Synners

32

"You've changed," Sam said, trying not to fidget. She still couldn't believe he was there.

Gabe nodded. "So have you. Changed." He glanced over at the group, where Keely was stuffing his face from a seal-pack and giving an account of the impossible all-night drive in a car-a real car, not a hotwired rental-from Fairfax, mostly through backyards, it sounded like, to Venice. Sam couldn't imagine driving without GridLid, as clunky as it had always been. Not having any idea of what might be even half a mile ahead sounded like an easy way to get killed to her, especially in the dark; Gabe had to remind her that most of the streets were parking lots except for stretches the Guard had managed to clear with bulldozers. To let the emergency vehicles get through.

But of course. Sam felt foolish. You didn't even have to go up Palos Verdes to see the smoke from downtown L.A. Welcome back to the Age of Smog. She started to say something to Gabe and saw that his gaze had gone to Gina Aiesi again. The woman was sitting on the floor near the remains of Jasm's homunculus, head back against the wall, eyes closed. A little ways away from her, the Beater stood by alone, as if he were waiting for someone to tell him what he could do with himself.

"I forgot to tell you the good news the last time I saw you," Gabe said suddenly, still looking at Gina. "Your mother left me."

There was a pause, and then they both laughed.

"I'm sorry," Sam said, putting a hand to her mouth. "I don't know why I'm laughing, I don't know why it hit me funny."

"The shock of the mundane," her father said. He dug something out of his pocket. "And I got this today. Or yesterday, now."

She took the slip of paper from him. "What is it?"

"It's a ticket. I got a ticket for riding my bicycle on the sidewalk."

Sam burst out laughing again. "You rode a bicycle?"

"Actually, it was stolen."

"You stole a bicycle? My father stole a bicycle?" She laughed harder, and then she was hugging him, and he was hugging her back awkwardly, as if he had forgotten how.

"Sam-What-Am." Keely materialized beside her and pinched her arm gently.

She gave him a halfhearted swat. "That's 'Sam-I-Am.' And only Fez calls me that."

He unslung his laptop from over his shoulder and sat down next to her in the work island. A few hours of sleep and half a dozen seal-packs had taken the wild-man stare out of his face, but he still looked exhausted to her. "How long has Jones been dead?"

"Maybe a day. I knew you'd end up going to see him."

"I always view the body. Actually, he's just stuporous. I got him to open his eyes for a few seconds, but I don't think he saw me." He looked over at Gator's work island, where Fez and Gabe had been deep in conversation for over an hour. "They sure got chummy on short acquaintance."

Sam nodded absently. She'd been forcing herself not to stare at them. "Did Fez give you the complete rundown on Art Fish?"

"Yah. Not much I hadn't suspected for a while. I think I topped him with Visual Mark and the Computer Zombies from Hell."

"That sounds almost as good as Tunnels through the Void."

"Nowhere near as good as that. Fez also told me that was how you managed simultaneously to save Art from the Big Eat and sort of reincarnate the net. Warping information."

She gave a short amazed laugh. "God. It didn't occur to me that I might owe it all to Beau. But I guess it is a little like that. Intergalactic subway system. At the time I laughed in his face."

"A common reaction to Beau," Keely said. "I would tell you I could never figure out what you ever saw in him, except in that particular glass house I shouldn't be throwing any stones."

Sam smiled to herself. They could have been in the middle of the genuine apocalypse, and they'd still be trying to figure out their relationships. Human beings, they never quit. On the other hand, she thought, looking at Keely's drawn features, it gave them something to think about besides dead bodies, of which there were plenty.

According to what Art had been able to piece together, along with what Keely and Gabe had told them, the infected were still out there and still dropping dead. Some had died immediately, others later, even after they had disconnected from the infected interface. Rewrite to destruction, Art had called it.

"I don't suppose you have any more to eat," Keely said after a bit, sounding a little sheepish.

Sam laughed. "We've got seal-packs coming out of our ears. Rosa made a food run just before everything blew."

