Synners

21

On one of the many screens set into the wall in Rana Copperthwait's office, an actress with wild black hair crossed her arms and looked petulant. "Couldn't we at least get a couple of German shepherds or something?"

"Not a chance," said Rana Copperthwait. "Now, die. And this time, make it look like death, not a multiple orgasm." She stabbed at the console on her desk, turning off the sound, and let out a tired breath. "She knows she's supposed to be freezing to death in the wilderness with wolves all around her, waiting to gobble her up, she knows it's all going to be put in later, during the finish. What could be clearer? I have to watch these productions constantly to make sure they're all doing what they're supposed to do, not what they think they want to do."

She gestured at the other screens showing different features in various stages of production and then flicked on her million-watt smile again. Gabe felt blinded. "I love what you've done. Just the little bit I've seen is enough to let me know you've got a winning combination in those women. How soon do you suppose you could work up a treatment for a feature?"

Gabe swallowed. "I don't know. I don't really, uh, work that way with them. With the program, I mean."

"With them," Copperthwait corrected him. "Look, you don't have to pretend with me, I know they're real to you. I told you, I understand artistic people." Her smile faded a bit. "Just how do you work?"

He glanced at Manny from the corner of his eye. There were no secrets now, nothing to hide, but he still felt uncomfortable talking about it in front of Manny. "Well, I just, uh, put on the programs, and then the RNG-"

"Orange E?" Copperthwait blinked her overdone eyes at him.

"Uh, R-N-G. Random number generator. It, uh, selects situations and prompts from a random pool of choices-"

"But surely you have produced results you've desired?"

Gabe shifted in the too-comfortable chair, bumping his foot against the front of her desk. Manny was frowning at him again. "Even then I try to leave room for some random elements. So it's more like a real experience. If you see what I mean."

"I'm sure I do." Copperthwait kept her smile on him as if she were pinning him to the chair with it. "Is an outline just completely out of the question?"

He opened his mouth to answer, and she suddenly sat up straight. "Maybe it is," she said, staring at him thoughtfully. "Maybe I'm missing the point here, maybe I'm missing the very thing that gives your creation the charm that captivates me and will captivate the whole country. Orange E. Orange E. Like life. You cant know exactly what's going to happen, not exactly." She rubbed her fingers delicately against each other. "All right, how about this-you give me some locales, a basic situation as a starting point, and that's all. Bare bones. Make it something like, oh…" She made a painful, thinking-hard face.

Manny kicked him, discreetly but hard.

"A zeppelin trip around the world," Gabe blurted. It was the first thing that came into his head. MORE DRUGS.

Copperthwait banged a hand down on her desk. "The last zeppelin! That's brilliantl That's what the giants from the old days used to call 'high concept.' "

"Um, you know, I don't think that's what happened with the last zeppelin," Gabe said politely.

"Well, it should have," she said, breezily. "It's too beautiful to waste. You'll be the crew on the last zeppelin. Or the passengers. Or they'll be the crew, and you'll be one of the passengers, or vice versa, however you want, it's totally up to you." She pointed a long, elegant finger at him. "I'm giving you total artistic control. All you have to do is come in here once in a while and talk to me about what you're doing. Just because I love to talk to artistic people, I think you're all just the crown of creation, I truly, truly do, and being around you artists makes me feel like I'm really alive. More alive than the best feature this studio has ever released, and that's saying a lot, I assure you, because my headmount is my best friend. I want us to get together as friends, just shooting the old- ahem-shit about the stuff you love to do. If you know what I mean, and I think you do."

"He certainly does," Manny said heartily, turning a fond face to him. Gabe thought it was the most frightening expression he'd ever seen on Manny.

"Well, that's magnum, and I really mean that from the bottom of my heart. Or should I say, my brain?" Copperthwait stood up and reached across the desk for his hand. He gave it to her, and she pumped it up and down hard. "This is going to be so… magnum. And profitable. We're going to give people what they really need, something which I happen to personally feel is the highest purpose of entertainment. This is going to feed people's souls, it'll be a boon to the lonely, and you know, I don't think anyone besides us really realizes how many lonely people are out there. I can tell, just by the fan mail we get." She pointed at Gabe again. "You, my friend, are going to give everyone a reason to go on living. We'll get a matching pair of men later."

Her smile vanished abruptly as her gaze went to the wall with the screens. She stabbed a finger down on the console again. "Excuse me, but what do you think you're doing now?"

"I'm being eaten. By wolves," the actress said as Manny ushered Gabe from the office.

"Well," Manny said, setting himself a little more comfortably at the other end of the limo's capacious backseat, "I'd say all's well that ends well. Especially when it all ends well in Hollywood, eh?"

Gabe managed a murmur that passed for agreement. Manny was sticking to the story that one of the sequences with Marly and Caritha had somehow been copied from the volatile memory onto the end of one of the commercial spots. They both knew that was a pile of horseshit, but Manny had been standing by it for the last three weeks, ever since he'd sprung it on Gabe in his office the morning Gabe had emerged from night court.

It had been a good morning for lies; Manny could not have timed it better. He'd been too fried to challenge Manny's version of reality, and he was sure Manny had fixed his evidence anyway. He'd just sat and listened, fingering the old-fashioned onionskin flimsy the cashier had given him. He still had it; it looked more like a certificate than a receipt for his fines. Know ye by these presents that the undersigned now has an official criminal misdemeanor record. Souvenir of the longest walk of his life, or at least of the parts he could remember.

