Synners

17

The overdone Arabian-Nights-type tent, complete with tassled pillows and Persian rugs overlapping each other in calculated disarray, was bit-by-bit perfect. No details had been lost or muddied anywhere. For the first twenty minutes after she'd put on the head-mounted monitor, Sam had kept looking quickly to one side or another, trying to catch blank spots. There weren't any; you could even look out through the partly open tent flap and see mountains, great humps of dark green that reminded her more of the Poconos than the Middle East, veiled by a sparkling mistiness that was too wet to be fog and too light to be rain.

Coaxing that kind of detailed perfection into a simulation required stone-home dedication. Or complete obsession. Sam couldn't decide what she wanted to say to the simulated person sitting across from her-Congratulations, or Get a life.

The simulated person's appearance was most likely pure wish-fulfillment fantasy. It was a composition of subtle and charming androgyny, the long dark hair, the classically sculpted features, the amber eyes so light in color they were luminous, the deep brown skin-definitely not one of the stock compositions you could get from Wear-Ware or some wannabee program. But he-Sam was calling it "he" on no basis other than arbitrary-had to have spent hours mixing palettes. Even the tasteful silks he was wearing were original. The calculation wasn't lost on her.

But then, any hacker this good wouldn't be artless on any level. Which was a little bit funny, since he'd told her his name was Art. (There, she decided, a male name. Like Sam? She started to wonder again.) She hadn't given him a name, not even a phony, and pressing him for information was futile. The only thing she'd gotten out of him after she'd agreed to put on the headmount was how he'd done the trick with Fez's monitor.

He'd made her work for it, though; he wanted banter, and he wanted jokes, and he wanted the hacker news of the world, which he already seemed to know in more detail than she did, before he finally gave it up.

"Just a little rewiring trick with the hardware," he told her at last. "I gave Fez the specs to rig it, with a program dedicated to the screens. So I can pop one whenever I have something to tell him, without waiting for him to come to me."

"Very fancy," she said, which was understating it; it should have been impossible. "But why don't you just call him on the phone?"

"Call him on the phone," he mused, the smooth forehead wrinkling slightly. He seemed to taste the idea, as if she had suggested something rare and exotic and perhaps a little improper in some way. The expression made him look suddenly more female than male, and she felt her mild confusion return.

"Don't you trust the telephone? Or aren't you local?" Maybe, she thought uneasily, he was a total paraplegic and incapable of speech. "Or, uh, I mean, if there's a problem…" She winced, glad he couldn't actually see it.

He grinned. "Don't make faces, it's okay. I probably could do that now. Wouldn't Fez just go wild if he heard me on the phone. Where is the phone, anyway?" He froze; after a few moments a phantom twin rose up out of his image and walked around behind her. She followed with her eyes, and the view on the screen shifted as if she were turning her head. There was a moment of vertigo; it felt a little as if her eyes had suddenly floated around the side of her head, a feature of headmount screens that she could never get used to. Through a small gap between some India-print curtains, she could see there was another room beyond.

She turned back to Art. "Are you still here?"

"Absolutely." He grinned again. "Complete multitasking capabilities, you know."

"Do you always expend that much on pyrotechnics, or is this a special occasion?"

"Well, I like to believe that I'm achieving self-expression. But then, that's the whole raison d'etre for art." He winked.

"I'm not going to groan. It'll just encourage you."

"But all conscious creatures need encouragement to thrive. Wouldn't you agree, Sam-I-Am?"

Fez's nickname for her was a fast cold shock running up the back of her neck. "Ah… excuse me?"

"Your technique is very characteristic," he said. "I've sampled some of your game simulations, tasted them inside out. If you input on a keyboard, I can tell it's you by your touch, the patterns of your input, the amount of time between one symbol and the next." He shrugged. "I can tell the difference between you and Rosa, or Fez, or Keely. Or anybody else."

The shock had turned to an unpleasant wave of creepiness. "Sorry, I find that a little hard to believe."

He shrugged again. "I knew it was you this time, didn't I? Even though you wouldn't identify yourself."

She hesitated. "Lucky guess. Or you recognized my voice."

"Have you ever spoken to me before?"

Sam suppressed the urge to hang up on him. (Him, she thought, definitely him.) She shifted uncomfortably in the chair, conscious of the headmount; suddenly it seemed very heavy. "You enjoy toying with other people, don't you?"

"I'm sorry." He looked so sincere that for a moment she almost forgot she was watching a simulated image and not an actual person. "But I really can distinguish between you. I know, for example, that the data Fez showed me was encrypted by Keely and decrypted by you."

