SINdrome

by J. T. Nicholas

  “Smart,” Danielle muttered.

  “Why?” Hernandez asked. “If it’s something that Walton did, you don’t think they’d have made it catching to humans, too? Not if it was their lethal omega protocol or whatever.” Her voice was part cop-worry, concern for the safety of the citizens, but a much deeper mom-worry, with concern for her daughter. The tough-as-nails, all-business face she presented to the world made it easy to forget she had a burgeoning teenager at home.

  “No,” Tia said. “But you can be a carrier for something and not subject to its effects. We know that it’s not super common for different circles of synthetics to interact with one another, not closely enough to facilitate the exchanges needed to transfer a virus, anyway. But they interact with us all the time.”

  “So they make us the carrier, and Walton gets to have humanity fuck over the synthetics one last time,” Hernandez grunted. “Sick fuckers, aren’t they?”

  “Are they?” I asked, looking at Tia. “I mean, did they? Shit. What did you find, Tia?”

  “Something,” she said. Her lips tightened a bit and her eyebrows drew down in a frown of frustration. “I honestly don’t know what I found, except that there was definitely something. My guess would be that it was viral in nature, but it’s not something I can identify.”

  “No,” Silas interjected. “Of course not. If it is something that Walton has done, then it would be new. Even if you had the appropriate training and knowledge, you still would likely not be able to identify it, Ms. Morita.”

  “I have the samples,” she said, pulling a data cube from her pocket. “And the test results. All of it. But we’re going to need someone with a lot more specialized knowledge…and maybe equipment, too.” She hesitated, and I could tell that whatever was coming next wasn’t going to be pleasant.

  “And…and it’s in my blood,” she said, voice falling to barely a whisper. “Whatever this thing is, it was in the blood I tested of the sick synthetics, not present in the healthy ones, and…and present in me.” She drew a breath, let it out as a shallow sigh. “I thought about not coming back… I think I’m a carrier. But…”

  “But if you are,” I said, “then so am I. So is Hernandez. And God alone knows how many other people.”

  “And how many other synthetics,” Danielle interjected. “The healthy synthetic blood Tia tested showed negative, but she didn’t test everyone. We’ve all been around the sick, and while we’ve taken some small measure of precautions, we certainly haven’t exercised any real quarantine procedures.”

  The table was quiet as that fact settled in.

  “So we have no idea who might be sick, no idea what we’re up against, and no idea what to do about it,” I said. “That about sum it up?”

  There were a few desultory nods around the table.

  “Well, too fucking bad,” I growled. “We didn’t come this far to give up. I didn’t get thrown into, and then break out of, jail just to watch this whole thing fall apart. So, what can we fucking do about it?”

  “Tell the people,” Silas said at once. “They are starting to believe, to truly believe, that we are what we say. I do not think they will stand for genocide.”

  I wasn’t so certain. A lot of people might wring their hands and weep, but if the synthetics went away, then so, too, did the problem. I’d been a soldier and a cop far too long to have the kind of faith in my fellow man to think they wouldn’t be happier just sweeping problems under the nearest available rug.

  I shrugged. “That might get us some sympathy, and might get other eyes looking at the problem. Hell, if we get lucky, maybe that even gets someone with the medical and scientific know-how and equipment on the job. But what if it doesn’t? What else can we do?”

  Danielle spoke, her voice heavy with an emotion that I don’t think I’d ever heard in a synthetic, though I’d glimpsed it, ever so briefly, on Annabelle’s face. It held sadness, yes, but also the edge of shame. “We have to monitor the sick. Track the progress of the disease. We don’t know that it’s lethal yet.” Hernandez choked off an incredulous snort at that, and I couldn’t help but agree. No one had died from it, not so far, but it would be the kind of miracle to restore humanity’s declining faith in all things divine for this not to end in death. Danielle, to her credit, ignored our cynicism. “But we must be meticulous, gather every data point that we can, even if we can’t yet analyze it properly. We must be ready to give over as much information as possible. We can’t…we can’t afford to waste any time.”

