Perion Synthetics (57 page)

“Is that really all you people care about?
Perion Synthetics versus Vinestead International? Do you think I wake up every
morning worrying about other companies dumping inferior products on the market?
We are in the business of synthetics here. Intelligent. Automated. Safe.”

Joe smacked his hand with each word.

“Safe?” asked a voice. “Since when have the
Perions ever been concerned with safety?”

A hush fell over the crowd as Arthur Sedivy
and his bodyguards pushed through the barricades to the left of the stage. One
of his men put a nearby box in front of the stage so Arthur could climb up.

Joe looked around for Parker, but the chief
had disappeared.

What would James Kirkland Perion do if
Arthur Sedivy crashed his press conference?

“Arthur,” said Joe, presenting his biggest
smile. “What a pleasant surprise. I wasn’t expecting to see you here. Surely VFeed
could have spared an aggregator?”

Joe cringed at his father’s voice coming
from his mouth.

“No,” said Sedivy, joining Joe at the front
of the stage. “I had to come myself.” He turned to the crowd. “I had to hear
the lies for myself! I knew you would stand up here and tell these fine people
your synthetics are safe, when in fact, we know them to be anything but.”

The screen behind the stage stuttered on a
frame from the Perion reel and then went to black. When the image returned, it
took Joe a moment to recognize an aerial shot of Perion City. The image zoomed
in.

“November 14, 2015,” said Sedivy. “An
aggregator named Gilbert Reyes livecasts as he struggles with a Perion synthetic.
We lock into his signal just before it goes dead.”

A few gasps went up from the crowd.

“We believe this is Gilbert Reyes trying to
escape the synthetic. He is then surrounded by Perion agents. And…”

The image was blurry, but there was just
enough detail to see Gil shake and go limp. The crowd around him dispersed,
leaving his body lying there on the grass in the courtyard.

Sedivy leveled an accusing finger.

“This boy will have you believe Perion
synthetics are perfectly safe, that by giving them free will, by giving them
the
choice
to disobey the three laws, they will somehow be superior to
all other synthetics on the planet. Unlike these mad scientists, we built
Vinestead Synthetics with the three laws as a foundation. We are firmly
committed to the idea that the protection of humanity comes first and foremost.
It should
not
be optional and certainly should not be an add-on
feature.”

Joe put his hands up.

“And here it comes,” said Sedivy. “Like
father like son, trying to explain away the loss of a human life. What lie do
you have for a murdered United States citizen? Or should we wait for you to
hire a new head of public relations? Who will do the lying now that your father
is gone?”

It was true; Joe had spent the last few
months trying to step into his father’s shoes, into the stuffy world of
meetings and negotiations and glad-handing. Joe couldn’t shake the feeling he
was simply pantomiming, going through the motions as a second-rate James
Perion, his performance feeble compared to the machine who still roamed the
basement of the Spire. At what point would he stop being the son of James
Perion and just be Joseph Michael Perion, CEO of Perion Synthetics?

Sedivy took a step closer, his voice
shifting to a whisper. “I outlasted your father, Mr. Perion, and you’re not
half the man he was. I will see your company burned to the ground.”

What would James Kirkland Perion do if
Arthur Sedivy threatened him in front of the world?

“There will come a time when you have to
make a choice,” said the memory of James Perion.

Beside him, Victoria Perion smiled at Joe. “All
must walk their own path to the dust.”

The question popped into his head before he
could stop it.

What would Joseph Michael Perion do if
Arthur Sedivy threatened him in front of the world?

Off to the left, Joe saw Nico climb onto the
stage in slow motion. He ran towards Joe, his arms outstretched. To the right,
the crowd undulated like the sea, spraying him with vitriolic questions directed
at both Perion Synthetics and Vinestead International. The chaos swirled, the
memories of James and Victoria Perion faded into the noise.

“Go hide in your spire, Mr. Perion. While
it’s still standing.”

All must walk their own path to the dust.

And James Perion has taken his last
steps.

