Synners

8

When Gina found out, Mark thought, she was going to kick his ass. She'd done it before, for a lot less.

It wasn't that everything had happened so fast the night before-no, two nights ago. Jesus. It was getting by him, it was all getting by him. There'd been so much happening. It sure hadn't been the night he'd gone out to have.

The Mimosa first, where there was always something going on. Mixed crew down there, the hackers and the bangers, the laces and the cases, roiling around on the sand and the walkways, squatting in vacant buildings, flimsy lean-tos, under piers. Those hacker kids, they really kept it going, the way they could tap a little power with their piggybacks and fooler loops and whatever else they had. They'd have their laptops going, and the bangers'd be jamming, and there'd be some kid, maybe someone's good little girl before she'd gotten her walking papers, coaxing a dream out of her cam with a hacker's laptop running a simulation assembly for her, and someone else'd be jumping an animate around using an exoskeleton and talking about what they could do if they had a hotsuit instead of an exo. While the cases watched like it was all video, which for them it was.

Valjean and his cape. That was it. He'd put the cape in one Of Canadaytime's videos, and Valjean refused to live without one in realife. Thing sucked power like Dracula, had to weigh a ton with all the solar collectors in it, and Valjean ran it eighteen, twenty, thirty hours a day, something like that. Vatican and his cape, Ecklestone preening, and Moray jamming with the kids like she used to before Canadaytime hit it on Video. That had been pretty fine, he could have listened to Moray and the kids jam all night, but somebody wanted to hit-and-run, and a whole bunch of them had been toxed enough to think it was a good idea. Himself included.

He could remember being crushed into a commuter rental with some other people. That hadn't been so fine. Once he'd owned a real car, but that had been before L.A., L.A. in the big C-A, and he seemed to remember telling someone about that on the way to Fairfax. Or maybe he'd just been talking in his mind. Sometimes with the music going, it was hard to tell. But the program director in his head had orders: play it all the time, and play it loud.

They'd set up in screwy old Gilmore Park, or what was left of it. Someday someone would come up with the cash to finish restoring what the Big One had shaken to shit. Underneat the toss-em chemlights on poles, it looked like the surface o Mars, or how Mars would look after humans got through crapping on it. That had depressed him a little, but the pickle stand was open for business (Why, officer, this ain't no drug bar, it's a pickle stand), and he'd wheedled a little cheer out of a young thing in a stone-home lethal flamingo mask with feathers sticking up to heaven.

The hacker kids had their fooler program going-it's so easy, it's sick, you just bypass the sensors to the surveillance alarm and feed it any simulated data you want, truly stone-home sick, I did this one myself-he'd tried to look interested for the kid because she'd been so earnest about it, earnest and young. Besides, it was a lot like the story of his life: just bypass the sensors and feed in any data you want. But either the cheer had gone bad in the can, or it hadn't been strong enough in the first place, because he'd gotten a bad feeling he couldn't lose. Nothing he could home in on, but he'd faded before Valjean could pounce on him and talk him out of it.

Well, he'd never really seen what was so high-top about hit-and-runs anyway. See how fast you can have fun before the cops showed. Although one time he'd gone to one set up in the middle of some closed-off lanes on the fucking freeway, and there had been something like stone-home righteous retribution to that one, like he was getting back some of the time he'd lost sitting in the clogs. That one had been worth the arrest and the fines.

So after Fairfax… yah, just driving around in the dark thinking he would go home, stick on a header, get toxed, and pass out in videoland, when the phone buzzed urgent. The next thing he knew, they were picking him up. Don't worry, we'll turn in your rental for you, but it's imperative you come with us.

Imperative. Im-fucking-perative. That had been Rivera. G ina had always disappeared when Rivera had come around, maybe because Rivera always came around with Galen, and Gina would just as soon have killed Galen as pissed on him.

He didn't feel any too warm toward the boy himself for what had happened to EyeTraxx, even though Galen had fixed up the deal for him. EyeTraxx had always been the Beater's, as far as he was concerned, even after the Beater had lost most Of it to Galen in a bailout. Galen hadn't been there in the beginning, when the Beater had put it together. EyeTraxx Video.

He'd been there. He'd been there the day the Beater had sold off the old tour bus for scrap. Touring was nowhere; video was everywhere. There were billions of little video production companies starting up, it seemed, all over the place, but EyeTraxx was different, because the Beater had still been the Beater, and it wasn't just somebody's money machine. That came later, after Galen took over.

