Synners

5

"You should have come to me first, Sam-I-Am," Fez said congenially.

Sam shrugged. "I guess I took a stupid pill this morning."

In the chair across from Sam, Rosa took a second doughnut from the box on the table between them and then offered the box to the young blond kid sitting on the couch. Fez's grand-nephew Adrian, just in that morning from San Diego, a real bolt from the ether. Fez had never mentioned having any family. The kid was fourteen and looked twelve, and there was something funny about his almond-shaped eyes. They seemed slightly out of focus, as if he'd taken a hard knock on the head moments before. A stunned fourteen-year-old. Sam imagined she must have looked the same way when she'd first been emancipated. The freedom was all you thought about, and when you finally got it, you were scared shitless. Welcome to the world, kid.

"Don't suppose you ate much else," Fez said with some amusement.

"Oh, I managed a little something," Sam told him, finding a stray rice grain on her pants. She rolled it between two fingers and then, for lack of anything else to do, put it in her pocket.

"The usual seaweed and grass clippings?" asked Fez.

"Seaweed and sushi rice."

Fez glanced upward. "Let me have a look in the larder. Maybe I can serve you something real. Besides doughnuts." He went to the kitchenette, a little alcove with a cooktop, zap-box, and midget-fridge built into the cabinets. Sam knew it well. She'd learned to cook there.

"You know how he gets about seaweed," Rosa said, wiping powdered sugar from the corners of her mouth.

"Yah. Fez's four food groups-meat, dairy, vegetables, and doughnuts." Sam sighed and let herself slump farther into the easy chair. "God, I'm tired. Those stupid pills really take it out of you."

"I wouldn't know," Rosa said loftily, and then winked. Sam laughed a little. Rosa probably didn't know. She was a canny little woman who had already achieved elder-statesperson status in the electronic underground by the time Sam had bumped into her on the nets three years before.

She'd met Fez right around the same time, along with the rest of them-Keely, Gator, poor lost Beauregard, Kazin, many others, some of them long since vanished, canned or on the move to keep from getting canned. Like Keely, perhaps.

"You know, I thought you'd come for your laptop first thing," Rosa said. "I couldn't believe you'd gone off without it to begin with. Like someone taking a trip around the world stark naked with no luggage."

Adrian giggled and then covered his mouth, embarrassed. Rosa turned her wry, lopsided smile on him. "It's okay, kid. Underneath their clothes everybody's going around naked." The boy giggled again and looked away from her.

"Don't torment Adrian," Fez called from the kitchen. The zap-box hummed and clicked off. "Try to remember that you two were once nervous junior citizens without a shred of savvy."

"If you can prove I was ever that young, I'll pay you a hundred thousand dollars," Rosa said.

"Listen to the old lady of twenty-four," Fez said, coming out of the kitchen with a large mug and a spoon. "Once you'd have paid me a hundred thousand dollars to prove you were ever going to get this old." He presented the mug and spoon to Sam with a slight bow. "Navy-bean soup, in lieu of green eggs and ham."

"Yuck to both. "Sam frowned at the lumpy tan mess in the mug. "I told you, I ate."

Fez stabbed the spoon into the soup and curled her hand around the mug. "I find it hard to, um, swallow seaweed and rice as a meal. Iodine's fine in its place, but you need something sticking to your ribs, which are still easily countable."

"You peeked," she said, which brought a small flush to his cheeks and sent him bustling over to the couch to sit next to his grandnephew.

Fez was about sixty, as near as she could tell, with a cloud of white hair that reminded her of cotton candy, and bright black eyes, a nose that had been broken once or twice, and a mouth that never quite stopped smiling. The particulars might have suggested Santa Claus, but Fez was neither fat nor bearded. Even if he had been (Sam couldn't imagine it), the angles of his face had a little too much sharpness to them, and in spite of the smile, his face had the wariness of a man perpetually on guard.

She remembered how hard it had been to reconcile this semigrandfatherly presence with the mental image she'd formed from on-line contact, picturing him as a grand old man of perhaps twenty-nine or thirty, with all the looks, charm, and sex appeal that had always been attributed to renegades.

