“Why do you think we created religion in the first place? It’s our nature to reject the idea of a single reality, of an immutable world. We long to be above it, to separate ourselves from this prison. That is why the synth flows, my friend. The code shows us the borders of this world and takes us beyond them. Reality cannot be escaped, but the borders can be transcended.”
Meltdown’s ramblings became more coherent each time Gil accessed them, translating themselves from Margate mush to something approaching insightful. For the first time in his life, Gil understood what the rusher had been trying to tell him all those years ago. And yet, something was lost in the translation, some bit of humanity or perspective that had made the insight feel more real. Storing the accumulated wisdom of Patrick Kumanov as binary data had normalized the content, made it more instruction manual than aphorism.
Gil closed the Margate file and returned his attention to the safe house. He reached out with his enhanced senses, took inventory of each room, the configuration of the furniture, the locations of stashed weapons, the various exits, the explosives meant to bring the house to the ground—the data streamed faster than he could consciously handle, but his processor ate it up, giving him complete awareness of the building.
Footsteps in the mud. Rubber soles on the evercrete.
The vibrations moved through the safe house, as loud as gunshots in Gil’s ears. He imagined the back porch and the reinforced, sliding door. The intruders were vague blobs in his mind, but where they interacted with the house, Gil saw feet and gloved hands. One of them placed something on the wall along the top of the back door. Fingers jabbed like jackhammers until an electronic beep pierced the relative silence.
Gil had Roberta slung over his shoulder and was halfway down the escape tunnel when the first explosion hit. It was followed by smaller reports—the caustic pop of a flash-bang, the soft hissing of tear gas. It would have been disorienting had there been any humans in the living room.
“You think they want me or you?” asked Gil.
Roberta said nothing. A line of oil descended her arm; drops fell from her outstretched fingers.
Gil didn’t even look back. The hatch over the tunnel was well-disguised, and he had sealed it from the inside with a steel slab half a dozen men couldn’t lift. Even if the surprise guests managed to get through the barricade, they would be buried alive when they triggered the explosives Gil had placed at the midpoint of the tunnel.
“That’s why you ring the doorbell first,” said Gil.
The tunnel opened into the storeroom of an abandoned bakery two streets over from the safe house. Gil broke the padlock on the other side of the hatch with a single punch. The opening was too small to carry Roberta on his shoulder, so he held her by the hand and dragged her up the ladder.
Once out of the hatch and crouching on the floor, Gil reached out beyond the walls of the store room and heard people on the sidewalk talking and laughing, filling the night with noise pollution. Putting Roberta on his shoulder, he moved to the door and gave the knob half a turn.
The veneered door splintered in front of him as automatic fire tore jagged lines across its face. Gil ducked, putting a dent in the wood floor as his knee came down hard.
“Fuck,” he said.
They knew about the safe house. They knew about the tunnel.
He squeezed Roberta’s legs in his right arm and thought of Jackie. How much did they know about his girls?
Gil loaded the Margate file and searched for some words of advice from Meltdown. Maybe somewhere in that synth-saturated mind of his was some Zen bullshit that might get Gil from the store room to the Ford Focus parked out back in one piece.
“We’re confined by the idea of a path,” said Meltdown, his cadence shaky from the Smashed Peas. “Oh, the path is blocked, the path is open, the path must be taken. We forget to ask the question what path? What is this unstoppable river of causality you speak of?” He sat up and leaned over the low coffee table. “Fuck the path, my friend. You are above it. You are beyond it.”
Gil took inventory.
Kneeling had been automatic, a way to keep the bullets from poking holes in his body the way Gantz had poked holes in Roberta. Judging by the spray along the wall, there were at most two or three shooters. Though they were putting out a lot of bullets, they didn’t seem to be aiming.
It would all depend on how fast Gil could move from the store room, across the prep area, to the back door. He ran the calculations in his head, but the numbers appeared jumbled. They fell apart and reformed as words.
