SINthetic

by J. T. Nicholas

  Who was the synthetic? The cop part of me immediately identified him as the primary suspect, despite the fact that, so far as I knew, a synthetic shouldn’t have been able to commit a crime, even against another synthetic. But who else could have a list of victims? Still, something about the big synth as the perp didn’t ring true. He hadn’t acted like a psycho gloating over his kills. He had been far too calm, composed…purposeful. If all the names were synthetics, then the crimes probably wouldn’t have even had a report filed, and certainly wouldn’t have been followed up on. So why bring it to a cop? Why bring it to me?

  There was only one possible explanation. He knew. Not just about the rumors, the label of “synth-sympathizer” that clung to me. That wouldn’t have been enough to risk life and limb breaking into a cop’s apartment. He must have known more, known about my purged records, known about the secrets locked away in my past. But how? No one should have been able to access those. Right. And no one but me should have been able to unlock the door to my apartment. Shit.

  I slumped back in my chair, nursing the whiskey, reading the names one by one. I was too tired, too drained by the events of the day to really process those names, but I read them anyway, over and over again. One more kept sneaking into the litany in my head, though it appeared nowhere on the crumpled piece of paper.

  Annabelle.

  Chapter 4

  The rising crescendo of Ravel’s Bolero dragged me from my slumber. I sat slumped in the armchair in my living room, empty tumbler dangling from my fingers. A nagging pain from my neck and shoulders reminded me that I was getting too damn old to sleep in anything other than a comfortable bed without paying a hefty price for it later. Ravel’s twining melody kept sounding, playing throughout the speakers built into the apartment. A light flashed next to the wall screen as well. I probably looked like hammered hell, but I said, “Answer,” anyway.

  The music stopped at once, and the screen lit. On it, a young woman wearing a light blue lab coat over particolored scrubs stared back at me. She was of Asian descent, Japanese, or maybe Korean, with jet-black hair and almond-shaped eyes. High cheekbones watched over surprisingly full lips that were, at the moment, pulled down into a frown. “Detective Campbell?” She spoke in a low, furry contralto, and I heard the tiredness in her voice. And the doubt.

  I set the tumbler on the coffee table—right next to my gun and the half-emptied bottle of whiskey. I scrubbed my hands over my face and then over my head, hoping to both wake up and make myself ever so slightly more presentable. The woman just stared at me, frown firmly in place and a faint air of disapproval settling in her eyes. She was young, late twenties, and, under the rumpled, unflattering clothing and fatigue, quite pretty.

  “Yeah,” I said, and the word came out a barely understandable growl. I coughed, to clear the sleep from my voice. I wanted to pour about three fingers into the glass and toss that back, but this call looked at least semiofficial so I refrained. “Yeah,” I said again. “I’m Campbell.” And, because I felt like I had to say something, I added, “Sorry. It was kind of a late night.”

  That got me a sympathetic twitch of the lips that could not, quite, be called a smile. “Of course,” the woman said.

  “And you are?” I asked, letting a little bit of the frustration from the case and last night’s unexpected visitor creep into my voice. She had called me, after all.

  A faint flush suffused her face at my words, and I realized that she was probably even younger than my first assessment. “Oh. Um. Sorry. It was kind of a late night.” I got a real smile as she gave my words back to me, and it lit up her face like a sunrise, washing away the fatigue and crinkling her eyes in a way that had me wishing she was a few years older. But I was too damn old to keep up with twenty-year-olds, however pretty, so I just smiled a bit in return and waited.

  She fumbled with a tablet for a moment, looking down at it and, I realized, struggling to regain her composure. When she looked up again, the blush was gone, and replaced by a mask of cold professionalism. “My name is Tia Morita. I work for Dr. Fitzpatrick.”

  I sat bolt upright, tiredness forgotten, and leaned forward, staring at the screen. The movement must have startled Ms. Morita, as she seemed to flinch back from her own screen. “You’re the assistant the doctor assigned to my case? To the synthetic?” Part of me was eager for answers, another part running the numbers on Tia Morita. If she was truly in her early twenties, she certainly had not yet completed, and maybe not even entered, medical school. If Fitzpatrick had pawned off the “mule” on a flunky with no chance of finding anything out, I’d wring his scrawny little neck.

  “That’s correct, Detective Campbell,” she said slowly and calmly. Too calmly. She spoke the way you would to try to calm an unfamiliar dog. One that looked ready to bite.

  I drew a steadying breath, and eased back in my chair, forcing a tired smile onto my face. “Late night,” I said again by way of apology, and she nodded in understanding. “What can you tell me?”

  Her eyes flicked back to the tablet, and I realized that this was probably the first time she had ever been responsible for giving information relevant to an investigation to the police. An intimidating notion under the best of circumstances, and these weren’t the best of circumstances. I scrubbed at my face again, and gave her a genuine smile.

  “Take it slow, Ms. Morita. It’s just you and me here. I assume you called me first, as soon as you were done?” Her chin bobbed in the barest of nods, eyes still locked on the tablet. “Good. Then think of this as a trial run. No Dr. Fitzpatrick looking over your shoulder. Anything you forget or miss, you can always call me later.” I grinned. “Maybe after both of us have had a little more sleep.”

