Synners (36 page)

For him it had been a way for him to say good-bye to the body, but as he lived it again in his memory, he knew it hadn't meant the same thing to her. If he'd been saying good-bye to his, she'd been saying something entirely different. He didn't understand how she could continue to cling to the heavy flesh even after knowing how the mind could be freed. But then, it didn't seem to happen the same way for her as it did for him. He knew that just by looking at her videos. Maybe her system would always be contained within herself and never spread out; maybe there was no other way for her to keep from getting lost.

It didn't matter. The last line was the same: she wouldn't be coming with him on this trip.

Maybe she couldn't have anyway, he thought, feeling the living and the nonliving creep along his awareness in the system. Maybe you could make yourself bigger, but you couldn't make yourself any less alone.

She made him take her to Mark's place. The building was old, shabby in a regal way, no elevators. Gabe let his eyes slide over the graffiti scrawled on the walls as he climbed the stairs behind Gina.
If you got the socket, I
got the plug. Free the Hackers! US OUT of Malaysia!
(That was an old one.) And the ubiquitous
Dr. Fish Makes House Calls!
Underneath that someone had printed in crayon,
do houses really come when you call?
Under that, more usual and less creative things.

A girl about twelve years old was sitting on the first landing with a laptop resting on her folded legs. She gave them a suspicious look as they passed. Gabe couldn't help staring. She was reasonably clean, not poorly dressed—the jeans had barely begun to fade—but she had a hungry look that was all too familiar. In a couple years' time, he thought, she would be emancipated, and she would melt into the city somewhere, finding a nest of hackers to belong to in a best-case scenario, finding a nest of something else in Fairfax or on the Mimosa in a worst-case, but regardless, her parents would never see her again. And hell, maybe they didn't want to.

He felt a sudden rush of guilt, as if he had taken Sam out into the middle of Los Angeles himself and dumped her, telling her to make her way as best she could. He should have fought for her, he thought miserably; he should have fought Catherine and the educational system,
himself,
if it had come to that, and anything else that had driven Sam away. Instead, he had just let her go.

Gina had to spit on the keystrip before the door would let them in. There was music coming from the apartment opposite, something fast and thrashy, what Gabe thought of as psychopath music. He looked around nervously, but the hall was deserted.

The apartment was dark and stale smelling, as if it hadn't been opened in days. Gina turned on the lights. There were a couple of empty LotusLand bottles over by the couch, clothes strewn on the floor. The only thing that seemed to be well kept was the entertainment center attached to the dataline against one wall. The large screen was blank except for some small numbers in the lower right-hand corner, indicating that something was being logged from the dataline.

"Make yourself to home," Gina said dully, stumping into the bedroom. She came out again almost immediately, made a stop at the refrigerator, and then plumped down on the couch, handing him a bottle of LotusLand. He looked at it doubtfully.

"I don't know if I should drink this," he said.

"If you don't, it'll just go to waste."

He perched on the edge of the sofa a short distance away from her. She was toxed, he realized finally.

"See, I had the wild, stupid, stone-home fucking hopeless idea that if I came here, he'd be here," she said, and let her head fall back against the sofa. "Like he'd snap out of it all of a sudden and come back. That's pretty high up in the stupidsphere, ain't it? Thinking if I go looking for him in some other place, he'll be there." She rolled her head over to look at him. "Well? Is that high up in the stupidsphere or not?"

Whatever was on her breath smelled lethal. He was about to ask her if he should get anything for her when she pointed at the remote lying on the carpet at his feet.

"See what's on the fucking dataline. Maybe it'll be another reason to go on living."

Hesitantly he picked up the remote and thumbed the on button. A list of downloaded items appeared on the screen, all music videos, judging from the tides.

"Skip that shit," Gina told him. "Spin the dial. Round and round we go, everyone a winner."

