Synners (27 page)

Rosa laughed a little. "You're approaching my threshold for that kinda talk. I'm a hacker, not a philosopher."

Fez turned to look at her. "Good choice of word, threshold. The way we all kept adding to the nets did exactly that, passed a threshold. It got to the point where the net should have collapsed in chaos, but it didn't. Or rather, it did, but the collapse was not a collapse in the conventional sense. Because the net kept
accommodating
the demands we put on it—that was its purpose, after all, to accommodate data. When it reached the point where it was burdened to the limit, it had two choices—crash, or accommodate. It did both.

"Going over the brink of catastrophe was the first stage. The second was recovery—since it was programmed to accommodate, it did. But the only way it could accommodate was to exceed the limit. Institute a new limit, and when that was reached, go over the brink of catastrophe again, recover and institute a new limit beyond that. And so forth."

"Ad infinitum," Sam said, expressionlessly. "Like a fractal growing from the bottom up instead of the top down. Triggered by catastrophe."

"It didn't get a break while all this was going on, of course," Fez continued. "The information never stopped coming in, which made for quite a lot of turbulence. But chaos is just another kind of order, and so we have another kind of net now than the one we started out with. We woke it up."

Rosa let out a breath. "Which came first—Art Fish, or Dr. Fish?"

"It's hard to say.
Art Fish
was the file name on a proposed AI program," Fez said. "There was also a prototype of a vaccine with the working title of
Virus Doctor.
The present incarnation is Dr. Art Fish, V.D. Virus Doctor."

Sam's gaze drifted over to the system on the desk, "Is it all in there now?"

"I don't think it's all any one place," Fez said. "It's all through the nets, though the core routine, if you can call it a routine, seems to be centralized in Dr. Fish's Answering Machine."

"What is it? The routine."

Fez stared past her, squinting thoughtfully. "I guess you could call it a virus, though that's not strictly true. It's not just
one,
that is, but several, and at least parts of many more than that. And it's not really a true virus anymore in many ways. I mean—" He blew out a breath. "Okay. Anytime a new access opens up on the dataline, as soon as it comes into contact with Art, it's 'infected.' And there is no part of the net that is
not
Art. Art is everywhere, though his
attention
is not, if you see what I mean."

Rosa shook her head. "Do you mean the L.A. net, or the state, or the continental net, or—" She frowned. "Worldwide?"

Fez nodded.

"Then there have to be other people who know about this," Sam said. "We can't be the
only
ones who know there's something . . . awake ... in the net."

"People see only what they want to see." Fez shrugged. "It's possible someone else knows, in some other part of the country or the world. But nobody's said anything."

"You
didn't say anything," Sam said accusingly.

He grinned at her. "Well, I'm not really the talkative type, Sam-I-Am."

"Sure." She gave a short laugh.

"There is one other person who shares full acquaintance with the Dr. Fish we know, serving as archivist and keeper of Art's ever-changing files. Encrypted, of course," Fez said. "I'm sure there must be others. Statistically there has to be someone somewhere else who's onto it. But it would have to be someone who was
looking
for it. You know how people use the net. We take it for granted, just like cars or telephones or refrigerators. If you don't take it for granted, then you probably don't have it.

"And you were looking for it," Sam said thoughtfully.

Fez nodded.

She sat forward. "Why?"

He smiled. "It seemed like the right thing to do. Now, are you going to show me the data Art salvaged?"

"Maybe we ought to Turing-test first."

"Oh, Art's conscious," Fez said confidently. "That's not the question. The question is whether Art's human or not."

"Part catastrophe and part chaos," said Rosa. "Sounds pretty human to me."

Stalling Rivera proved to be surprisingly easy, perhaps because he wasn't quite lying. The guards on the guy's system were the best he'd ever seen. Not impossible, though. Nothing was impossible. For the first couple of days after he'd contacted the guy, he'd just laid back and taken his time, and Rivera hadn't given him any trouble. What could he have done about it, anyway?