In retrospect she knew she should have figured it out. Fez's knowledge of the past forty years, casually displayed in the course of their many odd-hours on-line conversations, had been too idiosyncratic in detail to be the product of anything but firsthand experience.

Sitting in the old easy chair, trying to choke down enough of the bland/salty soup to appease him, reminded her of the first time she'd come to this one-roomer in East Hollywood. Rosa had brought her, and he'd tried to feed her that day, too, but she'd been too boggled. Rosa herself had been a revelation, Cherokee Rosa as she was known on-line; she really was a Cherokee, and her name really was Rosa, and she had a mass of curly black hair, a knowing look, and a bone-crusher handshake. And, apparently, a mandate to bring her out of the tiny Santa Monica closet she'd been holed up in, making subsistence with gypsy scut work on her homegrown laptop.

We've been watching you, doll. You hack good.

Sam had had mixed feelings about that. Big Brother, is that it?

Not Big Brother. More like the relative nobody wants to talk about.

That's me, Sam had said.

Doll, that's all of us.

Sure was. And so Rosa had brought her to be surprised by Fez, and after that she'd kept coming back on her own as often as possible. She found out later that she was one of a very few Fez allowed to visit so frequently or, for that matter, ever (Rosa was another). She might have ended up all but moving in with him if he hadn't always thrown her out eventually. He wasn't looking to host the eastern branch of the Mimosa, he told her firmly, and he was nobody's father figure, he told her even more firmly, both of them well aware that father figure was not how she felt about him.

She settled for the benefit of his extensive knowledge of computer communications, and the privilege of being allowed to use the elaborate computer system sitting on the desk against the far wall. It looked deceptively jerry-rigged with all the mismatched upgrades and add-ons. The configuration had changed again since she'd last visited; there was a second flat easel-type screen now, and a couple of very large housings that had to have quadrupled available memory. She also noticed that the head-mounted monitor sitting off to one side was hooked up to the system, as if it had seen some use recently, which surprised her. Fez had never been especially enamored of Artificial Reality, at least as a place to visit.

The system was on, she realized, even though neither screen was lit. That was unlike Fez, as well, to run anything without screening its progress.

"So, you've been out of town and out of touch," Fez said to her.

"Camping in the Ozarks," Rosa said. "I'm still trying to imagine it. That's in Missouri," she added to Fez.

"Yes, I've heard," he said serenely. "Some rather interesting things going on in Missouri, in the realm of nanotechnology -surprise, surprise"-he nodded at Rosa-"but I suppose you were too busy roughing it to check it out. Somehow I always had the idea that you thought camping was an overnight in a Mimosa squat, not hunting and fishing."

"No hunting. And I only tried fishing once. I have problems killing anything." Sam shrugged. "I was hacking around, and suddenly a trip out of town seemed like a good idea."

Rosa laughed. "And you left the hot hardware with me. You're just full of good ideas, aren't you?"

"Oh, the hardware was never hot. Just the software, and I took that with me."

"And what did you do, use it for earrings?"

Sam grinned. "No, but what a great encryption idea."

Rosa looked at her from under her brows. "It's not a real original idea. And I think the word you're looking for is camouflage. You've been in a computer too long."

"Whatever." Sam looked at Fez. "Did you hear from Keely?"

The lines around Fez's eyes deepened. "Keely is officially MIA. There's nothing on-line about him, and nobody knows where he is, not even Jones." "And where's Jones?"

"I've got him," Rosa said. "Strictly temporary arrangement. He had the supreme tack-ola to suicide in Gator's tent, and she called me to pick up the body."

Adrian was staring at her openmouthed. "You're keeping a dead guy in your apartment?"

"Temporarily. I mean, he's temporarily dead. He's probably not dead anymore, just comatose, but he'll go again in another couple of days."

The kid glanced at Fez a little dubiously. "Jeez, everything's different here. Where I come from, we usually die once, permanently."

