Synners

30

A few hours after Art disappeared, Sam and Rosa were picking their way through the human debris under the Hermosa Pier with hand-held scanners while a couple of Rude Boys acted as bodyguards. The cases were smelly, and the Rudes were bored. Gator had promised to pay them in tattoos, and they were hot to get themselves marked. Sam wondered what Gator was going to mark them with-an ordinary design or some other piece of Art Fish? No, had to be an ordinary design; Gator had destroyed all the paper copies of Art. Safer, she said. Anyone could steal paper, but you need one of my scanners to get at the tattoos; custom-built. How did you divide something like Art up, anyway? She found the whole thing rather dizzying. Or maybe just dizzy.

Rosa seemed unburdened by considerations of the abstract; Sam could tell that what was bothering her was the smell. She wouldn't have minded a gas mask herself, but apparently that was one of the few things you couldn't get on the Mimosa, along with personal hygiene products.

She ran the scanner over an intricate design of a spider web on the back of a gaunt man who seemed unaware of her most of the time. At least he wasn't resisting or trying to get friendly. Most of the cases had been passive, barely curious. Files, nothing more than files. What was in this one, she wondered-Art's sense of humor, or his tendency to posture, or some collection of associations that contributed to his self-awareness? An AI encrypted in tattoos. Or perhaps translated was a better word.

Just as she finished scanning the web, the electric-shaver-sized unit beeped, signaling a full buffer. Rosa looked over from where she was working on a semiabstract pattern of feathers running the length of a skinny arm. "I've got room for one more small one," she said. "Let me get it, and we'll go back together."

Sam nodded, glancing at the nearest Rude Boy leaning against a piling. Fifteen, maybe sixteen, shaven-headed, dressed in the usual black pseudo-patent leather with full chains and a necklace of teeth. Mostly his own, judging from the soft, sunken mouth. His partner, tracking Rosa at five paces, wasn't much different, except all his teeth were in his mouth, and his bald head was adorned with sex-porn decals.

"Get you back with that suck-thing! It's mine, you're not taking it!"

Rosa was frozen in a half crouch, staring at the point of a stiletto inches from her nose. The snowflake design she'd been after was clearly visible on the back of the knife hand. Sam had a glimpse of lank, oily brown hair and a profile with a badly broken nose before the Rude Boys waded in. There was a flurry of sand and rags, and then one Rude was kneeling on the back of the case's neck, holding his arm out at an awkward angle while the one with the decals plucked the stiletto like a flower and stuck it in his pocket. Then he took the offending forearm in both hands.

"Easier just to break the fucker off and take it with us," he said to Rosa casually.

"No, I, ah, have enough to carry," Rosa stammered as she moved the scanner quickly over the design. "There, done, let's go." She gave Sam a desperate look. Sam shrugged. If things had ever been stranger, she really couldn't remember.

In the ballroom of the inn, the system was changing from a showy time-killing hacker piece to what Percy called Serious Machinery. He nodded at them as they came in without missing a beat in the unintelligible instructions he was giving to a small group of kids even younger than himself, each one armed with a cam so stripped down it was barely more than a lens and a chip.

Against one wall Jasm was methodically taking her technoid homunculus apart with Adrian's help and sorting the components into piles. A few people were hanging off the silent framework of monitors, plugging in new connections while Kazin called directions to them. Fez was sitting cross-legged on the floor a little ways away with Gator's laptop balanced on the points of his knees, oblivious to the activity around him. He had added his own equipment to the larger system, Sam saw, and wondered if that meant he was planning to add himself, too.

"Prima," Gator said, materializing in front of Sam and taking the scanners from her and Rosa. "When Graziella and Ritz get back, that should make a full inventory. I really appreciate the help with the scut work." She took the scanners to a small work island set up on an assortment of uneven boxes. The monitor she was using was as stripped down as the cams in Percy's group.

"Hope you're grounded," Rosa said, gesturing at the monitor, which was showing a fast montage of what looked like portions of news programs and footage of L.A.

