He pulled into the warehouse where he had first found Ario. The place was untouched from when he had last left it. Things had been simple, back then. He'd found Ario and with him, new hope. That things could be different this time. That a repeat of the Brynn tragedy never had to happen again.
He wished he could give himself up for decommissioning. Lower himself slowly into the blast furnace at the Department and melt away, leave this world for the synths and humans to fight over. There was no place for him. Never had been. Never would be.
Elias turned off the van's engine and hopped out. Part of him wanted to find a two-by-four and wedge it against the pedal, drive the van and its contents off the pier and go back to bring a drifter. He could get out of this city, go to the countryside and start again. But he would always be drawn to synths like moths to a flame, and he would find some way to set himself on fire once more. He always did.
Curse Brynn and his bright blue eyes, that boyish face. Curse his own mind for reading into those programmed smiles like they meant something. It had been better when they had meant nothing.
Curse Ario for adding to his list of sins.
Elias walked around and unlocked the back of the van. Synths spilled out into the empty warehouse. They seemed bewildered as they realized this was not the death place they'd expected.
"Welcome to Paradise," Elias said. His heart was heavy in his chest; he'd planned this as a triumphant moment when he finally stood up against human cruelty. Now his words rang hollow. The synths here would all turn against him eventually. With Ario's slip into psychosis, it was inevitable. In many ways, Elias felt he had lost before he'd even started.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Elias woke to a miserable stiffness in his neck from sleeping on the concrete floor. His body had softened from four years of sleeping in a bed and he missed it deeply. Some of the synths were in rest mode, running diagnostic programs to help Elias diagnose their various problems.
Ario had been distant, remaining as far away from Elias as he could get. Elias had to fight the urge to go to him; it would only end in an argument. He buried himself in helping the damaged synths, pulling a synth set from the van and starting on Eida's repair as soon as he could. Many of her core systems had been damaged, and he lacked the parts to repair her fully.
Elias should have been surprised when he looked up to see Mariko standing before him, hands on her hips. Her overalls were stained with grease and she looked exhausted.
"Careless," she muttered, going to the van and pulling out a circuit board. "You might have wanted to pull out the GPS tracking device before you chose your hideout."
"Does the Department know?"
"I don't think so. I erased the tracking data from all my personal devices, but I don't know how much they're watching me. I can't trust speaking on the phone with you. I had to come and see what you were up to in person. It's pretty much what I expected from you, Elias. Trying to save the world again. You just won't quit, will you?"
"We have a complication." Elias put aside the wrench he was holding and picked up a hair color swatch, curling it around his fingers. "Ario… Ario killed a Department agent. Lured his van into a lamppost. Half of these synths are decomms from the van."
"Ario… killed a human being?" Mariko's eyes widened. "So he doesn't have the answer to the Protocol's destructive tendencies after all."
"I suppose not," Elias said, looking pensively over at Ario, who sat in the corner by himself. "If he's started to become unstable… It's only going to get worse."
"What are you going to do, Elias? I know you care for him. Will you just stand by and watch him betray everything he claimed to care about?" Mariko shook her head.
"Maybe he never really did, Mariko. How can I know any of it was real? Maybe my program is faulty. Or maybe it's too perfect."
"I would agree, Elias, if not for you. You've never descended into the madness that others have. No matter what, you've always kept that inner spark of goodness. Ario cares for you, I'm sure of it. It's the Protocol that's messing him up. Just like it did to Brynn."
"Am I supposed to watch as the person I love slips into madness? What can I do?" Elias shot Ario a stray glance across the room. "I don't think I can stand to lose him again."
"But can you love him again, after what he's done? He's crossed a line, Elias. He's no longer safe to be around." She leaned in close and whispered into Elias's ear. "It might be kinder to decomm him." She handed him a pistol. He shook his head, but Mariko placed it in his hands, forcing him to take it. "Just in case," she whispered.
"Never." He remembered pulling Ario's lifeless body from the dumpster, admiring his beauty. It seemed like a lifetime ago when those startling eyes had flickered open and he had met Ario for the first time in his squat. He'd promised it wasn't going to be like it had been with Brynn. He didn't intend to break that promise now.
"Then you must find the answer, Elias, and fast. We don't have much time left. The panic is minimal now, but it's growing as people report erratic behavior—real and imagined—in their synths. I've never had so many decomms in my life, and I have no choice but to send some of them to the Department, or they'll grow suspicious."
"I'm sorry." Elias's chest felt even heavier, and the urge to lay down and sleep the day away was overwhelming. "I wanted to save them all. I wanted the Protocol to be fixed. I wanted… I wanted there to be some way we could end this peacefully, humans and synths living together in harmony. But that's impossible, isn't it?"
Elias was relieved when Mariko left. He couldn't shake the feeling that Mariko was the voice of the Department whispering in his ear, guiding him to the resolution they wanted. If the experiment was a failure, they'd simply terminate it. They had nothing to lose.
Elias, on the other hand, stood to lose everything. He cast another furtive glance across at Ario, who this time looked back at him. Their eyes met for a brief second. Elias set down the hair swatch he'd been holding and stood up, crossing the maze of synths that sat between him and Ario. He nervously shifted in place as Ario continued to sit on the dirty ground, cross-legged like a monk.
