Synners

by Pat Cadigan

  "No, we never achieved that point in marriage where you start to look like each other."

  "Not what I meant. She doesn't look like she's for you, like she was supposed to be your wife."

  "I know." Catherine's picture lingered a moment longer, rippled slightly, and then vanished, to be replaced by some incomprehensible episode from a series labeled Lighthand in the lower corner. Gabe wondered idly when the divisions on the screen had disappeared. Everything seemed to happen when you were looking the other way. "I think I was always hoping someday she would look like my wife. Now I can't remember why."

  Gina yawned. "I fucking hate this kind of discussion."

  "You started it," Gabe said, his voice rising in exasperation. "You're a real comedy on wheels, you know that? As far as I can tell, all you ever do is hit people, get toxed, and chase around after a guy who doesn't know what planet he's on half the time."

  She looked down at her lap. "I make videos, too."

  "Is that what you were doing tonight? With those people, Loophead?"

  "You see any of that?" she asked, not looking up at him.

  "I saw it all. They wouldn't let me near you, but I saw it all, and I know what was going on."

  She nodded. "Yah. It was all right. The synthesis was there, just came up like it was meant to be, and it was all right."

  He set the bottle aside on the floor. "Are you going to do that with Mark?" he asked, without thinking.

  She looked up at him, shocked, and he wanted to bite his tongue off. "Mark's not a musician, he's another synner. Why would I do that with him?"

  He moved a little closer to her on the couch. "I just wondered, when I saw all of you connected at the same time. I-" Suddenly he couldn't think of what to say next, and he felt as if he had stepped off solid floor into a void. MORE DRUGS. He shook his head. "Never mind. I'm sorry, forget I asked that question."

  "What are you gonna do?" she asked.

  "When?"

  "When you're in the wire. When you're rattling around your condo while you wait for the floor to get sold out from under you."

  He shook his head again. This was the point where he could get up and leave, and he waited for his legs to push him upright and carry him out the door. He'd been running around in simulation for so long, he'd forgotten how to run a realife, real-time routine; he'd forgotten that if he made mistakes, there was no safety-net program ready to jump in and correct for him.

  "Well." Gina let out a long breath. "You want the bed or the couch? I've slept on both, they're equally shitty."

  "No, I can go home." He started to get up.

  "Bad idea," she said, pulling him down again. "The neighborhood slash-artists'll take you out before you get back to your rental. I'll come out tomorrow morning and find your bloody hide plastered up on the front of the building."

  Suddenly he was too tired to argue. Let her go to bed, and then he could sneak out and go home. "I'll take the couch."

  "Turn out the lights when you're done." She got up and went into the bedroom.

  He sat staring at the dataline, which had cycled back to General News. There was a new anchor now, a young Scandinavian type who looked about sixteen years old. He was rattling on in his sunny voice about something to do with sockets. Of course; if sockets were out of the news for more than half an hour, that would have been an item in itself. Surprising that Mrs. Troubles hadn't been offering advice for the socketed. Well, dears, a mixed relationship-the socketed and the un-socketed-is a peck of trouble waiting to happen, and we all know it. And so is the socketed with the socketed, and the un-socketed with the unsocketed. Better you should try to kindle something with a convicted felon behind bars, or even just forget the whole thing.

  "Didn't you hear me, stupid? I said, you're not really listening, are you? But then, if you weren't listening, of course you didn't hear me. Dealing with your type is enough to make me berserk."

  Gabe blinked rapidly at the screen. The sunny anchor's face was now a distorted mask of furious disgust.

