Synners

by Pat Cadigan

  Manny kicked him, discreetly but hard.

  "A zeppelin trip around the world," Gabe blurted. It was the first thing that came into his head. MORE DRUGS.

  Copperthwait banged a hand down on her desk. "The last zeppelin! That's brilliantl That's what the giants from the old days used to call 'high concept.' "

  "Um, you know, I don't think that's what happened with the last zeppelin," Gabe said politely.

  "Well, it should have," she said, breezily. "It's too beautiful to waste. You'll be the crew on the last zeppelin. Or the passengers. Or they'll be the crew, and you'll be one of the passengers, or vice versa, however you want, it's totally up to you." She pointed a long, elegant finger at him. "I'm giving you total artistic control. All you have to do is come in here once in a while and talk to me about what you're doing. Just because I love to talk to artistic people, I think you're all just the crown of creation, I truly, truly do, and being around you artists makes me feel like I'm really alive. More alive than the best feature this studio has ever released, and that's saying a lot, I assure you, because my headmount is my best friend. I want us to get together as friends, just shooting the old- ahem-shit about the stuff you love to do. If you know what I mean, and I think you do."

  "He certainly does," Manny said heartily, turning a fond face to him. Gabe thought it was the most frightening expression he'd ever seen on Manny.

  "Well, that's magnum, and I really mean that from the bottom of my heart. Or should I say, my brain?" Copperthwait stood up and reached across the desk for his hand. He gave it to her, and she pumped it up and down hard. "This is going to be so… magnum. And profitable. We're going to give people what they really need, something which I happen to personally feel is the highest purpose of entertainment. This is going to feed people's souls, it'll be a boon to the lonely, and you know, I don't think anyone besides us really realizes how many lonely people are out there. I can tell, just by the fan mail we get." She pointed at Gabe again. "You, my friend, are going to give everyone a reason to go on living. We'll get a matching pair of men later."

  Her smile vanished abruptly as her gaze went to the wall with the screens. She stabbed a finger down on the console again. "Excuse me, but what do you think you're doing now?"

  "I'm being eaten. By wolves," the actress said as Manny ushered Gabe from the office.

  "Well," Manny said, setting himself a little more comfortably at the other end of the limo's capacious backseat, "I'd say all's well that ends well. Especially when it all ends well in Hollywood, eh?"

  Gabe managed a murmur that passed for agreement. Manny was sticking to the story that one of the sequences with Marly and Caritha had somehow been copied from the volatile memory onto the end of one of the commercial spots. They both knew that was a pile of horseshit, but Manny had been standing by it for the last three weeks, ever since he'd sprung it on Gabe in his office the morning Gabe had emerged from night court.

  It had been a good morning for lies; Manny could not have timed it better. He'd been too fried to challenge Manny's version of reality, and he was sure Manny had fixed his evidence anyway. He'd just sat and listened, fingering the old-fashioned onionskin flimsy the cashier had given him. He still had it; it looked more like a certificate than a receipt for his fines. Know ye by these presents that the undersigned now has an official criminal misdemeanor record. Souvenir of the longest walk of his life, or at least of the parts he could remember.

  What he remembered best, though, was Gina waiting on the courthouse steps for Mark, who had been picked up by the cops on their incoming sweep. He had stood on the sidewalk under the steadily lightening sky, with his receipt and the battered-spouse literature the holding-cell medic had pressed on him while she'd been stapling up the gash in his face, and watched Gina wait.

  He'd wanted to go to her. It would have been a much longer walk than the one he'd just finished, through a lot of rough terrain, all of it mined, and a long, nasty trip through all the barbed wire she put up around herself. And it wouldn't have been a simulation. Everything he felt would have been real.

  Would have been. He'd still been trying to sort the woulds from the coulds when Mark had come out, settling the matter for everyone.

