, why didn't it show then?" He laughed. "Because it didn't want me to, that's why. Shit, I got to stop taking stupid pills. Oughta be real easy to break that habit now."

  It felt as if the music was boiling in him. The little one with the sticks, Flavia, had come up behind him to look at the laptop screen. "You read that?" she said incredulously.

  "The only thing you really have to know is the difference between on and off," he said. "Night and day. Right and left. In and out. Down and up. Beat and rest." The numbers began to slow, and he ejected the chip, holding out his hand for another. "However you want to think of it, that's the way it is, but you got to know the difference." He took the next chip Ludovic had dropped into his palm and slipped it into the drive. "I figure it's eighty percent sure the Fish is aware at least part of the time."

  "Aware?" Ludovic said.

  "Alive. Intelligent. Conscious. Knows where-to."

  "A conscious virus," Gina said flatly. She got up and went over to sit near Ludovic, who was watching the screen again. Stealthy was shifting along with the virus now; some of the points were coming up in the shadowed areas, and instead of winking out, they seemed to melt away.

  "The virus is taking over what it thinks is input from that terminal." Keely ejected the chip and held out his hand for another. He put it in, and the numbers gave a jerk, backtracked, and then waited. He ejected the chip and reached for another.

  "Don't anybody ask me," Ludovic said a little weakly. "I'm just the supplier. I don't know what he does with it."

  Keely laughed. "I smoke it. I mainline it. Do it again."

  "Yah, I've seen 'em get this way," Gina said. "If we actually get to the Mimosa, you'll see real fucking maniacs."

  Maniacs? She wanted to see a maniac? He stripped his shirt off, whipped it around over his head, and let it go. It sailed across the room and landed on the Beater, who was keeping his distance.

  "Is it really that good?" Ludovic said, putting another chip in his hand.

  Sweat was dripping into his eyes. He scoured it away with his fist. "You got a short memory. If we could run your head-mount and your hotsuit here, you'd fight me to do this."

  Ludovic was silent for a moment. "Maybe."

  "A what?" Sam said. She looked from the bottom left corner monitor where Art had parked his image to the cam next to it.

  "It's a commercial," Art said again. "For body armor."

  "That's got to be an encryption," Gator said, coming over from her work island. "Is it out of Phoenix or Alameda?"

  "L.A."

  Gator shook her head. "Dump it before it bites you."

  "But it's clean," Art said.

  "Nothing out of L.A. is clean now," Gator told him.

  "It got here the same way I did," Art said, sounding insistent.

  Gator frowned and turned to Fez, still sitting in her work island. Fez looked past her. "Sam? What do you think?"

  Sam rolled her eyes. "God, ask me an easy one. I don't want that responsibility."

  "Tough," Fez said mildly, getting up slowly and coming over to her.

  Sam rubbed her forehead. "Art, can you tell anything else about it? Anything at all?"

  Art's image froze for a moment. "It's something I used to know," he said finally.

  "That's a major help," Sam muttered. She looked at the cam apologetically. "Sorry, Art. Gator's right, dump it. It might be harmless, but nobody ever got infected from not receiving something."

  "Don't be so sure about that," Art said. "And you didn't let me finish. It's from Keely."

  Sam felt her mouth drop open. "Are you sure?"

  "I told you, I know you, I know you all." Abruptly Art's image was replaced by a street scene, the pov panning from a row of vandalized storefronts to a grotesque thug with a spiked ring piercing his cheek and a serrated knife in one hand. He lunged, and it cut to the knife bouncing off another man's chest. Sam stared, feeling goose bumps sweep over her in multiple-assault waves.

  "Sam?" Fez put a hand on her shoulder, bending to look at her.

  "That's Gabe," she said, pointing at the second man. "That's my father."

  The pov tracked him as he entered an office building. There was a sudden jump and flicker, and then he was sitting behind a desk, looking at a monitor. The pov cut to a shot of the screen over his shoulder.

