Flesh Blood Steel

by David Jones

“Where are we?” she asked.

  “About sixty kilometers from the border,” Winston said.

  Jake saw the instant Oliver’s persona went from neutral to killer. It was written on her face. Her brows tightened, her jaw set, and he knew she was going to assassinate the driver and his partner.

  Of course, that was only prudent. These men weren’t cybrids. They didn’t belong in Geneva.

  “I need to strap you back down,” Oliver said.

  “Do you have to? I promise I won’t get up.”

  She nodded and Jake reclined with a sigh, allowing her to secure him to the bed. Oliver cleared away their McDonald’s trash, shoving the greasy sacks and fry boxes into a red plastic bag meant for medical disposal.

  “Pull over,” she told Winston.

  The driver dutifully did as she commanded.

  “Come with me,” Oliver said. She popped the ambulance’s rear doors, and climbed out, leaving them ajar.

  A freshening breeze sighed into the van. It was cool, more so than it had been in Paris, and carried with it the scents of fresh loam and mold. Jake could see forest huddled up on the verge of the small road they had been traveling. The trees still had their leaves, but they were tinged red and orange. Soon they’d be falling.

  Traffic was light. Now and again he heard the soft hum of an electric car or else the whine of a low-powered gas engine. But they were few. Even quieter, and yet more insistent, he heard the sound of three people making their way into the woods, their boots crunching in the underbrush. From the sound, he could tell Oliver walked behind Winston and his partner. The partner had never spoken, just did his job as ordered without complaint or question.

  Good man.

  Soon, their footfalls faded, too distant even for Jake’s enhanced hearing to pick up. He imagined Oliver ordering them to stop, to kneel. Would they resist? He couldn’t say. It wouldn’t matter if they did.

  A sharp pop echoed once then twice from the direction they had gone, and Jake knew Winston and the no name man were dead. He felt a momentary sense of revulsion. His stomach tightened, sending a bite of pain through his abdomen before his cybrid could quell it. But the feeling was gone quickly, seemingly wiped from his conscious thoughts. He had no reason to mourn men he hadn’t known. If you did that you could never live your life. Those men had been a liability, a stumbling block. Things were better this way.

  Oliver returned. She climbed in the back with Jake and shut the doors then stood peering at him for a long moment.

  “If I unstrap you, let you ride up front, are you going to give me grief?”

  Jake shook his head. Without conscious thought he called up a map of their current location just west of the Swiss border. “Headquarters is just around the corner. I want to be there as much as you.”

  They resumed driving, Oliver at the wheel, Jake buckled into the passenger’s seat and watched the map in his head unfurl. What he saw wasn’t so much an image as an impression, or perhaps both things mixed into one. He could feel his position on the Earth as dictated by satellite and mobile comms towers. Across the border, in Geneva, stood Cymobius’s international headquarters building like a beacon on his internal map.

  “What’s it like inside? The Geneva building, I mean,” Jake asked.

  Oliver shrugged. “I’ve never been there. But I bet it’s more modern than any of the others.”

  “You’ve been to all of them?”

  “So have you,” she said.

  Jake frowned. He was trying to focus on the Geneva building, bring it into sharper focus, but he couldn’t seem to get a proper handle on it. This wasn’t like navigating Google Maps, where he could simply click on an interesting place and its image would spring forward. It was more like tapping into memories, calling up things he had known all his life and teasing out the facts. Except the facts wouldn’t quite come clear.

  He started to say as much, but was interrupted when a fast moving car rammed the ambulance from behind, giving them a small jolt.

  “What the hell?” Oliver studied her mirror. She seemed as surprised as Jake.

  The little car, a black Ford Focus, flashed its lights and honked its anemic horn. When Oliver did not immediately slow, the car rammed them again, harder this time.

  “Somebody wants to die,” Oliver said.

  She braked and pulled to the side of the road. Jake sighed in frustration. Why bother with some lunatic? Every second they lost was a second they weren’t traveling to Geneva.

  “This won’t take long,” Oliver said, noticing the look on his face.

