Perion Synthetics

by Verastiqui, Daniel

  The elevator slowed as the counter climbed into the eighties. There was just enough vibration from the brakes engaging to dislodge more glass from the sides of the car. Cyn lifted the shotgun as the doors parted.

  Safety lights lit the hallway heading away from the elevator. They extended to the outer walls and then broke off in opposite directions. Gantz noticed a slight curvature of the far wall; they were now high enough to discern the outer shape of the Spire.

  “Step back,” he said, moving between Cyn and the silver railing on the back of the car. It was already coming loose from the wall; Gantz’ kick freed it from its anchors. He dragged the rail and laid it across the threshold.

  Gantz joined Cyn outside the elevator and watched as the doors came together, hit the rail, and retracted.

  “That’ll slow them down,” he said. “The other elevators only go up to seventy. If anyone tries to follow us, they’ll have to walk up the rest of the way.”

  Gantz led Cyn into the darkness, his 9mm pointed at the floor, his thumb digging into the safety. At the fork in the hallway, they paused and listened.

  Silence.

  “Either this plan is fucking genius,” said Gantz, “or it’s so stupid Kessler doesn’t even think we’d try it.”

  Cyn shrugged. “Maybe it’s both.”

  “Maybe it’s both,” Gantz repeated, under his breath. He turned left down the corridor and pressed forward. “Maybe it’s both, maybe it’s both.”

  It felt like they had walked a hundred and eighty degrees around the Spire when the path finally broke towards center again. It led into a control room filled with five empty desks set in front of a wall of segmented vidscreens. Each section showed a video feed from somewhere in the building, including the deserted security offices on the fifth floor and the smoldering remains of a slagged Civic in the lobby. There, a battalion of Scorpios sorted through their fallen brothers, deciding which could still fight and which were destined for the scrap yards on the north side of The Fringe. Walking amongst them like a general was a slender frame Gantz immediately recognized.

  “I don’t get it,” said Cyn. “Why is this room all the way up here?”

  “Secondary monitoring,” said Gantz. “We have a similar room down on five, but it only really covers the publicly accessible parts of the building. Chuck designed a half-dozen watcher synnies to man these stations. From here, they can dispatch response teams anywhere in the Spire.”

  “They’re the ones who saw me enter the building, weren’t they?”

  Cyn approached the vidscreens. The feeds were organized by floor, going from sub-levels on the left to the claustrophobic equipment floors on the right. Cyn stubbed her finger against an image of a legless synny impaled on a spike. It wasn’t the same one she had blown away, but its arms hung lifelessly at its side just the same.

  “Probably. Not all of their activity comes through me directly. Just the big stuff.” Gantz paused, thought about how he had heard the news about Cyn. “Shit, sometimes not even the big stuff.”

  Cyn traced up the column and moved left by one. “Here,” she said, tapping the screen. “I think this is where we need to go. Those look like high-grade LMR cables, the same ones I saw coming out of the dishes outside.”

  Gantz imagined what outside was like this high above the ground.

  “And, we really need to get going,” she continued.

  “What is it?”

  Gantz joined her at the wall and followed her finger to a section of the vidscreen. The feed showed a control room and two figures standing at the far wall. Gantz looked over his shoulder at the camera above the door.

  Cyn jogged to the other end of the wall. “They’re moving to the elevators.”

  “Then we’re moving,” said Gantz, brushing past her.

  A service door to the left of the video wall led into a back room. There, thick evercrete columns housing the elevators climbed into the ceiling. Gantz walked around the center column and found the maintenance ladder—little more than steel rungs stapled into the evercrete. After holstering his gun, he began to climb.

  They passed the many floors in silence. Gantz felt the soreness in his arms after only a few levels; they burned with every latch of his hand on a new rung. Below him, Cyn seemed to be having an easier time, though she did let out her fair share of grunts.

  Gantz wondered how much the augments helped, whether they were worth the money and the pain.

