“Was anyone hurt?”
“A few fatalities,” she replied.
Was that satisfaction in her voice?
“Who?” asked Gil, pushing the words past the lump in his throat.
“You tell me.”
They stared at each other for several seconds before Gantz came lumbering up the steps again, slightly out of breath.
“Car checks out clean,” he said, tossing the key fob back to Gil. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Reyes.”
“Sorry I couldn’t be of more help,” said Gil.
Sava stared at Gantz for several seconds. “Okay,” she said, “then I guess we’re done here.” She turned and headed for the stairs, pulling her phone from her pocket as she went.
“Have a good day, Mr. Reyes,” said Gantz, following after her.
Gil peered into the breezeway just enough to see Gantz turn and walk backwards. He made a series of gestures: first, pointing to Gil’s condo, then miming breasts with his hands, then finally flashing a questioning thumbs-up.
He knew, or at least, he suspected. Leave it to the Chief of Police not to miss a damn thing.
But then why had he lied about where Gil’s car had been?
Gil glanced over his shoulder and then back at Gantz. He nodded, made an OK sign.
“Move your ass, Gantz!”
The chief put a finger to his lips and then hurried down the stairs.
28
The vidscreen in the kitchen came on at seven, as it had every Saturday and Sunday morning for the last few years. Previously, Gil had used the droning of the morning news to get him out of bed, and then later, as a backdrop to a breakfast of peanut butter toast or instant oatmeal. He hardly ever watched the television, instead preferring to flip through the feed board on his palette. Specialized apps pulled data from the big three feeds and displayed them in a carousel of content. Small up and down arrows below each story let Gil customize his megafeed, which over time, learned his preferences: technology, gadgets, and naked women.
Though Benny Coker might not have liked one of his aggregators subbing the other feeds, he knew it was necessary for Gil’s cover, as showing preference for any one media house might reveal him to be biased. Besides, Lincoln and Banks put out good content from time to time. At the core, it was all the same news. When a pic of some celebrity getting out of a low car in a short skirt popped up, it was only a matter of time before it appeared on all three feeds. The only thing that really mattered in the feed business was who had it first.
Coveting everything leaves you with nothing.
Gil stood with his forehead pressed against the front door waiting for the adrenaline to drain out of his body. It pooled in the small of his back, causing the surrounding muscles to spasm in protest. Even though Gantz had covered for him, Gil still read suspicion in the Kessler woman’s eyes.
“Mr. Sedivy, can you comment on the rumors of James Perion’s death in Perion City?”
Gil turned at the mention of Arthur Sedivy’s name. He approached the counter and put a hand on the back of a stool.
On the screen, Arthur Sedivy looked regal in his navy blue suit and black tie—a uniform for Vinestead International executives if there had ever been one. Though anyone else would have been put out by a mid-meal interruption, Sedivy simply smiled and folded his napkin. There were a few seconds of playacting, as if he were trying to choose the right words instead of already having a prepared statement.
“Obviously,” he began, ignoring the reporter and staring straight in the camera, “the entire Vinestead organization is deeply saddened by the recent stories implying the death of James Perion. As I understand it, he is battling, or was battling, a common form of cancer. I, of course, put the whole of Vinestead International at Mr. Perion’s disposal, to include my personal medical team, but for his own reasons, Mr. Perion has declined my assistance. Although we did not see eye to eye on many things, there is no denying he is a pioneer and a visionary, two qualities this world is severely lacking. If he has truly passed on, then the world has suffered a great loss.”
“There is speculation that Joseph Perion will take over the CEO position. Have you spoken with him? Is there any truth to the speculation that Vinestead International will try to acquire Perion Synthetics?”
Gil raised an eyebrow. Vinestead acquiring Perion was a stretch; nothing on the feeds for the last few days had even suggested such a thing.
