“One of you?”
“The others who came before you. Some of them handled the transition tolerably well. Some, not so much.”
“It’s just a body,” I said and sat up. I twisted to the side and let my legs hang off of the bed. The wall was mirrored and my eyebrows arched. “An extremely attractive body, certainly.”
“Sometimes, the Agent can’t be a male.”
“I got no problem with that,” I said and slipped off the bed to drop a little before my feet touched the floor. “Where is the person who came out of this body?”
“There was no one inside of the body, Mister Kade.”
“Now I’m curious.”
“Extreme cases in the prison system are sentenced to death. Our mode of execution is much different than it used to be. Instead of killing them, they are sent to us, where we wipe the mind. It is an empty shell. Then we use the bodies for Agents. It’s a relatively new system since we have had little success with the ‘wetware’ up to this point. We have high hopes for you Mister Kade.”
“Alright.”
The door opened, and Bern entered.
“How are you holding up, Mathew?”
“May as well call me Mattie for the time being, Doc.”
“You are handling it well enough,” he said.
“These,” I patted my chest, “are going to be a distraction. They seem to get in the way.”
I twisted and moved my arms, which kept connecting in unfamiliar places.
Red laughed again. “Welcome to womanhood, Mister Kade.”
“You may as well call me Mattie, too. At least as long as I’m in this body. Mathew when I’m not. Mister Kade is…was, a crotchety old man.”
“I can do that.”
“Alright, Doc,” I said as I turned to Bern. “What’s next?”
“I have a job for you, Mathe…Mattie. One you just might be glad to take care of. It is somewhat of a personal matter. I want you to remove someone.”
I was silent for a moment. I’d killed many men in my time as an OAS trooper. This seemed different.
“Kill someone,” I corrected. “Don’t mince words, Doc. Own it.”
“Yes,” Bern said. “I want you to kill the man who killed Mathew Kade.”
I watched Bern, closely. He was angry.
“That, I can do,” I said. “You guys were closer than I thought.”
“He was my friend,” he said. “It needs to look like an accident.”
“I can do that, too.”
“Good. You have all of the tools necessary for the job in that Agent’s body. I would suggest you go to the gym and test out what you are capable of before you leave the facility. You will find that you are much stronger, faster, and more durable. You also have many skills you are unaware of. If you think about it, you may remember many years of training.”
“What training?”
My mouth dropped open as sixty years of skills and training dumped directly into my memory bank.
“Holy shit,” I muttered.
“That training.”
“Damn, Doc.
“That is how the imprinter works, Mathew. If you have a grounding in any given field, it can be instantly added to your skill set. You have had many years with an affinity for violence. Now you have many years of training to accompany it. Some of it will not last, but some of it will be ingrained into you after this.”
“Okay, Doc. I’ll hit the gym and then go take care of business.”
“Thank you, Mathew.”
I nodded to him and turned to Red. “I never caught your name, but can you show me to the gym, and tell me where I can get some clothes?”
“It’s Regina,” she answered. “And you can follow me. I’ll take you to a dressing room first.”
I followed Regina out of the initial room where I had awakened. It felt a little weird walking down the hall naked. Even weirder to walk down the hall as a naked woman. There were subtle differences in my gait that seemed off. More movement in the hips than I was accustomed to.
I laughed.
“What is it?” Regina turned to me.
“Walking feels a bit weird.” I grinned. “Things move a little different.”
She laughed and opened a door. “Step on the scale,” she said, then placed her hand out to stop me. “But first, tell me how much you think you weigh.”
“How am I supposed to know?”
She cocked her head to the side. “Really?”
“I figure about a hundred and twenty at the most. This body has good musculature which weighs in heavier than it looks.”
She smiled. “Now step on the scale.”
“What the hell? How do I weigh two hundred and forty pounds?”
“The bones and muscle are denser than a normal person. Increased strength and durability. You’ll find that you can do things you never would have thought possible.”
She pointed toward a locker with the number four stenciled on the front. “The clothes in number four will fit you.”
I opened the locker and pulled a lacey pair of underwear from the top of the pile. I paused looking at them as it sank in where I was.
“You’re thinking naughty thoughts.”
“Just give me thirty minutes,” I said.
She laughed and shook her head. “Men.”
I chuckled and pulled the panties on.
“That’s weird,” I said as the thong slid into place.
“I take it you never wore a thong?”
“Yeah, for some reason they wouldn’t let us wear ‘em at the Vet’s.”
Next I pulled a pair of thin stretchy pants on.
“May as well just go naked,” I muttered.
They were really comfortable though.
Glancing to the side, I caught my reflection in the mirror. “Yep, thirty minutes.”
Regina laughed again.
I pulled the top from the locker and pulled it on. It was a sort of sports bra-type thing.
