Nova’s scowl deepened. “People are dying out there. A lot of people. Hell, in the five minutes the three of us were together out there, we were almost killed. This isn’t a game, Gyro. Or a nursery rhyme.”
“’Course it ain’t a game, Sis. It’s better than a game! We gotta find the other two that have the code pieces too and reassemble it all. Then we can save the city! I’d say that’s more like a comic … It’s a quest! Just sayin’.”
Nova rolled her eyes. “Even if this whole thing is real, you’re assuming this Prophet is the person—”
“Not a person,” corrected Gyro. “An AI. A total singularity. Not one of them stupid manufactured sorts.”
Nova sighed and held up a solitary finger. “Fine. Let’s assume everything you said is mostly true. You’re making a dangerous assumption that this AI is who we want to be working for in the first place. What if the Charon thing Prophet claims is the enemy is really the one we should be asking for help? What if we’re being tricked?”
Gyro snorted. “Uh, ’cause nobody can slip a trick past me, Sis. Y’know I can smell ’em a mile away.”
“That’s not exactly a convincing argument, hon.”
“Just look.” Gyro activated a projector panel next to a pine shelf covered with martial arts trophies and tapped in a few commands. Chicken Fingers stared. That was a lot of trophies … Two figures appeared above the table and Gyro pointed at the first one—a young man in a janitor’s drab outfit.
“This Anansi guy works for CHIMERA, scrubbin’ gunk in their arcology, but apparently he is secretly some hotshot Hyper Reality tricker for a band called Predapex. They had a gig going tonight, but I kind of doubt that’s still happening. ’Cause, you know, like, technology crashing and the world ending and all that crap.”
She frowned at the second figure. “Bob here is the real mystery. There’s nothing much in his file besides this image and some text. Dude is a ghost.”
From Chicken Fingers’ angle, the man looked like pasteboard on a stick, as bland as they came. Outdated but reasonably expensive suit and silk tie, balding, and not a bit of shiny skin. Regular desk jockey, most likely not in an office where he could actually generate some vitamin D from sunshine.
“He might as well not exist outside this file,” Gyro resumed. “No work logs. No housing logs. No geo-loc or Deep data at all. The only stuff we got from Prophet on him are his measurements and this sweet tidbit.” She pointed at foggy text that scrolled out beside the figure when she prodded it with her finger. “He’ll come when you need him.” Totally mystic, right? Right? I mean, the singularity hits, and an AI way beyond anything we’ve ever seen can’t dig up info on this guy! It’s so coooooool!”
“The kind that makes me wonder if any of this is legit,” Nova said. “Everything you’ve shown me makes no sense, and has no correlating proof. I don’t trust any of it, hon.”
“Nova,” Chicken Fingers tentatively interjected, “I think Gyro’s head is going to explode from excitement …”
Nova raised an eyebrow. “He’s right, Gyro. Chill for a minute and try to look at this from the outside. At how dangerous this is. It’s intriguing … but …”
“I can’t chill!”
Her and Gyro’s voices piped louder as they renewed their arguing. Chicken Fingers listened to it all with half his attention. The other half considered whether he should get out of the loony business right then and there. He’d survived long enough on his own and had plenty of places he could stash himself. So long as he had his guns, nothing and nobody would stand in his way.
Still … the one thing he hated more than running out of bullets was being bored. He didn’t have anything better to do, if he was honest, and sitting around waiting for the world to end, or for everything to even out, sounded boring as shit. Right and wrong only mattered to him on a personal level. He did things that felt right; he didn’t do things that felt wrong. He didn’t care whose side he wound up on—so long as it proved interesting and kept him busy for a while.
But these two … they were talking about world-changing stuff. His thoughts circled back to the idea of the digital tsunami. Really, what could they do? Either the world was going to end … or everything would eventually be okay. If it was going to end, they’d all end up dead. If it was going to be okay and they just sat here, well, that was boring.
“What we got to lose?” he muttered.
The sisters stopped arguing and focused on him.
