Synners

24

The sensation of falling was so real that even without a hot-suit, Sam felt it from toes to head. The ground rushed at her, swelling from a distant point to a gigantic vista of sudden death before everything went terrifyingly black. Nothingness; in the nothingness one last long note sang deeply, vibrating through every part of her shattered being, as if it were reassembling her with its sound.

The note faded away, and there was a space of quiet before Art said, "And that's what they call rock'n'roll."

The interior of Art's tent came up before Sam's eyes. "Jesus," she breathed.

"But that's only what you get on a screen," Art went on. "If you have the sockets, you get something more."

"Yah," said Sam, "a heart attack, probably."

"No, it's something else. A little more video, only accessible through the sockets. It's in there all wrapped up in itself. I can show you some of it, if you want."

"I'm not sure I'm ready for anything else," Sam said, still feeling shaky.

Art dragged a large pillow over and stood it up on his knee. "You can look at it on my screen," he said. "Video within a video, hey?"

Abruptly she was looking at the placid setting of a country lake with a shore completely covered with rocks. The pov moved in on the shore, descending to zero in on one of the smooth egg-shaped stones. Something seemed to move or change on the gritty surface of the stone before it blanked out. Art tossed the pillow aside. "That's all I can give you," he said, a little apologetically. "The rest won't translate into video."

"Translate from what?" Sam asked him.

He shrugged. These days Art was looking less ambiguous genderwise, at least whenever she talked to him. "From action. Something happens in there, but I have no idea how to explain to you what it is."

Sam felt a small coldness in the pit of her stomach. "Have you told Fez about this?"

"Only you. I haven't been able to decide what it is." He paused, looking apprehensive. "I think it might be another me."

"You mean another part of you?"

"That, or something like me. Strange operations are going on in there, in that part of the system, but I can't find them. I can only feel that they are happening."

Sam thought for a moment. "I think you might be feeling the presence of those people on-line with their sockets. You know, other intelligences-consciousnesses-in contact with the system." She winced, hating the sound of the word consciousnesses. It sounded like the mystic bullshit that was in all-too-ample supply on The Stars, Crystals, and You Show.

"No," Art said. "To feel that, I would have to crack their access points, what you call their consoles. The socket-people will be in contact with those, but not with the net. Like anything else in their consoles, they should be confined to their own hardware."

"You'd think so, wouldn't you," Sam murmured, more to herself. The socket-people. It reminded her of an expression Fez used from time to time: pod-people. Pod-people with sockets, the information going in and going out, while in their cocoons they mutated-

She pushed the thought away. "If you say so. You have more information about this than I do."

"Would you like more information? I can gather some for you."

"No, thanks. I've got enough to think about."

"I know," Art said, suddenly solemn. "When the beams look into your eyes, they see you are troubled."

"They don't look into my eyes," she said, somewhat dryly. "They bounce off my corneas. You'd be doing too well to pick up anything from my corneas."

"I know you by every move," Art said, unperturbed. "I know the pattern of your fingers on a keyboard, I know the movements of your eyes. The movements tell me a great deal about you."

"So. Remind me to stare straight ahead next time I come in." She sighed. "I've got a lot on my mind these days. I just wasn't cut out to be a fugitive, I don't think. At you later, okay?"

The screen faded to black, and she worked the monitor off her head. Behind her in the tent, Gator and Fez were studying something on Gator's laptop. The headmount had blocked the sound of their voices from her as well as the sound of her own voice from them; a way not to be in the same room with them while being in the same room with them, if you wanted to call Gator's tent a room. Like a bedroom, say.

The sleeping bags were rolled up and tucked away somewhere out of sight, as they always were during the day, so she had no idea how they were arranged when in use. Mostly she pictured them side by side, but that was as far as she would let the picture go. It was only surmise, really, even after all these weeks; she knew nothing for sure, and she hadn't asked.

Gator looked over her shoulder at her then and smiled. "How's the doctor?"

Sam shrugged. "He showed me one of the new videos. There's something funny in it."

"I'll bet there is," Fez said, without taking his eyes from the screen. Some kind of complicated graphic was rotating on it; another of Gator's tattoo designs. Sam caught a glimpse of something like paisleys surrounding some sort of shifting polygon.