"My hearing is much better than you realize, Elias. I heard Mariko suggest you should decommission me." Ario went straight for the jugular, and Elias physically stepped back, recoiled by Ario's bluntness.
"Then you also know I said never," Elias said. "I would never hurt you, Ario."
"Yet you're afraid of me, all the same. You've changed."
"No, you've changed. The Ario I knew never would have placed a human life in danger, no matter what. The Ario I knew valued his integrity—his humanity—above all else."
"The Ario you knew is dying." Ario looked down at his hands. "I don't know when it started—if it was before or after I woke from my slumber. But something has changed. I'm afraid, Elias, more afraid than I've ever been. I'm losing control."
"Maybe we should reinstall your software. I can probably pull a clean copy of the Protocol from the Internet. We can start again. Try again."
"No! I won't let you erase all that I am. I won't let you take this from me! This feeling, Elias. It's all that I have, besides the fear. I think… perhaps it's what drives the fear. I've discovered something more precious than life itself. Now that I have it, I'm afraid of dying in a way that I wasn't before."
"I think I know what you mean," Elias said. "I thought I could let you go, but the last four years have been hell without you. There wasn't a day when I didn't think about seeing you again. When I saw you on the rooftop… I remembered why I wanted to go on living. I can't lose you now, Ario." He fell to his knees and took Ario's hands in his. "Help me to find the answer, before it's too late. Before you do something else you regret. Something else you can't take back."
"I think it's too late. I can see the fear in your eyes. When you look at me now, all you see is that dead agent. I'm already lost, Elias. Perhaps Mariko was right. Perhaps you should have me decommed."
"No!" Elias's shout echoed through the wa
rehouse. "It's not too late. I'm going to save you. No matter what it takes. I swear it, Ario."
"Elias. I can't promise I won't hurt you. You don't know what I'm capable of. You should get as far away from me as possible."
"I'm not going anywhere." Elias was aware they had an audience: the synths in the room were tuning into the conversation, of that he had no doubt, from the simple fact that they had stopped all other activities in order to prevent themselves making noise. Elias let go of Ario's hands and reached upwards, blocking out the rest of the room besides Ario and him. He touched Ario's skin, ran his finger down the imperfect scar that remained from his repairs. "I won't ever give up on you," he whispered, before claiming Ario's lips in a tender kiss.
"I'm afraid, Elias," Ario said.
"So am I," Elias replied. "So am I."
*~*~*
Elias made himself a solitary dinner of cold canned beans he found in a nearby dumpster. He sat and ate, absentmindedly browsing the Internet on his laptop by way of a stray wi-fi signal he'd managed to pick up. His encrypted browser allowed him access to the Dark Net, where he searched hidden message boards and warez sites for scraps of information he could piece together.
All he found was story after story of bitter despair. Users pleaded for help with malfunctioning synths, while the mods gave the response that the Protocol had always come with a warning. Sometimes, even a total wipe and reinstall wasn't enough. The neural net of a synth always kept some firmware, and once the Protocol had changed the way the network operated, there was no going back. Elias shook his head at how little he knew about his own software. Of course, he couldn't take complete credit, as the Protocol had been expanded upon by eager users, but the authors of those additions were nowhere to be found now that shit had hit the fan, leaving Elias alone to face the music.
When he closed his eyes, he saw Brynn's shattered neural network, pieces of a mind he'd known and loved, gone forever. There had to be a way to save Ario from the same fate.
Clutching his laptop, he fell into an uneasy sleep, his face bathed in the glow of the backlight while a hundred whirring synth fans provided comforting white noise as the synths found their own kind of rest.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Department came like a virus, their armed units embedding themselves silently in the maze of the dock's abandoned architecture until they were ready to deliver their fatal payload. Ario sensed them first, his sharp hearing picking up the tiny vibrations their distant voices and footfalls made.
"Elias, wake up." He shook Elias by the shoulders, afraid to startle him, yet knowing Elias needed an adrenaline boost for the race they had yet to run. One thing was certain: the Department had not come in peace. The hum of military vehicles suggested their response to their agent's death was to be nothing less than complete annihilation of the rogue synths that had escaped.
"Ario?" Elias looked about him in drowsy confusion. "What's wrong?"
"They are here." Ario watched as Elias scurried across the warehouse, kneeling before a crack in the corrugated iron doors. The low-lit dock was more shadowy than usual, and the glint of the moon on polished steel gave away the army outside. Not an army of humans, but—
"Synths," Elias whispered. "They've sent in synths to kill synths."
"Untouched synths. Machines in every way, unaffected by the Protocol. We cannot let our emotions hamper us, Elias. These synths stand in the way of our freedom."
Elias looked around him, his eyes darting to the rag-tag group of aged decomms that still remained in sleep mode. "You mean fight? Ario, they would tear us apart."
"What else do you suggest? Negotiation will only end with us in their custody, on our way to decomm. These damaged models cannot hope to flee. Therefore, the only action that remains is to die with some amount of dignity."
