by Jace Kang
The image shifted to his ear canal.
Cochlear nerve fibers are fifty percent denser. With a wink, the fox spirit held up two images of the nerve, one with a wider range.
Meaning he could hear pitches beyond normal human ability.
Just what was Ryusuke Ishihara? After spending so much time snooping around the government’s classified regions of the EtherCloud, she of all people should’ve known if these theoretical technologies and gene manipulations were already being integrated into prototypes.
She would’ve gasped again—the deeper scans revealed no signs of artificial wiring to explain Ishihara’s speed. Nothing non-organic in him.
This was all genetically engineered. There was no other explanation for Ishihara’s abilities. Maybe the next iteration of the shocktrooper? After the Onslaught, the hulking Bovines had been instrumental in repelling platoons of Tivarae landing forces. Very few of their descendants remained, since they were genetically programmed to only sire male offspring, and they all died at age thirty-three. Perhaps Earth was now preparing for the next hostile alien species.
But who? The Elestrae? With a lifespan over thrice that of humans, and the ability to channel istrium radiation, they’d become a formidable enemy if their alliance with Earth ever fell apart.
Though that didn’t make sense, either. Ishihara had to be at least thirty, meaning they would have to have begun developing him a long time ago. Unless they’d sped up his maturation, like the earliest shocktrooper lines. That would explain his apparent age.
For now, this would be her working theory: he’d escaped from wherever they were developing him, and the Ministry of Defense had sent shocktroopers to reacquire their asset before the Peacekeepers got ahold of him.
Well, now that she knew this shadow program could possibly exist, she’d uncover it. With a command, she swapped her Avatar code’s outer shell, shedding the virtual kimono and donning the Armor of a Level One Sentinel.
Unlike a Cloak code, which could make her nearly invisible to almost anything on private corporate EtherSpaces, but not to high-level government Sentinels, the Armor would allow her to hide in plain sight with minimal energy usage. With a wave of her hand, she opened a portal in her firewall to the Peacekeeper EtherSpace, and slipped past the heavily-armored samurai—her representations of Level Five Sentinels.
Over the years, she’d meticulously coded her perception of the EtherCloud to display as feudal Japan. Inside the castle town, Level Two Sentinels appearing as lightly armored foot soldiers slipped among lumbering carts loaded with scrolls,; while swifter Data Transfer AI taking the form of carrier pigeons zipped through the air with smaller packets of data.
Low-level Operators running the EtherSpace’s processing functions looked like laborers running grain mills and irrigation sluices, while higher levels appeared as Dwarves working geared machinery. Basic Maintenance resembled craftsmen painting and carving as they repaired simple code, while high level gnomes patched walls and fixed machines representing more complex code.
In addition to these AI entities, the only other beings buzzing through the EtherSpace were Level Zero Avatars of real people, operating in Real Time. Aya almost felt sorry for them. In the real world, they’d be swiping their hands left and right, viewing output thousands of times more slowly than her. Only a handful of hackers had figured out how to code a sensory interface, dubbed an SI, that allowed them to experience the data like her.
She darted in and out of the Avatars as she headed to one of the many archives. Since no Sentinel would access files, and real Sentinels would investigate if she removed her Armor, she created a copy of her Sentinel Shell and programmed it to patrol around the archive.
As soon as she passed through the door, she activated her Filer Shell. Here, she blended in with the dozens of Filing AI, all resembling imperial court officials wearing different robes based on their level. Higher levels received scrolls from carrier pigeons, while lower levels unloaded laden carts.
One Filer was actually a fellow hacker, Dig, his disguise Shell obvious to Aya due to a flashing blue patch in his robe—her SI’s interpretation of Dig’s coding fingerprints. Per hacker conventions, she didn’t acknowledge him, lest Sentinel AIs take notice of any abnormalities. They’d certainly cross paths in one of the rotating hacker hangouts, where they could compare notes and perhaps trade information. She looked past him to the rows and rows of scrolls representing files.