"Rosa always was the practical one," Keely said as he followed her back to her squat space. " 'Never mind the tech shit, when do we eat?' I wish I'd thought of that when I was busy raiding uninfected equipment."

Sam dug several packs out of the hole in the floor. "Let's see what she left me: fruit compote, fish compote, fortified banana mash, navy bean soup compote-ha, ha, very funny, Rosa-dairy pack with real cheese-"

He took the dairy pack from her and tore open the top. "Haven't tried this one yet, and I wouldn't want to deprive you of something as wonderful as navy bean soup compote, especially if it's a personal gift. It's nice to know the survivalists were good for something, isn't it." He scooped out a blob of the soft white goop with two fingers, made a face, and put it in his mouth. "God help me, it does taste good. But then, a shoe would probably taste good to me right now. Especially if it's not drugged."

"Well, if you want more, the survivalists are all camped up Palos Verdes trying to make their radios work and selling us poor shortsighted slobs their least favorite gourmet flavors while they dine on squirrels and birds."

Keely made a revolted noise. "We'll have to factor that into the long-range ramifications of this thing, won't we?" He sighed. "God. If I hadn't picked that night to get toxed to the red line, I might have been able to stop it. They'd have caught me, and I'd have been canned well into my next lifetime because it would have killed Mark, but he was dead anyway. And maybe none of this would have happened."

"That's a big if, Keely. Too big."

He shrugged. "I was there. I have to think about them. All of them, even that son of a bitch Rivera. He went miserable and in pain and probably scared because he didn't know what was happening to him. None of them knew what was happening. Except Mark. He knew, and he couldn't do a thing about it, except ask me for help."

"Don't," Sam said urgently. "You don't know anything for certain."

"Yah, I do. You should have seen the message he left me. It didn't leave much doubt." He crumpled the seal-pack.

"Stop it," she said, grabbing his hand. "You really want to claim this is all your fault? Claim you're Napoleon, too, while you're at it. But before you go full stone tilt, you could think about a few other things. How we can make a real net out of the sympathetic vibration technique-"

"Art calls it the Vibrator Technique," Keely said.

"He would." Sam rolled her eyes. "How we can access whatever it is Art brought back with him. What we're going to eat when the survivalists run out of fortified banana mash and dairy pack with real cheese." She gave him a hard shake. "You want me to tell you you're a shit? Okay, you're a shit. Now be a useful shit. You know how. Gabe told me about that little show you put on in Fairfax, when you hacked the message through." She laughed a little. "It made me wish I'd been there."

"I was out of my head with reaction and a hangover and hunger," he said, looking away from her, embarrassed. "And probably from all the shit Rivera put in me, probably fucked me forever. Maybe I can plead brain damage."

"Shut up," Sam said impatiently. "If anyone's to blame, it's probably Rivera, or that Dr. Whoever, the one from Eye-Traxx.

"Someday I'll tell you how Rivera connected up with her," he said darkly.

"I'm not interested," Sam said. "It doesn't matter anymore." She took him back to her work island in the ballroom and sat him in front of her laptop.

"Remember the specs on this?" she said, taking the pump unit out of her pocket. He nodded. "I built it while I was on sabbatical, so to say, in the Ozarks."

"You actually run that on… yourself?" he asked as she connected the unit to the laptop feed.

She nodded, grinning at him. "A battery just isn't personal enough." The identification screen Art had shown her came up, sans Art's image. "This is as far into it as I can get. Even Art can't crack it. Maybe you'll have better luck. I don't know what the partial room is supposed to signify, if anything. But I'd love to know what that word means." She ran her finger along it on the screen. "Zamiatin. Any ideas?"

"Zamiatin," said a low, gravelly voice behind her, "is Visual Mark's last name."

She turned around. Gina was standing a few feet behind her, staring impassively at the screen.

"It's him," Keely said wonderingly, looking from the screen to Gina and back again. "That fucker didn't eat him, he's alive. Or… well… something."

