Virtual Immortality

by Matthew S. Cox

  Two DS2s circled above, engaging targets on the ground. A large craft, many times the size of the patrol hover, they were the standard Marine Corps transport used to ferry troops and vehicles from orbiting starships to a planetary surface. In addition, the DS2 had replaced many of the air to ground weapons platforms under the simplification doctrine. The cargo bay was large enough to carry two armored personnel carriers or one main battle tank. The green camouflage ship had a thick central body and a long tail boom with trefoil fins at the end and stubby angular wings that extended from the engine housings on either side of the main hull, giving it a buzzard-like profile.

  The sight of missiles on a facing wing as they glided past made Nina second guess her decision to get the military involved; they were not known for their restraint. Orange streaks from the DS2’s particle cannons seared threads of light into Joey’s retina that lingered for several seconds after each shot. Spherical blooms of energy rose from the ground wherever they hit, backlighting fragments of robots that sailed into the air. The barrage left a path of glowing plastisteel through the open area at the center of the ring.

  Hulking ten-foot tall monstrosities in various stages of completion streamed into the courtyard from all visible doors; an apocalypse of metal zombies so thick it blocked view of the ground. The more complete units had the profile of assault soldiers while ones that had been hurried off the assembly line appeared skeletal; gleaming silver and lit by the glow of exposed components. Tiny puffs of blue fire jumped around at random from rifles fired at the circling dropships.

  “Damn… I didn’t think they allowed Class 5 cyborgs to be powered up on Earth.” Joey leaned away from the window before a bullet came knocking.

  “They don’t,” Nina replied. “But I don’t think Shinigami gives a shit. Oh, this has gotta be like Christmas for Five.”

  Division 5 set up a blockade by the entry gate. The anti-cyborg units had a dozen A3Vs in a horseshoe at the front door. She imagined the 30mm cannon operators firing freely into the swarming mass of metal and howling with glee. Regardless of how much pleasure they derived from it, they managed to keep them penned within the ring. Division 1 arranged themselves at a quarter mile perimeter, corralling employees evacuated from the plant. The rest of the surrounding area fell under the control of the military. Once CENTCOM understood the magnitude of the event, they had assumed operational control.

  The patrol craft’s windscreen filled with bright orange as a missile leapt from the wing of one of the DS2s. Joey watched the stream of flames turn into a tiny glowing dot of light that vanished into the mass of cyborgs. A fraction of a second later, a roiling orb of plasma swelled up from the courtyard, sending parts into the sky and leaving a puddle of molten metal in its wake. The twenty-meter sphere of open ground it left behind filled in almost as fast as it had been cleared. It seemed for each one they took down, another came out.

  “Is there any way to shut this place down?” Nina yelled at the comm.

  A Division 5 sergeant appeared over the dashboard, his brush cut of white hair stark against his dark blue armor. “We already tried Lieutenant. The site does not operate on municipal energy since they have their own reactor. We’ve been trying to kill it, but their entire network is locked out. We can’t even turn the damn lights off.”

  “Shinigami.” Joey nodded.

  “Hardin?” Nina looked back at his screen.

  “Go ahead.” He looked up from another screen.

  “Net Ops is surrounding the place in cyberspace, right? Tell them not to let anything leave. No email, no data, no constructs, and especially no AIs.”

  “They should be. I’ll head down there and start directing traffic.” He moved off-screen.

  Joey put a hand on her arm. “The only way we’re taking this thing out is in Cyberspace. I have to get in there and plug in.”

  “Sergeant?” Nina looked back at the other hologram.

  “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  “I need to get in there, what’s the best point of entry?”

  He shook his head. “The whole thing’s a god damned mess. We got about a thousand or so rampaging cyborgs in the central enclosure and an unknown number inside the building. StarPoint is begging us not to incinerate the place, but we may not have a choice.”

  “How long before they start jumping inside tanks?” Joey grinned.

