Perion Synthetics

by Verastiqui, Daniel

  “How can you even know that for sure?” asked Cyn.

  Gil started to reply, but her question was valid. After all, he had only done a cursory investigation, seen the wrapping on Roberta’s synthetic body and heard her speak just a few lines. Maybe they had done it as an homage or by randomly selecting a pretty girl from the company directory. And there were things Roberta did that Jackie never would have done, almost like…

  “I need to scan her,” said Gil. “If they used Jackie’s personality as a base, then they could have done the same kind of modification they used with Cyn. You were still you, just with a few pieces changed. She could be Jackie carte blanche.”

  “Do whatever you want,” said Cam. “She’s not mine.” He looked away.

  It was all the invitation Gil needed. He set off for the break room, but ran into Gantz coming down the aisle.

  “She alright?” he asked. His cheeks were red from exposure.

  Gil glanced backwards to make sure they were in earshot. “She’ll be fine. She doesn’t have any attachment to the baby anymore. I suggest you dump it at the nearest fire station. And Cam claims to feel no attachment to his synthetic, so now’s as good a time as any to separate them. Is there any kind of plan to get them out?”

  Gantz smiled and touched Gil on the shoulder as he passed. “God always has a plan, my friend.”

  Gil shook his head and continued on to the break room, moving past the second row of tables where the synthetics began to take on more ethnic diversity. He wondered who they were based on, which Perion employees had had their likenesses stolen for use in the synthetic sex trade.

  “Fucking Joe Perion,” he muttered. Even if it had been his father’s idea to start this madness, Joe was the one letting it continue.

  The break room was lit only by the street lamps outside and a small bulb in the vent above the half-stove. Gil could just make out Roberta’s outline sitting on the far end of a couch, a bundle held snug in her arms. She was staring straight ahead, ignoring the synthetic baby who, through some mutual understanding, was remaining perfectly quiet. It wasn’t until Roberta detected Gil’s presence that she began to move again, bouncing the baby as if she were trying to calm its nonexistent tantrum.

  She looked up at him with orange light sparkling in her eyes.

  “I know you,” she said, her voice rising and falling in the unique cadence of the sweetest woman Gil had ever known.

  “Do you?” he asked. “Why don’t you let me scan you and we’ll find out?”

  Roberta shook her head. “No. I don’t think that will be necessary.”

  “Why not?”

  She smiled, revealing perfect assembly line teeth. “You know why, Gilly Bear.”

  Gil’s heart shuddered and he felt himself fall two inches before his muscles kicked in. The pet name evoked images of Jackie lying in bed with a sheet hung over her stomach, with one hand supporting her head and the other reaching out for him across the gulf.

  “Gilly Bear,” she would ask in the first light of morning, “are you awake?”

  “How,” he stammered. “How do you know that name?”

  Roberta set the baby down on the couch and stood up. Shadows hid half of her face and body, but the uncertainty somehow made her look more like Jackie.

  “I don’t know how,” she said, taking a step forward. “There are so many memories of you, locked inside.” With those words, she touched her chest just above her heart. “I can ignore them if I really try, but… I don’t want to. I feel you in there. I just didn’t know it was you until I saw you.”

  She paused at arm’s length, removed her hand from her heart, and placed it on Gil’s chest.

  “Do you feel me in there?”

  Gil gulped.

  He wanted to reach out for her, put his hand on hers or draw her near, but his body wouldn’t move. Staring into her eyes, he realized he was actually scared of her, scared she might come closer and rekindle the feeling he had worked so hard to stamp out.

  You can’t love a synthetic; he didn’t need Meltdown to tell him that.

  “You do feel me, don’t you?” she asked.

  Roberta closed the distance, pressing herself to Gil’s chest.

  Gil felt her pelvis against his erection and tried to move away, but a synthetic hand slipped behind his neck and held him in place.

