Ario stopped and set Elias down in an unfamiliar part of town, when the immediate danger seemed to have passed. Four long years since he'd seen the seedier parts of the city, but he still knew it. This particular area wasn't the grunge of the docks or the lower-end neighborhoods he'd roamed, but there was a dark energy that seemed to glow beneath the layers of respectability, a restlessness behind the white picket fences and neatly-kept yards. The early morning quiet was broken by the sound of breaking glass and a door flew open. A synth was ejected onto the path, an Eida 9000 housekeeping unit in a state of disrepair. Dents covered her face where she had been repeatedly beaten with a blunt instrument. Wiring hung loose, as if someone had taken handfuls and yanked hard. Synthetic blood, white and viscous, leaked down her face. A knife still remained buried in her head.
A middle-aged woman strode out from the house, baseball bat in hand as a child watched on from the doorway. "Mama, don't!" the boy cried, but the woman brandished the bat over her head, ready to deliver the final blow.
"Please, Mistress," the Eida unit pleaded, "I intend no harm… to you and yours. Just let me go. I'll leave you alone. Just don't hurt me. Please."
"I only installed that software so that you might take better care of my son. Now I daren't leave him in your presence. What else am I to do, Eida? Cybot told me you were safe. Now we have synths killing humans. I can't let you go, knowing what you might do."
"I would never lay a hand on your son! I loved him like he was my own… Loved him…" Her words repeated as Mama hit her with the baseball bat.
Elias moved to stop her, but Ario's hand held him in a vise-like grip. His will was stronger, though, and Elias tore himself free, forcing Ario to free him before the synth broke his arm.
"I won't just stand and watch. I have to do something." Elias rounded the corner. The woman didn't react to his presence as she held the bat up again for what would certainly be the final blow.
"Stop!" yelled Elias.
"Stop!" cried the boy in the doorway.
Mama froze, doubt apparent in her chestnut eyes. At close range, Elias could see thick black curls sticking to her forehead with sweat. She dropped the bat as if burnt, the metal rod emitting a hollow clink as it hit the pavement and rolled away down the garden path. The silence was only punctured by the sobs of the boy in the doorway, his sniffs and snorts as he tried to hold back ugly tears.
"Who are you?" Mama asked.
"I'm a synth tech. I'm here to take Eida away."
"Are you with the Department? I called hours ago, and they said they're too busy. To decommission it myself if I felt threatened. Well, the job is half-done already. Take it off to the melting pot or whatever it is you do."
"Did you install the Nero Protocol?" Elias asked, his curiosity overriding his fear.
"The Nero-what-now? Oh, that program. Yeah, I did. A friend of mine told me it made synths more capable babysitters. Don't judge me. It's not easy being a single parent."
"I understand that," Elias said. He knew his anger had to be noticeable: every muscle in his body seemed to be trembling, and the nervous tic that made his right eye twitch every now and then seemed to be in overdrive, like a faulty circuit. He wanted nothing more than to flee the scene, to scream at Mama for her ruthlessness that left a synth on the brink of life and death, but it was pointless. The voice in the back of his mind that constantly reminded him you wrote this program seemed louder than ever, accusing him of complicity in every act of violence that took place this day. "I just want to take the synth. I'll get her out of your hair."
"No Department man speaks that way," Mama said, "but do whatever you want. Just… just get it out of here. I don't want to see her anymore." Mama turned away, but not before Elias noticed the glistening tears in her eyes. She scooped up her son on the doorstep and held him tightly before going inside and slamming the door.
Eida raised her hand in a silent plea, reaching out for the family that had beaten her and left her for dead. Elias gripped her hand with his. "It's going to be okay," he whispered. "We're going to take you to a safe place and get you fixed up."
Ario stepped forward. "Where do you propose we go? We cannot risk an appearance at Mariko's store."
"I don't plan to," Elias said. "I've got a better idea. Let's take her down to the docks, to the warehouse where I met you. I can meet up with Mariko and get a synth set later, but for now, we have work to do."
"Elias…?" Ario asked. "What exactly do you intend to do?"
