SINdrome

by J. T. Nicholas

  “Are we really going to kidnap this Larkin, Campbell?” she asked as we made our way through the steel corridors and up an endless series of rusting metal ladders to the street level.

  “I hope not. I hope that she’ll listen to reason, tell us what we need to know. But if Walton Biogenics really has released some kind of pathogen or whatever, I need to get answers.” I paused for a moment, and gave Hernandez a long, level look. “I need to get answers, Mel. By any means necessary.”

  “You think you could do that, Campbell?” she asked. “You think you could…what? Beat it out of her? You’d go that far?”

  I hadn’t really considered what I meant by ‘any means necessary.’ But it certainly implied some sort of force. My training as a cop and as a soldier told me that those kinds of tactics rarely worked. But rarely wasn’t the same as never. But could I do it?

  The thought made my stomach turn. But so, too, did the thought of the synthetic population being wiped off the face of the Earth as the result of a bio-engineered plague. One woman’s pain, against the fate of millions.

  “Fuck,” I growled. “I don’t know, Hernandez. I really don’t. You know what’s at stake here.”

  “Better than you, hermano. Better than you. But you’ll see soon enough.” That comment struck me as odd, but then, I’d been locked up for a week, with little access to the outside world. Hernandez had been out in the shit.

  As we’d talked, we’d been navigating our way through the Ballasts, climbing ladders, traversing walkways, and generally moving from the bowels of Floattown up toward the surface of the man-made island. We’d reached the last hatch.

  “Me first,” Hernandez ordered, shouldering me aside.

  I nodded and gestured toward the ladder. Having her stick her head up into wherever we were emerging would be odd if anyone bothered to notice, but it was better than me sticking my ugly mug through the hatch and risking that someone—or worse, some unseeing electronic eye—would make note of it and alert the authorities.

  “Keep your eyes off my ass, pendejo,” she said as she placed her first foot on the ladder rung.

  I choked back something that was half-chuckle, half-sputter. Before I could either defend myself or get myself in trouble by insisting that I didn’t think of Hernandez that way, she was already moving up the ladder. Probably for the best. Getting caught checking out a woman was just as bad as her thinking you didn’t want to check her out.

  I still looked though. I’m only human, after all.

  It only took Hernandez a few seconds to shimmy up the ladder. She paused at the top, grunting with effort as she levered the manhole cover out of the way. Then she peeked out, taking her time. With a final shove, she pushed the cover completely to the side and climbed out of the darkness. I took that as my cue, and climbed up after her.

  I’d borrowed one of Silas’s raincoats, which managed to be both comically large through the shoulders and barely fall to mid-thigh on me, but at least it covered the ridiculous tee shirt. It also had a pair of nice, deep pockets. One of them held a shitty little ganger gun—an inexpensive, damn-near disposable, firearm popular with criminals because it was cheap enough to throw away. I’d be lucky if the damn thing put a bullet within a foot of where I intended it to go, but beggars and choosers. Hernandez had scavenged the piece from somewhere. Apart from Al’s and Hernandez’s personal firearms—and you couldn’t just ask someone to give up those—the only other guns our revolution had managed to put together were the nine-millimeter in my pocket, the twelve gauge that was on the way to the hospital with Tia, and about a half-dozen relics that may or may not go bang when the need arose.

  Which is why the other pocket held a collapsible baton, probably older than I was, but it was hard to screw up a telescoping steel bar. The neoprene grip had long since worn off and been replaced first with duct tape, and then with what looked to me like the cloth tape hospitals used to bandage wounds. Whatever it was, it provided a nice, secure grip. It also helped balance out the pistol in the other pocket.

  My ensemble was completed by a floppy rain hat with a broad, malformed brim that reminded me of an oversized boonie cap, also from Silas’s personal collection. Between the ill-fitting clothes and the ridiculous hat I must have looked like a drunk homeless person. Which, come to think of it, was probably a much better disguise than anything I could have planned.