"Not if you've got fancy implants," Rosa said sourly. "Our friend Jones-or rather, our friend Keely's friend Jones-was suffering from real bad chronic depression, suicidal, all that. Ellectroshock didn't work, so he went to this feel-good mill, and they gave him these brain implants that let him kill himself. He flatlines for maybe a minute or two, and then they kick up his adrenal system, and he comes back."

"Oh, she's not making it up," Fez assured his nephew. "It's actually an accepted alternative treatment for certain depressives who don't respond to any other kinds of implants."

"Which probably doesn't describe Jones," Rosa went on, "since he didn't try any others before he let the feel-gooders drill him. So now he's addicted to death, and he'll stay that way until his adrenal system tells him to go to hell. Then he'll go."

"Well, to purgatory, perhaps," Fez said good-naturedly.

Adrian sat back on the couch, hugging himself. "And people think I'm weird."

"I'd turn in the goddamn clinic that did him," Rosa said, "but they got canned for feel-gooding this week."

"That leaves Jones really adrift, then," Sam said. "No clinic and no Keely. What's he going to do?"

"Die. Periodically." Rosa turned to Fez. "So, should I take a hike while you look at the zap Sam got from Keely, or what?"

"What," Fez said. "You can keep a secret, can't you?"

Rosa drew a cross over her heart.

"Wait a second," Sam said, and looked significantly at Adrian.

He giggled again. "Don't worry, I'm perfectly safe. I guess Fez hasn't had a chance to tell you, but I can't read."

"Can't read English," Fez said pointedly. "Or any other language with an alphabet."

"Makes me safe for anything you wanna screen without a voice-over," Adrian added.

"He has a brain lesion," Fez explained, sounding curt. "He's alexic. For various reasons implants have been unable to mitigate the problem, but we've managed to sneak around it. He learned Mandarin."

Rosa's eyebrows went up. "Really? You can read Mandarin?"

The kid shrugged. "It's not really reading. Not for me. As soon as the world goes to a dual ideogram and alphabet format, I'm really gonna have it made. Or I could just move to China."

"Why not just use Spoken Text?" Rosa asked.

"Same reason you don't," said Fez. "Time. Spoken Text takes at least twice as long as silent reading. If you could stand all that natter-natter-natter. We've been routing the dataline through a homegrown translation program for him. Though I've noticed translation to ideograms does tend to put a slightly different spin on things."

Sam set her untouched mug of soup aside on the floor. "I wonder what it would do with Keely's zap. It's pretty odd stuff. Not that there's a whole lot to read." She looked at Adrian again. "Look, I don't want any innocent bystanders getting hit if they don't have to."

"Adrian's all right," Fez said firmly. "Now, what do you have?"

"I'm pretty sure Keely pulled this out of Diversifications. He wouldn't tell me, but I can't think who else would stampede him. The odd thing was that he encrypted it in some speed-thrash by a group signed with EyeTraxx for videos, and I found out completely by accident that Diversifications just acquired them. Now, my father's worked at the Dive since like the early Jurassic, and they've never, but never shown any interest in music videos. Besides hardware, all they do is commercials and Hollywood releases, insty-vacations and tons of that social-expression shit."

"Don't knock the electronic greeting card," Rosa said, "If it weren't for that, some of us wouldn't speak to our mothers even on Mother's Day. -Shit, sorry," she added, looking contritely at Sam. "I caught the news about EyeTraxx kinda by-the-way myself, but I didn't think a thing of it. I mean, lots of companies jump the bandwagons late. Maybe if you hunted around on BizNet, you'd find their profits were down somewhere. If you could actually read anything on BizNet."

"I wouldn't have thought anything of it, either," Sam said, "except there was nothing about it in the news. I mean, not oven a mention. Now, the Ozarks are picturesque as hell and terribly quaint, but they have datalines there, too, and I didn't see a thing about it anywhere. And EyeTraxx is-was-a Hall Galen company, and Hall Galen calls a media conference if he burps."

"Perhaps it was a very small burp by his standards." Fez got up and went to the desk, flipping on one of the screens. "How did you look up the news of the acquisition, dear?"

