“You’re better off destroying the damn thing,” Rangers warned. “That kind of power could be dangerous in the wrong hands.” Dickey Jets’ hands, he thought. “Who the hell would want to live forever in this city anyways?” Then he imagined Jets’ head between his hands, and how he’d like to squeeze it until it popped, too.
“Stranger things have happened in Gravity City.” Harry shrugged. “Okay, it looks like you’re good to go, except for maybe a little headache in the morning once we’re done with the procedure, but I’ll give you something for that,” he said, packing up his medical kit. “Axon thanks you, Rangers. If there’s anything you need, please—”
“You can start by taking the kid in for one of them fancy tune-ups. That’s what you can do for me. Just make sure you see to it that he gets everything that he needs.”
“I would be more than happy to,” Harry replied. Then he turned to Dirt, “How’s that sound, buddy? Did you hear that? We’re going to fix you up, make you good as new! Just let me check back here real quick and see what your make is first.” He turned Dirt’s head to the side and looked behind his ear.
“Um. Hmm. Okay, got it. Thanks.” He smiled at Dirt. “Uh, can I have a word with you for a second, please?” he said to Rangers, holding his smile and tugging Rangers aside, far enough so Dirt or anyone else couldn’t hear them.
“Spit it out. What gives?”
“I’m not quite sure how to tell you this, but…the kid’s tagged as a DFM, a Droid F-Modulation.”
“Yeah, in English, please.”
“Is anyone watching us right now?” Harry kept his eyes on Rangers and kept his cool.
Rangers casually glanced around the lot. Beta was meeting with one of the curators of the refinery while Squad made rounds with the CDUs. “No,” he said.
“Okay, listen to me. There are only 1-Class M-Modules, and they’re all males. The only agency that’s ever held a patent for a 2-Class Biologically Advanced F-Modulation is Pantheon, and I’m not talking about that cheap shit you see walking the streets now, either. Only two advanced F-Modules have ever been made, and for some reason, they destroyed them right after.”
“I don’t—”
The engineer pulled Rangers away a little further.
“The kid’s female, Rangers. The first advanced AFM I’ve ever seen,” Harry whispered nervously. “That’s some scary advanced shit you’re looking at there. It means Pantheon has somehow figured out a way to repurpose the modules for reproduction, catch my drift? Those psychos are reverse-fucking-engineering droids to breed and make robot babies, man. But someone high up keeps nixing plans on future development. They are way beyond what Axon Research is capable of doing right now.”
“I see.” Rangers looked back at Dirt for a moment and thought and thought some more, until his dreaded conscience nagged at him again. “It’s best if we kept this to ourselves until we know where she came from, understand? If this gets out, I know who to come looking for.”
Harry understood all right.
Competitors are making droids more human and making humans more like droids? That sounds like two pounds of crap in a one-pound bag to me.
“Give me a moment with the kid, will ya?
“Sure thing, Rangers,” Harry said. “Just holler when you’re ready.”
Rangers went to Dirt and knelt. He looked her in the eye, the good one. “Hey, um, I’ve been thinkin’, kid,” Rangers said, nodding. “About your name and stuff, and I, uh, I think Kid Rocket has a good ring to it. You’re the kid who can fix things and is going to build your own rocket one day, right? Waddaya say?”
“Whoa. Kid Rocket,” Dirt’s eyes went wide and she smiled. “It’s the best name ever! And I’m good at fixing things, and one day I’m going to build my own—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I heard ya the first time.” Rangers patted Dirt, now Kid Rocket, on her head. “And when you’re ready, I have an old friend Downtown who could use an extra tinkerer around the shop, and you’ll never have to sleep on the streets again, I promise. But listen to me, you’re going to have to make your bones around here, you hear me? Prove you’re worth me taking under my wing.”
“Really? You’d do that for me?”
“Sure, kid.”
Dirt plowed into Rangers with a hug. “Thank you, Rangers! I swear, I won’t let you down.”
“A’right, let’s not get carried away. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Rangers and Beta traded formal glances from across the lot. Beta nodded, Good job.
