Social Faith

by Damien Boyes

  FIS thinks, based on the positioning of the canisters, the doors were meant to stay shut. That it was an accident Galvan nearly died, but it also meant the cleansing wasn’t perfect, some of the contents escaped incineration, enough to figure out what was inside.

  It took the forensic techs and their molecular sniffers some time, but they eventually found traces of organic precursors, uncovered the fragmented remains of what looked to be bio-printing equipment and a portion of a cylindrical medpod. Their assessment was it had contained a small-scale scaflab—a mobile facility to create off-the-books bioSkyns.

  Someone had been inside when the container ignited, a Reszo, our third cypher, charred beyond recognition. Even with two sniffers running full out, the FITs will be examining the scene well into the mid-morning.

  We’d restrained the downed cyphers, just to be sure, but it hadn’t mattered. They were hardlocked. No respiration, no heartbeats. They posed no threat. Omondi had already been and carted them back to the station and sent a preliminary report. Too quick to be good news.

  He’d called shortly after and asked about Galvan and neither of us mentioned that first crime scene together, those few weeks that felt like years ago, when we had stood together over another incinerated body and Omondi had complained about the irrelevance of it all. But Galvan hadn’t just lost a few hours of his life, won’t be waking up somewhere in a fresh new skyn.

  He’ll be lucky if he wakes up at all.

  Omondi’s prelims said the downed cypher’s Cortexes had both been destroyed, but not from any external trauma. Unlike organic brains, he’d said, Cortexes were fairly resilient, and wouldn’t be too affected by the kind of concussive blast a grenade would supply, especially one set to low yield.

  The cypher’s Cortexes had been destroyed internally, by small shaped charges housed within their craniums. They’d self-destructed. He warned me not to expect him to find much in their heads, but their DNA put them squarely in line with the other traces we’d found leading back to Xiao.

  So there it is, all this carnage and we’ve only earned another small scrap. A sliver of intelligence to add to a minuscule pile. Nothing that gets us any closer to finding him.

  Xiao. He isn’t your ordinary, corner-store crime-lord. He’s careful. Prepared failsafe after failsafe. Manoeuvred to obscure all activity of his operation from the link. Likely gave orders to completely destroy any physical evidence if in danger of discovery, shatter any memories that could jeopardize the operation. He’s not taking any chances.

  But there’s something else gnawing at me: the cyphers, the way they acted, like they were doing everything they could not to hurt us. Not too bad, anyway.

  They kept us from advancing, but not with lethal force. Once they’d been discovered, if we had just stayed back, if Doyle had been more judicious, if I hadn’t been clever with the grenades—I wonder if anyone would have been hurt at all. Or if the cyphers would have clambered into the container, shut the door behind them, popped their skull charges and let the fire scour away the evidence of their operation.

  I’ll make sure to ask Xiao when I find him, which is now my number one priority. I owe that to Galvan at least. And if I’m lucky, finding Xiao might get me closer to Eka.

  I barely register when the Sküte pulls up in front of my apartment. It kindly encourages me to get the hell out or be slapped with a loitering surcharge and I slide off the hard plastic seat and into the damp morning air. The sun’s only just up. Birds are chirping like crazy from the trees around my building.

  I rub the heels of my palms into my eyes as I shuffle up the walk toward the building entrance, don’t slow down as the doors slide open. I lower my hands, blink the spots away and see Dora, waiting upright and immobile on the lobby couch, her eyes vacant, her bulbous purple cuff supporting her head.

  I walk over to her and touch her shoulder. Her body quivers a moment later as she returns and looks up at me with a sombre smile, the smooth skin at the corners of her eyes narrowing, her bottom lip firm.

  She stands, takes my hand, gives me a brief, soft kiss, then silently leads me upstairs.

  StatUS-ID

  [fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]

  SysDate

  [17:01:58. Sunday, January 19, 2059]

  I get outside the Ministry of Standards and struggle into the way-too-tight coat Inspector Chaddah brought me. The sleeves stop well before my wrists and the buttons won’t close at the front, but it’s better than nothing, if only by a little. The cold has already seeped through the thin fabric and is digging its nails into me.

