Perion Synthetics (12 page)

“No pull,” said Tate, replacing the bottle
on the shelf. “No favors, no leverage. This is a total cold-call engagement. My
hope is that you’ll be able to get in, get the TL;DR, and get the hell out.”

“What if I’m caught? Perion City has some
pretty mean sovereignty laws.”

“A girl’s got a right to defend herself.”

“Ah, so that’s why you chose me.”

“You know the stories about Perion City.
You’ve seen the vids of people trying to sneak in. I thought you might be up
for the challenge.”

Cyn slid off the stool and drifted to the
windows. Across the street, Version Seven was pumping out pure bass into the
night, attracting those whose hearts beat with a similar tempo. Despite the
chill in the air, there was still a decent line of body-mods and augs waiting
behind the velvet rope.

“So you admit there’s danger.”

Tate smiled to himself. He had her. “Yes.”

“I’ll need money for equipment.”

“Done.”

“And a needler, something compact. And I get
to keep it when we’re done.”

“I’ll send the boys out for something
immediately.”

Cyn turned around and crossed her arms.
“Standard six figure contract. Payment up front.”

“I was thinking of a fixed seventy with a
variable fifty depending on the SatIndex performance. The world is desperate
for news about Perion. You should be able to swing the numbers easily.”

“I can live with one-twenty,” said Cyn.
“Send the contract to Bryce and let him look it over. If he signs off on it,
you’ve got yourself a deal.”

“It was hand-delivered an hour ago. I asked
Bryce to let me break the proposal to you.”

“In that case,” she replied, pulling out her
phone. She sent a text to her handler and within seconds, had a response. “You
weren’t bullshitting.”

“Have you ever known me to lie?”

“Only when you tell me you love me.” She
smiled at something on her phone. “Which leads me to my next question. What
kind of insertion method do you have in mind?”

“Ah, now that you’re gonna dig.”

Tate produced a code card from his breast
pocket and tossed it to Cyn. It fluttered in the air and fell at her feet.

“What’s this?” she asked, bending to
retrieve it.

“A simulation construct. A ground approach
to Perion City would be sniffed out twenty miles from the border. But the sky…
the sky’s a much bigger place. I figure you can get a couple hours of simulated
jumps in and be on a plane by four.”

“You don’t think Perion will get suspicious
when we start feeding from the inside?”

“According to Benny Coker, James Perion is
dead. And judging by the after-hours trading, Perion Synthetics is dead too. If
there’s a chance the company might survive, if there’s a
plan
to keep
Vinestead from capitalizing on Perion’s death, I want to know about it. The
American people want to know about it.”

“The American people want hamburgers and
porn. Just say your panties are in a twist because Banks is one-upping you and
leave it at that.”

Tate scanned the length of Cyn’s body; it
still amazed him how innocent she looked, how perfectly harmless her thin legs
appeared in skin-tight pants. Only a trained eye would notice the rough edges
around the jackport on the back of her neck, the secondary trauma of having a
Guardian Angel biochip extracted and replaced with something more palatable.

“Stop eye-fucking me, Lincoln.”

Tate spread his hands and backed away. “Just
taking a mental picture in case the worst happens.”

“Right.” Cyn crossed the room and sat down
on the couch again. The code card made a popping sound as she freed the
electrode. “No funny business while I’m under,” she warned.

Tate motioned to a door beside the bar. “My
room is available if you’d prefer somewhere more private.”

“Just keep your hands to yourself, boss.”

Cyn pressed the tab to her neck and drifted
away with a satisfied sigh.

Tate stood at the edge of the couch for
several minutes, watching her chest rise and fall, wondering if he had made the
right move.

The roar of dual props clawed at the foam plugs in Cyn’s
ears, but her mind was on other things.

