Perion Synthetics

by Verastiqui, Daniel

A memory sparked.

  It had been Jackie, not Roberta, who had reached for Gilbert Reyes in the middle of the night.

  Roberta could then not be a facsimile of Jackie because Jackie was defined not only by how she affected the world, by what she did and said, but also by how the world treated her. And though Roberta might find her way into Gil’s bed and might, in the middle of the night, pull up close behind him and slip a hand over his waist, he would never be able to do the same to her, would never be able to put from his mind the simple fact that Jacqueline Dulac was dead and gone. The sum of her existence was now only video, pictures, and text… and the dwindling memories in Gil’s head.

  For Perion Synthetics to bring her back, to give a synthetic Jackie’s visage and verbal ticks, even her wonderful curves and impeccable posture, was an affront to nature and to those who loved her. More than that, it made no commercial sense. If the endgame was a product, something to be sold, then making it closer to human was commercial suicide. Buying and selling appliances was one thing; buying machines with memories and feelings was akin to buying humans.

  The line between man and machine is forever blurred, Gilbert. The world does not see a difference, so why should you?

  Gil wrote down Roberta’s last name and filled in some physical characteristics from memory. He paused again at occupation and settled on Synthetic Human. It sounded right, anyway. More than any simple task assigned to her, her first job was to be a close approximation of humanity. For that job there were no breaks, no sick days.

  Finally, he reached the blank line where he would write his topic question, the number one mystery he thought Coker and the world would want solved. Usually this question came after a long struggle. Humans were so complex and their stories so varied, but with Roberta, the question was too easy, and came with such quickness that Gil found himself typing it before he had even completed the thought.

  Why do you exist, he wrote.

  Could Roberta even answer such a question?

  Gil felt the reality of the situation as a throbbing in his stomach. His time in Perion City was coming to an end and the only way to go out was with an explosive bang that would shake the Spire to the ground.

  It was what they deserved after disrespecting the dead. If Joe Perion thought he could do whatever he wanted…

  The thought fizzled out in Gil’s mind, replaced as always by the immutable time scale, the mental rule he used to arrange events in the past. James Perion’s death stood like a beacon upon the line, obscuring the years that had come before it, but with a little concentration, Gil was able to see past the blinding light to the foundations on which his assumptions were based.

  He shook his head. It had seemed natural to blame Joe Perion. Office gossip had it the boy was a loose cannon, off developing his own line of synthetics in areas the old man didn’t agree with, things like sex dolls and military units. Gil would have believed every one of those rumors if it weren’t for Gantz, who rarely had a discouraging thing to say about the next ruler of Perion City.

  Maybe it was all a ploy, a calculated move to have a rumor out in the world to provide plausible deniability should word ever get out that there was a factory in The Fringe whose workers toiled day and night to repair engineered vaginas and fabricated cocks for a variety of lifeless synthetics. The old man could claim ignorance, give his son a slap on the wrist, and business would go back to normal.

  From the people Gil spoke to, there was no doubt the sex dolls, or synthetic companions, as they were listed in the catalogue, were real. Only research in that area could have given Roberta the natural skin suit she wore. Only trial and error could have improved the internal mechanics such that she weighed a buck and some change. Preparing her predecessors for the sex trade had made Roberta more than human—their loss of humanity had increased hers.

  So that takes care of her body, thought Gil.

  For her mind, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine the military applications for a thinking machine, synthetics who could react and plan in a battlefield situation—drones with minds of their own.

  The pieces began to line up in Gil’s mind. Seemingly random areas of study seemed to be converging on one ultimate goal.

  But why?

  Gil put the palette back in its dock and sighed. A sudden ache grew from the back of his head to envelope his entire brain. He stumbled to the couch, convinced that at any moment he might collapse from the pressure. Sinking into the cushions next to Roberta, he joined her in the passive observance of his photos.

  After a few minutes, Roberta said, “You collect people, you know that?”

  Gil barely heard her over the throbbing. “I what?”

