Perion Synthetics

by Verastiqui, Daniel

  Gil had once called the theory bullshit, only for Coker to reply, “Hell, it gave us religion, didn’t it? So you go out there and find those people a reason. Explain it to them so they don’t have to worry their simple minds about it. It hurts less for them to be told why than to let them think for themselves.”

  A hand on his leg made Gil look up.

  “Where’d you go?” asked Roberta, smiling.

  Jackie used to ask that whenever Gil drifted away to the workshop in his mind to puzzle something out. Roberta was really laying it on thick. The question was why.

  Look for the angle.

  Why would a synthetic pretend to know him, pretend to want him? What was there to gain by attaching to Gilbert Reyes, handyman extraordinaire? Unless…

  Maybe it was just a chance meeting at the warehouse. Maybe those mixed feelings truly were pieces of Jackie bubbling to the surface. But once Roberta was in his home, looking over his pictures, something had changed.

  Something had been noticed.

  “Do you know what I do for a living?” Gil asked.

  “Make me happy?” asked Roberta in return.

  “You know what I mean. Do you remember?”

  She flashed a frown, as if hurt by his disregard for her joke. “You do tech repair,” she said. “You come in when things break and make them work again. Right?”

  “No, not right. I work for Benny Coker’s White Line media feed. I came to Perion City four years ago to keep tabs on the development of a new synthetic race. Almost everything you know about me is a lie.”

  The SatIndex shot up ten points; people were intrigued. The new high made Gil smile, but he knew no good would come from exposing himself. He could have denied being the source of the broadcast, but attaching his name to the meta, plopping it down on the grid with the others, was something he never thought he’d do. It was a last resort tactic, something Benny Coker wouldn’t have suggested no matter how good his hand.

  “Why are you telling me this?” asked Roberta.

  “I’m not the man you think I am. And I’m telling you this because I don’t think you’re who you say you are either.”

  “But I have her memories, her feelings. I feel love towards you. Isn’t that enough?”

  “I’m not here for love,” said Gil, standing up. “I’m here for the story.”

  He walked into the kitchen and pulled down a bottle of Skyy from the freezer. A shot glass he had stolen from a bar in The Fringe was already sitting out on the counter. The vodka went down easy.

  He cringed at the thought of how the real Jackie would have reacted to his rejection. It would have crushed her. She would have cried. Her heart…

  “Of course you’re just here for the story, Gilbert Alejandro Reyes of Leonardo, New Jersey. That’s all you care about, because that’s what Benny Coker has drilled into your head. You believe it so much you don’t care who you hurt along the way.”

  Roberta rose and stood in front of the couch.

  From behind the counter, Gil raised his glass to her. “To synthetics with feelings.”

  “You think you’ve been enlightening people with the little stories you’ve been feeding over the years? All you’ve done is set research back and help Vinestead keep pace. Every leak cost people their jobs. And for what? For a SatIndex? For market share?”

  The dumber Gil felt, the more he drank. He had let her into his home, had been overcome with emotion for a dime store reproduction of a woman who hadn’t loved him enough to stay with him.

  And now his name was in the meta.

  Gil downed his fourth shot and felt the warmth spread through his stomach. It wasn’t the first time he had been conned, but no one had gotten him this good since his early days when he was making his way down the coast to the tech Mecca of Atlantic City. He’d arrived without the clothes he’d so dutifully packed, without the food or money that was supposed to sustain him on his trip. He’d arrived with nothing but a growing knowledge of the streets and a natural knack for social engineering. Those were the skills Benny Coker had tried to hone, but it hadn’t been enough.

  Nothing could have prepared Gil for life in Perion City. These were supposed to be the good guys, the ones you could trust. If Vinestead had been the target, Gil would have remained on guard for the duration. Instead, he’d become complacent and happy with Jackie.

  Look for the angle. Find it before it finds you.

  Gil drank another shot to Coker’s sage advice.

  “When did you know?”

