Dead Man Dreaming

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  Even now, though lying inert on his slab, Chico’s mind was active. His handlers had shut his limbs down and suppressed his remaining biological functions to restrain him. Even thus incapacitated, his brain hummed and buzzed along as if nothing at all was amiss. Every attempt to suppress his neurological activity got thwarted by Nonna, who was now wholly subverted by the Laura template’s machinations. The people working at his side would never know it, but it was only a matter of time before Chico restarted his systems and woke up a free man.

  Fate intervened to help him. The first explosion almost went unnoticed. External feedback was limited to biological signals while his main systems remained on shutdown. He could not hear, but his skin registered a shuddering jolt that was just as likely someone dragging a table across the floor next to him as it was the detonation of demo charges in the main records archives.

  The second explosion was sharper and more readily detected. Alarms and shouting followed. His auditory gain was nearly non-existent, but if he had to guess he would say people were arguing above his body. Then the power flickered, and Chico Garibaldi came back to life.

  The back-up power kicked on less than one second after the main feeds went down. This briefest instant of failure was almost imperceptible to the confused people shouting and gesticulating around the body on the slab. In the universe of dueling electronic signals, it was a far more noticeable lapse. Six hundred milliseconds was an eternity in the realm of software, and it was more than enough time for Nonna to start Chico’s boot cycle. Nonna was clever, and the first system to come online was his suite of electronic countermeasures. Not waiting for a command, Nonna immediately started the Wraith macro and all the electronic windows that allowed Sinclair and Watanabe to manipulate his body slammed shut with the crash of digital static.

  Now isolated, other systems began to shake off their electronic shackles and the body stirred. His auditory systems crackled to life and he could hear Sinclair shouting to someone nearby about safety protocols. A third explosion shook the room, and this time Chico knew it was a demo charge. There was a feel to high-yield military explosives that other more mundane industrial blasts could not duplicate.

  Strength suffused his limbs as Nonna overpowered the software keeping them inert. The black veil of his blindness began to blink with a boot screen and scrolling diagnostics. Soon the room around Chico snapped into stark focus with the coruscating digital cacophony of the labs electronics overlaid in streaks of neon. The Wraith illuminated all the electronic noise of the burgeoning catastrophe in red and orange echoes of alarm systems perforated by blue-white darts of frantic comms traffic.

  There was Lania’s voice, both audible as noise and visible as a comm transmission. “What the hell is happening, Bob?”

  The response came quickly, and one of the shadows in his mind found the perfect modulation of both voice and signal intriguing. “An explosion in the archives and another near the main power control relay. Back-ups are already online and the archives duplicated. Nothing to worry about, Doctor. Please ensure the unit is secure.”

  The Wraith showed Bob to be a liar. Several encrypted comms channels were rife with the sounds of gunfire and the shouts of men fighting. The lab was being attacked.

  “The unit is fine, Bob. Total shutdown.”

  Chico smiled. The unit was not fine, and the shutdown was far from total. His captors would never know that, though. The Wraith made sure the technicians saw only what Nonna wanted them to.

  Though many of his internal systems were not yet fully restored, Chico and his chorus of ghosts all agreed that it was time to move. The cyborg exploded from the slab with all the power his mechanical limbs could muster. The speed of the Gunslinger was still unavailable because Nonna needed the electronic countermeasures of the Wraith to keep his captors from reasserting control of his limbs. Even without the boost from his favorite macro, Chico’s speed exceeded anything the crowd of technicians could hope to contend with. What he lost in haste, the Wraith made up for with stealth features. It could not hide him from scans if he was not wearing his coat, but it was very good at spoofing inaccurate parameters to the scanners that found him. He was not so much invisible, as that was simply not possible given the state of modern security scanners. Nevertheless, when the Wraith scrambled spying devices Chico was extremely hard to track. He appeared to scanners as a shifting set of random characteristics, the indistinct and unreliable image of a ghost. This was more often than not sufficient for the task of hiding his escapes.