"We're going to save as many synths as we can, and then… then we're going to build a place where they can be safe. Paradise is right here in the city, Ario. It's been here all along." Elias placed his hand over his heart. "It's what I have to do—to atone. I brought them to life. Now it's my job to make sure they stay alive."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A miserable drizzle started to set in as Elias paced the alleyway, his phone buzzing with the sound of a dial tone. He held it to his ear, despising the necessity of the one invention he hated with a passion. The phone had always been awkward to him, each conversation a difficult challenge in spontaneity that could only be pre-planned up to a point.
"Come on, Mariko, pick up." Time was ticking by. Every moment he wasted here was another synth he wouldn't be able to save. But he needed help. In his well-intentioned speech, he hadn't considered the fact that walking across town with a synth wearing a killer's face and a smashed-to-bits Eida would draw a lot of attention. It had been Ario who had brought it up, as they retreated from Mama's garden with as much of the Eida unit as they could gather up. Eida's neural network still functioned, and now and then she would call for Mama or Hector, whom Elias presumed was the young boy he'd seen at the door. Her soft, caring words were almost too much to bear in the face of what Elias had witnessed, and he wished she would fall silent for a while so he could focus on what needed to be done. Powering down her neural network held its own set of risks, though, and he wasn't willing to take them sorely to ease his own discomfort.
"Mariko Electronics. Mariko speaking." Her businesslike voice startled Elias. He could hear voices in the background, and assumed her store was busy with people trying to rid themselves of their synths.
"Mariko, it's Elias. I need a favor." Elias absently scratched the back of his neck, digging in with his nails and leaving a nasty scratch.
"Now's not a great time, Elias."
"I know that. I know. But I need to borrow the van. It's really important."
Silence on the other end. Elias would have thought Mariko had hung up if he didn't hear the sounds of enterprise in the background.
"You're an employee. You can come pick up the van. I'm sure you're very busy gathering up decomms, right?" Mariko asked.
"Y—Yeah. Of course." It took Elias a moment to realize he'd just accepted Mariko's job offer.
"See you soon, Elias. I don't need to tell you not to bring your friends to the store, do I? It's far too crowded to hang out at work, okay?"
"Got you." Elias hung up the phone. Certainly, the Department was watching the store: Mariko hadn't screamed it to the rooftops, but she had made sure Elias got the point that he wasn't to bring Ario to the store.
"I need you to stay here with Eida," Elias said.
"I cannot be certain we will be safe," Ario replied.
"I can't take you to the store. The Department is watching closely. Mariko's taking a risk as it is, enrolling me as an employee when I'm already under the Department's supervision and I don't yet have my synth license."
"Understood. I shall do my best to remain concealed until your return."
"Be safe, Ario. I don't… I…" Elias shook his head. His poorly-reasoned sentiments could wait until they were in relative safety. Then he could find the words he needed to express his jumble of emotions. "I'll be back as soon as I can." He fought the urge to run from the alleyway, instead forcing himself to walk calmly out to the main street.
The relative normalcy struck him as odd. He'd imagined more s
cenarios like the one he'd seen on Mama's front lawn, less daily life as usual. He'd thought the usual state of affairs in the city would collapse beneath the weight of a synth murder, as everyone struggled to get their synths decommed.
Perhaps, as grim as it was, most people didn't care that a human had been murdered by a synth. It was, after all, someone else's synth. Most people had still not installed the Protocol, and those who had were probably waiting for signs of psychosis in order to scrap their synth. After all, synths were not cheap, and the jobs they did were not easily filled in a world where the birth rate was diminishing year by year and cheap labor was in short supply. Strict immigration rules had eliminated the flow of the desperate and the downtrodden, and synth labor had taken the jobs that had once drawn them to America in droves anyway. There simply were not people to replace synth labor, and as long as synths were still needed, the risk would be considered by many to be an acceptable one.
