Perion Synthetics (22 page)

The urge to hit her made Gil’s arm tremble,
but he knew what she was capable of, had seen traces of augments in her system.
Still, that didn’t give her license to be ignorant.

“No,” he answered, his voice low and calm.
“I’d feel jealousy if Cam were actually dating Jackie, if Jackie actually loved
and protected him. But he’s started some sick relationship with a
thing
and it’ll be a sunny day in Margate before I’m caught in bed with a fucking
machine.”

“She’s more than that,” said Cam. He crossed
his arms and leaned against the table next to Cyn.

“Sure, if you say so, but consider the
possibility that it only
appears
that way, that the humanity you see in
her is only there because it was stolen from a very real human, from
my
Jackie.”

“How can you even know that for sure?” asked
Cyn.

Gil started to reply, but her question was
valid. After all, he had only done a cursory investigation, seen the wrapping
on Roberta’s synthetic body and heard her speak just a few lines. Maybe they
had done it as an homage or by randomly selecting a pretty girl from the
company directory. And there were things Roberta did that Jackie never would
have done, almost like…

“I need to scan her,” said Gil. “If they
used Jackie’s personality as a base, then they could have done the same kind of
modification they used with Cyn. You were still you, just with a few pieces
changed. She could be Jackie carte blanche.”

“Do whatever you want,” said Cam. “She’s not
mine.” He looked away.

It was all the invitation Gil needed. He set
off for the break room, but ran into Gantz coming down the aisle.

“She alright?” he asked. His cheeks were red
from exposure.

Gil glanced backwards to make sure they were
in earshot. “She’ll be fine. She doesn’t have any attachment to the baby
anymore. I suggest you dump it at the nearest fire station. And Cam claims to
feel no attachment to his synthetic, so now’s as good a time as any to separate
them. Is there any kind of plan to get them out?”

Gantz smiled and touched Gil on the shoulder
as he passed. “God always has a plan, my friend.”

Gil shook his head and continued on to the
break room, moving past the second row of tables where the synthetics began to
take on more ethnic diversity. He wondered who they were based on, which Perion
employees had had their likenesses stolen for use in the synthetic sex trade.

“Fucking Joe Perion,” he muttered. Even if
it had been his father’s idea to start this madness, Joe was the one letting it
continue.

The break room was lit only by the street
lamps outside and a small bulb in the vent above the half-stove. Gil could just
make out Roberta’s outline sitting on the far end of a couch, a bundle held
snug in her arms. She was staring straight ahead, ignoring the synthetic baby
who, through some mutual understanding, was remaining perfectly quiet. It
wasn’t until Roberta detected Gil’s presence that she began to move again,
bouncing the baby as if she were trying to calm its nonexistent tantrum.

She looked up at him with orange light
sparkling in her eyes.

“I know you,” she said, her voice rising and
falling in the unique cadence of the sweetest woman Gil had ever known.

“Do you?” he asked. “Why don’t you let me
scan you and we’ll find out?”

Roberta shook her head. “No. I don’t think
that will be necessary.”

“Why not?”

She smiled, revealing perfect assembly line
teeth. “You know why, Gilly Bear.”

Gil’s heart shuddered and he felt himself
fall two inches before his muscles kicked in. The pet name evoked images of
Jackie lying in bed with a sheet hung over her stomach, with one hand
supporting her head and the other reaching out for him across the gulf.

“Gilly Bear,” she would ask in the first
light of morning, “are you awake?”

“How,” he stammered. “How do you know that
name?”

Roberta set the baby down on the couch and
stood up. Shadows hid half of her face and body, but the uncertainty somehow
made her look more like Jackie.

“I don’t know how,” she said, taking a step
forward. “There are so many memories of you, locked inside.” With those words,
she touched her chest just above her heart. “I can ignore them if I really try,
but… I don’t want to. I feel you in there. I just didn’t know it was you until
I saw you.”

She paused at arm’s length, removed her hand
from her heart, and placed it on Gil’s chest.

“Do you feel
me
in there?”

