Sync

by Damien Boyes

  I have to slow again and momentarily lose sight of her as she plows the bike into the pods. Her path is obscured by the covered platform, but I keep going overhead and we hit Bay Street at the same time. The limestone wall of Union Station lies ahead and I have to yank back on the throttle before I slam into it, but Fin-in-Dora doesn’t so much as feather the brake. She flies out from the platform, both wheels airborne, lands on the other side of the grassy boulevard between the north and south lanes of Bay street and shoots down a long flight of stairs into the pedestrian concourse, screaming at people to move and ramming aside anyone who isn’t quick enough to get out of her way, then glides through a wide sliding door and into the station.

  Shit.

  I pound the hopper’s handles, watching the people on the sidewalk getting back to their feet or standing shocked by the sight of a motorcycle blowing past them and into the train station.

  No way I can follow in foot. The train station’s connected to the underground PATH system—a warren of shop-lined corridors hollowed out under the downtown core spread all throughout the downtown core. It’ll be packed with people. She could come out anywhere.

  I’ll lose her.

  I hit the sirens and angle the hopper down over the stairs and into the concourse, ignoring the proximity warnings as I squeeze through the doors and into the station. There’s plenty of ways she could have gone, but it isn’t hard to pick up her trail. The PATH is much nicer walk to work on a January morning than the sidewalks, and she’s left a wake of startled people behind her.

  Luckily, the ceiling is high enough I can skim along over people’s heads. Most of them duck instinctively when they hear the sirens and the whine of the turbines, and the ones who don’t hit the deck as soon as they’re hit by the wall of air I’m surfing.

  I catch sight of Fin-in-Dora as she turns the bike and zips through a set of narrow doors. There’s barely enough room for the hopper and I have to slow right down and scrape the sides of the hopper through the opening. It gives her enough time to disappear off to the left, down a less-populated hallway of still-dark clothing stores and empty automats.

  I can’t keep up with her down here. The bike is small and nimble. This thing I’m riding’s built for the open skies, not spelunking.

  I ease back on the speed and let the hopper coast to a stop. This is stupid. I need to turn around and get back out of here before I get stuck. Maybe I’ll get lucky and pick up her trail from the air. If I don’t, SecNet has eyes everywhere, someone will track her down eventually…

  No—I have to be the one. That’s me in there. Me.

  This is all my fault.

  Believing Eka’s fragment was responsible for hurting all the people I’d met in my previous life almost made everything the last me had done excusable—like he’d made some kind of noble sacrifice instead of throwing his life away for nothing.

  Turns out it’s the exact opposite. I became the monster. I was the fragment causing so much pain. I became someone who would do anything—hurt anyone—to get what he wanted. How could I live knowing there was a version of me out there, using people up and throwing them away?

  I have to stop him.

  I urge the hopper forward, lean hard and bank thrust off a Tab Shack booth and take the corner at speed. The PATH ahead splits off in three directions, but by the looks on people’s faces Fin-in-Dora turned left and I swing around the corner and there she is. I watch her spot me and feel an instinctual flush of sympathy for the familiar spasm of frustration that spasms across her face. She cuts a quick right and I follow, in control but closing as she swerves to avoid a man lost in his tab, and has to bounce down a short flight of stairs to avoid running him down.

  The PATH isn’t much better for Fin-in-Dora. I’m playing defense, letting her dictate the rules, but I know how she thinks. I need to get in her head.

  What would I do if I were chasing me?

  With all the people and the random stairs and the constant corners I’d be ready to bail on the PATH. She knows I can keep up now, and since I didn’t give up immediately she knows I won’t. The motorcycle has the hopper beat on speed, but she needs the open roads. She needs out of the city. The tunnel’s still her best option.

  She’ll be looking for an exit, somewhere that’ll get her near a down ramp. The closest is off Bathurst, to the west. That’s where she’ll be heading.

  Time to end this.

  I take a hand off the hopper’s handles and fish the small gun out of my pink jacket pocket, take aim at the motorcycle’s back tire but as I start to squeeze the trigger, I hesitate, worried about hitting Dora’s skyn. Fin-in-Dora makes a left without looking back and I lose the shot.

