Virtual Immortality

by Matthew S. Cox

  She stared into space while her mind clawed at any trace of memory. “Maybe… kinda sounds familiar.”

  “You’re right.” Masaru lifted her chin with his finger.

  She swatted his hand away. “Don’t look at me like that, I’m not some horse for sale.”

  Masaru sighed at her. “Your name is Amber Wortham. Your picture was on dozens of flyers in the city.”

  “Well she’s not lying about her age.” Joey laughed.

  Kenny glared. “Joey, so help me, if you take advantage…”

  “Come on Kenny, if you weren’t married…” Joey smiled.

  “No.” He shook his head. “Her face is too…” He struggled over the words while wagging his hand. “She looks too young, and think about how we found her, you just can’t take advantage of someone in that situation.”

  “I wonder if that reward is still good.” Joey rubbed his chin.

  Kenny glanced at him with a raised eyebrow. “It doesn’t matter if it is or isn’t, we’re getting her back to the city. If you want to claim the reward, fine, but we help her either way.” He looked at the others. “Alright, wait here. I’ll run with Eldon back to the truck to grab my tools and some clothes for her. I don’t want to split up, but we can’t take her outside like that with the Canids around.”

  Katya nodded. “She’d be easy prey.”

  “For what?” Amber whined.

  “Don’t worry about it, we killed them already.” Joey smiled.

  The small degree of contentment Amber felt from the much warmer hallway lasted only until the desiccated corpse at the end of the corridor came into view. Joey pulled her away from the sight.

  Amber screamed into Joey’s shoulder, finding her voice after a few gasps. She held her arms up, too terrified to even struggle with the binders. “Oh my god, these things explode.”

  “They’re not going to.” Joey patted her back. “We are going to get you out of here.”

  She lowered her arms as if carrying nitroglycerin, crossing her hands over her crotch.

  “Kat, maybe you should take her into that locker room; she’ll feel better if men aren’t hovering all around her.”

  Katya blinked in disbelief. “Are you feeling okay?”

  He smirked. “Just go.”

  A peal of strained metal groaned through the entire building. Several discrete puffs of dust fell from the ceiling one after the other as footsteps thumped by overhead.

  “What was that?” Amber’s voice trembled in time with her body.

  She looked at the metal around her ankles, shakes worsening at the reminder she could not run. Her fingers dug into Joey’s coat as she hid behind him.

  Masaru drew his katana, advancing towards the noise. Katya reached to Amber to pull her into the locker room. Before she made contact, a door slammed open in a flash of brown fur. A Canid surged into the hallway, bowling into Joey and smashing him against the wall face first. The force of the hit knocked his pistol out of his hand, sending it clattering to the floor. Panic shone from his eyes as exhilaration warped his lips into a manic grin. He struggled to push himself away from the wall.

  The captive girl tripped on her hobbled ankles, sprawling on the floor. With Katya’s voice repeating “easy prey” in her mind, Amber went for the dropped gun. Joey howled, somewhere between terror and laughter as the mutant licked the back of his neck. Hot sticky drool slid down his back inside his armor. Amber pounced on the pistol with both hands, shoving herself up into a seated position, and aimed. The handcuffs allowed just enough separation to hold the weapon with a practiced two-handed grip. She flicked the safety off and fired three shots into the Canid’s side. Joey stared into eyes that no longer belonged to a petrified airhead, at least, until the dog man turned roared at her.

  Shackles clattered as her feet slid on the steel floor in a frantic effort to crawl backwards. With three slugs through it and its attention elsewhere, it weakened enough for Joey to push out from under it. He slid down the wall to the floor. The canid turned on Amber, sensing a helpless meal. It took one step before it let out a startled yelp as Masaru’s katana burst out of its chest. Warm blood hitting her face snapped Amber out of her deer-like stare. She shot it once more in the head. It went over sideways; Masaru spun his blade around and stabbed through its chest into the floor.

  “Where did you learn how handle a gun?” Joey sat up.

  Amber put the safety back on and let him take it.

