Synners

29

The security guard who had replaced the receptionist at the desk in the corporate lobby told him he shouldn't bother; there were no elevators working, and the building was emptying out. "Unless you really want to walk up sixteen flights," the guard added. "Probably meet the next wave coming down, and they'll sweep you all the way to the bottom again anyway."

"I'll take my chances," Gabe said, and sneaked a look at the monitors in the desk. They were all dark.

"Surveillance is down. Can't get anything but some kinda weird snow," said the guard, holding up a walkie-talkie. "Forward into the past."

"Probably." Gabe headed down the hall, fingering the key to the freight elevator in his pocket. More than likely it was in use by others like himself who had acquired a key and failed to return it, but at least it wasn't on-line.

Contrary to what the guard had said, he met no one going the other way down the hall or coming out of the stairwell, so he was able to slip off to the freight area unobserved. But it gave him a bad feeling anyway.

– -

The double doors to the Common Room resisted his push and then gave like a broken mechanism. Gabe hesitated, hoping no one was there, and then spotted LeBlanc. She was sitting at the same table where he'd sat the day she had come in to tell him Gina had been about to jump off the roof, in the same way, with her back to the rest of the room, watching the screens in the wall. Except now there was nothing on the screens but the strange pulsing shadows.

Gabe had another brief flash of the lake and the stony shore before he managed to block out the sight of the monitors. "LeBlanc?" he called, approaching her slowly. "Bonnie, are you all right?"

He moved around in front of her, keeping his back to the wall. The expression on LeBlanc's round face was one he had always associated with victims of especially grisly accidents who found themselves staring at the empty place where an arm or a leg had been. Her eyes had something wrong with them; it was as though they were no longer actually working in tandem, yet they moved together when she finally focused on him.

"It would be you," she said. Her voice was thick with effort. She shuddered a little, blinked, and seemed to refocus. "Ah, God, Gabe, you're in it, too, aren't you? Or it's in you, I should say.

His acute awareness of the pulsing shadows on the screens behind him intensified, becoming almost painful. "I guess maybe it is, Bonnie."

"Change for the machines." She sighed heavily. "That's all we've ever done is change for the machines. But this is the last time. We've finally changed enough that the machines will be making all the changes from now on."

He took her hands and tried to pull her to her feet. "We'll go down to Medical-"

"Forget it." She pulled away from him. "Medical was one of the first places it went, it's all changed there, too." With both hands, she felt her head all over, as if it were made of eggshell. "The only place to go now is into the context. If you can find it. Between the context and the content, between the mainline and the hardline, falls the shadow. Isn't that how it reads?" LeBlanc made a face. "If it doesn't, it should. I don't have much longer. The shadow will fall, and I'll fall with it. That was what it all meant, you know, why Valjean took Dinshaw to the terrace. Because of the fall. He fell with her. Gina." She laughed a little, but her eyes were pleading. " 'If you can't fuck it, and it doesn't dance, eat it or throw it away.' I hope you can dance, Gabe, and if you can, I hope you can dance fast enough, because- here it comes-"

She looked startled for a moment. Then her body gave a violent jerk, and she fell off the chair.

"Bonnie?" Gabe crouched beside her and raised her head. Her eyes stared blindly, her right pupil a pinpoint and her left a gaping cavern. A pulse beat twice in her temple and stilled.

Nausea sent the world sideways. Gabe sat down heavily, clutching his head with one hand. The sockets-

His thoughts raced, blurred, quick-focused, and blurred again. He squeezed his eyes shut and waited for it to happen, whatever it was. Maybe it would come like a swift kick in the head, or maybe a pickax, or a hot punch in the face…

Suddenly he had a startlingly clear image of the lake; he was looking across it to where someone was standing on the stony shore, just starting to turn around to face him. A sharp thrill of fear ran him through, and then he found himself blinking at the silent Common Room. He had almost seen who it was on the shore; almost. The image had vanished too quickly.

LeBlanc hadn't moved. "Bonnie?" he said again. The Common Room seem to swallow up his voice. He pushed himself upright and stumped over to the emergency panel near (change for) the machines.

