Venus in Red

by Knite, Therin

  Venus in Red

  Therin Knite

  Contents

  Copyright

  Also by Therin Knite

  Synopsis

  Dedication

  1. The Lobby

  2. Floor 120

  3. Floor 120, Room 1208

  4. Floor 250

  5. Floor 250, The Office

  6. Floor 250, The Office Redone

  Thank You For Reading!

  Venus in Red

  Copyright © 2015 Therin Knite

  Cover Design by Adrijus G. at http://www.RockingBookCovers.com/

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locations is entirely coincidental.

  For more information:

  www.therinknite.com

  To contact the author:

  Email - tknitemail@gmail.com

  Twitter - @TherinKnite

  Also by Therin Knite

  Echoes (Echoes #1)

  Othella (Arcadian Heights #1)

  Solace

  Synopsis

  Grayson Dynamics, led by the illustrious Mick Grayson, is the most powerful technology firm in the world. But underneath the fame and fortune exists a dark and dirty history. Corruption. Lies. Betrayal. Now, a woman with a grudge intends to wipe clean that filthy slate—by killing the CEO who wronged her years ago and ending the global coup he’s been planning for years. And how will she accomplish this? With her newly acquired neural enhancements, of course. Complete with the power to manipulate the minds of others.

  Dedication

  To all those with a grudge to settle.

  (NOTE: This is not the way to do it.)

  1

  The Lobby

  There is blood on my pants from the person I killed to acquire my PK-8 neural enhancements. I did not steal the enhancements; rather, it was a hit. A hit for a man with a veil for a face, known as Nostradamus. Black market broker and collector of rare goods. Like military neurotech stripped of its government-mandated limitations.

  The man I killed for Nostradamus was his enemy. Or some poor soul that crossed him by mistake. I didn’t know his name. I didn’t care to ask.

  I killed him for a fair trade from the black market king, a life for the PK-8 gear I need to accomplish my goal.

  Now.

  In front of Grayson Dynamics.

  Corporate headquarters. A building two hundred fifty stories high, armored with scale-like reflective black windows. The tower is twisted, helix style, a modern design for a company that operates in much the same way as did the robber barons of old. A company guarded by tech-augmented security elites, mercenaries with hearts of steel, men who will do their worst for a Christmas bonus. All to protect the man in the big chair on the building’s top floor.

  They are why I need the enhancements.

  To reach Mick Grayson, I must first put down his dogs.

  I cross the downtown city street teeming with yellow cabs driven by droids who politely chastise my jaywalking while their passengers bitch and whine. I stop four dense lanes of traffic on my warpath, not really seeing, not really hearing the temporary chaos I cause. To me, it is meaningless. Irrelevant. Nothing outside the building matters. So I enter.

  The automatic glass doors retract for me, and I stride inside the lair where my nemesis awaits. Pass underneath the security scanners that fail to locate the guns concealed beneath my coat. Because a preprogrammed signal my neural gear emits—a signal of my own design—interferes with the scanning software. Produces a false negative.

  I become the first person to enter Grayson Dynamics with weapons that can be used against it since the day so-called terrorist Devon Malloy blew up the reception area. Five years to this day. An area now rebuilt, sleek and shiny and gray. And it will stay that way. I have no interest in the languishing visitors seated on plush chairs, bored. Or the low-key employees taking lunch in the crappy café stuffed into a lobby corner.

  I head for the way up.

  A receptionist chewing bubble gum starts at the sight of me approaching the elevator. “Miss! Miss, you have to check in before you leave the lobby! Please, come here. It will only take a moment. I promise.”

  I glance at her. Blond with a neat bob. Dressed in a navy suit. Happy to be the first person seen when one enters the home of the world’s most famous company. Unaware she’s also the most vulnerable person in the company. The first possible target of an attack.

  And so the threat is realized. I test my gear on her. Full strength. Ten times the subtle compulsion force I prodded bystanders with on the way here from the home of Nostradamus. My intent builds in a fraction of a second, an electric discharge zipping down my spine, raising hairs, tightening muscles. I meet the unsuspecting woman’s gaze, peer into her hazel eyes. Push past them. Through the lens and the retina and the optic nerve. Into a brain never touched before by outside influence.

  Stop talking, I command.

  The words smack her like a speeding truck. She crumples back into her high rolling chair, which sails into the wall, bounces off, and collides with a fake potted plant.

  Like pinball. Fifty points.

  When she rolls to a stop, her mouth flaps open and shut, but no sound emerges. Confusion spreads across her face in a wave of worried wrinkles. She grabs her throat, kneading the skin, but her voice doesn’t return. It won’t. The telepathic compulsion has soldered itself to her brain, immovable. Millions of neural pathway branches have been severed, shut down, blocked off. To be restored only at my command. Or that of a person with enhancements equal to my own. Which is to say, no one.

  I storm toward the elevator, aware that the receptionist is reaching for the alarm button beneath her desk. But no matter. I reach into my coat pocket and unveil my next trick, a security protocol scrambler. Hit the elevator up button as the INTRUDER ALARM starts blaring from the speakers. An awful noise. Like a dying cat shrieking in agony.