"Grounded in reality, but which one?" Gator plugged the scanners into the processor and sighed through her smile. "It's definitely a capital-C collapse. I managed to raise the Phoenix node for news, but what news they've got is sketchy. There was some footage off a few sats before they locked down. The good news is, if they locked down, they must be clean." She nodded at the monitor. "The bad news is, not all of that is L.A. I don't have a thing more recent than an hour ago. But I've got some friends on a horse ranch in Santa Fe. If we can make contact with them, we might be able to open a clean line through Phoenix to Alameda. That Alameda node's a bastard, though, supersensitive, all pit bulls with lock-and-load trace. Ex-hackers did the protection on it. But my money's on you." She turned to Sam with a questioning look. "We need it, doll."

Sam nodded. "I can only try. What else do we know as of now?"

"Well, the region stretching from Lompoc up north, east to Barstow and all the way down to San Diego and Chula Vista is an electronic smoking crater." Gator moved to a large crinkled piece of paper spread out on top of an upended trash can. It was a hand-drawn map of the world, the continents mostly outlines with a few borders drawn in and dotted with tiny asterisks and zeros. "Adrian whipped this off. The boy can't read, but he's got prima eidetic spatial memory. Let's see, now: San Jose's hit, but Santa Cruz isn't. Can't contact them, it's like they put themselves under a bell jar. Radio worked for a while, but that's gone now, too."

"Everywhere?" said Sam.

Gator shrugged. "Walkie-talkies between here and my tent might work, but every frequency's jammed. What else? Mexico, of course-it's having a hot time in Tijuana and points south. Sacramento and Seattle took it within seconds of each other. Tokyo reports pockets of infection scattered around the islands but no epidemic. Yet. Hawaii caught it from Bangkok, not us-"

"Bangkok?" Rosa said.

"Go figure. It's the only infected site in Thailand, too. London's got it, but Brighton doesn't, and Glasgow's spotty, it should go any time. Swam the channel, punched France, one went east and one went south, through Spain and down to Algeria. I told Adrian to go help Jasm about then. It's hard enough keeping track of the relatively local stuff. Phoenix is okay, and I think it'll hold on, but Flagstaff isn't. Las Vegas is closed."

"That's almost funny," Sam said.

"Almost." Gator's face turned grim. "Phoenix picked up a kid briefly on shortwave before we lost radio altogether. He reported there were air disasters in Boston and New York- socketed pilots on-line with infected on-board computers."

"Jesus," Rosa said.

"Its worse," Gator said. "People's heads are blowing up."

Sam felt something cold gather in the pit of her stomach. "What do you mean?"

"There was this gypsy in a clinic doing a piece on something or other, media stars, who the fuck knows. Anyway, anyone who was on-line when it hit stroked out, went crazy, died-" Gator shrugged. "He was near an uplink and managed to bounce the footage off a sat before it locked out all transmissions. It was bad."

Sam's knees were shaking too much to hold her up. She sat down heavily. "Gabe. My father. He works at Diversifications, and he was probably working today."

"You don't know that," Rosa said quickly, crouching next to her and putting an arm around her shoulders. "You told me yourself he hates his job. Maybe he wasn't on-line, maybe he called in sick-"

Sam wagged her head from side to side. "He's doing that new release from Para-Versal. The Last Fucking Zeppelin. He must have been working on it today."

Gator looked as if she were going to be sick. "That's no good," she said. "Because as near as we can tell, Diversifications seems to be the source of the whole thing. I'm sorry."

"It's okay," Sam said. "I'd have heard sooner or later, and I'd rather know." She took a breath and looked up at Gator. "So, you want a line to Santa Fe, you said?"

Gator started to shake her head. Sam got up.

"I might as well," she said, "because I'd really, really like not to go back under a pier with the scanner."

"You're on," Gator said. "Download the specs from my system anytime you want to start." She gave Sam a hug, and Sam buried her face briefly in Gator's shoulder before she went off to set up a work island of her own.

Now that Art was gone, what was left of the net was much different-slower, less sensitive and less responsive. More like the public net, actually, than the private areas the hackers used.

Bent over her laptop, Sam kept her mind rigidly fixed on the task at hand. It was a relief to fill her mind with it so completely that there wasn't room for anything else, and it was something she had always enjoyed doing, several lifetimes ago, anyway, when all she'd had to worry about was how long to spend in the Ozarks and what to hack next. Finding alternate routes of communication. She'd just never tried it with such a widespread virus waiting to pounce.

