What the Heart Desires

by Jaime Derelle

  O had also been on these interplanetary clean up operations and had herself been part of activities designed to clean through whole communities of indigenous species; burning them down with chemical fires and gassing them with nerve agents— their twitching bodies lying on the ground, foam spilling out of their mouths.

  People like Bow and O had their hearts broken out there and very nearly lost their minds. The Cause offered them a form of redemption and a true calling for their fighting skills.

  “Everything good with the droids?” O asked the runt-like Kale.

  “For the twentieth time, yes,” he answered from beside her.

  “They cost us a hell of a lot, and we’re using practically all that we’ve got for this,” O stated.

  “Don’t worry, chief,” Kale assured her, “they're not wasted.”

  O then rubbed a cross that she had on a chain around her neck. It was an old relic from the times before moral rejection. Nowadays it was illegal to own a religious text or artifact, but some still existed on the black market. When she had come back from the colonies, broken at the atrocities that she had helped commit, she found the old religions comforting. Their tales of a world with morals, altruism, equality and shared humanity inspired her to join the Cause.

  “I’ve always been meaning to ask, O,” Bow remarked from the pilot’s seat, “why you always rub that cross?”

  “It’s good luck,” O muttered.

  “You believe in luck?” Kale blurted out in disbelief.

  “Yes, I do,” O slowly pronounced.

  “Even though we now have people who see into the future and know that everything is predetermined. Because I’m afraid that leaves out mystical calculations such as luck.”

  “The future can change, can’t it,” O spat back.

  “Yeah, but only if the present is changed before the future has a chance to happen— meaning that one event always causes another; there is no such thing as luck within it.”

  “I don’t know about you two,” Bow stated in his gruff voice, “but I’ve felt something else around me a few times; as if some entity or force was looking over me at that moment.”

  “Are we talking about luck or the possibility of God here?” Kale interjected.

  “Let’s just concentrate on the mission, guys,” O asserted.

  They all shut up after that and made their way through the heavy traffic of the city’s airway, clogged up with the midday congestion. The city towered up around them in massive formations of black metal and glass, neon lights glittering upon every surface in pulses, as if the city itself were alive and breathing. Below them, they could see nothing of the ground, which lay some three thousand metres below. The thick fog that rose up from down there often climbed to around a thousand meters in height and blocked any chance for those trapped beneath it to see up and those above it to see down. It was those poor wretches deep in the foggy ruins of the city that the Cause fought for.

  As they neared a checkpoint on the edge of Neo Manhattan, O made a signal to the others, and each of them pressed a device on their wrists. Their bodies instantly began to convulse, and their facial muscles began recoiling into the most awful spasms like they were having a hundred strokes at once. After a minute or so their bodies relaxed and, with their faces now completely distorted, they each appeared entirely different in appearance. On their wrist devices, a counter began ticking down from ten minutes.

  “No matter how many times I have to go through meta-morphing,” Kale remarked, “it still feels like taking a beating from fifty guys all in a twenty-second period.”

  They pulled up to the checkpoint. On either side of them, genetic scanners burst with light beams that examined their genetic makeup. The metamorphosis would last ten minutes and in the meantime, their genetic codes would be changed. Kale had been hacking government files for the past month looking for the bio codes of city employees. Once he found them, he then programmed the codes into the teams meta-devices ready for use when they came to the security checkpoints. They had ten minutes before the process would become unstable, changing them instantly back. And ten minutes to get through this checkpoint, followed by another two, before entering the New World Stock Exchange.

  Soon they were given the all clear and rumbled off, re-entering the slipstream of morning traffic. The city tower up over their heads so high they could barely see the sky above. It looked like a thin strip of blue river hovering over them. All the light where they were was artificial.

  “It was better on the colonies,” O said aloud to herself. “At least there you could see the sky.”

  Suddenly her reverie was blown apart by a burst of sound opening up outside the transport just beside her door. A flash went past and carried on into the traffic. It was an electromagnetic pulse bike, and the rider was taking it to its fullest limits. The three sat in the front of the transport and watched it disappear into the morning congestion, their mouths open the whole time. The rider was weaving in and out of traffic at high speed, like a flash of lightning splitting the atmosphere. They all held their breaths as the rider appeared to be heading straight to the back of a large transit module.

  However, as he reached it, the daredevil threw himself from the bike up into the air, flinging the bike underneath the large transit as he did so. All the people on board watched as the rider glided over the top of the transit and then met his bike on the other side of it, landing perfectly back on the seat, before bursting off again.

  “What the fuck was that?” Kale exclaimed.

  “A shifter,” O instantly pronounced. “It had to be.”

  They carried on towards their destination, saying no more about the rider.

  Eventually, they reached the New World Stock Exchange on Neo Wall Street. Their disguises still had a minute and a half to go so that it would be tight, but doable. They reached the entrance security of the back gatehouse. The security had been beefed up for the chancellors' visit and the whole of downtown Neo Manhattan was crawling with presidential security.

