Terminal (Visceral Book 4)

by Adam Thielen

  “I can imagine.”

  “But we had children of a sort. Kate came up with the idea to take in foster kids long-term. We did that for the better part of a decade. Usually, we were assigned kids who had just figured out their lives were going to be complicated by magic, but we took in a couple mundanes as well. The estate was a circus at times.” Taq stopped and looked down at his plate. Without looking up, he continued. “We started to give that up when she got worse.”

  Tsenka inwardly cringed, fearing the mood would be soured. She expected Anne to shower Taq with pity that he would not want, but instead, the director smiled.

  “That sounds like an adventure. I bet you have a lot of stories from those days.”

  Taq raised his head, then nodded. “I have more than a few.”

  “Mhmm,” hummed Anne. She looked to Cho. “What about you, Tsenka? Married? Kids?”

  “Nope and nope,” said Cho. “And yourself?”

  “I’ve had a few of each,” she said with a grin. “My last husband was a saint. He passed a few years ago, and he took the rest of my heart with him. I’m all work now.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Tsenka.

  “The kids keep in touch?” asked Taq.

  “Oh sure,” Anne replied. “Not as much as I’d like. I have a daughter who lives and works near the bay. My two sons left the country for better opportunities. I don’t get to see either of them enough. They have their own lives and children now.”

  At this, the conversation ceased. Cho picked at her remaining meat. Her thirst was greater than her hunger, and she couldn’t stomach any more solid food. The waiter delivered a paper check, and Anne insisted again on paying. They walked out of the restaurant together and stopped outside the door.

  “I would like to be a part of your search,” said Anne. “I will contact you tomorrow and we can work leads. I can help you get around and into places you might not be able to as easily.”

  Taq looked to Tsenka for guidance. She looked back at him, then to Courtemanche. “At this point, I’m really not sure where to go next.”

  “Well then,” said Anne. “I will have to make sure I get something useful for you tomorrow.”

  “Very well,” said Cho. “But something you should know is that I’m committed to seeing this through, and sometimes that means things can get rough.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “If you are coming with us, I just want you to be prepared. Pack heat, a stealth gen, whatever you feel comfortable with,” explained Cho.

  “Oh my,” reacted Anne. “I hope we can avoid altercations, but if we cannot, so be it.”

  “See you tomorrow then,” said Tsenka.

  “Have a nice evening,” bade Taq.

  “You do the same, Taq,” returned Anne. She walked to her car, an expensive sedan not unlike many parked in the lot.

  Taq stared after her for a moment, then followed his vampire companion to their ugly little cab. Cho stepped into the driver’s side, and the vehicle swept them away. But it wasn’t taking them back to the hotel.

  “I want to pick something up,” Cho said, to which Taq simply nodded as he stared out of the passenger-side window.

  The car stopped outside of a general store. Inside were several immersive reality booths. The successor to virtual reality, IR was capable of interfacing with neural implants directly, allowing an almost perfectly real experience inside of a virtual world. If not for small flickers, glitches, slowdowns, or the revealing of post-processing graphical enhancements, such worlds would be indiscernible from reality.

  The purpose of the small-scale worlds was to take the patrons to expansive stores where they could shop for virtually anything. Particularly useful when shopping for clothes, the technology allowed experiencers to try on any outfit. Not only would they see what it would look like on them, but also how it would feel.

  Tsenka stepped into a booth and plugged the needle-thin jack into a similarly sized port behind her ear. Her neural interface created a sandbox where the world would reside. It then invited her senses to join. The sandbox was a virtual environment itself, preventing any malicious code from corrupting her implant’s operating system by limiting any changes to within the virtual environment.

  The nocturnal tried on a few outfits and smiled as she found one she liked. As soon as she purchased it, a large glider drone was dispatched from a centralized warehouse. It flew through the city, analyzing wind currents and steering toward the general store. It dropped the package into a small chute, then veered around to its next destination. Robotic arms on the rooftop of the store snatched the box and placed it on a conveyor that traveled to a receiving counter, ready for Tsenka to inspect and accept.

