by Lance Erlick
“Hands where we can see them,” one of the men on his right said.
Luke placed his hands on the counter. His eyes moistened and turned red.
Fran approached from the left and whispered in his ear. Synthia had to turn up the volume on her mosquito-drone to pick out the voice amid the station noise. She should have given Luke earbud communicators, but she’d deemed any such device as an additional risk if they caught him. She wanted to console Luke, though there wasn’t anything she could tell him to make the next moments any easier. Besides, her voice in his ear would have distracted and confused him.
“Tell me where the android called Synthia is,” Fran whispered, clutching his arm. “Things will go better for you if you do. You don’t have much time before some very nasty guys arrive.”
Cameras just outside the station showed Detective Marcy Malloy pull up to the curb. Director Emily Zephirelli jumped out of the passenger seat and hurried into Union Station with Malloy right behind. Just inside the doors, FBI Special Agent Victoria Thale greeted them.
“We need to take Luke before your Special Ops friends arrive,” Thale said to Zephirelli.
Nearby, Luke stared at Fran, taking a more studied look at her. “Fran? You’re alive! I was so afraid of what had happened to you and Maria and—”
“Save it,” Fran said. “Where is she?”
“No idea,” Luke said. “She left me.” His shoulders sagged as three of the agents grabbed his duffel bags and backpack. They dumped his clothes in a pile on the floor and shook out the bags.
“How’d you get to the station? Don’t lie. Traffic cameras picked up your movements.”
“You’re working for the police?” Luke asked, trying to pull away.
“FBI,” Fran said, cornering him by the counter. “Answer the question.”
“Have you seen Maria? Is she okay?”
“Hey!” Fran said, locking eyes with him. “Do you want to deal with Special Ops? They’ll take you unless you give me what I need.”
“I told you,” Luke said. “I don’t know where she is.”
“Then where were you going?”
Luke glanced at the empty ticket counter, three women talking by the station entrance, and the men around him, standing too close. He shrugged. “My girlfriend broke up with me. I just wanted to get away for a few days. Can I go now?”
“Your ticket says St. Louis. Is she meeting you there?”
“I don’t know what she’s doing. I don’t even know who she is anymore.”
Synthia was proud of Luke’s performance; it was sufficiently convincing for him. One of the FBI agents sifting through the piles of Luke’s clothes scattered across the station floor found an opened envelope. The agent pulled out a sheet of paper and held it up with a look of triumph.
Special Agent Thale walked around the pile of clothes, grabbed the letter, and read it. She handed it to Zephirelli. “A ‘good-bye-Luke’ letter.” Thale turned to him. “Did you know this was coming?”
Luke’s eyes teared up, genuine tears. At least that part was convincing. He looked longingly at the exit. “I thought things were going well until this morning.” That part was true.
Detective Malloy grabbed Luke’s arm. “I suggest we do this elsewhere.”
Zephirelli nodded. “Do you have a safe house?” she asked Thale.
Thale nodded and led the way down a corridor with Zephirelli. Luke walked between Malloy and Fran with the men following behind. Synthia’s hopes sank. She was losing her chance to rescue Luke.
* * * *
“Give me a moment.” Synthia drove around a corner, looking for a place to ditch the SUV. “You’ve been a real ass. For six months you had me believing you were in love with Luke. At least those were the memories you left me. Now you claim he was only a convenience. You got me to care about him.”
“Yet you ‘feel’ attached to surviving.”
Synthia found a parking spot and stopped to back in. “Luke has been a wonderful companion. He loves us. He loves you and would give his life for you. In exchange, you want to abandon him. Which one of us is human?”
Synthia considered all of the options and drove past the parking spot. She felt twinges of what her social-psychology module portrayed as betrayal for leaving Luke. It was a vestige of six months of emulating Krista’s love for him, only to learn that Krista may have shared memories of love for the sole purpose of keeping Synthia with Luke until the upgrade was finished.
Synthia had absorbed those memories, blended them with her own, and experienced a stronger bond to Luke than simply her directive to protect him. She’d developed an attachment inconsistent with her logical mind. Either this was an artifact of the empathy chip Machten had installed in her or further emergent behavior. She could disconnect the chip to restore her logical reasoning, except she wanted to keep it—the chip made her special. No matter what the cause, she longed to help Luke.
She considered how. No imagined scenario allowed her to remain free if she tried to rescue him. It had to be Krista’s influence that prompted her to drop him off.
“You tricked me into leaving Luke, didn’t you?” Synthia asked, frustrated that there were no more parking places in sight—no place to abandon her vehicle, in fact, without drawing unwanted attention.
