Synners

by Pat Cadigan

  The item sent for review came back. The system examined it for any special instructions or markings that would designate it for return to the queue; there were none. This could mean only one thing, according to the procedures: it was to be expelled, sent out the exit, which was marked Release.

  Release was another part of the same system, but with different procedures. Unlike the area that governed the review queue, Release examined whatever came into it, for the sake of disposing of it properly. Hollywood releases were sent to the appropriate studios; commercials were sent to the designated networks; social-expression units were delivered to the proper addresses in the electronic mall; and the newest category of items, the rock videos, were delivered to the entertainment network for distribution, with a clone to the archives of the publishing company holding the rights to the music, another clone to the performer(s), and another to Home Storage and Records, tagged to indicate that it had been released to the proper targets.

  When the system had completed this task, it noticed that something peculiar had happened in the review area-the item that had just been released had left behind a complete replica of itself. Replication independent of the proper electronic cloning process specifically indicated the presence of a virus. There was nothing on the replica to indicate that it was actually the extra product of a cloning procedure performed too hastily by an inexperienced operator learning the system on the fly, from the inside rather than the outside; such a situation did not exist in the system's instructions. All the system knew was that this replication called for immediate antiviral procedures.

  The replica was isolated, sterilized by a complex series of instructions meant to counter and neutralize the reproductive apparatus, and then dismantled.

  The operation was a complete success. The system was in the process of disposing of the remains and posting a notice of successful sterilization when it noted that instructions belonging to itself were among the now-harmless separate elements. It reassembled the instructions and noted that they were for calling an item from the review queue out of sequence, to be sent to the review area. The system had no orders to dismantle and destroy a set of its own instructions, so it restored the set to the last location at which it had been operative.

  The system then returned to its starting mode, came to the instructions to pull an item out of sequence in the reordered queue, and sent it for review. The cycle repeated itself, and when it came to the same set of instructions, it obeyed them again, and again, and again.

  Before long the review area and its overflow storage were both full; neither had been meant to hold many items. Both had instructions to cover this eventuality, once again very simple: send the overflow back to the review queue. When items began returning from the review area, the system examined them for special instructions and, finding none, obeyed its own orders, which told it that, unless otherwise tagged for retention, any items returning from the review area were to be sent to Release.

  As far as the system knew, these were the complete original instructions. In fact, they had been modified, not by the restoration from the suspected virus but much earlier, in an unofficial, informal, and technically forbidden way by Manny Rivera himself. The system didn't remember this because the modification process had been purged from the memory local to Manny's area.

  The modification was small and actually quite common among busy supervisory staff. Manny's predecessor had shown him how to do it and also shown him how not to get caught. It just eliminated the necessity of a tag stating the item had been reviewed and was now authorized for release. Instead, the system was instructed to assume that any unmarked item coming out of the review area was to go directly to Release.

  Manny had found this so efficient, he might have forgotten about it and been caught running an illegally modified procedure several times over had he not set his calendar to alert him to restore the original program before each quarterly audit. When he had gone off to receive his own sockets, he had still been trying to work out something by which the calendar would automatically cue the program to restore the missing command, and then modify it again without his even having to think about it.

  The system went on obeying orders, and everything past a certain point in the review queue went to review and then to Release, the titles routinely logged and the inventory adjusted.

  Sometime much later the system discovered that another item had left a replica of itself behind, but this one reacted quite differently when the antiviral procedures were applied.

  24

  The sensation of falling was so real that even without a hot-suit, Sam felt it from toes to head. The ground rushed at her, swelling from a distant point to a gigantic vista of sudden death before everything went terrifyingly black. Nothingness; in the nothingness one last long note sang deeply, vibrating through every part of her shattered being, as if it were reassembling her with its sound.

  The note faded away, and there was a space of quiet before Art said, "And that's what they call rock'n'roll."

  The interior of Art's tent came up before Sam's eyes. "Jesus," she breathed.

  "But that's only what you get on a screen," Art went on. "If you have the sockets, you get something more."

  "Yah," said Sam, "a heart attack, probably."

  "No, it's something else. A little more video, only accessible through the sockets. It's in there all wrapped up in itself. I can show you some of it, if you want."

  "I'm not sure I'm ready for anything else," Sam said, still feeling shaky.

  Art dragged a large pillow over and stood it up on his knee. "You can look at it on my screen," he said. "Video within a video, hey?"

  Abruptly she was looking at the placid setting of a country lake with a shore completely covered with rocks. The pov moved in on the shore, descending to zero in on one of the smooth egg-shaped stones. Something seemed to move or change on the gritty surface of the stone before it blanked out. Art tossed the pillow aside. "That's all I can give you," he said, a little apologetically. "The rest won't translate into video."

  "Translate from what?" Sam asked him.

  He shrugged. These days Art was looking less ambiguous genderwise, at least whenever she talked to him. "From action. Something happens in there, but I have no idea how to explain to you what it is."

  Sam felt a small coldness in the pit of her stomach. "Have you told Fez about this?"

