One Man's War

by Steven Savile

  “You do realize what this sounds like, right? Whacko conspiracy theory shit, which of course I know is your favorite kind, but still… it’s a stretch.”

  “You were in that lab with us. You plucked the chip out of that biomech’s brain. You know this stuff works. That’s not conspiracy, my friend, that’s cold hard fact. And I don’t mind telling you, I don’t want to live in a world where one corp holds all the aces. People like me and you, we’ll be the first ones wiped. Our DNA’s all over GenX databases. They’ll turn us into nice little drone soldiers. Is that what you want?”

  I thought about it. The Beetle didn’t help me focus. I was jumpy and irritated and really just wanted to close my eyes and enjoy the high before the climb down, and the inevitable withdrawal shakes, pounding head, creeping flesh and all the not-so-fun stuff that went with the habit. The thing is, he was right. I don’t like the corporate system. I don’t like the way money makes our world go round. I don’t like the way we’ve ceded control of our lives over to these massive corporations and put our trust in them when all they care about is the bottom line. I feel like some kind of anarchist railing against the system, but the truth is our little crews, our four-man teams, feel like they should be a microcosm of what society ought to be, a team where we all look out for each other. That shouldn’t be so difficult, should it?

  “If I do this, we’re done, Fate. All debts paid off in full. We’re quits. I can’t keep doing this. We’ve gone beyond being smart. Now we’re just riding our luck, and that’s going to run out. We both know it. Going toe-to-toe with GenX? That’s suicidal. But you’re right, we’re a team. So, we’re talking one last hurrah. That’s the only way this is going down. I want that island in the sun, sure, but more importantly, I want to be alive to enjoy it.”

  “Sure. Absolutely. I’m with you, man. Growing old’s where it’s at.”

  “I said if. That doesn’t mean I will.”

  But of course it did. For old debts, for old friendships, for a clean slate. I understand exactly what the true nature of a crew is. I always have. Family. You can’t always choose your family, but you stick with them when the shit hits the fan. A gig needs all of the unique gifts we bring to the table. Getting out of the GenX Inc. labs was going to be no different.

  Fate was right for once.

  We just walked right on in through the front door.

  It was three days after Fate had come looking for me. I hadn’t exactly been in a hurry to leave Missy Tohe’s. I’d even broken one of my rules and taken advantage of more of the delights the Beetle den had on offer, including the lovely Amina, one of Missy’s girls, who was only too happy to try and blow the blues away. She didn’t exactly rock my world, but given I expected to die within a few minutes of walking into GenX, I figured it was better to go out empty rather than fully loaded, so to speak.

  We were supposed to meet with a new guy, Auster, who was handling contracts on the Former United States of America side of things. We’d never met him before. Which of course accounted for the fact that none of us had a clue that he was a she. A particularly well-dressed powerbroker of a she, in point of fact, who didn’t look all that pleased to see us. But then we had just walked into her office in full combat gear, carrying far too much equipment for a social call. She might spend most of her life surrounded by paperclips and hole punches, but even a pen pusher like Miss Auster could tell this wasn’t the social call Fate had pretended it was.

  She closed the door behind her and invited us to take a seat at the big table.

  The office was chrome and glass, sterile and angular. There were thirty seats around a huge conference table and no art on the walls. There was a giant screen at the head of the room, which was black, and speakers on the table that were no doubt for relaying the whims of whatever face filled that screen when it mattered. We, quite obviously, didn’t matter, and Auster made no bones about it.

  “I’ll admit I’m a little unsure why you were so intent on meeting like this,” she said, not sitting. She leaned on the mahogany table, putting her weight on her knuckles as she leaned forward, offering a tantalizing glimpse of cleavage. I’ll admit it improved my mood. “Obviously everyone here is appreciative of the work you’ve done for us in the past, but after events out in Africa, it’s perhaps best if you keep a low profile for a while, no? You’re hot, and not in a good way.”

  That was hard to argue with, but Fate decided it was his job to do just that. “On the contrary, right now is when you should be standing beside us, offering us more work, making a show of just how much you value us. We just walked into Akachi territory and walked out again with one of their prize boffins. Who else could have done that?”

  “Several teams that we’ve got on the books currently,” she said, bluntly. “And most of them would have made a lot less mess in the process.”

  “Easy to say, but with all due respect, you weren’t there. We did what we had to do, and I don’t mind saying we did a pretty a good job of it, all things considered.”

  “And you were well compensated for it. What do you want, a pat on the back?”

  I laughed at that. I was beginning to like this Auster woman. She had Fate’s number. Fate glared at me. Lisl Martagan smirked. Swann hadn’t taken his eyes of Auster since she met us at the door. It wasn’t exactly love-at-first-sight, but he was definitely smitten.

  “No, it’s all right. What I want is a job. A high profile job. Something worthy of what we’ve done for GenX so far. Something that says we’re your go-to guys.”

  It was a risky gambit, all she had to say was no, we don’t need you, and we were out of there, and we still didn’t have any idea where they were keeping Aldus Keyes.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said.

  “There are others out there who want our services, you do understand that, right? We’re hot property right now in the best way. There are plenty of corps who’d pay big money to have us on their side. After all, we know where the bodies are buried, if you catch my drift?”

