Voices in the Stream: Phase 02 (The Eighteenth Shadow)

by Grafton, Jon Lee

  The RIOT class battborgs’ skeletal chassis were composed of a commonly refined, AerMet 100 plastic alloy used in civilian law enforcement applications. While capable of stopping small caliber bullets, the alloy was no match for LOFN’s titanalum incisors, which ripped into the lead borg’s armored CPU housing, located behind the shoulder blade assembly.

  The force of LOFN’s surgical attack crushed the AerMet spinal column, slicing through the protective Kevlar jacket surrounding the heatsink. The first battborg flailed, systems crashing while the flanking Doberman locked its jaws on LOFN’s hind leg, ripping free huge swaths of her flesh before finding a lock. LOFN’s front paws dug into the dirt, and she howled in pain, ignoring the second animal as she sought the first. She again drove her muzzle into the Doberman’s back, gnashing, three, four, five more times, until the CPU housing was torn free of the creature’s motherboard. LOFN spat the CPU into the grass and the RIOT class cyborg collapsed in robotic spasms.

  The second Doberman remained locked on her hind leg, caustically driving its teeth against metal bone. LOFN braced and spun her body like a boomerang, capturing the RIOT unit by its own leg. She ripped the animal free, maintaining her grip on its extremity, and whipped her neck, using momentum to hurl the lighter Doberman into the trooper’s Dodge Charger. The door panel crushed inward and several windows shattered from the impact. LOFN wasted no time. She streaked to her assailant before it could recover, hammering her jaws into the Doberman’s neck, similarly crushing its CPU and rendering the second borg inert.

  LOFN turned instinctively to face the patrolman. Her armored eye shields closed over her vidorbs as the first hollow point .357 round shredded the BIOSKIN© from her muzzle, exposing metal skull. Anticipation of the assault following the retirement of the second battborg had allowed LOFN to prepare herself to absorb the kinetic energy of the bullets. The last three, deftly aimed rounds glanced off her cranial shield, completely obliterating her velvety left ear. When the bullets stopped flying, LOFN raised her head, fuchsia vidorbs glaring. She stared at Trooper Apollo and bore her silver teeth, yet slavering with Hala the German Shepherd’s blood. Trooper Apollo stood firm. He growled like an animal himself.

  LOFN began walking methodically towards him. The patrolman backed away and fired his Kevlar piercing botulinum darts, one, two-three-four-five and six into her face at point blank range. The glass cartridges popped like miniature champagne corks, drenching her mutilated BIOSKIN© muzzle with 36 cc’s of neuroparalytic.

  The patrolman looked like his mind might melt. The scene before him was some awful dreamscape risen up in a world where he normally controlled all. He had been tapping the emergency beacon on his combud frantically from the moment he watched LOFN decapitate Hala.

  The KHP comstream kept relaying the same automated message to his tympanic membrane, “We’re sorry, the Kansas Emergency Management System is not functioning at this time.”

  Apollo winced, again pressing the emergency transponder on his holotab to remote float his KHP Dodge Charger. He could hear the levfans spin up momentarily. Then the hovcar would die and crash back to Earth.

  “Arrhhhhhh!” the patrolman screamed in fury, throwing his gun, then his billy club at the steadily approaching cyborg.

  Still crouched beside the Ford, Tara looked at Hugo, “That’s my cue.”

  She smiled and stood for the first time since the dog fight began. She put her sunglasses in her dress pocket and stepped forward, eyes falling to the flaxen fur of the dead German Shepherd as she moved on her mark.

  The trooper did something unusual. He ran. He covered the five meters back to the pilot-side door in moments. Before his hand reached the manual access, LOFN blazed around the rear corner of his hovcar. The patrolman could not control himself. Like a trapped animal he now screamed, the sound inoculated by the rush of hovtraffic on the interstate below. The small cybernetic Rottweiler swung her bloodied titanalum head like a wrecking ball as she walked down the side of the car, impacting the shiny blue door into the Dodge’s frame and rendering it useless.

