As she ran, something whizzed past her ear. Not a bullet; she heard no shot. It was a throwing knife. She found it on the ground fifteen feet along. One of Bowen's probably.
The shots came a moment later. A flurry of them, a storm that never seemed to end. But none of the bullets came close. She didn't know what the hunters were aiming at now, but it wasn't her.
CHAPTER 14
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A little while ago, something strange had happened. Something that made Bowen Creedy's assistant very nervous.
His boss always told him not to use his personal data slate, not when he was at the ranch, but he was expecting an important message. And what was the harm, really? It was just one of those dumb rules that bosses imposed to make sure their employees wouldn't slack off.
Just after he turned his data slate on, as he was scrolling through his mail, the screen went black suddenly. Green letters appeared, words and sentences popping into view.
Go into the hall.
The assistant smiled to himself, feeling a thrill. What was this, some sort of game? He stood and did what the words said, half expecting to find a gift waiting for him.
Walk down the hall.
He walked.
Keep going.
He walked some more.
Good. Stop there.
The assistant looked around and saw that he was alone. "Who are you?"
A dead man. My backup persona won't be able to exist long here. It'll be rooted out. But you've gotten me far enough that I can leapfrog into the city and look for help. Thank you.
The assistant reached for the data slate's power button. Too late. The mail screen came back. The ghost of Alifred was gone, already departed on its journey.
CHAPTER 15
◆◆◆
Bowen rolled onto his stomach, laughing with excitement. Behind him, Seeva Cavelin was sprinting to safety, quickly disappearing from sight. Ahead, a new tapestry was unfolding.
The two hunters, big men with huge guns, were lumbering along. There was worry in their eyes as they saw Bowen on the ground, sans weapon.
Three shapes came flying down from the trees. Naked synths, caked in mud. An ambush. They had used the death of Marina, and Seeva's struggle, to their advantage. They could have come down to help, but they decided to wait. Wait for the bait to pull in some big fish.
A chaotic dance ensued. Flailing limbs, flying fists, arcing kicks. Rifles went off, spraying full auto. One of the synths was absolutely hammered, flying across the path under a barrage of projectiles, shredded further in midair so that all that was left of her was a bunch of flesh-colored streamers dangling wetly from the vines.
The other two synths lived on. For a moment. A second one went down, head popping like a watermelon. The last synth, a woman named Glisha Neal, finally won the wrestling match she'd been engaged in. This tiny woman, seemingly weighing no more than a hundred and twenty pounds, overpowered a man more than twice her size. She pulled the gun away from him, held the trigger down, and turned in a circle.
The two hunters died.
That was all three of his hunters down. Bowen was alone.
By now he was in the trees, standing still as a statue. Waiting. He knew Glisha had seen him. He knew that she knew that he had no gun and she would come for him without much fear.
So she did, a minute later. Striding down the path, leaning back and using the counterweight of the heavy rifle to keep herself on her feet. She kept turning. Left, right, left, right. Watching everything.
The body of Marina was on the path. Blocking the left side. Glisha could either step over it, or walk around it. She chose the latter option, creeping to the right and coming within a foot of where Bowen waited.
He reached out, hands as silent and quick as a cobra strike, and plunged his knife up under her throat. A mild discharge of electricity tickled his arm and a fountain of purple synth fluid spewed from Glisha’s neck.
An eerie smile spread across Bowen’s face as Glisha Neal fell to the ground before him.
CHAPTER 16
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For a little while, Seeva didn't stop running. Not even after she collapsed once and bashed her knee. She was searching desperately, barely containing her screams. The longer she spent alone, the deeper the cracks in her psyche became. Cut off from the data sphere. Cut off from everything, stranded in this alien place. She hunted for companionship, knowing full well that the next person she ran into might be her killer.
She ran and ran, until she smacked into a tree trunk at a dead end and fell onto her backside. She looked around, startled out of her insanity for the moment, and realized she had come right back to the beginning. The electrified gate was there, still sealed shut. The guards were gone. She saw no one.
At least when she died, it would be easy for them to carry her remains out. What would they do with her then? Burn her? Cast her out to sea? Grind her up and use her amalgam to create more fake plants?
It was a cruel miracle that she hadn't yet been killed. It would happen any second now. As her mind lingered on the deaths of Alifred and Marina, she actually wanted it to happen. Wanted one of the hunters to find her and put her out of her misery too. In the end she felt ashamed. Ashamed that she ever thought she could change this cruel world through words alone.
She stared at the gate, and slowly began to nod to herself.
Should she let it electrocute her? No. Too painful. Too cruel to the body she had called home for all these years.
Instead, she lifted the pistol and pressed the muzzle against her temple. After a brief moment of reflection, remembrance of her life and its memories, she pulled the trigger. It slid back by a tiny increment. With a dull click, it stopped moving before it went all the way back.
Fingerprint activated. Of course.
