Synners

by Pat Cadigan

  They were probably holding hands back there. They did a lot of that, hand-holding, and whispering and giggling. Reports on their previous stay in Mexico during the installation setup had said they'd spent their downtime holed up in their hotel room, watching videos, chowing down on polyester, and engaging in what they thought of as sex, a routine that never varied.

  Picturing that was an exercise in comic thinking. Galen was small, almost boy-sized, flabby without being fat, with a head like a block and an always-grinning face. Joslin was downright spooky looking, pale in a way that suggested she'd never been exposed to natural light. Her hair was the yellow of something gone sour, and her enormous eyes always seemed on the verge of popping out of her head, as if she were perpetually startled. Or revolted. Her thinness implied she found vomiting erotic.

  How in God's name could two such people find each other attractive? Manny filed that one under minor mysteries no one really wanted to solve. The EyeTraxx buy-out and subsequent developments would keep them in all the videos and edible polyester they wanted, and out of his sight. Considering their known behavior, they might never come up for air. Hell, when it came time to tell them they were shut out, they might barely notice.

  "Here," the driver said abruptly.

  Manny roused himself and sat up straight. The low white prefab had appeared on the scrubby landscape like trick holography. With the hurricane fence around it, the place looked more like a warehouse than a hospital.

  "After you take us through the gate," Manny said to the driver, "you wait in front till we come out. I'll have a little refreshment brought to you."

  The kid giggled.

  "Some apple juice," Manny went on, "unless you would prefer milk. Any other refreshment will be handed over back at the hotel."

  The kid giggled again and downshifted, working the floor stick with an expertise that belied his mental condition. Manny resisted the urge to shake his head. Implants could have alleviated the kid's condition, at least to a certain extent. Oh, the kid was almost certainly uninsured, which would make his getting help tremendously difficult, but not impossible. As a hardship case, he could have had hot-and-cold-running social workers filing petitions, begging grants, digging up sponsors. But he chose to stay the way he was, illustrating what Manny thought of as General World Rule Number One: some people liked the squirrel cage. Which reminded him-

  He twisted around in his seat. Galen and Joslin were fast asleep, his head on her shoulder. Manny reached over and gave each of them a rough shake. "We're here."

  Joslin came to with a jump, her big pop-eyes blinking in alarm while Galen floundered clumsily, grabbing at her shirt and inadvertently exposing more of her skin than Manny had ever wanted to see. He had a glimpse of a lattice pattern of thin scars across her chest.

  "You are prepared to show me the start-up, aren't you?" he said, staring hard at Galen.

  "Right, right. Of course." Blinking, he elbowed his twitch and motioned for her to cover herself up. She did so, staring at him as if she didn't know who he was or how she had come to be sitting next to him.

  "You told me everything was ready," Manny said.

  Joslin turned her head slowly from Galen to look at him. "Everything's ready," she said in her high-pitched monotone. "We've got everything except the heads."

  "You'll be getting those soon." Manny turned away from her as they approached the gate. The heads, he thought. Jesus wept.

  "We've got everything except the heads," she said again.

  "Manny says we'll be getting those soon," Galen told her soothingly.

  "Well, I know," she snapped. "I heard him."

  Manny took a long breath and let it out slowly. The doctors Diversifications had recruited were all experienced in implantation. The assistant chief of surgery, Travis, had assured him there would be no problem learning the technique Joslin had developed; a socket wasn't really so different from the more usual kind of therapeutic implant. Which meant it would be easy for Travis to take over after they squeezed Joslin out, possibly with the help of her own procedure. He would have to ask Travis how it could be engineered.

  The guard made the security check into a formal, cautious ritual Manny found more annoying than reassuring. Pulling up to the front door, the kid killed the motor and turned to Manny. "Where are we?"

  Manny didn't answer. A minute dragged by in silence; the front door remained closed.

  "We gave everyone the day off," Galen said with a vacant giggle.

  "Did not," said Joslin petulantly. "The staff's in residence."