  I have to find Dora. Before Wiser does. Before Eka’s fragment does.

  Except I have no idea where she is.

  I consider trying back at my apartment, or her’s, but then I think to check my tab. There’s no word from her. Saabir left me a message though. No details, just to get in touch with him.

  I walk down the sidewalk, getting away from Standards, as if they could overhear me if I remained close, and have the IMP ring Saabir back.

  “Why did you not demand counsel immediately?” he asks the moment the connection goes through.

  “I didn’t need you,” I answer. “I have nothing to hide.”

  “Are you certain about that?” he says.

  “I’m not certain about anything. Besides, how’d you know Standards picked me up?”

  “I was contacted by an acquaintance of yours. She informed me as to your situation.”

  Dora. My shoulders sag with relief. She’s okay. Not just okay, but did all the right things. Stayed ahead of the fragment and Wiser and even thought to contact Saabir. She knows what she’s doing. She’s a survivor.

  “Have you talked to her?” I ask.

  He nods on the screen.

  “You know where she is?”

  He wiggles his head, non-committal. “I am afraid I don’t. Even if I did, one can never be certain who may be listening. The Ministry of Human Standards does not always hold attorney-client privilege in the same high regard as I do.” He’s right. Standards or the Service could be listening right now, tapped into my call. “Why don’t you return to my office, and I’ll fill you in.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “Excellent,” he says, but before he cuts the call off, he adds, “If you wouldn’t mind performing me a service, I have run out of my favourite chai. If you could stop into the grocer’s down the street from me and obtain a new tin, I would be in your debt.”

  He wants me to buy him tea? I saw his kitchen. Unless he drank twenty pots in the past few days, he had plenty of tea.

  No, this isn’t about tea. He’s sending me a message.

  “Absolutely,” I tell him. “See you soon.”

  “Good evening, Mr. Gibson,” Saabir says, and the call drops. I hail a Sküte and pull the coat’s purple lapels up around my throat while I wait.

  A pastel pod pulls up the curb in thirty seconds, and less than fifteen minutes later I’m back in the Market. Back where this all started.

  It’s only been four days but it feels like a lifetime. Three lifetimes, depending on how you look at it. My life before the accident. Then Finsbury’s. Then mine.

  I’ve had enough.

  The Sküte rolls up in the slush outside a well-lit grocery store a half-block down from Saabir’s office. Hand-drawn letters on a sandwich board out front advertises a sale on fresh ground veat.

  I squint through the front windows and spot Dora in the cereal aisle, pretending to shop, a half-full basket of random items hanging from the crook of her elbow.

  She sees me come in, glances at the tiny woman’s coat I’m wearing, lays the basket at her feet and rushes over, wraps her arms around my neck and I hug her back. Her body is warm and welcoming and I feel a sense of comfort in her embrace, like I know her, have known her all my life.

  “Where’d you get this thing?” she asks as she steps back out of my embrace, hands still on my tiny coat.

  “Present from my
old boss,” I say with a weak smile.

  Her eyes narrow and she leans back in, her voice a harsh whisper. “Time to go. Standards is after us. The smartest man on the planet wants us dead. There’s nothing more we can do.”

  She’s right. I’ve been denying it all along, and I still don’t know exactly what happened last time to cause all this, but we don’t have any other choice. The best-case scenario for how this ends is with us both sentenced to an eternity in a low-fi stock. The thought of living the rest of my life trapped in one of those rubber bodies sends a shudder of horror through me.

  If it’s not Standards, then it’ll be Elder—or whatever’s inside Elder riding someone else’s stolen skyn. Everything in me wants to stay and fight, but how the hell am I supposed to fight a superintelligence that spreads through skyns like a virus, infecting everything it touches? I saw Wiser’s face. He was scared. Even Inspector Chaddah thinks I should bail.

  If it freaks out the heads of Standards Enforcement and the Psychorithm Squad, what chance will I have against it?