  The patrolman wailed like a dying hare. True fear consumed him. LOFN bore her incisors, teeth gleaming silver and yellow-red in the last rays of the failing sun. The patrolman backed up. He trained borgs. He knew there was an awful sound coming from the animal that he could not hear over the traffic. He was grateful for that. He stumbled back farther towards the docked Ford, towards the shoulder. He had no gun, no baton, no holotab, a dead hovcar and a malfunctioning combud implanted in his jaw. He turned to run as the small Rottweiler raked her claws over the pavement and howled. It was a high-pitched, wolf-like howl, loud enough to be audible over the humming interstate. It caused goose bumps to rise on his flesh.

  Upon turning, the patrolman found the young woman from the hovtruck standing before him. Her eyes stopped him like a brick wall. She was incomprehensibly beautiful. The wind blew her yellow sundress against her curves. The mossy green tone of her eyes called to every cell in his body. He wanted to look away, but the world grew sweet, then fuzzy. All things fuzzy, except for a girl’s green eyes gone black as the basement of an ocean.

  I am drugged, he thought. I am dreaming. Borgs. I knew it. Borgs…!

  Tara reached up and put both of her hands on the patrolman’s face as he fell backwards against the grill of his hovcar.

  “Ewww,” she said.

  “What ees?” asked Hugo behind her.

  LOFN had relaxed and limped to his side as soon as Tara took over. Hugo began to examine her injuries.

  “Nothing, just another sweating pig,” said Tara. “Men are disgusting.”

  “Dat’s well, chica, but we been one place too long. Do yo hoodoo voodoo and leet’s float. Boss William gon be peessed as a mutha when he see dis pup.”

  Tara held Trooper Apollo’s thick, muscular head like she was holding a helium balloon. The man’s body swayed but remained vertical.

  “Yeah, well, it was Dax and him who signed up unconscious Copernicus over there to do a float-along with us, so William can lick me if he’s pissed about his scratched up mutt,” said Tara, gesturing with her head at Virgil lying by the Ford’s bumper.

  She turned back to the trooper, who was now grinning like a sated baby, staring at her as if they were on honeymoon. The man’s nostrils flared as he drank in her smell.

  “Alright, Officer Apollo,” she said, lifting up the flap on the man’s polyhemp shirt pocket to read his name tag.

  “Marcus,” said Hugo behind her.

  “What?”

  “Hees name ees Marcus Apollo. Joan say he no good.”

  “Oh right,” she turned back and looked straight into the man’s eyes. “How do you feel, Marcus? You’ve been a very, very bad policeman today.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said dreamily. “You’re beautiful.”

  “I am hot, it’s true,” said Tara. She watched a conflict tear run down the man’s cheek as she held him. “This one’s had psych training. Probably white ops,” she said quizzically. “Trooper Marcus Apollo? Is that your name?”

  “Yesss,” he cooed back.

  Tara smiled, running her eyes quickly up and down, “Well, aren’t you a big old hunk of African love meat? Take all the badges and knives and guns and tasers, polyhemp dork pants and shiny boots and shit off, and you’re probably a real nice looking man. Aren’t you?”

  “Yes, Miss Rose,” he said sublimely.

  Tara raised her eyebrows, “Still remember my name, huh? So guess what it’s time to do now?”

  “Whaaat?”

  “It’s time to forget, Marcus.”

  “Forgeeett what?” he drooled, eyes flitting white.

  Tara pressed her hands harder against the sides of his head, “It’s time to forget everything. Where did you eat lunch today, trooper?”

  “In my hovcar.”

  “That’s the last thing you remember, isn’t it?” She kept one hand on the man’s face and took his free hand with her other, leading him to the shoulder on the f
ar side of his patrol hovcar, away from the interstate. She sat him down and leaned his body against the vehicle’s extended docking mount beside the destroyed carcass of his second RIOT dog, which was compacted into the side of the Charger with a gaping chunk ripped from its neck.

  “Yess,” he kept saying. “Yess…”

  Tara brought her other hand up to his head and looked into his eyes, “You don’t know us. You just ate lunch. You just woke up here on the side of the off-ramp.”

  “Alright.”

  She nodded like she was talking to a baby, “Are you ready to go to sleep then?”

  “I’m so tired,” said the patrolman, his heavy head lollygagging.

  “Okay, good. One last thing, Marcus Apollo,” said Tara emphatically. “I want you to remember this for the rest of your days.”