She told him. "Ah yes, they must have buried that little item in the hard-core biz news. You'd have had to have your defaults set a particular way to get it." Fez beckoned to her and Rosa, and they joined him at the desk. The general dataline menu came up on the screen, and he touched the BizNet listing with his little finger. Immediately the screen filled with BizNet's menu, divided into six dense sections.

Sam could feel her eyes crossing. "Jesus, what a mess."

"Your hard-core biz type can scan this as easily as you can scan a program in your favorite assembly language," Fez said, giving her an amused glance. "BizNet went to great lengths to customize this for their serious subscribers-eye-tracking tests on the layouts, allathat. BizNet is the epitome of narrow-casting. As opposed to old-style broadcasting. Focused information, no waste." He touched an item in the upper left area of the screen; the six sections gave way to a four-part screen, each quadrant containing a new menu.

"Isn't there any faster way than paging through menu after menu?" Rosa asked.

"Like I said, set your retrieval defaults correctly in the first place," Fez replied. "And if we knew what those were, we'd already know what we don't know. Ya know?" He winked at Sam and then flipped through several more menus and pages of small print before he froze the screen. "Here we are." He pointed to a small paragraph.

"Shit," Rosa said, squinting at it. "Can we run this through Adrian's Mandarin translator?"

"That'll be next," Fez said matter-of-factly. "Market-segment translations. In time the language of every subgroup of society will get as specialized as the data it uses, and we'll have a new set of suburbs in the global village. Or rather, the same old suburbs with new names."

"There goes the neighborhood," Rosa said, still gazing at the screen with distaste. "Or here comes the neighborhood. Whatever's right."

Fez shrugged. "People keep looking for ways to chunk themselves. Do you think your average thrash-rockers care if the credit on the latest video firestorm reads 'EyeTraxx' or 'Diversifications' or 'Some Asshole in Detroit'? That's why this didn't make it into the general music news. Anyone who cares about the business end is already tapped into BizNet, not G-Clef. The musicians are all on PerfectPitch, the techies are downloading CircuitBreak-"

"-and the rest of the world can go hang," Sam said thoughtfully.

Fez laughed. "By George, she's got it. Well, anyway, what this says, more or less, is that Diversifications investigated the possibility of a takeover of Hall Galen Enterprises as a whole, and Galen cut a deal, divesting himself of the EyeTraxx business unit, and they took that in a settlement."

Rosa put a finger on the screen. "Is that this part here- 'growth opportunities altered in reorganization, closing the aperture around the IBU? What's an IBU?"

"Independent business unit," Fez said absently. "A term for everything and everything in a term. There's a cross-ref here to MedLine, in Research: Human/Brain/Neurophysiology."

"I can read that just fine," Rosa said. "But why in hell would an item like this have a cross-ref in Med-for-god's-sake-Line?"

A small box blossomed in the lower central area of the screen, blinking a notice: 24 min. free access time left.

"Fucking gougers," Sam said, pointing at the box. The number changed to 23 as she watched. "That makes me so mad. Fucking surcharges."

Rosa shrugged as Fez touched the speed box at the top of the screen and selected the MedLine cross-reference out of the small menu that appeared at the bottom of the screen. "Could be worse. They could have just raised all the rates across the board."

Fez chuckled. "They might yet. 'Truth is cheap, but information costs.' I can't remember who said that."

"Vince What's-His-Name," said Sam. "Died in a terrorist raid or something. I thought you said all information should be free."

"It should. It isn't. Knowledge is power. But power corrupts. Which means the Age of Fast Information is an extremely corrupt age in which to live."

"Aren't they all?" Sam asked him.

He smiled his dreamy little smile at her. "Ah, but I think we're approaching a kind of corruption unlike anything we've ever known before, Sam-I-Am. Sometimes I think we may be on the verge of an original sin."

She didn't get the reference, but she felt a sudden chill run up the back of her neck. "Goose walked over my grave," she said.

"To get to the other side," Rosa murmured. Sam gave her a look.

"Besides being rich," Fez said, "you have to be extra sharp these days to pick up any real information. You have to know what you're looking for, and you have to know how it's filed. Browsers need not apply. Broke ones, anyway. I miss the newspaper."

