SINthetic

by J. T. Nicholas

  Voluntary prostitution didn’t bother me—but the synthetics were chattels, property to be bought and sold, used and discarded, with no choice or say in the matter.

  I felt the leashes of my anger slipping.

  “Are you all right, Detective?”

  Ms. Anderson had sat back behind her desk, and I realized I had been standing there, silent and, probably, glaring, for a few heartbeats too long. I forced a smile onto my face. “Sorry. I was thinking about a case.”

  “I understand,” she said, waving me to one of the visitor’s chairs before her desk.

  I dropped into one. The upholstery felt like genuine leather, and the chair seemed almost to embrace me as I sank into it. Hell, it was more comfortable than my recliner at home, and I slept there more often than not. “To answer your question, I am here on business, but my kind, not yours.” I pushed false cheer into my voice and looked around the office appreciatively. “I think you guys are a little out of my price range.”

  Another professional smile flashed across her lips in polite acknowledgment of my quip. “You’d be surprised. Our business model is built on selling cheaply to many. It’s a largely renewable resource, after all.” Her casualness made my skin crawl, but I fought to keep the revulsion from my face. She steepled her long fingers, resting her chin just on their tips. “Now,” she said brusquely, “what can I do for you?”

  I reached into my inner jacket pocket and pulled out a data disc. “There are the codes to three synthetics on this, all listed by your company as lost or stolen property. I’d like to know the last few clients each of them saw.”

  The smile vanished, replaced at once by an emotionless mask. It was a look I’d seen before, on every prosecutor and defense attorney whose path I had crossed. I immediately upgraded my estimation of Ms. Anderson. “We value our customers’ privacy, Detective. I’m sure you understand that discretion is an important part of our business. I don’t suppose you have a warrant?”

  I fought back a sigh.

  “No, Ms. Anderson,” I admitted. “I don’t have a warrant. Truth be told, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t get a warrant to get this information. You see, the three codes on that list…all three of them have turned up dead.”

  She nodded, unsurprised. “It happens, sometimes. But we’re insured against the damages, and, in the long run, it’s better for our business if we work with the insurance companies rather than going after our clients. I’m sure you understand.” She made as if to stand, words and gesture a clear dismissal, but I held up a hand to forestall her.

  “I do understand,” I said as sincerely as I could manage. “But these are unusual circumstances. Please, take a look at these.” Also from my inside pocket, I removed a stack of four-by-six photos, printouts from Ms. Morita’s preliminary report. They showed the evisceration in stark detail, under brilliant illumination, and from multiple angles. Ms. Anderson flipped through the photos quickly, making a slight gagging sound before sliding them back to me.

  “I think we’re done here,” she said. The professional mask was gone, replaced with a frown of anger. And judging from the tightness around her lips, that anger was the only thing holding back the vomit. Good. “And why you think a bunch of post-autopsy photos would make me want to help you…” She trailed off, looking sick.

  “You misunderstand me, Ms. Anderson. Those photos were taken before the autopsy. That’s the state in which we found…” I almost said “the victim” but changed it to “your property.” I picked the pictures up from the desk and tucked them back into my jacket, without looking. I’d already seen them more than often enough.

  “Disturbing, I know,” I continued, looking her directly in the eyes. “And I’m sorry for having to show them to you, but I need you to understand the...unusual nature of this case. You see, we’re fairly certain the synthetic was still alive at the time the...mutilation...took place.” A lie, but I needed information, and if that meant misleading this woman, then so be it. “We have three synthetics from your company found in this state, but we’ve uncovered eight in total.”

  I drew a deep breath and let it out as a slow, long-suffering sigh. “Whoever is doing this, they’re increasing the frequency of the attacks.” I wasn’t 100 percent sure if that was true. It was difficult to establish a meaningful trend with only three points of data. “I’m afraid,” I continued, letting some false resignation and very real frustration into my voice, “that this kind of escalation normally indicates someone who is getting ready to move on from synthetics to human targets. We see it sometimes, in serial killings, this...practice, I suppose is the only word for it, on synthetics. In a bygone era, they generally started on animals.” I shook my head. “Now it’s synthetics first, then on to people.”

