by Andy Remic
‘Bingo,’ said Teeth.
‘Bingo?’
‘Howzat!’
Bob Bob groaned. It was turning out to be a really bad day.
The skies around the Dreadnought NGO were swarming with choppers—Comanches and Apaches, Black Hawks, Mangustas, Havocs, Merlins—guns blazing and rockets leaving trails of fire across the heavens. Choppers ploughed downwards into the ground, rotors scything like huge razors across the swarm of infantry that came behind the pounding barrage laid down by the tanks.
Ed squatted behind a static, rumbling 8x8 FukTruk, a kilometre behind the insanity of the front-line action, breathing the huge vehicle’s sour fumes and staring at the digital pad on his lap. He watched with satisfaction as the bastard Nex were drawn towards the battlefront. The Nex were primarily assassins: ruthless killers, heartless efficient murderers. But as soldiers they were not in the same league as Spiral.
Ed traced several patterns with his tattooed index finger. And he watched as five covert squads on the other side of the Dreadnought began their slow advance on the Nex base.
Ed crossed his fingers.
He stared up at the sky.
‘Come on, Lord. Just give us this one chance. Just give us this one final shot!’
After being captured while supporting Carter in London, Ed had been brutalised and tortured by the Nex and placed in a cell with other captured Spiral operatives. This small group of hardened fighters had made an extremely explosive and violent exit from their prison cells, killing with their bare hands and stealing weapons before blasting their way to freedom and meeting up with other DemolSquads fighting for the same cause. And as the world shit had started to hit the fan, so Ed had been drafted into the front ranks of this, the final battle ...
The retired old soldier had done what he had said he would never do.
He had gone back to war.
Ed stared at the digital representation of the battlefield. He stared down at thousands of tiny dots, each one representing a living, breathing, dreaming, hating, loving human being. He grimaced. This was no game, no simulation. Warfare wasn’t something that could be conducted from a keyboard.
Eddie stroked the pad. He sighed, and tracked the advancing covert squads.
‘One shot, Lord. And then I’ll leave you alone. Please let me get what I want, Lord. I don’t need a future of continuous and eternal world domination. I’ll just close my eyes and pray for a future without this. Without war.’
[ON AIR]
SCENE: A large airy studio tastefully decorated in orange and blues; three long settees at gentle angles to one another around a central table fashioned from a single slab of onyx, on which stand a purple jug and crystal glasses which catch the studio lights and glitter. The rear of the studio is taken up by a huge plasma screen which currently displays a plain black backdrop.
ENTER Sonia J to ecstatic applause as TITLE MUSIC [5.2/ vol7] plays and gently fades to a backdrop [vol3].
Sonia J is dressed in torn and ragged combat clothing, and she carries a Steyr TMP 9mm sub-machine gun, currently in a battered and dented condition and with a spare magazine duct-taped to the stock. Sonia J moves to the centre of the TV studio and stands, eyes filled with tears, staring straight into the camera. The newly hijacked audience fade to silence. They stare in shock, horror and surprise at the former TV presenter they thought was dead; a previous ‘traitor’ who had been horrifically executed by the World State as a REB and—ironically—as a terrorist.
SONIA J: Welcome to this forced entry to HIVE Media and what will probably be my final broadcast across the globe—ever. Yes—I know—you thought you saw me executed on live TV for my supposed terrorist exploits and cooperation with the REBS. We yes, I am a part of the REBS. That much is true. But as for my execution? I am still here. I am still whole. And I am fighting alongside my brave comrades in a bloody and violent war against the traitor of mankind: Durell, his insect-blended Nex soldiers and the money-fuelled mercenary kill-squads known as JT8s.
AUD [volume enhance 5.8+ through 6.8+ through 9.8]: ... silence
CAM2 [zoom]: close-up of Sonia J’s weary face.