  YOU HAVE BEEN HACKED! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA AHAHAHAHAHAAH!

  "There are some things Gilding BodyShields won't protect you from," said a male voice faintly.

  The image froze. "This is what it really says," Art said. The words on the man's screen melted, writhed, and suddenly reformed.

  live n frfx 2 do SSW

  Z-U + – xRs

  dare

  Leaky

  GGF

  "Leaky's the clincher," said Rosa. She was standing on Sam's right with Percy. "That's what his family used to call him. He was a bed wetter."

  "Whack that family," Percy said darkly.

  "What about the rest of it?" said Gator.

  "Christ," Sam said, laughing. "Say it out loud. 'Live in Fairfax to do south-southwest.' We're due south-southwest of Fairfax. 'Zee-you over dare plus minus xRs.' Give or take however many hours. I have no idea what GGF is. Maybe 'gotta go, folks.' " She laughed some more, feeling her eyes starting to fill. "I guess he figured the one thing the virus wouldn't be able to read was his accent."

  "I wonder if that son of a bitch has been hiding out there all along," Rosa said. "If he's just been camped under some rubble all this time, I'm going to bash his brains in."

  "The boys's always had far more talent than brains," Fez said. "Isn't that right, Sam?"

  She nodded, wiping her eyes before they could overflow. She couldn't say why Gabe's image had appeared in the commercial Keely had sent, but knowing Keely, it had to mean he at least knew something about him. The ambiguity of the body armor bothered her, though; she couldn't decide whether it meant Gabe had been hurt in some way, and if he had, whether he would be all right. There are some things Gilding BodyShields won't protect you from. Her eyes began to fill again.

  – -

  Gabe was watching when the fluctuating points of light suddenly began winking in and out much more slowly. He tightened his grip on the wire.

  "Yank it!" Keely yelled. Gabe held up the plug, letting out a relieved sigh. The kid looked impressed. "That's what I call reflexes."

  "I yanked it as soon as I saw the lights changing," Gabe confessed. "Just a hunch." He shrugged; actually, it had been more of an accident. The feed had come out as soon as his hand had tightened on it.

  "Good for you. Sometimes all you got is one good guess." Keely stretched one arm and then the other over his head. "God, that felt great. It was…" He paused, looking puzzled. "Great." Then his eyelids fluttered, and he fell backwards, Flavia catching him just before his head could hit the floor.

  "Jesus!" Gabe leaped over the laptop to kneel down next to him. He felt for a heartbeat, trying to not to panic. The virus couldn't kill anyone without sockets, it couldn't be that bad-

  "Just guessing myself," Gina said tonelessly, "I'd say he fainted from hunger. Wh
en's the last time you ate?"

  Gabe looked at her, startled, taking notice for the first time of the ache that had been growing in his stomach over a period of hours. "Christ, you had to bring it up." He turned to Flavia.

  "No food here," she said. "But I got a car. Wait till dark. We'll go shopping."

  32

  "You've changed," Sam said, trying not to fidget. She still couldn't believe he was there.

  Gabe nodded. "So have you. Changed." He glanced over at the group, where Keely was stuffing his face from a seal-pack and giving an account of the impossible all-night drive in a car-a real car, not a hotwired rental-from Fairfax, mostly through backyards, it sounded like, to Venice. Sam couldn't imagine driving without GridLid, as clunky as it had always been. Not having any idea of what might be even half a mile ahead sounded like an easy way to get killed to her, especially in the dark; Gabe had to remind her that most of the streets were parking lots except for stretches the Guard had managed to clear with bulldozers. To let the emergency vehicles get through.

  But of course. Sam felt foolish. You didn't even have to go up Palos Verdes to see the smoke from downtown L.A. Welcome back to the Age of Smog. She started to say something to Gabe and saw that his gaze had gone to Gina Aiesi again. The woman was sitting on the floor near the remains of Jasm's homunculus, head back against the wall, eyes closed. A little ways away from her, the Beater stood by alone, as if he were waiting for someone to tell him what he could do with himself.

