Nina started to sound worried. “Four, come on!”
Joey evaded, weaving through the fragmented remains of terminals to foil “Kenny’s” shots until the AI stood where he wanted him. Joseph Dillon walked out from behind a display, flicking his coat away from his now holstered guns. Kenny did the same, exposing his pistols with an adrenaline grin. They stared at each other for a moment. A tumbleweed rolled between them.
“Nice touch.” The dark one smirked.
Kenny nodded. “Only the best for a friend.”
Nina screamed. “Two rounds left, what the fuck is going on in there?”
The old one took a step left; Kenny circled right. Yellow teeth peeked out from behind a grin that spread across the dark cowboy’s mouth. The silver discs that ringed his hat glinted purple in the light from the crystal as his eyebrows formed a solid flat line.
“Last mag. I only have twenty-two shots in this goddamned thing and there’s four times as many robots coming for us. Joey!”
Nina yelled his name as loud as she could, at the edge of panic. He imagined her face looked calm. Four hands teased at the handles of guns as the walls flashed with pink-purple lightning. Neither man moved for an eternity.
“Seventeen! Please… Joey.”
The tall one watched his friend’s eyes, looking for any trace of an attack. Another weed drifted between them as a western style guitar effect rippled through the room.
“Ten. Joey we have to get out of here now; they’re going to drop the hammer soon. There’s four DS2s overhead; we’re one ‘clear’ away from being screwed.”
Kenny grinned. The dark cowboy’s face remained cold and unemotional as his eyes narrowed into thin lines.
“Four!”
The old man drew and fired from the hip, causing Kenny to duck involuntarily. He turned his head as the smoking bullet streaked by his face. Shinigami’s eyes widened with the realization that Joey had not fired at him. During the showdown, Joey had been writing code.
Splinters flaked from where the shot shattered into the surface of the crystal, causing a large dark spot at the center of the glowing mass. The darkness expanded through the massive gem on the heels of the spidering cracks that raced through it. When the fissures reached from end to end, the light within the crystal waned then died, leaving a dark violet hunk.
The flickering lightning stopped.
Shinigami turned, melting back into a shapeless humanoid form covered with blue lines. The high bandwidth connection the AI had maintained with the CPU had left him a route in. Joey’s silver revolver transformed into Sho’s golden gun, and he blew the smoke from the barrel.
“Guess you didn’t get all of it.”
As Joey lowered the weapon, the crystal exploded and flung the anemic ebon body to the other side of the massive chamber. It hit the wall, splattering out of humanoid form into a puddle of tar that oozed to the floor.
“They’re falling over!” The anxiety in Nina’s voice became relief. “Harold, call off the strike, Joey did it!”
Giant crystal chunks tumbled out of midair, sliding over each other on their way down. Some struck the rim of the opening before tumbling into the bottomless vertical shaft. The tar pool disintegrated into pixels. Bubbles formed as the same inhuman voice tried to scream, but gurgled as though it drowned in itself. Hands of black slime clawed at the air and sank into the still puddle. When the ground had absorbed the last of it, Joey hit his disconnect command and let himself fall into weightlessness.
He sat up, gagging on acrid fumes. Heat radiated from components to his left, the words ‘high voltage’ had drooped into a molten warp. Nina lay on the stairs a few feet away, kneeling with a two handed grip on her pistol. The air reeked of propellant and the sound of dozens of robotic dominos echoed out of the smoke. He looked at the severed metal hand clamped around his ankle. He pulled at the fingers but could not move it.
“Hon? Would you mind?” He whined at his smoking deck, forgetting about the metal hand.
She slung her weapon and fell on him, cuddling him against her until the clattering of tin soldiers ended. The combat outside wound down as well.
“Are you okay?” They both spoke at the same time.
“Yeah.” Joey sighed.
Her answer took the form of a kiss.
Plucking the metal limb from his leg, she helped him to his feet. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“About that dinner we missed.” Joey slung the Necromancer across his back.
