Synners

by Pat Cadigan

  She straightened up from the laptop and went to find Gator.

  Fez and Gator were sitting on the floor in the work island with their heads together over Gator's laptop, now connected to the work-island system. Occasionally Art's face appeared on the bare monitor in a series of flash-frozen images. "It should work," Fez said tiredly.

  "… time," Sam heard Gator say in a low voice. "He didn't appear in a day, and he won't reappear in the course of one night."

  Standing several feet behind them, Sam told herself she should say something, let them know she was there. They'd have been happy to have her join them; Gator would want to know about the clean line and the way she'd done it. Gator might even have wanted to start sending to Santa Fe right away.

  Gator's head sank down on Fez's shoulder, and he put his arm around her. "… tired," Gator murmured. "Then let's go home and go to bed."

  Sam ducked down behind a pile of debris as they got up and left.

  She stayed there for a while, hugging her knees, and then, without really thinking about it, she went over to Gator's work island. The system was running quietly with a blank screen. Art, are you in there? Somewhere? Somehow?

  Her hand fell on the unit in her pocket. She'd made no use of it since that long-ago day in Fez's apartment, when both Fez and Rosa had chewed her out. Which was a stone-home waste of something she'd gone to so much trouble to steal.

  She wondered if that had been Fez's main objection to the pump unit, that it was stolen. Could have been. For all his protestations that information should be free, his basic outlook was really quite conservative. She could say she had hacked the unit out or cracked it or fooled it out, but Fez would say she'd stolen it, with a very slight edge in his voice as if he'd never stolen anything in his life.

  For all she knew, Sam thought suddenly, he hadn't. He was on-line a great deal, and he could access any secret hacker nook in any net setup, but she'd never heard of him cracking into some private business organization. His interest had always been with the system itself.

  Well, it wasn't as if she'd stolen the unit so that Diversifications didn't have it anymore, or for the purpose of going into business for herself, or to sell to a competing business for her weight in bearer-chips (she might have been able to get twice her weight in bearer-chips). She'd just wanted a copy of the specs so that she could have it, to build and work with. There wasn't much nanotechnology hardware around for anyone but germ jockeys, so the unit was a real find.

  She pulled the unit out of her pocket and unrolled the connections. The two needles gleamed in the light. Taking a breath, she reached under her shirt, pinched her flesh between two fingers, and slid the needles in.

  As usual, they stung for several seconds, and she waited for the sensation to subside before pressing the sticky area of the wires against her flesh to hold the needles in place. Rosa was right, she supposed, Diversifications would never have put this over in the mainstream marketplace, which was all the more reason to own one. But needles weren't that bad. Not considering that they delivered free power abundant enough for function on the nano-level.

  She took the sunglasses out of her shirt pocket and connected them to the unit, then plugged the unit feed into Gator's system. It wouldn't be necessary to use the chip-player this time, not for what she wanted to do.

  She found the data right away; Gator had it stored redundantly, in her own system, and in the larger communal one. Sam chose the raw source material, taking each tattoo separately, which made it a slower process, but she was interested in accuracy, not speed. Perhaps the problem with restoring Art was a matter of copy-fading, she thought idly as the data was copied to her pump unit. Making a copy of a copy of a copy always resulted in some loss of detail, no matter how meticulous the process. But maybe there was a way to restore the lost detail. A way that was the only way.

  The old excitement of trying something new began to stir in her. This was something worthy of her preoccupation, she thought firmly, not this going around behaving like a Spin-the-Bottle reject. And besides, Gator was probably better for Fez anyway, since she was closer to his age. Gator was practically thirty.

  Hope I look like that when I'm thirty. Wish I looked like that now.

  She shoved the thought aside forcefully as the system signaled the copy process was complete. She disconnected herself from Gator's system and went back to her own work island against the wall.

  The pump screen came up on the left lens of the sunglasses, blurring for a moment as it readjusted to her focal length. The data was all there, no errors, no bad spots.

  "Okay," she said, plugging the unit into her laptop. "A little traveling music, please."

  The procedure she had just finished with was still on deck. She started to activate it and then paused. How much, how far? Art had resided in the whole net. Worldwide, Fez had said. His attention was usually localized, but he'd been in the entire net, so the points between here and Alameda wouldn't be enough.

  She pulled the glasses down on her nose, topped back to the start of the program, and changed a few figures. What the hell, sooner or later she probably would have had to do this anyway, since someone would eventually want to talk to Japan or England or even just Boston. What the hell, she'd put in a search for all the points she could induce to vibrate sympathetically.

  It wasn't a fast search, but it went more rapidly than it had when she'd been trying for Alameda. Of course, she'd been making it up as she'd gone along, then; the hard part was done now.

  The inn grew more quiet around her. Even Mimosans sleep sometime, she thought wryly. Mimosans, right. The next step would be a campaign for statehood, perhaps, or even secession and status as a separate country. The national language would be that gibberish Percy spoke. Illegal aliens welcome. Tourist trade would probably be in the toilet, though.

  Her mind was playing a fantasy of customs agents taking over the inn when her laptop beeped and she realized she'd been dozing. The laptop screen showed her four columns of figures; she pressed a key, and the display changed to a chart with both figures and location names boxed and connected to each other.

