Synners

11

She could see why they called it a pit. It was cush; even the walls were carpeted. Down at the other end was enough junk for a personal gym-treadmill, stair-climber, a rack of pulleys with assorted handles, scaffold and platform assemblies, stacks of modular units that would probably make better furniture than what she had in her apartment. Hanging from the ceiling was a flying harness complete with joystick, in case she needed to levitate. They seemed to have thought of everything here, just like the Beater had said, and if you didn't see it, all you had to do was get your ass down to Central Stores.

The system was equally elaborate. It had a flatscreen as well as a headmount for the state-of-the-art hotsuit, a full sound system, and a keyboard about as wide as the farthest reach she could make stretching out both arms without locking her elbows. Plenty of capacity-two dozen programs in volatile storage wouldn't have taxed it. The phone was built in along with the controls for the room, including the printlock on the door, which she had left open. She could close it now just by touching a small lighted panel, but she didn't. The idea of being shut in completely had zero appeal.

She looked up at the open door, as though Mark might pop his head in at any moment and say, Wanna jam? And then, like the old days, they'd play a few rounds of Dueling Videos. Run this one, lover. Can you top it?

Not today. He'd about left a hole in the air after she'd popped the corporate stud-damfool just stepped between them at the wrong moment, and she hadn't been able to pull her punch. Christ knew where that clown's mind had been. There'd been a certain small amount of sour satisfaction in knocking him down-in knocking anyone down at that point-but it had dissipated right after. Guy looked even more lost than Mark, if that was possible.

Figured, though; go to get a few hard answers out of Mark, and he slipped out from under. It was the story of their life. Not the same as the story of their lives. They had their lives, and then they had this overlapping life, two circles intersecting each other, with the eye-shaped common ground between them. Sometimes she thought she knew that territory better than her own mind; other times she was sure it was a frontier only Mark knew. And then there were times like today, when neither one of them seemed to have any idea which end was up or which way was out.

Mark had always been a flake. By the time she'd managed to crack the video business, she'd practically memorized most of his work. He'd already been Visual Mark by then; it should have been Visualizing Mark. It was as if he had a pipeline to some primal dream spot, where music and image created each other, the pictures suggesting the music, the music generating the pictures, in a synesthetic frenzy.

Synner. Yah. The Beater's cutie-pie-tech term. If a synner was someone who continually hallucinated, then Mark was the original. Sometimes it seemed that when he looked at her, just looked, he had to search her out of some kind of wilder, larger, more baroque vision his brain had laid over the world. She'd wondered how long that could go on with him, how long it would be until some kind of critical threshold was reached inside that picture-filled brain, and what would happen then.

Twenty-umpt years ago that hadn't been a big worry. It had been a vague, not terribly real future they hadn't bothered to think about. Mark hadn't been burning out then, and she hadn't had crazy debts the size of Canada from the goddamn father who'd booted her ass into the Boston streets at fucking fourteen and years later took such a long fucking expensive uninsured time dying that the hospital had hunted her down with a court order to pay it off.

The Beater's old career had started to drag, but that hadn't been so real then, either. The Beater had still been young enough to feel immortal, at least on his better days. It was all, Wow, if we don't slow down, we're gonna die before we get old, except somehow it hadn't happened that way. So they'd all assumed it never would, not dying, not getting old-hell, not even growing up.

She looked around the pit. Definitely a place for grown-ups. Either they'd all gotten old, or they'd died and gone to video hell. Maybe both, and not necessarily in that order.

Someone was standing in the open doorway. The Beater.

The guy in the drab suit had only a vestige of the gong-banging wild animal she'd known when she'd first gotten into video. The straight chin-length hair had been slicked back, and she could see there was more gray among the brown. For that confidence-inspiring corporate look, no doubt. Most of the people he'd be moving among now wouldn't remember him from his performance days-his real performance days, when there had still been plenty of concerts, and video had been the come-on for the studio releases and the live events, not an end in itself.

If anyone had remembered him, Gina doubted that all the corporate grey in the world would have put him over. Hey, kids, this guy used to wear more paint than the Sistine Chapel and still holds the world distance record for projectile vomiting from a tour-bus window.

Just seeing him now, you could tell the party was definitely over, had been for some time. Everything's business, let's work again like we worked last century.

Did he know about the night-court follies starring Mark? Gina doubted it. But he had to know something; he had to know why Mark would have been with Galen and his twitch and Rivera. Maybe. The way the Beater told it, his new position at Diversifications was supposed to be something roughly equal to Rivera's. Yah, I'll still be your boss, you just gotta show up washed.

