Synners (45 page)

Then they did it.

The brain feels no pain, Good God, y'all, can you believe with me?

They said they could. Claudio's magic fingers, the Fender in Dorcas's grip, Tom holding on to the phantom train, and Flavia beating, beating, beating.

Well, you got it, it's totally painless, but they never mentioned it would feel like painlessly driving eight nails through your head going in and painlessly ripping your arms and legs off coming out again. And they only mentioned what you'd gain, they never mentioned what you'd lose, they never got to that, and what the fuck, even you can't tell sometimes. Right. Because we do what we do, we do it because we can . . . but do you
know
what you can do?

You can do this—

—take a little walk with me—

A little way, a
long
way, invaded, visited, and then left; walk all night, and then run and run and run until you forget. Were you running from something or to it?

Struck by White Lightning. Hope you like your barbecue extra-crispy. (She thought she heard someone yell in pain, but that was ridiculous, that couldn't have been. The brain felt no pain.)

You be the ass to risk. Ever done that? It goes something like this—

But Flavia was already tearing at her, whacking her across the face with the sticks to bring her out of it even as Claudio's magic fingers plucked the wires from her head and threw them down. Flavia yanked her to a sitting position.

"Hey,
you.
Get her
out."

Deja-voodoo. "How the fuck did you find me?" she said.

"Why didn't you wait for me?" Ludovic's face was pained. "Why didn't you come to me?"

"You ask a lot of questions for someone with holes in his head.
Hot
wire."

He carried her out.

———

Fez's smile was tired. He was sitting alone in the work island Rosa had set up with Percy directly in front of the screens, which were all dark now. It was some indecent hour of the morning, four maybe, and the inn was dead quiet, except for the faint sound of some hard-core party animals, probably Rude Boys, carrying from somewhere farther up the Mimosa.

"What are you doing here?" she said.

He yawned. "Research. I just wanted a little privacy."

"Oh. Sorry. I'll get out of your face." She turned to go back to her squat.

"No, it's all right. I think I've found out everything I need to know." He jerked his head at her. "Come here. You'll be interested in this."

She sat down on the floor next to him, yawning and wiping her watering eyes. "I don't vouch for my ability to know anything at this hour, but whack it anyway."

He gave her a look. "Going native?"

"Fuck, no." She blinked at the screen of the laptop on the crate in front of him. "Sixteen perfect screens, and you're using Rosa's laptop?"

"I didn't want to put this up where everyone could see it."

She studied the screen for several seconds until she realized it was something from MedLine. "God, I can't read this. It's got words like
oedema
and
homonymous hemianopia
in it." She paused as the words sank in, and suddenly she was wide awake.
"Hemianopia.
That's a visual deficit usually caused by a stroke. You don't see stuff on the left side or the right, depending on which hemisphere of the brain is involved." She looked at Fez.
"Oe
dema
is the antiquated spelling of
edema—"

"Thank you, I know," Fez said grimly. "Secondary swelling after a stroke."

"Who?" she asked.

"A rather disturbing number of people who have sockets. And not just strokes. Other neurological disorders, too. Seizures, sudden onset of multiple sclerosis, Huntington's chorea, Parkinson's—" Fez frowned. "Not enough Parkinson's cases, actually, to be significant." He blew out a breath. "The vast majority seem to be strokes of varying severity, and seizures. But the number of brain tumors ought to be ringing somebody's fire bell, and I don't think it is."

"All from sockets?" Sam asked, feeling her stomach turn over.

"They say there's absolutely no physical evidence connecting sockets to any of this," he said, scrolling the dense text forward several lines. "If you can believe them. They're calling it a 'statistically correct sampling of the populace,' unquote, mentioning other factors such as the effects of mutagens from environmental poisoning in the last century."

"We didn't kick you in the head, your grandparents did," Sam said.

Fez gave her shoulders a squeeze. "That's my Sam-I-Am."

"I'm not yours," she snapped.

He blinked at her in surprise for a moment, and then his face took on a wary look. "This is not the time to be mad at me, Sam."

