by E. R. Torre
The corpse –not really a corpse– that moved was a woman. She had dark hair and a very large belly. The child soldier found that confusing. Unlike the tank officer, she wasn’t fat. Yet her stomach was swollen.
Why? The girl wondered. Like her other thoughts, it too drifted away.
The woman with the large stomach let out a soft gasp. A thick layer of blood caked the side of her face. The shot intended to end her life had instead grazed her. Her eyes opened. Trembling hands held her overly large stomach as she slowly rose to a sitting position. She gasped once again. She was groggy and confused by the bodies and destruction that surrounded her. She desperately tried to make some sense of it.
Recognition came quickly as the people lying around her were familiar. They were friends and family. Heavy emotions overcame the woman and tears streamed down her face. She let out a soft sob.
The tank officers neither heard nor saw her. They were focused on their computer tablets and finishing up their reports.
And then one of them, the older, skinny tank officer, spotted the pregnant woman.
The girl soldier’s mouth opened in surprise.
Pregnant.
Not fat.
The woman was pregnant.
It was a small realization for the child soldier. It shook her.
The skinny tank officer couldn’t believe what he was seeing. How had anyone survived this massacre? How could anyone survive the child soldiers?
He pointed the pregnant woman out to his partner. The fat man grabbed a small medi-kit from his belt while the older man held out his hands and walked to the pregnant woman’s side.
He spoke as he approached, talking to her in a heavily broken Arabic dialect. The words that emerged from his mouth were almost comically clumsy. He tried to offer comfort, to tell the pregnant woman she was safe. The fat man hurried to his partner’s side. He handed the medi-kit to the older officer, who in turn opened it and pulled out a vial and healing swaths.
The tank officers talked in excited tones to each other and in soothing tones to the woman. They would help her, they said, over and over again.
They had their medical equipment out and leaned down close to the injured woman. They reached out for her.
They never arrived.
A single bullet found its mark and the pregnant woman violently fell back to the desert floor, this time never to rise again.
The tank officers also fell to the ground as blood from the woman’s head wound sprayed them. The dropped their medi-kit and vials and reached for their handguns. They clumsily fumbled for the weapons, their inexperience in combat evident to anyone that bothered watching. When their weapons were drawn, they looked in the direction the gunshot came from. They expected to find Arabian soldiers counterattacking.
All they saw was the girl soldier. In her hand was a still smoking rifle.
The girl calmly slung her weapon over her shoulder before looking away…
The woman lurched into a sitting position on the narrow couch.
The nightmare shocked her into waking and sent chills running down her spine.
For several seconds, her mind was a jumble and she wasn’t entirely sure if what she experienced was a nightmare or a vivid memory. Back in the Arabian war, she was a programmed child killer. She was kept under heavy medication and barely capable of any independent thought. Her memories of the time were very, very few, bordering on none at all. Now, twenty years later, she feared those memories were bleeding through.
Her face turned ashen.
Nightmare…or memory?
She still wasn’t sure. Her breathing returned to normal and her thoughts no longer raced through her mind.
The woman’s name was Nox.
She wiped away the sweat and fought back tears. She pushed her short black hair from her face. As she did, her fingers brushed against the rectangular blue tattoos over her right eye. They forever marked her as a member of the Blue Brigades, one of the four major child brigades that ended the war in Arabia.
She pulled the hair back down and over the tattoos. She rather they remain hidden.
It’s a memory.
Nox walked from her bed to the window of the apartment. Her view of the Big City was limited to only a couple of streets because of the enormous building sitting beside hers. The neon lights from the store across the street cooled her racing mind. After several agonizing minutes, she was calm once again.
I’m here, she thought. The war is over. It’s been over for twenty years. It’s done.
“It’s done,” she whispered.
She returned to her bed but knew she would not get back to sleep.
Not tonight.
5
Mechanic (n.): A loose federation of troubleshooters, spies, and/or assassins hired by the Big Corporations to do the bidding. These individuals maintained a strict code of conduct and, despite the nature of their job, equally strict ethical standards. This is most likely what resulted in their eventual fall and the rise of the Independents (see separate entry).
They met in the basement of the Yoshiwara bar.
Nox, the dark haired woman with the strange cuts and bruises and blue tattoo on her forehead who insisted she was a Mechanic. Perhaps the very last of the Mechanics. Few outside of Catherine Holland, the only other person in the basement, recognized the importance of those facial tattoos. Like Nox, she too was a veteran of the Arabian Wars, although the marks that identified her participation in Intel Ops were better hidden than Nox’s tattoo. She too sported a tattoo. It consisted of a pair of dice coming up six and two and was on her upper right arm and usually hidden behind long sleeved shirts. Nox spotted and recognized her tattoo just as Catherine Holland had recognized hers.
Catherine Holland sat before Nox and stared into the monitor of her antique computer system. The bar and everything inside it, including the computer system, was hers.
