Perion Synthetics (47 page)

“No,” replied Sava, her head dropping.

Of course she couldn’t walk away, no more
than she could let Gantz shoot at her without defending herself. There were
just some things in life that had to happen, effects that had to be caused.
Sava had known domestic terrorism wasn’t the answer years ago, when she first
assumed her new life in Perion City. Abandoning the plan now would relegate her
to a life of petty skirmishes that would do nothing to alter the course of
history. Driving Perion Synthetics towards all-out war with Vinestead was her
only hope.

As the elevator slowed, the construct began
to break down. Anela’s smiling face fell away, as did the smoky figures on the
edges of Sava’s periphery. The protective dome overhead winked out of
existence, leaving Sava alone with the demon for one terrifying moment, and
then it too was gone.

Sava opened her eyes as the doors parted.

The lobby was a mess, but the maintenance
synthetics were doing their best to clear the area. Sava found a swept path on
the other side of a Honda Civic and followed it to the north entrance of the
Spire. Outside, the cool air caused a chill to go up her spine.

“What the hell did I miss?”

Sava looked down at Cameron Gray sitting on
the steps leading to the Victoria Perion Memorial Plaza. He had arranged bullet
casings into a small pile next to him. He flung one into the plaza as he waited
for an answer.

“I thought I had you detained,” said Sava.
She sat down next to him.

“Yeah, well,” said Cam, handing her a
casing, “your guards kinda lost interest in me about an hour ago, so I showed
myself out. I guess I missed the war?”

Sava chucked the casing at a nearby
synthetic whose chest had been crushed by a tire. “This wasn’t the war. This
was all Gantz and Cyn.”

Cam smiled. “I tell you those Umbra girls
are crafty. Whole ‘nother breed of woman, if you ask me.” He glanced over his
shoulder. “Where is she?”

“Halfway to hell I hope.”

The smile disappeared. “And Gantz?”

“Already there.”

Cam nodded and flung another bullet into the
plaza. It clinked against an overturned drink cart.

“You didn’t like him much, did you?” asked
Cam.

“That had nothing to do with it. He and Cyn
smashed our transmitter feed. Every signal in the city runs through it. Broadcasts,
command and control, jammers…”

“Those are still working,” said Cam, raising
his wrist. “My sliver came back online about the same time the guards took a
powder, but every time I try to upload to BMP, the connection gets reset. All I
can do is download like some kind of ordinary subber.”

The construct flared and Anela Zabora walked
out of the black mist. “You have to tell him, Kai. Remember Rick?”

Sava fingered the silver band on her thumb.
She had worn Rick’s wedding ring ever since the day of the Reaping, the day he
and so many others were betrayed by Vinestead treachery, the day Calle Cinco
struck deep at the heart of the demon. And in all that time, no one had ever
asked nor had she ever told what it signified.

In truth, Sava had assigned many meanings to
it, from a simple remembrance of abbreviated love to a cautionary reminder not
to get too close to the target. It stood for corporate misdeeds and omission of
certain facts that could have saved an entire building of clueless engineers.
It was a promise to fight against the denigration of the innocent, the
assignment of numbers instead of names—against massive companies that wanted to
turn people into machines, companies with no appreciation for the blood and
sweat that fueled their profits. And though Vinestead was infamous for its
disregard for employees, Sava knew more and more companies were adopting the
practice, even Banks Media out of Los Angeles.

“No, Mr. Gray. Your sliver is broadcasting,
but no one is listening. Banks Media servers aren’t accepting your input
anymore.”

“Bullshit. The only way that would happen is
if Banks fired me and yanked my feeder ID from the database. And considering
the metric fuck-ton of content I’ve got for him, I wouldn’t be surprised if he
made me a partner when I get back.”

Sava rolled a bullet casing between her
fingers. “Cameron Gray still works for Banks Media, but his feeder ID has been
updated to match his new sliver. The old ID was trashed.”

“Why would I need a new sliver?” asked Cam,
looking at his wrist. “This one works just fine.”

“Not for you,” said Sava.