One particular file was at the center of attention, glowing like the sun as thousands of authorized Avatars accessed it. The vast majority were Peacekeepers, but some were marked as Ministry of Science and Technology. Unsurprisingly, given their contentious relationship, none of the Avatars appeared to come from the Ministry of Defense; but if they’d sent shocktroopers to fight Ishihara, they surely knew about him and would come knocking soon.
A quick look confirmed what she already knew: the file was all the information they’d gathered on Ishihara so far.
She tracked him from the point of his capture, an hour ago in real time. They’d taken him to the closest Peacekeeper facility. Coincidentally, that was just a block away from her home, at the Peacekeeping Headquarters in Kyoto Central.
The Ministry of Science had put in a request to transfer him to New San Francisco Bioengineering Laboratories. Unlike the hour-long shuttle civilians might take, the government’s high-altitude, sub-light transport would get him there in about four minutes. Of course, without the need for inertial dampeners to combat the laws of physics in the real world, her Avatar could cross the space between the servers in a millionth of a second.
Using a stealth copying macro, she duplicated the file and stuffed it into her robes. Upon leaving the archive, she used the Shell of a carrier pigeon and flew out of the Peacekeeper’s EtherSpace.
Returning to her own firewalled EtherSpace, she opened the package.
Riffling through it, she discovered yet one more surprise: the Peacekeepers knew only a little more than she did. They had yet to discover the structure of his muscle fibers and bone matrix, and his ability to manipulate water molecules.
Double-checking to make sure the package’s contents were indeed the original classified files, and not a false trail, she proceeded to the DNA tests. Several had been run, from spectral analysis of skin to saliva testing.
“Ai, Analyze subject’s DNA.”
In a billionth of a second, the fox spirt bowed and flashed the results in her vision.
No, this couldn’t be.
A map of Ishihara’s DNA lined up beside that of the average human.
The only thing special about his DNA, when compared to a billion other samples, was that he was totally ordinary. Not even XHuman.
He was Purebred.
Aya flipped to the earliest files on him, which were created an hour ago in real time.
The information appeared as brushed ink on rice paper, which meant the Peacekeepers had dug deep to determine his identity. These were ancient files, from three centuries before the Onslaught.
An image of a birth certificate appeared, identifying him as Ishihara Ryusuke, born in 2015.
He was nearly eight hundred years old!
How was that even possible? Even with genetic engineering and nanotechnology, Homo sapiens’ maximum theoretical age was half that. Practically speaking, no human had lived past three hundred.
Unless this was some elaborate hoax. No, fingerprints—to think the ancients used such unreliable biometrics!—and retinal scans all confirmed that this was indeed a man from the Age of Greed.
Primary school reports showed he had enjoyed something called Physical Education, though his poor health limited him; while junior high school records noted he hated English—now the common language of Earth.
And then, at age fifteen, all record of him disappeared.
She froze. Poor health? She swiped over to his medical records. “Vaccinations,” whatever those were, were “up to date,” whatever that meant; and he’d s
uffered a greenstick fracture of his tibia as a three-year-old.
Then, the words burned on her virtual eyes.
He had cystic fibrosis.
Same as her.
Could it be? She pulled over an image of her own DNA and had Ai compare it. The gene regulating CFTR in both their samples overlapped.
The silly notion of him not having gold hair flitted by, replaced by the obvious: he shouldn’t have lived to reach eighty, let alone eight hundred. Everything she’d read about the disease suggested that there had been no cure until CRISPR advances had allowed mankind to edit it out of the genome.
In the real world, tears welled in her eyes, and it took all her concentration for her consciousness to remain anchored in the EtherCloud. If he knew the cure…
Not like she’d want to live in the real world.
What could it offer, beyond actual people with their unfathomable mores? Whereas the EtherCloud made sense. AI constructs followed logical patterns, and whatever she didn’t like, she could reprogram in her own firewalled EtherSpace.
Still, with healthy lungs, she’d be able to stay in the EtherCloud indefinitely; tethered, but no longer chained to a frail body.