  Nina shook her head. “It wouldn’t help them much, weapons fitting happens on Mars. All the vehicles in the factory are unarmed.”

  “Small favors.” He exhaled. “But they could still use one to drive over the barricades.”

  “Shit. There’s got to be some way in. Normally, I’d jump through the roof but you couldn’t do that.” She glared at him. “And no, you are not trying.”

  The sergeant tapped a finger against the side of his head as he thought, and then cringed from a nearby particle beam impact. “There’s a VIP bunker but that’s almost impossible. You’d have to head a bit north to the air vent, down about a hundred ten meters of vent, back a half mile or so through the underground tramway, and up another hundred meter long shaft with no working elevator.”

  Nina smiled. “Oh, from the way you started that I thought it was going to be a pain in the ass.” She steered for the vent.

  Joey, mesmerized by the particle beams, stared at the chaos below. It did not seem real, more like a holo vid. Concussion from distant missile strikes shook the hovercar seconds after flashes of light. A quarter mile north of the facility, Nina pitched forward into a half roll dive through a gap in the city plates where an area had been left open. She leveled out of the nose-down plummet and jerked back on the throttle. The car settled flat and level, with no forward motion, and sank past fifty meters of pipe-laden superstructure on all sides. Some rag-clad Discarded scurried away from exposed catwalks, vanishing into tiny doors. Nina brought the car in for a landing next to an explosion of metal from the ground, where the emergency elevator had burst through the surface by a cluster of air pumps. She gave the door a shove and glanced at Joey.

  She could not conceal her worry. “It’s not too late to change your mind.”

  He pulled the handle on his door. “I’m not going to let you go in there alone, I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  She laughed and slung a padded bag over her shoulder as she got out of the car and jogged to the vents. Flashing lights winked from the broken elevator capsule lying on its side. The rocket-powered thing offered a one shot ride, designed to prevent re-infiltration.

  Joey opened the security panel to override the lock when the wrenching screech of twisting metal made him cringe. Looking up, he smirked at Nina, who had peeled the grating off the top.

  “Subtle.” Joey nodded.

  “We don’t have time for subtle.” She tossed the scrap metal aside and hugged him for a moment. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  Joey grinned at her. “Moi? Faire quelque chose de stupide?”

  She narrowed her eyes, pulling him by a fistful of shirt into a brief kiss. “I mean it.”

  Nina let go and glanced down into the dark. The shaft ran about a hundred and ten meters straight down just like the sergeant had said, interrupted by the occasional fan. She climbed onto the edge and pulled Joey over her back.

  “This would work better if you were taller.” He laughed.

  “Yeah.” She sighed; then jumped.

  Bracing her gloves against the sheer walls, she kept the fall at a controllable plummet. She stomped down as they reached each fan assembly, bursting through one after the other. A few seconds after the sixth fan died, several quiet seconds of free fall ended with a thunderous boom and a huge dent where the shaft took a ninety-degree bend. Joey stared up at the little square of light that was once the outside world. Sparks glinted here and there from the wreckage of fan motors in the dark. He had not heard the crack from his chest when they landed, but Nina did.

  Joey’s attempt to speak ended with a spike of pain as she stepped past the fragmentary remain
s of fans and ductwork to put him down in a clear space. He gasped, and she stuck him in the shoulder with a Stimpak. He grunted as nanobots stitched his rib back into one piece.

  “Ow.” He rubbed it.

  A motor slammed into the pile of scrap two feet behind her. Smaller bits of debris trickled after it.

  “We should get going before this thing caves in,” Joey backed up.

  Nina crawled a few meters ahead through the shaft, pausing to break through a grating that led to a larger round-walled tunnel full of flashing yellow light and acrid fumes. They were underground, well below the city and in the Earth itself. A small tramcar sat abandoned near the lower end of the emergency elevator system. It, as well as the immediate area, was scorched black by the elevator rockets. A single ceramic rail traced a grimy white line through the brackish water that collected on either side of it. Nina climbed out and then reached up to help him.