She flashed on the memory of Rick’s glazed
eyes the moment he realized Vinestead had lied to him.

“We built a synthetic Cameron and equipped
him with all of your tech. The only thing we couldn’t clone was the hardware ID
of your new sliver, so we updated the database. The synthetic you would have
never known the difference.”

Sava gave a quick glance to Cam and found he
was staring at the ground and biting his lip.

“I uh,” he said, chuckling. “I did a story
once on cloning. People thought it was going to be an escape from death, but
they didn’t consider they might wake up as the original instead of the copy. I
always wondered what that must feel like.” He huffed, drew himself up. “I
should like to meet this synthetic Cam.”

“You can’t,” said Sava. “A couple of
synthetics pulled its head off and dragged it back to the Spire. I had it
destroyed.”

“Naturally.” His head bobbed. “You see, the
originals got screwed because they weren’t the ones moving on in the better
body. If they cloned themselves to escape disease, they still woke with that
disease. What you people did here was make an unnecessary copy. Were you just
going to keep me locked up so the new me could take my place?”

“It wasn’t supposed to go down like this.
Things got out of hand when Cyn entered the picture. And then before I knew it,
I had aggregators crawling out of every crevice in the city. You people really
fucked things up for us.”

Cam laughed. “And your role in all of this
was what?”

“Everything was on the rails right up until
your head came off. If Joe… if it hadn’t gone the way it did, you’d be home in
L.A. getting ready to forward the cause of synthetic rights. Just like James
Perion wanted.”

“And Donato Banks,” said Cam.

“Excuse me?”

Cam dropped the remaining bullets to the
ground. “I know how this works. There’s no way you could have accessed the
Banks Media database from here. Our Quality Control group is the second biggest
department we have, right behind network security. And before anything gets to
QC, there are checks to make sure it is coming from the right person. The
feeder IDs of Banks Media aggregators are closely guarded secrets. You can’t
just telnet to our public webserver and change my identity.”

Sava looked away. “I know.”

“Only Donato Banks himself could have pulled
this off without raising eyebrows, which means he knew the switchover was
coming.” Cam paused, took a deep breath. “He knew you were gonna fuck me and he
did everything but put me in a pretty dress.”

“He did not even get a choice,” said Anela,
her voice a whisper on the air.

The construct threatened to show Sava an
image of Rick, of the way his face looked on the train back to Sacramento, the
sadness in his dying eyes as she told him who she really was.

Kaili Zabora pushed the memory away to
become Sava Kessler once more.

She reached out and patted Cam on the back.

They came out of The Fringe like ants to a rotting carcass.

Hundreds drifted out of the alleys and down
wide pedestrian thoroughfares on pre-programmed chemical trails as if heading
into work for the first time that day. For all of the intelligence built into
their synthetic brains, they seemed unaffected by the destruction around them.
They stepped over and around run-over, dismembered, and crushed synthetics in
the plaza as if they were loose trash someone had forgotten to pick up. Only
the ones in blue jumpsuits occasionally emerged from the crowd to set a table
upright before rejoining the flow.

Sava cursed every time she had to move over
on the steps to give way to the swelling torrent of synthetics. There wasn’t
any danger of being trampled; Sava just didn’t like all of those machine bodies
walking so close to her, swallowing her up like the last remaining sandcastle
on the beach, standing alone against the oncoming surf. The image evoked the
crumbling memories of Anela throwing oversized towels into the car and driving
them to the coast. Sava recalled watching the planes take off and land at San
Diego International Airport in the golden light of dawn. There was a
peacefulness to laying out on the sand with her sister that Sava had not known
since, yet the memory was enough to calm her down, to remove the emotional
barrier that so often got in the way of what needed to be done.

And there was so much to be done.

Sava stood and brushed the dirt from the
back of her skirt. Beside her, Cam faked a cough. She walked closer to the
parade of synthetics and examined them as they passed by.

“You,” she said, pointing to a female
synthetic in a nurse’s uniform, “come here.”

The synny returned a smile and broke free from
the pack. She stood in front of Sava and discreetly inventoried her injuries.

“How can I be of assistance?” she asked.