SONIA J: The truth is, you have been lied to. The truth is, you have been abused. The truth is, you have been gratuitously misled and misrepresented. It was Durell, he of Nex-kind and currently your World State leader, who launched the nuclear strikes which terrorised the globe five years ago ... and then he followed it up with multiple strikes of the biological weapon HATE. This supposedly made huge tracts of the world uninhabitable. You saw the pictures on TV, you saw the bubbling corpses out in the fields, on the lanes, in the desert, out on the ice ... and yes, HATE did exist—but only on a modest scale. You were conned, my friends. You were herded like cattle into the cities—ready for the next stage of Durell’s great plan. The ChainStations. Durell created the Dreadnoughts, and then the first ChainStation, with the aim of evacuating the planet. But not for you—not for the people. No. His intention was to clear out his Nex kind ...to give him a clear shooting gallery to launch EDEN. A newly designed biological toxin that was touted as a cure for the out-of-control poison that was HATE ... There would be no opposition to the development and launch of EDEN because it would be presented as a cure for a vastly over-exaggerated toxin which you believed riddled the world with its poison. But, believe me, when this EDEN poison is launched there will be no survival of the fittest, the meanest, the toughest, the slickest... there will be absolutely no escape from the extinction Durell wants to impose. He wants us out of the way, my friends. He wants you to become a Nex... or die, to make way for his new version of mankind, his new version of humanity. Even as we speak, missiles containing this poison are in flight. We have only hours until detonation. We have only hours until the missiles strike ... and the world becomes a barren desert, a biologically poisoned wasteland. A world wiped free of man. A world ready and waiting with open arms for its new half-breed child—the Nex. They’re all in it for the glory, the power, the domination, the resurrection, the extinction; they’re in it for the chance to murder, to hurt, to execute, to dominate, to slaughter, to massacre, to kill, to kill, to kill. They want us all gone—they want us all dead. But don’t take my word for it: here is a representation of what EDEN can do, followed by digvid of what it is truly capable of...
CAM12:
1] A complex series of molecular structures rotating then merging to create a new chemical: EDEN.
2] A chamber full of men and women: EDEN is released and they all collapse like bowled-over skittles in an instant, with blood leaking from mouths, noses, eyes and ears.
3] A large hall containing perhaps six hundred men, women and children; a single droplet of EDEN is allowed to fall from a pipette and before the droplet hits the ground the entire crowd hit the floor instantly, with blood leaking from mouths, noses, eyes and ears.
4] A series of outdoor experiments in natural environments; EDEN is released on a tube train, in a tower housing block, in a supermarket—all with the same catastrophic and instantaneous results.
SONIA J: None of these events were ever recorded or shown on the news. That is because Durell controls the media; he controls the world; he controls YOU. Now is the time to rise up. Now is the time to retake your freedom. Don’t just take my word for it. . [Nex file into the studio; they form a ragged line behind Sonia J and as one they rip free their masks showing a host of facial deformations from beneath those masks, and haunted, glowing, copper eyes.]
SONIA J: Many of the Nex are turning against Durell. Many are sick of his promises. He calls it evolution—but the Nex say the insects speak in your mind, they torture you with threats and promises. What happens when your thoughts are not your own? What happens when your thoughts are those of the insects with which you were genetically blended? You become unhuman. You become nonhuman. You become something less than human, something less than insect, I think. The sum of your parts becomes an inferior. Yes, you have improved physical strength and immunity, but you take on a
savage inner battle. You inherit an inner war. We need to put an end to this farce. We need to put an end to this war... before Durell puts an end to our race. Once and for all.
CAM12:
Textscroll [1/r]: Unreleased SmashVID footage ...
1] Nex slaughtering innocent protesters in the streets, Steyr guns firing as bullets chew meat and bone from faces and flesh chunks slap at the cold cobbles of the roadway ...
2] JT8s kicking a pregnant woman to death while a crowd of people stand around, faces averted, trying hard not to look at the savagery unfolding before them ...
3] A screaming Mig998 swooping low over the streets of Dublin, missiles detaching on glowing trails of blue energy, flames roaring and engulfing the peaceful march of five hundred placard-bearing innocents...