"Don't you get one?" Sam asked, surprised. "I do. Even while I was out in the Ozarks, I had no trouble at all getting The Daily You."

"Feh. That's not a newspaper. In my day we called it a dipping service, and it's not even a good one. A bunch of glorified headlines in a watered-down hodgepodge. Ah, at last." Fez froze the screen and began scrolling line by line. "Dr. Lindel Joslin, installed at blah, blah, blah, brain-path research, blah, blah, receptors, receptors, more receptors-" Several more lines marched up the screen. "Here it is. Hm. She's an implant surgeon. Research completed under the auspices of Hall Galen Enterprises and EyeTraxx, any and all subsequent patents now wholly owned by Diversifications, Inc."

"Patents?" Rosa said.

Fez shook his head and read a little farther before straightening up, pushing his hands against the small of his back. "Can't make head or tail of the rest of it. Medspeak."

Rosa laughed. "Crank that translator into overdrive, and let's see what she can do."

Sam was still studying the screen. "It still doesn't explain why some esoteric biz item about a takeover of a rock-video company would have a cross-ref in MedLine."

"Well, obviously because this Dr. Joslin was being funded by EyeTraxx," Rosa said. "Diversifications must have taken over her funding, so they've taken over whatever she was working on. It begs the question of why EyeTraxx was funding her. Tax shelter?" She nudged Fez.

"One possibility." He folded his wiry arms. "Actually, I think I can shed some light on the question of the cross-ref, and Sam, I think you can provide some of the fill-in details."

Sam looked at him, startled. "I can?"

"You only have part of Keely's zap," he said. "I have the other part. You show me what you have, and I'll show you what I have, and between the two of us, maybe we'll have something for real."

She grinned. "You'll show me yours if I show you mine?" She tucked a hand in her right pants pocket where the erstwhile insulin pump was resting against her thigh. "My chips aren't compatible with your system. Mind using mine?"

Fez lifted an eyebrow. "You have a system cleverly concealed about your person?"

She took the pump out of her pocket and showed it to him and Rosa. Fez's surprised expression deepened as he squinted at the palm-sized unit on her outstretched hand. "To my knowledge you're not a diabetic, especially not one whose body keeps rejecting pancreas implants. Very clever." He started to take it from her and spotted the wire snaking under the tail of her shirt. "Oh, God, Sam, not really."

"What?" said Rosa. "What's going on?"

Sam lifted her shirt just high enough to show where the two needles went into the fleshiest part of her abdomen. "You were wrong when you figured I was too busy roughing it to check out the latest in nanotechnology," she told Fez, a little smugly. "The Ozarks turned out to be about the best place I could have gone with my hot hack. I found a lab where I could trade scut work for work space."

"Oh, God!" Rosa made a gagging noise. "That's an atrocity! You're sick!"

"I'm a potato clock," Sam corrected her.

"You're a potato head," Fez said grimly. "What's wrong with batteries?"

"Not personal enough. No, no, I'm kidding." She laughed at his revolted look. "It's just an alternative power source. You can use batteries, or house current with an adapter, but if the power fails from one or the other, it's crash time. This never crashes. The Dive had this stored in a very out-of-the-way place. I bet my father doesn't even know about it. Probably they meant it for people working in isolated areas under hostile conditions-Antarctica, surface of the moon, places like that."

"Good for espionage, too." Fez winced. "What do you use for a screen?"

She put on the sunglasses. "You'll have to adjust the focal length for your own eye. Projects right onto the retina. How bad s your astigmatism?"

Fez touched the wire. "Hurt much?"

"Stings when I first put it on, but after that I almost forget It's there."

"That's because you're sick," Rosa said, refusing to look. "They'd never have put it over, never, never, never."

"She's right," said Fez. "Most people will reject anything that requires them to be a pin cushion. The hard-core diabetics and the endocrine cases do it, but ask them if they like it. Someone in Diversifications' research and development lab has a real ghoulish streak." He handed the pump back to Sam. "Give me your software and drive. I've got an adapter."

