Synners

33

Fez was spooning fortified banana mash into her mouth as if she were an invalid, and though it made her want to squirm with annoyance, Sam held still for it. If Gabe could do what he was about to do, she could make peace with Fez, at least in her own mind. For the first time he had expressed admiration for her vision in constructing the pump unit rather than only revulsion for the power source. Having his open respect made up for a lot.

"I really did see the usefulness of it all along," Fez was saying, "as outré as I found it. A computer running on a power source that can't be compromised-

"Unless you die."

"Then you can keep an extra set of connections in a potato and always carry it in your pocket. 'Is that a potato in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?' "

Sam blinked at him. "Huh?"

"I should have known you wouldn't get it." Fez sighed. "The one time I make a dirty joke with you, and you don't get it." She started to say something else, and he stuck the spoon in her mouth. "Eat up. We want you to stay comfortable."

She swallowed and pushed the spoon aside. "No more. I'm fortified and banana-mashed to the gills. If you want to see to anyone's comfort, take care of my dad and Gina. I don't have to be anything more than a potato."

Fez regarded her solemnly. "You're still against it."

"Yah, I am. I don't think they can bring it off. It sounds like a computer game I once wrote. Or a bad B-feature that did well in the wannabees. Ever hear of something called House of the Headhunters?"

"No. But the title could belong to a good many of all the computer games ever written. The rest being variations on Parcheesi."

"Really?"

"No." Fez sighed again. "Truthfully, I don't really like it, either. I think there's a good chance we could lose them all. And if it were just Art alone in there with them, I'd never allow it. Art's always been viral at heart. Figurative heart. If he were a flesh-person, I'd watch him for sociopathic tendencies."

Sam raised her eyebrows. "Why? I never found him particularly antisocial."

"Not lately you haven't. But what's more antisocial than a virus? Besides, he never had to be antisocial by the time you came along. By then we were all at his beck and call. But didn't you find him just a little bit stuck on himself?"

"Yah. When I thought he was a person. Flesh-person, I mean."

"The addition of Mark makes me more optimistic," Fez said. "Not very much more, but some. Humans have always been smarter than viruses. Humans drive, viruses are driven. Even the intelligent ones. Three-plus humans ought to have a fighting chance against one intelligent virus."

"But it's not a virus," Sam said.

"An intelligent spike, then." Fez let out a long breath. "No matter what it is, it's still driven. No initiative-the big human advantage. I hope."

Gina and Gabe came over then with Keely, who was carrying the cape and the connections. "All clear," Keely said. "The diagnostic says the connections are free of all infection. But I still don't know if four each are enough."

"Mark says it will work with four apiece," Gabe said. "My left hemisphere and Gina's right."

Fez started to say something, but Gina turned to Gabe.

"You sure you want to run at this thing?"

Sam met her father's gaze evenly. They'd hardly spoken since he and Gina had decided to do it. She wanted to tell him not to, that the risks were too great, that he didn't know what he was getting into, but something in his expression stopped her. He was looking for her support, she realized suddenly. Not her help, or even her approval, but just for her not to discourage him. He'd had enough of that with Catherine. She looked down at the pump unit resting on her lap and cradled it protectively in both hands before she looked up at her father again.

"Yah," he said to Gina. "Yah, I do."

Gina shook her head. "You're a stone-home crazy fucker."

In spite of everything Sam smiled. It was the nicest thing she'd ever heard anyone say to her father.

– -

They were lying side by side on a couple of narrow mattresses donated by Jasm and Graziella. Keely checked and rechecked the boot program before he divided the connections from the cape between them.

"When you connect," he told them, "the transmission and stealth programs will boot with you, and they'll stick by you till you disconnect. You can't accidentally disable them, but you might not always recognize them, and I'm afraid you won't be able to get a status reading whenever you need one. But whatever kind of controls you need, you ask-"

"Are you gonna fucking let us do this?" Gina demanded. "Or are you gonna fuck around till the fucking lights go out?"

Sam felt Rosa squeeze her hand, and she squeezed back. Keely looked up at her from where he was kneeling next to Gina.

"Sam, if you have to go to the bathroom, go now."

"If I have to go to the bathroom," she said with a nervous laugh, "you can bring me a saucepan, and everyone can look the other way."

"Let's just fucking go" Gina said, staring up at the ceiling. She reached over and took Gabe's hand.

"Okay," he said. Sam winced as he twisted his neck to take a last look at her. Suddenly she wished she'd thought to give him a hug or a kiss. Then his eyes were closed, and the program was running.