Fuck the path.
Gil tightened his grip on Roberta and tensed the pistons in his legs.
Somewhere above the whizzing of bullets, he heard a magazine drop to the floor.
The door was little more than splinters; it gave way easily as Gil pushed through it. He glanced at the front of the store as he pumped his legs, saw four figures, two on each side of the entrance. Barrel flashes lit three of their faces while the fourth struggled to get a new mag inserted. Gil scooped up an empty crate and whipped it towards the front of the store. It caught one of the shooters in the shoulder, altering their aim.
Gil slammed into the wall opposite the store room and then made a break for the back door. Bullets pinged off the sheetrock and scraped at the synthetic flesh of his arms. A few lodged themselves in his back and he wondered how many were hitting Roberta. He hadn’t had time to secure the inner shield over her heart before carrying her into the tunnel. If a bullet made it through…
A sharp wind cut across Gil’s face as he stumbled into the parking lot behind the bakery. He grabbed the hidden key from the front wheel well of the Ford Focus and managed to get the door unlocked and Roberta in the back seat before the gunmen caught up. He climbed behind the wheel and threw the car into reverse. Bullets tapped out a proximity warning on the hood as he pulled away from the building.
When the rear bumper tapped a chain-link fence, he shifted into drive and peeled out.
Late night revelers had filled the Las Palmas parking lot with their bouncing cars; they honked at the POS Ford tearing through their ranks. Gil turned out of the shopping center onto Chase Avenue and smirked at the street sign as it passed by.
He only made it a couple of miles from the bakery before three pairs of headlights began swerving in the rearview mirror. Gil cut across unfamiliar side streets in an attempt to lose them, always pushing towards the highway he knew to be somewhere westward. He ran a red light at El Cajon Boulevard and careened through the parking lot of a twenty-four hour pharmacy. The car rattled as the tires crossed two sets of railroad tracks. Finally, the highway appeared. He drove alongside the roadside barrier until he could get on.
When the headlights appeared again, Gil made a U-turn at an emergency crossover. As he passed his pursuers, bullets shattered the rear window. Gil looked back to see Roberta covered in shards of glass.
Fucking Perion. Did you send these men, Joe?
Gil pushed the beater up to ninety miles per hour. He had no idea where he was going, so he tried to make his getaway as random as possible. Every time an exit for another highway or bypass came up, he took it, guiding the car ever southward. Numbers of highways he had never driven flew past: the 8, the 125, the 54. Every time he took an exit, the rearview mirror cleared, only to be filled again a minute or two later.
The police took an interest as Gil turned onto the 805. Their flashing lights replaced the light blue HIDs. As they got closer, Gil counted two motorcycles and one SUV.
Gil thought about how he might explain his synthetic body to law enforcement. He couldn’t even talk to Benny Coker about it, couldn’t tell his former boss he was still alive and immortal and indentured to Calle Cinco’s Kaili Zabora. Would the cops believe his story? Or would they consider him a wayward product built by the man who donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the state police every year?
In the distance, the garish lights of the United States gave way to the forced darkness of
the MX. Traffic on the highway thinned as cars turned away from the border. Gil pressed the accelerator to the floor and pushed the engine to its limit. In the mirror, the cops kept pace.
Gil glanced over his shoulder at Roberta sprawled out in the back seat.
“Sorry, baby. This is the only way.”
Spotlights previously trained at the glide path to the border sprung up and blinded Gil. Apertures in his eyes closed and opened; filters slipped into place to deal with the glare. Sirens ramped up as shadows moved beyond the lights.
Doubt flickered across a logic gate.
It was one thing to run from the boys in blue, but to run into the waiting arms of MX soldados?
Gil ducked behind the steering wheel as large-caliber gunfire tore through the hood. The windshield cracked in jagged cuts until it was opaque. At the last second, Gil leaned his head out of the window to make sure the car was pointed between the booths.
