Synners (10 page)

"All good questions," Fez said. "We can do a docket search for Keely, and I'll make some copies of this and turn the doctor loose on them."

Sam stared at him. "You're gonna infect Keely's zap with a
Virus?"

"Not exactly. Let's take a break. You didn't eat your soup." He herded her away from the desk so that she had her back to both screens when the images vanished.

Big mistake, Manny thought, putting a few hours sleep between night court and Mexico. He'd boarded the jumper groggy and out of sorts, no better than if he'd decided to tough it out on stimulants, hit Mexico in the middle of the afternoon still groggy, and had to gobble more stimulants anyway.

The stupidities were piling up: the hacker managing to download before the trace-and-freeze kicked in, the goddamn feel-good mill, of all places, and then that obstreperous judge. Then coming face-to-face with the Eye Traxx bitch who'd been dodging him. Four-five visits to the EyeTraxx building, and he'd never seen her in person; one lousy trip into night court, and there she was.

At first he'd thought she might have been in it somehow with the hacker. The whole thing could have blown up then, but her appearance at the courthouse had just been a stupid coincidence. He wasn't completely convinced that she'd been too toxed to recognize him, but he was sure she didn't know anything. And now the hacker was taken care of, and the clinic gang was buried so deep in custody and procedures that by the time they saw daylight again, it wouldn't make any difference.

Sitting in the front passenger seat of the land-cruiser with his eyes halfclosed, he managed perfect, if temporary, isolation in which to collect himself. The only time he'd had to move was to shut off the radio when the driver had turned on some gaudy mariachi music. The driver was a blond, pimply-faced kid who had done too much Guadalajara Pink in his short life. He was definitely detoxed today; Manny had done the drug test himself.

Even so, by the time Manny was boarding the jumper back to L.A., the kid would barely remember the drive, or him, or anything else. Pink messed up the transfer from short-term to long-term memory permanently, which was why Manny had okayed him. Fortunately, he'd learned to drive before he'd learned the joy of forgetting.

Manny wouldn't have minded forgetting the previous few hours, or the prize pair sitting in the backseat. Galen and Joslin made a good argument for Pink. Galen was one of those pampered rich boys who liked to play at seeing what his money could do. Joslin was a bonafide twitch-case, thin as a promise, with the hint of a mentality Manny had always associated with the torture of small animals for amusement.

They were probably holding hands back there. They did a lot of that, hand-holding, and whispering and giggling. Reports on their previous stay in Mexico during the installation setup had said they'd spent their downtime holed up in their hotel room, watching videos, chowing down on polyester, and engaging in what they thought of as sex, a routine that never varied.

Picturing that was an exercise in comic thinking. Galen was small, almost boy-sized, flabby without being fat, with a head like a block and an always-grinning face. Joslin was downright spooky looking, pale in a way that suggested she'd never been exposed to natural light. Her hair was the yellow of something gone sour, and her enormous eyes always seemed on the verge of popping out of her head, as if she were perpetually startled. Or revolted. Her thinness implied she found vomiting erotic.

How in God's name could two such people find each other attractive? Manny filed that one under minor mysteries no one really wanted to solve. The EyeTraxx buy-out and subsequent developments would keep them in all the videos and edible polyester they wanted, and out of his sight. Considering their known behavior, they might never come up for air. Hell, when it came time to tell them they were shut out, they might barely notice.

"Here," the driver said abruptly.

Manny roused himself and sat up straight. The low white prefab had appeared on the scrubby landscape like trick holography. With the hurricane fence around it, the place looked more like a warehouse than a hospital.

"After you take us through the gate," Manny said to the driver, "you wait in front till we come out. I'll have a little refreshment brought to you."

The kid giggled.

"Some apple juice," Manny went on, "unless you would prefer milk. Any other refreshment will be handed over back at the hotel."