In the beginning they were doing goddamn visions. Video wasn't new even then, but it was getting better all the time, all the stuff you could do, hotsuits and artificial-fucking-reality, shit, you could finally be the music. And then that crazy whiz kid-where had he been from? somewhere-the lad had mixed up that simulation of the Great God Elvis burning licks with several later generations of rockabillies too spread apart to have overlapped in realife, though the one he'd really liked was Latin-Satin from 2002 handling Mad-Bad Jim Morrison from 20th C. Damn, but that had been stone-the-fucking-crows-at-home fire.

He'd had big visions for the Beater, bigger fire, and the Beater could have done it, he really could have done it, the Beater's music and his visions, and the Beater had had to go and put it down. Just gave up, covered over his synthesizer and made a desk out of it, full-time bizman. Without anything remotely like a whimper, even.

If it would do any good to kick, old son, I'd kick, but live performance is over. Most of the new ones coming along don't even bother about the clubs. And now I'm over. This is not synthesizer anymore. You are. You and Gina and the rest of them, you synthesize the sound and the pictures into what they want to see and hear. You're the real synthesizers.

He'd laughed at that one. I may be a sinner, but I ain't no synthesizer.

Synner, then. With a y.

And the goddamn name stuck, like a lot of other shit had stuck. And little by little Galen whittled away at them; Guerstein let go, Vlad gone, Kim fired, Jolene packing up and stalking off in a cloud of disgust, until it was the way it had been in the beginning, almost, just him and the Beater and Gina doing the videos. And now look where they all were.

He didn't actually know where they all were, at the moment, particularly himself. Diversifications? Right, some bedroom in the penthouse. They'd told him he could spend the night after, report for work in the morning-which morning?-and then he was free to go home the next night, no problem. He wasn't under arrest or anything. It was that hacker.

None of that was quite straight in his mind, either, the stuff about the hacker, who was occupying another bedroom nearby. Wasn't any hacker he could remember off the Mimosa, he knew that much.

He thought the hacker might have cracked Diversifications and gotten into Galen and Joslin's stuff, the stuff they were going to let him do. Except he couldn't shake the feeling that Rivera already knew the kid, and knew him real well. Galen and Joslin hadn't felt it, but it was a toss-up if Galen and Joslin felt anything. It wasn't like they were paying a whole lot of attention sometimes, anyway, but he'd kept catching these looks between Rivera and the kid, and he was pretty sure it wasn't just his mind playing tricks on him again, the way it did more and more often lately, especially when he was working on a video, which was all the time now. Working on video made him go away a lot, as Gina put it. But hell, how else was he supposed to see the pictures and get it right?

He was pretty sure he'd seen at least part of the police raid on the… had it been a clinic? Feel-good joint, yah. Jesus, and everybody thought he was crazy. He didn't have goddamn implants that were supposed to get you toxed without taking any drugs. What the hell was that, anyway-toxed without drugs. That wasn't right, that was crazy, that was stone-home unnatural was what it was.

Which made the deal Galen had swung for him unnatural, too, he thought uncomfortably. Except he wanted it so much. So what did that make him, another head-geek? It would be different, though, not just brain-buttons to push, but a better way to get the pictures he saw in his head out just the way he saw them, get them out and on video so everyone could see them the same way. Yah, that was different, real different, it wasn't like going to a feel-good joint at all.

He'd wished he could have had it done already while he was sitting in the limo watching the cops march the feel-good people into the van. One of the Beater's old tunes had been stuck in his head with the pictures running, and that had been some stone-home righteous video, running so hot he'd thought for a while that the Beater had been there with him. But he wasn't.

After the raid what had happened? Right, they'd sifted the hacker out from the rest of them, and there'd been a fast visit to somebody important's place. He thought maybe that had been in Bel-Aire because there'd been so many security gates to get through. Or maybe he was just remembering one gate with a stutter because of the way the music had been playing; the program director had been following the pictures and giving the music a house remix that the Beater would have wet his pants over. The old Beater would have, anyway.

He didn't remember much about the Bel-Aire place, except that there'd been hot-and-cold-running phone calls going on the whole time. There must have been about two dozen phone lines and even more terminals and screens-man, the information had been flying so thick and fast, he'd been afraid of getting hit in the head with it. The hacker had looked pretty wired, like he was afraid he was going to take a serious hit from all the shit flying back and forth.

