Perion Synthetics

by Verastiqui, Daniel

  “If it’s true, it’s a damn shame.”

  Tate turned to look at Cynthia Mesquina, who was splayed out on the couch with one leg propped up on the armrest and her dark, red hair fanned out over a black throw pillow. She wore a white tank top under a half-open shirt that hung loosely over skin-tight leggings. Along the insides of her exposed arms, an intricate black tattoo snaked its way over her skeleton, moving from joint to joint like a subway map.

  A memory flashed: the tattoo covered Cyn’s entire body, from the base of her jackport to the augmented Achilles tendons in the back of her heels.

  At twenty-two, she was the youngest of his freelance aggregators, but the most tenacious by far.

  Tate adjusted the sleeves of his jacket, making sure his Franz Felis shirt only peeked out a quarter of an inch. His titanium cuff links glinted under the multi-colored lights of the vidscreens on the far wall.

  “What do you mean if it’s true?”

  Cyn tapped her phone; it responded with a dull beep and a somber melody. “I’m terrible at this game.” The phone disappeared into an invisible pocket. “That’s why you called me up here, right? Nobody really knows if Big J has jacked out for good? Perion PR is ignoring the question, and Banks is feeding nothing but line noise. You ever get a name on his inside source?”

  “We think it might be Frank Gattis; he’s been covering Vinestead Synthetics for Banks for the last couple of years. The boys in the back think it could also be Cameron Gray out of Banks’ inner circle, based on the way the feed is structured. The meta coming off the BMP feed has been stripped of any aggregator IDs, so it could be anyone.”

  “I think what you really want to know is how Banks got a man on the inside.” Cyn tugged at one of the many bracelets on her wrist. “If Banks is withholding the aggregator’s name, maybe they’re not there with permission.”

  “I have no idea,” said Tate. He joined Cyn in the sunken lounge area and sat down on the couch opposite her; it groaned under his weight. “There’s been a lot of chatter between Banks and Perion City, but nothing the boys have been able to decode. For all we know, it could just be broadcast SYN-ACK.”

  “Lincoln Tate does not like uncertainty,” said Cyn.

  “I can’t feed uncertainty,” he replied. “People want cold hard data, not water-cooler gossip. They sub Lincoln Continental, not the goddamn TMZ.”

  “People have to keep up with celebrities somehow.”

  “Look, no one is saying there isn’t room for some celebrity news—Jesus knows we get our share in—but at the EOL, people want to feel like they’ve learned something, whether that’s coming up to speed on new tech or reliving the terrifying moments of some military incursion halfway around the world. They’re addicted to the data and right now they’re not getting their fix. When they start jonesing, they get cranky, the SatIndex drops, the subscribers start to flee, and suddenly Banks’ fluff pieces don’t look so bad.”

  “The people are fine,” said Cyn. She stretched her arms above her head, pushing her breasts into the air.

  Tate looked away. “The SatIndex is down thirty percent since Monday. We haven’t seen these kinds of numbers since the Calle Cinco de Mayo Massacre of ’09. And that was seven thousand people meeting their end in a single day. This is one man, Cyn. That just shows you how important he is.”

  “James Perion, synthetic titan!” Cyn’s voice pitched low as she raised a pointed finger to the ceiling. “Never before was there a visionary like James Kirkland Perion. Champion of the people. Fighter of the good fight.” She took a quick breath and resumed her normal voice. “And so on.”

  “Do you honestly believe this is just about James Perion jacking out of Terrareal? You think any of those pierced-face freaks down there knew the man well enough to care if he lives or dies?”

  Cyn touched the red stud in her nose and shook her head.

  “Sorry,” said Tate, sighing. His eyes jumped to the feed stats on the center vidscreen. The SatIndex was still in the high fifties, but it was falling. The people needed some reassurance.

  “No worries,” said Cyn. “Not all of us can pull off the teal suit and gold chain look.”

  Tate smiled, revealing his silver-plated teeth. “Not all of us have style, baby.”

  “No,” she replied. “Not all of us do.” Waving her hands around in the air, she asked, “So what is this all about, Lincoln?”