She fetched the chip-player from her bag and handed it over. He searched through a couple of desk drawers before he came up with a coil of thin cable. Plugging one end into the chip-player, he connected the other end to his system.

A moment later thrash-rock blasted tinnily from a small speaker. Fez looked pained. "You didn't tell me it was still encrypted."

"Of course. You think I was gonna chance getting caught with naked stolen data? You need the potato-head system here to decrypt, unless you want to wait around for one of your own programs to work on it. Might take a few days, though. Keely learned encryption from me."

"Only hours," he said loftily, and then beckoned to her. "Come on. But we'll run it on my power, thank you. I've got a first-rate generator in case you're paranoid about the Bigger One hitting just when things are getting good."

"Thanks," Rosa said faintly, still standing with her back to them. "Tell me when it's safe to look."

Fez found the adapter socket on the side of the pump and used another connector to hook it up to his system's power sou rce. When Sam was sure it was running, she slid the needles out of her flesh. "It's safe now, Rosa," she said.

"Now put that away," Fez ordered sternly, "and don't ever let me see you grandstanding like that again."

"Yes, Daddy."

He gave her a look. She punched up the decoding program, and the music cut off immediately. An image appeared on the screen, replacing the dataline. They all stared at it in silence.

"So, what do you think," Sam said finally. "Is that a diagram of some gardener's root system? One little thirteen-year-old dandelion, maybe? Or did things really get weird enough for that to be a synthetic neuron? The only thing that throws me is this here." She pointed at a fairly wide, hollow line extending up from the lumpily triangular blob in the center of the screen. "From what I remember of the brain science I had in biology-"

"You had brain science in biology?" Rosa asked.

"Advanced placement classes, when I thought I was going to college. Anyway, that should be either an axonal fiber to carry outgoing impulses, or a dendrite to receive incoming information. Since this is a cortical neuron, I mean. Still with me, everyone?"

Fez looked at her sidelong. "Go on, Professor Potato Head."

"Okay. Dendrites look like November treetops in New England, and this is too thick proportionally to be an axon." She ran a finger along a line trailing from the base of the blob. "That's a real axon, perfectly in scale. This thing on top reminds me more of a bus than anything-"

"Channel," Rosa said. "Everything's a channel now."

Sam shrugged. "They can put it on the stage and call it Rosebud for all I care. What I really can't figure is why you'd have something like that on a neuron when you already have an axon to do the job. This is wide enough to be a real bus-excuse me, channel-and take two lanes of traffic, one going in, one going out." She paused. "I think Keely found out someone at the Dive is making a cortex. Custom-making, I mean. Someone new there. This Dr. What's-Her-Bod, the MedLine cross-ref. That would be the patent, wouldn't it, Fez? And this is going to be their new hardware, and it's going to make every other piece of machinery obsolete. It's kind of weird that Dr. Frankenstein would work on something like this at EyeTraxx. Hall Galen Enterprises is one of those lotta-fingers-lotta-pies things. He could have stuck her in any of his other pies."

"Not if he needed a good tax write-off for EyeTraxx," Rosa said. "Or a good hiding place till they were ready to go public. If the doctor kept volatile records stored on deck, and someone looking for new videos cracked her, they wouldn't know what it was and pass it by. Keep your best whiskey in a bottle marked 'mouthwash.' "

"Yah, but tax write-offs have to be related to the business you put them in," Sam said. "I don't know dick about taxes, but I know that much."

"So he lied. You don't think Hall Galen would lie to the tax man?" Rosa shrugged. "Maybe he called it new video formats or something."

Fez's smile disappeared completely; it was one of the very lew times Sam had ever seen that happen. "Rosa, dear, that's exactly what he called it. It's on the part Keely gave me." He turned to Sam, looking troubled. "Keely tried to divide up the data so that if either of us was caught along with him, the other would have enough to raise hell with. When he divided it, he inadvertently saved our asses. But he also destroyed some of the information."

Sam shook her head, confused.

"I found the remains of a sleeping-load flare embedded in what he zapped me. When he spliced the data, he ruined the flare. If he'd just duped it and zapped it whole to both of us, we'd probably be in the can right now. Or somewhere."

