Perion Synthetics

by Verastiqui, Daniel

  “What do you see?”

  Cyn had no answer, for the thing in front of her defied sensible description. It gave every indication of being a baby—a normal, healthy infant with a light dusting of hair and puffy red cheeks.

  But it wasn’t a baby.

  Babies had eyes.

  This thing had nothing, had empty sockets backed by gears and motors and simulated sinew.

  Cyn put her hand over her mouth, torn between the horror and a previously dormant maternal instinct.

  The thing’s little pink lips parted, opening in sickening mimicry of a crying baby, revealing another empty chasm glowing blue in the oppressive light.

  “Fuck this,” said Cyn, stumbling backwards.

  15

  Lincoln Tate pressed his cell phone hard against his ear.

  For several minutes, the only sound coming over the link had been static, low and gravelly, approximate amplifications of the room Cyn had dropped into, a room of silence and horror and something else, something that had brought the toughest girl he knew to her knees. He’d heard her collapse, heard the plastic hit of her shin guards on the floor, followed by the dull slap of her back falling into the wall. Scraping sounds came next—Cyn trying to push herself further way from whatever she had seen. And though he called her name, she did not answer.

  So he listened to the static and tried to visualize the room where Cyn sat huddled in the corner, legs likely pulled up to her chest, her face buried in the warm pocket of air created therein. For a time, the words fuck this had come across the line in a whisper, a repetitive mantra meant to protect her from the abrupt change in reality. But slowly, the repetition had faded out, replaced by nothing. Until now.

  Tate heard the sound mixed in among the pocks and hisses of dead air.

  Crying.

  Cyn was crying.

  “Cynthia,” he said, barely hearing the word himself.

  No response.

  “Talk to me, baby. Tell me what you’re seeing.”

  “Are you recording?”

  Tate glanced at the vidscreen on the wall where Cyn’s vitals flashed in bright yellow numbers. In the lower right corner, the red REC light blinked off and on.

  “Always,” he replied, “but we had to switch to another channel when you went dark.”

  “Put me back on primary. I want to go real-time.”

  Briefly, he considered lying to her, considered leaving her feed on standby until he could sort out the situation. Hearing her collapse on the floor, hearing her struggle to get the words out, had brought Tate down from his chemical high so fast it made his skin itch. Stolichnaya or not, he was completely sober in an instant. Even the tab he had dropped earlier felt like a distant memory. His sense of being up, of being tied into the world through a million data connections, was gone. Now there was only Cyn and her first moment of weakness in recorded history.

  Tate tapped his palette, cutting off the filler material.

  “You’re live,” he said.

  “It’s all bullshit,” said Cyn. “This picture we have of Perion, like he’s some goddamn savior. He’s just another money-hungry suit who will do whatever it takes to be on top, to be in control. He’s no better than Sedivy and Vinestead.”

  “Come on—”

  “Just,” interrupted Cyn. “Just listen to me, Lincoln.” She sighed, rubbed her face with her gloved hand. “When I was eleven, I learned about something called The Net. I became obsessed with this infinite construct, a place where people could be truly free—no usernames, no product keys, no always-on DRM.

  “Then came Vinestead and their nightmare network. The way they took over, the white-flag tactics they used… it made me want to join up with a cipher den and pledge my code and my life to Calle Cinco or some other group.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “They wouldn’t take me. I was barely twelve when I began to seek them out in the darknets. I met a few recruiters in VR, but they took one look at me and jacked out. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why. So I kept reading, kept devouring everything there was to know about ZabSix and RevoMT and Calle Cinco. I read about what they did in Sacramento, how they took one back for the little guy.”

  “The Reaping,” said Tate.

  “Yeah, The Reaping. People talk about it like it was some great thing to kill people just for working for Vinestead. In the end, it didn’t even matter. That was the same day they passed the Guardian Angel bill, which meant all newborns had to be implanted with the biochip. No discussion, no way to get around it except to flee the country. And everyone just went along with it, just bowed to the promises Vinestead made with one hand on our shoulders and the other in our wallets. I was chipped even before that, but my parents never told me. I had to find out from the school nurse.”

