Synners

23

The memory sprang open, and she wasn't just remembering the fall, she was reliving it.

Her inner ear went crazy, the wind rushed into her, choking off her breathing, guided express missile, toes pointed at the sidewalk and the world blurring, smearing upward-

It cut off as the last chord faded out. Jesus, Jesus, Little Jesus Jump-Up, what a fucking rush. Signature image? This was going to scare Valjean out of a year's growth.

Getting good at falling, she thought. Falling off buildings and falling into bed.

Top, she commanded. Instantly she was looking at the frozen beginning of the video. She clicked through it by sequence until she reached the start of the fall, clicked back to add a small hint at key points throughout the video, just the barest eyeblink-thoughtblink?-of the point of view about to step into empty air. An almost-flash forward. She stuttered the beginning of the fall-step off, zip back to step off again, zip back to step off again, zip back to step off again-

Very nasty. What does this remind you of? She couid feel herself smiling. If things had been just a little different, she'd have thrown his ass out of the bedroom-Mark's bedroom. Instead, she'd gone ahead and jumped the fast train without looking. Maybe just because he'd come to her, she hadn't gone to him. Not quite the same way, at least, not till the last moment, when the fast train reawakened by Claudio and Flavia and Dorcas and Tom went into high gear at the sight of him rushing at her.

With Mark, nobody went to anybody; things came together, and there they were, like conditions being right for rain, or sleet, or nothing at all. It had been a long time since anyone had come to her the way Ludovic had, even longer since she'd gone to anyone. In some ways it had been easier with Mark. Just hang in, wait for conditions to be right, no hurry, no worry, and if they were, they were; if they weren't, they weren't. Don't like it? Go complain to the sky about the rain while you're at it.

But this one was different. This one she would have to do something about. If she'd known that at the time, maybe she'd have asked for more time to think about it.

Horseshit. You knew. You set it up. You put a few things around in a pattern, and then you stood back to see if he'd make anything out of it. What does this look like to you, an open window or an open wound? He saw an open window, and he climbed right on in, and the bitch of it is, you had a feeling that was what he wanted to see and what he wanted to do. It's your ticket for your trip, and you can't just back off pleading self-defense.

It had been one hell of a long time since she'd jumped the fast train. The fast train was the transportation of the very young and strong. After you got dragged under the wheels a few times, you knew you'd had your fill, you knew you weren't young and strong enough to do that anymore. If you were smart enough.

She didn't think Gabe Ludovic had ever jumped the fast train in his life. Standing at the end of fifteen years of marriage, he'd wanted a lot more than sex. The wanting had been all but tangible, in the way he'd touched her, in the heat of his body, a heat that surprised both of them. The heat and the wanting had run him a good part of the night, keeping him wide awake if not active the whole time, talking crazy and sometimes just talking. It might have been the night they should have had before she'd gone off to Mexico with Mark.

He'd been waiting. He'd been waiting for her to come back. Maybe he didn't know that, but she did. Now.

His face floated before her, waiting for her to save it to chip. Instead, she wiped it away and refocused on the video hanging fire in her head.

She was in the middle of the ghost-town sequence, moving among the images of the abandoned, rusted-out cars, when the feeling of being watched came over her. It wasn't part of the video, she'd have remembered the sensation. She halted the action and took a look around the empty street. Tall buildings with the windows busted out, dead-empty under cold, thin afternoon sunlight. On the street the smashed headlights of a murdered limo stared at her. Abruptly she remembered where the image had come from, the old footage of that college town on January 1, 2000. Except she'd left out the bodies.

And then the bodies were there, tattered phantoms on the hood of the limo, hanging out the passenger window, fallen from the rear door, strewn on the streets like discarded dolls. Her pov rushed at them, and the hell of it was, she couldn't really tell if she'd done that or not, put the bodies in just by remembering, or whether-

– take a little walk-

A fleeting thought that disintegrated even as she became aware of it. She moved on, going with the music and the visuals, riding it all the way to the fall again. The stutter built on itself, lasting a second longer on each zip back in time, until the fall was a relief.