  “Vinestead.”

  “May they burn in hell,” said Cyn, pretending to spit.

  “They might have, if Perion hadn’t refused their help. He was the only thing standing between Vinestead and world domination.”

  “Now who’s being TMZ?”

  “Don’t act like I’m exaggerating. You think Calle Cinco killed seven thousand people because VNet kept jacking up their access rates?”

  “Kaili Zabora is a lunatic,” said Cyn. “She’d kill her own mother if she thought it might cause a Vinestead employee some minor inconvenience.”

  “Well yeah, she’s nuttier than a Folsom Retread, but killing civilians wasn’t her intention. She wanted to bring down VNet, but she, like everyone else in this country, had no idea how deep Vinestead’s code went. I doubt anyone was more surprised than her when the planes started dropping out of the sky.”

  “So it’s been two days. If this is such a pivotal moment for Vinestead, why haven’t we heard from Krazy Kai herself?”

  Tate tapped the side of his head. “Good question, Cyn. A damn good question.”

  “Well? What’s the damn answer?”

  “I have no fucking idea.”

  Tate stood and walked to the bar set along the east side of the room. From the menagerie of bottles on the shelves, he pulled a nearly empty Stolichnaya that Benny Coker had sent over after last year’s sub census. He placed one shot glass on the bar and held another up to Cyn with a questioning look.

  “Sure, why the hell not? Been a while since I chem-tripped.”

  “All that synthetic shit you’re pumping into your brain is gonna come back to bite you in that pretty little ass of yours someday. Couple decades from now, you won’t even remember your name.”

  “So long as I can still do this,” she said.

  Cyn broke into an impromptu dance as she approached the bar.

  “Cute,” said Tate, sliding the diminutive glass in front of her.

  “That’s what they pay me for.” She downed the shot in one gulp. “Speaking of which, I didn’t call you up here just to pretty up the place.”

  “I figured,” said Cyn, tapping the rim of her empty glass with an obsidian fingernail.

  Tate obliged. “How would you feel about a little trip to Perion City? I could use someone on the ground floor. Banks thinks he’s the only player on the West Coast with the hookups to get inside intel. Well I say balls to that shit.” He shot the vodka with a flourish and smacked the glass on the bar.

  “Balls to that,” toasted Cyn. “So do you have any pull with Perion? I’m guessing I can’t just walk up to the front gate and say, hello, Lincoln Continental Pizza.”

  “No pull,” said Tate, replacing the bottle on the shelf. “No favors, no leverage. This is a total cold-call engagement. My hope is that you’ll be able to get in, get the TL;DR, and get the hell out.”

  “What if I’m caught? Perion City has some pretty mean sovereignty laws.”

  “A girl’s got a right to defend herself.”

  “Ah, so that’s why you chose me.”

  “You know the stories about Perion City. You’ve seen the vids of people trying to sneak in. I thought you might be up for the challenge.”

  Cyn slid off the stool and drifted to the windows. Across the street, Version Seven was pumping out pure bass into the night, attracting those whose hearts beat with a similar tempo. Despite the chill in the air, there was still a decent line of body-mods and augs waiting behind the velvet rope.

  “So you admit there’s danger.”

  Tate smiled to himself. He had her. “Yes.”
>
  “I’ll need money for equipment.”

  “Done.”

  “And a needler, something compact. And I get to keep it when we’re done.”

  “I’ll send the boys out for something immediately.”

  Cyn turned around and crossed her arms. “Standard six figure contract. Payment up front.”

  “I was thinking of a fixed seventy with a variable fifty depending on the SatIndex performance. The world is desperate for news about Perion. You should be able to swing the numbers easily.”

  “I can live with one-twenty,” said Cyn. “Send the contract to Bryce and let him look it over. If he signs off on it, you’ve got yourself a deal.”

  “It was hand-delivered an hour ago. I asked Bryce to let me break the proposal to you.”

  “In that case,” she replied, pulling out her phone. She sent a text to her handler and within seconds, had a response. “You weren’t bullshitting.”