She was sure now that her hair would have stood on end if she hadn't been wearing the headmount. "Fez showed you that?"

"Oh, yes. The missing information wasn't completely salvageable. The whole idea behind a sleeping load is destroy-and-notify, and it destroyed with gusto. By the way, Keely never spotted the flare because it was the data, in part. But I think I've restored enough."

Sam frowned to herself. Fez had said he'd had a program working on it. Why would he hide the fact that he'd brought someone else in on it? The idea of Fez lying to her made her feel more than a bit ill.

"Are you going to tell me about it?" she asked slowly. "Or is this only for Fez?"

He tilted his head and looked at her curiously. "Why would it be only for him? Keely sent you the sockets."

"The what?"

"The sockets. The schematic for the sockets." He dragged a large white pillow over and stood it up on one knee, yanking one of the tassels. A dark rectangular area appeared on the pebbly material; he touched one side of the rectangle, and the schematic Keely had zapped to her in the Ozarks came up just as it would have on an ordinary monitor. Art grinned at her, obviously pleased with himself. "I don't waste any part of a simulation; everything you see is fully functional as well as ornamental."

"Uh-huh," Sam said faintly. Christ, how was he doing it? He had to be either a handicap with a lot of time on his hands or obsessed beyond redemption.

He touched the other side of the rectangle, and the graphic of Visual Mark's brain appeared as Fez had first shown it to her. "When you decrypted this, you didn't notice that you had eight and not just one, did you?"

Sam blinked. "I noticed a lot of redundancy, but I thought it was the error safeguard from the transmission program-"

"Easily missed. It is just one until you put the two separate fragments together." The brain slid to the center of the screen as the other graphic of what Sam had thought was a neuron shrank in size and made a countermove to a spot above it. A moment later there were eight instead of one; the graphic of the brain increased in size as each of the eight things swooped to one of the highlighted areas on the cortex.

The image gave a sudden flicker and faded out, like badly spliced film. "One of the bad spots," Art told her. "It'll come back shortly. Ah, here we are."

The brain graphic reappeared, now with a network of red filaments radiating from each of the eight highlighted areas, from the points where each one had inserted itself.

"I was right. They're implants," Sam said, more to herself. "But why would a corporation like the Dive decide to move into therapeutic implants?"

Art held up a finger. "Not implants. I told you, sockets. They're receptor sockets that will accommodate a certain kind of input device-" He touched a finger to the highlighted area on the right frontal lobe. A window blossomed at the spot and zoomed out, showing a detailed line drawing of the socket. The channel Sam had noted as being too large for an axon was now filled with a pronged device.

"No explanatory call-outs," Art told her. "I'm afraid those were permanently obliterated."

"But what's it for?" Sam asked. "Either they're going to do this, or they've already done it, to Visual Mark-"

"Well, they're going to make rock videos, to start with," Art said casually. "I could show you some specs on the visual cortex of this brain-it's pretty fascinating. Apparently this visual cortex enjoys a particularly strong link with the visualizing center. You'd have to be a neurosurgeon to read it with any understanding, but it's an unusual brain. Has some problems, too, some weakened areas. A lot of the activity's been channeled away from those areas by the brain itself, to take the stress off. Whoever's working on this must have faith that the brain is going to continue doing that-"

"What kind of problems are you talking about?"

"I'm no authority. Stroke, maybe, or an aneurysm." He paused, looking thoughtful. "I'll have to access some new databases if I'm going to be that kind of doctor."

Sam, wasn't listening. "Wait a minute. Are you saying this guy, Visual Mark, is on the verge of a stroke? Are those sockets supposed to help him?"

"No, they don't have anything to do with that. There's a note here somewhere about antistroke medications already given. The sockets are an interface." Art smiled brightly. "I thought that was clear. They're a direct interface for input-output with manufactured neural nets. Computers."

Sam gave a short, incredulous laugh. "Damn. Somebody did it. Somebody finally did it! I want it!" She cut off. "God, what am I saying? The Dive did it, I don't want them putting holes in my head."

"Actually, Dr. Lindel Joslin did it during her tenure at EyeTraxx," Art said mildly. "Diversifications took EyeTraxx over just in time to claim the patent."

And somehow Keely had known about it, Sam thought. Somehow he'd been hacking around, or something, and he'd come up with the biggest thing since the transistor, and they'd caught him and made him disappear. What had he been going to do with the data? More important, what had he been expecting her and Fez to do with the data- now? They could post it untraceably, she supposed, but what would that accomplish, besides spoiling the Dive's surprise? The Dive already had the patent-

Art's phantom twin suddenly reappeared, coming around from behind her on the left, carrying a small handset. Art froze again, allowing the phantom to sink down and superimpose itself on him.

