“Real cream requires a farm and cows. All of that banned in order to reduce our carbon footprint in the world.”
Curious, Estrella.
Estrella spooned another mouth full of ice cream before the humidity finished it for her. What is it?
Reviewing your recent conversation with Piper.
She continued spooning the delicious dessert into her mouth as the silent AI chat went on. You invading my privacy now?
She knew your dietary preferences.
Yeah, didn’t I tell everyone that?
You did not mention it to Piper. How did she realize it?
Estrella’s next spoon of ice cream stopped shy of her opened mouth.
Geoffrey made an excellent point. How did Piper know Estrella preferred real ice cream over soy or synthetic? It was two things Piper knew about Estrella that she never told her. The more she looked at the pixie kiwi RW sitting beside her, the more she wondered if she was a spy from the Federation, having snuck into the Alliance with a sappy story that she was looking to trade the life there, for the freedom here.
The synthetic arm on Piper felt like a real one, her NC gauntlet, even her eyes, the longer she peered into them, weren’t standard cyberware. She doubted Piper was a new unit. Why would Yoshida give a woman from the Federation experimental parts? Somewhere, deep inside Piper’s head and AI were the secrets. Secrets that wouldn’t reveal themselves, no matter how long Estrella stared at her as they ate ice cream.
Piper caught her staring. The look on her face suggested she liked it, same with that damn Mona Lisa smile. Sitting close to each other didn’t help. Neither of the two spooned new scoops of ice cream into their mouths, instead Estrella and Piper gazed into each other’s emerald glowing synthetic eyes. Estrella wondering what Piper’s endgame was, and Piper wondering, whatever went through her head when she looked at Estrella like that.
Let’s ask her.
I would advise against that, Geoffrey said. Piper appears to be calm right now. Bringing this to her attention may cause her to worry and become reclusive.
I don’t like the idea of someone spying on me.
Perhaps we should take this chance to build rapport with her, and then, when the time is right, make an inquiry to your questions.
He was right. Then again, Geoffrey was an AI, so he was always right. Sitting together with Piper on the hood of her car put the mysterious and captivating RW in a state of bliss. This was Estrella’s chance to learn more about Piper that her files didn’t reveal.
Estrella returned to what remained of her bowl, her eyes turned to the neon and hologram filled skyline. “So, what made you want to go under the knife and become an RW?”
Piper shrugged and watched the skyline too. “It was important for me, and the people I care for.”
“You did it because you wanted to protect your daughter, and wife, at the time?”
Piper held the bowl with her synthetic hand, bringing her other hand wearing the NC gauntlet to her face. She examined it up and down, so did Estrella. “Got sick of seeing the world turn their backs on people that didn’t deserve it.”
It was a typical response of those that fled the Federation, and an understandable one. China had annexed various Pacific nations into a super nation, similar to the Alliance during the third world war. Most of its citizens, to this day, weren’t happy to see Chinese forces refusing to leave, and not pleased to discover the rest of the world refuse to do anything out of fear of triggering another war.
Einstein didn’t know World War III would be fought with weaponized witches, but with the way the world was going, sticks and stones might be the weapon of choice in the next world war.
“So, you became an RW not to fight IWs, but to use your powers to resist another force.” Like those that ruled over New Zealand. “But that plan backfired, so you came running into the arms of the Alliance, and then offered your body, already jammed with cyberware, to Yoshida.”
Estrella felt a soft nudge of Piper’s elbow. “You’re a smart girl, new girl.”
“You know, one day, you’re not going to be able to call me that.”
“What? Smart girl?”
“New girl!”
“You’ll be the new girl until another one shows up.” Hearty kiwi laugher followed. “And they got to be a girl! If it’s a guy, then you’ll still be the new girl.”
This time the two shared laughs. It ended with Piper eyes magnetized to Estrella’s when she faced her.
“But, being smart and new is a good thing,” Piper said. “Usually, the new people are foolish and get killed during their second or third fight with an IW. You’ve survived two so far. You’re off to a decent start.”