  However, the security was expecting them. Kale had hacked the security mainframe the day before and put in an order for ordinance equipment for that day. He then answered the order and set the whole thing up as a simple delivery. It meant that they would be expected as delivery men.

  At the gate, they waited impatiently while their clearance was okayed. O began to feel her skin crawling and realised that her disguise was becoming unstable. She looked beside her at Kale and noticed that his face was twitching; Bow too was beginning to come unstable. She started to sweat. Two shock troopers came spilling out of the gatehouse to inspect them personally.

  As they walked up to the window, O asked as casually as possible, “Everything good, guys— we kinda got a job to do. They need this ordinance pronto; you should have read the order— sounded really desperate.”

  “Your paperwork’s fine,” a voice came from one of the shock troopers, his body covered in black armour, “it’s just we got a visitor today, and we've got to come out and do a little inspection of each vehicle. It’s a pain in the ass, but orders are orders.”

  The two troops then went around the vehicle, checking the transport as it hovered there in midair. The three sat looking worriedly at each other as the counters on their wrists reached towards zero. The three transports behind them were feeling just the same level of anxiety. They were so close, but if their disguises failed now, the gatehouse scanners would immediately pick up their new genetic code frequencies. They had to get into the building before that happened.

  Suddenly both troops stood to attention. O watched them in the mirror. “They must have just received something on their near transmitters,” she thought to herself. After a second or two, one of the troops jogged into the gatehouse while the other came up to O at the window.

  “Sorry about this,” the troop said, “we just got a call saying that some guy is flying through the city like a maniac on an EPB; they think he could be some nut from the Cause coming to create
shit. You guys go straight on.”

  With that, the force gate opened, its blurred surface disappearing into clarity as it shifted. Bow instantly put his foot down, and they sped on into the underground of the New World Stock Exchange, their disguises fading as they got but a few feet beyond the gatehouse scanners. O looked in the mirror and was relieved to see the other three transports following them. They parked up deep into the underground car park, where there were no longer any scanners and only cameras that Kale could easily hack into.

  Once they were down there, they all opened up the transports and began unloading the sentry droids. Kale and some of the others went around them, making last minute checks on their programming. There were fifty in all, and it had taken them years to get ahold of them, but if they got to the chancellor or even just one of his cabinet ministers, then it would be worth it. The carnage created would claim many lives, some of them amongst the men and woman assembled in that car park, but mostly amongst the civilians in the area. The government was always good at making sure that civilian casualties were always high. They controlled the media and the stream of information that the world, so were able to blame the high number of casualties on the Cause. In a world of bio-scanning, you could no longer fake deaths as everyone's heartbeat and life signs are continuously monitored; so you had to create them.

  Bow had been a home world shock trooper at one time, stationed on Earth. He had carried out many atrocities in the name of the government within the cities of Earth as well as on the off-world colonies. The government would doctor security footage of the attack so that the blame for the atrocity was put squarely on the shoulders of the Cause. Death often created hatred, and if you could control who got blamed, then you could control who was hated. All you needed was death.

  The Cause found themselves trapped in a catch; they needed to fight for the people, but with every fight they found themselves thrown further away from them. In the streets, the very people they swore to protect often openly hated them.

  Once the sentry droids were ready, the others began loading up on plasma rifles and photon grenades. They each wore a shield suit that covered them in a thin ion field that looked like green static coating their body. This protected them from some of the lower frequency ammunition that was going to come their way. However, it wouldn’t protect them from a beam of light shot from a photon canon. This high-intensity beam of particle light shoots through your body, splitting each of your body’s cells into their individual atoms.

  They primed the sentry droids, the droids instantly becoming animated. They were initially curled up in a ball, but when primed they curl out, stretching their mechanical limbs out like a waking child. When fully stretched out, they resembled mechanical scorpions and were around the size of a man. They each have six mechanical legs that carry their curved body. The body mostly contains ammunition and ion field generators. Jutting out of either side of the body are two large photon canons. These bad boys were some of the best military hardware available, and if you could capture one intact, without being killed by it first, and break through its firewall, reprogramming it, then you had a soldier straight from the depths of Hell on your side.

  Priming them was always a worry. You were never sure if someone else, possibly working for the government, had cracked your firewall while the droids were asleep. They could wake up and then suddenly attack you. That’s why it was always useful to check them regularly.

  The droids jutted into action. Kale then went over to one of the walls of the building they were within. He brought out a device and scanned the wall.

  “This is it,” he called out to the others.

  He then motioned to the droids and commanded, “Go on, boys— do your work!”

  The droids immediately rushed at the wall, Kale jumping out of the way. Ten of the droids were fitted with drilling equipment and began tearing away at the wall. The twelve humanoid members of the Cause team stood behind them as the droids dug through the wall, their weapons primed.