The kid giggled again and downshifted, working the floor stick with an expertise that belied his mental condition. Manny resisted the urge to shake his head. Implants could have alleviated the kid's condition, at least to a certain extent. Oh, the kid was almost certainly uninsured, which would make his getting help tremendously difficult, but not impossible. As a hardship case, he could have had hot-and-cold-running social workers filing petitions, begging grants, digging up sponsors. But he chose to stay the way he was, illustrating what Manny thought of as General World Rule Number One: some people liked the squirrel cage. Which reminded him—

He twisted around in his seat. Galen and Joslin were fast asleep, his head on her shoulder. Manny reached over and gave each of them a rough shake. "We're here."

Joslin came to with a jump, her big pop-eyes blinking in alarm while Galen floundered clumsily, grabbing at her shirt and inadvertently exposing more of her skin than Manny had ever wanted to see. He had a glimpse of a lattice pattern of thin scars across her chest.

"You
are
prepared to show me the start-up, aren't you?" he said, staring hard at Galen.

"Right, right. Of course." Blinking, he elbowed his twitch and motioned for her to cover herself up. She did so, staring at him as if she didn't know who he was or how she had come to be sitting next to him.

"You told me everything was ready," Manny said.

Joslin turned her head slowly from Galen to look at him. "Everything's ready," she said in her high-pitched monotone. "We've got everything except the heads."

"You'll be getting those soon." Manny turned away from her as they approached the gate.
The heads,
he thought.
Jesus wept.

"We've got everything except the heads," she said again.

"Manny says we'll be getting those soon," Galen told her soothingly.

"Well,
I
know," she snapped.
"I
heard him."

Manny took a long breath and let it out slowly. The doctors Diversifications had recruited were all experienced in implantation. The assistant chief of surgery, Travis, had assured him there would be no problem learning the technique Joslin had developed; a socket wasn't really so different from the more usual kind of therapeutic implant. Which meant it would be easy for Travis to take over after they squeezed Joslin out, possibly with the help of her own procedure. He would have to ask Travis how it could be engineered.

The guard made the security check into a formal, cautious ritual Manny found more annoying than reassuring. Pulling up to the front door, the kid killed the motor and turned to Manny. "Where are we?"

Manny didn't answer. A minute dragged by in silence; the front door remained closed.

"We gave everyone the day off," Galen said with a vacant giggle.

"Did
not,"
said Joslin petulantly. "The staff's in residence."

The door opened then, and a tall red-haired man dressed in antiseptic white stepped out. Manny felt himself relax at the sight of Travis and climbed out to shake hands with him. Travis led him toward the door, started to speak, and then frowned at something over Manny's shoulder. Manny turned to look; Galen and Joslin were still in the cruiser, fiddling with the mysteries of the seat belts. Manny went back to help them.

"You're to wait here," he reminded the kid behind the wheel. Not really necessary; the map on the in-dash screen of the navigational computer had been replaced with the words WAIT HERE TILL FURTHER NOTICE.

"Gotcho, muchacho," the kid said with an idiotic grin. Manny didn't bother giving him a dirty look. But he canceled the kid's refreshment, and later the kid was going to have one of the worst trips of his life on the stuff Manny would give him, without having the slightest idea why.

———

On the screen two bubbles were moving in a slow dance around a length of complicated braid. Every so often one of the bubbles would hesitate and move to the end of the braid, attaching itself briefly before moving away again, leaving behind a new segment. Manny studied the action for a few minutes and then looked up at Travis. "What's this going to be?"

"The female. The receiver," Travis added.

Manny couldn't help glancing at Joslin, who was wandering around the small room with Galen in tow, pausing occasionally to whisper in his ear. "That's the part that stays in the skull."

"Right." Absently Travis scratched the back of his head.

"When it's finished, it will be a hollow tube only a few molecules wide." "But alive."

"Living tissue, yes." Travis's gaze remained on the screen. "For the first time implants will consist one hundred percent of living tissue. Therapeutic implants all have some percentage of hardware, so they all qualify as foreign objects, not completely at home in the body, though most recipients accommodate them with no trouble."

Manny made a polite noise.

