Synners

by Pat Cadigan

  Only in part. You were the fooler loop, she's the mirror. There she is. Better help her. She's strong enough to let you do that now.

  There was a sensation of being shoved through some kind of thin but tough barrier, like a sheet of plastic. He landed on two feet in the pit. Gina was already straddling Mark with her hands on the connections.

  The common eye-shaped area that was their life.

  "But what do you think will happen?" asked the Mark-thing under her. "What do you think this is?"

  A hard wave of dizziness hit her between the eyes, and she was staring up at herself holding the wires, ready to jerk them out.

  Should've known it wouldn't be so fucking simple. U B the ass to risk, that's me. What did I wannabee, yah, how can you wannabee something and not know?

  "There was a little bit of him left, then, do you remember? He opened his eyes and begged you to do it. Because the little of him that stayed with the body then, that was from the last time, in Mexico. Do you remember?"

  The surprise of her own urgency, and his, and the overwhelming familiarity, as if they'd never had any secrets from each other. Because he'd already taken her there, to the lake with the stony shore. The doctors had fed the image into her brain to find out if she could see it as he'd meant it, but what he'd meant was not what they'd thought. He'd taken her there, and she'd been there for him.

  "If you do it now, that goes, too.

  "Can you do that, really? Can you end it, not just him but that bit of yourself he kept with the part that stayed with the body, that is here now? Can you die a little and live through it?"

  She tried to force her pov back home, but it was jammed there, gazing up at her own face. Who had been there, looking out of his eyes and begging her to yank the wires? Mark? Or herself?

  "If you don't believe you can be in two places at once, you've forgotten everything you've learned. You, Ludovic, his simulated playmates, Mark-me. Do it, and everyone dies a little, and can you do that, really?"

  She could see herself waver at whatever she was seeing in those eyes, her/Mark's eyes; the surge of brute hope she felt from the thing at the sight was not as far removed from herself as she would have wished.

  That'll teach you to glory in your separateness, your precious aloneness.

  Ludovic reached around from behind and put his hands over hers on the wires.

  "Oh, it'll be even harder for you, Mr. Noble Gesture. Do it, and you'll kill your taste for it, and you'll kill your last link to them, your simulated playmates, and that's something you might not be able to get back, ever. Can you do that, really?"

  Ludovic's expression changed, and she knew that he was seeing them.

  "You gave up what you had of them, but see, here is what I took from the volatile memory of your system when I ran through, and it's every bit of them. Can you end it for them? Wouldn't you rather do just about anything else but lose them again, wouldn't you rather come and live with them and go back to the way it was, not having to do anything, least of all make Noble Gestures?"

  "Last thing they'd expect, hotwire."

  It should have been easy, but the desire for them was still there. The desire for them and the way things had been, for no good reason, just because-

  "Because you can," Gina said. "But it's not the only thing you can do."

  But it's different when you think you have no choice, and then suddenly you do after all.

  "I simply do not fucking believe we have to do this again," Gina said, and her fist was coming at him. "There ain't nothing to them you didn't have in the first place, hotwire. And you know what you got."

  "But how do you know whatever's right?" he asked, confused.

  "You don't," she said. Realization came simultaneously with the words. "It's a damned Schrodinger world." The name of the law.

  On the stony shore he turned not because it was pulling at him but all on his own power. And she was there, just having turned around herself to look at him.

  Her fist pushed through the air. This time he ducked, and it sailed past him to strike Mark.

  Their hands came up together, and the wires pulled free.

  The chain reaction went at the speed of light, unfeeling and unstoppable. It unraveled the pit around them, moved on to the lake with the stony shore, the common room, Mexico, Manny's office, Hollywood Boulevard, everything dissolving, running to nothing, and they were pulled along with it.

  "I didn't even know for sure sometimes you were there," Gina told him.

  "Likewise," Gabe said, feeling tired and exhilarated all at once. "You never know until you turn and look."

