“It was pretty tense. No one knew who was going to go to prison or get black-bagged to some other planet for knowing too much. Eventually, a ballsy young scientist, the guy who had built most of our neural networks, decided he would nuke the rogue AI that I was carrying around in my brain on his own,” Roland smiled, “Next thing I know, the same crazy bastard who built my nervous system is sneaking into my cell with a computer, telling me to shut up and let him work.”
It was a long story that Roland broke down to its most salient points:
One late night.
One very brave man.
One very risky operation.
“Boom. Just like that, I was free of it,” he smirked an evil smirk, “and without their little fail-safe, I was real fucking hard to contain. I’m not a man you can easily keep locked in a cell.”
Lucia’s smile returned slowly, “I’ll bet you had a lot to say to your Army superiors about the whole thing. How’d that conversation go?”
Roland loomed to his full height and bared his teeth in a predator’s grin, “Superiors? Hah. Once the Golem was out of me, it was pretty damn easy to illustrate to the program directors that as of that moment… I had no superiors.”
He was embellishing a little; but not much. What had actually transpired was that the scientists who had developed Roland’s technology threatened to go public with what had happened, Roland threatened to kill everyone and everything associated with pulling his strings in the field, and the various elected officials who were just realizing what had happened threatened to cut military spending. Recognizing a complete cluster-fuck when they saw it, the Army dumped Roland like the political hot-potato he was, and fired everybody involved with the project. The planetary government then swore them all to secrecy under penalty of prison; including Roland.
It took six months of lengthy government hearings, several murders, and a government-wide cover-up to get an honorable discharge for Lance Corporal Roland M. Tankowicz.
“They still refer to my body as ‘defunct military ordnance’ in my file. But I’m otherwise off the hook with a nice pension as long as I don’t tell anybody what they did to me.”
When he finished, she stared at him, eyes huge with a mixture of horror, awe, and sadness.
“The man who risked his life to save me was Donald Ribiero, Lucia. Your father freed me from a life of slavery. So why don’t you tell me exactly what’s happened to him and I’ll see what I can do.”
Chapter Six
With Roland’s story complete, Lucia thought hard about everything she had just heard. She tried to reconcile all the staggering truths that had been laid on her with what she knew of her father. She knew her father was a successful biotechnologist and did most of his work with cybernetics and prosthetics. What she had not known was that he was part of a top-secret super-soldier program that made cyborg killing machines for a corrupt cabal of high-ranking military leaders. This was new information.
He had never talked about anything like that, but he had raised Lucia with an obsessive attention toward security and safety. She remembered all the ‘bug-out’ plans and secret code words she had been made to memorize as a child. She had been given martial arts and weapons training from the most prestigious instructors available; no expense was spared where her safety had been concerned. Her whereabouts, friends, and habits were all carefully monitored, straining her relationship with her father through her teenage years. But Donald Ribiero was a doting father, and Lucia never really rebelled all that hard.
Lucia had always attributed this behavior to her father just being an obsessive and paranoid wealthy man with a daughter he wanted to protect. Kidnap and ransom schemes were not unheard of in New Boston. There were enough desperate poor folk and ambitious criminals around to make any well-to-do single parent nervous.
Now all of that took on a different timbre. Now her father’s disappearance was, if possible, even more ominous. Had he been abducted by black-bag government operatives? Industry rivals trying to re-build this ‘Project Golem’ thing? What other crazy top-secret things had her father done that she didn’t know about?
The list of suspects had just gone from ‘fairly specific class of criminals,’ to ‘endless unspecified groups, corporations, and politicians.’ She didn’t even know where to start.
She quickly relayed the conditions of her father’s apartment and the incident on her way to the Smoking Wreck. Roland took particular interest in her attackers and her reaction to the mugging.
“You getting mugged in Dockside isn’t all that hard to believe. You look like you have money and you definitely don’t belong here. But something isn’t right. They were too desperate, too eager. They took too many risks just for the contents of your purse.” He scowled, “Someone must have the word out to look for you, specifically. Judging by the fact that you got hit twice in two hours, and by the quality of those goons in the bar, there’s serious cash behind it, too. We’ve got everything from high-end augmented criminal thugs to lowlife street scum, so I’m guessing everybody will want to take a crack at you.”
“But why me?” She almost yelled, “They already have my father, and all I’m good at it is advertising and marketing!”
“I have a theory about that. Have you ever beaten the crap out of two grown men at the same time before?” Roland asked with a raised brow.
Lucia was pensive, “I’ve never beaten the crap out of anyone before. I’ve had all the classes and training, but I’ve never used it on anyone.”
“Need another?” He gestured to the fridge.
“Sure,” she replied, “It’s been a hell of a day.”
Roland opened the fridge, grabbed a fresh beer, and without warning threw it directly at her face. It was not a gentle toss, either, he put some speed and force on it. Lucia didn’t even blink but caught it easily and cracked it open.
She took a pull from the can and continued, “The whole thing felt so weird. Is that what real combat is like: all slow-mo and surreal?”