  "You out there, on your couches, on your beds, on your toilets, squatting in your expensive fetid hovels, you don't put this on to listen to anything. You just let it babble at you, and you let the babble bounce off, a little white noise to make you feel a little less like the stagnant, empty straw-people you really are. Get ready, all you null-and-voids, because here it comes-"

  The screen went blank. Seconds crawled by, and then an easy-viewing scene of Big Sur at sunset came up. "We are experiencing some technical difficulties at this time," said a calm, refined voice. "Normal programming should be restored within a few minutes. If you have been running a download from this channel, we strongly advise immediate diagnostics and decontamination, and that you refrain from uploading or downloading any other material until such time as your own system has been certified free of infection. We remind our viewers that diagnostic and decontamination programs are free whenever the problem stems from the network. Consult your program guide for further details."

  Gabe let out a short laugh of disbelief. It had been a long time since anything like this had happened on the dataline. He wondered how the abusive swashbuckler was. Maybe one of Sam's friends.

  He flicked off the dataline and sat in the silence, at a loss. When the dataline insulted and abandoned you, you knew you were really alone.

  A voice in his head. Somebody's, maybe his own. Hey, hotwire-you're an asshole.

  "Yah," he muttered, "but I'm trying to quit." He got up and went to the bedroom.

  She was sitting on the edge of the unmade bed in a T-shirt and underpants as if she had forgotten what she wanted to do next. He wanted to say her name, but his voice refused to work. She turned then and saw him standing in the doorway, holding onto the frame as if he were trying to push it out and make it wider.

  She got up slowly, the expression on her face unreadable. But not unhappy, definitely not unhappy. It may not have been the expression she'd been wearing while she was waiting for Mark on the courthouse steps, but he didn't know for sure because she'd had her back to him. If the best he could do was not unhappy, then he wasn't unhappy, either, he thought wildly. He opened his mouth to speak to her, but his voice still wouldn't come, and he threw up his hands as he went toward her. She met him halfway, and they toppled onto the sagging mattress in a frantic, urgent tangle.

  "This is like, port in a storm, nowhere else to go," she said after a few moments of struggling, grabbing, straining. Her voice was a growl. "You care about that?"

  He made a noise.

  "Me, neither."

  23

  The memory sprang open, and she wasn't just remembering the fall, she was reliving it.

  Her inner ear went crazy, the wind rushed into her, choking off her breathing, guided express missile, toes pointed at the sidewalk and the world blurring, smearing upward-

  It cut off as the last chord faded out. Jesus, Jesus, Little Jesus Jump-Up, what a fucking rush. Signature image? This was going to scare Valjean out of a year's growth.

  Getting good at falling, she thought. Falling off buildings and falling into bed.

  Top, she commanded. Instantly she was looking at the frozen beginning of the video. She clicked through it by sequence until she reached the start of the fall, clicked back to add a small hint at key points throughout the video, just the barest eyeblink-thoughtblink?-of the point of view about to step into empty air. An almost-flash forward. She stuttered the beginning of the fall-step off, zip back to step off again, zip back to step off again, zip back to step off again-

  Very nasty. What does this remind you of? She couid feel herself smiling. If things had been just a little different, she'd have thrown his ass out of the bedroom-Mark's bedroom. Instead, she'd gone ahead and jumped the fast train without looking. Maybe just because he'd come to her, she hadn't gone to him. Not quite the same way, at least, not till the last moment, when the fast train reawakened by Claudio and Flavia and Dorcas and Tom went into high gear at the sight of him rushing
at her.

  With Mark, nobody went to anybody; things came together, and there they were, like conditions being right for rain, or sleet, or nothing at all. It had been a long time since anyone had come to her the way Ludovic had, even longer since she'd gone to anyone. In some ways it had been easier with Mark. Just hang in, wait for conditions to be right, no hurry, no worry, and if they were, they were; if they weren't, they weren't. Don't like it? Go complain to the sky about the rain while you're at it.

  But this one was different. This one she would have to do something about. If she'd known that at the time, maybe she'd have asked for more time to think about it.

  Horseshit. You knew. You set it up. You put a few things around in a pattern, and then you stood back to see if he'd make anything out of it. What does this look like to you, an open window or an open wound? He saw an open window, and he climbed right on in, and the bitch of it is, you had a feeling that was what he wanted to see and what he wanted to do. It's your ticket for your trip, and you can't just back off pleading self-defense.