"Security," he said, hitting the panel with the side of his fist. "Medical, anybody-there's a woman up here who's hurt-" He looked over his shoulder at LeBlanc, caught a glimpse of the screens, and looked away quickly, in spite of the fact that they were pulling at his vision with a force that was all but physical. "Hurt or dead. Can someone come up here?"

There was a burst of static from the speaker above the panel, and he thought he could hear a faint voice under it.

"Security or Medical," he said, louder, hitting the panel again. This time the static lasted only a second or two before the speaker went dead.

Gabe looked up, as if he might somehow acquire X-ray vision to see through the building to the upper floors, to sixteen, where his pit was, and LeBlanc's, and Gina's, and Mark's. He touched his forehead; the skin felt no different. That's funny, I can't feel a bomb in there.

Something made him look over at LeBlanc again. There was a dark spot growing on the carpet next to her head. Blood was running out of her ears.

He flung himself through the double doors and ran to the freight elevator.

The hall was as silent as the Common Room had been, all of the doors closed. Gabe frowned. They should have been open; the locks were set to release whenever there was even a minor glitch in the building's programs. Fail-safe, to prevent them from being trapped in their pits during a catastrophe.

He went from door to door, trying each one, buzzing for entry, getting no response, not even an indication of whether they were occupied or not. Let them all have gone, he thought, let them all have left the way LeBlanc tried to.

At the end of the hallway, he found Mark's door partly open, and he made himself go in.

It's too hard, Gabe thought, looking down at Mark's body. If he'd stayed in the media bar, he wouldn't have had to see any of this, or listen to the kid talking and talking under the flickering lights. Whoever the kid was; eighteen, maybe nineteen years old, too young to be a doctor. Maybe he was one of Gina's weird rock stars, except he didn't seem quite weird enough. Comparatively speaking, anyway.

The kid reached over and shook his arm. "I said, what's going on out there?"

Gabe looked at him blankly.

"I could only raise the dataline in spots before he, ah, went," the kid said. "Now it's gone altogether."

Gabe turned to Gina. The emptiness in her face was more terrifying than LeBlanc's body. Or Mark's. "What it's like out there…" He took a breath. "Probably still like what you saw on the dataline. Except for some things that didn't make the dataline. I was in a newsbar and saw a woman have a stroke, and I'm pretty sure she had sockets, like LeBlanc, down in the Common Room. LeBlanc's dead. Her pit's on this floor, she keeled over and died and-" He cut off, looking at Mark.

Gina's gaze went from him to the kid. "It's out."

"Sure as fuck is," the kid said. "The Big One."

"What's out?" Gabe looked at each of them. "What big one?"

The kid started talking again, and he understood what the kid was saying well enough, it just didn't seem real, more like some scenario out of the Headhunters program. If Marly and Caritha had been with him, maybe he'd have been able to buy the idea of that poor, sad, dead mess on the floor being able to send a stroke out of his brain into a net-

"What we've gotta do now," the kid was saying as he packed the laptop connections into a small compartment in the base, "we gotta get all the uncontaminated hardware and software we can carry and get out of here. Out of the main part of the city."

"Maybe there isn't any," Gabe said slowly. "Uncontaminated stuff."

The kid closed the laptop with a snap. "This is."

"How? You had it plugged in." Gabe gestured at the console.

"Ever hear of a stealth program?" The kid's smile was flat. "It's a fooler loop crossed with a mirror. You can crack in anywhere disguised as any input a system is already receiving. I used it on the subroutine for the connection commands-I was trying to disconnect him before he blew, but there was too much noise. The most I could get was a look at the program itself, but he'd disabled it, and I couldn't get it to respond. But there was no contact with the virus. The fooler loop covered the source of the additional input-my input-and the mirror made it think my input was its own redundancy." The kid looked to Gina. "It wouldn't have worked for much longer. Eventually the virus would have started comparing the figures-"

The lights flickered again and kept flickering.

"If it cuts the power-" Gabe started.

The kid shook his head emphatically. "It won't. It's just playing. Flexing. It knows that if it cuts the power here, it's dead." His eyes narrowed. "Were you on-line today?"

Gabe glanced at Gina. "No."

"Good. You're uncontaminated, too. Let's pull whatever you've got, hardware, software, everything."

"I've got a console, like this one," Gabe said. "Even if we could get it out of the desk, we couldn't carry it."

