Perion Synthetics (25 page)

“There is speculation that Joseph Perion
will take over the CEO position. Have you spoken with him? Is there any truth
to the speculation that Vinestead International will try to acquire Perion
Synthetics?”

Gil raised an eyebrow. Vinestead acquiring
Perion was a stretch; nothing on the feeds for the last few days had even
suggested such a thing.

Arthur Sedivy looked away for a moment and
almost laughed under his breath. “Speculation,” he repeated. “Someone on Wall
Street is trying to position Perion stock for a quick cash-out. The acquisition
of a company is not something we would do on a whim, nor on the mere rumors of
a CEO’s passing. This is a difficult time for Perion Synthetics. Out of respect
for their family, we should reserve our speculation until the Perions have had time
to get their house in order. At any rate, Vinestead Synthetics continues to
make great strides. We will have some big announcements in the new year.”

Vinestead Synthetics, thought Gil. What a
joke.

No other company had generated as many sleek
product images and lofty marketing claims as Vinestead’s synthetics division.
When Perion announced a new breakthrough, Vinestead followed it up with a
similar but slightly better claim. The only difference was Perion had the
hardware to back it up; all Vinestead had was a marketing department.

And there was the true loss. If Arthur
Sedivy had any clue how advanced Perion’s synthetics were, he wouldn’t be out
having dinner at a faux Italian restaurant; he’d be pouring every dollar he had
into R&D. Perion’s offerings were going to change the world, were going to
put Vinestead in its place once and for all. And if last month’s model wasn’t
enough, then there was Roberta, a fully formed realization of James Perion’s
ultimate dream. He could flip the cards over as if they were trash: cooks,
messengers, and babysitters. Then, as Vinestead reached for the pot, he’d throw
down his pair of aces, two identical copies of Roberta and her stolen
personality.

It was in the way she looked at him, the
combination of her twinkling eyes sitting above her reddening cheeks that let
Gil know Jackie was in there somewhere. And though her future owner might not
know Jackie’s name, they would at least see a person, see the body language and
mannerisms as real as anyone else’s in the PC. With early synthetics, there had
always been a desire to see them as real, to marvel in the novelty of the
uncanny. With synthetics as advanced as Roberta, it was a struggle just to
remember she was artificial. The lure of accepting her as human was just too
much.

Gil touched the vidscreen and powered it
down. There was no point in watching the rest of the interview; any interesting
sound bites would be packaged up by a fellow employee at The White Line and
would appear on the feed within a few minutes. Besides, there were more
interesting things happening closer to home.

In the hallway, Gil stared at the thin blade
of light seeping out from beneath the door. A sound came with it, growing
louder as he approached his workshop, fluctuating like a variable-speed fan. Up
and down, the noise pitched, reverberating in a tiny knot in Gil’s stomach. He
had left the room with everything powered down. The only moving parts would be…

“Roberta?” he called.

There was something else too, something
beneath the hum, something grating and electronic.

Gil took a mental inventory of his workshop
and thought of the various tools capable of making such a sound, settling on
the off-network laptop he had used since the Margate days. He wondered how its
fan had sounded the last time he used it, and suddenly he remembered the
warehouse and the trace and replace on Cyn.

There had been shouting at the
time, a sense of urgency, so the minor issue of a fan wearing down had left no
impression on him. But he did remember the whine, the strident pitching of the
power supply about to lose a capacitor. Even as Cyn writhed on the table, Gil
had been thinking about how hard it would be to find a comparable part.

Gil approached the workshop door and keyed
in the passcode, expecting to find his rugged computer beeping away on the
workbench.

Instead, he discovered Roberta lying on the
floor.

From the position of her body, he assumed
Roberta hadn’t fallen. She was lying perfectly straight with one arm by her
side and the other outstretched to the laptop on the floor a few feet away.
Slack wire traced a line from the laptop back to her neck and that was when he
noticed her eyes were pegged open. The laptop’s screen scrolled the same code
Gil had used to restore Cyn, though the output looked garbled now.

