Synners (47 page)

She looked at the blank monitor screen again, and for a moment her mind made her see phantom patterns still moving on it.

Yah, we do what we do, and we do it because we can, and where did
you learn to do a thing like that?

"Little Jesus Jump-Up," she muttered. She knew where Mark was, and she knew where Valjean was, and she knew where the video was, in the pipe, out there in release, it had been released—

She hesitated for a moment, looking back at the bedroom. Maybe if they hadn't come back here to Mark's own apartment, she'd have gone in and woken him up long ago. But as he'd said, he didn't know where she lived, and he hadn't wanted to drive all the way to Reseda. Next time the Hollywood-Sheriott for sure.

Sure.

It's okay, hotwire,
she thought.
You don't have to volunteer anymore.

She left a note on the monitor.
Gone to get Mark.
That would say it to him.

He'd been dreaming that Rivera had sent him down to Medical to get sockets, and they'd been putting them in the hard way, using spikes and drills and steam-driven hammers that whistled horribly whenever they hit a trouble spot. He could feel them grinding in, driving all the way down through his skull, his face, his neck, into his body cavity—

Abruptly he raised his aching head and looked around. He was still in the penthouse. The light said daytime. "Fuckin'
dream,"
he muttered, and rubbed his head all over. Had to have been a fucking dream; if Rivera had just had them take him, he'd have awakened in Medical. Maybe.

He caught sight of the empty bottle standing next to the blank monitor and groaned. Shit, he was lucky to be alive. Alcohol was not the way he flew. He had a vague memory of thinking it had been a good idea at the time. Yah. Like putting a shotgun to your face and pulling the trigger with your toe.

The whistles blasted him then, almost knocking him off the chair. The monitor was no longer blank; Mark was staring out from that crazy partial room. In the background the clouds were boiling.

"Door's open, get the fuck out."

"When I'm alive, I'll give it some thought," Keely said. "I'm not—"

"I couldn't stick here waiting for you to come to," Mark went on abruptly. "You're looking at a message. Don't interrupt. Get the fuck outa here, go down to my pit on the sixteenth floor, hack the lock, rip the fucking wires right outa my head.
Now."

Keely made a face. "What?"

"You heard me. You rip the fucking wires outa my head now. Fast. The old meat's gonna stroke out big, and if the Big One gets up the wires into the system, it's all gonna stroke out, it's gonna eat the system alive and everyone connected to it. You got that?"

"Stroke?" Keely said, rubbing his forehead. He felt like he'd had one himself.

"Reference: cerebral vascular accident. Only it's different this time. If it gets into the system and finds someone hooked in with the interface, it'll get them, too. You got that?
A contagious stroke,
a fucking
virus,
are you with me yet?"

"Shit." Keely frowned. "Wait a minute . . . this is a recording?"

"Canned ham. Get the fuck outa here and go down to my pit on the sixteenth floor, hack the lock, rip the wires outa my head. Don't sweat the meat, the meat's over, it's only warm now."

"Meat," said Keely, trying to push his thoughts around in the wreck of his mind.

"Meat, reference: my body. You got that? Get the fuck outa here, go down to my pit on the sixteenth floor, hack the lock, rip the fucking wires outa my head. Or the Big One gets into the system with the little one."

"Jesus. Reference, the little one," Keely begged, not really expecting the program to answer.

"The little one, reference: the stroke I already had. Little thing, no one would have noticed it anyway, but it's already in the system, and it's why I couldn't stay here waiting for you to come to."

"Where the fuck are you now?"

"Fuck if I know, boy. Out in the big system somewhere, the Big Context. Change for the machines. You want to find me after you're out, dial up the access code VM for Visual Mark. Give the password
Gina,
and I'll know it's you. I'll answer if I can. Door's open, get the fuck out, go down to my pit on the six—"

The image froze and then began to unravel, starting at the top left corner of the screen and working across. It looked as if some invisible creature were chewing it away in little portions. Keely squeezed his eyes shut. Did hallucinations come with a hangover? Or was this Mark's idea of punchy visuals?