Nina smiled. “Hardin’s report can wait.”
he yard outside the factory lay strewn with the mangled remains of hundreds of cyborg bodies. The air, thick and caustic, carried the scent of molten plastisteel and NE6. Plumes of smoke churned out of glowing craters where particle beams melted the city plates. The DS2s continued to circle overhead, no longer firing. Division 5 troops chest-bumped and whooped out front; one or two still wasted ammo on dead cyborgs.
They emerged from a loading gate, trudging out of rolling black vapors and into the metal carnage. Joey held a sleeve over his mouth in a futile attempt to block the scathing fumes from his lungs.
A few shots echoed from the distant rear of the factory where a handful of cyborgs that had been loaded with AIs, not simply run remotely, still slugged it out with the military. The wall of police at the front opened as they passed through, to cheers. Nina glanced at where the crowd of evacuated StarPoint employees assembled. A group of line workers, techies, office personnel, executives, janitors, and secretaries all stood around in various stages of panic.
Hardin hopped out of a black A3V and walked over.
“Nice job, Duchenne.” He gave Joey a brief glance. “That was pretty impressive work there young man. We might have a use for someone with your talents.”
Joey glanced at Nina and blinked. The sheer irony of someone with his views on government working for them was almost too good to pass up, not to mention the allure of the potential danger. As Hardin discussed minutiae with Joey, Nina closed her eyes and sent a command to her unmarked patrol craft, causing it to autopilot to her location.
“I’m listening.” Joey put his arm around Nina’s back.
Hardin nodded. “Let’s talk in a day or two and you can tell me about Mars.” He took a step toward the truck, but turned with more to say. “Oh, by the way… you won’t be her partner or anything like that even if things work out. You’ll be in separate departments.”
He grinned. “No problem, I heard she has trouble hanging on to them anyway.”
She shot him a surprised and somewhat hurt look and dragged him over by a fistful of his collar. The silly expression he gave her changed the accusatory glance to a sigh of sad humor. She kissed him full on the lips and changed her grip into a tight hug.
“I’m not losing this one.”
Hardin turned away. “I have a sneaking suspicion that your report is going to be late?”
Nina flipped him off while his back was turned, making a few of the Division 5 officers laugh. They kissed for a long minute, and then stared into each other’s eyes while the patrol craft kicked up a cloud of dust as it settled in to a gentle landing between them and the factory.
“Steak or seafood?” Nina tilted her head.
He kissed her again. “Steak, definitely.”
The crowd of evacuees peppered the police with questions. One sobbing secretary in the rear of the crowd backed away from everyone as if the sounds of silence frightened her more than the fighting. As she slid out of sight away from the chaos, her panic-stricken demeanor gave way to perfect calm. Her walk changed from fearful scurry to confident strut. The slender blonde adjusted her suit jacket to hide a blood stain as an amethyst glow shone from electronic eyes.
She vanished into the endless night of West City.
Thanks to:
You for reading Virtual Immortality.
Mark Woodring for editing this work.
Lisa, Andrew, James, Clare, Nikki, and the rest of the CQ crew.
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Dean for an amazing cover.
RC, Ed, and Pam for character inspiration.
Born in a little town known as South Amboy NJ in 1973, Matthew has been creating science fiction and fantasy worlds for most of his reasoning life. Somewhere between fifteen to eighteen of them spent developing the world in which Division Zero, Virtual Immortality, and The Awakened Series take place. He has several other projects in the works as well as a collaborative science fiction endeavor with author Tony Healey.
Matthew is an avid gamer, a recovered WoW addict, Gamemaster for two custom systems (Chronicles of Eldrinaath [Fantasy] and Divergent Fates [Sci Fi], and a fan of anime, British humour (<- deliberate), and intellectual science fiction that questions the nature of reality, life, and what happens after it.