He was looking at a strange, half-finished room with black and white tiles and roofless walls against a backdrop of swiftly moving clouds. Or rather, he was trying to look at it. There was something very bright in the center of the room, undulating like a reflection of the sun on a ripply lake surface. It blinded him, blotting out most of the scene so that he would have to look away and readjust. He could sense Gina nearby. Her energy simmered like continuous, contained explosions. After a bit he turned toward her, and her visual was Gina as he knew her, but coming through strangely, the textures and colors shifting like a painting in flux.

She said something, but he couldn't understand it.

"Everything will be in phase shortly," said a voice from the bright light. "We're a little ways from full synthesis." And then: "Some trip, hey, Gina?"

The brightness became less blinding, not because it was fading, but because he was becoming adjusted to it. Gradually he came to distinguish a figure within the light, one figure but with two images superimposed on it, each image waxing and waning, sometimes in fragments so that it was a shifting composite rather than two separate images trading full dominance.

"Loads of room in here," the voice went on, and Gabe realized that it, too, was a composite. He turned to Gina again, and her image was smoothing out, the painting transmuting from impressionistic to photographic realism. And then it was like seeing her come through some transparent barrier, glass or water, before something gave, and he was perceiving her with total clarity.

The figure in the light moved aside to show them a four-paned window floating in midair against the backdrop of clouds. It put its hand on the windowsill; everything contained within the frame vanished, leaving a rectangle of darkness.

"Ipseorama," the composite voice said. " 'See distantly.' It's the word television would have been if the Latin and Greek roots had been reversed."

"Thanks," Gina said sarcastically. "I really needed to know that."

The figure was amused. "Just testing out the synthesis." It put one leg over the sill and paused, sitting half in and half out of the room. "You can see as distantly as you want to see. We're opening the line to the Phoenix node now." It climbed the rest of the way through the window.

Before he could think about it, Gabe's pov zoomed forward, through the frame and into the black.

A status line winked into being and marched across the bottom of the screen. "They're on-line to Phoenix," Sam said, and then felt foolish. The only person present who couldn't read a status line was Adrian. But nobody made any smart remarks. Maybe it was only natural to have someone call the action, so to speak.

Fez was hunched forward in the chair next to her, hands gripping his knees, staring at the screen intently. Rosa was still holding her hand, and Percy was camped next to Keely with his entire inventory of tools, hardware, and fragments of hardware. Gator had parked a supply of fresh batteries next to the screen, along with a couple of laptops. Everyone else -Jasm, Graziella, Kazin, Rodriguez, a few of Percy's merry little brigands, that drummer Flavia Something, and the Beater, looking old, tired, and anxious-hovered nervously. Another monitor nearby displayed the continuous diagnostic running on the big system while the patterns on the cape gyrated and squirmed like something live.

"I wish we could have tapped a full visual for this instead of just a status line," Sam said.

"We couldn't tax their capacity that much," Keely told her. "They'd have to cooperate in the transmission, even if I bugged their povs. Too much of a drain on their concentration."

"Could you crack in while this was in progress?" Fez asked.

Keely shrugged. "Maybe. Why?"

"If we lose contact with them, we could see what happened."

"If we lose contact with them, we wouldn't see much for long."

A new message appeared on the screen, just above the status line. ›Loading Headhunter programs. ‹

"Headhunter programs?" Sam said. "A B-feature?"

"One hell of a surprise for your father," Keely said, smiling at the screen.

On the mattress Gabe looked jarringly peaceful, as if he were asleep and having the best dream of his life.

For Gabe it was like crouching at the base of an enormous generator, the vibrations shuddering all the way through to his bones. He could feel Gina's presence as well, an energetic mix of anger, fear, and ready aggression that spoke to his own apprehension and uncertainty. On the outside he had believed a little more in the idea of joining forces with Mark and Art -Markt, now-than he did on the inside in this ragged landscape of what seemed to be enormous shadows of almost-things.

"You think we can synthesize something?" The words came from Gina, but he recognized them as his own. "Really synthesize something," she added. "Something of us, to use against it."

He started to reach out to her and then hesitated. Actually touch anyone this closely? Suddenly the idea of that kind of contact was a hard, wordless fright.

"Part my brain and part yours," Gina said. "Doesn't get much more fucking intimate than that. If I can stand it, you can. What've you got?"

He tried to think. What did he have?

– -

The house looked quiet enough, but then the whole street was quiet, and Gabe knew that was all wrong. All wrong- they were gone, a pile of dead chips on a cellar floor in Fairfax.

"Not quite." Marly grinned down at him and then threw a muscular arm around his shoulders. On his other side Caritha slipped an arm around his waist and nudged him with the handcam. "Hope you don't mind about all the modifications. Been a shitload since you last saw us. You thought it was a glitch in the program, but it was him all along. Art. Only I guess he's calling himself Markt now. More to him."