"I'm going back to St. Diz. See you later," Sam said, and slipped out of the tent without waiting to hear Fez's usual admonishment to be careful.

The air was a bit cooler on the Mimosa today. A calling card from October, as Rosa put it, a little reminder that summer would be ending soon. Already the Mimosa population seemed a bit sparser, people taking off for warmer hideouts, or going wherever it was they had to go when they weren't camping on the strip. The ones who stayed behind had a case-hardened look to them, weathered and more than a little bit hopeless. You had to be pretty much resigned from the world to stay on a permanent basis; Sam doubted she was one of them.

If she and Rosa had not found squat space in the ruins of the old inn or restaurant or whatever it was, she doubted that she would have stayed this long. However long that was; in spite of regular visits with Art and managing to keep up with the news off the net, she had pretty much lost track of the days. One week had blended into another in a strange stasis (or stagnation, she thought bitterly), each day bearing few distinguishing marks. And now summer was coming to an end, and they were no closer to any answers. They were all still wanted for questioning-it seemed to be a standing order- and Keely was still wherever he was. Legalization of the socket procedure had come about, and the world seemed no different for it, except most of the implant clinics were in the process of either changing to socket implantation or adding the procedure to their repertoires.

She passed a stand where a couple of kids were running graphics of dolphins and exotic birds on a matched pair of jerry-rigged monitors. The resolution was perfect, but the hardware looked like something from rewiring hell.

"Hey," one of the kids called to her. "I know you."

Sam gave her a one-finger salute. The kid beckoned, and she went over.

"You whack to AR?" the kid asked. The smaller one standing next to her had to be her brother, Sam thought. She shrugged noncommittally.

"Run with this, you see and be." The kid tapped the monitor on the counter in front of her. An impossible parrot was flowering into existence on the screen, neon-colored, luminous. "Fly like an eagle."

"Fly like a parrot," Sam corrected her, a little amused. Fly like a parrot and talk like an eagle, probably. So far there was no law against stupid Artificial Reality.

"Grown from the egg," the kid said. "Transform and believe."

Believe was a word that seemed to figure heavily in all the subgroups of Mimosa slang. That had to mean something, but Sam felt too weary to theorize.

"I 'll believe later," she said, waving a hand at the kids, and went on. Over on her right two cases were having an altercation over who owned a particular spot under the Hermosa Pier. One ragged figure was trying to haul the other one out by a leg while the latter tossed up a lot of sand and made hooting noises.

"There go the property values," Sam muttered. Just beyond was the half-falling-down building she and Rosa shared with the loose, semiorganized group of hackers that had taken it over and shored it up against further collapse. The big attractions of the place were an actual roof and a mostly regular power source, supplemented with what they could collect and store from the solars. The roof had a lot of holes, most of which were covered with any available material, none of it leak-proof, but hey, that's what we on the Mimosa call home, sweet home. She'd have cried, except she'd cried herself out during the first week.

Where the front door had been was a ragged hole and a lopsided gate where they all took turns doing a kind of half-assed sentry duty. Percy was sitting on the gate today, leisurely poking at a piece of hardware with one of his homemade tools (Homemade without a real home? Never mind.) while he held another between his teeth. He was big for fifteen, with thick, straight black hair he chopped off himself whenever it got long enough to dangle in the hardware he was always bent over, and a little bit of soft black fuzz on his upper lip that was trying to be a mustache. Sam had thought he was Spanish until Gator had told her he was part Filipino. He had a genius for hardware, and he was more competent and self-possessed than Sam remembered being at the same age. All of two years ago, she reminded herself. No, closer to three; she would be eighteen in October.

Eighteen on the Mimosa. "Are we ready for that?" she murmured to herself. "We don't think so."

Percy looked up then, spotted her, and waved her over. What the hell; where else was she going to go?

"Age of wireless," Percy said, showing her the piece he'd been working on. Her eyes widened.

"If that works as good as it looks, I'll pay you to make one for me. Better yet, walk me through it." She took the piece from him, a palm-sized card with an array of silvery receptors studding the surface.