  And then he'd gone off to work and lost Marly and Caritha, too, and then gotten them back, magnanimously restored by Manny who had another little piece of news for him besides. That was supposed to be the real Big One, but he'd already heard about it from Gina. He tried to look impressed for Manny, anyway, especially since Manny was telling him the sockets had saved him. Eight holes in his head had saved his ass, because the Marly and Caritha stuff was so compelling, the sockets just cried out for a product like this, it was the product they'd been looking for. Insty-friends!

  Insty-fucking-friends, he thought, putting Gina's intonations on the words. Jesus, Jesus, how did I get here?

  "… running the final battery of tests on our people down in Mexico," Manny said cheerfully. "If all goes well, as I'm sure it will, they'll be discharged this week. I'll be going down to oversee it. I would be negligent if I didn't personally make sure that everything was at one hundred percent peak condition for our next star." Manny gave him a satisfied smile. "You know, I'm glad things have turned out this way. I was worried about you, but it's all going to work out. I had no idea that you would have such a feel for that kind of work. It's a gift. And the fact that it came to light just as we were launching this new project is nothing short of miraculous."

  Miraculous. The word echoed in Gabe's mind as he stared unseeingly out of the tinted window. And here he'd always thought the miraculous had been strictly confined to Artificial Reality.

  "Saint Who of the What?" said Caritha.

  Gabe hesitated. He had blurted the name out on impulse, and it seemed as absurd as it had when he'd first read it on the slip Sam had given him.

  "The St. Dismas Infirmary for the Incurably Informed," he said again, and peeked over the top of the concrete wall at the zeppelin moored at the other end of the airfield.

  "Keep your head down, hotwire," Caritha said, looking at the side of the cam. It had acquired a small screen since the last time he'd been in. He was used to the program embellishing itself as needed, but a screen was more elaborate than he'd thought was possible. "There's activity all over the place here. I've got us shielded, but it won't stick if you insist on wiggling around. You'll break the field."

  "St. Dismas was the good thief," Marly whispered to him. He turned to look at her in surprise. Belly-down in the dirt on his other side, she looked up at him with feverishly bright eyes. He almost called for a status report when she went on suddenly. "Though most people think it's just another bulletin board for the discussion of political, cultural, and personal developments, St. Dismas is actually a repository for stolen and sensitive information. You have to have something to offer to access it." She winked at him.

  "How do you know that?" Gabe asked.

  "We know a lot of things," Caritha said, still studying the screen in the side of the cam. "They're starting to close down the hangar now. It should be empty in ten minutes, everybody going home to supper." She gave him a sidelong glance. "Be real sure you want this zeppelin, hotwire, because once we start for it, there's no going back."

  "I still don't understand why you want a goddamn zeppelin," Marly added, giving him a poke.

  "It's the last one," he said. "Someone has to take it for a spin, see what it can do in the open sky."

  " 'Spin' is a lousy choice of word," Caritha said. "Does the name Hindenburg mean anything to you?"

  Gabe sighed, beginning to regret not starting over with fresh copies of their programs. "The Hindenburg has nothing to do with the story line we're supposed to develop. Let's wipe that reference, as well as all mention of St. Dismas, okay?"

  "Okay, no St. Dismas steals the Hindenburg," said Caritha. "But if you'd asked me, which you didn't and you should have, I'd have told you going after headhunters is a hell of a lot more useful than stealin
g zeppelins."

  Gabe blinked at her. "Wipe that, too. Status!"

  Nothing in the status report indicated he was being hacked, or that the program was drawing on anything but already booted material. He plunged himself back into the simulation. "Resume."

  Marly tugged at his sleeve. "You're really going to make us steal that zeppelin and leave all those headhunters running loose?"

  "Last time," Gabe said, "we're not doing Headhunters. We can't. House of the Headhunters wasn't a Para-Versal release."

  "They're all in on it, I've told you that before, hotwire."

  He groaned. "Just steal this zeppelin with me, and then I'll go get headhunters with you later. All right?"

  "That's more like it," said Caritha. "Five minutes. Hope you can run like a rabbit."