  "I forgot to tell you the good news the last time I saw you," Gabe said suddenly, still looking at Gina. "Your mother left me."

  There was a pause, and then they both laughed.

  "I'm sorry," Sam said, putting a hand to her mouth. "I don't know why I'm laughing, I don't know why it hit me funny."

  "The shock of the mundane," her father said. He dug something out of his pocket. "And I got this today. Or yesterday, now."

  She took the slip of paper from him. "What is it?"

  "It's a ticket. I got a ticket for riding my bicycle on the sidewalk."

  Sam burst out laughing again. "You rode a bicycle?"

  "Actually, it was stolen."

  "You stole a bicycle? My father stole a bicycle?" She laughed harder, and then she was hugging him, and he was hugging her back awkwardly, as if he had forgotten how.

  "Sam-What-Am." Keely materialized beside her and pinched her arm gently.

  She gave him a halfhearted swat. "That's 'Sam-I-Am.' And only Fez calls me that."

  He unslung his laptop from over his shoulder and sat down next to her in the work island. A few hours of sleep and half a dozen seal-packs had taken the wild-man stare out of his face, but he still looked exhausted to her. "How long has Jones been dead?"

  "Maybe a day. I knew you'd end up going to see him."

  "I always view the body. Actually, he's just stuporous. I got him to open his eyes for a few seconds, but I don't think he saw me." He looked over at Gator's work island, where Fez and Gabe had been deep in conversation for over an hour. "They sure got chummy on short acquaintance."

  Sam nodded absently. She'd been forcing herself not to stare at them. "Did Fez give you the complete rundown on Art Fish?"

  "Yah. Not much I hadn't suspected for a while. I think I topped him with Visual Mark and the Computer Zombies from Hell."

  "That sounds almost as good as Tunnels through the Void."

  "Nowhere near as good as that. Fez also told me that was how you managed simultaneously to save Art from the Big Eat and sort of reincarnate the net. Warping information."

  She gave a short amazed laugh. "God. It didn't occur to me that I might owe it all to Beau. But I guess it is a little like that. Intergalactic subway system. At the time I laughed in his face."

  "A common reaction to Beau," Keely said. "I would tell you I could never figure out what you ever saw in him, except in that particular glass house I shouldn't be throwing any stones."

  Sam smiled to herself. They could have been in the middle of the genuine apocalypse, and they'd still be trying to figure out their relationships. Human beings, they never quit. On the other hand, she thought, looking at Keely's drawn features, it gave them something to think about besides dead bodies, of which there were plenty.

  According to what Art had been able to piece together, along with what Keely and Gabe had told them, the infected were still out there and still dropping dead. Some had died immediately, others later, even after they had disconnected from the infected interface. Rewrite to destruction, Art had called it.

  "I don't suppose you have any more to eat," Keely said after a bit, sounding a little sheepish.

  Sam laughed. "We've got seal-packs coming out of our ears. Rosa made a food run just before everything blew."

  "Rosa always was the practical one," Keely said as he followed her back to her squat space. " 'Never mind the tech shit, when do we eat?' I wish I'd thought of that when I was busy raiding uninfected equipment."

  Sam dug several packs out of the hole in the floor. "Let's see what she left me: fruit compote, fish compote, fortified banana mash, navy bean soup compote-ha, ha, very funny, Rosa-dairy pack with real cheese-"

  He took the dairy pack from her and tore open the top. "Haven't tried this one yet, and I wouldn't want to deprive you of something as wonderful as navy bean soup compote, especially if it's a personal gift. It's nice to know the survivalists were good for something, isn't it." He scooped out a blob of the soft white goop with two fingers, made a face, and put it in his mouth. "God help me, it does taste good. But then, a shoe would probably taste good to me right now. Especially if it's not drugged."

