Synners

27

Mark's Camadaytime video was in the pipe. Gina tried to watch it four times. The most she could go was two minutes before cutting it off.

Only a movie. She flicked the restart button on the remote.

Try again.

The monitor screen lit up white and blank. After a bit soft shadows began to congeal as the music faded in, a discordant machine-jangler cover of a real old one called "Wasted." So old it was new again. Valjean's rasp invited her to come down on her own, and something in it made her want to move closer to the screen, closer to the shadowy forms pulsing in an out now, writhing. The music made the shadows soft, and the shadows softened the music, and she could taste the texture in her mind, warm and alive like flesh.

She looked over her shoulder at the half-closed bedroom door. She'd awakened to find Ludovic lying next to her, fast asleep, but on top of the covers, while she'd been underneath. The charm of his refusal to presume should have moved her more than it did, but she had no room in her for charm this morning.

On the way over last night, he'd told her about the hookup Valjean had rigged. She'd found the idea of the crap in Valjean's head dancing on the cape revolting. And it had to have come out of this video.

This video. She hadn't taken it through the wire, but she could almost imagine how it would be. Like floating through a tangible fog bank, and as each shadow pulsed, there would be a corresponding pressure deep in the head, an invisible finger pressing here, and here, and here, searching for some particularly sensitive spot. Like being molested in some weird, witchy way.

The shadows were throbbing more urgently now, rock Rorschachs. Do you see a butterfly here, or a skeletal pelvis?

– an open window or an open wound-

She stabbed the quit panel and turned away from the monitor. It had happened again, that feeling of being hypnotized. More than hypnotized.

She ran a hand over her head, touching the places where the sockets were implanted. Maybe if she could have reached in as far as Mark had, she would have come up with something equally fucked.

From the bedroom she heard Ludovic turning over, and she waited, but he didn't get up. Go in and get him, see if he could watch this fucked-up postcard from the dark side? When he had popped up again in Loophead's cellar, she hadn't known whether to laugh or cry.

Why didn't you wait for me? Why didn't you come to me?

She'd had no answer for that; her condition had not been conducive to explaining her life to him.

If you're going to do this on a regular basis, I'm going to have to tap into a supply of good stimulants.

Oh, who fucking asked you? That had spilled out of her, more like vomit than words.

I'm a fucking volunteer.

Didn't your mother ever tell you never to fucking volunteer?

Jesus! He'd pounded the steering wheel of the rental with both fists, making the whole vehicle shake like the piece of shit it was. What does it take? What does it fucking take?

She glanced at the bedroom again. What does it take? Well, for starters, how does forty-seven miles of barbed wire sound? Just for starters. We'll get to the really lethal stuff later. Because we do what we do, and we do it because we can.

Suddenly she felt ashamed of herself, for that and for Loophead. I don't know what you did to those people, but they never want to see you again.

I told them not to do it. I didn't think I was toxed, I didn't feel toxed. I didn't feel anything.

Hadn't sounded like much of a defense then, and it didn't now. What she'd done to them. She knew what she'd done to them. She'd taken them hard, and manhandled them, each and all together. She hadn't waited for them to give it up, she'd squeezed it out of them, and when they'd given it all, she'd set them back up and squeezed out some more, running over them, shaking them, doing the sound and the music to them, not with them. She hadn't been a synner with Flavia and Dorcas and Tom and Claudio, but something altogether different-

She looked at the blank monitor screen again, and for a moment her mind made her see phantom patterns still moving on it.

Yah, we do what we do, and we do it because we can, and where did you learn to do a thing like that?

"Little Jesus Jump-Up," she muttered. She knew where Mark was, and she knew where Valjean was, and she knew where the video was, in the pipe, out there in release, it had been released-

She hesitated for a moment, looking back at the bedroom. Maybe if they hadn't come back here to Mark's own apartment, she'd have gone in and woken him up long ago. But as he'd said, he didn't know where she lived, and he hadn't wanted to drive all the way to Reseda. Next time the Hollywood-Sheriott for sure.

Sure.

It's okay, hotwire, she thought. You don't have to volunteer anymore.