  He took it all the way to the point where they were about to lift off in the zeppelin before he called a halt. The effort of keeping things moving had drained him. Perhaps he was going to have to give in and use fresh copies devoid of most of the headhunters material. The programs wouldn't be as broken in and easy to interact with, but it would be better than tinkering with the present versions.

  No, you don't want to tinker with us as we are now, hotwire, said Caritha's voice in his mind suddenly, because we're your best friends, and you're really going to want us after those sockets go in.

  Still putting fancy dress on his own thoughts and calling it company. But he wasn't so far gone that he didn't know what he was doing, couldn't tell the difference.

  That's why you want to keep us the way we are, hotwire. Because later on, after the sockets go in, telling the difference between us'll be harder. A lot harder.

  He wondered about that for days, for weeks, all the way up to the time they put the sockets in. Right downstairs in Medical, as it turned out, not in Mexico.

  22

  Change for the machines. The groups went crazy for it.

  She had missed most of the outgrabe when the story had broken, but there was still plenty of noisemaking going on when she had returned from Mexico. Dog-and-pony shows for the media, for the rock groups, for Concerned Citizens for a Better Tomorrow and the National Council of Implant Clinics and the Mothers' March for Mental Health and Addicts Anonymous. For the National Concerned Marching Addicts of Anonymous Mental Clinics, for all she knew. It was hard to tell the addicts from the mothers and the mothers from the others, and it was a brand new world out there.

  Meet the new world. Same as the old world.

  That wasn't how the old chorus went, but that was all right, because it wasn't really true, either. But the Beater could pretend it was. Basically. Basically the job's the same. Hear the music, make the pictures.

  Except it was better. It wasn't just hearing the music, it was being in the music, and the images coming up on the screen of her mind, forming as she looked at them. As soon as she thought it, there it was, and if she thought to change it, it changed, growing from her like a live thing. She suddenly found it hard to remember that she had worked any other way. At least, while she was doing it. It felt so natural, so right, to send a dream out of the inner darkness into raw daylight, where anyone could see it. Once you'd done that, you wanted to keep on doing it, and the more you did it, the easier it became.

  For the first time she had a real understanding of Mark's nature, of what had been happening behind those eyes for so many years. Change for the machines? Nah, the machines had finally changed for him, and he was just doing what he'd always done.

  Not everyone could do it. That was the strange part, that not all of them could change for the machines. Ecklestone vanished from the Canadaytime lineup, leaving Valjean and Moray hooked up and rocking through the wire.

  "You want to hear something?" Valjean asked her in the studio at the top of his house. "You want to really hear something?" A few quick hits off the oxy, the cape flickering and winking, and Moray looking like she was going to jump out of her skin if it didn't happen soon. They played it for her, beginning to end and from the first note; the pictures came up in her mind just the way they were supposed to. Except she wasn't plugged into the hardware, and the images boiled like a fever, looking for the way out, pressing to be released, until she thought her head had to explode.

  And then Valjean and Moray stopped, and her vision cleared. She barely registered that Valjean's synthesizer had remained closed and silent, that Moray hadn't touched her keyboard, they'd played it all the way through with only their minds, but she was already out, ripping down Topanga, needing her own machine. Change for the machines. Everything changed for the machines.

  – -

  U B the Ass to Risk was gone, and in its place was a joint that said it sold dreams.

  **SOCKET-FRESH**

  MODULES AVAILABLE FOR

  **FLATSCREEN** **HEADMOUNTS **

  !!!COMING SOON-SOCKET HARDWARE!!!

  WATCH THIS SPACE FOR FURTHER DETAILS

  Hadn't taken them long to catch on. The new clinics were open, and they were lined up around the block for them. Whether the dream joint actually had real dreams or just warmed-over clips from old wannabee releases almost didn't matter. Sockets were hot, sockets were it, sockets were the new sexual preference. The hardware was out there, and the merchandise was out there side by side with the stuff pretending to be the merchandise. Hadn't taken hardly any time at all for everyone to get into the spirit of the thing.