"Wherever Keely is," Rosa said soberly. "I'm surprised he didn't spot it."

"It was a very good flare. Good as hacker work. I'd have probably missed it myself if I hadn't found it in the ruins. Anyway, I'll show you what I've got, but I don't know if we're going to be able to make much out of it after all." He took a box from the bottom drawer and selected a chip about half the size of the nail on her littlest finger.

A few moments later the other screen lit up with a 3-D graphic of a human brain seen in three-quarter profile from llie left. The legend at the bottom of the screen said, New-VidFmt.

"Looks like medporn to me," Rosa said.

"There's an overlay," Fez said, "but it won't make much sense." He pressed a button on the console, and a new graphic superimposed itself on the first. It seemed to be a chart pin-pointing several areas of the brain, but the accompanying notations were garbage symbols. "Well, Professor Potato Head? Any ideas?"

"Implants," Sam said promptly. "Stone-home bizarro. I can buy the idea that the Dive is going into music videos faster than the idea that they're gonna open a clinic."

"I thought of implants, too," Fez said, "but from what I know of implantation, there are too many sites here, and they aren't deep enough."

Adrian had been standing behind them looking on silently. Now he leaned forward and touched each pinpointed spot on the brain. "Frontal lobes, temporal lobes, parietal lobes, auditory cortex, visual cortex. My lesion's back here," he added shyly, patting the back of his head.

Fez hit another button on the console, and the image rotated to show the left profile briefly before it was replaced by a diagram of the brain in cross section.

Rosa looked at Adrian. "Name 'em and claim 'em."

He shrugged. "Flank steak, shoulder roast, brisket?"

Another overlay appeared, showing an incomprehensible jumble of lines coming out of the brain stem and radiating throughout the cortex, seemingly at random, as if someone had dropped a wad of tangled yarn on the diagram and photographed the image.

"Can you take the overlay out for a second?" Sam asked, peering closely at the screen.

He obeyed. She studied the image carefully and then shook her head. "You can put it back."

"See something?"

"I see it in that mess, and I thought it was in the underlying graphic, but I was wrong. It's in the overlay. But I can't see it clearly enough with all that spaghetti or whatever it is."

"What does it look like?" Fez asked her.

"Well, it looks a little like it might be the reticular formation-"

Rosa threw up her hands. "You hit my limit for the technical shit. I'm a hacker, not a neurosurgeon. You babble if you want-I quit."

"It's where you dream," Sam said.

Rosa paused in the act of turning away, her eyebrows straining toward her hairline. "Okay, that's interesting. If you'll pardon the expression."

"Or is it the part that keeps you from falling into a coma?" Sam frowned. "Dammit, now I can't remember."

"Blah. Just when I thought it was getting good." Rosa plumped down on the couch.

"Never mind. Those scribbles could be just more garbled data." Fez touched the console again, and the screen changed to show a view of the brain from behind, the center portion highlighted. "This is one of the very few readable texts I've found," he said, pointing to a small legend in the bottom left corner of the screen, "and it doesn't tell me a thing. 'Visual Mark.' "

Sam bent to look. "It sure as hell does. It tells you whose brain this is. Which makes this a medical record. Shit, no wonder Keely jumped. They fucking clobber you for busting meds." She straightened up and turned to Fez again. "You don't follow any rock video, do you?"

"Not if I can possibly help it."

"Visual Mark is a guy who works-worked-for EyeTraxx. I guess he's at the Dive now. And either he's got implants, or they're going to give him implants."

"So what?" said Rosa from the couch. "Half the world's got implants. Maybe he's some kind of addict, maybe he's burning Out. Wouldn't surprise me."

"But what about my neuron?" Sam moved to the other screen again. "Where does that fit in with this? And where's Keely? Did he get away, or did they can him?"

"All good questions," Fez said. "We can do a docket search for Keely, and I'll make some copies of this and turn the doctor loose on them."

Sam stared at him. "You're gonna infect Keely's zap with a Virus?"

"Not exactly. Let's take a break. You didn't eat your soup." He herded her away from the desk so that she had her back to both screens when the images vanished.