Joe felt his lead knuckle catch the right
side of Arthur Sedivy’s nose. Blood erupted in a thick spray; it ran freely
over the Vinestead CEO’s mouth and splattered onto both men’s shirts. Joe kept
expecting Sedivy to put a hand out as he fell, but the man simply keeled over
in one smooth arc. His head smacked the stage, silencing the crowd.

Nico got his hands on Joe’s chest and pushed
him backwards. His lips moved, but the words were muted.

“Joe. Joe!”

The red hue of the world fizzled out and Joe
caught eyes with Nico.

“How was that for an ad-lib?” he asked.

Gil spent Valentine’s Day and most of the night staring at
Roberta’s faintly beating heart through the open wound in her chest. He had
spent two months at the workbench trying to repair the damage, rarely leaving
the back room at the safe house in El Cajon to do anything but check the
security monitors or answer a call from Kaili. When those calls stopped coming,
Gil planted himself next to the synthetic approximation of Jacqueline Dulac and
used his newfound focus and limitless energy to repair the connections that so
many bullets had torn apart.

He worked on her through the evening,
soldering broken pathways to link her heart back to the idle power sources
throughout her chassis.

Her lips had just begun to move beneath the
veil Gil had draped over her face when the lights in the safe house went out.

Gil listened as the generators wound down,
as the whirring of the fans in the equipment around him began to diminish.

The room fell silent.

He stood next to the workbench with his hand
on Roberta’s and closed his eyes.

The TSR Ayudante code had died along with
Gilbert Alejandro Reyes some three months ago, but the memories of Patrick
“Meltdown” Kumanov had crystalized during the transition to a synthetic
existence. Thinking back to the Margate days was easier than ever now. No
longer were those nights spent beneath the synth haze a foggy playback in Gil’s
rush-addled mind. Those memories had transcended the biological and found a
permanent home in the non-degrading ones and zeros of his Katsumi-brand
synapses. He would never forget Meltdown’s face now, would never forget how the
rusher’s eyes had dimmed when he spoke of the world above the world, the nirvanic
plane reserved for the enlightened.

“Why do you think we created religion in the
first place? It’s our nature to reject the idea of a single reality, of an
immutable world. We long to be above it, to separate ourselves from this
prison. That is why the synth flows, my friend. The code shows us the borders
of this world and takes us beyond them. Reality cannot be escaped, but the
borders can be transcended.”

Meltdown’s ramblings became more coherent
each time Gil accessed them, translating themselves from Margate mush to
something approaching insightful. For the first time in his life, Gil
understood what the rusher had been trying to tell him all those years ago. And
yet, something was lost in the translation, some bit of humanity or perspective
that had made the insight feel more real. Storing the accumulated wisdom of
Patrick Kumanov as binary data had normalized the content, made it more
instruction manual than aphorism.

Gil closed the Margate file and returned his
attention to the safe house. He reached out with his enhanced senses, took
inventory of each room, the configuration of the furniture, the locations of
stashed weapons, the various exits, the explosives meant to bring the house to
the ground—the data streamed faster than he could consciously handle, but his
processor ate it up, giving him complete awareness of the building.

Footsteps in the mud. Rubber soles on the
evercrete.

The vibrations moved through the safe house,
as loud as gunshots in Gil’s ears. He imagined the back porch and the
reinforced, sliding door. The intruders were vague blobs in his mind, but where
they interacted with the house, Gil saw feet and gloved hands. One of them
placed something on the wall along the top of the back door. Fingers jabbed
like jackhammers until an electronic beep pierced the relative silence.

Gil had Roberta slung over his shoulder and
was halfway down the escape tunnel when the first explosion hit. It was
followed by smaller reports—the caustic pop of a flash-bang, the soft hissing
of tear gas. It would have been disorienting had there been any humans in the living
room.

“You think they want me or you?” asked Gil.

Roberta said nothing. A line of oil
descended her arm; drops fell from her outstretched fingers.

Gil didn’t even look back. The hatch over
the tunnel was well-disguised, and he had sealed it from the inside with a
steel slab half a dozen men couldn’t lift. Even if the surprise guests managed
to get through the barricade, they would be buried alive when they triggered
the explosives Gil had placed at the midpoint of the tunnel.

