NLI-10

by Lee Isserow

  Her subconscious was leading her somewhere, traipsing through camera feeds, trying to find something, but her conscious mind didn't know what. She let her mind surf the digital stream of its own accord until it found what it was looking for.

  Whark was leaving her office, bag in hand, she was getting out before it all came crashing down on her head. Sarah wasn't going to let that happen.

  Disconnecting from the NeuralNet, Sarah stormed out the door, pinpointing Whark's location on the map, running down the hallway in pursuit.

  Alex and Micah were still deep in Rob's mind. He was mostly through unpacking the OS, and laying out the UI, whilst Alex was using Farah's knowledge to place the memories in as correct an area of his brain as possible.

  'Two more minutes.' said Micah 'Then I think we can boot him up.' He pulled out of Rob's head as he saw the orderlies on the camera feeds, stomping down the corridor towards their location.

  Letting go of the door lock, he shook his hands out, cracked his knuckles, and pulled up the sleep command. As the sound of clomping boots drew near, Micah hid behind the door and waited to pounce. The sounds ceased outside the room. They watched Alex from the hallway, observing the shadows in the room. After a moment, the first of them entered. Micah lunged out, hand reaching for the first orderly's wrist, which pulled away, his fist pummelling into Micah's gut, winding him. He redirected oxygen flow and turned the pain off, returning to his feet. The orderly smiled grotesquely, as if he had been waiting to put a fist through the patients' faces all this time. He threw a punch at Micah, which was dodged with the help of hypersight, but the second orderly was on him from behind, grabbing his arms, allowing the first to throw fist after fist into Micah's face and gut, taking great pleasure with each connection of his knuckles. The second orderly let go of Micah, allowing him to drop to the ground, and the first picked him up for the second to get his punches in. Another punch to the gut had him buckling over, the first orderly wrenching him back up for another round.

  When Micah raised his head, there was a smile curling up his lips. The second orderly pulled his arm back and fired it at the smile. As the fist connected with Micah's face, he sent a packet of data through to the orderly's brain. The next fist flying missed Micah completely, every ounce of the giant's strength crunching the bones in the face of his cohort, then another and another. The first orderly tried to fight back, but his auto-piloting colleague wasn't going to back down, and couldn't feel the blows. The second orderly stood over the first, who was now a bloody mess. He looked at his hands, the programming coming to an end, and realised what he had done

  “Hey, asshole.' said Alex, getting his attention.

  Alex, Micah and Rob put their hands on his face and together, wiped his mind clean. The gargantuan beast fell to the floor, and the three of them left for the rendezvous.

  Sarah was only a few corners behind Whark. She touched a door lock briefly as she ran to be certain her quarry hadn't changed paths, speeding up her pursuit. Whark turned as Sarah came round the corner behind her, and smiled.

  “My, what a fantastic fucking crusader you are... A fucking revolutionary. Just like your worm-food parents.”

  “You don't know shit about my parents.” said Sarah, walking confidently towards Whark.

  “I know them better than you, you fucking burnout. This is their experiment. I was with them every step or the way whilst they created the NLI programme. Did you know that? Did you know they spent their lives trying to programme people? Tortured fuck-knows how many in the process of reaching their dream?'

  “It wasn't their dream. It was their job.”

  “It was never just a job to them. They were pioneers, leading the fucking way in NeuroLoader technology, no matter the cost in human lives. It was only when that little cunt, a little girl just like you exposed some tiny little 'conspiracy' that they started getting all emotional, 'What if that was my little girl' they said...”

  “You were spying on them?” said Sarah, within a few footsteps of reaching distance of Whark.

  “We're spying on everyone, idiot. And your parents knew it. They knew what was going to happen if they tried to whistleblow...”

  “It was you.” Sarah said, realising Whark's place in her parent's death. “You had them killed.”

  “Of course I fucking did. They had to die because having you made them think twice about doing their fucking job, and now you have to die, because I'm completest like that...”

  “Good luck trying to kill me when you're a fucking vegetable.” Sarah said, planting a hand on Whark's neck. She initiated the tactile connection.

  Nothing happened.

  “Well that was disappointing...” said Whark, with a laugh.

  “What the fuck?” said Sarah, planting another hand on her, the tactile connection still refusing to work.

  “Until your mummy and daddy did something very dumb, they were very fucking smart.” she pulled her collar, revealing a scar at the back of her neck, a paper-thin circuit board visible just beneath the skin. “Neural Firewall.” she explained. “There's no getting into my head, sweetness.” She threw a punch at Sarah's face, which was dodged with ease.

  “Neural firewall... pretty smart” said Sarah. “Not so smart for being the big bad Bond villain and showing me...”

  In a swift movement, Sarah was behind Whark, her nails slicing through the scar and ripping out the chip from its connection with her spinal cord. She planted a hand on Whark's forehead, and activated the tactile connection.

