Synners

4

The house looked quiet enough, but then the whole street was quiet, and Gabe knew that was all wrong.

On his left Marly nudged him. "It's a lot weirder inside than it is outside," she said in a low voice. "Costa says a guy starved to death in there looking for a way out."

Gabe shook his head. "You believe everything Costa tells you?"

"I'd believe this. Since he's been in, and we haven't." She looked past him to Caritha standing on his right. Caritha held up the handcam projector, her half smile confident. Gabe felt a little more dubious. The projector was the best they could do on short notice, but it was awfully small. Like Caritha herself. The late-afternoon sun seemed to strike sparks in the black hair cropped close to her skull. By contrast, Marly's thick, honey-colored mane hung loose and wild.

As if reading his mind, she suddenly gathered it between her hands and wound it into a knot at the back of her head. Gabe stared, fascinated. He had no idea what was keeping it up there. The force of Marly's will, perhaps. He wouldn't have been surprised. She smiled down at him and threw a muscular arm around his shoulders. "Don't tell me you want to live forever."

Gabe winced. Marly was three inches taller than he was and possibly heavier, every pound invested in muscle. "Don't crack my collarbone, I might need it later."

"You want it all, dontcha, hotwire?" Marly gave him an extra squeeze and released him.

"All I really want now is to get in, get your friend, and get out," Gabe said.

"I want that viral program," Caritha said seriously. "I don't like clinics that go screwing up people's brains."

"I don't like clinics, period," said Marly. "Come on. Let's go do a little damage."

Nobody came to the front door in response to the bell. (Caritha tried the doorknob, and Gabe heard a faint sizzling sound.

"Son of a bitch," she said, looking at her palm. "It buzzed me."

"I call that blatant hostility," said Marly. She produced a small card from her breast pocket. "I'm glad I thought to get the key from Costa."

Gabe looked the door frame over. "Yah, but where do you put it? I don't see a slot."

"You gotta look." Marly reached up to the top of the frame and pushed the card in. It disappeared, and a moment later the door swung open. Caritha went first, holding the projector up and ready. Marly followed, pulling Gabe after her. He glanced behind; just before the door swung shut again, he saw a small figure standing in the middle of the street, a child holding up a hand in a strange gesture of farewell. The sight gave him a brief flash of superstitious dread. He shook it away. It could have just been the clinic playing games with holo, trying to spook them.

They were standing in a murky entrance hall that had been painstakingly antiqued. The highly polished woodwork looked both slippery and cold. Marly tugged his arm, and they followed Caritha down the hall.

Caritha stopped at the first doorway and waved them back. Marly flattened against the wall, throwing one arm across his chest. Somewhere far above he heard muffled footsteps. They stumped the length of the ceiling and then stopped. Gabe waited for the sound of a door opening and closing, but there was nothing. The silence seemed to press on his ears.

"I know you're there," said a woman's voice suddenly. Gabe jumped. Marly patted his rib cage, but he could feel how tense she was.

"You might as well come in and introduce yourselves like citizens," the woman went on. "And if you're burglars, you'll find out you've got a lot more of value to us than we have to steal. Come on, now."

Caritha swung around and stood in the doorway.

"That's right. Now your two friends. Two, I think. One of them is awfully big."

Marly joined Caritha in the doorway, and Gabe moved to her side. In the old-fashioned parlor an older woman in a straight black floor-length dress was standing near a round table arrayed with bottles, open pill cases, and several shiny, sterile-looking metal boxes.

Caritha swung the projector up. Half the woman disappeared. "Thought so," she said, and widened the beam to include the table. The bottles vanished. "Cheap holo show. They're buried in the heart of the house, they'd never get so close to an outside wall."

"Wait," Gabe said, looking at the table. The holo of the woman had frozen with a hand to her high collar. A moment later the transmission broke up completely, and the image frayed into nothing. "Not all that stuff on the table is a magic-lantern show." He took a cautious step forward before Marly could yank him back.

"Floor's mined," Caritha said offhandedly.

He kept his eyes on the one metal box that hadn't vanished from the tabletop. "You wanted that program. I'll bet it's locked up in that set of implants."

"Think, hotwire," Marly said urgently. "Why would they leave a set of implants out like that?"

"Maybe they didn't. Maybe it's a sign from your friend."

A moment later he felt Marly behind him. She hooked one hand in the waistband of his pants. His underwear started to ride up.

"Dammit, Marl," he whispered. "Ease off."

"You'll thank me for this," she whispered back.

He reached the table and put one hand on it carefully, reaching for the metal box with the other. His fingers closed on it, and he dropped through the floor, pulling Marly down after him.

