Synners

15

They kept tripping over Jones's body in Rosa's tiny apartment, but there was nowhere to put him, so they had to leave him lying around. Human clutter; how did we reach this pinnacle of civilization, Sam wondered.

"I've got to stay away from him," she told Rosa. "Sometimes I'm afraid I'll just start kicking him, and I won't stop till there's just shit and blood, and I'll be kicking that, too."

"Life's so unfair," Rosa said. "You care about Keely, and he loves that pile of refuse."

"Keely's the brother I never had," she said shortly. But in spite of everything, it felt good to be back. Rosa split some gypsy jobs with her, mostly scut work, recalibrating automated inventory programs, whipping up a rip-off of the Dodge-M, cheaper, faster, and smarter than the Dive's clumsy, overpriced notion of a fooler loop, encrypting data for spenders who didn't care to answer too many questions as to why they needed encryption. The work kept them both in enough bearer chips to survive on. And it was good to be back on the net, popping around looking for Dr. Fish's Answering Machine to see if anyone had uploaded anything interesting lately, seeing what crazies had come on-line and which ones had crashed themselves. And going over to Fez's place to see if he'd gotten Keely's zap figured out yet.

Fez seemed to be making better progress with Adrian's Mandarin translation program. Privately she felt much the same as Rosa did: Spoken Text wasn't so bad. She'd been known to use it herself when she wanted the illusion of Company. But Fez was adamant that the boy should be able to read, and the kid wasn't averse to the idea. What the hell; it wasn't her worry. Not that she knew of, anyway.

But then, up until she'd come back from the Ozarks, she wouldn't have thought Jones would have been her worry.

"How can he go on like that?" she said. "How can his system lake it? He should be in massive failure of everything."

"Fuck if I know," Rosa said grimly. She gripped the wheel of the cramped rental hard with both hands, glancing at the nav-unit screen bolted into the dash, and made a sudden hard right turn. "He's not continually comatose, just sleeping a lot. Regular sleep, I mean. Depressed people do that, sleep like it's gonna be outlawed. But he was up last night for a while."

"He was? I must have been dead myself."

Rosa made a left that threw her against the door. "Sorry. GridLid says bad clog, we'll have to go around it." She nipped around a bullet-shaped tour bus that was obviously lost and slipped into the gap just ahead of it, almost kissing the bumper of the old-style stretch limo in front of them. "Conspicuous consuming pigs," she said. "Who do they think they're impressing?-Yah, he got up, drank all the milk, checked the dataline for mail, futzed around, and then went back to his lying-in spot. I'd've gotten up except I was more asleep than awake myself. I don't think he's actually been dead for quite a while."

"He looks stone-home dead to me all the time now," Sam said. "He looks like the Grim Reaper's no-account brother."

Rosa stomped the brake, slamming the steering wheel with one hand. "Goddammit, a clog." She flicked a finger against the screen. "Damn you, GridLid."

Sam craned her neck out the window. "It's just a little one. We'll be out the other side in ten minutes."

"Who're you trying to shit? More like twenty. Fucking GridLid's so stuffed with viruses that someday the viruses are just gonna take over. Probably do a better job, too." She leaned an arm on her open window and rested her cheek on her fist. "Wake me when we're totaled."

"Don't go to sleep now, this is the fun part. Listen, what else do you know about this program Fez is running Keely's stuff through?"

"Only what I told you," Rosa sighed, running her right index finger around the circle of the steering wheel. "It's some kind of hyperutility embedded in an AI assembly."

"With viral aspects, something to do with Dr. Fish routines."

"That's the one."

"And you're going to keep giving me variations of that answer until I drop deader'n Jones."

Rosa looked over at her wearily. "Look, I've had my hands full trying to keep up with the gypsy jobs I'm on the wire for so I can keep paying that extortion they call rent, while making sure the resident deader is still warm, and running docket searches to find out if Keely's a fugitive or in custody, and if our names're on warrants as his known associates. You want the stone-home honest God's truth, I don't know what the fuck it is. I don't know where Fez got it, and I don't understand it. It's a program. It's a virus. It's an AI. It's a breath mint. It's a dessert topping. It's the greatest thing since sliced toothpaste."

Sam shrugged. "Jesus, just tell me how you feel, okay?'