  “It feels good to remember, doesn’t it? You were my Gilly Bear and I was your J-boo. Do you remember how you used to call me that? In the mornings, when you woke up, hard like you are now, and we’d fuck until we were late for work, until we lay there panting like a couple of animals? Yes, you remember.”

  Gil gnashed his teeth. “I remember fucking Jackie,” he said, swallowing hard. “I remember fucking a woman. You’re neither.”

  Thin fingers dug into the back of his neck, pulling his lips to Roberta’s. In the instant they touched, Gil questioned his own declarations. Whether she was Jackie or a real woman, whether it was wrong to bed a sex doll, there was no denying the electricity flowing from Roberta’s lips, no denying the exquisite taste and texture.

  Gil dropped his tool bag to the floor and wrapped his arms around Roberta’s waist. And there in the orange light of the street lamps, man and machine kissed.

  25

  Gil had often thought of Jackie in the moments before he fell asleep, when the lights in the room were so dim the LED from his phone lit like a road flare every time a new message came in. Darkness, two quick vibrations, and then the walls were bathed in a sickly red, telling him the world was reaching out to him, trying to get his attention. Only he didn’t want the world’s attention, didn’t care what new products Katsumi marketers were trying to sell him. Only three important updates ever passed by way of his phone: Benny Coker with some fresh encouragement, his other boss, Lori Maxwell, with some middle of the night emergency tech repair gig, or Jackie, with a simple note telling him how empty her bed felt without him, how she was burying her face in his pillow to be reminded of his scent.

  Lori’s messages still came with regularity, though Benny’s had petered out over the many months. Jackie…

  Well, it felt like forever since her profile picture graced his phone.

  Change is eternal and constant, a never-ending series of cards being dealt to all players at random.

  It was difficult not to think about her, not to get a little excited every time the LED began to flash, especially if Gil had fallen into half-sleep and forgotten Jackie was gone for good, never to return to Perion City or even the land of the living. His imagination would not be stifled though, and he often wondered what would happen if she did come back, if one day he saw her walking down Twelfth Street with a wide-brimmed hat and shopping bags on her arms like some kind of Rodeo princess. He always imagined her like that, in a fairy tale sort of way where her life exceeded that of her previous existence. She was no longer a clerical aid in this new reality, but rather a woman of money and influence, of unarguable beauty and refinement, as she deserved to be.

  And in those half-dreams that had left him sad or sexually frustrated, he had never imagined he would see her again under the swinging lights of a warehouse as they stood over the body of an aggregator who had snuck into the city and…

  Gil shook his head, found he was gripping the steering wheel too tightly, turning his knuckles white. Beside him, Roberta sat quietly in the passenger seat, hands folded in her lap, her head turned toward the window. Sunrise was still a couple of hours off, and Gil could see the dashboard instruments reflected in her window. The blue LED indicating the status of the headlights fell on the reflection of her lips, giving them a wet tint. He thought about those lips and how they had felt pressed against his.

  Sneaking out of the warehouse without telling the others had been an impulse decision; Cam had professed no attachment to Roberta anyway. Leaving the baby behind made practical sense, as it would be discovered in the morning when the first shift crews came in. It wasn’t until Gil paused at a stop sign three
blocks away that he risked looking back at the warehouse. Dark from the outside, the only discernible light came from one of the front windows, and it was very faint at that.

  “We shouldn’t stop,” said Roberta, her eyes focused on the rearview mirror. “They’ll be here soon.”

  “Who?” asked Gil. He searched the road for any other sign of life, but found none.

  “Sava Kessler, head of public relations and a ripe old bitch.”

  Another one of Jackie’s sayings.

  “I don’t see anyone.”

  “I can feel her,” said Roberta. “She is getting closer. If she finds Cam with Cyn, she’s not going to let him out of here alive.” Her voice wavered; she touched her lips to stem the betrayal. “I’m imprinted on him,” she explained.

  Gil nodded, unconvinced.