"I know." She could feel her face getting warm. Great; she was blushing. She only did that maybe once in two or three blue moons, and it had to be now. She gave an awkward shrug. "Hey, I'm trying to be a grown-up. I don't do so bad most of the time."

He was looking back and forth, from the screen to her, caught between the two, and she wanted to kick herself. Something big and bad was happening, and she had to give herself away by getting pissy over a casual remark she'd heard from him a hundred times before.

"Anything I say to you is going to sound lame," he said after a few moments. "I can tell you, 'Sam, you're very young, and I'm a broken-down old wreck' or 'Jesus, Sam, why, you're young enough to be my granddaughter, it's too indecent,' and we both know the meanest Hollywood hack could probably write better dialogue."

She laughed a little in spite of everything. "Forget about it. I'm sorry. I make a shitty fugitive, and I make a shitty Mimosan, and sometimes I'm a shitty friend, too."

"It's a shitty world," Fez said lightly, and they laughed together.

"I'm sorry," she said again, sobering. "It
is
a shitty world. What about this? Is anyone doing anything?"

"Not as far as I can tell. They're slowing down doing the procedure in some places, and a new clinic in Schenectady that was supposed to open has been delayed. Every single case was reported to be neurologically sound before and after the sockets were put in."

"Then it's something going into the sockets," Sam said. "I mean, assuming it isn't twentieth-century mutagens."

"Well, you're not a shitty thinker, whatever else you may be. But according to this nothing like neurotransmitter is going into anyone's sockets. It's all just entertainment stuff—rock videos, Hollywood releases. Commercials."

"Commercials would do it—" She stopped. "Art told me way back when that Visual Mark could possibly have a stroke in the future. If he's among the cases, that's stone-home evidence they knowingly implanted sockets into the head of someone who was already manifesting a problem."

Fez went back several screens and scanned a list of names. "Not here," he said after a moment. "Even if he was, we'd go to jail proving it. Receiving stolen meds."

"I'd cut a deal. It would be worth it." She looked at him. "Hell,
I'll
go to jail. You stay here, have fun." She paused. "I mean, this is not my favorite place I've ever lived."

"I knew what you meant," Fez said serenely, going back to the screen he'd been looking at. "The thing to do right now, I think, is give this to Art and let him run with it. If it means anything at all, he'll figure it out."

"You have a lot of faith in him." Sam sighed. "Actually, that's what I was going to suggest. Art can get around the system, find out all kinds of things. Between him and us we may be able to figure it out. It sure worked before. I just don't know where we'll hide out this time."

Fez gave her a puzzled frown. "Pardon?"

"It just seems like every time Art makes some kind of big discovery, we end up wanted for questioning."

"Only once, Sam."

"See? A definite pattern." She wiped a hand over her face. "Shit, I'm tired." Fatigue had suddenly resettled itself on her like some tremendous roosting animal.
"And
I have to go to the bathroom. Pardon me while I go get my little pail and shovel to play in the sand. Don't worry, I'll bury it deep so it won't kill anybody." She got up clumsily and started away.

Fez caught her hand. "Maybe sometime we can sit down in my apartment—my new apartment, wherever and whenever that may be—and I can try to explain some of the things I want. And if things had broken just a little bit differently, who's to say? But I've always taken you seriously, Sam. In case you had any doubt."

She nodded tiredly. "That's okay. Just—" she shrugged. "Next lifetime, let's get it right." She staggered off in search of toilet paper.

He was in a sort of rest/sleep mode when he first sensed it.

A presence and not a presence, it seemed as if it were calling to him in a way, signaling, beckoning, from somewhere within the Diversifications system.

At first he thought it was Gina, coming on-line to be with him after all, but as he sensed more of it, he realized there was nothing of her in it. Abruptly he flashed on the idle meat, still in the pit. The records said it had disconnected and taken itself home, but it was really still there. Records were easy to manipulate, and he'd tried to keep them as normal looking as possible, so as not to let anyone know he wasn't actually disconnecting at all. The prospect of returning to the meat, of being weighted down, was less appealing all the time.

