Synners

10

He knew trying to phone out was as futile as trying to walk out, but he'd had to make the attempt anyway. It was logged on the record of activity now, and Rivera would have something to say about it. But then, Rivera had probably been expecting it. The last surprise he'd given Rivera was the double cross; there wasn't going to be another one.

Keely shifted on the couch, putting a cushion under his knees and an extra pillow under his head. The corporate-issue mattress had been a little softer than what he was used to. So were the amenities; even the fresh-air-scented clothes they'd left for him were as soft as a baby blanket. Cush was the word, except for the extra-hard stuff on the phone line.

With a little concentrated effort, he should have been able to get around that, but the key word there was concentrated, or to be more precise, concentration. He just didn't have any. His mind was fogged over, in a very funny way. He felt alert enough, but his ambition was gone.

This was not exactly mysterious. Rivera had seen to it personally that he was fed and watered in this fancy stable, after he'd beefed up the watchdog program. The effects of whatever had been in the food or water or both would wear off eventually, certainly in time for the full overhaul of the security system Rivera had said he wanted. Along with a number of other things. Rivera was expecting plenty out of him. The only thing that really surprised him was that Rivera hadn't already had an in-house pet hacker to call his own.

But then, if he'd had, he wouldn't have needed to pay someone to crack EyeTraxx.

Keely looked over at the nine-screen dataline. The programs popping on and off barely registered with him. Occasionally he used the remote to turn up the sound on something that looked interesting, but everything took too much effort to follow. He wondered idly what Rivera had given him-mild Blank? Or just a garden-variety Thorazine derivative? Whatever it was, it was clever. He could think all he wanted, even dream up whole programs, but when he tried to do anything more complicated than press a button, the system failed. Not enough RAM, he thought with bitter amusement. Or too much RAM allotted to pure processing.

Jones was probably dead about it, dead several times over. Trying to deal with it. Because, as all therapy victims knew, il was not what happened, it was how you dealt with it. Thanks, brother, you're a big fucking help.

Not that he was going to win the Einstein Award for Smart Thinking himself. He wasn't sure which was more stupid- trying an end run around Rivera, or throwing in with him in the first place.

He'd sworn he wouldn't get involved with industrial espionage; in the past he'd turned down plenty of other offers from middle-management sharks looking for a way to turbo out of the corporate pack. But Rivera had interested him. Maybe because he'd been getting bored, or maybe because he'd felt the need to show Jones that B amp;E could be useful beyond personal gratification. Yah, play the big man for a dead man. The need to posture had gotten him more than he'd bargained for. Shit.

The fresh-air aroma from his shirt came up strong as he rolled over onto his side. Somehow he'd put disaster porn on the top-middle screen, and they were running the Twenty-Five Worst Air Crashes series. Pretty disgusting. He would change it as soon as he could muddle through a decision as to what to put on instead. Today was not his day for decisions. He hadn't been doing too well in that area lately anyway; his decision to hack Hall Galen Enterprises for Rivera had been the start of a sequence of bad career moves. So to speak.

Maybe if he'd known that Rivera had been Diversifications, he would have given him a hot dose of the Fish instead of service with a smile. But Rivera had been well shielded, communicating through an anonymous email-drop. They used the same one later to catch the data hacked out of HG.

Not an easy hack, but a pretty safe one, routed through a tangle of different nodes; in case HG detected anything, the cutoff would kick in on all the nodes simultaneously, frustrating even the swiftest trace-and-freeze. Of course, that had meant he couldn't access the data during the transfer, and Rivera was the only one with entry to the email-drop. Or so Rivera had thought. He had honored Rivera's request in letter but not in spirit, piggybacking a small catch-and-copy on the channel into the drop. If Rivera was stupid enough to think he would leave himself totally ignorant of what they were hacking, then Rivera deserved to get hacked himself, which was what he'd had in mind all along.

What the hell. The guy was a fucking thief, a pampered corporate thief who couldn't even do his own dirty work, and his mistake was trusting another thief. While his own mistake, Keely reflected ruefully, was believing that Rivera couldn't do any dirty work. And believing that everything Rivera said wasn't a fucking lie. Yah, I'm after financial records; I want to know if this company's teetering and what it would take to buy them out. That was a good one, just because it was so typical. Or maybe it hadn't been a lie, maybe that had been all Rivera had thought he was going to get.

The socket stuff must have been the first shit to hit the Rivera fan, so to speak, which had probably made it that much easier for Rivera to be so openhanded. Bearer-chips waiting in this or that electronic teller. He'd spent the chips happily enough and bided his time until Rivera closed the E-mail drop, which would trigger the catch-and-copy to zap its contents directly and untraceably to him.

Rivera's final message containing the promised bonus had come just before the C amp;C. The bonus had turned out to be the specs for Sam's system.

