SINdicate

by J. T. Nicholas

  Silas stood in the doorway, his expression unreadable.

  “It’s been a long and stressful couple of days for all of us,” I said by way of explanation.

  “Of course. We’re ready to review the IP address.” He waved one hand at me, my bandages, and my general lack of shirt-wearing. “That is, if you’re ready?”

  We were back in the booth with the makeshift screen. Tia had passed on coming with us, opting instead to check on Evelyn once more. She had assured me and Silas that the woman was doing well, but she wanted to keep a close eye on her. So I sat alone, somewhat regretfully, on my side of the booth while Silas and La Sorte sat on the other. Certainly, going to a web page didn’t require much in the way of computer expertise, but if Silas wanted La Sorte present, that was good enough for me.

  “I did some checking on the IP address,” La Sorte said. “Looking for things like any registered owners, or known malicious software associated with it. I came up empty, so it looks like it’s safe to proceed.”

  Okay. So maybe going to a net page took more savvy that I had thought—or at least, maybe I should have put a hell of a lot more thought into net content I accessed. “Well, then, let’s proceed,” I replied.

  He nodded, his fingers flicking over his screen. Then the large franken-screen on the table flashed to life. It displayed a single window, much like the window displayed for any given folder on any given screen I had ever used. It was, for all intents and purposes, a mostly empty gray box. Mostly empty, because there was one single file displayed there, a file with the uninspiring name of truth.vid.

  Silas arched a single eyebrow at me, and I shrugged and nodded.

  La Sorte caught the nod and tapped his own screen, twice.

  There was a brief second where nothing happened, and then the gray window was replaced with blackness. The blackness held for a second, and then it too, vanished, showing the face of a middle-aged man who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent. He had closely cropped black hair and a neatly trimmed beard. His eyes were dark, and something in them, at least to my eye, looked pained. He stared at the camera for a long moment, as if to make sure it was actually recording, and then he spoke.

  “My name is Dr. Mido Kaphiri,” he said. “And I am afraid I have enabled the worst tragedy in human history.” He drew a long, shuddering breath. His voice trembled as he continued. “I suspect that by the time the conditions I set around the reveal of this…testimony…arrive, I will be long dead. The coward in me prays that my death was from natural causes, though there is a small part that hopes I find the courage to die a better death than that.” The man paused again, and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “I am not sure if history will remember me at all—I somehow doubt that Walton will let that happen—but if history does remember me, it will remember me as the father of synthetics.”

  A glance passed around the table at that. The history of synthetics was…hazy at best. I’d come to understand why the vagaries existed—it was Walton Biogenics trying to protect its dirty little secrets. But to come face-to-virtual-face with the man claiming to be the father of the field… I turned my attention back to the video.

  “Like most scientists before me, I stand atop the shoulders of giants. But somebody had to be the first to create artificial life, and I had that honor. From there, it was just a small step, a few degrees of genetic manipulation, to take a technology originally intended to provide for organ transplants and research and create an entire new race of people.

  “I did not think about the potential consequences. I was too wrapped up in the possibilities, too enamored of the idea of success. I created the first synthetic. And he is an amazing, wonderful being. I raised him, as my son, for years.

  “Until my employer, Walton Biogenics, realized the possibilities in some darker applications of my research. To the commercial potential outside of the organ and tissue transplants where my work had previously garnered some small success.” Kaphiri paused again, for longer this time, and his face sagged in obvious defeat. He waved one hand at the camera, and the sense of failure and resignation in the gesture was palpable through the screen. “They took my work. All of it. All of my research. My notes. My successes and my failures. They sent an army of lawyers after me. I had signed all of the standard employment forms, of course, all of the nondisclosure agreements and contracts affirming that any work I produced on company time or using company resources was wholly owned by the company. There was nothing I could do. They took what I had built, and they turned it into what it has become.

  “I was given a choice. I could work with them, help them to understand and adapt my ideas, maintain some level of control over the science. Or I could be fired, sued, possibly imprisoned, and they would turn my work over to someone else to develop as they saw fit.” There was anger in Kaphiri’s voice, but also something else. Regret?

  “I chose the coward’s path,” he admitted. “But not just out of fear of what might happen to me. I’d managed to keep my first success, my Al’awwal, from the eyes of Walton. So far as they knew, Al was my son, and as long as I didn’t give them reason to dig too deeply, he would remain as such. As long as I didn’t give them a reason to think I would break with what they wanted, they would allow us both to keep living our lives.

  “So that is what I did. For decades. I watched—no, I helped—as Walton Biogenics created a slave race. I watched as legislatures around the world traded away their souls for the promised utopia of a synthetic world. I watched, and I feared, that they would discover that my son was not born of my body but of the same process by which they were creating their slaves. But, perhaps worst of all, I watched as they took the best parts of my work and threw them away.”

