Perion Synthetics

by Verastiqui, Daniel

  When it came down to it, money drove everything. Never mind that one of the greatest innovators of the century was dying from an easily treatable disease.

  Banks reached for a small box on the coffee table and removed a Red Velvet whisperer. He pressed it into his ear with his index finger.

  Lifting his wrist, he said, “Hashtag Internal: Cameron Gray.”

  Frank smirked. “You think he has any idea what’s coming?”

  “No one does,” said Banks, “but when it finally gets here, they’re going to hear about it on my feed first.”

  2

  It took three hours on I-10 to get from Los Angeles to Perion City. Cam passed the time by poring over the dossiers Diana had been sending him all morning, files too detailed to have been the result of VNet searches. He scrolled through write-ups on all C-level players with strong names like Shaw and Phelps, from where they went to school to which political party they backed. Grid dumps showed the relationships between each employee, the under-the-table deals and mutual back-scratching that had birthed Perion’s executive team. He studied the many faces and tried to ignore the mild revulsion he felt, a mixture of envy and contempt for men of power.

  The car pulled off the highway at the exit for Old Pinto Basin Road, a two lane blacktop that ran north another ten miles before dead-ending at Perion Terminus. The transit station was a sprawling collection of scaffolding and aluminum siding on an endless slab of gray evercrete. Cam counted twenty-four loading bays set to receive the cargo haulers lined up along the mile-long glide path running parallel to the road. There, grizzled and bored drivers sat baking in the California sun as their massive engines rumbled idly. Left of the main warehouse, the bland siding gave way to Perion’s signature silver. The abrupt change in material made the terminal appear tacked on, an afterthought that perhaps people, too, would want to travel to Perion City.

  A woman with her face buried in her phone sat on a bench just outside the terminal. A few paces away, a man in a chauffeur’s cap stood smoking a cigarette.

  Cam pulled the woman’s face from the dozens he had seen in the dossiers and identified her as Savannah “Sava” Kessler, fellow Berkeley graduate and Perion’s head of public relations. Looking from his phone to the window, he noticed the images in her file were out of date. Sava’s previously blonde hair was now a light auburn; it disappeared behind the shoulders of her black blazer instead of curling inward just below her chin. A scarlet blouse led into a black skirt that ended just above her knees.

  The chauffeur tossed his cigarette away as Cam’s car pulled into a parking spot next to a lone Nissan. He was at Cam’s door in seconds, opening it and allowing in the warm desert air. Cam stepped out into the daylight and waited for his eyes to adjust. He squinted as Sava approached.

  “Mr. Gray?” she asked.

  Cam saw himself reflected in the silver lenses of her sunglasses. The way they filtered the light turned the world to grayscale.

  “Ms. Kessler,” said Cam, extending his hand.

  Sava made a feeble attempt at a handshake and then motioned to her driver.

  Cam watched the man approach the trunk of Banks’ car. “No,” he told him. “I don’t have any luggage.” Then to Sava, “I didn’t have time to pack. I only found out I was coming here this morning.”

  “Interesting,” said Sava, over her shoulder. She waited for the chauffeur to open the rear door of the Nissan for her.

  “How’s that?” Cam asked, familiar with people who responded with the word interesting when they really meant I could give a shit.

  Sava didn’t answer until Cam walked around the car and got in the other side.

  “Because, this has been on my calendar for a week,” she replied. “But I suppose you Banks Media people are used to shooting from the hip.”

  So that’s how it was going to be. Cam took a breath and summoned a professional veneer.

  “I take it you’re not a loyal subscriber of our feed?”

  The car’s engine growled an answer for her.

  Cam nodded and sat back. The seatbelt resisted his efforts to buckle it.

  “Was that question directed at me as a Perion employee or a private citizen?”

  “Private citizen,” said Cam, finally finding the latch. He tugged on the belt to make sure it would stick.

  “It’s not for me. Banks Media appears to be in the business of self-promotion rather than any actual news reporting. The few times I’ve listened in, you were running smear jobs on Benny Coker and the other media houses.”

