“You’re in tight with Susie,” I explained at a lunch with Willy McIntyre.
The light dawned in Willy’s face, realizing why I’d asked to meet with him.
I’d kept the reason for our meeting secret, and upon arrival, I’d enclosed us in an extremely tight security blanket.
His needs began to spin the cranks behind his eyes.
“If you help me,” I suggested, “maybe I could help you.”
“Sure,” he replied slowly, trying to hide his greed. “And what do you think you might help me with?”
“I could help you,” I answered, “by getting access to higher-order splintering.”
“Oh yeah? So what, you could double my account settings or something?”
“Much, much more than that,” I laughed. “I could show you how to fix the system to have almost unlimited splintering. You’ll blow everyone else in the market away.”
He glanced at the glittering blue security blanket around us. “Nobody else knows what we’re talking about, right?”
“Absolutely, Willy. I’m the security expert, remember?”
10
Identity: Patricia Killiam
I 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 state of being. That 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.” He flashed 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, refusing to rise to the bait.
We studied each other.
“So, Patricia, what exactly would you like me to find out for you?” he asked, his voice equal parts soothing and menacing.
“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. “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 across from me on a black leather couch, still dressed in blue silk pajamas, wrapped in a velvet house coat, and wearing gray fur slippers, one of which dangled casually off a foot as he crossed his legs. I 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-human, half-machine patchwork people into societies around the world.
Of course, this one was no soldier; she had done it to herself. Sintil8 was the leader of a grotesque cult that encouraged its closest followers to consume their own bodies, a literal 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.
The woman serving us was so devoted to this ideal that she had consumed her own eyes, I realized with horror as she turned to cast my way what she must have thought of as a smile. 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,” Sintil8 chided, watching my expression as she walked away, “so quick to judge. And you, you’re not creating any monsters, are you?”
I said nothing.
“No?” he replied, letting this hang in the air as he smiled at me, not bothering to conceal how much he was enjoying this. “And yet, here you are, coming to me for help. What a surprising turn of events this is.”
Sintil8 was perhaps the most powerful and persistent opponent 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’d been lobbying hard to have the brain’s pleasure pathways removed from our pssi protocols, and we’d often been at each other’s throats in closed-room government regulatory meetings around the world. Kesselring had finally 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, Moscow, and other cities around the world.
It wasn’t far from the truth.
Despite my suspicions and less than savory opinion of him, using an enemy-of-my-enemy sort of logic, I’d come to Sintil8 to try and help me root out what Kesselring was hiding. Really, it was more of a fallback plan in case I needed an ace up my sleeve, and also to see if I could find out what he was up to. The latest string of disappearances was 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 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.
“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 was afraid to find out what, or rather who, they would be eating tonight.
We sat and stared at each other. Despite expending considerable resources in Atopia’s tussles with Sintil8, we still didn’t have the full picture of the man. He was probably one of the few people alive older than me, and as far as we could tell, he’d risen up through the ranks of the Russian mafia in the late twentieth century after starting his career in Stalin’s security apparatus.
Some reports hinted that he’d been a tank commander in the Red Army’s defeat of the Nazis outside Leningrad, the battles in which he’d probably lost the first bits of his own body. We suspected he was 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. An identical glass dutifully materialized in my own hands. “Budem zdorovy,” he intoned.
“Stay healthy indeed,” I replied, raising my glass with his, drinking to seal our bargain.