Perion Synthetics (26 page)

Look for the angle, Gilbert.

Coker’s words echoed in Gil’s head. He had
often made mention of
the angle
, bringing it up whenever Gil set out on
a new adventure to investigate illegal augmentations in the Manhattan
Underground or to sample the latest offerings of the Margate synth pushers.
According to Coker, it didn’t matter what happened to whom or when or with
what. It was the
why
that people cared about, the sequence of events and
motivations that led us from point A to point B. Causality, he claimed, ruled
the universe and all of the inhabitants of said universe were painfully aware
of that natural law. It was human nature to seek out the reasoning behind
everything and invent explanations when no true cause could be found.

Gil had once called the theory bullshit,
only for Coker to reply, “Hell, it gave us religion, didn’t it? So you go out
there and find those people a reason. Explain it to them so they don’t have to
worry their simple minds about it. It hurts less for them to be told why than
to let them think for themselves.”

A hand on his leg made Gil look up.

“Where’d you go?” asked Roberta, smiling.

Jackie used to ask that whenever Gil drifted
away to the workshop in his mind to puzzle something out. Roberta was really
laying it on thick. The question was
why
.

Look for the angle.

Why would a synthetic pretend to know him,
pretend to want him? What was there to gain by attaching to Gilbert Reyes,
handyman extraordinaire? Unless…

Maybe it was just a chance meeting at the
warehouse. Maybe those mixed feelings truly were pieces of Jackie bubbling to
the surface. But once Roberta was in his home, looking over his pictures,
something had changed.

Something had been noticed.

“Do you know what I do for a living?” Gil
asked.

“Make me happy?” asked Roberta in return.

“You know what I mean. Do you remember?”

She flashed a frown, as if hurt by his
disregard for her joke. “You do tech repair,” she said. “You come in when
things break and make them work again. Right?”

“No, not right. I work for Benny Coker’s
White Line media feed. I came to Perion City four years ago to keep tabs on the
development of a new synthetic race. Almost everything you know about me is a
lie.”

The SatIndex shot up ten points; people were
intrigued. The new high made Gil smile, but he knew no good would come from
exposing himself. He could have denied being the source of the broadcast, but
attaching his name to the meta, plopping it down on the grid with the others,
was something he never thought he’d do. It was a last resort tactic, something
Benny Coker wouldn’t have suggested no matter how good his hand.

“Why are you telling me this?” asked
Roberta.

“I’m not the man you think I am. And I’m
telling you this because I don’t think you’re who you say you are either.”

“But I have her memories, her feelings. I
feel love towards you. Isn’t that enough?”

“I’m not here for love,” said Gil, standing
up. “I’m here for the story.”

He walked into the kitchen and pulled down a
bottle of Skyy from the freezer. A shot glass he had stolen from a bar in The
Fringe was already sitting out on the counter. The vodka went down easy.

He cringed at the thought of how the real
Jackie would have reacted to his rejection. It would have crushed her. She
would have cried. Her heart…

“Of course you’re just here for the story,
Gilbert Alejandro Reyes of Leonardo, New Jersey. That’s all you care about,
because that’s what Benny Coker has drilled into your head. You believe it so
much you don’t care who you hurt along the way.”

Roberta rose and stood in front of the
couch.

From behind the counter, Gil raised his
glass to her. “To synthetics with feelings.”

“You think you’ve been enlightening people
with the little stories you’ve been feeding over the years? All you’ve done is
set research back and help Vinestead keep pace. Every leak cost people their
jobs. And for what? For a SatIndex? For market share?”

The dumber Gil felt, the more he drank. He
had let her into his home, had been overcome with emotion for a dime store
reproduction of a woman who hadn’t loved him enough to stay with him.

And now his name was in the meta.

Gil downed his fourth shot and felt the
warmth spread through his stomach. It wasn’t the first time he had been conned,
but no one had gotten him this good since his early days when he was making his
way down the coast to the tech Mecca of Atlantic City. He’d arrived without the
clothes he’d so dutifully packed, without the food or money that was supposed
to sustain him on his trip. He’d arrived with nothing but a growing knowledge
of the streets and a natural knack for social engineering. Those were the
skills Benny Coker had tried to hone, but it hadn’t been enough.