  “Do you feed at all?”

  Sava shook her head. “Maybe if I had a nine-to-five and some time to kill on a commute, but when you work for Perion Synthetics, there really is no downtime. You’re either working, asleep, or you’re dead. And even then you have to put in a request two weeks in advance.”

  Outside, the empty California desert sizzled. A sea of shriveled Joshua trees stretched to the horizon.

  “You have some time to kill now,” said Cam.

  “This is an anomaly. I hardly ever get out of the PC—there’s really no need to. The city was designed to be a closed ecosystem with every amenity provided. It keeps people where the action is instead of traipsing through the cacti.”

  Cam pulled out his phone and typed traipsing through the cacti at the top of a new file.

  “Do you mind if I record our conversation?” His sliver had started recording the second he stepped out of Banks’ car, but it was always polite to ask.

  “Sure,” said Sava, “but our legal team will have to approve anything that goes out. So unless I’m saying something on the record, in an official capacity, it’s probably not worth writing down.”

  “Ah, but it’s your unofficial perspective that I’m after,” replied Cam. “That’s all we really have, right? The world is observed through human eyes, so my job doesn’t end at reporting just the facts. I have to show how those facts affect real people.”

  Sava removed her sunglasses. For the first time, Cam made the connection between the woman sitting in front of him and the photos from her dossier. It was in her eyes, their aliveness. Cam shook his head, tried to think of a better word.

  “You sound like one of those touchy-feely reporters who do sappy human interest stories on the evening news. You know, the ones about some kid with a terrible disease whose parents can’t afford the treatment?”

  “I’m familiar,” said Cam. “I actually feed a lot of those.”

  “Ah, so you are one of those people.”

  “Proudly.”

  Cam’s eyes drifted to the front of the car. He noticed the chauffeur was talking to an invisible partner, maybe through a headset in his ear. His voice was muted by the thin pane of plexiglass bisecting the car.

  “And who is that?” asked Cam, pointing to the driver.

  “He’s the chauffeur. Do you really need to know his name?”

  “I guess not.”

  Sava put her sunglasses back on. “You guess? I was told Mr. Banks was sending over his best aggregator. Don’t you have any kind of agenda at all?”

  Cam took another calming breath. He did have some preliminary questions written down on his phone, basic conversation starters that might lead to more interesting stories. Sava, however, would probably answer as curtly as possible, giving only the necessary information to satisfy the question. How she became the star flack of Perion Synthetics with such a shitty attitude was a mystery, but one Cam nonetheless wanted to solve.

  “Tell me about the Perion Expressway.”

  Sava answered with a prepared statement.

  “The PE is a thirty-three mile channel following the old Pinto Basin Pass. It begins as a two lane highway at Perion Terminus and grows to six lanes as you get closer to the Spire. It is the only publicly known road to and from the PC, along with three emergency routes through the mountains. The landscape surrounding the highway is kept purposefully barren to discourage foot traffic. Anti-personnel measures for a mile on each side of
Outpost Alpha target anything over two feet tall.”

  She smirked.

  “The speed limit is 85 miles per hour, dropping to 65 at night.”

  Sava gave Cam a look as if to ask why he wasn’t writing any of this down. When he motioned to the sliver in his wrist, she continued.

  “In three minutes, we’ll be approaching the PNR and an armed outpost consisting of a small squad of Scorpio-class synthetics we call Automated Guards. AGs for short.”

  “Can I call them AutoGuards?”

  Sava exaggerated a sigh.

  “And what is a PNR?”

  “The Point of No Return, sometimes known as the Deadline, indicates the radial operating limit of a synthetic. The mountains provide a measure of security against anyone trying to take a synthetic out of the PC, but the PNR assures no technology leaves without Perion’s authorization.”

  “Has a synthetic ever left the…” Cam paused; there were so many initialisms. “The PC?” He laughed. “The Perion City?”