  We emerged into a narrow alleyway between two of the prefabbed cubes that gave Floattown its questionable charm. A quick glance showed that no one was around, so I took a moment to bask in the sea breeze and taste the tang of salt on the air. After the caring ministrations of the New Lyons Corrections Department and the dank darkness of the Ballasts, it felt good to be outside.

  “You done?” Hernandez asked. “We have things to do.”

  I smiled, keeping my head ducked so my face would be obscured from any prying electronic eyes. “Lead the way, oh great purveyor of inferior firearms and ill-fitting clothing. Where you lead, I am sure to follow.”

  She snorted. “I should lead your big gringo ass right back to jail.” She pulled out her screen and started swiping. “I’ve got a car coming to this location. And I’ve pulled the last known address on your Dr. Larkin. Records indicate she should still live there. It’s a gated community, though.”

  “And what do you want to bet that it just happens to be one hundred percent Walton Biogenics employees that live there?” I asked.

  “No bet. Pretty much guaranteed. How do you want to play it?”

  “We can’t just drive in, not through the security I assume they’ll have in place at whatever ‘gate’ leads in to the subdivision.” I hefted my coat, shifting the weight of the pistol. “And I don’t really feel like fighting our way past whatever rent-a-goons Walton hired. Only leaves one real option.”

  “Through the wire,” Hernandez said.

  “And over the hills,” I agreed.

  “To casa de la abuela we go.”

  * * * *

  The drive proved…enlightening.

  When the car pulled up a compact two-seater that barely had enough room to fit the both of us—Hernandez punched in the destination. But as soon as the little vehicle started to move, the set of her shoulders changed. I could read the tension in them, and in the way that her head went immediately on a swivel, continuously scanning for danger.

  “That bad?” I asked, forced to keep my head ducked down and obscured by the hat so as to avoid any prying electronic eyes.

  “You’ve no fucking idea, Campbell,” she replied. Even her voice had tightened. “The car’s computer should try to take us around the worst of it. Just thank your lucky stars that we don’t have to go downtown.”

  Floattown looked normal to me. That wasn’t surprising. It was one of those areas where, while money was tight, almost everyone had a job to supplement the basic living stipend. In the evening, the gangers would come out to play, and the tenor of the neighborhood would shift, but even they had day jobs to earn enough money to keep on keeping on. It wasn’t the kind of place where protests and riots happened. Everyone was too close to the brink, too reliant on their jobs to maintain their standard of living. It was the kind of place where, simply put, no one could afford to protest.

  I wasn’t really sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. It made the first part of our journey much easier. But the idea that free citizens were de facto financially excluded from some of the rights I’d bled over filled me with uneasiness.

  Once we crossed the bridge things started to change. The first thing that struck me was the lack of people. The streets of New Lyons weren’t exactly Ney York City or London, but there were always some people around. Not today. A few cars moved through the streets, but the sidewalks were empty. I kept my head down— you never knew where a camera might be pointing—but at least the odds of being recognized by another person were looking slim. Still did
n’t explain the tension Hernandez was oozing, though.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked.

  “The smart ones are staying inside,” she replied. “There’s an official recommendation to keep off the streets.”

  Something about the way she said it—and the continuing tension—told me there weren’t a lot of smart ones. “And the rest?”

  She shrugged. “We’ll see them soon enough, hermano. They’re doing what people always do when a large enough group gets angry. They’ve taken to the streets. And the people who disagree with them have done the same. You know the drill.”

  I did know the drill. Groups of angry protestors were nothing new. They’d been a part of our nation’s story since the very beginning. But the line between “angry protestors” and “angry mob” was vanishingly thin. Judging from Hernandez’s discomfort, it was a line that had been crossed more than once in the past few days.

  “Shit,” Hernandez muttered under her breath.