He pressed the scan. The screen split into four parts as
General News
came up, with the anchor on real time in the upper left quadrant, a listing of the major headlines of the day next to her, footage on the current story below her, and a menu of the other default channels in the lower right quadrant, along with choices for
Freeze, Replay, Select, Menu Top,
and
Quit.

After a minute the scan went on to the next channel. The wholesome, solemn features of the latest Mrs. Troubles replace the anchor, with a printout of the problem she was addressing in the quadrant next to her and audience responses posted in the square below.

"—accept the reality that when you enter into a relationship with an incarcerated individual, understanding is not a given. Things carry very different meanings depending on which side of the prison wall you are. And conversely for all you prisoners that I know are watching, just judging from the email I get here, you prisoners will have to accept the reality that when you enter into a relationship with a person who is
not
incarcerated, there can be expectations which you just aren't ready for. If you're not planning to go straight after your term is up, you really shouldn't even bother. Career criminals more than anyone else need to be involved with people who speak the language and understand the special protocols, which can be a real problem if you're on parole and forbidden to associate with other felons—"

"Behold, my culture speaks to me," Gina said. The scan went on to
Pec
cadillo Update.
Gabe lowered the volume. "Feel like a winner yet?"

Gabe shrugged. "What's a winner?" He looked around the shabby apartment. The legendary Visual Mark did not live in even a fair approximation of a video.

"I'm not sure," Gina said suddenly, "which I'm more curious about— how you found me, or why you bothered."

"I just went to all the places I could remember that you'd taken me to," he said. "Someone said they'd seen you in that joint on the boulevard. When I got there, someone else said you'd left with, ah, Loophead. I got the address of the studio off directory assistance."

"That's one question."

He shrugged. "I'm sorry, I'm unprepared. If I'd known I was going to have to go into detail, I'd have whipped up an outline and a storyboard."

Gina pealed hearty laughter at the ceiling. He sat fingering the unopened bottle of LotusLand and feeling embarrassed. "Come on," he said after a bit. "It wasn't that funny."

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "Jesus, we've all got you on the run, don't we? Rivera and Para-Versal and even me."

The dataline was showing a commercial for a new private neighborhood in Canoga Park; the voice-over seemed to jump out at him. ". . . tiled bathrooms, spacious living suites, kitchens where functionality wasn't left out of the design." The pov swooped along a narrow kitchenette that Gabe knew was only half as long as the cam made it seem, and cruised through another room shaped so that it was almost two separate spaces. "Canoga Park's finest new living arrangement, Park Residence. For further information, online tours, and in-person inspection, contact Catherine Mirijanian."

Gabe winced at the sight of the regal face on the screen. "My wife," he said. "She never did have a sense of timing."

"Her? The one that's leaving you?"

"Left. Gone already. I'm waiting for her to sell the condo out from under me."

"Where you gonna go then?"

He shrugged. "Somewhere. I guess."

Gina squinted at the screen. "She doesn't look like you."

"No, we never achieved that point in marriage where you start to look like each other."

"Not what I meant. She doesn't look like she's for you, like she was supposed to be your wife."

"I know." Catherine's picture lingered a moment longer, rippled slightly, and then vanished, to be replaced by some incomprehensible episode from a series labeled
Lighthand
in the lower corner. Gabe wondered idly when the divisions on the screen had disappeared. Everything seemed to happen when you were looking the other way. "I think I was always hoping someday she would look like my wife. Now I can't remember why."

Gina yawned. "I fucking
hate
this kind of discussion."

"You
started it," Gabe said, his voice rising in exasperation. "You're a real comedy on wheels, you know that? As far as I can tell, all you ever do is hit people, get toxed, and chase around after a guy who doesn't know what planet he's on half the time."

She looked down at her lap. "I make videos, too."

"Is that what you were doing tonight? With those people, Loophead?"

"You see any of that?" she asked, not looking up at him.

"I saw it all. They wouldn't let me near you, but I saw it all, and I know what was going on."

She nodded. "Yah. It was all right. The synthesis was there, just came up like it was meant to be, and it was all right."

