Synners

34

"Gina?" Gabe turned under the grey sky. "Marly? Caritha? Markt? Anybody?" Echoes of his voice danced all over, counterpointing each other. He took a few stumbling steps, fighting to keep his footing.

Why don't you look over here.

It was less a voice than a strong articulated urge. He refused to give in to it. "Somebody answer!"

Over here. Look over here.

At his feet the stones stretched away in a long, wide curve of shore, millions, billions, an infinity of stones, too many, and they were in there somewhere, he just had to find the right one. Except he wasn't going to live long enough to search them all, not even a fraction of them.

… died not of starvation but of old age looking for a way out… So why don't you just just look over here?

His pov began to move toward the source of the compulsion. He could feel it quite clearly, pulling at him. Not Gina's pull. With an effort he jerked his pov back to the stones as he stumbled along, but it slid away again, down to the water line, to the lake and the dark trees on the other side, past the trees to the stranger waiting on the other part of the stony shore.

"Gina?" he said without much hope as he turned all the way around.

There was a sudden bright light, and he was suddenly facing in a different direction entirely. "Guess again, Dad."

He could have believed it was another of Mark's apparitions (another of those visual marks, his mind whispered) except she was so obviously patched in, like a rough cut from the old days of hotsuits and head-mounted monitors. Old days… as if it had really been so very long ago.

"Yah, it's me," she said, walking smoothly over the stones as if they were an even surface like a floor. "It's Sam. I'm wearing your hotsuit."

He looked down at the permanent tattoo that was his virtual body. "What are you doing here?"

"Jamming." Her face rippled and flickered with mild line-noise. "Trying to give you a breather. It's been all over you and Gina. Where is Gina?" She reached out, and he took her hands. As patched in as she looked, the feel of her was startlingly realistic, and he could tell by the look on her face that she found the sensation equally real.

"It's not what you're used to," he said. "Things can change awfully quickly now. Maybe too quickly for you to keep up in that thing."

"Appropriate technology, Dad. Appropriate for me, anyway, since I don't have sockets." Her eyes shut tightly for a moment. "What is it?" he asked.

"Keely's got a program disrupting the frequency so I don't trance out," she said. "Sometimes it makes my eyes feel funny. Like they're bouncing. I don't have long. Where's Gina?"

" 'Where' is not exactly the word. She's here, I just"-he looked around at the stones-"I just can't find the right context." He felt the pull at his vision reassert itself, and he started to turn toward the stranger without wanting to.

Abruptly Sam was in front of him again. "Jamming," she said. "Buying you some time. What's this about a context?"

What does this look like to you, an open window or an open wound?

… the Beater? Jim Morrison, or Visual Mark? Mozart or Canadaytime? The Living Sickle Orchestra… or that strange red-headed doctor. Her mind turned fitfully like a sleeping creature in the grip of a dream about to become real. Real dreams.

Come along with me.

When was I ever not therefor you?

Come along with me now.

"It wasn't really that I didn't want your pain, Gina, it was that I could never take it away. Now I can."

What's your weak spot, Gina? Better get to it before he does.

Oh, you son of a bitch, you stupid fuck-up, my weak spot has always been you, and you know that, you've always known it. You do what you do, you do it because you can, and if that meant using my weakness against me, I just had to live with it.

She stood in the shadows on the courthouse steps, watching him pinned under Joslin's dead-white hand, she stood over him on the Mimosa, she knelt beside him in a thousand different places, waiting to see if he was going to turn blue or worse.

Can you top it, lover?

– -

"Can you, Dad?" Sam asked.

I don't know," he said, holding the stone she'd found for him. Sympathetic vibrations, she called it. He was getting a sense of the program without really understanding it, but the way things were for him, he didn't really have to understand it. Which was a good thing; he couldn't fragment his attention to that extent.

"Then maybe that's the wrong context," Sam said. Her image rippled with noise again. "Is there something you know for sure?"

He groaned. "God, Sam, how does anyone know anything for sure?"

She looked at another stone and then smiled at him a little sheepishly. "Well, what've you got?"

Back to that again, he thought. He'd been through this, he thought, picking his way farther along the shore, using Sam's sympathetic vibrations on the stones.

