Synners (9 page)

He smiled his dreamy little smile at her. "Ah, but I think we're approaching a kind of corruption unlike anything we've ever known before, Sam-I-Am. Sometimes I think we may be on the verge of an original sin."

She didn't get the reference, but she felt a sudden chill run up the back of her neck. "Goose walked over my grave," she said.

"To get to the other side," Rosa murmured. Sam gave her a look.

"Besides being rich," Fez said, "you have to be extra sharp these days to pick up any real information. You have to know what you're looking for, and you have to know how it's filed. Browsers need not apply. Broke ones, anyway. I miss the newspaper."

"Don't you get one?" Sam asked, surprised. "I do. Even while I was out in the Ozarks, I had no trouble at all getting
The Daily You."

"Feh.
That's not a newspaper. In my day we called it a dipping service, and it's not even a good one. A bunch of glorified headlines in a watereddown hodgepodge. Ah, at last." Fez froze the screen and began scrolling line by line. "Dr. Lindel Joslin, installed at blah, blah, blah, brain-path research, blah, blah, receptors, receptors, more receptors—" Several more lines marched up the screen. "Here it is. Hm. She's an implant surgeon. Research completed under the auspices of Hall Galen Enterprises and EyeTraxx, any and all subsequent patents now wholly owned by Diversifications, Inc."

"Patents?" Rosa said.

Fez shook his head and read a little farther before straightening up, pushing his hands against the small of his back. "Can't make head or tail of the rest of it. Medspeak."

Rosa laughed. "Crank that translator into overdrive, and let's see what she can do."

Sam was still studying the screen. "It still doesn't explain why some esoteric biz item about a takeover of a rock-video company would have a crossref in MedLine."

"Well, obviously because this Dr. Joslin was being funded by EyeTraxx," Rosa said. "Diversifications must have taken over her funding, so they've taken over whatever she was working on. It begs the question of why Eye Traxx was funding her. Tax shelter?" She nudged Fez.

"One possibility." He folded his wiry arms. "Actually, I think I can shed some light on the question of the cross-ref, and Sam, I think you can provide some of the fill-in details."

Sam looked at him, startled. "I can?"

"You only have part of Keely's zap," he said. "I have the other part. You show me what you have, and I'll show you what I have, and between the two of us, maybe we'll have something for real."

She grinned. "You'll show me yours if I show you mine?" She tucked a hand in her right pants pocket where the erstwhile insulin pump was resting against her thigh. "My chips aren't compatible with your system. Mind using mine?"

Fez lifted an eyebrow. "You have a system cleverly concealed about your person?"

She took the pump out of her pocket and showed it to him and Rosa. Fez's surprised expression deepened as he squinted at the palm-sized unit on her outstretched hand. "To my knowledge you're not a diabetic, especially not one whose body keeps rejecting pancreas implants. Very clever." He started to take it from her and spotted the wire snaking under the tail of her shirt. "Oh, God, Sam, not really."

"What?" said Rosa. "What's going on?"

Sam lifted her shirt just high enough to show where the two needles went into the fleshiest part of her abdomen. "You were wrong when you figured I was too busy roughing it to check out the latest in nanotechnology," she told Fez, a little smugly. "The Ozarks turned out to be about the best place I could have gone with my hot hack. I found a lab where I could trade scut work for work space."

"Oh,
God!"
Rosa made a gagging noise. "That's an atrocity! You're
sick!"

"I'm a potato clock," Sam corrected her.

"You're a potato
head,"
Fez said grimly. "What's wrong with batteries?"

"Not personal enough. No, no, I'm kidding." She laughed at his revolted look. "It's just an alternative power source. You can use batteries, or house current with an adapter, but if the power fails from one or the other, it's crash time. This never crashes. The Dive had this stored in a very out-ofthe-way place. I bet my father doesn't even know about it. Probably they meant it for people working in isolated areas under hostile conditions— Antarctica, surface of the moon, places like that."

"Good for espionage, too." Fez winced. "What do you use for a screen?"

She put on the sunglasses. "You'll have to adjust the focal length for your own eye. Projects right onto the retina. How bad s your astigmatism?"

Fez touched the wire. "Hurt much?"