"Don't be so sure," the kid said, heading for the ladder. "You might have a laptop in there you don't know about. Come on. We have to move now."

The kid pried his console housing apart and bent it back, revealing a laptop sitting like a spider amid a collection of rather unsightly peripherals. He disconnected the laptop and pulled it out.

"See, the console's all facade," he said conversationally, as if this were all more normal than normal. "Makes it look like you got a stone-home Rolls. Only thing it really covers up is the scam-jam somebody put over when you got these units in here, and the fact that there ain't nothing the big models can do that a high-capacity laptop with the right connections can't." The kid examined the peripherals quickly. "We could use all this. And the hotsuit and your headmount." His gaze fell on the cape that Gabe had left bunched up next to the desk, and he spread it out on the floor.

"Wait a minute," Gabe said as the kid started piling stuff in the middle of the cape. "The rest of the pits. I want them opened."

The kid paused and looked up at him. "I don't think you really want that, but I said I would, didn't I? Now, what about software? You got anything downloaded to chip from that program with those women? Marly and Caritha, the Headhunters stuff, anything?"

Gabe 's mouth fell open.

"I knew you as soon as you walked in," the kid told him, flashing a tight little grin. "Recognized your voice. You gotta have a stash. Anything could turn out to be useful."

Reluctantly Gabe pulled the lockbox out from under the desk and stuffed chips into his pockets as fast as he could. The kid gathered up the ends of the cape and twisted them together to make a crude sack, slung it over his shoulder and began struggling up the ladder to the catwalk where Gina was waiting by the open door. Gabe followed.

"What the fuck are you doing with that?" She backed into the hall, eying the cape with revulsion.

"We 'll raid your stuff, and then we'll-" The kid stopped and turned to Gabe. "Hey, did you walk up here? The elevators quit while I was on my way down."

Gabe shook his head. "I took the freight elevator. It isn't on-line."

"Prima." The kid looked almost sunny for a moment. "That's our way out. Where's your pit?" he asked Gina.

She jerked her chin at the door. "Loot all you want, but move your ass."

"Entry code?" He pointed at the panel next to the door. Gina tapped the numbered squares in a quick sequence; nothing happened. "Another program bites the dust. Never mind." He put down the sack, produced a butter knife, and pried the panel frame off. Reaching in, he wrapped the exposed wires around his fingers and ripped them out. The locks released, letting the door fall open a crack.

"That's what we call a Luddite hack." He grabbed the cape and went in.

Gabe stared at the panel. " 'Luddite hack.' " He turned away and went to the next door. Dinshaw's pit. He dug in his pockets hurriedly but only came up with a handful of coins. Change for the machines.

"Try this." There was a click, and a knife blade slid out under his nose. Gina flipped it over and offered him the hilt.

"Thanks," he said faintly. She didn't answer; her eyes were two dark holes. But her pupils, thank God, were the same size, and the thought made him almost giddy for a moment. He had the sudden urge to put his arms around her, but the look on her face said that if he made a move toward her, she would move away, and maybe she would keep moving away from him until the distance between them was too great to cross again in one lifetime.

How poetic, Gabe jeered at himself as he took the knife from her, how poetic and tragic and all that rot. If she only knew how poetic and tragic and all-that-rot you are, she'd forget someone she loves just blew up and died with blood running out of his nose.

He pried the panel off, ripped out the wires, and pushed through the door.

Dinshaw was hanging just above the console. One of the legstraps on the flying harness was wrapped around her neck in a clumsy noose. The connections streamed down from her head; the other end had pulled free of the console and was still swaying slightly.

The hardware had let go before her skull had; the thought lumbered through Gabe's mind in heavy slow motion, weighing him down so that he couldn't move. Someone was trying to pull him out into the hall again. He caught himself against the doorjamb and slammed his hand against the emergency communications panel. "Security! Someone's been killed up here!" Not even static from the speaker this time.

Gina was forcing him out into the hall, trying to say something to him. He pulled away from her and went to the door directly opposite. Shuet's.

Shuet had apparently been trying to break the connection by trashing the console. One leg of the chair he'd used on it had smashed through the monitor, making Gabe wonder with some faraway, detached area of his mind if Shuet hadn't accidentally electrocuted himself. His vision blurred, and he backed out, unable to bring himself to go down and see if the man lying several feet from the console might still be alive in spite of the stink of singed flesh and hair.

