Perion Synthetics (2 page)

Pieces of the puzzle, but never a complete
product.

“And,” continued Banks, “he trusts me enough
to not put something this personal and damaging on the feed.” He gestured to
the vidscreen. “This is all on Benny Coker’s head. The panic, the freefall…
everything.”

“I’m guessing you’re not dumping your Perion
stock like everyone else?”

Banks scoffed. “Too many people know about
my connection to Perion. They would assume I have inside information. And I
do.” He paused, brushed some lint from his slacks. “Perion doesn’t have much
time left. Weeks, a month at the most.”

Frank watched several seconds tick by on his
sliver.

“But even without knowing the truth, I still
wouldn’t sell. Those people are unloading everything, not because James
Kirkland Perion is dying, but because they’re unsure who will be replacing him.
Will that person, once chosen, be able to fill Perion’s shoes? Will they hold
to his vision of humans and synthetics living side by side?”

Cameron nodded as if Banks’ revelation were
old news.

“You already know who the replacement will
be, don’t you?” he asked.

“I do,” said Banks. “His son. Joseph. My
godson.”

The name made Frank sneer.

At twenty-seven, the son of a bitch was even
younger than Cameron and in line to inherit one of the biggest companies in the
world.

“Perion’s a mess about it,” continued Banks.
“It’s hard enough to have mortality breathing down your neck, but now he has to
worry about the future of his company once he’s gone.”

“But wouldn’t his son have help?” asked
Cameron. “I’m sure there’s an entire team of sycophants just waiting to guide
him on the day-to-day.”

“It’s not that. Perion doesn’t doubt the
company will continue to do what it’s doing. His concern is about what it
doesn’t
do. Currently.”

Cameron’s eyebrow bounced, but no
recognition took hold.

“You don’t get it,” said Banks, “but that’s
okay. I don’t need you to get it right now.”

“So what
do
you need from me?”

“How about you show some appreciation?” asked
Frank. “There are a lot of aggregators who would kill to be sitting where
you’re sitting right now.”

“What do you know about Perion City?” asked
Banks.

Cameron rattled off the clichés. “Darkened
streets of endless slag. Neon residents perpetually jacked into the great
collective. Skeletons of black metal gleaming in the LED twilight. At least,
that’s what I’ve heard.”

Frank rolled his eyes.

“It’s a niche city,” continued Cameron.
“Closed beta, employees only. All we have are rumors.”

“Which is exactly why I’m sending you
there,” said Banks. “Perion and I have arranged everything. His employees will
be told you’re there to do a story about the company’s fiftieth anniversary,
but what you’ll really be doing is checking every crate and closet for any
skeletons that might blindside Joseph. And if you happen to find those
skeletons in Joseph’s closet, so be it. Perion wants to be sure about his
company and his son before he goes.”

“So it’s an exposé
and
a biography,”
said Cameron. “I can do that.” He tapped a few more notes into his phone and
then pocketed it. After adjusting his pants, he gestured to Frank with his
thumb. “But so can he.”

Banks smiled and dipped his head. “And I’d
send him if I could, but I’m afraid there’s a little too much VTech in our
friend Frank here.”

Frank thought of the various body augments
he had acquired over the years. Though he had never opted for a full-on
Guardian Angel chip, many of the mechanical enhancements he had made did run
proprietary Vinestead code. His augmented eyes alone were enough VTech to worry
a Perion Synthetics employee. Paranoia was the name of the game in Perion City,
and Vinestead International was the poster child.

Banks’ answer seemed to satisfy Cameron. He
sat back on the couch and relaxed for the first time.

“Well?” asked Banks. “What are you waiting
for? Diana will meet you down in the lobby. She has some hardcopy and a car
ready for you. Now go get me some of that human interest crap you’re always
trying to pass off as content.”

Cameron stood and extended a hand. “Thank
you, Mr. Banks. This is a great opportunity, and I won’t let you down.”

Banks waved the hand away. “I know you’ll do
great.”

Turning to Frank, Cam said, “Sorry. This
was
more important.”

“Don’t mention it, kid.” Frank tapped out
several beats on the floor with his foot.

