Synners

28

He'd had no idea there was so much infection floating around in the system, coming in, going out, drifting like ocean-going mines or sitting camouflaged in various pockets and hidey-holes.

What he had sometimes thought of as the arteries and veins of an immense circulatory system was closer to a sewer. Strange clumps of detritus and trash, some inert and harmless, some toxic when in direct contact, and some actively radiating poison, scrambled along with the useful and necessary traffic. The useful and necessary things were mostly protected, though the protection made them larger, to the point where some of them were slower and more unwieldy than they should have been.

There was an ecology here, gradually becoming more and more unbalanced, polluted, and infected. Ecological disaster had been inevitable, even before the stroke had been released into the system; there was no way around it. It would be universal. Computer apocalypse, a total system crash.

And he would cease to be.

He had escaped that fate once by leaving the worn-out, failing meat, only to find the same thing creeping up on him Out Here.

He wouldn't let it happen. He couldn't. He would warn them, show them somehow, make them stop before the whole system went down in a firestorm. God damn them all, he thought furiously, God damn them all for doing what they always did, on every level in every way they could. Whole portions of the physical world had yet to be reclaimed from the unusable, unlivable state that negligence and malevolence had consigned them to, and the fuckers still didn't get it, they still didn't understand you weren't supposed to shit where you ate.

Nor did you, when you were meat and busy getting toxed. The thought came at him from nowhere and everywhere, in the simultaneous container and content that he was now. He had a moment of shame for his own blindness.

He spread his awareness out cautiously. It was like being in many places at once, taking in the information that came at the speed of light and working in nanoseconds as matter-of-factly as he had once worked in minutes and hours to shape it into something understandable for himself. He was already accustomed to the idea of having multiple awarenesses and a single concentrated core that were both the essence of self. The old meat organ would not have been able to cope with that land of reality, but out here he appropriated more capacity the way he once might have exchanged a smaller shirt for a larger one.

Gina's identification flashed at him as soon as it entered the system; in less time than it would have taken him to draw a breath, he had located her, but contacting her had been far more difficult. The little one had splattered itself unevenly through the traffic system, jumping in through the double-headed receivers that accommodated both the dataline and GridLid. But in the larger context of the city, the little stroke had to work harder, at least for the time being. That most of its capacity was taken up with the act of infection made it less of a threat to him; at least he had been able to contact her for a few seconds.

It was a disappointing contact; he couldn't be sure she had believed, and he had been unable to offer anything to prove it. But if he could make her go to his old body in the pit, then he wouldn't have to depend only on the kid in the penthouse, where his awareness had chopped off suddenly and permanently not long before he'd found Gina.

Neither the kid nor Gina would have understood that, how he could have been absent from the penthouse and yet still there in a way. It wasn't something he really understood himself, but that didn't matter now. That part of his awareness was as lost to him as any amputated limb, which had to mean the kid was lost to him, too.

It was up to Gina now to keep the Big One contained in the flesh. Every bit of the little one Out Here in the bigger context was waiting for it. And wherever it was awaited, it would go.

Even as he realized that, he realized his presence had made it worse. To escape being devoured by it, he would have to spread further, possibly amputating a great deal of himself, confined in some other location, losing his enlarged awareness. Or perhaps enlarging himself that much would dissipate him, fragment him into many little aspects of the same program, each one self-contained and out of contact with the other. Perhaps then he would lose his memory and forget that he had been human once.

He was still wondering what would become of him when he felt the first shock wave, followed by the last message he would ever receive from the meat.

– -

She didn't really understand what she was seeing at first. Mark was lying on the mat on the floor of the pit pretty much as she'd left him. At the console was some very young kid she'd never seen before, studying the screen so intently between taps on the keyboard (entering something? just browsing?) that he was completely unaware of her standing up on the catwalk. Moving quietly, Gina climbed down the ladder.

The kid saw something on the screen, and his fingers danced rapidly over the keys. He leaned toward the speaker. "Disconnect now?" he asked. Apparently the answer was no; the kid shook his head and muttered something. Probably another fucking child-prodigy doctor bused in to Diversifications' home implant program. This one had the sense to see all wasn't well, but it was too fucking little, too fucking late.

Gina moved along under the catwalk, skirting around to approach Mark behind the kid's back. Ripping the wires out of his head would either bring him out of it in a hurry or blow him up. Video turned it loose. Turn me off. Take out wires. Be there for me.

She looked down at Mark's inert body, still curled up on the mat. Shoulda kissed him when you had the chance, back in Mexico, she thought suddenly. Back in Mexico, when he first put the wires in when you were there. If you'd leaned down then, put your mouth on his, he might have stayed. Because after that nothing could pull him back, not love, not sex, not you. Not nothing, not no-how.

Thou shalt not fear?

The long, greying brown hair had fallen back from his gaunt face as if he were already dead. We don't grieve for what might have been in rock n'roll. We just keep rockin on.

This ain't rock'n'roll. It ain't been rock'n'roll for a long fucking time. This is business, and money, and change for the machines, but it ain't rock'n'roll.