The virus had a sort of three-dimensional perception that required her to keep shifting her own antiviral protection in a cycle that seemed random with sudden bursts of regularity. She tried not to wonder if that might not be a manifestation of Art's remains. It could be fooled, just like anything else.

Within a couple of hours, she had achieved a point where she could open an access anywhere in the net and remain undetected, provided she didn't try to do anything else except sit like an immovable bead on a string.

Well, if you couldn't walk on the floor, you walked on the ceiling. If you couldn't walk on the ceiling, you walked on the walls, and if you couldn't walk on the walls, you walked in them, encrypted. Pure hacking.

Pure but slow. Some hours later she had managed a routine of virtual sympathetic vibrations, a kind of virtual music. It wouldn't accommodate real-time communication, only short messages in quick bursts. But it was a way to send news out and get news in. Sam smiled to herself. If you were walking in the walls, and the walls had black holes, you had to be something that a black hole wouldn't recognize as existing.

She straightened up from the laptop and went to find Gator.

Fez and Gator were sitting on the floor in the work island with their heads together over Gator's laptop, now connected to the work-island system. Occasionally Art's face appeared on the bare monitor in a series of flash-frozen images. "It should work," Fez said tiredly.

"… time," Sam heard Gator say in a low voice. "He didn't appear in a day, and he won't reappear in the course of one night."

Standing several feet behind them, Sam told herself she should say something, let them know she was there. They'd have been happy to have her join them; Gator would want to know about the clean line and the way she'd done it. Gator might even have wanted to start sending to Santa Fe right away.

Gator's head sank down on Fez's shoulder, and he put his arm around her. "… tired," Gator murmured. "Then let's go home and go to bed."

Sam ducked down behind a pile of debris as they got up and left.

She stayed there for a while, hugging her knees, and then, without really thinking about it, she went over to Gator's work island. The system was running quietly with a blank screen. Art, are you in there? Somewhere? Somehow?

Her hand fell on the unit in her pocket. She'd made no use of it since that long-ago day in Fez's apartment, when both Fez and Rosa had chewed her out. Which was a stone-home waste of something she'd gone to so much trouble to steal.

She wondered if that had been Fez's main objection to the pump unit, that it was stolen. Could have been. For all his protestations that information should be free, his basic outlook was really quite conservative. She could say she had hacked the unit out or cracked it or fooled it out, but Fez would say she'd stolen it, with a very slight edge in his voice as if he'd never stolen anything in his life.

For all she knew, Sam thought suddenly, he hadn't. He was on-line a great deal, and he could access any secret hacker nook in any net setup, but she'd never heard of him cracking into some private business organization. His interest had always been with the system itself.

Well, it wasn't as if she'd stolen the unit so that Diversifications didn't have it anymore, or for the purpose of going into business for herself, or to sell to a competing business for her weight in bearer-chips (she might have been able to get twice her weight in bearer-chips). She'd just wanted a copy of the specs so that she could have it, to build and work with. There wasn't much nanotechnology hardware around for anyone but germ jockeys, so the unit was a real find.

She pulled the unit out of her pocket and unrolled the connections. The two needles gleamed in the light. Taking a breath, she reached under her shirt, pinched her flesh between two fingers, and slid the needles in.

As usual, they stung for several seconds, and she waited for the sensation to subside before pressing the sticky area of the wires against her flesh to hold the needles in place. Rosa was right, she supposed, Diversifications would never have put this over in the mainstream marketplace, which was all the more reason to own one. But needles weren't that bad. Not considering that they delivered free power abundant enough for function on the nano-level.

She took the sunglasses out of her shirt pocket and connected them to the unit, then plugged the unit feed into Gator's system. It wouldn't be necessary to use the chip-player this time, not for what she wanted to do.

She found the data right away; Gator had it stored redundantly, in her own system, and in the larger communal one. Sam chose the raw source material, taking each tattoo separately, which made it a slower process, but she was interested in accuracy, not speed. Perhaps the problem with restoring Art was a matter of copy-fading, she thought idly as the data was copied to her pump unit. Making a copy of a copy of a copy always resulted in some loss of detail, no matter how meticulous the process. But maybe there was a way to restore the lost detail. A way that was the only way.

