SINdrome
The
New Lyons Sequence #3
by
J.T. Nicholas
Genre: Science Fiction, Artificial Intelligence
Pub
Date: 9/18/18
The
Sickness unto Death
The
Synth revolution has come at last. The supposedly synthetic beings
humans crafted to do their dirty work for them have fully actualized
their own humanity—and they no longer acquiesce in their
enslavement. Victory in the struggle to tear down the institutions of
oppression seems just a matter of time. But the halls of power are
not so easily shaken—and a counterstrike is inevitable.
Former
Detective Jason Campbell has pledged his life to the Synthetic cause.
So when a mysterious virus starts wiping out Synths left and
right—and shows signs of mutating to target everyone else—he must
lead a race against time to prevent the outbreak of the most horrific
plague the world has ever seen. If he succeeds, he’ll expose the
moral bankruptcy of the depraved elites who will stop at nothing to
restore the old order. If he fails, it could mean the end of life on
this planet. For both Synth and Human.
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Chapter
1
You
went into a knife fight knowing you were going to get cut.
It
was one of the cardinal rules of weapon defense, and the reasoning behind it
was simple: you had to prepare yourself for the inevitability so that when it
happened, you didn’t freeze up. When blades came into play, inaction was
synonymous with death.
The
chow line at the New Lyons City Prison moved slowly, a long line of orange-clad
men shuffling forward, trays in hand. It reminded me, more than anything, of my
time in the Army. Sure, the uniforms were different, but the sense of routine,
the loss of any sort of control over your day-to-day life, those were…familiar.
Easier to adjust to than I’d anticipated. Boot camp had just been a different
flavor of prison.
Of
course, in boot, I’d only thought the instructors were out to kill me.
Here,
in the loving hands of the New Lyons Department of Corrections, things were a
little different. I had not—technically—been convicted of any crime. At least
not yet. But the charges leveled against me—which included everything the
prosecutors could think of but could be best summed up as domestic
terrorism—had equated to an automatic denial of bail and ensured that Momma
Campbell’s favorite son was headed to the big house for holding. Normally,
former cops wouldn’t be put into the general population. But somewhere,
somehow, a clerical error had been made. The guards assured me—with the biggest
shit-eating grins they could muster—that it would all get straightened out soon
and I’d go into protective custody.
In
the meantime, I was sharing a cell block with a few hundred inmates who knew
that I was a cop. The guards hadn’t even had to tell them. Denying inmates ’net
access had long ago been determined “cruel and unusual” punishment, access to
the web being deemed as vital a service as electricity or clean water, and with
hours on end of sitting in a cell with nothing but a screen to occupy their
time, damn near everyone knew who I was.
They’d
all seen the first ’net hijacking that Silas and the other synthetics had
engineered, showing the world Evelyn, the synthetic impregnated by her human
rapist. That wasn’t supposed to be possible, or course, since everyone know the
synthetics were genetically sterile inhuman things and not people at all.
Right. They knew about Silas’s demands, that all synthetics be granted full
rights of citizenship and freed from their captivity. They knew about the stick
that those in the revolution—myself included—claimed to have, the mountain of
secrets that could bring down governments. And, they’d all seen Hernandez, my
former partner and friend, escort me to the precinct and turn me over into the
fat, greasy hands of Francois Fortier.
They
didn’t know why or how that had happened. They didn’t know that I’d turned
myself in, after nearly a month of avoiding the cops and feds on my tail. They
didn’t know about the documents Al’awwal, the first synthetic, had helped us
recover from his “father’s” lab. The documents that proved not only that Walton
Biogenics knew the synthetics were human, but that they had deliberately
suppressed that information along with significant medical advancements that
could have benefited all of humankind, in the pursuit of profit.
But
they would. The deadline was up. Sometime this evening, Silas, LaSorte, and the
rest would flip the switch or press the magic button or whatever the hell it
was they did, and that information would go out to the world, along with the
first round of skeletons aimed at discrediting the most vehemently anti-synthetic
politicians. And my presence here, turning myself in, was all in an effort to
get some of that information into the official record, somewhere where an army
of paid ’net trolls couldn’t try to muddy the waters with a focused
disinformation campaign of their own. Evidence presented at trial became the
subject of deposition and investigation almost by default, and there was only
so much Walton Biogenics could do to hide the truth.
