It was hard to believe that someone would’ve been able to sneak up on her without her knowing, especially a lab tech with no combat experience. Hell, I had my doubts that I could sneak up on her, even with full chameleon gear and the best Gambits credits could buy. But if she’d been caught by surprise by one of the security guards, why hadn’t they taken her into custody?
She held a small, finger-sized cylinder in her palm. I didn’t recognize the gear, which wasn’t necessarily strange in and of itself; there was plenty of gear I couldn’t afford, some things were outside my price range and skill level—not that I’d ever say that to Cary. The table was covered with data pads and various pieces of lab equipment, nothing to indicate why she was unconscious on the floor.
Then I saw something that gave me pause. On the far side of the lab I saw two naked shells, both featureless and hairless. One was obviously female, small breasts, and milk-white skin with absolutely no blemishes at all. The male was exactly the same. They didn’t look like any shells I’d ever seen.
The female’s eyes twitched.
“The fuck?”
I kept my eyes on the woman’s face for a several long moments. The eyes twitched again, never opening, but moving like she was having a dream of something. They twitched again, then the female shell’s body convulsed, as if it was having a seizure.
“For fuck sake!” I backed away from the table. I couldn’t take my eyes of the shell, even after it stopped convulsing. I scanned the lab, searching for something…anything that would explain what the hell was going on.
“Cary!” I shouted. “You need to get up!”
A flashing screen along the wall caught my attention. The outline of two heads, red and orange and yellow lines flowing from one outline to the other. It reminded me of a data download graphic, complete with a percentage meter at the bottom of the screen.
I zoomed in with my optics to read the number. Ninety-five percent.
I walked around the table to the two shells. I leaned forward, inspecting the featureless one next to the female. I could see its veins underneath its skin.
“Creepy.” I reached out and touched it, expecting to feel a rough shell job, instead it actually felt like human skin. It was smoother than any skin I’d ever touched before, but it didn’t feel synthetic, it felt real.
A tactile feedback warning flashed over my optics, my exo-suit alerting me to possible intrusion. I took my finger away from the shell and the alert vanished. “What the hell?”
An alert chimed from the screen with two heads. The outlines flashed green, and all the data lines vanished, replaced by a text panel that read, TRANSFERENCE COMPLETE. An alarm sounded, and the lights in the lab began to flash amber.
“Son of a bitch.”
I moved back over to Cary. She was still unconscious. I thought about leaving her there. I had a feeling this entire job had been one giant con. I looked around the lab again, searching for anything that looked like a neural interface, and saw nothing. Not even a standard connection.
“Fuck it,” I said, kneeling beside Cary. “I’m going to feel really really bad about this.” I slapped her. “Cary! Wake up!”
Her eyes flickered.
“Cary!”
Slowly, they opened. They stared up at me, confused and dazed. “Gage?”
“Cary! What the hell happened?”
“Gage, they’re coming. We’re blown unless…”
“Unless?”
“Unless you work with me for a change.”
She had to be kidding, but the look on her face told me she wasn’t.
She continued, “I can’t explain, but if you can bring yourself to trust me, we might just both survive this.”
I wasn’t quite in line with the do-or-die scenario she seemed to be associating our current situation to, but I could see she was dead serious about it. Even so, we’d been opponents for so long, and with how sideways this whole mission had gone, I still wasn’t entirely convinced.
“Trust you.”
“Gage, listen. They’re coming. We don’t have time. Either you’re in or you’re not. But this could be the biggest score of both our lives.”
I helped her sit up. “Fine. What’s the plan?”
“You run,” she said, pointing to the naked female shell, “and you take her with you. Just do me a favor would you? Take the other one out for me. Just lay it on the floor there. I’ll take care of the rest.”
She had to be joking. I didn’t see any blood or bumps on her forehead, but my first thought was head trauma. She wasn’t making any sense. “What? Why are we dicking around with some sims? Cary, do you have the tech or not?”
“I have it, but you don’t understand. The shells are everything, Gage. You don’t…you don’t understand what they are. Just…just do what I ask, okay? We’re out of time.”
I stared into her eyes, trying to see if there was any bullshit there. The bio-readouts I was getting off her suggested everything about her was fine. I like to think I’m a pretty good judge of character in most instances. It’s not very often anyone pulls one over on me, with the exception of Cary of course.
I took a long breath. I didn’t have anything to lose. I nodded.
* * *
The shell was heavy. I could literally watch my exo-suit’s power indicator drop as I ran through the lab. I didn’t backtrack, the guards were busy trying to cut through the doors, but my downloaded building schematics told me there was a secure garage on the far side of the lab. Now the question was whether or not there’d be a car to jack. I knew damn well I wouldn’t be able to carry this shell and fly at the same time.
It still didn’t make any sense to me why I had to take this damn shell with me. Shells were a dime a dozen. Granted, none of the shells I’d ever encountered looked or felt so human, but I chalked it up to amazing innovation, but not, strictly speaking, ground breaking.
The run through the lab took longer than I thought. The entire time I weaved through the crisscrossing corridors, I couldn’t help but watch the power level on my exo-suit drop lower and lower.