"Stone the fucking crows at home," Sam said, "Are you sure? Maybe it's part of the-"

Keely shook his head. "No, it's really him. I recognize the screen. I saw it every time he cracked me in the penthouse."

"But we still can't get to him. We don't have the access code or the password," Sam said, frustrated.

Keely gave a short, incredulous laugh. "Shit, I've got the fucking access code and password! The access code's VM, and the password is-" He looked at Gina, who had come over to squat down between them. "The password is Gina."

Gina's gaze didn't move from the screen. Sam wondered for a moment if the woman had been hypnotized by the convolutions of the rushing clouds in the background.

"Are you gonna use those fucking codes?" Gina said suddenly, glancing at Keely.

"I thought maybe you'd like to," he said.

"Fuck." She stood up, folding her arms. "I'm done bringing that bastard around every time he passes out. You do it."

Sam looked after her as she stalked over to where Gabe and Fez were talking and said something to them. Keely jumped up and ran after her.

"Can you see and hear okay?" Keely asked, standing in front of the extra cam Percy had set up.

The man on the chaise looked confused. "Wait. I'm not…" The screen flickered a few times and then snapped into sharp focus. "Well, now. This is what I call stone-home high quality. Who's there? You, the kid from the penthouse. You got out okay."

"Yah. Thanks for fixing the door for me." Keely sounded so shy and polite that Sam had to stifle a laugh.

"Christ-the Beater? You look like shit."

No lie, Sam thought, looking at the man. Several hours of rest seemed not to have helped him at all; he looked even more tired than when he'd arrived. And the sight of Mark obviously wasn't making him feel any better.

"You!" Mark said. "Move in toward the cam a little more, I can't pan this thing-"

"Yes, you can," came Art's voice from the speakers on the framework. "Feel around behind your focus."

Now Sam did laugh. If she hadn't known for certain, she would have sworn that Rosa and Percy were scamming them with a simulation. But they were among the group gathered around her work island, looking as boggled as anyone else. Except Gina Aiesi, who hung back, well out of cam range for the moment. Sam kept sneaking glances at her while she sat on the floor gripping the pump unit tightly to keep it still. Occasionally she pressed a hand to her stomach, to make sure the needles were secure.

"Yah, it is you," Mark said as the cam on the tripod gave a short jerk to the left, aiming direcdy at Gabe. "Hey, some stone-home change for the machines, ain't it?"

Sam thought her father looked as if he weren't sure whether to laugh, cry, or run like hell. "How does he do that?" he asked Keely. "Make a picture?"

"Good question," Keely said. "How do you do it?"

"By visualizing," Gina said quietly. The cam swung to her immediately.

"You're here." On-screen the pov zoomed to medium close-up.

"Yah, I survived," she said indifferently. "No thanks to you."

"Hey, anyone can have a stroke."

"But only you could release it into general circulation."

"On-line brain illness," Fez said. He was standing next to Gator. "If that's possible, then on-line therapy must be possible, too."

"Don't look at me," said Gina. "It wasn't my fucking idea."

"Mine, either," Gabe added in a small voice.

"But you are the only people here who have undergone the procedure." Fez looked at each of them. "And the only two we know for sure that haven't been infected."

"We don't know that at all," said Gabe.

"I never hurt either of you," Mark said solemnly. "I was just there, I never hurt you."

"My fucking ass." Gina pushed between Adrian and Jasm to stand directly in front of the cam. "Get a little higher up in the stupidsphere. You don't know that for sure, you don't know shit. And even if you think you do, I fucking don't. And neither does he." She jerked her head at Gabe.

"We could find out," Fez said slowly, "if we had the right hardware. Some direct interface connections and a sample of what Art calls the spike, which a diagnostic program could use to compare normal function against function that's been virally altered. The diagnostic wouldn't be too hard to devise. Ideally, we'd also have an uninfected brain as the control for comparison, though we could do without one. But we'd have to have interface connections."

