SINdrome

by J. T. Nicholas

  “Right. Taking away their slaves is bad enough, but can you imagine the outrage if they turned off the ’net? All hell would break loose.” I said it half-jokingly, but the hell of it was, there was more than a grain of truth there. Enslave an entire people? Yeah, sure, a little outrage. But interrupt peoples’ internet access?

  “It already has,” Hernandez said, and I heard a bit of regret in her voice.

  “What?”

  She sighed. “Look, Campbell, I’m on board, okay? Shit needs to happen. I get it. But there’s a price, and it’s a big one. In the week since the files dropped, we’ve burned… How many, Silas?” she asked.

  He didn’t even turn his head from the screens he was monitoring. “Fifty-six, Detective. One in every state and a few at the federal level.” There was a distinct satisfaction in his voice.

  Hernandez grunted. “Fifty-six politicians. Burned them on affairs, bribery, misappropriation of government funds, and damn near all manner of criminal asshat-ery that you can imagine. And it’s created the worst kind of feeding frenzy I’ve ever seen.” She shook her head. “We’ve got people protesting the government, people protesting the treatment of synthetics, counter-protestors out in support of the government, or demanding that synthetics be destroyed. We’ve got roving gangs of thugs out to kill any synthetic they come across, and we’ve already had a shitload of attack first and ask questions later scenarios that have led to real people being killed.”

  She waved in the direction of LaSorte and Silas. “Sorry. You know what I mean. Humans killing non-synthetic humans because they thought they were synthetics. Fuck.” She shook her head. “And NLPD is stretched beyond the breaking point. We’re ground zero here, hermano, birthplace of the revolution. You know how it was before you turned yourself in? It’s ten times worse, now.”

  I winced at that. The protests and demonstrations had been in full swing as the deadline for Silas’s truth bomb approached, but nothing had quite spilled over into outright violence. It sounded like that ship had finally sailed. Sailed, and maybe sank. “What’s the damage so far?”

  “A handful of deaths. More people beaten up. That’s just locally, of course. Nationwide? Dozens.”

  “And that does not consider the synthetic deaths,” Silas interjected, still not looking up from his screens. “There are not many accurate ways to track that. My sources indicate that in New Lyons that number is already in the hundreds.”

  “Yeah, well, if my little visit from Woodruff is any indicator, that’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”

  * * * *

  The accommodations here were, arguably, worse than those I’d been experiencing as a guest of the City of New Lyons Department of Corrections while awaiting trial, but the salt in the air and the subtle movements of the VLFPs, the manmade islands dubbed “very large floating platforms,” felt like home to me.

  Of course, home had been on top of the platforms, in the prefabbed structures that gave the concrete islands all the charm of a stack of storage containers. Not in the network of spaces commonly—and inaccurately—referred to as the Ballasts. The platforms themselves were massive structures of concrete and steel. I’d had enough science courses in my distant school days to have known, on some level, that the fact that they floated at all meant that there had to be air pockets built into the structures to change the density. Or screw with the water displacement. Or however the hell floating worked. And of course, there were normal needs like plumbing and sewage and electric and all the other lifelines that made modern living possible. All that had to go somewhere.

  It turned out the “where” wasn’t much different from the mainland. Just beneath the streets, the sewers and infrastructure ran. Beneath that, space had been carved out for a hodgepodge of machinery. Pumps, generators, emergency equipment designed to deploy last-ditch float bags if shit went south.

  And below that were the Ballasts.

  They consisted of…rooms…chambers…cells? Shit. I didn’t have a good word for them. Metal boxes thirty feet on a side and ten feet high, stacked side by side and on top of each other, in a very shallow “U” shape. Each cell had watertight hatches leading to its neighbors, and ladders welded into the walls for ease of access, along with low-energy lighting embedded in the ceilings. And not much else beyond that—just empty air for providing the necessary buoyancy. The thought of those hatches all closing at once—there had to be a mechanism to do so to prevent all the cells from flooding in the event of a breach—and trapping me with a limited air supply made my throat feel tight.