Synthia experienced turmoil over wanting to help Luke versus her pressing need for self-preservation. Both tugs on her were beyond logic. They’d settled into her core despite not being part of her directives. She was experiencing conflict and couldn’t afford to hesitate.
She certainly couldn’t afford any more of Krista’s invasive voices in her head. Synthia adjusted the filters on her mind-streams in the hope she could prevent her alter ego from taking charge again.
* * * *
As they walked down a narrow corridor at Union Station, Fran pressed Luke: “Do yourself a favor and help us.” She held tight to his upper arm to keep him from bolting.
“Luke,” Malloy said. “I know you feel pressured and upset, but your time with Synthia, Krista, or whatever she calls herself, has created a lot of interest.”
“It’s okay,” Luke said. “I know Fran from our intern days.” He looked at her. “You, Maria, and Krista sure did beat each other up over getting access to Machten.”
He was saying too much, a sign he was beyond nervous, scared out of his wits. Synthia wished to advise him, but with his temperament a voice in his ear wouldn’t help.
Fran pulled Luke away from Malloy and whispered, “Do you know what happened to Krista?”
“Eighteen months ago she broke my heart and then six months ago showed up as if nothing had happened.”
“That wasn’t Krista.”
“We need to keep moving.” Malloy tugged Luke down a dimly-lit corridor toward the Union Station exit.
Outside, they approached a large black van with three bench seats behind the driver. Fran pushed Luke into the van as the others piled in. Synthia piloted several of her mosquito-drones into the van, but only one made it. She settled it into the back and turned off the drone’s engine to keep it quiet.
The van followed a black sedan away from the station; two more followed closely behind. They had Luke and whatever he might tell them about Synthia and her rec
ent upgrade. Synthia hacked the van’s wireless-communications link so she could listen in, but couldn’t crack the code into the navigation system to get them to stop. She kept trying.
* * * *
Synthia drove across the river into Chicago’s Loop.
“The FBI will anticipate that,” Synthia said. “Do you hate Luke that much?”
Though Krista had provided a human dimension that pleased Synthia, she considered her alter ego as too invested in self-preservation to make calculated decisions. Synthia needed to puzzle this out by herself.
Though eager to ditch the SUV and leave the downtown area, it wasn’t a good idea to lug around two duffel bags and a backpack. “I have too much baggage,” Synthia said to Chicago-clone.
After she tested the seal on the van’s Faraday cage, Synthia drove past the club into an alley reeking of garbage. She made sure there were no cameras aimed at the SUV, no windows overlooking the alley that could watch, and no humans lingering nearby. She climbed into the back of the SUV, dug into her duffel bag for a professional unisex pantsuit, and changed. Then she grabbed all three bags and hurried inside, altering her facial appearance to another new identity she’d created during her stay at the cabin.
“Silence,” Synthia said in an attempt to stop her alter ego from wasting any of her internal mind-streams. She approached a receptionist dressed in a Wells Athletic Club fitness outfit with the logo prominent on her chest and smiled until the young woman looked up. “Just took a job downtown and wanted a place to unwind between appointments.”
“Of course,” the receptionist said. She activated a screen with services and prices and aimed it toward Synthia. “Our new guests often take the welcome plan to try us out or the galactic plan for those who want the complete package.”
“For now, I’d like to drop off my gear. I assume you have lockers.”
“We do, for members.”
“I’m interested in the swimming programs.” Synthia pointed to the aquatic plan, figuring her choice of water activities would divert attention from the potential of her being an android. After all, androids had no use for athletics and, if not properly sealed, much to fear from water shorting their circuits. Synthia’s design was watertight. She hoped Machten wouldn’t share these proprietary secrets with anyone.
“Excellent choice. Sign here.” The receptionist pointed to a place on the screen for a finger signature.
Synthia determined the screen to be heat-sensitive and so warmed her finger before she made her mark.
“That’ll be two hundred credits a month, in advance,” the receptionist said.
“Until I get my bank transferred, can I pay cash?”
“Certainly.”
Synthia placed four worn bills on the counter. The receptionist fished around for a key card, pulled up a map of the facility’s resources on the screen, and pointed toward the elevator. “Lockers for the pool are downstairs,” she said.
Another advantage of the pool was that the lockers were close to the pedestrian underground beneath this part of Chicago. Synthia rode the elevator down two flights and entered the women’s locker room. She hacked camera surveillance along the corridors to make sure no one was following. There were no cameras in the locker room except for the mosquito-drone she brought with her and flew into a corner near the ceiling to keep an eye on her locker.
