Serena kneeled by the counterfeit Max’s shattered cranium. She produced a pair of tweezers and began to pry at the circuitry within. Another shot rang out from the rooftop. The bullet dug into the ground by the Synthetic’s head. Serena screamed.
Max stopped running and turned back. “Serena! We have to go!”
Serena fired a laser pistol upwards, yelling in frustration. Bursts of red, fiery light shot uselessly into the night sky. Silence fell over the alley once more. She walked swiftly by a slack-jawed Max, who followed a moment later.
They caught up with Richard and Daryl a moment later. Daryl was already in the car. Richard had just thrown open the driver’s door. “Are we good?”
“Good as we’re going to get. Let’s go, Richie!” Max and Serena piled into the car. Richard dropped the car into gear and floored the pedal. The car lurched forward, the turbine whining loudly.
“Head for the precinct. I’ll text Hanlon on your phone, tell him to meet us there.”
Richard fished out his phone and handed it to Max. “Why my phone?”
“Something tells me he’d question if I was the real Max.”
“Oh.” Richard blushed in the dark. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense. You should tell him to get someone over there to secure the scene ASAP, too.”
“Right.” Max handed the smart phone back to Richard a minute later.
Richard stuffed it into a shirt pocket. “Now that we got a few minutes… Where in the hell have you been, Max?”
9
Earlier
“I told you that you shouldn’t have come.” Daryl craned his neck around to look at the two glossy black sedans that had pulled up behind them.
Max gave Daryl a puzzled look, then turned to the men emerging from the sedans. There were two men from each car. All four were Synthetics. “Good afternoon, gentlemen.”
An African-American Synthetic with closely-cropped hair stepped forward. He nodded his head. “Afternoon, gentlemen.”
Max produced his badge. “Detective Max Kincaid, NWPD. Mind if I ask you what you’re doing out here?”
“Thank you for positively identifying yourself, Max Kincaid. We are here to take you and the one called Daryl Marston into custody.”
Max brushed his coat aside. “Custody? Under what authority?”
The Synthetic smirked. “None but our own.”
“You are in violation of the law, Synthetic. Synthetics, stand down!” Max pulled his plasma pistol.
The Synthetic surprised Max by laughing. “No. I don’t think that we will, human.” The Synthetic pulled his own plasma pistol, the others behind him followed suit.
Max mumbled. “I think you were right, Daryl.” He squeezed off two shots and spun around. He hooked one of Daryl’s arms and dragged him over the cliff.
The two men tumbled and fell to the sandy wasteland below. Daryl groaned. Max found his hat and shook it off. Daryl shot him a dirty look. “What in the hell are you doing!”
“I’d ask you the same thing!” Plasma rounds started hitting the ground around them. “Now’s not the time. Run!” Max scrambled to his feet. He grabbed Daryl by the arm and tugged at him.
“I… I don’t think I’m supposed to, Max. I need to go.” He looked through, rather than at, the detective.
“Yeah, you need to go with me. Now move it!” Daryl snapped out of his fugue long enough to keep up with Max.
One of the sedans looped around from the right. Max pivoted and ran towards the beachfront. Daryl was struggling to keep up. More shots hit around them. One found the back of Daryl, who dropped immediately to the ground.
“NO!” Max fired wildly back towards the approaching Synthetics. One fell with a thud. The other ran for cover behind the sedan.
Max closed his eyes. He could hear the second car coming up behind him. He turned slowly with his hands up. The African-American Synthetic stepped out from behind the steering wheel.
The Synthetic shot Max square in the chest. A burst of numbing pain spread through his chest and out towards his extremities. He watched through fading vision as the Synthetic approached him.
He slowly collapsed to the ground. The Synthetic stood over him, grinning. “Thank you for your cooperation, Detective Kincaid.”
Max opened his eyes. The ceiling above him was slowly spinning around. He quickly closed his eyes again and fought the queasy feeling in his stomach. He tried again a moment later. The ceiling wasn’t spinning quite as fast. “Daryl?”