Yah. Twenty-umpt years and that was the first time the word boss had come up in polite or even impolite conversation, even back when there'd been half a dozen of them cranking video, before Galen had taken over and pushed the others out. And if you couldn't tell who was the real boss, you were probably flatline.

"Pretty posh, huh?" he said. "May I come in?"

She folded her arms. "Sure. Fly on down."

He started toward the little platform lift. "I said, fly."

He stopped and looked at her.

"Go on, jump. Or I'll drag your ass back up there and push it off."

He leaned on the rail. "Tell you what-I'll just get down any old way I can, and you can take a swing at me. I won't even duck."

She grinned flatly. "Heard about that already, did you."

"You've made your usual good impression, yes." He stepped onto the lift and pressed the down button. "Manny Rivera told me that a chemical leash would be available if you got completely out of control."

"Chicken-fucking-shit. He didn't say dick at the time."

"I'm your supervisor, I'm supposed to take care of your misbehavior." The lift thumped to a stop, and the Beater stepped off. All fifty-plus years were showing hard on him today, mostly in the slumping posture of his softening body and in the hint of jowls on his oblong face. She had an urge to rumple his hair, but there was so much lacquer on it, it would probably break off in her hand.

"Supervisor. It's come to that already." She sat down and put her feet up on the console. "What have they got here, a demerit system? Five black marks and I don't get my fucking Christmas bonus?"

"Stop it," he said quietly, resting one haunch on the desk a careful distance from her. "I didn't want this any more than you did."

"Hey, you had no control, right?" She spread her hands. "They musta given you a fat little package for your share of EyeTraxx, so if you don't like what you see, you can walk away. Not like some of us."

"Where would I go?" The Beater's face was expressionless. "I don't have enough to start up a new production company, not with what it takes today, and I couldn't deliver the artists if I did have it. Our groups are contractually bound to Diversifications now. And I can just see me strolling the Mimosa or hunting the clubs looking for talent. Sign with me, boys and Kids, I'm real old, and I know what I'm doing." He sighed. "It worked out shitty. Go with the money you'll get. Maybe you'll pay off your father before you get to be my age."

"Except for Mark, I'd walk," she said. "They could put me in fucking debtors' prison, and I'd walk anyway. Except for Mark." She gestured at the pit. "How long do you think he's gonna make it in a place like this?"

There was a funny change in the Beater's face then, as if a wall had gone up somewhere inside him. "Maybe a lot longer than you think."

"Yah." She offered him a leg. "Pull this one, it's got bells on it."

"Shit, how long do you think he'd last anyway?" the Beater said, disgusted. "You've seen what he's been doing lately- the same goddamn thing over and over, stealing from himself. We had to redo most of the last video he made behind his fucking back, or don't you remember?" He leaned forward. "He doesn't remember. He doesn't even know. Half the time he doesn't know where the fuck he is or how he got there. He needs to be taken care of."

"And Diversifications is gonna look after him like a mother."

"They've got ways to help him."

Gina's mouth dropped open. "Shit, what did you do, put him in for implants? You gonna turn him into that corporate vegetable I popped in the goddamn company cafeteria, make him deliver good product? You're his friend, shit, he lived for you, he saw fucking visions for you, and you quit on the music and you quit on him, too." She stood up and grabbed the front of his crisp white shirt. "I oughta give you the beating I was saving for him."

He pried her hand off him and held it. "Badass Gina Aiesi, always looking for a head to punch. I can see why you'd want to punch mine, but not Mark's."

She gazed at him for a moment and then laughed without humor. "I thought so. You don't know."

"What." His expression didn't change, but the grip on her hand tightened a bit.

"Mark made an appearance in court night before last. With Boy-Wonder Galen, Frankenstein Joslin, and Manny Fucking Rivera. Do the words state's evidence do anything for you?"

The Beater was mystified. "Mark was state's evidence?"

"No, that part was played by an unknown," she said sarcastically, slipping her hand out of his. "But Mark was in on it. I thought you were, too. Guess not. Maybe you want to talk to Rivera about your career path. Isn't that what all you hot executives talk about when you lunch it up?"

Now he looked troubled. "Mark in court… with Galen, Joslin, and Rivera…"

"It was some big deal. Instant gag order. Unlawful congress with a machine."

The Beater snapped to attention. She shrugged at his alarmed expression.