He set the bottle aside on the floor. "Are you going to do that with Mark?" he asked, without thinking.

She looked up at him, shocked, and he wanted to bite his tongue off. "Mark's not a musician, he's another synner. Why would I do that with him?"

He moved a little closer to her on the couch. "I just wondered, when I saw all of you connected at the same time. I—" Suddenly he couldn't think of what to say next, and he felt as if he had stepped off solid floor into a void.
MORE DRUGS.
He shook his head. "Never mind. I'm sorry, forget I asked that question."

"What are
you
gonna do?" she asked.

"When?"

"When you're in the wire. When you're rattling around your condo while you wait for the floor to get sold out from under you."

He shook his head again. This was the point where he could get up and leave, and he waited for his legs to push him upright and carry him out the door. He'd been running around in simulation for so long, he'd forgotten how to run a realife, real-time routine; he'd forgotten that if he made mistakes, there was no safety-net program ready to jump in and correct for him.

"Well." Gina let out a long breath. "You want the bed or the couch? I've slept on both, they're equally shitty."

"No, I can go home." He started to get up.

"Bad idea," she said, pulling him down again. "The neighborhood slashartists'll take you out before you get back to your rental. I'll come out tomorrow morning and find your bloody hide plastered up on the front of the building."

Suddenly he was too tired to argue. Let her go to bed, and then he could sneak out and go home. "I'll take the couch."

"Turn out the lights when you're done." She got up and went into the bedroom.

He sat staring at the dataline, which had cycled back to
General News.
There was a new anchor now, a young Scandinavian type who looked about sixteen years old. He was rattling on in his sunny voice about something to do with sockets. Of course; if sockets were out of the news for more than half an hour, that would have been an item in itself. Surprising that Mrs. Troubles hadn't been offering advice for the socketed.
Well, dears, a mixed
relationship—the socketed and the un-socketed—is a peck of trouble wait
ing to happen, and we all know it. And so is the socketed with the socketed,
and the un-socketed with the unsocketed. Better you should try to kindle
something with a convicted felon behind bars, or even just forget the
whole thing.

"Didn't you hear me, stupid? I
said,
you're not really listening, are you? But then, if you weren't listening, of course you didn't hear me. Dealing with your type is enough to make me
berserk."

Gabe blinked rapidly at the screen. The sunny anchor's face was now a distorted mask of furious disgust.

"You out there, on your couches, on your beds, on your
toilets,
squatting in your expensive fetid hovels, you don't put this on to
listen
to anything. You just let it babble at you, and you let the babble bounce off, a little white noise to make you feel a little less like the stagnant, empty straw-people you really are. Get ready, all you null-and-voids, because here it comes—"

The screen went blank. Seconds crawled by, and then an easy-viewing scene of Big Sur at sunset came up. "We are experiencing some technical difficulties at this time," said a calm, refined voice. "Normal programming should be restored within a few minutes. If you have been running a download from this channel, we strongly advise immediate diagnostics and decontamination, and that you refrain from uploading or downloading any other material until such time as your own system has been certified free of infection. We remind our viewers that diagnostic and decontamination programs are free whenever the problem stems from the network. Consult your program guide for further details."

Gabe let out a short laugh of disbelief. It had been a long time since anything like this had happened on the dataline. He wondered how the abusive swashbuckler was. Maybe one of Sam's friends.

He flicked off the dataline and sat in the silence, at a loss. When the dataline insulted and abandoned you, you knew you were really alone.

A voice in his head. Somebody's, maybe his own.
Hey, hotwire—you're
an asshole.

"Yah," he muttered, "but I'm trying to quit." He got up and went to the bedroom.

She was sitting on the edge of the unmade bed in a T-shirt and underpants as if she had forgotten what she wanted to do next. He wanted to say her name, but his voice refused to work. She turned then and saw him standing in the doorway, holding onto the frame as if he were trying to push it out and make it wider.