He was sliding down some kind of long chute with a lot of twists and turns in it; his shoulders banged roughly against the sides, and he could feel Marly coming down just above him.

"Push out!" she yelled. "Wedge yourself in!"

It took him a few moments, but he managed to apply his elbows and knees to the sides of the chute, bringing himself to a stop.

"Gabe?" Marly called from somewhere above him.

"Did it," he said a little breathlessly.

"You think you can inch your way back up again?"

He groaned. "Nah, I'll just fly up. Be just as easy."

He heard a slithering sound, and then Marly s hands touched his shoulders. "How about if you hold onto me and do it?" she said with an effort.

"You can't pull us both up."

"Well, no, but I thought it'd be easier if you were holding onto me."

"Easier for who?"

"Don't waste breath arguing, it's the one thing they're not expecting."

He grunted, pushing himself up against the sides of the chute. "Because it can't be done."

"Dammit, hotwire-" she groaned, and rose a few inches. "Why'd you even come?"

"What was I s'posed to do? Give you the cam and wish you luck?" His elbow slipped. He struggled to regain his purchase on the chute, but the effort was too much, and he was sliding down again with a shout.

"Dammit!" yelled Marly. He heard her coming down after him.

He landed on a pile of musty mattresses and scooted out of the way just before Marly hit.

"See what happens when you don't introduce yourselves properly?"

The woman in the black dress was standing several feet away in front of a white cement-block wall. Gabe got up slowly, brushing himself off, and offered a hand to Marly. She ignored it, keeping her eyes on the woman. "Isn't a trapdoor kind of crude?" she said.

"But effective. Appropriate technology." The woman smiled. "You got what you deserved."

"Hotwire, I don't think this one's any more real than her twin sister," Marly said, and took a step forward.

The woman suddenly compressed to a sharp red point of light.

"Down!" Marly yelled.

They flattened just as the point became a red spear that shot out at the spot where Marly had been standing a moment before. It hit the chute with a loud sizzle, and the smell of hot metal filled the air. Marly raised her head slightly to look at him over the mattresses. "They know a few neat tricks with light."

Dumbfounded, Gabe blinked at the spot where the woman's image had been, then at the chute. "I thought the government said the holo-to-laser thing was impossible."

"Impossible for the government," Marly said, looking around warily. "These people hacked the team that worked on it, removed the real specs, and substituted their own." She got up slowly. "Shit, what are we in, a boxcar?"

The room was shaped like a boxcar and not much bigger, all walls and no entrance or exit that Gabe could see except for the end of the chute protruding from the wall. Marly ripped into one of the mattresses, pulling a chunk of ratty yellow foam rubber out of it. She tossed it at the cement-block wall; instead of bouncing off, it vanished.

"That answers that question," she said, and got up.

"Wait! What are you doing?" Gabe said as she headed for the wall.

"Ah, it's not like we're not already in sight, hotwire," she said. "If they can see us, I want to see them." She walked through the wall. Gabe hurried after her.

Beyond the white wall was a long room lined with beds, all of them occupied. Gabe braced himself, but no one rushed them. No one in the beds moved or even spoke.

"The ward," Marly said darkly.

"Why aren't there any attendants?" Gabe whispered.

"Don't need them, they're built in." Marly went to the nearest bed and yanked up the man lying there by his shirt-front. He hung bonelessly in her grasp, his eyes wide open but seeing nothing. A thick black cable was driven into the top of his shaven head, held in place by small clamps.

"Jesus," Gabe said.

"The viral program's just a sideline," Marly said grimly, laying the man down again. "You ever wonder where Solomon Labs gets all that fresh, natural-no-synthetics neurotransmitter?"

He stared, unable to speak.

"And if you think this is a deep, dark secret, you're wrong about that, too," Marly added. "They all know. Even that outfit you work for, the Dive. You crank out the commercials, and high-level management gets their regular doses of n/t to keep them running at peak brain power. If you could get promoted high enough, you'd get some, too." She looked around at the ward. "If Jimmy's in one of these beds, the best thing we can do is yank his cable and say kaddish before we beat it out of here."

Far down at the other end of the room, the silhouette of a man appeared. "Hey! You're not supposed to be in here!" The man started to run for it when another red beam speared the length of the ward and impaled him. He fell backwards.

A moment later Caritha materialized at Gabe's elbow, hefting the cam. "Did I mention I made some other modifications to your hardware? Hope you don't mind too much."

"Why did you come down the chute?" he asked incredulously.

"Last thing they'd expect," she said, winking at him. "Find Jimmy? I hope not."

"Haven't looked," Marly said. "Come on." They hurried through the ward, Caritha scanning the beds with the cam. Gabe marveled. It had originally been a simple record/playback holo projector until she'd gone to work on it; now it was the Swiss Army knife of handcams. She had the same easy genius for hardware that Sam did.