The next pit was empty, and he had a moment of wildly joyful relief before he remembered that it was LeBlanc's.

Silkwood was sitting at his console with his back to the door. Gabe straddled the ladder and slid down to rush over to the man. Just as he touched the back of Silkwood's chair, he saw the connections were still in his head, but he was already pulling the chair around.

Silkwood had bled only a little from the eyes and nose. The majority of the blood came from his still-full mouth and from his hands resting in his lap. They were barely identifiable as hands now; Gabe could see the teethmarks where Silkwood had started on his wrists and forearms.

Only then did the smell hit him full in the face, thick and coppery, coming from Silkwood's lap and the chair and the place under the desk where the blood had made a small lake.

Lake…

Gabe's ears began to ring as patches of darkness swam through his vision.

Sometime after that, he found himself out in the hall again. He was sitting on the floor, and someone was pushing his head down between his knees. He tried to raise himself up, and a strong hand forced his head down again. A dark hand; that would be Caritha, he thought woozily. Caritha taking care of him while Marly did a little recon, making sure they wouldn't he ambushed by any headhunters on the way out. If they could find the way out. Costa had told them people had died of old age trying to get out. Marly and Caritha hadn't believed that, but he knew Costa hadn't been exaggerating, because he'd come damned close to it himself, dying of old age trying to escape from the House of the Headhunters and hell, he wasn't out yet, there was no telling because he was on blind-select, so he didn't know whether he was going to die in the end or not, and right now dying of old age in the House of the Head-hunters looked a hell of a lot better than some of the other things you could die from in here-

Someone raised his chin, and he found himself almost nose to nose with Gina. He frowned. Here she was again; dammit, he could not keep his mind from wandering and dragging her into his simulated realities-

She straightened up, and he saw the kid standing beside her, looking sick and frightened.

"Told you you wouldn't want to do this," the kid said.

"Now do you want to go on with the death trip," Gina said, grabbing the front of his shirt and pulling him to his feet, "or do you want to get the fuck outa here?"

"Where's this freight elevator you used?" the kid asked him.

"Down the hallway past the elevators, then down another. I'll have to show you," Gabe said. Gina grabbed him around the waist and wedged her shoulder under his armpit as they started up the hall, in spite of the fact that his legs were steady and he could obviously walk on his own. Let it be, he thought, if that's the only way she can let you hold her. The contact felt almost too good. The memory of the one night they had had together flashed into his mind, of waking to find they had settled perfectly, arranged themselves so comfortably around each other that it had been like waking to discover he'd come home, there in Mark's apartment, in the dark.

Halfway down the next hallway, Gina stopped so suddenly he almost fell over.

"What is it?" said the kid.

Gina pointed at one of the doors, not a pit door, but the door to an office, labeled Manny Rivera in tasteful black letters. She pulled away from Gabe and went over to it.

What's wrong with this picture? The question echoed like madness in Gabe's head. Absurdly the image of the lake with the stony shore came with it before he pushed it away and reached for her. "Gina-"

She gave him a brief glance before she pushed the door open with one hand and stepped inside. "Rivera, you shit! Do you know what happened out here?"

Gabe went in after her and stopped. Manny was sitting behind his desk, smiling vaguely. The blood had poured from his eyes and nose and mouth, soaking the wrinkle-free white shirt, beading on the soft hand-tailored jacket.

"You shit," Gina whispered.

There was a movement from the table by the window. The Beater was sitting there with the slightly puzzled expression of someone who has just taken a bad blow to the head and is still deciding whether to fall down or not.

"I had an appointment to get fired," the Beater said matter-of-factly. "We were going to eat lunch together, and he was going to fire me. When he let me in, he was on the wires, and he told me he'd never forgive me for laying down my ax and turning it into a biz desk. Then he started to bleed."

Gabe moved cautiously, almost tiptoeing around the desk. All the connections were still in Manny's sockets, and except for spatters of blood, nothing on his desk had been disturbed. Business as usual. Things to do today: fire the Beater; after lunch bleed copiously and, probably, die. All in a day's work.

