Zero Rogue

by Matthew S. Cox

  She turned bright red. “Umm.”

  He looked away, staring out at the mall. A faint reflection of his face hovered on the surface of the clear barrier. “I know of the place, was just shocked you did.” His concentration failed at the sight of a man wandering out of a Reinventions clinic. His clothes would fit a six-hundred-pound behemoth, though he didn’t weigh a third of that. “Well I can tell why that one’s happy.”

  “Can we not talk about that place?”

  She sounded so fragile he couldn’t help but stare at her for a moment in silence.

  “Of course.” Aaron gulped a mouthful of hot tea that hurt going down, and hissed air between clenched teeth. “The CSB didn’t release their findings to the public. A psionic in frictionless? King William would shit himself right on the throne, and every Member of Parliament would toss bangers at each other and harrumph.”

  Anna burst into giggles. As tempted as he was to eavesdrop on the mental images she conjured, he wasn’t in the mood for that sort of humor.

  “The undersecretary of the CSB is a big Arsenal fan.”

  Her joy faded. “Oh, that figures.”

  “So’s Prime Minister Torrington. Would you believe she walked in on my ‘interview’ with one of the CSB stooges to get an autograph?” Aaron made a sound dangerously close to a giggle. “She didn’t even care about the whole cheating bit. Honestly, they could pick any bloke and make a celebrity out of him, regardless of talent or merit. It’s all dogs and ponies anyway.”

  Anna set her tea down. “I never did like that bitch.”

  “Anyway, there were a couple of ‘I solemnly swears’ and whatnot, and I was whisked out of the country in the middle of the night, sworn to secrecy, and deposited in Division 0.” Aaron bit off half a chocolate chip cookie, the closest thing they could find to biccys in 29P.

  “What’ll they do if you talk about it?”

  Aaron sipped tea over a mush of half-chewed dough, swallowing the slurry. “I’ve no idea. Probably say ‘don’t do that again’ in a louder tone of voice.”

  The fancy false bird glided by, closer this time.

  Anna gestured at it. “Maybe you’ll win something. You know, they’re starting to lighten up a touch back home. I wound up on the desk of Lord Thompson.”

  “Oh, I have to hear this story.”

  “Not like that, you pervert.” She kicked him in the shin. “CSB got me. Said they’d kill me if I didn’t assassinate the man. I figured I’d be dead either way, not that I wanted to kill the sod… I wound up diving on him to get him away from a sniper. Course, he turned out rather grateful afterwards.”

  “Savin’ a person’s life can alter their perception of you.”

  “His son’s gifted.” Anna examined a cookie, holding it to her mouth while Aaron feigned high-society shock. “Thompson launched an inquiry into the CSB last I heard.” She bit the top off. “So, why are you so glum? I doubt it’s your team’s record as of late, though that’s quite worthy of glumness.”

  Aaron sucked sugary bits out of his teeth. “I’m at a dead end. The only person I’ve had any hope of helping me’s fallen off the planet.”

  “Who is it? Why do you need to find them?”

  He waved her off. “Nothin’ you need worry about.”

  “Really?” She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward. “Maybe we can help?”

  Frustrated, he couldn’t settle on a place to put his hands. “I… I just don’t want to talk about it.”

  “This is it, isn’t it?” she asked, her voice bereft of its oft-accusatory tone. “It’s got something to do with how you’re such a chav.”

  Aaron stared at her. A glimmer of someone else lurked millimeters below the surface of her sapphire eyes, a girl who never was. A woman who’d clearly suffered a deep emotional wound. He let his gaze fall to the table as he pushed a cookie back and forth in the cheap plastic packing tray. They’d killed at least half the box. He’d lost the urge to eat.

  “Allison,” he whispered.

  Anna slid a hand through the sweetener dust toward him. The electronic bird hovered up to the railing by their table, a long rainbow train of holographic tail feathers glided behind it.

  He watched her fingers creep closer for a moment, looked up at her face, and thrust his jaw forward, unsure if he liked the feeling of absorbing her pity. “There was a”―four Division 0 tactical officers, in full armor, walked out of a distant hallway and looked around―“shit.”