"Well," he said, when the two of them had merged, "here's the phone." He flipped the handset open and examined it. "Complicated in its way, but hardly impossible. I hadn't thought about this. Of course, I'm more than I used to be."

She felt a touch on her shoulder and jumped. He leaned forward, looking anxious (and female again). "Is something wrong? Your vitals just went pop."

"They're back, I think. Fez and Rosa and-" She shut up.

"Good! Then I can call him right now. Don't tell him, okay? Let me surprise him." The eyes were definitely glowing.

"It's your party," she said, resigned. "What about Keely's data?"

"He's got it. I copied you on it, too. Now you go distract him while I figure out how to dial."

She started to protest, but the screen went dark as he hung on her. Sam called for disconnect and worked the monitor off her head.

Fez was standing over her, curious. "Keeping busy?"

"Yah," she said. "Your friend Art with the program popped in for a chat." She gestured at the easel monitor. "Cute trick with the on-off. Scared me out of a year's growth."

"Yes, well, I'll have to tell you all about that later. It's rather a long story." Fez started to turn away, and she caught his arm.

"Art salvaged the data." Why didn't you tell me you'd let someone else in on it? she asked him silently.

"Are you going to tell me about it, or is this a secret between you two?" he asked.

"Maybe I should let Art tell you. In the comfort of the tent."

"Yes, that's a bit much, isn't it? Art's a grandstander of the first order. Did I get a copy?"

Sam nodded, and he reached over to flip the easel monitor on. He brought up a file directory, tapping a box at the bottom of the screen to page ahead. "Here we are," he said, as the heading New Files: 12 Hours appeared at the top of the screen. There were three entries. Just as he tapped the last one, the phone rang.

"Can you get that for me, Rosa?" he asked, pulling a chair over and sitting down in front of the screen.

Rosa picked up the handset on the desk. "Yes? Uh-huh." She held the phone out. "For you, Fez."

He didn't look away from the data rolling out on the screen. "Who is it? Will they leave a message?"

"It's Art," she said.

He frowned at her. "Art who?"

Sam laughed. "Art who, he wants to know." Fez gave her a look.

"Art who?" Rosa asked the phone. Her eyebrows went up. "Art Fish."

Fez pushed his chair back from the desk and looked from Rosa to Sam. "Are you two in this somehow, is this some kind of joke you cooked up together?"

Sam barely heard him. "Art Fish? He calls himself Art Fish?"

"Actually, you get it faster if you say Artie Fish,' Adrian said, coming out of the kitchenette with a large piece of dry matzo.

"Adrian." Fez turned to him sharply.

Adrian shrugged. "Come on, you were gonna tell them."

"Fez, are you gonna talk to this person or not?" Rosa said, still holding the phone out.

Fez took the phone from Rosa. "Hello," he said cautiously. He listened for a long time without saying anything.

Adrian came over to the desk, nibbling the matzo and holding a hand under it to catch the crumbs. "I know he was gonna tell you when the data came through."

"Tell us what?" Rosa asked.

Fez closed the handset and sat holding it, his face blank. "That was Art Fish." He sounded amazed. "I'd said we were going to be out. Shouldn't have bothered popping on."

"It was just after you left," Sam told him. "Maybe he figured he could catch you." She leaned an elbow on the desk. "You mind telling us why he calls himself Fish? Not to mention who he is and if he is a he, and while you're at it, maybe you'll explain why you said you had a program working on Keely's data when you really gave it to someone-" She stopped and looked up at Adrian. "Artie Fish?"

Adrian chuckled. "Stone-home kick, ain't it?"

"Artie Fish?" She made a pained face at Fez. "Not really."

Light dawned for Rosa at the same time. "Well, it was bound to happen someday. But, Jesus, Art Fish? What's wrong with the good old names, like Frankenstein?"

"Actually," Fez said, sitting back in the easy chair and putting his feet on the coffee table, "we all did it, all of us together."

Curled up on the couch next to Rosa, Sam squeezed her twined fingers against each other. The revelation seemed to be playing on a loop in her head, making her heart leap each time it hit her.

"The net system was complicated to begin with," Fez was saying, with a faraway look on his face. "I suppose consolidating everything into the generic commodity we know as the dataline was the start of it. But nothing might have really come of it if it hadn't been for the input that exceeded. So to speak."

"Like what?" Rosa asked.