She left a note on the monitor. Gone to get Mark. That would say it to him.

He'd been dreaming that Rivera had sent him down to Medical to get sockets, and they'd been putting them in the hard way, using spikes and drills and steam-driven hammers that whistled horribly whenever they hit a trouble spot. He could feel them grinding in, driving all the way down through his skull, his face, his neck, into his body cavity-

Abruptly he raised his aching head and looked around. He was still in the penthouse. The light said daytime. "Fuckin' dream," he muttered, and rubbed his head all over. Had to have been a fucking dream; if Rivera had just had them take him, he'd have awakened in Medical. Maybe.

He caught sight of the empty bottle standing next to the blank monitor and groaned. Shit, he was lucky to be alive. Alcohol was not the way he flew. He had a vague memory of thinking it had been a good idea at the time. Yah. Like putting a shotgun to your face and pulling the trigger with your toe.

The whistles blasted him then, almost knocking him off the chair. The monitor was no longer blank; Mark was staring out from that crazy partial room. In the background the clouds were boiling.

"Door's open, get the fuck out."

"When I'm alive, I'll give it some thought," Keely said. "I'm not-"

"I couldn't stick here waiting for you to come to," Mark went on abruptly. "You're looking at a message. Don't interrupt. Get the fuck outa here, go down to my pit on the sixteenth floor, hack the lock, rip the fucking wires right outa my head. Now."

Keely made a face. "What?"

"You heard me. You rip the fucking wires outa my head now. Fast. The old meat's gonna stroke out big, and if the Big One gets up the wires into the system, it's all gonna stroke out, it's gonna eat the system alive and everyone connected to it. You got that?"

"Stroke?" Keely said, rubbing his forehead. He felt like he'd had one himself.

"Reference: cerebral vascular accident. Only it's different this time. If it gets into the system and finds someone hooked in with the interface, it'll get them, too. You got that? A contagious stroke, a fucking virus, are you with me yet?"

"Shit." Keely frowned. "Wait a minute… this is a recording?"

"Canned ham. Get the fuck outa here and go down to my pit on the sixteenth floor, hack the lock, rip the wires outa my head. Don't sweat the meat, the meat's over, it's only warm now."

"Meat," said Keely, trying to push his thoughts around in the wreck of his mind.

"Meat, reference: my body. You got that? Get the fuck outa here, go down to my pit on the sixteenth floor, hack the lock, rip the fucking wires outa my head. Or the Big One gets into the system with the little one."

"Jesus. Reference, the little one," Keely begged, not really expecting the program to answer.

"The little one, reference: the stroke I already had. Little thing, no one would have noticed it anyway, but it's already in the system, and it's why I couldn't stay here waiting for you to come to."

"Where the fuck are you now?"

"Fuck if I know, boy. Out in the big system somewhere, the Big Context. Change for the machines. You want to find me after you're out, dial up the access code VM for Visual Mark. Give the password Gina, and I'll know it's you. I'll answer if I can. Door's open, get the fuck out, go down to my pit on the six-"

The image froze and then began to unravel, starting at the top left corner of the screen and working across. It looked as if some invisible creature were chewing it away in little portions. Keely squeezed his eyes shut. Did hallucinations come with a hangover? Or was this Mark's idea of punchy visuals?

When he opened his eyes, half the image had been eaten away; there were slashes through what remained. Keely hit the clear-screen pad. Nothing happened. He pressed recall and replay, tried to raise the dataline menu. Something was actively clawing at the image now, ripping it up in big, messy strokes. He pressed the reset pad to take the unit all the way back to start-up mode. Nothing changed.

The last of the image vanished, and the screen turned a soft greyish white.

"Come on. Is this some kinda fancy demonstration?" Keely said. "You doing this to show me something?" A shapeless spot was darkening in the center of the screen. "You're really still here, aren't you."

