Synners (19 page)

"Alone at last," Marly said, looking up and down the alley. The spot where she and Caritha had been beating up the attacker was also empty.

"Solidified holo," Caritha said knowingly, brushing herself off. She examined the cam for damage. "The only place it's actually solidified is in your mind. They must have shot our retinas when we came in, ran an analysis of our wavelengths, got the subliminal code."

"I hate that," Marly said. "I just hate it when they use your mind against you like that. If we'd had the savvy to walk through here with our eyes closed, they never could have touched us, but once you've seen one of them, the illusion's burned in, even if you close your eyes after that. You gotta fight em."

"You
walk through a dark alley with your eyes closed if you want," Caritha said. "They'd have just had something a little more substantial waiting for us."

"Maybe," Marly said, massaging her knuckles, "but I hate giving them the satisfaction of knowing they made me hurt myself instead of them having to do it themselves."

"You want a fair fight, become a boxer." Caritha started up the alley, and Marly followed, beckoning to Gabe.

He looked around quickly and then found it, a strange spot about the size of a dime floating at the limit of his peripheral vision. Glitch in the program, he thought, irritated.

"Hey, hotwire!" Marly called, invisible now in the darkness ahead of him. "You comin', or you waitin' for the night nurse to come out and collect you for your bed in the ward?"

The glitch floated dizzily, then sailed around him to plant itself on his right. He turned again just in time to see it shrink sharply, as if it were receding up the alley after Marly and Caritha. His jaw sent a spear of pain all the way to his temple. He winced, automatically putting a hand to his face and making contact with the outside of the headmount, ruining the illusion completely.

"Uh . . . I'll meet you later," he called. "Disconnect.

He was about to stash the saved program in the lockbox under the desk when it occurred to him to check the system's security status.

Everything was normal, no intrusion had been registered, which could have meant nothing. It was the worst-kept secret of the computer age that B&E programs outdid watchdogs regularly. His own imagination getting the better of him, he decided. He was too toxed to concentrate on the program, but he could jump at shadows. As if Manny could spy on him without his knowledge. The only person he could think of who was capable of a hack like that was Sam. Or some of her friends.

But someone else
had
been there in the program. The thought refused to go away, and he leaned on the console, trying to think through the pain in his jaw that also refused to go away. It didn't make any sense. Neither Manny nor anyone else could audit him without an official corp requisition for an audit program, which would automatically notify him he had company. And without an audit requisition, the system was impenetrable. Was
supposed
to be impenetrable, nominally to preserve employee confidentiality but actually to discourage in-house hacking.

Someone else
had
been there in the program, his mind insisted. Whether that made no sense or all the sense in the world, someone—or something—had been there. Possibly a hacker cracking in from outside and moving on to some other part of the system when nothing of real interest showed up.

His inner eye could see the glitch-spot zipping away up the alley. Not winking out or closing, but moving away. Going to Marly and Caritha. As if it found them more interesting than it did him. But this time he hadn't left the program running along without him; if the glitch had indicated an intruder, the intruder had been thrown out when he'd ended the run.

He put a standard breach-of-security report on the flat-screen, started to fill it out, and then paused. If he reported his suspicions, he'd have to provide a copy of the simulation he'd been running. And wouldn't Manny be interested in
that.

Groaning, he sat back in the chair. He could just shoot himself and get it over with, that would take care of everything.

Shit. Call it a hacker. A hacker wouldn't get far; Diversifications' security would either throw the hacker out, or lock on for a trace and subsequent arrest. Either way he wouldn't be involved. Even if a hacker got something from him, what use could it possibly have been?
House of the Headhunters
had been so generally available, even collectors didn't care that it was out of release, and it wasn't like he was sitting on a pile of sensitive information.

Forget it, he told himself; it felt sick and eerie, but it was ultimately nothing and would stay nothing. Probably never happen again. He put another patch on his face, and then another before he filled out a sick-leave form and zapped it to Medical. As long as he was getting nowhere, he might as well go home and
be
nowhere.

