Perion Synthetics (23 page)

Gil pulled a t-shirt from the second drawer
and sat down on the edge of the bed.

Yesterday had been fine, he recalled, just
another day in the life of an undercover aggregator covertly feeding
information to Benny Coker and The White Line. How many years had Coker been
relaying the tidbits Gil was able to send him, throwing them out as
suppositions instead of the cold hard facts he knew them to be? The ruse had
gone on far too long.

“No,” said Gil, to the t-shirt in his hands.
He unfolded it, found he had pulled a race shirt from a 5K a couple of years
ago—the last one he had run-walked with Jackie.

It wasn’t the ruse or even how long it had
gone on that was the problem. It was the corporeal ghost standing in his living
room. It was Jackie returned.

Prior to his stint in the PC, Gil had worked
the garbage-filled streets of Atlantic City, slipping in and out of various
personas to gain confidence and information about the underbelly of a city
whose veins were clogged with corruption and evil, with a steamy black liquid
that led back to an ashen heart buried somewhere underground. Stories about the
heart always made the best feed, especially for the locals. Sometimes they
forgot just how horrible their own backyard could be. Benny Coker liked to
remind them.

That, too, had gone on for years. The more
times Gil escaped certain death, the more invincible he thought himself to be.
Then one day he impersonated the wrong guy, ended up taking a meeting with a
Vinestead enforcer who hadn’t appreciated the deception. Gil was found bloodied
and naked in the slums of Margate the next morning. After that, Vinestead had
been gunning for him. Coker allowed two attempts on Gil’s life before shipping
him out west, out to the one place even the ‘Stead couldn’t reach him.

Waking up in that alley under a rotting
cardboard box had been a
life-changing moment
, an indicator that things
had gone too far over the edge, that life couldn’t continue as before.

It was Vinestead’s doing then; it was
Perion’s doing now.

When the end comes, it will come smiling
and whispering words of comfort.

Gil cocked his head and listened for the
synthetic in the living room, but all he heard was the dull hum of the heater
and the rush of air through the vents. He pulled on the t-shirt and stepped into
the hallway, half expecting to see the front door thrown wide with nothing
remaining of Roberta except her perfume lingering in the foyer. Instead, he
found her sitting on the couch, her gaze focused on the vidscreen on the
opposite wall. Pictures scrolled across its surface, fading and star-wiping
through Gil’s history—more accurately, his history in Perion City, a history
delicately intertwined with a woman named Jackie.

The screen paused on an image of Gil’s
living room, reversed, as if looking into a backwards mirror. In the pixelated
memory, he was sitting next to Jackie. They both held a glass of wine; a
blanket covered their legs. They were suspended in the moment before a kiss, a
moment etched on every synapse in Gil’s brain. The anticipation, he recalled,
had been exceeded only by the contentment, the simple happiness of having her
nearby.

As the picture faded, the spell holding
Roberta captive broke. She turned her head just enough for Gil to see her
profile and the simulated tear descending her cheek.

In the kitchen, Gil poured himself a glass of water and
stood at the refrigerator wondering why he was so surprised to discover Roberta
could cry. She was, after all, a prototype beyond anything he had ever
encountered. Even on his trips to the Spire, the synthetics had been nothing to
write home about. They were advanced, yes, but primitive and clunky machines
next to Roberta. They were not exactly uncanny either; you could always spot a
synny amongst the organics, especially if you had been in the PC long enough,
had watched the evolution with wonder as Gil had. Maybe in the back of his mind
he knew one day they would get so advanced as to be indistinguishable from
humans.

If Roberta could cry, then maybe… she could
feel?

Gil turned his back to the fridge and stared
at Roberta over the counter. She was lost in the swirling pictures on the
vidscreen, entranced as if she had never seen a photo slideshow before. Was she
doing what everyone else did when the screensaver kicked in, simply looking for
themselves in the menagerie? There were as many pictures of Jackie as not, most
of them with Gil by her side, a loving hand draped around her hip.