I turned a final corner and saw the entrance to the garage. With another flick of my wrist, I sent a small disk twirling through the air. It smacked again the opaque glass door with a click and, a split second later, exploded. It wasn’t a large blast, just enough to shatter the glass. With the entire security team working to get through the doors on the other end of the lab I figured the time for subtlety was long past.
There were two cars in the garage, a small two-seat sprinter and a longer four-passenger cruiser. The sprinter would’ve been faster, but Cary damn well wouldn’t fit in that with the shell taking up the passenger seat. I ran a quick hack on the car’s simplistic security system and pulled the passenger door open.
I practically dropped the shell on her—its—head getting it into the backseat. Damn near threw my back out too, even with the exo-suit’s enhanced power.
I slid in behind the wheel and worked through the startup sequence. The four repulsors on the underside of the car lit up; I could see their blue glow on the gray pavement around the car. “All right baby, what’d’ya got?”
The exterior doors were shut, but two more flicks of my wrist sent two more Wreckers flying and a moment later the floor to ceiling glass wall exploded. I threw the throttle forward, and the car shot out of the garage.
* * *
The first sign I knew I was fucked was when I didn’t see any sign of Cary. The second was the three Neurovation thugs stepping out from the service entrance on the far side of the roof. Alarm tones in the car’s cab started singing. I saw the reason almost immediately, and as soon as I did, I knew it was too late.
“Shit,” I growled, throwing the throttle forward. The skycar’s engines thrummed and whined as they powered up. I pulled back on the controls, bringing the car’s nose up. I caught a split-second glimpse of the security guard bringing up his wrist rocket, then saw the flash as the weapon fired.
The explo
sion rocked the car, throwing me sideways and almost completely out my couch. My forehead smacked against the dash and stars danced in my vision as the world spun outside the car. It crashed back down to the roof, metal groaning and glass flying. I ducked, feeling the tiny pieces spray across my back and neck.
I glanced to the back seat where the shell was sliding like a passed out drunk. Even as the car spun across the roof—the world outside nothing but a blur—the sight of Cary in the back startled me.
What. The. Fuck?
“Gage!” Cary’s voice came through my direct link.
“Cary?”
The car tipped up, the front pointing at the stars, and everything froze for a moment. I braced myself against the dash and seat. Hampson seemed to close in around me as the shuttle slid over the edge, like the whole damn thing was going to swallow me whole.
“Well fuck me.” I dropped into the pilot couch, jamming my finger into the ignition override button, trying to jump start the repulsors as they flickered on and off, damaged by the blast. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
“Gage, get out of there!” Cary shouted.
“You know, that’s a great idea, Cary. Why didn’t I think of that? Sure, I’ll just get out, one sec okay? I’m kind of in the middle of falling to my death at the moment.”
The repulsors flared again, igniting briefly before winking out again. I tongued the molar at the back of my mouth, triggering a stream of andrenal-stims. Energy and clarity flooded my body, and time around me seemed to slow. My fingers danced across the cars’ control panel, searching through menus, trying to bypass whatever hiccup was preventing the repulsors from kicking on.
“Come on, come on!” I swiped through the last menu, rerouted the primary power flow, and the flashing red icons on the screen switched to green.
“Yes!”
The repulsors fired, lifting me out of the couch. I laughed, weightless, looking back at the shell. Cary hung there like she was floating in space, as calm and peaceful as a sleeping baby, but she no longer looked like a shell—she looked like a real flesh and blood human being.
More alarms sounded as the repulsors failed again. Multiple red icons flashed across the cars’ main displays, warning me of dropouts and disconnects throughout the system. The altitude warnings and proximity alarms blaring in my ears were extremely helpful.
I pushed everything to the back of my mind, forcing myself to focus on the only thing that mattered, keeping the car from smashing into the pavement three hundred meters below. The car’s internal matrix was attempting to solve all the issues at once, effectively putting Band-Aids on gushing wounds, instead of closing off the one that was most life threatening.
The repulsors needed power, but it wasn’t like I could just step outside and ask someone for a spare battery.
“But you have power,” I said as the realization hit me. The power readout in my virtual vision said I had twenty-seven percent left. There was no way of knowing whether it’d be enough to fire the repulsors, my exo-suit wasn’t designed to power a car. I pulled back my jacket sleeve, exposing the bottom of the exo-suit around my wrists. I pulled one of the charging wires free while frantically searching for a port on the dash. There had to be one.
Two hundred meters.
“Come on you bastard,” I said, ripping back the console. “You’ve got to be here somewhere.”
One-hundred and seventy-five meters.
I reached under the dash and ripped off the trim just to the left of the control stick. Using the boosted strength from my exo-suit, it almost took no effort at all to expose the car’s innards, but every second I burned strength was that much less power I’d have to shunt to the repulsors.
One-hundred and fifty meters.
My fingers brushed over the internal components. I tried to visualize each part, seeing with my fingers instead of my eyes.
One-hundred and twenty-five meters.
“Gage!” Cary’s voice in my head again.
“What?”
“You need to—”
“Listen, I don’t mean to be rude, but unless you know how to power-hack a C74 Stallion, then I’d appreciate it if you’d just shut up for once!”