The old excitement of trying something new began to stir in her. This was something worthy of her preoccupation, she thought firmly, not this going around behaving like a Spin-the-Bottle reject. And besides, Gator was probably better for Fez anyway, since she was closer to his age. Gator was practically thirty.

Hope I look like that when I'm thirty. Wish I looked like that now.

She shoved the thought aside forcefully as the system signaled the copy process was complete. She disconnected herself from Gator's system and went back to her own work island against the wall.

The pump screen came up on the left lens of the sunglasses, blurring for a moment as it readjusted to her focal length. The data was all there, no errors, no bad spots.

"Okay," she said, plugging the unit into her laptop. "A little traveling music, please."

The procedure she had just finished with was still on deck. She started to activate it and then paused. How much, how far? Art had resided in the whole net. Worldwide, Fez had said. His attention was usually localized, but he'd been in the entire net, so the points between here and Alameda wouldn't be enough.

She pulled the glasses down on her nose, topped back to the start of the program, and changed a few figures. What the hell, sooner or later she probably would have had to do this anyway, since someone would eventually want to talk to Japan or England or even just Boston. What the hell, she'd put in a search for all the points she could induce to vibrate sympathetically.

It wasn't a fast search, but it went more rapidly than it had when she'd been trying for Alameda. Of course, she'd been making it up as she'd gone along, then; the hard part was done now.

The inn grew more quiet around her. Even Mimosans sleep sometime, she thought wryly. Mimosans, right. The next step would be a campaign for statehood, perhaps, or even secession and status as a separate country. The national language would be that gibberish Percy spoke. Illegal aliens welcome. Tourist trade would probably be in the toilet, though.

Her mind was playing a fantasy of customs agents taking over the inn when her laptop beeped and she realized she'd been dozing. The laptop screen showed her four columns of figures; she pressed a key, and the display changed to a chart with both figures and location names boxed and connected to each other.

She patted the pump unit. "Ready, Art? Be careful, and write if you get work."

Her finger hovered over the transmit key. This was a rather sizable and lengthy transmission for the first try. If something went wrong, and the virus woke up and got around the defenses, that would give the virus Art's raw material. Not to mention an access to the clean lines.

"Art, you better be worth it." She hit the button.

At first she didn't know what she was seeing. Then she realized she'd fallen asleep with her sunglasses on. The message blinking on the lens said:

Successful Trans. Complt.

›Sam, If You're There,

Keep Quiet! ‹

Keep quiet. Sam started to giggle. Wasn't that a piece of karma? She had successfully brought Art back from the dead (or something) and he wanted her to keep quiet about it.

She looked over the top of the sunglasses. The ballroom was still empty. Routing the keyboard from her laptop to her pump unit, she typed: ›Art, if that's you, for god's sake, WHY?‹

The letters rolled out on the screen in a rhythm she instinctively identified as Art's. ›Don't feel well.‹

Getting reconstructed from scratch would probably take it out of anybody, even a virtual somebody, she thought. Well, at least the files Gator had saved contained a substantial amount of memory about herself.

›Don't feel well. ‹ The message blinked at her again, as if Art had repeated himself. Her hands shook a little as she typed.

›Are you infected?‹ One thumb hovered over the purge button. If he was infected, he had the laptop and the pump unit, but perhaps she could keep it from spreading to the larger system.

It seemed like forever until he answered. ›No. Pause. Thanks to you. Pause. Just don't feel well. ‹

›Listen carefully, Sam typed. Make that: pay close attention. You have been restored from files after a virus ate into the net and we lost you. Please list the most recent things you can remember. ‹

This pause was even longer, and she thought he was having trouble accessing his own memory.