  “The way you take pictures. The way you organize them. It’s like you’re building a collection of people.”

  “I don’t…”

  Roberta pointed to the vidscreen. “Look, this picture is normal, just you and Jackie out at a restaurant. But then…” She waited until a specific picture popped up. “This is like a passport photo: straight-on, no expression, and nothing distracting in the background.”

  Gil stared at the worn face of Eric Rusk, who worked on the twenty-eighth floor of the Perion Spire as a marketing admin by day and an underground human-synthetic fight promoter by night. The synnies were usually already damaged in some way, or handicapped by strategic snipping of vital tendons. Rusk justified the fights as a way for people to get exercise, learn to fight—the questionable list went on and on. Gil saw it as taking out aggression on poor synnies who couldn’t fight back.

  “A punching bag is a punching bag,” Rusk would always say.

  The story, titled Synthetic Fight Club, had been finished for over a year, shelved in some databank back in Atlantic City. Coker had enjoyed it, thought it oozed with the sickness affecting so many people in the AC. A little west coast disease for the east coast immune system, he had called it.

  “Why do you have so many pictures like that?” asked Roberta.

  Because Perion Synthetics is full of humans and humans are sick, conniving bastards who never fail to probe the depths of their depravity, Gil answered in his mind.

  “There can’t be that many,” he said.

  “Forty-eight.” She turned to face him. “Kind of a strange hobby, Gilly Bear.”

  “What do you know from art?” he asked, feigning offense. “I like to take pictures of people’s faces. Big deal.”

  Gil stood and retreated to the kitchen again. From the end cabinet, he pulled a bottle of aspirin and shook three white pills out onto the counter. They were chalky on his tongue.

  “It’s not just that,” said Roberta. She had pulled herself up into a kneeling position, arms resting on the back of the couch. “You look the same age in all of these pictures. How far back do they go?”

  “Far enough,” whispered Gil. Then, louder, “Maybe my college photos just aren’t a part of this stream.”

  “Did you go to college?”

  His laugh echoed in the kitchen. “It’s like you don’t know me at all.”

  Roberta crossed her arms. “I only know what Jackie knew, and she didn’t. There’s nothing about you on the network before you came to Perion City. Your personnel record lists your previous employer as PracTech out of Flagstaff, but that doesn’t wash with your Jersey accent.”

  “I don’t have an accent,” said Gil, listening to his words. They were clean, devoid of any AC affectations.

  “Not that any human can hear,” said Roberta, smiling. “But I’m more observant. I can practically smell the shore on you. So I wonder, why didn’t your J-boo know anything about your past? Why didn’t you tell her where you’re originally from? Was your entire relationship built on lies?”

  “I loved her,” he said, his eyes dropping to the floor. “I would have loved her until the end of time. That’s all that mattered.”

  Roberta considered the claim, relaxed, and sat back on her heels. A mischievous smile crept onto her face, put there by a million tiny servos em
bedded in her lips. For a while, she simply stared.

  Finally, Gil asked, “What?”

  “She loved you too,” said Roberta. “Even at the end.”

  27

  Gil sat on a worn stool in his workshop and stared at the folded piece of paper in his hands. It was a note from Jackie—the only hardcopy she had ever given him and the only thing she left behind.

  Gil thought back to that summer evening and how he had come home after a long day expecting to be greeted at the door with a kiss and a hug from the only person in Perion City who brought him happiness. Instead, he had been met with silence and a jarring absence of all things Jackie. Her throw pillows were gone from the couch. Her glass shelf in the bathroom had been cleared. Shampoo and conditioner bottles sat atop a pink loofah in the trashcan.

  The pristine condo made Gil wonder if his entire life with Jackie had been nothing more than a rush fantasy, a wandering of his idle mind. It was then he spied the note sitting on the dividing counter between the foyer and the living room.

  Gil, the note read, my love for you will always remain, in some form or another.

  Not a rush dream after all.

