SINdicate

by J. T. Nicholas

  The staple tines loosened, and I eased the point of the blade under the staple proper and pried it out. With forefinger and thumb I grasped the paper’s edge, slipping it from the corpse’s waistband and holding it up to my face.

  “Well?” Hernandez demanded. “Anything?”

  I could see Silas was watching as well, quiet as usual, but with deep curiosity burning behind his pinkish eyes. With a shrug, I turned the paper toward them, revealing the series of twelve numbers listed there. They were grouped in sets of three, each separated by a period. I was no cyber cop, but I lived in the modern world and I recognized an IP address when I saw one.

  “Is that it?” Hernandez groused. “A fucking web address?”

  I shrugged. “I’ll keep looking.” I understood her ire—it wasn’t a smoking gun, not all by itself. Certainly not enough to help her solve the question that was undoubtedly rattling around in her head—and, if I was honest, in mine as well. What was she going to do with this mess?

  I’d brought her down here for backup, and if she hadn’t been here, the odds were good I would have died in the fucking sewer. But four dead civilians presented her with a special kind of conundrum. Much to my surprise, I found that I had no problem, ethical or moral, with leaving the assholes to rot. Something about that bothered me. Had I moved so far away from the soldier and the cop who wanted to help and protect people?

  “We will not be able to access that on one of our burners. Not from down here,” Silas noted. “Wireless signals don’t reach this deep, particularly with all of the iron reinforcements sandwiched into the concrete.”

  “Great,” I said, as I went back to the task of searching the body. After several more minutes, I gave up. There was nothing—literally nothing—else of note on the body. “Does no one carry fucking identification or screens anymore?”

  While I’d been playing with dead people, Silas and Hernandez had begun a systematic search of the control room. The room itself looked like it could have served as any mid-level office in any corporation in New Lyons—except that it boasted only a single desk-mounted screen, doubtless hardwired into the net. That wouldn’t do us a lot of good, since not even Silas’s magic fingers could fix bullet holes. I wasn’t sure who had hit it, but it looked like it had taken at least a couple of rounds. “Anything?” I asked.

  Silas was examining the pile of furniture the security guards had used to create a bulwark while Melinda gave the enemy dead a more thorough search.

  “Perhaps a little something here, Detective,” Silas said. “The screen is, as you can see, nonfunctional. There are a couple of magazines for our mystery man’s rifle that look like they may have been sitting on the desk when the Walton people barged in. Some food wrappers and discarded cans mixed in with the other detritus. And a blanket. It appears our victim has been staying here—or at least planning on staying here—for a few days.”

  I grunted. “Interesting. So, maybe he dropped the body at the call center, then planned on holing up here as long as it took us to find him. But how did Walton find him first? Dammit! We were so fucking close.” I drew a deep breath, letting it out in a long sigh and trying to let the anger go with it. “You got anything else on the bad guys, Hernandez?”

  “We got ID, weapons, and shit-all else,” Hernandez said. She gave one of the bodies a desultory kick—more of a nudge, really. “Fucking rent-a-cops.”

  “All right, Hernandez,” I said, resigned. “Your call. What now? Silas and I can’t stick around, but if you have to call this in…” I hated the thought of abandoning her to the questions and administrative nightmare that was bound to follow. Just not as much as I hated the idea of being arrested by the likes of Francoise Fortier or his fellow anti-synth cohorts in the department.

  “This is the second time you’ve put me in a shitty situation, pendejo,” she said. The words were harsh, but her tone was more resigned than angry. “If I don’t call this in... Shit, I don’t even know what they call a self-defense killing that goes unreported, but whatever the fuck it is, it’s the best I can hope for. And if I do call it in, then I have to explain what the hell I was doing down here in the first place. I don’t suppose it occurred to you to have a story ready for that one, ’mano?”

  I could only shake my head. My focus had been on following the trail and trying to make sure the synthetics under my care stayed safe. Though I had suspected the possibility this would end in bloodshed, I hadn’t given any real thought to how to get Hernandez’s ass out of the fire if it did. In hindsight, I felt pretty shitty about that, but there it was.