  At first, I didn’t understand her shame. Her words made perfect sense. Anything we could learn could only help. It dawned on me, though, that synthetics, while used to watching humans inflicting pain on them, and maybe even on other humans, had no capacity to do the same. They underwent intense conditioning against harming humans and, presumably, each other, or I’m sure we would have seen synthetic fights to the death as prime entertainment long since, and coldly recording the pain and probable deaths of their fellows must have been a concept foreign to them. It had been standard procedure in humanity’s medical system—while trying to administer compassionate care, of course—for so long, that I didn’t bat an eye at it, but from the outside, how must it seem? That we measured and weighed and calculated every aspect of encroaching death so effectively and efficiently?

  I shook that thought from my head. “Right. We monitor the progress. Danielle, I assume you and Tia can take care of that?” Danielle nodded, but Tia gave me a frown.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Jason. We know I’m carrying whatever this is. I think I need to go to the hospital. I can fake the symptoms we’ve seen among the synthetics. If I can get them to do bloodwork, maybe they’ll be able to do something. Identify it or get some sort of treatment plan. It’s a long shot, but if something as simple as robust antibiotics can help, we should try. They’ll probably only give me a few weeks’ worth for my use, but we can spread that around a few test patients and see if there’s any improvement in the short term.”

  That sparked an entirely new larcenous chain of thought. “What are you giving the synthetics now?”

  It was Danielle who answered. “Just the basics, really. Fever reducers. Cough suppressants. Without UniCare cards, we don’t really have access to antibiotics.” That sadness and shame filled her eyes again. “If things progress to the point where there is significant pain, we can acquire some of the harder recreational drugs.”

  That was true enough, and easy enough. The war on drugs had ended long ago, in a rousing defeat. Opiates would be the easiest and most effective to procure. Easier than getting antibiotics. It had something to do with not overusing the drugs and breeding super-viruses immune to anything we could throw at them. Which, under the circumstances, seemed pretty fucking laughable. Why worry about viruses evolving, when your friendly local biogenics company was cooking them up in the lab?

  Still it prompted a larcenous thought. “Would antibiotics help?” I asked.

  My question was met with general shrugs. “We don’t know enough to know,” Tia replied. “If it’s truly viral, then no. If it’s bacterial, maybe. But at this point, they probably can’t hurt.”

  “So, why don’t we get some?”

  Hernandez cut in, “Are you suggesting we…what…go rob a pharmacy?”

  A chuckle escaped me. “You broke me out of a fucking prison, Mel. Are you going to balk at liberating a few antibiotics?”

  “Dios mio. What have you gotten me into?” There was no heat in the words, just a sort of bemused resignation.

  “There is one other thing we might want to consider,” Silas interjected.

  “Yeah?” I asked, mind already skipping ahead to planning how to knock over a pharmacy.

  “Do you recall the raid we executed to retrieve the information Dr. Kaphiri had gathered?” Of course I remembered. It had only been a couple of weeks ago. Oh, and it had ended up w
ith me in prison.

  “Yeah. It kinda sticks out,” I replied.

  “I am certain it does,” Silas conceded. “But do you recall how we escaped?”

  “Walked out the front door,” Al’awwal said, chiming in for the first time. I swear to God, the grin he gave me was one of pure fucking delight. Right before walking out the front door, we’d gone through a half-dozen cops like a pair of blenders. I think Al—the only synthetic I knew of to not have the conditioning that prevented his fellows from harming humans—had enjoyed getting back a little of his own. I had another flash, or maybe premonition was the right word, of ambivalence at the thought of what we might be unleashing.

  “We did. But in order to facilitate that egress, I triggered a certain alarm,” Silas said.