  “Drive,” she said, “before they—”

  Lights exploded in the clouds over the warehouse in three clustered sets of four—spotlights from unmanned drones. Gil had seen them before, mostly on reconnaissance runs from the Spire to the PNR. Rarely had their black hulls been seen in the skies above Perion City during the day; it would have spoiled the entire utopian illusion, one Gil had found himself believing in more and more these days.

  Cruisers shot in from the cross streets and pulled up to the front of the warehouse. Automated Guards poured out of them, their guns trained before their boots even hit the pavement. Roberta gave a soft yelp and Gil removed his foot from the brake.

  He drove as if the AGs were already on his tail, making multiple lefts and rights, but always adding distance between himself and the warehouse. The navigation system in the dash showed he was heading towards the outer border of The Fringe. There, a recently constructed loop would let him circle around the majority of the warehouses and factories to rejoin the main highway on the north side of the city. The outer loop even had some traffic on it already, mostly trucks making their early morning deliveries, getting fresh supplies to the donut shops in midtown. Gil found a spot between a pickup and a van and let the autodrive take over.

  Autodrive.

  That’s what Gil had been on since the moment he decided to leave with Roberta. Maybe it was because she had begged him in Jackie’s voice that he had believed it was a good idea.

  Gil studied Roberta’s profile, tried to see motivation in her synthetic lines.

  The car took a long, curving flyover onto the Perion Expressway and proceeded into the sleeping city. The Spire glowed dully as the sky began to warm. More commuters joined the flow; the short-timers were making their way to work. Diners lit up the side of the road every couple of miles, ready to fuel another day of innovation in the ol’ PC. Roberta watched it all pass by without a single word, as if her mind were elsewhere.

  “That’s my condo, just up on the right there,” said Gil. On cue, the garage door began to roll into the ceiling and a line of LEDs lit up the single-car space.

  They waited until the door had closed behind them before getting out of the car. Gil led Roberta out of a side door and up a flight of stairs. Running lights glowed from the floorboards in the living room as he opened the door.

  He watched Roberta explore the condo. She regarded the space with placid eyes. Maybe recognition was too much to ask.

  “Have a look around, see what you think,” he told her, tossing his tool bag onto the low table behind the sofa.

  The hallway responded to his presence, brightening like a child’s face at the return of its father. At the end of the hall, the ceiling in his bedroom ramped up to a soft glow; shafts of light danced above him in crisscrossing patterns. Gil eyed the bed with its one side of the covers pulled back, the pillows pressed up against the headboard—an invitation he almost accepted when he stepped into the room.

  At the dresser, Gil stared himself down in the mirror as he removed his shirt. The warehouse had been rather dingy and his white button-up was scuffed with black marks. He would have to take it to the cleaners today, see if they could…

  A memory flashed: Meltdown rolling his eyes in boredom.

  Gil put his hands on the dresser. For the first time, the gravity of his predicament hit him full force. What would Lori Maxwell think when she found out her best employee had absconded with a prototype synthetic? It wasn’t like pocketing a few office supplies.

  The clock in the mirror showed it was just passing five thirty; luckily, the letters SAT were written above the numbers, giving him the day off. He wouldn’t be expected back at work until Monday morning, which meant he had forty-eight hours before anyone realized he had deviated from his normal routine. And they would realize it. Someone was always watching and waiting for one of their little cogs to get out of line.

  Gil pulled a t-shirt from the second drawer and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  Yesterday had been fine, he recalled, just another day in the life of an undercover aggregator covertly feeding information to Benny Coker and The White Line. How many years had Coker been relaying the tidbits Gil was able to send him, throwing them out as suppositions instead of the cold hard facts he knew them to be? The ruse had gone on far too long.

  “No,” said Gil, to the t-shirt in his hands. He unfolded it, found he had pulled a race shirt from a 5K a couple of years ago—the last one he had run-walked with Jackie.

  It wasn’t the ruse or even how long it had gone on that was the problem. It was the corporeal ghost standing in his living room. It was Jackie returned.

