Synners (43 page)

Manny tried to remember what he'd seen, but the only thing that came to mind were vague shapes moving rhythmically. More tired than he'd realized, he thought, too much the first day back.

Abruptly he found himself standing up behind his desk, rubbing one eye to the point of soreness. Damn, but he needed a rest already, from obnoxious rock'n'roll animals and a certain hacker who was too smart for his own good.

Which reminded him—what was he going to do about that little bastard? He could go up and confront him and see where that would lead, or he could let him stew for a couple of days, worrying about what would happen, maybe let him get confident enough so that he cracked in again, but this time to a hot reception, Manny catching him in the act. And then see where
that
would lead. Threatening to revoke the reparation contract and having him remanded to prison could make him compliant.

The little shit. The little brass-balled cock-knocker. Screw him, why let him have even one more moment of feeling confident? He sat down and banged out a short, pointed message on the keyboard and zapped it up to the penthouse.
Sweat, you son of a bitch, sweat and suffer all night,
Manny thought,
so that when I get around to you tomorrow, you'll be the shi
vering little turd you ought to be.

Immanuel, when did you get so
mean?

It seemed to be his father's voice speaking in his head, a voice he had not heard for years, and it took him by surprise. His father had been proud of his ambition, but his father had also been dead for close to twenty-five years, since before he had graduated high school.

Correct. His father had never seen him as an adult. The flush of dismay hit him hard, making his mind spin with confusion. Just trying to get ahead . . . it takes a lot just trying to outswim the pack and get ahead. . . .

We've got everything but the heads.

The thought of Joslin was a rancid taste in his mouth.

Hackers and freaked-out vivisectors and berserk rock'n'roll animals
all around, an onslaught of human craziness, and what isn't crazy is al
most too limp to produce,
that's
how I got so mean, Father, and it would
make you mean, too, if you had to do what I do.

He became aware that he was whispering aloud, and a new wave of exhaustion swept through him. Too much, too fast, he thought. He would worry about everything tomorrow, including the kid in the penthouse. If he had the nerve to crack in again after getting Manny's message, that would only provide extra proof that he was intractable and unrepentant. If Diversifications couldn't handle him, the courts would, and any lost data would come out of his hide one way or another.

He paused and marked the videos for a second review with full sockets before shutting the console down. If they were so bad that they'd put him to sleep, he would have to be as familiar with them as possible in case the Upstairs Team wanted him to explain why he thought they were good enough to release. Reviewing them socketed and on-line, he shouldn't have much trouble staying awake for them, he decided.

If he had not stopped to take a little refreshment in the empty Common Room, he might have made it out the door before Security called him.

Gabe could hear her yelling as soon as he stepped into the hall. It was coming not from her pit, but from the one at the end of the hall. Visual Mark's. The door was open.

For a moment he wavered. The last time he'd talked to Gina hadn't exactly been an unqualified success, and she probably wouldn't welcome his intervention.
Go back to your jampot.
He was deluded thinking he could do anything for her, or for that matter, for himself.

"He's out of fucking control!" Gina was yelling. "You get him outa there—"

"Hey," said a soft voice behind him.

He turned. The tall thin man in the weird patterning cape was standing in one of the open elevators, holding the doors apart. The cape was thrown back so that he couldn't see most of it, but there seemed to be oddly shaped shadows pulsing all over it in a rhythm Gabe found immediately discomfiting. He tried to block out the sight without looking away from the man's face and then wasn't sure he wanted to look at the man, either. His expression was a peculiar mix of helplessness and something that Gabe would normally have identified as lust.

"You tell them," the man said, "I took the video mainline, and the hardline is, I've seen the stranger on the stony shore." He stepped back and let the elevator doors snap shut.

Gabe blinked, wondering what the hell had just happened, and went down the hall to Mark's open door.

Two of the implant doctors from the infirmary were standing on one side of Mark's inert body, and Gina was standing on the other, still shouting.

"He doesn't get up, he doesn't move around, he doesn't leave this place, he just lays there on that fucking mat jacking off!"