  The door opened then, and a tall red-haired man dressed in antiseptic white stepped out. Manny felt himself relax at the sight of Travis and climbed out to shake hands with him. Travis led him toward the door, started to speak, and then frowned at something over Manny's shoulder. Manny turned to look; Galen and Joslin were still in the cruiser, fiddling with the mysteries of the seat belts. Manny went back to help them.

  "You're to wait here," he reminded the kid behind the wheel. Not really necessary; the map on the in-dash screen of the navigational computer had been replaced with the words WAIT HERE TILL FURTHER NOTICE.

  "Gotcho, muchacho," the kid said with an idiotic grin. Manny didn't bother giving him a dirty look. But he canceled the kid's refreshment, and later the kid was going to have one of the worst trips of his life on the stuff Manny would give him, without having the slightest idea why.

  – -

  On the screen two bubbles were moving in a slow dance around a length of complicated braid. Every so often one of the bubbles would hesitate and move to the end of the braid, attaching itself briefly before moving away again, leaving behind a new segment. Manny studied the action for a few minutes and then looked up at Travis. "What's this going to be?"

  "The female. The receiver," Travis added.

  Manny couldn't help glancing at Joslin, who was wandering around the small room with Galen in tow, pausing occasionally to whisper in his ear. "That's the part that stays in the skull."

  "Right." Absently Travis scratched the back of his head.

  "When it's finished, it will be a hollow tube only a few molecules wide." "But alive."

  "Living tissue, yes." Travis's gaze remained on the screen. "For the first time implants will consist one hundred percent of living tissue. Therapeutic implants all have some percentage of hardware, so they all qualify as foreign objects, not completely at home in the body, though most recipients accommodate them with no trouble."

  Manny made a polite noise.

  "This one you see here is for the visual center." Travis tapped the back of his own skull where he had just been scratching. "Injected through the scalp and bone, it makes itself completely at home. So to speak."

  "Only a few molecules wide." Manny frowned. "The people who'll be getting the early benefit of this stuff-ah, most of them would be hard put to flip a marble into the Grand Canyon on the first try. How are they going to plug into a socket only a few molecules wide in the backs of their own heads?"

  Travis almost smiled. "Each target area will be marked with a small bump the size of a pimple. All they'll have to do is lay the connection against the bump. The connector finds its own way in by tropism. Makes no difference which socket-the software will make the adjustment for the correct input and output, and all the connectors retract automatically at the disconnect command, so there's no danger of damaging the mechanism. It will take a little practice, but your people should be able to receive their implants in the morning and be plugging and unplugging by lunchtime. In theory, that is."

  "Clever."

  "It's all Dr. Joslin's development."

  They looked over at her together. She was standing at a bank of cabinets, gesturing flightily with one pasty hand while she continued to whisper to Galen, who had one arm around her insubstantial waist.

  "Amazing." Manny jerked his chin at the cabinets. "What's in there?"

  "Very little as yet. Freeze-storage for the completed polymers. They have to be kep
t frozen so they'll remain in stasis until we're ready to insert them." Travis led him through a door into another room, tiled, white, and bare except for a table with a box about twice the size of a human head at one end.

  "Operating room," Travis told him. "Once we start up, well keep sterile conditions, of course." He put one hand on the box. "This is a standard combination scanner and insertion device. The scanner pinpoints each area of the brain for insertion. It hardly needed any adapting at all for the new procedure."

  "Is it painful?" Manny asked.

  "The procedure?" A flicker of amusement crossed Travis's ruddy, oblong face. "Not really. Dr. Joslin's primate subjects indicated some temporary tenderness at the insertion sites, a little itching that we've determined is psychosomatic. Depending on the individual, there may be some slight reactions and discomfort while the sockets become acclimated, but that depends on the individual. Brain tissue itself is incapable of feeling any pain."

  "Primates are a long way from knowing for sure about humans," Manny said. "Even running a projection-simulation-"

  Travis held up a hand. "Dr. Joslin?" he called loudly. "Could you come in here and help me show Mr. Rivera something, please?"

