by Alex Kirko
Conscience appeased, Tara pulled on the gloves she had taken off Sidney’s corpse. They were a bit small, but the important thing was that the smart fabric remembered the shape it had held. When she pushed a tiny sensor, the glove over her stump hardened into an imitation of Sidney’s right forearm and hand—lucky for her that Sidney had favored gloves that came up to the elbow. The fabric was white, unlike her clothes that by now were the color of dry blood. Luckily, she was near a destroyed mall. Tara searched for five minutes and found a clothing store where she picked up light nondescript pants and a long-sleeved blouse with something frilly around the low cut. No respectable aristocrat would be caught wearing these.
The last thing that remained was to change her genetic markers and appearance. She picked a hat with a brim from another ruined store, found some water to wash her face, and went into the street in search of a crowd. She soon found one—protestors, heading back from the direction of City Hall. There were hundreds of them and Tara blended in, lowering her hat. She got to work.
Sidney and Jack rested inside her, and Tara reached to her nanites, coaxing them into doing something they hadn’t been programmed to do. She felt the changes before she saw them. Her skin tingled, turning a shade lighter. She checked her hair, making sure she was a redhead now like Sidney had been. Subtler alterations came then: eye color, skin texture, fingerprints, smell. Everything genetic was a template to an Ascended. Usually it was used as a target when healing from injury, but Tara had found years ago that she could take on traits from the genetic code she consumed. She hadn’t told anyone about the ability: a dissection table wasn’t tempting. She had tried it with bags of human blood in the past, but it was much easier with food taken from the source.
Feeling inspired, Tara ordered the nanites to add an inch to her height and grew some fat over her lean muscles. She would need to feed again soon, preferably on her usual diet of organic nutrients without one overwhelming genetic structure. Nobody would identify her now based on her photo or DNA. Unless they noticed the arm, but she could pretend to be left-handed for a day or two until her arm grew back.
Tara separated from the crowd with a stream of people who were going to get drugs and drinks. Nobody had been able to take a city from the Joint Republic in a thousand years—there was no bar that would help anyone process this. Yet she knew that her bones were still healing after getting hit by that beast of a woman and after the changes she had made to her body type. Escaping the city would mean passing the sensor arrays at the perimeter—her transformation wouldn’t trick those. Some place to sit down and think sounded good, so she followed a group and got a drink in a place that was all alcohol and narcotic fumes and no light.
Half an hour passed, and yet no plan drifted up from her subconscious. The holographic projector on the wall clicked on, and a mind-bogglingly average man appeared.
“For those of you who have missed the previous broadcast, my name is Kyle Heatsworth. I am the leader of the Federation of the Unbound. We now control the entirety of Seind,” he said. “We have also taken over the city network. Please visit the City Hall node using your personal devices if your home has been destroyed—shelter will be assigned. If you are taking anyone in, please notify us so that we don’t send more people your way. Confirmation by the person who will be staying with you is also be required. Food will be dispensed on quota basis until we finish taking stock of what supplies the Council forces didn’t bury during their retreat.”
Tara had to give it to the man: he sounded more competent than the Republic leaders. This was, she supposed, what happened when the ruling body of a country stayed mostly the same for three hundred years. This was why she would sit in one of those Council chairs one day and replace the old farts one by one.
“Work will continue as usual in two days. Meanwhile, consider this a vacation.” Heatsworth’s smile was so warm that Tara was sure it had been perfected in front of a mirror like a prostitute’s orgasm. “You should also familiarize yourself with the laws of the Federation to prevent misunderstandings,” he said, looking over the room even if he couldn’t possibly see it. “I won’t go into the details, but starting from today the Ascended and the augmented and unaugmented humans possess the same basic rights. If you are found harming one another, you will be treated equally and without lenience.” The man in the hologram tapped on his personal terminal. “Also, all civil lawsuits are suspended until further notice. This is war, and the courts have no time to pass rulings on game account theft and copyright violations. If your case is ruled frivolous, you will be fined.”
The bar filled with exclamations of disbelief. It was like Heatsworth had no idea what life in the Republic even was. Equal rights for Ascended and humans? Ridiculous. No suing someone for stealing your game account? Tara didn’t play, but even she knew that humans spent decades cultivating their characters in all sorts of virtual worlds—they needed legal ways to protect those lives.
She finished her drink and left.
It took her ten minutes of wandering to remember that she didn’t need to come up with a plan. The orders had been given during the briefing before her deployment to Seind. Tara had paid only a token amount of attention, but an address and a password would have to be enough. The rendezvous point was in the industry district that had been shielded from artillery by the entertainment spires around it.
As her shoes clinked on the sidewalk and echoed off the walls of the surrounding buildings, Tara wondered if this area of the city was what machine afterlife was like. Even during the centuries-long entertainment boom, factories, power plants, and maintenance bays stood as monuments to the human need to build. Depowered metal colossi stood on street corners looking at her with disapproving black hollows of their optical sensors. She flipped one of the construction mechs the finger.