  Prior to his stint in the PC, Gil had worked the garbage-filled streets of Atlantic City, slipping in and out of various personas to gain confidence and information about the underbelly of a city whose veins were clogged with corruption and evil, with a steamy black liquid that led back to an ashen heart buried somewhere underground. Stories about the heart always made the best feed, especially for the locals. Sometimes they forgot just how horrible their own backyard could be. Benny Coker liked to remind them.

  That, too, had gone on for years. The more times Gil escaped certain death, the more invincible he thought himself to be. Then one day he impersonated the wrong guy, ended up taking a meeting with a Vinestead enforcer who hadn’t appreciated the deception. Gil was found bloodied and naked in the slums of Margate the next morning. After that, Vinestead had been gunning for him. Coker allowed two attempts on Gil’s life before shipping him out west, out to the one place even the ‘Stead couldn’t reach him.

  Waking up in that alley under a rotting cardboard box had been a life-changing moment, an indicator that things had gone too far over the edge, that life couldn’t continue as before.

  It was Vinestead’s doing then; it was Perion’s doing now.

  When the end comes, it will come smiling and whispering words of comfort.

  Gil cocked his head and listened for the synthetic in the living room, but all he heard was the dull hum of the heater and the rush of air through the vents. He pulled on the t-shirt and stepped into the hallway, half expecting to see the front door thrown wide with nothing remaining of Roberta except her perfume lingering in the foyer. Instead, he found her sitting on the couch, her gaze focused on the vidscreen on the opposite wall. Pictures scrolled across its surface, fading and star-wiping through Gil’s history—more accurately, his history in Perion City, a history delicately intertwined with a woman named Jackie.

  The screen paused on an image of Gil’s living room, reversed, as if looking into a backwards mirror. In the pixelated memory, he was sitting next to Jackie. They both held a glass of wine; a blanket covered their legs. They were suspended in the moment before a kiss, a moment etched on every synapse in Gil’s brain. The anticipation, he recalled, had been exceeded only by the contentment, the simple happiness of having her nearby.

  As the picture faded, the spell holding Roberta captive broke. She turned her head just enough for Gil to see her profile and the simulated tear descending her cheek.

  26

  In the kitchen, Gil poured himself a glass of water and stood at the refrigerat
or wondering why he was so surprised to discover Roberta could cry. She was, after all, a prototype beyond anything he had ever encountered. Even on his trips to the Spire, the synthetics had been nothing to write home about. They were advanced, yes, but primitive and clunky machines next to Roberta. They were not exactly uncanny either; you could always spot a synny amongst the organics, especially if you had been in the PC long enough, had watched the evolution with wonder as Gil had. Maybe in the back of his mind he knew one day they would get so advanced as to be indistinguishable from humans.

  If Roberta could cry, then maybe… she could feel?

  Gil turned his back to the fridge and stared at Roberta over the counter. She was lost in the swirling pictures on the vidscreen, entranced as if she had never seen a photo slideshow before. Was she doing what everyone else did when the screensaver kicked in, simply looking for themselves in the menagerie? There were as many pictures of Jackie as not, most of them with Gil by her side, a loving hand draped around her hip.

  Was it difficult to see yourself in photos your brain could not remember, to be shown a life that used to be yours, but with every trace of it removed from your heart and soul?

  Gil looked around for his palette and found it dormant in its dock on the table. He scooped it up, loaded his notebook, and began a new dossier for Roberta. He paused as he considered what to put for a surname, as synthetics typically had one or the other.

  “Do you have a last name, Roberta?” he asked.

  She was unwilling to take her eyes off of the show. “Mendes, but that doesn’t feel right anymore. What was Jackie’s?”

  “Dulac,” said Gil. He thought about writing the name next to Roberta in his notebook, but it didn’t seem right. Roberta was not Jacqueline Dulac of 117 Gracy Farms Road, apartment 928, Perion City. She was not the Jackie who had stood in the kitchen three years ago and burned a batch of ice cream cone cupcakes.