Code of Pride

by Ryan Kirk

  Next, he used one of Nat’s hacks that she had given him access to. He pulled up the police database, which now held not just criminals but all citizens, and ran facial recognition on the youth. He found a last known address, even though it was a few years out of date. He chose the store closest and decided it was time for a trip.

  To get there, Br00-S rode the light rail to downtown and then caught a connecting bus. Although traveling by mass transit wasn’t as quick as calling a car, this allowed him a greater degree of privacy. There were an amazing number of ways to track people in this digital age, and Br00-S did everything he could to throw off that tracking at every opportunity. Privacy was his greatest defense.

  The sun was sitting low on the horizon when Br00-S found the store his online research had pulled up. Before entering, he took the time to scan the building, finding that the store was armed with a detector over the front door that recognized robots in addition to stolen goods. Even if this wasn’t the place the weapon was purchased, it was definitely a shop that had no love for Br00-S or his kind.

  Not wanting to make a scene, Br00-S worked his way around the store, finding the loading dock in the back. The area was secured with cameras and alarms, and Br00-S debated his best way forward.

  Ultimately, he decided on speed. The store was close to closing hours, so there shouldn’t be too many customers. Br00-S would be as quiet as possible, but if they decided to make it a fight, well, he wouldn’t want to disappoint them.

  With a few quick steps, Br00-S ran up the loading dock and yanked the door open with one quick move. The door broke open and he stepped in, closing the remains of the door behind him and taking in his surroundings. The back area looked like most small storage areas, filled to the ceiling with beige boxes.

  Bruce’s optical scanners took in the labels and immediately reached some conclusions. This store was selling a lot of self-defense weaponry. His pattern recognition software quickly picked up on an obvious realization, given his recent research. Everything being sold here was easily modifiable. There wasn’t any concrete evidence, but it felt as though he had found the right place.

  There was no doubt he had set off an alarm, so he kept moving toward the front of the store. The most efficient path to answers would be to talk to someone directly about the modified weapons.

  His presence had clearly been discovered because he heard the door to the front of the store open and the footfalls of two people. They were just around the corner.

  Fortunately, Br00-S was capable of quick action. He approached the corner and ducked low, waiting for the two to come to him. His first glance surprised him.

  These two men weren’t carrying the stun weapons Br00-S predicted, but instead were armed with modified shotguns, and they acted as though they knew exactly where he was crouching. He scanned the room and cursed. There were cameras everywhere that he had forgotten to take into account. The robot heard the click of a shotgun shell being chambered and he dove forward into the row between the boxes.

  Br00-S moved faster than any human, but it almost wasn’t fast enough. He came to his feet, turned the corner, and leaped toward his opponents just as their fingers started to tighten on their triggers again. Br00-S landed between them and shoved their shotguns up toward the ceiling as they went off.

  For a human, the sound must have been deafening, but Br00-S had anticipated the noise and turned off his auditory input. While the humans dealt with the shock of the sound and the violence of their own weapons, he moved in with quick strikes that knocked the wind out of both assailants.

  As they fell, he yanked their shotguns away from them and tossed them off to the side. It would take the two several seconds to gather their wits about them, and Br00-S wanted to use that time to advance his own ends.

  He stepped through the door to the front of the store and saw two customers as they sprinted away from the building. He ran a quick scan using all his sensors and was convinced that he was now alone with the two gunmen in the back.

  Just to be certain they wouldn’t be bothered, Br00-S took a moment to block the front door, locking it from the inside and moving a shelf in front of it.

  The process took him a few seconds, and by the time he returned to the storage area one of the two men had managed to pick up his shotgun and get back on his feet. He must have been slightly dazed, though, because he didn’t even react when Br00-S reentered the room. The man jumped when he finally saw the robot again, but by then it was too late for him. Br00-S swiped the shotgun out of his hands and threw it deep into the storage area.

  Br00-S looked at the two men. From their matching uniforms, he presumed they were both employees of the establishment. They were both heavyset, their skin so pale it seemed obvious neither of them had seen the sun in many months. The one who hadn’t even tried to get back up looked like he hadn’t bothered to shave in three or four days.

  Of the two, the other man, who was taller, seemed to be in charge of the shop.

  Br00-S decided to get straight to the point. “Do you illegally modify your stun guns here?”

  The sneer on the man’s face was wiped away when Br00-S drove a fist into his stomach. The man doubled over and dry heaved.

  Br00-S saw the shock register on the other man’s face. As the tall man came back up, defiant, Br00-S knew there was one good way to get his answer.

  “One more chance,” he said to the tall man. “Tell me about the weapons you modify.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Br00-S had hoped that would be the answer, had expected nothing less.

  He moved nearly as fast as he could, sending a series of punches into the taller man, ending with a roundhouse that snapped the supervisor’s head around and dropped him to the floor. Br00-S picked him up with ease and threw him over his shoulder, taking him to the back of the storage area where the short man couldn’t see what happened. Sometimes sound was a better motivator. It allowed the imagination to fill in the blanks.