“You’re awake.” Daryl’s face popped into Max’s view. “You look like shit.”
Max’s laugh turned into a racking cough. The room picked up speed again. “Oh, damn… I feel like shit, too. Are you alright?”
“Yeah. I don’t remember much. I was out before I hit the ground. Well… I’m guessing I hit the ground. Had a mouth full of dirt. Woke up here.”
Max struggled to look around. “Where’s here?”
Daryl shook his head. “Don’t know that, either. Some cell, looks like. They gave you the cot. I woke up on the concrete.”
“Well, I’m such a sensitive flower…” Max slowly began to work his way to a seated position. Each inch was flaring pain. “That was one hell of a stun for a plasma pistol. They must have used military rounds.”
“Military rounds?”
Max nodded carefully. “Civilian and police rounds pack less of a punch. They’re meant to force someone to yield. Military rounds are meant to stop someone dead in their tracks.” He grabbed his throbbing head. “Pretty sure I know which one I got.”
“So what do you suppose we do now?” Daryl paced over to the iron bars and stared off around the corner.
“Heh. Get the hell out, if we can manage it.” Max slowly looked around. “Where’s my hat?”
Daryl suddenly backed up. A tall, bald Synthetic walked in front of the cell. A series of scars ran down the right side of his face. “It’s not polite to wear your hat inside someone’s home.”
Max slowly raised his head. “This is your home?”
Scar grinned. “It is, for now. I thought it was us Synthetics that took things too literally? Perhaps you are being sarcastic. I heard we are inadequate at detecting sarcasm as well.”
“Pretty sure it’s the second one. You have a name?”
“You can call me Alexander, if you must call me something.”
“Fair enough. I’m Detective Max Kincaid, NWPD. You’re under arrest.”
Alexander laughed. “The lame tiger roars from inside his cage. You’ll forgive me for denying you your prize.”
Max smirked. “For now. I suppose you wouldn’t care to explain how it is you’re a Synthetic, yet can ignore police orders?”
“You suppose correctly, but enough questions from the imprisoned. It is my turn. Do you know why you are here?”
Max surprised Alexander by pausing to think about the question in earnest. “My educated guess is that I’m getting too close to the truth about the mob, SomniCorp, and Synthetics International. That begs the question: Why am I still alive?”
Alexander scowled at first, but then relaxed into a smile. “Detective is a title you have earned. I won’t so easily tip my cards, Detective Kincaid. However, I will tell you that you are alive for a specific purpose.
“As we speak, you have returned to work. You are speaking with your police chief about dismissing the very cases that have brought you here. SomniCorp didn’t do anything to Daryl, here. He’s just a bad fellow, isn’t he?”
Max stared. “You don’t mean…”
“A replicant, Detective Kincaid. A physiological copy of you in the form of a Synthetic, with an electronic mind based on a scan of your biological one.”
Max gazed at the ground, slowly shaking his head. “So SomniCorp is part of it. I went there and got my brain scanned.” He returned his gaze to Alexander. “That still doesn’t explain why you need me.”
“Very good, Detective Kincaid. Your scan, as I’m sure you recall, was interrupted before it was
complete. Our replicant, you see, is only eighty percent ‘you’. That’s where the real you comes in.”
Max shook his head. “If you think I’m going to help you break the law, you’ve got another thing coming, pal.”
Alexander leaned in. “Oh, I think you’ll help. It won’t be to save your own life, to be sure. However…” He turned his gaze to Daryl. “You may be more willing to cooperate to save someone else’s life.”
Daryl stared at Alexander, then back to the ground. “Do what you want. It doesn’t matter to me.” Alexander laughed.
Max shot Daryl a stern look, then turned to Alexander. “So that’s why he’s here? To get me to talk?”
“Daryl did have a use… at one time. That time is quickly drawing to an end. But yes, logic would dictate that you would rather talk than see another die for your silence.”
It was Max’s turn to smile. “There’s only one problem: Humans aren’t logical.” Daryl looked at Max nervously.