Music came up, faint, jangly like machinery, and the shadow in the center of the screen began to pulse and blossom and just as he blinked, he caught-

He shook his head. Strange. All of a sudden he'd dropped a stitch, just lost his line of thought. The screen was full of pulsing shadows. Turning away, he groped for the off pad. Images were flashing in his brain, twisted progressions and distortions that made his headache worse. Something about stones, or clouds… water…

He saw then that he'd been tapping the off panel steadily, but nothing had happened. The shadows kept moving on the screen, insistent, magnetic, demanding, and if he didn't turn his back to them, he was going to drop into a trance again.

But he wasn't an easy subject for hypnosis, he knew that. Except this didn't feel exactly like hypnosis. It felt… ugly. Like something probing him for a weak spot, a secret hurt. But just shadows on a screen?

He tried to think. It had been something more than the shadowy things. Cautiously he turned his head until the screen was at the edge of his peripheral vision.

There. A vibration or a flutter, not apparent when he looked at the screen straight on. It was peculiar, irregular, like a glitch in the transmission bouncing the picture around. Somehow that, combined with the pulse rate of the shadows, had affected him on some level he wasn't really aware of. Maybe something to do with the rate at which the neurons in his brain fired. Sam could have told him, she'd studied all that stuff. But Sam wasn't here. He was on his own. Go down… rip the wires out…

He crawled under the desk, found the cords for the unit and the one next to it, and yanked them out of the wall.

On the screen the shadows kept throbbing, moving, writhing. He turned away and found himself staring at the heavy antique linen cloth on the dining table.

He pulled the cloth off the table, dragging along the metal-sculpture centerpiece and the bulky crystal candlesticks. They made some stone-home satisfying crashes when they hit the floor. He stumped backwards to the desk and flung the cloth over the monitor.

The shapes were pulsing on the material now. A chill went through him; then he realized that he was just seeing afterimages. Stop it, he ordered himself, and looked away, out the window, at the ceiling, at the floor, at everything, filling his mind with more visual input.

After a bit the discomfort in his head started to fade. He looked at the covered monitor again. Nothing, neither virus nor intelligence, should have been able to override a good old-fashioned power-down. So what the fuck was it, Super virus? Totally invulnerable?

Forget it; he would have to get down to the sixteenth floor without being caught and get into Mark's pit. Sure, nothing to it, hack the lock. Hack the fucking lock. With what? Shit, he couldn't even get that far, he didn't have a keystrip for the elevators.

His gaze fell on the other unit. He had never turned it on. And it was just a laptop in a console shell, bolted into the desk by the Diversifications cheap-asses.

"Thank you, cheap-asses," he said aloud, and went into the kitchen to see if he could find anything that might serve for tools.

In the end he just chopped away pieces of the desktop with a metal meat tenderizer (thank you, Rediscovery Cuisine), bent back the console shell, and disconnected the larger keyboard and monitor using a butter knife for a screwdriver. The unit had a smaller screen and its own portable keypad folded underneath and an unexpected wealth of extra connections tucked into the battery compartment. A light-collector battery, fully charged even after being hidden in the desk, thank you God, or Whoever.

He paused, looking at the other unit still covered by the tablecloth. Right, of course; as soon as he'd unplugged it, the battery had kicked in. To prevent a crash in case of power failure. Except the standard, resident antiviral procedures usually disabled the fail-safe cutoff to the battery as soon as it detected an infection, to keep the virus contained. Keely chuckled grimly. Not this time. Maybe this was Supervirus after all.

The elevator-call panel hotwired almost effortlessly with the penthouse laptop. He watched the activity on the screen impatiently, until he found a car emptying out on ten and called it up so quickly that he was sure he had given himself away. But that wasn't important anymore.

He was still on his way down to sixteen when the laptop screen told him all the other elevators had suddenly quit.

She was sorry she hadn't awakened him. No one should have had to face this kind of traffic alone.

Jammed in on Santa Monica Boulevard, she flipped through the screens on the commuter's nav unit, looking for anything with even a hint of space and movement on it. Or she tried to flip through the screens-the response time from GridLid was so long this morning, she could practically have gotten out of the commuter and checked the streets herself on foot. Almost nothing was moving. Periodically GridLid's usual crisis message marched across the bottom of the screen: DUE TO UNUSUALLY HEAVY TRAFFIC, ALL VEHICLES THAT DO NOT ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO BE ON THE ROADS AT THIS TIME SHOULD PARK WHEREVER LEGALLY PERMISSIBLE UNTIL STREETS CLEAR.

