Perion Synthetics Read Free

car
ready for you. Now go get me some of that human interest crap you’re always
trying to pass off as content.”
    Cameron stood and extended a hand. “Thank
you, Mr. Banks. This is a great opportunity, and I won’t let you down.”
    Banks waved the hand away. “I know you’ll do
great.”
    Turning to Frank, Cam said, “Sorry. This was more important.”
    “Don’t mention it, kid.” Frank tapped out
several beats on the floor with his foot.
    Banks stared across the table, his eyes
vacant.
    From the elevator, Cameron asked, “Who’s my
contact in Perion City?”
    Banks didn’t look away. “Sava Kessler,” he
said. “Perion’s head of public relations.”
    “Watch yourself with her,” added Frank.
“Word is she’s a true believer.”
    He listened to the doors open and close. The
hum of the descending car filled the office and then receded.
    Frank tried to tune into his whisperer and
keep up the staring contest with Banks, but with the stock market set to open
any minute, the frenzy in his ear was getting hard to follow.
    When it came down to it, money drove
everything. Never mind that one of the greatest innovators of the century was
dying from an easily treatable disease.
    Banks reached for a small box on the coffee
table and removed a Red Velvet whisperer. He pressed it into his ear with his
index finger.
    Lifting his wrist, he said, “Hashtag
Internal: Cameron Gray.”
    Frank smirked. “You think he has any idea what’s
coming?”
    “No one does,” said Banks, “but when it
finally gets here, they’re going to hear about it on my feed first.”
2
    It took three hours on I-10 to get from Los Angeles to
Perion City. Cam passed the time by poring over the dossiers Diana had been
sending him all morning, files too detailed to have been the result of VNet
searches. He scrolled through write-ups on all C-level players with strong
names like Shaw and Phelps, from where they went to school to which political
party they backed. Grid dumps showed the relationships between each employee,
the under-the-table deals and mutual back-scratching that had birthed Perion’s executive
team. He studied the many faces and tried to ignore the mild revulsion he felt,
a mixture of envy and contempt for men of power.
    The car pulled off the highway at the exit
for Old Pinto Basin Road, a two lane blacktop that ran north another ten miles
before dead-ending at Perion Terminus. The transit station was a sprawling
collection of scaffolding and aluminum siding on an endless slab of gray
evercrete. Cam counted twenty-four loading bays set to receive the cargo
haulers lined up along the mile-long glide path running parallel to the road.
There, grizzled and bored drivers sat baking in the California sun as their
massive engines rumbled idly. Left of the main warehouse, the bland siding gave
way to Perion’s signature silver. The abrupt change in material made the
terminal appear tacked on, an afterthought that perhaps people, too, would want
to travel to Perion City.
    A woman with her face buried in her phone
sat on a bench just outside the terminal. A few paces away, a man in a chauffeur’s
cap stood smoking a cigarette.
    Cam pulled the woman’s face from the dozens
he had seen in the dossiers and identified her as Savannah “Sava” Kessler,
fellow Berkeley graduate and Perion’s head of public relations. Looking from
his phone to the window, he noticed the images in her file were out of date. Sava’s
previously blonde hair was now a light auburn; it disappeared behind the
shoulders of her black blazer instead of curling inward just below her chin. A
scarlet blouse led into a black skirt that ended just above her knees.
    The chauffeur tossed his cigarette away as
Cam’s car pulled into a parking spot next to a lone Nissan. He was at Cam’s
door in seconds, opening it and allowing in the warm desert air. Cam stepped
out into the daylight and waited for his eyes to adjust. He squinted as Sava
approached.
    “Mr. Gray?”