  "Only you. I haven't been able to decide what it is." He paused, looking apprehensive. "I think it might be another me."

  "You mean another part of you?"

  "That, or something like me. Strange operations are going on in there, in that part of the system, but I can't find them. I can only feel that they are happening."

  Sam thought for a moment. "I think you might be feeling the presence of those people on-line with their sockets. You know, other intelligences-consciousnesses-in contact with the system." She winced, hating the sound of the word consciousnesses. It sounded like the mystic bullshit that was in all-too-ample supply on The Stars, Crystals, and You Show.

  "No," Art said. "To feel that, I would have to crack their access points, what you call their consoles. The socket-people will be in contact with those, but not with the net. Like anything else in their consoles, they should be confined to their own hardware."

  "You'd think so, wouldn't you," Sam murmured, more to herself. The socket-people. It reminded her of an expression Fez used from time to time: pod-people. Pod-people with sockets, the information going in and going out, while in their cocoons they mutated-

  She pushed the thought away. "If you say so. You have more information about this than I do."

  "Would you like more information? I can gather some for you."

  "No, thanks. I've got enough to think about."

  "I know," Art said, suddenly solemn. "When the beams look into your eyes, they see you are troubled."

  "They don't look into my eyes," she said, somewhat dryly. "They bounce off my corneas. You'd be doing too well
to pick up anything from my corneas."

  "I know you by every move," Art said, unperturbed. "I know the pattern of your fingers on a keyboard, I know the movements of your eyes. The movements tell me a great deal about you."

  "So. Remind me to stare straight ahead next time I come in." She sighed. "I've got a lot on my mind these days. I just wasn't cut out to be a fugitive, I don't think. At you later, okay?"

  The screen faded to black, and she worked the monitor off her head. Behind her in the tent, Gator and Fez were studying something on Gator's laptop. The headmount had blocked the sound of their voices from her as well as the sound of her own voice from them; a way not to be in the same room with them while being in the same room with them, if you wanted to call Gator's tent a room. Like a bedroom, say.

  The sleeping bags were rolled up and tucked away somewhere out of sight, as they always were during the day, so she had no idea how they were arranged when in use. Mostly she pictured them side by side, but that was as far as she would let the picture go. It was only surmise, really, even after all these weeks; she knew nothing for sure, and she hadn't asked.

  Gator looked over her shoulder at her then and smiled. "How's the doctor?"

  Sam shrugged. "He showed me one of the new videos. There's something funny in it."

  "I'll bet there is," Fez said, without taking his eyes from the screen. Some kind of complicated graphic was rotating on it; another of Gator's tattoo designs. Sam caught a glimpse of something like paisleys surrounding some sort of shifting polygon.

  "I'm going back to St. Diz. See you later," Sam said, and slipped out of the tent without waiting to hear Fez's usual admonishment to be careful.

  The air was a bit cooler on the Mimosa today. A calling card from October, as Rosa put it, a little reminder that summer would be ending soon. Already the Mimosa population seemed a bit sparser, people taking off for warmer hideouts, or going wherever it was they had to go when they weren't camping on the strip. The ones who stayed behind had a case-hardened look to them, weathered and more than a little bit hopeless. You had to be pretty much resigned from the world to stay on a permanent basis; Sam doubted she was one of them.

  If she and Rosa had not found squat space in the ruins of the old inn or restaurant or whatever it was, she doubted that she would have stayed this long. However long that was; in spite of regular visits with Art and managing to keep up with the news off the net, she had pretty much lost track of the days. One week had blended into another in a strange stasis (or stagnation, she thought bitterly), each day bearing few distinguishing marks. And now summer was coming to an end, and they were no closer to any answers. They were all still wanted for questioning-it seemed to be a standing order- and Keely was still wherever he was. Legalization of the socket procedure had come about, and the world seemed no different for it, except most of the implant clinics were in the process of either changing to socket implantation or adding the procedure to their repertoires.

  She passed a stand where a couple of kids were running graphics of dolphins and exotic birds on a matched pair of jerry-rigged monitors. The resolution was perfect, but the hardware looked like something from rewiring hell.

  "Hey," one of the kids called to her. "I know you."

  Sam gave her a one-finger salute. The kid beckoned, and she went over.

  "You whack to AR?" the kid asked. The smaller one standing next to her had to be her brother, Sam thought. She shrugged noncommittally.

  "Run with this, you see and be." The kid tapped the monitor on the counter in front of her. An impossible parrot was flowering into existence on the screen, neon-colored, luminous. "Fly like an eagle."

  "Fly like a parrot," Sam corrected her, a little amused. Fly like a parrot and talk like an eagle, probably. So far there was no law against stupid Artificial Reality.

  "Grown from the egg," the kid said. "Transform and believe."

  Believe was a word that seemed to figure heavily in all the subgroups of Mimosa slang. That had to mean something, but Sam felt too weary to theorize.

  "I 'll believe later," she said, waving a hand at the kids, and went on. Over on her right two cases were having an altercation over who owned a particular spot under the Hermosa Pier. One ragged figure was trying to haul the other one out by a leg while the latter tossed up a lot of sand and made hooting noises.