He felt himself flushing guiltily at the thought of his daughter, but there was no time to dwell on that; they had reached the end of the ward. He spotted three vacant beds, and then Marly was shoving him after Caritha into what looked like an elevator. Doors snapped shut behind them. Marly was still searching for a control panel when the floor tilted and spilled them out through the back wall. "Uh-oh," said Caritha in a low voice.

They were looking not into another room but down a long, dark alley strewn with garbage and the shattered remnants of unfathomable machine parts.

"This must be where all the bad machines go to be punished," Marly said. She pulled into a crouch, poised to strike out.

"Can you bust it up, show us where we really are?" Gabe asked Caritha.

"It's worse than you think," Caritha said. She thumbed a switch on the cam, and a bright circle of light appeared on a filthy wall. A moment later the words came up in poison green, precise and annoying:

TIME: 10.30 A.M.

MEETING: 11:15 A.M., NEW MONTHLY

ASSIGNMENTS

!!REMINDER!! LUNCH TOMORROW: 12:30 P.M.

W/MANNY RIVERA, PROBABLY RE QUOTA

ELAPSED TIME: 24 MINUTES, CREDITED TO

GILDING BODYSHIELDS

DISCONNECT: Y/N?

Gabe groaned.

"Rotten break, hotwire," Marly said, and then grinned at him. "Or is it?"

"It is," he said grimly. "I'd rather face the minions of technological evil than another monthly assignment meeting."

Caritha punched his arm. "Just answer y or n so we can get on with this or not."

"I'll catch up with you later," he promised, pushing himself to his feet.

"Y or n," insisted Caritha.

"Yes, dammit," he said wearily. "I mean, y. But leave it running. Leave it running!"

The alley faded to utter black.

The disconnect command automatically opened the clasps on his head-mounted monitor. Gabe eased it off, unplugging the feeds from his hotsuit. The monitor was brand new, lighter than the model he was used to, but it still made him feel as if he had a garbage can over his head.

He stood in the simulation pit, reorienting himself slowly. By afternoon he was going to be aching all over, the way he'd been throwing himself around the room. Like an overgrown, hyperactive eight-year-old playing junior G-man or something. And it was a big room, the biggest Diversifications had; after fifteen years he'd worked his way up to the basketball-court size with the twenty-foot ceilings and full range of equipment-treadmill, stair-climber, scaffolding assembly, modular blocks to stand in for furniture, padded mats.

He had spent a good hour bringing the platform-and-slide arrangement up in the freight elevator and then assembling it for the trapdoor-chute sequence. Looking at it divested of the simulation, he felt embarrassed, even though there was no one to feel embarrassed in front of.

What's the matter, hotwire-too much like kid stuff for you? He could hear Marly's deep, slightly hoarse laughter in his mind.

He looked down at the monitor lying open in his hands like a giant prayerbook, twice the size of his head. Most of the inside front was taken up by the screen, which enclosed the eye area like a diver's mask, surrounded by a multitude of tiny lasers. The beam coverage was particularly effective, better than the previous model's. He could look in any direction, and the laser beams bouncing off his corneas responded instantly, with a screen view-shift so smooth that it was exactly like looking around at a real environment. Which made it more possible than ever to lose himself in the simulation, and he'd been doing a pretty fair job of that before the alarm had gone off.

He took the monitor to the desk and set it down. The desktop screen told him the simulation was running along nicely without him. Not that Marly and Caritha would know the difference if he stopped everything. Hell, they weren't even being imaged anymore; they were just twinklings in the system now.

Now and ever, he thought, feeling suddenly weary beyond what his exertions could account for. Twinklings; fantasies; imaginary playmates.

Well, not totally imaginary. The templates had been assembled from two real, living people who had since vanished into the mass of faces that had failed to raise an appreciable blip in the test-audience ratings. He couldn't fathom that, himself. The Marly and Caritha templates had hit him between the eyes when he'd called them up from Central Filing. Perhaps the original programmer had just had a particularly good day, or maybe he'd been having a particularly bad one. Or maybe he'd just been losing his mind piece by piece all along, and when he had summoned up the Marly and Caritha simulations in tandem, it had been enough to blow out what fragments of sanity he'd still had.

Diversifications had voided their contracts before he got around to requisitioning official usage. His unofficial usage, however, was already extensive; buried in the back of a drawer in his console were chip-copies of the original templates. Every so often, when the running copies got too cluttered up with decision branches, he refocused the programs with the originals-originals once removed, he reminded himself. Or twice removed, if you wanted to count the actual people as the true originals. Normally he didn't; he'd never met the two women in person and didn't know anything about them, except if they'd known that for the last two years someone at Diversifications had been enjoying the benefit of their simulated selves without contract or recompense, they'd be into a sizable financial settlement, and he'd be out of a job.

