Synners

22

Change for the machines. The groups went crazy for it.

She had missed most of the outgrabe when the story had broken, but there was still plenty of noisemaking going on when she had returned from Mexico. Dog-and-pony shows for the media, for the rock groups, for Concerned Citizens for a Better Tomorrow and the National Council of Implant Clinics and the Mothers' March for Mental Health and Addicts Anonymous. For the National Concerned Marching Addicts of Anonymous Mental Clinics, for all she knew. It was hard to tell the addicts from the mothers and the mothers from the others, and it was a brand new world out there.

Meet the new world. Same as the old world.

That wasn't how the old chorus went, but that was all right, because it wasn't really true, either. But the Beater could pretend it was. Basically. Basically the job's the same. Hear the music, make the pictures.

Except it was better. It wasn't just hearing the music, it was being in the music, and the images coming up on the screen of her mind, forming as she looked at them. As soon as she thought it, there it was, and if she thought to change it, it changed, growing from her like a live thing. She suddenly found it hard to remember that she had worked any other way. At least, while she was doing it. It felt so natural, so right, to send a dream out of the inner darkness into raw daylight, where anyone could see it. Once you'd done that, you wanted to keep on doing it, and the more you did it, the easier it became.

For the first time she had a real understanding of Mark's nature, of what had been happening behind those eyes for so many years. Change for the machines? Nah, the machines had finally changed for him, and he was just doing what he'd always done.

Not everyone could do it. That was the strange part, that not all of them could change for the machines. Ecklestone vanished from the Canadaytime lineup, leaving Valjean and Moray hooked up and rocking through the wire.

"You want to hear something?" Valjean asked her in the studio at the top of his house. "You want to really hear something?" A few quick hits off the oxy, the cape flickering and winking, and Moray looking like she was going to jump out of her skin if it didn't happen soon. They played it for her, beginning to end and from the first note; the pictures came up in her mind just the way they were supposed to. Except she wasn't plugged into the hardware, and the images boiled like a fever, looking for the way out, pressing to be released, until she thought her head had to explode.

And then Valjean and Moray stopped, and her vision cleared. She barely registered that Valjean's synthesizer had remained closed and silent, that Moray hadn't touched her keyboard, they'd played it all the way through with only their minds, but she was already out, ripping down Topanga, needing her own machine. Change for the machines. Everything changed for the machines.

– -

U B the Ass to Risk was gone, and in its place was a joint that said it sold dreams.

**SOCKET-FRESH**

MODULES AVAILABLE FOR

**FLATSCREEN** **HEADMOUNTS **

!!!COMING SOON-SOCKET HARDWARE!!!

WATCH THIS SPACE FOR FURTHER DETAILS

Hadn't taken them long to catch on. The new clinics were open, and they were lined up around the block for them. Whether the dream joint actually had real dreams or just warmed-over clips from old wannabee releases almost didn't matter. Sockets were hot, sockets were it, sockets were the new sexual preference. The hardware was out there, and the merchandise was out there side by side with the stuff pretending to be the merchandise. Hadn't taken hardly any time at all for everyone to get into the spirit of the thing.

She paused in front of the Chinese Theatre. COMING SOON-THE LAST ZEPPELIN! trumpeted the holo arching over the entrance. A PARA-VERSAL/DIVERSIFICATIONS PRODUCTION! The holo blinked. AN ADVENTURE BORN IN THE MIND, DIRECT TO YOU! YOU WILL BELIEVE

YOU ARE THERE… blink… BECAUSE YOU WILL BE THERE!!!!

Good old Hollywood. Start with a great big flatscreen debut and work inward. Show it to them in gargantuan ultra-HDF: Wouldn't you like to be inside this? Well, you can! Here it comes!

"Thou shalt not fear!"

He was at her elbow as suddenly as if he had congealed out of the noisy air on the boulevard, a skinny hype in a dirty gray jumpsuit that might have been silver once. One hand thrust a glittery blue square at her face. "And with this stuff you ain't gonna fear no-goddamn-body, not nohow, not no-time, not nowhere!"

