Perion Synthetics (13 page)

The pressure on her foot lessened as the
wind tore at the holes, ripping the canopy apart. Cyn found the freedom to
rotate and pointed herself at the glittering tip of the Perion Spire, a
pinpoint around which an intricate fractal of streets extended into the
surrounding desert. She could make out the larger highways and heavy duty
trucks, but everything else was hidden behind the flashing text on her visor.

It was getting to be that time.

Cyn pulled the ripcord and breathed a sigh
of relief as the main parachute deployed without issue. She settled into a
sedate circle around the Spire.

Even with Tate’s considerable reach and
Cyn’s own hacking, there was little intel on the Spire itself, save a few
blueprints that had been marked up and shopped more often than Elise Portman.
As far as anyone could tell, the Spire was home to offices and housing for
C-level employees and managers who spent more time in meetings than checking in
on their workers. As the Spire ascended beyond habitable dimensions, the space
was thought to be filled with telecom equipment. Cyn could already see the
flowery antennas of such equipment blooming on the scaffolding around the very
tip of the Spire.

One of the sixteen schematics showed a
service hatch within reach of the scaffolding, located on the west side of the
building. In her tightening spiral, the compass on Cyn’s visor was useless. She
instead watched the horizon, knowing she had to put the Spire between herself
and the sun. The anxiety about where to land faded, replaced by the more
pressing issue of whether she could land at all.

Contrary to popular rumor, there were no
sentry guns on the Spire, at least, not at her altitude. The only defensive
measure in place was the reflective glass and the blinding glares it created
every time she caught the sun in them. After the last flash, she made a sharp
turn and approached the Spire head-on.

Cyn gripped the chute cord and waited for
the right moment to cut loose. Though the parachute had carried her this far,
it would no doubt pull her off the Spire when she landed. In one simulation,
Cyn had broken loose ten feet above the scaffolding and simply grabbed a
crossbeam on the way down. It would have made a compelling stunt in a movie,
but here, without an audience, there was no point in showing off.

A section of the scaffolding banged against
her shin, sending the splintering pain racing up her body. As it passed through
the five gates in her spine, the signal diminished, until her brain was left
with only a faint echo of distress. Cyn cut herself loose as her other leg
hooked around a horizontal bar. When she heard the signature click and saw the
chute fall away, she reached her hands out with the augmented power of a vise,
latching onto a section of metal piping and a mesh of coaxial cables spilling
from the back of a satellite dish.

She took a moment to catch her breath. The
numbers on her visor began to settle and shrink, allowing her to focus beyond
the fuzzy text.

“There’s my bitch,” she said.

Cyn pushed and pulled her way through the
scaffolding with the ease of a child at play on a jungle gym. The door was
unlocked and opened with a simple turn of a handle. Inside, she waited for her
eyes to adjust to the dark. She pulled the dive helmet from her face and took a
deep breath of machine-heated air.

“Excuse me,” said a voice to the right.

Cyn spun around, pulling the needler from
her hip. She pointed it into the darkness and waited for the speaker to come
into view.

Set on a pike in the middle of the room was
the upper half of what Cyn hoped was a synthetic man. Cables drenched in an
oily liquid hung from his elevated torso, dripping into a grate whose mesh was
thick with the congealed innards of previous caretakers. The synthetic had the
appearance of a young man and in another setting, might have been mildly
attractive. The look on his face was so piteous that the Ayudante chip mistook
it for sincere need and amplified it.

Empathy enveloped Cyn, enough to lower the
needler a full inch.

“You are not authorized to be in here,” said
the synthetic. “I will have to alert—”

The needler hummed as the synthetic’s lips
shattered and exited through the back of his head.

“Two minutes on-site and you’ve already popped one off?”

“Who are you, my narrator?”