"Stings when I first put it on, but after that I almost forget It's there."

"That's because you're
sick,"
Rosa said, refusing to look. "They'd never have put it over, never, never,
never."

"She's right," said Fez. "Most people will reject anything that requires them to be a pin cushion. The hard-core diabetics and the endocrine cases do it, but ask them if they like it. Someone in Diversifications' research and development lab has a real ghoulish streak." He handed the pump back to Sam. "Give me your software and drive. I've got an adapter."

She fetched the chip-player from her bag and handed it over. He searched through a couple of desk drawers before he came up with a coil of thin cable. Plugging one end into the chip-player, he connected the other end to his system.

A moment later thrash-rock blasted tinnily from a small speaker. Fez looked pained. "You didn't tell me it was still encrypted."

"Of course. You think I was gonna chance getting caught with naked stolen data? You need the potato-head system here to decrypt, unless you want to wait around for one of your own programs to work on it. Might take a few days, though. Keely learned encryption from me."

"Only hours," he said loftily, and then beckoned to her. "Come on. But we'll run it on
my
power, thank you. I've got a first-rate generator in case you're paranoid about the Bigger One hitting just when things are getting good."

"Thanks," Rosa said faintly, still standing with her back to them. "Tell me when it's safe to look."

Fez found the adapter socket on the side of the pump and used another connector to hook it up to his system's power source. When Sam was sure it was running, she slid the needles out of her flesh. "It's safe now, Rosa," she said.

"Now put that away," Fez ordered sternly, "and don't ever let me see you grandstanding like that again."

"Yes, Daddy."

He gave her a look. She punched up the decoding program, and the music cut off immediately. An image appeared on the screen, replacing the dataline. They all stared at it in silence.

"So, what do you think," Sam said finally. "Is that a diagram of some gardener's root system? One little thirteen-year-old dandelion, maybe? Or did things really get weird enough for that to be a synthetic neuron? The only thing that throws me is this here." She pointed at a fairly wide, hollow line extending up from the lumpily triangular blob in the center of the screen. "From what I remember of the brain science I had in biology—"

"You had brain science in biology?" Rosa asked.

"Advanced placement classes, when I thought I was going to college. Anyway, that should be either an axonal fiber to carry outgoing impulses, or a dendrite to receive incoming information. Since this is a cortical neuron, I mean. Still with me, everyone?"

Fez looked at her sidelong. "Go on, Professor Potato Head."

"Okay. Dendrites look like November treetops in New England, and this is too thick proportionally to be an axon." She ran a finger along a line trailing from the base of the blob. "That's a real axon, perfectly in scale. This thing on top reminds me more of a bus than anything—"

"Channel," Rosa said. "Everything's a channel now."

Sam shrugged. "They can put it on the stage and call it Rosebud for all I care. What I really can't figure is why you'd have something like that on a neuron when you already have an axon to do the job. This is wide enough to be a real bus—excuse me,
channel
—and take two lanes of traffic, one going in, one going out." She paused. "I think Keely found out someone at the Dive is making a cortex. Custom-making, I mean. Someone new there. This Dr. What's-Her-Bod, the MedLine cross-ref. That would be the patent, wouldn't it, Fez? And this is going to be their new hardware, and it's going to make every other piece of machinery obsolete. It's kind of weird that Dr. Frankenstein would work on something like this at EyeTraxx. Hall Galen Enterprises is one of those lotta-fingers-lotta-pies things. He could have stuck her in any of his other pies."

"Not if he needed a good tax write-off for EyeTraxx," Rosa said. "Or a good hiding place till they were ready to go public. If the doctor kept volatile records stored on deck, and someone looking for new videos cracked her, they wouldn't know what it was and pass it by. Keep your best whiskey in a bottle marked 'mouthwash.' "

"Yah, but tax write-offs have to be related to the business you put them in," Sam said. "I don't know dick about taxes, but I know that much."

"So he lied. You don't think Hall Galen would lie to the tax man?" Rosa shrugged. "Maybe he called it new video formats or something."

Fez's smile disappeared completely; it was one of the very lew times Sam had ever seen that happen. "Rosa, dear, that's exactly what he called it. It's on the part Keely gave me." He turned to Sam, looking troubled. "Keely tried to divide up the data so that if either of us was caught along with him, the other would have enough to raise hell with. When he divided it, he inadvertently saved our asses. But he also destroyed some of the information."