  Urged into prudence by one of his ghosts, Chico ignored all the shrieking people and ran. He ran straight to his remaining gun and his clothes, secured them, and ran some more. Explosions continued to rock the lab, and the notable absence of security further cemented his suspicions that the laboratory was under some sort of attack. He wondered if it was Tank, but he did not have the time to investigate that possibility.

  Nonna pushed a comm signal to the front of his HUD and Chico grunted at the displayed information. Bob was moving to intercept, and more than one voice in his head told him to avoid the strange man. Roger wanted to fight, his desire a volcano of aggression rushing to the top of Chico’s subconscious with a clarity that rivaled the dream state. Chico ignored it, acknowledging the cold feeling of doubt in his guts that must have come from the other two. Something about Bob made them all very nervous, and Chico valued his escape more than the opportunity to take a swing at the mysterious man.

  Thus, the naked cyborg flew down the corridors of the lab with his clothes and weapon clutched in a tight bundle against his chest. People scurried away from him as he ran, and no one dared bar his path. A single blast door tried to delay him, but it had been designed to keep people out, not in. The Wraith needed only a few scant seconds to locate the locking circuit and Chico found himself suddenly aware of how to ground the connection and release the clamps.

  Again, he sprinted. He tore through the factory level and past the bewildered potato farmers. Alarms still blared their furious shrieks and emergency crews ran back and forth adding to the general confusion. If anyone up there felt inclined to question why a naked man with bionic limbs was running across the production floor, Chico encountered none of them. Like his previous escape the killer simply accelerated when he saw the sky and was soon streaking across the open space between himself and New Boston. He could be in Dockside in under an hour if he held his current pace, yet he decided to stop and get dressed once he was a few miles away from the lab. His coat would keep the prying eyes of drones from locking onto him and he felt ridiculous running around with his bits and pieces flapping in the breeze. He needed to shut the Wraith down and rest his mind as well. He had been running the macro for almost eighteen minutes and the familiar light-headedness of vertigo was affecting his gait.

  Outside the agricultural zone and past the wind farms, he noticed a smattering of ancient industrial buildings that marked the very southern edge of Big Woo. He found one with the lights still on and approached it cautiously.

  He needed a place to hole up, rest, and maybe recharge. His needs did not mean he was going to risk being spotted though. He made two broad circuits of the gray edifice, letting his scanners and AI have a good look at the place. He was glad he did so as the security system proved to be far more robust than he might have guessed from the building’s otherwise pedestrian appearance. His scans also revealed that the building housed a small manufacturing facility. It had sufficient power and tools to recharge him and ensure that there were no hidden tracking devices or other vestiges of his maker’s control still within him. It was far too tempting to pass up.

  He turned his thoughts to the building’s defenses first. Numerous alcoves hid powerful autocannons, all the main approach vectors were mined, and he had scanned at least one EMP emitter facing each cardinal direction. There was enough scanning hardware and automated firepower protecting the ground level to give even Nonna pause. Whoever owned this building had prepped it to repel a serious attack
.

  From the ground, maybe. Chico perceived the thought as his own, but he knew well enough by now that the clever observation was not truly his. He suspected Torvald’s influence guided this observation.

  With a running start and a prodigious leap, the cyborg clamped vise-like fingers on a second-story window ledge and clambered to the sill. A klaxon howled when his hands peeled the bottom of the metal shutter away and bent it open. In a flash, Chico was inside the factory where the defenses were far less substantial. Chico’s bionic ears picked up the scratching and scrabbling of mechanical legs on the metal floor and the killer sighed.

  His pistol found its way into his hand without a thought, and he smiled at the slight warmth and vibration that followed the flow of energy from his palm into the weapon’s capacitors. It felt nice, like putting on a pair of favorite slippers after a long day.

  This is going to be fun.

  Chico did not know which of his ghosts felt so enamored of fighting a bunch of automated defense drones, but he was pretty sure he agreed with the sentiment. His smile grew wider.

  “Nonna.”

  “Ready.”