"More to everything," Marly added.

Gabe was too stunned to speak. There was no doubt they were real, or as real as they ever had been, not just phantoms pulled from his memory but the programs themselves, saved or restored, he wasn't sure which.

Programs?

"Try again, hotwire," said Marly.

The kid sitting at the laptop: Stone the fucking crows at home! This stuff s infected!

You thought it was a glitch in the program, but it was him all along.

Even after? Gabe wondered. Even after the sockets? He turned his attention inward, and there, deep in his mind, he found it, a little bit of a glow, the same glow that he saw in Marly's eyes, in Caritha's. It was like looking into an enormous dark box and discovering a very tiny, very perfect diamond. Incurably informed?

There was a pull outward like the one he'd felt when Gina had yanked him out out of a chair one night a lifetime ago. Her touch was unmistakable.

"Hate to interrupt you when you're contemplating the fucking jewel in the lotus," she said, "but it's here. The fucking program director's back."

"Good," Caritha said, hefting the cam. "I want that spike. I don't like programs that go around blowing up people's brains."

"Then let's go do a little damage," Marly said, and made a move toward the house, pulling Caritha and Gabe with her.

From within the new configuration of Markt, Art reconvened and watched with real fondness. He'd always liked the first part of the Headhunters scenario, where Gabe went barging in with the women, a reluctant hero fast losing his reluctance for the sake of people he loved, and then developing a taste for heroics as he went along. That was the way he'd always read it in Marly and Caritha, anyway.

Besides, it would help Ludovic if he just went to it as though it were the enemy he had always faced in House of the Head-hunters. Perhaps there really wasn't any other enemy for him anyway.

Gina's enemy would be more difficult to articulate. He would have to leave that to the Mark part of his new self.

Who do you love?

The only thing nastier than forty-seven miles of barbed wire was forty-eight, and she hadn't had to go that far yet. Just through this crowd of bangers on the tiny little dance floor to a likely-looking head nodding up and down, and déjà vu shuddering through her like inner thunder, more than déjà vu. Déjà-voodoo: had happened because she was reliving it now.

Who do you love?

Say again, doll, I didn't hear you that time.

She went through the door, stopped, looked at someone pounding it out with two sticks on the hood of an abandoned limo.

Who abandons limos this time of night on this street at the outer edge of Hollywood, land of the lost?

She went over and peered into the back window, cupping her hands around her eyes. The dark glass de-opaqued, and she saw herself and Ludovic lying side by side with connections trailing from their heads.

Disturbed, she stepped back, and Quilmar threw an arm around her shoulders, drawing her into Valjean's long, narrow kitchen. "Fucking right there's nothing fucking wrong with porn," he said. "Porn is the fucking secret of life, sister-mine. If you can't fuck it, and it doesn't dance, eat it or throw it away. That's the fucking order of the universe, and I'm at the fucking top of the food-fuck-and-dance chain. And I don't know what that is"-he gestured at the limo, which was now on one of the screens in Valjean's living room-"but it makes me horny, and that's all that matters."

Easy one; she left Quilmar in the kitchen again, turned away from the grotesque sight of him attempting the forcible seduction of a major appliance, and found herself back outside.

!! U B THE ASS TO RISK!!

Many Main-Run Features Starring U!

COMPLETE ROCK VIDEO CATALOG, TOO!

Gina nodded. It wasn't going to waste its energy trying to fool her with little things. Which didn't mean she wouldn't have to be any less careful.

Know you once, know you always.

Who do you love?

Doll, why do you keep on askin me that? You must be seeing something I didn't say.

Right; stone-fucking-home exactly. She could always see what he didn't say. With a fever in her chest. Nasty bridge, running from the top all the way down, hammering every step of the way, and she went, chased by her own growling need, but déjà -voodoo told her it was his, too. Her need and his, but hers had gone east, and his had gone west, hers had gone out, and his had gone in, and wasn't that always the fucking way of it?

Who do you love?

Oh, doll, wouldn't you like to know?

Sticks beating it out on golden garbage cans, a roadmark to tell her she was going in the right direction. Move.

The Mimosa was empty. She turned around and around, looking, but they weren't there now. They weren't hiding under the piers, they weren't watching from the shadows, they weren't anywhere. And then the ball of fire came anyway, and she started to walk through it.

More than a lot were left with when the smoking lamp started to burn low-.

Who-

… Gina.. . (So faint she didn't think she'd really heard it.)

There was a man with a different world in his eyes, still real, made of noise and light. More than a lot were left with-

Who do-

… Gina. .. (Yah, heard it this time.) There was a man, real, taking the long way home, walking a strip that had once been by the ocean where she had run across the nasty bridge, but that was all in the fire now, too, along with all those things that might have been.