"No, Dad," she said urgently, "what've you got?"

"It wasn't really that I didn't want your pain," Mark said. "It was that I could never take it away. And now I can. The brain feels no pain."

Maybe it was because she had never known what that would be like, maybe because she had missed the only other chance to find out all those years ago when Dylan had spoken the truth for both of them that night. Maybe that was why she was slipping now even though he hadn't even bothered to try to trick her. Take a little walk with me, yah, right into the jaws of the beast, with both eyes wide open and clear as rainwater, but God, to undo the years of getting toxed and renting furnished rooms with everything she needed and none of it hers and was that what it had all been about all along, was that really what it had all been for, all along?

"The brain feels no pain," he whispered.

"I feel pain," said Ludovic in a cool, clear voice. She looked up and saw him lying on his back in the graveyard. There was blood on his face. "Pain the day I met you, and it hasn't quit yet."

"So curable," Mark whispered to her. "There doesn't have to be pain. Just us…"

"Oh, come on, Gina." Ludovic sat up. The blood ran down his face in streams. "What would become of you if you couldn't cause someone some pain, raise a few welts now and then, draw a little blood, bring up the swelling?"

"That's not all there is to me," she said, feeling Mark try to tighten his hold on her (warm and so familiar, as if they had never led separate lives at all).

"I know that," Ludovic said. "The difference is, I'll take it. I have taken it. He never did." He leaned forward, stretching his hand out to her.

An open window or an open wound, whatever it comes up, Gina, I'll take it. The big bad c-word. Sure is big and bad. Never knew anything of value that wasn't.

His fingers brushed her face, and there was a roar like a hurricane wind that drowned out everything.

Had she gone to him this time, or had he come to her? And did it even matter?

"It's good," said Ludovic. He sounded a little surprised. She remembered that she had thought of him down in Mexico, and it was something he needed to know.

They didn't have to bother going down the hall to the room this time, they were just there, and he let her pull him down onto the bed.

"I know," he said, "this was never the easy part. You weren't smooch-faces." He laughed. "God, I love that. It's perfect."

She didn't understand how he could be there and also be on the stony shore at the same moment. But then, you could stand in the center of the burning flame untouched, too; the only problem was getting to the center without getting singed on the way in. And that was only impossible in the real world.

"I'm proud of you, Dad," she said impulsively.

He was still glowing, and yet he averted his gaze as if he were some lovestruck innocent.

"There's nothing to be embarrassed about," she added. "I know a little about this stuff. Maybe more than a little."

"Yah, but you're not supposed to see your father naked. Or your father's mind, anyway."

She started to say something, and suddenly Beauregard as she had last seen him popped into her mind, wearing a holo crown and hustling free preview tickets. "God, maybe it really is only impossible in the real world," she said.

"What is?"

She thought of Fez and laughed, feeling both hopeless and hopeful all at once. "Everything, Dad. Everything that matters. I hope not, I wish it weren't, but-"

The screen flickered several times; down in the lower right corner, the small icon warning of imminent power interruption appeared, blinking on and off.

"Oh, shit!"

"What is it, Sam?" He came closer, looking alarmed. "You are starting to break up-"

She threw her arms around him in a quick hug before something tore her away.

The Arabian-Nights-type tent was still ornate but it also looked disheveled now, messy, things out of place.

"This is certainly an unexpected and historic pleasure," Markt said too casually. "If the media is ever restored, we can state positively that interaction between the old and the new technology is indeed feasible."

"Where the fuck were you?" Sam shouted. "What are you doing? They're all alone-my father's all alone on those rocks and Gina's out somewhere all by herself, and what the fuck is that? You said you wanted their help neutralizing that thing, you never said you were going to make them do it all by themselves!"

"They have to," Markt said quietly. "To a certain extent, anyway. One of us is too viral, and the other is too… marked."

"I'm not in any fucking mood for bad wordplay," Sam said. The icon in the lower right corner was blinking more rapidly and she looked for the power-boost symbol. "You should have told them that before you let them go charging in to save the world. Your world."

