Cam called down into the car. “Tight fit up here, Chief. Not much to hold onto except our dicks.”
“Noted,” said Gantz, jumping up to grab both sides of the small, square opening. He kicked off the railing and launched himself upwards. He landed in a seated position on top of the car, legs still dangling inside. “Umbra girls always like to make a bad situation worse.”
Cyn motioned for him to move. As she closed the hatch, the car began to slow. “We need to jump to a platform before it comes to a stop.” She motioned to the platforms scrolling by on one wall of the evercrete shaft.
Joe’s breathing rasped above the magnetic hum as they waited.
The elevator halted in a series of three diminishing bounces. Cyn jumped before the brakes kicked in, leaving the three men on top of the car. She landed silently on the metal grate and turned around.
Gantz placed a finger in front of his lips as a ding sounded from below.
Gunfire erupted from the lobby of the Perion Spire; the ricochets smashed the mirrored walls and the vidscreens behind them. Bullets and debris exited the back of the car and pinged off the elevator shaft, prompting Gantz to shield his face with his forearm.
Joe moved first, jumping down to the platform. He crashed against the wall, but Cyn kept him from rebounding further.
Gantz and Cam made their jump together and then one by one, they descended the ladder.
The shooting lasted a full minute, bathing them in stray shrapnel.
When it ceased, Gantz froze, even while Joe and the aggregators continued to descend. He looked up through the smoke to see beams of light spilling out of the back of the car, illuminating the dull evercrete. The amount of damage suggested more than a single shooter. Perhaps as many as half a dozen had opened fired on the elevator.
Without warning. Without regard to its occupants.
I will bring every goddamn synny in the city down on you.
Kessler wasn’t fucking around.
“She’s out of her mind,” said Gantz, as he touched down on the B5 platform.
“Who is?” asked Cam.
“Kessler. Twenty bucks says they were firing under her orders.”
Cyn shook her head. “Too soon. They were probably already in position. Something else happened to trigger that response.” She traced the outline of a metal panel before turning around. “Maybe because you killed their leader.”
Gantz looked to Joe and back again. “Human life over synthetic—there’s no fucking question.”
Cyn smiled as if expecting his indignation. “I’m not complaining, Officer. You get me a weapon and I’ll do the same to every synth cocksucker we meet on our way out of here. The way you opened Perion up… it was beautiful.”
“It didn’t seem to surprise you,” said Gantz.
“What, that Perion was synthetic? How could anyone not see that coming?”
“I didn’t,” said Cam.
“Of course not,” said Cyn. “You got way too close to the goods, Gray. That Roberta doll got your mind and your dick so confused, you didn’t even know which way was up.”
“I don’t care which way is up, I care which way is out.” Cam tugged on the collar of his shirt. “It’s so fucking hot in here. I just want to get back to civilization. I want air conditioning and room service and a real piece of ass.”
Gantz spread his arms. “Anything else, sir?”
“A Seven and Seven, heavy on the Seven.”
“What’s the play from here?” asked Cyn. “What’s our fastest way out of the city?”
“We drive out,” said Gantz. “If they’ve got the lobby covered, then it’s a fair bet they have the garage staked out as well. They won’t be expecting us down here just yet, so we can sneak up a few floors and take a look.”
Joe shook his head.
“No good, boss?” asked Gantz.
Joe wagged his finger, pointed to his chest, and then mimed a steering wheel.
“I was never good at Twenty Questions,” said Cam.
“He says we should take his car,” said Gantz.
Cyn pulled back the metal panel to reveal a service door. “What does it matter whose car we take?” she asked, over her shoulder. “We still have to make it through the garage, right?”
“No. Executive parking is two levels below, and it has its own exit to the PE. If we move fast enough, maybe we can sneak out of here before they think to come looking.” Gantz gestured to the door. “After you, Mr. Perion.”
They walked the service tunnels for five minutes before finding the crossover from maintenance into B5 proper. Gantz led them into a stairwell and paused at the door, listening for movement.
