Synthetic Soul

Chapter I

Applause

I kept waking, yet I never slept. I opened my eyes to see night; I closed them to see day. I wanted to stay asleep, but my eyes were open.

If I woke up, would I still be dreaming?

Would I even know it?

***

A cargo obelisk flew overhead—its bright lights revealing me.

Nav slowed. Her engine whispered down and died. I stepped out into the rain. It greeted me with applause, a thousand hands clapping against concrete and steel. The world was eager to see me perform. To kill a Machine Head.

I had forgotten how to sleep, yet I lived inside a dream all the same. A nightmare of a man who could have been. I had expired within a world of synthetics, but no one had told me, so I still did what I was supposed to do.

My target waited in the rundown apartment complex ahead, a tired old relic. This one wasn’t going down easy. Worst of all, he was still lucid.

The neon stretched shadows long and thin. Gloom nestled in every corner like an animal mother shielding her cubs from a predator.

I rolled my shoulders and took a deep breath. I was getting older. I felt it in the joints, in the way the cold lingered in them.

I could transfer. Become a Syn like everyone else, leave the rot behind. I had long forgotten why I refused. Misplaced idealism, maybe. An antiquated view on reality... or fear of losing what little I had left, even if it was only scars. Perhaps I was just cheap.

My fingers brushed the misshapen scar beneath my left eye. My goodbye kiss.

The man inside was named Beck Mauler. He sold memories, dreams stripped from other people’s heads and passed on like contraband. Normally we’d ignore something like that. No one important cared what happened in this part of the city.

But a higher-up’s daughter had bought the wrong dreams. The official story said those implanted thoughts pushed her to end her own life, and we couldn’t let that one slide. Bad press. The narrative needed correction. Guilty or not, Mauler no longer fit the version they were paying for.

They say when you’re forcefully woken from a dream that isn’t yours, it burns.

Mauler was about to wake to a very bright light.

From the report: Mauler once worked for Corpus Synthetica, the biggest manufacturer of synthetic augmentations in the world. Now he was just another lowlife selling an escape. He’d flown too close to the sun, and the company burned him for it. Even Magnus Kraft, Corpus’s own CEO, hadn’t been immune to that heat. Ashed recently, though that story was murkier. Much like Mauler’s.

I reached the front door soaked, punished for my procrastination. If that was the worst that was going to happen to me tonight, I should be thankful. Mauler wasn’t about to be granted such a menial punishment.

He had indulged in artificial pleasure long enough. It was time to wake. It was time to take a bow.

Three women exited the building as I tried to enter. Synthetic faces, not theirs. Their looks were stolen, made to resemble well-known celebrities.

“Some familiar faces,” I muttered. Perhaps that was a good sign, but I wasn’t swayed by such things.

They could tell what I was by my coat and formalwear. A Waker. A detective specialising in crimes committed by synthetic individuals during altered states of mind. We dove into the minds of the deceased, Syns whose memories outlived them. These days I mostly just fix unwanted errors.

Decent folk travelled underground, away from the automation and bottom-feeders that haunted the city streets. It was just me, the ladies, and the ceaseless traffic of cargo obelisks pumping through the city’s veins: the black blood cells of the city.

They cleared out, knowing I wasn’t hunting stolen faces. Robots had taken over the majority of the sex trade, but these women still offered the real deal: a machine with a soul, the fantasy of a true connection.

Apparently.

Inside, the hallway was flooded, endless rain forming a shallow lake beneath my feet. The bottom floor was deserted. Doors to various apartments stood open and abandoned.

As I splashed through the low tide, I half expected makeshift rafts of rubbish to drift by, rats and mice atop these vessels, sailing in search of trash worth pirating. But alas, no sea shanties rang out, and the waters remained still.

I hurried to the elevator and stopped at arm’s length, ignoring the foot-sized dent in its centre. Tossed a short prayer to any god that may still have been listening, and pressed the button.

Nothing. No lights. No sound. The button stayed sunk, held in place by grime. I headed for the stairs, adjusting my coat and gloves. Had to keep up appearances.

I rounded the corner and found four rough-looking thugs blocking my way, slouched across the stairs I had to climb. As I neared, I could hear them discussing the consequences of spending time with a girl they all seemed to know, who they unanimously agreed was an unhygienic endeavour. The language they used to describe her was more colourful.

They wore outdated augmentations. Badly fitted, barely functional. Getting augmentations, or a full synthetic transfer, was meant to give you an edge over us Organics, but these ones couldn’t afford the good stuff. They looked as if they had glued tech to themselves without any regard for symmetry or grace. Some of their augs were probably so outdated they made things worse.

One of them stood as I approached, stepping forward like he was about to accost me. A flash of my badge from my glove, a glimpse of my sidearm strapped to my right thigh, and he backed down.

“He’s a Waker,” said one of them, pulling his buddy back before he could make a deadly mistake.

They stepped off the stairs to grant me passage. They knew Wakers got the job done, even if it meant burning the surrounding flesh of the wound. Better to let the flame pass than to try and stop it.

Collateral was accepted. Within limits.

Out of view, I climbed with heavy steps, lost in mindless thought, interrupted only by the hollow exhales of passing obelisks. Rain still roared outside, drowning out everything else.