  “Mierda. I’m fucked if I do, fucked if I don’t,” she said. “And I usually like to at least get dinner first.” She looked at the bodies again, eyes lingering on the one she’d taken out. “You using a clean weapon?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Not my service gun. One I bought on the street. It’ll come up as stolen, but no link to me. You?” I asked.

  “I’m not stupid, Campbell. Personal weapon. Bit of a family heirloom. Belonged to my grandfather. So far as I know, it was never registered anywhere. There’s definitely no ballistic data on it, nothing that can be linked to me.” She frowned. “I’m going to have to get rid of it now, though. Fuck you for that, and for making me have to think like the scum I’m supposed to be locking up.” Again, though the words were harsh, there was no heat in them. They were resigned. “But in for a penny, in for a fucking pound. If we’re done here, let’s wipe the place for prints and get the fuck out before some maintenance worker comes wandering by and wonders why all the corpses.”

  Chapter 14

  It didn’t take long to clean up the crime scene—at least as clean as we were going to get it. There wasn’t much we could do about the bodies or the bullets. But we’d worn gloves through the search process and wiped down anywhere else we could remember touching. It wasn’t perfect, but it also wasn’t terribly likely the scene would be found anytime soon. Given the heat and humidity, any latent prints we missed would probably be rendered useless. As for other trace evidence… Well, sure as shit we’d left some behind, but short of dousing the place in gasoline or bleach, there hadn’t been anything we could do about it.

  Hernandez had declined to return with Silas and me to the safe house. Not that I could blame her. We’d gotten her into enough potential trouble for one morning without taking her to a literal den of criminals, at least as far as the NLPD was concerned. The journey back was a repeat of the drive in—taking the most circumspect routes to avoid the omnipresent eyes in the sky and approaching every new intersection with the gut-wrenching moment of uncertainty as to whether this would be the time we found a roadblock waiting. The big green machine had trained me in escape and evasion, and I could make my way through enemy territory undetected with the best of them, but having to treat the city I’d called home for more than a decade as enemy territory was beginning to wear on me.

  We didn’t try to access the IP address from our vehicle, even though full access had been restored from the moment we resurfaced onto the streets of New Lyons. Too busy trying not to fall into the hands of the locals or the feds to risk the distraction. Somehow, I could feel the slip of paper, tucked into my front pants pocket, weighing as heavily as a stone. Would the IP address lead to more questions, just one more crumb in the trail I’d been following for… Had it only been two days now? Shit. It felt like longer—much longer.

  And yet, the days were trickling away, getting ever closer to the first and the start of the synthetic “offensive.” Or was it possible that the address would lead us to answers, real answers, as to how our last refuge had been discovered, why we were being sought out, and, perhaps most importantly, who had put this whole chain of events into motion?

  The worry gnawed at me, twisting my stomach into a churning pool of acid and bile. I longed to soothe it, preferably with about three fingers of good Kentucky bourbon. Unfortunately, liquor had been in
short supply since I’d become the most wanted man in New Lyons. I couldn’t exactly risk a run down to the corner store, and despite stocking plenty of food, potable water, sundries, and medical supplies, none of the safe houses that Silas had set up seemed to have anything in the way of alcohol. It made sense, after a fashion. Synthetics were property. Who would waste good money by buying liquor for their synthetics? So, I supposed, most had never really been exposed to the habit, never acquired the taste. Maybe that was a good thing, but it seemed like they were missing out on yet another of the simpler pleasures life had to offer. Of course, with what Silas had told me about their superior genetics, who knew how much alcohol it would take to get one of them drunk in the first place?