Nothing could have prepared Gil for life in
Perion City. These were supposed to be the good guys, the ones you could trust.
If Vinestead had been the target, Gil would have remained on guard for the
duration. Instead, he’d become complacent and happy with Jackie.

Look for the angle. Find it before it
finds you.

Gil drank another shot to Coker’s sage
advice.

“When did you know?”

“
It just feels like something has
started, Benny, like we’ve reached some kind of critical mass
,” said
Roberta.

The phone call to Banks from the warehouse—they had been onto him from
the start.

Gil replayed the early morning events. When
he got to Roberta and his workshop, the angle finally crystallized.

Roberta wasn’t trying to reset herself; she
was trying to steal his trace and replace program, code that could undo the
best brainwashing of Perion engineers.

They got me, thought Gil. And they got my
code.

“So,” he replied. “Do I have time to pack?
Or maybe a quick shower?”

“You thinking of running?” asked Roberta.
“Not a good idea. They’ll find you before you make it past the inner loop. And
of course, you’d have to get through me first.” She folded her arms and stepped
closer to the door.

Gil laughed as he tried to pour another
shot; it sloshed around in the glass and spilled on the counter. “It’s a shame,
you know? I bet I’m gonna regret not fucking you when I had the chance. You
look like you were built to be ridden hard and put away wet.”

Benny Coker’s favorite saying in regards to
Atlantic City escorts sent The White Line’s market share to fifty-seven
percent—an unprecedented occasion ruined by Roberta’s cold laughter.

“And I would have let you, if that’s what it
took.”

“Too late now?” asked Gil. “I mean, surely
we have some time to kill before the police knock down my door.”

“You don’t get it, Mr. Reyes. I have your
dead lover’s memories. She didn’t want to be with you, let alone have you
flopping around on top of her.”

Gil’s vision had blurred, but still the
market share numbers climbed. He poured the last of the vodka into his glass
and raised it to the unseen audience. Their applause was deafening in his ears,
making him smile. In his stomach, the liquor sent out comforting signals,
tricking the brain into thinking everything was going to be okay. But it
wasn’t.

He stared at the empty bottle on the
counter.

Sweet liquor eases the pain.

Gil was pretty sure Meltdown had never said
that.

As the laughter threatened to overwhelm him,
Gil reached for the bottle and whipped it at Roberta. It hit her squarely in
the face, as if she hadn’t even tried to move out of the way. Shards of glass
exploded outward, covering the foyer in shiny glitter. A rivulet of crimson
appeared on Roberta’s forehead; it descended between her eyes, to the right of
her nose, and came to rest at the corner of her mouth.

A bright pink tongue darted out and tasted
it.

“I’m going to take my time with you, Mr.
Reyes,” she said, taking a step forward. “You think it hurt when I walked out
of your life before?” She smiled; the blood broke free and dribbled down her
chin. “I’m going to show you the true meaning of pain.”

Gil bowed his head and looked at the shot
glass. He had known there was going to be violence; it was for that reason he
had begun drinking. The liquor would dull the pain, but the Margate chip in his
neck would start pushing that gritty Jersey synth into his brain to keep it
active. It wasn’t invincibility, but it would keep him from freaking out when
Roberta began breaking his bones.

“Alright,” he said, adjusting his waistline.
“Let’s begin then.”

“There are two types of people in this world: those that
rush, and those that don’t.”

Leave it to a Margate rusher to simplify the
world’s population into two easily defined groups. Patrick Kumanov, whose
business card gave his name only as Meltdown, often talked of the dividing line
between the unenlightened and the transcendental. If you weren’t rushing, he’d
say, you weren’t really connected to the universe. Only under the influence of
a synthetic drug could a person finally see reality for what it truly was.