›I am not a reconstruction. This IS me, the original. The one that was in the net when the infection hit. ‹

Sam frowned. Of course, he would feel original; he wouldn't have anything to compare. ›Why are you so sure?‹

›Because I incorporated the reconstruction during reconfiguration. You didn't reconstruct me, you FOUND me. Pause. And brought me home. Pause. Where is home?‹

She hesitated. For Art, where could have almost any answer. ›I am hiding out on the Mimosa with Rosa, Fez, others. You are running out of my ex-insulin pump unit. Is that what you wanted to know?‹

›Close enough. Another pause. Do you have a headmount handy?‹

›Why?‹

›Because I'm tired of producing type, that's why, I want to fee! like I ' m WITH somebody! But just you. Nobody else y e t. ‹

›Okay, you don't have to shout. Wait while I get the mount. ‹

It was almost funny, she thought, as she unplugged the feed from her laptop and went to get the head-mounted monitor Fez had brought with him. She connected it to the pump unit and put it on, muting her vocal input.

Art Fish faded in on the screen against a background of swiftly moving clouds. One by one other things began to appear-a loud black-and-white-tiled floor, partial walls on either side, a window stuck in midair where the back wall would have been, and finally a scattering of pillows from his old tent. Art twinkled out and reappeared in a nest of pillows. He didn't look any different than he ever had, as far as she could tell, but he was manifesting at a greater perceived distance than he usually did.

"You didn't tell anyone, did you?" he asked.

"No. What's the matter? Are you sure you're not infected?"

"I'm sure. I got caught out, but it didn't get me," he said. "I tried to get back by subway. Where there wasn't any subway, I had to make one. There were pit bulls out here and there, defending against the virus, but they didn't know the difference between it and me, of course." His face looked sad. "Anyone with clean lines means to keep them that way. They don't care what comes through the wire, if it's not something they recognize, they blast it." He made a gun of his left hand. "Boom. Kiss the sky, as Jimie would say. I like Jimie. I got down so many levels in the subway, it wasn't a subway anymore. There were the pit bulls, and there was the virus, and they were all after me. I compressed as much as I could, damped down, dug into a hole, but then I couldn't get out. I couldn't run a search to find other holes. Even if I'd been able to, I couldn't have used them. Too much activity, see; all that activity, they would have found me. But you found me instead."

"How?" she asked.

"You sent the reconstruction through. Vibrating in the net, point to point, clean point to clean point. It called me to it, and I sang with it, and it sang me all the way home." The image smiled for the first time. "You should close it down now. Before it wakes something up. That infection's smart."

"We're trying to get news in and out. If the Phoenix node goes, Alameda-"

He waved a hand. "If the Phoenix node goes, you won't have Alameda for ten minutes. L. A.'s completely trashed now. I took pictures from the subway when I still could. There were a few hit-and-run'ers out, but they didn't last long next to the looters. The National Guard is rattling around trying to figure out how to function without communications. No radio, no phone service. This thing's in a lot of receiver equipment, see, and all that stuffs on-line somewhere, even the little operators are on-line somewhere, in the phone, in the accounts with the utilities companies, lots of different ways. Tunes in any bandwidth it wants, screws the signal. It learned how to do that. Pretty soon it would have started learning the subway, too. I'd have been stuck there just waiting for it to learn how to get down to me."

"But it's just an infection. Unless it was programmed to learn-"

"It's not just an infection," he said, pulling her pov in a little closer. "See, that's what everyone thinks because nobody's been near it. And those that have can't tell what they know, or would know, if they still knew anything. It's not just an infection. It's not a virus or a bomb, it's-I don't know what to call it. A hot flash and a meltdown, a whack in the head with a spike." He gestured at the floating window frame. The panes vanished as a schematic of a human brain in profile lit up. Art rose from the pillows and crooked a finger at her; her pov slid smoothly over to the window for a medium close-up.

"Your neural network. As opposed to mine," he said. A blue balloon filled with computer-garbage symbols materialized in the upper right corner of the window and started to drift down toward the brain. "And here's the spike, looking for a victim." A string dangling from the balloon wriggled around, snakelike, until it touched the brain, piercing the outline. The symbols in the balloon slipped down the string into the brain, where they suddenly reproduced themselves until they were no longer separately distinguishable. The brain popped like a soap bubble.

"For the first time ever," Art said, "it's possible for people to die of bad memes, just like computers. Just like software. The input goes in, see-"

"Art," Sam said gently.

