Synners (2 page)

The big kid nodded.

"And then don't get lost," she went on. "I'll need you to load this one for a friend." She gestured slightly with Jones's arm.

The kid took a step forward and squinted at Jones dubiously. His friend crowded behind him, looking from her to Jones and back with large, frightened eyes. "Scan
him
flat," said the big kid.

"He
was
dead, he's just comatose now."

"Whack it for a mark." He pointed at the designs.

"You'll do it out of the kindness of your heart," she laughed. "We'll talk tattoos later.
Much
later."

He lifted his chin belligerently. "Hey, I'm packed. Whacked two yesterday."

"Honey, what I've forgotten about finding floating boards it'll take you the rest of your life to learn."

He looked over at the laptop covetously. The ivy design was rotating on the screen again. "Mark me?"

"It's spoken for."

His round face puckered sullenly. "N.g. to leave the cap off," he said. "Someone could crash the party."

"And someone who hacks me could find die doctor is in." She gestured at the case. "Just return my file for me and stick around, and then we'll discuss it. In English, please, I don't talk your squawk. I'm not going to stone you. I never have, have I?"

He pointed at Jones. "That's a stone." He and his friend each grabbed a leg and dragged the case out of the tent.

Kids, she thought, starting on the ivy. She had it mostly done by the time Rosa showed up.

The real stone-home bitch about night court was having to stay awake for it.

Sitting at the back of the well-populated courtroom, jammed between some fresh-face named Clarence or Claw and a null-and-void wearing a bail-jumper's Denver Boot, Gina tried to calculate her immediate prospects. Hit-and-run—probably fifty, since she'd only been an attendee, not a conspirator; a hundred if the judge got stoked by the time her turn rolled around. Possession of controlled substances would be another hundred. Public intoxication, disorderly conduct, failure to report a hit-and-run, trespassing, and resisting arrest—call it a hundred and fifty, red-eye special rate, possibly two hundred. The resisting charge was a stone-home joke, as far as she was concerned. She'd only run, she hadn't swung on anybody once she'd been caught. Like it wasn't natural to run like hell when a hypedup battalion of cops came at you.

Fuck it, what difference did one more charge make, anyway? The fines would clean her out and then some, one more garnishment on her wages, so-fucking-what. All she cared about now was getting back on the street so she could find Mark and take him home. Stupid burnout had let himself get dragged off without a second thought
again,
and here she was paying the price for it. She wouldn't have been at the goddamn hit-and-run in the first place if she hadn't been looking for him.

She'd started out on the Manhattan-Hermosa strip, what the kids called the Mimosa, part of the old postquake land of the lost. She wasn't old enough to remember the Big One, hadn't even been living in the big C-A when it had hit. The kids who shanked it on the Mimosa didn't remember the quake, either. For all they knew, the old Manhattan Pier and Hermosa Pier and Fisherman's Wharf had always stretched out over dry sand, just to shelter the space cases who squatted under them. Some of the cases probably remembered the Big One. Probably not as many as claimed to.

The piers shouldn't have survived the Big One (which everyone was now saying hadn't been the
real
Big One after all, just the Semi-Medium One, but that didn't scan as well). Except for part of the old Fisherman's Wharf, though, they were still standing. Not in prima shape, but standing. Not unlike Mark.

Living through the quake and the postmillennial madness that had followed was one way to end up under a pier talking to your toes; taking some of the stuff available on the Mimosa was another. Mark had always been a candidate for a spot in the sand, even back in the early days before all the hard party-time he'd put in had really begun to take its toll. Sometimes she could almost let the fucking burnout go ahead and flush himself down the rabbit hole in his brain. Like someone had said years ago, some of us can cut the funk, and some of us can't.

But she wasn't ready to let him slip away. Whether he was still salvageable or not, whether he was even worth the trouble, she couldn't bring herself to say fuck it and let him go. So she did another night on the Mimosa, poking into shacks and lean-tos, searching under piers, checking out the jammers and scaring off the Rude Boys, looking to take him home, hose him down, and detox him enough to get him through his corporate debut day after tomorrow.