“Think about it for a minute,” Meltdown had
said one night while he and Gil tripped on a synthetic hallucinogenic known as Smashed
Peas. He was leaning back in his favorite chair at Pritchard Sansbury’s, a
converted sim parlor whose machinery had been removed in favor of eclectic
seating and dim lighting. It was still a parlor of sorts, except the clientele
now preferred to trip in the comfort of their own minds.

“All these people,” he said, gesturing to
the circular couches set apart in the spacious common room, “are somewhere else
right now. Each one is plugged into their own version of reality. Artists do
this too, without the synth. To truly create something, they have to detach
from this reality. A writer will sit for hours thinking about an entire
microcosm that
doesn’t exist
. That means, at any given time, millions of
these artists are not connected to
this
reality. How scary is that?”

“What about aggregators?” Gil had asked.

“You’re the worst of it. You think you’re
exposing the real world, but it’s all at the mercy of the Almighty Filter. You
pick up on something your boss doesn’t like and it’ll never make it to the
subby’s whisperer. The houses think they’re selling reality, when actually
they’re just selling perspective. Because that’s all life is, a series of
shifting perspectives. The story’s never quite the same from the other point of
view, is it?”

“And this will change my perspective?” Gil held
a code card in his hand; its polished white gloss bounced the blue neons from
above.

“When the time is right. It’s a TSR variant
of a military-grade enhancement program, reverse engineered from a burnt
Ayudante chip.”

“TSR?”

“Terminate and stay resident,” Meltdown
explained. “It will be with you at all times and activate when you need it
most. Consider it a gift from one Bodhi to another.”

Leave it to a Margate rusher to compare
himself to the Buddha.

Gil shook his head at the memory of Patrick
Kumanov, surprised by its sudden appearance and clarity. Why had the rusher’s
image come back to him now? Was it merely the splash screen of the TSR finally
ramping up?

Roberta was over the counter before Gil
could settle on an answer. Her small frame rotated in the air, going fully
horizontal before swinging her legs beyond the edge of the sink. She slid down
the veneered countertop, landing simultaneously on both feet. The first jab
caught Gil by surprise, landing hard in his throat, causing a brief moment of
panic as he struggled to breathe. He took a quick step back and felt his heels
hit the refrigerator.

Roberta’s arm shot out; Gil ducked and threw
his weight towards the sink. At the last moment, he pushed off with his legs
and launched himself over the counter. The plan had been to land as gracefully
as Roberta so he could take off running, but instead, his foot caught on the
faucet, causing him to crash to the floor and land on his back, knocking the
air out of him. As the pain coursed through his body, Meltdown’s voice spoke in
his mind.

“You shall not rejoice in the killing of any
living creature,” said the rusher.

“She’s not alive,” Gil replied, straining to
get the words out.

Like a vision emerging from a transcendental
haze, Meltdown’s face appeared. He blew a plume of smoke from the side of his
mouth.

“Well then, I suggest you tear that bitch
up.”

Gil had only met one person in his entire
life who had an Ayudante chip besides Cynthia Mesquina. He was MoA infantry
turned Atlantic City street rat. It hadn’t been an easy task getting out of the
MX; the loss of his right leg and the burning of his Ayudante were the eventual
tolls he had to pay. Still, he retained his memories and had story enough when
Gil came around asking.

“It’s like your first orgasm, every single
time,” the former
soldado
had said, trying to describe the totality of
the chip’s control. “There’s a jittery feeling as it comes on, and you don’t
know what’s going to happen. You’re scared, but there’s also a sense of
well-being. Then you’re hit with an unbreakable calm. It can resist everything
the enemy throws at it: fear, doubt, and even pain. You can take a bullet like
a slap on the wrist.”

Scrambling to his feet, Gil looked around
for Roberta, who was still standing in the kitchen, a thin smile on her face.
There
was
a feeling in his stomach, but it was likely from the Skyy and
not the foreign Ayudante code. He took a step towards the door, only to see
Roberta slide across the tile floor and plant herself in the foyer. She hunched
over and bent her knees, reminding Gil of a blitzing linebacker. With blood
smeared on her face, she had never looked more unlike Jackie.