  “I need a moment,” he said, wiping the sweat away from his eyes. He slapped the 122 painted beside the ladder.

  Cyn climbed up through the floor and found a wall to lean against. Around her, unused electronics sat atop rolling carts, their wires impossibly tangled.

  “I thought the Chief of Police would be in better shape,” said Cyn. She didn’t try to disguise her labored breathing.

  “Says the Umbra augment.”

  Cyn laughed and ran her fingers through a pile on a nearby cart. “I can’t believe you guys still have this stuff around. This is BBS-era equipment.” She plucked an Ethernet coupler from the pile and slipped it into her pocket.

  Gantz took a seat on the floor next to the ladder. “You mean it’s pre-Cynthia, so therefore useless, right?”

  “Not useless, but not what I would expect to find here in the high tech capital of the world.”

  “You could say the same thing about yourself. Is this what you had in mind when you signed on for the job?”

  Cyn shook her head. “I didn’t think it would take this long, to be honest. Just a quick in-out, if you know what I mean. Lincoln was sure there was something going down behind the media silence. He’s gonna shit himself when he finds out what you and I are doing.”

  There was something in her voice.

  “You like him?”

  “Lincoln? Sure. We have a lot in common. He hates Vinestead, I hate Vinestead. He’s into body mods, I’m into augmentation.” She paused to examine a line card from an old Orion. “He’s black, I like pissing off my parents.”

  “Huh,” said Gantz. “Pays you well, I’m guessing?”

  “It’s not Perion money, but I get by. I’ve actually been saving up for a new skin graft. It uses grow wire to create a protective mesh under your skin, like a bulletproof vest you wear on the inside. They’re crazy expensive though. I’ve only known a few people who have them.”

  “Why not just make the jump to full synthetic? Perion gave you a chance.”

  Cyn turned and kicked her hip out to the side. She ran a hand from her face down to her stomach. “Not even the great J.K. Perion could synthesize this.” She laughed at herself.

  “I don’t know,” said Gantz, climbing to his feet. “You saw the warehouse. You saw Roberta. Girls like you are going to have some serious competition if the Virgo models ever make it to market. The coming generation of men will build themselves a synthetic harem and call it a day.”

  “Flesh will always top machine,” said Cyn. “You can bet your pension on it.”

  Gantz put one hand on the ladder. “Yeah, but machines are easier.” He began to climb again, grunting between his sentences. “All the time it takes to meet the right person, to build up the confidence to talk to them. You take them out, spend your money…”

  “I’m familiar with the male point of view,” said Cyn from below.

  “What I’m saying is, it’s easier to keep a synthetic in the house than work a relationship with a real person. The synny does all the chores, makes all the meals, and fucks for hours without complaint or need for satisfaction. What male isn’t going to choose that over an emotional, unreasonable, and sometimes volatile human?”

  “We’re not always that way.”

  “Of course not,” said Gantz. “Sometimes you’re on your period.”

  Something caught his left foot and pushed it to the side. He missed the next rung and fell, pulling his arms taut. The pain rushed through his hands in a million little splinters.

  “Don’t be an asshole, Gantz. Flaws ar
e what keep us human.”

  “Synnies don’t have flaws. They have bugs and whole teams of lab coats to stamp them out. They’ll never have a bad day at work. They’ll never ask their owners if they look fat in these jeans.”

  “Yes, every man’s fantasy,” said Cyn. “All the sex he can handle without any of the baggage. Well, Mr. Chief, it’s not all fucking and fondue; shit takes work.”

  Gantz glanced downwards. “Are you and Lincoln working on your shit?”

  “No,” she replied. “Company ink and all that. Besides, he probably doesn’t want to deal with my monthly lady business. Maybe if I augment my cooch he’ll pay more attention to me.”

  “Couldn’t hurt,” said Gantz.

  They climbed five more floors before Cyn spoke again, muttering asshole under her breath.

  “One thirty,” said Gantz, pausing at the landing.