And as she hung in the air for the brief moment before she dropped, the presence crashed in on her all at once, all the way through this time, and he took the fall with her.

Acceptance streamed through her along with the terror of falling, the terror of falling with him where he could not have been and seemed to belong all at once.

She came to, shivering on the mat.

Through the exterior lens of the head mounted monitor atop the console, he watched her take the lift down and come striding across the pit to him. With another ax to grind. Just to do it, he gave her one, a big fire-ax with a handle as thick as a child's arm and a hungry-looking blade. Nasty; he logged the visual for later use.

How perfectly she came through like this, the expressions on her face speaking more plainly than words. The frown of confusion as she looked at his body curled up on the carpet, wondering how he'd let her in, then the realization smoothing her face, irritation pulling at her mouth. It was almost like reading her mind, which he'd done when he'd sipped at her video. Great pleasure in the act, although there had been something disturbing there that had made him suddenly uncertain, made him wonder, which was not the only reason he wanted to do it again. Except he knew she had come to tell him not to.

The commands to the system ran instantaneously for him, nothing more than breathing.

"Over here, actually," came his voice from the console speaker. He saved the sight of her head jerking up to look, digitizing it as far as it would go, until he had a bit that was pure, self-contained startlement.

She moved closer to the console and looked it over, her gaze passing two or three times over the headmount before she picked it up. He felt a wave of vertigo as his outer pov slid and jerked in her hands.

"Take it easy, don't move so fast," he said.

He saw her trace the lines from the headmount back into the system, then follow the trail of wires leading from the system to his head.

"Think this up yourself?" she asked, putting down the head-mount.

"Easy to do from the inside. Whole console fits in here with room to spare. Lots of things are easy. Check the flatscreen."

He showed her the image of herself stalking across the pit toward him with the ax.

"Pretty clean," she said casually. "No extraneous elements, no static, good res. Get your ass up, I got something to say to you."

"Why don't you come on in here with me, then?"

She looked from the headmount to the meat on the floor and back, glaring. "I want to know how you pulled that shit on me."

"If it's on-line, I can get to it." How I did it, Gina? More like, how couldn't I? It's what I was made to do. I told you that ages ago, when I was far more meat than what I am now.

She stood over him, looking at the wires trailing out of his head. "Don't do it again," she said quietly. "Don't you break in on me again."

He let the words pour into him and run along his enhanced awareness, preserving the exact pitch of her voice, her pronunciation, the way her mouth had moved, and sent it all to the Gina file.

"I scared you," he said. "But really, it was just like this, like you coming here to see me. I just didn't disconnect." She glanced at the speaker.

"Yes, I do sound different," he said, and her attention snapped back to the meat on the floor. She was going to continue to address that poor meat, despite the fact that she should have looked directly into the headmount cam. "I'm better. I'm getting better all the time. That body was dragging me down."

"I wouldn't talk about it in the past tense. How the fuck you think you can last like this?"

He popped his vitals on the flatscreen for her. "Every time I took the wire, I learned to slow the metabolism a little more. I made adjustments, just like any other mechanism. Change for the machines."

She knelt next to the body, and he panned the headmount lens down, tracking her. Tentatively she took hold of the body's arm and squeezed it. Then she looked up at the console again.

"You can feel the difference, can't you, Gina? I'm not really in there, now. I'm maintaining it, but there's nobody home. I know it doesn't happen that way for you, but that's how it is for me."

She let go of him and stood up, stubbornly shaking her head. "You been in worse shape than this after a tough night. You think it's some kinda fucking novelty for me to see you passed out on the floor?" Abruptly she turned and headed back to the lift.

He swiveled the lens after her. "Gina."

She stopped and turned her head just a little. "What."

"I said this would be me. Didn't I?"

Her head dipped slightly in what might have been a nod. Then she moved off, fast.

He turned off the lens and gave himself over fully to what was within.