When he opened his eyes, half the image had been eaten away; there were slashes through what remained. Keely hit the clear-screen pad. Nothing happened. He pressed recall and replay, tried to raise the dataline menu. Something was actively clawing at the image now, ripping it up in big, messy strokes. He pressed the reset pad to take the unit all the way back to start-up mode. Nothing changed.

The last of the image vanished, and the screen turned a soft greyish white.

"Come on. Is this some kinda fancy demonstration?" Keely said. "You doing this to show me something?" A shapeless spot was darkening in the center of the screen. "You're really still here, aren't you."

Music came up, faint, jangly like machinery, and the shadow in the center of the screen began to pulse and blossom and just as he blinked, he caught—

He shook his head. Strange. All of a sudden he'd dropped a stitch, just lost his line of thought. The screen was full of pulsing shadows. Turning away, he groped for the off pad. Images were flashing in his brain, twisted progressions and distortions that made his headache worse. Something about stones, or clouds . . . water . . .

He saw then that he'd been tapping the off panel steadily, but nothing had happened. The shadows kept moving on the screen, insistent, magnetic, demanding, and if he didn't turn his back to them, he was going to drop into a trance again.

But he wasn't an easy subject for hypnosis, he knew that. Except this didn't feel exactly like hypnosis. It felt . . . ugly. Like something probing him for a weak spot, a secret hurt. But just shadows on a screen?

He tried to think. It had been something
more
than the shadowy things. Cautiously he turned his head until the screen was at the edge of his peripheral vision.

There. A vibration or a flutter, not apparent when he looked at the screen straight on. It was peculiar, irregular, like a glitch in the transmission bouncing the picture around. Somehow that, combined with the pulse rate of the shadows, had affected him on some level he wasn't really aware of. Maybe something to do with the rate at which the neurons in his brain fired. Sam could have told him, she'd studied all that stuff. But Sam wasn't here. He was on his own.
Go down . . . rip the wires out . . .

He crawled under the desk, found the cords for the unit and the one next to it, and yanked them out of the wall.

On the screen the shadows kept throbbing, moving, writhing. He turned away and found himself staring at the heavy antique linen cloth on the dining table.

He pulled the cloth off the table, dragging along the metal-sculpture centerpiece and the bulky crystal candlesticks. They made some stonehome satisfying crashes when they hit the floor. He stumped backwards to the desk and flung the cloth over the monitor.

The shapes were pulsing on the material now. A chill went through him; then he realized that he was just seeing afterimages. Stop
it,
he ordered himself, and looked away, out the window, at the ceiling, at the floor, at everything, filling his mind with more visual input.

After a bit the discomfort in his head started to fade. He looked at the covered monitor again. Nothing, neither virus nor intelligence, should have been able to override a good old-fashioned power-down. So what the fuck was it, Super virus? Totally invulnerable?

Forget it; he would have to get down to the sixteenth floor without being caught and get into Mark's pit. Sure, nothing to it, hack the lock. Hack the fucking lock. With what? Shit, he couldn't even get
that
far, he didn't have a keystrip for the elevators.

His gaze fell on the other unit. He had never turned it on. And it was just a laptop in a console shell, bolted into the desk by the Diversifications cheap-asses.

"Thank you, cheap-asses," he said aloud, and went into the kitchen to see if he could find anything that might serve for tools.

In the end he just chopped away pieces of the desktop with a metal meat tenderizer (thank you, Rediscovery Cuisine), bent back the console shell, and disconnected the larger keyboard and monitor using a butter knife for a screwdriver. The unit had a smaller screen and its own portable keypad folded underneath and an unexpected wealth of extra connections tucked into the battery compartment. A
light-collector
battery, fully charged even after being hidden in the desk, thank you God, or Whoever.

He paused, looking at the other unit still covered by the tablecloth. Right, of course; as soon as he'd unplugged it, the battery had kicked in. To prevent a crash in case of power failure. Except the standard, resident antiviral procedures usually disabled the fail-safe cutoff to the battery as soon as it detected an infection, to keep the virus contained. Keely chuckled grimly. Not this time. Maybe this was Supervirus after all.