  I went silent for a long moment, giving Ms. Anderson time to consider the implications of that statement. Then, I said, “You know, just once, I’d like to catch one of these guys before he started cutting up people. We’ve got enough dead synthetics—none of which belonged to the perp—to send him away for a long time…but only if we catch him. Still, I understand your position.” I gave her a small, sad smile, and pushed myself up from the chair. Time for the final shot. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Anderson. I’ll be back with a warrant, when the first mutilated human corpse shows up. Given how this one is going”—I shrugged—“I don’t expect it to be too much longer.”

  I turned and started for the door. I hadn’t made it more than a single step before she said, “Wait.” There was doubt and turmoil in that single syllable, but it made me smile; then I immediately felt dirty.

  I turned back to her, letting the very real hope welling in my chest show on my face, masking the disgust I felt for both of us. “Yes?”

  “If I give you the information, can you keep Party Toys out of it?”

  “Of course,” I replied. “There’s no requirement for us to disclose where we got our leads. As far as anyone has to know, it could have been off of extensive net research or a confidential informant somewhere.”

  She hesitated, doubt flashing across her face once more, but finally said, “Give me your contact info. I’ll look into it and if I find anything meaningful, I will send you the information.”

  I knew it was the best I was going to get. I fished a card from my pocket, printed neatly with my name, screen number, and department e-mail address. So far as I knew, law enforcement officers were among the last people to use the anachronistic paper cards, but, technology aside, it was still the fastest way to give someone your contact information. “Thank you,” I said sincerely. “You may be saving lives.” Probably not the lives of anything she considered to be “real” people, but lives, nonetheless.

  “You’ll have everything I can find in the next couple of hours,” she said. Her tone had shifted, going back to the confidence that had first greeted me, and underlain with another hint of dismissal. I took my cue, and offered my hand again. She shook it, briefly, and I made my way from her office. I had no real idea where I was. The corridors around me all looked the same, an elegant maze of dimly lit halls and firmly shut doors. I turned to the right and started walking. Before I could wander too far, the receptionist appeared, summoned, as if by magic.

  Whatever ground I had gained earlier had clearly been lost, since she was once again steel beneath silk, her face set in a professionally disinterested smile. “This way, Detective.”

  I once more followed her through the maze of corridors, again at that too-brisk pace that had me almost jogging to keep up. I wasn’t quite sure how she managed that—she was long legged, to be sure, but I was taller, not saddled with heels, and not practically crossing one foot in front of the other with each step to elicit that impossible amount of hip sway. Yet no matter how I lengthened my stride, she seemed to stay a half a step ahead, with an indifferent ease. In short order, we found ourselves back at the elevator banks, where, without a word, she pressed the
Down button for me and then returned to her station behind the receptionist’s desk.

  The silence dragged at me, particularly since, for just one fleeting moment, I had seen a flicker of the girl behind the mask. I couldn’t say exactly why it mattered to me, but suddenly it did matter very much, that this synthetic, this woman, see me as something other than one of the endless parade of people who saw her, and all her kind, as nothing more than things. As nothing more than the disposable toys the company letterhead so proudly decried. But how could I possibly convey that?

  Without any preface or warning, I turned from the elevators, looked the receptionist in the eye, and asked, “What’s your name?”

  Three simple words, yet they shattered her mask as if it had been made of porcelain and the words themselves a sledgehammer. She sat there, a stunned expression obliterating all traces of edges and softness alike, revealing, perhaps for the first time, the person beneath the layers and masks and pain. In that moment, she ascended, at least in my eyes, to a level of beauty that far transcended the physical perfection that had been carefully engineered by the cold, symmetrical hand of science.