“Not for most people.” Roland walked over and pretended to stumble, dropping his own beer can in the process. Lucia casually reached out with her off hand and caught the can easily without spilling a drop and handed it back to him. She looked at him with concern, “You feeling all right?”
Roland kicked the chair out from underneath her and it skittered across the floor with a clatter. Lucia didn’t fall or even appear to be off balance, she simply stood up smoothly as the chair flew away, beer in hand and entirely undaunted by the violent upheaval. She glared at him scowling furiously, “What the fuck are you doing!”
Roland sighed and put his face in hand, “You really aren’t getting it are you?”
“What?!?!?” was her frustrated reply. Roland shrugged and threw a punch directly at her face. It never got within a mile of her. She slipped it easily, with inhuman speed, and spun with dancer’s grace behind him. He turned, and she rolled backward, cleanly clearing the counter backwards and landed effortlessly on the balls of her feet, eyes flashing.
“What the fuck!” It was the only thing she could think to say. Lucia didn’t know if she was more scared or angry. Roland held up his hands in surrender.
“You don’t even know you are doing it, do you?” He chuckled.
“Doing what?” Lucia looked like she wanted to cry.
“I just beat the shit out of three androids and an augmented super-douche, but I can’t put a hand on you?” He continued, “You just back flipped over my counter holding two beers and haven’t lost a drop from either one of them.”
She looked down. She hadn’t even realized that she had snatched the beer back from Roland in the exchange. Understanding crossed Lucia’s face, “Oh! Oh… Shit.” She breathed limply, “Oh no.”
“Yeah,” the big man said, “Looks like your Daddy’s been tinkering with your nervous system. Speed, reflexes, proprioception all look to be waaaay above normal.” He took his beer back and clunked it against hers, “Congratulations, kid. You�
��re augmented. Welcome to the club.”
Lucia slid to the floor with a thud, “I’m augmented!” She began to breathe heavily, “That’s illegal! I’m illegal! Oh shit.”
Roland sat heavily on an oversized chair, “Relax, kid. Don’s not stupid. Smart money says there’s no way he put anything in his little girl that would get you in trouble. I’m betting whatever mojo you got from your old man, he damn sure made it undetectable; and since it all appears to be neuro stuff, there’s no real way to scan for it.” Roland waved his hand at her body, “Doesn’t look like he altered anything fundamental or added any technical stuff. Your strength and density are all normal, I’m guessing. Enhanced muscles, bones, organs: that’s the kind of stuff that can be easily found out with a scan.”
Roland continued reassuringly, “But it looks like he figured out how to juice up your nervous system without adding any hardware or tweaking you out. That’s some seriously high-grade shit.” He explained, “Most neuro augmentations need to come with additional tech to handle the loads. Just speeding up the brain isn’t so hard, but without something to help with the all that extra stimuli, it turns the guys into twitchy, tweaky, messes.”
He waved to the window, “Hell, half a dozen guys on this block alone will sell you junk to pep you up, if you don’t mind frying your brains like bacon. Too much feedback delivered too quickly taxes the brain over time.” He looked into her eyes for signs of brain trauma, and found nothing but clear, focused baby blues looking back. Actually, they were brown eyes, but that was immaterial. She had nice eyes. “Doesn’t seem to have been bothering you at all, except for your poor perception of how fast things are happening around you.”
“How do you know so much about what he did to me all of a sudden?” It was a legitimate question, so he answered honestly.
He smiled, “Time dilation is a bitch for me when I crank my reflexes up for combat, too. That’s normal. You’ve been so worked up all day that you’ve been dilating without knowing it,” he took a pull from his beer, “Your dad invented the system for interfacing augmentations to existing neural pathways. All that stuff’s in my head already. Hell, I’m the prototype.”
The big man scowled, “Of course, my body was built for that sort of thing. I seriously wonder if he didn’t figure out how to enhance your nervous system without all the… uh…”
“Hardware?” she offered, helpfully.
“Yeah,” he nodded, “If he pumped up your neural activity without frying your synapses, and then piggybacked it to your regular adrenal response, that would be pretty amazing. There’s about a zillion problems that have kept that sort of thing impossible, though.”
“He wouldn’t have done anything to me that would hurt me,” she sounded emphatic, but there may have been some trepidation in there, too.
“I think it’s safe to assume that’s true. Everyone seems to be going to great lengths to take you in alive, anyway. Probably as leverage to make your old man do something he doesn’t want to do. Roland smirked, “I know from experience that Don is a tough nut to crack. I’d put good money on you being leverage,” he paused, “Expensive leverage, to boot. I trashed about half a million credits in illegal android back there, and that guy’s augmentations cost well into the millions, I’m sure.”
Lucia’s face betrayed fear and sadness in equal proportions, “They must want whatever he has very badly.”
Roland was grim, “If he can really produce augmented people like you; ones who can’t be detected and don’t suffer crippling side effects? That’d be worth billions to the right people. Even more to the wrong ones.”
“But I didn’t even know about me. Do you really think somebody else out there does?”