  “Is that a threat, Mister Fate?”

  “More of an observation.”

  “I can’t say I particularly appreciate your ‘observation,’” she said. “But I shall take it under advisement. But the fact remains, there’s nothing for you to do.”

  “I beg to differ,” Fate said. She raised an eyebrow. I’ve never seen someone actually do that. “I happen to know that Akachi are looking to even things up with you. They’ve put a rather large contract out on GenX, specifically to get back their man, but also to put an end to the threat they believe you pose,” that wasn’t part of the script. Fate had gone off message. I really didn’t like the way this was going.

  “Is that so?” He had her interest.

  He had mine too.

  I don’t know what he hoped to accomplish, but he’d pretty much just told her we’d been offered obscene amounts of money to turn on her people, and what, precisely it was that Akachi hoped to achieve by hiring us.

  I stared at him.

  He wasn’t blinking.

  “You have my word.”

  “And how, may I ask, can you be sure of this?” She was fishing.

  He bit. “Because we were the first people they came to.”

  “Let me get this straight, you’ve been hired to steal back Professor Keyes and his Neurochip? Am I understanding this correctly?”

  Fate nodded.

  “And you’ve got the brass balls to come in here and tell me to my face?” She sounded like she genuinely admired his idiocy.

  I’m not afraid of death—it’s hard to be and do the job I do. But I have to admit, I’m not actually looking forward to the dying part.

  And that, right then, felt a whole lot closer than it had even an hour ago.

  I should have stayed in that Beetle den in Old Tokyo. Sometimes you don’t need to come home. Especially when this is the kind of shit you’re coming home to.

  “You have to admire that in a man,” Fate said.
/>   She didn’t seem to agree.

  “What’s to stop me just calling security in and having you ended right here, right now?”

  “Well, I’ll be honest, I was hoping you’d make a counteroffer,” Fate said.

  “Were you now? Well, I might just have something of interest, but that rather depends on you, and just how willing you are to commit to our cause.”

  The offer wasn’t what any of us expected.

  Or wanted.

  When she said how willing, what she was really saying was: are you ours, body and soul?

  We were given the royal treatment. Auster had an escort of ten men come to walk us down. That should have been a clue. Fate seemed oblivious to the implications of it, happily chatting to the woman as she led the way. GenX was the antithesis of Akachi’s facility. It was all sterile and white, like a new age hospital, white doors flush to white walls so that you wouldn’t have seen them if you didn’t know they were there. There were shuttles and glass elevators and a swarm of people moving through the place muttering. I overheard snatches of conversation that made precious little sense. One such involved bees and how the boffin thought he’d cracked a pseudo-pollination technique that would remove our dependence upon the humble bumble bee with a manmade corn-wheat crossbred. He seemed very excited. His partner not so much. But of course, a world without bees was something we were all having to come to terms with. It’s part of the whole evolution of the species and survival of the fittest. We needed to adapt, and that’s exactly what these white coats were trying to do, adapt. Of course, it was all GMOs now—genetically modified food. You can’t taste the difference no matter how many hormones have been pumped into your prime rib to make it big and juicy, and given the insane population spiral of the last fifty years, there’s simply no way a non-GMO world would do anything but starve.

  I followed them down, my head full of razor blade thoughts that cut into me repeatedly.

  Auster and her team led us to a secure area, Level 10, inside the facility. She needed to prove her identity at the door with a full body biometric scan. The intimation was that whatever went on behind that door was seriously classified, Eyes Only stuff. I wasn’t sure that seeing it was going to help our case.

  The door opened.

  Fate followed Auster inside.

  I looked at Swann. He just shrugged. The operation to repair his exospine had been rough, apparently. There’d been some serious damage to the vertebrae interfaces that the centipede legs anchored into, but the docs had the power to rebuild him, and Swann had the money to pay for a few enhancements to the rig along the way. He joked that he was Swann 2.0.

  We went in side-by-side.

  I don’t know what I’d expected, but we walked into a huge vault of stasis chambers, thousands upon thousands of them lined up, stretching as far as the eye could see. Behind the glass, in each one, I saw a face. Blank. Unknowing. Men, women, big, small, grotesquely obese, anorexically thin and all the shapes and sizes in between.

  “Our guinea pigs,” Auster said, proudly. “The dregs of society. Everyone in here has been judged and found guilty of some vile crime against humanity,” what she really meant, I was sure, was the corporation, but that was splitting hairs. “In here we aim to rehabilitate them so that they can become once again valuable members of society.”

  “You mean you’re wiping their personalities,” Martagan said, less than impressed.

  “It’s more complicated than that, my dear, but if we’re speaking crudely, then yes.”

  There were hundreds of them in here. Thousands.

  “How does it work?” Fate asked. It wasn’t the question that would have been top of my priorities—that would have been why have you brought us in here? Because I already had a good idea what Auster had meant when she asked how willing we were to commit to their cause.

  “It’s painless. They know nothing about it, believe me. We’re not animals.”

  “No,” I said softly, “but you treat them as if they are.”