"We've told you, Ms. Aiesi," said the taller doctor, an edge creeping into her voice, "that the readings for Mark when he is connected to the system are quite normal
for him.
His vitals have always sunk dramatically—-"

"Not
always—"

"—it's just the way his body has chosen to handle it, and it's nothing more than a manifestation of the same nature as a fakir—"

"Fuck
your fakir—"

The second doctor put up her hand. Neither of them was the doctor who had treated him the day Gina had hit him; Gabe wondered what had happened to her. "We can't force him to disconnect without possibly doing him grave harm—"

"This
is his fucking grave!" Gina pointed at the console. "This whole fucking pit's a tomb—"

Gabe drew back a little from the doorway, craning his neck. The figure curled up in the fetal position on the mat looked sick in some way, but Mark had always looked sick to him.

"—records do
not
show that Mark has been continuously on-line," the first doctor was saying.

"Your fucking records are fucking
wrong,
he did something to them. He told me himself he's not in his body anymore—"

"That's a fanciful way for an imaginative individual like Mark to put it-"

"Fancy this, lady." Gina doubled up a fist.

"That's enough," said the shorter doctor, putting up her hands and taking a step back. "This isn't a bar, we're not interested in brawling with you."

"You can't tell me this is normal."

The figure on the mat stretched out suddenly with a yawn. Gina jumped as Mark rolled over onto his back and opened his eyes.

"Hey," he said softly, "is this the mainline or the hardline?" Gabe frowned.
I took the video mainline. And the hardline is . . .

"Get those fucking wires out of your head," Gina ordered him, "and get up."

He looked around and saw the doctors. "Is something wrong?" he asked, raising himself on one elbow.

"Not that we can tell," said the shorter doctor cordially. "How are you feeling?"

Mark's mouth stretched in a smile. "Never better. I'm doing a lot of work."

Something funny about the voice, Gabe thought. He sounded too—Gabe groped for a term. Coherent?

"Have you experienced any symptoms you would like to talk to us about?"

"Make him take those fucking wires out," Gina demanded. Her dreadlocks were practically bristling visibly.

"Not now, Gina," Mark said patiently. "I'm working on a video."

The shorter doctor made a polite, indulgent noise. "Well, when you're through, you might have a word with your friend here. She seems to think you're working too hard and that you haven't been off-line in an abnormally long time."

Mark gave a short, flat laugh. "I'm real busy. Got everything I need here." He lay down and curled up again as the doctors headed for the lift. Gabe slipped out into the hall.

"You get your asses back here!" Gina yelled after them. "You can't tell me that's fucking
normal!
That wasn't him, that was some goddamn
pro
gram
or something, he's a fucking zombie—"

"Ms. Aiesi, we'll continue to monitor his vitals, but that's all we can do-"

"His fucking brain wave's abnormal!"
Gina shouted. "It's abnormal and
you know it!"

Gabe moved farther up the hall as he heard the lift reach the catwalk. "Considering the life you and your friend have lived, of course it's abnormal. But it's well within an acceptable range, allowing for the changes wrought by the implants."

"Bullshit!"

Gabe winced for her. Eloquence always deserted her at the wrong time. He fled back up to his own door and opened it as if he were just going in. The doctors emerged and came up the hall together, looking resolute and professional. They nodded to him, and he nodded back, staring after them and wondering if they also had sockets. He couldn't remember ever having seen them before, not even after his own procedure.

As soon as they were gone, he went back down the hall to Mark's pit. Gina was still standing over him, head bowed, hugging herself. Gabe felt a sudden flash of anger at Mark and then at her without really knowing why. He brushed it aside. "I heard all that," he said.

The fierce expression she turned up to him faded quickly. He took that as a good sign and went down to her.

"I didn't hear it all," he added, "but most of it. And I saw when he woke up and talked. He didn't sound right. But you didn't sound right to me, either, when you did it."