Synth’s have finally gotten fed up with how the humans are
treating them as if they are nothing more than slaves. They are tired of doing
their bidding and being their toys. They are finally starting to fight back.
With the revelation just around the corner a virus has swept through the world
of the synth’s. If a cure is not found soon then all synth’s will be dead. Is
this what the government wants?
A human Jason Campbell has made it his life mission to help
the synth’s as he believes that they deserve the same rights as humans. Jason
and Silas a synth must find a way to stop this virus before it destroys all
synth. If it mutates it could infect humans as well killing everyone in its
tracks.
I fell in love with the world of The New Lyons and all the
characters in the first book SINthetic. I would love to see The New Lyons
Sequence on the big screen. I can’t wait to see what the author has in-store for
us next.
I would recommend SINdrome to anyone whos loves science
fiction.
SINdicate
The
New Lyons Sequence #2
The
Post-Modern Prometheus
Synths
were manufactured to look human and perform physical labor, but they
were still only machines. That’s what the people who used—and
abused—them believed, until the truth was revealed: Synths are
independent, sentient beings. Now, the governments of the world must
either recognize their human nature and grant them their rightful
freedom, or brace for a revolution.
Former
New Lyons Detective Jason Campbell has committed himself to the
Synths’ cause, willing to fight every army the human race marches
against them. But they have an even greater enemy in Walton
Biogenics, the syndicate behind the creation and distribution of the
“artificial” humans. The company will stop at nothing to protect
their secrets—and the near-mythological figure known to Synths as
“The First,” whose very existence threatens the balance of power
across the world . . .
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There was a body on my doorstep.
I don’t know what woke me, or what drove me to climb so
early from the narrow cot that served as my bed. Maybe it was some lingering
cop instinct from my time with the NLPD, that nagging sense that something was
wrong. It was that instinct that had me tucking the paddle holster of my
forty-five into the waistband of the ratty jeans I had fallen asleep in.
I slid open the door of the eight-by-eight walled office
cubicle that served as my bedroom and stepped out onto the cavernous floor of
what had once been a call center. The first rays of dawn were peeking over the
eastern horizon, filtering through what remained of the call center’s windows,
casting the interior in monochromatic grays accented with darker pools of
shadow.
The broad floor was filled with sleeping people. Sleeping
synthetics. The genetically engineered clones that had served as an underclass
of slave labor for decades and, with a small amount of help from me and a whole
lot of work and planning from a synthetic named Silas, had begun a de facto
rebellion.
I padded among them on bare feet, stepping as silently as
possible, and yet, without exception, the eyes of each synthetic I passed
popped open. They stared at me, stark-white against the gray, eyes wide, searching,
and somehow fearful. Not one of them moved. They waited in statue-like
rigidity, a coiled-spring tension resonating from their stillness. It lasted
only a moment, until they realized where they were; until they realized who I
was. I couldn’t begrudge them that moment of fear, but it still hit me like a
punch to the gut.
Such was life in revolution central. Nearly a month since we
had taken over the air and net waves. Nearly a month since we had ripped off
the veil covering the ugly truth that synthetics were not unthinking, unfeeling
things, but as much people as any of the naturally born. Nearly a month, and
for synthetics, things had gotten worse.
Much worse.
It wasn’t unexpected. Silas had predicted the reaction from
society at large when we shone a spotlight on the truth that everyone suspected
but no one seemed willing to admit. It had started with protests. Angry people
marching with signs about respecting their rights and not dictating what they
could do with their bought-and-paid-for property. The protests should have
collapsed under the weight of irony alone, but instead they had given way to
violence—violence directed almost entirely against synthetics. Viral videos of
synthetic beatings—always popular—had hit unprecedented highs, as had videos
depicting darker, more depraved “punishments” for those who dared to think they
might one day be “real” people. The violence, in turn, had given way to death.
Not on a widespread scale—not yet. Whatever else they might be, synthetics
were, after all, expensive. Only the very wealthy could afford to dispose of
them wantonly.