  Jones and Cho sat around while streams of local productions played on the smart wall. Subtitles informed Taq what was going on between the starring characters, while Cho was already semi-fluent in Hindi from language programs uploaded to her perfect recall storage. She chuckled when the subtitles didn’t match her translator, usually an error on the part of the on-screen text.

  Taq spent most of his time staring at the table, lost in his own thoughts. It was a world hidden to Cho, and she glanced over occasionally, wondering what was going on upstairs. A notification popped up on her HUD indicating she had an unread message in an old dead-drop box, one that few people had the address to. Matthias was one of those few people. Kate and Desre had both used it at times, but no one had in years.

  When she opened the text message, it was garbled. Encrypted, she assumed. But why? The drop itself was a secure platform, so further encryption was redundant. Worse yet, the note didn’t have a return address; such was one of the virtues of the drop. Cho turned on an encryption analysis routine and ordered her storage module to search for all personal keys she had. Whoever dropped the message wanted it read, she reasoned. One of my keys is bound to work.

  Though curious about its contents, she put the process in the background and glanced over at Taq again. It was getting late, and while it wasn’t her natural cycle as a vampire, she knew she would need rest to function in the morning.

  “You getting some sleep tonight?” she asked while perched on the side of her bed.

  Taq thumbed his com off. “What did you think of Courtemanche?” he asked, turning to face her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “And that’s what scares me. I listened to her heart. She was never frightened. She could be trying to hide her body’s physiological responses to deception.”

  “She may know exactly where Somer is,” said Taq. “Desre brought you here, and then we meet her. The answer could be right in front of us.”

  “Or she’s one of the few allies we’ll find here,” said Cho. “If she isn’t, then we’ve become very vulnerable. If she can’t prove herself useful tomorrow, then I think we should leave.”

  “Hmm,” reacted Taq. “To another city?”

  “If possible,” said Tsenka. “We don’t want anyone knowing where we sleep at night. This is enemy territory, Taq.”

  “Such as the vampire slayer?”

  “Just another problem we don’t need.”

  “We? She didn’t say she was a mage slayer,” pointed out Taq.

  Tsenka grinned. “Ah, well, as long as you are safe.” She sighed. “Alright, I’m getting ready for bed.” She stood and walked to the bathroom, grabbing her shopping bag on the way.

  Jones’s shoulders slumped as he imagined that she would soon emerge naked as she had before taking her nap earlier. But when Tsenka appeared, it was not in the nude, but in a silk pajama set, with bright orange and yellow patterns featuring local motifs. It clearly had not been a cheap purchase. She moved closer to him and held out her arms, twisting one way, then the other.

  “How do I look?” she asked enthusiastically.

  “You look… very pretty,” he said. “I’ve never seen so much color on you.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “It was a little inconsiderate of me to traipse about naked.”r />
  “I had sort of adjusted,” Taq said. “But thanks, I appreciate it.”

  Tsenka twirled around in a circle, then went to her bed and slipped under the covers.

  “I’m sorry for staring at you,” said Taq. “Earlier, I mean.”

  “Oh… it’s—don’t worry about it,” said Cho.

  “Goodnight,” he said.

  “Goodnight.”

  Episode 6: Taq and Annie

  “Mr. Jones,” addressed the older gentleman at the front of the class. Everyone else went by their first name, but not Taq. He was always Mr. Jones. “Which of these isotopes has the longest half-life?”

  “Tellurium, Mr. Strucker,” answered Taq. He always had the answer. Well, almost always, which was enough to convince the teachers, professors, and trainers to call on him regularly. It was tiresome, but he couldn’t help himself, and he couldn’t bring himself to feign ignorance.

  “That is correct,” said the physics teacher. “And it beats out its competitors by a wide margin,” he continued as the class’s eyes glazed over.