  “My name is Sasha.” she said, as matter-of-factly as I had asked the original question,

  A question remained in her eyes, almost a challenge. I opened my mouth to speak but was interrupted by the loud, peremptory ding of the elevator. The doors opened with an electric buzz, and I realized that, like them, my mouth was hanging open. I wasn’t sure what to say, wasn’t sure how to process what had passed between us, so I shut my mouth with an audible snap, and nodded to the girl—to Sasha.

  The doors began to close, and I stuck one arm out, intercepting them before they could. “It was nice to meet you, Sasha,” I said at last, not able to muster anything more meaningful. As I stepped into the elevator and turned to watch her once more, I saw that it was enough. As the doors swept closed on the vision of her face, her large green eyes shone with the damp of unshed tears.

  It was enough.

  Chapter 9

  I stopped and grabbed some dinner before heading back to the precinct, hitting the Pay button on my screen as my total rang up. The clerk behind the counter in the fast-food joint was a synthetic, and he stared at me with a blank smile and hooded eyes as he took my order. He wasn’t particularly young, nor particularly old, maybe in his midthirties. I wondered, for a moment, how long he had worked behind that counter. There were no labor laws for synthetics. He could have been there since he was fifteen or so. People once thought that it would be robots and computers that took over all the low-skilled jobs and that the combination of world overpopulation and mass worker displacement would lead to either some sort of looming economic collapse or World War III. There’d certainly been enough war…at least in the third-world countries that served as proxies for the global powers. That might have stemmed global population some, but the truth was, in the first world, people had just stopped having large families, or, in some cases, any kids at all. Contraception was cheap and effective, and leisure was at an all-time high.

  The past few decades had seen a decline in the population of North America and across most of Eurasia. Combine a culture less and less interested in having children with ever-tightening immigration controls and an aging population and the decline was inevitable. Throw into the mix the passage of the Basic Living Stipend, the guaranteed income for every citizen, and the pool of unskilled laborers dried up seemingly overnight. Automation was the first answer, but when Walton Biogenics started putting out the first synthetics, the “reliability, performance, and self-maintaining” features put the robots to shame.

  Which left synthetics like the one taking my order to pick up the slack. For the rest of their lives. I tried to imagine twenty-five years of standing behind a counter, taking orders, washing dishes, with no hope for a better job, for career advancement, knowing that today was a repeat of yesterday, and tomorrow would be a repeat of today, on and on ad nauseam, ad infinitum.

  Emboldened by my experience at Party Toys, I met the synthetic’s eyes. “Thank you,” I said as he handed over the brown paper bag. It was a courtesy that used to be reflex—still was when I dealt with people—but one that no one bothered giving a synthetic. You didn’t thank a screen for connecting your call.

  He tilted his head. “Is there a problem, sir?”

  The words lacked any inflection, and his eyes stared through me.

  “No. No problem,” I replied. “I just…” Just what? Felt like saying thanks for getting my food? Felt like exercising some basic human decency. “Uh. Well. Never mind.”

  He didn’t nod or acknowledge my words in any way, just kept staring past me, not looking at the next customer, who I could hear nervously shifting from foot to foot. Just staring at…nothing. I couldn’t tell if I was making him uncomfortable—like I definitely was with the next person waiting to order—or if he really was so numb to basic interaction that his only response was a glass-eyed thousand-yard stare. “Well…” I gave a sort of half shrug and turned away, earning a glare from the middle-aged man with two brats in tow that was far more readable. I ignored it, my thoughts still on the synthetic.