Was she running the trace and replace on
herself?

Gil rushed to Roberta’s side and put an
exploratory hand against her cheek.

“Hey,” he said, shaking her at the shoulder.
“What are you doing?”

There was no response. The independent
threads responsible for making Roberta into a facsimile of a living breathing
person were offline, likely crashed by the invasive software Gil had acquired
at Pritchard Sansbury’s in the AC. There was no way Meltdown could have known
the program would one day be run against a synthetic human or that it would
shut her systems down cold.

Gil pulled the electrode from the back of
Roberta’s neck and noticed for the first time she had a jackport hidden beneath
her hair, as faint as a watermark. He climbed atop Roberta and straddled her
stomach. Again he shook her; her body felt light in his hands, but she did not
move on her own.

Something had gone wrong with the code,
something in the way it performed the trace had been incompatible with the
assumed intelligence of a synthetic. Gil thought maybe Roberta’s programming
had become corrupted, that her running config now contained extraneous
characters that didn’t translate into real instructions. If she were a
photocopier or a network router, the only course of action would be to reboot
her and hope her ROM contained enough information to bring her back online.

Gil scrambled over Roberta’s body to the
shelf on the far wall and began digging through the rows of bins. Buried at the
bottom of one container, he found a card marked
Boot and Nuke
. He palmed
the card and pulled wire cutters from his toolbox.

His eyes fell on a lamp in the corner of the
room. With a grunt, he was able to pull the cord from the base, revealing two
frayed ends. He stripped them with the wire cutters to expose the copper and
then knelt beside Roberta’s head.

Rolling her onto her side, Gil placed the
nuke against her jackport and waited for its LED to light up.

Under his breath, he prayed.

If the nuke didn’t work, that would be the
end of it. He’d have to make a run for the PNR and get out of Perion City
before Kessler figured out Gantz had lied to her. She’d come back with more
firepower and kick down the door. And Roberta would still be there, lying on
the floor like the inert doll she was.

Gil made sure he wasn’t touching any part of
Roberta as he pressed the bare wires to her neck just below the card. There was
an audible pop in the room and the lights continued to flicker for several
seconds after he removed the wires. Tremors raced the length of Roberta’s body,
shaking her fingers first before rattling up her arms and into her torso. The
sequence repeated in her feet, culminating in a vibration in her chest that
reminded Gil of a heartbeat.

THUMP-thump. THUMP-thump.

Roberta’s eyes began to roll around in their
sockets. After three revolutions, they settled on Gil. Recognition triggered a
smile on her face, but it was replaced by widening eyes and downturned lips.

“Gil?” Her voice came out digitized, but
settled as she asked, “What happened?” She sat up and reached for him.

Gil took her into his arms and hugged her.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You’re okay, baby.”

Small hands pressed at his chest, pushing
him away until he could see the sadness in her eyes.

“No, Gil-bear. I’m not.”

“It’s like waking from a dream,” said Roberta as she
searched for a comfortable position on the couch.

Gil nodded and checked his sliver for the
hundredth time. It was glowing bright red, but he was sure that at any moment,
the light would simply blink out and the live stream to The White Line would
disappear with it. Seeing Jackie emerge from Roberta’s skin had given Gil the
confidence—the justification—to begin feeding openly for the first time since
his arrival in Perion City. His transmission was sure to be noticed, whether by
local monitoring or by the reaction of the world as the content hit the feed.
Calling it risky was an understatement, but the world needed to know that a
woman Gil had known and loved had been repackaged into a synthetic being.

It was because of his personal interest in
the story that Gil reverted to a previous revision of himself, that of
aggregator, a persona whose mannerisms were automatic, whose questions just
happened to fall in line with what he wanted to know. And if
he
wanted
to know the answers, then he was damn sure Benny Coker would want to know, and
in turn, every Shore Dog and Umbrat in the country.

Coker, for his part, didn’t even question
the uplink. At least, he hadn’t said anything over the whisperer yet. Gil
assumed Coker was equally enthralled with Roberta’s story and was pleased with
the line of questioning so far.