  I tilted my head up some, risking exposing my face to the watching eyes to get a look at whatever had drawn out the expletive. The way ahead was clear, but we were about a thousand feet from an intersection. Thick, black smoke was pouring from somewhere down the side road and I could hear a low hum of noise that I couldn’t identify.

  The distance to the intersection closed, and the noise rose, moving from a hum to a roar. I could see the intersection now, see the living sea of people rushing seemingly at random, expanding to smash against the nearby buildings, contracting and coming together in a flurry of fists and feet. Signs were being waved, but they were too far away to get a good read on them. There were cops and soldiers in the mix—men and women in blue or green, trying to form a thin line against the destruction. Gas cannisters flew out, opening holes in the crowd as people stumbled, coughing and gagging away from the smoke. It was useless, and the cops knew it. Short of live fire, nothing was going to disperse a crowd that size.

  I watched as the cops—did the smart thing. They opened up ranks, clustered into tight, defensive knots bristling with weapons that even the angriest protestor would think twice about confronting, and let the crowd go.

  Which sent a stream of people into the intersection, and rapidly closing on our path.

  “Mother fucker!” Hernandez exclaimed. The car was slowing, detecting the potential issues of a large crowd of people entering the street. Great safety feature…right up until the people in the street had blood in their eyes and murder in their hearts.

  “No you fucking don’t!” Hernandez growled, rapidly tapping at the car’s built-in screen. She was still on the job, still had a valid badge number, so she still had the authority to override the self-driving features of the vehicle. In response, a steering wheel pushed its way out of the dash. I couldn’t see the pedals, but I knew they had emerged from the floor as well. I braced myself as Hernandez stomped on the accelerator and laid the wheel over.

  The tires squealed as the car simultaneously surged forward and angled hard to the right, avoiding the oncoming riot. Bottles, rocks, and other small objects rang against the metal and plastic frame of the vehicle as the protestors, angered that anyone or anything might try to defy them, unleashed a barrage of missiles against us. Something heavy crashed into the rear-window, causing a spiderweb of cracks to burst into existence all along the safety glass. But then we were past them, and the frustrated crowd, visible now only in the mirrors, took out their angst on buildings, vending machines, parked vehicles, and anything else that drew the uncaring eye of their ire.

  “Jesu Christo, that was close,” Hernandez muttered. She didn’t return the car to auto-drive. One close call was more than enough to make her want to keep control of things. Not that I blamed her.

  “Did you see who they were?” I asked.

  She laughed, a short, bitter laugh. “Yeah. That was our side, Campbell. You know how it is. At a certain point, it doesn’t even matter which group is on the side of the angels. Unless you’re in it, every violent mob is pretty much the same.”

  “Fuck,” I muttered. There really wasn’t much else I could say to how close we’d just come to being beaten and quite possibly killed by the people who agreed with us.

  “Pretty much. But as much as I hate to admit it, we need them. Everything we’re doing—Silas’s group of rebels, I mean—depends on the people getting pissed and taking action. Otherwise, we’re just glorified agitators.”

  I nodded glumly. Silas’s revolution—okay, maybe it was time to start calling it our revolution, given how deep I was in the shit—was really an information control campaign. Our only weapon of any note was the intelligence Silas had spent a lifetime gathering and curating from his fellow synthetics. The old saying was true; knowledge absolutely was power, but only if you could do something with it. Silas could take all the raw data in the world and turn it into actionable intelligence, but someone still had to act on it. I didn’t think for a minute that anyone in power would do that out of a sense of the greater good. Politicians were creatures that acted best when they were acting for their own survival. Which meant the voters had to not just be pissed, but they had to be seen to be pissed. They had to be protesting in the streets. The knowledge that they’d been lied to by the people they elected, and the constant stream of corruption Silas’s campaign continued to reveal were fuel for the fire. Flareups in the form of violent outbursts were inevitable.

  “Sucks, though,” I grunted.

  “Sucks hard,” Hernandez agreed. “But if it’s the price we gotta pay, then we pay it.”

