Synners (49 page)

"The other two screens crapped out this morning before we opened," the bartender said, and pointed at the ceiling. "I raised em up out of the way until I can get them fixed. Repair's supposed to come this afternoon and take care of them."

"I don't think they'll be here," Gabe murmured.

"It's like a quake, you know? Nothing's going right." The bartender flipped back to the top of the network menu and selected Cultural, getting another list beginning with Dance and ending with Museums, Children. She moused halfway down to Street/Open Air Performance and thumbed a button on the remote. Instantly the screen showed a dance group flinging themselves along the line of cars on Santa Monica Boulevard.

"God, I just
hate
street ballet," said the woman on Gabe's right. "It's
so
corny."

"Not the point. We're getting footage of the boulevard again," the bartender said. "No commentary, but we do our best."

There was a clicking sound. "Testing . . . test... all right. To those who may be watching, on-line L.A. local news is commandeering this channel temporarily. Due to technical difficulties we are unable to continue broadcasting on our usual—"

There was a burst of static on the speakers, but the picture remained clear. The ballet dancers were far down the line of cars; several of the nearest vehicles were still occupied. People waved from the windows, and someone held up a hastily handprinted sign:
DON'T WAIT UP FOR ME,
HARRY!

"—power outages, brownouts, and scrambled signals all over the general area and possibly beyond," said a new voice, very young and very nervous. "As far as we can tell now, L.A. is effectively cut off communicationswise from the surrounding region and from the rest of the state. No quakes have been reported anywhere in the west. Authorities suspect some kind of vandalism but have been unable to trace the trouble to anything like an, uh, original, uh, source—" There was a full ten seconds of dead air while the cam panned up and down the line of cars.

What's wrong with this picture, Gabe thought suddenly. The machinery of the city was melting down, and they were all just watching it happen on TV. He wondered if Gina had reached Diversifications yet, if she'd found Mark. He had the very strong feeling that he should get out of there and try to make it to West Hollywood any way he could, even if he had to walk over the hoods of gridlocked vehicles like stepping-stones. At the same time he was afraid to leave an available working screen. Something told him he might not find another very soon.

The young voice on the dataline began repeating the news about the impending gridlock, the collision, and the driver who had had a stroke. Onscreen the image began to ripple a bit, as if it were melting, and the colors of the vehicles began shifting toward whichever end of the spectrum they were closest to. The body of one vehicle started to pulse in a way that reminded Gabe of breathing.

Disturbed, he looked away from the screen, rubbing the back of his neck tiredly. He felt a bit odd, a bit fuzzy mentally, as if he had just woken up. Without warning the memory of the crazy rock star with the cape popped into his mind, and somehow he just knew the pulsing of the shadows on the cape and the image of the vehicle on-screen were identical.

Which had to be ridiculous, since one had nothing to do with the other, and even if it had, it was just an image on a screen, just a screwed-up image on a high-res external screen, not something that could affect you in any real, lasting way. There were no patterns produced from any screen that could do anything more than hypnotize the susceptible, and that was easily counteracted; there was no
picture
from any source that could actually
hurt
anyone—

"Change for the machines."

The voice was so quiet that Gabe wasn't sure at first that he hadn't imagined it. He turned to the woman on his right, feeling cold. "What did you say?" he asked.

She was staring at the screen as if she were seeing signs and wonders unfold on it. Something flickered at the edge of his peripheral vision, and he turned to look. It was no more than a fast flash, something just beyond the upper limit of subliminal, but the whole picture was vivid in his mind, some strange body of water and a stony shore, and the soft silhouette of someone standing on it. The image seemed strangely familiar, but he was sure he had never seen it before. For that matter, he wasn't sure he had seen it just now.

"Damned Schrodinger world," the woman muttered, running a hand over her head. "Never know till you look, do you? Never know who it'll be, waiting there for you ..."