"Whack to hardware, dontcha." Percy grinned and pushed her hand away as she tried to give it back to him. "Yours. Believe it."

She felt awkward under his friendly grin. "That's nice, Perce, but-"

"Believe it and forget about it. Whack to something new?" He jumped down from the gate and let out a bellow. "Ritz!"

A slightly older kid popped his head up from behind a pile of boards and junk. "What, this minute?"

"Now and now," Percy confirmed, nodding at the gate. The other kid took his place. "Come on."

Sam followed him, pausing to take a look at her own squat space. Most of her own belongings were hidden under some loose boards in the floor, which were in turn piled with what debris she had scrounged. Not that there was a debris shortage. Her spot was in what had possibly been part of a dining room, and there were still plenty of dismembered tables and chairs that had gone unsalvaged. The culture back at the turn of the millennium had been even more wasteful than the one she presently lived in-lived on the outskirts of, rather.

Few of the walls between rooms had remained standing, and the second floor had collapsed completely, except for a few beams. Some of the more daring souls in residence had crawled out on them to decorate them with impromptu hanging sculptures made of junk-old hardware, broken pieces of kitsch that some interior decorator had probably agonized over, never thinking that an earthquake would reduce it all to detritus.

At the very back of the building was an area that had been some kind of gathering hall or ballroom. There were no squatters here; it served as a common storage and work area. Sam had finally met the elusive Captain Jasm in person back here, a lanky black Japanese woman of some indeterminate age- twenty? thirty? Older didn't seem likely-who was always tinkering with exoskeletons. At first Sam had thought she used exos in lieu of hotsuits, but apparently Jasm didn't really care for hotsuits, at least for her own purposes, which seemed mainly to transfer arcane patterns of movement to programs. One of the exos was a twelve-foot monstrosity, vaguely humanoid in shape, burdened with whatever hardware Jasm wasn't using. Sam found the thing rather spooky looking, like a robot in progress. She could imagine it coming spontaneously to life and crunching through the building all of its own accord like a high-tech Frankenstein's monster.

At the moment it stood off to one side with the rest of Jasm's equipment piled around it, all cleared away to make room for an enormous metal framework bearing sixteen monitors. Sam's mouth dropped open, and she turned to Percy.

"Whack to a little TV?" he said, amused.

She spotted Rosa doing something with a cam on a tripod a little ways away from the monitor setup.

"Here," said Percy, and went over to her. Rosa looked up and smiled as Percy examined the connections on the cam. They led into the framework of monitors.

"Is this something?" Rosa said. "Sixteen monitors, no waiting."

"Where did they all come from?" Sam asked.

Rosa shrugged. "Here and there."

"TV and more TV. It looks like something out of an old movie," Sam said. "Forty, fifty years ago, they were always dragging out the TV screens when they wanted to show what the glorious future would look like. As if the future was just going to be more TV."

"And, as it turned out, it is," Rosa said.

"Now," Percy said, stepping back from the cam. "Whack it."

Rosa turned on the cam. Sam saw the monitors flicker to life, all of them showing broken-up images of something that might have been her and Rosa standing together.

"Still lousy, Perce," Rosa said.

"Whack it," he said again.

"It is turned on," Rosa said, frowning.

He shook his head, reached over, and slapped the top of the cam's plastic case. The images jumped, steadied, and then cleared.

"Perfect," said Art's voice, from a speaker somewhere up on the scaffolding. "Hey, don't look at the monitors, look at the cam so I can see you."

Percy came around and stood between Rosa and Sam with his arms around their shoulders. "Bad for three?"

Art chuckled. "No. Fool with Rosa, I saw Sam first."

Sam rolled her eyes. It would just figure. The first real, possibly conscious AI, and it postured. She would have to wait for the memory of their recent conversation to catch up with Art's current manifestation.

Percy gave her and Rosa a hard squeeze, pulling them both close. "Really bad for three, if you believe."

Sam nodded a little wearily, extricating herself from him. "I heard you."

The bottom row of screens went blank; a moment later four different dataline channels came up on them.

"See there," said Percy. "Ain't just flash. Tap the channels, whack to each. Billions and billions."