“Go on,” said Gil.

Roberta looked away to the screensaver on
the vidscreen.

“You’re aware of the dream while it’s
happening,” she continued. “But it’s not until you wake up that it all
condenses and you realize none of it was real. I remember things that didn’t
happen to me, faces without names. I remember you helping a woman, but not
here.” She looked around again, her eyes searching out something familiar.

“Cynthia Mesquina,” said Gil.

“She didn’t like me very much,” said
Roberta. A chuckle escaped her lips—a human one. “And the man with the
stubble?”

“Cameron Gray.”

It wasn’t like Cam and Cyn wouldn’t have
blown Gil’s cover if given the chance. A billion curious fingers were likely
hitting the search engines, elevating two previously incognito names to the
most visible points on the grid. If they were in the feeding game for fame,
then they would both get more than they could handle.

Assuming they were still alive.

“I feel something for him, or did,” said
Roberta, touching her chest. She held her hand there for several seconds. “My
heart beat is so soft. I can barely feel it.”

“What’s the last thing you remember from
before?” asked Gil.

He grabbed the remote from the coffee table
and switched the channel to The White Line home screen. Perion was still
blocking the incoming feeds, leaving the scrollers at the bottom of the screen
blank, but the stats were there, along with a photo of a smirking Benny Coker
dressed in Midwestern formal. The White Line’s market share, which normally
hovered in the low twenties, had climbed to the ungodly height of forty-four,
and was still rising. Gil watched as every question he asked, every response
Roberta gave, caused a blip in the rolling line graph. In the upper right hand
corner, the SatIndex grew at a slower pace; people were probably too engaged
with the story to up-vote it.

Roberta glanced at the screen when it
flickered, but didn’t recognize Coker. She shook her head. “This is too
strange. It’s like these memories aren’t my own. I can remember being in my
car, driving on the PE, and then I’m outside with that Cameron guy. And the
weather’s changed and I’ve changed.” Her lower lip began to tremble.

“It’s okay, Rob—Jackie. We’re going to
figure this out.”

“It’s not that,” she replied, forcing a
laugh. “You don’t work for Perion Synthetics without partly believing someday
you’ll wake up in a synthetic body. There were always jokes, you know, of them
wanting to transplant a human mind into a synny. Everyone laughed at the idea,
but I think we all secretly feared it.”

“It’d be a breakthrough,” admitted Gil. “I
mean, it
is
a breakthrough. Here you are, right?”

Roberta looked down and examined her hands
as if they were completely new to her. “I’m not here. This is not my body, no
matter how much it looks like it. The real me is out there somewhere. Why isn’t
she here with you? How long has it been?”

For a moment, Gil wanted to turn off his
sliver, but the numbers on the screen were just too high. To propel The White
Line to the next level, to give Benny Coker a heart attack and make Eileen a
slightly richer woman, he’d have to sacrifice a little of himself.

“The last time I saw you was here,” said
Gil. “Right over there by the door, actually. It was morning, and you were
leaving for work. Later, in the evening, I came home, but you didn’t. All of
your stuff was gone. You didn’t even say goodbye.”

“I left you?” asked Roberta.

Gil nodded. “Four months ago. July 7. It was
a Tuesday. You left on a goddamn Tuesday, Jackie. Without any warning at all.”

“I remember my Rogue, but I don’t remember
packing it, or ever wanting to leave you.”

Gil could see the pain behind her eyes, the
frantic shifting back and forth as they sought out a memory that simply wasn’t
there. A synthetic should have been able to recall any moment in its existence
with perfect clarity, but evidently, that didn’t apply to the memories they had
stolen.

Maybe they had played around with her synapses,
removing some and leaving others, perhaps choosing to block out what had
happened when she headed out on the Perion Expressway with her entire life
packed into the back of a taxi.

Gil’s brain ground to a halt.

Taxi? Or her Rogue?

Either Jackie was misremembering the details
of a major life choice or…