Who do you-

There was a man in a room, changed for the machines, not real now, and a stranger, real, on a stony shore under a gray sky, turning slowly to her.

Do you still want to?

Running down the long road. Sparks to lightning, white and otherwise.

Who do you love?

You tell me, doll.

He was there on the sand, waiting, and she made a move toward him.

Gina!

Something bumped her, and the memory came up like light.

You win the game as soon as you get them to say it. Then you do whatever you want. And she'd never said it, not once.

"Too fucking easy," she said, backing way, way off, until the Mimosa and the ball of fire she hadn't walked through was as small as something she might see from the wrong end of a telescope. "Where is it, really?"

Old habits, they do die hard, don't they. That's yours, ain't it-looking for Mark. And finding him.

She reached for Markt, but the sense of him was shockingly absent. Nor could she get a sense of Ludovic. She was suddenly and most definitely alone. Ridiculous, someone had just been calling her name-

And now you can find him wherever you look. What you've always wanted. Whether you know it or not. And I want you. I want you.

What the fuck was she supposed to do now?

Whatever s right, Gina.

Whatever's-

Markt looked sympathetic-both of him. He was there so suddenly, she didn't have time to be surprised, or even to demand where the fuck he'd been. "What's your weak spot, Gina? Better get to it before he does."

Weariness was a sudden ache all the way through her. "My weak spot. You got something we can make a list with?"

Markt glowed at her. "Who do you still want to love?"

"-right," she growled. She hadn't taken it through the wire, but she had imagined how it would be; how it was. Like floating through a tangible fog bank, and as each shadow pulsed, there would be a corresponding pressure deep in the head, an invisible finger pressing here, and here, and here, searching for some particularly sensitive spot. Like being molested in some weird, witchy way.

"I want you…"

She was in a place from years before, and Dylan's strangely engaging nasal voice was speaking the truth for both of them. Mark was sitting on the floor, waiting for her reaction.

Laugh that old laugh, break it up and break it down. Hey, jellyroll-

But it wasn't anything to laugh about, was it? Missed chances, they don't have a lot of humor value, do they? So now there's a second chance. You gonna take it this time, or shine it on?

The desire in the room had been electric, was electric now. Not just the sex, but the full, rounded desire for completion. She'd felt that, too, the same way he had. Completion.

"But is there really such a thing as a second chance?"

Ludovic was standing over by the door. Mark turned up the music, and Ludovic melted away. Right, he hadn't figured into it then.

But he did now. He wasn't a missed chance. He was the one she was going to have to do something about.

Mark was still waiting. But this was an easy one, too. She opened her mouth to laugh that old laugh.

"Are you sure you want to do that?" he said seriously. "Looking for me all those years, and now you found me again. Wouldn't you rather save me this time? You could."

In the moment of hesitation, the pictures came to her. Two decades and some-odd of the show that had no end, her life, his life, their life, hit-and-run, kiss-and-tell, a little walk that had turned into a long run. Who do you still want to love?

Oh, lover, I been afraid you'd ask me that.

"Save me," Mark said, the plea in his voice carefully small. "I don't want to be this way. If I did, do you think I'd have made it so fucking easy on you?"

Oh, lover, I been afraid you'd ask me that, too.

They were flattened against the wall in the dark hallway, Marly's strong arm thrown across his chest. Gabe waited for the voice, wondering who it would sound like.

"It's gonna be different this time, hotwire," Marly whispered. "You ready?"

"What?" he said, confused.

"You're gonna have to be. Here it comes." Before he could protest, she grabbed him and swung him around to stand in the doorway all alone.

He was looking across the twentieth-floor terrace at Gina standing on the railing. She had the harness on, but he saw that the cords weren't connected to the railing this time. When she went over, she would be falling for real.

For… 'real'? Could it be 'real' this way, in here?

Oh, yah; it would be different, maybe, but no less real, a virtual fall and a virtual impact, but when she hit bottom, the effect would amount to something real.

Did she know?

He couldn't tell for certain. She seemed to know and not know at the same time, and something suggested she would accept it either way.

Schrodinger s Gina.

Gabe frowned; where had that come from? He took a step toward her.

"Floor's mined," Caritha said offhandedly.

Gina looked over her shoulder at him, her gaze both meeting him and going through him in an odd way. What was she seeing, he wondered. Did she even realize she was on the railing? What was her context?

You got to know your context, because you're only gonna get one shot at getting into it.

Yes, but if she thought it was one thing, and he thought it was another, then what was the real context? He burned with impatience and frustration. How was he supposed to know what to do?

"Whatever's right," Gina said. "How'd you like to get even?"

Even? He could almost have laughed. There was nothing even about Gina.

