SINthetic

by J. T. Nicholas

  “I have been helping you all along, Detective, whether you realize it or not. Ask yourself, would it truly have been helpful to have me at your side? Would that have made your investigation any easier?” We both knew the answer to that one. “No, Detective. I gave you the information I had so that you might pursue leads that I could not. In the meantime, I have been doing the same, through channels to which your access would be extremely limited. Now that the time to act has come, I will help you directly.” A grimace twisted his face. “As best I can, given the conditions under which I must operate.”

  I wanted to ask him again how he had overcome his conditioning, how he had managed to willfully cause harm to another person. He had hinted at practice. Practicing overcoming any of his programming, or specifically practicing doing harm? But could I blame him if it was the latter? Instead, I said, “Not good enough, Silas. I need to know where we’re going. How did you even know there was another girl out there?”

  He sighed. “You will not let this rest?”

  “Rest?” I snorted. “I’m covered in blood and shit, may well lose some of the use of my arm, and, if I’m very, very lucky, I’ll only be fired for what’s gone down tonight. Rest is pretty goddamned far from my mind right now. Who’s the girl? How did you find her? How did you find Fowler?”

  “I have been using you, Detective. A fact, I think, of which we are both aware?” There was a question in his voice, and I snorted again. No shit. “I needed you to find a killer, and I gave you a list of victims to aid in that. You used the victims to find the killer. I used the killer to try to find his next victims. The same problem, Detective, but approached from differing ends.”

  That almost made sense. Identifying a pool of potential victims was a valid investigative technique, but it was more to build a profile of the perp. You couldn’t use it to pick a single likely target out of the herd. Or at least, I couldn’t. “Not good enough, Silas.”

  He was silent for a moment, long enough that I almost prodded him again. “Well, I suppose you have to learn the truth, eventually. I am not entirely alone in my undertaking, Detective. There is a network of those like me, synthetics who understand that they are not less than human, and deserve to have the same rights, the same respect, as everyone else. We do not have a name or a true leadership or anything like that—not yet. Our group is fledgling, nebulous, more an idea than a reality at this point. But we share information. Not only what we see, but what we are told by other synthetics.”

  I nodded, considering. He had implied as much before, when first we’d met. “How did that lead you to Fowler?”

  “I told you, Detective, it didn’t. But a day ago, a young synthetic woman we had been sheltering was taken. Those sheltering her…” He paused, drew a breath. “They were executed. They were synthetics, and could not do even as much as I did to help you, you understand? Killed in cold blood, without even the chance at self-defense. But the young woman was abducted. This was brought to my attention and I started tracking her down. Fowler was good, Detective, very good at what he did. And yet, I think your investigation rattled him. He was sloppy. He did an adequate job of avoiding the cameras.” I heard a bit of disdain in that admission, and remembered that Silas himself was almost preternatural in his ability to stay invisible to the omnipresent electronic eyes. “Adequate, but not perfect. I followed his vehicle—electronically, you understand. I lost it, often. But with the help of some others of my ilk, we pieced together a reasonable estimation of where the vehicle stopped for the longest period of time.”

  “And that’s where we’re headed?”

  “That is where we are headed, Detective.”

  I thought about it for a moment. My mind was spinning, maybe from the crushing weight of events over the past few days, maybe from the blood loss. Every time I turned around, I seemed to be tripping over a new conspiracy. Gutted synthetics left lying in the streets. Walton Biogenics and their fucking corporate hit squads. Silas and his band of synthetic freedom fighters. I’d been beaten, stabbed, gotten the daughter of one of my few friends kidnapped by a psychopath, and was sure as shit going to get fired, and maybe prosecuted. I wanted to scream. Instead I asked, “How did you find me? And why did you find me?” I placed a not-so-subtle emphasis on the last word.