  He nodded grimly, feeling the way he had that time his mom had gotten gallstones the week they were supposed to visit Disney World. Even at eight he hadn’t been angry with her. He understood such things were out of her control, but so was his disappointment.

  “Be quick,” he said.

  Oliver opened her door and froze. She slumped back in her seat, face slack, limbs succumbing to gravity. Only her eyes moved. They darted this way and that, finally settling on Jake.

  What was wrong with her? Jake tried to sit up, anticipating the pain that would cause in his wounded belly, but found he too was paralyzed. His heart gave a particularly tight squeeze in his chest, sudden fear overlaying his thoughts. He tried to get a view of the car that had pulled them over, but it was no use, he couldn’t see the ambulance’s mirrors from his position.

  The rear doors clicked open, and someone light climbed inside behind them. Probably female. She shut the doors, giving Jake enough time to recognize her breathing patterns.

  Jake’s eyes went wide. What was Anya doing here?

  She moved to lean between the van’s front seats, staring at them both. Her otherwise dark skin appeared paler than normal, her eyes frightened. She was trembling, obviously mustering all her courage to be here.

  “I know where you’re going,” she said. “Geneva. You think Cymobius’s headquarters building is there, but you’re wrong. That’s a Dissolution stronghold. It’s a trap, and you’re driving straight toward it.”

  Chapter 18

  Diverge

  A car zoomed past, its driver forced to cross the center line in order to give their parked vehicles a wide berth. Though traffic was light on this rural French road, it probably wouldn’t be long before someone took note of an ambulance parked on the shoulder.

  Oliver’s door stood slightly ajar. Anya reached across her to pull it shut. Though Oliver still sat paralyzed for reasons unknown, Jake saw a flicker of movement in one of her cheeks, a slight twitch that signified her rage. If she could move, she would have already killed Anya and been done with it.

  Anya tilted Oliver’s head to one side and then fished around for a moment until she found the Spearcast switch behind the other woman’s right ear. Jake heard the tiny click when it shut off. Then she turned to him.

  Seething didn’t begin to describe the anger overwhelming Jake’s mind. Horrid thoughts—murderous and gory—passed through his head as she gently traced cool fingers along the right side of his skull. In that instant he vowed to himself that he would kill her for this. Slowly. Make her pay for—

  A click and Jake’s Spearcast link died, and with it his anger. He was left feeling bewildered, disoriented. Even with his cybrid’s aid he suffered a moment in which he simply could not parse what was happening. Why had he been fantasizing about killing Anya—killing anyone. Had he become Harris for a moment there? Was that what it was like to reside in the assassin’s mind?

  Anya looked from Jake to Oliver and back again. She looked like a rabbit trapped in a jackal den.

  “I know you both want to kill me right now,” she said. “But you’ve got to listen. I don’t have much time before your cybrids break this immobilization code. There are things going on here, things neither of you know about.” She looked to Oliver, including her in that statement.

  Oliver’s arm twitched, and Anya jumped. It wasn’t a particularly aggressive movement, it lacked any sort of grace, but coupled with the
look of rage in the cybrid woman’s eyes it obviously struck fear in Anya’s heart.

  Jake was surprised Anya didn’t run—just exit the van, climb into her little car, and rocket away. To her credit, she resumed her spot between the seats and said, “You have to listen to me. Think. A second ago you both wanted nothing more than to travel to Geneva. But that feeling’s gone now, right?”

  That was true, at least for Jake. Suddenly, he couldn’t fathom why he had been so eager to reach Cymobius headquarters. It seemed ridiculous. Had he really been on the verge of letting them reinstitute his memories and thereby erase his persona in favor of Harris?

  “What you felt was a cybrid protocol called KILL MACHINE. It’s a programming framework built into all of you.” Anya turned to Jake, looked him in the eyes. “When you asked me that time, was I trying to program you, and I said no. I lied. I had already programmed you, and I used KILL MACHINE to do it. It’s what allowed me to erase the last thirteen years of your memory.”

  Oliver’s hands clenched and unclenched spasmodically. Anya saw the movement, her eyes drawn to it like iron filings to a magnet. Her voice shook when next she spoke.