Gil gulped.

He wanted to reach out for her, put his hand
on hers or draw her near, but his body wouldn’t move. Staring into her eyes, he
realized he was actually scared of her, scared she might come closer and rekindle
the feeling he had worked so hard to stamp out.

You can’t love a synthetic; he didn’t need
Meltdown to tell him that.

“You do feel me, don’t you?” she asked.

Roberta closed the distance, pressing
herself to Gil’s chest.

Gil felt her pelvis against his erection and
tried to move away, but a synthetic hand slipped behind his neck and held him
in place.

“It feels good to remember, doesn’t it? You
were my Gilly Bear and I was your J-boo. Do you remember how you used to call
me that? In the mornings, when you woke up, hard like you are now, and we’d
fuck until we were late for work, until we lay there panting like a couple of
animals? Yes, you remember.”

Gil gnashed his teeth. “I remember fucking
Jackie,” he said, swallowing hard. “I remember fucking a woman. You’re
neither.”

Thin fingers dug into the back of his neck,
pulling his lips to Roberta’s. In the instant they touched, Gil questioned his
own declarations. Whether she was Jackie or a real woman, whether it was wrong
to bed a sex doll, there was no denying the electricity flowing from Roberta’s
lips, no denying the exquisite taste and texture.

Gil dropped his tool bag to the floor and
wrapped his arms around Roberta’s waist. And there in the orange light of the
street lamps, man and machine kissed.

Gil had often thought of Jackie in the moments before he
fell asleep, when the lights in the room were so dim the LED from his phone lit
like a road flare every time a new message came in. Darkness, two quick
vibrations, and then the walls were bathed in a sickly red, telling him the
world was reaching out to him, trying to get his attention. Only he didn’t want
the world’s attention, didn’t care what new products Katsumi marketers were
trying to sell him. Only three important updates ever passed by way of his
phone: Benny Coker with some fresh encouragement, his other boss, Lori Maxwell,
with some middle of the night emergency tech repair gig, or Jackie, with a
simple note telling him how empty her bed felt without him, how she was burying
her face in his pillow to be reminded of his scent.

Lori’s messages still came with regularity,
though Benny’s had petered out over the many months. Jackie…

Well, it felt like forever since her profile
picture graced his phone.

Change is eternal and constant, a
never-ending series of cards being dealt to all players at random.

It was difficult not to think about her, not
to get a little excited every time the LED began to flash, especially if Gil
had fallen into half-sleep and forgotten Jackie was gone for good, never to
return to Perion City or even the land of the living. His imagination would not
be stifled though, and he often wondered what would happen if she did come
back, if one day he saw her walking down Twelfth Street with a wide-brimmed hat
and shopping bags on her arms like some kind of Rodeo princess. He always
imagined her like that, in a fairy tale sort of way where her life exceeded
that of her previous existence. She was no longer a clerical aid in this new
reality, but rather a woman of money and influence, of unarguable beauty and
refinement, as she deserved to be.

And in those half-dreams that had left him
sad or sexually frustrated, he had never imagined he would see her again under
the swinging lights of a warehouse as they stood over the body of an aggregator
who had snuck into the city and…

Gil shook his head, found he was gripping
the steering wheel too tightly, turning his knuckles white. Beside him, Roberta
sat quietly in the passenger seat, hands folded in her lap, her head turned toward
the window. Sunrise was still a couple of hours off, and Gil could see the
dashboard instruments reflected in her window. The blue LED indicating the
status of the headlights fell on the reflection of her lips, giving them a wet
tint. He thought about those lips and how they had felt pressed against his.

Sneaking out of the warehouse without
telling the others had been an impulse decision; Cam had professed no
attachment to Roberta anyway. Leaving the baby behind made practical sense, as
it would be discovered in the morning when the first shift crews came in. It
wasn’t until Gil paused at a stop sign three blocks away that he risked looking
back at the warehouse. Dark from the outside, the only discernible light came
from one of the front windows, and it was very faint at that.