  Patrolman Apollo replied, “Whuzz that?” with drifting, sleepy lids.

  “Dobermans are little pussy dogs,” said Tara with an evil grin. She let go of his face and stood, wiping the man’s sweat on her sundress, turned to Hugo and fake curtsied, “Ready, Speedy?”

  “Bout’ time, chica,” he said. “You gon sing heem a song too? We gotta drop dees booze and fly b’fore yo hombre wake up.”

  “Oh no shit!? Is that what we’re out here for?” she said petulantly as she pranced past and climbed onto the Ford’s running board.

  Hugo knelt over Virgil’s yet unconscious body, dragged the boy to a sitting position and hefted him over his shoulder like he was a 25 kilo bag of pumpkin seed. Tara watched. LOFN, already in the hovtruck cab, popped her bloody, ear-less head through the open door. The cyborg’s gleaming red vidorbs followed Hugo’s path as he carried the boy and dumped him onto the front seat.

  Tara sighed and dragged Virgil to a seated position, then crawled over him and shut the door. She pulled his heavy backpack full of poetry books out of the way with an oomph and dumped it in his urine stained lap. LOFN returned to her original spot on the floor, licking her shredded leg.

  Tara reached down and scratched the exposed metal between her eyes with a red fingernail, “You’re a good girl, Lofie.”

  She then grabbed her holotab and stylus from the hovtruck’s door pocket and resumed sketching a nude figure study with simulated charcoal pencil. She whistled a tune as the Ford’s heavy levfans whined to float velocity beneath them and Hugo jumped in the cab on the pilot’s side.

  Hugo pulled a joint from his cigarette case and lit it up, taking a long, grateful drag, “Computer, full manual.”

  “Pilot biometrics confirmed. Please observe posted speed limits and enjoy your float,” said the dashboard.

  The Ford 800 pulled away from the now dark and silent Kansas Hovway Patrol hovcar. In front of the Dodge Charger lay the decapitated body of the German Shepherd in a pool of blood. The flies had already begun to gather, buzzing over the fresh rot. A few meters off lay the yet twitching form of the first RIOT class Doberman, its chassis ripped open, wiring and shreds of Kevlar littered about like confetti.

  As the Ford’s propfans fired and the big flatbed hovtruck floated down the I-70 on-ramp into the last fragments of western sunlight, officer Marcus Apollo dreamed of Tara Dean’s pouting lips kissing his skin. Tears rolled slowly down his snuff colored cheeks as the dream faded and he fell deeper into blackness, his boots dangling off the edge of the hovway surrounded by billowing tall grass.

  At that moment, somewhere in the distant hills, a fish crow cried out, splitting the air, “Kawww!”

  But Trooper Marcus Apollo did not remember that part either.

  Wikipedia.holo Excerpt (Last Updated 2062.07.14) Regarding The North American Hemp Industry and Environmental Sustainability, a Social Philosophy:

  …first reported water suicides by farmers began as far back as 2015 in Dapegaon, India. By 2027, over 160,000,000 Indians had died from chronic dehydration, the earliest known example of ecologically induced mass genocide. This early 21st century decimation of groundwater supplies across the Indian sub-continent was accelerated by the ongoing cultivation of traditional, water-intensive crops such as sugar cane, rice and wheat. In the subsequent decades, as worldwide groundwater supplies were further depleted, similar pandemics followed in Peru, Morocco, China and other nations which failed to decriminalize industrial hemp.

  By contrast, in The North American United States, the rehabilitory effects of hemp-centric agricultural adaptation can literally be measured. In 2024, when the Federal government (Antique United States) reclassified marijuana (a schedule one narcotic since 1970) as an herbal supplement and agricultural textile, the Ogallah Aquifer beneath the Midwestern states of Kansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska was 97% depleted. Nebraska was the first breadbasket state to convert to hemp-centric agriculture the following year, in 2025, eventually winning the state its current moniker of “North America’s Hempbasket.” Kansas followed suit in 2027.

  In these two states, hemp production soon claimed 95% of agricultural land use totals, replacing corn, wheat, cattle, cotton, soybeans and sorghum almost entirely by 2031. The resulting positive effect on groundwater levels in the northern sections of the Ogallah Aquifer is credited with saving the primary food production centers of the antique United States in the early years of the PR.

