Perion Synthetics (14 page)

“I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“What happened now?” asked Tate.

“Now, I have to climb.” She tried to inject
some enthusiasm into her voice, but the stiffness in her legs told her it would
be a punishing descent.

Tate tried to distract her with stories of
the continuing silence coming from Perion Synthetics. Meanwhile, day-old
content tagged with Cameron Gray’s name was just now hitting the feeds. He was
painting a picture of a synthetic utopia where man and machine lived together
in a harmony not known since the days of Adam and God. It was all bullshit,
Tate was quick to point out.

“Lobby,” said Cyn, between breaths. “Still
going.”

“I’m going to feed the picture now.”

“It’s your donkey show, boss.”

Cyn continued on until she passed a marking
indicating level B15. The shaft extended further into the earth, obscured by
shadows. Using the platform for leverage, Cyn pried the metal grate from a
ventilation shaft and set it beside the opening. The interior was shiny and
slick, allowing her suit to slide over it with ease. She used the grips on the
palms of her gloves to pull herself along, until finally the shaft broke out
over a false ceiling. Light from the room below peeked in between the seams of
the drop tiles.

“Where—”

“Hush,” said Cyn, covering her ear. There
were sounds coming from below, muffled as if behind glass.

Cyn lifted one of the tiles and poked her
head through. The room was empty, sterile, and white. Along one edge of the
room were five bassinets set apart with deliberate precision. But instead of
looking cozy and warm as bassinets should, these were also sterile and lined
with cold, gray cloth.

Cyn dropped down from the ceiling, felt the
pressure in her legs as her augments absorbed most of the impact.

“I’m in,” she whispered.

The lights in the ceiling left no part of
the room untouched, and for a moment, Cyn felt completely exposed. The fear,
however, wasn’t strong enough to overcome her curiosity. She approached the
middle bassinet with cautious steps. Something beneath the blankets stirred.

“What do you see?”

Cyn had no answer, for the thing in front of
her defied sensible description. It gave every indication of being a baby—a
normal, healthy infant with a light dusting of hair and puffy red cheeks.

But it wasn’t a baby.

Babies had eyes.

This
thing
had nothing, had empty
sockets backed by gears and motors and simulated sinew.

Cyn put her hand over her mouth, torn
between the horror and a previously dormant maternal instinct.

The thing’s little pink lips parted, opening
in sickening mimicry of a crying baby, revealing another empty chasm glowing
blue in the oppressive light.

“Fuck this,” said Cyn, stumbling backwards.

Lincoln Tate pressed his cell phone hard against his ear.

For several minutes, the only sound coming
over the link had been static, low and gravelly, approximate amplifications of
the room Cyn had dropped into, a room of silence and horror and something else,
something that had brought the toughest girl he knew to her knees. He’d heard
her collapse, heard the plastic hit of her shin guards on the floor, followed
by the dull slap of her back falling into the wall. Scraping sounds came
next—Cyn trying to push herself further way from whatever she had seen. And
though he called her name, she did not answer.

So he listened to the static and tried to
visualize the room where Cyn sat huddled in the corner, legs likely pulled up
to her chest, her face buried in the warm pocket of air created therein. For a
time, the words
fuck this
had come across the line in a whisper, a
repetitive mantra meant to protect her from the abrupt change in reality. But
slowly, the repetition had faded out, replaced by nothing. Until now.

Tate heard the sound mixed in among the
pocks and hisses of dead air.

Crying.

Cyn was crying.

“Cynthia,” he said, barely hearing the word
himself.

No response.

“Talk to me, baby. Tell me what you’re
seeing.”

“Are you recording?”

Tate glanced at the vidscreen on the wall
where Cyn’s vitals flashed in bright yellow numbers. In the lower right corner,
the red REC light blinked off and on.

“Always,” he replied, “but we had to switch
to another channel when you went dark.”

“Put me back on primary. I want to go
real-time.”