A bullet caught him in the cheek, forcing his head backwards into the door frame. He felt the steering wheel slip from his hands as the car drifted to the right. The front passenger tire caught a barrier just beyond the booth, pulling the car into a retaining wall before bouncing it in the other direction.
Gil tried to avoid an evercrete barrier, but the Ford struck it hard on the left side, launching him into the air over the line of cars waiting to enter the United States.
Reality shifted as the car rotated. Gil saw the frightened faces of drivers as he sailed over them, close enough to reach out and drag his fingers over the tops of their cars.
He could almost touch…
Auxiliary lights on a pickup truck smashed into Gil’s shoulder; his outstretched arm wedged between them even as the Ford continued its arc. There was a sharp tug at his waistline, and then Gil was falling into the pickup’s bed, landing amongst various gardening supplies. A loud crash followed, punctuated by a shrill scream.
Roberta. His heart skipped a beat.
Jackie. It froze completely.
Gil tried to stand, but upon looking down, he found he longer possessed legs or even most of his torso. The damage feedback hit him all at once, drowning out the commotion around him. He wasn’t even aware of the MoA infantry surrounding the truck, didn’t notice the mustachioed soldado climbing into the bed.
The cries of severed wires, of tendrils with no sensors, were deafening.
Above them, very distant and echoing, was a voice.
It took Gil a moment to realize it was coming from the soldado.
“¿Qué chingado eres?”
The barrel of his machine gun pressed into Gil’s chest.
“¿Qué eres?!”
The soldado reached down and grabbed Gil’s torn collar.
Spitting synthetic blood, Gil managed to croak, “What?”
The man’s face came closer.
In a thick MX accent, he asked, “WHAT… ARE… YOU?”
CODA FIVE
CYNTHIA MESQUINA
March 2016
The dealer’s name was Huy.
He had a funny face and a funnier way of talking, but when the lights were down and the synth was flowing through Cyn’s veins, he was so much more than an ill-fitting Italian suit hanging on a coat rack. There was tenderness in his augmented arms; they hummed with the same power as Cyn’s, born from the same factory on the mainland.
Cyn had come to the other side of the world to escape the scene for a while, but landing in the port city of Da Nang had shown her there was no getting away from the tech. She had met Huy her second week in-country, and it had been his idea to come to the floating sanctuary of Hon Toan, some fifteen miles off the southernmost tip of Vietnam. The remoteness of the islet, the clear air lacking the stench of technology, had allowed Cyn to breathe for the first time in months.
The hour was somewhere in that indeterminate period between night and morning. Moonlight shone in through the slats in the window facing the beach. Cyn was wide awake, staring at the ancient fan in the ceiling as it spun its blades of petrified palms in lazy circles. Beside her, Huy lay on his stomach, the thin sheets pushed down to his lower back, revealing the cubist tattoos running up both sides of his spine. His rear ribs poked through the skin, highlighting thin lines of black fractures which broke off in random, almost fractal-like patterns. Cyn reached out and dragged a fingernail over one of the light blue cubes, as if it were some stray acrylic to be scraped off.
“Sleep, girl,” said Huy. He lifted his head from the pillow and turned it to face Cyn. The veins on his face glowed a light blue.
“Can’t.” Cyn pulled the sheet to her chest.
“Bad dreams?”
“No,” she lied.
“Sweet dreams?” Huy opened his eyes.
“What?” asked Cyn.
“Sweet dreams,” said Huy, reaching across Cyn’s stomach. He pushed his body against hers. “About candy.”
Not candy. Candice.
Cyn took a breath. It caught in her nose; she put a hand up to cover the noise.
Huy propped himself up on his elbows, his hair a tousled mess and his eyes glimmering. The augments in his irises gave off a blue aura. He had perfect night vision, so if there were any tears collecting in Cyn’s eyes, he would surely see them.
“Tell Huy,” he said.
Easier said than done.