My fingers brushed against a small round outlet. There! I had to basically fold myself in half to get the cable into the outlet. I gritted my teeth as I stretched the cable out, praying the damn thing wouldn’t just snap in half.
“Gage, I’m not going to make it to the roof. Just run, okay? Just run and keep running. It’s going to be okay. I’ll explain later.”
Explain later? What the hell was she talking about?
The transmission terminated.
“Cary?” I shouted, yanking the controls to the right, swerving around a yellow skycab.
She didn’t answer.
“Cary?”
Nothing.
I glanced over my shoulder and saw a brilliant ball of fire curling up from the Neurovation building, now fading into the distance. The explosion was right where the lab had been. The police had shown up now; their spotlights swept across the exterior of the building, illuminating the smoking holes made by the battle. I zoomed in on the roof, hoping maybe, just maybe, Cary would appear there. Every fiber in my chemically enhanced body yearned to turn the car around and head back. She had to be okay.
Cary can’t die.
She’s too good for that.
She’s too stubborn to die.
I slapped the controls. “Son of a bitch!”
All right, get ahold of yourself, Gage. We still have to get off this rock. You’re flying around with a billion credits worth of stolen tech in your backseat that looks like a dead mercenary and you’re the only other suspect the cops are going to link to the theft. If they could tie me to the theft, they could tie me to Cary’s death, which meant I’d be on the hook for murder, with no way to explain my way out of it.
First things first, kill the transponder, then reprogram it to broadcast a clean beacon. That would keep the cops off me for a while, but it didn’t solve the problem of Cary’s dead twin in the backseat.
I wondered briefly if a shell could actually be dead or not. Had it ever really been alive? If it could live, would it have a soul? Did that even matter? I couldn’t just dump it, if this kind of tech ever got into the open…I didn’t even want to think about it. A DNI that could literally turn a shell into an identical copy of someone, the implications were—
“Aaah!”
The scream made my heart stop.
I spun as the naked shell of Cary jerked up-right, grabbing the headrests of both seats in front of her. Her eyes were wide in terror, her breath coming in heavy ragged gasps.
“What the fuck?” I shouted, jerking the car straight as it drifted out of the lane.
A warning horn from a passing cargo hauler vibrated through my chest as it passed, the driver flipping me off, but then he hesitated when he saw what was in my back seat. His eyes lingered on the shell’s body for a long moment, before flicking back to me, a smile creeping across his face. He nodded, then waved as he moved off.
I glanced over my shoulder, eyes locking with Cary. She closed her mouth, inhaling slowing through her nose. I didn’t even know shells could breathe. After a couple minutes, her breathing relaxed. As her blue eyes stared into mine, the fear and confusion seemed to fade, replaced by—almost—serenity.
I couldn’t help but raise my eyebrow at her. It? “Uh…” I didn’t know what to say.
“That fucking hurt.” She looked down at herself and realized for the first time she was naked. She covered her breasts and shot me an accusatory look.
I scoffed. “Seriously?”
Her hands rubbed a spot between her breasts.
I shifted to face front again, eyeing her in the rearview. “Are you…?”
“I’m okay. I think.”
“Cary?”
She nodded and swallowed. “I’m thirsty as hell.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know;
I’m sorry,” Cary said. “Can I borrow your jacket?”
I slipped it off and handed it back. She put it on, then climbed into the front seat next to me.
“That’s not just any shell is it?” I asked, pretty sure I already knew the answer.
“No.” Cary ran her fingers through her hair, only a few centimeters long. “This isn’t a shell at all. Not the way we understand them, anyway. Hell, I barely understand them, and I have the entirety of the program in my memory. They programmed it into this brain. I’ve got it all.”
“And that new neural interface?”
“Wasn’t an interface, it was a way to transfer consciousness between host and copy. They weren’t just after a new weapon. They were after immortality. Can you imagine the things the corporations would do with that kind of power? The DNA replication process alone is revolutionary.”
“They copied your DNA? That’s why the shell morphed to look like you?”
“Yes. When I touched the shell back in the lab, it triggered the replication protocol. That’s why I had you touch the other shell. When they dig out the lab, they’ll find two bodies with our DNA signatures. As far as they know, we’re really and truly dead.”
I said nothing, the ramifications tumbling through my mind.
“We’re free, Gage,” she said then, and she reached over to take my hand. I glanced up at her, saw her lips curve. She really was prettier when she smiled.
“But, so…you’re a copy of Cary?”
“No, Gage, this is me now.”
* * * * *
Josh Hayes Bio
A retired police officer, Josh Hayes is author of numerous short stories and co-author of the popular Terra Nova Chronicles with Richard Fox.
Ever since he watched his first Star Trek episode (TNG not OS), Josh has loved science fiction. Watching it, reading it, and writing it. He grew up a military brat, affording him the opportunity to meet several different types of people, in multiple states and foreign countries. After graduating high school, he joined the United States Air Force and served for six years, before leaving military life to work in law enforcement. During his time with the Wichita Police Department, Josh served as a patrol officer, bicycle unit, community policing officer, and was an assistant bomb technician on the Bomb Squad.
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