  Abruptly he found himself back in the strange half room. Right; no need to go any further with it now, it was all happening by itself. He could sense it retracing every step the Big One had taken, undoing itself as it spread out in every direction, a starburst whose points touched Phoenix, Sacramento, Seattle, Japan, Mexico, London, Bangkok-

  He turned to say something to Gina. She wasn't there.

  "Hey," said Jasm. She had one ear to Gina's chest. "I hate to tell anybody, but I don't hear anything."

  Sam looked down at her father. His face was still swollen, but the impressions from his hotsuit were fading rapidly. "When do we pull them out? Or do we just pull Gabe out?"

  Keely motioned for her to be quiet. Sam looked at the Beater. He had refused to relinquish his new role as official potato, and she hadn't felt she could insist. Somehow, going in with them, even by old hardware, however briefly, whether to any purpose or not, had changed her status.

  But the way the Beater was sitting, she could lunge quick and yank the wires out of his stomach. One hard jerk. If she had to do it to save Gabe's life-

  "Whack to this," said Percy. He was holding the cape connected to the big system. The patterning side was blank white.

  Easy now, Gabe told himself. He'd only looked at one spot. She could be anywhere in the room. Schrodinger's Gina-

  The window still framed an area of black against the moving clouds. He took a step toward it and then stopped. The door swung only one way now, and it had already swung for him. He could wait, or he could go.

  They floated in near-perfect rapport, balancing. With the virus gone, Markt was wide open, and she could see everything now, Markt's life and Mark's life and her life and their overlapping life together, right where it had always been.

  "Let's dance," Mark said, surfacing in the composite. "Let's jump all night, let's burn it all down and burn it back up again. Let's die before we get old. Let's never die, ever."

  She hesitated.

  "It'll be better now than ever it was," Markt said. "And we're inoculated now. Even if it could come back, it couldn't touch us."

  "I want you," said Mark. "Always did. Just couldn't find my way through the noise. But the noise is gone, and the wanting is still there."

  Through the still-open window, she could see a very small and distant Gabe Ludovic, waiting.

  "It's what I was born to do. And doing that, I can do anything now. I can be there for you. It was only impossible in the real world."

  Her face pressed against his bony chest, hanging onto what was left. Not just remnants now, but everything. Better now than ever it was.

  "All the equipment we need is in our room," he said, leading her up the long hall. He opened the door, stepped inside, and turned, holding out his hand. Markt leaned close.

  "The brain feels no pain."

  It was a more persuasive argument this time.

  He knew. He could sense it all through the dark window, and he knew it dwarfed his own offering.

  Was that why they'd gone into this so easily? Did Gina want to be with him so badly? If she did, why had he come along? To be there to convince her to come out again after it was all over? Christ, he'd only known her a few months. After fifteen years of marriage, he'd been unable to persuade his wife to come out of a sealed office. How was he supposed to fight over twenty years of someone else, to compete with a, a whatever-it-was,
a video, a synthesis, a sympathetic vibration?

  Hey, Gina-come on out here and pop my chocks. Really, it'll make you feel better.

  Sure. When the brain felt no pain?

  What the fuck, as Gina would say if she were here. You got a punch in the jaw and, for a little while, a life. Keep asking, maybe someday someone'll put an egg in your beer. But not today.

  He yielded to the pull toward the outside and faded away.

  "I'd say about ten beats a minute, now," said Jasm, holding Gina's wrist. Sam tightened her grip on the wires in her stomach. There was a rustle as Gabe stirred on the mattress. Keely knelt down beside him and then looked up at Sam. "He's coming out of it."

  "She isn't," said Jasm.

  It was several hours before the feeling of disorientation and woolly-headedness even began to drop away from him. Gina stayed down. Ignoring his still-swollen jaw, he told them in as few words as possible what was happening to her, or what could be happening. Sam pointed out gently that he didn't know for sure, and he didn't contradict her by telling her he had looked and she hadn't been there. Not out loud.