  Everything had been happening so fast—and I’d been suffering from a few hard blows to the head—that I hadn’t really been paying too much attention to the details of what Silas had done during our escape. But something started to come back to me. “You said something about a biological hazard, or bio labs or something.”

  “Correct, Jason,” the big albino said with a slight smile. “When we were in their systems, I found a node governing alarms for labs with bio-safety levels. Not unusual for a bio-genetics company, I will grant you. But one of those labs was designated as BSL-4. That is a level of quarantine procedure reserved for the deadliest contaminants and biological agents. Why would a company like Walton Biogenics need such a secure laboratory?”

  It was Tia who answered. “To develop biological weapons.”

  “Shit,” Hernandez muttered, and it summed up my feeling exactly. “Are you telling me these assholes are building doomsday devices in the heart of fucking New Lyons?”

  “A suspicion, only, Detective Hernandez,” Silas said. “We have no proof. But I thought it odd at the time that such labs would be present, given the stated scope of Walton Biogenics’ work.”

  I drew a deep breath as all that sank in. “Okay. We’ve got a lot to do, people. And maybe not a lot of time to do it. Tia—you’re right. You should go to the hospital. Let them run tests. But watch your ass, okay? If anything feels off or wrong, even a little… Listen to your instincts. Walton’s smart. I’m sure they’re going to be monitoring their little superbug and listening for where it shows up. And we know they don’t mind doing a little wetwork to keep the populace quiet. You can’t bring a gun into your doctor’s office or the hospital or whatever, but you ran that shotgun well. Keep it in your car. And keep it loaded.” She didn’t look particularly comfortable with that thought, but she seemed to understand the need, and reluctantly nodded.

  “Good. What about the rest of us?”

  “I think I can handle acquiring antibiotics,” Al’awwal offered. “We may not need to resort to strongarm robbery on that front. I’ve got a few doctor friends. If I spread a little cash around, I might be able to get a supply big enough for those here.” He hesitated.

  “What?” I asked.

  “If this spreads… Well, we’re never going to be able to get a big enough supply. Not without tapping government resources.”

  “I know,” I admitted, “which is why we need another approach.”

  “We need,” Silas interjected, “to acquire some additional intelligence from someone who works at Walton Biogenics. Preferably, someone who works at the specific lab Dr. Kaphiri once called home. I suppose LaSorte and I could try to find someone who fits the profile.”

  I thought about that. The pair of them—the best of the best among the tech-savvy synthetics—would be better off getting the word out about the potential dangers. Silas, in particular, still had a network to run and I’m sure he had channels by which he could communicate with other synthetics. We’d never discussed it, never dragged his methods out into the light of day, but the entire revolution would have been swept under the rug in a matter of weeks if he didn’t have some kind of organization in place. That single point of failure bothered me—but at the same time, I couldn’t begrudge him the lack of trust he must feel toward… Well, everybody.

  Fortunately, as I thought of our last little trip to Walton, I realized that we really didn’t need to turn Silas and LaSorte loose on tracking down lab employees. We already knew one.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “We already know the name of at least one person on the payroll there, and a doctor to boot. I’m not sure what type of doctor, medical or philosophical, but in the end, it probably doesn’t matter. She has access, and that’s what we’re going to need right now.”

  “Larkin?” Al asked, an incredulous note in his voice.

  “Larkin,” I agreed.

  “And this Larkin is going to what… Help us out of the goodness of her heart?” Hernandez asked.

  “Not bloody likely,” Al replied. “Last time we talked, we sort of tied her up, robbed her office, and threatened to kill her. A little.”

  Tia gave me a bit of a glare at that. “You threatened to kill her? And how do you just do that ‘a little?’”

  I opened my mouth to launch into an explanation. But I was cut short when Silas coughed.

  Silas.

  Coughed.

  Chapter 8

  Silence reigned in the room.