Rangers nodded back. It’s what I do. He gave the engineer the cue that they were ready to go. He and Rocket hopped into the van and rode off into the night, headed for Axon Labs.
Agent Fin Samconi met Beta at the gated entrance and handed him a tablet. “It’s done. She’s been wiped clean from all the surveillance videos. Luckily, none of the cameras got a good shot of her on the highway last night,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do about calling up a new agent to replace Roxy as soon as possible.”
“Do that. What about the Cynapse Crystal?”
“It arrived safely at Axon last night. They send their condolences and thank you for your cooperation with setting up the heist with the decoy chip.”
“Good work, Samconi.” Sergeant Beta sighed. “We lost a good cop today.”
“It’s a shame she had to die for nothing.”
“She didn’t die for nothing,” Beta said with a stony voice. “She did what she had to do for Gravity City.”
“What did Roxy inject Rangers with if she didn’t have the real crystal?”
Sergeant Beta couldn’t give Fin an answer, not yet, so he ignored it. “Three years undercover with one more to go. She would’ve made a decent detective. She really looked up to Rangers.”
Samconi nodded in agreement. “Does he know?”
“Of course not,” Beta answered. “If Rangers knew we were implementing a cyborg program in Squad, he’d have our heads. He wouldn’t understand.”
“I don’t blame him,” said Samconi. “Did you hear what that thing did to him?”
“The crystal?” Beta paused for a bit. “Tech like that will be the norm soon enough.”
“What do you mean?” asked Samconi, looking up sharply.
Beta just turned and looked at the moon in the cold night sky and the storm clouds edging in to swallow it up again. “Dark nights are heading our way, Samconi. We can use all the help we can get.”
A Word from Artie Cabrera
“Drop Dead, Droid”, my first work featuring Johnny Rangers: Space Detective, is a story about change, evolution, and a city divided between the old ways and the dawning of a new technological era. The older generation has become resentful, an endangered species in light of a generation who prefers newer and shinier things.
In Gravity City, I see a world where citizens have taken extreme measures to assimilate themselves with their toys and applications so they’ll never have to know what it is to feel antiquated and alone. They will even kill for it. Their obsession has allowed them to abandon their human aspects in their quest to become equals with the progressive and complacent droid culture. In the interim, civilians will do what they’ve always done: fight for tradition or fight for change. Criminals and corporations vie to take advantage of both, until Johnny Rangers, an archetype borrowed from classic hard-boiled pulp comics, dishes out a hot plate of justice and knocks some heads together.
This is a fun commentary on how I view our world as it currently stands. Humans have become so dependent on their gadgets that you don’t often see one without the other. Commuters hold their smartphones and tablets in death-grips as they come and go, hardly taking their eyes off their screens, shutting out the world they’re presently walking through. Consumers race to upgrade even when the technological leap is marginal. The word often used in consumption or by addicts is NEED, when it’s really a desire to feed your habit. This story takes that theme and questions how far are we willing to go down the tech
no-rabbit hole before it’s too late to turn back.
Artie Cabrera is a writer, musician, and graphic designer. He worked and performed in the music industry for twenty-years before writing his first book, I’m Not Dead: The Journals of Charles Dudley.
http://www.amazon.com/author/artiecabrera
Hide and Seek
by Eric Tozzi
EVERYTHING WAS GOING TO HELL, and Oliver Banda boggled over the program running on his rubber framed, magnesium alloy computer tablet, desperate for an answer. Adowa Imani, seated directly behind him, began an exchange in Swahili with Oliver, their voices low and even. Blaine Peterson knew things had gone bad when he heard the screams a quarter mile off from their current location, which was a long way from nowhere. The first distant shriek sent a chill crawling up his skin. It rolled upward from the middle of his back, stiffening the hairs on his neck like quills on a porcupine.
“Did you hear that?” he asked. “Why would there be screaming?”
