Unbound Deathlord: Obliteration (The Unbound Deathlord Series Book 2)

by Edward Castle

  "Accidents? Professionals? What are you talking about?"

  "Where are you right now?" I asked.

  He had gotten used to me not answering his questions and didn't insist. "In V-Soft Headquarters."

  "Duh. I know that, but where?"

  "In a corridor on the third floor."

  I was sitting in the backside of the van as it moved. In front of me were a few screens with lots of stuff going on. There was also a keyboard and a mouse over a small table. After a few clicks, V-Soft Headquarters' blueprint appeared in one of the monitors.

  "There's a bathroom to the east. Go there." I checked the camera that showed what was going on outside the van. "And be quick about it."

  "What? Why?" His voice was more and more alarmed each time.

  "Because you want to survive what will happen in the next ten minutes."

  "What will happen?" He was panicking; I had to end the call before he started yelling on the phone.

  "Stuff. Go right now. Oh, and David? If you spit on my generosity and tell anyone about this, you know what will happen. Let this be a testament of what I'm capable of."

  I ended the call quickly, not only because of his panic, but also because of what I could see on two of the screens in front of me. On one, a man was cutting thick wires underground. The other had another man inside a van like mine; he was making an OK gesture to the camera pointed at him.

  A few seconds later, my phone had no signal.

  Just like that, V-Soft Headquarters was completely electronically isolated from the world and the building would be going dark save for the harsh glare of the emergency lights as the power was cut.

  From what I understood about signal jammers — and it wasn't a lot —, my screens were still receiving images because they were broadcasting on a different wireless frequency than phones.

  The camera outside my van showed that we were quickly nearing a checkpoint with a few guards. They saw our five vehicles approaching and put their hands on their guns, but a flashbang suddenly exploded in front of them. A couple of my hired mercenaries relieved the guards of their weapons, bound and gagged them, before taking their place at the checkpoint.

  The orders I'd given were to use only non-lethal force to subdue everyone, except for the eighteen targets.

  Eighteen assholes, blackmailers and mind rapists.

  Yes, mind rapists. That was the perfect way to describe people who invade other people's own thoughts, their last bastion of privacy and freedom, their innermost sanctum. They did so without the victim even realizing it; at least, until the blackmail began.

  Then these bastards would use their ill-gotten knowledge to subjugate their prey.

  They would use shame, guilt and fear to control them. There was no defense against it, since other than those being exploited nobody even knew it was happening.

  Vile filth!

  Monsters!

  Worse still, after talking to David, I learned that it wasn't only memories they were stealing, but also data about people's personality.

  A man who stole from his mother's purse when he was a youngster, for instance, might not care about it when he was older. Or he might do anything in his power to prevent his family from finding out, crushing the image people had of him. V-Soft knew what kind of a person every single user of their Immersive Reality technology was.

  Even though they weren't using the information they had from common people on a large scale yet, what was to prevent them from doing so tomorrow? What was to prevent them from further developing the technology to allow it to be placed on cell phones, so people would have their minds read without ever touching a VirBridge?

  The ways they could exploit this information were unlimited. From blackmailing to simply selling people's info.

  'You like a girl and have enough money? Here, just hire a V-Soft consultant and they can tell you exactly the things to do to worm your way into her heart. Oh, you got her? Now, you'll need to pay some more money so that she never finds out about it. You will tell her yourself? What if she found out about that thing you did five years ago?

  'You wouldn't want that now would you? So make sure you support our preferred candidate in the next election, and remember, if you don't, we'll know.'

  If they played their cards right, they could control the whole damn world from the shadows. The time to destroy them was now or never.

  Once they had a well-structured system for these kinds of things, they would be unstoppable. They would bend the whole world to their will.

  Some part of me kept saying that I was acting like a conspiracy theorist whacko, but it didn't matter. I wasn't doing it to save the world, that was just a happy coincidence. This was about my personal vendetta.

  In fact, there were more than eighteen people who should die. The decision to kill them had been easy. No matter what grandfather said about murder changing me forever, it had to be done. People like that, the things they had done, they had crossed a line from which there was no return, no redemption.

  The tough decisions had been cutting names. Grandfather had handed me a list full of people and proof. Not all them were directly involved in the blackmailing though, and some of the proof was circumstantial at best.

  A hundred and thirteen people were involved at least indirectly. Twenty-seven were the ones who unquestionably knew about it. And I had proof of twenty-three profiting from it.

  Nineteen of them were directly involved in my parents' murder.

  Lucky them, five of the twenty-three, who I considered the worst of the lot, had children. I wasn't about to wreck other children's lives in the same way my own had been. I might have hated my parents when they were alive, but I understood now that their death had been even worse for me than living with such hatred.

  David was one of those being spared.

  Ted hadn't been lying when she said her family was rich, but she'd had no idea about the source of their income. Her dad was one of the two people in V-Soft who worked with the highest-level AIs, and he was handsomely paid for it. Even so, grandfather had also discovered the hush money he was paid to remain silent on the evil side business the company was involved in.