  I’ve said it before, but Hernandez was good people.

  Chapter 9

  Crossing the wire was almost too easy. It wasn’t really wire, not in the barbed-wire barricade sense of the word. It was, however, a concrete barrier like the noise reducers found alongside highways, standing a good eight feet tall. There was no good place to leave the car—the Walton-owned subdivision was, apparently, self-contained, so there were no gas stations, convenience stores, or groceries nearby. So, we found the most remote side road near the subdivision and bailed on the vehicle. Hernandez re-engaged the auto-drive, and sent the car off the nearest inconspicuous place…which was far enough away that a quick egress wasn’t going to be on the menu. Better than leaving it somewhere it would be noticed and raise questions, though.

  “We need to get over fast, Campbell. We’re risking too much already, standing by the side of the road.”

  I nodded. “I’ll boost you up. You can vault and drop, make sure it’s clear, and then I’ll pull myself over.”

  She raised one eyebrow and tilted her head ever so slightly to the side. “You sure, hermano? That prison food must have been high in carbs or something, because you look like you maybe put on a pound or two.” But she was moving as she said it.

  “Low blow,” I replied, setting my back against the wall and bending at the knees. I made a stirrup with my interlaced fingers, and nodded at her. She took a couple of steps back, got a bit of a running start, and stepped up into my hands. I grunted as I took her weight—Hernandez wasn’t big, but she was solid muscle—her hands barely seemed to touch the top of the wall, and then she glided over it, like we had done it a thousand times before. I was kind of proud of that. Until I heard the vitriolic cursing coming from the other side.

  “You okay?” I hissed. Then I had to say it quite a bit louder. I mean, the wall was intended to be a sound barrier, after all.

  “Landed in a fucking thorn bush, pendejo,” came the growl back. “Next time I’m throwing your fat ass over the wall without looking.”

  “That’s just hurtful,” I replied as I drew a deep breath and jumped. I really didn’t need the jump to reach the top of the wall, but I weighed closer to two-fifty than two hundred and those guys who do a bunch of pullups? Yeah, they’re all skinny fuckers. I needed the extra thrust from my legs to help me scramble over the wall. Even then, it wasn’
t pretty, and I added a few muttered curses of my own as I dropped next to Hernandez.

  “Need a hand?” I asked, watching her pluck thorns from her jacket.

  “Fuck you,” she replied. “Let’s find this puta and then I need to get some disinfectant.”

  I chuckled at that as I tried to take in our surroundings. We’d picked a segment of wall that butted up to some trees, but with subdivisions like the one Walton had put up, you never really knew if the screen was a tree or two thick or went on for a hundred yards. This one fell somewhere between. I could make out the houses—pocket mansions, really, probably pushing five thousand square feet—nestled one on top of the other through the branches, but it looked like we had enough cover that no casual glance would reveal our intrusion. The real problem was, as soon as we cleared the treeline, we were guaranteed to be on camera. The heart of New Lyons was bad enough when it came to watching electronic eyes, but the suburbs? And corporate-owned suburbs at that? Every street would be under surveillance.

  “How do you want to play this?” I asked Hernandez.

  “Oh, darling,” she said, voice dripping honey, “we’re just another happy couple, strolling through paradise while the world burns down around us.” She reached out and grabbed my hand, her fingers interlacing with mine. It felt…weird. I’d been way closer to Hernandez than this—her own preferred methods of fighting were heavy in jiujitsu—but there was a difference between arm bars and hand holding. “Come on dear,” she cajoled, pulling me toward the edge of the woods. “I’ll smile all pretty for the cameras, and you keep your fucking face down, so the ‘hospitality patrols’ pay us no mind. Comprendes?”

  Sneaking about would only draw attention, and it wasn’t like we were going to make it very far without being seen. “Your lead,” I agreed, trying to adopt a natural-seeming slouch that just happened to tip the brim of my hat down and obscure my face from any camera mounted higher than three feet from the ground.