  “Okay,” I say. “Special Agent Wiser can deal with Eka. Let’s get out of here.”

  Dora raises her eyebrows and takes a quick breath, but responds almost immediately. “Thank God,” Dora says, tears forming in her eyes. “I thought you’d never come to your senses. Let’s go. Right now.” She grabs my arm, leads me down the aisle and out the sliding front doors.

  “Hold on,” I say, once we hit the sidewalk. “We need to do this right. Disappearing, really disappearing, that’s not easy.”

  “Yeah, it is,” she says and pats the big bag hanging from her shoulder. “I’ve gotten good at it.”

  “Six months is nothing.” The link’s everywhere. Cameras are everywhere. One frame of our image captured by a passing weather drone and the fragment will find us, then we’re right back where we started. “We need this to be solid. Eka will never give up.”

  “We don’t have time,” she says, looks up and down the street for a Sküte, and not seeing one, opens her tab and hails one.

  “No, we need Saabir. He can make this permanent.”

  “You can call him from the road,” she offers.

  “He’s expecting me,” I say, step up to her and clasp her shoulders. She looks down at my hands, twitches her cheeks. “We have time for a quick chat. Trust me.”

  She inhales. Exhales deeply. Nods.

  “Good,” I say. “He’s just up—” My tab chimes with a noise I’ve never heard it make before. I lift my arm and the screen is black, the regular display gone.

  The word ‘Ankur’ glows in simple white letters across the darkened screen.

  Dora twists her head and reads the name too. Her lips part, start to tremble. “Don’t answer it,” she says.

  I reach up to tap the screen but hesitate. What if it’s the fragment?

  This whole time, Ankur could have been part of its grand plan. Gain my trust by outing itself. Get me close. Then pounce when my guard is down.

  It’d be easier to ignore the call. To forget any of this happened and run away with Dora.

  We’d be safe.

  But Ankur knows. Knows what happened to me. What happened to Connie.

  I can’t walk away. I have to take the risk.

  I tap the screen and Dora drops her head.

  “Mr. Gage.” The voice is young, calm. This is his voice, not an anonymizer.

  “You know what’s after me,” I say.

  “I do,” he responds.

  “What do you want?”

  “To meet. I have an offer to present.” There’s a brief hesitation, then, “I need your help.”

  No, Dora mouths.

  “You want my help?” I ask. Why the hell should I help him? He’s the one who got me into this. Killed me. Killed my wife. Ruined everything I had left. “With what you’ve done to me, how can you even think about asking me for anything. Besides, I’m the one with an vindictive AI after me.”

  “It isn’t artificial, Mr. Gage,” he says. “But I take your meaning. Perhaps, then, we can be of mutual benefit.”

  No, this is a trick. It has to be. He’s playing me somehow. “You’re the reason all this is happening. This all started with you. Why should I believe a word you say?”

  He doesn’t respond for a moment, and I almost think he won’t, but when he does, his voice is sombre. “Because, Mr. Gage, I’m offering you the opportunity to engineer my demise. Your revenge, should you choose to take it. I offer you my life.”

  StatUS-ID

  [a646:d17e:8670:511f::Finsbury/D//GAGE]

  SysDate

  [11:29:51. Monday, April 29, 2058]

  I set my head for three hours sleep and wake to an empty bed, with only the lingering smell of lilac on the sheets to remind me that Dora had been here at all. My Cortex warned me that three hours wasn’t long enough to consolidate the events of the past twenty-four hours into my rithm, but I ignored it. Some of it I could stand to forget.

  I immediately check in on Galvan and the Service AMP tells me his surgery lasted nearly eight hours. They had to amputate his legs, his hands just past the wrists, and temporarily seal the holes in his various organs until patches to replace the damaged tissue can be grown. He’s sedated, and likely will be for a while.

  Since he was injured in the line of duty the Service insurance will cover the cost of printing new legs and hands, but they’ll take months to grow and a few more to reset. Then there’ll be the physical therapy. Painful, tedious work as he retrains his legs to walk, forces brand new hands to pinch and flex. He’ll be out of commission for half a year at least, maybe more. And it’s my fault. I did that to him. Maybe not directly, but I put him in the line of fire.

