by Grant Piercy
“What’s with the mannequin?” Courtney asked. “The foil over the face, that’s new.”
“It’s the only way I can break the connection.”
“The connection?” Dana asked.
“This is Opal. She was a company-issued synthetic. She was the victim of a blackout, and she was also the one I was remoting into when I discovered my husband fucking her. I have a hearing implant—it started acting up. Glitching . The other day I found out that the implant appears to be tethered to her.”
“Like Bluetooth?” Wendy asked.
“Exactly.”
I unwrapped the foil and began to demonstrate. The two of us stood in front of everyone and I began to mimic the robot dance, leaning forward and letting our arms dangle. They each looked on in shock, a few of them gasping.
“She moves the same as I do. But if I concentrate, I can make her move without duplicating actions.”
I closed my eyes and envisioned her tucking a lock of hair behind her left ear. I made her say, “Suck my dick!” to a chorus of laughter. She lifted her right leg straight up in the air behind her neck. When I opened my eyes, her leg dropped back to its normal position, her foot tapping the ground softly.
Dana walked up to Opal, cupping her face and examining her mouth and eyes. “Does it work both ways? Are you able to feel what she feels? Like a true remoting experience?” Her voice was soft and scratchy, but filled with warmth.
She pinched Opal on the shoulder, and I winced. I wasn’t expecting that, nor had I even thought to consider it yet.
“Now that’s interesting,” Dana said.
“Why tell us?” asked Cindy, sipping her margarita. “What’s the point of bringing her all the way down here?”
I noticed Beverly looking at me from behind the group of women. Bev and I had been friends for fifteen years. She and I used to work together at a company that’s since gone out of business, bought out and absorbed by a larger organization that laid us both off. That we were together in this house, in such a vulnerable position—there was a level of awkwardness that hadn’t been there the last time. Beverly actually knew me. She knew Devon.
“I needed to share. I needed to talk. Whatever did this to me asked me to do something else.”
I could see the concern in Beverly’s eyes, a concern that wasn’t in the eyes of the other women in this basement.
“But I interrupted. You were all busy.”
Cindy said, “Why don’t we do this—you and Opal come up to the backyard, and anybody that wants to join us out there can do so.”
“Okay, but I’m going to leave Opal here.” I sat her back on the couch and wrapped her head in the foil again.
“Let’s go get another drink too,” Cindy said, lifting her red cup.
The two of us, followed by three or four others, walked up the stairs and went back to the kitchen. That tabby cat was waiting for us at the top of the steps, its tail delicately waving back and forth. Cindy fixed a round of drinks for all of us and led us out the door and through the garage.
A few citronella candles lit the backyard. A patio table sat just outside the door, with chairs peopled by several more women.
“Well hello,” one of them said, lifting a red cup. As we poured onto the backyard patio, the seated women stood and filed into the garage, clearly going into the house.
Further out in the yard, a fire pit crackled lowly, two hooded figures sitting in lawn chairs on each side.
I looked around to the other girls who’d come with me, a little confused. “We trade off,” Dana said. “The owners are careful about the bandwidth coming through the house.”
Cindy, Dana, Beverly, Wendy, and Courtney were with me. I sat in one of the seats at the patio table that had been vacated. The drink Cindy had made was strong—a little heavier on the tequila than the mixer. I shuddered at the bitter taste.
“Mama don’t make no weak drinks,” she said, sensing my reaction. “You said someone asked you to do something.”
“Yeah. So... Where do I start?” I considered for a moment. “I heard a voice through my glitching implant.”
“What?” Dana asked, incredulous. The shadows of the flames danced across her smiling face.
“It repeated numbers... over and over again. I got the sense the numbers were an IP address. I found out they were the IP address of Opal, my own synthetic. That voice knew. It knew my suspicions about my husband, and it knew how to exploit that suspicion.”
“Who would know that kind of thing?” Bev asked.
I shook my head. “No one. I hadn’t talked about it to anyone before I heard those numbers. I talked to you after . And you told me about this place.”
She looked down at one of the candles resting on the table.
“After I discovered that I could control Opal’s movements, it spoke to me directly. It wants me to do something with my boss. James Burke.”
Dana let out a giggle.
“What’s so funny?”
“Maybe you need to talk to them,” she answered, gesturing toward the men at the fire pit while drinking from her red cup.
I couldn’t see their faces—they wore black hoodies that were propped up on their heads. They leaned comfortably back in the lawn chairs, hands in the pockets of their sweatshirts. Neither of them moved.
“Who are they?”
“They own the house,” Dana said, the flames still dancing on her smile. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and quickly lit one. I hadn’t smoked in at least a decade, but it made me want one. She tossed the pack up on the table and noticed me eyeballing them. “ We ’re all adults here. You can have one.”
I took her up on it. I inhaled deep and nearly coughed. The disgusting taste of smoke never changes, but there’s still something satisfying about it.
“Well, wish me luck,” I said, standing.