"This one you see here is for the visual center." Travis tapped the back of his own skull where he had just been scratching. "Injected through the scalp and bone, it makes itself completely at home. So to speak."

"Only a few molecules wide." Manny frowned. "The people who'll be getting the early benefit of this stuff—ah, most of them would be hard put to flip a marble into the Grand Canyon on the first try. How are they going to plug into a socket only a few molecules wide in the backs of their own heads?"

Travis almost smiled. "Each target area will be marked with a small bump the size of a pimple. All they'll have to do is lay the connection against the bump. The connector finds its own way in by tropism. Makes no difference which socket—the software will make the adjustment for the correct input and output, and all the connectors retract automatically at the disconnect command, so there's no danger of damaging the mechanism. It will take a little practice, but your people should be able to receive their implants in the morning and be plugging and unplugging by lunchtime. In theory, that is."

"Clever."

"It's all Dr. Joslin's development."

They looked over at her together. She was standing at a bank of cabinets, gesturing flightily with one pasty hand while she continued to whisper to Galen, who had one arm around her insubstantial waist.

"Amazing." Manny jerked his chin at the cabinets. "What's in there?"

"Very little as yet. Freeze-storage for the completed polymers. They have to be kept frozen so they'll remain in stasis until we're ready to insert them." Travis led him through a door into another room, tiled, white, and bare except for a table with a box about twice the size of a human head at one end.

"Operating room," Travis told him. "Once we start up, well keep sterile conditions, of course." He put one hand on the box. "This is a standard combination scanner and insertion device. The scanner pinpoints each area of the brain for insertion. It hardly needed any adapting at all for the new procedure."

"Is it painful?" Manny asked.

"The procedure?" A flicker of amusement crossed Travis's ruddy, oblong face. "Not really. Dr. Joslin's primate subjects indicated some temporary tenderness at the insertion sites, a little itching that we've determined is psychosomatic. Depending on the individual, there may be some slight reactions and discomfort while the sockets become acclimated, but that depends on the individual. Brain tissue itself is incapable of feeling any pain."

"Primates are a long way from knowing for sure about humans," Manny said. "Even running a projection-simulation—"

Travis held up a hand. "Dr. Joslin?" he called loudly. "Could you come in here and help me show Mr. Rivera something, please?"

Joslin appeared in the doorway, still towing Galen. She looked around the room and gave a strange little laugh, as if she'd been caught out at something.

"Dr. Joslin, would you please lie down on the table and put your head in the scanner?" Travis asked.

Joslin disengaged from Galen and hopped up on the table. Travis slid up a panel on the end of the box, and she lay down, moving up until her head disappeared inside the scanner. Travis picked up a small control and danced his fingers over it.

In the wall behind Manny, a mural-sized holo screen lit up with a 3-D display of a human brain in glowing green. Within the brain a network of black lines appeared, all of them coming from separate areas to meet in what looked like an impossible tangle.

"Dr. Joslin supervised the placement of her own sockets," Travis said mildly, facing Manny's frown with an even, noncommittal expression. Manny looked from Travis back to the display. The Upstairs Team wouldn't care much for the idea of Joslin making free with a procedure that was solely the company's property now, even if she had developed it. It made a convenient legal point that could be pressed should she decide to be troublesome later.

"The black lines you see on the screen are the pathways the sockets have generated in her brain. The configuration will vary from person to person, just as brain and mind organization vary."

Manny looked at Travis again. Travis liked this better than standard therapeutic implants for brain dysfunctions, he realized. Travis liked it a lot.

"Eight sockets will serve the purpose," Travis went on, "though we may eventually find that some subjects need more, or even fewer. This procedure, incidentally, makes implants used to treat the dysfunctional obsolete. A totally organic implant can alter brain tissue, replacing dysfunctional cells with healthy ones."

"You included that in the reports to the AMA and the Food, Drug, and Software Administration, didn't you?" Manny said.

Travis nodded. "You're aware that's not necessarily a strong selling point with them."