Perion Synthetics

by Verastiqui, Daniel

  The directive stepped forward to fill the silence.

  It told her to look to the door, at the woman in slacks and a frilly red shirt. She carried a bundle of blue blankets in her arms.

  Cyn didn’t need to ask what the bundle was; the way the woman held it was answer enough.

  “Cynthia?” asked the woman.

  A nod was all Cyn could muster.

  “Someone has been asking for you.”

  Then the woman was moving across the room, bringing the bundle closer and closer. Time slowed as she set the baby in Cyn’s arms, which had opened automatically.

  17

  Candice Marie Paulson.

  They would call her Candy throughout high school, until she was able to break free from her assigned nickname and choose something for herself. Maybe it’d be the seven letters from her birth certificate, maybe it would be something silly like C-dice or simply C. Whatever her handle, it would never be as perfect as the one Cyn had chosen moments after delivering a healthy baby girl, just as the nurse was laying the screaming angel in her arms.

  “Tangential to the primary issue is the application of force feedback as it pertains to pleasurable experiences for the user. If synthetics are limited by a directive to do no harm, then any exertion of effort in regards to rough play will be seen as a contradiction to that directive, leaving them inert and no better than inanimate devices.”

  The nurse attending to the talkative man nodded as if she understood or cared about the babble that had been coming out of his mouth all afternoon. Cyn was surprised her insurance wouldn’t cover a private room; instead, they had wheeled the deranged man in around noon with assurances he was harmless but suffering from a bad ticker. The room was designed for two–a track for a curtain bisected it–but Cyn still felt like the man was intruding.

  On the wall between the two beds hung a vidscreen that scrolled through a playlist of urban vistas, most of them of Perion City, landscapes as they appeared from the revered upper floors of the Perion Spire.

  At the end of the loop, the manufactured images gave way to a live feed for a few minutes, showing a failing sun over a subdued city. The foreground detail was enough such that Cyn could see corporate banners hung from every surface, from makeshift pikes on the eaves of buildings, to the railings of balconies, and on proper flagpoles in small parks. Corporate patriotism was at an all-time high; Cyn couldn’t remember ever seeing the place so made up.

  Couldn’t remember…

  Candice was asleep, so when the nurse wandered over to check on them, Cyn asked in a hushed voice, “What’s with all the flags?”

  “They’ve been like that since Tuesday.” She grabbed Cyn’s free hand to check her pulse, but it felt like she was going to deliver some bad news. “Everyone’s been really worried about what it means for the company. They’re saying it was a one-time glitch, but some of the engineers I know aren’t so sure. Morale has been pretty low since then.”

  Cyn nodded, felt Candice stir in her arms. Staring down into her daughter’s face made the nurse’s words fade into irrelevance.

  “The bones have to be as strong as they are pliant. They have to support the weight of the structure but not be more than the average man can carry or push around in the sack. The systems supporting this structure have to be equally light and resilient. Do you think this technology comes cheap, not only from a financial standpoint, but from the sacrifice our young men have had to make to ensure we found the right balance? Young men with their entire lives ahead of them confined to wheelchairs for months because of a shattered pelvis. And they have the nerve to call me reckless!”

  “Please, Mr. Sayre, you need to keep your voice down. You don’t want to have another episode.”

  “Episode? Is that what they teach you assembly line graduates to call cardiac arrest? My heart stopped beating! And whose fault is that? Mine? A Georgia chip would have kept me on my feet, instead of shitting my pants at the commissary. But no, the big man won’t allow it. I can’t even say the V-word in here without risking a pink slip. Imagine that–fired for saying a name. This is a massive company we’re talking about here, not some scared-of-its-own-shadow startup hoping its patent violations go unnoticed.”

  “If you don’t calm down, I’ll notify the doctor and he’ll just give you another sedative.”

  “Are you threatening me, Ms. Medco 5000? You wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for me. I’m done with you. You find me a real nurse right now!”