Gabe was about to ask her if she had sockets when she fell backwards off the stool, hitting the floor flat on her back.

"God, I
hate
drunks," said the man on Gabe's other side as several people rushed to the woman's side.

"She isn't drunk," Gabe said. He wanted to go to her, but he was frozen in place, watching as someone lifted her head. One wide staring eye was fiery red, and a thin line of blood trickled from her nose. A man with gilded hair turned to look at Gabe suspiciously.

"You
hit
her?"

Gabe shook his head. "No. I never touched her. She just— fell."

The woman's eyes focused on him briefly then, and her lips moved, silently forming one word before she went limp. "I think she's dead," someone said nervously. "Call an ambulance," said someone else.

"No, call Life-Flyer."

"Call the
cops. They'll
call Life-Flyer."

"She's got sockets," Gabe said. "Look in her wallet or purse, if she's got one. There should be a card."

"Right here," said the man with the gilded hair, holding up her wrist. There was an old-fashioned ID bracelet around it. "Says she's socketed and allergic to chocolate. I don't think she's had any chocolate." He frowned up at Gabe. "You think her sockets blew up?"

"I don't know," Gabe lied, his voice faint. He kept his back to the screen, imagining himself on the floor next to the woman in roughly the same condition. It could have happened; why hadn't it?

He had to get to Diversifications. The bartender was calling the police, or trying to, as he slipped off the bar stool, made his way through the people to the door, and waded out into the gridlocked city.

He'd had no idea there was so much infection floating around in the system, coming in, going out, drifting like ocean-going mines or sitting camouflaged in various pockets and hidey-holes.

What he had sometimes thought of as the arteries and veins of an immense circulatory system was closer to a sewer. Strange clumps of detritus and trash, some inert and harmless, some toxic when in direct contact, and some actively radiating poison, scrambled along with the useful and necessary traffic. The useful and necessary things were mostly protected, though the protection made them larger, to the point where some of them were slower and more unwieldy than they should have been.

There was an ecology here, gradually becoming more and more unbalanced, polluted, and infected. Ecological disaster had been inevitable, even before the stroke had been released into the system; there was no way around it. It would be universal. Computer apocalypse, a total system crash.

And he would cease to be.

He had escaped that fate once by leaving the worn-out, failing meat, only to find the same thing creeping up on him Out Here.

He wouldn't let it happen. He couldn't. He would warn them, show them somehow, make them stop before the whole system went down in a firestorm. God damn them all, he thought furiously, God damn them all for doing what they always did, on every level in every way they could. Whole portions of the physical world had yet to be reclaimed from the unusable, unlivable state that negligence and malevolence had consigned them to, and the fuckers
still
didn't get it, they
still
didn't understand you weren't supposed to shit where you ate.

Nor did you, when you were meat and busy getting toxed.
The thought came at him from nowhere and everywhere, in the simultaneous container and content that he was now. He had a moment of shame for his own blindness.

He spread his awareness out cautiously. It was like being in many places at once, taking in the information that came at the speed of light and working in nanoseconds as matter-of-factly as he had once worked in minutes and hours to shape it into something understandable for himself. He was already accustomed to the idea of having multiple awarenesses and a single concentrated core that were both the essence of self. The old meat organ would not have been able to cope with that land of reality, but out here he appropriated more capacity the way he once might have exchanged a smaller shirt for a larger one.

Gina's identification flashed at him as soon as it entered the system; in less time than it would have taken him to draw a breath, he had located her, but contacting her had been far more difficult. The little one had splattered itself unevenly through the traffic system, jumping in through the doubleheaded receivers that accommodated both the dataline and GridLid. But in the larger context of the city, the little stroke had to work harder, at least for the time being. That most of its capacity was taken up with the act of infection made it less of a threat to him; at least he had been able to contact her for a few seconds.