“What was that?” Nova asked.
Chicken Fingers took another swig from the bottle of rum he had decided was worth ingesting and set it down with a clink, oblivious to Nova’s scowl. “What we got to lose?”
“Besides our lives?”
He chuckled. “You say that like any minute of any day is different. You live in Chitown; you’re gambling your life just walking the streets. I’m no hero—and never want to be—but if this Prophet gave us each an edge to cut with, then leastways we can do is try and make a few peeps bleed. If the world is ending, let’s end it by doing something, maybe making a difference. Sitting here doing nothing, that’s way worse, right? Isn’t that the plan, Nova? Figure out what we could do after we found her?” He jabbed a finger in Gyro’s direction.
Nova shook her head, her jaw working soundlessly.
Gyro grinned. “She said that? You guys were gonna try to figure what to do about everything going on out there?”
He winked back. “She did.”
Nova closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “If we do this, going back out into that to find these other people, Gyro, you do what I say. We sleep first. We go out in a couple hours, and move slowly, move carefully. We do not expose ourselves, and above all, we survive the insanity out there.”
Chicken Fingers thought of the increasingly violent mobs swarming the city, as well as Prophet’s warning that another super-smart AI and its cronies were coming for them. Naw. Probably all of them would be deaders in less than a day. But at least they’d go out in style. He grinned and took another swig. “Sounds like a plan to me.”
Chapter Nineteen
Bob
The cube stayed quiet. Bob’s shoes, with soundproof soles and a deep black light-absorbing texture, didn’t even kick up dust as he ascended the stairs. He eschewed the elevators, not wanting to let himself possibly get trapped like fish in a metal bucket—just in case anyone managed to hack the building system while he took a ride.
The place might’ve been flashy once, using Holo Tags to make the hallways look like more than rusting steel corridors and giving the windows he passed epic vistas to gaze out at, rather than a view of several identical buildings across the road. He held up a small tablet to view the HR imagery hiding just out of plain sight. It was a self-contained receiver designed to show and not tell the surrounding electronics that he was visiting.
He couldn’t blame the residents themselves, but God, couldn’t people decorate with anything other than Holo Tags and Hyper Reality these days? It might be the cheaper route, sure, but turn off the tags and so much of Chicago became little more than a warren of steel, concrete, and rust. Modern “reality” was constructed holographically on the bones of a time that cared about substance more than veneer. Though, he supposed, every time would think that about the past.
The occasional stretch of park and real-glo neon sign added splotches of color, but to Bob, it sometimes felt like he was a rat scurrying through a giant metal maze. No, a Stainless Steel Rat, he corrected, remembering a tree-pulp-based book he enjoyed as a teenager.
Ah well. Better rat than cheese.
Fifteen minutes after his trio disappeared inside, another set of three joined the party. While their body armor didn’t look like anything fancy, they acted more professional than your average ganger. Their appearance didn’t have the hodgepodge stature of choppers or street scavengers. In fact, only one among them had visible augments, with red and green lenses screwed into his eye sockets, one color covering each eye.
The newcomers conferred with one another for a minute and then headed into the same building, obviously preparing to cause trouble. Bob trailed in after them, quick and quiet as a shadow. He was certain the newbies were tracking the group he was protecting.
He moved along the walls, listening as they moved. The hunt was on. He checked each stairwell, pausing to listen for any rustling or other telltale signs of their presence.
After the next flight of stairs, he stilled as voices came from above. One of the intruders, most likely male, though it was difficult to tell at this volume, spoke low and fast. “The boss says this traitor is holding out on us. She was supposed to report in but she fragged her handlers and jetted with some lone gunner right before mayday hit. She is in violation of her employment contract, so extreme prejudice and all that. Got it?”
A woman’s gravelly voice cut in. “What if she went nuts like everyone else? Not that I care, breach of contract is breach of contract. Just wondering.”