Several of the regulars had said they'd seen him hanging with a hit-andrun caravan headed for Fairfax. Toxed to the red line, no doubt. The stupe didn't even like hit-and-runs, but someone had probably said party-partyparty fast enough to blank out any other thoughts, someone like Valjean and the rest of his no-account band. Like any of them needed to play hitand-run in the Fairfax wasteland.

She'd ripped over to Fairfax as fast as the toy engine in the little twopassenger commuter rental would allow. The fancy rubble of the old Pan Pacific Auditorium had been hard alive and jumping by the time she made it, bangers and thrashers and the pickle stand in business while the hackers ran fooler loops on their laptops to confound surveillance. All the usual crowd you'd find at an illegal party set up fast in a public place, but Mark had already floated off somewhere else, if he'd ever been there at all. Before she could get a new line on him, the cops had come in and busted things up. She had almost sulked herself into a doze when most of the crowd that had been waiting ahead of her rose en masse to stand before the judge. To Gina's right a guy with a handcam climbed over two rows of seats for a better angle.

"Another clinic?" the judge said wearily, glancing at the monitor on her bench.

"Three subgroups, Your Honor," said the prosecutor. "Doctors, staff, and patients."

"At this hour?" The judge shrugged. "Oh, but of course. Doctors never keep regular hours. And if you weren't operating round the clock, some of your patients might reconsider. I wish you people would perpetrate insurance fraud in some other jurisdiction. Like Mars. Priors?"

"We'll get to that, Your Honor," said the prosecutor hurriedly as a few hands started to go up.

Gina sat forward, her fatigue momentarily forgotten. Insurance fraud wasn't exactly the kind of thing that called for a raid in the middle of the night. The litany of charges was boring enough: conspiracy to commit fraud, fraud, unnecessary implantation procedures—the usual for a clinic that put in implants under pretense of treating depression, seizures, and other brain dysfunctions. Just another feel-good mill, big fucking deal. She started to drift off.

". . . unlawful congress with a machine."

Her eyes snapped open. A murmur went through the courtroom, and somebody smothered a giggle. The guy with the handcam had climbed over the spectators' rail and was panning the group carefully.

"And what, Mr. Prosecutor, constitutes unlawful congress with a machine?" the judge asked.

"It should come up on your screen in a moment, Your Honor."

The judge waited and court waited. Several long moments later the judge turned away from the monitor in disgust. "Bailiff! Get downstairs right now and inform central we're having technical difficulties. Do
not
call.
Go,
physically, and tell them
in person."

Next to Gina, Clarence or Claw gave a loud, showy, fake sneeze. The judge banged her gavel. "We can cure the compulsively comedic here, you know. Six months for contempt may be old-fashion aversion therapy, but it works, and we don't have to bill your insurance company, either." The judge's glare fell on the prosecutor. "You have been warned repeatedly about inputting evidence and confiscated material without following proper decontamination procedures."

"The procedures were followed, Your Honor. Apparently they need updating."

"Who was responsible for the storage of this data?" the judge asked, surveying the group sternly. A hand went up timidly from somewhere in the middle.

"Your Honor," said the defense attorney, stepping forward quickly. "Data storage personnel cannot be held responsible for viral contamination and spread. I cite
Vallio vs. MacDougal,
in which it was determined MacDougal had no culpability for an infection that may have already existed."

The judge sighed. "Whose data was it, then?"

"Your Honor," said the defense attorney, even more quickly, "the owner of the data cannot be cited without establishing—"

The judge waved the woman's words away. "I get it, I get it. Viruses form all on their own, input themselves without a human agent, and nobody's ever responsible."

"Your Honor, even leaving aside the issue of self-incrimination, it's very hard these days to prove that any virus in question was not preexisting and inert until triggered by—"

"I'm familiar with the problem, thank you very much, Ms. Pelham. This doesn't alleviate the immediate situation."

"Move for a recess, Your Honor."

"Denied."