  “You were still going to school?” asked Tate.

  “I had no choice. I was infected with VTech; no cipher den would come near me. I had to live with the knowledge of that damn chip in my head for six years. And even when I got it dug out of me, I still didn’t feel clean. I hated Vinestead for what they did to me, to all of us. Someone had to step up and challenge them; I cried the day I realized it wasn’t going to be me.”

  “It’s a tall order for one person, even for you.”

  “James Perion could have done it. He has so much weight to throw around. I thought of Perion as a white knight come to fight the Vinestead dragon. He was supposed to be the good guy, a champion of the people. But that was just a fairytale, a myth we all wanted to believe, like the X sightings in VNet. James Perion is a monster, Lincoln. No better or worse than Arthur Sedivy.”

  “Why do you say that, Cynthia?”

  Cyn rose from her corner, her legs unsteady. She didn’t want to look in the bassinet again, but she was able to lift her phone, point it in the general direction, and snap a photo. Covering most of the screen with her hand, she hit SEND.

  It took a moment to sink in.

  “Shit! That just went out live, Cynthia. The SatIndex is climbing over sixty.”

  “He’s an evil son of a bitch,” said Cyn, “and I’m glad he’s dead. Perion Synthetics can burn in hell with Vinestead.” She spit on the floor. “Why would he do this, Lincoln? Why would he make something so wrong?”

  “I don’t know, girl.”

  Cyn shook her head and retreated to the opposite side of the room. “You put your trust in someone,” she continued, “and this is what you get. It’s all so pointless now.”

  “It’s not pointless. If Perion is responsible for this, we’ll expose him. For now, it’s time you got out of there. The boys are picking up a lot of chatter coming out of the Spire right now. I don’t know if they know exactly where—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Cyn. “Not anymore. If these things are Perion’s legacy, then we’re better off without him. Either way, there’s no one left to stand up to Vinestead. We are all monumentally fucked.”

  Cyn closed her eyes and saw waves crashing on a beach, saw an ocean between her and an increasingly fucked up world.

  “This is it for me. I’m out, Lincoln.”

  “Just like that? The SatIndex is over seventy and you just want to bail? We just gained half a million subbers, social media is blowing up, and Perion is trending on a dozen different networks. You’ve got support in all the major—”

  She waited for him to finish his sentence, but there was nothing coming across her whisperer, not even static.

  “Linc—”

  The lights blinked out before Cyn could finish her question, plunging the room into a darkness so absolute she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. Her eyes adjusted, and she discovered a blue light coming from the other side of the room. Cyn shut her eyes, refusing to look at the glowing, synthetic baby heads. She remembered her phone and used it to walk the perimeter of the room, always away from the blue, always away from the subtle hissing of tiny servos.

  Finally, she found a door with a recessed handle.
/>   “Lincoln, if you can hear me, I’m gonna make my way into the hall.”

  She slid the door open, revealing a dark corridor much too long for the limited power of her phone’s screen. The glow stick popped as she bent it. Cyn tossed it parallel to the wall she was hugging; it skittered down the hallway, casting long shadows on the doors.

  No workers. No security.

  Cyn crept out of the room and into the blinding green glare.

  They were on her in an instant. They felt like men with thick arms pushing against her body—so many of them, attacking from all directions. The Ayudante couldn’t keep track of everything, couldn’t move her limbs fast enough to prevent them from being immobilized. She felt herself spinning, then going weightless. In a brief flash, she saw the ceiling deform as she crashed into it. Her leg snagged one of the crisscrossing grid lines, rotating her body and sending her face first into the floor. The impact changed the green world to blue. Then gray crept in from the corners of her vision.

  As the world threatened to disappear, she saw them.

  Two feet stood some distance away, only the black boots weren’t boots at all, but segmented feet that clicked and whirred as they moved across the floor.