Sam's expression was even more cynical on the other twelve monitors. "That'd make kind of a big bulge in the node, don't you think, when we're trying not to advertise our existence?"

"Shit-man, capability," Percy said, exasperated. "Capability rules. The one thing. The one. You don't know what's gonna float in on you."

"Stone-fuckin'-A," Art agreed cheerily. The image on the monitor changed, showing him sitting in a comfortable nest of pillows with a laptop resting on his thighs, but the tent had been replaced by a background that didn't look terribly different from the ruins of the inn. Art Fish doing his human solidarity thing, Sam thought. At the moment he was probably more into the human experience than she was.

She sighed. "I agree we need all the capability we can get. But we can't watch billions and billions of channels at once. We can't even watch sixteen at once."

"I can," Art said smugly.

"Good for you." She looked around. "Wouldn't it be more practical to have monitors all around? That way there'd be one handy everywhere, and we wouldn't lose them all if the roof goes."

Percy wrinkled his nose. "Wouldn't look so glam-bam."

"Oh, of course." Sam gave him a sidelong glance. "I forgot." It did look impressive, she had to admit that. But it was strictly show-off stuff, and she wasn't even sure who they were supposed to be showing off for-themselves? Hardly necessary. Maybe it was all for Art's benefit. As he had made his presence known gradually over the weeks since they'd taken up residence on the Mimosa, all the hackers seemed to have shifted into high gear in a way that reminded Sam of the way her father had talked about everyone at Diversifications trying to look busy in front of their supervisors or whoever. As if Art were some kind of superhacker they all wanted to impress.

"Hey, speak up a little," Art said, cupping a hand around his ear. "I'm working with cheap audio. Maybe you can get Percy to fiddle with the mikes now."

"Nada," Percy told the cam. "Run with the one. Could kill it trying to thrill it."

"Well, there must be some kind of adjustment you can make," Art said. "Give me a schematic of the guts, let me figure it out."

"I don't have any schematics," Percy said. The sudden shift from Mimosa slang was mildly shocking. "It's all second- or third- or ninth-hand stuff that's been rewired and re-rewired. I'd have to take each one apart, run a scanner over it for the CAD, and then reassemble. It'd take for-fucking-ever to do that kind of close work. You gotta live with what you got till we get something better." He looked over at Rosa and Sam, who were staring at him. "Just wanted you to know I can talk like you if I want to." He stepped back and looked at the cam again.

"Hey, you got vocal, and you got high-res. Two outa three'll getcha good night."

Art's image made a put-out face. "You talk that way when you're getting frying-meat sounds on your hearing aid, Sonny-Jim."

" 'Sonny-Jim'?" said Rosa.

Percy launched into a long explanation or defense, now heavily salted with slang. Sam drifted away, leaving them to argue it out. You could spend all of an afternoon and most of an evening arguing with Art if he really got involved.

She went back to her squat space, squeezing between the piles of broken boards and plaster that sectioned it off, and flopped down on the narrow pad she had bartered from one of the junk collectors in Rude Boy turf. This was definitely better than the small tent she and Rosa had spent the first few days putting up, taking down, and lugging around with them along with the rest of their stuff. But something about all those monitors on the scaffolding had deepened her funk. There was something permanent in feel about it, as if it meant they were all settling in forever, Art included.

Her hand fell on the modified insulin-pump system in her pocket. In the midst of the rigors of life underground, or whatever it was called, she hadn't done anything with it lately. She hadn't done much at all except wander around in a daze. That wasn't a whole lot more than what Jones had been doing; he was even now laid out in a far dark corner, stuporous for sixteen hours a day. Too much death too often, Gator had said. The body's protecting itself the best way it knows how, by keeping him off-line, so to speak. It was as good a theory as any, Sam supposed.

She'd been ready to give Jones a more final demise when she and Rosa had caught up with him at Forest Lawn, sucking up to one of the kids running a fooler loop. Fortunately Rosa had known the kid, and it had been easy to persuade him he didn't want to take merchandise from someone wanted for questioning. Persuading Jones to come with them hadn't been as easy, but if bis stubbornness hadn't delayed them, she never would have been treated to the sight of her father lying on the ground near Liberace's tomb, being tended to by Gina Aiesi and Visual Mark.