The loose harness connections on the rail swayed slightly in the breeze.

"Make up your mind," she said. "I gotta go one way or the other, I jump or you push me."

No, that was wrong, he thought wildly, but he had no way to tell her. It wasn't in her context.

"Gettin' late, hotwire," Marly said. Her voice sounded just a bit strange to him now. "Already know you can't argue. What's next?"

He turned in what he thought was her direction, and the images rushed over him.

Go somewhere. Go somewhere.

Floor's mined.

Change for the machines.

MORE DRUGS.

Run Personnel run.

Take a little walk with me.

Why the fuck didn't you watch where you were going?

The desire on the terrace was electric. Gina started to turn away from him. The scene blurred in front of him, briefly became an arc of stony shore around a lake. He was back on the terrace before he could even be startled, and he saw Gina's knees bend as she prepared to jump.

Somewhere, someone was laughing. If you can't fuck it and it doesn't dance-

He shoved the thought away. If you can't argue, and you can't stop it…

Last thing they'd expect.

Hey, hotwire-you're an asshole.

Yah, but I'm trying to quit.

Just as her feet left the rail, he hurled himself forward and caught her in midair, at the moment before she dropped.

Port in a storm, nowhere else to go. That bother you?

She already knew the answer to that, but he told her anyway. They toppled onto the sagging mattress in a frantic, urgent tangle.

That's what I've got: a port in a storm, he thought.

That's more than most people are left with when the smoking lamp starts to burn low.

The feel of her was even more tangible in this state, if that was possible. The sense-memory of her T-shirt against his hands was wildly vivid, the warmth of her skin a shocking contrast, and then the taste and smell of her flooded him, carrying him to her like a hurricane tide.

Her physical strength had caught him unawares, in spite of that punch she'd given him. The power in her muscles had been astonishing. Or maybe it had been the force of her passion that had taken him by surprise, so different from long-ago, bloodless couplings with Catherine, no paler for being dim in the recollection.

Or maybe it had been the force of his own passion that had been the real stunner that night (was the real stunner now); until then he had all but forgotten that there was even the potential for passion inside him, let alone at this intensity. But he could, could then, could now-

We do what we do. We do it because we can. The words came to him now clearly, what he had only been able to understand in a primitive, gut-level way from the sound of her breathing in the dark. I'm lucky I can dance, and so are you, and we're lucky we can dance together now. Take a little walk with me. A little traveling music, please. Here it comes. Be there for you. What does this remind you of, an open window or an open wound…

The response poured from him without his willing it.

Well, the fact is, Gina, sometimes it looks like one and sometimes like the other, and it's really a combination of both. But what really matters, Gina, what really matters is, I climbed on in, because ninety percent of life is being there, and the other ten percent is being there on time, and it was time. And it still is, Gina. It still is time. But do I really have to tell you that?

No, he hadn't. But it had been good for her to hear it. She'd wanted to hear it.

Don't tell me who my enemy is; tell me who it isn't.

Okay, Gina; whatever works, whatever s right.

"How the fuck did you find me?"

"It wasn't that hard," Gabe said. "Not once I had the right associations."

There was a pause on the brink of one moment before the next.

"Jesus, yes, we've both got that, Ludovic. Run with it from there."

From there to anywhere, he thought. He could do that. What else did he have? Take a little walk with me.

Right; that, too-a walk he'd taken, a way. Go somewhere. And what else? Change for the machines.

MORE DRUGS.

Watch out, it can make you a little stupid. Definitely got that, Gabe thought, bemused; definitely got a little stupid.

So? The kid said anything could be useful.

How about the C-word? Commitment.

Lover, sometimes that's all you got. Remember?

Sometimes, Gina. But not this time.

– -

"All right," Mark said lightly, "I gave you that one. Now you can say I should have known better. That's okay, Gina. I got a million of them-"

– and they ain't all for you.

Gabe caught the rest of it, even if Gina hadn't. Apprehension hummed within him like a spinning sawblade. Can't get her on a direct approach, he thought, urgency rising in him and trying to become panic. Got to go at her through the weak link, and that would be me.

"Knock that shit off, hotwire," Marly said seriously, "unless you just want to paint a bull's-eye on your forehead and hold still for whatever's coming up next."

They were in the dark hallway again, flattened against the wall. But the hallway was different somehow, not quite right, and yet not totally unfamiliar.

"You're good. There's really no question about that, never has been."

"That's your cue, hotwire," Caritha said, and gave him a shove.

He was sitting at the table in Manny's office, and the smell of fried food was sickeningly strong.

"This was how I got you last time," Manny said. "Playing with your friends."

Gabe tried to look at Marly and Caritha, but his head refused to turn.

