The bodyguard backed off like scared a puppy. Estrella was a pissed-off witch. You don’t point pistols at people that were designed and built to fight users of special abilities. Just ask the two dead warlocks lying in the city morgue.
The patrons sitting at the bar got silent during the confrontation, probably watching it unfold like it was a sports game. There was an estimated three minutes before the doormen up front caught wind of her actions. She asked the AI wired into her brain to watch her back. Estrella was running out of time.
She placed a pistol on the table. It had old bloody fingerprints on it. Estrella pointed a finger at it. “Know where that came from, Ricardo?”
“Should I?”
“It belonged to your recent murder victim.”
“Fuck off! I ain’t no murderer—”
“Oh yes, you are, man. Her name was Lee Yu-Mi.”
“Yumi?”
“Yes, you fucking killed her.”
“Bullshit! She was weak and fell in combat.”
“She was my partner,” Estrella said angrily, “my best friend, my roommate, and a D ranked RW. We told you she wasn’t experienced enough for the mission. You didn’t listen. Yumi begged you not to send her. You didn’t listen. Yumi and I came up with a list of other teams you could have sent and were more experienced than her. Yumi was scared and felt her lack of experience would get her killed during the mission. And guess what happened? She fucking died. You’re a murderer, Ricardo; you sent her on that mission hoping she’d die.”
“You guys know the risk of our work!”
“And you knew corporate fuckwits would send you a replacement for her as part of the warranty you got on us RW units. Cheaper for you to have your weak RWs killed, and hope you get a free replacement that’s stronger and more experienced from the almighty corporation.”
Ricardo was committing warranty fraud, a murderer, and screwing underage streetwalkers. Estrella was okay with putting a bullet through his head. She grabbed Yumi’s pistol off the table, then grabbed Ricardo by the neck, using her synthetic left hand. The mechanized joints within it whizzed as she tightened her grasp onto him.
“Oh, and you didn’t pay me,” she spat and put the firearm to his head.
“I paid you!”
“You didn’t give me Yumi’s cut or send it to her crying family. You pocketed it.”
“Because half the witches I asked you to bring in alive ended up dead.”
“Because people were shooting as we walked in. What did you expect us to do, ask them nicely to stop?” She tightened the grip on his neck while bringing her gauntleted hand holding the pistol closer to his face. “I didn’t sell my humanity to Yoshida for this shit, and Yumi didn’t sell hers just to be erased, because you saw her as useless and wanted a free replacement unit.”
Ricardo smirked smugly. “You girls should have taken up pole dancing then.”
She flicked off the pistol’s safety. “Any last words before I deliver justice?”
Ricardo smiled. “Yeah, look behind you.”
Estrella’s body twitched violently. Holding onto Ricardo became an impossible task. Error screens populated her eyes and she lost the means to communicate with the nanites swimming in her body. That meant she couldn’t use her abilities, the one thing that prevented the bodyguard from taking action against her.
She fell to her knees and heard Ricardo laugh. The last status report from her AI reported that a surge of electricity entered her from behind. Her AI also failed to warn her of the ambush. She wondered if the modifications she made broke it. The energy surge was on the same level as a Taser, most likely from the doorman when that running girl ran past and told him. Next time, she won’t give people she hated the chance to utter last words.
If there was a next time.
Her hacked AI was bound to be discovered now.
Her last sight of the establishment she was in was the TV screens hanging on the wall behind the bar. The news was playing, a headline mentioned something about the jungles of Indonesia catching fire mysteriously.
Estrella’s vision went black amidst the various error screens obscuring her vision. It looked like someone powered down a computer screen.
Two
Ray
Everything looked like a blur at first, most things do when you open your eyes for the first time, after a long unexpected sleep. It took three seconds for Ray’s vision to clear, and three seconds more for him to realize he had been asleep, but at the same time not. It was hard to explain the feeling. This had been his first time doing this in years.
He rolled off the couch he had fallen asleep on. One half of his mind was surprised to notice he dozed off, and the other half was astonished that recalling what happened seemed so … real. Ray let that half shut down. He didn’t want to spoil what was to come next.
He was in his apartment out in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Evening had fallen upon the city, turning the once sunny skies that hadn’t seen rain in over a year into cloudless darkened skies devoid of the pinpricks of stars. Not that you could see the sunlight if you were on the streets below. The endless lines of towers and apartments, miles long, upstaged that.
Ray faced the window grimacing. His place, on the 80th floor, never provided a room with a view, unless watching other high-rise structures close by was your cup of tea. It wasn’t for Ray. He missed being able to look out a window and have sunlight enter his place during the day. It’s like the people that built the city didn’t want anyone to see sunlight.
Sunny LA my ass, Ray hadn’t seen direct sunlight in weeks.
The view of the city in the window got obscured by the reflection of a woman. She approached him from behind. The white and silky gown she wore didn’t do much to cover her bra, panties and garter belt set, and stockings, and he didn’t care. Her golden-brown, light curly hair draped over her shoulders. She brushed it away before wrapping her arms around his body, resting her chin on his shoulder.
