Perion Synthetics (11 page)

No kidding.

Waking up next to a naked synthetic with his
boxers on backwards didn’t exactly scream normality. There were so many
questions needing answers, not just in the
why
but in the
how
.
Had he made drunken love to a million dollar sex toy?

“What do you mean?”

Roberta nodded at the people below. “They
don’t look right.”

Now that she mentioned it, Cam noticed
something off about the synthetics—they were easier to spot now that most of
the humans were staring at the naked woman standing on a balcony. Not only were
the synthetics disinterested in Roberta and Cam, they were stuttering in their
movements, infrequently but noticeable when it happened. In the middle of the
block, a younger-looking synthetic was trying to sweep the pristine sidewalk in
front of a small grocery store. From a distance, Cam hadn’t even noticed there
was nothing to sweep, that the synthetic appeared to be caught in a loop, more
like a machine with a set program instead of a cutting-edge, assumed
intelligence.

“Probably just the cold affecting them. You
know how it is.”

“No,” said Roberta, “I don’t.”

“Do you remember how we got here last night,
Roberta?”

“A car brought us.” She smiled, remembering.
“It was a limo with sideways seats and vidscreens. We were all able to fit
inside.”

“All?”

“You, me, your friend Cosimo, and Chief
Gantz.”

The name wasn’t familiar, but then the
dossiers were all fuzzy in Cam’s memory. “I don’t remember any Gantz.”

“He was at the dinner—the man in the suit.”

The law man, thought Cam.

“I’m surprised you don’t remember him. You
two were fast friends last night. Things were a little tense at first, but once
he
started drinking—”

Roberta shuddered.

“Are you alright?”

“Maybe it is the cold,” she replied, pulling
Cam’s robe open. She pressed her warm, synthetic flesh against his cold skin.
“We should get back in bed. Maybe we could finish what we started last night?”

Cam caught his reflection in the glass of
the balcony doors.

“I need a shower,” he said.

“I’ll join you,” replied Roberta.

Cam was about to agree before his boss spoke
up.

“Have you ever considered
why
you met
Roberta?” asked Banks, except his voice didn’t come through the whisperer. It
was in Cam’s head, an imitation of the clear-headed thinking and suspicious
questioning his boss was always preaching.

Mental Banks made a good point. Meeting
someone, or something, like Roberta was a one in a million shot. Maybe it was
part of some ploy by Sava to get Cam to bed a synthetic and then later, if he
wrote anything unflattering, she could claim impropriety with one of their
products, expose him and his sexual proclivities. Whatever he had done with or
to Roberta the night before, there was no doubt it had all been recorded in some
databank—five streams for five senses, just waiting to be played back in high
definition should he color outside of the company lines.

Cam’s throat tightened. What if Sava had
been watching live?

“Who are you?” he asked, taking a step back.

“Cameron…”

“I just met you yesterday. I don’t know
anything about you.”

“That’s not what you said last night when
you were inside me. You said we had a connection, a—”

“Stop,” he barked. “Cut the bullshit.”

Roberta opened her mouth as if to speak,
shuddered again, and then collapsed on the balcony. The slapping sound of a
grown woman hitting the evercrete twisted Cam’s stomach, but it was nothing
compared to the echo that came from below.

Cam peered over the railing to see a dozen
or more people—synthetics—dropping in the street and on the sidewalk. Their
human counterparts were standing around dazed or indifferent. Further down the
road, the scene repeated, with bicycles crashed into news kiosks and lifeless
bodies lying where they had fallen. Only when the first human moved towards a
prone synthetic did Cam’s shock start to recede.

He knelt at Roberta’s side and shook her
shoulder, but she was unresponsive. Her chest rose and fell, but her open eyes were
devoid of any life. He stared into them as shouts from the street began to
increase in frequency and alarm. Synthetic names echoed between the buildings,
but there was no changing the fact that a good portion of Perion City’s
population had just fallen down dead.

Cam’s sliver glowed.

“It’s like they all lost power at the same
time,” he began to narrate. “It appears to be widespread, affecting every
synthetic in sight. It could be city-wide or localized to the surrounding
streets, I can’t tell for sure. Nobody seems to know what is going on. I—”

A soft whimper came from Roberta’s lips,
though they did not move.