It had almost been worth the risk of sneaking past the cops in the dark, seeing Gabe at a hit-and-run. Rosa had given her hell later for passing him the paper with St. Dismas written on it. But the only St. Dismas the authorities would know of was the long-defunct soup kitchen by the same name that had once operated in Watts, founded by a bright-eyed, Jesus-freaked technophobe with sticky fingers. Or so the old legend had it. Sam wouldn't have been surprised to find that she'd just been another hacker with her name on a warrant that wouldn't expire. Just being wanted for questioning would have been enough to drive her to a nunnery of some kind, if she hadn't already known how much she hated even half-assed communal living on the skids.

But it could have been worse all the way around. She and Rosa might still have been in the tent with Jones stashed in Gator's outhouse; she might have lost more than her shoes that first night on the strip; they might have been canned at the hit-and-run, and Gator's phony IDs might not have held up. As it was, the falling-down ruined inn now had a fancy-schmancy monitor setup to go with the sophisticated if homegrown system spread out among the squatters, bigger and faster than the system Fez had abandoned with his apartment, except for a few items he'd managed to transport to Gator's tent. Like the headmount she'd made for him.

She took the ex-pump unit out of her pocket and turned it over and over in her hand. She had made her own contributions in the way of hardware and programs in the tumble-down shelter, but she wasn't about to toss this out for communal use. Making the specs available was enough.

Of course, having the specs wasn't like having work space to do anything with them. The supply house in the Ozarks that she had made contact with had been well stocked and very accommodating, allowing her to trade scut work on their inventory and beefing up their antiviral routines for a clean, well-lit area with the right kind of equipment for manipulating the protein assemblers. Once she'd had the guts properly configured, she'd been able to make the rest of the modifications on the pump itself in the privacy of her tent. It was really just a hacker toy, stolen just for her own use because she hadn't wanted to wait six months, a year, maybe two years, before it came out on the market so she could buy one, putting more money into Diversifications' well-lined pockets, and strip it down to see how she could dupe it. If indeed the units had become available at all.

All things considered, this should have been the ideal place to use it. Made for inhospitable environments. She remembered the hardware Percy had given her, still in her other hand, and examined it. A little redesign, a little rewiring, and it would adapt perfectly to the pump unit. Then she'd be all set; her own intimately personal computer system with a wireless modem set to Art's iron-guard frequency. The sunglasses weren't as good as a headmount, but they were far better than nothing, and she wouldn't need even solar power to lack it over. Except for the modem, of course. She could have outfitted herself in a few minutes, except her ambition seemed to have deserted her. "Are you okay?"

Rosa was standing at the nominal entrance to her squat space; Sam nodded, beckoning. "Yah. I think I've just got them bad old cozmic Mimosa dead-end blues."

"Come on, it could be worse." Rosa eased down next to her, resting her back against the powdery, cracked wall.

"I know. I've just been telling myself that. I never did want to come here. I thought it would be the first place anyone would look for us. Cops aren't stupid, they could figure that we planted false information that we'd left town." Sam took a long breath. "But then I started softening up to the idea a little. Thinking that it would be kind of… oh, exciting, I guess. Romantic, even. Almost like being in the Ozarks again, except freakier. Laptops in the raw, jammers making music. Horny hardware geniuses making cordless modems for you." She laughed a little and then sighed again. "But mostly it's being dirty and smelly and not having any safe place to stay and not getting enough to eat."

"And getting your shoes stolen," Rosa added.

"Yah. I guess I never bounced back after that one."

"Well, I got them back. Black eye faded pretty quick, too. And you should have seen the other guy."

"I did see him. The scum. I still feel horribly guilty about the whole thing."

Rosa chuckled. "You don't have to feel guilty about that. You're a lover, not a fighter."

"Which means I definitely don't belong here. And I'm not even anybody's lover."

"Come on. If Percy could be bad for three, he could be bad for two. If you believe."

Sam groaned. "Even if I could bring myself to molest a fifteen-year-old-"

"-who probably has more experience than you do," Rosa put in wryly.

"-I'm not sure I could ever get around the language barrier. Half the time when he's talking, I'm winging it."