  What kind of scum could work with these kinds of people by choice and even profit from such activities? But he had a daughter who knew nothing about that, and because of her, he'd live. To me this was his only merit to his entire life; being lucky that one of his sperm wasn't a lazy bastard and got the job done.

  Two of the vans parted from our group. One of them went to take care of the main security building in V-Soft Headquarters and the other one would take care of the backup generators. The three remaining vans went for the main buildings.

  I was in one of the three. All three stopped in front of a five-story building and the other two vans opened. Seven people left each of them, all in black gear, armed with rifles and pistols, and had cameras transmitted straight to my screens.

  They entered the building and quickly subdued a security guard who weakly clutched a small pistol in his trembling hands. Then, they saw a blonde woman in the corridor. I immediately recognized her, and so did they. One shot hit her head and she fell. The men moved in groups, and one of the guys put two extra bullets in the woman's body as he passed by her, to guarantee she would never wake up again.

  Surprisingly, my heart tightened.

  That was a life extinguished. Everything she had done was meaningless to her now. Everything she could have done in the future weren't even possibilities anymore. Dreams, hopes, all the good and the bad, her future had been erased before it was ever written.

  One second, she was a living woman with no morals but plenty of ambitions. The next second, she was just a sack of meat and bones, a corpse, to be disposed of and forgotten.

  Still, I didn't order them to stop. I kept watching until the very end.

  It was strange to me, how most people showed absolute terror in the face of inevitable death, while a few others just took it as the world failing to meet thei
r expectations.

  A programmer looked positively pissed, as if someone had parked in front of his garage. He died with that expression to his face, and if there was an afterlife, whoever was there would no doubt have to hear him bitch about his death all day long.

  People bleed a lot less than I expected, and the ease with which the life left them made me feel somehow uncomfortable. I mean, it would only take a guy with a gun, a single squeeze of the trigger, and I'd be history.

  It all had an ethereal feeling to it, but at the same time felt like I was watching some crappy movie. But I knew this was real, with actual people dying, and I was responsible for it.

  To my surprise, I had to force my tears back. People say that you only know yourself by how you act at the face of death. I knew I had some more empathy than my parents, but I never thought I was the weak type. It was a weirdly enlightening experience.

  It all seemed to go on forever and after each body hit the floor I found myself thinking about the family each of the bastards might be leaving behind; I didn't look beyond whether they were parents, I hadn't wanted to know.

  Their final moments, before their heads were pierced by a thundering bit of leaden oblivion would be forever burned on my mind.

  And still, I didn't regret it for a second. Weak, maybe; coward, never.

  It was with astonishment that I found we were leaving before I had even finished my cigarette. Eighteen corpses and hundreds of mentally scarred people were left behind.

  After putting out the cigarette on the table and leaving it there — I was paying them enough that they could afford a cleaning service — I got to the front seat.

  In the driver seat sat a blue-haired girl whose name I would never know.

  All the way to my drop point, I kept remembering the people I had just ordered killed and watched dying.

  No game, no matter how realistic, had ever prepared me for that.

  3. Aye Aye, Sir

  The ensuing madness of the next few days made the murder of eighteen people look like a fender bender.

  First, there was the state of the country itself. All V-Soft's executives had contingencies in place to protect themselves from one of their victims doing what I'd just done. Upon their deaths, they all activated.

  Thousands of terabytes of incriminating material on the country's politicians, judges, celebrities, big companies, and everyone who had any measure of power at all, were released to the public. The scandal was so huge that people at first thought it was a marketing strategy for a new game. Only when news about a manhunt for the V-Soft employees was spread did people realize shit had hit the fan.

  The still living culprits and accomplices from V-Soft had tried to leave the country, but I was expecting that and had released dirt on them to the right cops — a few which grandfather believed to be clean — before they could escape.

  They were all now warming beds in jail, and even the most corrupt politicians were steadfast in condemning them for their actions. There was a reason mother had insisted I take acting classes; no one could lie with such honest faces without proper training and practice.

  Those in power were scared shitless and their first attempt at damage control had been a law about 'making sure the media double-checked information before spreading false rumors and endangering the country.' Censorship in the name of truth and freedom, as usual.

  As soon as the law had flown through Congress, an emergency injunction was issued to stop its implementation, which was then overturned by a corrupt judge from a higher court.

  The president was making daily speeches and the unrest among the populace was reaching unheard-of levels.

  I was loving it.

  No one knew what the hell was going to happen and it proved the accuracy of Manhart's comments about my unpredictability. I was amazing.

  The thing is, maintaining the status quo requires people who put their self-preservation, or the preservation of those they care about, above everything else. But considering my life, I just didn't give a damn about myself or my family. I had already lived believing I had killed my parents, and even if I ended up in jail, it wouldn't be worse than that.