Or maybe from Rivera. By that time he'd been stone-home positive Rivera knew the kid, the way the kid looked at him, like Rivera had a hand grenade with the pin between his teeth, ready to pull it. And meanwhile, they were all talking at the kid, not just talking, machine-gunning him with their voices, ya-ta-ta-ta-ta-tat, bang, bang, bang, ya-ta-ta-ta-ta-tat, bang, bang, bang. Enough to make you yell, Dive! Dive! except Rivera didn't have any sense of humor, that fuck.

The kid took quite a lot of that before he said the secret words: state's evidence. But the weirdest part was that Rivera looked even more relieved than the kid, and he flashed on the idea that the kid thought Rivera was going to solve all his problems when really what it was, was the kid had just solved Rivera's and didn't even know it.

So they'd given the kid a bunch of official-looking stuff to thumbprint and made him look into one of those retina-printing scopes. Some more talk, some more phone calls, and then, when he'd thought everything was all over and they could all go home, off they all went to night court. He hadn't really believed they were going there until they'd pulled up at the front steps, and he still hadn't believed it until they all started to climb them.

That was when the kid got balky. Something about copies? He couldn't remember. And then the courtroom-

He'd had a bad moment right then, just before they'd all gone in. He'd started thinking that he was going to run straight into Gina, busted at a hit-and-run or just toxed and disorderly or something. He'd see her, and she'd see him with Galen and Joslin, and boom, nuclear meltdown.

What she'd do when she found out about the deal he'd agreed to-fuck the meltdown, it would be stone-home apocalyptic. Jesus is coming after all, fucker, but just for you!

But they'd promised they'd bring her in on it, too, before they opened it up to everyone. She'd go with him, and it would be like it was theirs, together, and that would be good. But she was going to meltdown bad when she found out he'd kept stuff from her, she'd kick his ass just on general principle. In twenty years they hadn't kept any secrets from each other. Then again, he hadn't had any secrets to keep. And then again, he'd never been able to imagine having any to keep where Gina was concerned. Until now.

Sorry, Gina.

He wondered if he'd be able to get out even that poor little two-word apology before she nuked him.

Well, like the man had said they would, the times had definitely a-changed, and that made him feel sad beyond the usual morning-after funk.

No, two mornings after. Where did the second day go?

Oh, Christ, yes-they'd detoxed him the quick way. Rivera had taken him to a doctor in… no, the doctor had come here, to the penthouse, and she'd given him Purge. She hadn't called it Purge, but that was what it had been. He'd had Purge before, and once you'd had it, you didn't forget it. Purge always put a lot of miles on your odometer before it was through with you, and maybe it took a few years off your life and maybe it didn't, but it sure felt like it did. With Diversifications in the person of Rivera picking up the tab. A little trade-off, there- a good life, but a shorter one. Ars longa, vita fucking brevis.

Fuck it all. He'd just lie here now and watch the pictures. The video show that ran endlessly in his head was coming up to where he could see it better-that, or he was going down to where it was, it didn't matter to him one way or the other. Just as long as he could see it.

The lake, again; the lake with the stony shore. It showed up somewhere in all his videos now, and he didn't know what that meant, but he didn't question it. The pictures ran the way they would, and he was just the medium-

– synner-

– all right, synner, now he could believe in that word beyond its genesis as the Beater's PR device-it could have been worse, the Beater could have dragged out that old chestnut, cyberwhatsis, or whatever it was, he couldn't remember, and he didn't have to, because he was standing on the lake with the stony shore, a million-million stones worn smooth as eggs by the lapping of the water, and every stone a secret world to blossom at his touch.

Be careful.

A whisper that came through the music, but whether as part of it or something separate from somewhere else in his mind, he didn't know.

He could feel the stones hard against his bare feet as he made his way unsteadily along the arc of the shore. The sun was high overhead, falling hard on the water like a demand.

Be careful.

He was teetering on one foot, and the sun was demanding that the lake do something, allow something of it…

The stones shifted beneath him, and he felt himself twisting around as he lost his balance. Sky and ground seemed to nod and sway, and he went down, under the glaring demand of the sun.

Water touched his fingertips in a feather-kiss, and his hand closed around a stone.