"Don't interrupt. I've been through a lot just to talk to you. The input goes in, which is what input does, and it runs its little spike ramadoola, reproducing all over the place. The thoughts begin, and the adrenaline pumps up, or the serotonin goes down, or endorphins start popping all over the place. The sodium pumps go into overdrive, or shut down almost completely, and the brain starts rearranging all around this stuff, and by then the process is unstoppable. Feedback loops- outputs turn around and go back in as inputs. Neurons start firing in patterns over and over, and if they're bad patterns, that's, well, too bad. You people got no shields. You put in sockets, but you forgot about the watchdogs and the alarm systems and the antivirals and the vaccines. You people put those on every neural net except your own."

He looked at her accusingly. "It's something that happened to someone. And it's something they should have seen was going to happen to him, and they didn't. Or they ignored it because they didn't think it would matter."

"Art, at least let me tell Fez you're here," she said.

"Not yet." Her pov tracked him back to the nest of pillows. "I've been through a lot. I'm not ready for that much input right now. I've had a good part of myself amputated. If you got an arm and a leg cut off, you wouldn't feel chatty either. But I suppose I shouldn't expect you to understand. For you the nets are an object. You have self and nonself, and those are both constants. For me it's something else. The L.A. system wasn't a where; it was a configuration of me." He paused. "Not an arm and a leg, that's wrong. More like a hemispherectomy."

Could an AI get hysterical, Sam wondered. "Art, you're present. You're whole. And there's still a system to host you-"

"I'm not alone."

Sam hesitated. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, I'm not alone. I've got the Answering Machine with me.

"But the Answering Machine is you. Or yours. Or…" Sam trailed off. Self and nonself and semiself? She wondered briefly as to the exact nature of Art's Weltanschauung.

"It's somebody else now. Separate. But if I'm in your pump unit, it's in here with me."

She accessed the figures and saw he was telling the truth; there were two separate items inventoried. "What is it?" she asked nervously. "I have to know, Art, or it goes. Ill purge it rather than take a chance it'll eat our system alive and you with it."

"It won't eat anything. It can't." Art gestured at his surroundings. "This isn't mine, it's the ID screen for it. That's all I can get. And this." One word came up across the tiles on the floor: ZAMIATIN. Sam raised her eyebrows. It wasn't any brand name or trademark she recognized. "Maybe that means something to someone," Art went on. "The rest of it's walled up behind an access code and a password, and I can't give you either one."

"Can't you hack them out?"

"I tried. It's in lockdown. Everything comes out as garbage."

"You can figure garbage if you watch the patterns enough times," she said. "Fez told me he's seen you do it."

"Not this garbage. There isn't any fixed pattern, it comes out different every time. There's something like a program in there in charge of garbage."

"Something like a program?" Sam said, confused. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"I'm something like a program. Look, Sam, do you trust me?"

Sam winced. "It's just that you might not know if it's that thing, the spike, or not."

"I know."

She sighed. "All right then. Let's suppose you do. Hypothetically, for the moment. What do you want me to do about it?"

"Just let him stay here."

"Him?" She thought for a moment. "Art, are you sure what you've got isn't just that reconstruction I sent through the system?"

"I'm sure," he said. "If we can access it, it will be a reincarnation and half rebirth. If we can't, he may stay in a coma forever."

"A coma?"

"That's about as well as I can translate it. You wouldn't understand my term for it."

"Don't get too sure about what I would or wouldn't understand."

Art's smile was broad. "Being a fugitive hasn't made you any less a badass, has it?"

"You're beginning to sound more like your old self. Can I tell someone you're back now?"

"If you're connected to the system, I'll tell them myself. And Fez, too."

"You can't reach Fez," she said. "He donated his hardware to the pile. There's nothing in Gator's tent now. Except Gator and the tattoo stuff. And Fez, of course."

Art's image leaned toward her. "I see. Does it make you feel very bad?"

Sam laughed a little. "None of your fucking business. I'll connect you to the main system. One moment please." She took off the headmount and reconnected the feed to her laptop. Then she signaled him through the keyboard.

A few moments later Art's voice was echoing throughout the inn. "Wake up, everybody! I'm back!"

Wake up, everybody. Sure. Sam yawned; exhaustion washed over her. Sure tired easily these days, she thought as she unplugged the pump from her laptop and stumbled back to her squat space. Let Art give all the explanations. She curled up on her dirty laundry, making sure the pump unit was secure, and went to sleep.