There was a memory stirring in her brain, a
chemically repressed recall of a time in her life before Liberation, before she
had paid a back-alley hack four hundred bucks to rip the Guardian Angel chip
out of her neck. She had only been seventeen then, a late bloomer in a world
where children grew up too fast, where each new generation of tiny unmolested
minds sought out a culture to call their own. Cyn got her start at the age of
ten, latching onto the burgeoning NexLvl tech scene that would carry her into
adulthood, a world of circuitry and augmented physiology, of endless
possibilities put in reach for the first time by simple ones and zeros, by the
inevitable melding of nature and science. It kept her attention even as her
friends drifted away to the bourgeois pursuits of bad poetry, meaningless
trysts with local boys, and even college.

Cyn never even considered the possibility of
higher education.

By eighteen, she was free of the Vinestead
shackles and well on her way to her first augmentation, which she financed
through an under-the-table business of data theft and grid wipes. The last
decade had made paranoiacs out of everyone, made them question the
long-standing tradition of handing over their personal data for the promise of
ten dollars off their next visit to The Gap or for access to the latest social
networking destination. What it took the world ten years to realize, and what
Cyn had known from what felt like birth, was that it didn’t pay to be yourself
in VNet or Terrareal. A veneer was always preferable to the truth.

Cyn stretched in the jump seat, reaching for
the green mesh above her. Although the stimulants were keeping her awake and
alert, her body was realizing it hadn’t slept for a while. Her arms quivered in
the form-fitting suit.

“Nothing but the best for my girl,” Tate had
said as he pushed the lid off of a gunmetal box like it was the goddamn Ark of
the Covenant.

Contained within were various goodies: a
helmet with AR capabilities, a chute rig with built-in oxygen tank, and finally,
a next-gen automatic pistol known in Umbra circles as a needler. And though the
weapon seemed to vibrate in her hand in anticipation of the slaughter to come,
it had been the dive suit that grabbed Cyn’s attention. She had held it up to
her body and wondered aloud how she was ever going to get into it.

The answer came at the Maine Prairie
airfield thirty miles outside of Umbra. There, a tech who was more body hair
than man had shown her how to cut the seams and then temp-seal them once she
was inside. He had enjoyed every minute of educating an Umbrat, and he wasn’t
shy about lusting after Cyn’s bare skin as she slipped the material on.

Not that prying eyes worried Cyn anymore.
Most people were too distracted by her tattoos to notice anything anyway. Her
ink’s centerpiece was a skeletal outline that started at her jackport,
descended her back, and disappeared over the curve of her coccyx, segmenting
her body like the seams in the dive suit. It wasn’t so much an artistic choice
as a way to hide the scars on her arms and legs, the insertion points where her
skin had been punctured and the augments assembled underneath.

Her drop shadow spine bulged in five
specific areas to hide larger, more invasive insertions where her vertebrae had
been separated to route the grow-wire from the MoA Ayudante chip on her
brainstem to the breakout controllers at shoulder and hip height. The other
breakouts reached around her spinal cord to interface with her heart, lungs,
and other critical systems. The feedback loop it created was as close to
military grade as any aug could hope for. Among the Umbra underground, Cyn was
at the top of an ever-expanding inventory tree, a subset of players who had
spent their experience points on a single upgrade path, banking everything on the
improvement of their physical avatars in the hopes that one day, they might
pass from human to machine with one final procedure.

It was the journey to that moment that
discouraged most travelers, whether because of the cost, or the pain, or the
perceived loss of humanity. Cyn’s bank account could handle the first, her
strength and determination would cover the second, but the loss of her soul…

Well, that implied there was something there
to begin with, something to connect her to the rest of humanity.

Cyn felt neither the connection nor the
desire for it.

The dive suit’s helmet fit snugly; she
expected nothing less from Lincoln Tate. Though he was sending her into a
dangerous situation, it was worth the investment to see she came back alive.
Slamming headfirst into the Perion City evercrete would be an expensive end to
an aborted mission, especially since seventy thousand dollars were already
sitting pretty in her Bank of MX money market.

A Nixle Chronos interface chip on the back
lip of the helmet drew data from her Ayudante and displayed it on the visor in
a bit of augmented reality trickery. In the lower corner, an iconographic plane
approached the dive line set above a blue spike—the Perion Spire.