"And he just went to all the trouble of showing you he could talk like us. But I don't blame you for wanting to wait until his voice changes." Rosa chuckled again, a little sadly. "What else?"

Sam pressed her lips together. She had never mentioned her feelings for Fez to Rosa, but she doubted that she really had to. She was sure Rosa had picked up on plenty and tactfully held her peace, and she was also sure what her friend would say if she invited comment. Why bother bringing it up at all, she thought; if you've run the simulation, and you know how it turns out, there's no point in wasting time living through it all over again.

"I just miss civilization. I miss being able to move around, come and go as I please. Being out there. Maybe at heart I'm just another bourgeois who can't take the heat, and as soon as I turn eighteen, I'll turn in my laptop, look up my social security number, and go get a real job."

Rosa patted her leg carelessly. "Buck up, little soldier. As soon as the dust settles from the Instant Information Revolution, they'll lose interest in us, and we'll all be able to go home."

"You think so?"

"Either then, or when Keely's sentence is up." Sam groaned again, loudly.

"Now-" Rosa pushed herself to her feet and offered her a hand. "It's just about Stupid Headlines time. Let's us old and tired fugitives from justice go see what's on the news and have a few laughs. Unless you'd like to sit and sulk on your own."

Back to Gator's tent. Was she ready for that again? Oh, hell, she thought, and laughed. "Not really."

" 'Post-Millennarist Fundamentalists Claim Sockets Facilitate Demonic Possession via Rock Music' " Art's image, looking a bit purple, beamed from a Percy-supplied monitor at the group in Gator's tent. One of the easel monitors Fez had managed to salvage sat next to it with headline text.

"Stupid, but unimaginative and not one bit original," said Gator, leaning on the back of Fez's chair.

"Yah, but it's too stupid to ignore," said Captain Jasm, on Sam's right. Jasm's deep voice reminded her of an engine slightly and pleasantly out of tune.

Art paused. He had his image sitting at a desk sorting through papers. "Okay, how's this: 'Lobby for Decency Declares Brain an Erogenous Zone, Demands Mandatory Hatting.' "

" 'Hatting'?" said Adrian.

"Did you make that up?" Gator asked suspiciously.

"Nope." Art grinned. "Here, Adrian, just for you-" Mandarin subtitles appeared below each headline on the other screen.

"Hatting." Captain Jasm looked thoughtful. "I like that. I hat, you hat, she/he/it hats, I have hatted, I will have hatted, I will have been hatted-"

"Not to mention the soon-to-be-immortal 'Hat you, sucker,' " Rosa put in.

"Couldn't some of us just get capped?" said Adrian.

Jasm looked at him fondly and then gave the top of his head a glancing swat. "How's that?"

" 'Para-Versal Announces Forthcoming New Release with Multiple Cross-Tie-Ins,' " Art went on. " 'Tailor-Made Companionship Now a Reality, Thanks to Sockets.' "

No one said anything for a moment. "Is that stupid," Gator asked, "or just pathetic?"

"I don't know," said Art, "but I thought it would be of interest to Sam, since her father's involved."

"He is?" Sam frowned.

" 'New Release Custom-Created by Diversifications' Gabriel Ludovic,' it says here," Art told her.

"They must have drilled him, then," Sam said, more to herself.

"Let's not bandy surnames about too liberally," Fez said to Art. "We're among friends, but we never know who's going to walk in on us."

On-screen Art had not moved for several seconds. Sam reached across Jasm to tap Fez on the knee. "Fez-"

"I'm watching," he said. "Art? Still with us?"

Gator reached over and held a finger over the disconnect panel. Art's image unfroze.

"Something strange," he said.

"Trace?" Gator asked.

"No…" he looked thoughtful. "Something… touched me."

"Explain," said Fez.

"It was so momentary. Let me work on it. I'll get back to you." He shuffled the simulated papers on his simulated desk. "Ah, this just in. 'To whomever, wherever: Hi, I didn't die, I'm in the big tower. Divers up, divers down, divers on vacation.' "

Everyone looked at everyone else. "This is a headline?" Gator said.

"Actually, I found it in the current-events area of Dr. Fish's Answering Machine with a funny mark on it."