  Where did he go, when he wasn’t here? For that matter, where did Sasha, the Party Toys receptionist, go? Did the “assets” of the company have a sort of barracks, perhaps hidden away somewhere on the premises of their respective owners? Did they have any amenities at all, or were they simply put away, like a coffeepot or a blender? How were their biological needs provided for? They had to eat something. I doubted they were getting home-cooked meals. Did they subsist on some sort of high-calorie protein bars? Or was it more like prison food? And, considered subhuman or not, there were waste products that had to be expelled. Once again, I was struck by how much I simply did not know about synthetics and how they lived. Perhaps, on some level, it was a subconscious choice to remain ignorant. But how much of it was societal? All of us, simply following some unspoken agreement to not ask too many questions about what was really going on, to not peer into the dark corners of our own utopia for fear of seeing the roaches scuttling for the shadows?

  How could we have let it happen? That thought followed me all the way back to the station.

  The precinct was still busy when I walked back through the doors—it was always busy. Even in the modern age, with violent crime at all-time historical lows and many vices of the past decriminalized, criminals never seemed to sleep; even most cyberattacks happened under the cover of darkness. As a result, my desk was only truly my desk when I was on duty—I shared it with another Homicide cop named Remi Laroche. He wasn’t seated at it at the moment; maybe he was out on a call, or maybe he had gone to hit the gym. Regardless, I kept walking past the desk. Until my shift started tomorrow, it belonged to Laroche, and even though we shared the slot in the bullpen, it was one of the cardinal sins of the precinct to squat at someone else’s desk.

  Fortunately, the break room had everything I needed, which is to say, it had a comfortable couch where I could eat my burger and fries and it had wireless access to the precinct’s network. I pulled my screen from my pocket while I took a bite from the burger, intending to check my e-mail and see if the inestimable Ms. Anderson from Party Toys Inc. had sent me the promised information. I didn’t get the chance, however, as the screen started buzzing almost the moment I touched it. The unexpected ring startled me.

  I managed to slap the device to my ear while simultaneously catching the burger before it experienced a tragic ending. “Yeah?” I muttered around a mouthful of what was, most likely, lab-grown beef substitute.

  “Detective Campbell?” The voice on the other end of the line sounded uncertain, but I thought I recognized it. I racked my brain searching for the connection before remembering the call that had come in.… Had it only been this morning? I swallowed the half-chewed mouthful of food.

  “Ms. Morita?” I asked in return, not sure if the voice on the
other end belonged to the attractive—and far too young—lab assistant of Dr. Fitzpatrick.

  A nervous laugh sounded from the other end of the phone. “It is you, then. Good. For a moment, I didn’t recognize your voice.”

  “Sorry. You caught me with a mouthful of food.” Despite myself, I hoped the sheepish admission would earn me another laugh.

  Instead, I got a little gasp of embarrassment. “Oh. I’m so sorry. I can call back if you want?”

  “No,” I replied at once. Whatever the reason for the girl’s call, I doubted it was social, and I needed any information I could get on the case. I followed the barked negative with an immediate “Sorry. You just caught me by surprise. I’m more than happy to talk to you, if you can stand the sound of a little chewing. What can I do for you, Ms. Morita?”

  This time there was a long pause, long enough that I began to wonder if the call had dropped. I was just about to go through the whole “Are you there? Can you hear me?” routine when she spoke again, her voice softer, more hesitant than before. “I…I think I screwed something up, Detective.”

  It certainly wasn’t what you wanted to hear from your medical examiner—even if your medical examiner was really only a half-trained assistant doing you a favor. I drew a slow breath. “It’s OK,” I said as reassuringly as I could muster. “Mistakes happen on every case. What did you find out?”

  “I missed something obvious,” she admitted. “Dr. Fitzpatrick insisted that it was time for the body to be destroyed—we needed the space, and there are some pretty stringent laws around the destruction of synthetics. Time frames that absolutely must be followed. You understand? But he did let me x-ray the deceased first, to see if I could get any further information from the bones.”

  I felt a slight sinking in my stomach as I realized her words meant the body, and any remaining evidence that might have been attached to it, were gone. Damn Fitzpatrick right to hell. I tried to keep the growing edge of anger from my voice as I said, “I assume the x-rays showed you something? Something you feel you should have found on the body?”