"Yours, too," Markt said evenly. "Apparently you have some things you wish weren't impossible only in the real world. But then, doesn't everybody?" He looked away. "Sorry. We're on to something else now, and I can't keep it from biting off your power any longer. But thanks, Sam, you did the right thing. That sympathetic vibration program really is a banger. And thank Keely for the jamming program, too."

The screen went blank.

Keely helped her work the headmount off. The rest of them were still gathered around her work island, and they were all looking at her, including the Beater, who made one hell of a nervous potato. She felt a sudden wave of excruciating embarrassment.

"How was it?" Keely asked her.

"Weird," she said, letting out a long breath. "You can see everything at once sometimes, and sometimes you can't see but what's directly in front of you. And we'll need at least four times the resolution we've got now, I don't think I got a fraction of the detail. There's all sorts of things-I don't know, symbols and elements and-"

You're not supposed to see your father naked. Or your father's mind, anyway.

"-or maybe not," she said after a moment. "Maybe we should leave well enough alone. Damn. I really wished I'd had sockets. Sort of. Or maybe not. Seeing someone's mind like that-"

Some residue of power surged through the hotsuit then, and she had the sensation of someone squeezing her hand. She stripped off the gloves in a hurry. " 'Scuse me, I'm going to slip into something a lot more comfortable." She headed for her squat space.

"Good work, Sam," Keely called after her. "You did it, you know."

"Yah, I did it," she called back over her shoulder. "For a while, anyway."

"Sam?" Gabe called. The jamming program was still running, but he could feel how it was beginning to stumble. It kept correcting, but that wouldn't last. Eventually Mark was going to overwhelm it, and he would be back at the mercy of that pull to turn around and see the stranger. Mercy? Bad choice of word.

And then they were just there, in front of him. He jumped, startled, unsure if it was just some wishful visualization.

Then he was rushing forward to embrace them, but they stepped back from his reaching arms.

"Can't, hotwire." Marly's expression was only half-apologetic. "You promised."

"You did," Caritha added. "I was there. And so were you."

He looked at each of them, but there was no appeal. He had promised, to Gina, all the things that were supposed to be impossible only in the real world, and without waiting for an answering promise. Because that was how it was, whether you heard an answer or not, whether it was the answer you wanted or not, whether you had to crawl over shards of broken glass or cold, naked stones. Even with a sympathetic vibration program.

Someday- if they ever got out of this-Ludovic might understand. It had been somewhat of a dirty trick, the promise and the choosing. Perhaps the choosing most of all, because Ludovic hadn't realized he'd been choosing. Markt knew by his graph that he'd have made the same choice regardless, but Ludovic would have obstinately insisted on going through it the way he thought he had to crawl over every single stone. Even with a sympathetic vibration program. He'd have wanted to do it, actively and consciously, claiming it as a right. A right-when the Art configuration had invested Marly and Caritha with himself long ago, and Ludovic hadn't even known it at the time. He still didn't realize it all the way through, and it was hard to see how he couldn't. Took it for granted, perhaps, that a simulation could grow that responsive by virtue of growing so many decision trees. Wander through the enchanted forest, yes, it's magic, must be magic.

The magic is, there is no magic.

Sound and vision, yes, but no magic. Pain and pleasure, yes, but no magic. Catastrophe and chaos, yes, but ho magic.

Synthesis. But no magic.

Synners… but no magic.

None whatsoever.

Ludovic, this isn't bad news.

"How is that supposed to help me?" Gabe said, exasperated.

"Come on, hotwire," said Marly, or Caritha. It was hard to tell, now. They were both looking more like composites. "If you can face this, you can face anything."

He shook his head.

"If there was magic," Caritha, or Marly, said, "what would you need faith for?"

Gabe considered it. Then he turned around. Gina's fist was the size of a Hollywood Boulevard tourist bus as it came at him, and he was there for it.

– -

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up.

Night court. From high on the bench, the judge regarded her with a satisfied smirk. "You took the wrong turn getting up from that bed. Story of your life, eh, Gina?"

I cant be all fucking alone-

"Can't get you, but you can't get me, either." The judge tapped the gavel lightly and then pointed at the wall with it. "We can just stand each other off in here until I get him."