"See, you all tend to do the same things, gravitate to the familiar." Manny leaned forward, the bogus concern creasing his face as nauseating as the fried-meat stink. "You're so utterly predictable, it isn't worth the bother of plotting a decision tree for you. But our kind isn't. No trap doors, no twenty-story drops this time. Sticky field."

Gabe could feel it, sucking at him in the chair like quicksand. The ever-popular sticky field, mainstay of numerous B-features. Like the holo-to-laser trick, something else that was impossible only in the real world.

Something tugged at the edge of his thoughts, the bare, dim shadow of some idea, or-

Manny got up and came around the table to him. "And though you didn't ask, yes, it is me. Manny Rivera. After a fashion."

After a fashion. In spite of everything Gabe wanted to laugh. Poor old affected Manny Rivera, posturing even in this state. Although after the initial shock, Manny had probably taken to this like home. Anyone who could survive in the belly of the corporate beast would probably find this existence all but natural.

"Me," Manny said, "not that pitiful meat that walked and talked and played the villain in the set-piece of your life. Just as this is you, isn't it, Gabe, not the meat that breathes so slowly in some other reality. You left that behind to be where you are now, and it does breathe so slowly, doesn't it? Slowly, but it still breathes. Or can't you feel it anymore?"

The sticky field increased its pull on him and scrambled inside, trying to free himself, to get some sense of his body and his connection to it, because if he couldn't, there'd be nowhere to go if this failed, nowhere to go when it was over.

I can't remember what it feels like to have a body. No? Even after everything else? He wanted to scream in frustration, but he had nothing to scream with.

"Your life's all in your mind, isn't it? Good at dreaming, not so good at waking up-pretty bad, in fact. Stone-home bad, as they say in the world, the one you don't live in right now. You were right-you are the weak link. It's not hard to get to you. You just have to hold still long enough, and even I can work on you, even I can become so important that I can feed you a line of shit that will tie you in knots."

I can't remember what it feels like to have a body. All right, then, where was Marly, where was Caritha?

"Not something we can help you with, hotwire," Caritha said apologetically.

"Of course not," Manny agreed. "No body, no hotsuit to put on it."

He strained to look down at himself. No body and no hotsuit, but the familiar baroque pattern of snaky lines and geometric sensor shapes was there. At last the permanent tattoo.

I can't remember what it feels like to have a body.

Great people leave their marks. Everyone else is left with marks-

… with visual marks…

Manny was leaning forward to take it when Gina's face burst on him like a thunderstorm.

"Can't remember? Well, lover, it's a lot like this."

His face exploded with pain. The secondary hit of his body on the carpet was negligible, but he felt it clearly this time, his lower back hitting first, then shoulders and head, his heels bouncing a few times. From behind closed eyes he felt his mouth stretching in a smile.

"Jesus," said Keely. He knelt down to touch the left side of Gabe's face.

"What happened?" Sam clutched the unit on her thigh, her other hand resting on the wire leading to the needles in her stomach. "What's doing that, why is that happening? Keely, I can't read the fucking screen the way you can, goddammit!" One little yank; if that was what it would take to save her father's life, she would do it and hope it wasn't already too late, if that weird swelling in his face didn't mean he'd stroked out-

Keely was at the monitor again, scrolling the output backwards, forwards, and backwards again. Then he looked over the top of the monitor at Jasm, who was squatting next to Gina. "Jazz, look at her hands. Are her knuckles bruised?"

Jasm checked and then held up Gina's limp right arm. "You got it. Bruised and skinned a little." She glanced at Gabe and then did a double take. "Keely, something else." She leaned over Gina and pulled Gabe's shirt up. "You want to guess at what that is?"

Keely stared in silence at the sinuous lines and shapes pressed into Gabe's flesh. Then he blew out a long breath and shook his head.

"Keely, I'm gonna tear your fucking head off," Sam said tearfully. Fez put his arms around her, and she twisted away, keeping one hand on the wire leading to the needles.

"It's all right," Keely told her, laughing a little. "It's just the best case of stigmata I've ever seen. Actually, it's the only one I've ever seen with my own eyes, so let's say it's the best one I know about."

"Shit," said Gator, "they must be seriously hysterical in there."

"Wouldn't you be?" Keely said. He smiled at Sam. "Gina just belted your father a good one."

"Whack to that," said Percy, standing over Gabe and rubbing his own face. "Whack on sight when you been to the same party."

"What about those marks on him, what are those?" she demanded.

"From his hotsuit, of course," Keely said matter-of-factly. "You've worn hotsuits a time or two, you ought to recognize the marks they leave. Your father just discovered his whole body's a hotsuit, at least as far as his mind's concerned."