Watch out. It can make you a little stupid.

Watch out—

He ran a hand over his face, frowning at the memory of Gina Aiesi as he inched forward in the rental.

—it can make you a little stupid.

If that meant not having more sense than to get on La Cienega in the middle of the afternoon, she'd been right. God, when was the city going to admit defeat, scrap GridLid, and lay new lines with improved security and better transmission times, he wondered. Part of an illegal message that had leaked through GridLid's blocks was still showing at the top of the nav screen:
Why don't you just park this toy and take a walk? The Doctor feels
you don't walk enou

That would be Dr. Fish. One of Sam's heroes. He shook his head. Sam's admiration for outlaws might have been incomprehensible, until you factored in Catherine. With good guys like Catherine, you didn't need bad guys, and bad guys would look pretty good.

He played with the screen as he advanced little by little toward the freeway. At this rate, he would probably get home at his usual time, even if the freeways were half-decent. He could have waited out the rest of the day on a cot in Medical and made better time during the traffic-restricted rush hour. He could have stuck with the simulation and not noticed the day passing, except to take short breaks to put on more killers. Maybe with enough killer in his system, he might even have felt like doing one of those loathsome commercial spots. BodyShields: protection from everything except—what? Clogs? Hackers?

The nav unit beeped to notify him that Olympic was passable, if he wanted to take it down to the San Diego Freeway. He put on the audio, which informed him of the same thing in an even, cordial male voice, and then went on to warn the rest of the mobile public away from La Cienega.

It took him ten minutes to squeeze into the correct lane to make the turn. Down at Olympic a cop on a scooter was diverting all traffic from the lane onto Olympic. GridLid was supposed to relieve cops of most traffic duty; Gabe could read the disgust in the cop's face as she waved him onto the cross-street.

He got almost all the way to the southern edge of Westwood before he had to come to a complete stop again. Fifteen minutes later GridLid announced that high traffic concentration had brought Olympic to a standstill, stay on La Cienega, which was now moving fairly well, or try Venice Boulevard.

Gabe peered through the scratched plastic windshield at the sky, expecting to see a heli circling overhead. Nothing; not even a rich-commuters transport heading for Topanga or Malibu. GridLid's voice started to repeat the warning about Olympic, and he shut off the audio. It all felt too much like the story of his life, and the last thing he wanted was GridLid rubbing his nose in it.

———

Near the old 20th Century-Fox Studios buildings, the halt seemed to be permanent. GridLid sounded apologetic about the multivehicle pileup at the Sepulveda intersection, as if it were their fault somehow. All things considered, it probably was.

Which left him sitting in a cheap rental with a sore nose, Gabe thought, looking at the old buildings. They had been broken up into studio rental space sometime after 20th Century Fox had failed to continue to score interest with the catchy name of Twenty-First Century Fox. Perhaps they should have changed the Fox for something a bit more long-lived. Gabe had always known the place as a cluster of studios; for a short period of time early on in his dubious Diversifications career and even more dubious marriage, he had spent a few hours sharing studio space with another aspiring artist. He'd lost track of Consuela after giving up his half of the studio, but to his surprise the directory sign listed her as still being resident.

On impulse he twisted the wheel hard and pulled into the parking lot just before he would have inched too far past it. The listing indicated she had moved up to a larger studio than the one they had shared, which must have meant she was doing well, even though he couldn't remember seeing her name anywhere. Not that he'd been keeping up. Once he'd giiven up the studio space, he'd consciously avoided any news from the art world.

She had the back upper room in the largest building now; to his surprise there were no visible security devices, no guards to challenge him. All he had to do was walk in, go upstairs, and press a small lighted panel next to the door. The panel gave him pause. The usual
Ring for Entry
sign had been replaced with
Come in If You Dare.

Consuela must be feeling pretty sure of herself, he thought, and for a moment he wasn't sure that he did dare. Then he pressed the panel, and the door swung open silently.