"But the virus—"

"Counselor Pelham," the judge said wearily, "it may come as a shock to people of your generation, but courts were not always computerized, and it was not only possible but routine to conduct business without being online. We will continue, using hard copy as needed; that is why we maintain court clerks and court reporters. I still want to know what this 'unlawful congress with a machine' charge is supposed to be." She turned her gaze on the prosecutor again.

"Your Honor," said the prosecutor smoothly, "this particular charge also has charges of breaking and entering and industrial espionage attached to it. The complainant wishes to have all proceedings in this matter kept confidential. Permission to clear the courtroom, Your Honor."

"And who is this complainant?" the judge asked.

"Your Honor, the complainant wishes to keep that information confidential, too. For the time being, that is."

"Answer the question, counselor. Who is the complainant?"

Gina glanced around for someone who looked ready to bolt, but the only other people left in court had been pulled in at the hit-and-run with her. And the guy with the handcam, who had been forced back over the rail into the spectators' area by the other bailiff.

"Permission to approach the bench, Your Honor," said the prosecutor.

The judge nodded. "Granted. This had better be good."

They conferred for several moments while the group from the clinic shifted around, nervous but silent. The guy with the handcam was half sitting on the rail, looking sourly at the gag-sticker the bailiff had slapped over his lens.

"Court finds confidentiality will serve the public good," the judge said abruptly. "Before we clear the court, who else is waiting and why?"

The other bailiff herded the clinic group off to one side as Gina straggled up with Clarence or Claw, and the loser clunking his Boot on the floor, and the rest of the hit-and-run people, to stand before the bench. The judge cut off the reading of the charges.

"Is that it? No first-degree murder, no other unlawful-congress-with-amachine perpetrators? Very well. The court is dismissing the charges against you," she said, her gaze resting momentarily on Gina, "even though I know a few of you have quite a long list of priors. Since we have managed to apprehend none of the conspirators, and since we have more important fish to fry here tonight, the court is letting you off with full knowledge that you will all undoubtedly be back here on some other night. What's one conviction more or less? Except you," she added, pointing at the loser with the Denver Boot. "You can spend the night canned, and we'll pick up the rest of your story in the morning."

Gina had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from grinning. It didn't quite work. The judge shook her head and motioned for the room to be cleared.

"So, you up to do it again?"

Gina looked up at Clarence-or-Claw's smiling face. Didn't this guy ever get tired? Whatever he ran on, it had to be better than most of the stuff you could get from a hit-and-run pickle stand.

"I'm up for getting the fuck outa here," she said, brushing past him. He trotted down the shiny hall after her.

"No, really," he said, in a half whisper. "I know where it's happening right now, hit-and-run, better than the one where they caught us."

"Get the fuck outa my face." She walked faster, pushing through the fatigue that was weighing more heavily on her by the moment.

"Hey, wait—"

She swung around a corner, half turning to slap at him, when something smashed into her, and she went down hard on the polished floor. Sheets of paper rained down and scattered. There were frantic footsteps as someone chased after them.

Pushing herself up to a sitting position, she rubbed the side of her face and then blinked at what seemed to be a solid wall of business suits. She looked up.

"Mount Rushmore," she said. "Little far west of home for this time of year?"

The faces stared down at her impassively, three men and a woman. Attack of the Living Suits. She shrugged and pulled herself up on the nearest one, using his pockets for handholds. He didn't move or change expression, and she was sorry immediately. His face was familiar. At the moment she couldn't remember what it was associated with, but it couldn't have been anything good. The look in his eyes said he knew her, too, and he didn't like her, a lot.

Fuck him. She ran a hand through her dreadlocks and went into a tootoxed-to-live act. "Gotta stop having these crazy-damn dreams," she muttered, and elbowed her way through the middle of the group.

She got down to the first floor without further incident and also without Clarence or Claw or whoever he was. On the way out some instinct made her divert to the doors right of center, so she had a perfect view, without being seen herself, of Hall Galen and Lindel Joslin getting out of the unmarked limo at the curb. The young guy who got out just after them she didn't recognize. But the last guy out was Visual Mark.