Synners (57 page)

"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 longrange 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 . . .
some
thing."

"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.

"Are you gonna
use
those fucking codes?" Gina said suddenly, glancing at Keely.

"I thought maybe you'd like to," he said.

"Fuck.
" She stood up, folding her arms. "I'm done bringing that bastard around every time he passes out.
You
do it."

Sam looked after her as she stalked over to where Gabe and Fez were talking and said something to them. Keely jumped up and ran after her.

"Can you see and hear okay?" Keely asked, standing in front of the extra cam Percy had set up.

The man on the chaise looked confused. "Wait. I'm not..." The screen flickered a few times and then snapped into sharp focus. "Well, now. This is what I call stone-home high quality. Who's there? You, the kid from the penthouse. You got out okay."

"Yah. Thanks for fixing the door for me." Keely sounded so shy and polite that Sam had to stifle a laugh.

"Christ—the Beater?
You
look like shit."

No lie,
Sam thought, looking at the man. Several hours of rest seemed not to have helped him at all; he looked even more tired than when he'd arrived. And the sight of Mark obviously wasn't making him feel any better.

"You!"
Mark said. "Move in toward the cam a little more, I can't pan this thing—"

"Yes, you can," came Art's voice from the speakers on the framework. "Feel around behind your focus."

Now Sam did laugh. If she hadn't known for certain, she would have sworn that Rosa and Percy were scamming them with a simulation. But they were among the group gathered around her work island, looking as boggled as anyone else. Except Gina Aiesi, who hung back, well out of cam range for the moment. Sam kept sneaking glances at her while she sat on the floor gripping the pump unit tightly to keep it still. Occasionally she pressed a hand to her stomach, to make sure the needles were secure.

"Yah, it
is
you," Mark said as the cam on the tripod gave a short jerk to the left, aiming direcdy at Gabe. "Hey, some stone-home change for the machines, ain't it?"

Sam thought her father looked as if he weren't sure whether to laugh, cry, or run like hell. "How does he do that?" he asked Keely. "Make a picture?"

"Good question," Keely said. "How do you do it?"

"By visualizing," Gina said quietly. The cam swung to her immediately.

"You're here." On-screen the pov zoomed to medium close-up.

"Yah, I survived," she said indifferently. "No thanks to you."

"Hey, anyone can have a stroke."

"But only
you
could release it into general circulation."

"On-line brain illness," Fez said. He was standing next to Gator. "If that's possible, then on-line therapy must be possible, too."

"Don't look at me," said Gina. "It wasn't
my
fucking idea."

"Mine, either," Gabe added in a small voice.

"But you
are
the only people here who have undergone the procedure." Fez looked at each of them. "And the only two we know for sure that haven't been infected."

"We don't know that at all," said Gabe.

"I never hurt either of you," Mark said solemnly. "I was just there, I
never
hurt you."

"My fucking ass." Gina pushed between Adrian and Jasm to stand directly in front of the cam. "Get a little higher up in the stupidsphere. You don't know that for sure, you don't know shit. And even if you think you do, I fucking
don't.
And neither does he." She jerked her head at Gabe.

"We could find out," Fez said slowly, "if we had the right hardware. Some direct interface connections and a sample of what Art calls the spike, which a diagnostic program could use to compare normal function against function that's been virally altered. The diagnostic wouldn't be too hard to devise. Ideally, we'd also have an uninfected brain as the control for comparison, though we could do without one. But we'd have to have interface connections."

The little gold woman, Flavia, let out a short, hard laugh.
"Never
get back to 'fax now. Push luck over a
cliff."

"We don't have to." Gina went to Gator's work island, where Keely had stashed the bundle he'd brought with him and picked up the large piece of cloth he'd been using as a carryall. "We got connections, we got all kinds of toys and programs, and we got a sample right here." She took it to Fez. "It's a cape. Look in the collar."

"But it's been turned off," Gabe said.

"It's never turned off, it's just in nondisplay mode. Got solar collectors all around the edge of the hem. The program's still alive, and it's still infected. You want an uninfected brain, ask the woman who's got one." She pointed at Flavia.

"Not me," Flavia said. "Know you once, know you always. Knew
you
the night before. Remember?" The gold face took on a hard look. "Thanks for the memories."

Gina spread her hands. "I
said
don't do it. Didn't I?"

"We could use a simulation to stand in for the brain," Fez said after a moment. "That'll help me figure how to adapt the diagnostic—"

"I can do that," Mark said. "If Gina will let me. She might not want me to."

"Oh, cut the shit," Gina said irritably. "This is all your fucking fault, you better do everything you fucking know how."

It was good to be alive, and it was good to be alive again.

The configuration identified as Art Fish was a wonder and a revelation to him, a synesthetic concert of intelligence in conscious mode. In the first moments after the symbol
Gina
had broken through and brought him to a level where he could function and communicate again, Art Fish had shared memory with him. That had been disorienting at first, but with the data had come the format and the know-how. By the time he had seen Gina, he had changed in many, many ways.

But Gina stirred the old feelings in him nonetheless; perhaps even more so. He had been refined and reorganized to such an extent that he saw her with a clarity beyond anything he'd had in his last moments of meat awareness. He remembered that he loved her; that had not changed. There had been so much noise in the old meat that he would never have found his way through it to where she was, and now that the noise was gone, he didn't even have arms to put around her.

Art had much salient memory to share on the matter, in spite of the fact that It had never been flesh.
It
was the only thing he could think to call Art, and he still bridled somewhat against the old associations of the word, even though
It
in this new existence was a far more encompassing term than mere
he
or
she.
He supposed it was a matter of getting used to it . . . and getting used to
It.
He remained
he
in his own thoughts, though that too would change over time. Change for the machines. That could be a good thing.