Though I approached the brick fire pit, the two men in hoodies still didn’t move. “How can we help you?” the one on the right said, with no evidence of movement.
“They told me you own the house.”
“We do,” the one on the left answered.
“I was asked to do something about my boss, James Burke—the CEO of NMAC. I seem to be able to control a synthetic.”
“So can all of them,” left said.
“With my mind.”
The two of them sat in silence for a long moment, sitting perfectly still in their lawn chairs. Their hands stayed in the pockets of their hoodies. Finally, the one on the left spoke: “That’s quite something. What is it you’ve been asked to do, and who asked you to do it?”
“I hear a voice, broadcast through static in my hearing implant. It wants me to use my synthetic to steal something from Burke.”
“A heist then,” right said.
Left and right, right and left, volleying back and forth.
“We can help you,” left said.
“Sometimes it depends on the mark,” right said.
“This wouldn’t be the first time,” left said.
“Traveling would be involved,” right said.
“Some expenditure required,” left said.
“What are you supposed to steal?” right asked.
“ Access. ”
MyRead/agent_of_truth: life of the flesh
User: Agent_of_Truth
“For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life.” Leviticus, 17:11
Hello again, True Patriots.
In a recent interview, NMAC CEO James Burke commented on recent reports by yours truly of his involvement with the underground Transhuman movement, claiming that consciousness transfer was not possible—only copying, not moving. I’m here to tell you, Patriots, don’t you believe him! I know for a fact that not only is transfer possible, but it’s been successfully accomplished and repeated.
The first of the damned to be transferred from their piteous f
lesh were called Architects . They had a duty to edit and remove content from the Knowledgebase—operatives of a liberal deep state who wished to control the media by controlling the flow of information. Brave men like our President have been working from the inside to weed out the corruption seeded deep within the state, placed there by men like Burke, whose government contracts added to his exceeding wealth.
It was people like these architects who helped the escaped Transhuman terrorists of the Home compound, now loose in the world plotting their global takeover! These disgusting dissidents who have abandoned the life of the flesh plan to take our children from us and transform them into heinous beasts like themselves.
Don ’t be deceived by Burke’s lies that consciousness transfer isn’ t possible!
I’ve seen that followers of our movement have been active in cities like Atlanta, Raleigh, Tampa, and Denver, leading marches and gathering to prepare for the globalist Transhuman takeover. I apologize that I can’t join you, but I will reveal myself soon enough! Keep fighting the good fight!
In the meantime, my sources have told me that there is an uptick in Transhuman activity in suburban areas. Beware of houses in your neighborhood with higher than usual bandwidth, as they might be hosting a hub of sin for those who plan to abandon the flesh when the true Transhuman threat reveals itself! If you’re employed by public works, you have the opportunity to shut down these hubs and hit them right where it hurts. Notify your local OSS investigators! These criminals will be caught and removed from polite society. Only together will we be able to combat this evil infecting our young, our families, and our friends.
True Patriots, they hide in plain sight. They disguise themselves as those we love most—they have the technology! They come into our homes through our electronics and watch us through our phones, our electronics, and jailbreak our android synthetics! But we can fight back by removing the more dangerous of these technologies from our lives and not engaging in their games.
Stay on the lookout and remain vigilant! We WILL defeat them!
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18: where is everybody? (cassia)
We reentered the facility the same way we’d exited. The doors weren’t locked behind us when we left, nor were the orderlies waiting to greet us. Smalley hadn’t bothered to wait for us, perhaps believing we wouldn’t return.
It was dark inside, and I began to notice how much the Schema looked like a corporate office of some kind, with a marble floor and a greeting desk that, in another time, might have been staffed by a receptionist or administrator. Instead, only emptiness.
I followed Garrick, who entered first, and Charlie trailed behind me. “I didn’t expect it to be so quiet,” he whispered. “Where to first?”
“Smalley undoubtedly knows we’re here,” Garrick remarked.
“But maybe he doesn’t expect us?” I hoped aloud.
“We really should free the others first. Reinforcements and chaos will better allow us to move about in the building and locate our bodies,” Charlie said.
I’m sure we looked vaguely ridiculous, snooping in the dark on our tiptoes, awaiting for something to jump up from the darkness and snatch us. Even Garrick, who we certainly expected not to fear anything in this building with how easily he was able to reckon with the orderlies who attacked us previously. That added to my nervousness more than anything—that this guy, who was so well put together, would feel such fear. Who knew that an android could suffer from anxiety?
“He has a point,” Garrick stated plainly.
“Then we need to go up,” I said.
I moved ahead of Garrick, recalling the stairway that we used for our escape. There was a crosshatched window to peer through on the door. No one in the stairway either. “Where’s the trap?” I asked. I fully thought we would face some kind of resistance in this building. Maybe that was part of Smalley’s genius, just letting the flies into the web.
