SINdicate

by J. T. Nicholas

  Tia was still talking. “If I have to go back to work or class before she’s ready, I’ll take one of your burners. Call me if she goes into labor, and I’ll claim a family emergency. I should be able to be here, or wherever you may be, soon enough to help out.”

  I suppressed the slight tingle of alarm that coursed up my spine at that. I could trust Tia, and God knew, it would make all of us rest easier to have someone with medical training on standby when the moment came. “Thank you,” I said, simply.

  She nodded, and I turned my attention back to La Sorte. “Any idea how long this is going to take?”

  He didn’t look up from the screens, his fingers still flying over them in arcane patterns. “We’ll finish up the first pass in about twenty minutes. But that is the pass looking for a match based on the exact parameters of the cuts Ms. Morita made. It’s not likely to turn up results, but it’s where we need to start.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “Turn up results, I mean.”

  “Because, Detective, an exact match presupposes that, not only did Ms. Morita make perfect cuts during the extraction process, but also that whoever put the rods in place to begin with did so in a way that precisely matches the roads. Which is unlikely. But the first pass is allowing me to build a data set that I can…bend. Manipulate. I can start to introduce other variables, deflecting the roads in various ways, adjusting the angles and so forth. You understand, there are numerous intersections, so the possibilities… Well, let’s just say there are a lot of them. It’s going to take some time. Hours certainly. Maybe days. And no guarantees.”

  “Fuck.” It wasn’t what I was hoping for, but I wasn’t particularly surprised. The whole map thing had seemed way too easy. “How did you learn to do all this, anyway?” I asked La Sorte.

  “I was a Toy, Detective,” he said. “But just like children, adults get bored with their toys from time to time. I always had hours, and sometimes days and weeks, of uninterrupted time. I managed to acquire a screen.” He grimaced as he said it, giving me the impression that whatever he’d done to get the screen hadn’t been pleasant. “You can only surf the net for so long before it gets boring. I got tired with the games online, so I learned how to make my own. From there, I found a freedom I’d never experienced before. You can be just about anyone online, Detective, if you’re smart enough to spoof the identification requirements.” He smiled, a genuine smile, but with a slight predatory edge to it. “Many of us are smart enough.”

  “No doubt,” I muttered. “No doubt.”

  Chapter 9

  “Detective.”

  My head snapped up and my hand dropped for the butt of my pistol. It took a moment for me to realize where I was—hunched over in the booth while the screens continued to run. La Sorte was gone. Tia, too. She had sought her bed a while ago, finding a cot out among the synthetics. I had remained, babysitting the screens, though I wasn’t actually helping with anything. I couldn’t be sure when La Sorte had disappeared since, apparently, at some point I’d put my head down and passed out. It had been a long, long day.

  But now I found myself staring up into Silas’s red-tinged eyes.

  “Back again, I see,” I said, rubbing sleep from my own eyes. “Going to stick around this time, or is this just another quick stop before you’re off to deal with more important matters?” The bitterness in my own voice surprised me. Shit. I was tired.

  Silas tilted his head. “I assure you, Detective, I am engaged in tasks vital to the success of our mission.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I’m sure you are. And stop calling me fucking Detective, okay? I stopped being a detective the day I got involved in this shit.”

  “As you wish, Jason,” he said, his voice still insufferably calm. Then he hesitated. “Are you regretting your decision to join us?” There was a hint of something in that smooth baritone that almost sounded like worry. Could there actually be a crack in that alabaster armor?

  I sighed. “No, Silas. No regrets. I’m just tired. And worried. And frustrated. We’re what, a week away from an all-out war? Do we even know what the opening shots will be?”

  “Yes, Jason,” Silas replied. “We do. That is what I have been spending my time on. I did not believe for a moment that the human governments would comply with our demands. But many of the people who will help us in this war are still in servitude. Others have a deep and abiding hatred for all humanity. Your involvement with either type would be…problematic.”

  “Right.” The thought of synthetics out there who hated humans so much that even those like me—who were risking everything to help them—were anathema was exhausting. I understood why they felt that way. I couldn’t even blame them for feeling that way. But as long as there was that kind of hate on either side, I had a notion that true peace would be a long time coming.

  Silas must have heard something of the resignation in my voice, because he slid into the booth across from me. His own boulder-like shoulders slumped, and he let out a deep, rumbling sigh of his own. “It will be a difficult road ahead, Jason. For all of us. But it’s a road that must be traveled if we are to have any hope at all.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I know.”

  “What is all this?” he asked, waving at the array of screens spread out on the table, still working their way through whatever mathe-magical processes La Sorte had put in place.

  I gave Silas a rundown of the autopsy, our map theory, and the work La Sorte had done. “So now we’re in wait mode.”

  “Why welding rods?” Silas asked.

  “No idea,” I replied. “Easy to find?”

  “Certainly harder to find than regular wire, or some other medium. And if it was just about ease of acquiring, why use different gauges?”

  “You think it means something?”

  “I think you are potentially ignoring several dimensions of the data with which you’ve been presented.” He frowned, razor-thin brows drawing together. “In addition to the pattern, you have the material—copper—the variable diameters of the rods, and the fact that they are welding rods in the first place. Given the array of possible materials that could have been used, I think you have to assume that the choice was intentional and meaningful.”