  Local portions of the dataline came back by the next morning, anchors recapping the big story every few minutes. The final count of socket casualties had yet to be determined. L.A. was still burning, and martial law was the order of the day.

  The young guy called Percy offered him some 'killers. "They make me a little stupid," he said, pushing them back at the kid. "Thanks all the same."

  He distracted Sam with a shower of attention, telling her everything that had happened before he'd seen her at the graveyard, even though she'd heard a lot of that. He didn't have to tell her anything about after, and he didn't try.

  The following night Gina was still down, and he made a big deal out of tucking Sam in like a child in her little privacy area, her squat space, she called it. The ex-pump had been put aside, the contents transferred back into the big system, so it wouldn't be long before contact would be reestablished on the showy multimonitor arrangement they had. They were all waiting for that, he could tell.

  Sam went to sleep, and Gina had still not come out of it. There were so many kinds of doors that swung only one way, and he could wait, or he could go.

  Maybe there really is no magic, but for a few moments here and there, Gina, I think maybe there was. Just a few moments, but they were more than enough. And is that high enough up in the stupidsphere for you?

  Go somewhere. Go somewhere.

  He touched his swollen cheek. This was where he had come in; good place to make an exit.

  There was no pull toward the outside this time, but he went anyway.

  Epilog

  The light on the voice-only phone meant he had email. He called the local exchange, and the grandfatherly man read it to him. Just a thank-you note from the school on the latest simulations for the geometry students. Gabe felt pleased. It was an isolated area and not a moneyed one, either. Custom-programs off the dataline would have broken their budget, whereas the little bit he charged for producing them let him live well enough, combined with the other little bit he made on the holos he managed to sell from time to time. He was glad of the income but disgusted by the dataline. Still run by a bunch of greedy bastards who wanted to charge by the bit, who had learned nothing. He was glad every day that he'd refused to put it in his house.

  It was a pretty nice house, smaller than the condo in Reseda, but far more pleasant. It looked like someone lived there. Not in the best of style, perhaps-the furniture was a little of this and a little of that, and the last occupants had apparently gotten a deal on yellow-duck wallpaper. Cartoony yellow ducks sailed the walls in the kitchen, in the living room, and, mysteriously, on only one wall of the bedroom. Yellow ducks he could live with, though; they didn't bother him, and he didn't bother them.

  The electrical system was less easy to get along with-he had to unplug the refrigerator to run the holo cam. But nothing, neither food nor holos, had spoiled yet.

  The only thing he felt mildly bad about was his lack of gardening ability. The backyard seemed destined to remain scrub no matter what he did.

  But the front yard was just fine. It stopped short about fifty feet from the front door, where the land dropped sharply down a rocky incline. From there he had an unobstructed view of the ocean. Someone was operating an underwater farm a few hundred yards out; with binoculars he could watch the dolphins popping up and down, hard at work at whatever dolphins did on underwater farms. On some days he did almost nothing else but watch them.

  He'd thought at first that the solitude might make him strange, and then he'd asked himself just how much stranger did he think he could get, and after that he never gave it another thought. Being alone wasn't bad. If he really wanted to be among other people, he could walk the mile and a half to the village and do his shopping.

  There was one media parlor/bar on the village's meager main drag, and only once had he ever been tempted to go inside. That had been not long after he'd moved into the house. He'd been walking by, and the front door had been open, and he'd heard his own name from inside. He'd stopped then and listened. The anchor had been reading a list of known socketed people who were still missing, fates unknown. Gina was also on the list, along with a lot of other people he'd never heard of. He didn't notify anyone, and he didn't worry, because he wasn't using that name anymore anyway.

  Nor was he concerned that any available pictures of himself would give anything away. These days his hair was more grey than not, and long, down to his shoulders. He fit right in with most everyone else in the village. Appearancewise.