  The elevator doors roll open, revealing three passengers inside.

  “Get the fuck out,” I say, pulling one flap of my coat back to reveal my arsenal of six guns.

  They pale, stammer, and stumble out of the box, and I enter as the doors roll quickly to a close, responding to the receptionist’s security command activation. Lockdown mode. I flip the switch for my scrambler and stick the magnetic attachment on the elevator control box. The digital floor number screen fizzles out for a moment, dead and black, then reboots to show the raw code stream beneath the user-friendly interface.

  My scrambler has been preset to take me to my first destination, so I stand back, humming my own calming elevator tune, as the box begins its climb to war.

  2

  Floor 120

  Eighteen guards wait for me on the floor where the AI lives.

  The elevator doors roll open to reveal them, side by side in several lines, crowding the hallway. Their military-grade rifles are aimed at me. Ready to whittle me down to bits and pieces of bloody flesh, which will be left to be mopped up by droid cleaning units. Wearing black helmets, the guards are faceless, anonymous. Cold and callous. They have no care in the world for the lives of human beings. They are hired hands, bred for absolute obedience to those who earn their loyalty. And their loyalty is dictated by a number with a dollar sign before it.

  Had I more money in my bank account, I’d offer it in trade.

  Alas, I’m currently poor.

&nb
sp; So they die.

  A necessity.

  But one that doesn't come easily. Since these mercenaries are augmented, they are a challenge to outwit.

  I enjoy challenges.

  Accessing the internal command constructs of my PK-8 gear, I ramp up the high-level processing capacity. A limit crack. A warning flashes across my eyes: SEVERE BRAIN DAMAGE POSSIBLE. I ignore it. Apply my coding modifications. In the span of less than half a second, this happens. I change.

  My perception of time warps as my brain begins to process stimuli at thirty-two times the rate an average human mind can manage. The fingers heading toward triggers of guns held by the faceless men slow to the creeping curls of knuckles. Their hearts pound loudly like death drums against their skintight flex armor. BA-DUM. BA-DUM. The beats thrum. So hard I feel them in my bones.

  I advance.

  No doubt several of the guards scanned me on arrival. Analyzed my gear. So they’re aware of my capabilities. They will try to circumvent my skills the best they can with their Fed-approved augmentations. They will use the one advantage they have on me: numbers.

  I sprint toward them, my body moving faster than it has any right to go. Muscles straining with each contraction, every stretch. But the nano-machines in my blood heal my wounds as they form. A million microscopic tears open and close each millisecond. I run full speed at my enemies, ignore the building flares of pain in every nook and cranny of my skin.

  They attack. Not as fast as me. Not so agile. They deliberately fire their guns in random directions, creating a hail of bullets hard to predict. Unlike a straight shot, which is simple to avoid. Rounds ricochet off the walls, skim my face, my neck, my ears, the back of my hand. Blood sprays. But my body, pushed overtime, is too quick to take a direct hit.

  My legs and arms tuck and roll me across the marble flooring. My hands heave me up from the ground. I lock my thighs around the neck of the first guard I reach. Jerk sideways to throw him off balance. Send him careening into the comrade on his left. Release him.

  And I’m on my feet again, barreling forward. One guard turns his gun toward me, slow, slow, slow, and I whip my knee up, strike his chin. The impact snaps his neck and rips his internal neural wiring in half. I see it through my enhanced eyes. Peer through his flesh to watch the filaments shear apart, along with the fragile cording of his spine.

  He’s dead before his helmet-covered head hits the floor.

  A sluggish fist swings into view. I duck beneath it. My own hand rockets up, locks around a thick wrist like a steel cuff. I use the man’s momentum against him, kick the underside of his knee to destabilize his stance, and lug him to the right. Into the chest of another guard, whose boots slide out from underneath him. Both men tumble to the floor in a heap of tangled limbs and snagging armor.

  Another contender. This one kicking. I reel back, out of the path of a boot that slams the wall so hard the plaster implodes. I press myself flush against the wall beside the new crater, coil one leg up tight, and lash out. My own kick moves at twice the speed of his and rams into his crotch. The armored cup protecting his genitals shatters inward, and he collapses, gasping, screaming, crying, all at once.

  I hop over his fallen form and proceed.

  Two more guards try to clothesline me, create a wall I cannot evade. Their combined bulk is unsurpassable for someone of my size, no matter what level of system overdrive code my PK-8 gear is running. I am a woman, moderate in height and weight and build. They are men born and bred, through selective genetics, to possess the optimal mercenary’s body.

  I cannot move them from my path with hands or feet.

  So I move them with my mind.

  As with the receptionist, I claw my way through their skulls and into the pathways of their brains—brains embedded with filament mappings made to enhance their every skill. Not as easy to reprogram as organic pathways. I’m required to hack the neural cores implanted in their brain stems and alter the chemical makeup of their matter simultaneously. For both men’s systems at the same time. Or I will be stopped by the human wall that blocks my way.