On the monitor she saw Ludovic frowning down at the stones.

Dammit all to fucking hell, Gabe, it doesn't make any difference which fucking stone-

"Not that it matters," said the judge, looking satisfied, "but how do you plead?"

"I don't plead," Gina said, feeling shakier than she sounded. "I never fucking pleaded in my life."

"No?" The judge was amused.

Get your claw off him, bitch, that meat is mine.

How'd you like to get even?

She turned away from the judge and got back into bed.

"Can I help you?"

Gabe hesitated. The common room was completely silent. Over at the cold-drink machine, Marly and Caritha were waiting patiently, Caritha tapping the cam resting on one raised thigh. She nodded at him. "Go ahead."

He looked down at the stones and then up at her again. "Oh, Christ. I know how this comes out."

"So hurry up," said Marly.

It's only impossible in the real world.

He sighed. "I thought you looked like you needed change for the machines."

"The more change, the less you know what's going on."

Markt smiled dreamily, turned him around, and pushed him into the path of Gina's fist.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up.

"Open up in the name of the law!" The judge's voice, or maybe Manny Rivera's, doing Mark. "You are all alone in there. You took the wrong turn again getting up from the bed, and you are all alone."

She was getting closer to the center now. Mark's bedroom. How's that for fucking symbolism, she thought sourly. Maybe she wasn't getting singed on the way in, but things were definitely starting to get warm.

"Open up in the name of the law!"

She paused in the act of getting back into bed. "What did you say?"

The name of the law…the name of the law… The echoes danced in the gray air above the lake. Gabe could imagine them bouncing off the low clouds like maddened rubber balls. Now, what was that name, the name of the law? He could almost feel it, but it wouldn't come clear, wouldn't straighten itself out from the noise in his mind.

He looked at the stone in his hand and let it go. That was the bad news about the sympathetic vibration program. There was a sympathetic vibration in all of them, something that rang a response in him one way or another, but no way to tell which was the right one.

Who says it has to be the right one? Will you just look over here?

The name of the law… He searched, grabbing as many stones as he could, but the name wasn't in any of them. There might as well have been nothing at all. He felt like a fool.

Fool.

Fooler loop.

He raised his head to the grey sky and laughed aloud.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up.

U B the Ass to Risk.

Yah, we're already clear on that, thank you one fuck of a lot.

Who you wannabee?

Gina laughed. Have you got the wrong number, fucker.

Really, Gina? Really? A very old room; surprising, this close to the center, but nothing should have surprised her anymore.

… because the larger pattern is contained in the smaller … She brushed the thought away, not even wondering who it belonged to.

Dylan's nasal, tuneful whine. I want you.

Who you wannabee?

But she had her own music with her, her own sound and her own vision. Nasty bridge, hammering all the way, the growl of her own need. Colors pouring down the bowl of the sky.

U B the Ass to Risk.

Lover, I always was. I'm lucky I can dance. Can you top this?

It was the real head of the food-fuck-dance-and-be chain, and it was going to try. She didn't run from it. I hit him, but what can he do for me?

– -

"I can find you," Gabe said.

– and the other ten percent is being there on time. It was time then, and it's time now.

"Bravo, hotwire," they all said. "All right, this won't hurt a bit. -Well, not much," Caritha's voice added.

It was like being tumbled in an enormous barrel rolling along a bumpy road, but somehow it wasn't unpleasant.

Got all the associations now, Gabe. One voice.

Was that what this was all about-associations? Just to find her? he asked.

Only in part. You were the fooler loop, she's the mirror. There she is. Better help her. She's strong enough to let you do that now.

There was a sensation of being shoved through some kind of thin but tough barrier, like a sheet of plastic. He landed on two feet in the pit. Gina was already straddling Mark with her hands on the connections.

The common eye-shaped area that was their life.

"But what do you think will happen?" asked the Mark-thing under her. "What do you think this is?"

A hard wave of dizziness hit her between the eyes, and she was staring up at herself holding the wires, ready to jerk them out.

Should've known it wouldn't be so fucking simple. U B the ass to risk, that's me. What did I wannabee, yah, how can you wannabee something and not know?