Gator started to chew Art out for maintaining the bulletin board when a voice behind them spoke.

"Divers on vacation. Come on, even I can figure that one."

Sam twisted around to look at Jones standing just inside the tent flap, looking puffy-eyed and depressed. He gazed around at all of them. "Percy told me where to find you," he added, a bit apologetically.

"That's fine," Gator said, "but don't you die in here."

Sam jumped up. "Come on, I'll take you back."

He waved her away. "Don't bother. I temporarily can't sleep. And don't worry, Gator. The implants have stopped working. For now, anyway."

" 'Sockets Inventor Dies in Mexico,' " Art said. " 'Suicide Pact with Hall Galen Suspected.' "

They all turned back to the screen again. Even Jones seemed interested.

The music, all cruising synthesizers and pumping beatbox, decreased in volume again.

"Message sent. So did I tell you it was a damned Schrodinger world?" said the man on the screen. He was sitting on a yellow chaise in a strange partial room. The walls on either side rose to unequal heights, and where the ceiling and back wall should have been was a backdrop of swiftly moving clouds in a blue green sky, gray and almost stony looking, reflected in the large, shiny black and white tiles on the floor. Besides the chaise there were two angular black chairs that looked like dollhouse miniatures and a small white table on impossibly thin legs.

"Schrodinger or Heisenberg?" Keely said, talking into the speaker.

"Well, either one, I guess. To be or not to be, are you or aren't you-can't be sure of either one till somebody opens your box. Fly Heisenberg Airlines-we don't know where we are, but we're making damned good time." An old-fashioned detonator with a plunger materialized in his hands. "Sure you don't want me to blow the door for you?"

"If I leave here, it would be just like a jailbreak," Keely said wearily. "An outside phone line is better, for the time being. Since I don't know where anybody is or how to reach them. And wouldn't want anyone to trace them if I did."

The detonator swelled to desk size and straddled the man on the chaise. Lifting the top, he reached in and plucked out a tangled handful of wires, surveying them closely. "I still haven't figured this. It could take some time."

"I don't know how much time I have," Keely said. "I could be down in Medical tomorrow."

"Don't know how you take the confinement." The man shook his head in time to the music, which was still playing at a level just below the attention threshold. "Confinement is a double-A, stone-home, all-wool-and-a-yard-wide bitch. And don't you forget it."

Not likely, Keely thought, watching him with interest. Visual Mark's energy had definitely picked up since he'd gotten his sockets.

"I'm outa the box now myself," Mark went on, searching through the tangle of wires. He reached into the desk again and pulled out some more.

"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Keely asked, tentatively.

"Fuck, no. I'm picking it up on the fly. Fly, fly, fly is what I do now. I don't actually know dick about anything."

Keely frowned, suddenly suspicious. "So, what's this, then, some kind of cheap comedy video you're trying out on me?"

The man dropped the wires and looked out of the screen sternly. Keely found himself marveling; he could almost believe that the on-screen image could actually see him. Sometimes Mark's gaze missed him entirely, but most times, like now, Mark's estimate of where he was sitting at the monitor was dead on. "Did I say I'd help? Did I send your fucking message for you? You can answer anytime."

"Sorry," Keely said.

"You didn't let me finish anyway. I don't know dick about any of this stuff just being like you are, no holes in the head. But now I'm on-line. Connected." Wires appeared on his head, growing out from his skull in a frenzy. "Understand now? I know what there is to know. Only thing I don't know is how I'm supposed to get all this stuff back in my head with me. I mean, where can I put it?" He picked up the tangle of lines again.

"Wait," said Keely. "You mean you're on-line that way?" For some reason it hadn't occurred to him that Mark would be using the interface.

"Come on. Anyone can tell something's different with me. Haven't been this coherent since I was sixteen fuckin' years old." He held the wires up and grimaced at them. "Gonna haveta cook this one awhile. Getting back to you later. I'll leave a back door open for you. Access code 'Gina' and you're in.'

"What if you're off-line?"

Mark spread his hands. "If I'm off-line, call Medical. It'll mean I'm dead."

The screen went dark, leaving Keely staring at his own distorted reflection in the glass.