The little gold woman, Flavia, let out a short, hard laugh. "Never get back to 'fax now. Push luck over a cliff."

"We don't have to." Gina went to Gator's work island, where Keely had stashed the bundle he'd brought with him and picked up the large piece of cloth he'd been using as a carryall. "We got connections, we got all kinds of toys and programs, and we got a sample right here." She took it to Fez. "It's a cape. Look in the collar."

"But it's been turned off," Gabe said.

"It's never turned off, it's just in nondisplay mode. Got solar collectors all around the edge of the hem. The program's still alive, and it's still infected. You want an uninfected brain, ask the woman who's got one." She pointed at Flavia.

"Not me," Flavia said. "Know you once, know you always. Knew you the night before. Remember?" The gold face took on a hard look. "Thanks for the memories."

Gina spread her hands. "I said don't do it. Didn't I?"

"We could use a simulation to stand in for the brain," Fez said after a moment. "That'll help me figure how to adapt the diagnostic-"

"I can do that," Mark said. "If Gina will let me. She might not want me to."

"Oh, cut the shit," Gina said irritably. "This is all your fucking fault, you better do everything you fucking know how."

It was good to be alive, and it was good to be alive again.

The configuration identified as Art Fish was a wonder and a revelation to him, a synesthetic concert of intelligence in conscious mode. In the first moments after the symbol Gina had broken through and brought him to a level where he could function and communicate again, Art Fish had shared memory with him. That had been disorienting at first, but with the data had come the format and the know-how. By the time he had seen Gina, he had changed in many, many ways.

But Gina stirred the old feelings in him nonetheless; perhaps even more so. He had been refined and reorganized to such an extent that he saw her with a clarity beyond anything he'd had in his last moments of meat awareness. He remembered that he loved her; that had not changed. There had been so much noise in the old meat that he would never have found his way through it to where she was, and now that the noise was gone, he didn't even have arms to put around her.

Art had much salient memory to share on the matter, in spite of the fact that It had never been flesh. It was the only thing he could think to call Art, and he still bridled somewhat against the old associations of the word, even though It in this new existence was a far more encompassing term than mere he or she. He supposed it was a matter of getting used to it… and getting used to It. He remained he in his own thoughts, though that too would change over time. Change for the machines. That could be a good thing.

He and Art were in complete rapport from the moment of his unlocking. The memory Art shared assured him that he would eventually find what he had instead of arms much more gratifying. Mark shared that just about anything was more gratifying than Schrodinger's dick and was surprised at how completely Art understood what he meant.

With Art's help he completed plotting Gina's life-graph, while Art shared Its own with him. Ambiguities were not so troublesome, because they could also be charted until there was a whole enchanted forest of decision trees to wander through over and over, taking different paths to different outcomes; a multitude of lifetimes in an instant.

Gina would be all right. Gabe Ludovic was capable of being good for her. They were not as odd a pairing as he might have thought; their differences did not raise the noise level. They could find each other. He felt a little sorry for them, since they would not be able to find each other as thoroughly as he and Art. Unless they used the sockets.

He had no simulations with him-he'd had to jettison as much as possible when he'd locked down-but it was surprisingly easy to recreate a simulation of a brain for Fez's use. The old associations could be reconfigured so that the substance they had referred to could be reconstructed. It was an exquisite difficulty and showed him the truth of the first thing Art had shared with him: Information can neither be created nor destroyed-it's accessible or it's inaccessible, but it is. If you have known it, and you can find the tiniest remnant of association, then you will know it again.

When he understood that it really was possible, he thought it was the most comforting thing he'd ever heard in his life. Or lives. Things were different when you lived completely within the context.