He touched Manny's shoulder, expecting him to fall out of the chair. Instead, Manny suddenly swiveled around to look at him, and he jumped back.

"You shit," Gina shouted; all at once she was standing at the desk. "Do you know what you did, you stone-ass, mother-fucking-"

Manny sprang at her, grabbing her by the throat and dragging her across the desk before Gabe could even register that he'd moved. Gabe went for him, and Manny brought his elbow up directly into his face.

The pain was like a scream, overwhelming, drowning him. He was dimly aware of Gina cursing and struggling, and the kid yelling briefly, a couple of thudding noises. He rolled on the floor, feeling the blood pour out of his nose as he held it with both hands. He got clumsily to his knees and looked up.

Through a blur of tears, he saw that Manny had Gina pinned on the desk while he held something over her face. One of the connections from his own head, Gabe realized, and then understood what Manny meant to do.

He groped for the desk and pulled himself up on it. "Manny," he said.

"Not Manny. Mark," said the Beater, getting up from where he'd fallen on the floor next to the kid.

"Not completely," Manny said, "but more than not by this time, I think. Not completely a stupid fuck-up, either, Gina." Manny smiled, and it was Visual Mark's vaguely dazed and fixed smile. Gabe blinked at him through a fresh wave of dizziness. It was more grotesque than Silkwood, seeing Mark's expression on Manny's face. It was as though Manny had been trying to do an imitation of Mark and somehow become trapped in it. Simulating Mark.

Gina had stopped struggling and was staring up at him. "The problem is, it isn't an idea, it's a stroke. Or maybe a stroke is just Mother Nature's riff on an evil idea," Manny went on, still holding the wire near her head. "Oh, not just evil. Corrupt. This is what it looks like, rock'n'roll and big biz. The biz been Marked, see, and they're both fucked now. The way it should be. They were right, Gina-if you can't fuck it, and it doesn't dance, eat it or throw it away." His gaze drifted over to Gabe, and the expression on his face changed to vintage Manny Rivera. Gabe felt his stomach roll over. He couldn't breathe.

Gina's fist shot up, and Manny staggered back against the large wall screen, which came brightly to life as he collapsed on the floor. Gabe stumbled around the desk and collided with Gina.

"Get the kid and come on," she said, giving him a shove. He made a move toward the kid and then saw what was on the screen.

Not the strange pulsing shapes, but the lake with the stony shore. The perspective was moving slowly along the shoreline, and in another moment or two, Gabe knew it would reach the figure standing there, waiting. He wanted to look away, he didn't want to see the figure, he didn't want to find out who it was, but his body wouldn't move. The image on the screen had clamped onto the image in his mind, and the two of them had been meant to come together somehow, they'd been meant to merge because they were really one and the same-

The screen went dark, and he came back to himself in a rush, feeling the blood still dripping from his painful nose.

"I said, get the kid and come on." Gina was standing over Manny, holding the end of the connection she had ripped out of his system. The torn wires looked like crooked insects' legs. She threw it down. "You said it. The hardware would give before his skull did." She looked at the kid, now getting up and rubbing the back of his head. "We should have thought of that, tried ripping it out of the system instead of him."

"Gina-" the Beater started.

"Shut the fuck up. You want to get out of here or not?" The lights flickered, buzzed, and went out.

The weak early-afternoon light coming through the window by the table filled the office with shadows. Gabe's mind automatically began to make them pulse; he ground his fists into his eyes and then blinked. It was still happening.

"Yah. Me, too." Gina gave him a hard look and turned to the kid. " 'It won't cut the power.' "

"It didn't cut the power," he said shakily. "Just the lights."

"Find me something to burn," Gina said, looking around. "It's gonna be pitch in those fucking hallways."

"Not quite," Gabe said, and pointed. Glowing blue strips ran along the top of the baseboards. "Those are all around the building. They'll last about five hours, maybe longer."

"I'd feel a fuck of a lot better with a searchlight." Gina started rummaging through Manny's desk drawers.

"I doubt if-" Gabe cut off when she came up with a hand-cam. She switched it on, and a narrow high-intensity beam above the lens played briefly across the walls before she shut it off again. He shrugged. "Okay. I feel better, too. Let's go."