Tate’s laughed buzzed in Cyn’s ear; the
whisperer was holding up well despite the electronic interference coming off
the tightly packed telecom equipment. Dusty metal blades with frenetic lights
covered every surface of the glorified broom closet. A semi-circle of
user-serviceable devices surrounded the pike on which the now lifeless
synthetic—if it had even been alive to begin with—sat impaled with no legs and
no head and no dignity. Even before Cyn had happened upon him, the synthetic
had been indentured into the life of a remote terminal server, a set of hands
in the inhospitable attic of the Spire where the dust and dirt swirled in the
super-heated air.

When the line didn’t cut out, Cyn asked,
“Are you gonna babysit me the entire time?”

“Are you going to keep pushing your tach
into the red?”

“Goddamn chute opened early. When I get
back, I’m going to have some words with that ape at Maine Prairie.”

There was a sporadic throbbing in Cyn’s leg;
the Ayudante was letting the pain through every couple of minutes to remind her
of the injury.

“I’m fine, Lincoln. I don’t need someone
looking over my shoulder.”

“It’s not a problem,” said Tate. “I dropped
a tab on the way back so I am jacked, baby. So long as you make it back before
this wears off, we should be good.”

“We’ll see.”

Cyn looked around for a door, remembered
where she was, and began examining the floor. A square section of the raised
grate was marked with black and yellow paint. In the center, a looped handle
sat in a recessed half-moon.

“Yes, we will,” said Tate. “I gotta get this
SatIndex up before we start losing subbers.”

Cyn had the hatch open, but paused to let
her feet dangle into the dark room below. She pulled her phone from the
zippered pocket on her chest and snapped a photo of the synthetic. “I’m sending
you something. Just give me an hour before you feed it.”

There was silence as the picture
transferred.

“This is why I had to
pop one off
,”
she added.

“The fuck,” said Tate. “Damn, girl. Alright,
counter starts now.”

Cyn rubbed the material on her shins,
activating the luminescent fibers. The room below was slightly larger and
similarly wallpapered in electronics.

“Same goes for anything else I send you. If
Perion sees it, I want them an hour behind me.”

“Little girl telling me how to feed like
it’s my first day and shit.”

The needler was still warm, but Cyn didn’t
bother holstering it, not with the possibility of another synthetic in the room
below. She pushed her chute rig and helmet into the corner, knowing she would
never see them again. Gripping the needler in one hand, she used the other to
lower herself to the next level.

No one, synthetic or otherwise, challenged
her. Again, she searched the floor for a hatch, again she lowered herself down.
The lower she got, the bigger the rooms became, the more the claustrophobia
receded.

The banks of electronics gradually
disappeared, leaving her with empty rooms of rough evercrete to crawl down
through. Finally, she reached a room with massive generators set in two lines
of three. She snapped a picture and sent it to Tate.

“What do you make of these?”

“Magnetic inductors,” he replied. “Looks
like they’re using mag-lev for their elevator system.”

“And just how would you know that?” Cyn
walked around one of the generators, but its smooth sides gave no clues about
the tech contained within.

“The executive entrance at Umbra Terminus
takes you under the train’s mag tracks. They’ve got similar designs, but yours
looks more specialized.”

“Are they about the same size?”

“It’s hard to tell, but I’d say probably.
Why?”

“How far can one of those inductors drive
the mag-lev?”

“Give me a minute.”

There was static on the line as Tate had a
conversation with someone else. He wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty with
the data mining, but years spent as a producer had left him slower than the
boys in the back, his quasi-ciphers whose nimble fingers banged out like
pistons, pumping ones and zeros into the ether like a needler firing at full
automatic.

Cyn began to whistle, but thought the better
of it.

“Maximum track run is twenty-five hundred
feet. On average, between Umbra and Sacramento, inductors are set every two
thousand feet.”

“And how tall is the Perion Spire?”

“It depends on which schematic you trust.
This one says ninety or so habitable floors, another forty for equipment, and
the rest is just decoration. This other one says it has a toe to teeth distance
of sixteen hundred feet.”

“And these are just pushing elevator cars,
not whole trains.”

Cyn pulled back a maintenance hatch near an
inductor and stared into the black abyss below. In the distance, she could hear
the smooth whooshing of air as an elevator car ascended.

“What are you thinking, Cynthia?”