Sam stared at her father, not quite believing. The marks on his skin were fresh and deep, his swelling cheek looked painful, and the expression on his face said the best dream of his life had just gotten even better.

I feel pain.

That's sober as I remember it.

"Anybody can take shelter," Marly said. "Can you take on someone else's pain?"

"You're gonna have to try, at least," Caritha said, before Gabe could answer.

He was in somebody's living room, somebody's enormous, endless living room, currently filled with a glittery array of people eating, drinking, wandering in and out, watching the multiple screens on the walls, giving the thing in the center of the room a wide, courteous berth.

Gabe blinked at it. He remembered a creature eight feet tall, part ersatz samurai and part machine-fantasy, but this thing was so much more overdone that he was having trouble keeping it in focus. He thought he could catch glimpses of Marly at certain angles, Caritha at others; sometimes when it turned a particular way, he was sure it was Gina he saw within it, other times Mark, or Markt, and occasionally even himself.

Then it was a pillar of fire, and he remembered how he had ducked, expecting it to become a laser beam in the next moment. He got up and went over to the wall of screens.

Instead of the tech-fantasy porn clip, he was watching Gina. She was lying on a cot with wires in her head; behind her closed lids her eyes moved back and forth.

Gina-porn?

"That's a good way to put it," said a familiar voice. "If you can't fuck it, and it doesn't dance, eat it, be it, or throw it away. Lucky her. Not only can she dance, but she can be it, too. And so can you."

Abruptly the scene switched to Mark's bedroom, and he saw himself and Gina together. He looked away quickly only to find he was turning to the wall of screens again, all of them showing the scene in Mark's bedroom now. He put his back to them and there they were in front of him, above him, below him, on all sides, at every angle.

"It's no more of a prison than you were ever in," Mark's easy voice said soothingly. "After all, that's entertainment. Isn't it? One person's pain being another's entertainment. One person's grand love affair being another person's porn. That's all it ever meant to anyone. 'Don't know what it is, but it makes me horny, and that's all that matters'-other than that, nobody cares. It doesn't make a difference to anyone. A drop in the consumer bucket, to be drunk up, digested, excreted, and fed back into the food-fuck-and-dance chain. Food-fuck-dance-and-be chain, excuse me, whether it's you and Gina, or you and your virtual playmates, you and your wife, you and Sam, or just you and your carefully cultivated, fully formed pain."

The screens were splitting, multiplying, now displaying a myriad of pictures from both himself and Gina, each one different. His vision rebelled, unable to see them all at once, and they melted into a blur that ran and faded to a bleak grey color.

– -

Ow.

She turned in a rush, looking for Markt. For all she could sense of him, or them, or whatever the fuck, Markt might have vacated as soon as she and Ludovic had gone through the window. "Enjoying the show?" she called angrily. "You get off on fucking with me like this?"

Laughter in the dark, flowing like music. Then Mark was pulling her onto the narrow bed in the room in Mexico. She hadn't been sure at first what he'd been doing, or even if he'd been sure, she remembered that, just as she remembered clutching his jumpsuit in both hands and tearing it away from him, driven by an urgency she hadn't wanted to identify at the time. Reveling in that intense familiarity and letting it cover over thought of anything and everything else, especially the feeling that this would be the last she could have from him in this way, that he was going down the rabbit hole in his brain finally and for good.

Feeling? Shit, he'd told her, right out… you're gonna see this funny-looking thing, a piece of flesh clutching into naked console…

So what was she doing here, with the feel of cloth and flesh so vivid?

"Because you can have anything you want, just by thinking of it. Make it over into what you wanted it to be, instead of the disappointment it turned out to be," Mark whispered. She felt his breath on her neck and strained toward him in reaction, pulling an arm out of her own jumpsuit. "Because the brain feels no pain."

The sensation running down her side with his hand definitely wasn't pain, she thought, letting herself open to it as it intensified; not pain, nothing like it.

"Pain is curable," Mark whispered to her. "It's the most curable thing of all, really, and it's the thing we all walk around feeling all the time when we don't have to. There doesn't have to be pain. Just us. No pain. Just us… us…"

Is there really such a thing as a second chance? "It's not a second chance, Gina. It's a new one. And in spite of all that's happened-maybe even because of it-you want that. Do it any way you want to. Pain, your pain, my pain, it was all noise, and I've cleared it away for us."

What's wrong with this picture?

Echoes of phantom sounds bounced oft the low clouds above the stony shore. Gabe stared up at the sky, wincing at the feel of the stones pressing into his back. In a moment the shadowed areas of the clouds would begin to shift and throb, and he didn't want to see that. Stones scraped the back of his head as he turned to look across the water.