Oliver closed his eyes, just as he always did when someone else was talking, and Blaine wondered if it was because he was attempting to focus on what was being said or whether he was blocking it out. Erasing the words. Erasing the person speaking.
He listened for more, the air thick with the chorus of insects. The next scream was piercing and short, followed by a measure of staccato gunshots. Mere pops in the vast dark, coming from their point of origin that was a squatting hut complex. More exactly, a hideout for the poachers.
“Lower your voice, Peterson, and pull yourself together,” Oliver said. “We are perfectly safe.”
So said the bio engineer of this project, but Blaine wasn't entirely convinced. The armored Land Rover they’d driven out here from Dodoma over a tortured, angry savannah was indeed a worthy mode of transport, and by most standards it offered adequate protection from Tanzanian wildlife. Nevertheless, Blaine was disturbed, and those screams in the dark were like a blaring siren that something had gone catastrophically wrong with LEON.
More screams bled into howls and shrieks. Like children in the clutches of a night terror. But those bone chilling cries belonged to men, not children. Men who were ruthless, insatiable killers. Men with no fear, no conscience or soul. Hunters now reduced to hopeless prey.
Blaine clamped his eyes shut and drew in a deep breath, steadying himself beneath a startling current of nausea. “I'm going to be sick,” he said.
“I have never met a mzungu so afraid as you,” Moses Chausiku said from the driver's seat. “Are you not ashamed?”
Blaine opened his eyes and found himself the subject of a diamond-hard stare from the man. Moses Chausiku's features were blunt and severe, made even more so by the scar he wore beneath his chin. It zippered down across his throat, touching his collar bone. Blaine figured that scar was at one time an open, gushing coulee of blood. How the man had gotten such a disfigurement remained unknown, and it was better left that way, Blaine decided. He quickly disengaged from Moses and threw his attention to the back of Oliver's head.
“Walk me through this again,” Blaine said, sharpening his tone for effect. “LEON was supposed to track, locate, and transmit precise coordinates on our subjects, after which he was to back off and await further instruction? Hide and seek?”
“An oversimplification, but essentially correct,” Adowa said, her speech far more European sounding. Her eyes glowed dimly two seats away from him. She was pretty, Blaine thought, and a much softer person than the others in this party. But not in the eyes. There was no softness in her eyes.
“Then why in God's name are we hearing screams and gunshots?” Blaine asked, hoping for a palatable answer.
“When I know something, you will know something,” Oliver said, not looking at him. “I am contacting LEON now and ordering him to respond.” He fingered dexterously around a glowing set of command lines. His undercurrent of contempt for Blaine was only too obvious, had been since the very beginning.
“Ordering him,” Blaine echoed.
Sensing a bomb about to detonate between the men, Adowa said, “We communicate directly with the neural implant through a few simple commands. The software interacts with the impulse center of the brain through the implant. When LEON performs a task, it notifies us with a text message.”
“Sounds too simple,” Blaine remarked. At this, he noted tension in Adowa's jaw.
“Not as simple as your corporation would like to think,” she said.
And she was right, of course. It wasn't as simple as the biotech shareholders were led to believe. Nevertheless, this mission was the crucible, the hinge in the doorway to a much larger objective. One that many saw as terrifying, others as miraculous.
In a short period of time, neural implants had evolved dramatically, interfacing with insects and mammals, creating a narrow palette of cybernetic organism—bio-bots or robo-animals. Those particular cases created working animals for search and rescue, mostly. Others became effective surveillance tools in the hands of governments willing to fund the technology.
Predictably, moral and ethical objections were raised almost instantly, regardless of whether the interface with the animal was surgical or non-invasive. There was wide speculation that one day non-invasive methods might prevail by use of advanced ultrasound to control animal behavior remotely. Still, it brought a monsoonal downpour of objection from animal rights activists and environmental groups. But the reality—the truth they failed to acknowledge—was that it became inevitable. Nothing would stop it. Programs had already been set in motion, grants penned, monies exchanged, and governments around the globe were in a race for the ultimate goal: successfully weaponizing the animal kingdom. LEON was the price of admission. The big ticket.