  He drew a deep, steadying breath and looked directly into the camera’s watchful eye. “Synthetics are superior to regular humans in every conceivable way. I do not mean that they are more attractive—bilateral symmetry and optimized fat and muscle content are the most basic applications of what Walton Biogenics can do. But they have done—we have done—so much more than that. Every new pharmaceutical to come out of Walton in the last three decades has been directly derived from applications of the synthetic program. And every one of them has been a virtual placebo compared to what Walton could have done. As of the time of my recording this video, Walton has within its power the ability to eliminate something like seventy percent of known diseases. It has cures for dozens of forms of cancer. It has the ability to produce retroviruses capable of altering the DNA of humanity in such a way to cut the aging process nearly in half.” He shook his head and sighed.

  “Walton Biogenics has the ability to do all of this and more, and has sat idle upon it for decades. First, because there is little profit for a biology and genetics company in curing disease. But that is secondary to their true concern. They have built a commercial empire unlike any known in the history of the world, and they have done it on one simple, foundational lie: synthetics are not human.” Kaphiri waved one hand dismissively at the camera. “I am a man of science and will not argue the philosophical question of the soul, as it relates to synthetics or anything else. What I will argue, what I can prove, is that in every way that we can measure, in every way that we know how to examine and codify, synthetics are genetically indistinguishable from humans. We have simply been able to push the potential curve so that they normally operate at what would be the limits of human potential. Walton Biogenics claims otherwise, while simultaneously forcing the passage of laws in every nation that make it impossible for anyone to legally verify their claims.”

  He looked down and away from the camera, and when his eyes rose once more, he face sagged in exhaustion. He appeared completely drained. “I have gathered this proof for years. Smuggled it out of Walton’s labs and entrusted it to the only person I can. My son. Al’awwal. Over the years, I have found a few like-minded individuals, a few on the,” he grimaced, “lunatic fringe who h
ave come to believe what I know to be the truth. And I have given them certain sets of instructions. I believe—I pray—that there will come a time when someone has a real chance of not only getting my evidence out to the public, but of making it heard, making it believed. Someone who can weather the storm of killers and lawyers that Walton Biogenics will surely send to silence the truth. If you’re watching this video,” a wry, almost apologetic smile replaced the tired expression, “then congratulations. You’re the lucky ones who get to try to take down what I truly believe to be the most evil syndicate in the history of mankind.”

  That certainly got our attention. I looked across at Silas to find him staring back at me. His face was calm acceptance, and well it should be. I realized that, while freeing the synthetics from their servitude was his primary concern, taking back a little of his own on Walton Biogenics had been on the agenda from the beginning. LaSorte, on the other hand, looked dumfounded, his lips forming a silent oh of surprise.

  On the screen, Kaphiri was continuing. “So, that is who I am and what I am responsible for doing. Now it is up to you to undo this terrible thing that I have wrought. The agent who directed you to this site should be able to give you more details, perhaps already has.”

  My stomach tightened. Presumably, Dr. Kaphiri’s agent had been the man gunned down in the sewers by Walton Biogenics security personnel. Equally presumably, he was the person who had dropped a body on my doorstep. I still didn’t quite understand why that had happened—it seemed like a poor introduction to Dr. Kaphiri and his work. It also had, one way or another, contributed to the poor bastard’s death. Why hadn’t he just knocked on the door, handed over the IP address, and waited while we watched the video? I couldn’t figure out if the body had been a warning, a threat…or, and a frown pulled at my lips as the notion occurred to me, a way to get rid of the evidence of a previous assault upon the messenger by Walton Biogenics. I didn’t have much time to ponder that possibility, though, because Kaphiri was still talking.

  “In case he did not, or in case you stumbled upon this video through some other channel but, through serendipity, are a like-minded individual, you must seek out my son. You must find Al’awwal, for it is he who holds the keys to the proof that Walton Biogenics has not only enslaved generations of people, but that they have kept key medical advances from us all, in the hopes of protecting their precious revenue streams. You can find him here.” The display flickered, and the image was replaced with a series of numbers that I recognized as longitude and latitude.

  “At least it’s not going to be another fucking scavenger hunt,” I muttered.

  “I wish you the best of luck,” Kaphiri said, as his face came back into frame. “Do not underestimate the forces arrayed against you—the inertia of the status quo is a powerful force, perhaps the most powerful force known to man. But do not underestimate the basic goodness of the human spirit, either. I have faith that once the world knows the truth, the average person will not allow for this travesty to stand.”

  There was another pause in the video, long enough that I started to wonder if we were all staring stupidly at a still image. Just as I was about to raise the possibility, Dr. Kaphiri spoke one final time. “Please,” he said, his voice soft, “tell my son I love him.”

  The screen went black.

  Chapter 15

  “Well,” Silas said.

  “Well, indeed,” I replied. “I’m not sure what to make of this, but we’re going to have to go to those coordinates and see if we can find this Al’awwal, this first synthetic.”

  “There may be a slight problem with that,” La Sorte said.

  “Because of course there is.” I sighed. “What is it?”

  “I was doing some searching while the video played. It looks like Dr. Mido Kaphiri died nearly fifty years ago,” La Sorte said. “And, I also found an obituary for one Al’awwal Kaphiri from almost a decade ago. I don’t know if it’s the same person, but what are the odds that the coordinates in the video are still accurate?”