“Bosses picked up camera feed that says otherwise. And you saw her out in the street fighting those Reapers. She looked pretty focused. I figure she’s using this mess as cover—to cut a deal. No, we take her out before she is protected by that deal.”
“Who do you think she’s defecting to?” came the third person’s voice, younger, with a hint of fear wavering in the tone. “Should we worry about an extraction team showing up?”
“No clue,” said the man. “That’s what we’re here to find out. We go in, we slag all three, then download whatever she’s got in her brainstem and cut loose. Got it?”
“Yeah, whatever. This job already bores me.”
“Sure.”
“Fan-friggin-tastic. Murla, you drop down a floor and come up on the other side. Cut off that exit in case any of them make a dash. Tymone, soon as I blow the door, you’re in blazing. Remember, aim for Nova’s chest, leave her brain intact. I don’t care how you take down the other two. I’ll cover your back. Two minutes to playtime. Go, go, go.”
Footsteps descended, growing louder. Bob glanced up at the underside of the next flight of stairs. It had a ridged texture to its molding. With a gather and jump, he jammed his heels against the back of a lower stair and the meat of his palms into the ridges of a higher one. He braced in this angled position, muscles tensed like steel rods as the footsteps approached.
The woman thumped down the stairs, silenced bolter gripped in both hands held at the down but ready position. A burly sort with wide ears that would flap in a strong wind, she trudged directly past, and under, Bob’s position without a glance up. Sloppy. Whoever hired these goons should get their deposit back.
He dropped noiselessly as she passed. She shoved through the landing door with her shoulder into another main hall, and he followed, carefully tracing her footsteps. Then he paced her halfway down the hall until she paused. She cocked her head to the side, as if listening. Bob didn’t breathe, staring at the back of her head.
Pressing a finger to a nostril, the woman shot a wad of snot to the floor.
Bob grimaced. Charming scrub team we have here. Shifting half of a step closer, he straightened his arms and twitched them to loosen another set of arm sheathes.
Twin daggers dropped into either hand. He glided forward. Bob had a unique knack. When people trained in corporate combat programs, one of the things they learned was how to listen for silence. It was a unique aspect of sound, that the human ear could hear when there was sound missing that should be there.
Bob didn’t walk on wings of silence; he glided through the noise, becoming ambient. The noise he made was natural, and, while the ear absolutely heard him coming, it just didn’t notice. Almost casually he walked up behind her and thrust his hands forward. The first blade thrust into the woman’s lower back, through the gap between her torso and leg plating.
Spine severed.
She was instantly paralyzed. The second he snaked around her neck thrust up and through her jaw, pinning her mouth closed to prevent a scream. She gasped and dropped forward.
Silenced.
He pulled the second blade free, let her weight drag her throat along it, spraying blood across the chrome. As her body drained and gurgled, he cleaned the daggers off on her pants, tucked one away, and headed back the way they’d come. Bob took the stairs up without so much as a creak or groan of metal to betray him, despite the building’s dodgy construction.
Two flights up, he spotted a lean man with thick black hair bristling across every inch of exposed skin. He stood in a stairwell corner, puffing a stimstick, blowing fumes from his mouth and then sucking them straight back into his wide nostrils.
When the man closed his eyes briefly to savor the pungent aroma, Bob whisked up and leaned against the wall right next to him. In the flickering lights of the stairwell, it took the man a whole ten seconds to realize he no longer waited alone.
He jerked and turned. “Mur—?”
Bob’s blade took him under the soft of his jaw, pinning his tongue to the roof of his mouth. Bob shifted his grip, placing his palm against the bottom of the handle and slapping his hand with the other hand. The blade speared straight into gray matter. The move was one of the easiest ways to beat cyberware and dermal armors. No one armored the roof of their mouth.
The man swung his gun up in dying reflex, but Bob grabbed his wrist with his free hand and pinched the nerve cluster just below the palm, crunching into the bone. Apparently this man hadn’t had dermal armor anywhere. The weapon dropped from senseless fingers, and Bob caught it with his shoe before it clattered to the floor, pleased that his old pastime of playing hacky sack with his boyhood church friends ended up being useful. Bob eased the hirsute man down slowly, careful to prevent any final twitches from making a noise. Sorry, it was time for your final curtain—as it will be for every one of us, eventually.