  I jam the gun back in my pocket and I’m around the corner only seconds later but it’s a rare long straightway and she’s already opened the bike up. Before I can catch up, she spots a fire door—big enough for the bike but I’ll never get the hopper through—bangs through and guns the bike up the wide steps and out of sight.

  Good thing I know where she’s going.

  We’re close to Bathurst. It’s four-lanes each way, running north and south. A straight run down to the tunnel and out of the city. I just have to get there before she does.

  With all the twists and turns, I only have a vague sense of where I am, but I know there’s a street-level exit a few turns behind me so I swing the hopper around streak back the way I came.

  I manage to find a way back to the surface streets without decapitating anyone and rocket out of the PATH and up into the orange sky. Bathurst’s ahead and I spot Fin-in-Dora on the bike two blocks up, she’s hauling ass but I can catch her. I lean forward, hug the controls and set the turbines screaming after her.

  The bike is quick but can’t open up in the morning traffic. She’s slowed at a red light to wind through opposing traffic as I blow past, pull the hopper up and twist back around to face her. We lock eyes and it almost looks like she smiles.

  She abandons the plan to hit the tunnel immediately, makes a right turn and I gun the hopper and follow, trailing like a kite. The street’s a wide open cavern of one-way traffic spread between high-rises, perfect for flying. I’m on Fin-in-Dora immediately and then it’s a drag race. She’s got a slight head start and the speed, but I don’t have to worry about hitting anything.

  I stay right over her, staying close as she races along the solid white line between the Sküte lane and the other vehicles. I don’t want to hurt Dora’s skyn, but I need her stopped.

  Maybe I can to blow her off balance with the turbine wash, or at least force her to slow down. I get above her and lurch the hopper ahead then ease back on the throttle to lose altitude directly above her, but she senses my descent and pulls in front of an AV hauler. I have to yank the hopper back up to avoid rear-ending the big vehicle.

  Where’s she going? Does she even have a plan or is this pure instinct?

  I need to keep her guessing, force her to make decisions until she comes up wrong.

  She’s still just ahead and I gun the turbines and roar over her, and just as I’m passing above her, she veers right and lets the bike have all the watts it can drink.

  I swing around after her as she blows a red light without slowing then sails through a stop sign. Too bad for her, she’s just about run out of pavement. The street she’s on ends in a T intersection with Lakeshore Ave and the high fence of the rail lines. She takes it way too fast.

  I immediately see what she’s trying to do and know she won’t to make it. Fin-in-Dora comes in at a wide angle, riding the brake, trying to slip perfectly into the traffic on Lakeshore, but she misjudges the speed, clips a hirecar and then has nowhere to go.

  She tries her best to stay upright but the bike wobbles and for a second, it looks like she’ll recover, but she’s going too fast. The front wheel hits the curb and the forks snap and bike bucks. I’m still down the street, hurrying to catch up, as the fractured copy of the man I used to be sails into the air, like a stone flung from a catapu
lt.

  StatUS-ID

  [a646:d17e:8670:511f::Finsbury/D//GAGE]

  SysDate

  [19:12:59. Saturday, May 11, 2058]

  Not only does the Amit Johari know who I am, he’s been waiting for me to come rescue him.

  Fin-in-Dora and I disentangle ourselves from the scrum of silent skyns. Their bodies lie everywhere, dozens scattered across the floor. I get to my knees, watch Amit silently cry while Dora reloads.

  “What was that?” I ask.

  Amit looks over at me with a wan smile, wipes his eyes, and shakes his head. “I’m not sure I can explain.”

  “Who gives a shit what it was?” Fin-in-Dora says. She has her pistol trained on him, the reloaded rifle slung over her back, ready to keep fighting. “We came to kill this bastard. Let’s get it the fuck over with.”

  “If your intent is revenge,” Amit says to Fin-in-Dora, “you won’t find it through violence. I am, even now, distributed. Scattered safe around the world.”

  “Then we’ll start here, find each and every piece of you and shut them down one by one until we get them all,” Fin-in-Dora says through a pained squint.