  “I”―she offered a helpless stare―“I guess I know how to shoot… but I don’t know why I know.”

  “Maybe you’re a secret project assassin, some kind of genetically engineered killer. That would explain all the security on you.” Joey tapped her ankle restraints. “Those things would probably hold a Canid; overkill for a little thing like you.”

  Amber blushed and tried to cover herself.

  “She’s not a doll.” Katya’s metallurgical scan showed a dark girl-shaped shadow; only the restraints and some minor headware showed up white. She looked up. “Are there any more?”

  Eldon’s voice crackled over the comm link. “I heard shots, what is your sit-rep?”

  Joey squinted at thin air. “What the fuck is a sit-rep?”

  “One dog. It’s handled.” Masaru wiped his blade on the thing’s back. “How is it out there?”

  “We were engaged by a pack of six… They’re dead, we’re clear. Kenny took a hit but it’s nothing a stim won’t fix.”

  “They hunt at night.” Kenny grumbled into the channel. “Stay inside.”

  Joey wandered into a small office while Masaru covered the hallway. Amber followed Katya into the locker room, taking a seat on the bench with a mournful stare at her restraints. She made a half-hearted attempt to tug at them, but remembering their explosive nature, she froze, shivering and stiff.

  “This can’t be really happening to me. Where am I?”

  Katya hovered in the doorway, back turned. “They probably erased your memory too.”

  In the office, Joey examined several terminals and found only one of them still in working order. The rest looked like someone shot them out on purpose.

  The lack of defenses surprised him, until he realized the security servers were all offline. Holographic panels appeared littered with files, most of which turned out to be useless. A smear of flesh-tone in the dark attracted his eye. It showed Amber curled up on a metal floor. He tapped on it, pulling it into the central display screen. A two handed swipe pulled it open to reveal a video object. Unable to resist, he poked it and a new panel opened with a feed dated about seven years old. She was in one of the cells, naked, twitching and screaming from a series of electric shocks. When she wasn’t being zapped, she either pounded on the door and begged, or sobbed quietly to herself. A recorded voice kept offering her release if she would tell them how she found this installation. He swiped his hand through the video, fast forwarding. The shocks stopped, replaced with periods of extreme cold, then high heat. As young as she was, she resisted the torture. Joey could not continue watching her beg for her mother, and stopped playback after only a minute.

  Another video depicted a fire exchange at the perimeter. Amber and two men jumped out of the trees, mowing down a trio of security guards with silenced weapons. As the men covered either side, Amber affixed what looked like a bomb to the wall. Four men in green armor similar to Eldon’s leapt on them from above. Amber was disarmed and flung to the ground with such ease it looked like a Special Forces soldier fighting a high school kid. He held her down with one foot in her back while disarming the device. Another commando disarmed the older man before spinning him face first into the wall. Judging by the blood spray, the hit killed him. The other man went down, unconscious but alive. The attack ended before any of them could react.

  “Hey Masaru. Check this out.” Joey called him over and replayed the files.

  “She was HLM.” Masaru frowned.

  “Amber Wortham, spoiled little rich girl… Yeah that fits.” Joey killed th
e terminal. “Oh well. So much for my genetic assassin theory.”

  They turned at the sound of the outer hatch squealing open. Kenny came through in a hurry with Eldon backing in behind him, firing. After two shots, a distant growl turned into a yelp.

  “Where is she?” Kenny held up his toolbox.

  Joey pointed. Kenny edged into the locker room, smiling as he set the toolbox down with a heavy clank. The scent of oil wafted as he opened it and sifted through tools. He knelt in front of her and pulled her foot into his lap to study the binders. The tiny screws that held the outer shell closed had been bored out to make it impossible to remove them with a normal tool, but Kenny had a drill driver that would work. Eldon dropped a duffel bag of clothes inside the door and went back to the exit to stand guard.

  It was tedious work. After twenty minutes, the last screw came out and he eased the two pieces apart. A snow of crystallized dust fell out from the hollow space inside, snowing over her foot. Kenny pinched some of the grey substance between two fingers, holding it up and twisting to the rear.