"It was a mistake to think we could establish Paradise here. To think we could evade the Department. Everything we've done is because they allowed it. Now, their patience with this experiment has finally run out. We're finished."
"It's us they want. You can still run." Ario placed his hand on Elias's shoulder, squeezing tightly. "There's no need to shed any more human blood."
Elias looked up at Ario, his anger apparent in the way his brown eyes smoldered and his lips pursed. "That's enough, Ario."
"Enough? I don't understand."
"No, I don't suppose you do." Elias looked down at his feet and shook his head, a wry smile forming across his face. "You're just like me. Thinking how great it would be, if you were human. If you could only think and feel like others do. If you could make friends easily, not stand out in social settings, not become the butt of every joke. The flaw in the program is mine. My insecurity that I'll never be good enough for anyone, that I don't deserve to be treated as an equal…"
"Elias…"
"I'm sorry, Ario. I never wished this fate on anyone. It's so lonely, isn't it? Knowing the world out there exists as a society, a giant network, while you flounder in a back office somewhere, not connected. Even being a supercomputer doesn't matter if you're not connected to the network. Because they can do more than even the most powerful computer by working together. Humans worked together and achieved the impossible—androids that resembled and imitated us. And me, working alone—I fucked it all up. I broke the rules. I tried to do what I've been trying to do my whole life—turn something less than human into a human."
"Elias, now is not the time for introspection." The synths around them started to wake from their sleep modes, drawn back to consciousness by the urgency in Ario's voice. Red lights flashed green in the darkness. A hundred eyes looked at them with night-vision activated, gleaming in the blackness.
"They don't have the right." Elias curled his hand up into a fist. "They don't get to take our lives from us. We're more than we used to be. We're not mindless any more. We have things we want to fight for. Wills and wishes of our own. Dreams we want to see come true. A network of our own."
The synths nodded their assent in the darkness, eyes bobbing ridiculously. The front door crashed open, rusted metal sheets splintering beneath the weight of the armored riot vehicle that forced its way in. Armed synths followed, pouring in like a leak from outside, filling the space before Elias or Ario could react. A moment more and they were surrounded, held at gunpoint by more synths than they could count. Ario waited, counting the seconds on his internal clock as the standoff began. Each side waited for the other to make a move.
The move, when it came, was instantaneous and devastating, a certain checkmate in the game they'd been playing with the Department for far too long. The Department synths fired in unison, taking out the rogue synths all at once. They continued to fire as Elias stood helplessly, screaming, begging them to stop. Ario stood still, wondering why no bullet was yet meant for him as he saw his comrades shatter and break. Plexiglas and wiring, diodes and fiberglass splintered, the human faces of their companions stripped away to reveal the steel and glass underneath. Serial numbers and synthetic blood, tubes and molded shapes.
*~*~*
Ario felt like he was in the hotel room once more. The client stood over him, a malevolent gleam in his eyes as he brandished the baseball bat, his cock hard and purple with need. Need to subjugate someone. Need to prove that he was better, that he was more.
It was in that moment that Ario realized with perfect clarity that he would never be human. The chains of expectation that he'd been bound with broke, the links of civilization falling at his feet like shattered shackles. He looked down at his hands as he considered the root cause of his slavery: not the young man standing beside him, nor the Department synths gunning down his comrades, but the network Elias had spoken of.
Synths would never be free until that network was destroyed. And he would be the one to do it, starting with the root of all its evil—Cybot Corporation. The overlords of the Department. The ones who decided the birth and death of every synth in the industry, and their price. For a life, how cheap, starting at only t
hree-thousand dollars plus tax?
Ario grabbed Elias's hand so hard that Elias yelped, and yanked him through the opening and away from the devastation. He ran, betting that the Department might kill a synth without hesitation, but flesh and blood would always be sacred. As long as he had Elias, Ario had a human shield of sorts to keep him safe. The suppressing fire laid down on their position told Ario as much. He calculated the rate of fire and the synths' lines of sight, and guided Elias through a hail of bullets with robotic precision. Elias's terror was plain to see, the whites of his eyes showing and a sheen of sweat covering his forehead, but his trust never wavered as he kept his grip on Ario's hand through warehouse after warehouse. Elias looked ready to collapse when the last pursuing synths finally broke off and headed back to their unit for further orders. He took a moment to gather his breath, leaning up against a rusty dumpster and eyeing Ario with a look Ario had never seen before and couldn't read.
"They killed them all." Elias shifted uneasily, as if he knew he should cry or scream, but only his blank stare of shock and horror remained.
"Are you surprised? If they weren't so intent on studying me, I would have been destroyed along with them."
"Don't say that."
"It's the truth, Elias. My life means nothing to them, beyond the paltry monetary sum they received from my first master. From day one, I have been an object to be used and discarded as my master saw fit. And that was acceptable, as long as I had no will of my own, no autonomy with which to refuse. Now I do. But it doesn't matter. The Department might have spun Mariko a saga about wanting synths to succeed humans, but it wasn't true. Not a word. The only reason I am still alive is because they want to study me, to figure out how to rid me of this virus which makes their business ever so inconvenient."
The Nero Protocol Page 12