“Thanks.”
“Just, don’t go running your mouth off about this ice cream place. It’s the only one in the city that has this secret. Getting these folks busted again, would be dumb.”
“I won’t.”
“It’ll be our secret, okay?”
“Got any other secrets to share?”
Piper raised an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” her voice had a touch of fascination in it.
“Well, that’s why I asked.”
Estrella was worried she might have been too firm. But she couldn’t think of any other way to put it. Leaning back on the hood, with elbows supporting her body, Piper asked. “What are you trying to get at?”
“Why did you give up your fight and come to LA?”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“Keep at it,” Estrella’s gaze returned to the neon and hologram ad skyline ahead. “I mean, look at this. The world’s fucked, even here in the Alliance. We get up to please our corporate masters every day, working jobs we don’t like, using our money the way they tell us to, believing the media when they start flapping their lips. All this stuff? It’s just an illusion to keep us blind, happy, and spending.”
“Could be worse.”
“After three fucking world wars, it should be better.” Estrella paused when she heard Piper snort. “You think I’m just some kid ranting, huh?”
Piper chucked. “Yep, and it’s pretty cute honestly.”
“Sorry. When someone important to you dies because of greed, well, it tends to open your eyes.”
“The world isn’t all that bad. Some folks are working and living their dreams.”
“Dreams have a habit of turning into nightmares,” Estrella said with a grimace. “Just ask my old roommate, Yumi. She wanted to be an RW, and now she’s dead.”
“That the close friend you mentioned?”
Estrella nodded, holding back the wave of sorrow that appeared in her chest. “Yeah, it is. Eighteen is too young to die in combat.”
“No offense, but it sounds like she didn’t understand the risks and jumped into this. Our line of work is dangerous.”
“Yumi understood the risks. What she didn’t realize was that her boss could try and have her killed, to take advantage of an insurance loop-hole.”
“What are you going to do then? All I hear is ranting, love.”
Estrella grinned at the dark city that was in a dire need of change. “First, I need to get my shit sorted,” she said, the grin held. “And then? I’ll find a way to tell people they need to wake up and smell the bullshit the media and corporations are shoving us.”
A gust of humid wind blew past the two. It made Estrella’s long black hair tickle the side of Piper’s face while Piper’s lace black robe skirt fluttered. Droplets of water, reflecting the neon glow fell from the skies shortly afterward. It was time for the two to be on their way.
The news played on the radio as Piper drove Estrella home, deep within the IW district. The broadcaster spoke of an update to the report that’d been making headlines across the Alliance. In addition to the mysterious IWs attacks in Los Angeles, a group of IWs attacked JFK International Airport in New York. Estrella’s head went racing searching for the connections.
Piper’s charming face melted into one of
despair and concern. Something about the news gave her anguish. She placed her car on autopilot, reaching for her phone and dialed several numbers. None of them responded to Piper’s calls.
Piper threw the phone, her immaculate white teeth visible from her frown. “Fuck!”
Twenty-Four
Ray
“No, she’s not.”
The vision came to a standstill. Arianna, pulled from Ray’s memories of the airport attack, held him, perpetually frozen in time. Celia’s white glowing hand pointed an index finger at Arianna’s head. “Your girlfriend’s syncing with your mind, telepathically.”
Ray shook his head in denial. “Arianna’s human, she works for Yoshida. They wouldn’t hire an IW, registered or not.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.” Celia shrugged. “But at this point, your mind was getting opened up with telepathy. If it wasn’t her, and I really doubt that, then it was someone else.”
“There were other IWs there, maybe it was them?”
“Yeah, and none of them were telepaths, except for …”
Ray and Celia approached the fall to the runway. They saw nothing but a blur of colors. Ray at the time wasn’t looking at the drop, and therefore wouldn’t know what was going on regarding the ponytailed man, who had been standing near it before he vanished.