What he remembered best, though, was Gina waiting on the courthouse steps for Mark, who had been picked up by the cops on their incoming sweep. He had stood on the sidewalk under the steadily lightening sky, with his receipt and the battered-spouse literature the holding-cell medic had pressed on him while she'd been stapling up the gash in his face, and watched Gina wait.

He'd wanted to go to her. It would have been a much longer walk than the one he'd just finished, through a lot of rough terrain, all of it mined, and a long, nasty trip through all the barbed wire she put up around herself. And it wouldn't have been a simulation. Everything he felt would have been real.

Would have been. He'd still been trying to sort the woulds from the coulds when Mark had come out, settling the matter for everyone.

And then he'd gone off to work and lost Marly and Caritha, too, and then gotten them back, magnanimously restored by Manny who had another little piece of news for him besides. That was supposed to be the real Big One, but he'd already heard about it from Gina. He tried to look impressed for Manny, anyway, especially since Manny was telling him the sockets had saved him. Eight holes in his head had saved his ass, because the Marly and Caritha stuff was so compelling, the sockets just cried out for a product like this, it was the product they'd been looking for. Insty-friends!

Insty-fucking-friends, he thought, putting Gina's intonations on the words. Jesus, Jesus, how did I get here?

"… running the final battery of tests on our people down in Mexico," Manny said cheerfully. "If all goes well, as I'm sure it will, they'll be discharged this week. I'll be going down to oversee it. I would be negligent if I didn't personally make sure that everything was at one hundred percent peak condition for our next star." Manny gave him a satisfied smile. "You know, I'm glad things have turned out this way. I was worried about you, but it's all going to work out. I had no idea that you would have such a feel for that kind of work. It's a gift. And the fact that it came to light just as we were launching this new project is nothing short of miraculous."

Miraculous. The word echoed in Gabe's mind as he stared unseeingly out of the tinted window. And here he'd always thought the miraculous had been strictly confined to Artificial Reality.

"Saint Who of the What?" said Caritha.

Gabe hesitated. He had blurted the name out on impulse, and it seemed as absurd as it had when he'd first read it on the slip Sam had given him.

"The St. Dismas Infirmary for the Incurably Informed," he said again, and peeked over the top of the concrete wall at the zeppelin moored at the other end of the airfield.

"Keep your head down, hotwire," Caritha said, looking at the side of the cam. It had acquired a small screen since the last time he'd been in. He was used to the program embellishing itself as needed, but a screen was more elaborate than he'd thought was possible. "There's activity all over the place here. I've got us shielded, but it won't stick if you insist on wiggling around. You'll break the field."

"St. Dismas was the good thief," Marly whispered to him. He turned to look at her in surprise. Belly-down in the dirt on his other side, she looked up at him with feverishly bright eyes. He almost called for a status report when she went on suddenly. "Though most people think it's just another bulletin board for the discussion of political, cultural, and personal developments, St. Dismas is actually a repository for stolen and sensitive information. You have to have something to offer to access it." She winked at him.

"How do you know that?" Gabe asked.

"We know a lot of things," Caritha said, still studying the screen in the side of the cam. "They're starting to close down the hangar now. It should be empty in ten minutes, everybody going home to supper." She gave him a sidelong glance. "Be real sure you want this zeppelin, hotwire, because once we start for it, there's no going back."

"I still don't understand why you want a goddamn zeppelin," Marly added, giving him a poke.

"It's the last one," he said. "Someone has to take it for a spin, see what it can do in the open sky."

" 'Spin' is a lousy choice of word," Caritha said. "Does the name Hindenburg mean anything to you?"

Gabe sighed, beginning to regret not starting over with fresh copies of their programs. "The Hindenburg has nothing to do with the story line we're supposed to develop. Let's wipe that reference, as well as all mention of St. Dismas, okay?"

"Okay, no St. Dismas steals the Hindenburg," said Caritha. "But if you'd asked me, which you didn't and you should have, I'd have told you going after headhunters is a hell of a lot more useful than stealing zeppelins."

Gabe blinked at her. "Wipe that, too. Status!"

Nothing in the status report indicated he was being hacked, or that the program was drawing on anything but already booted material. He plunged himself back into the simulation. "Resume."

Marly tugged at his sleeve. "You're really going to make us steal that zeppelin and leave all those headhunters running loose?"

"Last time," Gabe said, "we're not doing Headhunters. We can't. House of the Headhunters wasn't a Para-Versal release."

"They're all in on it, I've told you that before, hotwire."

He groaned. "Just steal this zeppelin with me, and then I'll go get headhunters with you later. All right?"

"That's more like it," said Caritha. "Five minutes. Hope you can run like a rabbit."

He took it all the way to the point where they were about to lift off in the zeppelin before he called a halt. The effort of keeping things moving had drained him. Perhaps he was going to have to give in and use fresh copies devoid of most of the headhunters material. The programs wouldn't be as broken in and easy to interact with, but it would be better than tinkering with the present versions.

No, you don't want to tinker with us as we are now, hotwire, said Caritha's voice in his mind suddenly, because we're your best friends, and you're really going to want us after those sockets go in.

Still putting fancy dress on his own thoughts and calling it company. But he wasn't so far gone that he didn't know what he was doing, couldn't tell the difference.

That's why you want to keep us the way we are, hotwire. Because later on, after the sockets go in, telling the difference between us'll be harder. A lot harder.

He wondered about that for days, for weeks, all the way up to the time they put the sockets in. Right downstairs in Medical, as it turned out, not in Mexico.