Sava ignored her and pointed again to the
crowd. “And you, guard. Front and center.”

A male synthetic at least six and a half
feet tall brought his hulking frame and bolted-on scowl to rest in front of
Sava. His eyes went passive, awaiting an order.

“There’s an injured woman on one
thirty-seven who needs medical attention. You can take the elevator to
eighty-nine and use the service ladders the rest of the way.” Sava pointed to
the nurse. “Triage the situation.” Then to the guard, “If she determines the
woman can be moved, take her down to Medical and get her some attention.”

The nurse nodded.

“Yes, sir,” said the AG, furnishing a quick
salute. He headed into the building at a hasty clip, the nurse following on his
heels.

“I was wondering if you were gonna do
anything about her,” said Cam.

“She doesn’t have to die,” said Sava. “We’re
going to need more women like her in the world, people who are ready to fight
for what they believe in.”

“Then why’d you shoot her?”

“Just because she was
wrong
doesn’t
mean she didn’t believe in what she was doing. It probably doesn’t make any
sense to someone like you, but there is honor in conviction. Mine just happened
to be stronger.”

Cam shook his head. “If that’s how you want
to justify it, fine. Gil and Gantz are dead; Cyn could be. I’m pretty sure
you’d be digging a fourth grave for me if this plan of yours had worked. The
world doesn’t need two Cameron Grays, does it?”

“
My
plan?” she asked, placing her
hand on her chest. “You think I wanted any of this? I wanted James Perion to
continue running his company for another thirty or forty years. He had infinite
resources. He could have found a way to steal Vinestead’s tech and save
himself. But no, he had to be ideological instead of practical.”

“So he
is
dead then?” asked Cam.

Sava nodded. “He could have faced mortality
with dignity, but instead he was selfish, worried only about
his
wants
and
his
needs. He lost sight of the bigger picture, of Perion
Synthetics’ role in the global tragedy that is our world. I went along with it
on the assumption that a synthetic James Perion is better than no James Perion
at all. But the longer this goes on, the more out of control it gets.”

Cam nodded slowly. “James Perion became his
own product. I should have seen that one coming. You people sure know how to
fuck with the status quo.”

“Whatever,” said Sava. “If I had it my way…”

Sava felt the ground shift as the construct
bloomed around her. The players crept out from the shadows and took their first
positions. There was Synth J, pacing the invisible floor the way he had the
previous Monday when word of his illness got out and the company’s stock price
had plummeted. His son, Joe, stood a few feet away, back turned to his father,
looking for patterns in the ether. Cam and Cyn stood face to face, speaking
into each other’s slivers, caught in the mutual masturbation of cyclic feeding.
To the right, Anela stood over the body of Robert Gantz, nudging him with her
shoe.

So many pieces to move. So many different
ways to set things right again.

“You are forgetting someone,” said Anela.
She tapped Sava on the shoulder and pointed behind them.

Sava turned and saw a figure in the
distance. It was looking directly at her, shoulders slightly hunched, arms held
rigid at its side. A mental manipulation brought the face closer.

Gilbert Reyes.

“If you had it your way?” asked Cam. “Let me
guess, you would have dumped me and Cyn at Perion Terminus and been done with
us, right?”

Sava looked down at the aggregator. “I still
might,” she replied, and then turned for the door. When Cam asked where she was
going, she called over her shoulder, “More loose ends to tie up. Why don’t you
make yourself useful and go look for Joe?”

“And how exactly am I supposed to find him
in this mess?”

Sava paused to point at the black plume
rising beyond the nearby buildings. “He’s helping the people he hurt when he
crashed into a recharge station,” she said.

“How do you know that?”

“Someone is always watching,” she replied,
then stepped through the busted doorframe.

Inside, the lobby was looking better; the
synthetics had made good progress in the last hour. The whine of six backpack
vacuums filled the space, echoing off the high ceilings and reverberating in
the hallways. Sava was happy to get away from the sound, and after turning a
few corners, she found herself in silence again. It was there she could hear
Anela’s voice more clearly, where she could find comfort in its company.