Roland thought for a moment, “I guess we can’t know for sure, but that’s a good point. You may have just been a side project he kept secret. Something special he did just for his daughter.” He rubbed his bald dome of a head. The gesture struck Lucia as oddly comical from someone so large. “But yeah, Don is a genius and a master of bleeding-edge biotech. There’s a million reasons someone might want him… and you.”
“The way I see it,” Roland opined, suddenly very businesslike, “There are two ways to go about this.” He ticked points off on black fingers the size of bratwurst, “We can figure out exactly what they want, and use that to narrow down our lists of suspects,” one finger down, “or we can figure out who has been paying to grab you and start there.” He scowled, “I’m not sure which will be easier. I can start cracking heads and running down the usual sort of scum who would take this job without too much trouble, but I will have to claw my way up the underworld ladder to get to any usable intel. It will take time, and it will attract attention.”
He began to pace, “Or, we can go through all of Don’s stuff, and look for clues as to who he has been working with, or signs that any of the old players have been sniffing around lately.”
Lucia offered, “We could split up. You run down the criminals and I can go through Dad’s things.”
Roland shook his head emphatically, “No way. I’m not letting you out of my sight, pretty lady. You are one seriously hot commodity right now. If it’s as bad as I think, the only reason we aren’t dealing with more assholes at this exact moment is that people in Dockside are more afraid of me than they are greedy.”
The big man shook his head, “That won’t hold for long, trust me. Once word gets out of Dockside that you are here… and it will… my gut says we will be dealing with uptown and off-world muscle.” Roland punched his palm, “You can’t handle that without me, and if we lose you, we lose the game.”
He shook his head again, “Nope, no splitting up. That’s B-movie bullshit.”
“Fine, herr kommandant,” she sighed, “What’s first?”
“More beer,” the giant cyborg replied, “We’re dry.”
Chapter Seven
Roland was, in fact out of beer. This was rightly and fairly considered a catastrophe in Roland’s opinion, as he loved beer. Beer made Roland happy in ways many other things could not. First of all, he could not drink beer fast enough to get drunk. This was a blessing as ‘drunk Roland’ was a very bad thing. His liver was organic, but augmented to the point that he could likely drink rocket fuel without injury; and his kidneys were so suped up they could turn it into tap water.
Once, on a dare posited by his idiot cohorts in the squad, he had tried to get drunk. It had subsequently been discovered that if he power-chugged straight ethanol, he could get there in about two hours. Of course, the unit then had a drunk super-soldier with armored skin and a multi-ton bench-press on their hands. The good news was that Roland’s ultra-liver had him sobered up within an hour or so. The bad news was that Roland could do a positively fantastic quantity of property damage in an hour.
His CO had to stage an industrial accident to fabricate a believable cover story for the destruction that had resulted. Roland avoided hard liquor after that.
À propos to the current situation, there was another reason for the sudden need for a beer run besides his obsession with dark ale and Belgian pilsners. Roland needed to talk to the Dwarf.
So, after some preparation, they left the apartment and started walking. It was cool, but not cold. It wasn’t even ten o’clock yet, and the night-time crowds were just starting to trickle onto the dirty streets. Dozens of scruffy Docksiders emerging from squat grey apartment buildings looked like insects scuttling from under rocks and leaves to bicker over the day’s leavings.
Blue-white street lights sprayed garish iridescence over streets that Roland knew to be dull slate-grey thoroughfares under the light of day. But when it blended with the flashing signage of the hundred petty diversions that peppered the main drag, the resulting photonic cacophony was almost poetic to Roland. It reeked of humanity. It thrilled with the energy of teeming swarming masses of people.
Ninety percent of Roland Tankowicz had been built in a laboratory. He needed this place to be alive. Needed it like fish needed
water to breathe.
Every so often, a car would streak overhead, likely carrying some fat Uptown bastard to whatever whorehouse, drug den, or seedy dive he’d be slumming in that night. Roland knew he lived in the sordid underbelly of the great shining beast that was New Boston. Dockside was a densely packed forty squalid square block area reviled by the respectable folks who worked uptown. Located far enough from the Old Fen Way that that the big docking towers for the cargo shuttles that moved goods from the giant freighters in orbit didn’t spoil the views of the harbor, Dockside was the heart of the commercial empire that sprang up from the discovery of Anson gates and the fantastic worlds beyond them. Naturally, the folks in Uptown did not want to see that heart beating. It was enough for them to know it was there.
But when night fell, and the shadows were deep, the luminaries would come down from the well-lit towers to partake of those delights that could not be found in the shining towers of the Old Fen Way.
And there was no shortage of delights in Roland’s little corner of the city. A person could indulge any fetish, addiction, or depraved proclivity in the warrens of Dockside. Law enforcement was an afterthought at best, and a purchasable commodity at worst, once you crossed over from the Sprawl. Not entirely missing, but certainly not ‘present.’ For the right price, the police would make sure that you had no issues at all with the local color. For the right price, you could make sure the police were entirely blind to your activities as well. If you were very rich, you could get both services at the same time.
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