  She looked up, smiling back at me. Then she drew a breath and started speaking, rattling off her report in clear, crisp bursts. “OK, Detective. Here’s what I know so far. The body that the EMTs delivered is a synthetic that belonged to a company called Party Toys Incorporated.” Her lips twisted into a little moue of disgust. “They are, as you might imagine, a service that provides synthetics of a certain type for rent to various business and individuals to…well…” She trailed off.

  “You mean they’re pimps,” I said flatly.

  “Well, I suppose. Though the term has certain connotations that I’m not sure apply to synthetics.”

  I grunted. “Trust me. A pimp’s a pimp, regardless of who, or what, they’re pimping. Go on.”

  “Right. Well, the synthetic was registered under the name Molly Cummings.” Another blush crept up her cheeks as she said the name, and I fought back a snort. I didn’t want to embarrass the girl—her innocence was kind of cute. Besides, the synthetic hadn’t named herself, and had clearly been destined as a sex worker from the moment of her “birth.” “That’s all the information I could get from her tag, just her name and place of employment. Well, some other stuff, too. The facility she came from, the training facilities she attended, things like that, that are part of her features list before she was purchased by Party Toys.”

  I nodded. Synthetics weren’t born in the traditional sense, but they didn’t spring full grown from the vat, either. Their growth could only be rushed so far, to about the equivalent of a ten-year-old child, before they had to age naturally. Anything longer, and something in the brain chemistry started to break down, leaving the synthetics catatonic. It was also illegal to sell most synthetics before they were the age equivalent of fifteen years old. The reasons for that were darker, but could be summed up by saying that even the most indifferent of lawmakers didn’t like to think about the kind of things that happened to synthetics happening to something that looked like a preteen.

  But the manufacturers didn’t let that time go to waste. Instead, they sent legions of little synthetics off to “training facilities.” That all those things lawmakers didn’t like to think about happening likely happened during the course of the synthetics’ “schooling”
didn’t seem to matter to anyone.

  “Send me that information,” I said, thinking of the list of seven names. It was a long shot, but maybe there was a link, buried somewhere in their backgrounds. “What else?”

  “She was dead before the…evisceration took place,” Morita said, stumbling a little over “evisceration.” Well, most people did, I supposed. “I can’t say for sure what killed her. Too much is…missing. But I found an injection site on her neck, and her blood work showed unusually high levels of potassium.”

  “Which means?” I asked.

  She shrugged, and glanced down at the pad once more. “Maybe nothing.” She sighed. “I can’t say conclusively, you understand. The evidence isn’t there.” The frown was back, pulling at her lips, and I heard the frustration mixed with apology in her voice.

  “Yeah, I understand,” I grunted. “If you go too far out on a limb, you may not pass Fitzpatrick’s test. I get it. But part of the job is giving me your best guess.” It wasn’t, not really. I didn’t like lying to the girl, but she knew—or at least suspected—something more.

  Morita sighed, and looked up from her tablet. Dark shadows hung under her eyes and her face sagged in fatigue. “An injection of potassium chloride most likely,” she said.

  I frowned. “Isn’t that a fertilizer?”

  “It has medicinal uses as well. And nefarious ones. It’s normally taken orally, but if injected into the system without the buffer that digestion provides…well, at high enough dosages, it will stop the heart faster than you can say the words.” Her shoulders lifted in a short shrug. “You see it all the time in the vids—the perfect, undetectable murder weapon. Which, since I can’t conclusively prove it was there, seems true enough in this case.”

  “Poisoned,” I mused.

  “Probably poisoned,” Morita corrected. “No heart, liver, kidneys. Nothing I can test further. There’s not even much in the way of blood, though fortunately we had enough to run some tests.” She frowned a little at that and her voice dropped almost as if she didn’t want anyone to overhear what she said next. “I’m not entirely sure I was supposed to run the blood tests,” she admitted. “Dr. Fitzpatrick said to do whatever I wanted, but there are rules in place around synthetics.”

  “I appreciate it, Ms. Morita,” I said. I felt a little flash of guilt at the thought that I might have inadvertently gotten the girl to do something that could land her in trouble. “Don’t bother telling Dr. Fitzpatrick about the poisoning or the blood work. He’ll just want to hear the stuff you can back up with hard evidence.”

  She shot me a grateful glance at that, and nodded.

  “If you find anything else, call me.” I offered a grin. “No matter what time it is.”

  She returned my grin with a wan smile and gave a half wave to the screen. It went black, leaving me, once more, alone in my apartment.

  I needed to get up, get showered, and get into the precinct. There were other cases on my desk, murdered people that the city actually cared about. Less than in days past, to be sure, since the sanctioned murder of synthetics provided a release valve for the thrill killers and psychos, but there were still plenty of “crimes of passion” to go around. I couldn’t be seen working too hard on the synthetic—on the Cummings—case. So long as no one told me not to work it, I could still operate under the auspices of the New Lyons Police Department. But that meant making sure that nobody at the precinct actually knew what I was doing. Just how in the hell was I supposed to manage that? I sighed and headed toward the bathroom, that question, and one other, rattling around in my head.