  Jackie had been in his life, and now she was gone.

  It was worse than never having her there in the first place.

  He had turned on the television absently, more to drown out the stifling silence than anything else. And as his eyes read Jackie’s handwriting for the hundredth time, his ears picked up the voice of KPC anchor Lauren Simmons reporting on an accident on the Perion Expressway. A delivery van coming from Perion Terminus had blown a tire and jumped the median. It struck a taxi, killing both the driver and a female passenger.

  “The victim’s name has not been released, pending notification of the family.”

  When Gil’s phone began to ring, his shaky hands could barely answer.

  And so Jackie left without explanation and whatever reconciliation Gil could have hoped for had died along with her on the Perion Expressway. He had kept the letter safely hidden in his toolbox, folded gently and placed in a small compartment within the red lid. He didn’t take it out often, but every time he opened the toolbox, he saw the edges of the paper sticking out, reminding him of what he had lost.

  In some form or another.

  It wasn’t exactly poetry, and at the time, Gil had written it off to what he imagined was a waning interest in their life together, as if Jackie’s real life were a wheel rolling along at a set speed, occasionally picking up people and things, carrying them through one or two revolutions, only to leave them on the ground once more, changed for better or worse, far from where they started. That’s what Gil felt when he held the letter in his hand, when he sat on the same stool where Jackie had once walked up behind him and slipped her arms around his stomach and laid kisses on his neck; where he had spun around and pulled her close, sinking his hands down the back of her pants to squeeze her butt, a gesture that had always evoked a playful groan.

  A note, a handful of memories, and a lingering question of why Jackie had gone and how poor her decision must have been to get such a strong karmic reaction.

  Gil laughed. It was the kind of Meltdown-brand, Zen bullshit he might use on the feed, a scenario so overblown it could only be found on The White Line. Only Coker would make Gil dress it up, give it a spin worthy of its primetime slot.

  Love and intrigue in Perion City.

  Just like some Banks Media fluff piece.

  Gil returned the letter to its resting place, folding it carefully to keep from stressing the paper. He closed the toolbox and put it back on the shelf next to bins of various computer parts he hadn’t used in years. There used to be a time when repairing machines made sense, but working for Perion had shown him that not only was replacing the entire system easier, it was preferred. Just RMA the copier and send the defective unit back to the warehouse. Let the DeVry graduates tinker with it for a while.

  “We can make you a technician,” Coker had told him. “You like building computers, right?”

  Gil had tried to explain it was just a vestigial pastime from youth, that now he cared more about being other people, slipping into places where he didn’t belong, and getting the scoop no one else could get.

  Looking around the converted bedroom, Gil tried to remind himself this was all an act, an illusory persona crafted for a singular purpose: to infiltrate Perion City. And he had done that. In another reality, he was already packing up his stuff and making a break for the PNR—he would have done so before the sun even cracked the horizon.

  But because of Jackie and Roberta, the sun was already up, the day already set in motion.

  Gil wondered what Coker would say if he simply abandoned the story, if he got in his car and rammed the synthetic guards at Outpost Alpha. It could work, though he wouldn’t be able to take Roberta with him.

  Footsteps in the hallway.

  Roberta was standing at the door, a hint of worry in her eyes.

  “She’s coming,” she said.

  “Stay here,” said Gil, as the soft tones of the doorbell began to echo down the hall. He looked around the room. “Don’t touch anything and don’t come out until I say it’s safe. You hear me?”

  Roberta took the seat he had just vacated and nodded. “I hear you, Gilly Bear.”

  “Don’t call me that,” he replied, shutting the door. He secured the electronic lock with a four-digit code.

  The doorbell chimed again before he made it to the foyer. On the wall above the light switch, the vidscreen showed two people standing outside. One of them was Gantz, still dressed in his gorilla suit, but he had tightened it up since their bullshit session behind the warehouse. The other was a younger woman whose hardened face Gil couldn’t place. She looked impatient, and as the delay dragged on, she nudged Gantz in the elbow, to which he sneered and rapped harshly on the door. The sudden sound made Gil recoil.