This morning, he thought he had the answer to that. He'd awakened feeling stupid and out-of-sorts, as if he'd spent the whole night toxing out with Jones on the Mimosa. Son of a bitch, he thought dully. He couldn't smell anything in the clothes Rivera had left for him, but just to be on the safe side, he stayed nude. Rivera could have given him something to suppress his olfactory, since he'd had the enormously bad judgment to let on that he'd figured out the clothes.

Stupid even when I'm
not
toxed,
he thought sourly, sitting at the terminal. He made a move toward the keyboard and suddenly felt overwhelmed with fatigue. "Shit," he muttered, putting his face in his hands.

"I'll be needing some more copies of the original download and anything else you might have," said Rivera's voice behind him.

At least his reflexes were too dull to make him jump and give Rivera
that
satisfaction. He looked over his shoulder. "Didn't hear you come in," he said. "Extra copies of the original downloads all I got." He held up a small plastic envelope with two chips in it. "Nothing else ready to travel."

Rivera came over to the desk and picked up the envelope, his eyebrows lifting slightly at the sight of Keely's nudity. "Can you have something at the end of the day?" he asked in his crisp supervisor's tone. Like he was talking to one of his indentured servants. Like that guy, maybe.

"That depends." Keely yawned, making no attempt to cover himself. "When does the day end around here?"

"We'll call it five or so."

Keely shrugged. "Could take me till three to get in. Maybe get it on a fast buffer capture. The quality won't be great, and I can't guarantee you'll have anything complete—"

"Can you do it or not?"

"I don't know," Keely said irritably. "Yah. Maybe. I don't fucking
know.
If you'd stop fucking around with me, I could probably put this thing into overdrive whenever you wanted."

Rivera seemed to be regarding him from a great height. "That hasn't been true in the last few days. Perhaps you need a little help."

"That what you did to me last night, give me a little
help?"
Keely snapped. "You better let me detox soon, or maybe you'll come back here at five and find nothing but a little pool of shit and blood on this chair where I used to be."

"You wish medical attention?" Rivera asked politely.

"I think I've had some fucking
medical attention."
His anger was starting to wake him up. It felt good. "I just think you better detox me before my first physical with the Corrections Board, or you're gonna have to explain more than I ever did."

"The board has waived the standard physical examination requirement, in light of Diversifications' outstanding record with reparation-sentenced felons," Rivera told him cheerfully. "Any other questions? Good. Tap Ludovic—"

"Who?"

"Our man. Tap him, get everything you can, and make three copies. I'll be back to pick it all up around five. Can you remember that?"

Keely felt himself deflating. Should have known they'd bought the Corrections Board. They could buy anything. He yawned again. "Never forget it."

"After you do that, you can enjoy some leisure time if you want. Watch the dataline, have some more cognac. But try to be ready to travel."

He felt a small wave of fear. "Oh, yah? You taking me on a Mexican vacation?" he asked slowly.

"I haven't really decided," Rivera told him. "Now or a month from now may make no difference at all. It's not your worry, anyway, just be prepared." He nodded at the console. "Ludovic will be on-line now. I suggest you start trying to get in and get as much as you can. I have an important meeting this evening, and I'll need that material."

Keely leaned on the desk and slowly went through the motions of getting ready to tap the guy's program again until he heard the door close behind Rivera. Then he sat back in the chair and tried to think. All Rivera had to do was look at the record of activity in the black-box recorder to know he'd already tapped the guy's program again without downloading anything. But he seemed to be too busy to look, so the good guys were safe for the moment.

Hell, for all he knew, the guy wouldn't be on-line now anyway. Maybe the system activity for the last few days had just been the guy tidying up his system before he ran for it. Except Rivera had sounded pretty confident on that matter.
Ludovic will be on-line now.

Ludovic.
Sam's father, Gabe. Had to be. Shit. Why hadn't she
told
him she'd had that kind of in with the Dive? If he'd known that, he'd have suggested they go partners instead of trying to hack the dragon all on his own. Except she probably would have said no, and he'd have ended up here after all. No fucking use thinking about it.