"Not any body I'm afraid of," she told him, moving on.

"Would you like to be?" He caught her arm and stuck a yellow lozenge under her nose. "I can handle that for you, too. Pure terror, it's the way to go. Hey, take 'em both at once, send your nerves to the playground of the gods!"

She pulled away from him.

"Hey, how about an ego trip, wanna go on an ego trip?" he called after her. "Fuckin' sockets've sent the drug trade right into the fuckin' toilet."

Already? You betcha. Hadn't taken long for everything to change for the machines. Pretty soon it would all be happening at the speed of thought, before it could actually happen, so that nothing would ever have to happen again. You'd only think things had happened, and if anything ever did happen, you wouldn't know the difference.

Take a little walk with me.

Here it comes.

White Lightning in a mason jar. It wasn't terribly visual, but when you'd been struck by lightning, you didn't need a passport to LotusLand. Zzzzzt! Hope you like your barbecue extra-crispy.

She was making the level in the jar go down little by little all by herself for what seemed like a long time while the music pounded. Without the usual excuse, because tonight she knew where Mark was, she knew exactly where to find him, and she would always know from now on.

But old habits sure died hard, she thought, and though being struck by White Lightning had left her movements kind of gluey and slow, her mind was running hot, full of pictures, ready to stand and deliver any time she put her request through the wire.

She let the music wash over her, speed-thrash, cruise-metal, bang-rock, hard-core soul. It was almost like being back in one of those bad old Boston bars, Babe's Beantown, Harborville, Kathye's Klown, in the before-days, putting on a plain old tox-getting shitfaced, smashed, blasted, hammered-and then jumping all night to some group so hungry you got to starving yourself.

The sticks were rapping away on the table, stealing a few licks on the side of the jar. Little Flavia, letting her sticks do the talking, and the sticks were saying all there was to say. Gina peered through the White Lightning haze at her. Here it comes.

The rest of Loophead melted out of the crowd of tables around her, out of the throbbing mass on the dance floor, where a kid with a heelprint tattooed on his forehead was climbing onto the stage again. Flavia was talking now, but the sticks had already said it all. Here it comes. Take a little walk with me.

"Because we have to catch it now," Flavia added. "You can. We can."

Loophead's bass boy Claudio lifted her up out of her chair nice and easy. He knew how, he'd done it before, more than once. He could really play, too, he wasn't just a keyboard cheater, the boy had real magic in his fingers. Real magic, real fingers.

A little traveling music, please.

Loophead worked out of a cellar studio on the outskirts of demolished Fairfax, where the property values had joined the drug trade in the toilet. Had to be one pretty big toilet, Gina reflected, the way they were flushing the world down, piece by piece.

The Fender was definitely not in the toilet. Dorcas slipped it on the way another person might have slipped on a diamond necklace. Dorcas was big, black, and old enough to know what a Fender meant. Tom was smaller, wiry, out of the Mimosa and numerous other places east and north, and you called him a keyboard cheater at your peril, because he knew, too, he knew what a keyboard was supposed to be.

Flavia leaned over her, still holding the sticks, smiling. No hard feelings from that night a million years ago, when Gina had pulled a likely-looking body out of a chair by the back of his neck. "It cost us a fortune to pry an extra box out of the supplier. Everyone in the world wants them. Make it be worth it."

Someone else gave her another hit off the mason jar before sinking the wires into her skull.

She went down fast, longer and harder than any fall she'd ever done for Valjean. She remembered that Claudio had cleaned Valjean's clock for him once. Called him a cheater and a fake.

That wasn't now. The music was now, the music lighting up the inside of her head, coming from somewhere else, the sound of sticks on metal, on glass, on wood, striking sparks in her mind.

She could feel Flavia's smile, the stretch of her mouth, the warmth, the teeth digging into her lower lip just a bit, and a little harder on the beat.

