Synners

Epilog

The light on the voice-only phone meant he had email. He called the local exchange, and the grandfatherly man read it to him. Just a thank-you note from the school on the latest simulations for the geometry students. Gabe felt pleased. It was an isolated area and not a moneyed one, either. Custom-programs off the dataline would have broken their budget, whereas the little bit he charged for producing them let him live well enough, combined with the other little bit he made on the holos he managed to sell from time to time. He was glad of the income but disgusted by the dataline. Still run by a bunch of greedy bastards who wanted to charge by the bit, who had learned nothing. He was glad every day that he'd refused to put it in his house.

It was a pretty nice house, smaller than the condo in Reseda, but far more pleasant. It looked like someone lived there. Not in the best of style, perhaps-the furniture was a little of this and a little of that, and the last occupants had apparently gotten a deal on yellow-duck wallpaper. Cartoony yellow ducks sailed the walls in the kitchen, in the living room, and, mysteriously, on only one wall of the bedroom. Yellow ducks he could live with, though; they didn't bother him, and he didn't bother them.

The electrical system was less easy to get along with-he had to unplug the refrigerator to run the holo cam. But nothing, neither food nor holos, had spoiled yet.

The only thing he felt mildly bad about was his lack of gardening ability. The backyard seemed destined to remain scrub no matter what he did.

But the front yard was just fine. It stopped short about fifty feet from the front door, where the land dropped sharply down a rocky incline. From there he had an unobstructed view of the ocean. Someone was operating an underwater farm a few hundred yards out; with binoculars he could watch the dolphins popping up and down, hard at work at whatever dolphins did on underwater farms. On some days he did almost nothing else but watch them.

He'd thought at first that the solitude might make him strange, and then he'd asked himself just how much stranger did he think he could get, and after that he never gave it another thought. Being alone wasn't bad. If he really wanted to be among other people, he could walk the mile and a half to the village and do his shopping.

There was one media parlor/bar on the village's meager main drag, and only once had he ever been tempted to go inside. That had been not long after he'd moved into the house. He'd been walking by, and the front door had been open, and he'd heard his own name from inside. He'd stopped then and listened. The anchor had been reading a list of known socketed people who were still missing, fates unknown. Gina was also on the list, along with a lot of other people he'd never heard of. He didn't notify anyone, and he didn't worry, because he wasn't using that name anymore anyway.

Nor was he concerned that any available pictures of himself would give anything away. These days his hair was more grey than not, and long, down to his shoulders. He fit right in with most everyone else in the village. Appearancewise.

But a few days after that incident-or non-incident-he'd dreamed about everything, for the first time in a long time. It hadn't been much, a quick flip through some of the high and low points leading up to his departure from the broken-down inn on the Mimosa. After that the dream had been very detailed: the long, long walk, part of it under the not-so-hidden eyes of the survivalists and then the ride with the old guy to Santa Ysabel in the panel truck. He'd told the beautiful one, Gator, that he'd just had to get out and walk to clear out the cobwebs, blow the stink off. At the time he'd been sure she'd believed him, but in the dream she obviously didn't. It made him wonder if she hadn't known all along that he'd been leaving. Or maybe she'd wasted a day or two driving around in Flavia's car while the urchins picked through the cases under the piers, thinking he'd been jumped. Now he couldn't decide.

The next ride he'd gotten from Santa Ysabel had taken him due north several hundred miles. The dream got sketchy again about the time in Reno, which had been a mistake anyway.

Detail returned again when he got to the coast, well north of the L.A. area but far from San Francisco. The dream marched him through the Recovery and the way he'd established himself in the village as a refugee from the L.A. collapse. Much sympathy all around; everyone assumed he wasn t socketed, and he didn't tell them otherwise.

The dream might have taken him right up to the moment he'd gone to bed that night, except he'd forced himself to wake up and stayed awake for what remained of the wee hours and all of the following day, keeping busy and instructing his brain that it would not visit any more nostalgia on him.

It worked for a while. After a time he discovered he could weather the occasional dream about Gina. You could get used to just about anything if you endured it long enough.