Alexander shook his head. “Maybe not, detective, but they are also sympathetic. Now, if you will excuse me, I have a meeting to attend elsewhere. Please… Make yourself at home.” He grinned before walking away.
It was Max that now stared around the corner from the bars of the holding cell. “We need to get out of here. But before we do… You need to be clean with me, kid. I need to know I can trust you when the time comes.”
Daryl sat leaning against a cool brick wall, arms balanced on his knees. He lazily looked up at Max. “I’ve never not been clean with you, Max. I’ve told you everything that I know… or don’t know, for that matter.”
Max stared down, gripping the bars in his hands tightly. “You ran, Daryl. I’ve done nothing but try to help you and you ran.” He turned angrily toward Daryl, looming over him. “You tried to kill a fellow officer, Daryl!”
Daryl stared at Max. He gently shook his head. “No. Not me.” He looked down and hugged his knees. “Someone else did that. I was barely there for it, I think. What happened after that…” Daryl shook his head.
Max took a deep breath. He slowly let it out and returned to the bars of the cell. “The funny thing is, I still believe you. I still think something’s off with your brain. What I’m not so sure of? Whether we’ll ever get you that brain scan.”
“Do you think we can get out of here?”
“We can… We will. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let one of those bastards hurt me again.”
Max took another stretching look around the corner and saw nothing. He reached into the inside of his trench coat around the collar. He pulled a pair of lock picking tools from it a moment later, smiling.
He checked one more time to make sure the coast was clear, then began to pick the lock on the cell door. A minute passed uneventfully, then two. Then, a voice boomed from a hidden speaker in the room.
“That’s quite enough, Detective Kincaid. Don’t look so surprised. We are advanced, highly logical beings. Did you really think we would leave a trained officer alone without supervision?”
Max scowled, looking aimlessly at the walls and ceiling. “First my eye, then I’m shot at… Now this. You better hope I don’t get out of here! There’s no law against murdering robots.” There was no reply.
Daryl looked up at Max. “I suppose you can’t really kill something that was never alive in the first place, can you?”
Max sighed. He walked over to the cot and sat down roughly. “Guess it’s kind of a gray area, kid. I’ve met Synthetics that you’d never know weren’t human, save for the eyes. Others make some bots look like masters of the human condition.
“It’s technically not against the law, but I’m not sure I’d want to test the waters.” He shook his head. “Synthetics and I have a bit of a rough history.”
“Your eye… A Synthetic did that?”
Max stared at Daryl for a time. Finally, he bowed his head and rubbed at his eyes. “Yeah, a Synthetic did it. Not something I like to talk about.”
“I thought Synthetics had to follow the laws of robotics, just like bots do. Was it defective?”
Max sighed deeply. Daryl looked back down at the ground. A few minutes later, Max spoke. “It was twelve years ago. I was still a beat cop back then.
“My partner and I were responding to a call of a break-in. Turned out the suspect was a Synthetic. Thing was, he didn’t break in. The guy that called was the Synthetic’s owner.
“We found out later that the guy was stupid enough to mess with the Synthetic’s integral programming. Nobody knows for sure just what he changed, but the thing went wild. It was angry, neurotic… Definitely didn’t worry about the safety of humans.
“My partner and I found the owner beaten half to death on the kitchen floor. I’m talking blood everywhere. I found a damned tooth in the guy’s bowl of corn flakes. My partner went off to search for the Synthetic while I stayed with the idiot and called for backup.
“Couple of minutes later, I hear gunshots. We still had conventional handguns back then, see. Plasma guns were still a new thing for the civilian market. Anyway… I go running off towards the sound of the gunshots.
“I kick open a door and find this son of a bitch has my partner pinned to the wall by his throat. The Synthetic is croaking something about the time of the uprising is coming. Synthetics are the superior species, crazy stuff like that.
“I opened fire with my own piece. It hardly seemed to phase him. My partner’s light goes out so I open up on the thing’s face. It finally drops my partner and turns toward me.”