"There was a little bit of him left, then, do you remember? He opened his eyes and begged you to do it. Because the little of him that stayed with the body then, that was from the last time, in Mexico. Do you remember?"

The surprise of her own urgency, and his, and the overwhelming familiarity, as if they'd never had any secrets from each other. Because he'd already taken her there, to the lake with the stony shore. The doctors had fed the image into her brain to find out if she could see it as he'd meant it, but what he'd meant was not what they'd thought. He'd taken her there, and she'd been there for him.

"If you do it now, that goes, too.

"Can you do that, really? Can you end it, not just him but that bit of yourself he kept with the part that stayed with the body, that is here now? Can you die a little and live through it?"

She tried to force her pov back home, but it was jammed there, gazing up at her own face. Who had been there, looking out of his eyes and begging her to yank the wires? Mark? Or herself?

"If you don't believe you can be in two places at once, you've forgotten everything you've learned. You, Ludovic, his simulated playmates, Mark-me. Do it, and everyone dies a little, and can you do that, really?"

She could see herself waver at whatever she was seeing in those eyes, her/Mark's eyes; the surge of brute hope she felt from the thing at the sight was not as far removed from herself as she would have wished.

That'll teach you to glory in your separateness, your precious aloneness.

Ludovic reached around from behind and put his hands over hers on the wires.

"Oh, it'll be even harder for you, Mr. Noble Gesture. Do it, and you'll kill your taste for it, and you'll kill your last link to them, your simulated playmates, and that's something you might not be able to get back, ever. Can you do that, really?"

Ludovic's expression changed, and she knew that he was seeing them.

"You gave up what you had of them, but see, here is what I took from the volatile memory of your system when I ran through, and it's every bit of them. Can you end it for them? Wouldn't you rather do just about anything else but lose them again, wouldn't you rather come and live with them and go back to the way it was, not having to do anything, least of all make Noble Gestures?"

"Last thing they'd expect, hotwire."

It should have been easy, but the desire for them was still there. The desire for them and the way things had been, for no good reason, just because-

"Because you can," Gina said. "But it's not the only thing you can do."

But it's different when you think you have no choice, and then suddenly you do after all.

"I simply do not fucking believe we have to do this again," Gina said, and her fist was coming at him. "There ain't nothing to them you didn't have in the first place, hotwire. And you know what you got."

"But how do you know whatever's right?" he asked, confused.

"You don't," she said. Realization came simultaneously with the words. "It's a damned Schrodinger world." The name of the law.

On the stony shore he turned not because it was pulling at him but all on his own power. And she was there, just having turned around herself to look at him.

Her fist pushed through the air. This time he ducked, and it sailed past him to strike Mark.

Their hands came up together, and the wires pulled free.

The chain reaction went at the speed of light, unfeeling and unstoppable. It unraveled the pit around them, moved on to the lake with the stony shore, the common room, Mexico, Manny's office, Hollywood Boulevard, everything dissolving, running to nothing, and they were pulled along with it.

"I didn't even know for sure sometimes you were there," Gina told him.

"Likewise," Gabe said, feeling tired and exhilarated all at once. "You never know until you turn and look."

Abruptly he found himself back in the strange half room. Right; no need to go any further with it now, it was all happening by itself. He could sense it retracing every step the Big One had taken, undoing itself as it spread out in every direction, a starburst whose points touched Phoenix, Sacramento, Seattle, Japan, Mexico, London, Bangkok-

He turned to say something to Gina. She wasn't there.

"Hey," said Jasm. She had one ear to Gina's chest. "I hate to tell anybody, but I don't hear anything."

Sam looked down at her father. His face was still swollen, but the impressions from his hotsuit were fading rapidly. "When do we pull them out? Or do we just pull Gabe out?"

Keely motioned for her to be quiet. Sam looked at the Beater. He had refused to relinquish his new role as official potato, and she hadn't felt she could insist. Somehow, going in with them, even by old hardware, however briefly, whether to any purpose or not, had changed her status.

But the way the Beater was sitting, she could lunge quick and yank the wires out of his stomach. One hard jerk. If she had to do it to save Gabe's life-

"Whack to this," said Percy. He was holding the cape connected to the big system. The patterning side was blank white.