Again donning a Sentinel Shell, she opened a portal back to Kyoto Central Peacekeeping Headquarters and stepped through. Ishihara’s file still glowed brightly as even more authorized Avatars from Peacekeeper facilities all over the world accessed it. Several Sentinels prevented Ministry of Defense Avatars from entering the EtherSpace at all.
No doubt, once someone near the top of the Peacekeeper hierarchy realized what they had, they’d place the highest level encryption on it. That was a few levels beyond her ability to crack. With no Sentinels monitoring the crowd at this split second, she changed her Shell to a human Avatar with Level Five clearance. Just high enough to access his files without drawing undue attention.
A quick scan revealed Kyoto Central was keeping Ishihara in a low-security medical unit. He was still unconscious, and staff continued to monitor and run tests. But once they’d cleared him, they’d likely transfer him to the top-level holding area, which was the most heavily guarded, and also close to the sub-light transport.
Swapping her Shell for a Sentinel’s armor again, Aya jumped over to the surveillance partition and hacked into the medical unit’s cameras.
Ishihara lay on a biobed, eyes closed, wearing nothing more than organic-fiber underpants and the Ballistrax restraints that secured him. Deliciously lean, toned, and hairless, he looked frail compared to the chiseled bulk of shocktroopers. He might’ve been mistaken for XHuman if he weren’t so tall.
His chest rose and fell. Curiously, his hands lay palms up, index fingers touching his thumbs. Even more curiously, his injured hand didn’t look as if it had just been mangled in the rotating barrels of a power armor minigun. Transdermal pads connected to various points on his body sent data to several data projections on the otherwise sterile walls. What exactly they were monitoring, Aya didn’t know, but she copied the data stream.
“Another one!” A nurse dressed in a high-collared white uniform threw up his hands and tossed a bent bioinjector needle onto a table with several others. He stomped off.
For the moment, Ishihara was all alone. Well, save for the people connected to the EtherCloud, running scans on him.
So far, they hadn’t looked at his lungs, and this camera couldn’t scan that deep. She switched to another angle, where the camera could do a chest CT.
A young man in the high-collared grey suit of cleaning staff crept in, blocking the camera’s line of sight. Mop in hand, he was undoubtedly Purebred, like all people in this line of work. He was quite good-looking for his kind.
Still, he wasn’t doing any mopping, and had no business approaching a patient, let alone a high-profile prisoner like Ishihara. Strange that they would allow him in there, instead of having a cleaning droid do the work. And he clearly knew where he was going.
What if this was a disguise, and the man intended to harm Ishihara?
Well, after what he had done to three Peacekeepers and two shocktroopers, he probably had a lot of enemies.
Taking active control of the camera, Aya zoomed in on the boy’s nametag.
Kentaro Tanaka.
“Confirm identity,” she commanded Ai.
In a trillionth of a second, a copy of the tag, biometric data, and other forms of identification popped up. This was indeed Kentaro Tanaka, or else someone as good as her had hacked the government’s databases to falsify his information and steal his identity.
And who would want to steal a Purebred’s identity?
And what would a Purebred custodian want with Ishihara? Was it just pure curiosity?
Ken’s expression showed no sign of ill intent.
No, it was of pure wonder. He placed a hand on Ishihara’s forehead.
Lights flashed in the EtherCloud representation of the server. A remote viewer based in New London’s Peacekeeper Headquarters had seen Kentaro and was now double-checking. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to be there at all, and he certainly shouldn’t be touching Ishihara.
Still, he showed no sign of doing harm.
Aya’s curiosity got the better of her. Hands moving furiously, she made a virtual copy of Kentaro turning back to the door, while masking the real Kentaro. The alarm from the remote viewer shut off.
Back in the room, Kentaro’s hand still rested on Ishihara’s forehead.
Ishihara’s eyes opened.
The tether to her real body tugged. In order to follow Ishihara on the camera, she’d slowed her perception to Real Time, and now her lungs were filled with mucous.