  It had been one hell of a long time since she'd jumped the fast train. The fast train was the transportation of the very young and strong. After you got dragged under the wheels a few times, you knew you'd had your fill, you knew you weren't young and strong enough to do that anymore. If you were smart enough.

  She didn't think Gabe Ludovic had ever jumped the fast train in his life. Standing at the end of fifteen years of marriage, he'd wanted a lot more than sex. The wanting had been all but tangible, in the way he'd touched her, in the heat of his body, a heat that surprised both of them. The heat and the wanting had run him a good part of the night, keeping him wide awake if not active the whole time, talking crazy and sometimes just talking. It might have been the night they should have had before she'd gone off to Mexico with Mark.

  He'd been waiting. He'd been waiting for her to come back. Maybe he didn't know that, but she did. Now.

  His face floated before her, waiting for her to save it to chip. Instead, she wiped it away and refocused on the video hanging fire in her head.

  She was in the middle of the ghost-town sequence, moving among the images of the abandoned, rusted-out cars, when the feeling of being watched came over her. It wasn't part of the video, she'd have remembered the sensation. She halted the action and took a look around the empty street. Tall buildings with the windows busted out, dead-empty under cold, thin afternoon sunlight. On the street the smashed headlights of a murdered limo stared at her. Abruptly she remembered where the image had come from, the old footage of that college town on January 1, 2000. Except she'd left out the bodies.

  And then the bodies were there, tattered phantoms on the hood of the limo, hanging out the passenger window, fallen from the rear door, strewn on the streets like discarded dolls. Her pov rushed at them, and the hell of it was, she couldn't really tell if she'd done that or not, put the bodies in just by remembering, or whether-

  – take a little walk-

  A fleeting thought that disintegrated even as she became aware of it. She moved on, going with the music and the visuals, riding it all the way to the fall again. The stutter built on itself, lasting a second longer on each zip back in time, until the fall was a relief.

  And as she hung in the air for the brief moment before she dropped, the presence crashed in on her all at once, all the way through this time, and he took the fall with her.

  Acceptance streamed through her along with the terror of falling, the terror of falling with him where he could not have been and seemed to belong all at once.

  She came to, shivering on the mat.

  Through the exterior lens of the head mounted monitor atop the console, he watched her take the lift down and come striding across the pit to him. With another ax to grind. Just to do it, he gave her one, a big fire-ax with a handle as thick as a child's arm and a hungry-looking blade. Nasty; he logged the visual for later use.

  How perfectly she came through like this, the expressions on her face speaking more plainly than words. The frown of confusion as she looked at his body curled up on the carpet, wondering how he'd let her in, then the realization smoothing her face, irritation pulling at her mouth. It was almost like reading her mind, which he'd done when he'd sipped at her video. Great pleasure in the act, although there had been something disturbing there that had made him suddenly uncertain, made him wonder, which was not the only reason he wanted to do it again. Except he knew she had come to tell him not to.

  The commands to the system ran instantaneously for him, nothing more than breathing.

  "Over here, actually," came his voice from the console speaker. He saved the sight of her head jerking up to look, digitizing it as far as it would go, until he had a bit that was pure, self-contained startlement.

  She moved closer to the console and looked it over, her gaze passing two or three times over the headmount before she picked it up. He felt a wave of vertigo as his outer pov slid and jerked in her hands.

  "Take it easy, don't move so fast," he said.

  He saw her trace the lines from the headmount back into the system, then follow the trail of wires leading from the system to his head.

  "Think this up yourself?" she asked, putting down the head-mount.

  "Easy to do from the inside. Whole console fits in here with room to spare. Lots of things are easy. Check the flatscreen."

  He showed her the image of herself stalking across the pit toward him with the ax.

  "Pretty clean," she said casually. "No extraneous elements, no static, good res. Get your ass up, I got something to say to you."