  The cells weren’t empty anymore. They weren’t exactly overflowing, either, but every one we’d passed through on our way to whatever metal box Silas had designated as Central Command had a few people in it. Well, a few synthetics, anyway. I knew they were synthetics. They were too… “too” to be human. Too pretty. Too handsome. Too muscular. Too tall or thin or pale or short. Too purpose-built for whatever task they were genetically engineered to perform. For the most part, they fell into parameters that regular humanity might hit, but their “average” was our exceptional. The average Toy made most underwear models look frumpy, and the synthetics built for labor had muscles that I didn’t even know existed.

  It was disconcerting, moving through those poorly lit chambers, feeling their eyes on me, hearing the whispers that popped up in my wake. Did they see a savior? A champion? Just another human, which, to most of them, meant a monster? Or something else? And what would they see if Woodruff wasn’t feeding me a line of bullshit? Would they view me differently if they learned that I helped trigger the event that might bring about their extinction?

  I shook the thoughts from my head as I descended another ladder. This chamber was different. The others had a few cots, some bedding, a cooler or two. Bucket-like contraptions that I didn’t really want to think about, since sanitation was always a problem where biological beings gathered. Instead, this one was filled with screens. I had no idea how Silas was getting a signal down here, but he clearly was, since almost every available inch of wall space had some kind of screen stuck to it. There was a table in the center of the room, a few more around the edges, and some scattered chairs and what looked like military-issued foot lockers.

  A few other people—synthetics all—were already in the room as my rescue party and I entered. I caught a few more glances, but whatever they were doing, it seemed more interesting to them than I was, because they quickly turned back to their screens. It was hard not to be distracted by the screens. Better than half of them looked like they were churning away on some sort of net analysis or crawl, but the rest were tuned to various news streams, live vlogs, or drone shots of the streets, not just of New Lyons, but the rest of the world.

  The sound was off, but every single screen was showing some scene of protest, riot, or police response. The scrolls along the bottom presented their own streams of facts—stores vandalized, businesses shut down, number of injured. Number of dead. That was bad enough, but it wasn’t the worst of it. Every few seconds, one of the screens would cut away to a different shot. A still image of a middle-aged man, looking haggard and somehow sad.

  My mug shot.

  The screens were splashed with words like Breaking and Escaped Prisoner and, my least favorite, Nationwide Manhunt Underway.

  “That didn’t take long.” I turned, to see that Tia had made her way down the ladder and stepped up beside me while I was enthralled with the flicking images. She hadn’t bothered ditching the guns and gear—none of us had—so she still had the shotgun dangling from a tac-strap. Even with the pistol grip and shortened stock and barrel, the thing seemed almost as big as she was. But she’d put it to use, and, I had to admit, the whole G.I. Jane thing was a good look on her.

  “Yeah,” I grunted. “Guess we had to expect that, though. You don’t spring public enemy number one out of jail and get a light response from the law. They’ll be looking
even harder now than they were before.”

  “True,” Silas said from somewhere off to my left. “But they also have more to occupy them than just you. They will have to make a show of it, of course, but I do not think they will be looking quite so hard as you might imagine.”

  I grunted at that and looked at the screens not showing my ugly mug. Protest. Demonstration. Riot. Response. Rinse. Repeat. Yeah, the cops had a few other things on their minds. But I didn’t think for a second that Fortier, for one, and the Federal Marshal service, for another, were going to let me walk. I watched a moment later as Hernandez and Al’awwal made their way down the ladder. Whatever else we’d managed to do, between the information the synthetics had released and my own prison break, we’d kicked the shit out of the anthill. And Woodruff was still out there somewhere, sitting on top of whatever plot he was waiting to hatch like a demonic hen.

  “We need to talk,” I said, turning to face Silas. I glanced around at the synthetics working the screens and wondered if, instead of a safe house, this was the real deal. Silas’s secret stash. It would be a hell of a thing, to think that he’d been living beneath my feet in the bowels of Floattown for god alone knew how long. “Maybe somewhere with fewer people.”