  The nurse rolled her eyes at Cyn and smiled. “Sorry about him.”

  “Don’t apologize for me. You have no right!”

  “Hey,” snapped Cyn. She whispered as loudly as she dared. “Shut the hell up. My daughter is trying to sleep.”

  “Well excuse the hell out of me,” said Sayre. “I didn’t know your daughter was asleep. Please give your daughter my deepest apologies. I wouldn’t want to do anything to interrupt her precious little dreams.”

  “Nurse, hold my baby.”

  The nurse didn’t have time to protest; she was still adjusting to the added weight in her arms as Cyn crossed the room.

  Sayre’s eyes widened as Cyn grabbed the front of his hospital gown.

  “Look, asshole, if you say one more goddamn thing about my daughter, I’m going to rip your chest open and pull out your black fucking heart and squeeze it until every drop of blood squirts out onto your ridiculous fucking mustache! You let her sleep, or so help me, I will put you to sleep!”

  Then an orderly was pushing her away as a team of nurses streamed into the room. Cyn unfocused and became aware of a grating alarm coming from the wall where a red light flashed its warning. Sayre’s heart rate had spiked and the terror she saw in his face was not his fear of her, but of the tightness gripping his chest. In less than thirty seconds, the team had disconnected him from the monitors and wheeled him out of the room. As the bed rolled past the doorway, the alarms quieted.

  Candice began to cry.

  Cyn retrieved her from the nurse and looked down at the puffy cheeks and toothless gums. Goddamn Sayre and his rambling.

  “Ssh,” she said, rocking her baby back and forth.

  “Someone’s back to her old form, I see.”

  Dr. Bhenderu stood in the doorway, a curious smile on his face and a few drops of coffee on his otherwise white lab coat.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” said Cyn.

  “I don’t presume to know the depths of the maternal instinct, so I certainly can’t pass judgment on you. It’s amazing what a mother will do when she cares very deeply for her child. It is admirable.”

  “I’d give my life for her,” she said. “She is the most wonderful thing I’ve ever made.”

  Candice gave another cry and shook her tiny fists.

  “I need a bottle for her.”

  Dr. Bhenderu nodded. “Of course. Perhaps you’d like to take her to the atrium? Get out of the room for a little bit? I will have the nurse bring Candice a bottle.” He stepped aside and extended a hand towards the hallway.

  Cyn had grown tired of her hospital bed anyway, so she followed the balding Indian man through the hallways and around the nurse stations until they came to an open space where the ceiling rose to twice its normal height. On the second floor, frosted glass railings obscured Cyn’s view of the other patients.

  The atrium was made up to look like a garden, with a quincunx of flower beds at the corners and center. The low walls of the beds provided close seating for those who could endure the overpowering aroma of fresh flowers. Small tables filled the empty spaces, with armless chairs for patients and doctors to sit and chat.

  A bronze tree rose from the center of the atrium, its branches bending in a deliberate pattern, reminding Cyn of the copper pathways on printed circuit boards. Instead of leaves, the tree had sprouted four large vidscreens which displayed the same tranquil nonsense as the one in Cyn’s room.

  “There are some divans along the west side,” said Dr. Bhenderu. “And it’s quieter th
ere as well.”

  “Thanks,” said Cyn, though she barely felt the words.

  Candice continued to whimper. The longer the doctor took to show her around, the longer Candice went without her late afternoon snack. If she didn’t eat now, she wouldn’t nap, wouldn’t fall asleep at the right time later in the evening before Patsy arrived.

  The name echoed, but no face rose from her memory.

  “I’ll see about that bottle,” said Dr. Bhenderu.

  “See that it’s warm,” said Cyn.

  She made the short walk from the entrance to the blue divans, noticing for the first time that the skylights in the ceiling weren’t real. It was in the way the light rolled, like old fluorescent light bulbs. The bits of blue sky were just projections from a vidscreen hidden in the ceiling. As she sat down on the divan, she wondered if anything in the room were real.