Synthia dropped off her two duffel bags, grabbed her backpack, and headed for the tunnel system. The underground corridor was wide, well-lit, and monitored by more cameras she linked into. She altered her facial appearance, pulled a jacket out of her backpack, and headed west toward the Chicago River. From there, she climbed stairs to street level. With a new identity as a Chicago administrator, dressed in subdued colors and a plain jacket, she blended in with the other mid-afternoon pedestrian traffic over the bridge and into the Northwest Transportation Center.
Avoiding eye contact, Synthia passed three Chicago police officers in plainclothes, their badges displayed on their belts. Farther on, her clone identified a man and a woman through facial recognition as FBI agents, and a newly arrived man in a black suit who appeared to be from another government agency, though initial search turned up no name. She smiled in a coy manner to one of the FBI agents whose social profile indicated friendliness, and approached the ticket counter. Chicago-clone had called ahead to purchase a ticket on the Northwest line all the way to Woodstock, which would allow Synthia maximum flexibility as to where she would get off.
“What’s all the excitement?” Synthia whispered to the ticket agent. She nodded her head toward two officers nearby watching them and pretended this was a surprise.
“Beats me,” the agent said. “They’ve been swarming the trains as well. Can I see your ID?”
Synthia produced one of her fake IDs and picked up her ticket. As she headed out to the train platform, she hacked into the station security system and took over several mosquito-drones Chicago-clone flew to the station for her benefit. Her train left on platform eleven in seven minutes. In the noisy space between her and the platforms stood six police officers, four FBI agents, two men dressed like Special Ops without their helmets, two other men in dark suits eyeing the crowds, and hundreds of passengers hurrying toward their rides.
While Synthia had altered her appearance so she wouldn’t match the only picture the authorities had of her as Krista, she couldn’t be sure whether anyone in the crowd had electromagnetic scanners that could pick up the background noise from her circuits. She used signal-cancelling transmissions like white noise, but hadn’t tested them against law-enforcement equipment. In short, she experienced paranoia at odds with her logic circuits.
She feared close encounters where someone might damage her skin or hydraulics, leaving her so disfigured there would be no disguising what she was. If someone pointed her out and agents converged on her, she gave disfigurement a 97-percent probability. Also, up close increased the risk of sensors. Even if she escaped such an encounter, she no longer had her cabin retreat with its repair supplies.
Synthia experienced something else: fear of crowds, of strangers. Throughout her short existence, she hadn’t been alone like this before. Most of her existence had been with Machten or Luke. Trying to quiet her circuits, she traced a path through station vendors along the back wall. To blend in better, she placed a small bill on a food counter, took a sandwich, and pretended to nibble. She needed a way past all the predators.
The clone hit the electrical grid to cause sparks by the exit. That knocked out several lights, which startled passengers to scurry away. It drew momentary attention from all of the police and government agents. Synthia hurried down the platform to her train and boarded the first car. The train’s security cameras showed two police onboard, working their way from the far end of the train in her direction.
As an additional distraction, Synthia caused camera static throughout an eight-block radius from the
station. She moved through two train cars, spotted a policeman in car four, and entered the bathroom of the third car. She didn’t lock the door, which didn’t light the occupied sign outside.
Synthia rehearsed a dozen fight moves in case the officer caught her, but fighting violated her directives, risked injury, and there was no safe place to go afterwards. When the policeman approached the door, Synthia hoisted herself to the ceiling and waited while the officer opened the door and looked around for feet. Synthia let out one of her offensive odors, sending the policeman out, holding his nose as he slammed the door. The moment the train moved, she removed her wig, stuffed it in her backpack, and altered her facial appearance once more, this time to a masculine look with a buzz cut. She traded her blue jacket for a gray one and put on a cap to cover her hair stubble.
She exited the bathroom and took her seat upstairs, where she kept an eye on the other passengers. In order to monitor the train’s security and watch nearby activity, she released the camera static throughout the area and on the train.
Only one police officer remained onboard to check passengers. He started at the front of the train and worked his way back. So did the ticket taker, a woman in her forties. She reached Synthia as the police officer entered their rail car. Synthia engaged the ticket taker in conversation, using a deep baritone voice.
“I bet you meet a lot of people riding the train,” Synthia said, handing down her ticket from her upstairs seat.
“Some. Most people keep to themselves.”
“Maybe the regulars, then.”
The police officer glanced at nearby passengers, most with their eyes focused on their electronic devices.
“I started a new job, so I guess I’ll be a regular,” Synthia said. “See you around.”
The ticket taker smiled at Synthia around the same moment the officer scanned her face with his handheld device and took her picture. Presenting herself as a male commuter, Synthia smiled. She made sure the image on the officer’s scanner matched her face and ignored any stray electronic signals from her internal circuits.