The kid was still busy at the console, running some kind of complicated program that showed mostly numbers in three columns on the monitor. She knelt down next to Mark and put her fingers gently against his cheek. His face was comfortably warm. She lifted his head and wrapped the wires around her other hand, getting a good grip on them. "What are you doing?!"

She jumped, nearly yanking the wires out of his head right then. "I'm taking care of him," she said. "Get your ass back to Medical and pretend you never saw this. If he dies, I'll turn myself in."

"I'm taking care of him," he said. "I'm overriding within the program for the connections. If I can make them let go, we might get him to a doctor before he strokes out big."

She felt her mouth drop open. "Who the fuck are you? Whadda you mean, 'stroke out big'?"

Mark's body gave a jerk.

"Aw, shitl" the kid yelled and lunged for the console. "Disconnect! Disconnect now!"

Mark jerked again, and his head flopped out of her grasp as he rolled over onto his back, quivering and twitching. Bubbles of saliva bloomed on his lips; his left arm flailed, slapping against her thighs.

"Disconnect! Disconnect!" the kid was yelling desperately, and Mark kept twitching and bucking as she tried to get her hand free of the wires. She could feel how they were pulling at his head, and she had the horrible thought that if they pulled away now, they'd turn his skull inside out.

"Yank them!" the kid shouted.

Mark was flailing like a fish drowning in air. All the shit he'd ever gotten toxed on, and he'd never had a seizure until now. She straddled his chest and took the wires in both hands, intending to yank his head off if she had to.

Abrupdy he opened his eyes, and she knew that he could see her there, sitting on him, holding the wires, about to reel him in the hard way. Underneath her his body was still twitching a little, but the energy was going. She could feel it.

The faded green bloodshot eyes moved back and forth as if he were fixing her face in his mind.

Say it, whispered a voice in her mind.

She took a firmer grip on the wires; his head lifted slightly, but his eyes never left hers.

Say it. He wants to hear it. He always did, he was just always too toxed or too far out in the stupidsphere to know it.

The whites of his eyes were getting redder. The wires in her hand were very warm, fever temperature. On his lips, foam thickened into a stream that ran down to coat his chin, and she wanted to look away, but he wouldn't let her. She gave the wires a hard yank; his head dipped forward in a grotesque nod, driving his chin down onto his chest, but the connections held.

"Yank them!" the kid yelled at her.

She gave another hard pull. Mark nodded. Yes.

Say it!

"Yank them!"

Yes.

Say it!

His eyes were all red now, she could barely see any of the old green in them at all.

"Yank them, goddamn it!"

Yes!

Say it!

"You stupid fuck-up!" she yelled.

Mark smiled. Good enough. His eyes closed, and she felt his body go limp under her.

She lifted him under the shoulders with one arm, still holding the connections with her other hand, getting off him so she could cradle him on her lap. The kid was going, "Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus," at the console, and she had the vague idea that in a little while she would get up and bash the kid's brains out on the desk, put her foot through the monitor, and then head on down to Rivera's office and show him how to do the funky chicken while she crushed his windpipe. In a little bit. After she was sure Mark was resting.

One red tear trickled swiftly down his left cheek, dropping away from the side of his face. She shifted position slightly, and the blood suddenly gushed from his nose, painting his mouth and chin red, saturating his shirt.

The connections let go, then; all at once they dropped from the sockets, and she was holding a fistful of eight wires in a limp bouquet. She had to force her cramped fingers against her leg to make them unbend and drop them.

Musta hurt. Musta felt like I gave you a hot one with a set of brass knuckles. His eyes, she saw, weren't completely closed after all. He might have been nodding out on a dose he'd misjudged. Yah, we did that often enough-me keeping watch while you were toxed out, waiting to see if you were gonna turn blue or purple or some other stupid fucking color. His head sagged toward her, and a red tear diverted across the bridge of his nose and dropped.

Okay, I didn't say it. But you knew what I meant, didn't you, you stupid fuck-up. Yah, you did. I could tell. So don't you fucking try to lie to me, because I know you did.

She had a vague sense of time passing, but it was unimportant. Let it pass, let it go around me and him now. We been racing for the last twenty-some-odd, fuck it, we're taking a break now. Taking a break.

Sometime later the lights flickered. She thought at first she had imagined it, but they flickered again. Annoyance began to fill the void in her mind. Christ, did everything have to fuck up at once, did she have to put up with stupid shit like brownouts when she had more important things to think about, like how she was going to get through the rest of her life?

When she felt the touch on her shoulder, she lashed out with a snarl.

"I'm sorry," the kid said quietly. "I'm really sorry, but we got a big problem here."

He was pulling at her arms, gently but firmly, trying to make her let go of Mark.

"Jump back," she snarled, and he let go of her.

"We didn't do it," the kid said. "It's out."

The lights flickered again.

It came as a small tremor followed by an instantaneous jump in the level of every infection. As if a loose infestation of rats had suddenly been transformed into a battalion of terrorists. The intelligence that drove it was different from his own, brutish in some ways but with the sophistication of an evolved mechanism capable of adapting itself at will.

There was nothing he could do now, he could never stand against something like that. It had been made for him in the first place, and he would draw it to himself just by continuing to be.

