by J. N. Chaney
Copyrighted Material
Intrinsic Immortality Copyright © 2019 by Variant Publications
Book design and layout copyright © 2019 by JN Chaney
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing.
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Intrinsic Immortality
Book 2 in the Sol Arbiter Series
J.N. Chaney
Jia Shen
Book Description
In a world where the human mind can be given a synthetic body, the line between man and machine is blurred.
Despite the authority of the Sol Federation, major corporations hold most of the power. When the head of one such company, Chief Executive Julian Huxley, is killed, his body is left undiscovered for over three years.
Arbiter Tycho Barrett is sent to investigate the executive's death, but what he finds reveals more than he could have imagined.
Now, Tycho must search for an android who was once human, forcing him to question everything around him.
There are secrets here, written in blood and polymer, and they threaten to fundamentally change mankind's place in the universe.
After all, if so much of the body can be replaced by wires and circuitry, what does that say for the human soul?
Get ready to experience the second volume in the bestselling Sol Arbiter series. If you're a fan of Altered Carbon, Dredd, or Blade Runner, you'll love this engrossing cyberpunk epic.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
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1
The wall in front of us wasn’t all that high, but the active denial cannons mounted along the top swiveled ominously, scanning the surrounding area for any threat from rival corporations, or even one of Earth’s legitimate governments. Here on the Moon, there were plenty of both to contend with, and they often overlapped in dangerous ways.
We were there to arrest some important people who didn’t want to be arrested. That’s a dicey proposition under the best of circumstances. If anyone up here started shooting, the consequences could spiral of control before anyone had a chance to even ask themselves if it was worth it. The man beside me was probably thinking along the same lines.
Senior Arbiter Byron was wary, holding his combat rifle in the ready position and eyeing the craters surrounding us. The terrain on Luna, like most moons, was ripe for ambush. Shadows were pure black, and no atmosphere meant no sound to tip you off. There was a very real chance that at any moment a hundred killers could slip from the dark and overrun us. Between Byron's demeanor and the automated weapons over our heads, I got the impression that someone was about to die regardless of whether it made any sense.
He gave the order. “They’re not answering. Do it.”
I inserted my skeleton key into the corporate security gate, immediately bypassing their defenses. The outer airlock slid open and a cultured female voice said, “Welcome to the Lua Campus, home of Huxley Industries. Let’s conquer the future!” Somewhere inside, an alarm would already be sounding. They couldn’t stop us from entering without starting a war the company wouldn’t win. That didn’t mean they couldn’t kill us.
I keyed up my dataspike and told our car’s AI to park inside. We followed behind it and once we were in, the outer airlock closed and a timer started. I caught myself absently thumbing the safety on my rifle before glancing to Byron and noticing he’d already disengaged his.
The timer hit zero and the inner airlock slowly opened.
As we stepped through into the campus, I had the distinct impression I was walking into enemy territory.
The Lua Campus of Huxley Industries is legally a territory of Earth, but from the blatantly hostile stares and tense body language all around me I might as well have been on some outer world, just waiting for someone to lose their nerve. That was when the shooting always started.
That didn’t usually happen here, though. People didn’t just start shooting each other, not even when they really wanted to. Here on Luna, the potential fallout of a clash made people particularly cautious about killing anyone. Still, walking through the Lua Campus didn’t feel much different from walking through the dark corridors of Tower 7 on Venus just before the first sniper spotted us.
Byron stepped up to the elevator and hit the button, then flashed me a look that said be ready for anything.
I gave a nod. We entered the elevator, leaving our escorts staring as the doors closed, and rode up to the top in a spartan silence. Byron stared at the walls as the elevator ascended, lost in whatever thoughts he wasn’t choosing to share with me.
The elevator stopped, the doors slid open, and we found ourselves looking down the barrels of cutting-edge weapon prototypes in the hands of several nervously assertive guards. Byron looked at them like puppies that had just made the potentially fatal mistake of waking the big dog from his nap.
A well-dressed exec strolled over, said, “Stand down, gentlemen,” in an almost-bored tone, then looked at Byron and me. “Yes?”
The guards did as they were told, lowering their weapons and backing off slightly. We stepped out of the elevator, and Byron brought up a holographic image for the exec to look at.
The man leaned in to glance at it then shook his head. Along the top of the image, I could see the words ARBITRATION WARRANT. “I don’t understand.”