  "Why don't you come on in here with me, then?"

  She looked from the headmount to the meat on the floor and back, glaring. "I want to know how you pulled that shit on me."

  "If it's on-line, I can get to it." How I did it, Gina? More like, how couldn't I? It's what I was made to do. I told you that ages ago, when I was far more meat than what I am now.

  She stood over him, looking at the wires trailing out of his head. "Don't do it again," she said quietly. "Don't you break in on me again."

  He let the words pour into him and run along his enhanced awareness, preserving the exact pitch of her voice, her pronunciation, the way her mouth had moved, and sent it all to the Gina file.

  "I scared you," he said. "But really, it was just like this, like you coming here to see me. I just didn't disconnect." She glanced at the speaker.

  "Yes, I do sound different," he said, and her attention snapped back to the meat on the floor. She was going to continue to address that poor meat, despite the fact that she should have looked directly into the headmount cam. "I'm better. I'm getting better all the time. That body was dragging me down."

  "I wouldn't talk about it in the past tense. How the fuck you think you can last like this?"

  He popped his vitals on the flatscreen for her. "Every time I took the wire, I learned to slow the metabolism a little more. I made adjustments, just like any other mechanism. Change for the machines."

  She knelt next to the body, and he panned the headmount lens down, tracking her. Tentatively she took hold of the body's arm and squeezed it. Then she looked up at the console again.

  "You can feel the difference, can't you, Gina? I'm not really in there, now. I'm maintaining it, but there's nobody home. I know it doesn't happen that way for you, but that's how it is for me."

  She let go of him and stood up, stubbornly shaking her head. "You been in worse shape than this after a tough night. You think it's some kinda fucking novelty for me to see you passed out on the floor?" Abruptly she turned and headed back to the lift.

  He swiveled the lens after her. "Gina."

  She stopped and turned her head just a little. "What."

  "I said this would be me. Didn't I?"

  Her head dipped slightly in what might have been a nod. Then she moved off, fast.

  He turned off the lens and gave himself over fully to what was within.

  He was run
ning across the airfield toward the zeppelin, following Caritha. The distance was deceptive-either that, or his pov was out of sync again. He couldn't seem to get coordinated, and he wondered how Gina handled that. He would have asked her, except there hadn't been any time the night before to bring the subject up gracefully. If he had even thought of it, which he hadn't. He was sharply aware of the way his heart was pounding, as if it were trying to beat itself to death in his chest, and not just from the illusion of running, though he was also conscious of the sensations of his feet pounding the ground and his arms pumping.

  Abruptly the side of the zeppelin lit up, flashing marquee-style. MORE DRUGS. He thumped to a stop and stared up at it, more amused than dismayed. Marly paused on the stairway up to the gondola; Caritha poked her head out the doorway to see what the holdup was.

  "Excuse me. What are you doing?"

  He turned. Rana Copperthwait was striding across the airfield, looking both severe and concerned. Christ, his mind was wandering again.

  "This is love," Copperthwait said. A breeze lifted her heavy curls slightly, brushing one ringlet across her mouth. She pushed it away irritably. "This is love and sex, no ambiguity here, no coyness. You're living everyone's fantasy, to be desirable to two people and them being willing to share. That's pretty great. It would be even better if you could throw in a few more women. Now don't you think you'd better get up in that zeppelin and get busy?"

  Gabe looked over his shoulder at Marly and Caritha. They shrugged. "Come on, hotwire," Marly said, and trotted up the steps to the gondola. He followed, pausing just outside the doorway. Caritha poked her head out again.

  "What's the matter now?"

  "I'm blank on what the inside of a zeppelin gondola looks like."

  "So call a database." She grabbed him by the front of his shirt and yanked him inside.

  He was standing in Mark's bedroom, looking down at Gina asleep in the rumpled sheets. Startled, he looked at Marly, who put up her hands and backed away. "I'm not touching this one. You made it, you deal with it."