SONIA J: We’re all so frightened. We need to change.
CAM2: fades to black and white
EARMIC: That’s all gone out, Sonia. Globally ... and you fucking know I’m going to get fucking sacked, right? Yeah, a great job. How to cause a fucking world riot. Now, can somebody please take this sub-machine gun out of my ear? Hey ... hey, I did what you asked, right? What do you mean, I’ve been perpetuating a hate campaign against humankind? I am humankind! What do you mean, I’m a stupid motherfucker? Hey, if all stupid motherfuckers received the death penalty, then we’d have a serious population decline on our hands, now wouldn’t we? Wouldn’t we? Oww, that hurts, hey, get that fuc— [cut earmic]
CAM4: [drops to the floor and zooms out without music/fade to black]
AIRTIME: BREAK
CAMS-CUT
Throughout oppressed cities all over the world, men and women and children started to rise from their mental and physical slumber. Those who had not witnessed the broadcast soon learned of its savage contents. In many countries, the Nex made pre-emptive strikes—attacking known dissidents, suspected REBS, even people who had been involved only in peaceful protests and marches: they murdered them in their beds, leaving trails of splattered blood as evidence of rough justice for all to see. But this time it did not eliminate the problem: within hours these hundreds, maybe thousands of murders fuelled a further and sustained belief in the rightness of Sonia’s revealing global media broadcast.
Units were quickly formed, schools and churches and supermarkets turned into centres of command from which to hit the Nex, the NEP Nex Production Plants, the WarFactories and the Sentinel Corporation Tower blocks. The world was rising up against the Sentinel Corporation, against Durell, against oppression. Every day people were taking up arms and fighting their way out of tyranny and subjugation, with only the truth as a guiding light propelling them onwards; with only their human hearts driving them forwards to a necessary and violent confrontation ...
There were battles in the streets. Helicopters dived from dark skies, mowing down charging civilians. Stolen tanks hammered shells into WarFacs, detonating the stores of ammunition and igniting hundreds of tonnes of HighJ and plastic explosives. Soldiers fought hand to hand, JT8s were slaughtered by orphaned children throwing rocks, Nex were gunned down by women with pistols, and machine guns were mounted on the back seats of battered family saloon cars that had had their roofs removed.
Anarchy had arrived.
Chaos had risen.
Carter stood on a plateau, a flat section of black rock, with a towering black mountain above him. Beyond stretched a world of dark graphite sand. The sky spun away for infinity, streaked with trails of purple and yellow.
Carter blinked.
There was a fire burning in a ring of rocks, and Carter looked around him. But he was alone. There was no Kade. There were no enemies. Carter was trapped in the prison of Kade’s holding cell. Carter was locked in Kade’s AI. Carter was incarcerated within his own brain.
‘You little fucker,’ he snarled.
He spun round once more, boots kicking up dark sand on jagged rocks. He ran to the edge of the plateau. Its slope fell away for a long, long way until it levelled out and stretched off over undulating dunes. Carter breathed deeply, then closed his eyes.
‘Come back to me,’ he said.
A cold wind mourned from the mountains, hollow and desolate.
‘Come back to me!’ he screamed.
But Kade had gone.
Carter moved to the fire, glancing down into the flames. They were flickering between states of orange-red and glistening black. Carter sat down on the rock that Kade had always used as a seat, and stared into the fire.
What game is this? he thought.
And how do I drag the fucker back? How do I get back?
Years earlier, he had argued with Kade in this very place. One day I will find you, Carter had said. One day I will find you and we will fight and I will kill you.
Carter frowned.
How to summon the devil?
How to summon the AI who had taken over his body?
Carter grinned then, leant forward, and plunged his left hand into the flames ... Pain screamed through him as the fire scorched his skin, which peeled back, black and blistering, the stench of burning flesh rising up as an element of the smoke from the fire—which now burned a steady glassy solid black.