  No sooner were the droids through the wall than the building’s alarm system went off. The droids piled into the wall, followed by the members, O and Bow at their head. The droids at the front had been programmed to get them straight up to the stock exchange itself. The chancellor was giving a speech there that very moment.

  In the main stock exchange room, everyone stood silently watching the chancellor give his speech. The day’s trading had been put on hold for the time being. They all watched the great man, once a day trader himself just like them, holding forth, expressing his love for the great manipulators of money who made planet Earth what it was: glorious!

  Suddenly the alarms went off in a dirge, and all of the room’s exits instantly closed. A couple of the metal security shutters came down hard upon peoples’ heads, instantly killing them, scything through their bodies, blood spilling out everywhere. The chancellor stopped dead in his speech as his security team closed around him. Government sentry droids came spilling out on every side of him, creating a ring of protection.

  Everyone stood frozen to the spot wondering what was about to happen. The room was filled with the sound of the alarm wailing and the ‘keep calm and stay still’ message playing over and over on the room’s intercom.

  Everyone looked around, looking for a sign of action. Surely it wasn’t a drill, they thought. Not during the chancellor’s speech. Some thought they could hear a rumbling below their feet, in fact, they began to feel vibrations through their feet, becoming more violent with each second.

  All of a sudden, the ground in the centre of the room began to cave in, forming a large crater. Some people fell into the newly formed pit as it opened up. They kept sliding down its sides, their hands clawing at the debris in an attempt to get back up, but dropping down through the hole. Others were merely thrown onto the ground. The government sentry droids that surrounded the Chancellor aimed their weapons squarely at the pit.

  A brief silence ensued. Then a loud boom emerged from the pit, followed by a blinding light. Sparks and smoke shot out everywhere, and people began screaming and running, some of them on fire, green and yellow chemical flames eating into their flesh. Someone had let off a chemical blast in an attempt to clear the room. The pit erupted in a shower of coloured light beams that came shooting out from deep within it. The government droids began pulverising the pit with plasma, and the whole room erupted into a dazzling multicoloured firefight. The exits opened up so that more troops and droids could start piling into the room from outside. People started crushing each other in the stampede to leave the room through the newly opened doors. It quickly became carnage.

  **************

  Vanda raced through the funnel of traffic, throwing his bike around, his reactions sharpened by his three-second lapse. He had caught the eye of several police pods on his day’s ride, but had managed to avoid any fire from them, and he ignored their repeated warnings on his comms that he risked arrest and death. He didn’t care, his contacts at the government bureau usually got him off any of his more criminally dangerous violations. He had an excellent success rate with his predictions for them and seen as a valuable shifter in their fight against the Cause. He could be afforded a few misdemeanors.

  As Vanda shifted his bike upside down through a paper-thin gap between two cargo transits, he looked down and saw the same courtyard above Neo Time Square that he had seen in his vision that morning. Again his mind’s eye saw her face.

  It had taken four hours of meditation and another pill to get Vanda’s time lapse down to three seconds that morning. The girl’s pretty freckled face had haunted him for hours, as it had been for weeks now. But only in the visions of that morning had he seen her die. He was struck with further images of her recurring death during meditation; her face shortly before it had gone dead touched deep into his soul.

  He dipped the bike down through the thick traffic, the police pods racing down after him, and headed for the courtyard. He ran downwards through the different layers o
f traffic that clogged the airways, weaving and twisting the bike through the gaps. In his visions, he had been able to view the time on the big clock that covered one of the massive Time Square buildings. It had read 15:08:17. Vanda checked the time in the corner of his helmet. Seven minutes away. He decided to ditch the pods and twisted the bike around some service platforms that stood underneath the huge courtyard. He pushed his manoeuvring of the bike into overdrive as he shot it through gaps barely big enough to fit a man. He noticed one explosion behind him shortly followed by another and realised that he was no longer being pursued. He eased the bike off and then stopped on a service platform. He jumped off of the motorcycle and then swiped his finger across the face of his wristwatch. The bike instantly folded up into a small solid metal backpack, which Vanda picked up and strapped to his back, before heading up to the courtyard.

  Usually, he was supposed to report all strange visions to his contact, Dr Kelvin, but the girl’s face had intrigued him. He had decided not to tell Kelvin, but he had also realised that it would be too dangerous to get directly involved. He had gone out on his bike purely to get his mind off of the vision, not to get involved in any way.

  Once he had calmed his lapse he had headed out on the bike, but somehow had ended up riding through the city and coming to the precise place of the vision just seven minutes before it happened. He was sure that he had done it subconsciously. When he had looked down, while riding through the gap, he had fully expected to see the courtyard below him, as if he had always meant to be there at that point.

  Now he really was getting directly involved.

  Vanda walked onto the main boulevard of the courtyard, the huge neon advertising signs of Neo Time Square all around him peddling everything from clone servants to off world mineral stocks, the blue sky but a thin slither above his head. He checked the time: he only had thirty-three seconds with the time lapse.