Celia crossed her arms. “Thing is, it feels like it was coming from her, and no one else. That guy that stepped through that portal thingy is a telepath, yeah, but he ain’t here anymore.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Positive. Don’t forget, we’re both in your head. I can experience what you did. The only difference is I’m a telepath. I can sense telepathic power coming from your girl, Arianna. I was able to sense it from that guy with the ponytail, right up until he vanished.”
“Where did he go?”
“The fuck if I know. Never seen a telepath just vanish into thin air like that.”
They both returned to the still visage of Arianna holding Ray. Celia was convinced Arianna was a witch. Ray was convinced it was a trick, mental manipulation, like the one Celia used. It’d explain the change of character in Arianna’s personally. She went to the EU, and someone else came back in her place, a telepath that made people around them see Arianna, and not the real IW they were.
The AIT agents also claimed Arianna’s name wasn’t on any of the flights. She was still in the EU as far as he was concerned, and her business trip took a turn for the worst. An IW chose her, of all women, to impersonate. That had to be it. There’s no way Ray had been putting his penis in a witch for the past five years and then want to marry her. And what of her parents, Norris and Maria? They weren’t witches.
Nothing was changing Ray’s mind on that.
Ray looked at himself in the vision. It was the version of himself that was seconds away from blacking out, only to awake with weird shit in his brain. “What’s happening to my head exactly? Because as I recalled I blacked out a second later.”
Celia motioned to the frozen image. “Let’s see.”
Ray’s memories of the airport incident continued like someone hit the play button. He saw Arianna hold him and mutter words that made little sense, acting out of character as he remembered. The airport turned black, leaving Ray and Celia standing, hovering in space without stars. He floated, watching Celia lost in a deep trance, her hands waving about to focus, then they glowed white.
The blackness of the void dissolved. New memories played, none of them belonged to Ray.
Celia verbalized her personal thoughts on the matter. “What the fuck?”
They were in Arianna’s head, or the IW impersonating her. Looking about, Ray quickly recognized the room the memories transported them to. It was a hotel in Munich, where Arianna had been staying. He remembered it from the video call he had with her when she first arrived, back before the terrorist attack in Munich. The Arianna he spoke to that night was the woman he loved, no questions asked.
Now he wasn’t sure if an IW had been impersonating her.
“Looks like we got another set of memories,” Celia said. “I can’t get all of it though. I ain’t a high enough rank for that.”
He grunted. “What rank would you need to be?”
“That’s the ‘what the fuck’ part,” she said, her voice carrying a little uncertainness to it. “An S ranked witch did this.”
“What the fuck indeed.” Ray briefly thought back to his basic knowledge of IW ranks, his fingers stroking his chin in a sage-like way. “I thought rank A was the strongest?”
“It is.” She nodded, and the white glow of her hands remained. Celia was using all her energy. “Rank S is a weaponized IW. You need some serious military training to get on that level.”
“Weaponized IWs haven’t existed since the war,” Ray said. “Every country agreed to disband and outlaw IW training programs to prevent them from achieving that power.”
“Looks like someone out there lied and kept training. Whoever put this shit in your head was a weaponized IW. Highly illegal internationally and fucking dangerous.”
Celia waved her white glowing hands again, attempting to focus her abilities and play the new memories. Nothing replayed in order. One moment Ray saw the hotel, the next a jungle burning, an idle structure in the middle of the cause of it, then a science lab, then the hotel, then the jungles of a tropical forest.
The science lab appeared again; it was the same as he’d seen in his weird dreams. A man dressed in a lab coat put a gun into his mouth and then blew his brains out, spattering it up against the ceiling, walls and glass stasis tubes behind him. The crimson and pink remains of his head slowly moved down on the smooth glass surface of the tube leaving behind grisly lines, obscuring whatever it was, whoever it was, inside.
The reflection of Arianna’s hypnotic blue eyes shot back on the glass not yet coated with the dripping blood.