Sam shook her head, confused.

"I found the remains of a sleeping-load flare embedded in what he zapped me. When he spliced the data, he ruined the flare. If he'd just duped it and zapped it whole to both of us, we'd probably be in the can right now. Or somewhere."

"Wherever Keely is," Rosa said soberly. "I'm surprised he didn't spot it."

"It was a very good flare. Good as hacker work. I'd have probably missed it myself if I hadn't found it in the ruins. Anyway, I'll show you what I've got, but I don't know if we're going to be able to make much out of it after all." He took a box from the bottom drawer and selected a chip about half the size of the nail on her littlest finger.

A few moments later the other screen lit up with a 3-D graphic of a human brain seen in three-quarter profile from llie left. The legend at the bottom of the screen said,
New-VidFmt.

"Looks like medporn to me," Rosa said.

"There's an overlay," Fez said, "but it won't make much sense." He pressed a button on the console, and a new graphic superimposed itself on the first. It seemed to be a chart pin-pointing several areas of the brain, but the accompanying notations were garbage symbols. "Well, Professor Potato Head? Any ideas?"

"Implants," Sam said promptly. "Stone-home bizarro. I can buy the idea that the Dive is going into music videos faster than the idea that they're gonna open a clinic."

"I thought of implants, too," Fez said, "but from what I know of implantation, there are too many sites here, and they aren't deep enough."

Adrian had been standing behind them looking on silently. Now he leaned forward and touched each pinpointed spot on the brain. "Frontal lobes, temporal lobes, parietal lobes, auditory cortex, visual cortex. My lesion's back here," he added shyly, patting the back of his head.

Fez hit another button on the console, and the image rotated to show the left profile briefly before it was replaced by a diagram of the brain in cross section.

Rosa looked at Adrian. "Name 'em and claim 'em."

He shrugged. "Flank steak, shoulder roast, brisket?"

Another overlay appeared, showing an incomprehensible jumble of lines coming out of the brain stem and radiating throughout the cortex, seemingly at random, as if someone had dropped a wad of tangled yarn on the diagram and photographed the image.

"Can you take the overlay out for a second?" Sam asked, peering closely at the screen.

He obeyed. She studied the image carefully and then shook her head. "You can put it back."

"See something?"

"I see it in that mess, and I thought it was in the underlying graphic, but I was wrong. It's in the overlay. But I can't see it clearly enough with all that spaghetti or whatever it is."

"What does it look like?" Fez asked her.

"Well, it looks a little like it might be the reticular formation—"

Rosa threw up her hands. "You hit my limit for the technical shit. I'm a hacker, not a neurosurgeon. You babble if you want—I quit."

"It's where you dream," Sam said.

Rosa paused in the act of turning away, her eyebrows straining toward her hairline. "Okay,
that's
interesting. If you'll pardon the expression."

"Or is it the part that keeps you from falling into a coma?" Sam frowned. "Dammit, now I can't remember."

"Blah. Just when I thought it was getting good." Rosa plumped down on the couch.

"Never mind. Those scribbles could be just more garbled data." Fez touched the console again, and the screen changed to show a view of the brain from behind, the center portion highlighted. "This is one of the very few readable texts I've found," he said, pointing to a small legend in the bottom left corner of the screen, "and it doesn't tell me a thing. 'Visual Mark.' "

Sam bent to look. "It sure as hell does. It tells you whose brain this is. Which makes this a medical record. Shit, no wonder Keely jumped. They fucking
clobber
you for busting meds." She straightened up and turned to Fez again. "You don't follow any rock video, do you?"

"Not if I can possibly help it."

"Visual Mark is a guy who works—worked—for EyeTraxx. I guess he's at the Dive now. And either he's got implants, or they're going to give him implants."

"So what?" said Rosa from the couch. "Half the world's got implants. Maybe he's some kind of addict, maybe he's burning Out. Wouldn't surprise me."

"But what about my neuron?" Sam moved to the other screen again. "Where does that fit in with this? And where's Keely? Did he get away, or did they can him?"