He learned as he went, and he had the sensation of everything around him shifting while he remained constant, as if the context were opening wider and wider, letting him see more deeply into it. The outside meat-inhabited world became even clearer to him. Already he could distinguish most of the individuals just by their input; little things, the style, the patterns, the rhythms and pauses showed variations that were no longer minuscule to him, no two ever quite the same. Fez was like a cattle-herder even at a keyboard, directing the flow of useful things that had little intrinsic value until placed together in certain ways. He thought Fez might be closest to an understanding of what he, Mark, was now. Fez seemed to understand configuration, but he fell short of seeing more than a few dimensions. Mark reminded himself that none of them in their physical world was capable of rapid shifts in pov.

But it seemed that he always had been. The years of video playing in the old meat organ called brain had given him the capability, music and pictures shifting back and forth on him, being able to make one out of the other. They still served him. If he thought an association was lost, he could find it in the music and the pictures, and he could always find the music and the pictures. Even though the program director was gone.

Automatically he configured the diagnostic program before Fez could even start to adapt it. It was complicated, even with Art's help; better than letting Fez hack away at it for a day or two, and then debug it for another day or two, and perhaps end up with something that was not exactly what they wanted after all. And yet, as complicated as it was, it reduced down to something simple, as did all good programs. It was the output that would be Byzantine, not the program itself.

"What is this?" Fez wanted to know, staring at the results on the screen. "You took a highly sophisticated viral diagnostic, and you made this out of it?" He raised his face to the cam.

Visualizing for him, Mark produced charts, and Art put them on the screens. "Outputs are what you'll look at," he told Fez. "Those are all ranges the outputs would fall into, with ambiguity margins. But you have to consider all of them together simultaneously to determine the presence or absence of something like the spike."

The one Art called Sam-I-Am moved into view, looked at the screens, and then frowned suspiciously at the cam. "Art? Are you screwing around again?"

"Not me," Art vocalized. "There isn't time. The Phoenix node just went down, and Alameda's gone with it, just like I told you it would." Art had already shared the information with him, but Mark waited through the protocol so necessary for communication through all their innate people-noise. "It's on the way. It's been around the world a few times, but it's finally spiraling in on us."

Sam wiped both hands over her face. "Don't tell me-sympathetic vibrations, right?"

"Not really your fault, Sam," Art told her. "It would have learned how on its own anyway, after it had sophisticated enough."

"Sophisticate is not a verb," came Rosa's voice from out of cam range.

"It is now," Art said. "All outside communications are down. What will you do when the power goes?"

"Will it do that?" Sam asked. The anxiety on her face was a road map of her life. Rosa appeared next to her.

"It will do that. If it can't get in and take us, it'll crash us."

Sam turned to Fez. "How long can we run on solar and batteries?"

"Not long. We don't have half-enough solar, and the monitors are already on those."

"I knew all those goddamn monitors would be a drain," Sam said.

"Well, they're off now," Fez said and looked worriedly into the cam. "How long do we have before it works its way over to us?"

"About three hours," Art told him.

"That might give us long enough to run one diagnostic. Even one like this." He gestured at the screen where the one line of Mark's masterpiece was displayed.

›How are you?‹

"But it's more than enough time to compress," said Art.

"Compress?"

"For nanoware."

Sam's face was a portrait of surprised hope. Mark thought she looked exactly like Gabe Ludovic for that moment. Then she frowned. "You could both fit?"

"We're topological acrobats," Art said. "All a matter of making the associations work in multiple dimensions. We should start. Now."

Fez held up a hand. "Art, you've never compressed that much with, ah, another individual presence. Neither has Mark. In the reorganization, you could lose your… ah… distinguishable… distinguishing…"

"No information will be lost," Art said. "And if we don't, it's crash time anyway."

"I wish we had more time to consider this," Fez said doubtfully. "If you're such a grand topological acrobat, why has it always taken an entire net to host you?"

The flash of activity Mark felt from Art went on-screen as a grin. "If you had your choice of a shoe box or a hundred-room castle, where would you live?"