  But a few days after that incident-or non-incident-he'd dreamed about everything, for the first time in a long time. It hadn't been much, a quick flip through some of the high and low points leading up to his departure from the broken-down inn on the Mimosa. After that the dream had been very detailed: the long, long walk, part of it under the not-so-hidden eyes of the survivalists and then the ride with the old guy to Santa Ysabel in the panel truck. He'd told the beautiful one, Gator, that he'd just had to get out and walk to clear out the cobwebs, blow the stink off. At the time he'd been sure she'd believed him, but in the dream she obviously didn't. It made him wonder if she hadn't known all along that he'd been leaving. Or maybe she'd wasted a day or two driving around in Flavia's car while the urchins picked through the cases under the piers, thinking he'd been jumped. Now he couldn't decide.

  The next ride he'd gotten from Santa Ysabel had taken him due north several hundred miles. The dream got sketchy again about the time in Reno, which had been a mistake anyway.

  Detail returned again when he got to the coast, well north of the L.A. area but far from San Francisco. The dream marched him through the Recovery and the way he'd established himself in the village as a refugee from the L.A. collapse. Much sympathy all around; everyone assumed he wasn t socketed, and he didn't tell them otherwise.

  The dream might have taken him right up to the moment he'd gone to bed that night, except he'd forced himself to wake up and stayed awake for what remained of the wee hours and all of the following day, keeping busy and instructing his brain that it would not visit any more nostalgia on him.

  It worked for a while. After a time he discovered he could weather the occasional dream about Gina. You could get used to just about anything if you endured it long enough.

  Eventually he lost track of time. He'd been waiting for that to happen, but when it came, when he realized he didn't know exactly how many seasons had come and gone since he'd left the Mimosa, he was neither happy nor unhappy. It fit the context, it caused him no discomfort not to know how much time had passed between one thing and another. Working for the school kept him on a reasonable schedule.

  He enjoyed the work more than he'd thought he would, even on the used, jerry-rigged equipment from the supply house north of the village. It wasn't exactly state of the art, but for his purposes he didn't need all the bells and whistles and dancing bears. Appropriate techn
ology, he told himself, and nothing more. Words to live by. Better than killed your taste for it.

  When he saw her standing in the front yard, he thought he was having another dream, the dream he had been dreading, where she appeared in his new context, grinning that smartass grin and announcing, Hi, I'm not dead after all. I'm only impossible in the real world.

  Then Sam came around the side of the house, and he was sure he was hallucinating.

  He closed the front door and went into the yellow-duck kitchen to splash water on his face.

  "There," he told himself. "Just me and the ducks."

  The knock at the door was very polite.

  "Open up, Ludovic. This is real."

  "A what?" he said.

  "Eclone. That's why I was down for so long." She was stretched out on his second-hand couch while he perched on the footrest. Sam was wandering through the rest of the house; she seemed to like the ducks.

  "They made a complete copy. As complete as they could," Gina went on. "It was the error-checking that took so fucking long."

  "Thank God," he said suddenly.

  "What?"

  "You said 'fucking.' I thought you never would, I thought I'd die waiting for it."

  She gave him a look. "You left before I could tell you what was happening." Almost an accusation. But he could tell she wasn't mad. "I came up starving after most of a week, and there was nothing but those fucking seal-packs from the survivalists, fucking banana mash, fucking navy bean soup. And food porn on the dataline. Would you believe the fucking porn channels were some of the first shit back on the air?"

  He shrugged. "Sure. Why not?"

  "I notice you don't have the dataline."

  "No," he agreed, "I sure don't."

  They'd stayed at the Diz-everyone was calling it the St. Dismas Infirmary for the Incurably Informed by then-for most of the initial recovery period, she told him. Getting around hadn't been terribly easy unless you had a private car. But the day the rental lots had reopened, she and Sam had left. Sam had had enough of communal living, and she'd had enough of everything else.