  “You okay?”

  Joey nodded. “Yep.”

  “Hold your breath as much as you can, there’s toxic fumes.”

  Once again, she put him on like a backpack and took off at a superhuman sprint atop the rail. His attempt to talk came out as a series of barks; the motion pounded the air out of his lungs and reminded him of his weakened rib. The run lasted a little under a minute before she came to a halt at the tram port at the other side and jumped from the rail to the platform.

  This elevator could only go down; they would have to climb. She forced the doors open and knocked the maintenance hatch out of the roof. The shaft above was pitch black, filled with silence punctuated by intermittent drips of unseen water. The impenetrable darkness shifted to shades of green as her night vision took over. She climbed onto the roof of the cab and pulled Joey up.

  “There’s a ladder, hop on.”

  With a resigned moan, Joey got on again.

  “You could climb it yourself if you wanted.” She smiled at him.

  “Nina Kong go for high ground.” Joey yelled.

  She laughed. “Don’t make me drop you.”

  Untiring Myofiber muscles hauled them up to a sealed door. The VIP exit had no power at all, another security precaution.

  She eyed a dim camera. “One good thing about all the power being out down here, he can’t see us coming.”

  “I can’t bypass this door with no power.” Joey gestured at armored doors. “You can’t get your fingers in that seam and those look a bit thick to just kick down.”

  “I brought a key.” Nina popped her Nano blades.

  He scurried out of the way.

  A faint click came from each stroke as the metal offered little resistance to a monomolecular edge driven by the strength of a doll. The clear blades vanished into her arms as she leaned back and punted the slug of metal through the outline of a hole, and squeezed through into a corridor filled with smoke and the sounds of war.

  The engine rush of the DS2s was much louder here, and the entire building shuddered each time one went by. Occasional explosions rocked the ground, some powerful enough to make Joey stumble into the wall.

  Nina brought up a map of the facility and navigated through the executive suite and around a long curved hall towards the technology wing. With the help of Whisper 7’s sensors, she avoided detection by cyborgs below as they crept through the murky shadows of the observation deck. Each time the attacking ships passed, they had to dodge searchlights that filtered through holes above them. A particle beam pierced the roof some distance ahead, followed by the heavy scraping sound of cyborg parts sliding along the ceiling. They exchanged a glance and picked up their pace.

  At the central core of the facility, Joey hazarded a peek over the railing at the assembly floor. Production appeared to be in full swing, the facility churned out cyborgs as fast as the robotic arms could move. Most of the walkers rushing for the door were only half-built, lacking full armor and the usual onboard combat systems.

  “Looks like our friend didn’t expect to get noticed this fast. He’s throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.”

  Nina clasped his shoulder. “Yeah, come on, I see a place we can use on the schematics.”

  Blurry catwalks above the manufactory gave way to solid hallway on the far side of the production line floor. Nina stopped at a supervisor’s terminal nestled in a recess in the floor among pipes and wire bundles. A row of power transformer boxes lined the back wall of the small sunken work area.

  “Here.” Nina shoved Joey into the pit and followed.

  He slid to a seat by the terminal. “Can’t we do this from a nice office?”

  “We have more cover here. The offices are the first place he will come after us, and they’re all glass. It’s all thermacrete and steel here. If we stay down, you can’t even see us.” Nina swung the padded bag off her back and pulled her deck out.

  “Wait, you’re coming in?” He shot her a look of real worry. “Who’s going to watch our asses?”

  “My deck will. It’s got a prox sensor; I’ll be able to see what’s going on out here.”

  “I must get one of those!” Joey held aloft a single raised finger.

  Nina plugged her deck into the terminal. “Ready?”

  “Yep.”