Be careful. Can you cast this stone?

He brought the stone up close to his face. It was almost bone white, pockmarked and shot through with spidery veins of silver gray. The texture shifted in his sight, and the hard, demanding sun struck a tiny, white-hot spark in it. On the lake a ripple broke the mirror-smooth surface and sent an echoing spark, briefly blinding him. Or was it still the stone he was looking at, or both stone and lake at once…?

The texture of the stone shifted again; something seemed to part, like water, like veils, and he was looking into the stone, his sight traveling toward the heart of the secret-

The surface of the lake rippled again; more flashes of light, brighter, to the point of pain, hot needles driving into his head, needles the size of spears, needles of light and oh God if that was what this stone meant, he wanted to get out, get out get away get away

Be… careful…

And then he was out, floating away more weightless than weightless, consisting of less than the empty space between his dreams, as if everything that was himself had been distilled down to one pure thought.

It felt right; it felt more than right, something he'd been meant to do all his life.

The bone white was a bed; he was looking down at himself lying in it, and the sight was receding like a tiny image at the wrong end of the telescope.

Stop.

The movement stopped, and he had a sense of waiting.

Rippling on the lake disturbed the air, and he felt how the air pressed up, parted around him; the movement of the kid in the next bedroom turning fitfully in his own bed, tangled in the sheets and in a situation of his own making.

Jones, the kid had said at one point. Aloud? Had to be, he remembered the kid babbling to him when they'd been alone once. Jones. Jones was dead. No, Jones wasn't dead. No, Jones was dead, but only sometimes. Schrodinger's Jones. What was Schrodinger's Jones? Putting cats in boxes with vials of poison gas; strange habit. No stranger than Schrodinger's video, though, the one he kept making over and over because he couldn't seem to get it right, and it wouldn't leave him alone until he did, and the Beater couldn't understand, which was why he was on this deal with Galen and Joslin. That was supposed to fix Schrodinger's video. Maybe it would also do something about Schrodinger's dick, which he also suffered with from time to time. It was a stone-home Schrodinger world, when you came right down to it.

He could feel the stone against his hands, the smooth-rough surface surrounding him as he surrounded it, but his body was still far, far away, sprawled on the bed like a cast-off exo. On the bed, floating on the lake, ripples striking sparks all around, secret world in the stone, and no mark to point the way home-

There was a stranger on the stony shore, turning slowly, turning slowly to him, turning like the seasons, like the moon, and he was afraid to see what face the stranger would show him this time, what face, what face, turning from the darkness, what face face

Gina. Relief shuddered through him. This time, Gina. It was like seeing her clearly for the first time in a long time, as if he'd been looking at her through layers and layers of veils or fog or something. Twenty years would build up a lot of layers. He had almost forgotten she was beautiful to him.

She had the greatest color of skin, all her own, a gift of nature, though he'd seen the same shade in various dye-joints around town, tagged "Wild Forest Hardwood." She'd never been much of a peacock type, it never seemed that important lo her, she had other stuff to do. Dreadlocks pretty much took care of themselves, he guessed; they spilled down her forehead, past her ears, onto her shoulders, down her back in fluid, thickly graceful lines. Strong features, extraordinary eyes. No one else in the world looked like her, better now than twenty years ago when she'd first appeared with her laptop and a homemade simulation, crazy to make videos. Not more than sixteen or seventeen then, couldn't have been, but he didn't know. All this time and he'd never gotten around to saying, How old are you?

She knew how old he was. He could see it in her face, still turning through the light and her gaze sweeping across him, she knew how old he was, she knew-She knew.

That was in her face as well, and he could see it clearly now, what he had not seen at the time when he had been standing on the courthouse steps while Galen and Joslin danced around the kid (because they didn't know), trying to draw him into the rhythm and the pattern, meaning to strangle him with it, while he stood there and watched, and the sight that had passed into him without his noticing and buried itself in his brain showed itself to him now, the shadow in the deeper shadows, watching from hiding. Some stray little bit of light had found her and ignited itself in her eyes. Now he saw the glint he had not seen then, felt the way her breathing had sent ripples across the lake.

Gina, I'm sorry.

And she was turning from him, and he saw himself again sprawled on the shifting texture of the bed and knew that it was time to go back. If he was going back.

This was the part of Schrodinger's video that he could never be sure of. Every other time he had gone back, but this might be the time he didn't, this time.