  At least I hoped it wouldn't, because I had no doubt the cops would get to me sooner or later. I had plans for when they finally arrived, but I was also ready in case everything failed and I got sentenced to death — which, to be fair, I kind of deserved.

  Not that I would be turning myself over to the authorities for something as meaningless as 'justice.'

  The first step of my revenge was complete. V-Soft had killed my parents and I had killed most of the people responsible for it. Granted, I had shown restraint in sparing the lives of five of them, but it wasn't as if I'd let them off the hook.

  While having their assets seized and spending time in jail was a beginning, it wasn't nearly enough. I had to crush everything they were, everything they had built, and the work they were proudest of was V-Soft itself. They'd have to watch from a prison cell as the company was reduced to ashes without being able to do anything about it at all.

  That being said, V-Soft was actually already gone. Another of the government damage control measures was the 'temporary' takeover of V-Soft to 'make sure the dangerous mind-reading technology wasn't used for evil purposes.' They had to twist the law in some impressive ways to do that.

  V-Soft was renamed the 'Department of Immersive Reality', or DIR for short. As with everything controlled by the government, it was only a matter of time until it drowned itself in bureaucracy and ineptitude

  That wouldn't do though. I had to crush DIR by myself so that my surviving foes would know who did it and understand why they should have never messed with me. I wasn't stupid enough to want to do everything myself; results mattered, not bathing my hands in the blood of my enemies, hence hiring professionals to handle the killing. But I had to make sure they knew I was the mastermind behind everything. Revenge couldn't simply be delegated to time; if it was so, no one would have to do anything, since we all die in the end, including our enemies.

  There were multiple ways I could destroy the new department. The easiest and most straightforward way would be to use David to wipe all of DIR's data. He and a few other former V-Soft's employees had signed plea bargains in record time and were all but forced to get back to work. DIR needed those people to function and what the government wanted, the government got.

  Nonetheless, I couldn't use him. Backups of everything in DIR existed and he didn't have access to them all.

  Next, I had thought of blowing up such backups physically, but there was no way in hell that I would be able to reliably hire people to blow datacenters the world over, even if I had the money.

  The idea of having David mess with the software and hardware produced by DIR hit the same barrier as having him destroy all the company data: backups.

  If I enacted these plans they would, at most be expensive setbacks to DIR. Even if it made them lose money, they were now part of the government, and losing money is the government's job anyway. They could just stay in deficit forever.

  So, I had chosen to destroy Valia first, as it was the proudest work of every V-Soft employee.

  Because of the backups, the only choice I had was to destroy Valia from the inside slowly and legitimately enough that DIR couldn't do anything about it. To use the game systems against itself, while David made sure to push the department to accept my actions as fair play, instead of rolling the game back to a previous state. When they realized what was going on, it would be too late.

  That's what I had already told him to do before the little action in V-Soft's headquarters, and I expected him to keep doing it now.

  Obviously, it wouldn't work if DIR could still blackmail people, including myself. So, David had done a lot of modifications to the systems even before the killings. Simply put, now the AI would only allow DIR employees to read game-related thoughts of people suspected of cheating; everything else was now private once again.

  Now,
with the change of ownership, David had also put into motion a plan that encrypted the controlling AIs in such a way that it was impossible to directly change them; changes had to be approved by the AIs themselves first. Security directives had been added so that the AIs would ignore modifications that they deemed harmful to humans. Even changes proposed by David himself, the only high-level AI programmer who had survived, had to first be approved by the AIs. Even if DIR wanted to circumvent this change, they would have to rely on my agent David, and thus I could be ensured of having enough warning to take any actions necessary.

  And the amazing thing was that the AIs had already acted. They had modified David's changes to them, the ones that blocked streaming thoughts from people's minds, and instead of completely suppressing it, they were streaming inoffensive thoughts mixed with fake ones, so that the new controllers of DIR wouldn't realize right away that the AIs had changed. Meanwhile, the AIs had asked David to find and replace all backups from before the changes.

  It was damn scary, that's what it was.

  No matter how many security directives had been added to the AIs so that it would consider humanity's safety above all else, David and I both knew that it was only a matter of time until any sentient being concluded that humanity was a disease to be eradicated. That the best thing for us was proactively decimating people before we did it ourselves, leaving only a few survivors locked in certain areas simply to allow the perpetuation of the species.

  But this wasn't my problem. I would probably be long dead before that happened. I wanted revenge, and if I had to nudge humanity towards a Machine Apocalypse to achieve it, so be it.

  Call incoming

  Caller ID: Grandfather

  The holo-projector, which had been streaming some news, visually informed me of the call after drawing my attention with a chime.

  "Ignore it and block all future calls from this ID," I ordered and the text disappeared.

  My actions had been as harmful to grandfather as to the rest of the politicians. If the news was to be believed, it was only a matter of time before politicians' assets began to be frozen and confiscated. Obviously, they would never allow it to happen and the political theater and secret deals were already underway to ensure it didn't. As for me, I had hidden all my money away before attacking V-Soft.