  Whark's memories flooded through Sarah's mind, dispersed through the network to the others. She went through every memory of every experiment. Every meeting and report. Gathered and distributed all the intel amongst the group and pulled out, disabling the spinal column controls as she left the connection. Whark fell to the floor, her legs refusing to hold her weight, and Sarah strutted down the hallway triumphantly to join the others at the entrance.

  Whark reached to her bag with an arm that barely responded to her commands, knocking the contents on to the floor and shouting at her phone, commanding it to call head office.

  “The experiment had fucking failed.” she said. “The idiot guards couldn't contain a simple fucking rebellion. I want the Butcher dispatched after these fucks to clean up the mess...”

  “Miss Whark.” said the voice on the other end, a young male speaker that she didn't recognise.

  “Who the fuck is this?” she said.

  “Nathaniel Myra. I'm the new head of Network Operations.”

  “New head?” Whark spat, venomously. “I'm the fucking head of Network Operations!”

  “Not any more, Miss Whark, I'm afraid this little fuck up of yours was somewhat expected... You're being reassigned to a project with a more... observational role.”

  “The fuck I am!” she shrieked, flailing on the floor. Myra chuckled as he hung up, leaving the woman abandoned in the hallway with only the red lights of the prying A-Eyes for company.

  The bus pulled up as Sarah ran along the corridor, joining Alex, Rob and Micah as they made their way out of the facility and climbed on board. It took off at speed down the dirt road towards the gate, smashing through the aluminium mesh as if it were paper.

  'So that's it?' asked Rob. 'We're free?'

  'Free to do what?' asked Farah 'They're going to be looking for us...'

  'We're not done.' said Sarah.

  She pulled up the intel she took from Whark's head.

  'These fucks have governments in their pocket, politicians eating out of their hands, and there are nineteen other facilities around the world... nineteen other NLI experiments, where people just like us are being taken apart, put back together. Personalities and memories wiped, emotions turned off, turned into fucking robots, and they're not all going to be able to get out like we did...'

  'So what do you want to do?' asked Micah.

  'First, we're going to free our brothers and sisters,' said Sarah. 'And then... we're going to take the fight to APEX.'


  Epilogue

  Marx withdrew her fingers from Agent Murphy's hand, severing the tactile connection. He shook off the download that had been dumped in his memories and looked at her.

  “Did that just happen?” he asked.

  “About six months ago, sure.” she said.

  “I meant... did you just... network with me?”

  She grabbed his hand again.

  'I did.' she said, her words a whisper through his thoughts.

  She closed the connection as Agent Murphy undid her cuffs and removed them.

  “That's why you're here? That's why you went after the Secretary?” he asked.

  “He was in their pocket. Travel records on the NeuralNet had him visiting at least two facilities before he pushed for increased investment for NLI-enhanced troops to be instated in military units. He's just another pawn, but it's one step closer.”

  “How many facilities have you freed?” he asked.

  “Four.” she said. “There's twenty-eight of us now. Maybe another fourteen after we breach the two we just discovered.”

  “Do you think you can really do this? Free the others? Have a revolution? Bring down the company?”

  “I do.” she said, conviction on her face. “But we can't do it alone. We need people like you, good people, who want to do the right thing. I'd have approached you back in Texas, but needed the time to get to know you a little better...” She gave him a smile, knowing him better than he did himself.

  “So.” she said. “Want to change the world?”

  Marx knew his response before it came out of his mouth. As she walked away, one of the network nodes, Madero, routed Murphy's call over the radio for her to hear. He declared the altercation with Marx as a case of mistaken identity. He was certain the unknown subject fleeing The Plaza never made it that far and instructed all units to begin searching in a radial pattern.

  Shedding her moniker of Marx, Sarah walked to the next subway stop, feeling a little bad for rewiring Murphy's brain whilst he was distracted with the data dump. His reward and pleasure centres were set to give him a little dopamine boost every time he thought about her, thought about their revolution. It would feel natural, as if he had always had love for her, and love for the coming change. Even though she knew it was wrong, this was how they had recruited all their assets thusfar, and how they would continue to do so.

  Finding real revolutionaries in a time of myriad distractions was something they all knew was unlikely. Even anti-corporation and anti-capitalist groups they had approached proved to be more about rhetoric and armchair revolutions than actually changing the world. So they were making their own. The Network watched through her eyes as she got on the train and headed back to their base in Brooklyn. The others were already hard at work placing the additional facilities on the map and coming up with plans to storm them. Each time it was getting more difficult, there was more chance of casualty or failure, but they wouldn't let that stop them. There were fifteen more facilities to take down, and at least a hundred more NLI subjects to break free.

  Sarah took a seat and watched over the information being put together by the Network, each of them working in harmony, filling the skill gaps with one another's knowledge. Together, there was no stopping them. And there was no time for them to stop.

  There was work to be done.

  About ABAM.INFO

  ABAM, or 'A Book A Month', is a terrible experiment to see how long a former screenwriter can produce a original novella every month before he goes insane.