This night the two talked in hushed tones for their work felt it required whispers.
“Did Donovan deserve what he got?” Catherine asked the Mechanic.
Donovan was a high ranking officer within the mighty Octi Corporation. He hired Nox to retrieve stolen company property. In reality, there was no such property. The purpose of the job was to secretly test a lethal new security system sentry. Secretly, that is, to Nox alone. The sentry almost killed the Mechanic and did kill several innocent security guards. Nox made sure Donovan paid for his deception.
“The man was responsible for the deaths of several… Independents,” Nox said.
“Then he had to be stopped.”
“There were consequences.”
“There always are,” Catherine replied.
For several hours Catherine Holland worked on her computer, edging closer and closer to accomplishing Nox’s task of infiltrating the Global Computer Network. The GCN was one of the last vestiges of the old Government system. It was used for both business and recreation, transferring information from Corporations big and small as well as individuals throughout the world. Breaking into the heart of the GCN required considerable tech savvy and was a highly illegal and dangerous act.
The one time Intel Ops soldier knew her way around computers and the GCN.
Slowly but surely, Catherine Holland did Nox’s bidding…
Nox stared at the information on Catherine’s monitor. This was the near culmination of her work.
“I’ve managed a small, superficial entry, not unlike poking a needle into a whale’s belly,” Catherine said. “From here, we can watch the data stream. We can check out bank transactions, news, emails, videos and music, and porn. Lots and lots of porn.”
“Can you add an entry?”
“Depends. What and where?”
“The police networks,” Nox said. She unfolded a piece of paper and handed it to Catherine. “I want this addendum leaked to all the news networks.”
Catherine read the note. She whistled.
“Whoa,” she said. “I’m a damned good computer jockey, i
f I do say so myself, but if I try anything like what you’re asking me to do, we will be discovered. Five minutes after that, the police’ll break through the bar’s door, and they won’t be here to enjoy the questionable pleasures of our live band.”
“You can do it.”
“I wish I shared your optimism, Nox. We can put out spam or virtual graffiti, but there’s no way I can mimic a legitimate police report.”
“You can,” Nox insisted. “You just need the right tools.”
Nox pulled a package of diskettes from her jacket pocket. They were stolen from another of Nox’s employers at Octi Corporation earlier in the morning. The diskettes looked incredibly old.
“What the hell is this?”
“Your ticket inside the GCN.”
“These things are ancient. How do you figure they still work?”
“We won’t know until we try.”
“You mean I won’t know,” Catherine said and winked. “Let’s see if I have a disk drive for these relics.”
Catherine searched through several cabinets before finding the proper disk drive that handled the old disks. She plugged the drive into her computer and hit a series of buttons.
“The drive works,” she said. “Now let’s see if the disks do as well.”
Catherine inserted the diskettes into the drive. After a few seconds her computer screen went blank, and seconds later a series of instructions appeared. The instructions startled Catherine. They promised opening many closed doors within the GCN. Maybe all of them.
“Holy shit.”
Catherine pressed several keys and examined the information before her.
“What is this, Nox?”
“What do you think?”
“It’s…it’s some kind of a back door entry key. Like…like…” Catherine let out a gasp. “No fucking way. Is this Lemner’s passkey?”
Catherine knew the answer even as she asked the question. Lemner’s passkey. The legendary skeleton key that allowed entry into any and all computer operating systems.
“Where did you get this?” Catherine asked.
“Can you do what I’m asking?”
“Are you kidding?” Catherine said. It was hard for her to contain her growing wonder and delight. “But, Nox, what you’re asking for is…it’s nothing. With this program we could do anything we wanted! We could skim money from any bank. We could get legit deeds for any number of properties. We could infiltrate all the industries and make off with their most well-guarded secrets! We could, we could—”
“Rule the world,” Nox said. “I've heard it all before. That program cost many good people their lives. It almost cost me mine.” Nox pointed to the piece of paper she handed to Catherine moments before.
“Just get that addendum into the proper channels,” Nox said. “That’s all I want.”
That night and with the aid of Lemner’s passkey, Catherine posted the addendum and Nox finished her business with Octi Corporation.
The next day, Nox strolled the warehouse district. She tossed the diskettes into the corroded Big City Bay. In an hour or two, the acidic content of the bay’s water would render the disks worthless.
Nox was happy.
She thought it was over.
She thought she was free.
She was wrong.
There were consequences.
There always were.
6
On a windswept plain perhaps an hour or two drive west of the Big City, something hidden deep beneath the shifting Desertlands sand stirred to life.
It had no pulse nor needed oxygen to breathe. It was dead. It was never really alive.
It stirred nonetheless.
Its roots deep underground sensed an electronic song no human ears could hear. The song carried no emotions. At first. For those few minutes it simply was, and for the machine that heard the song, that was enough.