  “What?” she perked up like a meerkat. “There was a shit?”

  The woman leading them spotted him and pointed.

  “Zeroes.” Aaron jumped up.

  “Pryce!” shouted a woman’s voice, amplified by helmet speakers. “We just want to talk.”

  He shoved his arm forward; a telekinetic wave knocked the police flat and sent them skidding into a toy store. Two spikes of mental effort toppled shelves, burying them in a massive pile of stuffed animals and children’s dolls. He grabbed Anna’s wrist and ran, dragging her along.

  “Is that necessary?” Anna scrambled to keep her feet under her.

  “What?”

  “The arm waving thing.”

  Aaron stopped and gave her a matter-of-fact look. “It feels more dramatic.”

  “You are such an idiot.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” He smirked. At the sight of a two-foot red ball bouncing past, he sprinted off. “Come on!”

  “Not going to fly?”

  “No, that’ll draw too much attention.” He ran down a moving stairway.

  “Oh, and sprinting about won’t?”

  A spread of octagonal tables in the court at the bottom threw off a blinding glare. Half of them shifted from painful gleam to black as they descended, forming an alternating pattern. He swayed from the disorienting optical illusion of a moving spiral and bumped into a table, startling several people away from Asian food. A short sprint later, he knocked a man into a pond full of holographic koi and ducked past an archway resembling wooden posts carved into dragons.

  “Dammit, Pryce, stop!” shouted a man somewhere above and behind.

  Telekinetic force grabbed him. Aaron whirled about, threading his power into the intangible hands grasping for him. The Division 0 officer at the top of the escalator sailed out of sight as Aaron overwhelmed him in a contest equivalent to an augmented assault Marine arm-wrestling a two-year-old. For a few seconds, Aaron stood still, blinking at his own strength.

  “Well, I’ll be…”

  Anna prodded him into running again. They weaved among the crowd for another hundred meters or so, ducking snack food carts and random unlicensed vendors selling refurbished junk. The Division 0 officers had the advantage in the sea of people, as most who saw police armor got well out of their way.

  “Sorry, Anna.” Aaron stopped, squeezed her arm, and let go. “You don’t need to get dragged into this.”

  “Who’s Alli―”

  She made a noise like a kicked chicken as he telekinetically launched her down a wide corridor lined on both sides with kid-tainment shops. Her distancing shriek drowned in a thousand explosions, beeps, and starship noises from holo-sims. A shower of sparks burst from the ceiling overhead, wherever lights bore the brunt of her surprise. Electronics faltered, creating the illusion of a sphere of shadow racing down the corridor. He slowed her to a gentle stop some two hundred meters later near a bank of doors, targeting someone in a giant rooster costume as a landing cushion. On impact, the suit’s electronics emitted a loud squawk.

  He struggled to resist laughing at the ungainly flailing of the poor man, though the sight of Zeroes reaching the bottom of the escalator on the far side of the food court did the trick. Aaron cast a brief glance at the ensuing chaos down the hall, hoping he’d moved her away fast enough to escape notice. He gestured at the police, who flinched despite him doing nothing psionic. He gave them a ‘gotcha’ smile and sprinted in the opposite direction from Anna.

  Opportunity for salvation came in the form o
f an ‘employees-only’ door at the end of a hallway of rental lockers and public bathrooms. An unpainted corridor between the exterior wall and the rear exits of numerous stores ran in both directions on the other side, flooded with the stink of rotting food and industrial chemicals. Aaron used his sleeve as an emergency air filter. Not trusting his former friends’ motives, and with no crowd to dissuade the use of weapons, he sprinted to the left, which offered a shorter distance before a ninety-degree turn.

  They’ve probably got at least two units in the air if not drones. I can’t just run out the back.

  He jumped a pile of pungent trash bags at the rear door of a restaurant, tossed against the wall by a lazy employee who couldn’t be bothered to walk to the exit. An oblivious teen girl in the white and green polo shirt/skirt uniform of a Chinese food vendor sang along with whatever music pumped into her ears while propping open a door decorated with a cute, painted panda face. A wheeled robot jostled and thrummed as it processed something, the smell coming off it a clear indicator of their reason for bringing it to the back hall. The voice of an older man yelled in Cantonese from inside. The girl didn’t notice him as he shot by.