Cyn’s heart rate rose, not in fear, but in
anticipation. Not only had the simulation given her virtual experience in high
altitude jumps, but it also awoke in her a taste for the rush, a nearly
orgasmic response to the adrenaline overload she experienced each time she
stepped out of the plane and into the nothing. As far as detachment went, it
was the most removed from the world she had ever felt, so high above that great
big ball of death and distraction whose edges curved in her periphery.

At the edge of her visor, a timer changed
hue to yellow as it passed two minutes remaining. The plane had been climbing
for an hour, making a slowly tightening corkscrew around the center point of
Perion City, slipping in and out of commercial traffic to lower their chances
of being spotted. The theory was that a completely vertical approach would
provide a one-dimensional signature on the monitors, a blip the operators might
dismiss as interference from another satellite passing too close, such as the
MilTel A8 or the defunct Iridium 29 whose only purpose in life was to spit
electronic noise into the thermosphere.

The timer turned red as it sank into the
double digits.

Cyn stood and walked to the back of the
pressurized cabin. A dull buzz rang out, signaling the impending loss of
atmosphere. Soon, the pocket-size oxygen tank on her back would become the
center of her existence. It hissed in response to the sudden drop in pressure
and Cyn felt air swirling around her mask. Scrubbers along the backside of the
suit would recycle what they could, but if she didn’t find an oxygen-rich
environment in ten minutes, then all the Pesos in the MX wouldn’t do her any
good.

A shiver ran through her body as she flexed
and jumped. The cold air welcomed her, screaming across her visor in damp
streaks. The initial violence of acceleration faded away until it was just Cyn
and serenity diving together through a space whose definition was neither earth
nor the emptiness beyond it. In between worlds, Cyn tried to steady her
breathing. The great City of Perion was a speck on the brown landscape below
and its approach was like that of a bulbous monster skulking its way to its
next victim.

Then she was spinning, using her arms and
legs to route the oncoming air such that her body turned in a lazy barrel roll.
The horizon rotated, faster and faster. Cyn screamed with delight as the
airspeed readout on her visor continued to increase. Beside it, an altimeter
was headed in the opposite direction. It flashed red for a second as the
numbers blanked.

Cyn’s scream was cut off by something
popping on her back.

Damn, she thought. Too soon.

Before she could come out of the roll, the
stage one parachute had already wrapped itself around her torso. She made one
last effort to right herself, but the nylon ropes found their way to her foot,
circled it twice, and then began to pull as the chute caught some air. When it
finally went taught, Cyn felt her body being thrown downwards, and then the earth
and the sky swapped positions.

Cyn closed her eyes against the advancing
enemy, recalling the relaxation exercise the simulation had drilled into her
brain, training up the muscle memory so that any inkling of fear was
immediately squelched by rote concentration. If she couldn’t right herself
before landing, if she cut loose and died on impact, there was no sense
worrying about it now. There was nothing to do except breathe the dwindling
oxygen and enjoy the novelty that she was likely the only person currently
hurtling to her death in such an odd fashion.

Warmth spread through her neck; the Ayudante
was coming online.

The change was subtle.

At first, Cyn was only aware of the wind
running its fingers over her body, starting at her helmet on the way to
caressing the impermeable fibers of her dive suit, leaving off with a soft tap
on the toes of her shoes. Then she could hear the soft cries of alarm coming
from the Ayudante. Even though her vitals were within normal ranges, its panic
spoke to observations of brain activity, of a primal part of her gray matter
that was trying to fill her head with images of a body splattered on the
ground, its bones having liquefied on impact, with nothing remaining to
identify the flattened organic mass as human.

Her hand moved on its own, seeking out the
holster on her hip, her fingernails digging at the clasp set into the leather.
The needler came free and she used both hands to steady it. Hitting the ropes
would have been impossible; the half-inflated canopy was a much bigger target.
Cyn let the air push her aim around, making holes in the sky-blue fabric.