“We’re Sol Federation Arbiters. We have an arrest warrant for three of your executives. Combatives A.I. Division Chair Anton Slotin, Ballistics Development Chair Stefan Graves, and Generative A.I. Division Chair Lucien Klein.”
The exec smiled. I don’t know what it was exactly, but something in his face creeped me out, like a rictus grin on a living head. “Whatever the fine is, the Federation will lose much more in the lawsuit that follows,” he said. “Even if you win the lawsuit. I
t’s just not worth it.”
Senior Arbiter Byron Harewood stepped closer then, intentionally violating the man’s personal space. Byron was a dark-skinned man with a neatly trimmed goatee and mustache, and eyes so serious you could easily mistake him for always being always angry. As large and as heavily armed as he was, this would have frightened most people into panicky compliance.
“Do I look like a civilian to you? These are federal charges.”
The exec shrugged, then held his wrist up to his mouth. “Shelly, this is Nguyen. Could you send Anton, Stefan, and Lucien down here please? There’s a misunderstanding they need to clear up. No, they’ll make their two o’clock.”
Byron frowned. He wasn’t the sort of man to put up with any disrespect. “These are criminal warrants. They won’t be going to any two o’clock meeting.”
The exec just shrugged again. He didn’t seem to believe it, or if he did, didn’t seem to care. To a corporate power, the forces wielded by any nation state in the solar system were little more than a nuisance. The Sol Federation was supposed to be the exception, but we hadn’t yet convinced every company of that fact.
One of the guards stepped forward—the one most interested in getting a promotion, I would imagine. “I’m going to have to ask you to step back, sir. Sir, step back.”
He put a hand on Byron’s chest. My partner turned, swiped the hand away with his right arm, and tossed the guard to the floor in a joint lock so quickly and easily I didn’t even see how it was done. The man’s face went a white, and he started tapping Byron’s arm with his free hand in an absurd attempt to admit defeat. Byron waited for the message to sink in before letting him go, and the guard curled into himself with a look of shock and pain. Ngyuen frowned. No promotion for you.
A corporate campus is like another world. The guards are used to being obeyed, but as far as we were concerned, they had no authority. That was the theory at least, but authority is nothing more than superior force. Taken all together, did the guards have enough force to assert their authority? They seemed to think they might. The only thing holding them back so far was their orders. They looked to their boss for some kind of guidance, but he wasn’t about to tell them to start a war.
The executive turned to us, and his smug little smile became even more self-assured. “Unnecessary brutality? Well. This will all be resolved in court eventually. May I have your names and badge numbers?”
Byron simply ignored the man, and the three men we were there to arrest came strolling down the corridor with even more security in tow. Anton Slotin and Stefan Graves both held back upon seeing us, but Lucien Klein came barreling forward.
He was a large man, with a broad and somewhat fleshy face. Neither fat nor muscular, he gave the impression of someone who frequently yelled at waiters for not getting his food just right. His skin was flushed, and his eyes flashed angrily with what he probably thought of as a dominant look.
“What’s going on here? I have a call with… Oh.”
Nguyen gave the man his creepy smile. “They have a warrant. Something about weapons trafficking. Is there something you need me to tell the Board?”
From the look on his face, Lucein Klein had seen this coming—but only in his nightmares, where the consequences he had never experienced before in his entire life somehow caught up with him. He sputtered for a few seconds, then turned away suddenly as if to bolt. I shifted my weight and bent slightly at the knees. If he tried to run, we would have to put him down on the ground one way or another, but Nguyen caught him just under his arm.
“Come on now, Lucien. You know you need to do this. We’ll send the lawyers, and you’ll be back in time to make your two o'clock.”
It was 12:15.
Byron had apparently had enough, because he spun Lucien Klein around and manacled him before he could say another word. Byron’s teeth were clenched, and his eyes glared fiercely as if daring the guards. They wanted to do something, but Nguyen wasn’t giving the order. If they made a wrong move, I could easily have seen Byron shooting a few of them just to make a point.
Why is he doing this? He wasn’t there with me in Tower 7, and he didn’t lose anyone to Marcenn’s androids. This was just an arrest, one part of a larger investigation. Why all this anger?
I thought of saying something but decided it should wait for later. Instead I stepped forward and manacled Anton Slotin and Stefan Graves over their loud and indignant objections. Phrases like “Do you know who I am?” were thrown around, along with a few classic variations like “You’ll be checking ship registrations somewhere in the Oort Cloud.”