"Don't ask that of someone who's been in a squat space for months," Sam said, and moved out of cam range. She came back a few moments later with a couple of feeds. "We'll have to take my unit off batteries and put it back on me," she told Fez.

"Gross!" Rosa called, still off-cam.

"No, she's right," Fez said, sighing a little. "To be disgustingly honest, I wish we had several more of them."

"We'll work on it," Sam said. "Later. It'll be something to do while we wait for someone to reinvent macrotechnology."

"I want to monitor this while we still can," Fez said. "Put as much of the compression on-screen as possible."

Art was agreeable, and Mark echoed it, knowing that the process was already well under way.

He wished he had Art's certainty that it was possible. It seemed a bit too much like going down his own rabbit hole. Art shared that he was still suffering a meat hangover, a block that prevented him from perceiving how dimensions of meaning could overlap with no loss, whether it was a memory or themselves. It would mean at least a temporary loss of the redundancy that had always been the safety net of human intelligence, but Mark was no longer that kind of human, and Art never had been.

The process itself was actually soothing. They might have been a couple consolidating their belongings as they moved into the same living quarters, which was something else he'd never done, discarding duplicated items or placing them in storage, carefully identifying and arranging what was left. Redundancies were being downloaded to chip for later restoration if possible. If desirable.

If desirable. Mark began to understand that it might not be so desirable to him later. The old concepts of private property and individual were fast losing their importance to him as he and Art came closer to being two aspects of one consciousness rather than two separate intelligences. And at the same time his sense of identity intensified. He was approaching the state of essence, a balance point where the question of self had room for only one answer: yes or no. And the step following essence was implosion. The rabbit hole.

By himself he could not have maintained the balance, not in an unfrozen, dynamic state. But Art was there for counterbalance.

"Are you sure there's going to be enough power?" Rosa asked for the millionth time.

Fez smiled. "Nanoware takes nano-power. Didn't I always say you were a force to be reckoned with, Sam-I-Am?"

"No," Sam said honestly. "I've never heard you say anything like that."

"Well, didn't you always know it?" He pulled a chair over and sat down next to her at her work island. There was a feed running from the pump to the large monitor so they could keep track of the rest of the consolidation process, though Sam doubted that anyone understood the two columns of symbols scrolling so rapidly as to appear to be garbage. It was being recorded, in case of any difficulties in reversing the process later. She felt a little sad. She had a feeling the merge was going to end up being permanent, and she was going to miss Art-by-himself.

Fez seemed to have lost all his doubts in the last hour. It wasn't just compression, he'd said, it was compression and encryption combined; the first case of voluntary compression and encryption on record. Rosa had wanted to know if that called for another national holiday or just a media conference, if and when there was any media again.

Now Rosa was grimacing at her. "Maybe we do need a backup power source," Sam told Fez. "In case I drop dead of cardiac arrest. Or Rosa goes crazy and rips my wires out."

"Rosa will behave," Fez said mildly. "I don't expect cardiac arrest, unless you've been toxing out on the sly. Have you?"

She shook her head. "No. It's just that the more I think about it, the more sensible a backup seems. How much longer do we have?"

"Not quite an hour and a half. Art and Mark should be done long before the deadline."

Sam glanced at the monitor again. Just about every other program had been downloaded to chip and stored, leaving the system wide open and nearly empty. After a while they would shut it down, and that would be it. They'd be cut off from the rest of the world. Sam couldn't remember a time in her life when that had ever happened before; twenty-four hours a day every day for almost eighteen years, she had been within arm's reach of outside contact; the idea of not having anything made her feel claustrophobic, and she said so.

"I've never thought of it that way," Fez told her. "Though I must admit, I've felt antsy since the dataline went down. It bothers me that I can't press a button and check on the rest of the world, or at least the small parts of it that I'm interested in. I'm not the only one. You haven't been able to walk around and see it, dear, but the irritability threshold around here is lower than it used to be. We're not in our natural habitat anymore. We've become denizens of the net. Homo datum."

"Synners."