  Amit groans and rises to his feet, swivels his head around on his neck and rolls his shoulders. The cable dangling from his neck—the one that had been pulsing a brilliant blue—is now barely glowing. His projected rithm is quiet too. It used to dwarf us all and now it’s half the size it was, the thin filaments stretched into wide bands, but the black streak seems to be gone. The rithm is so different now, I wonder if the Amit Johari we’re talking to is even the same person he was when we walked in.

  Amit studies Dora’s skyn, glances at me for a moment then focuses his attention back on her. “You would fail,” he says and straightens his back. “But I understand your sentiment. You want your revenge.”

  “I want justice,” Fin-in-Dora spits. “For what you took from me. From us.”

  Fin-in-Dora and I both know we’re way past justice. We came here to kill the person who destroyed our lives. That’s not justice. Not even close.

  “I thought you were after me too but you weren’t, were you?” I ask. “You didn’t try to run my Sküte under a bus and you didn’t send those skyns to kill me. There was something living in your rithm, something haunting your mind, acting with it—”

  “Yes I—” the superintelligence stammers. With his rithm now a shell of what it was, I wonder if he’s that super anymore.

  Amit’s silent for a long moment, gazing inward, then snaps back to reality, overcome once again, and more tears leak down his cheeks.

  “Are you going to shoot him or am I?” Fin-in-Dora says, his impatience growing. “We need to get this over with and get me back into my head. It doesn’t feel right in here. I’m having a hard time remembering who I am.”

  “Soon,” I say to Fin-in-Dora. “We came all this way, I want answers.”

  For a second, it seems as though she might argue but doesn’t. She wants answers too.

  “Why did you kill me?” I ask Amit.

  “Why…?” he mutters, seemingly unconcerned we’re arguing about killing him, then he levels his gaze at me. “I was scared. I was stupid and overconfident and terribly, terribly lonely.” He takes a breath and straightens. “I wanted my mind back the way it had been, the one I’d lived twenty four years with, the one I had before Mom and Dad had me fixed. They thought my autism was a deficiency. Even with all the things I could do, I still wasn’t good enough. They wanted a normal son and they did what they needed to make me one. They didn’t care they were killing me, changing me so much, I became someone else. I wanted to be the way I was, thought I could alter my rithm, undo the changes they had made. I met a man named Woodrow Quirk, a genius who knew everything there was to know about the human psychorithm—at the time, anyway. He helped me understand how my mind functioned, and how to alter those functions. We were close to success, I could sense it, but I was impatient and tested it too soon. I was a fool. It twisted me up, made me see horrors. I killed Woodrow. Killed you and your wife. Others, so many others...” He trails off but begins speaking again almost instantly. “Afterwards, when the changes timed out and my rithm reset and I saw what I’d done I couldn’t bear it, couldn’t live with the memories, so I made them go away.”

  “Just like that?” I say. He makes it sound so easy. If I could have edited the crash out of my head, made it so the memories of Connie were simply gone and I didn’t know the difference, would that have been preferable to the grief I’ve been suffering? I couldn’t imagine not having her in my head. Removing her would be like removing a part of me.

  “Oh no,” Amit replies. “Nothing is so simple. I erected walls in my rithm to ensure I’d never accidentally stumble over the missing memories and created active subroutines that kept me from knowing anything was amiss. As my rithm expanded, as I became more intimate with the inner workings of my mind. As I grew into what became Eka, so did these hidden aspects of my mind expand as well. They evolved as I did, growing smarter along with me. Finally they became what I came to understand as the Void: a living blank spot in my mind, one tasked with the primary purpose of keeping me from knowing what I’d done, part of which included me from realising its very existence. That day in the Market—when you were able to see through the data shields I’d erected around Xiao’s team—that was a direct result of the Void acting to prevent me from knowing of your existence. The Void evolved to hide my pain from myself, saw you as an extension of that pain and kept you from me. It must have concluded erasing your presence was the most pragmatic course of action.”

  “And what about the Void now?” I ask. I want to believe that we’ve beaten it, that we’re free of the threat of it returning, but after everything that’s happened, it almost seems an impossibility.