  By 2035, northern sections of the aquifer were 67% replenished. Conversely, in Oklahoma, where hemp was prohibited by state law until 2037, the Ogallah and Garber-Wellington Aquifer(s) were entirely decimated. The subsequent collapse of surface irrigation systems gave way to the Oklahoma Dust Bowl(s) of 2032 and 2034, in which an estimated 40,000 North Americans lost their lives.

  At the time of this article’s publication, the Garber-Wellington Aquifer beneath Oklahoma City stands at 89% capacity. “The Greening of Oklahoma” that began in the 40’s and has lead to the current environmental rehabilitation of the state’s natural resources occurred due to ubiquitous hemp (and later, marijuana) introduction.

  A reversion of anthropogenic ecological damage has been seen globally in foreign nations that have similarly industrialized the water conserving hemp plant…

  Chapter 2.7 – Voices in the Stream

  Lawrence Police Department – Downtown Precinct – September 2081 – One Year One Month Before Event.

  Detective Slopes felt as though the old man’s hand was actually on his throat as he fought for breath, gurgling, “I’m sor-soorry… I tho-thought there… ight be a relationship.”

  The sharp featured geezer on Slopes’ holoscreen squinted and released his grip on the detective’s windpipe, almost whispering as he replied, “I have told you, I am no relation to that pumpkin farmer. If I were, I would sense it. Would I not, Dennis?”

  “Yes sir, I’m sorry sir,” said Slopes, gasping, his eyes darting protectively to his puzzle, then back. “It’s just, my knowledge is your knowledge.”

  “Yes, yes, all very well. My drivers have cross referenced the holograph you sent against all known Govstream records. Again. The image is not my son.” The old man pronounced each syllable as though sharpening a knife with the letters, “On the remote chance a firewall so sophisticated is in place, dolphin in origin or not, my drivers will be there when a fracture appears.” The pupils in the old man’s blazing tangerine colored eyes dilated, further accentuating the pale lines of his face, “A fracture always appears. Find the aggressor’s daughter, you will find my… child,” he said the word as though it burned his tongue. “If they are together and already bound, her presence shrouds him from me.”

  Slopes swallowed slowly, careful with his words, “As you know, we have lost agents under… mysterious circumstances in the vicinity of Abner Family Pumpkin & Gourd. The proximate Coyote appearance bears mention again as well.”

  “Indeed,” said the old man glibly. “I suspect a ruse. A ruse planted on this serf’s doorstep unbeknownst to him. They are using the coincidence of a shared surname to throw you off. There are thousands of Abners in the NAUS. It is a red herring.”

  “A good one,” mumbled Slopes,
his eyebrows flinching.

  “What was that?”

  Slopes felt the old man enter his brain like a hand sifting sand, then he was gone.

  “Don’t be a fool, Dennis!” the ancient face howled as Slopes cowered away from the monitor. “You can no longer think like a human being. Think instead like the savage beast we trained you to be. The alcohol is flowing out of your county. Adler’s hideous offspring is the cause. Do you doubt me?”

  “Of course not!” Slopes almost spit the words.

  “I thought as much.”

  “Where do you suggest we focus our attentions next, sir?”

  The old man sneered as though the question were perverted, “Determining that is not my job, Dennis. There is a reason I left Kansas. It is a detestable state.” He titled his chin resolutely, “Now. Tell me about these alleged rapes.”

  Slopes plucked his index finger up his ribs and exhaled a huge breath, causing his lungs to rattle, “It was Director Sapet, sir. His sidekicks, Bubba Sparks and Howler too. We’ve already maxed out their Pleasium allocations. Their CNED team is by far the worst, no accountability. I’ve had to cover up four violent incidents against citizens already this year. Three assaults, two rapes, including this most recent with the high school girl.”

  The old man waved his hand dismissively, “There’s a reason Sapet is graphene prairie director. He is aggressive, devoted and ruthless, indeed.” The orange eyes focused on Slopes, “My people will make sure the girl forgets what she needs to. But meanwhile, we mustn’t lose control of our own dog. Not at this crucial time. Tell that fool Sapet he’ll be prey bait on the lunar ranges if my drivers must scrub another of his team’s… indiscretions… from the stream.”