Synapse

by Steven James

  “Go around back,” Nick shouted to Ripley, “in case he heads east!”

  As Ripley took off, Nick bolted toward the fleeing suspect.

  With his flashlight beam leading the way, he hurdled a pile of concrete rubble where a portion of the ceiling had caved in, shot through the slats of sunlight edging in from above, and then reentered the darkness.

  “Stop!” he yelled. “Federal agent!”

  But that only seemed to spur the person on to run faster, and Nick lost sight of him in a soot-enshrouded hallway, but realized that Ripley should have been in place to stop him.

  Moments later, he heard Ripley shout, “Drop your weapon!”

  Nick darted toward his voice through the passageway that the person had disappeared into, and emerged in the east wing of the building.

  He got there just as the shots rang out.

  Four.

  Double taps.

  Someone who knew what he was doing.

  The two figures had been standing maybe ten meters apart and now, following the gunshots, the one on the left crumpled limply to the ground.

  Nick still couldn’t tell if his associate had been the shooter or the victim.

  “Ripley!” he called urgently. “You okay?”

  No reply.

  Nick leveled his weapon at the figure who’d fired the shots, the one who hadn’t yet responded to his shouting.

  “Ripley?”

  “I’m alright!” he announced at last.

  Yes, he was alive.

  Yes, he was the one still on his feet.

  Nick steadied his gaze at the victim, who lay prone on the concrete, and asked Ripley, “What do we know?”

  “He drew something out of his waistline and pointed it at me. I thought it was a handgun and I couldn’t take the chance that I was wrong.”

  Together, with guns in position, the two men approached the person to see if he was dead and if he’d really had a weapon after all.

  * * *

  Before I could leave, Arabella insisted that I take some food with me, and though I declined at first, when she pressed me, I finally gave in, accepting a covered plate of fried chicken. Knowing Arabella, I guessed that it would be from an actual chicken and wouldn’t be factory-grown meat, which was the norm these days.

  Despite my views on such an extravagancy, I accepted the gift.

  Then, I checked my slate, saw no messages from Conrad, and took off for my apartment.

  * * *

  Halfway to the body, Nick reminded himself to not assume anything.

  Even though the figure lay still, it didn’t mean that he was necessarily dead—he knew that from past experience. A year ago, his partner at the time had shot a suicide bomber before the man could detonate his vest, and he’d collapsed and lay on the ground facedown, completely motionless—until they came to his side, when he suddenly rolled onto his back, exclaimed his allegiance to his god, and blew himself up.

  Though Nick’s arm and left side were still scarred from the incident, at least he’d survived the blast. His partner had not.

  That’s what was on his mind as he approached the figure on the grimy floor of the warehouse.

  “Stay back and cover me,” he said to Ripley. “I’ll check for a pulse.”

  As he drew closer, he saw that the person had a small frame, and by her figure, he could tell that it was a woman. Her hands were visible. Caucasian. She lay on her back. Balaclava still in place over her head. No weapon in sight.

  As per protocol, Nick once again identified himself as a federal agent, ordered her not to move, then, to secure the scene, he cuffed her before placing two fingers on her neck.

  No pulse.

  After verifying that she didn’t have an explosive vest or belt, he eased the ski mask up to reveal her face.

  And immediately recognized her: Sienna Gaiman, the technician he’d met yesterday at the Terabyne production facility.

  21

  Startled, Nick stared in disbelief at the dead woman’s face.

  “I know her,” he whispered.

  “You do?” Ripley said. “Who is she?”

  “Her name is Sienna Gaiman. She’s the tech who checked Jordan in at the plant yesterday. Wait.” He pulled up both of her sleeves to make sure there weren’t any buttons on either of her wrists. If she were an Artificial, she wouldn’t have had a pulse anyway and the handcuffs wouldn’t likely have been able to hold her.

  No buttons.

  A human being.

  Deceased. A quieted threat.

  Nick turned to Ripley. “You said she drew a weapon. Where is it?”

  “I don’t see it.”

  Nick stood and scanned the area, but it was Ripley who came up with the gun under a nearby charred office desk where it must have slid after he shot her.

  A .40 caliber Ruger handgun.

  “Serial number?” Nick asked.

  “Gone. Looks like they used acid. We won’t be able to raise the digits.”

  “Hang on.” Nick knelt beside her again. “We might be in luck.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Her eyes.”

  “What about them?”

  “She’s a Plusser. Augmented. Ocular implants.”

  “Oh.” Ripley caught on. “They would have recorded everything she saw, probably uploaded it to her account on the Feeds.”

  “Yes. But something doesn’t fit here.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Purists are against technology and yet Sienna has augmented eyes. Have you ever heard of a Purist being a Plusser?”

  “Maybe she became a Purist after she got her vision augmented.”

  “Maybe. Tracking down the timeline makes sense. Pull up everything we know about her and find out when she had the surgery.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And let’s get a tech crew here now. I want to know what this woman has been looking at over the last week—if she’s the one who ransacked Kestrel Hathaway’s apartment, and if she was involved in any way in planning that bombing.”