He wished he had some way of getting the meat to operate at least briefly on its own, without him right there to control it. Then it could disconnect, walk around, go home, and come back. The doctors would accept such a performance as normal, just as they had accepted the little show he had put on for them earlier. After all, they were still busy processing the hordes of Diversifications employees, the social-expression composers, the hardware designers, the administrative people, and the fabled Upstairs Team. Meat was easy to bamboozle. It had to expend so much energy and attention just dragging itself around that it tended to miss a lot.

In the midst of his ruminations on the meat problem, he felt the thing again, no closer but somehow stronger. From Rivera's area, he realized. His attention blinked into existence there, and without warning it went for him.

It was a voracious thing, mindless under a facade that was vaguely like himself; impressions of old sensations, pain, compulsion, the old drive toward oblivion. Juggernaut, wanting to devour and to infiltrate, rape, merge. There was a blip of consciousness or near consciousness to it, a shadow of consciousness all destructive in its makeup, and yet no more deliberately evil than cobra venom. It knew nothing else, and in a way it knew nothing at all, except that it would do what it would do.

He almost got away; it almost got him.

Both, for some infinitesimal measure of time
(damned Schrodinger
world)
—he was feeling himself being reeled into it and watching from a safe distance as it moved along each new item in the review queue, sowing itself in little flashes of yellow, in a driving beat—

He flickered away to the meat and tuned in the brain like a small, feeble radio.

The brain was still running, but it had a new balkiness. He could not have depended on it to work a routine; it would have garbled each line in the act of reading it.

Abrupdy he realized that if he could have removed this new shell of garbled operation, he would have something very similar to the thing sitting in Manny Rivera's area working away on the items in the frozen release queue.

In the meat-vernacular, I stroked out on them,
he thought, almost wonderingly.

It had been coming for a long time. The flashing lights, the floating sensation. From Medical's area he got the term
trans-ischemic attack
and the knowledge that they had known all along, since the night they'd grabbed the hacker, and they'd just pumped some antistroke medication into the meat during the detox and called it their best try and hoped that the sockets would help him.

Poor meat. Nobody cared. Not even me.

It hadn't really been a very big stroke. If he'd still been inside the meat, he would have been up and walking around, a little more vague than usual, a little more argumentative, talking crazy shit when he talked at all, and nobody would have noticed anything out of the ordinary about that.

You were good at that. Talking crazy shit and video. What made
America great.

The problem was, the meat was going to stroke out again, any time now, and when it did, that would be the big one, and as long as the wires were in the head, that meant the big one—the Big One—would charge right out of the meat, into the wires, into the system, where the little one was already waiting, and if—no,
when
—the two of them got together, they'd make something that couldn't be called a stroke, not anymore. Something like an unguided missile, a loose cannon rolling through the system, and when it found a receptor site, someone on-line with sockets—

Gina? Gina?

Her console was off, her pit empty, stone-home cold and dead, like she was never coming back.

Ludovic was gone, too. He turned a facet of his attention briefly to the top-down graphing of their respective worldlines. He couldn't be sure that they were together now, but it seemed more likely than not.

He flickered on Medical, but there was no one there, either. Dammit, what time was it? The middle of the night.

The kid in the penthouse.

———

Rivera had been right about one thing, Keely thought woozily. The good stuff didn't make you as sick. Or sick at all. He looked over at the antique liquor cabinet gaping open. Booze had never been his particular preference; it was like using a shotgun to pick off a mosquito, or maybe putting yourself in a trash compactor to swat a fly on your nose, too broad-spectrum. On the other hand, there was something to be said for being broad in the spectrum. He had climbed into that old trash compactor and found that it sure did the fucking job. Maybe not too visual, but it was getting the fucking job done that counted.

And that was a
big
fucking job, after the message from Rivera. It was still on the screen across from where he was sitting on the couch with the bottle trapped between his thighs.
I know you cracked my system. Damage
nowhere near as great as you anticipated. I'll be up to look into the final
disposal of your case tomorrow. You can expect the worst, if you like.