Synners (52 page)

Someone raised his chin, and he found himself almost nose to nose with Gina. He frowned. Here she was
again;
dammit, he could
not
keep his mind from wandering and dragging her into his simulated realities—

She straightened up, and he saw the kid standing beside her, looking sick and frightened.

"Told you you wouldn't want to do this," the kid said.

"Now do you want to go on with the death trip," Gina said, grabbing the front of his shirt and pulling him to his feet, "or do you want to get the fuck outa here?"

"Where's this freight elevator you used?" the kid asked him.

"Down the hallway past the elevators, then down another. I'll have to show you," Gabe said. Gina grabbed him around the waist and wedged her shoulder under his armpit as they started up the hall, in spite of the fact that his legs were steady and he could obviously walk on his own.
Let it be,
he thought,
if that's the only way she can let you hold her.
The contact felt almost too good. The memory of the one night they had had together flashed into his mind, of waking to find they had settled perfectly, arranged themselves so comfortably around each other that it had been like waking to discover he'd come home, there in Mark's apartment, in the dark.

Halfway down the next hallway, Gina stopped so suddenly he almost fell over.

"What is it?" said the kid.

Gina pointed at one of the doors, not a pit door, but the door to an office, labeled
Manny Rivera
in tasteful black letters. She pulled away from Gabe and went over to it.

What's wrong with this picture?
The question echoed like madness in Gabe's head. Absurdly the image of the lake with the stony shore came with it before he pushed it away and reached for her. "Gina—"

She gave him a brief glance before she pushed the door open with one hand and stepped inside. "Rivera, you shit! Do you know what happened out here?"

Gabe went in after her and stopped. Manny was sitting behind his desk, smiling vaguely. The blood had poured from his eyes and nose and mouth, soaking the wrinkle-free white shirt, beading on the soft hand-tailored jacket.

"You shit," Gina whispered.

There was a movement from the table by the window. The Beater was sitting there with the slightly puzzled expression of someone who has just taken a bad blow to the head and is still deciding whether to fall down or not.

"I had an appointment to get fired," the Beater said matter-of-factly. "We were going to eat lunch together, and he was going to fire me. When he let me in, he was on the wires, and he told me he'd never forgive me for laying down my ax and turning it into a biz desk. Then he started to bleed."

Gabe moved cautiously, almost tiptoeing around the desk. All the connections were still in Manny's sockets, and except for spatters of blood, nothing on his desk had been disturbed. Business as usual.
Things to do to
day: fire the Beater; after lunch bleed copiously and, probably, die.
All in a day's work.

He touched Manny's shoulder, expecting him to fall out of the chair. Instead, Manny suddenly swiveled around to look at him, and he jumped back.

"You
shit,"
Gina shouted; all at once she was standing at the desk. "Do you know what you did, you stone-ass, mother-fucking—"

Manny sprang at her, grabbing her by the throat and dragging her across the desk before Gabe could even register that he'd moved. Gabe went for him, and Manny brought his elbow up directly into his face.

The pain was like a scream, overwhelming, drowning him. He was dimly aware of Gina cursing and struggling, and the kid yelling briefly, a couple of thudding noises. He rolled on the floor, feeling the blood pour out of his nose as he held it with both hands. He got clumsily to his knees and looked up.

Through a blur of tears, he saw that Manny had Gina pinned on the desk while he held something over her face. One of the connections from his own head, Gabe realized, and then understood what Manny meant to do.

He groped for the desk and pulled himself up on it. "Manny," he said.

"Not Manny. Mark," said the Beater, getting up from where he'd fallen on the floor next to the kid.

"Not completely," Manny said, "but more than not by this time, I think. Not completely a stupid fuck-up, either, Gina." Manny smiled, and it was Visual Mark's vaguely dazed and fixed smile. Gabe blinked at him through a fresh wave of dizziness. It was more grotesque than Silkwood, seeing Mark's expression on Manny's face. It was as though Manny had been trying to do an imitation of Mark and somehow become trapped in it. Simulating Mark.