When he'd decrypted the data and seen that wild little nano-thing you could make from an old insulin or endocrine pump, he'd had a mental blowout. He hated Diversifications from the bottom of his heart, them and their overpriced crap ripped from hacker designs, repackaged and foisted off on a gullible public as hot, new product. Like the Dodge-M program, a little facade the busy career person could stick on the electronic mailbox; made it look like you hadn't picked up your email when you already had-that was nothing more than a fooler loop, dumbed down enough so that it responded only to the E-mail system and called dedicated so the public would think of it as reliable instead of an idiot release of a smart program.

And then the C amp;C had come in and his blowout had become a meltdown. Sockets, fucking brain sockets, and he'd given it to Rivera on a silver platter in exchange for a set of specs Sam had given him for free. Rivera had had the benefit of that for fucking weeks, while he'd been sitting with his thumb up his ass figuring he was dealing with some CPA whose idea of porn was a stolen spreadsheet.

He'd begun to wonder then if Diversifications hadn't cooked up the nano-system just for hackers, as a decoy. Maybe there was a sleeping load in the specs, and as soon as you ran them on your system, the alarm went out. Which meant Sam could be in danger.

A fast Dr. Fish search routine had traced her to the Ozarks. He still didn't know how the Fish had done it, and there hadn't been time to find out. Apparently she was safe, though. Safer than he'd been.

The sleeping load in the copied files hadn't awakened until he'd zapped the stuff to the clinic, after he'd divided another copy between Sam and Fez. The clinic had been his final stupid brainstorm. Later he thought he must have gone over the edge, thinking how it would be a great case of giving Diversifications a taste of their own medicine, see how they'd like finding out some cheap feel-good clinic had beat them out just by modifying some already existing implants and making them over into sockets.

Sockets from a feel-good joint, not some antiseptic, respectable corp like Diversifications-the government would have had a ban on them before you could say, well, feel-good. Not a whole lot of profit opportunity there for Diversifications. Wow, Rivera, what a bad bounce.

He couldn't say what had made him decide to split another copy between Sam and Fez any more than he could have said what they would do with it once they got together and figured out what they had, but it had seemed like a good idea at the lime. Backup in case something went wrong.

And he'd still been sitting at his laptop feeling like he'd bitten the biter when the cops had popped his lock and taken him straight to Rivera for a deal. A new deal.

You go state's evidence against the clinic, and nobody'll charge you for hacking Diversifications and violating confidential medical records in the process. How does that sound? Rivera hadn't had to explain how it could fall that way-there was no record of the email-drop, and since Diversifications had finessed EyeTraxx out of Hall Galen Enterprises weeks before, he was the only one holding a bag, and the bag was labeled Felony Hack. If they prosecuted the clinic with him as state's evidence, it would muzzle them and keep the sockets under wraps until Diversifications was ready to go public with their hot new development. And under the current state's-evidence law, he was bound over to the victim-i.e., Diversifications -for reparation service, in exchange for the felony charge being dropped. Reparation service didn't usually amount to house arrest in a corporate penthouse, but he imagined Diversifications' lawyers had been very persuasive with the judge. The meds had clinched it; if Visual Mark's medical records hadn't been in the data, he'd have been able to get a public defender to knock it down to a misdemeanor. But once you busted someone's meds, you might as well just bend over and kiss your ass good-bye. Even other hackers had no sympathy for you. Too many people had suffered from having their meds used against them some years back, during the Age of the Retrovirus.

The only satisfaction he'd gotten out of the whole thing was seeing the discomfiture on Manny Rivera's face when he realized the project that had taken the construction of a fancy installation in Mexico had been up and running in a lousy little feel-good mill with no amenities, no big salaries, and no Manny Rivera to boss it. Might take a while for the corporate brass to figure that out, but sooner or later someone was going to take note of the fact. And when they did-well, it was already too late for himself, but he could enjoy knowing that he'd shot Rivera with a sleeping load of a different but no less volatile kind.

He glanced over at the phone again. It might have been imagination, but he thought he felt a little more competent. Rest a bit longer and maybe he'd be ready to try canoodling around the outcall block again.

Or maybe a miracle would happen and Visual Mark, Diversifications Guinea Pig Number One, would come back and agree to get a message out for him. He'd been too dumbed down to ask before. Not that Visual Mark had seemed a whole lot better himself, but at least he was free. For the time being, anyway. Damn but he had to admire Diversifications' strategy on this. Pushing the implants by way of the artificial reality of rock videos-the ground swell of prelegal demand alone would probably kick things over in the States. Fuck the bribes to the AMA and the FDSA and the politicians-the vidiots would kill for it.

Truth to tell, he'd have killed for it himself. He wanted it as bad as everybody else was going to when the news broke, he couldn't deny that. He just didn't like the idea that Diversifications was in the driver's seat. All he'd wanted to do was steal the wheel and toss it out for grabs.

Nice try. He would remember it for as long as he could, because he had a feeling that by the time he saw anything besides the inside of this penthouse again, he might have forgotten all about it.

He looked at the phone again. Just a few more minutes and he was sure he'd be up for another try. Another wave of fresh-air aroma from his corporate-issue shirt hit him, and he dozed.