Eventually he lost track of time. He'd been waiting for that to happen, but when it came, when he realized he didn't know exactly how many seasons had come and gone since he'd left the Mimosa, he was neither happy nor unhappy. It fit the context, it caused him no discomfort not to know how much time had passed between one thing and another. Working for the school kept him on a reasonable schedule.

He enjoyed the work more than he'd thought he would, even on the used, jerry-rigged equipment from the supply house north of the village. It wasn't exactly state of the art, but for his purposes he didn't need all the bells and whistles and dancing bears. Appropriate technology, he told himself, and nothing more. Words to live by. Better than killed your taste for it.

When he saw her standing in the front yard, he thought he was having another dream, the dream he had been dreading, where she appeared in his new context, grinning that smartass grin and announcing, Hi, I'm not dead after all. I'm only impossible in the real world.

Then Sam came around the side of the house, and he was sure he was hallucinating.

He closed the front door and went into the yellow-duck kitchen to splash water on his face.

"There," he told himself. "Just me and the ducks."

The knock at the door was very polite.

"Open up, Ludovic. This is real."

"A what?" he said.

"Eclone. That's why I was down for so long." She was stretched out on his second-hand couch while he perched on the footrest. Sam was wandering through the rest of the house; she seemed to like the ducks.

"They made a complete copy. As complete as they could," Gina went on. "It was the error-checking that took so fucking long."

"Thank God," he said suddenly.

"What?"

"You said 'fucking.' I thought you never would, I thought I'd die waiting for it."

She gave him a look. "You left before I could tell you what was happening." Almost an accusation. But he could tell she wasn't mad. "I came up starving after most of a week, and there was nothing but those fucking seal-packs from the survivalists, fucking banana mash, fucking navy bean soup. And food porn on the dataline. Would you believe the fucking porn channels were some of the first shit back on the air?"

He shrugged. "Sure. Why not?"

"I notice you don't have the dataline."

"No," he agreed, "I sure don't."

They'd stayed at the Diz-everyone was calling it the St. Dismas Infirmary for the Incurably Informed by then-for most of the initial recovery period, she told him. Getting around hadn't been terribly easy unless you had a private car. But the day the rental lots had reopened, she and Sam had left. Sam had had enough of communal living, and she'd had enough of everything else.

"What about the Beater?" he asked.

She shrugged. "What about him?"

"But you're not really in two places at once," he said over the messy casserole dinner. Odds and ends in a dish, but not survivalist fare, at least. "Since they made an electronic copy, and you're here, it means the clone is just a sophisticated, intelligent program. But not conscious."

"If she wasn't conscious before," Sam said, "she is now. She's been merged with Markt. And Marly and Caritha."

He nodded once, shortly. Of course, he thought.

"Which reminds me," Gina said, watching his face. She reached into her shirt pocket and put some chips on the table.

He stared at them. The yellow ducks swam around him crazily for a few moments.

"Unaffected," Gina said. "Markt copied the programs, left the originals for you. They're yours again." The chips gleamed in the lamplight. She pushed them into the middle of the table and left them for him to pick up.

"And you're wrong," she added. "From Mark's point of view, I'm there for him. That's good enough for me. You want the stone-fucking-home truth, I couldn't have stayed. Mark was born to do that. I was just born." She grinned. "Only the embodied can really boogie all night in a hit-and-run, or jump off a roof attached to bungi cords."

Sam excused herself and went into the living room.

"I guess," he said. "Doing all that for the sake of pouring it into simulated reality. After being here for-I don't know, however long I've been here"-her face told him that she knew exactly how long it had been, to the day-"that doesn't make too much sense anymore. Doing all that just to simulate doing all that."

Gina burst out laughing. "Simulate my ass! I did video just so I could do all that shit!"

Sam dabbed at the corner of her eye with her little finger. "It got a little hard to watch. No. It got a lot hard to watch." She let out a breath. "Everything that was going on and the thing I thought about most was-oh, shit, it sounds so stupid-ass when you say your heart was breaking."