Claudio's magic fingers, manipulating the bass line. She could remember a time, just barely, but it had happened. She'd been even more toxed that night than she was now, and it seemed that he hadn't been so close that night, nowhere nearly so close, not inside her skin that way.

Sparks to lightning, white and otherwise; a glimpse of towers in each flash, minarets, monoliths, obelisks. Gina smiled to herself; what Claudio lacked in subtlety he made up in pure heat.

Dorcas's first chord came through, shaking the world all the way up to the moon, and they were off, all of them, charging down the line Tom was making on the keyboard, mystery tracks for the phantom night-train.

Here it comes. She let it. That was all she had to do, all she could do; it was right there, and she was right there, and they were all right there with her.

Be there for you.

There was a man with a different world in his eyes, still real, made of noise and light.

Be there for you.

There was a man, real, taking the long way home, walking a strip that had once been by the ocean, and she was running across a bridge, chased by her own growling need, but the harder she ran, the farther away he was.

Be there for you.

There was a man in a room, changed for the machines, not real now, and a stranger, real, on a stony shore standing under a grey sky, turning slowly to her, but the music split the sky and shattered it, and she was gone again.

The music wailing from the Fender hit a sober part of her brain, but there was no time to consider what she was doing because it sent her off again, gone again, running down a long road with a fever in her chest, and the trees on either side bowed, branches like fingers, reaching, and when they touched, they were like mist, like smoke, and she was gone again.

Gone again… gone all night, one of those endless nights, don't look for the sun this time, and hell, you don't need it anyway.

Here it comes…

Endless night; flesh on flesh, not a furnished room but a place to live for a little while. She turned and ran again, but it overtook her, flung her down, and opened her up.

All right, admit it then, just one time. She could do that before it let her go.

Flying; hurtling like a meteor, alive and burning. Scorched air, and then the whole sky was on fire, and what the hell, if a thing's on fire, then let it burn, let it all burn down and burn back up again.

Burn back up, and up, and up, and over the top.

Flavia was leaning over her, mopping her face with something soft. "And that's what we call video," she said seriously. "If your sanitized bosses can't handle that, we can all walk, and walk tall, you with us. What's the Dive got to put up against what we just did? Not a fucking thing."

She couldn't even nod. She had sweated through her clothes. Flavia put the mason jar to her lips; burned all the way down. Burn… Gina raised up on one elbow and twisted around on the mattress. The connections hung limply near the console, harmless now. Tom was just disconnecting his own; he looked over at her, breathing hard.

"What did we just do?" she asked thickly.

Flavia grinned; it made her golden features look sharp enough to cut. "We made a video the new way. The real way. What's the fucking point of sockets if you don't do it the real way?" She looked over her shoulder. "We're done. He can see her now."

Gina let herself fall back on the mattress, throwing one arm over her eyes. Christ, that anyone would see her now. Footsteps came across the cellar floor and stopped next to her, and the hope flared in her, brand-new fire that he might have changed so much for the machines that he would come and find her now, instead of the other way around. She took a deep breath and lowered her arm.

There he was, big as life and possibly more real.

"How the fuck did you find me?" she asked.

"It wasn't easy," Gabe said.

He felt better than he had in years. Never mind better. He felt fantastic. He felt more than fantastic. He felt unreal. Un-fucking-real.

Visual Mark. That's the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

He lost all awareness of the meat that had been his prison for close to fifty years, and the relief he felt at having laid his burden down was as great as himself. His self. And his self was getting greater all the time, both ways, greater as in more wonderful and greater as in bigger.

The sense of having so much space to spread out in-a baby emerging from the womb after nine months must have felt the same thing, he thought. Stone-home true enough for himself. After the initial trauma, hey, it's party-time!

All those years in meat hell, he marveled. All those years of getting toxed, getting crazy, thrashing, banging, going from one thing to another until he couldn't hold himself upright anymore, and never understanding that what he'd really been trying to do all along was drill a few holes in his head and get out of meat-jail.