  Sava shook her head. “Not that I’m aware of. All modern synthetics—we call them synnies—have proximity protocols to keep them close to home. My sister likes to joke that when they rise up and kill us all, at least they’ll only be able to wipe out a small radius of the state’s population.”

  “Sounds like a smart woman.”

  “Yeah, but once you spend some time with the synthetics, you’ll understand they’re not a threat to us. The threat has always been and will always be human, people who want to take the technology out of the PC and use it for…”

  Cam’s attention had drifted to the window again, but Sava’s pause made him look back. “Use it for what?” he asked.

  “For something unbefitting its intended purpose,” she replied.

  The car began to slow and Cam leaned forward to get a better look. Ahead of them, the road narrowed as thick, evercrete walls grew up beside it. The blacktop led to a brick of a building sitting astride the road, its wide tunnel reminding Cam of a gaping mouth.

  “You were expecting a little shack with one of those traffic bars?” asked Sava.

  Ominous warnings dotted the sides of the road like long-forgotten campaign signs littering the landscape after an election. They told stories of private property and reminded travelers of the sovereignty laws giving Perion Synthetics the right to shoot trespassers on sight.

  The car pulled over about a hundred yards away from the outpost. On the second floor, shadows moved behind the windows. The driver shifted into park as six black-clad men stepped out from behind support columns in the tunnel. Against their chests, their silver machine guns glinted.

  On the other side of the plexiglass, the driver made a silent phone call and waved through the windshield.

  Cam noticed Sava tapping her foot. “Is there a problem?” he asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Note,” said Cam. “Armed response appears to be disciplined and formidable. One wonders if this is not perhaps an overly dramatic response to the threat of corporate espionage.”

  “You’re really going to feed that?”

  Cam shrugged. “The only bad content is no content.”

  The driver rapped on the divider and gave a thumbs-up sign.

  “Come with me,” said Sava. “I want to show you something.”

  Outside, the mountains came right up to the road, stopping the comforting breeze that had made the heat bearable. Cam followed Sava towards the outpost; she stopped at a thick red line on the blacktop and gestured to an evercrete barrier extending away from the road. Beyond it, metal stakes grew like a row of crops from the cracked earth.

  “Proximity beacons. They let the synthetics and their handlers know when they’re getting too close. If you walked this line, you’d see they circle the PC completely.”

  Cam followed the line into the distance, picking out the beacons with some intense squinting.

  “Those are the primary measures,” said Sava. She kicked at a patch of dirt beyond the edge of the road and revealed a dark gray band extending from one beacon to the next. “Magnetic repulsers give the synnies a sixth sense about the border. They’ll feel as if they’re being pushed back.”

  “Are they?”

  “Not by much, and it wouldn’t stop them if they really wanted to leave.”

  “Do they want to?” asked Cam.

  Sava smiled, but didn’t answer. She led Cam back to the car and then waved to the outpost. One of the armed men approached at a leisurely pace.

  “Oh, you shoot them if they try to escape.”

  “Of course not,” said Sava. “These are multi-million dollar synthetics we’re talking about, Mr. Gray. You don’t shoot your product just because it wants to go off the reservation. Haven’t you ever read Your Life, Our Rules?”

  Cam vaguely remembered the self-help book being in the bestsellers list a few years ago, but at the time, Dahlstrom Academics had pulled their advertising from Banks Media and taken their two million dollar account to Benny Coker, leaving Banks reluctant to feed any coverage of what he called new age garbage.

  “No,” replied Cam. “I think I have it on my phone, though.”

  “One of the primary tenets of social engineering is to create within the target a genuine desire to do what you want them to do, and at the same time, make them believe it was their idea.”

  The man stopped several feet away from the red line in the road. He touched the tip of his black cap with his fingers, but didn’t remove it. The bill cast a shadow over silver sunglasses. For a moment, it appeared as if he were sneering, perhaps put out by having to step out into the sun.

  “How can I assist you, Ms. Kessler?” he asked.