We’d given the world an ultimatum: give synthetics rights,
or be prepared to have all the little secrets that they had gathered in their
decades of near-invisible servitude released to the public. Silas had managed
to bring together and weaponize secrets that could topple governments and
destroy lives. The plan was simple enough—release a wave of compromising
information on a number of politicians and public figures. The first wave was
embarrassing, but not damning, not actively criminal. If that failed to spark
action, then a second, more catastrophic wave would be released. And so on,
until the governments either acceded to our demands or toppled from the sheer
weight of skeletons tumbling out of closets.
But as that deadline crept closer—now just over a week
away—the bodies were beginning to pile up. The richest among
society—individuals and corporations alike—could afford to throw away a
synthetic here, a synthetic there, and as the dawn of revolution approached,
they made their position clear. One billionaire businessman had gone so far as
to cobble together a reality livestream. Every day, contestants undertook a
series of challenges, and the winner got to kill a synthetic in any way they
chose, all during a livestream that, last I checked, had viewership measured in
the millions.
And yet, there was hope out there.
That hope was part of the reason the floor I moved across
was filled with synthetics, crowded in here and there in clusters amidst the
cavernous call center. They would trickle in by ones and twos, somehow always
finding us, despite our having changed locations four times in the past month.
Most told the same story—their nominal owners, horrified by the revelation that
they had, in essence, been keeping slaves, but terrified of the possible
reprisals from those who thought differently, had simply set them free. Turned
them out. Part kindness, part assuaging of guilt…and part washing your hands of
a problem you wanted no part of.
I didn’t know how they found us. They trusted me enough to
share some pieces of their stories. The part I played in the rescue of Evelyn,
what I had sacrificed to get the truth out, had earned me that much.
That didn’t stop a young synthetic girl, maybe seventeen,
from rolling into a half crouch as I neared. Her hands were extended in front
of her, a gesture half defense, half supplication. Her look of horror and shame
and guilt and fear reminded me so suddenly and sharply of Annabelle that it was
like a knife twisting in my intestines. Her mouth opened and formed a single
word, not spoken, but clear as a gunshot nonetheless.
“No.”
What could I do? I wasn’t the one who had hurt her, but
she’d been hurt, badly. I offered a smile and kept my distance. It took a
moment for the recognition to dawn, for the panic to quiet. Quiet, but not fall
silent. I was still an outsider. I belonged to a different class, a class that
had long subjugated and tormented them. A human. Trust only extended so
far. But I had my suspicions as to how they found me, and my
suspicions had a name.
Silas.
The albino synthetic who had started my feet on this path
remained elusive. We received messages from him on a regular basis, and he made
brief appearances a couple of times a week, mostly to check in on Evelyn and
make sure she was receiving the medical care she needed so late in her
pregnancy.
But after only a short visit, he would vanish with the ease that had
made him so damn hard to track down in the first place. He, or rather his
messages, told us when to move, and where to move. That let us know when my
former brothers and sisters in blue were getting too
close. I had no doubt that it was his network that funneled
the turned-out synthetics to our door.
I just didn’t know what in the hell he expected me to do with
them.
Whatever Silas might hope—whatever I might hope—when
February 1 rolled around, the governments of the world would not simply roll
over, pass some new laws, sprinkle a
shit-ton of fairy dust, and declare that synthetics were now all full-fledged
citizens. And by the way, sorry about all the assaults, rapes, and murders
suffered in the interim. No. The months ahead would be steeped in blood.
And not one of the synthetics that were beginning to stir
with the rising sun would be able to spill a single drop of it. Call it
conditioning.
Call it brainwashing, but synthetics were engineered to be
incapable of violence, even in self-defense. Which was going to make fighting a
war pretty fucking hard.
I had nearly reached the main door of the call center. The
entire front of the building—once a shining wall of steel and glass—had been
boarded up, long sheets of plywood secured to the frame. Thin cracks of light
filtered in where the boards fit imperfectly, and more came from openings
higher up, where other windows had been spared the fortification. I had moved
through that fractured light, my unease growing with each step. I dropped my
hand to the butt of my pistol, thumb finding the retention lock and easing it
forward.
A four-by-four rested in a pair of brackets across the door,
barring it more effectively than any lock. I had eased it off with my left
hand, straining slightly with the effort, and lowered it to the floor. I had
pulled the door open, reflexively scanning left and right, searching for
threats. Nothing.