  Joslin appeared in the doorway, still towing Galen. She looked around the room and gave a strange little laugh, as if she'd been caught out at something.

  "Dr. Joslin, would you please lie down on the table and put your head in the scanner?" Travis asked.

  Joslin disengaged from Galen and hopped up on the table. Travis slid up a panel on the end of the box, and she lay down, moving up until her head disappeared inside the scanner. Travis picked up a small control and danced his fingers over it.

  In the wall behind Manny, a mural-sized holo screen lit up with a 3-D display of a human brain in glowing green. Within the brain a network of black lines appeared, all of them coming from separate areas to meet in what looked like an impossible tangle.

  "Dr. Joslin supervised the placement of her own sockets," Travis said mildly, facing Manny's frown with an even, noncommittal expression. Manny looked from Travis back to the display. The Upstairs Team wouldn't care much for the idea of Joslin making free with a procedure that was solely the company's property now, even if she had developed it. It made a convenient legal point that could be pressed should she decide to be troublesome later.

  "The black lines you see on the screen are the pathways the sockets have generated in her brain. The configuration will vary from person to person, just as brain and mind organization vary."

  Manny looked at Travis again. Travis liked this better than standard therapeutic implants for brain dysfunctions, he realized. Travis liked it a lot.

  "Eight sockets will serve the purpose," Travis went on, "though we may eventually find that some subjects need more, or even fewer. This procedure, incidentally, makes implants used to treat the dysfunctional obsolete. A totally organic implant can alter brain tissue, replacing dysfunctional cells with healthy ones."

  "You included that in the reports to the AMA and the Food, Drug, and Software Administration, didn't you?" Manny said.

  Travis nodded. "You're aware that's not necessarily a strong selling point with them."

  Manny gave a short laugh. "I know all about them. They'll have representatives in Topanga tomorrow night for a presentation, which will include much stronger selling points."

  Travis's face didn't change expression. "The pathways from each socket all end up, without exception, at the limbic system, the seat of our basic emotions-rage, fear, pleasure. When the sockets are engaged, stimuli will induce these things directly, for the duration of the experience. The consumer plugs into the feature presentation-music video, movie release, commercial, standard TV fare-and undergoes a three-dimensional experience." Travis's sudden, brief smile was bizarrely sunny. "Your advertising people will understand how to make good use of this."

  Manny nodded, feeling uneasy.

  "Now, here"-two areas on either side of the brain stood out in sudden highlight-"sockets feeding into the temporal lobes will enhance whatever data come in. Interactivity again-the consumer can cooperate in the forming of the images. Useful for games of any level of sophistication. It will feel quite extraordinary. Mystical, if you like."

  Manny wasn't sure that liked was how he'd have put it himself.

  "Manipulation of the parietal lobes"-two other areas of the brain stood out-"will give the illusion of movement. Your people will no longer have to move about physically in hotsuits to produce effects like walking, climbing, and so forth. And the consumers will feel it without needing hotsuits of their own."

  "Wait a minute," Manny said. "I thought there was no way to stimulate those areas without producing a corresponding movement."

  Travis looked impressed, which pleased him. It meant Travis was getting the message: Don't try to skid one by me, because I know what you're doing. "There was no reliable way, until now. Dr. Joslin developed a technique to block the physical movement from the sensation. It comes partly from the suppression of movement during REM sleep and partly from the old phenomenon of the ghost limb-where an amputee feels a limb no longer there. It's a kind of combination and reversal of those processes with an extra sideways twist." Travis glanced down at Joslin's gawky form on the table. With her head concealed in the box, she looked too much like a scrawny victim of decapitation. "She's really quite brilliant," Travis said, as if he couldn't believe it either.

  "We cover the frontal lobes as well," he went on, "one for each hemisphere. Your people should find they feel more creative. Among other things.