“We go up two from here,” he said. Joe started up the stairs, but Gantz pulled him back into second position. “I’ll take point.” He drew his 9mm.
“Go,” said Cyn. “I think someone is coming.”
On B3, they broke out into a small corridor leading to the executive garage. Gantz peeked his head around the corner to assess the situation.
Thin lines of LEDs snaked along the ceiling, making the reflective yellow paint marking the parking spaces glow. Perion’s personal fleet of identical black Nissans lined one side of the garage; the light bent along their recently waxed curves. They would have made good getaway vehicles if not for the GPS locators embedded in their engine blocks. Gantz had watched their little blue tracking dots crawl along a map of Los Angeles more than a few times.
Opposite the company cars was a varied collection of high-end sports cars and a few vintage models James Perion had acquired from museums. Joe’s cobalt GT-R was parked at the end of the row near the entrance; the blue ground effects under the body sensed Joe’s sliver and began to glow.
“Looks cl—,” Gantz started to say, but then noticed something moving on the far side of the garage.
He trained his 9mm on the figure who had stepped out from behind an evercrete pillar. It was dressed in a green jumper; a patch on its chest held a nametag, but Gantz couldn’t read it at a distance.
The figure twitched as it stood in the middle of the garage. It looked over its shoulder, down at its work boots, and then shuffled forward. Gantz waited until it came close enough for him to read the nametag.
“Sam,” he whispered, over his shoulder. He looked to Joe. “Your mechanic?”
Joe nodded.
Gantz holstered the 9mm and waved his hand. “Let’s move out.”
They came out from behind the corner as a group and Sam immediately took an interest.
Gantz raised a hand in greeting at the synthetic, but it only growled in response. It took jerky, uncoordinated steps towards them, its eyes jumping from Gantz to the two aggregators. When its arms came up, reaching across the void, the party slowed.
“I think it likes you,” said Cam.
“That’s far enough, Sam,” said Gantz. When the synny kept coming, he added, “Sam, directive. Step aside.”
Sam moaned a response, but it was unintelligible.
Cam tapped Joe with the back of his hand. “Try the thing.”
Joe croaked the first word and then grabbed his throat.
“Oh yeah,” said Cam.
Cyn sighed and stepped forward. “All that lives must die,” she said.
There was something in the way Sam locked onto her that made Gantz reach for his weapon again. He rested his palm on the holster and dug his nail under the clasp.
Cyn stopped ten feet in front of the synny and stood with her legs in a wide stance. “All must walk—”
Sam morphed into a blur of moving limbs. It shot forward with a grab that turned into a slashing elbow, catching Cyn on the side of her face. She stumbled as Sam pounced on her, wrapping one of its synthetic legs around hers. They fell to the ground and rolled towards a pillar.
“Shoot it,” screamed Cam.
Gantz drew and tried to find a clean shot. He circled the wrestling match, but no matter if he stood tall or crouched low, he couldn’t aim fast enough to catch
an open window.
Cyn, for her part, was fighting back, sending a barrage of close quarter combat moves at the synthetic, keeping it from finding a viable lock on any of her limbs. Blood covered her face, loosed by the synny’s first attack and smeared by the ensuing struggle. Gantz debated tossing the weapon to Cam and joining in the fray.
Before he could move, a guttural cry rose from the tangle of human and synthetic. It resonated in Gantz’ chest and echoed through the parking garage.
Cyn’s scream made Cam take a step back. Gantz watched as her body shuddered from head to toe. Although he had never seen it in person, Gantz had heard stories about the famed battle cry of the Ayudante biochip, a sound as common in the MX as that of birds chirping from the fabricated trees on any street in the PC. Gantz imagined the chip reaching deep into Cyn’s body to take control of her augmented frame; the machinery responded to the common language as if meeting an old friend.
A knee came up between Cyn and the synthetic. It squirmed around until Cyn’s foot found a soft spot in the synny’s stomach. With another bowel-rumbling grunt, she kicked Sam off, sending the mechanic rolling along the oil-stained evercrete. It wasted no time regaining its footing to charge forward once more, but by then, Gantz had already fired.
