Perion Synthetics (58 page)

When the headlights appeared again, Gil made
a U-turn at an emergency crossover. As he passed his pursuers, bullets
shattered the rear window. Gil looked back to see Roberta covered in shards of
glass.

Fucking Perion. Did you send these men,
Joe?

Gil pushed the beater up to ninety
miles per hour. He had no idea where he was going, so he tried to make his
getaway as random as possible. Every time an exit for another highway or bypass
came up, he took it, guiding the car ever southward. Numbers of highways he had
never driven flew past: the 8, the 125, the 54. Every time he took an exit, the
rearview mirror cleared, only to be filled again a minute or two later.

The police took an interest as Gil turned
onto the 805. Their flashing lights replaced the light blue HIDs. As they got
closer, Gil counted two motorcycles and one SUV.

Gil thought about how he might explain his
synthetic body to law enforcement. He couldn’t even talk to Benny Coker about
it, couldn’t tell his former boss he was still alive and immortal and
indentured to Calle Cinco’s Kaili Zabora. Would the cops believe his story? Or
would they consider him a wayward product built by the man who donated hundreds
of thousands of dollars to the state police every year?

In the distance, the garish lights of the
United States gave way to the forced darkness of the MX. Traffic on the highway
thinned as cars turned away from the border. Gil pressed the accelerator to the
floor and pushed the engine to its limit. In the mirror, the cops kept pace.

Gil glanced over his shoulder at Roberta
sprawled out in the back seat.

“Sorry, baby. This is the only way.”

Spotlights previously trained at the glide
path to the border sprung up and blinded Gil. Apertures in his eyes closed and
opened; filters slipped into place to deal with the glare. Sirens ramped up as
shadows moved beyond the lights.

Doubt flickered across a logic gate.

It was one thing to run from the boys in
blue, but to run into the waiting arms of MX
soldados
?

Gil ducked behind the steering wheel as
large-caliber gunfire tore through the hood. The windshield cracked in jagged
cuts until it was opaque. At the last second, Gil leaned his head out of the
window to make sure the car was pointed between the booths.

A bullet caught him in the cheek, forcing
his head backwards into the door frame. He felt the steering wheel slip from
his hands as the car drifted to the right. The front passenger tire caught a
barrier just beyond the booth, pulling the car into a retaining wall before
bouncing it in the other direction.

Gil tried to avoid an evercrete barrier, but
the Ford struck it hard on the left side, launching him into the air over the
line of cars waiting to enter the United States.

Reality shifted as the car rotated. Gil saw
the frightened faces of drivers as he sailed over them, close enough to reach
out and drag his fingers over the tops of their cars.

He could almost touch…

Auxiliary lights on a pickup truck smashed
into Gil’s shoulder; his outstretched arm wedged between them even as the Ford
continued its arc. There was a sharp tug at his waistline, and then Gil was
falling into the pickup’s bed, landing amongst various gardening supplies. A
loud crash followed, punctuated by a shrill scream.

Roberta. His heart skipped a beat.

Jackie. It froze completely.

Gil tried to stand, but upon looking down,
he found he longer possessed legs or even most of his torso. The damage
feedback hit him all at once, drowning out the commotion around him. He wasn’t
even aware of the MoA infantry surrounding the truck, didn’t notice the
mustachioed
soldado
climbing into the bed.

The cries of severed wires, of tendrils with
no sensors, were deafening.

Above them, very distant and echoing, was a
voice.

It took Gil a moment to realize it was
coming from the
soldado
.

“¿Qué chingado eres?”

The barrel of his machine gun pressed into
Gil’s chest.

“¿Qué eres?!”

The
soldado
reached down and grabbed
Gil’s torn collar.

Spitting synthetic blood, Gil managed to
croak, “What?”

The man’s face came closer.

In a thick MX accent, he asked, “WHAT… ARE…
YOU?”

The dealer’s name was Huy.

He had a funny face and a funnier way of
talking, but when the lights were down and the synth was flowing through Cyn’s
veins, he was so much more than an ill-fitting Italian suit hanging on a coat
rack. There was tenderness in his augmented arms; they hummed with the same
power as Cyn’s, born from the same factory on the mainland.