  “Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? Obviously, this is meant to intimidate us,” Martagan said. “So let me just state for the record I’m not intimidated in the slightest. I’m not even particularly curious. So make your counter offer and then we can go about doing what we’ve been hired to do. After all, it’s only business, right? Nothing personal.”

  “Quite,” Auster said. “I have been authorized to make the following offer. I advise you to think it over carefully before you answer. It’s a one-time offer. We would like you to join us, to lead our team of Sleepers.”

  I looked at the blank faces in the glass cases. The one thing they weren’t doing is sleeping.

  “We have developed a revolutionary command structure,” Auster continued. You will become four of the most powerful people in the world, with an army at your disposal.”

  “An unthinking, unquestioning army,” Martagan said, cutting to the chase. “So why do you need us? Why not just wind them up and point them in the right direction for whatever war it is you want to start?”

  “The Sleepers are linked—even now they are in constant communication with each other, networked on a cerebral level. We have you to thank for this development. Did you know that? Yes, it’s amazing what you can do when someone brings you the missing link. Suddenly the gap between hope and understanding is bridged, and your dream of a drone army becomes a reality. So thank you. Without Professor Keyes’ marvelous invention we never would be in a position to do this. Now we have the means to control the neural highways and byways in a virtual network, all linking back to a single controlling mind.” I really didn’t like the way this was going. I knew what the offer was going to be before she spelled it out. It was an offer you couldn’t refuse but absolutely had to. “We want you to be that controlling mind.”

  And there it was.

  The rock and the hard place crushing in around us.

  The devil and the deep blue sea looking to drown us in a fiery ocean of shit.

  Or more basically, we had a choice: to be the fucked or the absolutely fucking fucked. It wasn’t much of a choice.

  “And if we say no?”

  “Then we must, unfortunately, terminate our arrangement.”

  The inference was ‘with extreme prejudice, meaning a bullet to the head, which is how all the best people terminate arrangements.

  “I’m going to have to say no,” Fate said, moving faster than I’ve seen him move in years. He was behind Auster and had her in a headlock, the muzzle of his Vent HK01 pressed up against her temple before she could give the signal for her goons to attack.

  Or so he thought.

  There was a soft click that was amplified as it was repeated not once, not one hundred times, but thousands of times throughout the vault, the click followed by a steam-hiss of pressurized air venting out of the glass coffins.

  We were in trouble.

  Big trouble.

  “That is a pity,” she said. “I had such high hopes for you.” She didn’t move to free herself and showed no sign of discomfort or panic. “Kill them all,” she said, vocalizing the order for our benefit, I’m sure. It was effective. The glass coffins opened and slowly the Sleepers began to emerge from their hibernation.

  “I’m thinking this wasn’t the best plan you’ve ever had,” Swann said, beside me. Gallows humor. You tend to do that as a Bleeder. Making jokes about the inevitability of death is the only thing that keeps you sane after a while.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, “I think this is one of his better ideas myself.”

  The synchronized marching feet was unerring, bare feet slapping on the marble floor. It took me a second to realize these drone soldiers weren’t armed. Not that they needed an arsenal to take us out. There were thousands of them and four of us. They could tear us limb from limb, and there was nothing we could do about it. No matter how many we took out a dozen more would rise to take the place of the fallen. They’d swarm over us.

  It wasn’t the way I’d im
agined going out.

  That had always been a blaze of glory kind of deal, plenty of last-ditch heroics and snappy one-liners that made it look like I was laughing in the face of death, not shitting myself at the prospect of being drawn and quartered by a zombie horde.

  How did you take out several thousand mindless warriors all at once?

  I wish I knew.

  Fate had his own ideas.

  He pulled the trigger.

  The side of Auster’s head opened up, spraying blood, bone, and gristle across the nearest Sleeper as her body buckled in his arms.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  But it made sense: if she was controlling the army with her mind the only way to call them off was to sever the connection. Killing her was the fastest way to do that.

  Some of the slop from her brain landed at my feet with a wet squelch.

  I looked down at it, then up at the nearest Sleeper, hoping to hell the lights had gone out in its head.

  It stared back at me blindly.

  I looked at Fate.

  He was grinning like an idiot.

  He seemed to have completely forgotten that a dozen of the men who’d accompanied us down here to Level 10’s glass coffins weren’t tied to the hive mind.

  This wasn’t what we’d planned. Not even remotely. We’d just made some very bad enemies. We’d fucked up any chance we had of coming good as far as Akachi’s objectives went, and we’d painted a big target on our backs as far as GenX were concerned. We were running out of allies. We’d got Ayako-Mizuki out in Asia, who were all about reaching for the sun if you swallowed the corporate line. Their focus was off-world exploration. Not sure where we could fit in there. Then there was Warwulf-Blaze, commodity traders who basically ruled Fortress Europe. Avalon, a security corporation set up in a no longer Great Britain, which was probably our last real shot at a lasting friendship, but that meant rain and lots of it, steel grey skies and constant depression, but that was better than the afterlife, or Kuznetzov, energy solutions operating out of the autocratic Russian Steppes and then we were shit out of luck, and out of friendly corps. We were making enemies far too quickly.