Was it difficult to see yourself in photos
your brain could not remember, to be shown a life that used to be yours, but
with every trace of it removed from your heart and soul?

Gil looked around for his palette and found
it dormant in its dock on the table. He scooped it up, loaded his notebook, and
began a new dossier for Roberta. He paused as he considered what to put for a
surname, as synthetics typically had one or the other.

“Do you have a last name, Roberta?” he
asked.

She was unwilling to take her eyes off of
the show. “Mendes, but that doesn’t feel right anymore. What was Jackie’s?”

“Dulac,” said Gil. He thought about writing
the name next to
Roberta
in his notebook, but it didn’t seem right.
Roberta was not Jacqueline Dulac of 117 Gracy Farms Road, apartment 928, Perion
City. She was not the Jackie who had stood in the kitchen three years ago and
burned a batch of ice cream cone cupcakes.

A memory sparked.

It had been Jackie, not Roberta, who had
reached for Gilbert Reyes in the middle of the night.

Roberta could then not be a facsimile of
Jackie because Jackie was defined not only by how she affected the world, by
what she did and said, but also by how the world treated her. And though
Roberta might find her way into Gil’s bed and might, in the middle of the
night, pull up close behind him and slip a hand over his waist, he would never
be able to do the same to her, would never be able to put from his mind the
simple fact that Jacqueline Dulac was dead and gone. The sum of her existence
was now only video, pictures, and text… and the dwindling memories in Gil’s
head.

For Perion Synthetics to bring her back, to
give a synthetic Jackie’s visage and verbal ticks, even her wonderful curves
and impeccable posture, was an affront to nature and to those who loved her.
More than that, it made no commercial sense. If the endgame was a product,
something to be
sold
, then making it closer to human was commercial
suicide. Buying and selling appliances was one thing; buying machines with
memories and feelings was akin to buying humans.

The line between man and machine is
forever blurred, Gilbert. The world does not see a difference, so why should
you?

Gil wrote down Roberta’s last name and
filled in some physical characteristics from memory. He paused again at
occupation and settled on
Synthetic Human
. It sounded right, anyway.
More than any simple task assigned to her, her first job was to be a close
approximation of humanity. For that job there were no breaks, no sick days.

Finally, he reached the blank line where he
would write his topic question, the number one mystery he thought Coker and the
world would want solved. Usually this question came after a long struggle.
Humans were so complex and their stories so varied, but with Roberta, the
question was too easy, and came with such quickness that Gil found himself typing
it before he had even completed the thought.

Why do you exist
, he wrote.

Could Roberta even answer such a question?

Gil felt the reality of the situation as a
throbbing in his stomach. His time in Perion City was coming to an end and the
only way to go out was with an explosive bang that would shake the Spire to the
ground.

It was what they deserved after
disrespecting the dead. If Joe Perion thought he could do whatever he wanted…

The thought fizzled out in Gil’s mind,
replaced as always by the immutable time scale, the mental rule he used to
arrange events in the past. James Perion’s death stood like a beacon upon the
line, obscuring the years that had come before it, but with a little
concentration, Gil was able to see past the blinding light to the foundations
on which his assumptions were based.

He shook his head. It had seemed natural to
blame Joe Perion. Office gossip had it the boy was a loose cannon, off
developing his own line of synthetics in areas the old man didn’t agree with,
things like sex dolls and military units. Gil would have believed every one of
those rumors if it weren’t for Gantz, who rarely had a discouraging thing to
say about the next ruler of Perion City.

Maybe it was all a ploy, a calculated move
to have a rumor out in the world to provide plausible deniability should word
ever get out that there was a factory in The Fringe whose workers toiled day
and night to repair engineered vaginas and fabricated cocks for a variety of
lifeless synthetics. The old man could claim ignorance, give his son a slap on
the wrist, and business would go back to normal.