Another flash of memories. Ray saw the hotel again in Munich. Arianna was there, along with men and women, shades covered their eyes. Some had chunks of metal in their limbs, cyberware by the looks, what manufacturer, he couldn’t tell. Everyone’s lips were moving, but no sound came out, not even from Arianna.
The memories distorted. When it returned, the room had turned into a warzone. The curtains were stained red, and bullet holes shattered the windows behind them. Rays of sunshine touched the bodies on the floor with expanding pools of sticky crimson leaking away. Arianna was in the washroom, red droplets raining from her, painting the bandages on her arm when they fell upon it. She plunged her hands into the bathtub full of water, turning it murky with blood.
When she brought her hand up, a man’s head followed, splashing the murky water in every direction. Upon closer inspection she was holding a man under the water, drowning him. No, she was torturing him. How did Ray know? Because the two exchanged words before she forced his head under again, the water roared when the man was denied the air needed to breathe.
After the fifth time of her yanking his head out from the bathtub, she raged, yelling something. She pulled on his hair, exposing his neck, holding a dagger with her other hand. Arianna put the blade to his neck and cut. A three-inch deep gash across the man’s neck squirted arterial blood, four times in three different directions, maybe more. Ray was too sick in his belly at that point to keep count.
The murky bathtub water turned red when she kicked his body in. Arianna’s dagger sank into the back of the deceased man’s arm, sawing back and forth, cutting down to the bone, so Ray had thought. She cut down to a cyberware augmentation, pulling the flesh and muscles off it like a butcher deboning a cut of meat, back when butchery was a legal profession. Arianna read something on the metal jammed inside the man, a serial code, a manufacture number perhaps.
Ray’s eyes narrowed when he saw the Chinese letters and the corporate logo of the cyberware’s manufacturer. “Zhang Industries.”
The Arianna in the vision stormed out in a rush, stripped naked, whipping the red stick
y juice off her curves and face. She looked like an occultist that finished having a blood orgy. He was certain Norris and Maria didn’t raise Arianna to act like that.
“Okay,” Celia stepped forward. Her face had grown pale from the horror. “I’m shutting this the fuck down.”
“No wait—”
“Fuck that! I didn’t sign up for conspiracy shit.”
A bright flash put an end to the vision.
Ray opened his eyes. He was still sitting on the bed, the sheets below him drenched with the sweat that trickled off his body. He was shaking internally at the secret they unlocked, unsure what to do. The erection that wanted to rip a hole in his trousers went away at least.
Celia stood ahead of him, dragging her hands away from the left and right of his head with a look of terror on her face. Her hands came together and then pulled apart. A memory sphere appeared after a three-second burst of white light. She looked at the shiny orb in her hands, winced, then handed it off to Ray.
“This is everything I got,” she said.
The memory sphere joined his phone in his pocket. “Thanks.”
“There’s more in there, but like I said, I’m not high enough rank to get it. And honestly? I don’t want to know what it is.”
“I understand. Thank you.”
“Want my advice? Destroy it and break up with your girlfriend.” Ray said nothing as he went for the door. “Seriously,” Celia called out to him. “If you miss her that much, you could just fuck me with the projection. I know a lot more about her now that I’ve been in your head.”
He replied with more silence.
On his way out, Ray grabbed his phone, thumbing in a quick internet search on the name of the corporation stamped on the cyberware part Arianna discovered. Zhang Industries was it?
The first site listed was Zhang Industries, the exclusive provider of weapons tech and cyberware to the People’s Federation of Pacific Nations military. No one else, not even Yoshida sold tech to the Federation’s military. Anyone with Zhang developed tech were trained members of the Federation’s military.
The men Arianna killed in the hotel were Federation soldiers. The hotel was most likely the one talked about in the news, the one IW terrorists attacked in the EU. They must have come for Arianna because of what she did, and torched the place, before chasing her out of the EU. The story of her going to London must have been a cover to trick those following her. Arianna never left Munich before catching a flight to New York.
Cyber Witch Page 19