  “This way, Detective,” Silas said.

  “I’m coming, too,” Tia said. Hernandez stepped up beside me, and Al’awaal was already following Silas. Well, they’d earned it.

  “Let’s go.”

  Silas led us through one final hatch, this one to the chamber next door to his…shit, I had to call it something, and command center seemed to work. So, next to his command center. This cell was set up like a cross between military quarters and a ready room. I saw a bunk in the far corner, but closer to the door was a makeshift conference table cobbled together from a half dozen folding plastic card tables. A bunch of folding metal chairs sat around it. Wherever Silas was getting his revolution budget, it was clear that the big bucks were being spent on tech and office furniture was pretty far down the list.

  I dropped into a chair, taking a deep breath as I did so.

  The others followed suit, first divesting themselves of their gear and firearms. In a few short minutes, the table was bristling with ballistic vests, balaclavas, blades, tac-lights, and enough firepower to take down a fortress. Or a prison. Tia dropped into the chair on my left with Hernandez taking the one on my right. Hernandez gave me a big grin and a “Welcome home, pendejo,” as she sat. Silas and Al’awwal sat across from us. LaSorte had peeled off back in the command center, so it was just the five of us in the room.

  Hernandez got right to the point. “Okay, Campbell. We’re as secure as anything gets in this fucking city these days. Why the call to bust you out? Spill.”

  My lips twitched in a smile. “It’s not that the tender mercies of the New Lyons detention system were getting too much for me,” I said. “Though I’d definitely leave a one-star review.” I rubbed my hand lightly over the bandages that Tia had wrapped around my arm. It was a stall. I didn’t really know how to begin. The rest waited, some more patiently than others, for me to find the starting point.

  Fuck it. Subtle wasn’t my strong suit. “I think Walton Biogenics is planning some sort of mass genocide of the synthetics. A final omega protocol to wipe out every one of them. Maybe it’s their version of a recall, or maybe it’s the only way to cover their assess and try to stop heads from rolling.” I paused. “And I think they’re going to do it soon.”

  There was a long, heavy silence at the table. It wasn’t the reaction I was expecting. Outrage. Disbelief. Calls for action. But not the quiet.

  It was Al’awwal who spoke.

  “We know. And we think it’s already starting.”

  Chapter 6

  The coughing was the worst.

  One of the chambers in the Ballast had been converted to an infirmary of sorts. Cots were laid out in rows, and patients lay on them. There weren’t a lot of them—maybe a dozen forms shifting restlessly on their thin beds. It was a sight that, among humans, may not have been all that disconcerting. Everyone got sick at some point, and most of us had seen the inside of a hospital.

  But I’d never seen a sick synthetic. Not once, in all my years. And now here were a dozen of them. Their discomfort was bad enough, the constant motion of their pain creating a steady rustle. But the coughing. It created a rhythm all its own, a syncopation of throat clearings and low barks that swelled to a crescendo of deep, wracking hacks that left the synthetics gasping for breath in their wake when the fits finally settled, only to be taken up by a different synthetic. The result was ear-splitting and more than a little maddening.

  I had pulled on a surgical mask, as had Silas and Tia. The rest, perhaps wisely, had remained behind.

  “We don’t know how it spreads,” Tia said, jolting me from my reverie as we moved among the sick. Silas, being Silas, was stopping at every bunk. He had a warm touch and soft word for each of his people, and I could see in their eyes, that they truly were his people now. “We don’t even know what it is. It presents like flu, but…”

  “But no synthetic in the history of synthetics has ever had the flu,” I guessed.

  “Right. We’re still going through the haul you guys pulled out of the Walton lab, but according to that, synthetics have immune systems that make ours look like…” She floundered at a loss for words. “Look, you know how when the flu—the everyday, vanilla flu—comes through, it’s always the very young and very old who are at the greatest risk?” I nodded, wincing as a particularly harsh cough ripped through a patient Silas was speaking with. I swear I saw little flecks of red spittle forming at the corners of the man’s mouth. “Well, if I use that analogy, then compared to the synthetics we aren’t even the old or the young. We—humanity I mean—we’re like babies born weeks premature, who have to go into a sterile environment to stave off all the little things that can do us harm. That’s how much stronger their immune systems are than ours.”