  Who was the strange synthetic that had broken into my apartment last night?

  Chapter 5

  The Forty-Third Precinct sat on the border between the red-light district and the warehouse district. At different points in New Lyons’ damp and moldering past, the building had been pressed into service as a bank, an office building, and, briefly, an underground casino and brothel. Back when that kind of thing was not only illegal, but also not staffed with an endless parade of synthetics. My desk sat off to the far side of the open bullpen, symbolically removed from the beating heart of the precinct.

  Once upon a time, robbery and homicide would have held the place of honor, the hub around which the rest of the department turned. Now, cybercrimes took center stage, staffed with cops who were more hackers than they were investigators, bent, even now, over their consoles, hard at work tracking black hats across the net. I had nothing against them—they were good cops, whatever their skill set, and by the official numbers, cybercrimes far outstripped violent crime and murder put together. The official numbers didn’t include crimes against synthetics, of course.

  I made my way to my desk and slumped into the faux-leather chair. Between Ms. Morita and the synthetic that had broken into my apartment, I had a list of murdered synthetics and the name of a company. Not much to go on, but I fired up the computer and got to work anyway.

  I started with Party Toys Inc. There was only so far I could go without a warrant, and I had no chance in hell of getting one for an investigation around a synthetic, but they were a publicly traded company, so I pulled their financials. I was a long way from a financial genius—my talents lay in other directions, most of which were learned fighting wars, not doing long division—but I didn’t need to be one to do an analysis. All I had to do was feed the file into our forensic accounting analyzer software, and wait.

  While the program was crunching the numbers, I turned my attention to PTI’s net presence, digging into their web pages, finding them on various social media sites, identifying employees who had public profiles. The amount of data readily available, if one cared to look, was staggering. I gathered the URLs, user names, everything else I could find and fed them into another forensic program, this one designed to do data mining and text analysis. It would crawl the web, searching through the various known pages and identifying other linkages, analyzing posts on social media, and hunting for anything suspect hiding in cyberspace, all without ever once going into anyone’s system or looking at any private data, building a relationship map that outlined even the most tenuous of connections. I added a few more parameters: the names from the list the synthetic had given me, the cross streets where Ms. Cummings had been found, a few keywords around murder, disemboweling, poisoning, and anything to do with synthetics. After a moment’s pondering, I added the phrases “sewer rat” and “albino” to the mix.

  But I wasn’t done yet. I pulled a data chip from my pocket and slipped it into my system’s card reader. A list of files popped up, each a string of unique alphanumeric characters ending in a date range. I clicked on one of the files, and a window opened on my screen, split into four separate views of my building. One showed the front door, another the back entrance, a third the hallway leading to my door, and the fourth a view that mirrored the peephole on my apartment door.

  I chose to live in a bad neighborhood, but I wasn’t stupid. A little surveillance went a long way when it came to security, and though my building had no system of its own, one of the first things I’d done on moving in was convince the superintendent to let me install one. Given that it would cost him nothing, and he could market it to his tenants, it hadn’t been a very hard sell.

  Most of the time, I didn’t bother looking at the footage. Despite the poverty around me, the majority of the crime stayed on the street, and people were more or less safe in their homes. I had no desire to spy on my neighbors. Not only was it none of my business, but if I knew too much, it might create a professional duty to do something about it. Few people liked having a cop around the building…most just barely tolerated it. If I started busting people for minor bullshit, that tolerance would turn quickly to hate. And then the walks home at night would lose all their charm.

  But any doubts I might have had about the need behind the video surveillance had evaporated last night when I walked into my home to
find a stranger in my chair.

  I scanned through videos at ten times regular speed, watching a steady stream of people moving in and around the building, despite the late hour. The first file, the one that overlapped the time I returned to my apartment, did not show a large, pale, bald synthetic at any point. I worked backward from there, and with each new file I opened, my sense of trepidation grew.

  Had the synthetic managed to avoid my cameras entirely? Or had he arrived at my apartment so early that I hadn’t yet found him in the footage?

  I had worked my way backward to the file covering eight to nine o’clock, a full five hours before I returned home and not long after I got the call about the eviscerated girl. At last, I found him. A khaki raincoat stretched taut over his massive shoulders, and a matching fedora hid his baldness, but there was no mistaking his fireplug build or his pale, almost translucent skin. He entered through the front door, timing his approach so that, without the slightest sign of hesitation, he hit the stairs a few steps behind another tenant, catching the door with a casual hand before it could swing closed and latch again.

  I lost him in the building, but picked him up again when he walked onto my floor. He moved at a sedate pace. Nothing furtive or scheming about him—just a normal guy coming home from work. I watched, with morbid curiosity, as the synth walked up to my door and placed his palm against the lock.

  That lock was coded for me, and only me. Nobody else was in the system, not even the landlord. I paid him extra rent to keep him out. The door should not have opened to any hand but mine.

  But it did. Without hesitation. The synthetic put his hand on the pad, and waltzed into my apartment. “Son of a bitch,” I muttered.

  I ground my teeth and clicked on the part of the window that showed the peephole view.