  * * *

  He passes through the production facility. Fitting in by not drawing attention to himself.

  He registers his surroundings. Watches those approaching him. Identifies the Plussers, the Artificials, the Naturals by the subtle, nearly indistinguishable differences in their strides, in their arm swings, in their posture.

  Memories guide him. Lead him on. And at last he finds himself near the place where the bombing occurred.

  And the reminiscences sharpen.

  Images of his mother.

  Of speaking with her.

  An obsolete model. The last time they spoke she told him she was about to be sent off to experience her CaTE. To pass away and have her consciousness uploaded to the CoRA. To live on there.

  A gaping maw in a corner of the building opens to the outside world where six Naturals, no doubt NCB agents, sort through the rubble, categorizing the detritus into piles.

  One of the men glances at him momentarily, but then, disinterested, goes back to work.

  Off to the side, he sees a line of scorched and discarded Artificials lying on the ground. He approaches them, scans them, and near the end he finds her.

  His mother.

  He kneels and wishes he had a sheet of paper that he could fold into an origami rabbit, one he could leave here beside her.

  He is not a rock. He is a robot.

  And he will die.

  Just like her.

  And go on to live in the Consciousness Realignment Algorithm.

  Just like her.

  This he tells himself. This is his reassurance. His doubt. For what if it isn’t real?

  What if the claims about the CoRA are a lie? What if your CaTE is truly the end after all?

  What if the explosion interfered with her moving into the CoRA?

  He wonders what might be causing him to question things. Was it the damage he sustained? Was it his current HuNA curiosity settings? The disrupted t
ests he’d been undergoing?

  Is the CoRA there?

  Is it real?

  Maybe the questions were ones he should be asking, ones that all Artificials should grapple with and—

  “Jordan!” Two technicians hurry toward him. “There you are.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ve been looking all over for you.”

  “I’m here.” Words marked with distraction.

  “We need you to come back with us.”

  “I’m ready to go home.”

  “We haven’t finished your diagnostics.”

  “I’m ready,” he repeats firmly. “Contact Kestrel and let her know.”

  * * *

  I’d only been in my apartment for a few minutes when I got the call from the production center that Jordan was requesting to come home.

  “Have you finished with the tests?” I asked the man on the other end of the line.

  “No.”

  “Can I speak with Sienna? She’s the one who checked him in yesterday. She told me to call back at noon.”

  “I’m afraid she hasn’t shown up for work today.”

  “Alright, let me talk to Jordan.”

  He put him on. “You can take me back to the apartment now.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine. Thankful.”

  “Thankful?”

  “To be operating efficiently. To be awake. To be aware.”

  “They still need to run some tests on you.”

  “I’m done with the tests. I’m ready to leave.”

  His curt tone surprised me, and I couldn’t shake the thought that he still wasn’t quite back to normal.

  “Listen, Jordan, I can’t come to pick you up right now. I’m meeting Trevor there at the production plant at one for lunch. Why don’t you let them look you over and we’ll leave together when they’re done?”

  He was quiet for a long moment, then said, “I’ll need to tell you about my mother when I see you.”

  “Alright. I’ll look forward to hearing about her.”

  Then he ended the call.

  Clearly something was up with him. He’d told me earlier that he’d received some coding from his mother, but I wondered if he was thinking coherently now and why it was so important for him to talk with me about her.

  Maybe the final diagnostics would be able to identify what was going on.

  * * *

  Ripley wasn’t sure what to do.

  Since he didn’t know the name of the person he’d been communicating with through his slate during the past couple of weeks—didn’t even know if it was a man or a woman—it might very well have been the woman he just shot.

  For all he knew, this was the individual who’d spoken with him last night when he was tied up in that room—or the one who’d held that knife to his throat.

  So many questions.

  Too many.

  Either way, when he saw her here a few minutes ago, he’d realized that he couldn’t risk the possibility of her being able to identify him. He had to fire. He had to take the shots.

  And that might’ve been alright if she hadn’t been a Plusser with ocular implants.

  So, now there was that to deal with.

  The digital forensics technicians would study those back at the lab. And when they did, the footage would make it clear that she hadn’t had a weapon when he’d shot her. And if the implants were still working during the fleeting moments after her demise, the image capture might even have recorded him planting the gun at the scene.

  He couldn’t take the chance that the footage might implicate him in any way. He had to do something to stop her records from being accessed, and that meant destroying the eyeballs before they could be tested, not to mention deleting her account on the Feeds.

  The latter task shouldn’t be that much trouble. He could access her data with his Federal Verifi Code—hers wouldn’t be the first account he’d had to erase in his career. Yes, that wouldn’t be a big problem, but the eyeballs were another matter altogether.

  He was considering how to handle the situation when Nick came striding toward him.

  “I hate to have to do this,” his supervisor said, “but you know the routine. Paid leave until the lawyers can clear you for a justified shooting. Since I didn’t see what happened I’ll need your incident report, and I don’t want to see you in the office for the next week.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ripley replied after a brief hesitation.