He was running across the airfield toward the zeppelin, following Caritha. The distance was deceptive-either that, or his pov was out of sync again. He couldn't seem to get coordinated, and he wondered how Gina handled that. He would have asked her, except there hadn't been any time the night before to bring the subject up gracefully. If he had even thought of it, which he hadn't. He was sharply aware of the way his heart was pounding, as if it were trying to beat itself to death in his chest, and not just from the illusion of running, though he was also conscious of the sensations of his feet pounding the ground and his arms pumping.

Abruptly the side of the zeppelin lit up, flashing marquee-style. MORE DRUGS. He thumped to a stop and stared up at it, more amused than dismayed. Marly paused on the stairway up to the gondola; Caritha poked her head out the doorway to see what the holdup was.

"Excuse me. What are you doing?"

He turned. Rana Copperthwait was striding across the airfield, looking both severe and concerned. Christ, his mind was wandering again.

"This is love," Copperthwait said. A breeze lifted her heavy curls slightly, brushing one ringlet across her mouth. She pushed it away irritably. "This is love and sex, no ambiguity here, no coyness. You're living everyone's fantasy, to be desirable to two people and them being willing to share. That's pretty great. It would be even better if you could throw in a few more women. Now don't you think you'd better get up in that zeppelin and get busy?"

Gabe looked over his shoulder at Marly and Caritha. They shrugged. "Come on, hotwire," Marly said, and trotted up the steps to the gondola. He followed, pausing just outside the doorway. Caritha poked her head out again.

"What's the matter now?"

"I'm blank on what the inside of a zeppelin gondola looks like."

"So call a database." She grabbed him by the front of his shirt and yanked him inside.

He was standing in Mark's bedroom, looking down at Gina asleep in the rumpled sheets. Startled, he looked at Marly, who put up her hands and backed away. "I'm not touching this one. You made it, you deal with it."

"Likewise," Caritha said, moving closer to Marly. A doorway appeared behind them, and they slipped through it. He had a glimpse of something that looked like a pilot's cockpit before they shut the door on him.

In the bed Gina remained asleep. Cautiously he moved around it and sat down on the edge of the mattress. She stirred slightly.

At first you think things are going to get better. You keep believing, and you honor the commitment-

C-word, she'd said abruptly.

Pardon?

C-word. The big bad c-word. Commitment. You got them Bad Old Cozmic C-Word Blues.

It wasn't a word to me. It was something real, not an incredible simulation. You can run on that… oh, years and years. Even after it doesn't seem worth it anymore, you can still run on it, and then one day… all gone. All used up.

Yah? Try it Cheshire-cat style. One day it's all that's left, and everything else is gone. Either way it's a stone-home bitch. I got a c-word and nothing to use it on. What've you got?

The Last Zeppelin. Coming soon to a brain near you.

Gina stirred again. There was the hint of a smile on her mouth. Had anyone ever smiled in sleep because of him? He didn't know. Still didn't but then, it had been dark.

He hadn't started to worry until the room showed signs of getting lighter. Suddenly he'd had the wild idea that the darkness had been a safe zone or a fooler loop, and the daylight would screw it all up. He'd turned to her a little desperately then, and maybe she'd been feeling the same thing, or something like it. They'd gone at each other in frenzy, and Jesus but he'd thought that would have kept the day away if anything could have.

Maybe it had. The room was completely light when they'd quieted, but the spell had not been broken. Out of bed they'd continued to move around each other easily, not falling all over each other like a couple of schoolkids, just… easily. A little sex magic could go a long way, even in the only port in a storm.

Fast train.

Pardon?

Fast train. It's usually the night-train. Never mind, Ludovic. Now you know what it's like.

The room swayed slightly as the zeppelin lifted off, and he suddenly had the certain feeling that something/someone was approaching; a new presence, as full and individual as he was. He twisted around to see who it was.

He was looking at himself in the mirror in Medical's bathroom, turning his head from side to side. Just as they'd said, he didn't look any different. Same old head, only now it had eight holes in it, eight holes to be filled with eight plugs and a small menu of commands he could use to manipulate the images in his head. Top. Forward. Reverse. Freeze. Resume. End. Save. Quit.