Sure, Jack. Like the fucking vehicles were driving themselves. She shifted impatiently in the worn, sagging seat. Try and run away from something in L.A. The traffic was so fucking awful, you might as well stay put and face it down.

From the corner of her eye, she saw the GridLid screen flicker.

"Great, you motherfucker," she growled, and tapped the monitor. "Go out on me now, blow a fucking fuse, you think you don't absolutely have to be on the road, is that it?"

The driver in the private car behind her tapped the horn.

The commuter in front of her had rolled forward all of six inches. "Okay, shitheel, okay." She moved up six inches. "No one's gonna cut in front of us, happy now?"

The driver honked again. Irritated, she twisted around in her seat and saw a young guy beckoning to her, looking like he was approaching the thin edge of desperation. She got out of the commuter and went back to him.

"Excuse me, you don't know anything about these navigator units, do you?" he asked. She looked at the car. Private car, not a commuter, with custom everything. Including the nav unit. Full dataline access.

"No more than anyone else," she said. "Why?"

"I'm getting a real funny message on mine. Look." He swiveled the monitor around and sat back so she could see. "It ought to show up again any second."

Even as he spoke, a parade of words cut across the middle of the navigational graphic on the screen. THOUGHT WE TOLD YOU TO GET THIS PILE OF SHIT OFF THE ROAD. Gina gave a short incredulous laugh in spite of herself.

"This is my parents' car, and they've done a lot of customizing to it. The nav unit has a cutaway to full dataline access, and I thought maybe I was getting a crossed signal or something. Because, look-" He thumbed a panel on the body of the unit in the dashboard. "I can't raise any other screens to find any clear streets." He looked up at her with a pleading expression.

"Well, first of all, there ain't any other clear streets. You can't get any other screens because GridLid's running too slow to feed them. You might as well use the cutaway to the dataline and catch Dear Mrs. Troubles on FolkNet, or you can watch gridlock footage on General News L.A. That answer all your questions?"

"What about that weird message?" he said. "GridLid doesn't send out messages like that, do they?"

She chuckled. "No. But Dr. Fish does. I guess now he makes car calls."

"I'm sorry to bother you," he called after her apologetically as she went back to the commuter. "I haven't been driving very long."

"By the time we get outa this, you'll have been driving for-fucking-ever," she muttered. Dr. Fish in GridLid. More likely Dr. Fish was in the car's nav unit because Mommy and/or Daddy was always downloading hot tips off the free bizboards, going to and from work. Don't wanna waste a precious moment of those waking hours stuck in traffic, gotta do the fucking business in the car.

The nav-unit screen was blank. She banged on the housing with her fist. "Perfect, you son of a bitch. If I could get fucking men to go down on me that easy, I'd probably be fucking mellow about this!"

One word popped onto the screen.

Gina.

She pulled her hand back, staring at her name. It's Mark.

She stared, not willing to believe it. The sight of her credit strip sticking out of the slot next to the ignition jumped out at her briefly. How he'd found her, by her little tiny credit allowed for essentials like food and gridlock.

Don't have long, said the screen. It flickered again. GridLid's had it. Meat, too. Me, too.

There was a long pause. She reached for the phone on the other side of the monitor, not really knowing whom she intended to call. Moot choice; the phone was dead. Biz-freaks must have been having nervous breakdowns by the six-pack all up and down the street.

This is hard.

Losing her mind, she thought, still holding the useless receiver in both hands.

Video turned it loose. Left body. Turn me off. Take out wires. In my pit.

The screen rolled suddenly. THOUGHT WE TOLD YOU TO GET THIS PILE OF SHIT OFF THE ROAD. That didn't sound much like Mark's style.

The aggressive capital letters faded away, and then a new message came up.

Be there for me.

That sounded like Mark's style. As she watched, the smaller letters melted and ran, becoming a line flowing across the screen, first in a smooth, lopsided sine pattern and then sharpening into spikes. She recognized her own brain wave as she'd seen it on the screen in her pit. It changed suddenly, the spikes suddenly shooting up and down in a frenzied scribble before the screen went dark again.