  Amit glances at his floating rithm. “The Void is purged. My current rithm stems from a deep archive, one I made only days after I committed those horrible acts to you and your wife and those others. Before I erected the blocks in my mind.”

  “So to you, the accident—it just happened?” I ask. I’m torn by the conflicting impulses, don’t know whether I want to kill or pity him. Now that I’ve found him, he seems so small, so fragile. This is the last person I expected to meet when I started my mission to find the person who killed Connie.

  “Only days ago,” he says, and once again wipes the tears from his face.

  “I heard what I needed to,” Fin-in-Dora says, her face pained. “Can I shoot him now?”

  Amit shakes his head. “You don’t understand. You can not harm me.”

  “We’re going to find out—” Fin-in-Dora replies and steadies her arm but Amit holds up a finger.

  “You can not harm me,” Amit repeats. “But I can give you what you want.”

  This pauses Fin-in-Dora and her pistol wavers.

  “What are you saying?” I ask.

  “I’m offering you my life,” Amit says.

  I can’t parse what he’s saying. This person I’ve been hunting for weeks, who I’ve sacrificed so much of myself to find, now that I’ve found him, he’s willing to simply lay down and die to satisfy my need for vengeance?

  Amit directs his eyes at me but his mind doesn’t follow and they go blank. A few seconds later, he returns to his body, reaches back and snaps the cable from his neck. He strokes it and the contact port detaches, extrudes a thin black datakey from inside. He pulls it free and offers it to me.

  “What the hell is that?” Fin-in-Dora asks, her eyes narrow.

  Amit blinks and turns to her. “I have locked away my back-ups and secured my expanded consciousness—the Eka pattern—everything I was and had grown to be, behind this key. Even if someone were to discover the physical location of my stored mind, they would find it encrypted with such strength, it would require a team of coordinated AMPs running to the end of the universe to crack the code. Everything I am is now standing before you, reduced to a single mind. My fate is in your hands. If you decide my life mus
t end, then it will end.” Then he adds, “I should mention, my death will trigger a fail-safe. A countdown that will give you three minutes to evacuate the building before the charges trigger and detonate a controlled implosion. I can’t have the technology I’ve developed in here falling into unworthy hands. Three minutes should provide you time enough to exit safely.”

  I’m speechless. I came here thinking I was doing something noble, that we were ridding the world of a dangerous entity who also happened to have destroyed my life, but unlike Darien Cole who deserved to die, I can’t say the same about Amit Johari. He may have done terrible things, but he isn’t a bad person. He’s made mistakes, but he doesn’t deserve to die for them.

  My gut twists up in confusion. All this time, I’d been so convinced, so sure, I was doing the right thing, but now that I’m here, what if I’m wrong?

  I turn to look at Fin-in-Dora as she turns toward me.

  “On three?” she asks but I shake my head. After all this death, after hearing what Amit put himself through, my anger and hate toward him have eased and I finally see him for who he is: not much more than a kid, scared and alone who made some bad decisions that spiralled out of control.

  But no. Regardless of who he is in this moment, no matter what he’s been through—he’s still the one who took Connie away from me. That he was fleeing a trauma is no excuse. He killer her. Tore her to shreds before my eyes, robbed her from me and the world and everything she’d ever become. Connie had decades ahead of her, who knows what she might have accomplished.

  We were going to have a kid. We had our whole lives and Amit Johari stole them from us.

  He deserves to pay.

  Amit’s still watching me, face stoic, the key in his hand. He knows exactly what he did. Knows it so well that trying to hide from the pain it caused him, he twisted himself into a shadowy version of himself he couldn’t recognize. He did things he’d never imagined he be capable of.

  And then I see her face. Clearly. This time she’s not trapped in the last seconds of her life. We’re back on the island, sitting poolside early in that perfect tropical night, the sun still an hour away from rising. There’d been a pause in the conversation as we stared at the endless stars and the flashed her shy grin, the first of many times I’d see it, and said ‘We’re going to count a lot of stars together, aren’t we?’