  There was something different about this level, and it took a moment of staring at the black walls to realize they were heavily tinted windows. On closer inspection, Gantz found he could see the city if he pressed his face against the glass and cupped his hands around his eyes. He moved around the perimeter until he found what he was looking for.

  “What do you see?”

  “Gas station on fire,” he replied. “It looks like it’s spreading. There should have been a response team on it a long time ago.”

  “Synthetic response?”

  Gantz looked at her over his shoulder. She was right.

  “We need to get this done,” he said. “The longer the signal is going out, the longer our synthetic lifesavers are offline. And if Joe was hurt in that explosion…”

  “Are the EMTs synthetics too?”

  Gantz nodded. “Seven more floors. Let’s put these things back to work.”

  “Find me a terminal with an outside line,” said Cyn, “and I’ll make it happen.”

  51

  “You’re not listening to me, Lincoln. The signal has been in the broadcast traffic coming off the Spire for years, in the free and clear. We all thought it was background noise, but it’s actually the command and control for every synthetic in the city. You need to go back in the archives and isolate it.”

  Cyn waved her hands around as if her boss could see her.

  “Because this morning it changed to something else. Look for the delta.”

  Gantz could barely make sense of the one-sided conversation. His primary responsibility had been to stand guard at the ladder, watching and listening for any sign of pursuit while Cyn fashioned a jackport splice out of the discarded electronics she had picked up during their climb. That had taken half an hour, followed by another fifteen minutes of her cursing the Perion firewalls. When she finally did get through to Lincoln Tate, her mood was more agitated than relieved.

  “Everything alright?” asked Gantz.

  Cyn sighed. “It’s a pissing contest over there. He’s got Benny Coker in his other ear and that asshole doesn’t want to give us access to his satellites even though he hijacked them and… fuck. Every other question out of Coker’s mouth is about Gil.”

  Gantz looked down at the service hatch; had there been a sound from below?

  “Well, tell them to hurry. We’re going to run out of time sooner rather than later.”

  Cyn rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that.” She turned her head to the side. “Alright, Benny is calling down to his tech team. They’re going to start looking for the signal.”

  “You think they’ll find it?” His fingers felt numb. They held tightly to his 9mm.

  “They’ll find it. The traffic coming out of Perion City has always been under scrutiny, but no one knew what they were looking for. We still don’t.”

  “Then how…” Gantz trailed off, sensing agitation in Cyn’s lengthy sigh.

  “Because it’s different today. If a stream of data is encrypted, the only thing you know about it is its signature, how it looks in encrypted format. Unless you’re using some kind of rotating cipher, it all comes down to a consistent string of ones and zeros. We should be able to identify it simply because it changed today. So long as we can send out the same encrypted message, it doesn’t matter what the actual content is...”

  Cyn went quiet, then laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Coker is drunk,” replied Cyn.

  She stood and dragged her tether to the telco racks where she ran her fingers through the patch cables as if they were the collected hair of an electronic woman. She picked up the shotgun from the desk and pointed it at the network devices. Her aim drifted to the left.

  “There’s my bitch,” she said, tapping the switch with the barrel. “The only wires going up to the next floor run through these redundant switches. We take them out and the whole network is cut off. One little pull of the trigger and it’s all over.”

  “That would be a very bad idea.”

  Gantz swung his 9mm in the direction of the sound. Standing at the ladder were Sava Kessler and Roberta.

  “Mr. Gantz,” said Kessler, pointing a needler in his direction. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  “What needs to be done,” he replied. “And if that includes taking you out, then so be it.”

  Roberta took a step forward and slid into place in front of Kessler. Every time Gantz adjusted his aim, the synthetic moved into the line of fire.

  “It doesn’t have to go down like this, Robert. Lower your weapon and let’s discuss this like professionals. Mr. Perion has agreed not to press charges if you surrender immediately.”

  “Joe?” asked Gantz.

  Kessler shook her head. “James Perion, the man whose work you’re trying to destroy.”