He stepped in and found himself underwater.

Ribbons of seaweed in neon colors undulated lazily upward from the ocean floor, lighting up the semidark with cold fire. Gabe hesitated, letting the door fall shut behind him, and took a step forward. His foot passed through the pale, soft-looking ocean floor and disappeared; he could feel the more conventional floor below, but the illusion never gave way to show it to him. Consuela was doing
awfully
well, he thought; only the very rich and large corps like Diversifications had projectors of this quality.

A luminous purple octopus crawled over the top of a waist-high rock and took a look at him, its arms moving with sensuous grace; a spiny fish floated out of the shadows ahead of him like a dignified airship. He blinked. Not quite a fish—the spines were needles growing out of chips instead of scales. Its enormous brown glass eyes surveyed him with cold-blooded solemnity.

"What do you want?" the fish asked him in the slightly accented female contralto that was still familiar to him.

"Hello, Consuela," he said. "It's me. Gabe Ludovic."

The fish flicked its tail and darted away in a cloud of tiny, sparkling bubbles. Gabe waited; Consuela always had been quirky. Maybe that was the difference between successful artists and himself, the quirk factor. He scored pretty low on that meter.

There was a shimmer in the water, and then a silver shark sailed up and over his head in a wide arc, the muscular body shining. Crushed roses trailed from the jaws. "You've been a stranger," the shark said with Consuela's voice.

"And you've done well," he said, watching the shark roll over and over as it sailed around for another pass over him.

"Sometimes I'd get to wondering whatever the hell happened to you." The shark came around, aimed itself at his face and swooped upward at the last moment. One of the roses drifted down and landed just at his feet. "Pick it up."

Gabe bent and put two fingers around the illusion of stem. A thorn disappeared into the ball of his thumb. He raised his hand, and the rose came with it, moving exactly as if he were really holding it. "That's good, Con."

"Better than that." The crushed petals opened up, and he saw her face within. "Check this."

Blood was trickling from where the thorn had sunk into his flesh. Painless blood. Almost as deadly as bloodless pain, he diought, a bit boggled. "Ouch," he said.

The aristocratic face in the heart of the rose didn't look smug. Consuela had a little too much dignity for that. "Didn't ever expect to see you again. Whatever the hell
did
happen to you, anyway?"

"I don't know," he said. "Things."

"And stuff and people and all like that?" Her smile made her look hard; it always had. She was hard, though. There was something about Consuela that he'd found slightly scary, scary the way an unreal thorn drawing unreal blood from the ball of his thumb was scary. Everything in her was directed one way, into her work, and in that way perhaps she wasn't quite so different from Catherine, and maybe that was what he'd found frightening about her. But Catherine's drive came out as multimillion dollar real estate deals, and Consuela's—

He got up and moved farther into the room, looking around. The ceiling was invisible in shadows above him; he caught a glimpse of a small school of glowing fish moving in jerky choreography, leaving minor, angular trails behind them. The purple octopus was still lazing on the rock, watching him with a gaze so intelligent he squirmed inwardly. One of the long arms lifted and beckoned to him. He went over to the rock slowly; the underwater ambience had seeped into him, taking him over. It wasn't an unpleasant feeling.

"You gave up, didn't you?" the octopus said.

Gabe shrugged, laying the rose across his palm. It was hard to maintain the illusion of holding it without looking at it constantly. "Maybe I just got real. Like they used to say." He gestured at the environment. "Something like this is beyond me. There's not much call for it with commercials, anyway."

"That's shit. There would be, if you did it right. They'll call for anything if you do it right for long enough."

"I never had your drive, Con."

"You did, you just never put it in gear. And you know it. The octopus blinked, furling its tentacles briefly to show the glittering suction cups underneath. "Why'd you think to come here?"

"Happened to be in the neighborhood, thought I'd drop in."

"Bad clog caught you on Olympic?"

He laughed. "How in
hell
did you get a setup like this?"