He is also fond of cats.
drift in the wind, a catchy advert jingle wafted down from above, ensnaring Kirsten’s thoughts as it had been designed to do. The melodic din drew her eyes up to a sky the color of soot, hidden somewhere beyond the frenetic clutter of hundreds of moving objects. Glittering ad-bots saturated the grey fifty feet above her, flitting just below faster moving lanes of hovercar traffic. Smaller bots zoomed along, careening around lumbering giants struggling even to move forward. The boxy droids lit the smog with a patina of bright holograms that soaked the street below with unabashed commercialism. Any of the products they hawked could be hers with two taps of a thumb on the screen of her NetMini, arriving within minutes via flying delivery bot. Sadly, none of them sold love, sincerity, or a do-over for her twenty-two years on the Earth.
Running away from home had been the scariest decision of Kirsten’s life as well as the easiest. It had taken her only ten years, not to mention the urging of a ghost, to make up her mind; and ten minutes to vanish into the endless glittering night of West City. She could not forget what her mother had done; those memories would haunt her forever, as they had that morning.
The form-fitting uniform did little to protect her from the cold car hood as she waited, on the verge of tears. Nicole would return soon, and she did not want to answer the barrage of questions that would follow being caught crying. She shifted to allow feeling to return to her butt, one side at a time, and stared at the window of the shop her friend had entered. The redhead chatted with the clerk, an infectious smile across her face. Kirsten’s head sagged forward as she picked at the retaining strap securing her sidearm. In less than an hour, she might need to use it on a living man. The same dread came back each time she tried to put the dream out of her mind, leaving her doubting she would even want the food Nicole bought.
Why do people always look at the sky for answers? There’s nothing up there but smog and useless crap no one needs to buy.
She shrank away from gleaming steel edifices towering around her. Today, just like the people, the city felt like it wanted nothing to do with her. She looked down to Earth, to the unending flow of humanity that squeezed past where the wide patrol craft intruded upon the sidewalk. Glowing cybertattoos, luminous hair, blinking electronic devices, and the occasional loud conversation leapt out from the sea of people and caught her attention for a second or two at a time. She watched them go by, all walks of life, from wealthy businessmen to body-modifying cyber freaks, every one of them oblivious to her presence or mood. She folded her arms and wondered how they would react if they knew they passed three feet away from a psionic.
She imagined them screaming and running, eyes filled with terror.
A crowd two steps away, yet as alone as if she floated on the other end of the universe.
I’m being silly, this is just newbie work. I’ve been doing this for six years―why am I letting it get to me today?
Sure, Division 0 stuck a laser pistol on her hip and sent her out here to be shot at; but they cared more than her own family had. They also did not want to burn her at the stake for her gifts.
A cheery singsong voice patted her on the cheek as her friend returned. “Hey, I hope you like jalapeños in your egg. It’s all they had left.”
The uninvited happiness drew her attention to Nicole weaving through the river of people with her arms held high. Two plastic cartons teetered atop two cups of coffee―an effort to shield them from the jostles of passing humanity. Glossy black tactical armor gleamed in the ambient light as she moved. Kirsten felt silly for not having requested the same for this run; her I-Ops uniform, made of thin cloth, seemed a stupid choice for front line work. Just as Nicole reached the curb, a teen a little younger than them shot through the crowd on powered wheels sprouting from cybernetic legs the color of unpainted steel. He parted the river of bodies, Nicole included, away to both sides as he rumbled past. Kirsten leapt in an attempt to save at least one of the cartons as they went flying, but stopped when they both stalled in midair like paused video.
Nicole narrowed her eyes at the boy, and he swerved with a startled yelp to the left, as if shoved by unseen hands. He bowled, screaming and flailing, into a pile of trash with a loud crunch. The clatter of some unseen metal object rolling away tarnished the subsequent silence. Kirsten knew what her friend had done, and smiled despite her anxiety. Coffee and food floated over to her before Nicole released her telekinetic grasp on it.
She scowled. “Damn idiots. Can’t we give him a citation for that? I swear, someone gets a Mishiro booster and they think they can fly.”
Kirsten’s smile gave way to a guilty glance down the street at the moaning pile of limbs. She set her food on the roof of the car. “That was mean, and I’m not sure. I’m gonna check him out to make sure you didn’t hurt him.”