Briefly, he considered lying to her,
considered leaving her feed on standby until he could sort out the situation. Hearing
her collapse on the floor, hearing her struggle to get the words out, had
brought Tate down from his chemical high so fast it made his skin itch.
Stolichnaya or not, he was completely sober in an instant. Even the tab he had
dropped earlier felt like a distant memory. His sense of being
up
, of
being tied into the world through a million data connections, was gone. Now
there was only Cyn and her first moment of weakness in recorded history.

Tate tapped his palette, cutting off the
filler material.

“You’re live,” he said.

“It’s all bullshit,” said Cyn. “This picture
we have of Perion, like he’s some goddamn savior. He’s just another
money-hungry suit who will do whatever it takes to be on top, to be
in
control
. He’s no better than Sedivy and Vinestead.”

“Come on—”

“Just,” interrupted Cyn. “Just listen to me,
Lincoln.” She sighed, rubbed her face with her gloved hand. “When I was eleven,
I learned about something called The Net. I became obsessed with this infinite
construct, a place where people could be truly free—no usernames, no product
keys, no always-on DRM.

“Then came Vinestead and their nightmare
network. The way they took over, the white-flag tactics they used… it made me
want to join up with a cipher den and pledge my code and my life to Calle Cinco
or some other group.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“They wouldn’t take me. I was barely twelve
when I began to seek them out in the darknets. I met a few recruiters in VR,
but they took one look at me and jacked out. For the longest time, I couldn’t
figure out why. So I kept reading, kept devouring everything there was to know
about ZabSix and RevoMT and Calle Cinco. I read about what they did in
Sacramento, how they took one back for the little guy.”

“The Reaping,” said Tate.

“Yeah, The Reaping. People talk about it
like it was some great thing to kill people just for working for Vinestead. In
the end, it didn’t even matter. That was the same day they passed the Guardian
Angel bill, which meant all newborns had to be implanted with the biochip. No
discussion, no way to get around it except to flee the country. And everyone
just went along with it, just bowed to the promises Vinestead made with one
hand on our shoulders and the other in our wallets. I was chipped even before
that, but my parents never told me. I had to find out from the school nurse.”

“You were still going to school?” asked
Tate.

“I had no choice. I was infected with VTech;
no cipher den would come near me. I had to live with the knowledge of that damn
chip in my head for six years. And even when I got it dug out of me, I still
didn’t feel clean. I hated Vinestead for what they did to me, to all of us.
Someone had to step up and challenge them; I cried the day I realized it wasn’t
going to be me.”

“It’s a tall order for one person, even for
you.”

“James Perion could have done it. He has so
much weight to throw around. I thought of Perion as a white knight come to
fight the Vinestead dragon. He was supposed to be the good guy, a champion of
the people. But that was just a fairytale, a myth we all wanted to believe,
like the X sightings in VNet. James Perion is a monster, Lincoln. No better or
worse than Arthur Sedivy.”

“Why do you say that, Cynthia?”

Cyn rose from her corner, her legs unsteady.
She didn’t want to look in the bassinet again, but she was able to lift her
phone, point it in the general direction, and snap a photo. Covering most of
the screen with her hand, she hit
SEND
.

It took a moment to sink in.

“Shit! That just went out live, Cynthia. The
SatIndex is climbing over sixty.”

“He’s an evil son of a bitch,” said Cyn,
“and I’m glad he’s dead. Perion Synthetics can burn in hell with Vinestead.”
She spit on the floor. “Why would he do this, Lincoln? Why would he make
something so
wrong
?”

“I don’t know, girl.”

Cyn shook her head and retreated to the
opposite side of the room. “You put your trust in someone,” she continued, “and
this is what you get. It’s all so pointless now.”

“It’s not pointless. If Perion is
responsible for this, we’ll expose him. For now, it’s time you got out of
there. The boys are picking up a lot of chatter coming out of the Spire right
now. I don’t know if they know exactly where—”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Cyn. “Not anymore.
If these
things
are Perion’s legacy, then we’re better off without him.
Either way, there’s no one left to stand up to Vinestead. We are all
monumentally fucked.”

Cyn closed her eyes and saw waves crashing
on a beach, saw an ocean between her and an increasingly fucked up world.