The surface of the lake rippled as something began to fade in on the part of the shore directly in his line of sight. He could feel the pressure of its gathering, an unpleasant tightening sensation behind his eyes. With an effort he rolled over and sat up, keeping his back to the lake. The stones dug into him harder. When your whole body was a hotsuit, he thought, there were definite disadvantages. He pushed himself to his feet.

Something pulled at him from behind, trying to make him turn around. Caught off balance, he did a little staggering dance on the stones and managed to stay upright and still keep his back to the lake. "Gina?" he asked.

Her absence was a hole in the air.

The patterns on the cape weren't just unusual, Sam thought, watching them. There was something different about them. Sometimes she thought she could almost see pictures in them, not just shadowy shapes but real pictures, as if her mind were being teased into projecting images, or filling in color and detail. The longer she watched, the more tangible the pull on her mind felt, as if the patterns were somehow touching her in a very personal way. She wasn't sure that she liked it, but she wasn't prepared to say that she didn't like it, either. She wasn't prepared to say anything at all or, for that matter, listen to anyone else say anything, either. Good thing it had grown so quiet in the big room; no distractions. She could continue to meditate on the patterns shifting and reforming on the material.

But, God, she had to concentrate so hard. It was worse than when she'd been doping out the sympathetic vibration technique. Her thoughts kept nipping away, slipping out from under her almost before she could even make sense of them. It was like trying to catch sight of a number of very quick and elusive creatures that would dive into hiding places the moment she turned to them, so that all she ever saw was the very tail-end bits of them as they vanished. And that was the part she wasn't sure she liked at all, because it was like her mind was being emptied out, cleaned, sterilized in preparation for something else to come fill it up.

Something stirred on the fringes of her outer vision, disturbing her meditative state. She felt a surge of wordless, reflexive irritation that quickened to a flash/roar of blind rage.

Then she was blinking her watering eyes at the sight of Adrian standing in front of the cape, hands on his hips, looking bewildered.

"Are you all completely fucked?" he said.

"Not anymore," Keely said wearily. Wiping her eyes, Sam turned to look at him. He was rubbing his face with both hands as if he'd just woken up from a long, deep sleep. Which wasn't too far from the way she felt at the moment. "Thanks, Adrian. How'd you do it?"

"How'd I do what?" Adrian took a step forward.

"No, don't!" Keely said. "First, find some way to cover that goddamn thing up, or turn it inside out, or something."

Obediently Adrian turned the cape so that the plain, unpatterning side faced out and then rejoined the group. "That's the weirdest thing I ever saw," he said conversationally. "I kept trying to talk to you all, and you all just kept staring at those patterns-" He shrugged.

"I know," Keely said, watching the screen again. "Something similar happened to me the first time I saw it, but I pulled out of it on my own. It must be a lot stronger now. What makes you immune, I wonder?"

"He can't read," Sam said slowly. "Brain lesion in the visual center." Amazed, she looked at Adrian, who shrugged again.

"Then maybe he ought to be in there instead of Gabe and Gina," Keely said grimly. "A whole lot's happened since we all went under for a while, and none of it's good."

"What is it?" Sam said, craning to look at the screen. The figures on it still told her little.

Keely shook his head. "We're gonna lose them."

"All of them?" Fez said. He sounded as dazed as he looked.

"Oh, no. Just Gabe and Gina," Keely told him sourly. "Markt's just fine. At worst he'll stand the thing off, but it looks like he'll end up neutralizing the thing. But not before he sacrifices Gabe and Gina to it. Shit."

"I should have known," Fez said bleakly. "Art's always been viral at heart. Make that core. He's never had a heart."

"But Mark's part of him now," Sam said. "He wouldn't do that. Would he?" Her gaze fell on the Beater, standing silently on Keely's other side.

The Beater's face was expressionless. "I don't know anymore. 'Talent drives out sense.' Gina always said that about him. He's pure information, now. What does that drive out?"

"We've got to help them," Sam said, grabbing Keely's arm. "We've got to reach them."

"Sure," Keely said. "We might even be able to do it, we've got another person here with sockets. But we're fresh out of connections, and if we try to pull any from either Gina or Gabe, we'll finish them off. Sending in another fooler loop isn't going to do it, we need something conscious. A human. Any ideas?"

Sam was staring past him, at the pile of hardware he'd brought from Diversifications. "Yah," she said. "What kind of power do we have left, and how long will it last?"

Keely followed her gaze and then looked back at her with astonishment. "Sam, you am a genius."

"Yah, but will it work?" she said.

" 'Will it work,' the genius wants to know." He beckoned to Adrian. "C'mere, kid-"

"No." Sam stood up, holding the pump unit.

"But he's the only one who's immune-"

"They don't know him." She looked around. "Could someone else be a potato for a while?"