“Roberta?” he asked.

“The…” What followed was barely a whisper,
sounding more like a melody than an actual string of words. She repeated it, as
if on a loop.

After several repetitions, Cam realized the
sound wasn’t just coming from her, but from the street too. It sounded like the
collective groan of
brains
from a horde of zombies. The loop went on and
on.

“The Creator…”

Roberta blinked, came out of the stupor that
had held her hostage. She looked at Cam with glistening eyes and spoke the
message clearly.

“The Creator is dead.”

A pall had fallen over Umbra.

Lincoln Tate stood at the window on the
fifth floor of the Decker Plaza building and watched the people moving
listlessly in the streets below. Usually filled to the brim with synth-fueled
wonder, tonight’s crowd was subdued, as it had been for the past two nights. Rumors
of James Perion’s death had shaken the foundation of the city and left its
residents scrambling for something solid to hold onto. Tate had tried to
provide a baseline by lacing the Lincoln Continental feed with mood-leveling
code, a subsonic insertion meant to calm and sedate his subscribers. It had
kept the city from erupting into a riot, but a pensive population meant less
excitement, meant less content to feed.

The Umbra Tower pulsed against a moonless
sky, rising out of the Canopy like a steel nail from a board. A blue haze
climbed its length every thirty seconds, symbolizing the city’s cultural
contribution to the world. This night, however, the pulse stopped halfway up,
held for two seconds, and then faded out.

“So the old man is really dead,” said Tate.
He had his arm pressed against the window and his forehead resting on his fist.
The eyes staring back at him from the other side of the glass blinked rapidly.

“If it’s true, it’s a damn shame.”

Tate turned to look at Cynthia Mesquina, who
was splayed out on the couch with one leg propped up on the armrest and her
dark, red hair fanned out over a black throw pillow. She wore a white tank top
under a half-open shirt that hung loosely over skin-tight leggings. Along the
insides of her exposed arms, an intricate black tattoo snaked its way over her
skeleton, moving from joint to joint like a subway map.

A memory flashed: the tattoo covered Cyn’s entire
body, from the base of her jackport to the augmented Achilles tendons in the
back of her heels.

At twenty-two, she was the youngest of his
freelance aggregators, but the most tenacious by far.

Tate adjusted the sleeves of his jacket,
making sure his Franz Felis shirt only peeked out a quarter of an inch. His
titanium cuff links glinted under the multi-colored lights of the vidscreens on
the far wall.

“What do you mean
if it’s true
?”

Cyn tapped her phone; it responded with a
dull beep and a somber melody. “I’m terrible at this game.” The phone
disappeared into an invisible pocket. “That’s why you called me up here, right?
Nobody really knows if Big J has jacked out for good? Perion PR is ignoring the
question, and Banks is feeding nothing but line noise. You ever get a name on
his inside source?”

“We think it might be Frank Gattis; he’s
been covering Vinestead Synthetics for Banks for the last couple of years. The
boys in the back think it could also be Cameron Gray out of Banks’ inner
circle, based on the way the feed is structured. The meta coming off the BMP
feed has been stripped of any aggregator IDs, so it could be anyone.”

“I think what you really want to know is how
Banks got a man on the inside.” Cyn tugged at one of the many bracelets on her
wrist. “If Banks is withholding the aggregator’s name, maybe they’re not there
with permission.”

“I have no idea,” said Tate. He joined Cyn
in the sunken lounge area and sat down on the couch opposite her; it groaned
under his weight. “There’s been a lot of chatter between Banks and Perion City,
but nothing the boys have been able to decode. For all we know, it could just
be broadcast SYN-ACK.”

“Lincoln Tate does not like uncertainty,”
said Cyn.

“I can’t feed uncertainty,” he replied.
“People want cold hard data, not water-cooler gossip. They sub Lincoln
Continental, not the goddamn TMZ.”

“People have to keep up with celebrities
somehow.”