Cyn had come to the other side of the world
to escape the scene for a while, but landing in the port city of Da Nang had
shown her there was no getting away from the tech. She had met Huy her second
week in-country, and it had been his idea to come to the floating sanctuary of
Hon Toan, some fifteen miles off the southernmost tip of Vietnam. The
remoteness of the islet, the clear air lacking the stench of technology, had
allowed Cyn to breathe for the first time in months.

The hour was somewhere in that indeterminate
period between night and morning. Moonlight shone in through the slats in the
window facing the beach. Cyn was wide awake, staring at the ancient fan in the
ceiling as it spun its blades of petrified palms in lazy circles. Beside her,
Huy lay on his stomach, the thin sheets pushed down to his lower back,
revealing the cubist tattoos running up both sides of his spine. His rear ribs
poked through the skin, highlighting thin lines of black fractures which broke
off in random, almost fractal-like patterns. Cyn reached out and dragged a
fingernail over one of the light blue cubes, as if it were some stray acrylic
to be scraped off.

“Sleep, girl,” said Huy. He lifted his head
from the pillow and turned it to face Cyn. The veins on his face glowed a light
blue.

“Can’t.” Cyn pulled the sheet to her chest.

“Bad dreams?”

“No,” she lied.

“Sweet dreams?” Huy opened his eyes.

“What?” asked Cyn.

“Sweet dreams,” said Huy, reaching across
Cyn’s stomach. He pushed his body against hers. “About candy.”

Not candy.
Candice
.

Cyn took a breath. It caught in her nose;
she put a hand up to cover the noise.

Huy propped himself up on his elbows, his
hair a tousled mess and his eyes glimmering. The augments in his irises gave
off a blue aura. He had perfect night vision, so if there were any tears
collecting in Cyn’s eyes, he would surely see them.

“Tell Huy,” he said.

Easier said than done.

She had never spoken to anyone about her
experiences in Perion City. Her feed in the Lincoln Continental archive stood
on its own. Even Lincoln, with his constant questions and unwavering curiosity,
had simply let her go, had driven her to the airport under the cover of night
and put her on his private jet. She changed planes in Vancouver, travelling
first class on a commercial flight for the trans-Pacific part of her trip. The
last few legs through Tokyo and Shanghai were less glamorous, but Cyn took
comfort in the knowledge she was putting more miles between herself and the PC.

“You have secrets. Tell Huy.”

The waves crashed on the beach, ceaseless
and powerful.

Cyn closed her eyes. The files were opening
against her will, the memories pouring out, rushing up the beach of her
conscious mind to obliterate whatever temporary structures she had constructed
there, whatever life she thought she had built as refuge from a pain that
lingered on. Forgetting those events had been the only way to stem the tide, to
keep away from the current running within the ocean, a thread of tiny fists,
sparkling eyes, and a smile so perfect it could have been engineered in a lab.

Huy exhaled; his breath crossed her cheek.

“They thought I left,” she said, grabbing
Huy’s hand and holding it to her chest. “They told me to go, but I went down
instead, down to where I first met Candice’s brothers and sisters. No one was guarding
them. The racks stretched on and on. Too long. Too many of them. That’s when I
knew. Candice wasn’t a prototype. They were making thousands.”

Huy slipped his hand from hers and stroked
her hair. He wiped away a tear from her cheek.

“I burned them. I burned them all. I stood
there and made sure nothing was left. No one tried to stop me. No one was waiting
when I tried to leave. They had to have known, but they let me do it. They let
me kill them all.”

“You see them?” asked Huy.

“I
hear
them,” said Cyn. “Crying. So
loud. All those screaming voices.”

“Huy help you forget.”

“There’s not enough synth in the world.”

Huy traced a line down Cyn’s cheek to her
neck, to her chest. He drew the sheet back and ran his palm over her breast.

“More to Huy than synth.”

“Yeah?” asked Cyn. “You got something that
will burn out every memory I have of that place? Because that’s what I want. To
forget.”

“Not with Ayudante,” he replied, touching
her forehead lightly. “Not with equipment here. We go to mainland.”