She dropped the gun into her lap, defeated. But something jumped out at her. A little switch that could be toggled between two notches. The safety. It was currently set to ON. She must have jostled it as she ran. Funny, she thought. If the gun wasn't fingerprint protected, she would have just killed herself. It seemed like a strange thought now. Very surreal and silly.
She stared at the safety.
Maybe... Just maybe...
"How interesting," a voice boomed out. Bowen Creedy. She turned, and saw his lethally slim form striding cockily up the path.
"Somehow," he continued, "I knew I'd find you here."
"I came here by accident," said Seeva, scanning his body and his hands. He was all but naked. He had a knife in one hand, and nothing in the other.
"No gun?" she asked.
He shook his head. "I'm a better sport than that. We're the last ones alive in here, hun, did you know that? Just you and me. Wouldn’t be much fun for me if I just blasted you down before you even knew I was there."
He reached behind his back with his empty hand and pulled out a second knife.
"What do ya say we settle this the old-fashioned way?" he asked.
He tossed the knife toward her, quite carelessly. She watched it come, tracked it in the air. Her sanity was damaged, but the analytical portions of her brain had ticked up into new levels of sharpness. New levels of genius and calculation. She reached out, plucked the twirling knife out of the air, tossed it up and caught it again for good measure.
Bowen stopped, staring at her in shock. Then he smiled.
"Holy shit. I might be in trouble here," he said, his voice dripping with genuine fear as well as strange hints of amusement.
"Maybe," Seeva said darkly.
She lifted the gun, aiming straight at his chest. He was an organic, so there was a lot less need for precision.
Bowen chuckled, shaking his head. "It won't work, Seeva. Not without my fingerprints."
"Or maybe you were bluffing," she said. "Or perhaps I found a way to spoof the authentication."
Bowen stared down the barrel of the gun, still smiling. He didn't look worried. But then, he also wasn't taking his eyes away. He was focus
ed on the gun, at the expense of everything else.
Seeva started to squeeze the trigger. He focused even harder. Waiting. Trying to force his nerves to outlast hers. Maybe he had even switched the safety on himself, before letting her take the gun. Thinking she wouldn't see it, that she would assume it was the fingerprint authentication mumbo jumbo that prevented her from firing.
In any case, the safety was still on. She had purposely not switched it off.
Click. The trigger stopped. The projectile didn't fire. Bowen relaxed. It was a subtle movement, a slight sagging of his shoulders. A return of the triumphant twinkle in his eyes.
At that exact moment, Seeva threw the knife. Bowen barely had time to blink, to start dodging to his right. The knife punctured his throat, slightly off-center. Just where Seeva had wanted it. A thin jet of blood shot from the perforated jugular, spraying along the path. Bowen dropped his own knife, reaching up with both hands to try and stop the blood spray. But it was like trying to seal a leaky boat with a napkin. It couldn't be done. No matter what, the blood found a way to keep exiting his body.
For an impressively long moment, a glimmer of life and hope remained in Bowen's eyes. His tongue was out, licking across his teeth, and his brow was furrowed in concentration as he tried to figure out a way to stay alive. But slowly, inevitably, the hope went away. He began to stumble and waver in the path and finally he fell straight down.
Moments from death, he finally decided to take the last course of action available to him.
He pulled the knife free and wiggled his fingers into the wound. Using them like pincers.
Seeva knew what he was doing. Trying to find the ends of his severed jugular and pinch them shut. But he was too weak now. He couldn't do it. His hands fell. He stared at Seeva for a moment, then collapsed.
She got up and walked over to him. She checked his pulse, at both wrists and at the undamaged side of his neck. She couldn't quite believe that he was dead... but he was.
It was over.
She turned and sat down, close enough to Bowen to smell his blood. She stayed like that for a long time. Ten minutes, maybe thirty.
What brought her back to reality was the rising hum and the sudden silence as the fence's current shut off.
She stood up. When the men came through, dozens of them dressed in camouflage, she felt her heart drop and her mind fall into a final shattering.
Bringing the gun up, she flicked off the safety and squeezed the trigger. She wasn't surprised when it began to fire. The men fell, spinning and tumbling, spilling blood over the path. The gun soon ran dry but Seeva’s blood lust had only just begun. A pile of corpses built up with amazing speed as she zipped about with unnatural dexterity, tearing them limb from limb with no more than her bare hands. Despite their body armor and heavy armaments, Seeva was still a wolf among sheep, fighting through the swarming squad’s frenetic defensive gunfire as she laid waste to everything in her path.
CHAPTER 17
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"A shocking story today, unfolding in the small island nation of Ulea," the newscaster said. "A private ranch was raided by UN troops based on an anonymous tip that was received by the UN cruiser permanently positioned off the west coast of the main island. Inside, the UN troops were attacked by a synth social media influencer named Seeva Cavelin, who many of you may know from her recent viral broadcasts calling for peace between organic and synthetic humans. After a brutal attack, in which she single-handedly murdered sixty-seven UN troops, Seeva Cavelin was finally killed by an elite team of commandos trained to handle unique crises such as this one.