There was a fast montage of images as each command was executed-Caritha, MORE DRUGS, Rana Copperthwait speaking to him forward and backward, freezing briefly and then gesturing at the zeppelin, Mark's bedroom, Gina, Marly and Caritha shutting the door on him, Gina stirring and the sense of another presence even more strongly this time, his face in the bathroom mirror, the awareness of the whole mess being saved to chip, and then he was blinking at the ceiling of the pit high above him, wondering if he'd ever get this right.

Disconnect, he thought. There was a fleeting acknowledgment deep within, a feeling he had tried to describe to himself without success. Without success seemed to fit the situation in general. He reached up and removed each connection carefully. There was never any sensation of the connections going in or coming out again, it was all as painless as they'd promised, but the association he always made was voodoo. Sticking long pins in a doll and pulling them out again. Perhaps because he didn't want to think about the ward sequence in House of the Headhunters. If he did, he'd have to look at it.

He shook his head as if to clear it, even though he wasn't the least bit groggy. That was the interesting thing about using the new interface-he never came out of it feeling drained and hung over the way he sometimes had with the old system. No eyestrain, no muscle strain, no strain of any kind.

He should have felt groggy, though, considering the sleep he hadn't gotten the night before, but rest wasn't what he'd needed, not then, and not now.

C-word, Ludovic. It takes more fucking nerve than most of us have to say the whole thing right out. Because there's nothing worse than having lead in your pencil and nobody to write to.

He laughed aloud at the memory. He could hear her voice so clearly in his head. The sockets had given him that-all his thoughts ran as big and vivid and sharp as any high-definition monitor screen, seeming so real he could almost reach out and touch them.

What the sockets hadn't given him, though, was control over what came into his head. No strain, but nothing to show for his efforts, either. He couldn't seem to get out of his own way long enough to produce a coherent sequence.

He got up, ejected the chip from the console, and held it up to the light on the tip of his forefinger before he pushed it into the erasure/reformat slot above the keyboard. Manny had had his implants four days before, which meant Medical would keep him for another three, leaving him three more days to come up with a feature-length zeppelin adventure for Para-Versal. And he couldn't even get five minutes of conversation without his mind skittering all over the place. Maybe he could divert Copperthwait with another story conference. Sure, come on over, shoot the-ahem-shit. Love for you creative types to talk.-Excuse me. What are you doing? If he could stand it.

His gaze came to rest on the hotsuit folded neatly on the shelf above the desk with the head-mounted monitor on top of it. He'd have been better off with the old system and the old chips. Wouldn't take any longer than, oh, two weeks. Then he could run it through with the new interface, which would probably reduce it to video confetti in a matter of two minutes, the way his mind was wandering. Pop it into Manny's electronic review queue and wait for him to watch it. He would know when Manny screened it, because he'd be able to hear Manny screaming from here. Or maybe Manny would just drop in via some spyhole-

Maybe he already had.

The memory of the other presence coming up on him hit him like a shot to the head. He knew for certain. It was the same sensation he'd felt during the visualization exercises the day after he'd had the procedure, a sense of pressure like someone leaning or pushing against him.

The hacker, maybe. But wouldn't the hacker have tried to talk to him?

Gabe ran a hand through his hair. He couldn't think about the hacker, or he'd have that coming out on chip along with the rest of the extraneous images. Maybe he should run down to Medical, see if they had a program for extracting unrelated and unwanted ideas.

He realized he was digging his fingers into his hair as if he could yank out his anxieties by the roots. He looked at the hotsuit and headmount, the console, the connections now coiled on the desk, the whole pit, and suddenly he felt as if he were sealed off in a small, airless box. He banged the console's door-open panel and ran for the ladder to the catwalk.

Across the hall the indicator light on the door to Gina's pit said it was occupied. Slowly he went over and raised his hand to the buzzer. Would this ruin it, somehow, was she all tied up with the music and the videos again, trying to make them do something, be something to her in place of something else? Or would she want to see him now as badly as he wanted to see her?

He pressed the buzzer. After a moment the door swung open silently. He hesitated again, unsure of what he would say to her, and the door started to swing shut again. He nipped around it quickly, wincing as the edge brushed his chest, tearing off a shirt button.

The lift whined softly as she sent it up to the catwalk for him. She was sitting at the desk with her feet up, staring at one of the console flatscreens as if she were unaware of him.

He took the lift down, waited briefly for her to look up and acknowledge him. Suddenly the lift started to rise again, and he jumped off. "Jesus," he said.

"Sorry. Thought maybe you'd changed your mind." There was a distracted, forced quality in her voice. A few moments later he saw the wires trailing among the dreadlocks. Hooked in. He took a step backward, toward the ladder.

"Come on, you afraid I'll bite or something?" She turned her head slowly and looked at him, her eyes seeming to go in and out of focus, as if she were having trouble picking him out of the surroundings.

He approached uncertainly. "What are you doing?"

"Checking my brain wave." She lifted a finger in the general direction of the screen.

The three rows of lines moving up and down on the monitor meant nothing to him. Abruptly they stopped and reversed themselves, flowing backwards to several explosively jagged interruptions in the otherwise semiregular patterns.

"Those bursts are where I opened the door, closed it, sent the lift up, and then started to send it up again. In case you're wondering." The screen blanked, flickered, and then he was looking at himself standing outside at the door. "You can reach all the controls from inside, if you know how." The screen blanked again. "Disconnect," she said.

He found himself looking anywhere but at her while she removed the wires from her head and set them aside.

"Pretty fucking strange, huh? Just wanted to see if I could do it. I can. You could, too, if you wanted." She yawned, rotated her head while she rubbed her neck, and then looked at him expectantly.

Once again words failed him. Like some kind of bad joke. He had goddamn sockets in his head to send out any thought at the drop of an inhibition, and he couldn't manage to tell the person he'd just spent the night with what he was doing there.

She nodded. "Look, it's all right. It's all all right. Just take care of your shit now. You got your Para-Versal deal with your complete artistic control. That's more than a lot of us end up with, count yourself lucky to've landed jam side up this time. You could make enough to buy out your ex-wife, hang onto your condo. Maybe you'll get real lucky, and Para-Versa'll decide they want you working directly for them, not this place."

He blinked at her. "Why?"

She laughed a little. "Christ, you think now that there's a fucking direct interface to the brain, studios like Para-Versal are gonna keep jobbing shit out to mills like the Dive? They don't need the Dive anymore, they just don't know it yet. But when they do, they'll get their own interface hardware, hire writers to sit around all day and all night dreaming up features right outa their brains, no production work necessary."

"But the unions-"

"The unions are finished. The best they might do is force a situation where you got a set designer dreaming up sets and a costumer dreaming up wardrobes, a writer dreaming up plots and characters, and a synner to put it all together, someone to synthesize everybody's dreams into one big dream. Goes round and round, and it comes out there." She jerked a thumb at the console. "So just take care of your shit now. I got to take care of mine."

She turned away and started putting the connections back into her sockets one by one. He left.

He was ensconced at a safe, undetectable distance when he felt her speak.

Come on, you afraid I'll bite or something?

There was a lot of noise around it, but he screened it out easily, saving it for later, because it all had to do with him. She was thinking of him while she sat there, flexing her muscles on the console. Neat trick, like, Look, Ma, no hands. But she didn't feel the pull to it the way he did. She almost understood, though, she almost got it, and if she went a little longer, tried a little harder, she might go all the way. But he didn't know whether that would be good for her or not, now, because he knew. It was more than just the difference between them- he wanted to go where the pictures were, she wanted the pictures to come out to where she was-because he knew for sure now. He hadn't been able to pick it up from her, but he'd been filled with it. Ludovic, filled with her.

What are you doing? Christ, she should have been able to smell him. And it had gone right past him. With all the new resources at his command, he should have been able to figure it out, graphed them from the top down, her movements, his movements as far as he knew them or could interpolate. Then he'd have been prepared for it. A little prepared, anyway. It was still like a fucking spike in the throat.

You can reach all the controls from inside if you know how. Lotta noise around that one, some for him, some for Ludovic. Shit, even she didn't know what she was really telling him.

Pretty fucking strange, huh?

Only if you don't have all the facts, lover. But once you do, it ain't a bit strange at all. He sneaked a look at her visuals. Yah, Ludovic looked good to her in ways she had no idea of.

Disconnect.

Shit. He surged forward, feeling around her console for a way to keep listening, at least, but he could tell it would take him a relatively long time to figure out how to infiltrate the hardware without her there as a gateway. Leave a piece of himself to work on that problem but withdraw now.

He replayed what he'd just received from her. No need to bother with top-down multigraphs and decision forests. He could see where it would go if somebody didn't fuck up, somebody being Gina, thinking twice, about him and his change for the machines.

Let her go. Have to. Have to.

Considering this was the one place she couldn't be for him, it was all right. He had no right to mind about it. Mind about it, ha, ha. But fuck it, it would make it easier to do this thing that he had been born to do. He'd been holding back, keeping himself sized down enough to return to the meat, because he couldn't go back and be contained in the meat once he'd allowed himself to expand beyond a certain point. It was too defective, too worn-out and tired for him.

So, out the one-way door then. What did he have to lose? Only the meat, and he already knew that he didn't miss that. He didn't. He wouldn't. Even if the meat missed him.

It sent out feeble signals, dumb animal semaphore: come back to the nest, little Sheba. Even if this was what he'd been born to do, that didn't make it exactly natural. Not that he'd ever been accused of being a natural man, but there he was, wagging his meat behind him, so to speak. If he could have given the disconnect command from this side, it would be over in a twinkling. So long, meat, write if you get work.

But he couldn't access any of the commands from where he was. The commands only took orders from the meat, and that poor old meat wasn't about to cut him loose. It was back there in the pit dreaming that it was something bigger and more wonderful than it actually was, and if it disconnected, the dream would be over.

If he could just get someone-Gina-to come in and yank the connections out of his skull. She'd never do it. He could plead and wheedle and try to explain that the thing lying on the floor in the pit was two steps from garbage. Good luck. That meat is mine. That was a good one; he'd caught it in some old memories. But why that, and not Ludovic?

That meat is mine.

No, lover, it isn't, and it never was. If you could take a little walk with me, I could tell you how it really is.

Being renewed and enhanced apparently wouldn't keep him from dwelling on the could-haves and wish-it-weres.

He took himself back to the guy's storage area and picked up some more data, noting that the sensation of his presence had registered without being identified. He'd have to be careful. If he pushed it too hard, he'd end up nose-to-nose with the guy, with no secrets.

Well, the guy was far more resistible than Gina. God, it was fucking hard to let her go when she did video like the Canadaytime. He hadn't been able to keep from taking that fall with her, even though he knew it meant giving himself away. He'd been hoping she would have felt differently when she found out, when she saw that she didn't have to fall all alone. But maybe she wanted to fall all alone.

He wished suddenly that he'd made a copy of the video for himself. Distantly he sensed her coming back on-line again, but he stayed away, not wanting to go back and find her with so much of Ludovic in her thoughts, but he could check the central activity record and see what she'd done with the video.

It was in something called a review queue, in Manny Rivera's area. Manny was conveniently out of the way, recuperating from his own procedure. Manny Rivera on-line. Shit, he was going to have to screen that bastard out.

Unbidden, the memory of the hacker in the penthouse came to him-with his associations spread out all over the place, sometimes he never knew what was going to come up on him next-and he wondered if the kid was still there. Probably; there was some kind of activity coming from that direction. He ought to pop in and say hello later, after he mainlined Gina's video a few times. Just pop in and remind him it was a damned Schrodinger world when you were meat. That would really stone the kid's crows.

– -

The computer-run wheels of the complex mechanism known as Diversifications, Incorporated, continued to turn as reliably and smoothly as ever, unaffected by new developments. It had accommodated an intelligent entity before, and though it knew this one was different, it had no reason to care. No new instructions had been issued concerning the procedures that had been locked in for the disposition of various items of business. Energy was allotted in the proper quantities to each part of the physical building; phone calls and electronic mail went to the designated recipients; intruders were blocked and turned away.

Its eye was on the sparrow as well. The system noted that there were fewer items than usual in Manny Rivera's review queue, and they remained there longer, but the notation was only for purposes of inventory. There was a procedure for slowdowns in traffic, satisfactorily simple: maintain and wait for instructions. Had the building suddenly been abandoned to stand empty for fifty years, anyone returning would have found the review queue waiting just as it was, assuming the power had held out, which was not completely improbable.

Abruptly the system received instructions to deliver one item out of the established queue sequence for review. Out-of-sequenee reviewing was permissible with the correct instructions, which came after a small hesitation. This didn't matter to the system. It identified the requested item-Gina Aiesi/Canadaytime: Rock Music Video. The system delivered it to the usual review area and adjusted the rest of the inventory, reordering it. Then it waited for another command.

The item sent for review came back. The system examined it for any special instructions or markings that would designate it for return to the queue; there were none. This could mean only one thing, according to the procedures: it was to be expelled, sent out the exit, which was marked Release.

Release was another part of the same system, but with different procedures. Unlike the area that governed the review queue, Release examined whatever came into it, for the sake of disposing of it properly. Hollywood releases were sent to the appropriate studios; commercials were sent to the designated networks; social-expression units were delivered to the proper addresses in the electronic mall; and the newest category of items, the rock videos, were delivered to the entertainment network for distribution, with a clone to the archives of the publishing company holding the rights to the music, another clone to the performer(s), and another to Home Storage and Records, tagged to indicate that it had been released to the proper targets.

When the system had completed this task, it noticed that something peculiar had happened in the review area-the item that had just been released had left behind a complete replica of itself. Replication independent of the proper electronic cloning process specifically indicated the presence of a virus. There was nothing on the replica to indicate that it was actually the extra product of a cloning procedure performed too hastily by an inexperienced operator learning the system on the fly, from the inside rather than the outside; such a situation did not exist in the system's instructions. All the system knew was that this replication called for immediate antiviral procedures.

The replica was isolated, sterilized by a complex series of instructions meant to counter and neutralize the reproductive apparatus, and then dismantled.

The operation was a complete success. The system was in the process of disposing of the remains and posting a notice of successful sterilization when it noted that instructions belonging to itself were among the now-harmless separate elements. It reassembled the instructions and noted that they were for calling an item from the review queue out of sequence, to be sent to the review area. The system had no orders to dismantle and destroy a set of its own instructions, so it restored the set to the last location at which it had been operative.

The system then returned to its starting mode, came to the instructions to pull an item out of sequence in the reordered queue, and sent it for review. The cycle repeated itself, and when it came to the same set of instructions, it obeyed them again, and again, and again.

Before long the review area and its overflow storage were both full; neither had been meant to hold many items. Both had instructions to cover this eventuality, once again very simple: send the overflow back to the review queue. When items began returning from the review area, the system examined them for special instructions and, finding none, obeyed its own orders, which told it that, unless otherwise tagged for retention, any items returning from the review area were to be sent to Release.

As far as the system knew, these were the complete original instructions. In fact, they had been modified, not by the restoration from the suspected virus but much earlier, in an unofficial, informal, and technically forbidden way by Manny Rivera himself. The system didn't remember this because the modification process had been purged from the memory local to Manny's area.

The modification was small and actually quite common among busy supervisory staff. Manny's predecessor had shown him how to do it and also shown him how not to get caught. It just eliminated the necessity of a tag stating the item had been reviewed and was now authorized for release. Instead, the system was instructed to assume that any unmarked item coming out of the review area was to go directly to Release.

Manny had found this so efficient, he might have forgotten about it and been caught running an illegally modified procedure several times over had he not set his calendar to alert him to restore the original program before each quarterly audit. When he had gone off to receive his own sockets, he had still been trying to work out something by which the calendar would automatically cue the program to restore the missing command, and then modify it again without his even having to think about it.

The system went on obeying orders, and everything past a certain point in the review queue went to review and then to Release, the titles routinely logged and the inventory adjusted.

Sometime much later the system discovered that another item had left a replica of itself behind, but this one reacted quite differently when the antiviral procedures were applied.