  Aaron gagged; the stench came close enough to food to transcend from merely bad to abhorrent.

  The straightaway led to a switchback left turn and an unexpected group of mops, brooms, and plastic pipes stacked against the wall. He windmilled his arms, managing to avoid landing on his face despite tripping and sliding through the mass of junk. His mind tracked at least seven or eight objects at once, mostly the ones tangling his legs, and forced them out of his path while holding his body upright. He kicked his way out of the debris and made it to the end of the section of hallway, where it opened into a room with fuse panels, generators, and a large metal rolling door. Numerous empty pallets littered the floor, with more stacked to his right.

  Three teenaged boys in three different store uniforms leaned against a broken cargo lift parked atop a Cryomil stain. A case of synthbeer canisters perched on one of the loader’s fork tines. One sucked on a Flowerbasket inhaler and stared into space. The other two slurped their drinks; their continuous complaining about weak drugs and weaker beer came to a suspicious halt as Aaron skidded to a halt by the door.

  Strong telekinetic encouragement forced it to roll upward, breaking the magnetic locks and sending sparks flying from the motor at the top. Two of the three slackers went running back into the mall screaming while the one hitting the Flowerbasket laughed. Aaron slipped under into a loading dock. As soon as he ‘let go’ of it, the magnets slammed the door down hard enough to crack the concrete. He didn’t expect the loud, echoing bang, and jumped. Nine smaller doors designed to accept cargo transports ran across the right-side wall. Automated cargo loaders rumbled back and forth past rows of merchandise, while refrigerator-sized hover bots ferried items from shelving stacked to the ceiling to conveyor belts at the distant end of the room. A continuous stream of delivery bots floated in via purpose-built doorways at the fourth-story level and picked up outgoing shipments from the belts before flying off into the city.

  The well-oiled machinery of commerce mesmerized him for a few seconds.

  He frowned, realizing he couldn’t take any of the truck doors. He figured it a veritable certainty more police―or at least some manner of electronic spy―would see him. For a moment, he entertained the thought of hitchhiking on a delivery bot, but none of the ones coming in looked large enough to carry a man.

  Armored bodies clattered in the hallway, urging him deeper into the room. He ducked among the cargo movers, which seemed to disregard his presence. Everything from small pieces of furniture to clothes to snacks floated past him on its way to someone in West City. Banging at the door grew louder, urging him to a careless run. One of the large movers came out of a blind corridor, hitting him broadside and sweeping him off his feet. He let off an oof as he crumpled over it, clinging to a seam in its paneling. Fortunately, it wasn’t moving too fast, and the collision hit him no harder than a pair of frictionless players having a head-on encounter at a full sprint.

  With the wind knocked out of him, he could only cling and try to breathe as it flew up to the ceiling and gathered a number of one-gallon plastic canisters with a cartoon goat’s face on the label. Aaron’s stomach did a backflip at the idea of synthetic goat milk shakes, in powder form. Some manner of high protein supplement for a muscle-head. He wanted as little to do with imagining how it tasted as possible, but his evil brain tried to figure it out based on the cloying smell leaking out of the containers.

  He still choked on it twenty seconds later when the product-fetcher bot descended upon the conveyor belts. Aaron jumped free the second it came within two stories of the floor. He caught himself on a telekinetic cushion, floated to the ground, and ducked under the nearest row of shelves, hiding beneath patio furniture.

  The sound of dripping water attracted him toward ever-narrower passages in the tangle of merchandise, into a dark space under sixty-foot tall shelves packed with yet more consumerism. He helped himself to a pack of instant self-heating hot pretzel nuggets and crawled to the back corner. The spot was dark and hard to reach, but a telepath would be able to sense his mind regardless of light. Dripping echoed louder here, leading him to a grating in the floor.