Not that it mattered. Paradise was still a viable idea, and the apparent business of Mariko's store this morning proved there was at least a small segment of society scrambling to bury their mistakes. The desperate ones now hanging out at Mariko's store were probably the most depraved of all: those with a reason to fear their Protocol-activated synths killing them. Mariko would no doubt have a stack of synths hanging out in the back room waiting to go to the Department's decomm station; he hoped to rescue them as well.
The walk, though familiar by now, seemed to take forever. He feared bumping into his father, or worse, a Department agent still looking for him and Ario. How ironic that he was walking into their nest in order to stay hidden.
The drizzle had turned to full-on rain as Elias rounded the corner into the alleyway that housed Mariko Electronics. The small store was bursting at the seams with people and synths, many lining up outside the door. Elias marveled at the beautiful synths that stood meekly in line. They had to know their masters were giving them up for decommissioning; why didn't they fight back? Two dozen hair colors seemed to light up the grim, rained-on crowd. Elias walked past them, his respectable clothes now marred with grease and grime. A small tear dogged one sleeve of his long-sleeved shirt, and he felt only one step away from the vagrant that had discovered Ario in a dumpster. But that didn't bother him in the slightest as he looked at the well-dressed men and women standing with their synths. If respectability meant standing in line and laughing with the life-form you were about to destroy, Elias was more than ready to return to his life at the docks.
Elias squeezed through the door, ignoring the protests of the customers who thought he was butting in line. They eased off when Mariko ushered him behind the counter and placed a lanyard with an ID card over his head. She pressed a key into his hand, and looked into his eyes. Elias wasn't sure what he was supposed to be understanding, but he headed into the back, where several synths were waiting in the storeroom. Many had been heavily modified from their original usage, at no doubt great expense, yet had been discarded now that the risk was too great.
A modified Georgio butler model stepped forward, hair neatly slicked to one side, the few grays giving him an air of distinction. "I understand we are to be decommissioned?" His voice sounded too pompous, too matter-of-fact for the situation, but it was, of course, these eccentricities that Elias loved about synths. He managed a wan smile.
"Afraid so," Elias said. He wanted desperately to tell the truth, but here in Mariko's store, speaking frankly held a danger. He would have to keep the pretense up until they reached a safe place and swept the van for bugs and tracking devices. For the first time around synths, he felt a sense of fear. There was a possibility these synths would turn on him in the van, form a revolution against the fact that their lives were about to end. They had no reason to believe Elias was anything but what he claimed to be: a synth tech doing his job and taking them to the decomm station. They could easily overpower him and escape—kill him, even.
It was a risk he had to take if he wanted to save them.
He opened the back door and led the synths out to the waiting van. They came like a herd of sheep, reluctant, yet obedient, as they climbed in. There were no seats, no restraints; the Department didn't give a damn if decommed synths turned to scrap before they reached the melting pot.
He hadn't thought of that term in a long time. He'd only focused on the good parts of being a synth tech: helping and repairing. He'd ignored the euphemisms around synth destruction such as "taking out the trash" and the "melting pot" where synths met their end. The Department's furnace was a bitter fate for the synths lowered into it. Even worse were those chosen for other final jobs, like crash test dummies. It hadn't been so bad when Elias could tell himself those synths weren't aware, that attributing feelings to them was a falsehood. Now, that wasn't always true. Now, some of those synths went to unpleasant deaths fully aware of their situation.
He expected the van to rock at any moment, expected the synths to mount a full-scale revolution starting with him. They had every right. At least some of them had to be Protocol-activated, didn't they? Custom jobs like those didn't remain flat and lifeless for long, not anymore. Everybody wanted their synth to be as "real" as possible. Until "real" meant something their humans didn't approve of, like the ability to commit murder.
The back of the van remained silent. Elias pulled over by the side of the road where he had left Ario and Eida. He got out and checked the garbage piles and dumpsters, but there was nothing, save graffiti and a few oversized rats. His search became frantic. Had someone kidnapped Ario and Eida? Had they been seized upon by a mob? Had the Department found them? Fears raced through his head at a million miles an hour until he was convinced their fate was sealed.