  She patted the pump unit. "Ready, Art? Be careful, and write if you get work."

  Her finger hovered over the transmit key. This was a rather sizable and lengthy transmission for the first try. If something went wrong, and the virus woke up and got around the defenses, that would give the virus Art's raw material. Not to mention an access to the clean lines.

  "Art, you better be worth it." She hit the button.

  At first she didn't know what she was seeing. Then she realized she'd fallen asleep with her sunglasses on. The message blinking on the lens said:

  Successful Trans. Complt.

  ›Sam, If You're There,

  Keep Quiet! ‹

  Keep quiet. Sam started to giggle. Wasn't that a piece of karma? She had successfully brought Art back from the dead (or something) and he wanted her to keep quiet about it.

  She looked over the top of the sunglasses. The ballroom was still empty. Routing the keyboard from her laptop to her pump unit, she typed: ›Art, if that's you, for god's sake, WHY?‹

  The letters rolled out on the screen in a rhythm she instinctively identified as Art's. ›Don't feel well.‹

  Getting reconstructed from scratch would probably take it out of anybody, even a virtual somebody, she thought. Well, at least the files Gator had saved contained a substantial amount of memory about herself.

  ›Don't feel well. ‹ The message blinked at her again, as if Art had repeated himself. Her hands shook a little as she typed.

  ›Are you infected?‹ One thumb hovered over the purge button. If he was infected, he had the laptop and the pump unit, but perhaps she could keep it from spreading to the larger system.

  It seemed like forever until he answered. ›No. Pause. Thanks to you. Pause. Just don't feel well. ‹

  ›Listen carefully, Sam typed. Make that: pay close attention. You have been restored from files after a
virus ate into the net and we lost you. Please list the most recent things you can remember. ‹

  This pause was even longer, and she thought he was having trouble accessing his own memory.

  ›I am not a reconstruction. This IS me, the original. The one that was in the net when the infection hit. ‹

  Sam frowned. Of course, he would feel original; he wouldn't have anything to compare. ›Why are you so sure?‹

  ›Because I incorporated the reconstruction during reconfiguration. You didn't reconstruct me, you FOUND me. Pause. And brought me home. Pause. Where is home?‹

  She hesitated. For Art, where could have almost any answer. ›I am hiding out on the Mimosa with Rosa, Fez, others. You are running out of my ex-insulin pump unit. Is that what you wanted to know?‹

  ›Close enough. Another pause. Do you have a headmount handy?‹

  ›Why?‹

  ›Because I'm tired of producing type, that's why, I want to fee! like I ' m WITH somebody! But just you. Nobody else y e t. ‹

  ›Okay, you don't have to shout. Wait while I get the mount. ‹

  It was almost funny, she thought, as she unplugged the feed from her laptop and went to get the head-mounted monitor Fez had brought with him. She connected it to the pump unit and put it on, muting her vocal input.

  Art Fish faded in on the screen against a background of swiftly moving clouds. One by one other things began to appear-a loud black-and-white-tiled floor, partial walls on either side, a window stuck in midair where the back wall would have been, and finally a scattering of pillows from his old tent. Art twinkled out and reappeared in a nest of pillows. He didn't look any different than he ever had, as far as she could tell, but he was manifesting at a greater perceived distance than he usually did.

  "You didn't tell anyone, did you?" he asked.

  "No. What's the matter? Are you sure you're not infected?"

  "I'm sure. I got caught out, but it didn't get me," he said. "I tried to get back by subway. Where there wasn't any subway, I had to make one. There were pit bulls out here and there, defending against the virus, but they didn't know the difference between it and me, of course." His face looked sad. "Anyone with clean lines means to keep them that way. They don't care what comes through the wire, if it's not something they recognize, they blast it." He made a gun of his left hand. "Boom. Kiss the sky, as Jimie would say. I like Jimie. I got down so many levels in the subway, it wasn't a subway anymore. There were the pit bulls, and there was the virus, and they were all after me. I compressed as much as I could, damped down, dug into a hole, but then I couldn't get out. I couldn't run a search to find other holes. Even if I'd been able to, I couldn't have used them. Too much activity, see; all that activity, they would have found me. But you found me instead."

  "How?" she asked.

  "You sent the reconstruction through. Vibrating in the net, point to point, clean point to clean point. It called me to it, and I sang with it, and it sang me all the way home." The image smiled for the first time. "You should close it down now. Before it wakes something up. That infection's smart."

  "We're trying to get news in and out. If the Phoenix node goes, Alameda-"

  He waved a hand. "If the Phoenix node goes, you won't have Alameda for ten minutes. L. A.'s completely trashed now. I took pictures from the subway when I still could. There were a few hit-and-run'ers out, but they didn't last long next to the looters. The National Guard is rattling around trying to figure out how to function without communications. No radio, no phone service. This thing's in a lot of receiver equipment, see, and all that stuffs on-line somewhere, even the little operators are on-line somewhere, in the phone, in the accounts with the utilities companies, lots of different ways. Tunes in any bandwidth it wants, screws the signal. It learned how to do that. Pretty soon it would have started learning the subway, too. I'd have been stuck there just waiting for it to learn how to get down to me."

