SINdicate

by J. T. Nicholas

  Soon, the shallow baking dish held more than a dozen copper welding rods of varying lengths and diameter. I had the duty of washing off the blood and other fluids and had twice taken the pan to the sink for additional cleaning. Some of the rods had been bent, twisted into shallow curves. Others were arrow-straight. All were made of copper.

  “That’s the last of them,” Tia said, as she dropped the final bit of metal into the pan with an audible clank.

  “And you’re sure they were all done after death?”

  “Absolutely,” Tia replied. “I could show you more if we had a microscope, but you can tell from the tissue around the wounds that blood wasn’t pumping when the trauma occurred. I haven’t found what killed him, Detective, but I guarantee you it wasn’t the…” she shrugged. “Whatever those copper bits are. Wires?”

  There was something in her voice, a slight hesitancy, and not about what the metal rods were, that caught my attention. “Is there something else?”

  She sighed, a frustrated breath of air muffled by the surgical mask. “I think you should know, Detective…Jason…that I now think it’s highly unlikely I’m going to be able to determine the cause of death. The visual examination showed no other obvious wounds. The neck and spine appear to be intact. No signs of strangulation. No readily visible head trauma. And no damn equipment to test for toxins. No X-ray for bone anomalies. I can keep going, do the full examination, but I’m not hopeful on what we’ll find.” She paused again, and when she started up her voice held a different tone. It wasn’t diffident, but it was…delicate. “And then there’s the matter of the mess. If I start extracting organs… Well, what are we going to do with them? And the contents of the stomach, intestines, and bowel? And the pooled fluids that I can’t drain?”

  I weighed the question, silently kicking myself. “I really didn’t think this through, did I?” I said ruefully.

  Tia shrugged. “There’s a lot that I could tell you without cutting him open—more than I have any way—if it was there to tell. But it isn’t. Without proper lab equipment, I don’t think I can achieve much more. You have one major anomaly, Detective. Do you think it likely there will be more?”

  The hell of it was, I had no fucking idea. “Our delivery boy left a note that said I had everything I needed to find him,” I said. “But I doubt I could have found the fucking welding rods, much less anything else. Not without help.”

  “Well, maybe he knew the help you’d get, and the level of ‘facilities’ that you’d have access to. Or maybe he’s just a psycho killer.” As she spoke, she pulled off the rubber gloves, and tugged the mask down. She looked tired, with dark shadows under her eyes and a faint sheen of sweat on her face. “Do the welding rods mean anything to you?” she asked, brushing her hair back with one hand.

  “Not a damn thing,” I grunted, conscious that I was starting to fall back into the vulgarity that cops tended to use with each other. Tia didn’t seem to notice or at least not to care, and all of my brainpower was focused on the question at hand anyway. I didn’t have the spare capacity to try and censor the more colorful parts of my vocabulary. “But whoever this asshole is, he’s starting to piss me off. ”

  Tia put both of her fists into the small of her back, pushing forward and arching her back into a bone-popping stretch, simultaneously shrugging her shoulders. The resultant body mechanics were…appreciable. Particularly given the lack of undergarments. I tried to look away. I couldn’t quite make myself, but I promise, I tried.

  Tia released a slight groan as she stretched, then sighed again, dropping her arms. I immediately dropped my gaze, but I guessed by the quick and knowing smile that flashed across her face that I hadn’t acted quickly enough. My face felt dangerously hot, and there was a slight flush in her own face. I couldn’t meet her eyes. But there was one place to look to cool any ardent feelings. I looked at the body.

  And for the first time, I saw what Tia had done. Really saw it.