Arthur Sedivy looked away for a moment and almost laughed under his breath. “Speculation,” he repeated. “Someone on Wall Street is trying to position Perion stock for a quick cash-out. The acquisition of a company is not something we would do on a whim, nor on the mere rumors of a CEO’s passing. This is a difficult time for Perion Synthetics. Out of respect for their family, we should reserve our speculation until the Perions have had time to get their house in order. At any rate, Vinestead Synthetics continues to make great strides. We will have some big announcements in the new year.”
Vinestead Synthetics, thought Gil. What a joke.
No other company had generated as many sleek product images and lofty marketing claims as Vinestead’s synthetics division. When Perion announced a new breakthrough, Vinestead followed it up with a similar but slightly better claim. The only difference was Perion had the hardware to back it up; all Vinestead had was a marketing department.
And there was the true loss. If Arthur Sedivy had any clue how advanced Perion’s synthetics were, he wouldn’t be out having dinner at a faux Italian restaurant; he’d be pouring every dollar he had into R&D. Perion’s offerings were going to change the world, were going to put Vinestead in its place once and for all. And if last month’s model wasn’t enough, then there was Roberta, a fully formed realization of James Perion’s ultimate dream. He could flip the cards over as if they were trash: cooks, messengers, and babysitters. Then, as Vinestead reached for the pot, he’d throw down his pair of aces, two identical copies of Roberta and her stolen personality.
It was in the way she looked at him, the combination of her twinkling eyes sitting above her reddening cheeks that let Gil know Jackie was in there somewhere. And though her future owner might not know Jackie’s name, they would at least see a person, see the body language and mannerisms as real as anyone else’s in the PC. With early synthetics, there had always been a desire to see them as real, to marvel in the novelty of the uncanny. With synthetics as advanced as Roberta, it was a struggle just to remember she was artificial. The lure of accepting her as human was just too much.
Gil touched the vidscreen and powered it down. There was no point in watching the rest of the interview; any interesting sound bites would be packaged up by a fellow employee at The White Line and would appear on the feed within a few minutes. Besides, there were more interesting things happening closer to home.
In the hallway, Gil stared at the thin blade of light seeping out from beneath the door. A sound came with it, growing louder as he approached his workshop, fluctuating like a variable-speed fan. Up and down, the noise pitched, reverberating in a tiny knot in Gil’s stomach. He had left the room with everything powered down. The only moving parts would be…
“Roberta?” he called.
There was something else too, something beneath the hum, something grating and electronic.
Gil took a mental inventory of his workshop and thought of the various tools capable of making such a sound, settling on the off-network laptop he had used since the Margate days. He wondered how its fan had sounded the last time he used it, and suddenly he remembered the warehouse and the trace and replace on Cyn.
There had been shouting at the time, a sense of urgency, so the minor issue of a fan wearing down had left no impression on him. But he did remember the whine, the strident pitching of the power supply about to lose a capacitor. Even as Cyn writhed on the table, Gil had been thinking about how hard it would be to find a comparable part.
Gil approached the workshop door and keyed in the passcode, expecting to fi
nd his rugged computer beeping away on the workbench.
Instead, he discovered Roberta lying on the floor.
From the position of her body, he assumed Roberta hadn’t fallen. She was lying perfectly straight with one arm by her side and the other outstretched to the laptop on the floor a few feet away. Slack wire traced a line from the laptop back to her neck and that was when he noticed her eyes were pegged open. The laptop’s screen scrolled the same code Gil had used to restore Cyn, though the output looked garbled now.
Was she running the trace and replace on herself?
Gil rushed to Roberta’s side and put an exploratory hand against her cheek.
“Hey,” he said, shaking her at the shoulder. “What are you doing?”
There was no response. The independent threads responsible for making Roberta into a facsimile of a living breathing person were offline, likely crashed by the invasive software Gil had acquired at Pritchard Sansbury’s in the AC. There was no way Meltdown could have known the program would one day be run against a synthetic human or that it would shut her systems down cold.