From the people Gil spoke to, there was no
doubt the sex dolls, or synthetic companions, as they were listed in the
catalogue, were real. Only research in that area could have given Roberta the
natural skin suit she wore. Only trial and error could have improved the
internal mechanics such that she weighed a buck and some change. Preparing her
predecessors for the sex trade had made Roberta more than human—their loss of
humanity had increased hers.

So that takes care of her body, thought Gil.

For her mind, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine
the military applications for a thinking machine, synthetics who could react
and plan in a battlefield situation—drones with minds of their own.

The pieces began to line up in Gil’s mind.
Seemingly random areas of study seemed to be converging on one ultimate goal.

But
why
?

Gil put the palette back in its dock and
sighed. A sudden ache grew from the back of his head to envelope his entire
brain. He stumbled to the couch, convinced that at any moment he might collapse
from the pressure. Sinking into the cushions next to Roberta, he joined her in
the passive observance of his photos.

After a few minutes, Roberta said, “You
collect people, you know that?”

Gil barely heard her over the throbbing. “I
what?”

“The way you take pictures. The way you
organize them. It’s like you’re building a collection of people.”

“I don’t…”

Roberta pointed to the vidscreen. “Look,
this picture is normal, just you and Jackie out at a restaurant. But then…” She
waited until a specific picture popped up. “This is like a passport photo:
straight-on, no expression, and nothing distracting in the background.”

Gil stared at the worn face of Eric Rusk,
who worked on the twenty-eighth floor of the Perion Spire as a marketing admin
by day and an underground human-synthetic fight promoter by night. The synnies
were usually already damaged in some way, or handicapped by strategic snipping
of vital tendons. Rusk justified the fights as a way for people to get
exercise, learn to fight—the questionable list went on and on. Gil saw it as
taking out aggression on poor synnies who couldn’t fight back.

“A punching bag is a punching bag,” Rusk
would always say.

The story, titled
Synthetic Fight Club
,
had been finished for over a year, shelved in some databank back in Atlantic
City. Coker had enjoyed it, thought it oozed with the sickness affecting so
many people in the AC. A little west coast disease for the east coast immune
system, he had called it.

“Why do you have so many pictures like
that?” asked Roberta.

Because Perion Synthetics is full of humans
and humans are sick, conniving bastards who never fail to probe the depths of
their depravity, Gil answered in his mind.

“There can’t be that many,” he said.

“Forty-eight.” She turned to face him. “Kind
of a strange hobby, Gilly Bear.”

“What do you know from art?” he asked,
feigning offense. “I like to take pictures of people’s faces. Big deal.”

Gil stood and retreated to the kitchen
again. From the end cabinet, he pulled a bottle of aspirin and shook three
white pills out onto the counter. They were chalky on his tongue.

“It’s not just that,” said Roberta. She had
pulled herself up into a kneeling position, arms resting on the back of the
couch. “You look the same age in all of these pictures. How far back do they go?”

“Far enough,” whispered Gil. Then, louder,
“Maybe my college photos just aren’t a part of this stream.”

“
Did
you go to college?”

His laugh echoed in the kitchen. “It’s like
you don’t know me at all.”

Roberta crossed her arms. “I only know what
Jackie knew, and she didn’t. There’s nothing about you on the network before
you came to Perion City. Your personnel record lists your previous employer as
PracTech out of Flagstaff, but that doesn’t wash with your Jersey accent.”

“I don’t have an accent,” said Gil,
listening to his words. They were clean, devoid of any AC affectations.

“Not that any human can hear,” said Roberta,
smiling. “But I’m more observant. I can practically smell the shore on you. So
I wonder, why didn’t your J-boo know anything about your past? Why didn’t you
tell her where you’re originally from? Was your entire relationship built on
lies?”

“I loved her,” he said, his eyes dropping to
the floor. “I would have loved her until the end of time. That’s all that
mattered.”

Roberta considered the claim, relaxed, and
sat back on her heels. A mischievous smile crept onto her face, put there by a
million tiny servos embedded in her lips. For a while, she simply stared.

Finally, Gil asked, “What?”