Holding Gina's arm, he waded through the pulsing shadows into the hall. As soon as he did, he was glad Gina had found the cam. The blue glow was entirely too unsettling, too much like one of the cheaper fun-house sequences from House of the Headhunters.

"Ease the fuck up," Gina whispered, twisting her arm in his grip. "You're breaking my fucking bones."

"Freight elevator," said the kid urgently.

Gabe looked up and down the hall. His sense of direction had suddenly deserted him, leaving him adrift in a glowing blue void. Patches of deeper darkness were swimming through his vision even here, pulsing in a way that was all too familiar. He tried to force them away somehow, but there was nowhere he could look where they were not. He squeezed his eyes shut, and they played on the backs of his eyelids, insistent, compelling, calling to the image deep in his brain, a lake under a gray sky with a stony shore-

"Over here, Ludovic. Look over here. Now!"

He turned in the direction of Gina's voice and was blinded by a bright light shining directly into his eyes. It hurt, but at the same time it felt oddly good. The angle of the light changed, and blinking against the afterimages, he could discern Gina's face bathed in part of the beam from the cam.

"Okay now?' she said.

He blinked again. Afterimages still, but no pulsing shadows. "Yah," he said, amazed. "What-ah, how-"

She chuckled grimly. "Easy to see you ain't lived rough. The vermin always scuttle back into their hidey-holes when you turn on the light. Now where the fuck is the freight elevator?" She did something to the cam, and the beam widened, illuminating the corridor all around them.

"That way," he said, pointing, and she pulled him along, holding the cam on her shoulder. "Around the next corner and down at the end of the hall."

They rounded the bend and then stopped so suddenly the kid and the Beater bumped into them from behind, almost knocking the cam from Gina's grasp. Someone was sitting in the middle of the hall.

One hand went up, fending off the light. "Whoa, it's too early or too late for that, don't know which-"

The voice was Clooney's, but the intonations were Mark's. Gabe felt Gina stiffen as she shifted the cam from her shoulder, holding it chest-high with both hands.

"Well." Clooney pushed himself to his feet, still trying to block the light. "Old habits, they do die hard, don't they, Gina. All those things. Change for the machines. If you can't fuck it, and it doesn't dance, eat it or throw it away. And looking for Mark. That's yours, ain't it-looking for Mark. Gotten so now that even when you're not looking for Mark, you're looking for Mark. And finding him."

Clooney shuffled forward a few steps, and the alien smile on his face was only nominally vague. There was a new hardness in it-or maybe that wasn't so new, Gabe thought as his own startlement began to turn toward fear. Maybe hints of it had always been there, something that kept the smile always looking vague to mask what was really at work underneath.

"And now you can find him wherever you look," Clooney went on. "What you've always wanted. Whether you know it or not. You don't, do you? Nah, that's not one of the things you'd care to face, being the way you are, Gina. Laugh it off, break it up, and break it down, that's you. But that doesn't change anything for anybody, least of all you. And I want you. I want you."

He got within arm's reach of her, and then she swung the cam up and out, right into Clooney's face. He staggered back, crashed into a wall, and then keeled over facedown.

The kid started to go to him, and Gina stopped him. "He looks okay to me. Come on."

As if by some unspoken agreement, they were all suddenly racing for the elevator still gaping open the way Gabe had left it. Or maybe it was just that they were fleeing from Clooney's body, Gabe thought as Gina shoved him into the elevator and played the light from the cam over the empty hall behind them. Nothing there but Clooney, who hadn't moved. Gabe looked away, not wanting to have to see blood pouring from his ears, too, and locked eyes with the kid, who frowned a little and jerked his head at Gina.

Gabe shrugged and reach over to touch her shoulder. "What is it?" he said. "What are you looking for?"

She brushed his hand away, irritated. "What's the matter, you deaf or something?" She turned away from the corridor and went to lean against the wall. "Take it down."

"Wait a minute," said the Beater, looking around at them. "If that's what happened to Rivera, and to that guy, what about everybody else? All those pits-"

"You don't want to know," said the kid, closing the door. "And neither do any of us." He looked at the control panel for a moment and then pressed for the ground floor.

They rode all the way down in silence and went out an emergency exit into the chaos that was no longer really a city.