The tension I’d felt since awakening had started to ease.
Until I had looked down.
And saw the body.
SINthetic
The
New Lyons Sequence #1
The
Artificial Evolution
They
look like us. Act like us. But they are not human. Created to
perform the menial tasks real humans detest, Synths were designed
with only a basic intelligence and minimal emotional response. It
stands to reason that they have no rights. Like any technology, they
are designed for human convenience. Disposable.
In
the city of New Lyons, Detective Jason Campbell is investigating a
vicious crime: a female body found mutilated and left in the streets.
Once the victim is identified as a Synth, the crime is designated no
more than the destruction of property, and Campbell is pulled from
the case.
But
when a mysterious stranger approaches Campbell and asks him to
continue his investigation in secret, Campbell is dragged into a dark
world of unimaginable corruption. One that leaves him questioning the
true nature of humanity.
And
what he discovers is only the beginning . . .
Chapter
1
The neon signs glowed sullenly, sending
sickly tendrils of light slithering down the rain-soaked streets like so many
diseased serpents. Once bright and inviting, the reds and blues and greens had
dimmed and paled, sloughed off the flush of health, and left behind a spreading
stain of false illumination that heralded nothing but sickness and decay. The
signs themselves, flickering and buzzing, wheezing like something that wanted
to die, something that should have
died long ago, offered up a thousand different sins, unflinching in the frank
descriptions of the acts taking place within the walls that they adorned.
I stared at those signs, indistinct and
hazy beneath the mantle of falling rain. The mist softened their lurid offers,
restoring, however imperfectly, an innocence the city lost long ago. As the
gentle caress of a silken veil added mystery to the sweeping curves of the
female form, hinting at secrets far more tantalizing than the revealed flesh
beneath, the cloak of rainfall shrouded the city’s darker side, softening its
edges and lending it an air that approached civility.
Approached civility, but did not—could
not—achieve it.
With a sigh, I turned my eyes away from
the cityscape, and dropped them to the pavement beneath my feet. To the body
that rested there, or what was left of it.
After nearly ten years on the job, I
still had to fight down the bile threatening to crawl its way up my esophagus
and force its insistent path between my teeth. The body—so much easier to think
of it as “the body” and not “the woman”—lay flat on its back, arms stretched
out above its head and crossed at the wrists, legs spread akimbo. No clothing.
Nor could I see any discarded garments in the immediate area. The pose,
purposeful and meticulous in its own horrifying way, was a parody of passion.
It was a pose that was likely even now being played out in many, perhaps most,
of the establishments adorned with the gasping neon signs.
With one very notable difference.
Vestiges of beauty clung to the woman,
holding desperately to a youthful vivacity that was losing an inexorable battle
to the unnatural slackness of death. Makeup adorned that face, hiding the
pallor beneath blush and eyeliner, lipstick and shadow, only now beginning to
fade and run beneath the unrelenting assault of a thousand raindrops. Her
features were symmetrical, regular, past the awkwardness of youth, but not yet
touched by the wrinkles or worry lines that would fell all of us in time.
I forced myself to look past her face,
past the strong lines of her outstretched arms, sweeping past her bared breasts
and to the…emptiness…that extended beneath her sternum.
From her lowest ribs to the tops of her
thighs, the woman had been…
I realized I didn’t have a word for
what had been done to her. The words that stormed through my mind—savaged,
brutalized, tortured—leaving a teeth-gnashing anger in their wake and making my
stomach twist itself into a Stygian knot, were almost certainly true, but they
did not describe what lay before me.
Hollowed.
The word floated up from somewhere in
my subconscious, bringing with it memories of carving into pumpkins and
scooping out the seeds and ropey innards with big plastic spoons made slick and
awkward from the pulpy mess.
I clamped my teeth so hard that a lance
of pain shot along my sinus cavities, but it kept me—if only just—from
vomiting.
Hollowed.
The skin and muscle had been removed
from the woman’s stomach and groin. The organs that should have been
present—stomach, intestines, kidneys, everything south of the lungs—were gone.
The tissue beneath them, the muscles along the spine, back, and buttocks
remained, exposed to the air and rain. I could just make out pinkish gray
tissue poking from beneath the ribs, so I guessed the lungs, and probably the
heart, were intact and in place.