  “It just feels like something has started, Benny, like we’ve reached some kind of critical mass,” said Roberta.

  The phone call to Banks from the warehouse—they had been onto him from the start.

  Gil replayed the early morning events. When he got to Roberta and his workshop, the angle finally crystallized.

  Roberta wasn’t trying to reset herself; she was trying to steal his trace and replace program, code that could undo the best brainwashing of Perion engineers.

  They got me, thought Gil. And they got my code.

  “So,” he replied. “Do I have time to pack? Or maybe a quick shower?”

  “You thinking of running?” asked Roberta. “Not a good idea. They’ll find you before you make it past the inner loop. And of course, you’d have to get through me first.” She folded her arms and stepped closer to the door.

  Gil laughed as he tried to pour another shot; it sloshed around in the glass and spilled on the counter. “It’s a shame, you know? I bet I’m gonna regret not fucking you when I had the chance. You look like you were built to be ridden hard and put away wet.”

  Benny Coker’s favorite saying in regards to Atlantic City escorts sent The White Line’s market share to fifty-seven percent—an unprecedented occasion ruined by Roberta’s cold laughter.

  “And I would have let you, if that’s what it took.”

  “Too late now?” asked Gil. “I mean, surely we have some time to kill before the police knock down my door.”

  “You don’t get it, Mr. Reyes. I have your dead lover’s memories. She didn’t want to be with you, let alone have you flopping around on top of her.”

  Gil’s vision had blurred, but still the market share numbers climbed. He poured the last of the vodka into his glass and raised it to the unseen audience. Their applause was deafening in his ears, making him smile. In his stomach, the liquor sent out comforting signals, tricking the brain into thinking everything was going to be okay. But it wasn’t.

  He stared at the empty bottle on the counter.

  Sweet liquor eases the pain.

  Gil was pretty sure Meltdown had never said that.

  As the laughter threatened to overwhelm him, Gil reached for the bottle and whipped it at Roberta. It hit her squarely in the face, as if she hadn’t even tried to move out of the way. Shards of glass exploded outward, covering the foyer in shiny glitter. A rivulet of crimson appeared on Roberta’s forehead; it descended between her eyes, to the right of her nose, and came to rest at the corner of her mouth.

  A bright pink tongue darted out and tasted it.

  “I’m going to take my time with you, Mr. Reyes,” she said, taking a step forward. “You think it hurt when I walked out of your life before?” She smiled; the blood broke free and dribbled down her chin. “I’m going to show you the true meaning of pain.”

  Gil bowed his head and looked at the shot glass. He had known there was going to be violence; it was for that reason he had begun drinking. The liquor would dull the pain, but the Margate chip in his neck would start pushing that gritty Jersey synth into his brain to keep it active. It wasn’t invincibility, but it would keep him from freaking out when Roberta began breaking his bones.

  “Alright,” he said, adjusting his waistline. “Let’s begin then.”

  30

  “There are two types of people in this world: those that rush, and those that don’t.”

  Leave it to a Margate rusher to simplify the world’s population into tw
o easily defined groups. Patrick Kumanov, whose business card gave his name only as Meltdown, often talked of the dividing line between the unenlightened and the transcendental. If you weren’t rushing, he’d say, you weren’t really connected to the universe. Only under the influence of a synthetic drug could a person finally see reality for what it truly was.

  “Think about it for a minute,” Meltdown had said one night while he and Gil tripped on a synthetic hallucinogenic known as Smashed Peas. He was leaning back in his favorite chair at Pritchard Sansbury’s, a converted sim parlor whose machinery had been removed in favor of eclectic seating and dim lighting. It was still a parlor of sorts, except the clientele now preferred to trip in the comfort of their own minds.

  “All these people,” he said, gesturing to the circular couches set apart in the spacious common room, “are somewhere else right now. Each one is plugged into their own version of reality. Artists do this too, without the synth. To truly create something, they have to detach from this reality. A writer will sit for hours thinking about an entire microcosm that doesn’t exist. That means, at any given time, millions of these artists are not connected to this reality. How scary is that?”

