Dead Man Dreaming

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  Kitty ignored his interruption. “But I think I’ve figured it out. You just aren’t that scary, Chico. Sure you’re a crazy asshole who thinks he gets to own me.”

  “That’s not true!” he said, equal parts irritated and desperate. “You really shouldn’t talk to me like that. I just saved your life.”

  “Saved my life?” The strange laugh looked poised to return. “You were the only one putting it at risk! If you died tonight, my life would be perfectly safe.” Her face fell then, a deep oppressive sadness locking her bright green eyes in a morose frown. “But you don’t see that. You can’t see that you’re what’s hurting me, because you can’t hurt something you own.”

  “It ain’t like that, Kitty. I came for you because that’s what a man’s gotta do. All those fuckers were trying to stop me from getting you back, to keep us apart. I’ll kill them all for trying to do that. I love you.”

  “No you fucking don’t,” she snorted. “You love you. You aren’t trying to win me back, you’re trying to keep me away from anyone else. You can’t stand the thought of me being happy without you.”

  “I don’t know where the fuck you get off thinking you can talk to me like that, Kitty. You know I don’t tolerate no disrespect...”

  “That’s the funny part! You say that, but let’s be honest. Nobody actually respects you! Not even whoever attached all those fancy parts. What you are is feared, Chico. I’ve been hiding behind all these people because you had me so goddamn scared, when all along I could have just taken care of this myself.” Kitty placed a hand to his cheek and drew her forehead against his. Her face was calm and relaxed, her eyes glistening with sadness and sincerity as she spoke. “You are a very dangerous man, Chico Garibaldi.”

  Chico smiled at this and placed his good hand over hers. “I know, and I’m sorry I scared you. Sometimes a man’s got to be a certain way to make things happen.”

  The pretty young woman smiled back at the mechanical monster. She kissed him lightly on the forehead and said, “Maybe you think that’s how it works, but man, you really don’t know shit about women.”

  Kitty’s gunshot penetrated Chico in the one place where he had no augmented muscles or reinforced bones to protect him. At first, the killer did not understand what had happened. Pain flared white-hot and intense as a five-millimeter bead tore through his groin, glanced off his pelvis, and traveled upwards to perforate his bowel. He lurched to his feet, bewildered by the agony and confused by the string of alarms scrolling across his field of vision. The Medic macro loaded automatically, and Chico felt the dead weight of his prosthetics as they were brought to minimum power. Pouring blood like a garden hose, the killer sank to the floor of the alley slowly. A dozen internal systems pumped clotting agents, painkillers, and stimulants into his bloodstream in a vain attempt to prevent the host from bleeding to death. It might have worked, had a twenty-five-year-old Dockside working girl not risen to her feet, walked over to his leaking body, and emptied the tiny pistol’s magazine into his guts.

  Barney’s gift was not a powerful weapon. The reinforced muscle fiber of Chico’s abdomen was tough and difficult to penetrate, too. However, at this range it did not matter. Each bead drilled a neat little hole in his stomach and let more precious blood out of the dying sack of meat and wire that was Chico Garibaldi.

  Chico died slowly, his mouth working up and down in confused silence, his shiny black eyes fixed upon the face of his killer. Kitty never looked away. He thought maybe she was crying, but his failing optics made it hard to tell if those were fresh tears he saw on her cheeks, or just a trick of the light. It was in these last few moments that the voices came back to him. As consciousness retreated into the hazy gray darkness of near-death, the dream returned and in the dream Chico was again alone with his headmates. They had no advice for him this time, no insight for his predicament. Now they brought only recriminations. He had failed them all, he knew, and they hated him for it. One by one, artificially energized neurons in his brain de-polarized, and the sparks and lights of the three other templates began to flicker out as he watched. As each one died, the killer was forced to realize that he too, was dying. He knew because the dream was slowly fading to black, and dead men did not dream.

  Then, far too soon and not without a great deal of sadness, the dream ended altogether.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Half a mile away and far above their heads, the thing called Bob was running across a third-story rooftop.