  Once Br00-S was out of sight he threw the dazed man into a pile of collapsed cardboard. The actual impact wouldn’t hurt too much, but the sound was what he was after. Br00-S opened his hand and slapped the man several times, allowing his hand to bang against the shelving every time he wound up.

  By the time he was done, the tall man was unconscious, and although he hadn’t suffered anything more than some bruises and maybe a cracked rib, it had sounded much worse.

  Br00-S stood up and walked slowly back to the front of the storage room, where, as he had predicted, the short man was cowering in fear.

  “Your friend wasn’t very talkative. I know that you’re connected to the illegal weapons modification happening around town. Tell me.”

  The shorter man nodded and blubbered, spilling everything he knew.

  The weapons dealers still couldn’t secure their location as much as Br00-S assumed they wanted. In the city, and even out in the suburbs, there were cameras almost everywhere. Even crimes committed inside buildings were usually recorded, and on the off chance they weren’t, the second the guilty party stepped outside, street cams would pick them up. Big brother was here, and it had been at the request of the people.

  There were ways to hide from the cameras and the biometric sensors. Br00-S and Nat engaged in the practices every time they left their cave. But it was limiting, forcing those who wished to remain anonymous to fit into predictable patterns of behavior.

  If one was going to run an illegal business, say like a weapons modification market, one couldn’t rely on the wisdom of the customers. Br00-S figured if the average customer was of the caliber he had encountered in the alley the night before, it was the responsibility of the dealer to keep the meeting secure.

  The simplest answer was to find the abandoned and quiet places of the city, places where cameras weren’t constantly watching and the police weren’t patrolling. Places where people could enter and exit unobserved. Wherever those places existed, there were gatherings of people, Br00-S had noticed. Sometimes
it was the homeless and destitute, trying to stay off the radar of social services.

  Sometimes it was criminals modifying weapons for others to use.

  The shorter employee at the store had only been able to give Br00-S an approximate location. The shop sold the legal weapons and acted as a gateway, a place to connect. So Br00-S used what he knew about the logistics of criminality and determined the location from the limited information he’d received.

  The location was a good one, underneath an underpass about forty minutes away from the heart of downtown. Accessing it wasn’t much of a problem, but it was remote enough that no random passerby would stumble upon it. The nearest camera wasn’t for almost a half mile. The surrounding area was overgrown with weeds and grass, and there were no parks nearby to distract from the business at hand.

  Br00-S scouted the location for over two hours. While he couldn’t be certain this was the exact spot, he hadn’t found anyplace else that fit his criteria. He studied the terrain and the surroundings. Based on what he observed, he was fairly certain he knew how the criminals would approach and how he could take them down.

  He had hoped the illegal weapons would be sold straight from the shop. It would have made his life easier. Unfortunately, they were totally legit, just the first link in a chain. All the weapons they sold were legal, and they kept their business operating within the rule of law.

  It had taken some gentle persuasion, but eventually the short man told Br00-S there was a sale happening that very night. The robot received the impression that the meets weren’t that uncommon. The salesman hadn’t known the exact time or location, but he had given Br00-S enough.

  Currently, Br00-S was perched on the underside of the bridge itself. Any further scouting would only add risk without much reward, so there was little left to do but wait. Time had little meaning for him, and he suspected the best way to get the drop on the weapons dealers was to be present well ahead of time.

  He was hidden deep in the shadows, and he waited for his targets to arrive.

  They came, but not the way he expected. It seemed the short man had shown some courage after all. Br00-S and the man had agreed that informing the dealers of the robot’s intentions wasn’t in the salesperson’s best interest, but apparently the logic hadn’t held long. The first movement Br00-S noticed was at the periphery of his sensors. There was a man, climbing onto the underside of the bridge, not thirty feet away from where Br00-S himself hid deep in the shadows. Leaning out gently to get a better look, Br00-S saw that the man carried a rifle with a large scope. The man took up a position overlooking the meeting location.

  Perhaps such precautions were standard procedures, but Br00-S doubted it.

  Once he leaned out, his sensors alerted him to the presence of even more threats, confirming his suspicion. There were two men with automatic weapons perched on the embankments that connected the bridge to the ground. That made three he noticed, and there was no telling how many more might be hiding out of range.

  Br00-S was wearing body armor, conveniently looted from the business he had visited earlier that day. Even so, the risk on this mission had just risen considerably.

  He wasn’t scared, and he never once considered changing or abandoning the mission. He was better than them, more skilled. All that was left was planning how to defeat them.

  He needed one last piece of information. There was a considerable support team in place, but he still didn’t know how many men would actually show up for the deal.

  Everyone settled into place, and Br00-S was struck by the humor of the situation. They were hiding from him, but he was already present, hiding from them. He knew where at least some of them were, and they didn’t even know he was here.

  The employee had told Br00-S the meetings happened around ten at night. At half past nine, a group of five men walked into the clearing beneath the underpass. Only one of them carried a light backpack. The rest carried submachine guns. There was enough illegal weaponry here to send everyone involved to jail for a few years.