Gina had stopped struggling and was staring up at him. "The problem is, it isn't an idea, it's a stroke. Or maybe a stroke is just Mother Nature's riff on an evil idea," Manny went on, still holding the wire near her head. "Oh, not just evil.
Corrupt.
This is what it looks like, rock'n'roll and big biz. The biz been
Marked,
see, and they're both fucked now. The way it should be. They were right, Gina—if you can't fuck it, and it doesn't dance, eat it or throw it away." His gaze drifted over to Gabe, and the expression on his face changed to vintage Manny Rivera. Gabe felt his stomach roll over. He couldn't breathe.

Gina's fist shot up, and Manny staggered back against the large wall screen, which came brightly to life as he collapsed on the floor. Gabe stumbled around the desk and collided with Gina.

"Get the kid and come on," she said, giving him a shove. He made a move toward the kid and then saw what was on the screen.

Not the strange pulsing shapes, but the lake with the stony shore. The perspective was moving slowly along the shoreline, and in another moment or two, Gabe knew it would reach the figure standing there, waiting. He wanted to look away, he didn't want to see the figure, he didn't want to find out who it was, but his body wouldn't move. The image on the screen had clamped onto the image in his mind, and the two of them had been meant to come together somehow, they'd been meant to merge because they were really one and the same—

The screen went dark, and he came back to himself in a rush, feeling the blood still dripping from his painful nose.

"I said, get the kid and come on." Gina was standing over Manny, holding the end of the connection she had ripped out of his system. The torn wires looked like crooked insects' legs. She threw it down. "You said it. The hardware would give before his skull did." She looked at the kid, now getting up and rubbing the back of his head. "We should have thought of that, tried ripping it out of the system instead of him."

"Gina—" the Beater started.

"Shut the fuck up. You want to get out of here or not?" The lights flickered, buzzed, and went out.

The weak early-afternoon light coming through the window by the table filled the office with shadows. Gabe's mind automatically began to make them pulse; he ground his fists into his eyes and then blinked. It was still happening.

"Yah. Me, too." Gina gave him a hard look and turned to the kid. " 'It won't cut the power.' "

"It didn't cut the power," he said shakily. "Just the lights."

"Find me something to burn," Gina said, looking around. "It's gonna be pitch in those fucking hallways."

"Not quite," Gabe said, and pointed. Glowing blue strips ran along the top of the baseboards. "Those are all around the building. They'll last about five hours, maybe longer."

"I'd feel a fuck of a lot better with a searchlight." Gina started rummaging through Manny's desk drawers.

"I doubt if—" Gabe cut off when she came up with a hand-cam. She switched it on, and a narrow high-intensity beam above the lens played briefly across the walls before she shut it off again. He shrugged. "Okay. I feel better, too. Let's go."

Holding Gina's arm, he waded through the pulsing shadows into the hall. As soon as he did, he was glad Gina had found the cam. The blue glow was entirely too unsettling, too much like one of the cheaper fun-house sequences from
House of the Headhunters.

"Ease the fuck up," Gina whispered, twisting her arm in his grip. "You're breaking my fucking bones."

"Freight elevator," said the kid urgently.

Gabe looked up and down the hall. His sense of direction had suddenly deserted him, leaving him adrift in a glowing blue void. Patches of deeper darkness were swimming through his vision even here, pulsing in a way that was all too familiar. He tried to force them away somehow, but there was nowhere he could look where they were not. He squeezed his eyes shut, and they played on the backs of his eyelids, insistent, compelling, calling to the image deep in his brain, a lake under a gray sky with a stony shore—

"Over here, Ludovic. Look over here.
Now!"

He turned in the direction of Gina's voice and was blinded by a bright light shining directly into his eyes. It hurt, but at the same time it felt oddly good. The angle of the light changed, and blinking against the afterimages, he could discern Gina's face bathed in part of the beam from the cam.

"Okay now?' she said.

He blinked again. Afterimages still, but no pulsing shadows. "Yah," he said, amazed. "What—ah, how—"

She chuckled grimly. "Easy to see you ain't lived rough. The vermin always scuttle back into their hidey-holes when you turn on the light. Now where the fuck is the freight elevator?" She did something to the cam, and the beam widened, illuminating the corridor all around them.