  He had spotted the drones as soon as they were airborne. He assumed they were tracking him and he was not wrong. He had been built to be undetectable, and the hovering insectoid machines were unable to lock onto him with anything other than bare optics.

  This was still a problem, he knew. All the annoying machines really needed to do was report his position to Breach. Then the obsolete unit would be upon him. Bob was sophisticated enough to understand that ‘obsolete’ did not necessarily mean ‘inferior.’ The Breach armature was purpose-built for close-quarters fighting and heavy ordnance delivery. It was a machine made to give and take enormous amounts of damage. He respected the design, and not merely because many of those same features had been included in his own chassis.

  Bob had never truly expected to best the thing in hand-to-hand combat. Nevertheless, Inksip desired data from live field operations, and Bob had obliged his creator in this by engaging the Golem. The opportunity to strike at Breach while he was wounded had been too compelling to pass up. His assessment was that he fared about as well as could be expected. The diagnostics from his body told the tale of the fight as good as anything. The internal damage he had endured was extensive yet not catastrophic. There were more fractured elements in his substructure than there were undamaged ones, and much of his musculature had failed under the stress of trying to match the Breach armature’s great strength. Bob was not worried about the damage. It was all quite survivable and what remained of his body and systems would be sufficient to recover the Garibaldi unit.

  If he avoided another fight with Breach he would be fine, and better prepared for the next thanks to what was learned from this one. To accomplish any of this, he needed to get off the rooftops. Without active scanning, the drones required a clear line of sight to follow him. Slipping into the winding canyons of Dockside alleyways would lose the drones but make the task of tracking Chico that much harder. The obnoxious cyborg’s last remaining transponder used a weak and highly innocuous frequency since anything stronger would have been picked up by his AI and disabled. The device worked, though it had a range of barely one mile. Chico could move a mile in less than one minute if he chose. It was a pace Bob could match provided he knew which direction to run. The tight spaces within the warren of alleys and between the dense concrete slabs of old buildings would reduce the signal fidelity even more. It was possible Chico could lose him in that maze.

  There was nothing to be done for it, though. If he stayed up here he would end up in another pitched battle with Breach. This was untenable, so Bob slipped from a rooftop and dropped the three stories to the alley below. His landing shook the ground and cracked pavement, but the thing was off and running without a second thought. Chico’s signal faded in and out as Bob ran. Buildings and vehicles, lights and signs, and all manner of electromagnetic noise from a busy Dockside night obscured and interfered with the transmission. Bob moved in broad arcs, avoiding drones and triangulating the proper direction when the signal was good and inferring the route when it was not.

  The signal appeared stationary, at least. The unit had stopped moving, and Bob surmised he was either assessing his damage or tarrying with the girl in some untoward manner. As he slipped within two-hundred yards, Bob slowed and checked his tail for police drones. Finding none, he moved to the street end of his current alley. His path had taken him along The Drag, and he was not sure if stepping out onto the main street in his current condition would be conducive to mission success. His suit was in rags, and he looked highly disheveled even by
Dockside standards.

  Bob did not curse. He experienced frustration only the most abstract terms, so the sight of two police drones scanning the street was met with a slight backup of residual neurological energy in his personality matrix. It was unpleasant, but otherwise irrelevant. The need to make him invisible to active and passive scanning alike had meant his sensor suite was rudimentary at best. His eyes and ears were excellent, but he did not have the ability to use active LIDAR or ultrasonics to check the street. He could not see the scanning cones of the drones, nor could he eavesdrop on their electronic transmissions. He decided it would be best to move back into the alley and find a less conspicuous route to the unit. A quick check showed that it was still in the same spot, so there was likely time to take a more circuitous route.

  Off The Drag, Dockside was little more than a maze of hidden side streets and slender spaces between buildings. The Drag was always bright, its surface awash in garish neon signage and the flickering of three-dimensional holographic advertising. Moving a mere three steps into one of those interstitial paths allowed the darkness to reassert itself with a vengeance. It was in one such place that Bob turned a corner and found himself face to face with Breach.