"Like the viruses, and the piggybacks, the floating boards that pop in and out wherever there's space to accommodate them. All the hackers who found a little capacity here and there and squeezed in compressed data and programs. The hackers who made capacity where there technically wasn't any by using the virtual spaces between bits, and then the spaces between those bits, and the spaces between those."

"Between one point and another, there's always another point," said Rosa. "That's elementary geometry. Even I learned that, and I hated geometry. I liked that paradox, though. Whatsisbod's Paradox, proving forward motion is impossible. Like, lay back, relax, you can't go anywhere anyway."

Fez smiled. "It also has to do with fractals. Take a line, bend it in half. Then bend each half in half. Then bend all the segments in half, ad infinitum. You get fantasy snowflakes and baroque seacoasts-"

"-and great paisleys," murmured Adrian.

"-and if you look several levels down into a fractal, you'll find that a larger pattern's been duplicated. Which means that the fractal several levels down from the area of the fractal you're looking into contains all the information of the larger fractal. Worlds within worlds."

Rosa laughed a little. "You're approaching my threshold for that kinda talk. I'm a hacker, not a philosopher."

Fez turned to look at her. "Good choice of word, threshold. The way we all kept adding to the nets did exactly that, passed a threshold. It got to the point where the net should have collapsed in chaos, but it didn't. Or rather, it did, but the collapse was not a collapse in the conventional sense. Because the net kept accommodating the demands we put on it-that was its purpose, after all, to accommodate data. When it reached the point where it was burdened to the limit, it had two choices-crash, or accommodate. It did both.

"Going over the brink of catastrophe was the first stage. The second was recovery-since it was programmed to accommodate, it did. But the only way it could accommodate was to exceed the limit. Institute a new limit, and when that was reached, go over the brink of catastrophe again, recover and institute a new limit beyond that. And so forth."

"Ad infinitum," Sam said, expressionlessly. "Like a fractal growing from the bottom up instead of the top down. Triggered by catastrophe."

"It didn't get a break while all this was going on, of course," Fez continued. "The information never stopped coming in, which made for quite a lot of turbulence. But chaos is just another kind of order, and so we have another kind of net now than the one we started out with. We woke it up."

Rosa let out a breath. "Which came first-Art Fish, or Dr. Fish?"

"It's hard to say. Art Fish was the file name on a proposed AI program," Fez said. "There was also a prototype of a vaccine with the working title of Virus Doctor. The present incarnation is Dr. Art Fish, V.D. Virus Doctor."

Sam's gaze drifted over to the system on the desk, "Is it all in there now?"

"I don't think it's all any one place," Fez said. "It's all through the nets, though the core routine, if you can call it a routine, seems to be centralized in Dr. Fish's Answering Machine."

"What is it? The routine."

Fez stared past her, squinting thoughtfully. "I guess you could call it a virus, though that's not strictly true. It's not just one, that is, but several, and at least parts of many more than that. And it's not really a true virus anymore in many ways. I mean-" He blew out a breath. "Okay. Anytime a new access opens up on the dataline, as soon as it comes into contact with Art, it's 'infected.' And there is no part of the net that is not Art. Art is everywhere, though his attention is not, if you see what I mean."

Rosa shook her head. "Do you mean the L.A. net, or the state, or the continental net, or-" She frowned. "Worldwide?"

Fez nodded.

"Then there have to be other people who know about this," Sam said. "We can't be the only ones who know there's something… awake… in the net."

"People see only what they want to see." Fez shrugged. "It's possible someone else knows, in some other part of the country or the world. But nobody's said anything."

"You didn't say anything," Sam said accusingly.

He grinned at her. "Well, I'm not really the talkative type, Sam-I-Am."

"Sure." She gave a short laugh.

"There is one other person who shares full acquaintance with the Dr. Fish we know, serving as archivist and keeper of Art's ever-changing files. Encrypted, of course," Fez said. "I'm sure there must be others. Statistically there has to be someone somewhere else who's onto it. But it would have to be someone who was looking for it. You know how people use the net. We take it for granted, just like cars or telephones or refrigerators. If you don't take it for granted, then you probably don't have it.

"And you were looking for it," Sam said thoughtfully.

Fez nodded.

She sat forward. "Why?"

He smiled. "It seemed like the right thing to do. Now, are you going to show me the data Art salvaged?"

"Maybe we ought to Turing-test first."

"Oh, Art's conscious," Fez said confidently. "That's not the question. The question is whether Art's human or not."

"Part catastrophe and part chaos," said Rosa. "Sounds pretty human to me."