"Ah, Christ," she muttered.

The commuter in front of her had moved up another few inches. In the rearview mirror she could see the kid in the custom-job staring down at his dashboard worriedly.

"Fuck it," she said. She cut the motor, climbed out of the commuter, and went back to the kid behind her.

"Listen," she said. "I gotta go to the bathroom. I left the thing in neutral. Just nudge it with your bumper every time you want to move up, and it'll go."

His eyes bugged out. "But that's illeg-"

The driver behind him stuck his head out the window. "Hey, bitch, where do you think you're going? Hey, get back in that thing, you can't leave it there-" Horns began honking as she walked briskly toward West Hollywood.

"… and reports that GridLid is in the grip of one or more crippling viruses can be neither confirmed nor denied."

Sitting in the media bar looking up at the big screen, Gabe sighed, heavy-lidded. His apprehension on waking had faded into weary bewilderment when he'd realized he was alone in Mark's apartment. He hadn't thought Gina had gone out to pick up a couple of fancy breakfasts at the Greek joint on the corner. The message on the monitor had told him pretty much everything he needed to know.

Didn't your mother ever tell you never to fucking volunteer?

Have to take that up with Mom, he thought sourly. Now he was sitting on a bar stool at eleven-thirty in the morning, not caring that he was incredibly late for work, sipping bad coffee in elbow-to-elbow isolation with a rather questionable clientele. Possibly more questionable than Gina Aiesi, though he wouldn't have laid any bets.

He should have figured on gridlock, the way his luck had been running. The only way to end a bad day was to screw up the start of the next one.

Fuck it up, you mean. People who are afraid of profanity are afraid of life.

I'm not afraid of life. I just don't know where it is anymore.

Not last night, but the other night, when he'd been sure that everything they said to each other was yet another secret of the universe. You could get pretty high up in the stupid-sphere, thinking shit like that, and it was a long way down without a parachute.

This morning he knew next to nothing, and he'd already forgotten some of that. Mental gridlock.

Mental gridlock probably looked something like what he was seeing on the screen now. From the Hollywood Freeway back to La Cienega, Santa Monica Boulevard looked like a long, narrow parking lot.

"Hey," said the hostile-looking man next to him. "Do we have to watch this? Why don't you put on some porn?" He was wearing a too-tight yellow plastic overall with a red noose around his neck.

The bartender sneered. "What's the matter, you never heard of gridlock porn?"

"It ain't porn unless it's on a porn channel," the guy said.

"It's obscene enough for me," said the woman on Gabe's right. She was stirring a bright purple drink with a broken light pen. "Turn it up, will you?" she asked the bartender.

"… sudden unexplained fluctuation in the timing of traffic signals, combined with what seems to have been faulty transmission from GridLid Navigation to drivers. GridLid has experienced occasional communications breakdowns in the past but never transmission of erroneous data."

The camera panned up and down the seemingly endless line of cars before the pov cut to a shot of the traffic on the Hollywood Freeway, moving along smoothly beneath the Santa Monica overpass.

"This incident is also remarkable for the selectiveness of the traffic-signal glitches and the data errors from GridLid. No other part of the greater Los Angeles area was involved, though of course other arteries and roads will be affected as traffic is diverted from Santa Monica Boulevard during clear-out, which some say will last all day and well into the evening."

Another cut, to a chain-reaction fender bender near La Cienega. "No serious injuries were reported in this collision involving over two dozen vehicles, though several older drivers were taken to local hospitals via Life-Flyer helicraft. No word on their condition yet, nor was any reason given as to why police insisted that they be sent for treatment.

"Also impossible to confirm at this time is a rumor claiming that at least one of the drivers involved, identified only as an actor from West Hollywood, was on-line with her or his vehicle at the time of the accident. Donner Moquin of the Motor Vehicle Bureau stated that although there were no licensed vehicles with that capability registered with the bureau, the modification is not impossible."