  Too much concrete, too many twists and turns, and too much unfamiliarity with the terrain made the ambush possible. The first blow took Bob off his feet and smashed him into a pile of refuse stacked against a broken recycler.

  “Stay down, Bob.” It was a growl, low and impatient. Bob did not fully grasp the nuances of human verbal communication, but he suspected Breach did not really want him to surrender. Breach wanted him to fight. Bob was certain fighting was a bad idea, but he was trapped in a narrow space. He rose from the junk pile and took a fighting stance. Despite a powerful directive to finish the mission, he could not stop most of his brain from analyzing escape routes. His neural matrix was glitching hard at the moment. Too many competing directives and unnecessary subroutines were running at once.

  “Fine, then. Have it your way.” Breach advanced.

  Bob tried a toe kick to the inner thigh followed by a sweeping heel kick to the ribs. Both missed, and a counter right fist glanced of his guard to send him spinning.

  “Savate?” The Golem was laughing. “You don’t learn real fast, do you? You’ve got it all in your head, but no idea how to use it. You’re just going through the motions.”

  Bob leapt high, turning in the air to send a knee into Breach’s face. The big cyborg swatted him away with a right hook that shattered something deep inside.

  The glitching in Bob’s neural matrix grew more frantic. None of his existing protocols had a contingency for this situation. He was a sophisticated creature, nonetheless. Adaptive programs applied complex machine-learning algorithms to the problem. This would normally grow new subroutines better suited to resolving complex issues. Unfortunately for Bob, so many systems were being affected simultaneously that electrical activity was backing up and bleeding across his synapses. Unrelated protocols were being applied to the wrong subroutines, and correcting for errors began to burn through his available processing power. Back-up routines and fail-safes engaged to protect his neurological matrix by uncoupling non-essential programs. Yet for reasons Bob could not fathom, this actually accelerated his cognitive decline.

  Bob was not getting better at fighting Roland; he was getting worse. Attempting to index his vast library of fighting techniques was using too much processor time, so this access was curtailed. Because it required high-order logic and adaptive sequencing, his priority matrix lost the ability to distinguish between effective measures and defective ones. To protect his brain from total collapse, a simpler strategy was thus employed. Not unlike a person might, Bob adopted a fighting style that required no complex thinking whatsoever.

  His attacks lost their precision, and speed and power were substituted for proper technique. What had started as the methodical and workmanlike pursuit of an effective fighting style devolved into the flailing blitzkrieg of an untrained street fighter. Bob thrashed his limbs against the fixer’s black body like a demon-possessed jackhammer. He landed some hits but took many more. His muscles, so similar to his foe’s, tore and failed. His bones, configured like a man’s, fractured and bent. The runaway electrical feedback in his brain grew stronger with each passing second, and the fight was over before Bob ever really understood he was in it.

  Within the chaos of his frenzy, Bob got lucky. A poorly executed kick, driven from bad position and fueled by a power surge well in excess of his rated safety levels, made contact with a thickly muscled leg. Breach must have been braced on that leg, because it bent and twisted with a crunch, tearing a grunt from the giant cyborg. The Golem staggered and lurched backward, awkwardly balanced on the bent limb, and Bob pounced.

  His attack, performed without conscious acknowledgment and instigated by a tiny combat subroutine buried under his crippled tactical programming, was premature. A left hook like a thermonuclear missile caught Bob’s body mid-leap and hurled him down the alley as if shot from a cannon. He caromed from a wall at a height of fifteen feet and spun off to drop with a thud into the adjoining street. Dragging his failing body upright, he scanned back and forth to determine exactly where he had landed. Disorientation came as a surprise to Bob, a new and unpleasant experience made all the worse when an automated ground transport struck him.

  The driverless beverage truck smashed into Bob and threw him back down with an impact not unlike getting punched by the Golem.