And into… what?

His own context. It went little by little with him, a little more every time he took the wire. That was what he called it, taking the wire.

What time he spent off-line faded into dull stretches he waited out until he could take the wire again and get a little bit greater. The wire was good to him, helped him along, showed him how he could spread out a little more each time, easing himself into his context. Like going home.

He stopped bothering to disconnect to use the little bathroom in the pit. What the hell, the wires were long enough. They weren't long enough to stretch all the way out the door, but he found out they'd let him use the in-house delivery staff to run food up to him just like they did for the big shots on the fabled Upstairs Team when they worked overtime. He didn't bother disconnecting to eat, either; it only took a few minutes.

With all that there didn't seem to be much sense in disconnecting and going back to his apartment. The pit was bigger, he had everything he needed, and the program director was always cranking on high.

He knew the time was coming when he would try to slip back into the meat-jail and find out it was too small for him. Once he had been sure his brain held a rabbit hole, a pocket of infinity where no limits applied, no boundary conditions were enforced, and he could fly through the universe if he wanted to. Maybe he'd just been fooling himself. Maybe the rabbit hole, for all its depth and breadth, had been finite after all. Or maybe it was closing up a little more every time he stepped out of the meat, because soon he wasn't going to need it anymore. Like the brain itself, and the rest of the warm meat.

Deciding to stick with the wire was better than anything he'd done before. His mobility, was virtually unlimited, along with his vision-the Dive was surveillance heavy, he'd known that already. He'd seen the cams back when he'd been in meat. But there were a number of cams he hadn't seen, quite a number. In his previous incarnation the discovery might have dismayed or angered him. Now he was just glad to have so many eyes.

And to shut those eyes, he withdrew and looked inward, though he could continue to capture anything that came in through a lens, storing it for later viewing. Little caches of information could fit almost anywhere he wanted them to; there were extensive stretches within the system that went unused. He minimized the possibility of the extra information being detected by nesting as much of it as possible, making one association carry double, triple, quadruple referents, more if he angled his pov all around the information space.

Taking the wire had taught him how to do that. Gradually he saw how he could completely rearrange not just his own but all the information storage and transmission so that it would occupy a fraction of the space it did at present. The patterns came to him with the music, patterns becoming images becoming dreams becoming the videos that the ones outside still demanded of him. He was growing less interested in that. He had the program director, and he had his own pictures, and at last he had a place big enough to see them as he had always wanted to see them.

He thought of rearranging the system to suit himself. He could wait until night, when there were only minimal demands on the system and his movements would go completely unnoticed. In the morning everyone would come to work and discover they had been streamlined. But then the hardware would be too clunky, and the operating systems would be too unrefined to work properly, and he was dependent on those things to get around in whatever this was he was getting around in. It was becoming obvious to him now that the system and the hardware were actually as different as the mind and that meat organ, brain.

In the very beginning he had thought that Gina might possibly be there for him, as she had been so many other places. He'd really thought that she had understood, down in Mexico, not just because they both knew how it was in the system but because of how they'd come to each other outside, in meat.

He recalled the sensations with pleasure. They hadn't done that in a while, and he'd forgotten how really good it could be. Now all he had to do was reach for it in his memory, and he was there again, in the pleasure. But in the loneliness, too.

It was a lonely thing. There was no way to be sure if it meant the same thing to both of you. He'd forgotten that part of making love, how you couldn't assume that intent was as joined as bodies were.

For him it had been a way for him to say good-bye to the body, but as he lived it again in his memory, he knew it hadn't meant the same thing to her. If he'd been saying good-bye to his, she'd been saying something entirely different. He didn't understand how she could continue to cling to the heavy flesh even after knowing how the mind could be freed. But then, it didn't seem to happen the same way for her as it did for him. He knew that just by looking at her videos. Maybe her system would always be contained within herself and never spread out; maybe there was no other way for her to keep from getting lost.