  We all just sort of sat there, staring at the big synthetic, watching, waiting for him to say that he was just clearing his throat. But he wasn’t. That was clear from the look on his face. Part confusion, part discomfort, and, most terrifying of all, just a little hint of fear. In all my interactions with Silas, I’d never seen him afraid. Not until now.

  Tia moved first, pushing back her chair and walking, without particular haste or undue concern, to Silas’s side. “Hold still for a moment,” she said, pressing one hand against his forehead. She then took his pulse, and asked him to stick out his tongue. I’d seen caricatures of the procedures all my life, though modern medicine had rendered them subservient to a variety of far more precise machines. They must have still taught the basics in med school, though, because Tia was assessing Silas’s health with a calm, professional certainty.

  While she worked, she asked questions.

  “How are you feeling? Any discomfort in your throat? Your head? Any pressure, here?” Silas fed her answers, but I didn’t really hear him. The network, the rebellion, the revolution was built upon Silas. The NLPD could arrest me, a Walton hit squad could take out Al’awwal, Tia could get hit by a friggin’ bus, God forbid, and the revolution would go on. But what happened if Silas got sick?

  “We’re going to have to isolate you,” Tia said. She raised her hands at the look of protest that flashed across his face. “I know, I know. You have work to do. Fine. We’ll isolate you in here, or even in your room, somewhere you can have access to all the screens in the world, but you’re not going to do anyone any good if you’re around those who might not have contracted this thing yet. For that matter, we should almost certainly put Jacinda and Evelyn somewhere away from everyone. Full quarantine procedure for them. That little girl is probably at more risk than any of us.”

  “Dios mio,” Hernandez whispered.

  “Amen,” I muttered. I hadn’t even considered that the child would be at more risk. The thought of her getting sick, and possibly dying… I’d spent so long thinking of the synthetics as adults—and hale and hearty adults at that—that the normal warnings about the very young and very old with respect to illness hadn’t sunk in to my mind yet.

  “As you wish, Ms. Morita,” Silas was saying, jolting me from my reverie. “But let us acknowledge that it is probably already too late for any of these actions to matter, as far as those of us here in the Ballasts are concerned. We will take every precaution, but we have been down here for weeks. The damage is very likely done. We are better served trying to find a way to combat it than limit its spread. We should not waste time worrying about my health.”

  “Uh-huh,” Tia
said, ignoring his words as she continued to give him a once over. “And we’ll all do just that. Once you’re taken care of.”

  “This is quite ridiculous. It was just a cough,” Silas grumbled.

  I stared in amazement as Tia deflected every protest the synthetic voiced and ushered him from the command center. It was amazing to watch the tiny woman bully the much larger man into submission with nothing more than a calming tone and a professional demeanor. She was back before we knew it, a smile that I couldn’t quite read on her face. The whole thing filled me with a weird combination of pride and the edge of something I could only call lust. Watching her work was kinda hot.

  “Danielle,” she said as she returned. “Can you make sure he stays isolated, and also see to getting Jacinda and Evelyn situated somewhere?”

  “Of course, Tia,” the synthetic woman replied.

  “Well,” I said, “that leaves the rest of us. LaSorte, can you work with Silas on getting the word out? Without needing to be in the same room with him I mean?”

  He shrugged and looked at me through hooded eyes. “Most of the time I’ve worked with him it’s been remotely. But… Campbell... If Silas gets sick….” He trailed off, but I could see more than just worry for the revolution on his face. I could see real fear over the potential loss of a friend.

  “I know,” I said. “But we can only do what we can do. Right now, that means trying to solve this thing before anyone starts dying. And that means Tia goes to the doctor, Al’awwal tries to secure some antibiotics, you and Silas get the word out, and Danielle tries to contain the spread of this thing as much as possible.”

  “Shit,” Hernandez muttered.

  I arched an eyebrow at her.

  “I guess that means I’m the one who has to help you kidnap a Walton Biogenics employee.”

  I grinned. “Something like that.”

  * * * *

  Hernandez still had access to department resources. That made things a little easier.