"That way," he said, pointing, and she pulled him along, holding the cam on her shoulder. "Around the next corner and down at the end of the hall."

They rounded the bend and then stopped so suddenly the kid and the Beater bumped into them from behind, almost knocking the cam from Gina's grasp. Someone was sitting in the middle of the hall.

One hand went up, fending off the light. "Whoa, it's too early or too late for that, don't know which—"

The voice was Clooney's, but the intonations were Mark's. Gabe felt Gina stiffen as she shifted the cam from her shoulder, holding it chest-high with both hands.

"Well." Clooney pushed himself to his feet, still trying to block the light. "Old habits, they do die hard, don't they, Gina. All those things. Change for the machines. If you can't fuck it, and it doesn't dance, eat it or throw it away. And looking for Mark. That's yours, ain't it—looking for Mark. Gotten so now that even when you're not looking for Mark, you're looking for Mark. And finding him."

Clooney shuffled forward a few steps, and the alien smile on his face was only nominally vague. There was a new hardness in it—or maybe that wasn't so new, Gabe thought as his own startlement began to turn toward fear. Maybe hints of it had always been there, something that kept the smile always looking vague to mask what was really at work underneath.

"And now you can find him wherever you look," Clooney went on. "What you've always wanted. Whether you know it or not. You don't, do you? Nah, that's not one of the things you'd care to face, being the way you are, Gina. Laugh it off, break it up, and break it down, that's you. But that doesn't change anything for anybody, least of all you. And I want you. I
want
you."

He got within arm's reach of her, and then she swung the cam up and out, right into Clooney's face. He staggered back, crashed into a wall, and then keeled over facedown.

The kid started to go to him, and Gina stopped him. "He looks okay to me. Come on."

As if by some unspoken agreement, they were all suddenly racing for the elevator still gaping open the way Gabe had left it. Or maybe it was just that they were fleeing from Clooney's body, Gabe thought as Gina shoved him into the elevator and played the light from the cam over the empty hall behind them. Nothing there but Clooney, who hadn't moved. Gabe looked away, not wanting to have to see blood pouring from his ears, too, and locked eyes with the kid, who frowned a little and jerked his head at Gina.

Gabe shrugged and reach over to touch her shoulder. "What is it?" he said. "What are you looking for?"

She brushed his hand away, irritated. "What's the matter, you deaf or something?" She turned away from the corridor and went to lean against the wall. "Take it down."

"Wait a minute," said the Beater, looking around at them. "If that's what happened to Rivera, and to that guy, what about everybody else? All those pits—"

"You don't want to know," said the kid, closing the door. "And neither do any of us." He looked at the control panel for a moment and then pressed for the ground floor.

They rode all the way down in silence and went out an emergency exit into the chaos that was no longer really a city.

A few hours after Art disappeared, Sam and Rosa were picking their way through the human debris under the Hermosa Pier with hand-held scanners while a couple of Rude Boys acted as bodyguards. The cases were smelly, and the Rudes were bored. Gator had promised to pay them in tattoos, and they were hot to get themselves marked. Sam wondered what Gator was going to mark them with—an ordinary design or some other piece of Art Fish? No, had to be an ordinary design; Gator had destroyed all the paper copies of Art. Safer, she said.
Anyone could steal paper, but you need
one of my scanners to get at the tattoos; custom-built.
How did you divide something like Art up, anyway? She found the whole thing rather dizzying. Or maybe just dizzy.

Rosa seemed unburdened by considerations of the abstract; Sam could tell that what was bothering her was the smell. She wouldn't have minded a gas mask herself, but apparently that was one of the few things you couldn't get on the Mimosa, along with personal hygiene products.

She ran the scanner over an intricate design of a spider web on the back of a gaunt man who seemed unaware of her most of the time. At least he wasn't resisting or trying to get friendly. Most of the cases had been passive, barely curious. Files, nothing more than files. What was in this one, she wondered—Art's sense of humor, or his tendency to posture, or some collection of associations that contributed to his self-awareness? An AI encrypted in tattoos. Or perhaps
translated
was a better word.