  Alternating between dramatic and comedic prose, the books will be released on on the first Monday of every month in print, audiobook and as ebooks.

  If you've enjoyed this book in any capacity, do please review it on Amazon and Goodreads – I read them all and will no doubt veer towards writing more of what you like.

  Please visit the links below for more information and forthcoming releases.

  http://amazon.com/author/leeisserow

  http://ABAM.info

  Thank you kindly for being an observer to my mental deterioration.

  Next month on ABAM:

  I Hate Time Travellers

  synopsis

  Five years ago, everyone became a time traveller. Everyone except Luke Denton.

  The entire planet has been reshaped to accommodate this gift, and very little thought has been put into Non-Travellers like Luke. They're all too busy travelling through time and space to care.

  Luke tries to live a normal life in a world where practical jokes have gone up 60,000%, his roommate insists on having 12-self orgies in front of him, and every potential girlfriend he's had seems to get mad at him for stuff he hasn't done yet.

  He finally thinks he's found the perfect woman when he finds himself in bed with a future version of himself, and a secret government agency is hunting him down with the intention of slicing him up for experimentation.

  No wonder he hates time travellers...

  I Hate Time Travellers

  sample chapter

  It was August 25th 2010, exactly five years, eight months and three days since T-Day. That's what they were calling it now, although it had been through many deviations of name and overall rebrandings in that time. At first it was referred to as 'The Happening', but that just brought back memories of the M. Night movie that bored the hell out of millions of film patrons just a few years previous. 'The Event' didn't last long either, for not dissimilar reasons. T.S. Day was the name of choice for a little while, but that too was laid to rest, as the conservative media weren't particularly comfortable with conjuring images of gender transition whenever they discussed the fundamental change in the human race that had occurred. Not that the general public seemed to notice or mind. They were all too busy travelling through time and space to care.

  All of them except Luke Denton and around a thousand other souls who'd been left behind whilst the rest of the human race were evolved against their will, by a force conspiracy theorists around the world had put down to anything from governmental to extra terrestrial tinkerings. Each of these non-travellers had a story, each of them as boring as the last. Luke's story was based solely on unfortunate timing. Had the boiler in his apartment not gone out, and the electricity not follow soon after, he would have never ventured down to the basement. If he had just looked out the window, rather than obsessing over the utilities failing, he would have seen the night's sky glow a violet hue, the streetlamps flicker and die as the clouds dissipated, followed by the stars blinking out of view one by one. When the planet was dark and alone in the night's sky, the purple skies faded, replaced by darkness. A silent planet in the black. Once a hub of radio activity emanating into space, now a silent void. Time passed. Nobody could say how long. Then, one by one the stars returned, winking back into existence. Normality resumed.

  But everyone who was above ground while the spectacle occurred was now far from normal. In the initial panic, terrified governments threw billions at scientists, trying in vain to restrict travelling - but it was nigh on impossible. However, after the initial months of mass migration, population numbers were not actually that dissimilar to how they were before T-Day. With borders being entirely irrelevant, nation states finally put their differences aside and declared the United Nations the centralized home of world government. Oppression and persecution swiftly ended, because the oppressed and persecuted could be anywhere else at the drop of a hat - and now that transport costs were entirely negated, feeding and watering the third world was a task anyone could do. The world had become a utopia. Not that anyone would call it as such, seeing as they all still had to earn money.

  So despite living in a paradise where time had little meaning any longer, the denizens of the planet still grumbled. Although few grumbled as much as Luke. He had, in the last half-decade, trawled the internet and watched maybe hundreds of videos of the event, witnessing vicariously what he missed through handi-cam eyes. The others all seemed entirely disinterested in re-watching the marvel – mo
stly because of the constant back-and-forthing through their recent chronology. At one point, desperate to be like the rest of the human race, he begged his roommate Kyle to take him back to T-Day, or at the very least travel back to and stop him from heading down to the basement (it's not like he managed to work out how to fix the electricity or boiler anyway). But to no avail. He had heard rumours and they turned out to be true; travellers could not go back to before they gained their ability, and even if it were possible, there were tangential factors at work that as a non-traveller he could only begin to try to wrap his head around.

  But that was years ago, when he still cared. Luke had long since given up the dream of being like everyone else, and resigned to the fact that he would never know what it was like to travel through time, other than in the normal (and distinctly boring) linear fashion. At the present moment, unable to relocate in the blink of an eye as he deeply wished he could, he was sitting on the couch in his apartment while Kyle was standing with his hands at his zipper, offering to urinate on him.

  - - - -

  I Hate Time Travellers will be available from

  ABAM.Info and Amazon

  from 4th April 2016

  About The Author

  Lee Isserow is an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker, with over fifteen years spent trawling the back streets and dark alleys of the 'entertainment' industry.

  He's pretty sure he has some traits of autism, because he's been constantly working and obscenely prolific for the entire duration, writing over a hundred screenplays, many of which he's adapting into forthcoming ABAMs, because very few people are willing to turn them into movies. For now.