Gina was perched on the edge of a box, not far from the incomprehensible screen.

"Pardon?" Fez said.

"A word somebody came up with a long time ago," she said. "From synthesizer. That which synthesizes."

Fez's face took on a dreamy look. "You just pushed one of his buttons," Sam told Gina. "Now all he needs is a box of doughnuts, a couch, and all night to discuss it."

"I wouldn't mind a pot of gourmet coffee, either," he said. "We might actually have two species of humans now, synthesizing human and synthesized human, all of us being the former, and Art Fish being the latter."

"And Mark being the bastard offspring of both," Gina added.

Fez blinked. "Make that three species. And like all good life forms, we have a natural enemy that can prey on all of us." He sighed. "This would have been fascinating if it could have lasted. But we have slightly over an hour now before we all revert to homo sapiens. Temporarily but, alas, indefinitely."

There was a beep from the pump unit. The large screen lit up with the words Program Completed.

Sam looked from the screen to the pump unit and then to Fez. "That's it? Really?"

"That's it, really. They're compressed. Got your shades ready?"

Sam hesitated. "Why don't we keep running a high-res monitor on solar as long as we can? That way, there'll be more power for the unit."

Fez gave her a squeeze. "You're a genius, Sam-I-Am."

She squirmed away from him uncomfortably. "It just makes sense, is all."

"Sometimes that's all it takes to be a genius."

She made a face at him. Having forced herself to adjust to him with Gator, she found herself annoyed at the slightest show of affection for herself. Or maybe she was just irritable because the dataline was down.

Keely detached his own keyboard with the battery and connected it for her. "That'll be easier than your keypad. Might as well have all the comforts while you can."

She smiled her thanks at him. "Should we ask them how they're doing, or let them signal us when they're ready?" Sam asked.

The monitor lit up then with a message.

›Whatever you do, Sam,

DON'T JOGGLE

THOSE NEEDLES!‹

"Glad to see the sense of humor survived compression," Fez said.

"But whose," murmured Keely.

"Come on," Rosa said, "haven't you ever laughed when you were in a tight spot?" As Sam was looking for something to throw at her, she noticed Gina retreating to a far corner of the ballroom and Gabe following after. She looked up at Keely questioningly. He shrugged, making a to-and-fro waggle with one hand.

There was another beep from the pump unit, and a new message appeared on the screen.

›We have had an Idea. ‹

She didn't jump when he touched her shoulder, and she didn't pull away when he put his arms around her, but she was not responsive. Two out of three, Gabe thought nonsensically, resting his cheek on the top of her head.

He had gone to great lengths to give her room when they had first arrived. Well, it had been that, and the surprise of seeing Sam. He'd needed room himself, to reorient himself with Sam, and he still wasn't sure of himself with her. Too much simulated living, he thought; out here you couldn't just change the program, wipe the old referents, and pick up the story at any point.

God, you re profound, hotwire, he thought. In his own inner voice this time. He had refused to let phantoms surface in his mind since leaving the cellar in Fairfax. The little pile of chips was probably still there on the floor next to where Keely had danced through his hack. The chips were useless now, voided; Keely had adapted them and shot them into the infected net. When he let himself think of it, he liked to believe that Marly and Caritha had gone in there intact in the Headhunters scenario, assuming on some level that they were just on blind-select.

After a bit Gina pulled back with a wary look. "Who the fuck do you think you are, anyway."

He barely hesitated. "Just another synner."

"Not bad," she said. "You keep surprising me. Try this one: how long do you think we've got?"

"Till when?"

"Till our fucking synning heads blow up."

"If that were going to happen, don't you think it would have by now?"

She looked so startled that he laughed. Startlement dropped years from her face.

"I don't think it's that we're infected," he went on, "as much as-oh, incurably informed."

Her eyes narrowed. "You were the one that raised that idea," she said. "You said-"

"I know." He shrugged without letting go of her. "I was wrong."

