Free Synners by Pat Cadigan Page A

want any innocent bystanders getting hit if they don't have to."
    "Adrian's all right," Fez said firmly. "Now, what do you have?"
    "I'm pretty sure Keely pulled this out of Diversifications. He wouldn't tell me, but I can't think who else would stampede him. The odd thing was that he encrypted it in some speed-thrash by a group signed with EyeTraxx for videos, and I found out completely by accident that Diversifications just acquired them. Now, my father's worked at the Dive since like the early Jurassic, and they've never, but never shown any interest in music videos. Besides hardware, all they do is commercials and Hollywood releases, instyvacations and tons of that social-expression shit."
    "Don't knock the electronic greeting card," Rosa said, "If it weren't for that, some of us wouldn't speak to our mothers even on Mother's Day. — Shit, sorry," she added, looking contritely at Sam. "I caught the news about EyeTraxx kinda by-the-way myself, but I didn't think a thing of it. I mean, lots of companies jump the bandwagons late. Maybe if you hunted around on BizNet, you'd find their profits were down somewhere. If you could actually read anything on BizNet."
    "I wouldn't have thought anything of it, either," Sam said, "except there was nothing about it in the news. I mean, not oven a mention. Now, the Ozarks are picturesque as hell and terribly quaint, but they have datalines there, too, and I didn't see a thing about it anywhere. And EyeTraxx is— was —a Hall Galen company, and Hall Galen calls a media conference if he burps."
    "Perhaps it was a very small burp by his standards." Fez got up and went to the desk, flipping on one of the screens. "How did you look up the news of the acquisition, dear?"
    She told him. "Ah yes, they must have buried that little item in the hardcore biz news. You'd have had to have your defaults set a particular way to get it." Fez beckoned to her and Rosa, and they joined him at the desk. The general dataline menu came up on the screen, and he touched the BizNet listing with his little finger. Immediately the screen filled with BizNet's menu, divided into six dense sections.
    Sam could feel her eyes crossing. "Jesus, what a mess."
    "Your hard-core biz type can scan this as easily as you can scan a program in your favorite assembly language," Fez said, giving her an amused glance. "BizNet went to great lengths to customize this for their serious subscribers—eye-tracking tests on the layouts, allathat. BizNet is the epitome of narrow-casting. As opposed to old-style broadcasting. Focused information, no waste." He touched an item in the upper left area of the screen; the six sections gave way to a four-part screen, each quadrant containing a new menu.
    "Isn't there any faster way than paging through menu after menu?" Rosa asked.
    "Like I said, set your retrieval defaults correctly in the first place," Fez replied. "And if we knew what those were, we'd already know what we don't know. Ya know?" He winked at Sam and then flipped through several more menus and pages of small print before he froze the screen. "Here we are." He pointed to a small paragraph.
    "Shit," Rosa said, squinting at it. "Can we run this through Adrian's Mandarin translator?"
    "That'll be next," Fez said matter-of-factly. "Market-segment translations. In time the language of every subgroup of society will get as specialized as the data it uses, and we'll have a new set of suburbs in the global village. Or rather, the same old suburbs with new names."
    "There goes the neighborhood," Rosa said, still gazing at the screen with distaste. "Or here comes the neighborhood. Whatever's right."
    Fez shrugged. "People keep looking for ways to chunk themselves. Do you think your average thrash-rockers care if the credit on the latest video firestorm reads 'EyeTraxx' or 'Diversifications' or 'Some Asshole in Detroit'? That's why this didn't make it into the general music news. Anyone who cares about the business end is already tapped