LEON was once a male lion named Lewis, a tenant at the Dar es Salaam zoological park in Tanzania. His journey to becoming LEON started when a local visitor to the park taunted the cat and was subsequently mauled. The man's brother returned to the park a week later and threw a grenade at Lewis, who pounced on it, having no idea the little lobbed thing would disintegrate almost half his body, which it did a few moments later in a grisly spasm of explosive energy.
Lewis was written off as dead, but a bio-tech company based in South Africa saw it as a sudden, miraculous opportunity and offered to take Lewis and ostensibly save his life through reconstructive biomechanical surgery. Dar es Salaam agreed immediately and was paid a fee for Lewis, and so it began. Lewis was given new limbs that combined restorative and enhanced capabilities. Half his face was reconstructed along with his lower jaw. He was outfitted with new carbon fiber teeth. Finally, he received an advanced neural implant in his brain along with a titanium alloy plate to reinforce the integrity of his skull. They dubbed him LEO-NEURAL. LEON for short.
Text appeared on Oliver's tablet, drawing immediate stares from Adowa and Moses. Blaine scooted in for a better look. It read: HIDE AND SEEK. TARGETS FOUND. ALL CLEAR NOW.
Oliver puzzled over the message, as did Adowa. Moses was stone-faced, an Easter Island effigy.
“What does that mean?” Blaine asked.
No one spoke, but a moment fell between Oliver and Adowa, quiet understanding bridging their stare.
“Mr. Banda... what exactly is going on? Where is LEON?” Blaine pressed.
Ignoring him, Oliver caught the eye of Hassan at the very back of the vehicle. The wiry, muscular man was assigned to them as a measure of protection. Hassan was handy with AK-47s, and was also considered a 'fundi' or jack of all trades. Oliver spoke something in Swahili, and Hassan quickly unlatched a Pelican case and opened the top.
Not looking at Blaine, Oliver said, “I do not know what has happened. We will send in the drone.”
Hassan expertly prepped the device. Blaine watched closely, then wheeled his attention back on that glowing message: HIDE AND SEEK. TARGETS FOUND. ALL CLEAR.
“What does LEON mean by all clear?” Blaine asked.
Moses paid him a glance then. A glance that seemed to imply that if Blaine didn't shut
up immediately, he'd be made to take a long walk through the savannah alone. And so he decided, for the time being, to keep quiet as they prepped the drone for flight.
* * *
The angle was fixed and fluid, skimming the top of the long grass. Outfitted with a specialized 4K Ultra-HD camera operating in infrared mode, the drone skimmed along a target path with a structure now only a hundred yards out. Adowa flew the drone via an app on her smartphone. Oliver, with separate controls on his tablet, panned the camera left, then right, the sweep providing an IR panorama of the area, which remained still as a crypt. Re-centering the angle, the foreground of moving grass created a dramatic parallax as the drone approached the building, which materialized from the dark like a shipwreck buried in the deep sea.
“Fifteen yards,” Oliver said. “Circle the building, then go in through the door on the north side.”
“Yes, I've got it,” she said, piloting the drone into a gentle orbit around the structure. The walls of the building unspooled on the left side of the frame, and occasionally there were small craters that flashed the lens—bullet holes to be more precise. A slumbering Jeep bled into view momentarily. No sign of the poachers. No bodies. Nothing out there.
“Nothing on the perimeter. They must be inside,” Adowa said.
An open door loomed into view as the drone rounded the north edge of the building.
“LEON's point of entry?” she asked.
“Take us in,” Oliver said, pinned to his display.
Banking expertly, the drone hummed inside the building, holding in the main room. Panning the camera, blood patterns resolved on the walls in the IR-painted dark. Seeing them on her drone app, Adowa shivered lightly. There was something about the pattern—something incongruent with the savage attack of a large predator.
“Gunshots to the head,” Hassan said, a disturbing coldness in his voice. “These were executions.”
The Cyborg Chronicles (The Future Chronicles) Page 13