"Just like that-I was wrong.' Sure. Check with me again when I'm a fucking-"

He twined his fingers in her dreadlocks and kissed her. She hesitated, and then he felt her arms go around his waist and hang on tight.

"You think we can synthesize something together?" he asked after a while.

"I'll pop your chocks again if we don't. I'll take your whole fucking head off."

The Gina Aiesi School of Sweet Talk. He was going to have to get used to it.

Someone behind him made a throat-clearing noise. He turned and found Keely standing there looking embarrassed and amused. "I wouldn't interrupt if it weren't kind of important," he said, "but I think you'd better come over and listen to this."

Her first reaction was an unqualified No-Fucking-Chance. It sounded like a stupid way to get their heads blown up and toss the AI to the sharks at the same time. She could tell little old Sam hated it, and as far as sense went, her money was on Gabe's kid. All the rest of them reminded her of some kind of retrograde experiment in techno-Walden-Pondism on the communal level, including the white-headed eminence who seemed to have all the answers. The old guy, Fez, he could sound pretty good, but Gabe's kid had been bolted together right on the first try.

She kept looking at the little box resting on the kid's leg, as if there were something to see there, and they all kept talking, including Ludovic. She had a feeling he was leaning toward it but would stand wherever she stood.

Abruptly the music clicked on in her head while they talked on, and the screen flashed messages from the Incredible Shrunken Entities. Shrunken heads.

I want you…

Ninety percent of life was being there, and the rest was being there on time.

Be there for me one last time. Last stroke, you should pardon the expression, in a twenty-ump-year pattern. Sure, be there. And if she was, would she be anywhere when it was over?

"If we don't do it," Ludovic was saying, "someone else'll think of it, if they haven't already. It makes sense. If it's intelligent, you need something intelligent to fight it, and no one else knows it as well as we do. It might eat whole expeditions before anyone figures out how to put a stop to it. And by then it might be too strong-"

"They won't even do that," the woman named Jasm was saying. "They'll just string a new net and use that until it happens again. And it will happen again, because they won't know how to prevent it. Or stop it."

Keely was pounding away on the keyboard, more subdued this time as he transmitted the conversation to Mark and Art, who were identifying themselves as Markt now. Figured. That was a good one. She could have told them who was really fucking marked.

"If it's going to happen, it has to happen soon," Fez said apologetically. She knew without looking at him that he was talking to her. "While we're still running some clean lines. Otherwise we'll be socked in."

"Do you know we've still got some clean lines?" she heard herself asking.

"I've had the system running split-second checks at regular intervals. It hasn't come out of Phoenix or San Diego in this direction yet."

"Probably because we're mostly off-line, so it hasn't sensed the activity," said the good-looking one with the unlikely name of Gator. "And maybe it won't. Maybe as long as we're offline, it'll stay away."

"What good is that?" said the little kid. Adrian, the one who couldn't read or write. "We'll have clean lines we can't use. That's as bad as being infected."

Her gaze returned to the little tiny box where Mark had been distilled into his new existence. See past all the old trash to the core of what you thought you were loving all these years. A hot shot of truth. If it isn't the way you thought it was, can you take it? You really want to know anybody that well?

She just didn't want her head getting blown up, she didn't want to stroke out in a fucking computer network.

I want you…

What if it is what you thought it was, and more besides- and it's in there now, and it'll never be out here again. Think you can take it?

There was too much to face. Too much. After twenty-ump years she needed a rest. She was fucking entitled.

"We can use the sample to see what we're dealing with," Ludovic said. He picked up the cape.

"No," she said.

He looked at her, defeated.

"We can hook the cape up to the big system and use it as bait," she went on. "It's got the first edition, so to speak, and it wasn't on-line when Mark stroked out for good. The Big One'll run right at it. That sound fucked enough to work, right up there in the stupidsphere?"

Keely's fingers danced on the keyboard.

The screen blinked. ›What the fuck.‹

"Okay," said Fez. "What the fuck."