‘Fuck you!’ screamed Kade.
Carter withdrew his hand, a crisp and blackened claw, and stared up at Kade standing rigid before the fire. Carter stood, slowly, cradling the scorched limb to his chest as he looked deep into Kade’s dark eyes.
‘Welcome to my fire.’
‘Fuck you, Carter. That was a cheap trick.’
‘You have something I want.’
‘What, the power and the glory? Or maybe you want to suckle on that Alexis, taste her fine Nex insect cunt. That’s my destiny now—you are just a dream in my fucking head. Stand back and let me through, or I swear—’
‘You swear, Kade?’ Carter smiled. ‘What will you do? What can you do? Once, I stood here and I said I would fight you, and kill you. You said that it would be interesting ... that you would welcome the day. Well, that day is here.’ Carter unfolded his scorched hand with crackles of burnt flesh. Pain pounded at him in waves as Kade looked down, eyes wide, horrified.
‘Not now, Carter. This is the wrong time ...’
‘There will never be a right time,’ snarled Carter. ‘This needs to be done. A score I should have settled a long fucking time ago.’
Carter charged through the fire, flames licking up at his boots as he leapt at Kade. Kade stumbled back, throwing out a series of punches that Carter blocked easily against his forearms.
‘No, Carter, no!’
With a hiss, Carter hammered a right straight into Kade’s face, followed by a right hook which shook his dark twin. Carter powered a right kick that connected with Kade’s chest, sending him stumbling back once more. Carter stalked forward, and Kade grimaced and counter-attacked, throwing a blur of punches, hooks and straights, jabs and double-fisted smashes. Carter blocked them all, ducking and sidestepping, his face serene, his stare locked on Kade ... and suddenly Carter grabbed his nemesis, pulling him in close so that their eyes were only inches apart.
‘I want my body back!’ he spat.
‘Come and take it,’ said Kade darkly.
Carter slammed his forehead into Kade’s nose, and Kade howled like a haunting banshee. Again Carter head-butted his demon twin, again and again. Then he lifted Kade’s head up by both ears, released it and, before it could fall back, smashed both his fists down against his adversary’s temple with one terrible bull-hammer blow that slammed Kade straight down onto the rocky ground, where he groaned, curled up like a foetus.
Carter moved forward, stamping first on Kade’s groin, then on his chest, then on his nose.
‘That’s for the people I didn’t want to kill.’
He took a step back, then made a short run and delivered a massive kick to Kade’s head. Kade rocked under the impact, blood spraying from shattered teeth.
‘And that’s for the fucking Alsatians in Egypt. You fucking know how I love dogs.�
��
Kade had curled further into his foetal ball as Carter stooped, pulling out a long, slick dagger. He moved to stand over Kade, and the dark demon looked up then, eyes glittering with black gloss tears.
‘Don’t kill me, Carter,’ he whispered.
‘Why not?’
‘I am you.’
‘You are a fucking AI. Which means that your tears are not real. Just numbers on a static digital disk.’
‘Don’t kill me, Carter. I can help you.’
‘How?’
‘I have information.’
‘About?’
‘About your past. I can give you back your past. All those moments you have forgotten ... the time with Durell and Feuchter and the others, when you were in the Nex DemolSquad. The first Nex squad. I can give that back to you. I can supply your history. Your memories. Your life.’
Carter smiled then, and stooped, sheathing the knife. He stared down hard at Kade, who whimpered, rolling in pain and spitting out tiny pieces of broken tooth.
‘Always the fucking negotiator, eh, Kade? Don’t you ever take my body without my permission,’ he said, voice low, tone dangerous. ‘You will never get a second chance. I will never let you live again. You understand me?’
Kade nodded, submissive.
‘Now stay down, little doggie.’
Carter blinked, and the dark mountain plateau shrank and swirled, dissolving like sand sucked down the neck of an hourglass. He opened his eyes to sunlight and the worried face of Alexis. He breathed deeply, and looked down at his left hand ...