It didn't matter. The last line was the same: she wouldn't be coming with him on this trip.

Maybe she couldn't have anyway, he thought, feeling the living and the nonliving creep along his awareness in the system. Maybe you could make yourself bigger, but you couldn't make yourself any less alone.

She made him take her to Mark's place. The building was old, shabby in a regal way, no elevators. Gabe let his eyes slide over the graffiti scrawled on the walls as he climbed the stairs behind Gina. If you got the socket, I got the plug. Free the Hackers! US OUT of Malaysia! (That was an old one.) And the ubiquitous Dr. Fish Makes House Calls! Underneath that someone had printed in crayon, do houses really come when you call? Under that, more usual and less creative things.

A girl about twelve years old was sitting on the first landing with a laptop resting on her folded legs. She gave them a suspicious look as they passed. Gabe couldn't help staring. She was reasonably clean, not poorly dressed-the jeans had barely begun to fade-but she had a hungry look that was all too familiar. In a couple years' time, he thought, she would be emancipated, and she would melt into the city somewhere, finding a nest of hackers to belong to in a best-case scenario, finding a nest of something else in Fairfax or on the Mimosa in a worst-case, but regardless, her parents would never see her again. And hell, maybe they didn't want to.

He felt a sudden rush of guilt, as if he had taken Sam out into the middle of Los Angeles himself and dumped her, telling her to make her way as best she could. He should have fought for her, he thought miserably; he should have fought Catherine and the educational system, himself, if it had come to that, and anything else that had driven Sam away. Instead, he had just let her go.

Gina had to spit on the keystrip before the door would let them in. There was music coming from the apartment opposite, something fast and thrashy, what Gabe thought of as psychopath music. He looked around nervously, but the hall was deserted.

The apartment was dark and stale smelling, as if it hadn't been opened in days. Gina turned on the lights. There were a couple of empty LotusLand bottles over by the couch, clothes strewn on the floor. The only thing that seemed to be well kept was the entertainment center attached to the dataline against one wall. The large screen was blank except for some small numbers in the lower right-hand corner, indicating that something was being logged from the dataline.

"Make yourself to home," Gina said dully, stumping into the bedroom. She came out again almost immediately, made a stop at the refrigerator, and then plumped down on the couch, handing him a bottle of LotusLand. He looked at it doubtfully.

"I don't know if I should drink this," he said.

"If you don't, it'll just go to waste."

He perched on the edge of the sofa a short distance away from her. She was toxed, he realized finally.

"See, I had the wild, stupid, stone-home fucking hopeless idea that if I came here, he'd be here," she said, and let her head fall back against the sofa. "Like he'd snap out of it all of a sudden and come back. That's pretty high up in the stupidsphere, ain't it? Thinking if I go looking for him in some other place, he'll be there." She rolled her head over to look at him. "Well? Is that high up in the stupidsphere or not?"

Whatever was on her breath smelled lethal. He was about to ask her if he should get anything for her when she pointed at the remote lying on the carpet at his feet.

"See what's on the fucking dataline. Maybe it'll be another reason to go on living."

Hesitantly he picked up the remote and thumbed the on button. A list of downloaded items appeared on the screen, all music videos, judging from the tides.

"Skip that shit," Gina told him. "Spin the dial. Round and round we go, everyone a winner."

He pressed the scan. The screen split into four parts as General News came up, with the anchor on real time in the upper left quadrant, a listing of the major headlines of the day next to her, footage on the current story below her, and a menu of the other default channels in the lower right quadrant, along with choices for Freeze, Replay, Select, Menu Top, and Quit.

After a minute the scan went on to the next channel. The wholesome, solemn features of the latest Mrs. Troubles replace the anchor, with a printout of the problem she was addressing in the quadrant next to her and audience responses posted in the square below.