  “I didn’t put the KILL MACHINE protocol in your heads. That was Cymobius. It’s their way of controlling you. It’s a genius bit of programming really. It commands your cybrid to plant directives unobtrusively into your psyche. It isn’t mind control exactly—more like yearning control. You want to do the things it tells you, and your brain will find every reason to rationalize the decisions you make in pursuit of the implanted goal.”

  Oliver lifted one arm in a quick, jerky movement. She reached for the steering wheel, missed, reached again, and hooked her fingers on it. She was breathing hard, shaking, and making growling sounds with every exhalation.

  Jake still couldn’t move. His limbs were unresponsive. How was Oliver doing that? Was it just pure rage, a desire to kill Anya for the sheer audacity of paralyzing her? Either way, if Jake didn’t manage to move soon, he wouldn’t be able to stop her. A horrible image passed through his mind: him lying inert in his seat, listening while Oliver strangled the life out of Anya.

  Jake twitched a finger. It wasn’t much, but it was something to build on. Concentrating, focusing on the fear that Anya was about to die, he managed to flex his hands, first one then the other. He still wasn’t rising, but it was something.

  Anya, meanwhile, spoke faster and faster as if the weight of her words might weigh Oliver down. “You aren’t murderers. None of you are. You’ve killed for Cymobius, but only because you were driven by KILL MACHINE. They put those desires in you. Think. Before you ever became a cybrid, were you the type to indiscriminately murder someone just because you were ordered to do it?”

  Oliver sat up. Her left armed hung limp at her side, but her right, the one gripping the steering wheel, appeared healthy. She gazed at her palm, flexed her fingers twice, and grinned slowly.

  Jake couldn’t read her mind, but he felt he saw the trace of her thoughts. She might have only one hand, but it was plenty enough to deal with one loudmouthed teenager. She twisted feebly towards Anya, teeth bared.

  Anya scuttled back into the ambulance’s rear compartment. Jake couldn’t see her, but he could hear the rustle of fabric as she slid across the gurney where he had lain. “Listen to me, please. We captured Jake so that I could put a Trojan horse in his cybrid. We’d been trying to do that for years, trying to find some way to crack Cymobius’s security, but we hadn’t managed it until then. After I wiped his memories, I introduced a trust algorithm. It made it impossible for him to distinguish truth from lies whenever he spoke to me. Once he started to trust me, I was supposed to tell him to return to the company, exposing their systems to the virus. Which happened, but we all got caught in the process.”

  So many things made sense now. Jake recalled his first meeting Anya, how he had accepted everything she told him, how all her compatriots had left the room besides her brother Calvin. They hadn’t wanted Jake to see their faces for fear he might realize they were lying to him. Even Calvin had kept himself out of sight most of the time. He must have feared leaving Anya alone too much to simply leave with the others.

  And when Dr. Crocker had linked Jake’s cybrid to the computers in Cymobius’s Washington offices, the power had immediately failed. That must have been Anya’s Trojan program at work. It had made everyone an admin user, giving them the power to open any door whether real or computerized. That program had infiltrated the entire Cymobius network, making it possible for Dissolution or, more rightly, Seanan Reese to access their cybrids. That done, Moore had wanted to ditch Jake. That was why he had argued with his leaders on the phone outside the airport. Far as Moore was concerned, Jake had served his purpose and become nothing more than a dangerous liability.

  Oliver scuttled forward on her knees and one good hand, dragging the dead one along behind, bringing Jake back to the moment. Her progress was slow, but determined.

  “Cymobius has been controlling you, using you, for years, but that feeling you’ve been having, the one driving you to reach Geneva, that didn’t come from them. It came from Dissolution. Seanan forced me to activate a beacon deep inside every cybrid’s mind. She’s bringing you all together.”

  With effort, Jake managed to flop onto his side. He could just see Oliver’s boots sliding toward the back of the van. Concentrating his will into the movement, he lifted one numb hand, dropped it on her ankle, and squeezed.

  Oliver looked back at him, teeth bared, eyes aflame with anger, even hatred.