“That helps keep the damn things under control,” I said and moved my arms around without as much interference.
“The gym is through here,” she said with a grin.
I followed her through another door into a large room with lots of exercise equipment and a wide open space in the center. Glancing up, I could see the ceiling was about thirty feet above us.
“The first thing I want you to do is jump straight up,” she said.
“Okay.” I shrugged and jumped.
I gasped as I realized I had jumped higher than the top of the door behind us.
“Damn.”
“That was what you could do with what you expected. Now I want you to jump all the way to the ceiling.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
I squatted a lot further and really pushed off. The ceiling approached pretty quickly, and I raised my hands to stop myself from hitting it with my head. Then I was falling back down. I remembered my training from the OAS and let my legs bend to absorb the shock. There wasn’t as much as I expected though, the body was made to handle things like that.
“Son of a bitch,” I muttered.
“Now let’s go lift some weights.”
* * *
“This is different,” I said as I re-lived the memories of slipping into the hospital.
I’d gone out a window and climbed up the side of the building to bypass the guards outside the room of Delmar Maples. He looked up as I slid his window open and dropped into his room.
“Who are you?”
“You killed someone very close to me, Mister Maples.”
His eyes widened as I dragged him from the bed he was laying in. His mouth opened, and I clamped my hand over it.
I held him in front of the open window. “What do you see out there? A world of victims? You shot three people and an old man who walked into a bank. The old man was my friend.”
I removed my hand from his mouth.
“That old bastard killed three of us.”
&n
bsp; “Yes,” I said. “That glorious old bastard did. And now he’s going to kill the last one.”
I gave him a small push, and he staggered forward, out the window.
I left the window open and climbed back out. In a few short jumps, I was on the roof and walking calmly toward the roof access door.
* * *
“They said he jumped out the window instead of facing the courts,” I said to Bern as my reverie into the past faded.
“Yes, they did,” he said. “They closed the case the next day. Not even much of an investigation.”
“That seems to have worked out well,” I said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “I’m curious why it took you so long to return after the mission.”
“A gentleman never tells.”
I heard a giggle from the speaker. Apparently, Regina was also on the other side of the conversation.
“It seems I need to build a new training ground in here to keep these new skills,” I said. “Give me a holler when you need me again, Doc.”
* * *
I spent many hours using the fighting techniques that had been imprinted in the previous body, but many of them still slipped away. Not all of them, but some faded. I had hoped to keep them all.
I sat in the garden and read a book from the unlimited library that was held in the computer systems.
“Mathew!”
Doc Bern’s voice was frantic.
“We are under attack!”
“Get me a body,” I said.
“It is underway,” he said. “There won’t be time to acclimate. You must get into action immediately!”
“Gotcha.”
I waited for something to happen but there was nothing. Then I realized what was happening. They’d downloaded a copy, just like before. I would just have to wait until he returned.
It seemed like a long time as I paced around the gardens.
“Nothing you can do about it, old man,” I muttered to myself. Or maybe it was just a thought. It was pretty much the same thing in the machine.
Then everything went dark for a moment.
“That doesn’t bode well,” I said.
Then there were memories flooding my awareness. I staggered and dropped to the ground in front of the roses I had planted for Elena.
Everything was jumbled up and almost impossible to follow. I was here, but I was there, and at another place. After the memories stopped flooding in, I just sat there in front of the roses and tried to make any sense of what was happening. Then I realized what they had done. I had been downloaded into six different bodies at the same time, and all the memories were clamoring to be first.
“That’s enough!” my voice, or thought rang across the gardens and the memories were pushed aside. “One at a time.”
I sifted through six different versions of me as they took up the defense of the facility. After a bit, I settled on the one that had awakened as Number One.
* * *
I awoke before they could even get me pulled from the Imprinter. It was a cylindrical device that encircled the body like an old MRI machine or tanning bed...I sat up as the straps holding me to the platform tore.
“Situation, Doc.”
“A large force of JalCom troops are flooding into the base, Mathew,” he said. “I don’t know how they found us.”
“How many?”
“Hundreds!”
“Safe to say they found out what’s happening here.”
“We can’t let this fall into their hands, Mathew.”
“Load me into all the remaining Agent bodies, Doc.” I said as I strode from the chamber toward the locker room. I went straight to the number one locker and pulled clothes on quickly. I saw something in the back of the locker.
“What do I tell them?” Doc’s voice came from the comm in my ear. He was still in the control room.
“Tell them to kill anyone that ain’t us, Doc.”
I pulled the object from the locker and flipped open the straight razor with a smile.
The closest place I would find a gun would be the Armory. This would do until then.
“How long until the others are ready?”
“Number two is downloading.”
“Alright. I’m heading for the Armory,” I said. “Tell him to grab what he can and join me there.”
I was at the door in an instant.