  “Who is it?” he asked.

  Gantz looked directly into the security camera and said, “Perion City PD, sir. Can you please open the door?”

  “Just a minute,” replied Gil.

  He scanned the room, but Roberta had left no traces in the condo. He dimmed the lights in the living room and kitchen, shed his pants, and tried to wrinkle his shirt as much as possible. The photo stream on the vidscreen continued to scroll; Gil slapped the remote control to turn it off. Then, as he opened the door just enough to get his head through, he tried to effect a fatigued look.

  “Mr. Gilbert Reyes?” asked Gantz. His eyes flared for a moment, entreating Gil to go along with the deception.

  “Maybe after my coffee,” he replied. “Is there something I can help you with, Officer?”

  A flash of recognition passed Gantz’ face and he suppressed a smile.

  “I’m Chief—”

  “Where were you at eight p.m. last night?” interrupted the woman.

  “I don’t see how that’s any of your business, lady.”

  “Mr. Reyes,” said Gantz, “there’s been an incident in The Fringe this morning. A vehicle registered to you matches the description of a car seen leaving the area.”

  “My car?” asked Gil. “You mean someone saw a blue Nissan on the road and you came here first?”

  “We had to start somewhere,” said Gantz.

  The woman broke in again. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I don’t see why I have to.”

  Gantz cleared his throat. “Mr. Reyes, this is Sava Kessler, head of public relations for the company. She’s investigating the disappearance of a prototype synthetic, handle Roberta. Have you seen any prototype synthetics running around the neighborhood?”

  “She has a Brazilian template,” said Sava. “Brown hair, light brown eyes, slim build.”

  “No,” said Gil. “Not my type. I’m more into Asian prototype synthetics.”

  “Really?” asked Gantz. “But they’re so small.”

  Gil shrugged. “We all have our tastes.”

  “H
ey, asshole,” barked Sava. She shoved the door open. An involuntary glance down at Gil’s loose boxers made her lock eyes with him. “This isn’t a social visit. You’re a person of interest in a very serious investigation.” Then to Gantz, “Make yourself useful and check the GPS in his car. We don’t have time to be fucking around.”

  Gantz nodded and held out his hand. “I’m sorry to inconvenience you, Mr. Reyes. If you could just give me your keys, I’ll do a quick check of your car.”

  Gil hesitated, but the look on Sava’s face told him there would be no argument. He pulled the key fob from the bowl on the dividing counter and handed it to Gantz.

  “It’s in 8F,” he said. “Door code is 0724.”

  Sava folded her arms as Gantz disappeared down the breezeway and stairs.

  “So,” said Gil. He searched for pockets to bury his hands in, found none, and ended up scratching himself.

  Sava huffed and turned away.

  “Do you work in the Spire?” asked Gil. When she didn’t respond, he continued, “I’ve been there several times. Nice place. Always very clean. Kinda cold though, don’t you think?”

  A noise from behind caught Gil’s attention. He turned and looked down the hallway. With the rest of the condo dimmed, the workshop’s light blazed from behind the door. Shadows crossed the thin beam at the bottom of the threshold; Roberta was pacing the room.

  Gil stepped away from the door.

  “Stay where I can see you,” said Sava.

  “Just grabbing the remote,” said Gil, scooping it up from the back of the couch.

  The vidscreen popped back on and he tuned it to the local KPC news station. Once again, Lauren Simmons appeared on his wall, her long blonde hair framing a thin face, one punctuated by the brightest red lips super definition could deliver. Although the sound was muted, Gil gleaned everything he needed to know from the inset video in the upper right hand corner. It showed the warehouse where he had brought a woman named Cyn back from mental death. It looked different now, as all things tended to when they were engulfed in flames.

  “Looks bad,” said Gil.

  Sava turned to face him, followed his gaze, and nodded at the vidscreen.