The first bullet caught Sam in the leg, causing its whole body to spin in place. When it hit the ground, Gantz put two more deafening rounds into its torso. Cyn scampered away, and Gantz moved between them. He trained the gun at Sam’s head.
“Say something witty,” said Cam, stepping up beside Gantz.
“Fuck you, Cam,” said Gantz. He pulled the trigger and lit the evercrete with a spray of white sparks.
Black sludge pooled around the synthetic’s head. In the glare of the LED lighting, it almost looked like blood.
“Yeah,” said Cam, kicking the synthetic in the ribs. “Fuck you, Cam!”
Cyn accepted Joe’s outstretched arm and rose to her feet. She leaned against the spoiler of a nearby Countach. “Goddamn synnies are tough. We’re not gonna make it out of here with just our fists.” She paused, examined the torn skin on her knuckles. “Well, you won’t.”
Gantz nodded and holstered the 9mm. “We can make a break for it now or try to raid the armory up on five. Personally, I vote we break.”
The son of Perion pointed to his GT-R.
“Cam?” asked Gantz.
“If my boss taught me anything, it’s to always follow the man with the gun.” He started walking away. “Come on, you lucky bastard. Let’s check out your wheels.”
Gantz turned to Cyn. “Well, what’ll it be, Princess?”
“Next time,” she replied, “pull the trigger before the synny opens my fucking face.” She tried to smooth out her shirt before starting after Joe and Cam.
On the floor, the synthetic twitched as its chest began to sink.
Gantz smiled at the gaping hole in Sam’s forehead.
“Keep ‘em coming, Kessler. I can do this all day.”
He kicked the synny in the head with his boot.
45
“It makes you wonder,” said Cam, popping a Dorito into his mouth. “How are they all being drawn to the same place? There has to be some kind of centralized management system for getting orders to all of the synthetics at once. Maybe the directive spread virally, jumping from one robot to another until they were all infected.”
Gantz was barely listening. He had been standing at the third floor window of the 8910 Park building watching a steady stream of synthetic workers make their way east on Glendale towards the Perion Expressway. They would be joining the already massive contingent of stone-faced synnies occupying and blocking all six lanes of Perion City’s main artery to the outside world. From there, they spread outward to circle the city, their ranks disappearing over the horizon. There had not been enough time to see how far they actually went.
When the synthetics first appeared on the road, Gantz had been able to weave the GT-R’s bulky frame around them. The deeper they got into The Fringe, however, the more packed the streets became. Gantz crushed more than a dozen brown jumpsuits with the front bumper before deciding to turn off the PE and onto Loop 12, inadvertently leading the group past the charred hull of a warehouse, bringing silence to the car.
Turning into 8910 Park was a snap decision brought on by the sudden lack of synthetics, a rare chance to get off the street without being seen or followed. Now Cam, Cyn, and Joe sat around a low table in a break room, eating snacks from a busted vending machine and tending to their injuries.
“Too fast for word of mouth,” said Cyn. “It’s been what, only a few hours since we left the Spire? To reach that many synthetics in that short of time would take something more.” Her voice was slightly muffled by the gauze she held to her cheek.
Beside her, a still-silent Joe played with the contents of a First Aid kit.
“A hundred and fifty thousand synthetics reprogrammed in less than three hours.” Cam crunched a chip. “Maybe it’s not really word of mouth, but more like peer to peer transmission. If a synthetic comes within a certain distance of the infected, it downloads the directives and becomes a mindless drone.”
Outside, two dock workers in brown jumpers walked shoulder to shoulder down the middle of Park Avenue. They were last year’s models, Libras perhaps. At the time, Perion had christened them free thinkers, with three times the autonomy of the previous generation of warehouse worker, able to complete multi-stage assembly jobs without constant oversight. Gantz hadn’t heard how the trial ended up, but the idea of a synthetic being in charge of anything had not sat well with him at the time and seemed even more dangerous now.