She could hide here until the mess sorted itself out, Tara realized. The city was large, and she could keep her head down and take care with her meals. She shook her head and entered the dark maw of a maintenance garage.
By now her abilities were back to normal—minus one hand—and she could see in the dim light coming from the entrance even after she went deeper into the building. There were no lamps, but she had enough light not to bump into anything.
The smell hit her first. The kind of chemicals used in biology laboratories to clean the traces of specimens off the equipment. She was an Ascended, however, and even this wasn’t enough to hide the traces of blood from her. Somebody had missed a corner.
It was cold too. Tara stepped around a table that housed two prosthetic arms, two legs, and a set of artificial organs—everything but the brain. She made her way to a man—she was quite sure it was a man—working at a table illuminated by the only lamp in the room. His white coat was a patch of snow among the oily labyrinth of junk that was probably an illegal implant and prosthetics shop. She stepped up to him and checked that he didn’t have any weapons nearby.
“Whatcha working on?” she asked.
The man jumped away from her, and electrical components she couldn’t identify went flying everywhere. She caught something egg-shaped in her hand before it hit her on the forehead.
“Gods of old, you startled me,” he said, and Tara got her first good look at her contact.
His eyes glowed in alternating red and green, and his skin was pale white streaked with blue veins. The overall impression was of a skull mounted on top of a lit Christmas tree and dressed up in faux skin. She heard a faint heartbeat, but there wasn’t much else. The human smell was concealed under something she would have expected from a mech.
The circle of his left eye narrowed into a green pinprick, and he said, “Look, I keep telling you people, you can’t have an augment. Not done, impossible, no way. You either get the whole vampire shtick or you get these babies,” he gestured over his body. “Not both.”
He was nuts, she realized. The Kamarkvat Directive existed for a reason, and he must have come close to breaking it by almost turning himself
into a machine. But it was none of her business, and she could respect humans who realized that their bodies sucked.
“The rooster has lost its nest,” she said. “What is a rooster anyway? Wish they’d explain that.”
“Oh, right,” the man said, nodding. He rummaged in a pocket of his lab coat. “They gave me a paper note. Brilliant, nobody would look for paper. But the hen is still in place. Actually, I have no idea what either of those are. Maybe some kind of snake or something? I don’t know. What lives in nests?”
He walked to the center of the room and freed a third of the largest table by pushing all the junk to the sides where the piles now threatened to spill over onto the floor. He then pulled two chairs up. He said, “Can I offer you something? Tea? Preserved blood?”
She looked around the shop and said, “I don’t think so. Do you have orders for me?”
He nodded in a robot-like motion. “The Federation is regrouping for the moment, and the people up top want to know more about their forces, technology, political structure—everything. They destroyed the identification records before retreating and cut the city off from all the government stuff.” He fished a data chip, a PDA, and a small box out of the pile on his right. “I’m supposed to give this to anyone who reaches me. The personal digital assistant is clean. On the data chip, you will find an approved CV in public relations and management attached to a person who won’t mind you being her for a while, and the box is a compact DNA scrambler. Not enough to fool the monster scanners on the edge of the city, but you should be able to hide inside well enough.” He scratched the back of his head and it made a metallic clank. “Sorry, I’m not good at this. Simply got caught a few years ago . . . What was I saying? Yes, standing orders for everyone are to hide and wait for additional orders or try and infiltrate the local government.” He pulled up the holographic interface on his own pad. “These are my safe houses and switch days. And here are the ones used by a backup operative. The code phrase for him is ‘the back of the moon looks beautiful tonight’, whatever the hell that means.”
The man showed a remarkable amount of self-preservation by not asking any questions of his own. She strapped the PDA to her left hand and inserted the chip. Tara couldn’t leave the city. With her right arm left in that truck, she would need much more than this tiny jammer to get through the scanner arrays. In hindsight, she probably should have taken her arm with her, but she had looked suspicious enough just limping through the city in a half-destroyed Ascended soldier uniform and trying to hide her stump. She was lucky that the alley had been too dark for Sidney to see Tara’s uniform.
But now she had a disguise and nobody holding her back for the first time in her life. However bad her circumstances were, it was an opportunity to start on the path of getting on the Council and fixing all the shit that had caused her family so much hurt.
Nobody except Heatsworth had been able to conquer a major city since the original civil war. Bringing him down would be enough to earn her a place in the Upper City in Delmor. She could already see her pompous mother and father staring at their feet in stunned silence after they would hear of her being personally rewarded by the Council. The riches, the luxury, blood straight from the tap, and a chance to get rid of the obsolete policies that the mothballs of the Council protected—all Tara had to do was to reach for that low-hanging branch.
“What should I call you?” she asked him.
The man furrowed his brows in confusion, as if he didn’t know the answer to the question. “Hm. Not used to people not knowing my name.” He tapped his metallic fingers on the table. “Call me Mark III if you need to.”
“You can call me Mary, robot-boy, the same as the ID,” she answered. “Do you know if anyone else survived? There was this guy, Blake Drummond. And my squad.”