Sitting on the couch next to her, Gabe patted her shoulder, trying to think of something full of fatherly wisdom and comfort to say to her. "We do what we do," he said after a bit, "and we love because we can. Can't argue with it and can't stop it-" He gave a short laugh. "About all you can do sometimes is stand it."

"I've got a hack for anything," Sam said. "Any program anywhere. Even that fucking spike, I hacked that. But I got no hack for this."

Gabe nodded. "Welcome to the world."

Sam gave him a sideways look.

"I'm sorry," he said, shrugging, "But that's about it."

"I was afraid of that." She dabbed at the corner of her eye again.

"Oh, go ahead and cry," he said. "I won't tell anyone you're not cool."

"Thanks."

He put both arms around her. "No problem. What's a father for, anyway?"

– -

Sam had found him. As it turned out, he hadn't really been so hard to find, provided someone had been actively looking. There wasn't another independent simulation producer in a few hundred miles.

"Everyone else has pretty much gravitated to the center of the action," Gina told him as they strolled around the house together. It was night, the moon was up, and they hadn't stopped talking long enough to do anything else but start talking again. Talking and moving. It felt important to keep moving. "Even a lot of the St. Diz people. That old guy, Fez, he's consulting with some doctors and technologists they can trust. Mark's new existence is still pretty much a secret, but it opens up all new possibilities for healing brain damage, disorders, all that stuff."

"But you'd still need sockets," he said.

"Yah. You'd still need sockets." She paused. "There aren't that many socketed people around now certified safe. Not many people to help out with the new research." She almost went on, but something made her leave it at that, for the moment. He was relieved.

Some hours later she picked it up. The sun had come up, was already high in the sky. He didn't feel tired or sleepy; it was as if somewhere inside of him, some generator had come to life to turn out an endless supply of energy for him to run on as long as he liked. Not magic, of course.

"I couldn't keep doing it all by myself," Gina said. "Accessing them day in, day out, day-fucking-back-in again. I had to tell them to leave me the fuck alone for a while."

They had come to rest on the grass a little ways from the edge of the cliff.

"When they got insistent, I left. They want to revamp the new, inoculated net. I say that's good, that's a fucking good thing to do, but I ain't doing all the work."

"Inoculated," he said glumly. "I thought for sure they'd just ban sockets, and that would put paid to it. The end."

"No one's doing the procedure now," she said. "But that's temporary. Once they get the safeguards done right, they'll be back in business."

He frowned. "Who will be back in business?"

"Socket people. Socket doctors. The doctors are almost back in business as it is, certifying survivors. There aren't many, but there are more than anyone thought." Casually she pulled up a blade of grass and examined it. "I've been certified. Guess you haven't."

"No. And I don't want to be. The sockets should be banned."

"Forget Schrodinger. Yo, Pandora, how's your headache?" She grinned, and he couldn't help grinning back. "Mark knew. The door only swings one way. Once it's out of the box, it's always too big to get back in. Can't bury that technology. All we can do is get on top of it and stay the fuck on top."

He shook his head. "Appropriate technology. That's how I live."

"Yah?" She shifted position, leaning closer to him. "Think on this one. All appropriate technology hurt somebody. A whole lot of somebodies. Nuclear fission, fusion, the fucking Ford assembly line, the fucking airplane. Fire, for Christ's sake. Every technology has its original sin." She laughed. "Makes us original synners. And we still got to live with what we made."

Far out on the water, he could just barely discern a blip that must have been a dolphin breaking the surface. "Think on it," she said.

"I will." He turned to her. "But it's going to take an awful lot of thought for me. I'm still-" He paused, and then shrugged. "Maybe there isn't even a term yet for what I'm still. But whatever it is-" He spread his hands. "This is it."

"That's all right. Take all the time you want."

He frowned a little. "From the way you were talking, it sounded like you were in a hurry."

"I was in a hurry to be here," she said.

There was a long moment when he couldn't say anything. "Is this like any port in a storm?"

"You have to fucking ask me that? What are you, stupid?"

He threw back his head and laughed. "I just wanted to hear it. Is that too high up in the stupidsphere for you?"

"Nah," she said, grinning. "That's just stupid enough."