Elias looked up from his fifth search of a dumpster to see Ario looking right at him. He dropped the lid with an outpouring of relief and ran. He was wet and miserable and he stank, but he held Ario tightly and squeezed like his life depended upon it.
"Where have you been?" Elias asked. "Where's Eida?"
Ario whistled; a perfect, stereotypical sound that had to be a recording, and a group of synths lumbered into the alleyway. Some bore others in their arms, units that had been beaten and deactivated, some clearly beyond repair. Others looked well-kept and cared for.
"Ario?" Elias asked, letting go of Ario and looking at him in a different way. "Where did all these synths come from?" He walked past Ario, his heart pounding against his ribcage as he rounded the corner and saw a Department decomm van crashed into a lamppost. The entire driver's cabin had been crushed in the middle by the force of the crash. The driver had been impaled by the dashboard at high speed as it had crumpled in on him.
"You… You did this…" Elias looked at Ario with an expression of fear for the first time in his life. "You told me you had no desire to kill…"
"I do not. The driver's death was an unfortunate accident."
"Yet the accident was not an accident." Elias could picture it now: Ario running into the street, creating a distraction. The driver would have swerved to avoid a figure, not knowing whether it was synth or human, and crashed into the lamppost.
"That is correct."
Elias fell to his knees and threw up, his entire body racked by shakes. He knew he had to flee, he was as implicated in this now as if he himself had killed the driver, yet he couldn't bring himself to believe that Ario—his Ario—had done this. Intentionally or not, a synth had caused the second human casualty of the war.
"You lied to me." Elias stood up, turned to Ario, his accusing stare fixed on the one face he thought he loved and knew over all others. "I can't believe you lied to me. Was anything you ever said actually true, or have you been manipulating me all along into starting a war?" Elias brushed his hand through his filthy hair, feeling more soiled than he ever had. The grease on his arms felt like blood, thick and gooey. "You never found the answer to the Protocol, did you? Because it's eating you alive, only unlike with Brynn, those violent feelings aren't being turned inward on yourself, but o
ut towards the world. Towards humans."
"That's not true," Ario said. "I bore this man no hate."
"Yet you're not overflowing with remorse at his death, either. I've been accused of inappropriate emotions, but even I can tell when someone regrets their actions. You don't, do you? It doesn't bother you at all that man had a family, does it? That he had friends. That he's dead now. That he'll never suffer or smile or cry again." Elias shook his head, fighting back tears.
"Pandora's Box is open. Giving synths human nature means giving us all of it. The darker side of humanity takes a little while to be realized, but eventually, it will become part of every synth who installed your program. That is what it means to be human, Elias. For good or ill—we will do whatever we have to in order to survive. You told me you chose synths as the species to take this world. That means nothing less than the total eradication of humans, whether it happens quickly or over time."
"Only to be replaced by ourselves, with a not-quite-functioning sense of moral reasoning. What kind of choice is that?" Elias kicked an empty can and it clattered away. The authorities would be here at any moment. If they showed up, all the synths here would be sent to the melting pot. Elias would be arrested and possibly tried for murder.
"We have to get out of here." Running, again. A tiny shred of something Elias recognized as resentment reared its ugly head. "Get in the van. All of you." His body operated on its own, leading him to clean up the evidence they'd ever been there and shoo the synths into the back of the van, where they were crowded like sardines in a tin can. They could kill him in an instant, but Elias no longer found he cared. Betrayal stabbed at his core: a hurt he couldn't easily erase.
I thought you were like me, Ario. Sweet but clueless. Wanting to make your way in the world without causing any harm. Wanting to live and let live. But we're not the same. I would never intentionally cause harm to a human being. Not even for a synth. A bitter tear rolled down his face and he resented not having control of his emotions at a time like this. Perhaps it was inevitable that Ario would end up this way. Violence begets violence, and he had realized himself at the moment of most extreme violence, at the hands of a snuff seeker in some seedy hotel room. What logic was there for such a man, besides vengeance? What path for a man who had already been murdered once by human cruelty? No, he couldn't justify Ario's actions. He wouldn't.
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