  Since waking up yesterday morning, I’d managed maybe four hours of sleep in the past twenty-four, and that had been sitting down in a restaurant booth. My brain wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders, and Silas’s idea of common usage wasn’t helping. “Can you translate that into something that I can understand without either coffee or whiskey?” I asked.

  “The diameter of the rods may signify the size of a road. The copper or welding rods might point you to a specific part of the city.”

  “I’ve given you everything you need to find me,” I muttered. “And probably enough that it shouldn’t require a blind, brute-force approach. I guess we better go wake up La Sorte.”

  Once we’d roused the synthetic, he and Silas put their heads together over the screens and started working their magic. They were speaking English—I think—but I still only managed to understand every third word. I can’t begin to explain it, but there was a lot of talk about the ways they could “narrow down the available data set” and “add dimensional parameters to the search criteria.” There wasn’t a whole lot I could do to help, but despite my exhaustion, I couldn’t sleep either. Eventually, I wandered off, heading toward the kitchen to try and find something to drink. I didn’t check the fridge, though. It was once again occupied by our unfortunate murder victim.

  When I returned, Silas and La Sorte were staring down at the screens as if the devices had betrayed them. “Bad news?” I asked.

  “We can’t find it,” La Sorte answered. “Silas,” he said the name with a slight reverence that was hard to miss, “managed to speed up the base program that I had written, and we incorporated everything we could think of related to the rods. The search finished a fe
w minutes ago. Zero results.”

  “What?” I demanded. It had seemed so clear, a perfectly detailed road map. Okay, so carved into the back of a dead man was unusual, but still. If not a map, then what? “Dammit,” I growled, resisting the urge to slam my fist on the table. “What else could it be? Or where else? I can’t believe someone delivered a body here in New Lyons and left us a map for some other city or town.”

  “Have you identified the body?” Silas asked. “Perhaps if we knew more about the victim, it would give us more clues about his killer.”

  I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. In the excitement of finding what we thought was a map, the search I had going to try and identify the victim had slipped my mind. “Shit,” I muttered. “I need to get some real sleep. I completely forgot.” I dug my screen out from my pocket, unlocking it and flipping to the window running my search.

  The search was still scouring through the endless bytes, but it had returned one preliminary result. It wasn’t a perfect match for the picture—but then, people in the flush of health didn’t always look like the corpse they left behind. The bone structure was the same, though. “This could be our guy,” I said, passing the screen over so Silas could see the photos.

  “Derrick Montgomery,” he mused. He began tapping at the screen, his fingers flicking rapidly across the surface. “No indication of family. No workplace of record. No address.” He slid the screen back to me.

  “So, nothing,” I grunted. Damn, but I missed having access to the police databases. I thought about calling Hernandez, to try and get her to run the name down for me, but dismissed the idea. Putting me in touch with Tia was one thing. Using department resources to run down what was, at this point, probably reported as a missing person would eventually lead to questions. I couldn’t put Hernandez in that position.

  I flipped through the pictures of Montgomery that the facial recognition program had uncovered. They were all banal shots of the man engaged in everyday tasks, but with the sort of false sheen that said they had been pulled from a variety of social media sites. They looked staged: perfect smiles, perfect poses, perfect backgrounds. Not that that was particularly unusual. Most people’s net presence fell into one of two categories—a scrubbed and idealized version of the life they wanted other people to think they lived, or a brutal “true life” approach that only showcased the worst aspects of existence. There was probably some middle ground out there, but if there was, it didn’t garner much attention.

  “Wait. Go back,” Silas said. He had moved around to peer over my shoulder at the pictures. I swiped the other direction, pausing for a second or two each time to give him the opportunity to peruse the images. “That one,” he said, stabbing one blunt, alabaster finger toward my screen. Without asking, he tugged the phone from my hand, fingers flying over the display. In moments, the image had moved from my screen to the cobbled-together display lying on the table. It zoomed and rotated, the frame moving off Montgomery and focusing on a building in the background.

  The picture appeared to be taken selfie-style, with the camera held at arm’s length. A filter had been applied—of course—to give the image a stylized sepia-tone that softened all of the light. It made Montgomery, who looked decidedly average, seem a little classier. But Silas wasn’t interested in Montgomery. “I know that building,” he muttered, as he continued to fiddle with my screen, manipulating the image. The view shifted again, cutting out Montgomery completely. The picture had been taken from a high angle, so not much of the building was visible, but Silas had zoomed in on a portion that appeared to be a lower corner. One of the stones had something carved into it. I couldn’t quite make it out—except to say that it was there at all—but Silas wasn’t done.

  The onscreen image flashed several times, each time applying some new filter or enhancement. It didn’t work like on the netvids, where, with a few button clicks, the blurry or indistinct image became instantly clear. Instead, we were left with a mushy mess of pixels that were largely unrecognizable from their original form. There were, however, some hard outlines that formed a vaguely familiar image. Three distinct smudges, one curved like a loose backward c, one more or less vertical, the third like a normal c, all lined up in a row. They formed a symbol that—even in its bastardized state—any New Lyonian would recognize at once. It was a fleur-de-lis, an icon that had been associated with the city, and its predecessor, since time immemorial. Except it appeared to be within the confines of a rounded triangle.