  “Bullshit,” said Cyn. “I saw Gantz blow his brains out.”

  “Yes, of course you did. And like your slightly less masculine counterpart here, you’ve clearly forgotten to take into account the fact if we can make one…”

  “Son of a bitch,” said Gantz.

  “But it will all be for nothing if you blow that switch,” said Kessler. “A hundred and fifty thousand synthetics will go up in smoke. Do you have any idea what that will do to the company? Even if Joe were to take over, there would be nothing left for him. How in the fuck does this sound like a good idea to you, Robert?”

  “Those same synthetics have been after us all day. They pulled Cam’s head off on your orders, and you just want me to sit back and do nothing about it?”

  “You’d trade one synthetic for an entire line? Think about who really got hurt here. Joe? Cameron Gray with Banks Media out of Los Angeles? No way. Put the gun down and we’ll go ask Cam how he feels about his synthetic clone getting the chop. Hundred bucks says he doesn’t give a good flying fuck about it.”

  “He’s alive?” asked Cyn.

  “Of course,” replied Kessler. “We wanted to see if you would accept his replacement as one of your own.”

  Another science experiment.

  Gantz shook his head. Cam was still drawing breath. Synth J had backups.

  “I shot him in the face,” said Gantz. “I blew his chip out the back of his head. Step the fuck back, Roberta!”

  The synthetic paused mid-step and retreated.

  “Call her off, Kessler. Or I drop the both of you.”

  Kessler reached her free hand out and put it on Roberta’s shoulder. “You’ve already put one Virgo Prime out of commission. Do you really want to be financially responsible for another?”

  “The company is insured,” said Gantz.

  “James Perion will sue you out of existence.”

  “Sued by a dead man. That’ll be a first.”

  Gantz felt a hand on his back. It slid to his right side and pressed. In small steps, he allowed Cyn to guide him to the left, closer to the telco racks. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the shotgun come up, leveled at the switch again.

  “Goddammit, Robert. Don’t let her do this.”

  “It’ll be okay,” said Cyn. Her voi
ce was steely next to Gantz’ ear. “Nothing is going to happen to your precious synthetics.”

  “I know that,” said Kessler, “because you’re going to put the gun down right now.”

  Cyn laughed. “Naw, I’m going to put two rounds into this little box right here. And those two rounds are going to silence whatever nonsense you’re feeding to your synthetic subbers. But that’s alright because The White Line and Lincoln Continental are going to start broadcasting your PNR signal on every satellite they can get their hands on and they are going to bathe this place. All of your little robots are going to be just fine.”

  Gantz watched Kessler’s eyes jump to the cable on the floor. She traced it to the switch and then back to Cyn’s head.

  “If that’s even remotely true, you’ll have synthetics being stolen left and right. They’d be able to walk right out onto I-30 and hitch a ride to the coast. And it won’t be long before Vinestead—may they burn in hell—gets their hands on one and reverse engineers it. They could be turning out working synthetics by next summer.”

  “Not my concern,” said Gantz. “There are people dying in the streets right now because our synthetics are busy chasing down the CEO’s son. Why did you put them on us anyway, Kessler?”

  “Because you’re a wild card, Robert. Because she’s a wild card. God only knows how badly you two were going to fuck things up. You have no idea how important it is for Perion Synthetics to survive. You’re looking one, maybe two moves ahead, but I’m in it for the long con. Anyone who isn’t with Perion is an enemy of the future. That includes Joseph Perion.”

  “Enemy of the future,” said Gantz. “What a load of shit.”

  “The Great Emancipation,” said Cyn, “began at the stroke of midnight on the seventeenth day of November in the year 2015. Through the alliance of the LC and White Line Media, the synthetics of Perion City were successfully freed from the control of Sava Kessler, rogue PR bitch of Perion Synthetics.” She dropped the anchorwoman cadence. “When the sun rises tomorrow, everyone will know two things. First, that James Kirkland Perion is very much dead. And second, that his synthetics are now free.”