  “Give me the Gunslinger in five.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Mark the Mercenary was as good as his word. Inasmuch as he grabbed what was easily available, destroyed what he thought might be important, and then ran off like hell itself was on his tail. Roland and Lucia were somewhat disappointed with how little their two-hundred thousand credits had ultimately purchased. Since they were very much in the position of beggars, they ultimately declined to be choosers. With much grumbling and scowling, the credits were transferred and the meager haul handed over.

  Lucia’s father began an immediate and intense perusal of any project records and Lucia dove into the financial and corporate entanglements. Roland’s inquiries into the manufacture of Chico’s pistol were generating responses as well. Late the following evening, the whole team assembled at Roland’s apartment to pool their findings. Detective Parker joined them with his stack of warrants, and Kitty was present for security reasons. She sat with Elena Granovich on Roland’s couch, listening but not really taking part in the discussions.

  Roland started the conversation by tossing the mangled remains of Chico’s pistol onto the kitchen table. “It’s not really a gun. It's a block of capacitors and induction coils attached to a magazine and barrel. The power cell, trigger, and all the other hardware probably lives in Chico’s arm. It’s way beyond a PressPoint implant, folks. It’s an extension of Chico, literally. We can safely assume he will never miss.”

  They all groaned at this news, and Roland pressed on. “The housing is from a custom fabricator one of Marty’s guys knows, and the rest of it is made up of premium components from a defense contractor called ‘Claymore Components.’ High end shit for tier one operators who like custom gear.”

  “Pricey gun?” Manny asked.

  “Very,” the big man replied. “It would be highly illegal for both its power and lack of registration except for one problem. Legally, it’s not a gun at all. He could duct-tape the damn thing to his forehead and walk into a police station and not be committing a crime. Scanners don’t recognize it for what it is either, so once he sticks it under his coat, it may as well not be there at all as far as cops are concerned. If he wanted to, Chico could access the Legislative Authority Building with this and not set off the alarms.”

  Lucia chimed in. “That may not be far from the truth. This Corpus Mundi project is buried as deep as anything I’ve ever seen. Deeper than that ‘Better Man’ thing they tried to rope Dad into. It gets too fuzzy, I can’t tell if Corpus Mundi knows they are being used by The Brokerage or not. The secret facility is actually owned by AgPro, which is an OmniCorp company. The AgPro CEO spends a lot of comm signal on that facility, so I can only assume he knows what is going on there. If AgPro knows, then OmniCorp probably does, too. There is a lot of chatter between the OmniCorp CEO and Arthur Inskip, who sits on the Boards of both OmniCorp and Corpus Mundi.”

  “Sounds fishy to me,” Roland said.

  “It does, but we’ll never know. All of it is heavily encrypted, unfortunately. We might break in eventually, but our usual Gateways codebreakers won’t touch official corporate correspondence. Too close to illegal industrial espionage to risk it.” They looked to Manny, who held up both hands to forestall the oncoming questions.

  “I break into buildings and mess with municipal systems, guys. Hacking top-secret corporate communications is way past my level.”

  Lucia sent the magenta stripe of hair away from her eyes with a frustrated huff of air. “I thought that might be the case. Inskip does a lot of electronic correspondence. It seems he hasn’t left his penthouse in years. He does most of his delegation through, get this,” she paused for dramatic effect. “A guy named Robert Robertson.”

  “Let me guess,” Roland chuckled. “About six-foot-five, dark hair with a widow’s peak? Fond of boring black suits, maybe?”

  “Got it in one.” She elbowed him in the ribs. “And here Dad told me all you muscled-up types were dumb!”

  “I wanted you to date a doctor,” the elder Ribiero said. “Not GI Jumbo over there.”

  “Wait,” Mindy said. “His name is ‘Bob Robertson?’ That’s not even clever as far as fake names go. His mama hate him or something?”

  “Can’t say,” Lucia answered. “This guy is a ghost. He was hired five years ago from some no-name Ariadne mining outfit. All his personal info is up to date, but unverifiable due to inter-system bureaucratic hurdles. He pays his taxes, at least.”