Just when it looked like Ishihara was going to speak.
To a Purebred, no less.
And outside of the EtherCloud she wouldn’t be able to shield their conversation from other prying eyes.
Chapter 4:
The Purebred
F or all his seventeen years, Ken had either been unseen or treated like a pet by the XHumans. Now, here in front of him lay a man who was genetically closer to his kind, and yet was superior to the XHumans in at least two or three ways.
Which was why Ken had risked his job, and maybe even more, to come here.
Earlier, he had taken his time cleaning the broken glass in the monitoring station, taking advantage of his menial duties to watch as Master Ishihara Ryusuke overwhelmed two shocktroopers before finally being subdued by six Peacekeepers. As always, Ken’s cultural invisibility had served him well, because he’d overheard they were bringing him here, of all places, to make sure he survived.
Now, Master Ishihara was in Kyoto Central, along with the first three Peacekeepers. Rumor had it they were unconscious, but didn’t seem to have been grievously harmed. A Ministry of Defense team had scooped up their own shocktroopers and taken them to who knew where.
Technically, Ken wasn’t prohibited from entering the medical unit. In fact, it was on his cleaning schedule. Just not today. And common sense said he shouldn’t be approaching a high-profile prisoner, let alone touching him.
Of course, no XHuman would ever accuse a Purebred of having common sense, and that would be his excuse if someone saw him. A big if, because the Peacekeeper standing guard outside the room hadn’t bothered to stop him from going into Master Ishihara’s room.
Every nerve prickled as he approached. The stranger’s lack of clothes revealed a slim body, not unlike the XHumans, yet he’d overpowered heavily muscled Bovine shocktroopers, each with a tactical cybernetic eye, and clad in strength- and speed-enhancing power armor.
Well, in the old movies the masters had all shared a similar build, and always managed to defeat some hulking brute of an enemy. Ken placed a hand on the man’s forehead.
Master Ishihara’s eyes opened.
Ken’s soul just about jumped out of his body. He jerked his hand back.
Master Ishihara said something in a low whisper.
Right, he didn’t speak English, at least not very well. Ken
pressed the translator ear dot he’d lifted to his ear. “Could you please repeat yourself?”
“You have questions.”
How did he know? Ken nodded. “I do, Master.”
“I am one rank short of that title, and I’m not your teacher. You may call me Ryu.”
Rank? His clothes hadn’t had insignias like the Peacekeepers and shocktroopers. Ken tasted the name Ryu on his mouth and decided it was inappropriate address for someone so exalted. “Yes, Master Ishihara. Your humble servant is Kentaro Tanaka. If it is your wish, please call me Ken.”
“Ken-coon.” Master Ishihara harrumphed. “First, I have a question for you: you are not like the others. Your Essence has a foundation. Your Qi flows. Your Spirit is firm. Why are you different?”
If not for all the ancient movies Ken had watched, this would all be gibberish, even with the translator. Of course, it’d all been terminology from fantastical legends, and nothing related to his boring existence. And to think that at least in this, he was better off than XHumans. “I’m Purebred,” he answered.
“What does that mean?” Master Ishihara turned his head as much as the restraints would allow. “Since when are people classified like dogs?”
Ken placed a hand over his heart. “My people were never genetically engineered.”
Understanding bloomed in Master Ishihara’s expression. “Ah, that would explain why everyone else is so fragile.”
Fragile? Ken scratched his head. XHumans were the epitome of health and longevity, as perfect as Homo sapiens could be. And the shocktroopers, they were giants of men, engineered soon after the Onslaught to fight hand-to-hand against the invading aliens. Nicknamed ‘Bulls’ at the time, they’d been called Bovines for the last three and a half centuries. Just not to their faces.
“Why weren’t you engineered?” Master Ishihara asked.
“It’s different from case to case, but for me, my ancestors belonged to an ‘unclean’ class.”
“Ah, I remember such a concept.” Master Ishihara shook his head. “But that was nearly a thousand years ago. You don’t look that old.”