  “What about aggregators?” Gil had asked.

  “You’re the worst of it. You think you’re exposing the real world, but it’s all at the mercy of the Almighty Filter. You pick up on something your boss doesn’t like and it’ll never make it to the subby’s whisperer. The houses think they’re selling reality, when actually they’re just selling perspective. Because that’s all life is, a series of shifting perspectives. The story’s never quite the same from the other point of view, is it?”

  “And this will change my perspective?” Gil held a code card in his hand; its polished white gloss bounced the blue neons from above.

  “When the time is right. It’s a TSR variant of a military-grade enhancement program, reverse engineered from a burnt Ayudante chip.”

  “TSR?”

  “Terminate and stay resident,” Meltdown explained. “It will be with you at all times and activate when you need it most. Consider it a gift from one Bodhi to another.”

  Leave it to a Margate rusher to compare himself to the Buddha.

  Gil shook his head at the memory of Patrick Kumanov, surprised by its sudden appearance and clarity. Why had the rusher’s image come back to him now? Was it merely the splash screen of the TSR finally ramping up?

  Roberta was over the counter before Gil could settle on an answer. Her small frame rotated in the air, going fully horizontal before swinging her legs beyond the edge of the sink. She slid down the veneered countertop, landing simultaneously on both feet. The first jab caught Gil by surprise, landing hard in his throat, causing a brief moment of panic as he struggled to breathe. He took a quick step back and felt his heels hit the refrigerator.

  Roberta’s arm shot out; Gil ducked and threw his weight towards the sink. At the last moment, he pushed off with his legs and launched himself over the counter. The plan had been to land as gracefully as Roberta so he could take off running, but instead, his foot caught on the faucet, causing him to crash to the floor and land on his back, knocking the air out of him. As the pain coursed through his body, Meltdown’s voice spoke in his mind.

  “You shall not rejoice in the killing of any living creature,” said the rusher.

  “She’s not alive,” Gil replied, straining to get the words out.

  Like a vision emerging from a transcendental haze, Meltdown’s face appeared. He blew a plume of smoke from the side of his mouth.

  “Well then, I suggest you tear that bitch up.”

  Gil had only met one person in his entire life who had an Ayudante chip besides Cynthia Mesquina. He was MoA infantry turned Atlantic City street rat. It hadn’t been an easy task getting out of the MX; the loss of his right leg and the burning of his Ayudante were the eventual tolls he had to pay. Still, he retained his memories and had story enough when Gil came around asking.

  “It’s like your first orgasm, every single time,” the former soldado had said, trying to describe the totality of the chip’s control. “There’s a jittery feeling as it comes on, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. You’re scared, but there’s also a sense of well-being. Then you’re hit with an unbreakable calm. It can resist everything the enemy throws at it: fear, doubt, and even pain. You can take a bullet like a slap on the wrist.”

  Scrambling to his feet, Gil looked around for Roberta, who was still standing in the kitchen, a thin smile on her face. There was a feeling in his stomach, but it was likely from the Skyy and not the foreign Ayudante code. He took a step towards the door, only to see Roberta slide across the tile floor and plant herself in the foyer. She hunched over and bent her knees, reminding Gil of a blitzing linebacker. With blood smeared on her face, she had never looked more unlike Jackie.

  “You can’t do this,” said Gil.

  “I’m pretty sure I can,” Roberta replied.

  “You see this?” He held up his wrist as if it were a holy relic. “You know what this flashing red light means? Everything we say or do is being broadcast live on The White Line. If you kill me, hell, if you so much as bruise me, everything Perion has done will be for nothing. Lay a finger on me and you’ll kill the public’s trust in Perion Synthetics forever.”

  Roberta shot forward, reaching for Gil’s arm. Her fingers closed around the sliver in his wrist and squeezed.