It was a disappointing contact; he couldn't be sure she had believed, and he had been unable to offer anything to prove it. But if he could make her go to his old body in the pit, then he wouldn't have to depend only on the kid in the penthouse, where his awareness had chopped off suddenly and permanently not long before he'd found Gina.

Neither the kid nor Gina would have understood that, how he could have been absent from the penthouse and yet still there in a way. It wasn't something he really understood himself, but that didn't matter now. That part of his awareness was as lost to him as any amputated limb, which had to mean the kid was lost to him, too.

It was up to Gina now to keep the Big One contained in the flesh. Every bit of the little one Out Here in the bigger context was waiting for it. And wherever it was awaited, it would go.

Even as he realized that, he realized his presence had made it worse. To escape being devoured by it, he would have to spread further, possibly amputating a great deal of himself, confined in some other location, losing his enlarged awareness. Or perhaps enlarging himself that much would dissipate him, fragment him into many little aspects of the same program, each one self-contained and out of contact with the other. Perhaps then he would lose his memory and forget that he had been human once.

He was still wondering what would become of him when he felt the first shock wave, followed by the last message he would ever receive from the meat.

———

She didn't really understand what she was seeing at first. Mark was lying on the mat on the floor of the pit pretty much as she'd left him. At the console was some very young kid she'd never seen before, studying the screen so intently between taps on the keyboard (entering something? just browsing?) that he was completely unaware of her standing up on the catwalk. Moving quietly, Gina climbed down the ladder.

The kid saw something on the screen, and his fingers danced rapidly over the keys. He leaned toward the speaker. "Disconnect now?" he asked. Apparently the answer was no; the kid shook his head and muttered something. Probably another fucking child-prodigy doctor bused in to Diversifications' home implant program. This one had the sense to see all wasn't well, but it was too fucking little, too fucking late.

Gina moved along under the catwalk, skirting around to approach Mark behind the kid's back. Ripping the wires out of his head would either bring him out of it in a hurry or blow him up.
Video turned it loose. Turn me off.
Take out wires. Be there for me.

She looked down at Mark's inert body, still curled up on the mat.
Shoul
da kissed him when you had the chance, back in Mexico,
she thought suddenly.
Back in Mexico, when he first put the wires in when you were there.
If you'd leaned down then, put your mouth on his, he might have stayed.
Because after that nothing could pull him back, not love, not sex, not you.
Not nothing, not no-how.

Thou shalt not fear?

The long, greying brown hair had fallen back from his gaunt face as if he were already dead.
We don't grieve for what might have been in rock
n'roll. We just keep rockin on.

This ain't rock'n'roll. It ain't been rock'n'roll for a long fucking time.
This is business, and money, and change for the machines, but it ain't
rock'n'roll.

The kid was still busy at the console, running some kind of complicated program that showed mostly numbers in three columns on the monitor. She knelt down next to Mark and put her fingers gently against his cheek. His face was comfortably warm. She lifted his head and wrapped the wires around her other hand, getting a good grip on them.
"What are you
doing?!"

She jumped, nearly yanking the wires out of his head right then. "I'm taking care of him," she said. "Get your ass back to Medical and pretend you never saw this. If he dies, I'll turn myself in."

"I'm taking care of him," he said. "I'm overriding within the program for the connections. If I can make them let go, we might get him to a doctor before he strokes out big."

She felt her mouth drop open. "Who the fuck are you? Whadda you mean, 'stroke out big'?"

Mark's body gave a jerk.

"Aw,
shitl"
the kid yelled and lunged for the console. "Disconnect! Disconnect
now!"

Mark jerked again, and his head flopped out of her grasp as he rolled over onto his back, quivering and twitching. Bubbles of saliva bloomed on his lips; his left arm flailed, slapping against her thighs.

"Disconnect! Disconnect!" the kid was yelling desperately, and Mark kept twitching and bucking as she tried to get her hand free of the wires. She could feel how they were pulling at his head, and she had the horrible thought that if they pulled away now, they'd turn his skull inside out.