“This is it for me. I’m out, Lincoln.”

“Just like that? The SatIndex is over
seventy and you just want to bail? We just gained half a million subbers,
social media is blowing up, and Perion is trending on a dozen different
networks. You’ve got support in all the major—”

She waited for him to finish his sentence,
but there was nothing coming across her whisperer, not even static.

“Linc—”

The lights blinked out before Cyn could
finish her question, plunging the room into a darkness so absolute she couldn’t
see her hand in front of her face. Her eyes adjusted, and she discovered a blue
light coming from the other side of the room. Cyn shut her eyes, refusing to
look at the glowing, synthetic baby heads. She remembered her phone and used it
to walk the perimeter of the room, always away from the blue, always away from
the subtle hissing of tiny servos.

Finally, she found a door with a recessed
handle.

“Lincoln, if you can hear me, I’m gonna make
my way into the hall.”

She slid the door open, revealing a dark
corridor much too long for the limited power of her phone’s screen. The glow
stick popped as she bent it. Cyn tossed it parallel to the wall she was
hugging; it skittered down the hallway, casting long shadows on the doors.

No workers. No security.

Cyn crept out of the room and into the
blinding green glare.

They were on her in an instant. They felt like
men with thick arms pushing against her body—so many of them, attacking from
all directions. The Ayudante couldn’t keep track of everything, couldn’t move
her limbs fast enough to prevent them from being immobilized. She felt herself
spinning, then going weightless. In a brief flash, she saw the ceiling deform
as she crashed into it. Her leg snagged one of the crisscrossing grid lines,
rotating her body and sending her face first into the floor. The impact changed
the green world to blue. Then gray crept in from the corners of her vision.

As the world threatened to disappear, she
saw them.

Two feet stood some distance away, only the
black boots weren’t boots at all, but segmented feet that clicked and whirred
as they moved across the floor.

“Subject detained,” croaked a voice, and
then gray became black.

Cyn felt the emptiness the moment she opened her eyes.

It was an unwelcome feeling, one of want and
of worry—a weak feeling that at first, she refused to acknowledge. There was
pain in her head and soreness in her joints; those were concrete stimuli to be
dealt with or ignored. But underneath the throbbing was a
lack
of
something. Not knowing what she was missing made it even more confusing, made
her mind go back in time and wonder what had been in her life that was no
longer there, sitting on the rug in front of the television or relaxing in the
middle of the bed.

Was that right? Was the thing a
who
?

She shifted under the thick blankets of the
hospital bed, felt her skin move against a cotton nightgown. Her mind tried to
fill in the blanks. What was the last thing she remembered before the
emptiness?

Her normally pliant consciousness had no
answer.

Cyn raised a hand to rub her face but found
it weighed down by lengths of wires and tubing. An IV snaked along the edge of
the bed, ending in a cannula on the back of her hand. Thin wires ran from the
side of the bed, up the right side of her torso, and disappeared behind her
back. She felt them taper off just below the base of her skull. When she took a
deep breath to stem the rising panic, she felt electrodes on her chest move
against the nightgown.

“Good morning, Mrs. Paulson,” said a voice
from the doorway. A woman in pink scrubs spoke as her fingers tapped rapidly on
her palette. “I’m Suzanne. I’m the charge nurse on duty today. Dr. Bhenderu
will be with you shortly.”

“Who?”

Suzanne ignored the question and helped Cyn
into a sitting position. She adjusted the sheets on the bed and rolled away the
various medical carts. Once the room was in pristine condition, she touched her
ear and said into her headset, “We’re ready in seven.”

Cyn glanced at the door, but couldn’t
remember who she was expecting to see.

“Don’t worry,” said Suzanne, as she fluffed
Cyn’s pillow.

Cyn didn’t get a chance to ask why she
should worry before an older Indian man with dark brown skin and oily black
hair entered the room, pushing his quaint glasses up his long nose. His white
lab coat identified him as a doctor, at least in Cyn’s estimation. That
was
how doctors dressed, wasn’t it? Her brain answered with a
mostly yes
,
but was unable to offer more.