Jesus, two years? That long? He felt silly. Like some teenager nursing a crush by playing wannabee-format simulations over and over. In the beginning he'd pretended activating their simulations and merging them with some scenario was actually an elaborate warm-up exercise, something to prime the old idea pump, jump start the creative generator. After fifteen years of cranking out commercial spots for body armor and pharmaceuticals, clinic-spas and body-carvers, dataline modules and spray-for-chrissakes-cleanser, you needed the extra stimulation, or you ran completely dry.

Even after he'd gone through half of the stock scenarios and started raiding the wannabee files, he'd kept telling himself it was all for the sake of the old idea pump. His output had been dropping gradually but steadily, and he was spending longer periods of time on the commercials he did complete, or so the automatic log in his system said. He kept spreading the time he spent evenly among his assignments, and the times grew longer and longer, and Manny started making noises about lowered productivity, and still he'd been unable to go a day without spending at least an hour in simulation with Marly and Caritha. An hour? More like four hours; it was so easy to lose track of the time.

He unzipped the hotsuit, peeling it away from himself. Underneath, his skin bore the impression of a baroque pattern of snaky lines punctuated by the sharp geometric variations of the numerous sensors. The coverage was twice as thorough as all but the most expensive 'suits sold to the public. Except for-ahem-genitalia. Only the employees who worked on refining Hollywood feature releases got the complete hotsuits.

Gabe rubbed at the marks, imagining a day when they wouldn't fade after an hour or so-he'd have a permanent tattoo, and when he died (or was fired), Diversifications, Inc., would have him skinned and use his hide as a pattern for new hotsuits.

Great people leave their marks. Everyone else is left with marks. He stripped the top part of the suit off and examined himself. There were cases of hysterics who hallucinated being grabbed and managed to produce fingermarks on their flesh like stigmata. Without hotsuits, too.

There was a sudden sensation in his still-gloved left hand, as if someone had taken it gently. Residual flashes of fading energy. It happened sometimes. He took off the rest of the suit in a hurry and changed into his street clothes.

The timer in the bottom right-hand corner of the console flatscreen caught his eye. Somewhere in the computer-in an alternate universe-Marly and Caritha were fighting off a squad of shadowy thugs in a dark alley with a program phantom standing in for himself. He knew how it would come out; the simulation he had merged them with was an old Hollywood B-release-House of the Headhunters' a B-title if there ever was one-that had been converted to wannabee format. As a regular feature release, it had done barely modest business, but in wannabee format it had been an over-the-top hit. Apparently it had had more appeal as something to be in than to watch. When even that had faded, it had gone into the files as something to be cannibalized for commercial spots.

Gabe had told himself he was accessing it for the sake of the body-armor spot. It would certainly appear more plausible on the quarterly time and productivity audit, which, he didn't need to remind himself, was coming up as quickly as the deadline on the body-armor spot that he hadn't even started on yet. Well, he would replay the whole thing this afternoon and mark the sequences with the best possibilities, assuming Marly and Caritha hadn't wrought more changes in it than was technically legal. They were smart programs, capable of learning and manipulating certain portions of other programs they were merged with. House of the Headhunters had a high manipulation quotient; you could die at the end if you wanted to, or even blind-select so you wouldn't know whether you would survive or not.

He toyed with the idea of working that into a finished commercial. Gilding Body shields Can Save Your Life… Or Can They? The Gilding people would shit pears.

Or maybe he should just work up a simulation of his upcoming lunch with Manny Rivera and turn Marly and Caritha loose on that. Then, instead of having to go through it himself, he could just view it later. He knew exactly what Manny would say: We're facing another quarterly audit of our productivity, Gabe, and you know that for the Upstairs Team, it's all a matter of numbers. How much you're producing and how long it takes. That's all the Upstairs Team understands. The Upstairs Team was Diversifications-speak for upper management; Gabe imagined it was supposed to make them sound less batch-processed, more like co-workers or something. Sure.

"Ten-forty," said the console clock politely. He used the ladder instead of the small one-person lift to get up to the catwalk, hoping the exertion would keep his muscles from knotting. Just as he reached the top, something in his pocket dug into his thigh. The key to the freight elevator; he'd forgotten to return it to Security. The hell with it. If they wanted it, let them come and get it.

There was a short delay after he pressed his fingers to the printlock; keeping the program active stole a little from the other pit functions.

"Love my work," he muttered.

Likewise, hotwire, said Caritha's voice in his mind.

The lock released, and he went down the hall to the elevators.