  As we neared the run-down block in the LNW, I could see that, despite the vastly eased restrictions on contraband goods, the black market was in full swing. Kids were working corners, making quick transactions with all manner of junkies and addicts. Lookouts saw us coming, and even through my efforts, pegged me as a cop from a mile away. As soon as we got close to an active corner, the people just sort of dried up and blew away, only to appear a moment or two later in the rearview, back to business as usual. It seemed like no matter how much change—political, technical, social—came to the city, some things remained the same.

  We pulled up in front of the boarded-up restaurant and quickly exited the vehicle. It pulled away from the curb, heading for whichever preprogrammed parking area Silas had directed. The lookouts once again saw us coming, and the door swung open as we approached, slamming closed behind us as we entered the shadowed interior. I nodded to the synthetic at the door, this time a woman in her forties, and she nodded back, somberly, before returning her attention to her task.

  “Jason!”

  The excited call—so out of place amidst the quiet, almost subdued, atmosphere of the gathered synthetics—startled me. I glanced around, and it took a moment to see the petite form of Tia Morita making her way through the crowd. I noted the expressions on the faces of the synthetics as she passed. I rated a sort of guarded respect from most of them, a begrudging acknowledgment that I was putting myself in harm’s way to help them, but with an undercurrent of inevitable disappointment, as if my assistance could only be a transitory thing. She, on the other hand, had somehow managed to elicit an entirely different response. I saw actual, tentative smiles as she wended her way through the various tables and benches of the refugees. I had no idea how she’d managed that in the few hours she’d been left alone with the synthetics. I’d been trying to earn their trust for months and had scarcely hit the level of cautious acceptance.

  I’d started to open my mouth to answer the excited coroner’s assistant, but she talked right over me. “These people are amazing. Amazing! I’ve been doing routine physicals, checking vitals, whatever I could, trying to make sure everyone’s healthy.”

  A wry smile spread across Silas’s face as Tia spoke.

  “And?” I asked in the half-second pause she needed to draw breath.

  “And nothing. They’re all in perfect health.”

  “That’s a good thing, right?” I asked, confused by her excitement.

  She let out an exasperated sigh. “A good thing? These people have been living in crowded conditions, under extreme levels of stress, in run-down and abandoned buildings that have God alone knows what kind of bacteria. By all rights, a third of them should be sick as dogs, and another third showing at least some signs of encroaching illness. But they’re all perfectly fine, Jason. All of them.” Her words took on an almost accusatory note, and I raised my hands in a mock-defensive posture. Of course, doing so strained my badly bruised ribs, and I winced.

  “What was that?” the aspiring doctor said, immediately reaching toward me. She applied a gentle pressure along my chest and ribs, probing for injury. It hurt… but it also felt good. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, Ms. Morita,” I replied.

  “Yes,” Silas said with an uncharacteristic twinkle of mischief in his eyes. “I assure you, Ms. Morita, he only got shot a little bit.”

  She growled at that. “With me,” she said, pulling me none-too-gently into her makeshift examination room, where she had me seated and shirtless before I could do anything. She probed my ribs more, before clucking her tongue and reaching for a roll of bandages. I winced as Tia pulled the bandages tight. “You really should get this X-rayed, you know.”

  “Can’t exactly walk into a hospital, Tia,” I replied. “Too many cameras. Too many cops. So unless you have a portable X-ray machine tucked away somewhere, I’m just going to have to trust to your tender ministrations.”

  She wrapped another loop, pulling, I felt, much harder than was necessary. She must have seen my grimace, because she smiled, a touch too sweetly. “Sorry,” she said. “Most of my normal patients are a lot less talkative than you.”

  I grunted, and restrained myself—barely—from making some comment about working with stiffs.

  “Detective Hernandez did a decent job,” she continued in a more conversational voice, “particularly given the limited resources, but you definitely have at least one cracked rib. Maybe more. And if you take another hard blow to the chest, like say from getting shot,” another too-tight pull on the bandages, “one of them might break and puncture a lung. Then you won’t get a choice on going to a hospital, at least not if you want to live.”

  “Great,” I muttered. “If I promise not to get shot anymore, will you stop trying to turn me into some horrible cross between a mummy and a corset model?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “You don’t have the figure to pull off being a mummy.”