  He smiled, one of the few real smiles I’d ever seen cross Silas’s face. It was a surprisingly warm expression, and for a moment the mystery and dignity were shattered and he sat before me as just another man, just another person. “The first was easy, Detective. I bugged you.” He said the words with such delicious irony that I couldn’t help the chuckle that escaped my lips. I should have been enraged at the invasion of my privacy, but given that privacy was something completely and utterly denied to synthetics—even in their own person—I couldn’t manage to muster any outrage. “Before I ever came to your apartment. The cybersecurity of the New Lyons Police Department is somewhat laughable.”

  That should have bothered me, but at that stage? Fuck it. “Fine. Why me, Silas?”

  The smile fell from his face. “Did you know that there are those out there among your kind advocating for us? On a daily basis, they stand up and say that we deserve more, that we’re as human as you, or them?” I thought about the news clip on the SynthFirst lawsuit and nodded. “And they’re dismissed as crackpots. Reactionaries. Bleeding hearts blinded to fact and reality.” There was another moment of silence, and I saw another new emotion flicker across Silas’s face. Guilt. “They cannot be our voice,” he said at last.

  “Because they’re too easy to paint as radicals. Too easy to dismiss,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes.”

  “And then there’s me,” I said, a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “A decorated war hero,” Silas acknowledged. “A law enforcement officer. A seeker of truth. A man whose integrity is above reproach.” There was a longer pause. “A man who once killed over the mistreatment of one of ours.”

  “God damn it, Silas,” I said. “And god damn you.”

  “Very possible, Detective.”

  With those ominous words, he lapsed into silence and turned his face away.

  Shit. Silas didn’t want me to help with his budding revolution. He didn’t want me to assist from the inside. He wanted me to lead it, or at least to be its face. The trusting representative of “the man,” the ultimate insider turned by all things right and just and good and… “Fuck,” I muttered again. If I came through this unincarcerated, I knew I was going to do it, had to do it, to make up for all the time I’d been standing still, trying to be a rock against the torrential current that was society. It was time to lean in, and put one foot in front of the other. But still…fuck.

  It was clear that Silas didn’t want to talk about it anymore, and I was too damn tired to push. There was nothing I could do about my wounds—the blood on the sleeves of my coat had already begun congealing anyway, forming a makeshift bandage from the tattered cloth. It was likely to tear open the minute I had to move with any real vigor, and I didn’t even want to think about the probability of infection, but it was the best I had. I checked my weapons again, more out of nervous habit than any real need. Then, out of things to keep me busy, I sank back in the chair and tried very hard not to fall asleep.

  * * * *

  “Wake up, Detective.”

  The soft words pulled me from the depths of slumber. It took me a moment to process my surroundings, to remember that I was in a cab headed to find Hernandez’s daughter. As that thought crashed home, it occurred to me that I hadn’t called in Fowler’s death—that I hadn’t even considered calling it in. Had I been too wrapped up in events? Or had I truly drifted that far from who I was? Had I crossed into the bounds of a criminal?

  The gunshots had undoubtedly been reported, filed away somewhere by the network of security cameras and microphones blanketing the city. Eventually, the body would
be discovered. A cursory investigation would put me at the scene. If I found Arlene, it wouldn’t matter, not as much. I could play it off, could plead exigent circumstances and claim that a child at risk was more important than following proper procedure. It would work. It was even true. But I wasn’t completely convinced that it was why I hadn’t called in Fowler’s death.

  I pushed those thoughts aside. We were here, wherever here might have been. I rubbed at my eyes—wincing as dried blood pulled at my various cuts and lacerations—forcing the last blurry vestiges of sleep from them. Here, it turned out, was a pretty damn nice neighborhood. The house was a majestic structure, all columns and balconies and black-iron fencing. It had the air of an ancient plantation home, though all the original ones were destroyed decades ago. A re-creation, then, but one done with loving attention to detail.