  Candice settled down with the change in scenery, but it wasn’t until the nurse arrived with the bottle that she closed her eyes in contentment. Her fidgety limbs slowed as she drank.

  In the calm that followed, Cyn put her head back and shut her eyes. She listened to the din of conversation, the whoosh of an air conditioning vent somewhere off to her left, and the light classical music emanating from hidden speakers in the gardens.

  The gentle melodies brought her heart rate down, allowed her a brief moment of repose before a voice in the back of her head spoke up, telling her it was dangerous to let her guard down. The voice had been chatty all day, begging for something but unable to articulate exactly what it wanted. It was hard to hear over the bustle of the real world, but in Cyn’s fleeting moment of calm, it came out of the darkness like the back-beat of some techno slop when all other tracks had faded out. It came with the realization it had always been there.

  Cyn opened her eyes, feeling a presence nearby.

  On the divan to her right sat a woman about Cyn’s age with radiant eyes that reminded her of Candice. The woman was smiling and blushing a little.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  Candice had fallen asleep after the bottle went empty.

  Cyn readjusted her arms and shook her head. “I must have dozed off.”

  “She’s beautiful. I saw her from across the room and…”

  Cyn tightened her grip.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” The woman put up her hands. “Please don’t think…”

  Cyn managed a weak laugh. “No, it’s me. I’ve been on edge all day. I’m not usually this paranoid.”

  “Every mother’s different. Mine was very protective of me and my sisters when we were kids. She rarely even let us out of the house.”

  “I hope I’m not that bad,” said Cyn, looking down at Candice again. One day, she would have to let her daughter go out into the world and experience everything it had to offer: sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

  Cyn shook her head. Rock and roll? She couldn’t remember being a fan. The only memories of music she had involved techno offshoots and anything by Eliana Alcivar. Why then had the words formed in her brain like that? Had she heard the three put together before? Was it just something old hippies said when they talked about the good old days?

  “What’s her name?”

  “Candice,” said Cyn, breaking out of the cloud. “And I’m Cynthia.” She extended her hand to the woman.

  “Roberta,” she replied, grasping Cyn’s fingers lightly. “It’s a pleasure to meet you both.”

  18

  Roberta was at the hospital not as a patient, but as assistant to her new friend, a man she spoke about in a voice so wistful it made Cyn sick with envy. She pointed him out in the crowd, a lanky and stylishly unkempt man with dark hair and a disarming smile. He had soft eyes that shone with true interest as he spoke to people. He walked from table to table while Cyn and Roberta talked, sitting casually with older patients as they looked up from their palettes, artificial light glinting off the metal clasps of their oxygen tubes.

  According to Roberta, she had met Cameron Gray only a few days before, the Monday preceding the Synthetic Collapse. She explained about the resulting confusion, the lack of direction from managers going all the way up the chain. How would the company respond? Would Perion Synthetics survive such a widespread failure? Patio cafes saw a surge in business as Perion City residents gave into their need for camaraderie, for sharing their theories about what went wrong and who was to blame.

  After a few days, the only discernable change was the heightened security in the plaza outside the Spire. That and the media blackout, a safety measure the executive team assured residents was only temporary.

  “But doesn’t he work for a media outlet?”

  “Yes, Banks Media Productions,” said Roberta, “out of Los Angeles. All they told him was not to mention the Collapse, so he’s just been interviewing random people for the past few days. It’s been kind of nice. They’ve pretty much forgotten about us. Even that nasty woman who used to follow us around hasn’t shown her face in days.” She paused, sighed. “Cam’s got hours and hours of interviews to go though. I’ll probably have to help him index them.”

  “The things we do for love, right?”

  “Yes, but what beautiful things come of it,” she replied, nodding at Candice.

  Cyn felt her eyes tear up and she sniffled.