  Fuck.

  What am I doing? This is not who I am. I’m careful. I follow orders. I’m a good soldier.

  I don’t take liberties with people’s lives.

  I don’t cheat with people’s wives.

  Fuck.

  Dora… This has to end.

  Now, before we let things get too far. We’re both lonely and scared but that’s no excuse. She has a husband, some old guy waiting desperately at home for her while she’s in bed with me, while I’m inside her. Add him to the list of people whose lives I’ve ruined.

  And Connie. She’s only been gone a few weeks and already I’m fucking someone else. I’ve forgotten what she smelled like. All I can smell is lilac. In the bed. On my hands.

  A slick of revulsion creeps down my throat, roils my stomach. I can see her face, the snap of surprise that dissolves into hurt as she realises what I’ve done. Who I’ve become.

  I abandoned us. Abandoned her. Didn’t give her a proper funeral. Didn’t grieve. I just ran away. Threw myself into finding the person that killed her as if that would make everything better.

  It won’t.

  Finding Amit or Eka or whatever he’s calling himself won’t change anything, nothing will. Because after I do find him, what then? What will I have?

  My job?

  Another man’s wife?

  Closure?

  The room is spinning. I feel nauseous, the smell of Dora’s perfume is overwhelming.

  This all has to end, and soon. I can’t live like this much longer.

  One way or another, I need to get to Eka.

  But I can't think about any of that right now, because I have to get into work. With Galvan hurt, we’ll need all hands on deck.

  I crawl out of bed, rip off the sheets, roll them in a ball, toss them in the corner then stumble to the shower and fumble the water on, hot as it will go.

  I wash Dora off me then dry myself off with a still-wet towel. She must have showered before she went home to her husband.

  I pull on my last clean pairs of socks and underwear, rummage on the closet floor for my least dirty shirt, and climb into my one still-presentable suit.

  The Revv dropped during the night, so I fix my cuff to my neck and refresh it. The world snaps into focus and the tension in my head eases.
I throttle it back to realtime, comforted in knowing it’ll be there if I need it.

  On the way out of the bedroom, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror—a tall, lithe skyn wrapped in the clothes of a rumpled man. I need to hold it together, for just a little bit longer.

  Until I’ve done what I need to do.

  ***

  SysDate

  [12:31:51. Monday, April 29, 2058]

  My tab buzzes with Omondi’s final report on the cyphers from the drone yard as I enter the office. I’m scanning the room for an empty desk when it buzzes again. It’s the Inspector.

  I look up to her window and she’s standing in it, arms clasped behind her back. She summons me with a twist of her chin and watches as I climb the stairs to her office. When I enter, she steps across the room and settles in behind her desk, starts talking before the door slides shut behind me.

  Here we go. This is where my career comes to an end, busted for shyfting. I wonder if I’ll just be discharged or if I’ll need a lawyer to fight criminal charges too?

  There are two hard-backed chairs in front of Chaddah’s desk. Omondi’s in one, his eyes sunken and his lanky frame sagged in his seat, but he seems chipper enough. I settle into the chair beside him.

  “Reggie was running me through his report,” Chaddah says, taking a seat facing us. “Since you’re here, you might as well listen and save him from repeating himself.”

  That’s not what I was expecting. I thought that Galvan would have reported me by now. That I’d be coming in to at least a suspension as they investigated.

  He’s probably still sedated, won’t be talking to anyone. I wonder how much longer before all this comes crashing down?

  “Go on,” she says to Omondi.

  He looks at me, then back to the Inspector. “Like I was saying, when we first got the Cortexes back to the lab I thought they’d be a write-off. They were shattered, massive damage, the oProc clusters in pieces. Whoever designed the explosive was very clever. Not only does it cause physical damage, but the explosion itself is preceded by a photonic concussion that erases the data first. Why wipe a drive if you’re just going to blow it, right?”