The two synnies stopped at the end of the street; their heads turned on immobile shoulders as they scanned the area.
“Or maybe, your synthetics can phone home. Someone with the keys to that kind of system could reprogram an army of synthetics from the comfort of their office in the Spire.” Cam leaned back and threw his feet up on a nearby chair. “What of it, Mr. Perion, recently promoted CEO of Perion Synthetics? Are you aware of any centralized system that can push new configs to your synthetics and if so, will this be a standard feature once you go into production?”
“Leave him alone,” said Cyn.
“If there’s a security failsafe,” said Gantz, “it was never mentioned to me. The non-human population was never really considered a threat by my boss or Perion himself, perhaps because they knew how to shut them down if necessary.”
“Well and good,” said Cam, “but I was asking Mr. Perion.”
Joe shrugged and handed fresh gauze to Cyn.
“A CEO with no comment,” said Cam. “There’s a surprise.”
“Cut him a break, Gray.” Gantz left his post by the window and sat down in the chair opposite Cam. “It’s only his first day.”
Cyn tried to laugh but hissed instead.
“It is interesting to note,” said Cam, “that my LC counterpart has received a majority of the organic damage, even though our missions in Perion City were more or less the same. It makes one wonder if Mr. Perion’s synthetics have been imbued with some good, old-fashioned American sexism. Although I have the CEO in my presence, I feel it would be pointless to even ask him for his opinion.”
“Cut it out, Cam,” said Gantz, folding his arms.
Cam lifted his wrist to show his glowing sliver. “Just keeping a record of everything that happens here. This kind of insight separates us from the likes of Lincoln Continental and The White Line.”
Cyn snorted.
“It’s only a matter of time before Banks Media becomes the dominant feed in the country. And I’m not talking about simple number one; I mean total coverage, a majority share to end all majority shares.”
“Keep dreaming,” said Cyn. “Banks thinks he’s at the center of the world because he happens to live in Los Angeles, a city that hasn’t been relevant in decades. The future is in tech, and the tech is in Umbra.”
“The future is in med
ia saturation, covering all facets, not just the latest Vinestead transgression or breakthrough in fuck-sims. The tech is in Umbra? Ha! Ha, I say! Umbra is a wasteland of tech-worship and depravity, a slag upon which the misguided youth sacrifice their humanity for a chance at symbiosis with a machine world that cares nothing for them.”
Cyn stared back, unblinking.
“I mean, that’s what I’ve heard.”
Gantz watched one of Cyn’s arteries throb in her slender neck. It beat a rapid tempo before disappearing beneath her skin.
“Don’t hate,” she said through a thin smile.
Cam fished another chip out of his bag. “The future is in tech and the tech is in you, right?”
“James Perion said he was the future too,” said Gantz.
The aggregators stared at each other until Cam winked and Cyn rolled her eyes.
Joe stood up and made for the door. When Gantz asked him where he was going, he rasped the word piss in return.
“I think you hurt the prince’s feelings,” said Cam.
“No time to worry about that now,” said Gantz. “We need to focus on getting out of the city. If the road is blocked from here to the PNR, then we’re going to have a tough time even under the cover of night.” He looked at the windows; the tint made the hour seem later.
“I thought Kessler said there was another way out,” said Cam. “Like a back door to the city?”
“Yeah, but it involves a route through the mountains, and those tunnels are only opened in an emergency. I doubt the gates will be up.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t be running.” Cyn flexed her arm and admired the bulging muscles. She looked to Gantz. “I’ll be more than happy to get out of this shit-hole, and Cam probably has some ambulances to chase back home, but if Joe is the new CEO, why does he have to run? Why are you trying to get him out of the city?”
Cam sat up and pointed a finger at Cyn. “Good call,” he said. The finger swung around to Gantz. “Plus, you left Gil in the Spire this morning like it was nothing. And he didn’t seem eager to come with you anyway. The way you talked him up the other night, I thought you were good friends.”
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