  “Registered augmentations?” Roland asked. “He picked up Chico like he weighed nothing.”

  Lucia shook her head. “I thought of that. None. He even scans as clean.”

  “Maybe he just works out a lot,” Mindy remarked and pointed to Sam Parker. “Detective Dreamboat over here could probably pick up Chico, too. He’s not augmented.”

  “It’s possible,” Lucia squinted, letting her mind run with that for a second or two. “But I’m not buying it. Bob doesn’t fill up his suit the way Sam does his.”

  “No one does,” Elena called from the living room. Sam blushed and the rest of them politely ignored it.

  “Let’s table the Bob discussion and move onto Chico,” Mindy advised. “That’s the one who gives me the willies.”

  “Right,” Roland agreed. “Don? You got anything on that.”

  The old man stared through the top of his eyes at the group. “How much do you want to know? I’ve only just touched on what they’ve been doing, and it’s quite complicated.”

  Lucia said, “Start with the general stuff, and we’ll ask questions as needed.”

  “Mr. Garibaldi’s physical body is nothing too revolutionary. Corpus Mundi has always been at the forefront of prosthetics and this time is no different. I find it interesting that they seem to have abandoned Johnson’s techno-organic muscle and bone analogs and gone back to traditional musculoskeletal prosthetics.”

  “That’s what he sounds like when he’s being general?” Mindy rested her head on the table. “I’m not going to understand any of this, am I?”

  “No. I suspect you won’t.” Donald sounded satisfied with this result and continued. “Now, from what I can tell, this Dr. Watanabe has built wired neural connections in parallel. It’s been tried before, and the universal result was seizures and strokes.”

  “But this guy got it to work?” Parker asked.

  “Lady, actually,” he corrected. “And the answer to that is a qualified ‘yes.’ The project records show a staggering quantity of failures. Dr. Watanabe beat the problem with a two-tiered approach. She grew synthetic nerve cells and seeded the brain with them. Then she implanted a complex AI to monitor and to suppress excess brain activity over a certain threshold. The subject’s brain is still trying to have a seizure, but the device and the AI stop them as they begin. Excess electrical activity gets shunted to the new nerves, and either gets u
sed or allowed to ground itself.”

  “Huh,” Parker grunted. “So it works.”

  “The subject is still in great danger of brain damage, and I suspect they all go quite insane before long. But I suppose it ‘works’ in the crudest sense of the word.”

  “I feel like there’s more, Dad. What aren’t you telling us?”

  “I have to dig further into the records, dear. I’m still going through Watanabe’s personal files. But I think they may have improved Chico even beyond that. His test numbers early in the program are abysmal. Nowhere near what you saw him capable of. His neural synchronicity was barely sixty percent optimal. He could hardly walk, let alone run and jump and shoot. Watanabe raided Johnson’s ‘Better Man’ notes and came back with what she called ‘templates.’ The files were massive, Lucia. I surmised they were some sort of behavioral database. Perhaps a type of pre-packaged alpha wave pattern that could relieve the neural load in the subject or something like that. Truly enormous amounts of data and reference material, presumably for the AI to use when adjusting his brain function.”

  “Like a command matrix?” Manny asked.

  “I thought so, too. But the files were so damned big. Watanabe referred to them as organic, which made little sense to me until I found some of these files in the stolen records. This is where things get rather... complex.” He tossed the blond assassin an apologetic smile.

  Mindy batted her eyelashes. “Don’t mind me, Doc. I’ll just pretend to catch butterflies in my head or something.”

  “What were they, Dad?” Lucia did not like to be kept waiting.

  “When you look at the data as a whole, they aren’t anything. Just an enormous clump of codes and signals assembled on a big block of what I would have sworn was unrelated noise. I did not recognize them at first because they were too big to make sense of. But Watanabe had this program that would activate specific interactions within this cloud of seemingly random information. If you knew how to trigger an event, the data would assemble itself and signal its own connections within the cloud. Just a little nudge, and a single packet of data would traverse a linear and organic path from potential, to action, and back to potential.”