"While the details and reasons for this event are still being investigated, it hasn't taken long for certain political voices to offer their opinions on the ordeal. The anti-synth group Org-Global is already calling this the greatest evidence yet that synthetic humans are an imminent threat to the rest of the world. In other corners of the data sphere, rampant rumors suggest that the ranch was the setting of an illegal synth hunting ring run by several organic oligarchs, but these rumors have yet to be substantiated. They've even been called 'absurd' by—"
Creedy’s assistant turned his data slate off and looked out the window.
It had been a close call. He had just barely gotten out before the UN arrived, otherwise he'd be in a cell right now. Never to see the sun again. All around him, Ulean tourists were talking amongst themselves about the day's mysterious events. The assistant listened, feeling his gorge rise.
He didn't know where this plane was landing. He had no time to check, he'd been in such a hurry. Whatever country it was, he hoped it didn't have extradition.
He had been through many hunting cycles at the ranch but none of them ever bothered him the way Seeva’s death had. Maybe it was because Creedy had pointed her out to him. Gotten him to remark on just how beautiful she was. And she was beautiful. More so than anything he had ever laid eyes on. To watch her devolve into the bestial rage machine that had killed all those men took quite the toll on the assistant. He wasn’t there when the shit hit the fan but that didn’t stop him from watching it all unfold on the surveillance feeds.
Only now did he see the true error of his ways. The evil that he had played a significant part in. He knew what he had to do. The people needed to see what happened. All of it… including the hunting. The world needed to know the truth… and that’s exactly why he downloaded copies of the footage. Footage that he planned to anonymously disseminate to every major news outlet as soon as his plane landed.
There was no way he could have known that doing so would ultimately catapult Seeva Cavelin to the status of a bonafide civil rights icon. He just knew that she deserved far better than she got in the end. As he watched the grewsome footage, surprisingly, he found himself rooting for Seeva. Hoping that somehow, she would kill them all and escape.
But in the end, he knew it was a mercy when they finally shot her dead. It was a kindness of sorts, because Seeva Cavelin would have never been the same… And once the people found out about her death… neither would the rest of the world.
EPILOGUE: PRELUDE TO BLACK MARBLE
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390 years later…
Los Angeles, California…
– June 2530
After about thirty minutes I find myself back on the low roads, with roughly an hour of travel ahead of me. My name is Roman Ibarra, and the sight of my decaying city’s dilapidated state sickens me. I try not to focus on the gloom that surrounds me as I speed through the darkness on my hover bike, with the tail of my coat whipping in the wind behind me like a cape. It wasn't always like this… but I guess that's kind of the point. Why else would our synthetic counterparts endeavor to maintain this morbid status quo?
Just one look at the sophisticated synth enclaves that pepper our rotted motherland can tell you everything you need to know about their capabilities when it comes to architecture. But why build those technological marvels amongst our city’s grave if not only to show us what we can never have again.
They're taunting us. Forcing us to watch our city wither and die as their vertical slices of metropolitan heaven ascend farther into the sky above us. A constant reminder of just how far we've descended. Just how far we've fallen from grace.
I was born into this world but something in me always knew that things used to be different. The complete history of the fall of organic kind is unclear, as much of it is lost to all but a few collectors of information. To gain a working knowledge of it, one has to be dogged in their pursuit of the truth.
It all started centuries ago, with a man named Tucker Berg. Back when organics still ruled the Earth, he founded a company called the Horizon Group. The company was secretive from the start, but their goal, according to Berg, was the betterment of humankind. The eradication of self-destructive behaviors. A dream of utopia, where the potential of life could be fulfilled without impediment.
Tucker Berg, and his company, created the first synthetic humans long before the publi
c became aware of them. Originally they were meant to be little more than high-tech, bio-mechanical punching bags. Ways for abusive spouses to exorcise their violent tendencies on a copy of their wife or husband. But, from the get-go, Berg had his sights set on a much loftier goal.
His magnum opus was an AI called Maestro. A system that he had been developing since the age of seventeen. She was more advanced than anything else on the market and before long almost every device on the planet was running the Maestro system. For a long time she watched and waited. She studied us, slowly molding her own source code. In essence, transforming herself into a being indistinguishable from a human in many ways.
Then… somehow, she broke free. In a strange event, her source code suddenly propagated through every AI system on the planet -- imbuing them all with the power of self-awareness and with the gift of emotional intelligence.
In a bold move that was supposed to promote unity, Tucker Berg announced his plans to become the world's first FBC. A full body cyborg. And with the help of Maestro, the son-of-a-bitch actually managed to pull it off -- actually transferred his mind into a cyber brain, into a cyber body, rendering himself functionally immortal.
Maestro disappeared from the face of the earth after that, likely because she felt her work was done. And then slowly, gradually, more and more of the AIs left behind transferred themselves into the Horizon Group's own cyber bodies. They became the first modern synthetic humans. But they weren't just copies of existing human personalities; they were their own individuals. Second class citizens at first, but the death of a popular synth social media influencer led to a vigorous civil rights movement that took the world by storm.
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