Gil pulled the electrode from the back of Roberta’s neck and noticed for the first time she had a jackport hidden beneath her hair, as faint as a watermark. He climbed atop Roberta and straddled her stomach. Again he shook her; her body felt light in his hands, but she did not move on her own.
Something had gone wrong with the code, something in the way it performed the trace had been incompatible with the assumed intelligence of a synthetic. Gil thought maybe Roberta’s programming had become corrupted, that her running config now contained extraneous characters that didn’t translate into real instructions. If she were a photocopier or a network router, the only course of action would be to reboot her and hope her ROM contained enough information to bring her back online.
Gil scrambled over Roberta’s body to the shelf on the far wall and began digging through the rows of bins. Buried at the bottom of one container, he found a card marked Boot and Nuke. He palmed the card and pulled wire cutters from his toolbox.
His eyes fell on a lamp in the corner of the room. With a grunt, he was able to pull the cord from the base, revealing two frayed ends. He stripped them with the wire cutters to expose the copper and then knelt beside Roberta’s head.
Rolling her onto her side, Gil placed the nuke against her jackport and waited for its LED to light up.
Under his breath, he prayed.
If the nuke didn’t work, that would be the end of it. He’d have to make a run for the PNR and get out of Perion City before Kessler figured out Gantz had lied to her. She’d come back with more firepower and kick down the door. And Roberta would still be there, lying on the floor like the inert doll she was.
Gil made sure he wasn’t touching any part of Roberta as he pressed the bare wires to her neck just below the card. There was an audible pop in the room and the lights continued to flicker for several seconds after he removed the wires. Tremors raced the length of Roberta’s body, shaking her fingers first before rattling up her arms and into her torso. The sequence repeated in her feet, culminating in a vibration in her chest that reminded Gil of a heartbeat.
THUMP-thump. THUMP-thump.
Roberta’s eyes began to roll around in their sockets. After three revolutions, they settled on Gil. Recognition triggered a smile on her face, but it was replaced by widening eyes and downturned lips.
“Gil?” Her voice came out digitized, but settled as she asked, “What happened?” She sat up and reached for him.
Gil took her into his arms and hugged her.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You’re okay, baby.”
Small hands pressed at his chest, pushing him away until he could see the sadness in her eyes.
“No, Gil-bear. I’m not.”
29
“It’s like waking from a dream,” said Roberta as she searched for a comfortable position on the couch.
Gil nodded and checked his sliver for the hundredth time. It was glowing bright red, but he was sure that at any moment, the light would simply blink out and the live stream to The White Line would disappear with it. Seeing Jackie emerge from Roberta’s skin had given Gil the confidence—the justification—to begin feeding openly for the first time since his arrival in Perion City. His transmission was sure to be noticed, whether by local monitoring or by the reaction of the world as the content hit the feed. Calling it risky was an understatement, but the world needed to know that a woman Gil had known and loved had been repackaged into a synthetic being.
It was because of his personal interest in the story that Gil reverted to a previous revision of himself, that of aggregator, a persona whose mannerisms were automatic, whose questions just happened to fall in line with what he wanted to know. And if he wanted to know the answers, then he was damn sure Benny Coker would want to know, and in turn, every Shore Dog and Umbrat in the country.
Coker, for his part, didn’t even question the uplink. At least, he hadn’t said anything over the whisperer yet. Gil assumed Coker was equally enthralled with Roberta’s story and was pleased with the line of questioning so far.
“Go on,” said Gil.
Roberta looked away to the screensaver on the vidscreen.
“You’re aware of the dream while it’s happening,” she continued. “But it’s not until you wake up that it all condenses and you realize none of it was real. I remember things that didn’t happen to me, faces without names. I remember you helping a woman, but not here.” She looked around again, her eyes searching out something familiar.
“Cynthia Mesquina,” said Gil.
“She didn’t like me very much,” said Roberta. A chuckle escaped her lips—a human one. “And the man with the stubble?”