But the question remained—what was Ludovic doing now? Just waiting for Rivera's ax to fall? He tried to remember what Sam had told him about her parents. She was on the outs with them, he knew that for certain, but he seemed to remember it being more with her mother than her father.

Keely sat back in the chair, one hand on the keyboard. Too bad the guy wasn't a hacker. Then the guy could pass him a virus, maybe even a little dose of the Fish, and he could pass it on to Rivera, who could then give it to whatever VIPs he was sucking off. Maybe he should just do that himself. He didn't have any Fish handy, but he knew a few tricks of his own—

He'd just be delaying the inevitable and maybe making his own position worse. Rivera would just take the virus to the Corrections Board, and he'd end up polishing Rivera's boots for the next two decades. He sighed and started the tap routine.

A couple of hours later, he was in, and he managed to capture thirty minutes before the system spat him out again. He disengaged and made the three copies Rivera wanted. Then he took a look at what he'd gotten off the guy.

Rivera was going to shit. There were maybe fifteen minutes of the guy's personal program, probably volatile storage he'd forgotten to dump. The rest of it was all commercials, finished spots, roughs, initial composition storyboards, requisition lists. He rather liked the one for body armor—guy strolling through a bad neighborhood, gets shot at, knives thrown at him, people trying to punch him, everything bouncing off; gets to his office, sits down at his terminal, and the message comes up on the screen:
You Have
Been Hacked! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
! Guy turns to pov and says, Well, there's one thing Gilding BodyShields can't protect you from. Woman enters picture, leans down, gives him openmouthed kiss, walks off, he stares after her, saying, And there's another.

Thanks, guy,
Keely thought,
but what the fuck have you been sitting
around doing commercials for when you should have been running like
hell?

Well, whatever Rivera had had in mind, Keely was sure it hadn't included commercials, which was going to make Rivera look like an idiot in front of whomever he was trying to impress. He patted the monitor. "I can't believe that's the best you could do, but if it was, good for you, pal. Good for you." He staggered off to shower.

"Something off the local dataline," Fez said, looking up from the screen.

"I'll get it," Adrian said, moving to the other screen. "Let me practice my Mandarin." He punched for the translation program and sat back and waited for the characters to appear on the screen. "Makes me feel useful."

Sam gave a small, soundless laugh. At least someone was feeling useful, she thought. They'd spent the last few days studying Keely's zap, but not doing much else. Sam felt antsy. She wanted to do something, tell somebody, but both Rosa and Fez had been adamant about keeping quiet. The information would be too traceable if Keely had talked, and they had to assume that he had. Not willingly, perhaps. She didn't like to think about that, and she knew they were probably right, but she still felt frustrated. Keely had zapped them the data for
some
reason.

"Oh, damn," Adrian said, and something in his voice gave Sam a small chill.

"What is it?" Rosa asked, sitting up on the couch. She'd been going over a hard flatcopy of some program she'd been working on.

"Rosa, you and Jones, and possibly Sam, are being sought by the police for questioning."

"Stone the fucking crows at fucking
home.
" Rosa threw down the hardcopy and stalked over as Fez rolled his chair over next to Adrian. "What for?" Sam's small chill became a deep freeze. She wanted to get up out of the easy chair and join the others at the screen, but her legs felt too watery to hold her up. In three years on her own, she had never been specifically targeted by the police.

"What do you mean, possibly me'?" she asked in a small voice.

Fez split the screen horizontally, putting Adrian's translation on the bottom. "Details of the case aren't available," he said after a moment. "Someone's put out a 'round up the usual suspects' command. I imagine they're working on a list of Keely's known associates. There's a whole list here, but they don't have any real names—Gator, Kazin, Captain Jasm, Cherokee Rosa, Jones, and Pheasant Sam."

"Who
Sam?"

He spelled it for her.

"The Mandarin has it closer to game bird, actually," Adrian murmured.

"Well, that's that. Time for a change of address," said Rosa. "Better run home and pack up my stuff and my stiff."

"I'll go with you," Sam said shakily.

"I think it would be better if you both stayed here," Fez said, looking from Rosa to Sam.