“Damn these Agent bodies are fast,” I muttered, and sprinted down the hall toward the ramp that circled the facility.
I saw a group of our guys crouching behind the first checkpoint.
“Hi, guys!” I yelled as I leapt over them and kept running.
Someone in a tan camo uniform rounded the corner and met with the straight razor across his throat. I caught his body in one hand and drew the holstered sidearm on his right. The strap had been over it but I ripped it from his side without much problem.
His body slid to the floor, and I looked around the corner. Three more followed the guy I had killed, about halfway down the hall. I launched myself forward, careened off the far wall, and opened fire with the stolen pistol. Two of them went down before the last got off a shot. I was already halfway down the hall toward him and bouncing like a pinball from side to side. There was a tug at my leg, but I was already too close for him to do anything except die, as my fist folded around the closed razor and slammed into his chest like a pile driver.
There was an audible crunch, and he flew backward.
“Damn!” I mused at the strength behind that blow.
“Doc, tell your guys on Checkpoint One to start moving forward as I clear these out.”
“Okay, Mathew. Two is on the way.”
“Almost to the armory.”
I dropped and peeked around the next corner to see another group of JC’s between me and the armory access.
“Alright then,” I said as another form approached from behind me.
I glanced back to see Agent Two coming up the hall with what looked like a prosthetic leg gripped in his hand.
I looked at him with one eyebrow arched.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothin.’”
“What are you waitin’ for, then, Old Man?”
He sprinted around the corner faster than a human has any right to move, and I followed right behind him. He slammed into the group of four like a football player and started laying them down with the leg.
I shot one of them who looked to be about to raise his rifle.
“Heh, heh,” Two giggled.
“Sometimes I have to wonder about myself,” I said as I moved past the grinning idiot.
The JCs had killed the four OAS troopers guarding Checkpoint Two on the far side of the Armory access. Glancing back, I saw the guys I had passed earlier, now coming up the hall behind us. I motioned to the other checkpoint.
“Hold that while we get armed.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Two and I grabbed vests and slid them on. Buckling up, I saw him stick the foot through an adjustable loop.
“You’re keeping that?”
“Of course,” he said and cinched the loop down to hold the leg along his left side.
The vest had pockets for pistol and rifle magazines; I filled them all. I had holstered a pistol and slung a rifle when I turned around and saw Two cramming grenades anywhere he could put them.
“What?” he shrugged.
“I’ll take a few of those.”
We left the armory just in time to see one of our guys go down from fire on the other side of the checkpoint.
I pulled the pin and tossed one of the grenades down the hall.
The explosion was deafening in the closed area, and my ears began to ring, but I followed the grenade into the hallway with my rifle firing into the group of JC’s. They were disoriented by the grenade blast, and I made short work of them. The ringing in my ears was already easing. Regina had said the bodies healed very quickly.
We were nearing the open area at the front of the building a
nd I knew there would be a lot of JC’s in there.
“I’ll take the left,” I said to Two. “You take the right.”
“Gotcha.”
“I’ll take the middle,” A woman’s voice said as Four ran past with nothing on but a savage smile. She was carrying two Kukri knives and hadn’t even bothered with a gun.
“They’ll all be watching her,” I said and charged out of the hallway behind the naked Agent. I shot the first two on the left while they were still distracted and ejected the mag to slam another back in its place. I glanced to the right to see Two slam his rifle right through the chest of a JC.
“That’s not how you’re supposed to use that!” I yelled as my mag ran out again.
Two looked like he was giggling again.
“Shit,” I muttered and did the same thing as the JC’s got too close.
I didn’t even reach for another weapon, I just reached out and grabbed the first JC I could. Pulling him in close with my arm around his neck, I squeezed and ripped his head completely from his shoulders.
“Maybe she had the right idea all along,” I said and threw the head into the face of another. Then I was right in among them.
When my fists connected, bones broke, and organs ruptured. There were a lot of screams. Three exited the hall and started shooting from the edge of the room. Every shot meant another dead JC, and soon enough the room was completely empty except for the cooling bodies and pooling blood.
“When we head outside, everyone has to keep moving. Only way they’re going to stop us is from a distance.” I pointed toward the doors that had been blown open.
“Gotcha.”
The three answers came as one, and it was just a little creepy since I know they were all me.
“Distraction time,” Four said.
“Go for it,” I said.
She grinned and charged out the door with her bloody knives.
“I’d say I was in love, if it weren’t me,” Two said as he followed her.
“Nothing wrong with that,” I said as I went through the door, “I love me.”
* * *
It was dark outside, and we moved faster than any of the JC’s were expecting. It was the very definition of a target-rich environment, but it only took a moment for them to track us. I felt a fire in my side that seemed to fade into the background as I reached the first soldier. I had seen Four jerk once as she crossed the clearing, and Two had been hit as well.
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