by Pat Cadigan
She didn't answer, but her gaze slid away from him. He burst out laughing.
"My God, I hit it! You've been marking time to put together a down payment on a house!"
"Not a down payment," she said in a low voice. "The whole thing, outright."
He could feel all expression leaving his face. "Damn. You've got millions."
"Because I wanted it badly enough!" She had a startlingly desperate look now, as if she were also trying one last time to be understood. "I worked around the clock, no matter how tired I was, no matter how bored, no matter how dead the market seemed. When there were no leads, I made them out of nothing. Instead of sitting around bitching, I kept watch so that when something showed even the slightest hint of promise, I was the first to see it and the first one on it. I kept track of the buyers and the sellers, I charted their spending patterns and their activities so that I knew when they wanted to buy or sell even before they did, and I was right there to make it happen for them."
She rose smoothly, brushing at her trousers and her vest. "I didn't worry about making friends. I didn't waste my energy or my work time letting some clown cry on my shoulder and get my expensive clothes all wet. I didn't let myself get marked as a troublemaker, a screwup, or a loser."
"Like me," he said simply.
She glanced upward. "God, you had a very clear grasp of all the politics at Diversifications. You could have played them like a Stradivarius, but instead you chose to bitch about them, show opposition, huddle with the other moaners and whiners. It kept you back. That's the pity of it, that's the uselessness, that's why I'm so mad at you. It wasn't that you couldn't. You just said no." She folded her arms and gave a small shudder. "I'd be embarrassed if I were you."
The faint voice-over from the dataline jumped out at him. "… don't know how to relax, we have the solution. If you're driven too hard, we have the brakes. The Coves Clinic. We don't do anything to you that you wouldn't do yourself, if you knew how. The only implant clinic with its own on-site spa. Triple-A rating by the Neurological Council, on file with the Food, Drug, and Software Administration."
The beachscape on the screen had been enhanced a little, Gabe knew. LeBlanc had done that spot; she'd thought she was going to get a couple of days on location, but instead Diversifications had jobbed the taping out to some students and called it "intern-work," beating the union fees and LeBlanc's hopes for an incidental vacation.
"You won't be able to keep this place by yourself," Catherine said. "When the time comes, I'll handle the sale for you. You'll do well, even after I take my share and my commission."
He kept staring hard at the dataline as her quiet footsteps went toward the front door. "You gonna find me something else more in my range?" he called suddenly as he heard the lock disengage.
"I don't work in your range."
At least she wasn't a door-slammer. He continued to stare at the dataline, which was babbling a report on consumer spending habits from BizNet, watered down for civilians. Obviously this was supposed to mean something to him, but he couldn't bring himself to care. It was going into the capture buffer anyway, and if he ever did find a reason to care, he could look at it later.
Sam would be happy, he thought after a bit, when his mind began to work again. Well, perhaps not happy. Relieved would be more like it. Or maybe it wouldn't matter to her one way or the other-her emancipation had put her beyond having to care about the state of her parents' marriage. If it had come to this three or four years ago, it might have made a difference to her. Even two years ago. She'd only been emancipated for a year then-he might have been able to persuade her to move in with him, go to college, get some legitimate work in programming, or simulations. She had a lot of talent-
Oh, yah. Legitimate work with some corporation, perhaps, some company like Diversifications, turn her into another corporate employee. If she'd wanted to have the spirit ground out of her, she could have stayed home and let Catherine do it.
Sure, I'll come back, Dad. As soon as you can give me one goddamn good reason why you didn't leave a long time ago yourself.
What could he have said to that-Well, Sam, you had to be there? It would have been just one more way to tell her she didn't understand, and she already knew that. He wouldn't have understood himself, back in the beginning. He hadn't been a whole lot older than Sam was now when he and Catherine had married. There had been no room in him then for the idea of a Plan B, what to do if things didn't turn out the way he wanted. There had been no room for looking ahead to a time when the dreams hadn't come true and there was no love anymore, and instead of the art he had some bootleg simulations he played with on the company clock, the way he passed the days until such time as he dropped dead. Of disinterest, most likely.
"First warning," Melody said suddenly, and he jumped at the sound of her voice.
"What?"
"You can still get to work on time if you leave now. Commuter units are still available at the nearest rental lot. Call ahead and reserve?"
"Yah, sure," he said. Yah, sure. Go to work, why not? He had that lunch with Manny, but what the hell-when your wife left you first thing in the morning, how much worse could the day get?
He'd have to remember to feed that line to the Melody Cruz module. Or maybe Marly. Yes, Marly; it was a good line, and it sounded far more like her than it did him.
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 stick
ing 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.