Bob checked the tiny glass window on the metal door. Tymone remained oblivious in the hall beyond, eyeing one of the cube doors. He had a scorch pistol in one hand, an automatic rifle in the other. Bob raised an eyebrow. It looked so very commando!
He moved out of the line of sight the man had and rapped his knuckles on a door. He turned and bounded up the stairs three at a time. Sliding to a stop, he peered down from the next landing up just as Tymone came through the doorway and spotted his dead team leader. Curses bounced off the walls, and he aimed his weapons every which way, searching for the threat.
Every way but up, yet again. Bob timed his leap, and subsequent plunge, over the railing so that his feet struck the dead center of the other man’s back. Tymone didn’t have time to get off a shot before the hit broke his back, even through his armor and cyberware. Bob crumpled to his knees, still on the other man’s back, and grabbed the man’s chin, jerking sideways. There was a satisfying crunch as his neck broke.
The landing boomed under the impact, and Bob remained crouched on his downed target’s back until the sound faded. “Shhh …” he whispered in the dead man’s ear. “We wouldn’t want to disturb the nice people just trying to stay safe here.”
He rose and straightened his tie, not breathing hard, or having broken a sweat. Bob peeked out into the hall again, ensuring the noise hadn’t alerted any of the three he protected in particular. Once assured no alarm had been raised, and indeed no one at all even seemed to have noticed, he grabbed both dead men by the ankles and started dragging them downstairs to join their companion.
Time to get these folks dumped down the nearest elevator shaft. Cleaning up my own mess is the polite thing to do, after all.
Chapter Twenty
Anansi
Anansi panted for breath as he stumbled into the band’s practice and recording station, flipping the light switch on and off five times from habit. His mind whirled as he tried to piece together the most recent events.
The practice studio was abandoned. Not a single instrument or band member in sight, but the posters, tables, and couches were still littering the practice studio. Anansi staggered around, double-chec
king that he remained alone. Nothing. No one. Damn. He should’ve figured his friends had been affected by the HR blowout as well, but he had hoped … he’d hoped …
Fuck it.
He had something more important to figure out now. He thought back to the rioting in the street, when the parade had devolved into competing HR sims of a conflagration and flood. He’d … he’d …
Memory unfolded like a flower of light.
Anansi gave up trying to move with the crowd, he kept being pushed away from the wall he was trying to get to. Staying with these people and their broken, battered minds would be suicide. Yet trying to move against them also proved nearly impossible. He fought to a standstill as the virtual wave thundered closer and the flames crackled nearer.
Those the flames caught screamed and beat at themselves, not realizing their flesh wasn’t actually melting, that their clothes weren’t liquid fire. Those who fell to the inundation grabbed their throats and thrashed on the pavement, choking on air.
Anansi turned endless circles, with moments left to figure out what to do. He didn’t know if his filters could withstand such strong, contrasting sims. If they failed, he’d be lost to mindless madness along with the rest, unable to tell reality from projection. His mind spun … then settled. He did have one weapon. His own TAP. He grabbed his airbrushes and worked a second pattern onto the back of his other hand, painting faster than he ever had before.
In a mere instant, fire and water would clash, with him at the epicenter.
Code, he told himself. It’s just code! I work with code all the time. Trickers control the code and it doesn’t control them!
He raised one hand to the wall of flames. One hand to the wall of water. As they collided, he focused on the back of his hand. His filters glitched, overwhelmed, and everything rebooted. As his brain’s neural interface rebooted, his eyes flicked to the back of his other hand. Anansi’s head snapped back as his TAP fed on the electrical activity of his own body, boosting its own signal, and he screamed as the code thrust his mind out through his TAP and commanded the world to STOP AND LEAVE HIM ALONE.
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