“Look, no one is saying there isn’t room for
some celebrity news—Jesus knows we get our share in—but at the EOL, people want
to feel like they’ve learned something, whether that’s coming up to speed on
new tech or reliving the terrifying moments of some military incursion halfway
around the world. They’re addicted to the data and right now they’re not
getting their fix. When they start jonesing, they get cranky, the SatIndex
drops, the subscribers start to flee, and suddenly Banks’ fluff pieces don’t
look so bad.”

“The people are fine,” said Cyn. She
stretched her arms above her head, pushing her breasts into the air.

Tate looked away. “The SatIndex is down thirty
percent since Monday. We haven’t seen these kinds of numbers since the Calle
Cinco de Mayo Massacre of ’09. And that was seven thousand people meeting their
end in a single day. This is one man, Cyn. That just shows you how important he
is.”

“James Perion, synthetic titan!” Cyn’s voice
pitched low as she raised a pointed finger to the ceiling. “Never before was
there a visionary like James Kirkland Perion. Champion of the people. Fighter
of the good fight.” She took a quick breath and resumed her normal voice. “And
so on.”

“Do you honestly believe this is just about
James Perion jacking out of Terrareal? You think any of those pierced-face
freaks down there knew the man well enough to care if he lives or dies?”

Cyn touched the red stud in her nose and
shook her head.

“Sorry,” said Tate, sighing. His eyes jumped
to the feed stats on the center vidscreen. The SatIndex was still in the high
fifties, but it was falling. The people needed some reassurance.

“No worries,” said Cyn. “Not all of us can
pull off the teal suit and gold chain look.”

Tate smiled, revealing his silver-plated
teeth. “Not all of us have style, baby.”

“No,” she replied. “Not all of us do.”
Waving her hands around in the air, she asked, “So what is this all
about
,
Lincoln?”

“Vinestead.”

“May they burn in hell,” said Cyn,
pretending to spit.

“They might have, if Perion hadn’t refused
their help. He was the only thing standing between Vinestead and world
domination.”

“Now who’s being TMZ?”

“Don’t act like I’m exaggerating. You think
Calle Cinco killed seven thousand people because VNet kept jacking up their
access rates?”

“Kaili Zabora is a lunatic,” said Cyn.
“She’d kill her own mother if she thought it might cause a Vinestead employee
some minor inconvenience.”

“Well yeah, she’s nuttier than a Folsom Retread,
but killing civilians wasn’t her intention. She wanted to bring down VNet, but
she, like everyone else in this country, had no idea how deep Vinestead’s code
went. I doubt anyone was more surprised than her when the planes started
dropping out of the sky.”

“So it’s been two days. If this is such a
pivotal moment for Vinestead, why haven’t we heard from Krazy Kai herself?”

Tate tapped the side of his head. “Good
question, Cyn. A
damn
good question.”

“Well? What’s the
damn
answer?”

“I have no fucking idea.”

Tate stood and walked to the bar set along
the east side of the room. From the menagerie of bottles on the shelves, he
pulled a nearly empty Stolichnaya that Benny Coker had sent over after last
year’s sub census. He placed one shot glass on the bar and held another up to
Cyn with a questioning look.

“Sure, why the hell not? Been a while since
I chem-tripped.”

“All that synthetic shit you’re pumping into
your brain is gonna come back to bite you in that pretty little ass of yours
someday. Couple decades from now, you won’t even remember your name.”

“So long as I can still do this,” she said.

Cyn broke into an impromptu dance as she
approached the bar.

“Cute,” said Tate, sliding the diminutive
glass in front of her.

“That’s what they pay me for.” She downed
the shot in one gulp. “Speaking of which, I didn’t call you up here
just to pretty up the place.”

“I figured,” said Cyn, tapping the rim of
her empty glass with an obsidian fingernail.

Tate obliged. “How would you feel about a
little trip to Perion City? I could use someone on the ground floor. Banks
thinks he’s the only player on the West Coast with the hookups to get inside
intel. Well I say balls to that shit.” He shot the vodka with a flourish and
smacked the glass on the bar.

“Balls to that,” toasted Cyn. “So do you
have any pull with Perion? I’m guessing I can’t just walk up to the front gate
and say,
hello, Lincoln Continental Pizza
.”