Agent G: Infiltrator

by Phipps, C. T.

  “Palatable.” I practically spit the word. “How?”

  “Your brain isn’t organic,” Gordon said, sighing. “Your IRD implant isn’t an implant. It’s the whole of your consciousness. It’s a microchip in a processing unit occupying the space where your brain should be located. You’re not a human being in the eyes of the law, G, you’re a machine.”

  I took deep breath. “I’ve always been a machine.”

  I pulled on the trigger of my pistol.

  Gordon proceeded to wet himself as the bullet sailed past him. I could smell his terror and now that I knew I wasn’t a human being, I opened myself to the full range of senses my IRD implant provided. I realized I could monitor his heart rate, his body temperature, and a dozen other things that I shouldn’t be able to, but could.

  I was breathing heavily now, even though my body regulated its oxygen intake regardless of my emotional state.

  “I still have questions,” I said, wanting to kill him.

  He wasn’t my father.

  He was my fucking creator.

  Gordon took a deep breath. “We harvest the IRD’s memory cards after the death of agents. The ones that aren’t destroyed, at least. The experiences they’ve accumulated can be taken from their memory drive and uploaded into new bodies. You’re the second G with all the skills of the original inside him. The death of her child for a second time is why Rebecca fled. Left us. Left the project.”

  I became eerily calm. Too much emotion caused me to shut down. There were tears in my contact-covered eyes and my nose was running, but I wasn’t feeling anything.

  “I don’t care about that,” I lied. “I want to know who Persephone answers to. I want to know what this is all about.” If I was going to die in less than a decade, I wanted to find everyone responsible for this atrocity and kill them. Screw Marissa’s plan to subvert them to the United States’ service. I wanted revenge.

  “That’s not going to give you the answers you seek,” Gordon said, sounding almost sympathetic. He was still terrified, but there were other emotions: guilt and shame.

  Good.

  “Fuck off with your advice, Frankenstein,” I whispered. “Just answer the question.”

  Gordon swallowed and nodded. “The Society answers to the Karma Corp board of directors, Universiti PMC, and Halifax International.”

  “That’s it? It works for a trio of corporations. This is all for money?”

  “They’re the ones my team sold the plans to and receive the paycheck from the government for supervising. Yes. They’re doing a lot of illegal shit, mind you, but they have plenty of documents that say C’est par mon ordre et pour le bien de l’Etat que le porteur du present a fait ce qu’il a fait.”

  Which was French for It is by my order and for the good of the state that the bearer of this has done what he has done.

  “Mind you, I don’t know how much they’re worth, but it’s all supposedly for the greater good. That’s what they tell themselves while raking in their fat paychecks, at least. Kill the Saudi Prince’s mistress and a human rights lawyer for national security,” Gordon said, shaking his head. “You didn’t think this was part of a big grand conspiracy, did you? Sorry. No. Even Black Technology is just DARPA classified material with a hefty order of proprietary copyright. There are no Illuminati here, only corporate greed and malfeasance.”

  “Why are you here?” I asked my final questions. “Were you kidnapped or are you here voluntarily?”

  Gordon didn’t answer.

  I smacked him to the ground with the butt of my gun, just barely keeping myself from shooting him then and there. “Answer the question! Please!” I was desperate now. At my most human, my most confused, broken, and alone. This was not what I wanted. I wanted to go back to the blissful horrid ignorance I’d possessed before coming down here.

  Gordon felt the back of his head. “After Rebecca left, I started looking at you robo—cyborgs differently. I noticed how very human you could be and the conditioning process used to make your handlers was designed to give you emotional satisfaction. In short, I started to see how human you really were. That’s why I started leaking information to the Carnevale. I wanted to get loose by promising them my people, and I recruited F to help. He was always my favorite. The most human of you. I knew I was getting in bed with psychopaths, but I wanted to let out the information I’d managed to accumulate on the Society, Karma Corp, Universiti, Task Force-22 and the US government. I was going to turn whistle-blower.”

  Anger replaced my regret. This sonofabitch’s selfishness had no limits.

  “You realize they’d just kill us, right? Wipe the place and records clean. They’d never find any of our bodies.”

  He looked back at me. “Is what you have really a life?”

  I shot him in the throat. He fell backwards, trying to hold his neck closed but failing as blood spurted out everywhere.

  I let him choke to death in his own blood.

  Then I shot his corpse six more times.

  Seven for the seventh letter of the alphabet.

  That was when I heard a gun click behind me and I turned around to look at the figure of Marissa. She took a look down at Doctor Gordon’s body, then up at me. She could have told me I shouldn’t have done that, but didn’t. In a weird way, we’d come to an understanding, and I no longer blamed her for the events we’d had to go through together.

  “Did you know?” I asked.

  “Which part?”

  I explained what Doctor Gordon had said.

  Marissa’s eyes widened. “I—”

  “Does it change anything?” I asked, daring her to tell me it didn’t. She had been lovers with a machine this entire time.

  Marissa lowered her gaze. “No, no it doesn’t.”

  I believed her. “All right then.”

  “I’ve contacted the President. She wants to speak with you personally at a secure facility. The International Refugee Society’s base in Boston was cleaned out, but we’ve captured a number of the facility members. I believe they want you to be a tool to spearhead the capture of the other Letters. They’ll offer you a pardon and United States citizenship if you agree.”

  “Do I get to kill the people responsible for this? Because I will.”

  Marissa paused. “They will want them alive—so we’ll have to figure out a way to do it that doesn’t piss them off.”

  I nodded. “Let’s go.”

  To be continued in:

  AGENT G: SABOTEUR

  Book Two of the Agent G Series