“I’ll download a list of vulnerabilities in the Atopian perimeter that you can use to connect with the outside, and then I’ll show you how to anonymize your conscious stream.”
The perplexed look on his face changed and grew into a smile.
10
Identity: Patricia Killiam
I curiously wondered how many ways this unpleasant specimen of humanity had inflicted death upon his fellow man-fellow man being something of a stretch given his own current state of being. That being said, Sintil8 projected the image of an attractive and urbane gentleman, his elderly face smiling warmly from under a manicured wave of properly graying hair. Intelligent eyes sparkled at me darkly.
“Nice press conference today,” said Sintil8, flashing a mouthful of perfect teeth. “Such a wonderful thing you are doing, saving the world.”
The sarcasm was as thick as his Russian accent.
“Thank you,” I replied simply, not taking the bait.
We studied each other.
“So, Patricia, what exactly would you like me to find out for you?” he asked with an equal parts soothing and menacing voice.
“These storm systems, for one,” I replied cautiously. “I want to know if this is some kind of new weapon. It seems the sort of thing you’d know about.”
He laughed. “Ah, I see.”
We were sitting in a sumptuous penthouse atop one of his many skyscrapers dotting the landscape of New Moscow. Views from the top of the world stretched out brightly below us in the midday sunshine, and I caught glimpses of the Moskva River snaking out into the smoggy distance below.
Sintil8 was comfortably draped on a black leather couch across a glass and steel coffee table from where I was, still dressed in blue silk pajamas. He was wrapped up in a velvet house coat and wearing gray fur slippers, one of which dangled casually off a foot as he crossed his legs. I was perched uneasily on the edge of my matching couch.
As we spoke, one of his minions, or disciples depending how you looked at it, swept smoothly across the landing to hand him another glass of scotch. Her scarred and mottled body was barely a shrunken stump suspended between impossibly spindly metal legs, with matching thin metal arms.
Sadly, she wasn’t all that unusual. Mandroids-humans with extensive robotic replacement limbs and parts- were becoming all the more common as entanglements in the Weather Wars continued to spread. Medical technology could stop soldiers in the field from dying from almost any inflicted trauma, apart from major brain damage, and so had begun the steady stream of half man, half machines into societies around the world.
Of course, this one was no soldier, but had instead done it to herself. Sintil8 was the leader of a cult that grotesquely encouraged its closest followers to consume their own bodies; literally a ritualized eating of themselves that was matched with a gradual replacement of their disappearing body parts by robotic ones. Consuming themselves was the path to spiritual and corporal enlightenment; so preached Sintil8.
“Thank you,” said Sintil8 as he accepted the drink.
This included consuming her own eyes, I realized with horror as she turned to attempt what she must have thought of as a smile my way. Dark caverns yawned out at me from where her eyes should have been. In the depths of the shadows at the backs of her scarred orbitals, I could see the glittering red of photoreceptor arrays.
“Tut, tut,” chided Sintil8, watching my expression while she walked away, “so quick to judge. And you, you’re not creating any monsters out there, are you?”
“We’re not brainwashing people into twisting their lives around.”
“No?” he replied, letting this hang in the air as he smiled at me, barely able to conceal his mirth. “And yet, here you are, coming to me for help. What a surprising turn of events this is.”
Sintil8 was one of the most powerful and persistent opponents of the pssi program. As one of the greatest purveyors of pleasures in the physical world, not to mention arms dealer to all sides of the Weather Wars, the global organization he represented stood to lose a lot of money when pssi was released.
He had been lobbying hard to at least have the pleasure pathways removed from the pssi protocols, and we’d often been at each others’ throats in closed-room government regulatory meetings around the world.
Kesselring had won the day by portraying Sintil8 as a modern-day Al Capone-style gangster, lording over the weaknesses of the human animal from his fortresses in Chicago and Moscow and other cities around the world. It wasn’t far from the truth.
Despite my less than savory opinion of him, in an enemy-of-my-enemy sort of logic, I’d come to Sintil8 to try and help me root out what Kesselring was hiding from me. Really, it was more of a fallback plan in case I needed an ace up my sleeve. I also had half an idea of wanting to keep Sintil8 close to my chest to tease out his own intrigues involving us. The latest string of disappearances was just the sort of thing he’d be capable of orchestrating.
“Look,” I said, turning all this over in my mind, “I may be able to help you if you help me.”
“Now you’re finally speaking my language,” he replied with a smile. He scanned the information and data sets I’d just sent him, the details of a deal.
“Ladno. I will find out what I can,” he said finally, nodding his understanding of my offer.
“Good.”
A pause, and his smile grew wider. “How rude of me, would you like to stay for dinner?”
I shook my head. “Thanks, but no,” I replied, gruesomely wondering what, or rather who, they would be eating tonight.
We sat and inspected each other again. Despite expending considerable resources in Atopia’s tussles with Sintil8, we still didn’t have the full picture of him. He was probably one of the few people alive older than me, and as far as we could tell he had risen up through the ranks of the Russian mafia in the late 20th century after starting a career in Stalin’s security apparatus.
Some reports hinted that he had been a tank commander in the Red Army’s defeat of the Nazis outside Stalingrad, the battles in which he had probably lost the first parts of his own body. We suspected he had become just a brain in a box somewhere, but exactly where we didn’t know.
“We drink to our agreement,” Sintil8 commanded as he raised his scotch. A glass of scotch dutifully materialized in my own hands.
“Budem zdorovy,” intoned Sintil8.
“Stay healthy indeed,” I replied, raising my glass with his and drinking to seal our bargain.
11
Identity: Jimmy Jones
“Where did the idea for your distributed consciousness technology come from?”
The question wasn’t directed at me. Some of the reporters laughed, and Nancy smiled. They’d all heard this before. The question was another opportunity for a sound bite, and Nancy launched into it with a smile.
In the days and weeks after the announcement of the Infinixx launch date, Nancy’s star had risen dramatically. The press couldn’t get enough of her. I’d been asked to help out, and I had splinters strung out in a seemingly endless stream of press events across the multiverse.