  “I guess being a corporate hit man pays pretty good,” I said as the cab came to a stop. I didn’t bother putting it on standby—if things went the way I hoped, we were walking out of that house with four people, and the little two-seater taxi wasn’t going to be big enough to do the job. If they didn’t go as I hoped...well, I was probably going to picked up by my brothers and sisters in blue anyway. “Let’s go.”

  I should have called for backup. It would have been the smart thing to do. The ambush at the docks—had it been just a few hours ago?—suggested that even if Fowler wasn’t directly working with anyone, he, or at least Walton Biogenics, wasn’t above hiring a few thugs to help out with the scut work. Silas had already proven a willingness to help if things got messy, but that willingness was trumped by his conditioning. If the shit hit the fan, I got the feeling he’d be good for about one shot, and then he’d be curled up in a ball. Not his fault, but not terribly helpful, either.

  I didn’t call, though. I was so far off the reservation that at best I would get a stand-down order while the brass at multiple agencies tried to figure out what the hell to do with me. It could take hours to sort out, get a SWAT or HRT team on-site, and actually gain entry to the house. I didn’t think Arlene had that kind of time. So I slid my pistol from its holster and, keeping it at the low ready, advanced toward the door. Silas, silent as a ghost despite his bulk, slipped in behind me.

  I took up a position at the side of the front door, Silas still at my back. The windows on the first floor all had their curtains drawn, but the door itself had a glass insert and a pair of sidelights. A faint light shone from somewhere deeper in the house, just bright enough for me to make out a few details. I was expecting a horror show. I got a showroom.

  From what I could make out, the interior of the house was...nice. Homey. The kind of place that should, by rights, smell of cookies and be filled with children’s laughter. That somehow made the thought that a cold-blooded killer lived there all the worse. There was a fairly standard lockpad by the door, with a red light indicating that it was, in fact, locked. And probably alarmed. Shit.

  “Perhaps I could be of assistance, Detective,” Silas whispered. “I have a way with electronics.”

  I remembered how easily Silas had entered my house, and how he seemed to disappear from surveillance cameras. I nodded and edged to the other side of the door, trying to stay out of the framing of the sidelights. “See what you can do.”

  I was too far away to tell exactly what Silas did, but he started just like anyone else trying to open the door—he placed his palm on the sensor pad. Ordinarily, if you weren’t a registered occupant of the house, that action would have resulted in nothing. Instead, there was a slight beep. It took a moment for the reason behind that to dawn on me. Silas was a synthetic, and legally synthetics weren’t people. They were things, and things completely incapable of hurting anyone. But they were things that were often tasked with a variety of menial labors, like deliveries and cleaning.

  I had never used synthetics—or anyone else for that matter—to take care of my dirty work. I wish I could say it was a matter of purely standing on my principles, but really, it was as much about my own antisocial isolationism as anything. I did my own cleaning, my own laundry, my own cooking because I didn’t particularly like to be around other people. I knew it all stemmed from Annabelle, and the past few days had made me realize that it was, at least in part, a way to hide from what I knew about the world. If I was constantly alone, I didn’t have to see or think about the injustice around me.

  I realized now, however, that there must have been some list, somewhere, of synthetics and agencies that had access to...well, damn near everything was my guess. I was once again staggered by the casual reach that so-called humanity had ceded all too willingly to the synthetics. It clearly wasn’t universal access—if it was, the door would have opened for Silas and he wouldn’t still be busily typing away, exercising, no doubt, that “way” he had mentioned with electronics. But how many agencies, businesses, and corporations had services that required synthetics to gain access to private dwellings? Cleaning agencies, certainly. Delivery agencies. Personal chefs. Child care. Companionship. Repair services. Even prostitution. The list was endless. Did anyone—even people with some knowledge of the truth, like Fowler—even think twice before blindly signing terms and conditions that likely granted an entire stable of synthetics full access to their homes?