  “Please come forward,” said Sava.

  The man took a step; faint LEDs began to flash on the beacons for fifty yards in both directions. On his second step, he faltered and stumbled.

  “Please,” prompted Sava. “Come closer.”

  After another step, the man crumbled, as if his knees had given out. Once on the ground, he began to push himself back towards the outpost. He hadn’t made it anywhere near the red line.

  “As you can see, any synthetic that approaches the PNR will suffer exponential power loss. If he got a running start and threw himself over the line, he’d lose power completely and wouldn’t be able to drag himself back to safety.”

  Cam felt his mouth hanging open. There had been nothing in the man’s voice or behavior to suggest he was a synthetic, and yet there he was, unable to stand, betrayed by the failsafes in his mechanical body.

  “You look surprised, Mr. Gray.”

  The last image Cam had seen of a synthetic replayed in his mind. It was years ago, part of some documentary about replacing humans in dangerous environments. James Perion had garnered an entire third of the broadcast with his ideas about synthetic firemen and astronauts. He talked over video clips from his factories, dramatic sweeps down never-ending assembly lines. There were robots hunched over conveyer belts, ready to build the next generation of themselves. There were men in lab coats encircling a completely exposed skeleton, adding and removing synthetic tendons to see which ones worked best.

  And while the synthetics they showed were impressive, they were nothing compared to the machine slowly getting to its feet in front of Cam. It was the equivalent of the technological chasm between a Ford Model T and the electric Nissan that had brought them from Perion Terminus—they were simply worlds apart.

  “You guys have been keeping some secrets,” said Cam.

  “Absolutely,” said Sava, nodding. Her eyes drifted to the right as if listening to a voice in her ear.

  Cam wondered if she had a whisperer installed after all.

  Finally, she smiled and said, “We’re further along than anyone can possibly imagine.”

  3

  Outpost Alpha was bigger than it looked from the outside, a disparity Cam only fully understood after following Sava down two flights of stairs to get to the processing room where they now st
ood. Two of the outpost’s Automated Guards had escorted them down while two others brought up the rear. Cam couldn’t stop looking at their faces; Sava’s earlier demonstration had left him questioning who was real and who was synthetic.

  “Mr. Cameron Gray?”

  A technician in jeans and a white Perion Synthetics polo had entered the room while Cam was busy counting the number of blinks performed by each guard. Cam turned at the sound of his name.

  “I’m Mr. Ferko,” said the tech. “I’ll be performing your scan today.”

  Cam turned to Sava. “My scan?”

  “As I understand it, part of the agreement between Mr. Banks and Mr. Perion was that an aggregator would be allowed into the city provided that individual has no ties to Vinestead International or any of their subsidiaries or partners.” Sava pointed to Cam’s sliver. “That includes endotech.”

  So Banks hadn’t been lying when he said Frank Gattis couldn’t go.

  Cam held up his wrist. “Katsumi Maximo sliver, second generation. Backside, I’ve got a BSC iMerse jackport. It’s VNet compatible, but it uses third-party transcoding, so no Vinestead IP.” Cam tapped his earlobe. “I feed with a top of the line Banks Media Red Velvet whisperer with full-duplex broadcast abilities.”

  Sava nodded, unmoved. “What do you think, Mr. Ferko? Should we just take his word for it?”

  Ferko laughed the question away. “Don’t take it personally, Mr. Gray. We scan everyone who comes through here. Even Ms. Kessler will have her turn now that she’s been past the PNR.”

  Sava shrugged and sat down on a couch against the far wall. She pulled her phone from her pocket to check for messages. “Now you see why I don’t leave the city too often? Waste of time.” Her thumb moved in quick, upward swipes. “The White Line has been feeding this cancer nonsense all morning. I guess Benny Coker’s finally found a leg to hump. It still amazes me how ruthless you feeders can be.”

  Nonsense? So she didn’t know…

  Cam made a note to keep what he’d learned from Banks to himself.