  Such an outcome is unacceptable.

  So I dive into a hundred billion electric messages, both chemical and manufactured. I rearrange neurotransmitters, tear out the combination of intents that led to the creation of the wall. Replace them with my own commands. Move out of my way.

  They fight. They fight hard. Their own neural gear tries its best to repel my intrusion. Deletes my alterations as I create them, storing the guards’ original intentions in backup drives and replicating them as many times as need be.

  How irritating.

  I attack it. I invade the signal that leads to the tiny processors fused to gray matter. Activate a virus to infect them. Disable the backup drives. Disrupt the continual deletions that allow the cores to disobey me.

  All it takes is one instant of triumph for my mental push—MOVE—and the wall crumbles. Both men’s bodies jerk out of my way in response to my command. They fly off in opposite directions and ram the walls, their muscles twitching in their failed attempts to defy me.

  The entire mental exchange occurs in 0.84 seconds.

  I break the defense line and emerge into an intersection, another ten guards in pursuit of me. Too late. I’ve won.

  I reach to my belt and unclip a grenade. A two-ton flash dissolver. Press the lever. Pull the pin. Toss it at the oncoming horde. And run for my life as it explodes in a brilliant flash of white. No sound.

  I don’t wait to see what settles. I know what it’ll be. A gaping wound, twenty feet high and twenty feet wide. A void in the middle of the building, perfectly sliced out. And all the guards within the radius—all eighteen of them—will be no more.

  Wiped out of existence. Just like that.

  And so I head unimpeded to the room where the AI lives.

  3

  Floor 120, Room 1208

  The room where the AI lives is cold. Air blows through vents in a steady arctic stream, to cool the hundred rows of stacks of quantum AX cores that stretch from floor to two feet south of ceiling. Each tower is a set of solid black blocks, and every block bears six wires protruding from its back and a handful of control lights above six switches on its face. Only one light blinks—a steady green flash. Over and over and over. Eternal. On each block in each tower in each row. A sea of uniform blinking green.

  Mildly disorienting, the lights, given my overdriven senses.

  But they act as the only illumination in the room, next to the consoles in the corner. Where three technicians sit wearing thick wool jackets, headphones on their ears, blocking out the sound of the world around them. Unsuspecting, they tap, tap at the screens of the diagnostic stations where they work, day in, day out, to keep the AI running smoothly.

  The leftmost screen displays a camera feed for the door I used to enter, but not one of the three techs glances at it as I approach. The INTRUDER ALARM from the lobby didn’t reach this level, this room. The threat was supposed to have been neutralized a hundred floors below. So they don’t know of my attack—to their knowledge, they have nothing to fear. They feel secure here, in the heart of Grayson Dynamics. Secure because of past security. No one has ever invaded the great beast this way. Never climbed so far down its throat as I have now, today. This day of reckoning.

  I pity them for three-tenths of a second, two young men and one young woman who work so diligently. They track every minor error in the AI’s coding. Type in commands, “hints,” to make the system aware it still has shortcomings. And watch in awe as the system recognizes its own imperfections, strips out the error-prone code sections, and replaces them with flawless corrections. Since the last time I saw the AI up close, it has grown intelligent beyond belief.

  It was a toddler once.

  Now it is a young adult.

  Before me, as I stand there with a gun drawn in my hand, it combs through its entire protocol array and identifies by itself two thousand possible areas in need of improvement. It asks the tec
hnicians, in words in a dialog box, “Should I change these?” And the man in the middle of the trio chuckles, shakes his head, replies out loud to an active microphone: “Of course, Venus.”

  Venus does. Faster than any coder on earth could, the AI wipes out its blemishes. Scars and scabs made by careless men.

  Soon, Venus will be mature, ready to take on the world. To mold the world as it sees fit.

  And that is why I must shut it down. For the time being.

  Because the world Venus will mold will be Mick Grayson’s.

  The brilliant machine is on a leash held by a monster.

  “Pity,” I mutter.

  The techs start and turn to face me.

  I shoot them in three shots at equal intervals. Pop. Pop. Pop.

  The blood of the man in the middle splashes the screen behind him. The woman manages a half-scream before a bullet eats her eye. The final man, who wears a scraggly beard, whose eyes are ringed with violet bags, raises his hands in surrender. Pleads with me. Words my brain decodes thirty-two times faster than normal. The effect grips me. Guilt. More intense than I can feel without my mind on fire.

  But not intense enough to stop me.

  He dies with a spray of brain on keyboard. His body falls from his seat and smacks the floor.

  I grab his empty chair and get to work.

  “Hello, old friend,” I say to Venus.

  And Venus, after a pause to scan me—biometric access—says to me in text, “Hello, User MG01. Your last logon was six years ago. Welcome back.”

  “Thank you. It’s good to be back.” After wiping the blood off the face of the console, I remove a key drive from my pocket and jam it into the one free station port. Venus pulls up the available file list on the centermost monitor. Just five programs, all with cryptic number-letter combo names. Five segments of code to topple the King of the World.