  The possible violations of privacy were staggering, and tempered only slightly by the notion that synthetics could do no harm. Except, Silas had done harm. If he had a gun, could he have pulled the trigger as easily as he had thrown the wrench? It would only take a single shot to end a life. But just as I had when I realized the potential information network available to the synthetic population, my worldview underwent another spiraling shift. If they could overcome their programming, even enough to do that single trigger pull—oh hell, or plant a bomb—how much damage could they wreak?

  With a soft buzz, the door panel flashed green. I motioned for Silas to stay behind me and pushed the door open. The interior was dark, save for that soft glow coming from somewhere deeper in the house. It was a maze of rooms, the space subdivided in a way that completely ignored the more modern, open style. Whoever had it rebuilt, had done it to the original cramped, multiroom specifications. Maybe it added some kind of charm; for me, it turned the place into a nightmare of blind corners and shadowed hiding places.

  I moved through the downstairs as quickly as possible, checking every room and closet, every nook and cranny that looked big enough to stash either a bad guy or a little girl. Zero joy. The light had proven to be coming from the kitchen, a simple fluorescent bulb left on above the range, but no people or any other indication that people had been through recently. The house had three separate staircases leading to the second floor. I picked one at random and began the process anew. Same cluster fuck of rooms stuck together seemingly at random. All the furniture was expensive, and looked pristine. The whole place felt more like a show house than a place where an actual human being lived. Of course, Fowler was a pretty damn far way from human, but still. The vibe didn’t exactly scream “serial killer,” either.

  Different floor. Same results. Nothing.

  “Perhaps an attic?” Silas whispered.

  We ransacked the upstairs again, looking for any entrance into an attic. We found it, at last, in the ceiling of a closet. Stealth had gone right out the window, and I shoved armfuls of clothing at Silas in order to reach the pull-down ladder. It unfolded and, gun leading, I climbed up. As my head broke the plane of the ceiling—or was it floor?—I panned my flashlight around. Boxes. Dust. Insulation. No missing synthetic. No little girl.

  The joists were exposed, thick two-by-eights evenly spaced with no flooring atop them. A couple of inches of foam insulation filled in the gaps between the lumber. The space was huge, running the full length of the house, hot, humid, and all-around unpleasant. But it was also, for the most part, empty. I still pulled myself all the way up, picking my way carefully from beam to beam, checking behind boxes. “Arlene?
” I called softly, not expecting—or getting—an answer.

  After sweeping the attic, I made my way back downstairs, where an expectant Silas waited.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  I shook my head, sliding my pistol back into the holster at my waist. “Nothing.” I felt an uncomfortable weight settle around my shoulders as I said it—the weight of a little girl’s life. “You should have let Fowler take the shot.”

  “Then you would have been dead, Detective. And the little girl would almost certainly have followed. And my people would continue in servitude and slavery that would make the worst despots of past generations blush. No matter what happens, I made the right choice.”

  “I’m not your revolutionary leader, Silas,” I growled. “I’m not your Washington, or Lincoln, or King. I’m a fucking cop, and I’m tired. Why the fuck did you come to me in the first place?”

  Silas didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “Hope is not lost, Detective. I do not think we were led here astray. The grounds are large, and there are many places yet where we may find what we seek.”

  “What is it, exactly, that you seek, Silas? Fowler’s next victim, obviously. But why?”

  He just smiled that enigmatic smile and headed for the stairs.

  Bastard.

  Chapter 27

  The grounds of the house were extensive, probably close to five acres, which, in New Lyons, was practically an estate. There were, as predicted, several outbuildings—a barn, a trio of sheds, and a Quonset hut, the purpose of which was unclear at first inspection. We started with the sheds. The first held landscaping tools, old-school tools that were all sharp blades and pointed tines. Nothing electric, or even gas powered here—all of it was old-school muscle. All the tools showed signs of wear...and of recent cleaning. Given the proclivities of Mr. Fowler, I didn’t want to think what nonstandard uses any of them might have been put to.