  She paused in front of the Chinese Theatre. COMING SOON-THE LAST ZEPPELIN! trumpeted the holo arching over the entrance. A PARA-VERSAL/DIVERSIFICATIONS PRODUCTION! The holo blinked. AN ADVENTURE BORN IN THE MIND, DIRECT TO YOU! YOU WILL BELIEVE

  YOU ARE THERE… blink… BECAUSE YOU WILL BE THERE!!!!

  Good old Hollywood. Start with a great big flatscreen debut and work inward. Show it to them in gargantuan ultra-HDF: Wouldn't you like to be inside this? Well, you can! Here it comes!

  "Thou shalt not fear!"

  He was at her elbow as suddenly as if he had congealed out of the noisy air on the boulevard, a skinny hype in a dirty gray jumpsuit that might have been silver once. One hand thrust a glittery blue square at her face. "And with this stuff you ain't gonna fear no-goddamn-body, not nohow, not no-time, not nowhere!"

  "Not any body I'm afraid of," she told him, moving on.

  "Would you like to be?" He caught her arm and stuck a yellow lozenge under her nose. "I can handle that for you, too. Pure terror, it's the way to go. Hey, take 'em both at once, send your nerves to the playground of the gods!"

  She pulled away from him.

  "Hey, how about an ego trip, wanna go on an ego trip?" he called after her. "Fuckin' sockets've sent the drug trade right into the fuckin' toilet."

  Already? You betcha. Hadn't taken long for everything to change for the machines. Pretty soon it would all be happening at the speed of thought, before it could actually happen, so that nothing would ever have to happen again. You'd only think things had happened, and if anything ever did happen, you wouldn't know the difference.

  Take a little walk with me.

  Here it comes.

  White Lightning in a mason jar. It wasn't terribly visual, but when you'd been struck by lightning, you didn't need a passport to LotusLand. Zzzzzt! Hope you like your barbecue extra-crispy.

  She was making the level in the jar go down little by little all by herself for what seemed like a long time while the music pounded. Without the usual excuse, because tonight she knew where Mark was, she knew exactly where to find him, and she would always know from now on.

  But old habits sure died hard, she thought, and though being struck by White Lightning had left her movements kind of gluey and slow, her mind was running hot, full of pictures, ready to stand and deliver any time she put her request through the wire.

  She let the music wash over her, speed-thrash, cruise-metal, bang-rock, hard-core soul. It was almost like being back in one of those bad old Boston bars, Babe's Beantown, Harborville, Kathye's Klown, in the before-days, putting on a plain
old tox-getting shitfaced, smashed, blasted, hammered-and then jumping all night to some group so hungry you got to starving yourself.

  The sticks were rapping away on the table, stealing a few licks on the side of the jar. Little Flavia, letting her sticks do the talking, and the sticks were saying all there was to say. Gina peered through the White Lightning haze at her. Here it comes.

  The rest of Loophead melted out of the crowd of tables around her, out of the throbbing mass on the dance floor, where a kid with a heelprint tattooed on his forehead was climbing onto the stage again. Flavia was talking now, but the sticks had already said it all. Here it comes. Take a little walk with me.

  "Because we have to catch it now," Flavia added. "You can. We can."

  Loophead's bass boy Claudio lifted her up out of her chair nice and easy. He knew how, he'd done it before, more than once. He could really play, too, he wasn't just a keyboard cheater, the boy had real magic in his fingers. Real magic, real fingers.

  A little traveling music, please.

  Loophead worked out of a cellar studio on the outskirts of demolished Fairfax, where the property values had joined the drug trade in the toilet. Had to be one pretty big toilet, Gina reflected, the way they were flushing the world down, piece by piece.

  The Fender was definitely not in the toilet. Dorcas slipped it on the way another person might have slipped on a diamond necklace. Dorcas was big, black, and old enough to know what a Fender meant. Tom was smaller, wiry, out of the Mimosa and numerous other places east and north, and you called him a keyboard cheater at your peril, because he knew, too, he knew what a keyboard was supposed to be.