Be careful.

Teetering, about to fall, he could fall either way-

He was lying facedown on the floor, one cheek pressed against the carpet and the afterimages of bright sparks fading in his vision. The fingers of his left hand were curled clawlike around a piece of air the shape of a good-sized stone.

Weird stone fucking shit, he thought, using the bed to help himself up. Have some fucking stone-home crazy dreams and then fall out of bed. With a fucking Purge headache, too. Christ, if they ever did that to him again, he'd take a walk and keep walking, over hill, over dale, over the fucking ocean, he didn't care if they had the stone-home Secret of the Universe in a chocolate candy-fucking-coating, no more fucking Purge, the-fucking-end.

He found his clothes wadded up in a fat, overstuffed chair and dressed slowly, smoothing away the wrinkles with his hand and wondering if he should be concerned about a change of underwear. Diversifications was a pretty detox/safe-sex kind of outfit. If it hadn't been for Joslin's big-deal project, he was pretty sure Diversifications wouldn't have wanted any part of him, or Gina either.

The memory of Gina was like a physical blow. It caught him off balance with one leg in his pants. He staggered across the room, and for a moment he saw the stony shore in the velour smooth of the carpet before he fell sideways onto the bed.

He lay with the breath knocked out of him, more by surprise than by the fall. She had been there, and he'd been too toxed to register the sight of her then, but his brain had saved her for later, for the lake with the stony shore.

Sitting up, he pushed the pants down his leg with his other foot, stamped them into a wad, and tossed them over on the chair again. "Did it wrong," he muttered. He had to be carefu about that these days, doing things wrong, because wheneve he did, he found himself toppling over onto that shore of egg-smooth stones again, and sometimes it took him a long time to find his way back to where he'd been. And that was different from just going there on his own for Schrodinger's video, because-

But he couldn't say why, really. Except maybe it was just better to jump than to be pushed, the way it was better to burn out than to fade away.

And that was something of the lake with the stony shore, too. One of the multitude of secret worlds there could show him the way out, but the deal with Galen and Joslin was also a way out, and a surer thing. Or so the Beater had convinced him, when the deal was done.

It may be better to burn out than to fade away, Mark, but It's best of all not to do either. And you know you're burning out. Don't you?

Yes, I do, old pal, and how tactful of you to say so. I should have told you when it happened that you had a hand in it as much as anything else, maybe more. You put your ax away too soon, my man; when you closed up your synthesizer for the final time, I heard the lid closing on my coffin as well.

"Woo," he said, and blew out a short breath that might have been a laugh directed at himself. Then he stretched out facedown on the floor and got up again to walk carefully to the chair where his clothes were. And this time it was the right number of steps in the right way according to the music playing in his head. He dressed without any more problems.

The living room was tastefully luxurious, and empty. Over on a desk near the windows, a monitor was flashing his name. But he had to wait for a while, until the program director cued something up with a matching rhythm before he could go to it and press the message-waiting button on the control panel built into the desktop.

Thank you for your help in court, the screen told him. It was not absolutely vital in terms of legal procedure that you appear before the judge with us, but it did strengthen our case beyond question. Hope you rested comfortably. Press the printout button for a hardcopy map of the building and the areas that directly concern you. The hallway to your left as you face this screen leads to the elevator. Manny Rivera.

That was it? A Purge detox and not even a fancy French breakfast? What a bunch of cheap-asses.

H e was reaching for the map sticking out of the printout slot when he felt the difference in the air.

The kid was standing in the doorway, dressed only in a pair of colorless jockey shorts that had passed the stage of true wearability. Kindred soul, secret words or not.

"Visual Mark," the kid said.

He shrugged.

"I've seen a lot of your stuff. I always wondered what your real name was."

Mark gave a short laugh. "Who fucking knows? I lost track of that a while ago." Not quite true; some of the stuff he'd toxed out on in the past had had some bizarre lasting effects, but he could remember his real name, if he tried. Mostly, the effort was incompatible with the sound track.

"Yah," the kid said. "Well." He stared distractedly at a spot on the carpet about midway between them.

"Listen, guy-" Mark made a move toward him and stopped. It wasn't like he could help. The kid had said the secret words, and that had locked things up. He shook his head. "Guy, it's a stone-home Schrodinger world." He stuffed the map in his shirt pocket and headed for the elevator.