  “Have you ever known me to lie?”

  “Only when you tell me you love me.” She smiled at something on her phone. “Which leads me to my next question. What kind of insertion method do you have in mind?”

  “Ah, now that you’re gonna dig.”

  Tate produced a code card from his breast pocket and tossed it to Cyn. It fluttered in the air and fell at her feet.

  “What’s this?” she asked, bending to retrieve it.

  “A simulation construct. A ground approach to Perion City would be sniffed out twenty miles from the border. But the sky… the sky’s a much bigger place. I figure you can get a couple hours of simulated jumps in and be on a plane by four.”

  “You don’t think Perion will get suspicious when we start feeding from the inside?”

  “According to Benny Coker, James Perion is dead. And judging by the after-hours trading, Perion Synthetics is dead too. If there’s a chance the company might survive, if there’s a plan to keep Vinestead from capitalizing on Perion’s death, I want to know about it. The American people want to know about it.”

  “The American people want hamburgers and porn. Just say your panties are in a twist because Banks is one-upping you and leave it at that.”

  Tate scanned the length of Cyn’s body; it still amazed him how innocent she looked, how perfectly harmless her thin legs appeared in skin-tight pants. Only a trained eye would notice the rough edges around the jackport on the back of her neck, the secondary trauma of having a Guardian Angel biochip extracted and replaced with something more palatable.

  “Stop eye-fucking me, Lincoln.”

  Tate spread his hands and backed away. “Just taking a mental picture in case the worst happens.”

  “Right.” Cyn crossed the room and sat down on the couch again. The code card made a popping sound as she freed the electrode. “No funny business while I’m under,” she warned.

  Tate motioned to a door beside the bar. “My room is available if you’d prefer somewhere more private.”

  “Just keep your hands to yourself, boss.”

  Cyn pressed the tab to her neck and drifted away with a satisfied sigh.

  Tate stood at the edge of the couch for several minutes, watching her chest rise and fall, wondering if he had made the right move.

  13

  The roar of dual props clawed at the foam plugs in Cyn’s ears, but her mind was on other things.

  There was a memory stirring in her brain, a chemically repressed recall of a time in her life before Liberation, before she had paid a back-alley hack four hundred bucks to rip the Guardian Angel chip out of her neck. She had only been seventeen then, a late bloomer in a world where children grew up too fast, where each new generation of tiny unmolested minds sought out a culture to call their own. Cyn got her start at the age of ten, latching onto the burgeoning NexLvl tech scene that would carry her into adulthood, a world of circuitry and augmented physiology, of endless possibilities put in reach for the first time by simple ones and zeros, by the inevitable melding of nature and science. It kept her attention even as her friends drifted away to the bourgeois pursuits of bad poetry, meaningless trysts with local boys, and even college.

  Cyn never even considered the possibility of higher education.

  By eighteen, she was free of the Vinestead shackles and well on her way to her first augmentation, which she financed through an under-the-table business of data theft and grid wipes. The last decade had made paranoiacs out of everyone, made them question the long-standing tradition of handing over their personal data for the promise of ten dollars off their next visit to The Gap or for access to the latest social networking destination. What it took the world ten years to realize, and what Cyn had known from what felt like birth, was that it didn’t pay to be yourself in VNet or Terrareal. A veneer was always preferable to the truth.

  Cyn stretched in the jump seat, reaching for the green mesh above her. Although the stimulants were keeping her awake and alert, her body was realizing it hadn’t slept for a while. Her arms quivered in the form-fitting suit.

  “Nothing but the best for my girl,” Tate had said as he pushed the lid off of a gunmetal box like it was the goddamn Ark of the Covenant.

  Contained within were various goodies: a helmet with AR capabilities, a chute rig with built-in oxygen tank, and finally, a next-gen automatic pistol known in Umbra circles as a needler. And though the weapon seemed to vibrate in her hand in anticipation of the slaughter to come, it had been the dive suit that grabbed Cyn’s attention. She had held it up to her body and wondered aloud how she was ever going to get into it.