“Cameron Gray.”
It wasn’t like Cam and Cyn wouldn’t have blown Gil’s cover if given the chance. A billion curious fingers were likely hitting the search engines, elevating two previously incognito names to the most visible points on the grid. If they were in the feeding game for fame, then they would both get more than they could handle.
Assuming they were still alive.
“I feel something for him, or did,” said Roberta, touching her chest. She held her hand there for several seconds. “My heart beat is so soft. I can barely feel it.”
“What’s the last thing you remember from before?” asked Gil.
He grabbed the remote from the coffee table and switched the channel to The White Line home screen. Perion was still blocking the incoming feeds, leaving the scrollers at the bottom of the screen blank, but the stats were there, along with a photo of a smirking Benny Coker dressed in Midwestern formal. The White Line’s market share, which normally hovered in the low twenties, had climbed to the ungodly height of forty-four, and was still rising. Gil watched as every question he asked, every response Roberta gave, caused a blip in the rolling line graph. In the upper right hand corner, the SatIndex grew at a slower pace; people were probably too engaged with the story to up-vote it.
Roberta glanced at the screen when it flickered, but didn’t recognize Coker. She shook her head. “This is too strange. It’s like these memories aren’t my own. I can remember being in my car, driving on the PE, and then I’m outside with that Cameron guy. And the weather’s changed and I’ve changed.” Her lower lip began to tremble.
“It’s okay, Rob—Jackie. We’re going to figure this out.”
“It’s not that,” she replied, forcing a laugh. “You don’t work for Perion Synthetics without partly believing someday you’ll wake up in a synthetic body. There were always jokes, you know, of them wanting to transplant a human mind into a synny. Everyone laughed at the idea, but I think we all secretly feared it.”
“It’d be a breakthrough,” admitted Gil. “I mean, it is a breakthrough. Here you are, right?”
Roberta looked down and examined her hands as if they were completely new to her. “I’m not here. This is not my body, no matter how much it looks like it. The real me
is out there somewhere. Why isn’t she here with you? How long has it been?”
For a moment, Gil wanted to turn off his sliver, but the numbers on the screen were just too high. To propel The White Line to the next level, to give Benny Coker a heart attack and make Eileen a slightly richer woman, he’d have to sacrifice a little of himself.
“The last time I saw you was here,” said Gil. “Right over there by the door, actually. It was morning, and you were leaving for work. Later, in the evening, I came home, but you didn’t. All of your stuff was gone. You didn’t even say goodbye.”
“I left you?” asked Roberta.
Gil nodded. “Four months ago. July 7. It was a Tuesday. You left on a goddamn Tuesday, Jackie. Without any warning at all.”
“I remember my Rogue, but I don’t remember packing it, or ever wanting to leave you.”
Gil could see the pain behind her eyes, the frantic shifting back and forth as they sought out a memory that simply wasn’t there. A synthetic should have been able to recall any moment in its existence with perfect clarity, but evidently, that didn’t apply to the memories they had stolen.
Maybe they had played around with her synapses, removing some and leaving others, perhaps choosing to block out what had happened when she headed out on the Perion Expressway with her entire life packed into the back of a taxi.
Gil’s brain ground to a halt.
Taxi? Or her Rogue?
Either Jackie was misremembering the details of a major life choice or…
Look for the angle, Gilbert.
Coker’s words echoed in Gil’s head. He had often made mention of the angle, bringing it up whenever Gil set out on a new adventure to investigate illegal augmentations in the Manhattan Underground or to sample the latest offerings of the Margate synth pushers. According to Coker, it didn’t matter what happened to whom or when or with what. It was the why that people cared about, the sequence of events and motivations that led us from point A to point B. Causality, he claimed, ruled the universe and all of the inhabitants of said universe were painfully aware of that natural law. It was human nature to seek out the reasoning behind everything and invent explanations when no true cause could be found.
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