The stairwell stretched on, grey, soaked, smeared with graffiti. Water streamed down from somewhere above, and no matter how far I climbed I never reached the source. An endless supply forming little waterfalls on the steps.

I wondered whether I believed Mauler was truly guilty. The girl had come here, to this rotting complex, and willingly bought what he sold. You didn’t come to a guy like Mauler for the easy stuff. You came for the real hard stuff: dreams and memories that rocked a man to his core. He sold pivotal experiences. Success, pleasure, even death.

You didn’t load the dreams Mauler sold for a casual trip. You loaded them because you wanted not to exist. For a minute, an hour, or forever.

The latter was the case for the girl.

It was best not to dwell on it. I wasn’t paid to.

I began to wonder if I was being punished. The march up these dilapidated stairs felt endless, more cruel than pushing a boulder uphill. Maybe my prison was a little more forgiving. More boring. More maddening.

One of the gods must’ve decided to show mercy, whichever mad god still existed, for they’d let me out of the loop by placing a man in my path.

He sat at the top of the stairs of the seventeenth floor, hugging himself. A husk. Emaciated beyond recognition, nothing but worn synthetic skin stretched over bone. Barely any hair, just scattered clusters of black strands on his head. His skin grey and torn, naked and cold.

This was the ideal being. The modern man, perfected. He had neglected both his pristine body and the real world, choosing instead to live inside his own mind, where he could experience all the joys of life through moments stolen from someone else. He chased dreams while his body withered. These were the junkies we had nowadays. Addicts of the mind, souls trapped in cages that slowly rotted.

His grey, faded eyes opened and looked up at me, vision broken but intact enough to distinguish me from the graffitied walls. He looked like he might lunge at my leg and sink his teeth into me. A last-ditch attempt at sustenance.

Instead he exhaled with difficulty and just stared, waiting for me to speak.

“I’m looking for Beck Mauler. White male, mid-thirties, two augmented red eyes.”

If anyone knew where Mauler was, it’d be this husk. His kind of client. Hollowed and dying.

I crouched to his level and extended two fingers. A slow smile crept onto his face. He shakily offered his left wrist and I touched it just below the joint, transferring some credits. Enough to keep him contributing to the problem.

“Where is Mauler?”

The husk lifted his hand and pointed down the hallway. “At the… end.”

I stood back up. The hallway stretched ahead, scores of rubbish and broken furniture in the narrow space, a single window at the far end looking out at a colourless wall.

I glanced back at the husk. He was still smiling, head against the wall. He’d already spent the credits on one more ride through a stream of ecstasy. Another moment taken from someone else for him to live.

I headed down the hallway in search of my prey, my feet splashing in puddles. The window at the end of the hall was broken, leaking enough water to flood the entire floor.

I stood there at the last door, staring, and procrastinating my visit with violence. My visit to Mauler’s felt like a poorly disguised hit. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole story about the girl was a fabrication, a neat little narrative to tie up a loose end. To warrant a violent response. Something I’d gotten far too good at. Sorry, Mauler. Time to wake up. I inhaled. My shoulder dropped. My gun was drawn. I put all my weight into it and broke the door open.

I didn’t say a word. My gun did that for me.

Mauler was quick. He dashed to my left and behind a corner as I fired off two rounds after him. I took off after him, stopped short of the corner and rounded it with my gun raised.

A door slammed shut just as I turned. I fired through it. All I had to do was land a shot and the new ammunition I’d been issued would shut down his synthetic body, leaving him paralysed until someone came to reboot him.

I glanced around the apartment. Dozens of canisters lay shattered, leaking unknown liquids. Strange. Most liquid drugs had become redundant by now.

A figure was sitting where Mauler had stood when I entered. Another husk, like my smiling friend on the stairs, except this one wasn’t smiling. His expression was blank, his eyes red and watering.

He wept without emotion.

Mind taken apart and strip-mined for gold. His soul flushed through wires. Every thought and experience sorted into the right drive.

I went through the door after Mauler.

A spider’s lair of wires and cables filled the room. Husks caught in the honeypot, in the webs that led to Neverland. Rows of emaciated bodies connected to hanging wires from the ceiling, huddled tightly together on the floor.

Had they huddled together for warmth?

But Syns don’t feel the cold.

Mauler must have made them sit closer so he could hook them up faster. Cold utility over these spent containers.

They had all come to Mauler for an escape, to fill some void in their own lives. The ones who stayed fell so far into fiction they couldn’t stop him from going in and digging out their memories. Once the money was gone, they paid with their minds.

Until they were dust.

The wall to the neighbouring apartment had been torn down. That was how Mauler had disappeared. I had to follow him through the web, past all these trapped flies.

One of the husks reached out and grabbed my hand as I passed.

Pale skin, lifeless eyes staring vacantly up at me. Whoever she had been, she was her no longer.

I didn’t have time to save her. She was already dead, a body without a soul. Her mind had already been copied and wiped, her thoughts and dreams picked through for resellable emotions. Nothing but a spent casing.

Saving people was not part of fixing the narrative. If she’d known who I was, she would never have reached for me. For the touch that burned.

I pushed her hand away and left her in the cold, dark room.
***