  “No.” It was all he could say. It felt like his mouth was full of Play-Doh, his jaw made of iron.

  For a moment, Jake thought Oliver might simply rip free of his grasp. It would have been like eluding a toddler for her. But she didn’t. She gazed at him, her expression slowly collapsing, transforming from utter rage to something he would have never expected: heart-rending regret, pain, and sadness.

  “She’s lying,” Oliver said, through barely contained tears.

  “Maybe.” Jake couldn’t be certain whether Anya was lying or not, she had certainly lied to him before, but either way he didn’t want her dead. “Just don’t kill her. Please.”

  Oliver pulled her leg free from his grasp, not suddenly, but with gentle pressure. She drew her knees up to sit on her butt, arms folded. “I’ve killed people.”

  “It wasn’t you,” Jake said. “It wasn’t us.”

  “I remember every one of them—every face is right here with me.”

  “Not you,” Jake said again. The bleak devastation written on Oliver’s face tore at his heart. He knew in that instant that no matter how much guilt he might feel over what he had become, it could never compare to what Oliver bore. She remembered. And those memories carried a kind of weight he could not fathom.

  Oliver gave a start, her eyes lifting to his, her face awash in new pain, new regret, “Winston.” She breathed the name as if it were sacred.

  Jake swallowed as his loathsome, perfect memory replayed the sound of gunfire from the woods just a few hours ago while he had lain there, feeling satisfied that Oliver was making the right choice.

  “I killed him.” A tear slipped from one of Oliver’s eyes, leaving a track of wetness down her cheek. “I knew him for years. He was a good man, solid, trustworthy.” She looked at Jake. “He had a wife and kids.”

  Jake struggled up to a sitting position, slid forward, and enveloped Oliver in his arms. An hour ago he wouldn’t have believed such a thing possible. Now he pressed her wet face to the hollow of his neck while she wept against him.

  After a long moment, Jake pulled back, dabbed at her eyes with his sleeve. She clutched at him, holding tight to his shoulders.

  “We’re victims in all this,” he said.

  Oliver shook her head. “I don’t know if I believe that.”

  “It’s true,” Anya said. “You are weapons. Cymobius used you, and now Dissolution is trying to do the same.”

  Oliver pulled
away from Jake to stare at Anya. “Why are you doing this? How do I know you’re not part of Reese’s plan, sent here to lure us into some sort of Dissolution trap?”

  “They have her sister,” Jake said. “That’s why she’s been working for them.”

  “You trust her? She could lie to you and you’d never know it.” Oliver narrowed her eyes at the younger woman.

  “Yeah, but could she lie to you?”

  “They do have my sister, and they’ve been using her safety to manipulate me.”

  Oliver considered her for a moment, then nodded slowly. “Truth.”

  “All along, I kept thinking they’d eventually release her and I could leave Dissolution for good, but now I’ve realized that’s never going to happen. So long as I’m useful, they’ll keep stringing me and my brother along. Seanan Reese never wastes an asset.”

  Oliver’s eyes went wide with recognition. “Reese? The egghead? I’ve heard of her. Didn’t know she was part of Dissolution.”

  Anya nodded. “Neither did I until yesterday. Now I realize she is Dissolution. She runs it like the corporations she supposedly hates. That’s why I did a little digging into their computer networks this afternoon. I found where they’re keeping my sister.”

  Jake perked up. “Where?”

  “Same place you two were headed, Geneva. Seanan has control of my Trojan program. She’s the one calling all cybrids there.”

  “What for?” Oliver asked.

  “Mayhem.”

  Chapter 19

  Race

  “How are we supposed to get across the border?” Oliver had taken the wheel, resuming their course for Geneva. Though her tears had dried, Jake could sense her tension and lingering melancholy.

  “Your e-papers are all in order,” Anya said. She sat on the gurney, furiously typing commands into her tablet. “I’m more concerned about the city.”

  Oliver grunted.

  “Why’s that?” Jake asked.

  “During the war, ISIL pushed up from Algeria into Spain and through the southeastern part of France into Switzerland so they could claim Geneva. They saw it as a strategic target, one that would demoralize the West if they could seize it.”