New instincts took over for him, in lieu of fight-or-flight. He backed far off, damped down before it could sense all of him, retreating to a level of activity that might have been the equivalent of a camouflaged soldier melting into the surrounding jungle. It did not pursue; as far as it was concerned, he was not there, but only for the time being. Eventually it would achieve a level where it could sense him in his new state, but at the moment it still had its limits, it was still on the other side of a certain threshold, the side called Finite.

And he still had a rabbit hole; a little altered for the new circumstances of his existence, but there. It was the last exit, the way out where there was no way out. If he took it, the result would be pretty much the same as a systemwide crash-and-burn, from his perspective-he would cease to exist on this level. Undoubtedly he would continue to be as traveled through the rabbit hole, but the hole itself would be winking out of existence one step behind him. As if he'd swallowed himself and continued to swallow himself forever.

If that was really existence, what kind was it?

Meanwhile the thing was moving through the system, lashing out, absorbing, growing. Once he might have wanted to think of a fancy word for it, but in the system a thing was what it was, or it was not anymore, and this thing did not alter in nature. It was a virus, but with a most important difference: this one knew where it was, and what it was, and that it was. This one was alive.

So the problem was to keep from getting sick. Or rather, sicker. It still amazed him how sick he was-how sick the system was-and yet everything could continue to operate. He remembered his old existence as meat. Weren't there certain kinds of infections-bacteria, rather-that were useful, even vital?

He would not have thought of this at all if he hadn't come across some old notebooks Dr. Fish had left behind when he'd bailed out. He knew Art Fish must have sensed him there, at least in a passing way. Now and then he could feel a vibration or an echo of a sympathetic nature, a resonance, but no acknowledgment as such. Dr. Fish was no longer making house calls, but he could see where Dr. Fish had gone, approximately. Going there himself had been an option lodged inactively at the rear of his thoughts, unconsidered until the last message from the meat came through to him.

Suddenly he was there with her in the pit, looking up into her face while she held the wires in both hands and tried to yank them out. If he had been there, he might have made some effort to tell her she had arrived just that little bit too late, because it had already begun in his brain, the Big One. In a way he had been there with her, just enough of him to constitute a definite presence. Not unlike the way he had been during his last days as meat.

What surprised him, looking at her face now, was how visible her thoughts were, and always had been. He'd just never seen before, never comprehended. Her desire for him was not just in her face, it formed her face, was formed of her face, and he knew she'd been thinking of how it had been in Mexico, and she was sitting on him not just to do what he'd asked her to do, but because she wanted to touch him as much as possible.

He found the idea repellent now, her meat pressing his own. They could have been two gutted sides of beef brushing against each other on their way through a processing plant, for all the real contact it afforded. And she didn't understand, he realized. That was a first; she'd always understood him, or so he'd thought from the way she'd always been there to catch him when he fell. But maybe the fall had been what she'd understood, the only thing she'd understood, and he hadn't fallen this time.

It would have broken his heart if there'd been any heart to break.

If he could have gone back to those moments and reactivated the meat, if the brain hadn't been too small and too worn to accommodate more than mere presence, he would have done it long enough to beg her to join him in the system, just for a little while, just to try it and see how far apart incarnation had kept them.

And then he was looking at Gina with what felt like a universe of knowledge within him, everything from every part of the system, databases that outlined every face of human behavior, delineated every emotion, defined every word by tone of human voice, and told every story, all scanned from the countless thousands that had passed through to be simulated, packaged in incidents called commercials and releases and videos, and more, sequences called news, talk shows, episodes. One picture could not tell all the stories, but every picture told a story. Every bit of it converged on him, enlarged the context of his vision, and suddenly it was as if he were looking into Gina as much as at her.

Joy surged within his configuration, to see so deeply into her, even though she was not on-line with him, even if it was after the fact. Moments later he seemed to plummet, out of balance because she wasn't there and there could be no reciprocation. The unfairness of it was truer pain than anything he'd ever felt incarnate.

Then he realized that giving such energy to his feelings would take him back into the virus's visible spectrum, and he damped down again, holding Gina's last moments in deep reserve (You stupid fuck-up; even the merest shade of his own presence could translate that with ease now) as he searched out the buried areas he might not have noticed at a higher energy level. They were deceptively small, nothing more than blips unless he moved carefully along a certain pathway in a particular point of view, and then they opened up like sudden blossoms.

Eventually he came upon Dr. Fish's Answering Machine and knew it was the thing he wanted, the exit Dr. Fish had taken, but the way out was barred to him as he was now. Still holding tight to Gina, he worked himself around, mimicking the form of the Answering Machine itself, and left himself as a message, hanging fire in camouflage.

In another time something came and got him.

"Get up, Sam," Fez said urgently. She tried to focus on him, but he was shaking her too hard.

"What? What is it?" she said, forcing her eyes open. It seemed as if she'd gone back to bed only a few minutes before.

"There's bad news, and there's worse news. Something's happened. L.A.'s gone."

"It was right where we left it," she mumbled sleepily, and then it registered on her. "Wait a minute." She pulled away from him, blinking. "What else?"

"I think we lost Art with it."