"-accept the reality that when you enter into a relationship with an incarcerated individual, understanding is not a given. Things carry very different meanings depending on which side of the prison wall you are. And conversely for all you prisoners that I know are watching, just judging from the email I get here, you prisoners will have to accept the reality that when you enter into a relationship with a person who is not incarcerated, there can be expectations which you just aren't ready for. If you're not planning to go straight after your term is up, you really shouldn't even bother. Career criminals more than anyone else need to be involved with people who speak the language and understand the special protocols, which can be a real problem if you're on parole and forbidden to associate with other felons-"

"Behold, my culture speaks to me," Gina said. The scan went on to Peccadillo Update. Gabe lowered the volume. "Feel like a winner yet?"

Gabe shrugged. "What's a winner?" He looked around the shabby apartment. The legendary Visual Mark did not live in even a fair approximation of a video.

"I'm not sure," Gina said suddenly, "which I'm more curious about-how you found me, or why you bothered."

"I just went to all the places I could remember that you'd taken me to," he said. "Someone said they'd seen you in that joint on the boulevard. When I got there, someone else said you'd left with, ah, Loophead. I got the address of the studio off directory assistance."

"That's one question."

He shrugged. "I'm sorry, I'm unprepared. If I'd known I was going to have to go into detail, I'd have whipped up an outline and a storyboard."

Gina pealed hearty laughter at the ceiling. He sat fingering the unopened bottle of LotusLand and feeling embarrassed. "Come on," he said after a bit. "It wasn't that funny."

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "Jesus, we've all got you on the run, don't we? Rivera and Para-Versal and even me."

The dataline was showing a commercial for a new private neighborhood in Canoga Park; the voice-over seemed to jump out at him. "… tiled bathrooms, spacious living suites, kitchens where functionality wasn't left out of the design." The pov swooped along a narrow kitchenette that Gabe knew was only half as long as the cam made it seem, and cruised through another room shaped so that it was almost two separate spaces. "Canoga Park's finest new living arrangement, Park Residence. For further information, on-line tours, and in-person inspection, contact Catherine Mirijanian."

Gabe winced at the sight of the regal face on the screen. "My wife," he said. "She never did have a sense of timing."

"Her? The one that's leaving you?"

"Left. Gone already. I'm waiting for her to sell the condo out from under me."

"Where you gonna go then?"

He shrugged. "Somewhere. I guess."

Gina squinted at the screen. "She doesn't look like you."

"No, we never achieved that point in marriage where you start to look like each other."

"Not what I meant. She doesn't look like she's for you, like she was supposed to be your wife."

"I know." Catherine's picture lingered a moment longer, rippled slightly, and then vanished, to be replaced by some incomprehensible episode from a series labeled Lighthand in the lower corner. Gabe wondered idly when the divisions on the screen had disappeared. Everything seemed to happen when you were looking the other way. "I think I was always hoping someday she would look like my wife. Now I can't remember why."

Gina yawned. "I fucking hate this kind of discussion."

"You started it," Gabe said, his voice rising in exasperation. "You're a real comedy on wheels, you know that? As far as I can tell, all you ever do is hit people, get toxed, and chase around after a guy who doesn't know what planet he's on half the time."

She looked down at her lap. "I make videos, too."

"Is that what you were doing tonight? With those people, Loophead?"

"You see any of that?" she asked, not looking up at him.

"I saw it all. They wouldn't let me near you, but I saw it all, and I know what was going on."

She nodded. "Yah. It was all right. The synthesis was there, just came up like it was meant to be, and it was all right."

He set the bottle aside on the floor. "Are you going to do that with Mark?" he asked, without thinking.

She looked up at him, shocked, and he wanted to bite his tongue off. "Mark's not a musician, he's another synner. Why would I do that with him?"

He moved a little closer to her on the couch. "I just wondered, when I saw all of you connected at the same time. I-" Suddenly he couldn't think of what to say next, and he felt as if he had stepped off solid floor into a void. MORE DRUGS. He shook his head. "Never mind. I'm sorry, forget I asked that question."

"What are you gonna do?" she asked.

"When?"