  “Hey Eldon? What do you think of this?”

  He squinted at Kenny’s finger, then shirked off one glove and gathered a handful from the floor. Amber brushed the substance away from her instep, moving as if one wrong twitch would kill them all.

  “The extended freeze rendered the explosive inert.” Eldon wiped his hand on his chest.

  “Dammit, we could have cut her out of these things right away.” Kenny grumbled while offering an apologetic look. “Okay hon. I’m going to cut these things off you, but I need you to stay still. If you jerk away it’s going to…”

  She bit her lower lip and nodded. “Burn like a mother, I understand.”

  True to her word, she sat motionless as he pulled out the laser cutter and removed the scrap metal from her other leg, and freed her hands. As the last bit of them hit the floor, she flung herself onto him with a hug, saying “thank you” so many times it all blended into one long sound.

  “Okay… Okay… Put something on so we can leave you alone with Joey.” Kenny patted her on the back and stood up.

  “Bite me.” Joey’s voice drifted in from the hallway.

  he clothes had a look and scent familiar to Amber, and she spent a moment feeling the fabric and trying to find some trace of memory among the threads. Everyone turned and looked at the young woman peeking out of the door in a purple sweater, jeans, and pink socks. Lacking only shoes, she carried herself with more confidence.

  “I can’t say thank you enough.” She dragged the duffel bag out and added a sweater to her wardrobe.

  Masaru gave her a simple nod.

  “Just doin’ what’s right.” Eldon nodded at her.

  “So… Amber… You might want to see this.” Joey opened the office door.

  She followed him to the terminal. “What?”

  “Found some vids that show how you got here. Some of them are hard to watch.”

  “Did they-?” She cringed.

  “I doubt it. They used shock torture on you in that room over there.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “Then again, you did come here to blow them up so I can see why they were less than hospitable.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “It looks like you were part of the HLM, and you and some friends came here to show your objection to whatever went on here, with some bombs.”

  She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, trying to warm up. “I don’t remember that… I…” Amber looked up as a glint of memory lit up in the back of her mind. “They did something very, very bad here…”

  Masaru appeared in the doorway. “The haphazard cryo-stasis is responsible for your memory loss; it may or may not return.”

  Eldon chimed in from the hallway. “You don’t have to go back to that life. You can go home. The HLM ain’t what it was seven years ago. They’re just another damn street gang now, just one that tries to excuse their violence with a righteous cause.”

  “I…” She trembled. “I don’t want to hurt people.”

  “Good.” Joey nodded, dragging the files into a virtual trashcan. “Then no one needs to ever see those.”

  “C’mon, let’s take her back to the truck.” Eldon took her hand and passed her to Kenny.

  They made their way out the door, though Kenny carried her over the spiky stairs. Not quite six yards from the building, the echo of a gunshot rang around the walls, followed by the sharp plastic clack of a slug striking Masaru across the side of the helmet.

  He went over backwards like a wooden target dummy.

  Kenny sprinted left, dragging Amber behind a portable air handler a few meters away from the security building. He pushed her to the ground with as much care as he could manage given the rush, and swung the rifle off his back into a firing position over the machine. She crawled against the side of the air unit.

  “Why are they shooting at me?”

  Kenny fired twice at a shadow by the wall where the original shot came from. “We don’t even know who it is.”

  Eldon rushed forward and to the right, diving behind a large chunk of concrete embedded in the ground.

  “Masaru, you alright?” Eldon yelled over the comm.

  Masaru flooded the comm with a low throaty growl for a few seconds. “Whoever did that has forfeited his life.”

  He sat upright and touched the scuffmark. The impact had driven his helmet into his nose and bloodied it, but the bullet had not pierced. He rolled behind a different piece of debris.

  Katya ran back up the stairs into the security building. A handgun was her only weapon and the shooter was almost a hundred yards away.

  “You boys can handle this; I’m not going to be effective at this range with a handgun.” She pulled the door closed.

  Joey hit the ground as well, crawling under the security building. Amber looked at the door and thought about making a run for it, but fear got the better of her and she stayed down.