She had never spoken to anyone about her experiences in Perion City. Her feed in the Lincoln Continental archive stood on its own. Even Lincoln, with his constant questions and unwavering curiosity, had simply let her go, had driven her to the airport under the cover of night and put her on his private jet. She changed planes in Vancouver, travelling first class on a commercial flight for the trans-Pacific part of her trip. The last few legs through Tokyo and Shanghai were less glamorous, but Cyn took comfort in the knowledge she was putting more miles between herself and the PC.
“You have secrets. Tell Huy.”
The waves crashed on the beach, ceaseless and powerful.
Cyn closed her eyes. The files were opening against her will, the memories pouring out, rushing up the beach of her conscious mind to obliterate whatever temporary structures she had constructed there, whatever life she thought she had built as refuge from a pain that lingered on. Forgetting those events had been the only way to stem the tide, to keep away from the current running within the ocean, a thread of tiny fists, sparkling eyes, and a smile so perfect it could have been engineered in a lab.
Huy exhaled; his breath crossed her cheek.
“They thought I left,” she said, grabbing Huy’s hand and holding it to her chest. “They told me to go, but I went down instead, down to where I first met Candice’s brothers and sisters. No one was guarding them. The racks stretched on and on. Too long. Too many of them. That’s when I knew. Candice wasn’t a prototype. They were making thousands.”
Huy slipped his hand from hers and stroked her hair. He wiped away a tear from her cheek.
“I burned them. I burned them all. I stood there and made sure nothing was left. No one tried to stop me. No one was waiting when I tried to leave. They had to have known, but they let me do it. They let me kill them all.”
“You see them?” asked Huy.
“I hear them,” said Cyn. “Crying. So loud. All those screaming voices.”
“Huy help you forget.”
“There’s not enough synth in the world.”
Huy traced a line down Cyn’s cheek to her neck, to her chest. He drew the sheet back and ran his palm over her breast.
“More to Huy than synth.”
“Yeah?” asked Cyn. “You got something that will burn out every memory I have of that place? Because that’s what I want. To forget.”
“Not with Ayudante,” he replied, touching her forehead lightly. “Not with equipment here. We go to mainland.”
Back to the flashy lights and electronic pulse, back to the data seeping from every exposed jackport like running faucets emptying into the open sewers the people called streets. Just th
inking about the muck collecting on her boots, the brown, pungent liquid worming its way through the leather, into her socks, around her toes, made a shiver go up Cyn’s spine. Somewhere deep down she knew she would one day have to plunge headfirst back into the pool, but couldn’t that day be put off for another sunset, for another synth-filled week of ignorant bliss, where memories stayed hidden in the shadows and the only feelings to contend with were the ones rising from the valley of her legs?
“Are you sure you could do it?”
“Nothing for sure,” said Huy. He slipped off the bed and walked to the door, shadows dancing on his enhanced muscles. “Huy get you water.”
His footsteps grew distant in the short hallway.
The horizon outside was still dark; the first inklings of sunrise were still a few hours off. The wood floors groaned beneath Cyn’s feet as she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. Each footstep echoed in the small cabana, as did the squeak of the patio doors when she opened them. Cyn put her arms on the railing and looked out over a dark blue ocean streaked with shimmering white. The sea breeze wrapped around her body, calling forth the goose bumps even as her augments began to warm. Something was in the air, something familiar.
Cyn scanned the horizon: the black fins racing through the water, grains of sand sparkling amongst the shells on the beach, and the trees reaching for the ocean but not daring to get too close. Finally, looking off to the right to the lone pier where the weekly supply ship docked, she saw a shadow exiting a small boat. The hulking silhouette stood on the pier talking to someone before finally turning its eyes up the coastline to Cyn’s cabana. The way it lumbered up the beach, the way the pimp cane swung forward as if to ward off any attackers, told Cyn it could only be one person.
She grabbed a robe from the chair by the bed and stepped barefoot onto the cool sand. The slope of the beach carried her down to the water where she waited patiently.
Perion Synthetics Page 44