  I laughed, which set my ribs to aching. “Ow. God. Tia. Don’t make me laugh.”

  “Serves you right.”

  I raised my hands in supplication. “You win. You win.” As she finished taping down the bandages, I asked, “How did you get the synthetics to warm to you so quickly?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked. “They barely talk to me.”

  “Yeah, but they look at you with…” I thought about it, trying to find the right word. “Fondness? Respect? I’m not sure what it is, but it doesn’t have the undercurrent of fear that I always feel when they look at me.”

  She gave me an elfish smile. “Oh, that’s because I’m adorable.” She said it with such butter-won’t-melt-in-my-mouth innocence that I had to laugh again. Which sent more tendrils of pain dancing along my ribcage. Then she sobered. “I just talked to them, Jason. It’s amazing how much people will open up to you if you just ask them how they’re feeling.” She paused, and a flicker of something like real sadness flashed across her face. “I think, for a lot of them, no one has ever asked that question.”

  “How are you feeling, Tia?” I asked. I didn’t mean to say it. It just sort of fell out. Considering the timing and the strange intimacy of our situation—I was sitting half-naked as she tended to my wounds, after all—I couldn’t help the slight flush that suffused my face as soon as I realized what I’d said. But a half-second of reflection was all it took me to realize that I really wanted to know.

  She gave me a long, silent look, her eyes unreadable. “I… I think I’m doing really good, actually,” she said. She sounded surprised as she said it, but another smile lit up her face. “I wasn’t sure about coming here, Jason. Wasn’t sure about getting…embroiled in this. I work for the city! They’re paying my med school bills. If they catch wind that I’m involved…” She shrugged. She didn’t have to say that, in addition to the whole thrown in prison for life thing, she would also lose out on the free ride on tuition. “But...”

  “But?” I asked.

  “But like I said, I’ve spent the last few hours talking to them. I can’t believe what some of these people have been through. And I can’t sit around and do nothing anymore. I can’t go back to my job and pretend that the world is okay as it is.” She sho
ok her head, and a shimmer in her eyes suggested tears. Her voice didn’t quaver, though. “I’m not stupid, Jason. I’ve read history. I know all the terrible things humans have done to each other over the centuries. I know nobody’s hands are clean. I know that all the horrible things we’ve done to synthetics—the abuse, the rape, the murder—none of it ever goes away. Because some people are evil, or sick, or whatever you want to call it, and they always have been, and they always will be. But we—all of us—we’ve done more than just turn a blind eye to the violence. We’ve done more than just ignore it and pretend that it can’t happen to us. We’ve outright sanctioned it. We’ve created—literally, created—an entire subclass of people and said, ‘Hey, it’s okay to hurt them. Because no matter how much they look, act, think, and feel like us, they aren’t real people.’ And we all just bought into it, because it made life that much easier for the rest of us.” She spoke at a frenetic pace, her voice rising in volume and pitch. The tears leaked from her eyes, tracing wet streaks down her cheeks.

  Something about her vulnerability, about her obvious passion and pain, filled me with an almost overwhelming memory of Annabelle, and I felt tears form in my own eyes. I reached out unconsciously and put my arms around her, drawing her to my chest. Despite my attraction to Tia, there was nothing provocative in that hug. Any potential attraction was lost beneath the undeniable weight of two people sharing a simple, if profound, moment of grief, not for any one person, but for the soul of humanity itself.

  “Am I interrupting something?”

  The basso voice pulled us from our embrace. Neither of us jerked back—it wasn’t as if we were illicit lovers caught in some wrongdoing. We simply dropped our arms and separated a bit. The evidence of Tia’s tears were clear upon her face. My own were—I hoped—at least somewhat hidden by the two-day growth of stubble that covered my face. Shaving hadn’t exactly been a high priority the past couple of days, and neither had sleep. I told myself that that would explain the redness in my eyes.