  "Well, if you want more, the survivalists are all camped up Palos Verdes trying to make their radios work and selling us poor shortsighted slobs their least favorite gourmet flavors while they dine on squirrels and birds."

  Keely made a revolted noise. "We'll have to factor that into the long-range ramifications of this thing, won't we?" He sighed. "God. If I hadn't picked that night to get toxed to the red line, I might have been able to stop it. They'd have caught me, and I'd have been canned well into my next lifetime because it would have killed Mark, but he was dead anyway. And maybe none of this would have happened."

  "That's a big if, Keely. Too big."

  He shrugged. "I was there. I have to think about them. All of them, even that son of a bitch Rivera. He went miserable and in pain and probably scared because he didn't know what was happening to him. None of them knew what was happening. Except Mark. He knew, and he couldn't do a thing about it, except ask me for help."

  "Don't," Sam said urgently. "You don't know anything for certain."

  "Yah, I do. You should have seen the message he left me. It didn't leave much doubt." He crumpled the seal-pack.

  "Stop it," she said, grabbing his hand. "You really want to claim this is all your fault? Claim you're Napoleon, too, while you're at it. But before you go full stone tilt, you could think about a few other things. How we can make a real net out of the sympathetic vibration technique-"

  "Art calls it the Vibrator Technique," Keely said.

  "He would." Sam rolled her eyes. "How we can access whatever it is Art brought back with him. What we're going to eat when the survivalists run out of fortified banana mash and dairy pack with real cheese." She gave him a hard shake. "You want me to tell you you're a shit? Okay, you're a shit. Now be a useful shit. You know how. Gabe told me about that little show you put on in Fairfax, when you hacked the message through." She laughed a little. "It made me wish I'd been there."

  "I was out of my head with reaction and a hangover and hunger," he said, looking away from her, embarrassed. "And probably from all the shit Rivera put in me, probably fucked me forever. Maybe I can plead brain damage."

  "Shut up," Sam said impatiently. "If anyone's to blame, it's probably Rivera, or that Dr. Whoever, the one from Eye-Traxx.

  "Someday I'll tell you how Rivera connected up with her," he said darkly.

  "I'm not
interested," Sam said. "It doesn't matter anymore." She took him back to her work island in the ballroom and sat him in front of her laptop.

  "Remember the specs on this?" she said, taking the pump unit out of her pocket. He nodded. "I built it while I was on sabbatical, so to say, in the Ozarks."

  "You actually run that on… yourself?" he asked as she connected the unit to the laptop feed.

  She nodded, grinning at him. "A battery just isn't personal enough." The identification screen Art had shown her came up, sans Art's image. "This is as far into it as I can get. Even Art can't crack it. Maybe you'll have better luck. I don't know what the partial room is supposed to signify, if anything. But I'd love to know what that word means." She ran her finger along it on the screen. "Zamiatin. Any ideas?"

  "Zamiatin," said a low, gravelly voice behind her, "is Visual Mark's last name."

  She turned around. Gina was standing a few feet behind her, staring impassively at the screen.

  "It's him," Keely said wonderingly, looking from the screen to Gina and back again. "That fucker didn't eat him, he's alive. Or… well… something."

  "Stone the fucking crows at home," Sam said, "Are you sure? Maybe it's part of the-"

  Keely shook his head. "No, it's really him. I recognize the screen. I saw it every time he cracked me in the penthouse."

  "But we still can't get to him. We don't have the access code or the password," Sam said, frustrated.

  Keely gave a short, incredulous laugh. "Shit, I've got the fucking access code and password! The access code's VM, and the password is-" He looked at Gina, who had come over to squat down between them. "The password is Gina."

  Gina's gaze didn't move from the screen. Sam wondered for a moment if the woman had been hypnotized by the convolutions of the rushing clouds in the background.