Nicole rolled her eyes and hopped into the driver’s seat, getting started on her food. A few minutes later, Kirsten returned, looking relieved.
“Well at least you don’t still look like your cat died.” Nicole offered a sympathetic glance while she slurped her coffee. “Careful, the eggs are spicy.”
Kirsten managed a shrug as she got in and opened her coffee. “I’m just nervous about this warrant run.” The gull-wing door on her side sank closed with a soft pneumatic hiss.
Nicole paused, mouth open an inch from her food. Eyes shot to the right. “You’re not a precog, are you?”
“No. I deal with ghosts.” The harsh synthetic coffee choked the last traces of sleep from her taste buds.
Nicole’s contagious cheer returned. “And beat the snot out of them! Is it true that all the power went out in a three block area when you took out that Wharf Killer one?”
“Actually, he sucked the power out of the area before I obliterated him; he was winding up for something big.” The memory came with a shiver.
Nicole gasped like a wide-eyed kid. “Ooo, I wish I could see it.”
“No, really you don’t.” Kirsten tried to force the images out of her thoughts. “Not all ghosts are pretty. I’m just glad I never met him when he was alive.”
“It’s cool you can whip ghosts like that―hey, isn’t that pretty rare for an astral?”
Kirsten hesitated. She hated talking about her other gift. Most people, even other psionics, feared anyone with it. “I… um… I can do the mind blast thing too.” She looked down, picking at her uniform. “It somehow works together.”
Much to her relief, Nicole’s jovial smile did not weaken. “Neat.”
Nicole’s fingers danced over the controls, bringing the car to life and flooding the cabin with dim azure light cast by holographic displays as they winked on one after the next. With a tap of the control stick, they rolled away from the sidewalk and got underway. At first, Nicole tried to drive on the ground so they could eat, but after rounding the corner into standstill traffic, she decided to switch to hover mode.
“What’s the point of having a police car if we don’t fly?”
More than a mouthful of coffee scorched its way down Kirsten’s jalapeño-tenderized throat as the car lurched upward. Once the tears and coughing stopped and she could breathe again, Kirsten glared. She knew how Nicole liked to fly and stoppe
d trying to enjoy her food, inhaling the rest before she wore it. The patrol craft picked up speed and altitude, drifting through the layer of advert droids as it plowed a twisting whorl through the smog. Nicole banked corners hard, making the windows on the sixtieth story of several buildings shudder. Kirsten looked behind them, grumbling.
“If this thing didn’t have police lights on it, we’d have a Division 1 patrol car behind us already. Do you have to drive like you’re fifteen?” Kirsten rubbed her neck and coughed. “This isn’t cyberspace, you could kill someone.”
Her friend flashed a wicked little grin. “It got your mind off of whatever really killed your cat, didn’t it? Ooo, mind blast, really?” Nicole flashed a mock-accusing squint, then giggled. “That’s cool. No wonder Morelli avoids you.” Then came the sincere pout. “You could have told me, it doesn’t bother me. I think it’s cool.”
“Sorry, it’s just, you know how people get about mind blasters. I’m nowhere near strong enough to erase an entire brain permanently.” Kirsten examined her nails. “I never had a cat. Look, it’s not a big deal. Just a bad dream is all. Really, I’m fine.”
Nicole had known her for a few years and accepted she did not like to talk about that dream. “Suit yourself. Say, how’d your date go?”
Kirsten’s head slumped forward. “Horrible, he―”
“Oh, I’m thinking of going blonde like you, does it help with―”
Kirsten blinked at the scatterbrain next to her. “…ran screaming out the door…”
“…attracting guys? Oh.” Nicole offered her a sheepish look. “Another runner, huh?”
“Yeah.” Kirsten fidgeted with her cup. “The second I told him.”
“Trail of flames leading to his car?” Nicole shook her head. “Why did you tell him on the first date? You know they always run.” She looked away for a second before her brain switched gears again. “Oh, hey, did you get carded again or did they believe you were over twenty-one?”
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