  “Which makes all this.” I waved my hand at the coughing synthetics…

  “A fucking nightmare,” Tia said. I started at that—I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard her curse before. I pulled my eyes away from the miserable forms tossing and turning on their beds to look at her. Most of her face was obscured by the medical mask, but her eyes were filled with a mix of sorrow and honest-to-God rage. Tia may have been an assistant medical examiner, but I didn’t think that was her true calling. She cared too much about the living.

  “When did it start?” I asked as Silas continued to make his rounds.

  “A couple of days ago,” she replied. “So far, whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to be spreading fast.” Looking at the dozen figures, I opened my mouth to object, but her raised hand forestalled me. “I know, I know. A dozen people in a few days sounds like a lot, but trust me, given our conditions, it isn’t. We’ve got hundreds of people, Jason—hundreds—scattered throughout these stupid metal boxes, in close proximity to one another, with no real fresh air circulating. It’s a nightmare,” she said again. “If these were regular people, half, maybe more, would be sick already.”

  “Small mercies, I guess,” I muttered, but she was shaking her head.

  “If this was the flu, maybe. But if you think this is some sort of bio-engineered weapon—and it would almost have to be to get through the natural defenses the synthetics have—then the slow speed makes it worse, not better.”

  I was no doctor, but that didn’t make a lick of sense to me. She must have been able to see the confusion on my face, even through the surgical mask, because she let out a bitter little chuckle. “Incubation periods, Jason. Look, if someone gets really sick, really fast, they know it, right? They stay home from work. They don’t travel. But if they don’t know that they’re sick, or if the symptoms are minor, then they do all those things. See more people.”

  “Spread the virus,” I said, understanding dawning.


  “Right.” It was her turn to shake her head, this time in frustration. “Honestly, I’m way out of my depth here. I’m not a virologist or immunologist. Or even a doctor, yet. I’m barely competent to talk about this with respect to how it would spread among different populations of people. But no one’s ever looked at how synthetics interact with each other or even if synthetics interact with each other. I have no idea how this spreads or why it spreads or how it progresses or if treatments that help us will help them or…”

  I could see the tears forming in her eyes and hear the panic creeping into her voice. I reached out and pulled her into my arms. She hugged me back, hard. “It’s okay,” I murmured, not really believing it myself. “Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out.” It wasn’t much, but it was all I had to offer.

  Maybe it was enough, because after a moment, she pushed away from me. She didn’t wipe at her eyes—because poking your fingers into your face when you were in a room full of sick people probably wasn’t the best way to stay healthy—but I could tell by the slight rise in her cheeks and the corners of her eyes that she was offering a wan smile. “Thanks. Doctors shouldn’t cry in front of their patients. Bad form. Not that I’ve been able to do much for them. Make them as comfortable as possible, is all, since we don’t even know what we’re dealing with. We need to figure that out, somehow.”

  “We do,” Silas agreed, approaching us after making his rounds. “But that is not the most important question, Ms. Morita.”

  “Isn’t it?” I asked. “We need to know what we’re dealing with if we’re going to stop it.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “But we also need to know what is triggering it. You may not know much about the habits of synthetics, but I do. A normal virus spreads through human,”—his eyes narrowed on the word—“contact. People gather together. They exchange touches, breathe the same air as strangers. Any number of things to expose themselves to contagion. But synthetics? For the most part, we reside in relatively small, relatively isolated groups that do not see many other synthetics from the outside.” His massive shoulder rose and fell in a ponderous shrug. “The gathering here is an exception. We have many synthetics who filled different roles before escaping their tormentors. But most synthetics encounter only a small subset of other synthetics or normal humans throughout the course of their day. They do not often find themselves in contact with unfamiliar synthetics.”