Back to the flashy lights and electronic
pulse, back to the data seeping from every exposed jackport like running
faucets emptying into the open sewers the people called streets. Just thinking
about the muck collecting on her boots, the brown, pungent liquid worming its
way through the leather, into her socks, around her toes, made a shiver go up
Cyn’s spine. Somewhere deep down she knew she would one day have to plunge
headfirst back into the pool, but couldn’t that day be put off for another
sunset, for another synth-filled week of ignorant bliss, where memories stayed
hidden in the shadows and the only feelings to contend with were the ones
rising from the valley of her legs?

“Are you sure you could do it?”

“Nothing for sure,” said Huy. He slipped off
the bed and walked to the door, shadows dancing on his enhanced muscles. “Huy
get you water.”

His footsteps grew distant in the short
hallway.

The horizon outside was still dark; the
first inklings of sunrise were still a few hours off. The wood floors groaned
beneath Cyn’s feet as she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up.
Each footstep echoed in the small cabana, as did the squeak of the patio doors
when she opened them. Cyn put her arms on the railing and looked out over a
dark blue ocean streaked with shimmering white. The sea breeze wrapped around
her body, calling forth the goose bumps even as her augments began to warm.
Something was in the air, something familiar.

Cyn scanned the horizon: the black fins
racing through the water, grains of sand sparkling amongst the shells on the
beach, and the trees reaching for the ocean but not daring to get too close.
Finally, looking off to the right to the lone pier where the weekly supply ship
docked, she saw a shadow exiting a small boat. The hulking silhouette stood on
the pier talking to someone before finally turning its eyes up the coastline to
Cyn’s cabana. The way it lumbered up the beach, the way the pimp cane swung
forward as if to ward off any attackers, told Cyn it could only be one person.

She grabbed a robe from the chair by the bed
and stepped barefoot onto the cool sand. The slope of the beach carried her
down to the water where she waited patiently.

Lincoln Tate put his hand to his head to
secure his hat as the breeze picked up.

“What are you doing here?” asked Cyn.

His eyes fell to Cyn’s feet and came back up
slowly.

“Nice to see you too,” he replied.

“Cut the shit,” said Cyn. “I asked you for
some space. You agreed. So again, why are you here?”

Tate looked around at the sparse islet.

“Primitive,” he said. “No transmission
lines, nothing to tie you to the mainland. Of course, there are always the
satellites, but I’m guessing no one here has a receiver. You’re completely cut
off, aren’t you?”

“It’s better this way,” said Cyn. “Far less
noise. No feed in my ear all day.”

Tate leaned his head back and scratched his
chin. “Must be nice to just opt out of the world. Let someone else deal with
it, right?”

“You came all this way to lay some guilt
trip on me?”

Tate stuck his cane in the sand and removed
his hat. From inside, he pulled out a code card and offered it to Cyn.

“Things have been happening,” he said.

“I don’t give a shit what Perion is—”

“Not Perion,” said Tate. “It’s quieted down
on that front. People are losing interest in your replays. This time next year,
they will have forgotten all about it.”

“But I won’t,” said Cyn, crossing her arms.

Tate waved the card around as if it were a
piece of candy.

Cyn grabbed it and shoved it under her
armpit.

“I’m done feeding,” she said, looking out
over the water again. “The scene is dead.”

“This has nothing to do with the feeds,
nothing at all.”

“Then what?” asked Cyn. She pulled the card
out, examined the hexagonal scales on both sides, and put it back.

“VNet,” said Tate, following Cyn’s gaze to
the horizon. “Something is happening in VNet.”

“May it burn in hell.” She spit into the
sand.

“One of my contacts got wind of a bounty,
something I think you’d be suited for. The payout would be enough to secure an
unprovisioned Ayudante chip.”

Cyn looked at Tate. There was a smile on his
face, but he was serious.

“Yes, you know what that means,” he
continued. “Memory suppression, complete synaptic control. All the advantages
of ReTread without sacrificing every bit of your soul.”

Candice’s face rose out of the surrounding
darkness, erupted into flames, and receded.