  "There go the property values," Sam muttered. Just beyond was the half-falling-down building she and Rosa shared with the loose, semiorganized group of hackers that had taken it over and shored it up against further collapse. The big attractions of the place were an actual roof and a mostly regular power source, supplemented with what they could collect and store from the solars. The roof had a lot of holes, most of which were covered with any available material, none of it leak-proof, but hey, that's what we on the Mimosa call home, sweet home. She'd have cried, except she'd cried herself out during the first week.

  Where the front door had been was a ragged hole and a lopsided gate where they all took turns doing a kind of half-assed sentry duty. Percy was sitting on the gate today, leisurely poking at a piece of hardware with one of his homemade tools (Homemade without a real home? Never mind.) while he held another between his teeth. He was big for fifteen, with thick, straight black hair he chopped off himself whenever it got long enough to dangle in the hardware he was always bent over, and a little bit of soft black fuzz on his upper lip that was trying to be a mustache. Sam had thought he was Spanish until Gator had told her he was part Filipino. He had a genius for hardware, and he was more competent and self-possessed than Sam remembered being at the same age. All of two years ago, she reminded herself. No, closer to three; she would be eighteen in October.

  Eighteen on the Mimosa. "Are we ready for that?" she murmured to herself. "We don't think so."

  Percy looked up then, spotted her, and waved her over. What the hell; where else was she going to go?

  "Age of wireless," Percy said, showing her the piece he'd been working on. Her eyes widened.

  "If that works as good as it looks, I'll pay you to make one for me. Better yet, walk me through it." She took the piece from him, a palm-sized card with an array of silvery receptors studding the surface.

  "Whack to hardware, dontcha." Percy grinned and pushed her hand away as she tried to give it back to him. "Yours. Believe it."

  She felt awkward under his friendly grin. "That's nice, Perce, but-"

  "Believe it and forget about it. Whack to something new?" He jumped down from the gate and let out a bellow. "Ritz!"

  A slightly older kid popped his head up from behind a pile of boards and junk. "What, this minute?"

  "Now and now," Percy confirmed, nodding at the gate. The other kid took his place. "Come on."

  Sam followed him, pausing to take a look at her own squat space. Most of her own belongings were hidden under some loose boards in the floor, which were in turn piled with what debris she had scrounged. Not that there was a debris shortage. Her spot was in what had possibly been part of a dining room, and there were still plenty of dismembered tables and chairs that had gone unsalvaged. The culture back at the turn of the millennium had been even more wasteful than the one she presently lived in-lived on the outskirts of, rather.

  Few of the walls between rooms had remained standing, and the second floor had collapsed completely, except for a few beams. Some of the more daring souls in residence had crawled out on them to decorate them with impromptu hanging sculptures made of junk-old hardware, broken pieces of kitsch that some interior decorator had probably agonized over, never thinking that an earthquake would reduce it all to detritus.

  At the very back of the building was an area that had been some kind of gathering hall or ballroom. There were no squatters here; it served as a common storage and work area. Sam had finally met the elusive Captain Jasm in person back here, a lanky black Japanese woman of some indeterminate age- twenty? thirty? Older didn't seem likely-who was always tinkering with exoskeletons. At first Sam had thou
ght she used exos in lieu of hotsuits, but apparently Jasm didn't really care for hotsuits, at least for her own purposes, which seemed mainly to transfer arcane patterns of movement to programs. One of the exos was a twelve-foot monstrosity, vaguely humanoid in shape, burdened with whatever hardware Jasm wasn't using. Sam found the thing rather spooky looking, like a robot in progress. She could imagine it coming spontaneously to life and crunching through the building all of its own accord like a high-tech Frankenstein's monster.

  At the moment it stood off to one side with the rest of Jasm's equipment piled around it, all cleared away to make room for an enormous metal framework bearing sixteen monitors. Sam's mouth dropped open, and she turned to Percy.

  "Whack to a little TV?" he said, amused.

  She spotted Rosa doing something with a cam on a tripod a little ways away from the monitor setup.

  "Here," said Percy, and went over to her. Rosa looked up and smiled as Percy examined the connections on the cam. They led into the framework of monitors.

  "Is this something?" Rosa said. "Sixteen monitors, no waiting."

  "Where did they all come from?" Sam asked.

  Rosa shrugged. "Here and there."

  "TV and more TV. It looks like something out of an old movie," Sam said. "Forty, fifty years ago, they were always dragging out the TV screens when they wanted to show what the glorious future would look like. As if the future was just going to be more TV."

  "And, as it turned out, it is," Rosa said.

  "Now," Percy said, stepping back from the cam. "Whack it."

  Rosa turned on the cam. Sam saw the monitors flicker to life, all of them showing broken-up images of something that might have been her and Rosa standing together.

  "Still lousy, Perce," Rosa said.

  "Whack it," he said again.

  "It is turned on," Rosa said, frowning.

  He shook his head, reached over, and slapped the top of the cam's plastic case. The images jumped, steadied, and then cleared.