  The voice in the back of her mind was screaming at her, chastising her for being so weak, and pointing out the ridiculousness of being so attached to something other than her own life. But maybe that was what the voice didn’t realize; as the directive pointed out, Candice was as much a part of Cyn as her own hand or memories or sense of morality. Candice had grown in her womb, had been assembled from Cyn cells and fed on Cyn nutrients. Why did the voice refuse to recognize that?

  “Oh,” said Roberta, raising a hand in the air. “Can I introduce you to Cameron?”

  This time, the name resonated. Cyn reached for a memory that wasn’t there.

  “Sure,” replied Cyn.

  The aggregator cut through the crowd, tossing a few veiled looks at the two orderlies walking the second floor balcony. When he arrived at the divans, he put out a sturdy hand.

  “Cameron Gray,” he said, “with Banks Media out of Los Angeles. Who are you today?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “How are you today, Miss…?”

  “Paulson,” she replied. “Cynthia Paulson. And I’m doing fine.”

  Cam sat down on the divan next to Roberta and tapped his phone. “I see you have a baby.”

  “You don’t miss much, do you?”

  Roberta snickered, but something defensive flared behind Cam’s eyes. Cyn read the danger as easily as she read the laminated press badge hanging around his neck.

  “I don’t,” said Cam. “That’s how I get all the cushy assignments. First aggregator to step foot in Perion City in who knows how long.”

  “Eight years three months,” said Roberta.

  Cam laughed. “Yes, yes.”

  Cyn raised her eyebrow, but the aggregator pressed on.

  “Would you mind if I asked you a few questions about you and your daughter?”

  His enunciation of the word daughter had that same bite as Sayre’s, but Cyn nodded her head anyway.

  “First off, with the recent collapse of Perion’s entire product line, I’ve been asking everyone for their reactions and what they think could have been done to avoid this mishap.”

  She paused, searching for an emotional reaction to an entire population of synthetics dropping dead, but found none. “I don’t know. Everyone seems pretty worried about it, I guess. Everyone except you.”

  Cam shrugged. “Objectivity comes with the job. I’m just doing what I can to make sure the real story about the Great Perion Synthetic Collapse of 2015 comes out in the end, that all parties are held responsible, and that the true heroes are recognized blah blah blah.”

  He didn’t actually use nonsense words, but Cyn heard the meaningless syllables in her h
ead just the same. The little speech he rattled off reeked of insincerity.

  “How’s the general mood about the company?” asked Cyn. “Roberta says things have gone back to normal for the most part.”

  “Oh have they?” Cam nudged Roberta with his elbow. “Well, no doubt there have been some interesting revelations in the past couple days. The sense I get is that James Perion and his son don’t see eye to eye on the direction of the company—maybe they never have. There’s been a lot of miscommunication between father and son, lots of drama, and lots of special projects coming to light because of the Collapse. I’m purely speculating here, but I think Joseph Perion has been running his own little company right under the old man’s nose.”

  “And what about the media blackout?”

  Again, Cam shot a glance at Roberta. He raised the glowing red sliver on his wrist into view. “There are always exceptions.”

  Cyn looked to her own wrist, at the monitoring strip that hadn’t come off when the nurse disconnected the wires. It felt stuck to her skin, as if some clueless intern had used too much glue.

  “So let me ask you, Ms. Paulson…”

  “Mrs. Paulson,” said Cyn.

  Cam made a note on his phone. “As you may have seen on the news, the world’s population passed eight billion over the summer. This, of course, brings up a lot of questions about resources and social services, but one group in particular has been using this milestone to push their own agenda. This small minority believes child bearing should be a privilege, not a right. There is an article available on my feed about a small township in New England that has begun experimenting with competency exams and birth licenses. As a new mother, what is your opinion on that?”

  “On what?”

  “On requiring a license to have a baby. You would have to prove to a regulatory agency that you’re competent to raise and care for a child, not to mention provide proof of financial stability.”