  “Great. So we’ve got a departed father and a dead son. I think I’ve heard this story before. Any chance for a resurrection?” I asked.

  “Quite possibly,” Silas said.

  “Do what now?” I asked, hearing the surprise and confusion in my own voice.

  “Well, perhaps not literally,” Silas allowed. “But unless that obituary that La Sorte found indicates that our mysterious Mr. Al’awwal was killed in some violent and readily verifiable way, I seriously doubt he simply passed away.”

  “Shit, Silas. Kaphiri wasn’t real specific on times, but I got the impression that he kept working for Walton for decades. And if he died fifty years ago… His son would have to be, what? Seventy? Eighty years old? Something like that. It’s not that unreasonable to think that he passed away.”

  Silas glanced first at La Sorte, and then at me. He looked at me for a long moment. Then he sighed. “I’m sixty-four years old, Jason.”

  I stared at him, shocked into a silence so profound that I had to literally try three times before I could make words. The albino synthetic looked…unusual…with his fireplug build, alabaster skin, and pinkish-hued eyes, but he also looked to be in his early thirties, maybe pushing forty. He sure as hell didn’t look like someone eligible for a senior discount. At last I just said, “How?”

  “You heard Dr. Kaphiri, Detective,” he replied. “And I think I’ve mentioned before that our genetics are, if you’ll forgive the term, superior to your own. Synthetics,” he said the word as if it left a slightly bad taste in his mouth, “have the potential to live far longer than humans. We seldom do, of course, given the tasks and uses to which many of us are put. It is part of the reason why I’ve been able to overcome at least some of my conditioning—that is the product not of months or even years, but rather decades, of mental discipline and repeated exposure. Add in the fact that those disease immunities that the good doctor mentioned are native to our own genetics—after all, Walton couldn’t have products getting sick, as that would not only impact customer satisfaction but also be yet another clue as to our true nature and risk building empathy toward us—and you get the potential for a lifespan that might far outstrip even Dr. Kaphiri’s estimations.” He shrugged his boulder-like shoulders. “I am, so far as I’ve been able to ascertain, one of the oldest living synthetics, at least in New Lyons. If you consider how long synthetics have been around, and the fact that, despite my youthful appearance, I haven’t even lived a normal human span, that will give you one more dimension of the controlled genocide humanity has been undertaking.”

  I shook my head, not in negation, but from a growing sense of both wonder and rekindled anger. I was fairly certain Silas had explained some of that to me before, in at least a roundabout way. But it was one thing to understand the possibilities Walton Biogenics had been denying to people in order to keep its dirty little secrets. It was another thing entirely to come face-to-face with the reality.

  Silas was older than my parents, yet looked younger—and healthier—than me.

  “Okay. So, maybe Al’awwal is alive and well,” I said. “And yeah, it’s unlikely he’s been sitting in the same damn place for decades. But it’s all we have to go on, so I guess…”

  I stopped as a synthetic woman I hadn’t yet met rushed up to the table. Her face was flushed, her breathing quick. She was young, late teens or very early twenties. Or maybe, I realized, that’s just how old she appeared to be. I didn’t have time to ponder that thought as she blurted, “Ms. Morita asked me to tell you that it’s time.”

  “Time for what?” I asked.

  A wide smile split her flawless features. “The baby is coming.”

  * * * *

  It didn’t happen that fast of course. In fact, it took hours. Silas, revolutionary mastermind that he was, had a plan. It involved lots of cameras and filming the birth. Not in that “Oh my God, we want to remember this ma
gical moment” kind of way. More in the “We must provide full evidentiary support for our claims that this is the natural-born child of a synthetic” kind of way. That was, more or less, a direct quote. So rather than one shaky screen cam used to capture the miracle of birth, with some discreet cutaways for the sake of privacy or decency, Evelyn got enough cameras in her face—and other places—to produce a full-fledged Hollyweird production.

  I’m not ashamed to admit that once the real thing started, I got the hell out of Dodge. Miraculous? Sure, especially in this case. It wasn’t exactly a virgin birth, but it was still a birth that should have been impossible. But beautiful? I understood the emotion behind the sentiment, but the “beauty” of childbirth was lost on me. I figured Evelyn and the others could get by just fine without me. Tia seemed to be in her element, taking charge with a calm professionalism that was surprising not only because she seemed so damn young but also because of her chosen profession. I wouldn’t have pegged the medical examiner’s assistant as someone destined for obstetrics, but damned if she didn’t seem quite natural in that environment.

  In any event, I cleared out, leaving the professionals to do their work. I did what any good former soldier, faced with a period of enforced dead time and lacking a deck of cards, would do—I found an unused cot, stretched out, and got some much-needed rack time. I knew I should be hunting down Al’awwal, finding out if he had proof of the wrongdoings of Walton Biogenics. We had data—lots of data—proving to any reasonable mind that synthetics were, in fact, human. But it was a far cry from that to proving that Walton Biogenics, and by extension at least key personnel from governments all over the world, knew that was the case. But Al’awwal and Dr. Kaphiri’s notes were the smoking gun.