We moved quietly through the door to the dark staircase and softly up the steps. Lights that previously flickered overhead were burnt out. Perhaps he had gone through his resources faster than we had assumed.
Round and round we climbed, misremembering how many flights of stairs we needed to go to reach our destination. Carefully we looked through the window on each floor. It didn’t help that the floors weren’t numbered.
“I think this is it,” Charlie said after we’d been climbing for a while. The building was far too silent; the only sounds in the stairwell were our footfalls. Through a crosshatched window we saw only darkness.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“It’s a feeling.”
He pushed the door open slowly and stepped through. We followed, exploring the darkened corridors of the floor where we’d been held captive. The rooms looked empty.
“Where is everybody?”
Perhaps we were too late. The thought occurred that maybe the ones we’d left behind had been food for the thing down in the basement. Or maybe Garrick’s trick with the orderlies had shut down everything else in the building and the only reason we were okay had to do with hiding in the vents at the time.
“ Garrick —could you have knocked out everything in the building when you stopped the orderlies?”
“It’s possible I miscalculated.”
“Charlie, we might not have been affected because we were in the vents, protected from what he did.”
“If that’s true, we have free reign of the building,” Charlie said quietly.
“Then we should move to our next objective,” I said, a little louder. “Our bodies.” Nothing matched my desire to shed the horrible machine in which I’d been trapped—the reminder of the person that I had been. I wanted to be back in my skin. I wanted to be back in my bed with Gabby, playing with her pink hair, listening to her soothing whispers. I had to escape this sorry duplicate of who I’d been. I thought about how many times I’d been deadnamed in my life, and living in this shell was a thousand times worse.
Most of the time, people didn’t know. Transgender people had to remain so well hidden from this government so we wouldn’t wind up in a place like this. Investigating Stockton’s disappearance, I walked right into this trap, and for what? Stockton’s long dead, and from the sound of it, a victim of events he couldn’t possibly control.
“ We ’ll need to locate your bodies, but then we’ll need to find the equipment to transfer your minds back,” Garrick said. “At the Home compound, the architects and administrators kept the humans in a separate building nearby, where the transference procedures were conducted. There we printed new bodies and could operate at our leisure. I believe that’s all located in this one facility.”
His eyes closed for a moment, almost like he was meditating.
“We need to go up a few more floors.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Energy consumption spikes a few levels up.”
“Could it be Smalley?”
“Hard to tell. But keeping people alive is going to require energy.”
We walked back to the stairwell, carefully treading through the darkness. Onward we climbed, five more floors. In that gloom, we found the source of energy consumption. The pitch-black corridors on that level led to storage units—large rooms with cryonic tanks. Columns and columns of tanks.
“Cryogenic storage,” Garrick said. “They must have learned from their mistake at Home. Leaving the blank bodies active could lead to complications like we faced with Stockton. Still, with what happened to Smalley, the problem persists.”
“Could we be reanimated?” Charlie asked.
“We need to find the bodies first.”
Each of the cryonic tanks had a small red light, like the cameras back in our cells. With each tank, we noticed a small number below the light. I remembered back to when I first arrived at the Schema—they said my number was 1292.
“Charlie, what was your number?”
He thought for a moment, then said,
“Fifteen four six.”
“Jesus, how many had they been holding here?”
“At Home, there were barely a hundred captives,” Garrick said.
“Maybe he’s been feeding well.”
We located the tanks containing our bodies without much difficulty, matching the number they had given me: 1292. I looked in the cryonic storage, marveling at the person I saw within. She reminded me of Sleeping Beauty. It’s quite something to be able to look upon yourself from the outside and realize that all the faults you see in the mirror, all the worst things about you, they’re all in your head. I could see her through the cryofreeze, perfect and beautiful and waiting. But there was another step before we could go home.
“Can you find where they printed these bodies?” I asked Garrick, referring to the ones we currently inhabited.
Two floors down from the cryonic tanks, we found our answer. Talos X raw materials: neoprene for muscles, liquid polymer latex for skin, storage tanks of the refrigerant and blood simulant, and PNN kits used to construct the neural network of each model. All separate, requiring assembly.
Garrick hacked into the computers fairly easily, locating the data storage that included information on the previous models that had been printed in the Schema. Charlie was the easy one—we simply needed to print a replacement for his current, damaged body. I requested a female body, a true duplicate of the one they’d taken from me. Garrick complied, and asked me to assist in the customizable features.
We assembled and printed the bodies without difficulty. The transfer procedure needed to take place on the floor below. Each room on that floor was like a dentist’s office, with two patient chairs next to one another, each like the ones Smalley had us strapped to when he fed on us. One chair had a large helmet apparatus with wires crisscrossing all over it, while the other had a bulky, laser-like device suspended above.
Charlie insisted I go first. He sensed how difficult it had been for me to be in this body, while softly picking at his own. The stump where Smalley had taken his hand had been fashioned into a razor-sharp weapon, and it seemed he liked feeling dangerous.