  "One socket each goes to the auditory and visual cortices. Technically your video people could use only those two sockets to produce a music video, but it will be a fuller experience using all the sockets. Less like a video, more like a waking dream. More like a real experience." Travis flashed his weird smile again. "What we've done-what Dr. Joslin has done, really-is hardwired an out-of-body experience. The feel of an out-of-body experience, I should say."

  Manny had no reply to that. Travis dabbed lightly at the corner of his mouth with his ring finger and shut off the screen. "You can get up now, Dr. Joslin. Thank you."

  Joslin squirmed down on the table, and Galen offered her a hand as she hopped off, smiling proudly at Manny. "So," he said, "you want to see mine, too?"

  Manny looked at Travis. "Nothing was supposed to be done down here until Diversifications gave the go-ahead."

  Travis's chin lifted a little. "Dr. Joslin is the chief of surgery. It was her decision."

  "Loosen up, Manuel," Galen said expansively. "When this breaks, even if only a tiny percentage of people jump for It, it's gonna be harder getting a reservation in here than getting political asylum on the moon. And nobody knows what kind of trouble you're gonna have getting it legalized in the States, I don't care how many legislators Diversifications has on their tit. Did you see the look on that judge's face last night?"

  "Earlier this morning," Joslin said in a loud stage whisper. She was massaging Galen's shoulders with both hands, making his ill-fitting jumpsuit even more rumpled.

  Galen patted her thigh absently. "When I got into that courtroom and found out that goddamn feel-gooder had already modified some twitch's implants, and they were already fooling with direct-"

  "That, at least, is taken care of," Manny said, forcing a genteel smile. "I'm sure the Upstairs Team at Diversifications won't have any problems with either of you already having undergone the procedure. But technically you do need permission from us before-"

  "Oh, get off it, Manuel." Galen laughed. "It's Lindy's thing."

  "Not anymore. When Diversifications took over EyeTraxx, it also took legal possession of all copyrights, trademarks, and patents originating with EyeTraxx. Have your lawyer look it up on the agreement for you."

  Galen laughed again. "Big fucking deal. Without us Diversifications wouldn't have shit, so don't go splitting fucking legal hairs with me, Manuel. I don't have to be pissed on by some taco fl
unky whose grandmother went over the border squatting under a load of jalapeno peppers in the back of a pickup truck."

  Manny's calm never deserted him. "My full, legal name is Immanuel Castille Rivera. My ancestors were conquistadores, and their line had been long established in this hemisphere by the time your forebears were quarantined for smallpox at Ellis Island. Not that such things matter. It has been fortunate for my own advancement that the tradition of the old barrio gangs never took hold in my family, and I grew up without believing that ethnic slurs had to be avenged for the sake of my manhood. I do, however, take a dim view of unprofessional behavior, something I share with the Upstairs Team."

  "So? No offense, then." The arrogance was gone from Galen's face. "Hey, I made a few bad investment decisions, and Diversifications was ready to ride in and take over. Like conquistadores, eh?" He shrugged. "EyeTraxx had a history of that kind of stuff anyway, but what the fuck. Now I'm gonna be even more fabulously wealthy than I ever was, and after today we don't gotta bother with each other, as long as Diversifications keeps up their payment schedule."

  He leaned back against Joslin, who put both arms around him and rested her chin on his shoulder. Considering the differences in their heights, it was a comically awkward pose. "Frankly, I wouldn't want to be where you are, anyway," Galen went on, regaining a little of his old cockiness. "I still say you're gonna have to go some fucking distance to turn public opinion on what looks like a faster, easier way of mind control and brainwashing, all that shit. There's still plenty of people around who believe that manic-depressives and the schizos and the migrainers and the epileptics and the narcoleptics and all those leptics are morally wrong to have little buttons in their heads to keep them even. Hell, there's still plenty that think test-tube babies are a fucking atrocity. And that doesn't even cover the fucking AMA priesthood and the FDSA. They're gonna be screaming rape all over the place. It's gonna be a real mother's mother of a headache, and I don't like headaches."

  "And what about you, Dr. Joslin," Manny said. "Do you have any thoughts on the matter?"