“Who knows.” Mark III shrugged. “My information network is a mess. The net is up, but the cameras inside the city are still down, and a lot of the data in the city systems has been wiped out. Find me in a few days, and I might be able to tell you something.”
Mark III chuckled. His laugh was like fast wind blowing through a grate. He took a long look at Tara, for the first time since the start of their conversation spending more than five seconds on examining her face. “If they capture you, please commit suicide.” Seeing her stupefied expression, he added, “I don’t want to get caught, and you don’t want to be interrogated by them. Honestly, if my sensors didn’t detect that anomaly in your DNA . . .” He smiled disturbingly wide. “You are a special one, aren’t you?”
Tara stared at him for half a minute before laughter burst out of her in an explosive guffaw that would have made her etiquette teachers hang their heads in shame. “Aren’t you forward for a spy contact?” she said.
Mark III showed her a back door out of his place, and she gave him a peck on the forehead for this. He must not have dealt with Ascended often as he didn’t pull back, which gave Tara the opportunity to confirm her suspicions. There was almost no flesh or blood left in his body. She had heard of tech-crazies that wanted to replicate the most important part of Ascension—immortality—through implants and grafts. They were idiots, but at least they recognized how weak the unenhanced humans were.
After her talk with Mark III Tara wandered around Seind for a while. She couldn’t afford to be completely absent-minded, but even with a thousand soldiers a city of this size couldn’t be patrolled properly, and the automatic security system relied on citizen records that were stored back in the capital. Now that Seind was cut off from the other Council territories, cameras and DNA identification devices were almost useless.
She sat down on a bench in a park eventually, watching a group of human children play on purple decorative grass. They looked troubled at first but after fifteen minutes the state of their city was forgotten, and the six-year-olds were picking translucent blue flowers and talking about the building they had been relocated to. Their minder was an Ascended man of indeterminate age who smiled at Tara when he saw her watch the children. She wondered why he would demean himself to the role of a babysitter. He looked fourteen, but his face would never develop laugh lines, and ancient brown eyes would be the only thing that would show his maturity. At least, Tara had Ascended in her prime and not during the awkward teenage years.
She could have talked to him, but a dozen little devils kept the man occupied. Tara discovered that she was smiling. It had been far too long since she could just sit like this and enjoy the innocence of others. Childhood was the only time when there were no Ascended, no humans, no employed or unemployed, no religion, no sexual preferences—freedom with nothing to divide them. She had never been like that. For some reason, this summoned the memories of the women she had killed in the morning, and Tara got up. The sun was starting to burn through her reserves anyway.
The ID held up. She managed to find an intact food dispenser center for Ascended citizens between the civil service and entertainment districts. Daylight couldn’t get inside, which was lucky, as she had spent the remains of her morning meal on more modifications to her body. Tara Linheld had been a woman who reveled in her sexuality—a type all too common among her race. It was even easier, because her beauty lent itself well to pallor and sharp features, and her slender body wasn’t a product of surgery. She needed to say goodbye to that for a while.
The woman who walked into the feeding depot was three inches taller and a chest size larger than Tara. She slumped her shoulders and walked as if her legs were pistons. Her eye color was the only thing she hadn’t been able to tweak, but contact lenses fixed that even if she detested them. No one would recognize her, at least not until the genes she had absorbed deteriorated.
There was a woman in the queue in front of her. She was so short she would barely need to duck when she got into a car. A two-inch green crystal pendulum swung from a half-inch golden ring in her left ear. People glanced at her from time to time, but the woman paid them no mind. She smelled of blood, lavender and disinfectant. A huma
n. She was also talking to a tall Ascended woman with obsidian skin.
“No,” the Ascended said. “I don’t want anything to do with the Federation administration. You guys do your thing, and I just want to live in peace without all the bullshit Nazi hypocrisy of the Republic. Good day.”
The Ascended turned away from the short woman, who sighed. Her communicator beeped, and Mary moved a bit closer to eavesdrop. “No,” the woman was saying. “I didn’t find more help. Call Leo, he is a charmer. Honestly, my entire lab being sent to nutrition centers to find employees for the City Hall? I understand that everyone else is overworked with this many people in the city, but what am I, a human proficiency detector? I hope they repair the servers soon, and Moira finds other things to occupy her mind, so that she’ll stop bothering me. Yes, Arthur is fine. I’m getting him some food right now.”
The human hung up, and began furiously typing something up on her personal assistant. Mary tried to see what it was, but it was impossible to follow that speed without implants, and most of the symbols were unfamiliar.
“Is your friend okay?” Mary asked.
The woman turned around, one eyebrow raised. Her face could have come from a biology textbook designed to prevent any awkwardness in class by making all the depictions of humans as bland as possible. Her only redeeming quality was a sharp gaze peeking from under black brows that cried for some trimming with a lawnmower. The no-nonsense bun on her head completed the image of someone who didn’t give a damn about what she looked like.