Banks stared across the table, his eyes
vacant.

From the elevator, Cameron asked, “Who’s my
contact in Perion City?”

Banks didn’t look away. “Sava Kessler,” he
said. “Perion’s head of public relations.”

“Watch yourself with her,” added Frank.
“Word is she’s a true believer.”

He listened to the doors open and close. The
hum of the descending car filled the office and then receded.

Frank tried to tune into his whisperer and
keep up the staring contest with Banks, but with the stock market set to open
any minute, the frenzy in his ear was getting hard to follow.

When it came down to it, money drove
everything. Never mind that one of the greatest innovators of the century was
dying from an easily treatable disease.

Banks reached for a small box on the coffee
table and removed a Red Velvet whisperer. He pressed it into his ear with his
index finger.

Lifting his wrist, he said, “Hashtag
Internal: Cameron Gray.”

Frank smirked. “You think he has any idea what’s
coming?”

“No one does,” said Banks, “but when it
finally gets here, they’re going to hear about it on my feed first.”

It took three hours on I-10 to get from Los Angeles to
Perion City. Cam passed the time by poring over the dossiers Diana had been
sending him all morning, files too detailed to have been the result of VNet
searches. He scrolled through write-ups on all C-level players with strong
names like Shaw and Phelps, from where they went to school to which political
party they backed. Grid dumps showed the relationships between each employee,
the under-the-table deals and mutual back-scratching that had birthed Perion’s executive
team. He studied the many faces and tried to ignore the mild revulsion he felt,
a mixture of envy and contempt for men of power.

The car pulled off the highway at the exit
for Old Pinto Basin Road, a two lane blacktop that ran north another ten miles
before dead-ending at Perion Terminus. The transit station was a sprawling
collection of scaffolding and aluminum siding on an endless slab of gray
evercrete. Cam counted twenty-four loading bays set to receive the cargo
haulers lined up along the mile-long glide path running parallel to the road.
There, grizzled and bored drivers sat baking in the California sun as their
massive engines rumbled idly. Left of the main warehouse, the bland siding gave
way to Perion’s signature silver. The abrupt change in material made the
terminal appear tacked on, an afterthought that perhaps people, too, would want
to travel to Perion City.

A woman with her face buried in her phone
sat on a bench just outside the terminal. A few paces away, a man in a chauffeur’s
cap stood smoking a cigarette.

Cam pulled the woman’s face from the dozens
he had seen in the dossiers and identified her as Savannah “Sava” Kessler,
fellow Berkeley graduate and Perion’s head of public relations. Looking from
his phone to the window, he noticed the images in her file were out of date. Sava’s
previously blonde hair was now a light auburn; it disappeared behind the
shoulders of her black blazer instead of curling inward just below her chin. A
scarlet blouse led into a black skirt that ended just above her knees.

The chauffeur tossed his cigarette away as
Cam’s car pulled into a parking spot next to a lone Nissan. He was at Cam’s
door in seconds, opening it and allowing in the warm desert air. Cam stepped
out into the daylight and waited for his eyes to adjust. He squinted as Sava
approached.

“Mr. Gray?” she asked.

Cam saw himself reflected in the silver
lenses of her sunglasses. The way they filtered the light turned the world to
grayscale.

“Ms. Kessler,” said Cam, extending his hand.

Sava made a feeble attempt at a handshake
and then motioned to her driver.

Cam watched the man approach the trunk of
Banks’ car. “No,” he told him. “I don’t have any luggage.” Then to Sava, “I
didn’t have time to pack. I only found out I was coming here this morning.”

“Interesting,” said Sava, over her shoulder.
She waited for the chauffeur to open the rear door of the Nissan for her.

“How’s that?” Cam asked, familiar with
people who responded with the word
interesting
when they really meant
I
could give a shit
.

Sava didn’t answer until Cam walked around
the car and got in the other side.

“Because, this has been on my calendar for a
week,” she replied. “But I suppose you Banks Media people are used to shooting
from the hip.”

So that’s how it was going to be. Cam took a
breath and summoned a professional veneer.