"What, and lose my mystery? Sorry, I'm tense as fuck-all. I've seen a lot of people get canned, and I've seen a lot o people fade out so they wouldn't get canned, and I've dodged a couple of warrants myself in the past, and I don't like hanging around waiting for the ax to fall."

"We don't know anything for sure-'

"I know," Rosa said firmly. "If Keely weren't canned, we'd have heard from him by now, and Jones wouldn't be cluttering up my floor. If they've got a gag on it so hard that I can't even find Keely's name on the public record, it's got to be bad enough to send us all down the black hole."

" 'Dive, dive,' " Sam said.

"Damnsure." The traffic broke, and they sped toward East Hollywood.

They arrived at Fez's just in time to catch him coming out the front door of the building with Adrian.

"Doctor's appointment," Fez told them. "It's a condition of Adrian's emancipation that he keep regular in-person appointments with a neurologist. Since he's underage and technically brain damaged."

"That could describe half the hackers in town and almost everyone on the Mimosa," Rosa said. "No offense." She flipped the keycard to her rental at him. "Take mine. There's a line at the lot up the block."

Fez flipped it back. "I don't drive."

"I knew that." She looked at Adrian.

"Underage and brain damaged," Adrian said miserably. "No license."

"Okay, I'll take you," Rosa said. "Don't argue. If you go looking for a bus, you won't get back till Adrian can vote. But my rental won't take four."

Fez passed his keystrip to Sam. "Don't hack the Pentagon on a traceable line."

She let herself in and flopped down on the couch, feeling slightly annoyed that Fez was conveniently out when he knew she wanted to question him about the program. Viral aspects-what the hell was that supposed to mean? And why was it taking days?

On the other hand, it felt great to be in an empty apartment. The last time she'd spent any amount of time alone had been in the Ozarks, and she hadn't realized just how much she'd missed having some solitude.

Of all the things Catherine had always hammered on her about, being solitary had not been one of them. If anything, Catherine was even more solitary than she was, which had always made her wonder how her mother could have even considered getting married. And hooking up with someone like Gabe seemed completely out of character.

Not that her father had the soul of a game-show host, exactly. He spent hours alone doing his loathsome job, but he minded it more. Or maybe that was just the job itself-

Fuck it. With at least two hours guaranteed to herself, she wasn't going to piss it all away playing that bad old tape in her head. She'd left some chips in Fez's desk with a few games sketched out; she could fool around assembling those for a while.

As she was reaching for the power button to one of the screens, it popped on all by itself.

INFORMATION YOU REQUESTED

NOW AVAILABLE

(THE DOCTOR IS IN)

Sam sat down very slowly, keeping her hands away from the console, and waited to see what was going to happen next.

It was a magnificent thunderstorm, captured in its entirety on the central Kansas plains, where there was nothing to obstruct the view from horizon to horizon. Little had been done to it, except for added detail in the billowing grass and the shapes of the clouds. And the lightning. The lightning had undergone a little minor orchestration for more dramatic timing. It was possibly one of the best environmental sequences of any kind, and Gabe wasn't sure it really fit in the Head-hunters scenario, but the space was there in the program to add an optional environment, and he had popped it in just because he'd gotten tired of swampland and voodoo. The Head-hunters program had accepted it easily, but if it didn't work, he could always take it out again.

The strange little glitch that had been popping in and out on him since the entertainment sequence in the French Quarter was gone now. He kept looking around the barn that he and Marly and Caritha had taken shelter in, expecting to see the dark spot suddenly reappear, but apparently it was a problem confined to the visual portion of the original Head-hunters video. Which was a relief; for a while he'd been afraid he'd pushed too hard by putting in Marly and Caritha and overloaded the capacity.

Thunder growled briefly and then suddenly let loose with a crash that shook the barn. "That was prima," said Marly from her post by one of the open windows. A cold wind blew her hair straight back, and she leaned into it with pleasure, letting the shotgun rest against the bale of hay she was sitting on. "One thing you don't get on the Gulf is good thunderstorms. Plenty of hurricanes, but not many thunderstorms. None this good, anyway."

Gabe sat down next to her on the bale. In the distance a large tree was whipping its leaves from side to side furiously.

"Hey," Caritha called from the loft. "It's clean and dry up here. We got a place to spend the night."

"You really want to stay here that long?" Gabe hollered over the thunder.