Cut to a pensive-looking man squinting against the afternoon sun as he murmured something at a microphone. The sound came up. "… not real complicated. You'd need an extra set of connector wires, but you can get those from any supplier, they don't have to be brand name. It's an easy wiring job, the same thing they do for the airline pilots, minus the wing stuff. We looked into it, sure, in case the public demand rose for it, but all we had is requests for information. I myself feel it's a good idea"-he paused to laugh a little-"but my husband says I've always been kind of car-crazy anyway-"

"So what is that supposed to mean, on-line with the vehicle?" said the man in the overall querulously. "The goddamn socket stuff?"

The bartender pushed a dataline dial-up unit across the bar at him. "Why don't you call and ask for a clarification? We'll put it on your tab." The man pushed the unit back with a mutter.

The screen was showing another long pan of the accident. "Traffic signals are still dead on Santa Monica Boulevard," stated a new female voice-over with a flatter, more serious tone. "Word has just reached us that the affected area seems to be spreading, onto Sunset Boulevard, starting at the point where Santa Monica merges into Sunset before Sunset goes into downtown L.A. Trouble is also reported on La Cienega, where traffic lights are malfunctioning. Officials have refused to confirm or deny that L.A. is only a few minutes away from a full red-line transportation emergency. They also still refuse to comment on the rumor that the problems are due to a specialized 'traffic-jammer virus' inserted into the GridLid timing system by hacker-vandals."

The screen was now showing a small group of what looked to Gabe like twelve-year-olds, who seemed to be both pleased with and disdainful of the camera focused on them.

"Hackers didn't do this," said the designated speaker, a sharp-faced girl too skinny and dirty for her own good. She stood sideways in front of the other four or five lads, hugging herself tightly. A slivery chip dangled on a tiny chain from one earlobe. "No freakin' way hackers did this," she added belligerently, her eyes darting toward whoever was working the camera. Minicam free-lancer interview, Gabe thought, some would-be stringer in the right place at the right time; there was none of the wobble characteristic of the cheaper minicams, but the perspective gave it away. The kids looked just a little too big in the cam's eye.

The spokeskid seemed to listen to something for a moment. "Well, you know, this is our town, too, we like to get around it, we got places we like to go. That's how come I'm so sure no hackers did this. If there even is any virus. Every freakin' time something goes wrong, people say, 'Oh, must be some hacker doing the virus thing again.' They like to blame us for all their problems. Prolly the software just gave out all at once. You people, you watehamacallits-"

"Mainstream," offered a slightly older kid standing behind her, leaning forward and then slipping back and clapping a hand over her mouth, as if she'd said something embarrassing.

"Yeah, you mainstreams, you straights, none of you maintain your software or hardware like you should. I mean, you treat it like my parents treat each other, it's no goddamn wonder it goes out once in a while. You don't do no maintenance or updating, I'm surprised the whole place ain't blacked out-"

Abruptly the picture started to break up into static and zigzag lines. The man in the yellow jumpsuit gave a short disgusted laugh. "Shit, one of their little friends must be watching and did that on purpose."

"Probably set it up themselves," muttered the woman on Gabe's right. "Set it up in the system to go off when they said certain trigger-words, like the other one-"

"Trigger-word viruses are more trouble than they're worth," Gabe said, without thinking. "Half the time there's such a wide margin for variation in inflection, volume, and tone that the damned things go off too easily and too soon. Or the triggers are so precise that they won't go off if there's even a half-decibel variation. The simple stuff, a counting fuse or a timer, is always better. You can tell genuine hacker work. It's always as simple as possible…"

His voice trailed off as he realized he had the attention of everyone sitting at the bar.

"Really," said the woman next to him. "You an authority? Maybe one of those reformed delinquents all grown up, or are you maybe one of those lawyers that gets them off with a slap on the wrist all the time?"

"Just something I heard somewhere," he said lamely, looking around. "On some program about it." He squirmed a little. It was, as Sam would have said, a cold, cold house.

The screen suddenly popped into focus on a studio anchor setup. "We apologize for the interruption, but the Hollywood node seems to have gone down. The cause of the trouble is unknown at this point, but dataline service crews are already at work on it. Signals are currently being routed through the West Hollywood node or the Century City node."