“I take it you’re not a loyal subscriber of
our feed?”

The car’s engine growled an answer for her.

Cam nodded and sat back. The seatbelt
resisted his efforts to buckle it.

“Was that question directed at me as a
Perion employee or a private citizen?”

“Private citizen,” said Cam, finally finding
the latch. He tugged on the belt to make sure it would stick.

“It’s not for me. Banks Media appears to be
in the business of self-promotion rather than any actual news reporting. The
few times I’ve listened in, you were running smear jobs on Benny Coker and the
other media houses.”

“Do you feed at all?”

Sava shook her head. “Maybe if I had a nine-to-five
and some time to kill on a commute, but when you work for Perion Synthetics,
there really is no downtime. You’re either working, asleep, or you’re dead. And
even then you have to put in a request two weeks in advance.”

Outside, the empty California desert
sizzled. A sea of shriveled Joshua trees stretched to the horizon.

“You have some time to kill now,” said Cam.

“This is an anomaly. I hardly ever get out
of the PC—there’s really no need to. The city was designed to be a closed
ecosystem with every amenity provided. It keeps people where the action is
instead of traipsing through the cacti.”

Cam pulled out his phone and typed
traipsing
through the cacti
at the top of a new file.

“Do you mind if I record our conversation?”
His sliver had started recording the second he stepped out of Banks’ car, but
it was always polite to ask.

“Sure,” said Sava, “but our legal team will
have to approve anything that goes out. So unless I’m saying something on the
record, in an official capacity, it’s probably not worth writing down.”

“Ah, but it’s your unofficial perspective
that I’m after,” replied Cam. “That’s all we really have, right? The world is
observed through human eyes, so my job doesn’t end at reporting just the facts.
I have to show how those facts affect real people.”

Sava removed her sunglasses. For the first
time, Cam made the connection between the woman sitting in front of him and the
photos from her dossier. It was in her eyes, their
aliveness
. Cam shook
his head, tried to think of a better word.

“You sound like one of those touchy-feely
reporters who do sappy human interest stories on the evening news. You know,
the ones about some kid with a terrible disease whose parents can’t afford the
treatment?”

“I’m familiar,” said Cam. “I actually feed a
lot of those.”

“Ah, so you
are
one of those people.”

“Proudly.”

Cam’s eyes drifted to the front of the car.
He noticed the chauffeur was talking to an invisible partner, maybe through a
headset in his ear. His voice was muted by the thin pane of plexiglass
bisecting the car.

“And who is that?” asked Cam, pointing to
the driver.

“He’s the chauffeur. Do you really need to
know his name?”

“I guess not.”

Sava put her sunglasses back on. “You guess?
I was told Mr. Banks was sending over his best aggregator. Don’t you have any kind
of agenda at all?”

Cam took another calming breath. He did have
some preliminary questions written down on his phone, basic conversation starters
that might lead to more interesting stories. Sava, however, would probably
answer as curtly as possible, giving only the necessary information to satisfy
the question. How she became the star flack of Perion Synthetics with such a
shitty attitude was a mystery, but one Cam nonetheless wanted to solve.

“Tell me about the Perion Expressway.”

Sava answered with a prepared statement.

“The PE is a thirty-three mile channel following
the old Pinto Basin Pass. It begins as a two lane highway at Perion Terminus
and grows to six lanes as you get closer to the Spire. It is the only publicly
known road to and from the PC, along with three emergency routes through the
mountains. The landscape surrounding the highway is kept purposefully barren to
discourage foot traffic. Anti-personnel measures for a mile on each side of
Outpost Alpha target anything over two feet tall.”

She smirked.

“The speed limit is 85 miles per hour,
dropping to 65 at night.”

Sava gave Cam a look as if to ask why he
wasn’t writing any of this down. When he motioned to the sliver in his wrist,
she continued.

“In three minutes, we’ll be approaching the
PNR and an armed outpost consisting of a small squad of Scorpio-class
synthetics we call Automated Guards. AGs for short.”

“Can I call them AutoGuards?”

Sava exaggerated a sigh.