“That’s why you ring the doorbell first,”
said Gil.

The tunnel opened into the storeroom of an
abandoned bakery two streets over from the safe house. Gil broke the padlock on
the other side of the hatch with a single punch. The opening was too small to
carry Roberta on his shoulder, so he held her by the hand and dragged her up
the ladder.

Once out of the hatch and crouching on the
floor, Gil reached out beyond the walls of the store room and heard people on
the sidewalk talking and laughing, filling the night with noise pollution.
Putting Roberta on his shoulder, he moved to the door and gave the knob half a
turn.

The veneered door splintered in front of him
as automatic fire tore jagged lines across its face. Gil ducked, putting a dent
in the wood floor as his knee came down hard.

“Fuck,” he said.

They knew about the safe house. They knew
about the tunnel.

He squeezed Roberta’s legs in his right arm
and thought of Jackie. How much did they know about his girls?

Gil loaded the Margate file and searched for
some words of advice from Meltdown. Maybe somewhere in that synth-saturated
mind of his was some Zen bullshit that might get Gil from the store room to the
Ford Focus parked out back in one piece.

“We’re confined by the idea of a path,” said
Meltdown, his cadence shaky from the Smashed Peas. “Oh, the path is blocked,
the path is open, the path must be taken. We forget to ask the question
what
path?
What is this unstoppable river of causality you speak of?” He sat up
and leaned over the low coffee table. “Fuck the path, my friend. You are above
it. You are beyond it.”

Gil took inventory.

Kneeling had been automatic, a way to keep
the bullets from poking holes in his body the way Gantz had poked holes in
Roberta. Judging by the spray along the wall, there were at most two or three
shooters. Though they were putting out a lot of bullets, they didn’t seem to be
aiming.

It would all depend on how fast Gil could
move from the store room, across the prep area, to the back door. He ran the calculations
in his head, but the numbers appeared jumbled. They fell apart and reformed as
words.

Fuck the path.

Gil tightened his grip on Roberta and tensed
the pistons in his legs.

Somewhere above the whizzing of bullets, he
heard a magazine drop to the floor.

The door was little more than splinters; it
gave way easily as Gil pushed through it. He glanced at the front of the store
as he pumped his legs, saw four figures, two on each side of the entrance.
Barrel flashes lit three of their faces while the fourth struggled to get a new
mag inserted. Gil scooped up an empty crate and whipped it towards the front of
the store. It caught one of the shooters in the shoulder, altering their aim.

Gil slammed into the wall opposite the store
room and then made a break for the back door. Bullets pinged off the sheetrock and
scraped at the synthetic flesh of his arms. A few lodged themselves in his back
and he wondered how many were hitting Roberta. He hadn’t had time to secure the
inner shield over her heart before carrying her into the tunnel. If a bullet
made it through…

A sharp wind cut across Gil’s face as he
stumbled into the parking lot behind the bakery. He grabbed the hidden key from
the front wheel well of the Ford Focus and managed to get the door unlocked and
Roberta in the back seat before the gunmen caught up. He climbed behind the
wheel and threw the car into reverse. Bullets tapped out a proximity warning on
the hood as he pulled away from the building.

When the rear bumper tapped a chain-link fence,
he shifted into drive and peeled out.

Late night revelers had filled the Las
Palmas parking lot with their bouncing cars; they honked at the POS Ford
tearing through their ranks. Gil turned out of the shopping center onto Chase
Avenue and smirked at the street sign as it passed by.

He only made it a couple of miles from the
bakery before three pairs of headlights began swerving in the rearview mirror.
Gil cut across unfamiliar side streets in an attempt to lose them, always
pushing towards the highway he knew to be somewhere westward. He ran a red
light at El Cajon Boulevard and careened through the parking lot of a
twenty-four hour pharmacy. The car rattled as the tires crossed two sets of
railroad tracks. Finally, the highway appeared. He drove alongside the roadside
barrier until he could get on.