  “Subject detained,” croaked a voice, and then gray became black.

  16

  Cyn felt the emptiness the moment she opened her eyes.

  It was an unwelcome feeling, one of want and of worry—a weak feeling that at first, she refused to acknowledge. There was pain in her head and soreness in her joints; those were concrete stimuli to be dealt with or ignored. But underneath the throbbing was a lack of something. Not knowing what she was missing made it even more confusing, made her mind go back in time and wonder what had been in her life that was no longer there, sitting on the rug in front of the television or relaxing in the middle of the bed.

  Was that right? Was the thing a who?

  She shifted under the thick blankets of the hospital bed, felt her skin move against a cotton nightgown. Her mind tried to fill in the blanks. What was the last thing she remembered before the emptiness?

  Her normally pliant consciousness had no answer.

  Cyn raised a hand to rub her face but found it weighed down by lengths of wires and tubing. An IV snaked along the edge of the bed, ending in a cannula on the back of her hand. Thin wires ran from the side of the bed, up the right side of her torso, and disappeared behind her back. She felt them taper off just below the base of her skull. When she took a deep breath to stem the rising panic, she felt electrodes on her chest move against the nightgown.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Paulson,” said a voice from the doorway. A woman in pink scrubs spoke as her fingers tapped rapidly on her palette. “I’m Suzanne. I’m the charge nurse on duty today. Dr. Bhenderu will be with you shortly.”

  “Who?”

  Suzanne ignored the question and helped Cyn into a sitting position. She adjusted the sheets on the bed and rolled away the various medical carts. Once the room was in pristine condition, she touched her ear and said into her headset, “We’re ready in seven.”

  Cyn glanced at the door, but couldn’t remember who she was expecting to see.

  “Don’t worry,” said Suzanne, as she fluffed Cyn’s pillow.

  Cyn didn’t get a chance to ask why she should worry before an older Indian man with dark brown skin and oily black hair entered the room, pushing his quaint glasses up his long nose. His white lab coat identified him as a doctor, at least in Cyn’s estimation. That was how doctors dressed, wasn’t it? Her brain answered with a mostly yes, but was unable to offer more.

  “Mrs. Paulson, how are you feeling today?” He took the palette from Suzanne and looked over his glasses at the screen. “I was relieved to hear of your improvement, though I never doubted you would pull through.”

  “What happened?” asked Cyn. Sitting up had shifted her weight, putting pressure on bruises she felt but couldn’t see.

  “A bit of misfortune, but that’s not important right now. What is important is that you are feeling better. We are all very—”

  “Just tell me what happened,” snapped Cyn.

  The anger had come from deep down, below the emptiness and the fleeting feeling that perhaps this was all a dream. It felt so different, so far removed from what she thought her life was. The sterile walls, almost blinding in their whiteness, didn’t belong to the aging rooms at Sutter General in Sacramento or the free clinics in Ember.

  The gears caught, stuttering on the word. Was that right? Ember?

  Cyn shook her head.

  “You were in a car accident.” A black suit darkened the doorway for a moment before stepping into the room. “T-boned by a dump truck making a haul out to The Fringe. The driver was on some kind of synth, so we’ve got him locked up until we find out what it is and where he got it.”

  The Fringe, thought Cyn. It meant the outskirts of Perion City, an industrial zone tasked with the…

  The feed petered out.

  “Chief Gantz, please. This is not the proper way to talk to someone after they’ve experienced a serious trauma.”

  “It’s fine, Doctor,” said the square-jawed man. “She asked for the truth; beating around the bush wasn’t going to do anything except freak her out.” He came closer to the bed but stopped a respectful distance away. “Chief Robert Gantz, Perion City Police Department. I was one of the first responders to your… accident.”

  His subsequent smile set off an alarm in the back of Cyn’s head. At least her bullshit detector was still going strong.

  “Fortunately for us,” said Dr. Bhenderu, “the safety systems in your vehicle performed valiantly. With the exception of some bruising, you escaped without major injury. No broken bones, no lacerations. The only concern we had was for your head. You suffered a nasty bump.”