I wouldn’t have manacled them, because it isn’t exactly standard procedure on the rare occasion we arrest a corporate executive, but in this scenario I couldn’t avoid it. Byron had already manacled Lucien Klein. If it was necessary for one of them it was necessary for all of them, or our justification for restraining Klein went out the window.
As for Nguyen, he kept on smiling, probably just as happy to see a few power rivals get taken away by Arbiters as he would be when the company won its lawsuit against us.
“Don’t worry about a thing.” He smiled, but there wasn’t a hint of sincerity or even sympathy for his colleagues in that soulless grin. “You’ll be out in an hour or less. Hang tight for the lawyers. None of this will change a thing.”
I wanted to hit him, irritated with his lack of respect for the law. For any kind of broader society. For anything but the bottom line, and his own swift climb to the top of the corporate ladder. I could have driven my knuckles into his teeth and it would have done no good, so I didn’t do anything. I just turned away, nudging my prisoners into the elevator ahead of me.
Their eyes kept darting between Byron and me, as if they were afraid we might kill them all at any moment. Arbiters are frightening to the average civilian, an image we cultivate intentionally to cover up for the fact that we don’t have the authority to commit acts of violence without consequences. As we left the elevator and walked back through the busy main floor, they looked so hopeful I almost felt bad for them. They all seemed to expect some kind of rescue, perhaps by Huxley security commandos, but if it hadn’t happened yet then it was obviously never going to happen.
The Board of Huxley Industries had cut them loose, which meant it had probably already decided to use them as scapegoats. Someone at the company had given the order to sell illegal heavy weaponry to August Marcenn, and someone had to pay for it. It might as well be these three as anyone else.
Once we were in the car, with the prisoners safely stowed in the back, the car pulled out to return us to the waiting shuttle. We couldn’t see outside unless we used the screen, but Byron preferred to have an overhead tactical map displayed at all times. I watched our green dot crawl across thin blue topographic rings. I turned to him to speak, Byron seemed to know what I was going to say.
“Either spit it out or lock it up, Barrett.”
He may smile occasionally, but it looks more like a quiet grimace. It was often hard for me to tell whether he what he said was rhetorical or genuine, so I’d made a habit of waiting a few beats before responding. That seemed to work most of the time.
“You’re a Junior Arbiter,” said Byron. “Emphasis on the junior. I’m the Senior Arbiter. I call the shots.”
“Don’t you think…?”
He held a hand up. “I do. That’s exactly the point, Barrett. It’s my job to think, because I’m the Senior Arbiter in this drop-team. Your job is to do. That’s a different and necessary job. You follow my lead wherever it goes, and you don’t hesitate or question it. Not out loud, not to yourself. Don’t even dream about it. Are we clear or unclear?”
“Of course, we’re clear. You should have used more tact, that’s all.”
He frowned. “More tact? I don’t know how you handled things with Gabriel Anderson, but I call the shots. The amount of tact I decide to use is up to me, and you will follow that decision to the best of your ability, and then some.”
; He was coming on so strong, I decided it must be personal. He must be under the impression that I was challenging his authority, and he wasn’t about to let that go.
I held up both hands in mock surrender. “Yes, Sir. Just trying to learn the correct procedures.”
He nodded sagely. “The correct procedure is: You arrest who I tell you to arrest, shoot who I tell you to shoot, and let me worry about how much tact to use.”
“Copy that, Sir. Understood.”
I lay back in my seat and closed my eyes. The easiest way out of this conversation was to disengage and let him feel like the bigger man.
Byron snorted quietly. From his point of view, I was just another Junior Arbiter who needed guidance from a more experienced veteran like himself.
After everything I’d seen on Venus.
Until my next promotion, I might as well be a raw recruit on his first jump. If I didn’t like it, I was free to go on not liking it for all the good it would do.
2
The ongoing investigation into what had happened on Venus led us to the rarest of all combat drops. Our target was on Earth, in a secluded place far from both the Equatorial Desert and the Arctic Farm Zones. Nestled among blue-green trees, in one of the last remaining wildernesses, was the private estate of Huxley Industry’s Chief Executive, Julian Huxley. Byron and I moved through the dense forest in heavy armor, on our way to pay Julian a visit. Not surprisingly, our target’s android proxies had their own opinions about that.