She shrugged. "Nobody cares but me, and he doesn't want me to care." She nudged Mark's back with the toe of her boot. "I oughta just say fuck it, if this is what he wants, it's what he wants."

Impulsively Gabe took her by the arm and led her to the lift, surprised when she didn't pull away from him. "Maybe we ought to get an outside doctor," he said as they went up to the catwalk together.

"I tried that," she said wearily. "Rivera'll block it. I figured I'd just try to get somebody's attention here."

"Well, there's something else," he said. "That guy in the cape that changes all the time—"

"Valjean," she said irritably, striding out into the hall ahead of him.

"Him. I saw him just a few minutes ago, here. He was on the elevator, and he told me to tell you, or them, or somebody something about the mainline and the hardline."

Gina stopped to frown at him. "What?"

"I know, that's something like what Mark said—"

"What the fuck was it?" she asked impatiently.

"He said he'd taken the video mainline, and the hardline was something about a stranger on a stony shore."

"That again." She shrugged. "Mark did Canadaytime's last video,"

"I thought you did their last video," Gabe said. "You jumped off the terrace for it."

"Mark's done another since we got drilled. The boy's a regular videoproduction factory now, ain't you heard?"

The elevator doors opened suddenly, and two security guards came barreling out, stopping short when they saw Gina. "That guy Mark in his pit?" one of them asked.

"More or less," Gina said. "Why, you think I stole him?"

Gabe couldn't remember if either of them had been on the terrace when Gina had jumped; at Diversifications security guards tended to run together, the same clean-cut, private gestapo squad looks in identical brown uniforms.

"Is he available or not?" asked the other guard.

Gina made a disgusted noise. "Ask me an easy one."

The guards turned to Gabe. He shrugged. "I'd say no, he's not available."

"You know,
he
was up there the day she pulled her little stunt," the first guard said to the other one. "Who was?" Gina asked.

"It's probably how he got the idea," said the second guard. They started to walk away.

"What idea?" Gina caught his sleeve.

The first guard looked at her. "Forget about it. You'd hurt more than help."

"I'll hurt you right now if you don't tell me what the fuck's going on," Gina said darkly.

Both guards hesitated. Gabe herded them toward the elevator without saying a word, as if he had all the authority in the world, and the guards took them up to the terrace on the twentieth floor.

There should have been wind. Twenty stories up, wind should have been a given, but the air seemed to have lay down and died. That made it worse, Gina thought. If there had been wind, the cape would have been blowing back so she wouldn't have had to look at the shadows throbbing over it.

She tried to keep her eyes focused on Valjean's face and the woman— Dinshaw whoever. The same one who'd threatened to have her arrested that day in the common room. Gina had to hand it to her. She didn't look completely nuked, and she hadn't wet her pants yet, but she was getting there. Valjean had one haunch up on the railing, his left arm wrapped around her while he held the knife near her throat, ready either to slice her or go over the rail with her anytime he pleased.

"Hey!" he yelled to Gina, looking grotesquely cheerful. "You're here!" He gestured briefly at the security guards standing in a tense semicircle at a useless distance. "You can all go now." He blinked at her, his face twisting abruptly into a pained expression. "When's Mark coming?"

She took a few careful steps forward, watching for any sign of panic. "Mark's still on-line. I think he's waiting for you to show your face. Or your ass, whichever applies."

Valjean shook his head vigorously. The Dinshaw woman held onto the arm gripping her with both hands. "No, no, you got it wrong. He's
in con
text.
You understand? He's in context, and we're all out of context, because he's the stranger on the stony shore. It was always him. But we're all out of context, and everybody knows that when you take something out of context, it can't make no fuckin' sense."

Gina nodded. "Which context are we talking here? And where the fuck does
she
fit in?"

"It's gonna be
my
context, so I get whoever I want for it." Valjean rested his chin on top of the woman's head. She clenched her eyes shut, and Gina saw Valjean's hand start to move.

"Hey, asshole, knock off that dirty stuff!" she yelled. "You ain't in the context of your bedroom here, fucking security guards're
watching,
chrissakes!"