“We shouldn’t stop,” said Roberta, her eyes
focused on the rearview mirror. “They’ll be here soon.”

“Who?” asked Gil. He searched the road for
any other sign of life, but found none.

“Sava Kessler, head of public relations and
a ripe old bitch.”

Another one of Jackie’s sayings.

“I don’t see anyone.”

“I can feel her,” said Roberta. “She is
getting closer. If she finds Cam with Cyn, she’s not going to let him out of
here alive.” Her voice wavered; she touched her lips to stem the betrayal. “I’m
imprinted on him,” she explained.

Gil nodded, unconvinced.

“Drive,” she said, “before they—”

Lights exploded in the clouds over the
warehouse in three clustered sets of four—spotlights from unmanned drones. Gil
had seen them before, mostly on reconnaissance runs from the Spire to the PNR.
Rarely had their black hulls been seen in the skies above Perion City during
the day; it would have spoiled the entire utopian illusion, one Gil had found
himself believing in more and more these days.

Cruisers shot in from the cross streets and
pulled up to the front of the warehouse. Automated Guards poured out of them,
their guns trained before their boots even hit the pavement. Roberta gave a
soft yelp and Gil removed his foot from the brake.

He drove as if the AGs were already on his
tail, making multiple lefts and rights, but always adding distance between
himself and the warehouse. The navigation system in the dash showed he was
heading towards the outer border of The Fringe. There, a recently constructed
loop would let him circle around the majority of the warehouses and factories
to rejoin the main highway on the north side of the city. The outer loop even
had some traffic on it already, mostly trucks making their early morning deliveries,
getting fresh supplies to the donut shops in midtown. Gil found a spot between
a pickup and a van and let the autodrive take over.

Autodrive.

That’s what Gil had been on since the moment
he decided to leave with Roberta. Maybe it was because she had begged him in
Jackie’s voice that he had believed it was a good idea.

Gil studied Roberta’s profile, tried to see
motivation in her synthetic lines.

The car took a long, curving flyover onto
the Perion Expressway and proceeded into the sleeping city. The Spire glowed
dully as the sky began to warm. More commuters joined the flow; the
short-timers were making their way to work. Diners lit up the side of the road
every couple of miles, ready to fuel another day of innovation in the ol’ PC.
Roberta watched it all pass by without a single word, as if her mind were elsewhere.

“That’s my condo, just up on the right
there,” said Gil. On cue, the garage door began to roll into the ceiling and a
line of LEDs lit up the single-car space.

They waited until the door had closed behind
them before getting out of the car. Gil led Roberta out of a side door and up a
flight of stairs. Running lights glowed from the floorboards in the living room
as he opened the door.

He watched Roberta explore the condo. She
regarded the space with placid eyes. Maybe recognition was too much to ask.

“Have a look around, see what you think,” he
told her, tossing his tool bag onto the low table behind the sofa.

The hallway responded to his presence,
brightening like a child’s face at the return of its father. At the end of the
hall, the ceiling in his bedroom ramped up to a soft glow; shafts of light
danced above him in crisscrossing patterns. Gil eyed the bed with its one side
of the covers pulled back, the pillows pressed up against the headboard—an
invitation he almost accepted when he stepped into the room.

At the dresser, Gil stared himself down in
the mirror as he removed his shirt. The warehouse had been rather dingy and his
white button-up was scuffed with black marks. He would have to take it to the
cleaners today, see if they could…

A memory flashed: Meltdown rolling his eyes
in boredom.

Gil put his hands on the dresser. For the
first time, the gravity of his predicament hit him full force. What would Lori
Maxwell think when she found out her best employee had absconded with a prototype
synthetic? It wasn’t like pocketing a few office supplies.

The clock in the mirror showed it was just
passing five thirty; luckily, the letters
SAT
were written above the
numbers, giving him the day off. He wouldn’t be expected back at work until
Monday morning, which meant he had forty-eight hours before anyone realized he
had deviated from his normal routine. And they
would
realize it. Someone
was always watching and waiting for one of their little cogs to get out of
line.