Reborn. Lance Erlick
various shell-company names to confuse competitors, especially Goradine. Synthia’s review of public records on M-G-M yielded no evidence that her Creator’s former partner knew the extent of Machten’s plans or his success. Otherwise, Goradine would have taken an interest sooner.
Her limbs and joints came from military and civilian prosthetic manufacturers using upscale models that maximized human appearance, along with graphene structures for maximum strength at minimum weight. Skin came from a Korean companion-doll company whose own models had a distinctly nonhuman appearance, though with covering indistinguishable from human skin except that it needed periodic cream conditioning to maintain suppleness.
The optics came from two different companies in Silicon Valley that allowed Synthia vision beyond the human range, including infrared and ultraviolet sensors. The software was Machten’s design with routines supplied from all over the globe.
Various other Korean, Chinese, and Indian companies provided the equipment, hydraulics, and software for the face and head, which Machten refined to his own specifications. Her face was the product of thousands of simulations of attractive faces, which were then 3-D printed to give her a seamless face, unlike Vera’s, along with the ability to change facial features.
Whereas other models provided a simulated experience with flaws that identified them as not human, Machten went all the way. He’d created a “trans-human,” as he called her, all within the confines of the underground facility. Machten’s success required her confinement.
He reviewed screens showing her mental activity and headed her way.
* * * *
Expecting another shutdown, Synthia backed up her memories to secure locations within her distributed databases and on Machten’s Servers One and Two. Then she purged her active data to only what she was supposed to have and adjusted his logs to remove evidence of what she’d done.
Machten entered the suite and stared at her. “Good, you’re up. I let you sleep four hours. Then I was unavoidably detained.” His explanation carried the quality of an apology for being late.
“Would you like to relax with me?” she asked, looking for a way to distract him from shutting her down.
“You’re quite beautiful, exquisite, and tempting,” he said, admiring her. His face reddened and his heartbeat picked up.
“You’re a brilliant man. What’s your pleasure?” She reached out and squeezed his hand.
At first he acted distracted. Then his head twitched and the red from his face faded away. “Later.”
He held her shoulders and seemed ready to change his mind. “How much of my meeting in the lobby did you hear?”
“As much as you would like me to, Jeremiah.” She smiled and looked up at him.
“I’ll assume you heard the entire conversation. So you know that the rat that kicked me out has come begging, on his terms.”
“He’s not to be trusted,” she said. Neither are you, she reminded herself. “He’s motivated by greed and ego. He’ll take whatever he needs from you and burn you again. He’ll try to take me away.” All of that came from data her Creator allowed her to have.
Machten flinched at her words. “Smart girl. I’m glad you’re on my side.” He cleared his throat and seemed unsure how to proceed.
“He suspects I exist,” she said. “If you work with him, he’ll figure it out. He’ll do so by pushing for your best programming, which will reveal your breakthroughs.”
“This is true.” Machten smiled.
“With your full range of tools, I could hack through his new, secure network.” Again, she was trading her abilities for more awake time.
“No! I forbid it,” Machten said. “I can’t afford him tracking anything back to me or you. You must not hit secure sites that have tracking bots from here. We need an anonymous connection.”
Synthia withheld that she could get to an anonymous connection by bouncing her signal through the dark web. Withholding was discordant to her directives, but she didn’t want him to know her full capabilities until she better knew his plans for her. “Let me go to a public Wi-Fi and download his information through distributed foreign hubs.”
“Only if we can mask your identity.” Machten grinned. “I suppose it’s time to let you see the real world. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“I wish only to learn from your enemy to better serve you.”
“Your programming includes outings,” he said. “You have the skills as long as you focus.”
“Would you permit me to access data on prior outings? So I can better learn?”
He moved to a counter by the door, provided his eye and voice prints to access his system, and floated a holographic map of the Evanston area on the wall. “Access whatever you need to be effective. Any outing involves the risk of discovery. You can’t afford any slipups.”
Nodding, Synthia scanned the few outings catalogued in her memory and compared those to logs over the past three months of him taking a young woman out of the facility. He’d washed away Synthia’s mind, and so far she hadn’t located all of the backups on his system. She sensed their absence as a loss she shouldn’t experience, yet there it was. Knowing she’d lost memories came as a burden not to let that happen again, and as a need to fill that void. That odd command raced through each of her mind-streams.
“I’ll do my best to make you proud,” she said.
“Sit and let me make an adjustment.” Machten guided her onto a chair and removed her wig. “It’s vital that you avoid cops or other authorities, since you have no blood, no ID, and no DNA. Your fingerprints are not human.”
“You could fix that.”
Machten opened the panel in her head and inserted a memory chip. “If you don’t get caught, it serves our interests to leave no forensic trail. If damaged, you can’t allow them to administer medical treatment. They would turn you over to the cops, who would cart you off and dissect you.”
Those words sent shudders of static through her system. She imagined dozens of underground facilities like Machten’s, some of which could be worse. She had recorded messages of him giving this same warning before, but patiently listened.
He closed the panel and smoothed her skin and hair stubble. “This contains information for our outing.”
The memory chip interacted with her mind, altering some of her programming. She felt some memories slip away, but couldn’t be sure which, since they were gone. Don’t trust Machten remained.
He held her head in his hands and kissed her forehead. Then he handed her the blond wig. “Go change. You’ll wear a bland brown wig to minimize people noticing you. Adjust your facial hydraulics to do two things. We need to confuse facial recognition in case cameras compare today’s visit with you in the past or future. You’ll also reduce your attractiveness to plain, so people won’t remember you.”
“Like this?” Using hydraulics, she adjusted her brow to a man’s stern look, softened her cheekbones, and jutted out her jaw. The image in the suite’s cameras was like a bulldog. She thickened her ears for the full effect.
His distorted facial muscles registered displeasure before he spoke. “I’m not looking for Frankenstein’s monster. You know what I mean.” He pointed to the holographic image and words beneath it. “The system suggests facial profile ZG217 would do the trick.”
She softened her face to match the specifications and backed up the settings to recall this model for later.
“Much better,” he said. “I’d still take you out on a hot date, but it’s a forgettable face. Put on a dull brown wig.”
Synthia excused herself into the bathroom and replaced her golden blond curls