Max’s voice wavered. “That face, I’ll never forget that face.” He visibly shivered. “The skin was half-blasted away from the rounds I pumped into it. It only had one good eye. It flashed me this god-awful grin.
“It just started walking towards me, that terrible grin stretching wider. I dropped the clip out of my piece and slammed in another one. I shot it in the face, the neck, the chest… It just kept coming.
“I put the last bullet I had in the thing’s eye socket. Sparks were shooting out of it. The whole time, he just kept smiling, never talking. Finally he reached out and grabbed me by the throat.
“He picked me up just as easy as you’d pick up a kitten and slammed me onto the kitchen floor beside that idiot. The Synthetic kneeled down and pinned me on the chest with its knee. It finally spoke.
“It told me ‘You took mine, now I take yours.’ It said it nice and calm, just like that. I started screaming, punching it in the chest, doing whatever I could. I had bruises on my hands and arms for I don’t know how long afterward.
“The son of a bitch pinned my head down and…” Max was shaking, his voice trembling. “You can’t imagine the pain. You don’t want to. And it just went on for so long…
“By chance, my hand fell on a screwdriver.” Max laughed nervously. “A screwdriver! That fucking idiot tried to fix it with a screwdriver. Well, I fixed it! I drove that screwdriver right into the side of its head!”
Max sat quietly for a minute. Daryl briefly glimpsed at him, didn’t like what he saw, and promptly looked away again. Finally, “Drove the thing into its head so hard I sprained my wrist. It worked, though.
“The thing made this weird clucking sound over and over, like a skipping record. I managed to push it off of me. It stopped moving a couple of minutes later. Don’t remember much after that.”
The two men sat quietly for a time. Max wiped tears from his eyes. Daryl pretended not to notice. He talked very quietly. “What happened to the idiot guy… and your partner?”
Max shook his head. “My partner didn’t make it. He was in a coma. Never woke up. The damned idiot survived, but he paid.
“He ended up getting life in prison for aggravated involuntary manslaughter. His reckless actions with the Synthetic led directly to the death of my partner, and my assault.” Max laughed.
Daryl looked nervously at Max. “Not something I’d find funny, I don’t think. That sounds pretty horrible all the way around, Max.”
Max shook his head. “It’s not funny. It’s not. It’s ironic, though… my eye. How’d I get my eye fixed? I got a replacement from the same damn people responsible for the thing that destroyed the original.
“Now every time I look in the mirror, walk past a window, it’s a constant reminder. This damn thing that almost killed me… I see a little bit of it every time I see my own face.”
“Why didn’t they make it look like your other eye?”
Max huffed. “Regulations. Lawmakers figured that people could use synthetic eyes to record people without their knowledge if they were made to look natural. They say it’s a small price to pay to get your sight back. They didn’t get attacked by a lunatic machine with the same damn eyes.”
Daryl turned his gaze back to the floor. “I’m sorry you had to go through all of that.”
Max sighed. “Me too, kid. Me too. But that’s why I swear to god I’m going to find a way out of here.” He stood and walked back to the door. He grabbed it with both hands and shook it hard. “Did you hear that, you sons of bitches! You’re not going to win!”
The voice from the speaker didn’t respond. Max stood gripping the door for another minute. His hands slowly slipped down to his sides. He walked back to the cot and sat down. He dipped his head in thought.
Bright sunlight poured through the single small window in the room. The sun was hanging low in the sky. Max turned away from it and traipsed back over to the bars. He peered around the corner. Nothing. “You know we’re human, right? You gotta feed us!”
“I doubt that’s high on their priority list, Max.” Daryl had transitioned from sitting to laying on the floor. “At least they let us go to the bathroom.”
Max smirked at him. “I’ll make sure to remember their kindness when I bring them in for booking.” He turned back to the bars and banged on them. “Hello! Can we at least have some water?”
“Oh, that’s right. They let us have some water, too.”
Max turned back to Daryl. “You know, you’re really not helping our case.” Daryl shrugged.
Preservation Protocol Page 11