Caritha appeared at the top of the ladder and climbed down, her rifle slung across her back and the cam dangling from the crook of her arm. "Unless you want to mix it up with the bad guys out here, where there's plenty of land for them to bury our bodies in. We'll be fertilizer for the winter wheat crop if we're not careful."

"They won't come," Marly said confidently. "Too exposed. We could see them approach and pick them off. And no one's going to fly a 'copter out in weather like this. Hello." She lifted her hand and Gabe saw an enormous emerald grasshopper squatting on the back of it, its forelegs resting on the base of her largest knuckle. There was more thunder then and a violent strobe of lightning, reflected in the grasshopper's shiny copper-colored eyes.

"Wow, that's what I call passion," Caritha said, kneeling on the bale next to Gabe. He smiled to himself; in a hotsuit with no genital coverage, thunder and lightning was what he had to call passion, too.

The thunder rolled long and hard, and the barn shuddered again. Far across the rippling grasses, the tree seemed to strain its branches upward, and a thick bolt of lightning arrowed down to strike it. Gabe saw a burst of sparks, and part of the tree blew apart, but it remained standing. Caritha smoothed her hands along his shoulders, rubbing them lightly and firmly.

Marly rested her hand on the rough windowsill, letting the grasshopper stay where it was. Strange eyes, Gabe thought. They were much too shiny for a real grasshopper. He wondered if the insect had been added or just embellished. It hadn't appeared in the preliminary scan. He found he could pick out the reflection of Marly's face in its eyes, and next to that his own and Caritha's, distorted in the bulging lens.

Marly turned her head to look up at him. The lightning was flickering soundlessly now, out there and in the grasshopper's twin copper mirrors. "What do you see?"

"A life I won't live," he said. The words sounded strange- he couldn't imagine what had made him say that, but he felt suddenly sleepy and careless. Caritha kept rubbing his shoulders, and the grasshopper kept staring, and the rain came down, beating on the wooden barn and the land around it so hard, he almost couldn't hear anything else. Even Marly's voice was too faint to hear under the noise, but Gabe was aware of her asking him something else, something about being specific, and of his own voice answering, though his mind felt far away, as if he were half in a dream. It didn't seem to matter.

Sometime later he became aware that the rain had stopped and he was alone by the window.

"Marly? Caritha?"

They appeared at the edge of the loft, smiling down at him. "Come on up, hotwire," Marly said, beckoning to him. There was an emerald green stain on the back of her hand. Had she crushed the grasshopper? Or had the program stuttered when it had sent the thing away?

He put it out of his mind as he climbed the ladder.

He flinched when Rivera clapped him on the shoulder. Rivera didn't seem to notice; he was trying not to grin too widely. Like royalty's displays of emotion were unseemly in front of the serfs, Keely thought sourly. He felt stone-home shitty. Hey, you, with your dick in your hand-say hello to everybody, this is Global News Update, and you're the feature entertainment story of the hour-you and your dick.

Nothing he could do. Rivera was calling the shots, and if Rivera wanted to hack one of his own employees, he didn't have anything to say about it. Who would have believed him?

"I want two copies of that," Rivera said cheerfully, pulling his chair a little closer to the console.

Obediently Keely punched for duplication and then stood up. "Mind if I take a piss?" All over you?

Manny jerked his head toward the doorway. "I think you know where it is by this time."

"Yah. Sure do." Actually, I thought I'd use one across the street, if you don't mind. You do? Well, fuck. If the poor clown he'd just finished tapping had to work for Rivera day in, day out, it was no wonder he was jerking off in the bit bucket with imaginary playmates. Jesus.

There was a lock on the bathroom door. But then, the bathroom had no windows. He could pee, or he could kill himself, those were the choices. Does this picture look familiar?

He had his first on-line Corrections Board meeting in a month. Suppose he actually did try to tell them that Diversifications' reparation program had him doing in-house hacking, breaking into employees' confidential systems to eavesdrop on their work?

Sure, try. If he'd had to report in person, he might have had a chance to make a case. Diversifications wouldn't even let it get as far as his word against Rivera's-they'd pull the plug on him in midsentence and claim technical difficulties, have him back on-line in twenty minutes, grinning like an idiot in drugged-fucking-clothes.

What the fuck. In a month it wouldn't matter. Their little project would be up and running hot in Mexico, probably close to legalization in the States. Diversifications seemed to be more pervasive than Dr. Fish.