The anchor cleared her throat abruptly. "Two minutes ago traffic control declared a limited traffic emergency for all of Hollywood within the boundaries of Mulholland Drive to the north, the San Diego Freeway to the west, the Hollywood Freeway to the east, and the Harbor Freeway to the-"

There was a mass exclamation of disbelief from everyone at the bar. "Limited?" somebody down at the other end said. "Are they shitting? That pretty much paralyzes anyone trying to get into or out of."

"If they can still move around in Canoga Park and Reseda, it's considered limited," said a hard, sarcastic voice. "But if you can't get out of San Berdoo, it's all-out meltdown." A few people laughed at that, but the laughter was thin and nervous. Gabe shifted uncomfortably on his stool. He was well within the area the anchor had described, and it occurred to him that he had no idea how he was going to get to Diversifications, or anywhere else.

"… unofficial report that at least one driver removed by helieraft had suffered a stroke, causing the multivehicle collision. We are waiting for official confirmation on that from the hospital." The anchor paused, leaving a thudding two-second interval of dead air as she looked at something off-cam.

"In other news two people were found dead in unexplained circumstances in their Santa Monica home. Police refused to release many details concerning the deaths, but sources close to the scene say they believe the pair were found still connected to direct neural interface equipment, which has been rising in popularity since it was legalized in the States. Police are investigating but refuse to speculate whether the people, whose names are still being withheld, were the victims of foul play."

The anchor paused, frowning. "Word has just arrived concerning a situation at Los Angeles International Airport. All travel in or out of the airport has been shut down. No reason has been given. A jumper from the Bay Area scheduled to land at LAX was diverted to an emergency landing strip at the Van Nuys Airport and seems to have landed safely. That's all we have on that." The anchor looked a little disgusted, appeared to listen to someone or something off-cam again. Things were pretty loose at the local station today, Gabe thought. He had an uncomfortable feeling that something was off-kilter with the fabric of daily life in general, not just GridLid or the dataline.

Off-kilter, sure. What happened was, you weren't expecting to wake up alone this morning.

"One of our stringers has just managed to get in touch with us from the hospital," said the anchor suddenly. "Apparently, phone service is a little spotty-"

"Phone service is what?" said the man in the jumpsuit.

"-the individual being treated for stroke was on-line with her vehicle. Repeat, we have confirmation that the individual treated for stroke was on-line with her vehicle and was the apparent cause of the crash on Santa Monica Boulevard-"

The image on the screen exploded into mostly white static. Somewhere behind the snow dark shapes seemed to be moving around, as if a picture were trying to break through the interference.

"Must be your hardware," the man on Gabe's left said. "Online L.A.'s General News never goes down."

The bartender picked up a small remote and switched to the general menu. Of the five other channels listed, one was marked off the air, and the other four were showing either movies or series episodes.

"No other screens?" said the woman with the purple drink, tapping her broken light pen on the rim of the glass. "What kind of media bar is this?"

"The other two screens crapped out this morning before we opened," the bartender said, and pointed at the ceiling. "I raised em up out of the way until I can get them fixed. Repair's supposed to come this afternoon and take care of them."

"I don't think they'll be here," Gabe murmured.

"It's like a quake, you know? Nothing's going right." The bartender flipped back to the top of the network menu and selected Cultural, getting another list beginning with Dance and ending with Museums, Children. She moused halfway down to Street/Open Air Performance and thumbed a button on the remote. Instantly the screen showed a dance group flinging themselves along the line of cars on Santa Monica Boulevard.

"God, I just hate street ballet," said the woman on Gabe's right. "It's so corny."

"Not the point. We're getting footage of the boulevard again," the bartender said. "No commentary, but we do our best."

There was a clicking sound. "Testing… test… all right. To those who may be watching, on-line L.A. local news is commandeering this channel temporarily. Due to technical difficulties we are unable to continue broadcasting on our usual-"

There was a burst of static on the speakers, but the picture remained clear. The ballet dancers were far down the line of cars; several of the nearest vehicles were still occupied. People waved from the windows, and someone held up a hastily handprinted sign: DON'T WAIT UP FOR ME, HARRY!