"Maybe Joslin was fucking an earth-mover, and they caught her at it. You figure it out, son." She paused. "Can you figure it out?"

"Some of it," he said slowly. "I think."

She grabbed his shirt again, closer to the collar this time. "Then you better fucking tell me what's going on."

He shook his head, pulling her hand off. "Not till I find something out for sure. I'll talk to Rivera." He started to get up, and she seized the waistband of his pants, yanking hard.

"Fuck Rivera and his mother, too, my man, you oughta be talking to me!"

The Beater pulled away from her, shoving her back into her chair. "Goddammit, Gina, will you grow the fuck up? What do you think this is, a hit-and-run? We lost EyeTraxx, it's over! The corporations took over the world, that's not my fault! Mark spent the last twenty-five years toxed, and now he's paying the price for it. Nothing stays the same, Gina, nothing works forever. If I don't like it, that's too bad. If you don't like it, that's still too bad."

She stared up at him darkly. "All I wanna know is just what it is I don't like. And how bad is 'too bad.' "

The Beater pressed his lips together. "Just do the videos. Just do the videos and hope for the best."

He stood on the lift with his back to her.

She sat for a while, thinking nothing, the pit so much empty space around her. In the old days at EyeTraxx, they'd have killed to get something like this. Or the Beater might have. Operating out of a converted warehouse hadn't made much difference to the videos. Sometimes they'd all been practically on top of each other, especially when the groups came in. Valjean and that cape, the crazy skiffle-revival group, the Little Cares; Vlad had done most of their videos, usually bouncing one of his seven kids on his knee while they all watched a rough cut on flatscreen. Galen had laid Vlad off early, and when Vlad had gone, he'd taken the Little Cares with him in a show of solidarity that had lasted through one more video, a gypsy production, and when it had failed, they'd all dropped out of sight.

Kim had gone next, Galen insisting they were losing money like crazy, and Jolene had stomped out after her. Kim had taken off for parts unknown, but Jolene was still around, picking up the work wherever she could. Guerstein had been Galen's final cut, Guerstein who did news like other people did dope, and that left just the three of them, the way it had been in the beginning, except that someone else owned them now, and Galen partitioned the warehouse and rented out three-fourths of it for storage. And that had lasted something over a year before the real end came.

It was strange, but sometimes she couldn't remember what it had been like; it was almost as if those years had never happened. Except for Mark; that was where the mileage really showed.

Just do the videos and hope for the best.

Sure. Do the videos. Do it their way. She looked around the pit. This was a place to make commercials, and fool with feature releases, and maybe play a few nifty games, but it wasn't rock'n'roll. Rock'n'fuckin'roll. Jesus. Yah, what the hell, we'll just put that in a nice clean box and keep it business, keep it all business, and maybe she'd go out of her mind in the nice clean box.

Grow the fuck up. She might give the Beater that one, but she wouldn't give him the rest of it, at least not until she knew what it was. If you had to surrender, you at least ought to get to know what you were surrendering to. They owed her that much, Mark most of all.

Just do the videos. Hope for the best. Wanna jam? Can you top it, lover? Not today.

She had just stepped out into the hall when the door directly across from her own opened, and she was face-to-face with the guy she'd punched. He froze, staring at her as if he thought she was going to pop him again. That was a good one. Or maybe he wanted to pick a fight, get his own back on her. He didn't look like the type, but you never knew. Maybe she should offer him a free shot.

Or maybe she should pop him again, for staring. "You want something?"

He shook his head wordlessly. His face looked pretty swollen, and there were three or four flesh-tone squares spotting his cheek.

"You know you can get toxed on that shit?" she said. He blinked at her uncomprehendingly, and she tapped her own cheek.

"Stuff builds up in your system, and you get off. Watch out, it can make you a little stupid."

Now he looked thoughtful; probably trying to decide whether he was toxed or not. Life was pretty fucking hard when you couldn't tell the difference.

"Wait!" he called.

She turned to him disinterestedly. "Yah?"

"I was just wondering…" He came out a little farther into the hall, touching his wounded face. "I was just wondering why you hit me."

"It was a mistake, all right? You got in the way."

"I see." He shrugged. "Well, then, why did you want to hit the other guy? Or anybody?"

"Is that supposed to be important to you?"

"I thought that since I wasn't going to get an apology, I might get an explanation."

Gina laughed. "You want a lot, don't you? Homeboy, you just keep asking. Who knows, maybe someday someone'll put an egg in your beer."

He almost looked like he understood. Hell, maybe he did. She headed toward the elevators.