  "But it's just an infection. Unless it was programmed to learn-"

  "It's not just an infection," he said, pulling her pov in a little closer. "See, that's what everyone thinks because nobody's been near it. And those that have can't tell what they know, or would know, if they still knew anything. It's not just an infection. It's not a virus or a bomb, it's-I don't know what to call it. A hot flash and a meltdown, a whack in the head with a spike." He gestured at the floating window frame. The panes vanished as a schematic of a human brain in profile lit up. Art rose from the pillows and crooked a finger at her; her pov slid smoothly over to the window for a medium close-up.

  "Your neural network. As opposed to mine," he said. A blue balloon filled with computer-garbage symbols materialized in the upper right corner of the window and started to drift down toward the brain. "And here's the spike, looking for a victim." A string dangling from the balloon wriggled around, snakelike, until it touched the brain, piercing the outline. The symbols in the balloon slipped down the string into the brain, where they suddenly reproduced themselves until they were no longer separately distinguishable. The brain popped like a soap bubble.

  "For the first time ever," Art said, "it's possible for people to die of bad memes, just like computers. Just like software. The input goes in, see-"

  "Art," Sam said gently.

  "Don't interrupt. I've been through a lot just to talk to you. The input goes in, which is what input does, and it runs its little spike ramadoola, reproducing all over the place. The thoughts begin, and the adrenaline pumps up, or the serotonin goes down, or endorphins start popping all over the place. The sodium pumps go into overdrive, or shut down almost completely, and the brain starts rearranging all around this stuff, and by then the process is unstoppable. Feedback loops- outputs turn around and go back in as inputs. Neurons start firing in patterns over and over, and if they're bad patterns, that's, well, too bad. You people got no shields. You put in sockets, but you forgot about the watchdogs and the alarm systems and the antivirals and the vaccines. You people put those on every neural net except your own."

  He looked at her accusingly. "It's something that happened to someone. And it's something they should have seen was going to happen to him, and they didn't. Or they ignored it because they didn't think it would matter."

  "Art, at least let me tell Fez you're here," she said.

  "Not yet." Her pov tracked him back to the nest of pillows. "I've been through a lot. I'm not ready for that much input right now. I've had a good part of myself amputated. If you got an arm and a leg cut off, you wouldn't feel chatty either. But I suppose I shouldn't expect you to understand. For you the nets are an object. You have self and nonself, and those are both constants. For me it's something else. The L.A. system wasn't a where; it was a configuration of me." He paused. "Not an arm and a leg, that's wrong. More like a hemispherectomy."

  Could an AI get hysterical, Sam wondered. "Art, you're present. You're whole. And there's still a system to host you-"

  "I'm not alone."

  Sam hesitated. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, I'm not alone. I've got the Answering Machine with me.

  "But the Answering Machine is you. Or yours. Or…" Sam trailed off. Self and nonself and semiself? She wondered briefly as to the exact nature of Art's Weltanschauung.

  "It's somebody else now. Separate. But if I'm in your pump unit, it's in here with me."

  She accessed the figures and saw he was telling the truth; there were two separate items inventoried. "What is it?" she asked nervously. "I have to know, Art, or it goes. Ill purge it rather than take a chance it'll eat our system alive and you with it."

  "It won't eat anything. It can't." Art gestured at his surroundings. "This isn't mine, it's the ID screen for it. That's all I can get. And this." One word came up across the tiles on the floor: ZAMIATIN. Sam raised her eyebrows. It wasn't any brand name or trademark she recognized. "Maybe that means something to someone," Art went on. "The rest of it's walled up behind an access code and a password, and I can't give you either one."


  "Can't you hack them out?"

  "I tried. It's in lockdown. Everything comes out as garbage."

  "You can figure garbage if you watch the patterns enough times," she said. "Fez told me he's seen you do it."

  "Not this garbage. There isn't any fixed pattern, it comes out different every time. There's something like a program in there in charge of garbage."

  "Something like a program?" Sam said, confused. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "I'm something like a program. Look, Sam, do you trust me?"

  Sam winced. "It's just that you might not know if it's that thing, the spike, or not."

  "I know."

  She sighed. "All right then. Let's suppose you do. Hypothetically, for the moment. What do you want me to do about it?"

  "Just let him stay here."

  "Him?" She thought for a moment. "Art, are you sure what you've got isn't just that reconstruction I sent through the system?"

  "I'm sure," he said. "If we can access it, it will be a reincarnation and half rebirth. If we can't, he may stay in a coma forever."

  "A coma?"

  "That's about as well as I can translate it. You wouldn't understand my term for it."

  "Don't get too sure about what I would or wouldn't understand."

  Art's smile was broad. "Being a fugitive hasn't made you any less a badass, has it?"

  "You're beginning to sound more like your old self. Can I tell someone you're back now?"

  "If you're connected to the system, I'll tell them myself. And Fez, too."

  "You can't reach Fez," she said. "He donated his hardware to the pile. There's nothing in Gator's tent now. Except Gator and the tattoo stuff. And Fez, of course."