“Don’t you have to work in the morning?” Arianna said to him.
He reached down, holding Arianna’s soft hands as she continued the embrace from behind. “Don’t you have a flight to catch?”
“Yeah.”
She pressed her pink lips against his neck. Ray wasn’t a fan of neck kissing, neither was Arianna. This was her way of saying turn the fuck around so we can do this the right way. So, he did, and then they did things the right way, a two-minute long make-out session. It was just how he remembered they did it. He felt the increased blood flow into his penis.
Arianna tilted her head away from him, a gap formed, separating the lips of the two lovers. “Come to bed, Ray.”
Ray glanced behind Arianna, looking at the travel luggage bag that remained open. It was free of clothes. “Shouldn’t you be home, packing?”
“It’s just a business trip to the European Union,” Arianna said. “In and out, don’t need to bring much.”
She pushed on Ray’s chest, and he fell backward onto his bed. A grin spread across his face; he always forgot how strong those skinny arms of hers could be. She crawled over the top of him on all fours. Arianna’s opened gown made it easy for her to peel it off her body like she was shedding skin. A push of a magnet keeping her bra connected released her pink-nippled breasts from their captivity. Ray slipped his trousers off, releasing his erect penis from its prison.
He looked up at Arianna’s natural curves, now exposed to the flashing neon glow from outside, illumining her body as each of her garments come off. One by one, she flung them in the corner. She hovered above his penis, her knees skinning into the fabric of the sheet and mattress. Arianna looked down at him, smiling and giggling with excitement, this was going to be their last night of fun before she went away.
Ray’s world froze, even the lights outside that been painting her pale body with various tones of pink and purple neon colors stopped, as did his own body. The entire world was put on pause, and he fucking hated it.
“Yo! Holmes,
” the sound of a male voice spoke. “You got an incoming phone call, ese.”
Ray groaned internally. “Ah, man … Fuck!”
The apartment vanished in a burst of light. Arianna’s idle body, the bed, even Ray’s body that was seconds away from penetration deep beyond her beautiful pussy hair.
Ray’s eyes opened, this time for real. He was reclining on a chair, in a room with walls made of concrete, shaking with vibrations from the loud music played from beyond it. He was back in the real world and out of the world of his past.
Ahead of him stood Garcia wearing a tank top with an unlit joint in his mouth, tattoos of pentagrams decorated his muscular arms. Ray shook his head at the telepathic warlock who had interrupted his psytrip session as he reached for his phone stuffed in his business suit pocket.
“You like?” Garcia asked him, holding a palm size memory sphere for him to look at.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll take it.”
Garcia tossed the sphere, and it arced toward Ray. He caught it with his free hand, while the other held his phone still ringing its tone. Before he answered the call, or checked to see who was calling, Ray accessed his banking information with a payment app. Garcia did the same with his phone. A screen appeared asking Ray to pay 120 Alliance dollars for the memory sphere. His thumb tapped the confirm button. Garcia smiled when his phone beeped the confirmation message.
“Got a two for one deal going on now too,” Garcia said. “Wanna go back to high school and fuck the prom queen again?”
“Never did that.”
“Whatever man.” Garcia put his phone away and held his hand out. A cigarette lighter flew into it from the counter. “Anything from your past, I’ll recall for you.”
“I’m fine with this for now.”
Ray held the phone to his face, the real cause of the interruption to the service he was paying for. The caller ID from the blaring phone displayed the name Steven Jarrod and his Los Angeles area code number. The editor-in-chief of the Alliance Star newspaper. Leave it to a late-night call from your boss to blow your memory recall experience.
He thumbed the answer call button. His transparent plastic phone turned into the image of a middle-aged man with a fading hairline. “Ray, what are you up to?”
“Stuff,” Ray replied, shrugging.
He’d rather not say. This was the Pause, Play, Rewind. Most people that came here were there to record new memories and then save them, not recall them. The telepathic women faking orgasms in the rooms at the far side of the hall could attest to that.
Steven, on his end of the phone call, aimed the camera on his phone at a computer screen for Ray to see. What Ray saw was a news broadcast from the European Union, depicting police and ambulances bathing a hotel with their siren lights. The text crawl on the screen was written in German.
It made Ray’s heart thump with fear.
“Terrorists hit the EU today. Some hotel in Munich got attacked,” Steven said bringing the camera back to face him. “You got any contacts down there?”
“None,” Ray said, his mind drifting to Arianna. She went to Munich on business. “Except for—”
“Arianna, your girlfriend, right?”
“Yeah … Fuck.”
“I’m sure she’s okay, she works for Yoshida, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Forget that story about the jungle fires in Indonesia. That shit’s old news. We need to be the first to report this.”
“Are you sure? My source is certain an explosion started those jungle fires.”
“And even if they were, he’ll never get past the Federation’s veil of censorship to confirm that. Fuck the Indonesia story, find out who these EU terrorists are.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Call, email, text every fucking contact you have in the EU. Give me everything you can.”