"When you're in the wire. When you're rattling around your condo while you wait for the floor to get sold out from under you."

He shook his head again. This was the point where he could get up and leave, and he waited for his legs to push him upright and carry him out the door. He'd been running around in simulation for so long, he'd forgotten how to run a realife, real-time routine; he'd forgotten that if he made mistakes, there was no safety-net program ready to jump in and correct for him.

"Well." Gina let out a long breath. "You want the bed or the couch? I've slept on both, they're equally shitty."

"No, I can go home." He started to get up.

"Bad idea," she said, pulling him down again. "The neighborhood slash-artists'll take you out before you get back to your rental. I'll come out tomorrow morning and find your bloody hide plastered up on the front of the building."

Suddenly he was too tired to argue. Let her go to bed, and then he could sneak out and go home. "I'll take the couch."

"Turn out the lights when you're done." She got up and went into the bedroom.

He sat staring at the dataline, which had cycled back to General News. There was a new anchor now, a young Scandinavian type who looked about sixteen years old. He was rattling on in his sunny voice about something to do with sockets. Of course; if sockets were out of the news for more than half an hour, that would have been an item in itself. Surprising that Mrs. Troubles hadn't been offering advice for the socketed. Well, dears, a mixed relationship-the socketed and the un-socketed-is a peck of trouble waiting to happen, and we all know it. And so is the socketed with the socketed, and the un-socketed with the unsocketed. Better you should try to kindle something with a convicted felon behind bars, or even just forget the whole thing.

"Didn't you hear me, stupid? I said, you're not really listening, are you? But then, if you weren't listening, of course you didn't hear me. Dealing with your type is enough to make me berserk."

Gabe blinked rapidly at the screen. The sunny anchor's face was now a distorted mask of furious disgust.

"You out there, on your couches, on your beds, on your toilets, squatting in your expensive fetid hovels, you don't put this on to listen to anything. You just let it babble at you, and you let the babble bounce off, a little white noise to make you feel a little less like the stagnant, empty straw-people you really are. Get ready, all you null-and-voids, because here it comes-"

The screen went blank. Seconds crawled by, and then an easy-viewing scene of Big Sur at sunset came up. "We are experiencing some technical difficulties at this time," said a calm, refined voice. "Normal programming should be restored within a few minutes. If you have been running a download from this channel, we strongly advise immediate diagnostics and decontamination, and that you refrain from uploading or downloading any other material until such time as your own system has been certified free of infection. We remind our viewers that diagnostic and decontamination programs are free whenever the problem stems from the network. Consult your program guide for further details."

Gabe let out a short laugh of disbelief. It had been a long time since anything like this had happened on the dataline. He wondered how the abusive swashbuckler was. Maybe one of Sam's friends.

He flicked off the dataline and sat in the silence, at a loss. When the dataline insulted and abandoned you, you knew you were really alone.

A voice in his head. Somebody's, maybe his own. Hey, hotwire-you're an asshole.

"Yah," he muttered, "but I'm trying to quit." He got up and went to the bedroom.

She was sitting on the edge of the unmade bed in a T-shirt and underpants as if she had forgotten what she wanted to do next. He wanted to say her name, but his voice refused to work. She turned then and saw him standing in the doorway, holding onto the frame as if he were trying to push it out and make it wider.

She got up slowly, the expression on her face unreadable. But not unhappy, definitely not unhappy. It may not have been the expression she'd been wearing while she was waiting for Mark on the courthouse steps, but he didn't know for sure because she'd had her back to him. If the best he could do was not unhappy, then he wasn't unhappy, either, he thought wildly. He opened his mouth to speak to her, but his voice still wouldn't come, and he threw up his hands as he went toward her. She met him halfway, and they toppled onto the sagging mattress in a frantic, urgent tangle.

"This is like, port in a storm, nowhere else to go," she said after a few moments of struggling, grabbing, straining. Her voice was a growl. "You care about that?"

He made a noise.

"Me, neither."