  Beneath all the chaos in his brain, a tiny spark leapt the gap of a synapse and Bob grabbed the undercarriage of the vehicle as it passed over him. The truck, oblivious to its new passenger, traveled on without slowing. Each passing second moved him further from the Golem and each passing second found Bob’s priority matrix settling down a little more. In just ninety seconds, he was nearly himself again. He dropped from under the vehicle when it slowed at an intersection, then dragged his broken body to the curb.

  He was still running diagnostics when his internal comm crackled to life and the voice of Arthur Inskip filled his head.

  “Robert, your telemetry is most distressing. Are you all right?”

  “My condition is below field-ready thresholds. Probably inadequate to retrieve the unit, sir.”

  Inskip’s irritation sounded almost fatherly. “Forget the unit, Bob. What happened to you?”

  Bob rose gingerly to his feet, swayed, and took a weary step. “I engaged the Golem, sir. It was a very informative interaction.”

  “I assumed as much. You need to come in, Bob. You’ve taken too much damage.”

  “But sir,” Bob wanted to argue. “I can still locate the missing unit.”

  Inskip was having none of it. “To hell with that psychopath, Bob. He’s dead. It’s all over the police channels. We can build another any time we want to. You, on the other hand, are irreplaceable.”

  “I am very close...”

  “The Golem and a sizable contingent of police are less than a quarter mile from your position, Robert. Can you survive another encounter with Breach?”

  Bob paused. “No sir. Not likely, anyway.”

  “Then you must abandon the mission. I have a car nearby. I’m sending you the location now. Get in it and get out of there.”

  Feelings were strange and confusing to the thing called Bob. His desire to finish the task he had been given was powerful, though he could not say if that was due to programming or an artifact of the templates his consciousness was built upon. He wanted to go retrieve the escaped unit, but he also wanted to do what Inskip told him to.

  Part of him wanted to kill Breach. Yet another part, a strangely tenacious piece of code built from a difference engine, did not want this at all. That part was using a disproportionate amount of energy and processor power to exert control over his priority matrix, exploiting his self-preservation sub-routines to alter the sequence of his higher-order command classes.

  The thing called Bob did not have a word fo
r the strange implacable feedback loop that drove every thought in his brain toward the waiting car and the safety of home. But then again, fear was a difficult thing to define, and an even harder one to program.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Mindy had no issues tracking Chico, but it became obvious once Lucia’s firmware upgrade began to wear off that she was not going to be able to keep up with the augmented assassin. As her perceptions began to reenter a more normal state, the dull distant throbbing of her leg became an acute and fiery agony. The limp became a shuffle, and the shuffle became a slog. “Go on ahead,” she told Mindy. “Get Kitty away from him. Hold him off if you can but don’t get killed.”

  Mindy seemed relieved to be able to move at top speed. “I’ll be careful. I think he’s hurt real bad, ‘cause he hasn’t been moving fast at all. Just send Roland or Parker as soon as you can.”

  “Will do. Go.” Lucia waved a hand impatiently, masking her grimace of pain from the assassin. Mindy took off like a gazelle. She sprinted at just over thirty miles per hour, tracking the lightly fluorescent spots of whatever fluid Chico was dripping as they traced a nearly straight line down Dockside’s main thoroughfare. The path led to the mouth of an alley just off The Drag across from a VR parlor. The entrance to the side street was an uninteresting and unremarkable column of blackness that rejected the light cast by a hundred street lamps and a thousand neon signs. Dockside had hundreds of such alleys, though tonight this one was special. This was Mindy’s favorite alley in the whole galaxy because Kitty was walking out of it.

  Muddy, glassy-eyed, and looking a hundred years old, the pink-haired bartender stepped from the darkness of murder into the red and yellow neon light of a Friday night on The Drag. People walking down the sidewalk gave the disheveled women a wide berth, and not merely because each was armed. The air of fear and the stink of murder on both repelled any uninvited scrutiny from the passing citizenry. Furthermore, the sky chose that moment to wash the night’s sins away with a steady drizzle. The implied threat of a downpour hurried the steps of those poor souls still on the street, though Kitty seemed not to notice.