  “What am I looking at?” I asked.

  “You,” Silas replied, his voice filled with satisfaction, “are looking at the main offices of the New Lyons Department of Sanitation.” The albino tapped thoughtfully at his thin, pink lips with one finger, then dumped my screen back into my hands, shuffled over to the other side of the table, and dropped back into his original seat next to La Sorte. His fingers went back to work on whatever master control the two of them had rigged up, without so much as a whisper to the other synthetic.

  La Sorte looked confused by Silas’s sudden activity. I met the former Toy’s eyes across the table, and he gave me a half-shrug. It seemed that, even to other synthetics, Silas was a bit on the strange side.

  We didn’t have long to wait. The image on the table dissolved, replaced once again with layers of maps. The maps cycled as before, but something was different. I could still see street and building designators, but they were faded, translucent. The match program was running, dropping the cut marks from the victim’s—Montgomery’s—back onto the grid. But the possibilities seemed much reduced, if you ignored all of the translucent lines. The more solid avenues ran, for the most part, parallel to the more familiar roadways, but not always. Sometimes they crossed under buildings or cut strange pathways across intersections. I wanted to ask what the hell we were looking at, but I wasn’t going to give Silas the satisfaction. He was peering at the screen intently, as if he expected a result at any moment, so I held my tongue and waited with him.

  It took about ten minutes. By the end, I was starting to get itchy. Hell, I was starting to long for a drink. It wasn’t even six in the morning, so I wasn’t about to crack open a bottle, but I hated this kind of detective work. This was what the cyber guys were for. At least, back on the job, when this kind of thing had come up, I could go pound the pavement and ask questions. When you’re at the top of the country’s most wanted list, stepping outside was contraindicated, the kind of thing you should do only when absolutely necessary. So there wasn’t much I could do but sit and wait.

  The screen elicited a sudden beep and the nauseating motion of the program stopped. Taking up nearly the entirety of the display was the image of the incisions overlaid on whatever the hell it was Silas had been searching. It wasn’t perfect. In fact, according to the flashing indicators, it was an eighty-two-point-six-percent match. But the computer wasn’t the human eye. Just glancing at it, I could tell that it was right. Whatever “it” was.

  Silas, being Silas, gave me a tight smile. For the big synthetic, it might as well have been a fist pumped over his head in triumph. “Well, then, Campbell. It appears we’ve found your map.”

  “Great,” I muttered. “Now can you tell me what the fuck it’s a map of?”

  “You’re looking at the wastewater and storm water disposal systems for the city of New Lyons.”

  It took a moment for me to catch on. “You mean that whoever we’re looking for is in the friggin’ sewers?” I demanded. “Shit.”

  I hadn’t intended the expletive to be a joke, but La Sorte chuckled and even Silas arched an eyebrow. “So it seems, Detective. So it seems. And now?”

  I answered with a tight smile of my own. “Now that we know where we’re going, we go kick in some doors.”

  Chapter 10

  It hadn’t been that simple, of course. Silas and La Sorte might have been wonderful assets when it came to writing net programs, but neither would be much he
lp in a fight. Silas had managed to overcome his conditioning once, saving me from Fowler, but it had left him nearly unconscious to do so. I needed him to come with me; he was a sanitation worker—sewer rat—after all, and his knowledge would be invaluable, but I didn’t know what we were up against, and I couldn’t rely on the imposing albino if the shit hit the fan. I’d checked the map and scoured my memory, and if both were accurate, the sewer lines indicated were deep in the heart of gangland. I wasn’t up on what was going on currently in that world, but if things hadn’t changed too much, it was the territory of Los Locos Muertos. They were mostly into guns and drugs. Even with legalization of nearly every previously banned substance, the prices the pharmaceutical companies charged were off the charts. There was always a black market for people who weren’t willing to pay retail.

  Tia was still standing by, playing nurse-attendant to Evelyn. Even if she would have been willing to come with me, I couldn’t ask it of her. I had no idea of the level of danger into which I was going to be walking, except to say that it would be dangerous. Tia was a med student, a medical examiner’s assistant. Not a soldier. Not a cop. Not even a revolutionary, though whether she realized it or not, by helping Evelyn deliver her baby, Tia was casting her lot with us. I felt a wrenching in my gut as I considered that. I should probably make sure the pretty ME’s assistant knew what she was getting into, but we needed someone with medical training. Could I risk the chance that Tia would pack up and bug out if I laid out the possible consequences for her?

  In the end, I left Tia with Evelyn, telling myself that she was a smart girl and could see the implications of what she was doing. It wasn’t much comfort for my aching conscience, which made what I needed to do next even harder. I didn’t have very many friends—fewer, certainly, than before I got involved in the budding synthetic revolution—and it seemed I was destined to keep putting them in danger just to help me save my own skin. Still, I wasn’t spoiled for choice, so I made the call.