  The answer came at the Maine Prairie airfield thirty miles outside of Umbra. There, a tech who was more body hair than man had shown her how to cut the seams and then temp-seal them once she was inside. He had enjoyed every minute of educating an Umbrat, and he wasn’t shy about lusting after Cyn’s bare skin as she slipped the material on.

  Not that prying eyes worried Cyn anymore. Most people were too distracted by her tattoos to notice anything anyway. Her ink’s centerpiece was a skeletal outline that started at her jackport, descended her back, and disappeared over the curve of her coccyx, segmenting her body like the seams in the dive suit. It wasn’t so much an artistic choice as a way to hide the scars on her arms and legs, the insertion points where her skin had been punctured and the augments assembled underneath.

  Her drop shadow spine bulged in five specific areas to hide larger, more invasive insertions where her vertebrae had been separated to route the grow-wire from the MoA Ayudante chip on her brainstem to the breakout controllers at shoulder and hip height. The other breakouts reached around her spinal cord to interface with her heart, lungs, and other critical systems. The feedback loop it created was as close to military grade as any aug could hope for. Among the Umbra underground, Cyn was at the top of an ever-expanding inventory tree, a subset of players who had spent their experience points on a single upgrade path, banking everything on the improvement of their physical avatars in the hopes that one day, they might pass from human to machine with one final procedure.

  It was the journey to that moment that discouraged most travelers, whether because of the cost, or the pain, or the perceived loss of humanity. Cyn’s bank account could handle the first, her strength and determination would cover the second, but the loss of her soul…

  Well, that implied there was something there to begin with, something to connect her to the rest of humanity.

  Cyn felt neither the connection nor the desire for it.

  The dive suit’s helmet fit snugly; she expected nothing less from Lincoln Tate. Though he was sending her into a dangerous situation, it was worth the investment to see she came back alive. Slamming headfirst into the Perion City evercrete would be an expensive end to an aborted mission, especially since seventy thousand dollars were already sitting pretty in her Bank of MX money market.

  A Nixle Chronos interface chip on the back lip of the helmet drew data from her Ayudante and displayed it on the visor in a bit of augmented reality trickery.
In the lower corner, an iconographic plane approached the dive line set above a blue spike—the Perion Spire.

  Cyn’s heart rate rose, not in fear, but in anticipation. Not only had the simulation given her virtual experience in high altitude jumps, but it also awoke in her a taste for the rush, a nearly orgasmic response to the adrenaline overload she experienced each time she stepped out of the plane and into the nothing. As far as detachment went, it was the most removed from the world she had ever felt, so high above that great big ball of death and distraction whose edges curved in her periphery.

  At the edge of her visor, a timer changed hue to yellow as it passed two minutes remaining. The plane had been climbing for an hour, making a slowly tightening corkscrew around the center point of Perion City, slipping in and out of commercial traffic to lower their chances of being spotted. The theory was that a completely vertical approach would provide a one-dimensional signature on the monitors, a blip the operators might dismiss as interference from another satellite passing too close, such as the MilTel A8 or the defunct Iridium 29 whose only purpose in life was to spit electronic noise into the thermosphere.

  The timer turned red as it sank into the double digits.

  Cyn stood and walked to the back of the pressurized cabin. A dull buzz rang out, signaling the impending loss of atmosphere. Soon, the pocket-size oxygen tank on her back would become the center of her existence. It hissed in response to the sudden drop in pressure and Cyn felt air swirling around her mask. Scrubbers along the backside of the suit would recycle what they could, but if she didn’t find an oxygen-rich environment in ten minutes, then all the Pesos in the MX wouldn’t do her any good.

  A shiver ran through her body as she flexed and jumped. The cold air welcomed her, screaming across her visor in damp streaks. The initial violence of acceleration faded away until it was just Cyn and serenity diving together through a space whose definition was neither earth nor the emptiness beyond it. In between worlds, Cyn tried to steady her breathing. The great City of Perion was a speck on the brown landscape below and its approach was like that of a bulbous monster skulking its way to its next victim.