"-power outages, brownouts, and scrambled signals all over the general area and possibly beyond," said a new voice, very young and very nervous. "As far as we can tell now, L.A. is effectively cut off communicationswise from the surrounding region and from the rest of the state. No quakes have been reported anywhere in the west. Authorities suspect some kind of vandalism but have been unable to trace the trouble to anything like an, uh, original, uh, source-" There was a full ten seconds of dead air while the cam panned up and down the line of cars.

What's wrong with this picture, Gabe thought suddenly. The machinery of the city was melting down, and they were all just watching it happen on TV. He wondered if Gina had reached Diversifications yet, if she'd found Mark. He had the very strong feeling that he should get out of there and try to make it to West Hollywood any way he could, even if he had to walk over the hoods of gridlocked vehicles like stepping-stones. At the same time he was afraid to leave an available working screen. Something told him he might not find another very soon.

The young voice on the dataline began repeating the news about the impending gridlock, the collision, and the driver who had had a stroke. On-screen the image began to ripple a bit, as if it were melting, and the colors of the vehicles began shifting toward whichever end of the spectrum they were closest to. The body of one vehicle started to pulse in a way that reminded Gabe of breathing.

Disturbed, he looked away from the screen, rubbing the back of his neck tiredly. He felt a bit odd, a bit fuzzy mentally, as if he had just woken up. Without warning the memory of the crazy rock star with the cape popped into his mind, and somehow he just knew the pulsing of the shadows on the cape and the image of the vehicle on-screen were identical.

Which had to be ridiculous, since one had nothing to do with the other, and even if it had, it was just an image on a screen, just a screwed-up image on a high-res external screen, not something that could affect you in any real, lasting way. There were no patterns produced from any screen that could do anything more than hypnotize the susceptible, and that was easily counteracted; there was no picture from any source that could actually hurt anyone-

"Change for the machines."

The voice was so quiet that Gabe wasn't sure at first that he hadn't imagined it. He turned to the woman on his right, feeling cold. "What did you say?" he asked.

She was staring at the screen as if she were seeing signs and wonders unfold on it. Something flickered at the edge of his peripheral vision, and he turned to look. It was no more than a fast flash, something just beyond the upper limit of subliminal, but the whole picture was vivid in his mind, some strange body of water and a stony shore, and the soft silhouette of someone standing on it. The image seemed strangely familiar, but he was sure he had never seen it before. For that matter, he wasn't sure he had seen it just now.

"Damned Schrodinger world," the woman muttered, running a hand over her head. "Never know till you look, do you? Never know who it'll be, waiting there for you…"

Gabe was about to ask her if she had sockets when she fell backwards off the stool, hitting the floor flat on her back.

"God, I hate drunks," said the man on Gabe's other side as several people rushed to the woman's side.

"She isn't drunk," Gabe said. He wanted to go to her, but he was frozen in place, watching as someone lifted her head. One wide staring eye was fiery red, and a thin line of blood trickled from her nose. A man with gilded hair turned to look at Gabe suspiciously.

"You hit her?"

Gabe shook his head. "No. I never touched her. She just- fell."

The woman's eyes focused on him briefly then, and her lips moved, silently forming one word before she went limp. "I think she's dead," someone said nervously. "Call an ambulance," said someone else.

"No, call Life-Flyer."

"Call the cops. They'll call Life-Flyer."

"She's got sockets," Gabe said. "Look in her wallet or purse, if she's got one. There should be a card."

"Right here," said the man with the gilded hair, holding up her wrist. There was an old-fashioned ID bracelet around it. "Says she's socketed and allergic to chocolate. I don't think she's had any chocolate." He frowned up at Gabe. "You think her sockets blew up?"

"I don't know," Gabe lied, his voice faint. He kept his back to the screen, imagining himself on the floor next to the woman in roughly the same condition. It could have happened; why hadn't it?

He had to get to Diversifications. The bartender was calling the police, or trying to, as he slipped off the bar stool, made his way through the people to the door, and waded out into the gridlocked city.