There was no blood.
The steady rain had formed a small pool
in the resulting cavity, taking on a cast more black than red in the dimness of
the night. No more blood on the body. No more blood at the scene.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God.”
The heartfelt exhalation came from
behind me, and I glanced over my shoulder, tearing my eyes from the horror
before me. The uniforms had finished cordoning off the area, spreading the
yellow tape in a rough perimeter maybe twenty yards in diameter. Even on a
night like this, in a neighborhood like this, a crowd had gathered, a few dozen
people pressed up against the tape as if it were the glass wall at an aquarium,
desperate to peer into the darkness and see the wonders and horrors within. All
of them pointed screens in my direction or stared with the strange motionless
intensity of someone wearing a recording lens. I prayed that the darkness,
rain, and distance would cloud their electronic eyes, and grant the woman what
little privacy and modesty were left to her.
Halfway between me and the tape stood a
small, trim man in his late forties. A fuzz of iron-gray hair sprouted from his
head like a fungus, and a pencil-thin beard traced the line of his jaw. He wore
blue coveralls, stenciled with the words “Medical Examiner” in gold thread. Dr.
Clarence Fitzpatrick had been medical examiner in New Lyons for longer than I’d
been a cop. We had worked some gruesome homicides, scenes far messier, at least
in terms of scattered gore, than what lay before us. But nothing quite so damn
eerie.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “What can you tell
me?”
He made his way to the body and knelt
by it, blue-gloved hands extended over it as if trying to divine information
from the ether. “Liver temp is out of the question,” he said. There was no
humor in his voice, no attempt to make light of the nature of the remains; he
was simply stating the facts of the case before him, retreating behind cold
professionalism. It was something you learned quick on the job. Those who could
not put a wall between the atrocities and their own souls never lasted long.
He touched the flesh of the woman’s
arm, pressing against it, feeling the elasticity. “No rigor mortis, which means
that death was either very recent or she’s been gone awhile.”
He panned a flashlight across the body,
the pale flesh luminescing under the harsh white light. “No discoloration of
the remaining tissue. The damage sustained to the torso is sufficient to cause
death, but there is no way to tell in situ if that occurred before or after she
expired. Though if it had been done here, we would certainly be seeing a lot
more blood, even with the rain.” He spoke in short, clipped bursts, keeping the
medical jargon to a minimum, for my benefit no doubt.
His hands moved to the woman’s head,
peeling back the eyelids. “Cloudy. Most likely, she was killed more than
twelve, but less than forty-eight hours ago. Apart from the obvious
evisceration, there is no readily identifiable cause of death.” He cupped the
woman’s face in his hands, twisting it gently to the side, continuing his field
examination. He brushed back the dark locks of her hair, revealing the back of
her neck. A deep sigh, a sound of relief, not regret, escaped him. “Thank God,”
he said.
I stared down at the woman, not really
seeing what the doctor saw, but I knew what would be there. Only one thing
could have drawn that reaction from Fitzpatrick. A raised pattern of flesh,
roughly the size of an old postage stamp, darker than the surrounding skin and
looking for all the world like an antiquated bar code. The tissue would be
reminiscent of ritualistic scarring, but, unlike the woman herself, would not
have known the touch of violence. It could be called a birthmark, but “birth”
was not a word applied to the lab-grown people that were, collectively, known
as synthetics. They bore other names, of course, dozens of them, all
derogatory, all aimed at dehumanizing them further, at driving home the point
that, though they might look and act and feel like us, they were not humans.
Dr. Fitzpatrick was not immune to that
dehumanization. “Thank God,” he said again. “She’s a mule.”
J.T.
Nicholas was born in Lexington,
Virginia, though within six months he moved (or was moved, rather) to
Stuttgart, Germany. Thus began the long journey of the military brat,
hopping from state to state and country to country until, at present,
he has accumulated nearly thirty relocations. This experience taught
him that, regardless of where one found oneself, people were largely
the same. When not writing, Nick spends his time practicing a variety
of martial arts, playing games (video, tabletop, and otherwise), and
reading everything he can get his hands on. Nick currently resides in
Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, a pair of indifferent cats, a
neurotic Papillion, and an Australian Shepherd who (rightly) believes
he is in charge of the day-to-day affairs.
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