  I’d been paying so much attention to the welding rods themselves, trying to figure out their purpose or meaning, that I hadn’t been paying attention to the actual task of retrieving them. The corpse’s back, at first glance, looked like a patchwork of lacerations, as if a knife-wielding maniac had taken long, lazy swipes again and again. But Tia’s work had actually been quite meticulous, carving along the spine of each of the imbedded welding rods. There were a few ragged edges, where the wires had curved unexpectedly and Tia had to probe a bit to find the path once more, but by and large, I was staring at a series of interconnected lines and curves, drawn in red, laid out on a field of pale white. It reminded me of something—something that, as both a soldier and a cop, I had come to rely upon.

  “It’s a map,” I said.

  Tia’s gaze was still on the welding rods. “What?”

  “Look.” I hovered one finger above the cuts, tracing the paths, though never actually touching the body. “Look at the way the rods were laid out. One flows into the next, except where two come together, almost like an intersection. Some are perfectly straight. Others curve around…around buildings or obstacles or…terrain features, maybe?”

  Tia turned her attention back to the corpse. “Could be,” she said thoughtfully. “There’s certainly no medical reason why the objects would have been inserted how they were. It was meant as a message of some sort, but isn’t a map sort of… Well… Literal?”

  “Only if we can figure out what it’s a map of,” I pointed out. “I mean, we can assume New Lyons or the surrounding area. But how many different streets crisscross this city? And the surrounding suburbs?”

  “Hundreds,” Tia replied at once. “Maybe thousands once you count alleyways. Maybe tens of thousands if you throw in county roads.”

  “Shit.” That about summed it up.

  “Give me your screen,” Tia said.

  “What? Why?”

  “Because you made me leave mine in a cemetery. Along with my underwear.”

  Not exactly a lot of arguments I could make against that. I unlocked my screen and passed it over. It was a simple model—most burners were—but it still had full access to the net and all the standard apps. I had disabled the GPS chip, of course. Even with a burner, there were some risks I wasn’t going to take.

  “Hold me steady,” Tia said. Before I could ask why, she was climbing onto the table with the corpse, poised with her knees on the edge and leaning far forward over the body to position the screen more directly above the cuts. I moved without thought, stepping up behind her and placing my hands just above her hips, doing my best to ignore the heat coming from her skin. She took several pictures and said, “Okay. Coming down.”

  I backed off, keeping my hands up in case she stumbled as she moved out of her precarious position, but she managed it with an athlete’s grace. She tossed me my phone.

  “Okay,” I said, confusion in my voice. “Now what?”

  “Detective. You took over the entire fucking net a month ago. Are you telling me that you don’t have someone in that room out there,” she pointed to the dining area where most of the synthetics were gathered, “who can work some magic with satellite imagery and telemetric overlays or whatever the right term might be? I mean, if we fiddle with the image so we just have the incisions, we should be able to start seeing where it fits on the New Lyons streets. Like a giant puzzle piece. Right?”

  It seemed like an easy enough idea, and I did have access to a couple of shit-hot hackers who could make screens sing, but somehow, I knew it wasn’t going to be that simple. “Okay,” I agreed. “Let’s give it a try.” I paused, thinking. “Do you want to be here for this part, or do you want me to take you home?”

  “Why, Detective, are you asking me to spend the night?” she asked, coyly.

  My mouth dropped open, but no words came out. All I could do was stare at her with a blank, and almost certainly stupid, expression on my face.

 
; “I’m staying,” she said, taking mercy on me. “Class isn’t in session right now, and Fitzpatrick gave me a few days off. But we’re going to have to go get my clothes, Detective.” She scratched surreptitiously. “These have got to be the itchiest damn scrubs I’ve ever worn.”

  Chapter 8

  There was a surprising number of skilled hackers among the synthetic population. I shouldn’t have been surprised, I supposed. Whatever else they were, the synthetics had had their genes tampered with to an extent that I could only guess. Who knew what kind of side effects that might have? Whether the cause had something to do with an increased potential from their altered genetics or was a product of the easy availability of screens coupled with enforced periods of time with little or nothing to do, many of them went far beyond simple technological literacy.