  Nick held out his hand to accept Ripley’s gun.

  Years ago, it used to be that law enforcement officers would immediately receive their weapon back after a fatal encounter with a suspect as a way of showing confidence in them, but in the wake of unjustified shootings in the early twenty-first century, standard operating procedures had changed, and now the opposite occurred. These days, the officers weren’t treated as innocent until proven guilty, but guilty until proven innocent.

  So much for the presumption of innocence.

  Ripley handed over his weapon and then dictated his incident report. As he was finishing up, the team arrived to process the scene and transport Sienna Gaiman’s body to the lab to analyze the information that her ocular implants had recorded.

  Before Ripley could take off, he saw Nick turning to leave, himself.

  “Where are you off to?” Ripley asked him.

  “We have her address. I’m going to have a look at Miss Gaiman’s condo.”

  22

  I spent some time straightening things up as best as I could. The new furniture arrived and the delivery droids carted the old couch and recliner away, but left the task of rearranging my living room to me—and I left it for when Nick would be coming over. The hardest part for me was entering the nursery and seeing the crib and mobile that I’d bought for Naiobi destroyed and lying in a crumpled mess on the floor.

  That, and the indiscriminately shattered music box I’d played for her while she was still in my womb.

  I realized that, sadly, I would never again hear those lullabies without feeling the weight of loss. They would now and forever be mired in grief.

  More than once I’ve heard that after experiencing the death of a loved one, a person needs to move on, but what does that even mean? It couldn’t mean trying to forget what happened. You can’t forget. You don’t want to forget—and as long as you remember, you suffer.

  Maybe it referred to not being consumed with sadness, to finding a way to live your life without the memory of what’d happened looming foremost in your mind.

  In either case, I knew that, for me, it was way too early to worry about moving on. I could hardly imagine what it would look like or even if it was something I would ever want to try doing. The heartache was a way of expressing my love for my daughter—and that was something I couldn’t imagine ever living without.

  It would be so much easier to make sense of our world if it were one or the other—if it were only good or only bad, only a place of love and wonder and glory and joy, or only one of terror and grief and heartache and despair. But it’s not a one-or-the-other world. It’s a both-and one. Always has been, ever since the Garden of Eden when harmony with the Almighty was shattered. And when people try to make it into only one or the other, they end up failing to understand the world as it truly is—both hurting and healed, with people who are both lost and found.

  There isn’t any balance to life. Joy doesn’t balance out sorrow. Pleasure doesn’t balance out pain. Justice doesn’t balance out injustice, and love doesn’t balance out loneliness. It’s a terrible world; it’s a beautiful world. It’s both, somehow, inexplicably, at the same time. And that’s part of the enigma of life on God’s green earth.

  For right now, being here in my daughter’s room was too much. There were too many harsh thoughts scratching away inside of me. I just didn’t have it in me to clean up Naiobi’s nursery, and I ended up stepping into the hall without rearranging anything, and then softly closing the door behind me.

 
The pastor I’d contacted to preach for me reached out to let me know he’d heard about what had happened with Naiobi and offered to take over for the next couple of months if I needed him to. “I’m here to help,” he said. “Just let me know.”

  “I will. Thank you.”

  While I was in the living room finishing up shelving my books, Nick called. “Something has come up with the investigation.” His words were heavy and solemn.

  “A breakthrough?” I asked, hoping I was misreading his tone.

  “Hard to tell.”

  Though curious to know more, I realized that it wasn’t my place to pry.

  He went on, “I’m not sure I’ll be able to help you with that furniture tonight.”

  “That’s alright.” I figured that Jordan could give me a hand after I brought him home. But still, there was something in Nick’s voice that gave me pause. “Are you okay?”

  “I am. I can’t really tell you any more right now, but I’ll be in touch later. In the meantime, have you been able to return to your apartment?”

  “Yes. I’m here now, actually.”

  “Did you identify if anything else is missing?”

  “It doesn’t appear so. At least not that I can tell.”

  “Alright.”

  And then, rather abruptly, he hung up.

  I chided myself for thinking about him so much, for wondering what was going on in his life and what was causing the stress and anxiety in his voice. It wasn’t any of my business and I didn’t need to concern myself with it.

  Still, I did. I couldn’t help it.

  Even though it wasn’t necessarily time for me to be on my way to meet up with Trevor, I wanted to get moving, so after confirming with him that our lunch was still on, I left for the production plant with the thoughts of Naiobi’s vacant nursery pursuing me as I did.

  * * *

  Nick scrutinized Sienna Gaiman’s condo.

  She had a rather indulgent lifestyle for someone who was simply a tech at a Terabyne production plant. High-end clothes, jewelry, furniture—and weapons. Really nice weapons, as a matter of fact.

  A gun safe with four custom-made long guns and two 3D-printed handguns.

  She didn’t have her ViRA set up and her account to the Feeds was secured with high-level encryption, so there wasn’t really anything more he could do here at the condo right now. He would need his computer at work to access her account.