  The university was not exactly a high school or a college. It was, however, a prison and a home. It was a place of constant education and a self-contained ecosystem of drama and relationships.

  Jones was nearly twenty-two years old, and relationships were not his strong suit. He was well regarded by the staff of the facility, and for the most part, respected by his peers, but the social part of his brain, while not completely absent, was at the least stunted in its growth.

  Unlike many of his colleagues, the young mage wanted freedom less than he wanted power. Not power over others, but the power to fully realize his abilities, to be the master of his craft. But his casting professors regularly preached the pitfalls of ambition. Taq paid them no heed, breaking the rules regularly. He had been caught twice using the casting rooms outside of supervised hours, and another time reading a restricted volume on invocation from a teacher’s tablet.

  The one thing the wardens and president wanted was to believe they had control of their students, that they could be predicted, that they could be steered in the direction seen as most beneficial for the reputation of the facility and mage security. And while Taq’s behavior was mostly benign, the Mage Enforcement Security Service was running out of patience.

  Exiting Stein Hall, Taq heard footfalls quicker than that of the slow march of the surrounding throng. Nearly ramming head first into a passing student, Manny caught up to Jones, then matched his pace.

  “Tomorrow is going to get burnt!” he declared.

  “Ya, bro,” Taq played along.

  “E-fun convo,” said Manny. “Finally gonna get fresh air.”

  “We’re outside, Manny,” pointed out Taq.

  “You know what I mean, bro,” said Manny, backhanding Taq’s shoulder. “Going to get me all sorts of IDs.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be all over you,” snarked Taq.

  “Bug, we mages! Of course they will.”

  “You cast in public,” said Taq, “and you’ll never see public again.”

  Manny rolled his eyes. “Don’t be so stiff, Taq. You are still going, right?”

  “You know,” said Taq with a nod.

  “Ey, good. I’ll catch you later, bro.” Manny took off in a sprint to harass Pauly, another of the convention’s attendees.

  Even as young as Taq was in the grand scheme, those younger than he had been transferred to corporations as part of work release agreements. And for the first time since his placement at the campus, he was one of the ten eldest student mages. As such, he was eligible for special field trips and excursions. Saturday would be the first such trip as he and nine others traveled to the Electric Fun Convention in the city of Denver.

  It took two pills to carry the ten students, two professors, and one warden through the turbotube, as it was called. Air pushed the pills at great speed from one territory to the next. As the gaggle unloaded on the other end, the warden called out names.

  “Audra. Manny. Chris. Shelly, Fenner, Taq, Pauly, Rikan, Shane, Samantha.” All were accounted for.

  Not wanting to pay for accommodations, the university president had shipped them off before the sun had risen and would take delivery of them upon their return well after midnight. In between those times, the students were allowed the freedom to tour the booths at the Molycorp convention center.

  Said booths numbered in the hundreds, with some corporations renting side rooms for grander demonstrations of interactive gaming and experimental technologies. The hot item pushed within a large chunk of the booths was the neural implant, micro-computers that would both be powered by and have access to the brain’s synaptic pathways.

  The technology was heavily regulated and legal only when deemed necessary by a physician or therapist. But the applications for the implants had grown such that they treated a myriad of diseases and symptoms ranging from psychosis to loss of hearing. Rebellious youth were constantly finding ways of forging prescriptions or allowing street doctors to drill into their skulls. All toward the goal of exerting control over their brain chemistries and involuntary bodily functions, immersing themselves in virtual worlds, or becoming information traps.

  Audra nudged Taq on the shoulder. Though she was only two years his elder, the gap seemed larger. He still looked boyish, and she was clearly a woman and more mature than he and his male peers. “I suppose you are going to run off to the gaming section.”

  “Defo. But I am going to see it all before we go back,” he replied, pushing his blond hair out of his face. “You going to go to the botany exhibition?” he asked, referring to their earlier conversation on her love of gardening and plant life in general.