Ray stood up to leave, keeping the phone’s camera on him, hoping the concrete wall behind wouldn’t give away where he truly was. “Understood.”
“Every fucking paper and news outlet in the Alliance will be on this soon, so make it fast!”
His call ended, and the phone returned to its natural form, a rectangular transparent object. Ray slipped both the phone and memory sphere into his pockets. If he wanted to return to that steamy night he and Arianna shared, he’d need to present it to a telepath, like Garcia. The Pause, Play, Rewind was full of them, IW class witches or warlocks that used their special gifts to provide a service.
Walking out from the room, down the narrow halls, Ray could hear behind closed doors others paying a telepath to recall old memories or make new ones. Some people broke down, when they suddenly found themselves back in time, reunited with loved ones that had long been dead. Others wept tears of joy when they relived happy moments that had been forgotten.
With a few extra dollars, you could even live in memories that weren’t yours. The memory sphere wasn’t exclusive to the brain it originally came from. Arianna was known for gifting him memory spheres she bought, so Ray could sense the emotions she felt when they went on dates. Why tell someone you love them when you could have them go through what you felt about them? Just pay two hundred dollars for the service to extract the memories and transfer them to the sphere.
A warlock doorman stood with their pentagram tattooed arms crossed when Ray approached the exit. He shouted to Ray as he reached for the handle. “Yo.”
Ray faced the warlock doorman; he was pointing at a box. It was a sad looking box, made of haggard cardboard full of rifles, pistols and shotguns. A sign on the wall above it read ‘no weapons beyond this point.’
“Don’t forget your gun,” said the warlock doorman.
Ray shrugged. “Didn’t bring one.”
“The fuck? You crazy man? Never leave your home without a gun! Even us powered folks need ‘em.”
“I’m from district three,” Ray said. “Never needed it and it’s not that late.”
“Fuckin’ district three humans, I swear. One day, you’re going to regret not keeping a gun on you in the streets.”
Ray grinned and left. Outside, the humid evening air of Los Angeles hit Ray in sync with the sea of neon around him, like the Pause, Play, Rewind sign above the door he walked away from.
“Get your fucking hands up!” The voice of law enforcement personnel yelled in his direction.
Ray’s heartbeat sped up. Two policemen had their pistols drawn, approaching the building he left. Darkness had fallen in Los Angeles, and Ray hadn’t realized he was inside so long. If he did, he would have left earlier. Or brought a gun with him.
The streets weren’t safe for him at night. They weren’t safe for anyone, honestly.
Three
Estrella
When Estrella awoke, she found herself on a medical table. Her slender body was stripped naked, and she lay back down with her bare chest and trimmed pubic hair facing up to the ceiling. Her fusion of state-of-the-art technology, and what remained of her humanity, was exposed for anyone to see including the barcodes tattooed into her right thigh.
She went to move her arms, but restricting bindings kept them in place, the same with her legs. Repeated attempts to break free yielded the same result, her breasts shook with each jerk of her body while seeking escape.
She couldn’t see much of the room, just the ceiling covered in darkness, and the logo of the Yoshida Corporation on the wall, barely visible. She tried activating her night vision, but an error screen denied her. It informed Estrella she wasn’t connected with her AI, and that she should report to a service tech to have it looked at.
Yeah, a little hard to do that right now … she stared at the bindings keeping her arms and legs to the table. They left Estrella with little choice but to lie back. She felt the soft fabric of her long black hair press against the flesh of her back, right down to her ass. It was that long.
“Ah, welcome back real witch unit seven, eight, three, nine, two.”
She moved her face from l
eft to right looking for the source of the voice. She found it; the speakers on the wall while a mechanical arm lowered from the ceiling and slowly inched toward her face. A maintenance AI.
“How long was I out for?” she asked the ceiling arm.
“Approximately two days, six hours, seven minutes,” the maintenance AI said.
She growled at that statement. “I can’t access my AI, Reeves.”
“We have removed your AI.”
“I can see that. Why?”
“It will be replaced shortly with a new one as there was some damage done to it, likely because of unauthorized modifications which enabled you to willfully assault a human.”
She grinned. “I may or may not have been responsible for that.”
“That is the consensus of the audit recently conducted on you. You are under a great deal of stress. You will be reassigned.”
“I didn’t ask for a fucking new post!”
“We at Yoshida Corporation value the hard work and contributions all employees and RWs make and understand that at times things may become stressful in this competitive business world we live in.”
Blah, blah, she thought, it was the copy and paste company statement for situations like this. “Oh, here we go,” she said as the arm made its way to the back of her head.
It peeled off the skin on her left temple, giving it access to the wires and parts that made her AI and neural implants work. What it did next, she couldn’t tell, only hear, and what she heard was the buzzing sound of drills, and the pulling and inserting of computer parts. She couldn’t feel it; the maintenance AI had deactivated her sense of feeling at that point, her whole body turned numb. It felt great all things considered, the nasty draft blowing against her and tickling her exposed nipples couldn’t annoy her anymore.
Cyber Witch Page 2