  I didn’t know the synthetics hunkering down at the safe house well enough to be able to identify if any of them had the skills we needed, so I went to Evelyn. I’d had to wake her up. Waking up a pregnant woman, regardless of her genetic lineage, is generally contraindicated, but I sucked it up and reached out to gently shake her shoulder. Her eyes opened at the first brush of my hand against her, flashing wide in momentary panic.

  “Easy,” I said. “It’s just me.”

  She didn’t say anything, only rising ponderously from her reclined position until she was seated on the edge of the cot. I made no offer to help—it was pretty clear she didn’t want to be touched. We were doing our best to prepare for the whole “giving birth” thing, but there were some fairly significant obstacles. We couldn’t very well take her to a hospital. But risking a birth with no possibility of medical intervention seemed like a bad idea. The child she was carrying was far too important to take any risk. We managed to gather some medical supplies, but so far, the best we’d come up with was to try a forced abduction—courtesy of yours truly, of course—of a midwife or doctor when the time came. It wasn’t a plan I was overly fond of—my morality could bend far enough to break an unjust law, but the notion of kidnapping someone was sticking in my throat. I wondered if Tia had done any work in obstetrics during her schooling.

  “What do you want, Detective?” she asked at last.

  Right to the point. Well, I couldn’t blame her. But I was going to have to figure out a way to make people stop calling me detective. It wasn’t accurate anymore, and every time I heard it, I felt a little twist of the knife. I didn’t mind leaving NLPD—I’d never been fully comfortable there anyway—but I did miss being one of the good guys. Well, at least from society’s perspective. “I need someone who’s good with computers,” I replied. “Since Silas seems to have vanished again, we thought you might know someone who would fit the bill.”

  “We?”

  Being the literal first mother of her race and the synthetic face of the revolution, Evelyn rated private quarters at each of the safe houses. In this one, that meant a cleaned-out supply closet maybe eight by eight feet furnished with a cot and a single chair. It was a long way from lavish, but privacy and space were both at a premium. I had no doubt that the second we disposed of the body—and I still had no idea how we were going to manage that one—many of the synthetics in the dining area would take up residence in the kitchen. They’d have done so already, body or no, if it wasn’t out of some marginal level of respect for me and what I was trying to do.

  I waved to Tia, who was standing just outside, to enter the room. With three people, one of them pregnant, the small space felt more than a little cramped. “Tia Morita,” I said by way of introduction. “The assistant medical examiner and a friend. Tia, this is Evelyn.”

  Much to my chagrin, Tia immediately launched into a barrage of questions relating to Evelyn’s pregnancy. Questions that were very specific, very graphic, and made me very, very uncomfortable. Even more discomforting, Evelyn, who never used three words with me where one would get the job done, responded in great and specific detail. Perhaps that was because Tia’s concern came across clearly, and despite most of her work being with the dead, she had a calm and earnest bedside manner. Or maybe it was because she talked to Evelyn like a human being and not like a thing. Whatever the reason, I found myself square in the middle of a pregnancy conversation that had nothing at all to do with tracking down a murderer.

  “Uhm… Tia? Evelyn? Maybe we can do this later? After we find that computer expert?”

  Both women gave me a look so startlingly and quintessentially female that if I had taken a picture I could have provided the world with irrefutable proof they, at least, were the same species.

  “Go find La Sorte,” Evelyn said, with more than a hint of dismissal in her voice. “He can help you.”

  “Ohhhh-kay. Tia?”

  “I’m good here,” she said. “There’s still a lot to cover. If that’s okay with Ms. Evelyn?” Evelyn only nodded. “And shut the door on your way out.”

  What the hell had just happened? I stepped from the room, easing the door shut behind me, feeling somehow like a schoolboy caught doing something naughty. I was glad Tia and Evelyn were talking about her pregnancy—surprised that Evelyn had opened up so quickly, but certainly glad. But I wasn’t used to such casual dismissal. I had to admit, I didn’t like it. Which brought on another of those strange “everything is upside down and sideways” moments. Most of the people in the safe house had likely spent the entirety of their lives up until this point in a perpetual state of casual dismissal. And I’m sure they didn’t like it either.