  At first, it was just a mild pressure; the vodka had dulled his senses sufficiently enough, but nothing could compete with the sensation of bones crumbling between synthetic fingers. The cracking sound echoed in the condo, each reverberation ripping at the lining in his stomach. Gil visualized his wrist turning to white shards, mixing with the sliver circuitry to create a non-viable, human-machine sludge.

  The pain was intense but brief, occurring so quickly Gil wasn’t sure it had happened at all. The blood was there, as was the mangled flesh and a hand hanging loosely from taut skin, but there was no data coming in, no mention of organic damage in any of the trillion signals passing through his brain. All he felt was detachment, an almost refreshing peace of mind.

  On the vidscreen, the market share swelled, but the SatIndex took a huge hit as millions of angry subbers down-voted the sudden dead air.

  Roberta had broken his wrist, and more importantly, the uplink.

  A knee came up between them and Roberta buried it in Gil’s chest. The acceleration backwards felt like falling, but Gil was able to get his body turned around before toppling over. Now he was falling forward, in the direction of the glass doors of the balcony. Instead of trying to stop himself, he pumped his legs and listened to Benny or Meltdown or someone in his head telling him to raise his arms and use them to protect his face.

  The impact rattled his remaining bones.

  How many times had he watched people go through windows and glass doors in movies? It had always seemed so effortless, but of course that was because it was fake glass, or pre-cut, or something other than the thick double-pane separating Gil’s living room from his balcony. It almost felt like the glass wouldn’t give; his elbows made no dent on their initial contact. Then his body hit and the door shattered before him, sending shards of glass into his forearms and torso. On some level, he registered the accompanying pain, but the Ayudante envoy was singing an inviting tune, drowning out everything else in the world.

  Gil used his momentum to hurl himself at the railing. This time, there would be no jump, just a shifting of weight over the side to whip his legs up. He closed his eyes as he became weightless and didn’t open them again until his shoulder dug into the soft grass, separating it from the socket. Gil let out a curt howl, then became quiet again. Staring into the brightening sky, he gave thanks that he was able to see it—

  “Again, I’m addressing the current leadership of Perion Synthetics. You have a product that is out of control and threatening the life of one of my aggregators. You are also holding two aggregators
from Banks Media and Lincoln Continental. If our people are not returned unharmed, we will have no choice but to hold Perion Synthetics and its employees personally responsible. Again, I’m addressing…”

  “Coker?” asked Gil, looking around for his boss. He realized the voice was in his head, coming across the feed through his whisperer. Coker must have boosted the signal to get past the PC blackout. Jacking the repeaters was a trick that could only be used a couple of times; that Coker had used it to help Gil…

  Roberta’s face appeared over the railing of the balcony. Her eyes widened when she saw Gil lying on the grass.

  He rolled onto his stomach and used his good arm to push himself up. His legs felt like sandbags, but at least they kept him upright.

  The courtyard behind his condo was formed by the cornered arrangement of four buildings. Exits to the streets sat on the midpoint of each side, all pointing to a raised center where several picnic tables and two grills sat unused in the chilly weather. It was deserted; Gil looked around at the windows facing into the courtyard, wishing and hoping someone would be standing at one, perhaps sipping a cup of coffee, unaware they were about to see the first synthetic on human murder since Vinestead launched their NORM series.

  A thud sounded from behind, and Gil ran.

  He didn’t know where he was running to, only that Roberta was behind him and if she got her hands on him again, she wasn’t likely to let go. He opted for the closest exit, off to the left. He could see the black, wrought-iron fence growing out of the high shrubbery on either side of the path. He imagined himself hitting the gate, thrusting downward on the handle, and pushing his way out into the street. There, he would be able to flag down a car, or maybe someone would see him.

  A sharp pain tore into in his calf muscle; a glance backwards revealed the retreating toe of Roberta’s shoe. The remaining power in his legs gave out and he tumbled to the ground, once again landing on his shoulder. His little slice of Ayudante tried its best to block out the signals, but it gave up when Gil attempted to use his broken wrist to turn over.