  Br00-S had no doubt that he had been set up. He suspected that if this had been a real deal, there would be more backpacks filled with merchandise. No operation that hired eight well-trained warriors for modified stun gun deals was profitable.

  Br00-S leaned out from his hiding place again, risking the small chance of discovery for the opportunity to find people he hadn’t discovered earlier.

  He didn’t find anyone new.

  At about a quarter to ten, the men who had come with the dealer split off, finding fire positions in the tall grass that surrounded the clearing. Had Br00-S been a clueless customer, or even a poorly prepared vigilante, he would have been caught in a tremendous crossfire.

  But he had one advantage they couldn’t match. He was already here, and he knew where they were.

  At about three minutes to ten, Br00-S decided it was time to act. Everyone’s attention would be on the site of the deal and the approach leading to it. Moving silently across the I-beam that supported the bridge, Br00-S worked his way to the sniper’s perch. The man had rigged up a clever harness so he had a stable shooting platform. Br00-S saw that with a simple tug, the setup would allow the sniper to rappel down to the ground for a quick exit if necessary.

  The man was so focused on the scope of his rifle that he never heard Br00-S work his way right beside him. The robot knocked the sniper unconscious with one quick strike.

  Next up were the two on the embankment.

  They were harder to approach, but Br00-S took extra time and worked his way behind them.

  The two of them were lying side by side, their attention riveted on the motionless scene below. Br00-S reached down and wrapped both their necks in choke holds, cutting off their air until they passed out. Then he laid them back down gently.

  Before he moved down, Br00-S took a moment to scan his surroundings. Eight felt like an unusual number to him, but he still couldn’t pick up anyone else in any spectrum.

  There were times, he reflected, when it was nice not to be a human.

  Humans weren’t great at crawling once they became adults. After a lifetime of walking, they simply didn’t handle it well anymore, their shoulders and arms needing relief after only a few seconds of effort.

  Robots weren’t designed with that drawback. Br00-S dropped down to his hands and feet and crawled quickly through the tall grass, leaving nothing but a softly swishing blades of grass in his path.

  He chose speed over stealth, worried that the men he’d already incapacitated would miss a radio check-in, and the decision came back to haunt him. He got close to his next set of targets before they noticed him, but all the same, they heard him coming and had a chance to prepare.

  They were on their bellies, waiting for the trap to be sprung, but as soon as they heard Br00-S, both rolled over onto their backs and sat up.

  Br00-S got to them before they could pull their triggers, but the sounds of their brief fistfight carried through the silent night. The men were skilled, preventing Br00-S from an easy fight.

  The man who Br00-S had pegged as the dealer yelled, “He’s over there! Get him!”

  Br00-S blocked an elbow to his head and returned a blow in kind to one of the men in the grass. The man’s nose crumbled and the light in his eyes went out as he lost touch with the world. Br00-S finally got his hand around the other’s throat and squeezed until the man passed out. That was one pair in the grass taken care of, but the others were almost on him.

  With surprise gone, the only option left was speed and violence. He saw the final pair of guards standing up in the grass for a better view. The dealer screamed once again, “Get him!”

  Br00-S was reassured by the lack of a response. Even though they knew they were being hunted, they didn’t exactly know where their predator was.

  Still low to the ground, on hands and feet like a four-legged spider, Br00-S sprinted towards the final pair. All they ever saw was the grass part before he was on them.

 
Another weakness in humans was their expectations. With all their training, the final pair was expecting someone to run at them, or crawl slowly. Even armed and ready, knowing an enemy was out there coming for them, they couldn’t react fast enough to the robot’s unusual movement.

  Their submachine guns tracked him, but it was too little, too late. Br00-S sprang from the grass and tackled them both to the ground. After a furious exchange of fists and rifle butts, the two men were unconscious.

  He took just a moment to call the police and let them know that a group of heavily armed men was in the area. He received almost immediate notification that a police force was on the way to help take care of the situation.

  Br00-S figured he had about four minutes before he needed to clear the scene. That would give him enough time with the dealer.

  His attention distracted by the call to the police, Br00-S only just reacted in time to the sound of a gun being drawn. He slid to the side quickly as two loud reports echoed in the underpass. The bullets must have missed because he didn’t register a single impact.

  Then he was next to the dealer. He grabbed the pistol and wrenched it out of the man’s hands.

  “Who do you work for?”

  The man growled and swung his fist. Br00-S leaned back and let the fist pass in front of his face.

  “Who do you work for?” Br00-S repeated.

  “Fuck you, man.”

  Br00-S was getting tired of hearing the same thing again. The Sapiens First members weren’t much for respect or conversation, in his experience.

  Ultimately, Br00-S didn’t care much. He had hoped he might be able to work his way up the chain of command a little further, but this was good. This was moving in the right direction. He could live with today’s work.

  In the back of his mind, he was tracking the progress of the police and the time they would need to get to him. His window to escape without complication was growing narrower by the second. It was too late for him to get much more out of the dealer, so he knocked the man unconscious and laid him gently on the ground.