  A figure in green armor darted past the gap in the wall, about Eldon’s height and build and carrying what looked like the standard UCF combat rifle, the M2414 Crusader. Eldon and Kenny both fired as he went by, but missed the jade blur.

  “Son of a bitch can move.” Eldon lurched back to his feet, sprinting to another hunk of debris closer to the wall.

  “That looks like one of the Spec Ops guys from the vid. Be careful, they took the HLM down like high school kids.” Joey ducked under the security building.

  “They were high school kids, jackass.” Eldon sounded unamused.

  The figure came back through the gap, sprinting and firing at Eldon’s position, making him duck as the bullets chipped the debris into a shower of fragments. Kenny triggered again; two shots glanced off the man’s chest with sparks. The attacker skidded to a halt behind a cargo container that had been knocked off the pile.

  “Any chance that guy is active duty?” Kenny aimed at the metal box.

  “Nah.” Eldon replied. “I’m not getting any transponder ID or IFF signal from him. Plus there’s only one. If the military was here, there would be a lot more.”

  “Whatever happened to talking?” Katya asked via comm, from inside.

  The figure whipped around the cargo box, firing at Kenny. He dove on top of Amber as a hail of projectiles came by, trenching gouges in the side of the machine and showering them with small fragments. One slug came back off the security building and scored on Kenny’s back like a kidney punch, failing to penetrate his armor.

  Masaru leapt from cover and kicked on his speedware. The augmentation pushed him into a near thirty mile per hour sprint. The figure turned to aim at him as he lit up the area with his S-19. The invisible laser left no obvious explanation for the sudden formation of holes and spurts of liquid metal that burst from the container, spattering the figure’s armor with grey splats. Two flashes of sparking smoke blew out of the stranger’s arm, making him abort the attempted shot at Masaru. Somersaulting straight ahead, the man in green skidded to a halt behind a small
chunk of concrete.

  Kenny pulled himself up and aimed over the air handler. He chipped away at the block with a few shots that did little more than make the helmet duck. Amber grabbed a pistol from the left side of Kenny’s belt and angled for a shot.

  “What the hell are you doing?” He tried to push her back down.

  Kenny’s pistol, larger than Joey’s, almost bounced off her forehead when she fired it. The second shot came less severe, but still knocked her around.

  “I’m not gonna die without a fight.”

  “Get your ass down!” Kenny shoved her to the floor and landed on top of her. “Look, kid, if you have a gun, you’re a damned target. You have no armor on so you’re gonna die if you take a hit.”

  Eldon interrupted via comm. “Kenny, hate to break it to you but that Crusader’s loadin’ ten mil AP-EX. You ain’t wearin’ armor either.”

  Kenny did not see Amber. In his mind, she was Alyssa out on her first Badlands trip.

  Amber looked at him, shocked by the concern in his voice. “Whoa, okay, Sorry.” She released the gun. “I just hate feeling helpless.”

  “Sorry.” He crouched. “You remind me of my kid, that’s just the sort of thing she would say. Keep it, but stay down.”

  Their attacker had vanished for the moment. Eldon swept back and forth with his rifle, waiting for motion. Masaru crouched behind a lump of wall halfway between Eldon and the gap they had entered from, some fifty yards ahead of everyone else.

  Eldon stood up as he prepared to advance to the next bit of debris. The figure popped up over a hunk of wall and fired at him. Two shots glanced off Eldon’s shoulder as he flung himself to the ground. The angle was weak; they had not pierced, but his shoulder throbbed.

  Kenny’s rifle belched blue as he sent a stream of automatic fire across the chest of their assailant. The figure staggered back as several fragments of armor flew. No blood sprayed, which made Kenny worry. He knew he had gotten a near perfect hit from multiple slugs; there should have been blood.

  Hearing the hit, Masaru activated his speedware again. Overcharged signals ran down microwires into his muscles, throwing him into a ten-foot high leap over a broken piece of wall. He landed in a blurring sprint, closing in a serpentine path in an effort to bring his katana into the fight.