  They connected simultaneously. The hallway in both directions drew in as the high res surface image stretched like liquid over a wireframe skeleton. The dark cowboy glanced to his side at Nina’s avatar forming next to him. Blue gridlines traced the outline of a female figure before a black bodysuit spread up and over everything but her head. She looked much the same as her real self except for wispy tendrils of black light that exuded from her back, hinting at the outline of angelic wings. She did not stand, instead hovering inches from the ground.

  The old gunslinger grinned luridly at her, distracted for a moment by his maleness. “L’ange de la mort, nice.”

  “I didn’t know you had a chip board.” She winked.

  “I don’t, but I have GlobeNet access.” He laughed. “Just don’t tell Alex I spoke French.”

  Sparks flew from the walls as cyberspace passed on the concussion and sound of distant explosions. The hallway was a decent facsimile of reality except for the pipes glowing blue, green, and orange as they carried light instead of industrial fluids.

  “Can you find him?” Nina looked left and right, both offered the same mechanized darkness.

  Joey brought up a node map, filtering it to processor nodes. One stood out many times more active than the rest, all the way across the network. It would take a bit of running to get there.

  “This way.” He smeared into a blur of black and silver.

  Joey knew Shinigami would have sensed them the instant they connected, and wanted to waste no time. Moving as fast as the connection allowed, he darted around corners in defiance of inertia, running at a speed that felt close to a hundred miles an hour.

  The frustrated comm chatter from the DS2 crews filled Nina’s ear; they wanted to drop the hammer on the place from orbit, but Division 9 command held them back. CENTCOM authorized sending in another ship or two as well as gearing up for a ground force to move in to the interior. Somewhere in the mess, Hardin barked at some general, telling him he had people on the inside.

  The AI-controlled cyborgs spilled out into the area beyond the building, threatening to push Division 5 back. They functioned as a hive mind, stymieing the forces outside. The only good thing was that none of the weapons the borgs had access to posed a threat to the DS2s.

  The men on the ground were not so lucky.

  “We’re almost there.” Joey pointed at an upcoming door.

  Shinigami’s takeover savaged the network security, almost as if it had rendered it useless out of spite. The virtual doors that should have represented difficult barrier nodes appeared blasted and smoking. Joey was thankful that at least one stereotype of super AIs rang true, hubris. Given the condition of the internal network, it was clear that it never thought anyone would get inside the building and online.

  Rounding an
other corner, he skidded to a halt on his heels. Itai Korin waited for him with an anticipatory smile. He looked ready for a repeat performance of their last one-sided confrontation. The dark one smiled as well; he had a surprise for Itai. Joey’s grin only got wider when Anatoly Nemsky materialized out of the wall behind them.

  Joey shot Nina a look. “Take Nemsky, this fucker’s mine.”

  or a moment, all was still except for the dark cowboy’s hair drifting in a wind that existed only to him. His gnarled old fingers teased at the chestnut handle wood of his silver revolvers. Not one of the four beings present made a sound or broke the staring contest. Anatoly exuded confidence at Nina, his face a collage of menace and pleasure.

  Itai shifted his stance rearward; his lip curled with a smug assumption of his opponent’s inferiority. Seconds passed with no one willing to flinch, until a wire outline of a rifle formed in Itai’s grasp.

  The cowboy’s guns leapt into his hands, unloading a barrage of virtual bullets at the false Mossad agent. Itai reached up to catch them as before, roaring with anger as the smoky skulls blasted his hand into a fine red mist before continuing through his body. Glowing trails of flickering numbers and lines stretched out of him, pulling the texture of his chest into the hole. The cloud of vapor at his wrist sank into itself and coalesced once more into a hand.

  “These ain’t the same old smokewagons, boy.” The gravel in the dark cowboy’s voice chased the thunder of the gunfire into the silence.

  Itai snarled through his teeth as the hole in his palm closed. He lifted his gaze and a burst of data flew, animated as the firing of a rifle. The dark cowboy vanished in a cloud of smoky bones, the incoming data stream disregarded by the new deck. He materialized amid the fragments of metal that drifted away from a glowing crater in the wall.