  With perhaps a sliver of newfound empathy, I went in search of someone named La Sorte.

  * * * *

  I was hunched over a collection of old and battered screens, sitting across from a synthetic man who looked more like an underwear model than a computer geek when Tia found me again.

  “Got anything yet?” she asked.

  “Not a damn thing,” I replied. “La Sorte here is a fucking genius with all this.” I waved to the array of electronic devices before us. The synthetic had programmatically chained more than a dozen personal screens together, somehow distributing their processing power while simultaneous linking their displays. We sat in a ratty old booth, me on one side, him on the other, with the screens spread out in a rectangular grid on the table between us. They showed an old-school roadmap view of New Lyons, rapidly scrolling, zooming, and shifting. In the center of the collection of screens was an enhanced and smoothed-out version of the cut lines from our victim. Whatever program La Sorte was using, it was trying to match the shapes of the intersections with the various roadways. While it looked like the setup was moving fast, there was a lot of ground to cover.

  “Not a genius, Mr. Campbell,” the synth replied in a bell-like tenor. “But I did have a lot of free time on my hands when my owner was at work. And he didn’t mind if I used the screens. It’s amazing what you can learn on the net, given enough time and motivation.”

  “Right. Totally not a genius. He just managed to hack the fucking planet when we needed to get our message out. Still genius or not, there’s a metric shit-ton of possibilities,” I said.

  La Sorte, fingers busily working on another screen held before him, looked up long enough to give Tia a brilliant smile. “A pleasure to meet you, Miss Morita,” he said.

  I don’t care where you fall on the gender or sexuality spectrums. I’m as straight as they come, and La Sorte made me feel funny things. Whatever genetic soup they started with when they put him together must have been the good stuff. Tia couldn’t help but give him an answering smile and a surreptitious once-over—but she slid into the booth beside me.

  “How’s Evelyn doing?” I asked.

  “As well as can be expected, given the lack of actual medical care,” was her somewhat-tart reply. She didn’t bother pointing out that Evelyn needed to be receiving regular, modern checkups. And I didn’t bother pointing out all the reasons that was impossible. We both understood the current situation to
o well for that. “As far as I can tell, baby and mother are both healthy. But you need to lay in some supplies, and soon, to deal with any complications that may arrive during the actual birth.”

  “I know,” I said with a sigh. “And we’re working on it. But… Well, this is pretty new for all of us. We don’t know what might happen, and we don’t know what to do about it if it does. Can you make us a list?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I can do that. And better than that. Like I said, I’ve got a few days off.” She hesitated, throwing a weighing glance at La Sorte, who didn’t seem to be paying the slightest attention as his fingers flew over the screens. “Evelyn doesn’t know exactly when she was impregnated. There were, apparently, numerous…encounters…any of which could have resulted in the pregnancy.”

  “Rapes,” La Sorte said, voice still mellow. “When there’s no consent, they’re called rapes.” The casual way he said it took both of us aback. Still without looking up, he gave us a wry smile. “It was a daily part of most of our lives, before Silas.” A slight nod in my direction. “And you, Detective. We don’t sugarcoat it. Not among friends.”

  “Rapes, then,” Tia agreed. “But doing some math, she should be due any day now. I’ll stick around here to help with that, as long as I have vacation, and as long as everyone is okay with it. I was going to suggest that I take a look at the rest of the…people…gathered here, but everyone seems to be in remarkable health.”

  I didn’t tell her that, in addition to the more obvious physical benefits of bilateral symmetry and metabolisms I would have envied in my twenties, synthetics almost never got sick. That their injuries healed much faster than our own. That they possessed a vitality and energy that professional athletes would envy. The quest for genetic perfection had come with many, many beneficial side effects. If only it weren’t for that pesky slavery thing….