  “How long have I been out?”

  “About eighteen hours. We were keeping you sedated until the swelling went down. We shouldn’t see any long-term effects, but you may experience some temporary mental fragmentation as a result of the concussion.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Again, the anger surged. Cyn found herself unable to contain it, as if frustration were some orphaned thread running in the background, ready and waiting for the right memory allocation to come—

  A spike tore through Cyn’s temple, crossing behind her right eye. She put her free hand up to stop the stinging.

  “Are you alright?” asked the doctor. “I’ve got you on synthetic regulators for now, but I can up the baseline if you’re feeling any discomfort.”

  This wasn’t discomfort; beyond the pain there was something more, some gaping emptiness.

  “Mrs. Paulson, do you remember anything about the accident?” Gantz leaned against a counter on the far wall and buried his hands in his pockets. “Anything at all?”

  Cyn tried to piece the memory together, but there was simply nothing there. The file had been deleted, the pointer overwritten with garbage.

  “I don’t remember… anything.”

  Her memory felt dull, out of focus, as if she couldn’t pinpoint a single moment in her life before waking up in the hospital.

  “Mental fragmentation,” she whispered.

  “It happens sometimes,” said Gantz. “Nothing to be ashamed of.”

  Cyn shot him a look, asking who the hell said she was ashamed of anything.

  “And nothing to be worried about at this stage,” said Dr. Bhenderu. “It is almost always temporary. You should start remembering things soon and have total recall within two or three days. Going home will help immensely, but I wouldn’t recommend returning to work for several days.”

  “Home?”

  Home—a twin bed shoved carelessly into the corner, sea green sheets pulled back, waiting for her.

  Gantz pulled out his phone. “2011 Westbrook, apartment 4D, out by the Drafthouse?”

  Cyn shook her head at the chief. There was something odd about him.

  “Why are you here?�
�� she asked.

  “Excuse me?” He drew himself up as he pocketed the phone.

  “You heard me. Am I under arrest or something?” There was a lingering feeling of guilt circling Cyn’s chest—she had done something wrong recently.

  “I just thought you’d want to see a friendly face,” he replied.

  Cyn turned to the doctor. “Is my health so meaningless you’d have the cops here to interrogate me as soon as I wake up? I know my rights. If this is a formal questioning then I want my lawyer present.”

  If I have a lawyer, she thought.

  Gantz crossed his arms and smirked.

  “Please, Mrs. Paulson,” said Dr. Bhenderu, “allow me to apologize. There are… other… circumstances that require Chief Gantz to be here. With head trauma, there are no hard and fast rules about recovery time. If you were found to be unfit—”

  “Unfit? What the hell does that mean?”

  Dr. Bhenderu put up a hand. “You were not the only one in your vehicle when you were struck yesterday.”

  Cyn’s stomach flipped, gave her the same feeling as reaching out for a step that wasn’t there. She thought of her family, of a mother whose face moved behind the curtains and a father who stayed in the distance, beyond the power of her mechanically enhanced vision.

  That last part didn’t sound right to her. She narrowed her eyes at a sign in the hallway, but it was too blurry to read.

  “Who?” Cyn coughed in response to her suddenly dry mouth.

  You know who. It was not a voice that spoke, but rather a feeling, a perennial directive that had always been there.

  “I’ll get the lady,” said Gantz, jumping at the opportunity to leave the room.

  “First, you should know she’s perfectly alright. She’s been under close supervision since your arrival.”

  She, thought Cyn. So her passenger had been a woman.

  “Who is she?”

  Dr. Bhenderu hesitated. “Your daughter, Mrs. Paulson. Your baby girl is just fine.”

  An unseen boot slammed into Cyn’s chest and held there, preventing her from taking another breath. She wanted to question the doctor, wanted to ask how and by whom, but the words would not come out. She stared at his cold, brown eyes, speechless, unable to comprehend anything anymore.