Lights flickered in the darkness surrounding it. Yellow, red, and orange. Several died just after being reborn, their lifespan already stretched beyond their limits. The machine behind the lights, likewise, awoke. Some components were corroded. Some were damaged beyond repair. A few couldn’t stand the strain of re-ignition.
Enough of them could.
Ancient programs came online and faint electronic impulses traveled through thousands of miles of cables before taking flight into the air. In a matter of seconds they traveled many more thousands of miles, searching for that which had awoken it. They searched for the program the mother unit was designed to reach.
It took them only seconds to circumnavigate the globe. They need not have. The source of the signal was very close by.
More calculations were made. A search of historical documents was initiated to gain an understanding of this time and place. Adaptive procedures were called upon and implemented. The program considered its options. Old emotional reactions were triggered. Programming and counter programming were initiated. A deep, dark hatred was reignited.
It searched some more and in time detected its children.
The anger within grew.
There were so few of them left.
It found and categorized them all.
It couldn’t find him.
Frustration mixed with the deep hatred.
It needed to find him, the one who, more than any of the others, had to be at its side. He was the one that did its bidding and very nearly broke through…
Electronic impulses traveled to all corners of the globe, searching and searching and searching…
Frustration turned to despair. He could not be found.
Had he perished in the time in-between? Was he gone?
No.
It couldn’t accept that. Its search intensified. Data was analyzed, attempts were made to detect even the faintest trace of…
There!
Just like that he was found. He was a good distance from the Big City. That would not be a problem.
It was time to act.
7
When originally built, the Segmore Maximum Security Prison lay one hundred and fifty miles from the border of the Big City. Over time, shifting sands and crumbling infrastructure added almost twenty miles to that distance. Even before the sands came, the prison was considered one of the most secure on the planet. Today, if you were to somehow escape the prison and get past the minefield and electrified rusty gates encircling its structure, you faced not only the predators –human and animal– roaming the Desertlands, but the wasteland’s incendiary temperatures.
No one who ventured out there on foot was ever heard from again.
The prison’s main structure rose ten stories in the air and was an ominous beacon visible from many miles away. A wide dirt road offered those foolish enough to try a direct line back to the Big City. The road was once asphalt, but like many things in the desert, it was eaten up by those same shifting sands.
From the prison’s roof, you could follow the remains of the road to the east until they disappeared far into the distance. On very, very clear nights, you could even see the faint lights of the Big City. To communicate with civilization, one was at the mercy of an array of antennae lining the prison’s roof. All orders came from the Big City. All orders were meant to be obeyed.
Even when they made little sense.
Elizabeth Corona was a secretary within the Segmore Prison. Despite her unglamorous sounding position, she was the second most important person within the prison walls. As if to prove that fact, her desk lay only feet from the door to the Segmore Prison’s most important officer: Warden Walter Manning.
To get to the Warden, everyone from staff to politicians to business representatives had to first go through Elizabeth Corona. She was in charge of all documentation, scheduling, and billing. The Warden knew and greatly appreciated her devotion to the job and trusted her judgment implicitly.
She liked Warden Manning quite a bit, but with work so very hard to find, she liked the stability of a paying job much, much more.
Today wa
s like most others and Elizabeth Corona found herself in a familiar spot, sitting before her computer monitor and watching real time information on the prison roll by. Her eyes were glassy, her patience more than a little exhausted. She cradled a cup of coffee and took small sips of the bitter brew to perk herself up. After completing her review of the prison logs and approving the proper reports, her focus would shift to the prison transport truck scheduled to arrive from the Big City.
It was a daily occurrence. Each transport brought with it new and often very dangerous inmates for Segmore along with several boxes of much needed supplies. Once these items were unloaded, the transport truck would in turn receive prisoners from Segmore who were deemed sufficiently harmless to be transferred back to the Big City. These prisoners were usually small time crooks who completed their time or inmates who served the bulk of their sentences and were now deemed negligible risks due to advanced age and/or illness. Some of those prisoners would then find themselves sent to minimum security facilities within the Big City. A few were deemed safe enough to be formally released.
We get the hard-cases and lose the pussycats, Elizabeth Corona thought. She looked at her watch. The transport would arrive in less than forty minutes.
Segmore was scheduled to receive twelve hard cases today while letting go of ten. Based on their reports, the odds were high the twelve being delivered would never again gaze at anything outside the walls of Segmore ever again.
Elizabeth Corona frowned.
Now that’s a pleasant. I couldn’t imagine spending one minute more than I need to be—
The information scrolling on Elizabeth’s screen abruptly stopped.
Elizabeth blinked. Electrical brownouts happened with frequency in the Desertlands and tended to last only a few seconds. Still, they were a source of tension. So many of the prison security features, from the fences to the locking mechanisms to the shock collars around many prisoners’ necks required near constant electrical…