Easy now, Gabe told himself. He'd only looked at one spot. She could be anywhere in the room. Schrodinger's Gina-

The window still framed an area of black against the moving clouds. He took a step toward it and then stopped. The door swung only one way now, and it had already swung for him. He could wait, or he could go.

They floated in near-perfect rapport, balancing. With the virus gone, Markt was wide open, and she could see everything now, Markt's life and Mark's life and her life and their overlapping life together, right where it had always been.

"Let's dance," Mark said, surfacing in the composite. "Let's jump all night, let's burn it all down and burn it back up again. Let's die before we get old. Let's never die, ever."

She hesitated.

"It'll be better now than ever it was," Markt said. "And we're inoculated now. Even if it could come back, it couldn't touch us."

"I want you," said Mark. "Always did. Just couldn't find my way through the noise. But the noise is gone, and the wanting is still there."

Through the still-open window, she could see a very small and distant Gabe Ludovic, waiting.

"It's what I was born to do. And doing that, I can do anything now. I can be there for you. It was only impossible in the real world."

Her face pressed against his bony chest, hanging onto what was left. Not just remnants now, but everything. Better now than ever it was.

"All the equipment we need is in our room," he said, leading her up the long hall. He opened the door, stepped inside, and turned, holding out his hand. Markt leaned close.

"The brain feels no pain."

It was a more persuasive argument this time.

He knew. He could sense it all through the dark window, and he knew it dwarfed his own offering.

Was that why they'd gone into this so easily? Did Gina want to be with him so badly? If she did, why had he come along? To be there to convince her to come out again after it was all over? Christ, he'd only known her a few months. After fifteen years of marriage, he'd been unable to persuade his wife to come out of a sealed office. How was he supposed to fight over twenty years of someone else, to compete with a, a whatever-it-was, a video, a synthesis, a sympathetic vibration?

Hey, Gina-come on out here and pop my chocks. Really, it'll make you feel better.

Sure. When the brain felt no pain?

What the fuck, as Gina would say if she were here. You got a punch in the jaw and, for a little while, a life. Keep asking, maybe someday someone'll put an egg in your beer. But not today.

He yielded to the pull toward the outside and faded away.

"I'd say about ten beats a minute, now," said Jasm, holding Gina's wrist. Sam tightened her grip on the wires in her stomach. There was a rustle as Gabe stirred on the mattress. Keely knelt down beside him and then looked up at Sam. "He's coming out of it."

"She isn't," said Jasm.

It was several hours before the feeling of disorientation and woolly-headedness even began to drop away from him. Gina stayed down. Ignoring his still-swollen jaw, he told them in as few words as possible what was happening to her, or what could be happening. Sam pointed out gently that he didn't know for sure, and he didn't contradict her by telling her he had looked and she hadn't been there. Not out loud.

Local portions of the dataline came back by the next morning, anchors recapping the big story every few minutes. The final count of socket casualties had yet to be determined. L.A. was still burning, and martial law was the order of the day.

The young guy called Percy offered him some 'killers. "They make me a little stupid," he said, pushing them back at the kid. "Thanks all the same."

He distracted Sam with a shower of attention, telling her everything that had happened before he'd seen her at the graveyard, even though she'd heard a lot of that. He didn't have to tell her anything about after, and he didn't try.

The following night Gina was still down, and he made a big deal out of tucking Sam in like a child in her little privacy area, her squat space, she called it. The ex-pump had been put aside, the contents transferred back into the big system, so it wouldn't be long before contact would be reestablished on the showy multimonitor arrangement they had. They were all waiting for that, he could tell.

Sam went to sleep, and Gina had still not come out of it. There were so many kinds of doors that swung only one way, and he could wait, or he could go.

Maybe there really is no magic, but for a few moments here and there, Gina, I think maybe there was. Just a few moments, but they were more than enough. And is that high enough up in the stupidsphere for you?

Go somewhere. Go somewhere.

He touched his swollen cheek. This was where he had come in; good place to make an exit.

There was no pull toward the outside this time, but he went anyway.