He sniffed his shirt collar. The fresh-air smell was long gone; otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to tap into the system-

He could tap into the system again, he thought suddenly. Look for another peripheral item in the sequence, contact the guy again, and feed him the whole story, the real story, and have him call-

Who? Sam? Fez? Jones? What could they do, other than get canned themselves. Maybe just alert the guy-hey, you with your dick in your hand. He went back out to the living room, where Rivera was now rerunning the sequence and enjoying the show. Enjoying it a little too much-maybe Rivera was fooling his bosses, but he knew just by looking at him that Rivera had been turbo'd for days. Working overtime on his big project. Or maybe Rivera found the paranoia useful.

Rivera froze the display and sat back in the chair, drumming his fingers on his thigh. "Is there any way you can run any sequences without his activating them? I'd like to see what else he's been playing with."

It was on the tip of his tongue to say, Yes, if it's in volatile storage, but he caught himself in time. "Sorry. Maybe someone else could, but you've got the security locked up tighter than a rat's ass. The only way I can get in is through a database he's annexed to the simulation, and that's a matter of split-second timing. I have to wait and see which template goes into the simulation. That storm, for example. Then I can get in before the program accepts it. Because, technically, it's not really in his system before it's incorporated into the simulation. It's in the storage area, and that's just a section of a pool common to all the other employees."

Rivera nodded thoughtfully. "So any other employee could do this."

"If they knew how. It's tricky even if you know the proper commands. It's hacking." He felt ashamed at the hint of pride in his voice. He wasn't doing anything to be proud of now.

"How about the volatile storage?" Rivera asked. "It's just a subsection of general storage."

Keely felt a flare of anger. "Isn't this just slightly against the law?"

The smile Rivera gave him was bizarrely cordial. "If you want to quibble about the law, we can void your contract, and you can quibble with a real judge in a real court."

"Maybe I'll just tell them what you've been up to here."

"And maybe there won't be any evidence of it, and you'll go down for perjury. It would be easy enough to get another hacker." Rivera paused. "Not a bad idea, actually. Hackers bounce off us all the time. We don't usually bother tracing the ones that don't get in-otherwise, we'd be in court constantly. But maybe we ought to reel in another."

Keely nodded vigorously. "You do that. You go right ahead and do that. I'd like a chance to show you fuckers what two hackers could do to your system."

Rivera threw back his head and roared laughter at the ceiling. "Please, follow this up with a hymn to solidarity, anything less would be anticlimax!" He gestured at the image of the grasshopper, still frozen on the screen. "In case you don't know, the only difference between you and this gentleman is-ahem-balls. He doesn't have any, and we have yours."

"And what are you gonna do to him? Gonna wire him up, too, with your little socket-and-plug set? Or is he out in the cold on this one?"

"My plans for him don't concern you. Just stay with him," Rivera said, getting up. "I've got quite a lot of other things to take care of before I meet with our friend here; he won't be going anywhere, either." He picked up the briefcase he'd left on the highly polished conference table in the center of the room. "Download me two more copies to chip-no, make it three. Have them packed for me when I come back tomorrow, along with three copies of whatever else you tap from him between now and then. You've got supper makings in the kitchenette, full dataline subscription for your entertainment. No pharmaceuticals, I'm afraid-"

"Laundry on strike?" Keely asked.

"-but if you can hack the lock on the liquor cabinet, you can get toxed on the Upstairs Team's best cognac. I understand the good stuff doesn't make one quite so sick."

Keely turned away as Rivera left and sat down at the console to run the sequence again, dividing the screen so he could study the mechanics of the program along with the execution. If he could figure a way to manipulate the filler elements more extensively, he might be able to add original input rather than shifting already existing data to create dialogue. He'd pulled everything the woman had said to the guy under hypnosis out of the pool of most-used dialogue and even then he'd almost crashed everything fooling around with the grasshopper. If only Dr. Fish could have made a house call here. But then, if Dr. Fish could have made this house call, maybe he wouldn't be in this wringer.

The program was pretty complicated, far beyond what he'd expected someone at Diversifications to be capable of, but if he could make it accept him without crashing, he could do more than just download a copy of the guy s fantasy land. He could talk to him. Hey, you, with your dick in your hand. He could warn him.