UnCommon Bodies: A Collection of Oddities, Survivors, and Other Impossibilities (UnCommon Anthologies Book 1)

by Michael Harris Cohen

I didn't answer. I just ran faster and faster until I was sprinting down the dock toward the end.

  "Isha!" he screamed, running after me as I leapt off the end of the dock and the wind lifted me up into the sky.

  About the Author

  Award-winning author of multi-cultural and transgressive literature, P.K. Tyler is an artist, wife, mother and number cruncher. In addition to literary fiction and Sci-Fi, P.K. also writes erotica and romance under the name Pavarti K. Tyler.

  She graduated Smith College in 1999 with a degree in Theatre. After graduation, she moved to New York, where she worked as a Dramaturge, Assistant Director and Production Manager on productions both on and off Broadway. Later, