Read Online Synners by Pat Cadigan - Free Book Online Page B

reminded her of cotton candy, and bright black eyes, a nose that had been broken once or twice, and a mouth that never quite stopped smiling. The particulars might have suggested Santa Claus, but Fez was neither fat nor bearded. Even if he had been (Sam couldn't imagine it), the angles of his face had a little too much sharpness to them, and in spite of the smile, his face had the wariness of a man perpetually on guard.
    She remembered how hard it had been to reconcile this semigrandfatherly presence with the mental image she'd formed from on-line contact, picturing him as a grand old man of perhaps twenty-nine or thirty, with all the looks, charm, and sex appeal that had always been attributed to renegades.
    In retrospect she knew she should have figured it out. Fez's knowledge of the past forty years, casually displayed in the course of their many oddhours on-line conversations, had been too idiosyncratic in detail to be the product of anything but firsthand experience.
    Sitting in the old easy chair, trying to choke down enough of the bland/salty soup to appease him, reminded her of the first time she'd come to this one-roomer in East Hollywood. Rosa had brought her, and he'd tried to feed her that day, too, but she'd been too boggled. Rosa herself had been a revelation, Cherokee Rosa as she was known on-line; she really was a Cherokee, and her name really was Rosa, and she had a mass of curly black hair, a knowing look, and a bone-crusher handshake. And, apparently, a mandate to bring her out of the tiny Santa Monica closet she'd been holed up in, making subsistence with gypsy scut work on her homegrown laptop.
    We've been watching you, doll. You hack good.
    Sam had had mixed feelings about that. Big Brother, is that it?
    Not Big Brother. More like the relative nobody wants to talk about.
    That's me, Sam had said.
    Doll, that's all of us.
    Sure was. And so Rosa had brought her to be surprised by Fez, and after that she'd kept coming back on her own as often as possible. She found out later that she was one of a very few Fez allowed to visit so frequently or, for that matter, ever (Rosa was another). She might have ended up all but moving in with him if he hadn't always thrown her out eventually. He wasn't looking to host the eastern branch of the Mimosa, he told her firmly, and he was nobody's father figure, he told her even more firmly, both of them well aware that father figure was not how she felt about him.
    She settled for the benefit of his extensive knowledge of computer communications, and the privilege of being allowed to use the elaborate computer system sitting on the desk against the far wall. It looked deceptively jerry-rigged with all the mismatched upgrades and add-ons. The configuration had changed again since she'd last visited; there was a second flat easel-type screen now, and a couple of very large housings that had to have quadrupled available memory. She also noticed that the head-mounted monitor sitting off to one side was hooked up to the system, as if it had seen some use recently, which surprised her. Fez had never been especially enamored of Artificial Reality, at least as a place to visit.
    The system was on, she realized, even though neither screen was lit. That was unlike Fez, as well, to run anything without screening its progress.
    "So, you've been out of town and out of touch," Fez said to her.
    "Camping in the Ozarks," Rosa said. "I'm still trying to imagine it. That's in Missouri," she added to Fez.
    "Yes, I've heard," he said serenely. "Some rather interesting things going on in Missouri, in the realm of nanotechnology —surprise, surprise"—he nodded at Rosa—"but I suppose you were too busy roughing it to check it out. Somehow I always had the idea that you thought camping was an overnight in a Mimosa squat, not hunting and fishing."
    "No hunting. And I only tried fishing once. I have problems killing anything." Sam shrugged. "I was hacking around, and suddenly a trip out of town