The elevator-call panel hotwired almost effortlessly with the penthouse laptop. He watched the activity on the screen impatiently, until he found a car emptying out on ten and called it up so quickly that he was sure he had given himself away. But that wasn't important anymore.

He was still on his way down to sixteen when the laptop screen told him all the other elevators had suddenly quit.

She was sorry she hadn't awakened him. No one should have had to face this kind of traffic alone.

Jammed in on Santa Monica Boulevard, she flipped through the screens on the commuter's nav unit, looking for anything with even a hint of space and movement on it. Or she tried to flip through the screens—the response time from GridLid was so long this morning, she could practically have gotten out of the commuter and checked the streets herself on foot. Almost nothing was moving. Periodically GridLid's usual crisis message marched across the bottom of the screen: DUE TO UNUSUALLY HEAVY TRAFFIC, ALL VEHICLES THAT DO NOT ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO BE ON THE ROADS AT THIS TIME SHOULD PARK WHEREVER LEGALLY PER- MISSIBLE UNTIL STREETS CLEAR.

Sure, Jack. Like the fucking
vehicles
were driving
themselves.
She shifted impatiently in the worn, sagging seat. Try and run away from something in L.A. The traffic was so fucking awful, you might as well stay put and face it down.

From the corner of her eye, she saw the GridLid screen flicker.

"Great, you motherfucker," she growled, and tapped the monitor. "Go out on me now, blow a fucking fuse, you think you don't absolutely have to be on the road, is that it?"

The driver in the private car behind her tapped the horn.

The commuter in front of her had rolled forward all of six inches. "Okay, shitheel, okay." She moved up six inches. "No one's gonna cut in front of us, happy now?"

The driver honked again. Irritated, she twisted around in her seat and saw a young guy beckoning to her, looking like he was approaching the thin edge of desperation. She got out of the commuter and went back to him.

"Excuse me, you don't know anything about these navigator units, do you?" he asked. She looked at the car. Private car, not a commuter, with custom everything. Including the nav unit. Full dataline access.

"No more than anyone else," she said. "Why?"

"I'm getting a real funny message on mine. Look." He swiveled the monitor around and sat back so she could see. "It ought to show up again any second."

Even as he spoke, a parade of words cut across the middle of the navigational graphic on the screen. THOUGHT WE TOLD YOU TO GET THIS PILE OF SHIT OFF THE ROAD. Gina gave a short incredulous laugh in spite of herself.

"This is my parents' car, and they've done a lot of customizing to it. The nav unit has a cutaway to full dataline access, and I thought maybe I was getting a crossed signal or something. Because, look—" He thumbed a panel on the body of the unit in the dashboard. "I can't raise any other screens to find any clear streets." He looked up at her with a pleading expression.

"Well, first of all, there ain't any other clear streets. You can't get any other screens because GridLid's running too slow to feed them. You might as well use the cutaway to the dataline and catch
Dear Mrs. Troubles
on FolkNet, or you can watch gridlock footage on
General News L.A.
That answer all your questions?"

"What about that weird message?" he said. "GridLid doesn't send out messages like that, do they?"

She chuckled. "No. But Dr. Fish does. I guess now he makes car calls."

"I'm sorry to bother you," he called after her apologetically as she went back to the commuter. "I haven't been driving very long."

"By the time we get outa this, you'll have been driving for-fucking-ever," she muttered. Dr. Fish in GridLid. More likely Dr. Fish was in the car's nav unit because Mommy and/or Daddy was always downloading hot tips off the free bizboards, going to and from work. Don't wanna waste a precious moment of those waking hours stuck in traffic, gotta do the fucking business in the car.

The nav-unit screen was blank. She banged on the housing with her fist. "Perfect, you son of a bitch. If I could get fucking
men
to go down on me that easy, I'd probably be fucking
mellow
about this!"

One word popped onto the screen.

Gina.

She pulled her hand back, staring at her name.
It's Mark.

She stared, not willing to believe it. The sight of her credit strip sticking out of the slot next to the ignition jumped out at her briefly. How he'd found her, by her little tiny credit allowed for essentials like food and gridlock.

Don't have long,
said the screen. It flickered again.
GridLid's had it.
Meat, too. Me, too.