  Aaron crouched, peering down into a shaft full of wire bundles and corroded pipes descending into the dark, at least twenty meters down into the city plate. Laser pistols went off in the not-distant-enough loading area, leaving him precious little time for pre-regret over what the trip into The Beneath would do to his fresh suit. The clatter of the once-door striking the ground erased the last of his doubt. He scowled. His need to escape didn’t come from fear. If Division 0 got a hold of him, Talis would be free and clear. They’d never bother going after her. Most of them likely hadn’t even believed she existed.

  He frowned at the grate and gathered a sense of its mass in his mind before tearing it off its bolts. The metal warped from the force needed to move it, no longer able to fit back over the shaft.

  “Bugger all.”

  Aaron set it aside and levitated himself into the foul darkness, before a telepathic ping could find his thoughts.

  ith an unceremonious shove, Aaron flung the door to his current piece-of-shit squat apartment to the side. It slammed into the wall, knocking some unknown object to the floor. Various awful fluids coated every inch of him, sliding into places and crevices he would not have otherwise known existed if not for the sensation of creeping sludge. The maddening trek through the interior of the plate had indeed kept him away from police detection, but at the cost of a stink able to stain a man’s soul.

  A reek like metallic fermented raspberries blended with a full-bodied aroma of fetid beef permeated his senses, both smell and taste. He swallowed bile for the fortieth some odd time and trudged into the bathroom. The first fifteen-minute cycle of the autoshower happened with clothes on. He stripped for the next two.

  At the halfway mark of the first naked shower, he stopped fighting and puked into the spray of water. When the third dry cycle stopped, he stood motionless in the steam-filled enclosure staring at the mass of fabric on the floor. Puddles of industrial sludge had an awful lot of nerve disguising themselves as safe ground. He contemplated burning the suit, but lacked the energy.

  The entirety of his food intake for the day consisted of about a half-dozen cookies and a cup of tea. His purloined pretzels still floated somewhere in a pond of vileness, lost the first time he’d gone under. Getting out had been more important than recovering a snack of opportunity. A second glance at his clothes chased away any inkling of desire for food. If not for the ‘hot water low’ warning on the shower’s console, he would have run it a fourth time. Aaron grumbled the entire way from the safe, warm tube to his cold ‘bedroom.’ If he missed anything from his real home, it would be the white machine on the wall, which provided a constant supply of clean knickers… as long as he kept stuffing dirty ones in the top end.r />
  The entirety of his clothing stank―not that his sense of smell had much recovered from his foray below the city―even the unworn ones, having absorbed the ambiance of the place. Aaron remained nude while pacing back and forth with his NetMini, ordering new skivvies as well as laundry service. Minutes later, he slipped into a brand new pair of boxers and a t-shirt before loading the rest of his clothes into a service bot. With the bulk of his emergency clothing on its way to be cleaned, he fell face-first on the clapped out Comforgel pad with a dull splat.

  One eye popped open. Some thread of cognizance had reached into his skull and tricked his brain into separating itself from a wonderful dream of breakfast with Allison. He seemed in much the same orientation as he last remembered, face down, lips mushed to one side, and arms limp. In the odd sort of way the human mind tends to process information in the first moments of wakefulness, he realized he heard a sound that did not belong in his apartment, but couldn’t identify what it was.

  Hissing.

  Snakes? He forced himself to blink. No, too constant. Perhaps there’s a steam pipe blown? Steam pipe? What century are you in? He sucked in a breath, which added a smell to the list of suspects accused of criminally causing consciousness in a sleep-deprived idiot. Sausage? Oh, someone’s broken in to steal the use of our stove.

  Aaron disregarded it as a lunacy of exhaustion and closed his one open eye.

  Whirring and rhythmic banging woke him a second time. Criminal wakefulness in the first degree. He dragged a hand up to wipe the drool from his lips and used it to push himself over onto his back. The hand remained pasted to his cheek. This lack of hangover thing is becoming annoying. I need to drink more. He lay there for a moment, breathing. Yes, that’s definitely sausage.

  “Darwin? Is that you cooking?”

  “Not quite,” said an unfamiliar female voice, deeper than Anna’s and brushed with a dash of haughtiness. She also sounded British. “I see you’re up then. Your laundry’s back. I took the liberty of stacking it by the duffel.”