  “Need to pull up a pamphlet or I’ll never find it,” she said, fumbling with a rudimentary com given to a few of the students for accessing the local network.

  “Want to come with me? Might catch sight of it.”

  Audra laughed. “I doubt it will be over there. I’m thinking more like in the practical innovations section.”

  “Ey, visual games are very practical,” protested Taq.

  Fenner overheard and placed his hand around Taq’s shoulders. “You tell her,” he said. Fenner was Taq’s age, and it was his first trip as well. “Plus, the gaming booths have the hot numbers.”

  Audra rolled her eyes then widened them. “Last year, they had this protein synthesis display with the buffest bro I had ever seen. He had his shirt off and was flexing his pecs and had a six-pack that—”

  “Audra,” interrupted Fenner. “Gross. Don’t treat men like objects.”

  “That man was an object,” she countered, her eyes staring forward as if he were standing before her.

  Taq laughed. Fenner steered Jones by the shoulders, turning him toward the interactive entertainment section.

  “That’s great, Audra,” Fenner said. “See ya.”

  “Layta, boys,” she returned.

  The two navigated through the crowds. In a place so expansive and busy, it was impossible not to get lost. But if any of them had ideas of getting permanently lost, the tracking anklets they wore would ensure such plans were thwarted. Escaping was the last thing on Taq’s mind. He and Fenner waited in lines to try out new gaming tech involving improved non-invasive neural interfaces, traditional augmented reality, and virtual reality headgear.

  While a few hours of pumping explosions and gunfire into Taq’s eyes and brain were enough for him, Fenner decided he wanted to visit each exhibit yet again. They parted ways, and Taq wandered aimlessly from booth to booth. He found himself drawn to soothing sounds, mostly drowned out by a cacophony of shouts and laughter, of new-era musical instruments.

  On display were finger-driven percussion touchpads. The rest of the instruments involved virtual interfaces, either projected using fledgling hologram technology or displayed only for the musician via smart glasses. Listening carefully, the mage noticed recurring themes in the note progressions and sound effects despite clearly different
hand motions and speeds. It was not a new theme for technology-based music to correct and aid the player’s attempts, but the room for error had expanded over time, to cover looser and looser movements.

  The result was that music was created with a clear bias toward the sensibilities of the algorithm’s programmer. And programmers often copied or built from existing programs. Musical experimentation was slowly being funneled into more and more specific styles.

  As the horror of what he was witnessing dawned on him, he heard a voice, soothing and feminine, break through the noise around him. “You hear it, don’t you?”

  Taq turned his head toward the voice, and the face of a young woman with dirty blonde hair entered his frame of view. His thoughts now jumbled, he replied, “Hear what?”

  “The sounds don’t really match what they’re doing,” she said. “Not consistently.”

  Jones’s earlier epiphany returned to him. “It’s the assist routines,” he said, trying to sound sophisticated. “They must all come from the same source.”

  The woman’s pouty lips stretched into a smile. “I would bet crypto you’re right about that,” she said. She held out her hand, with the palm facing down. “I’m Annie.”

  The mage took her hand, startled at its softness. “Nice to meet you—”

  “Taq Jones,” she finished for him.

  Her soft grip soothed the sharp sense of anxiety triggered by her knowledge. They had all been warned of corporate interest in surveying mages in the rare moments they could be found outside a university. Somehow, Taq found it hard to believe that this young woman Annie had a corporate affiliation.

  He pulled his hand away. “How’d you know?”

  “I took a look at the registry,” she said, grinning. “Then I cross-referenced it with the databases at the nearby universities. I thought maybe some of the Boulder university mages would be here, but it turns out they scheduled their trip for day three. That’s a secret, by the way.”

  “You accessed our database?” asked Taq, still stunned.

  “Sure,” she said with a shrug. “There’s even pics of you in there. They should consider keeping those offline.”