“Not really thinking,” she replied, pulling
a glow stick from her belt. It was small, about the size of a tube of lipstick,
but it gave off light like a strip of magnesium. She depressed the plunger on
the end and tightened her fist around it. “Ten bucks says it bounces right off
the top of the car.”

“
What
bounces?” asked Tate. “What the
hell are you up to?”

“Well,” she replied, using her own voice as
a distraction from the scenario building in her head, “it’s simple. The
inductors drive less weight a further distance than required by the Spire. So
that means there must be more of this thing underground, and that makes perfect
sense. Why keep anything of value in the fifth largest building in the world?
You’re just asking Kaili Zabora to fly a plane into it.”

“You’re going to jump, aren’t you? Damn it,
girl.”

Cyn released her grip and waited a few
seconds before peering down after the glow stick. The bright speck receded to a
pinpoint, casting a green-white glow on the walls of the elevator shaft,
highlighting a series of descending platforms and the connecting ladders. When
the glow stick finally stopped, a tinny smack echoed up the shaft.

“Got it in one,” said Cyn.

“I’m not sure this is one of your better
ideas.”

“You want the real story, don’t you? Or
should I just pick up a brochure in the lobby? One picture of that synthetic
amputee isn’t going to make Banks shit himself.” She took a deep breath; the
car was too far down to risk a jump. “Ask the boys in the back if they know
anything about the mag-lev system. Is there a way to call the car to the top?”

“Oh sure,” said Tate. “I’ll just have them
pull up the PDF.” His sarcasm tapered to a long silence.

Cyn waited, wondering idly how much a pair
of Koertig enhanced eyes would cost. Low-light vision, non-visible spectrum
dithering, telescoping irises: anything to help her see the bottom of the
elevator shaft.

“No luck hacking the planet.” Tate huffed.

“Screw it. I’ve got enough spider silk to
get me halfway down.”

“And if the car is any lower?”

“Who thinks that far ahead?”

Cyn tugged at one of the hidden pockets
running down the length of her leg and retrieved a titanium snare. Looping it
into the spider silk took time; though both were rated for loads ten times her
weight, she knew the weak point would be where the two joined. If she fell, it
would be because of her own shoddy workmanship. After a few minutes, she had
the snare and the silk wrapped around one of the anchor bolts holding the
magnetic inductors to the evercrete floor.

“You’re really going to do this?” asked
Tate.

Leaning over the lip of the hatch, Cyn
raised her sliver to her mouth. “Yes!” she barked.

Then she was falling at a clip that evoked a
whine from the silk feeder on her belt. In the distance, the glow stick
approached. As Cyn got closer, she realized the elevator car was descending,
dropping just a little slower than she was falling. She did her best to match
the speeds, but the impact was still more than she was expecting and louder
than she would have liked. Cyn made a grab for the loose cables on the outer
circuitry of the car to keep from falling off.

She could hear alarm in the muffled voices
inside the car; hopefully they would pass her landing off as mechanical noise.

Cyn unhooked the feeder from her belt and
hit the retract button. It sped up into the darkness.

“Sounded like that hurt,” said Tate.

“You try it next time.” She groaned
dramatically, playing up the sympathy.

“Tell me what you’re seeing.”

The car continued its controlled fall as Cyn
whispered to herself and Tate.

“We’re going down, just passing the forty-seventh
floor. There are chalk markings on the walls calling out each level. Doors,
piston-driven, I think. Opposite side has ventilation shafts, maybe exhaust
from the floors. I get a blast of warm air each time I pass one. Every fifth
floor has a landing going from one side of the shaft to the other. Ladders
alternate between each—”

“Ladders? You could have climbed down?”

“Yes,” said Cyn, rolling her eyes. “And
three years later I would have made it to the bottom. At least when this thing
stops, I’ll be able to climb off. Could probably make the jump now if I wanted
to, but since I’m already…”

The car slowed to a stop on the nineteenth
floor, paused, and started to climb again. Cyn jumped to the landing on the
twentieth floor with a graceful leap.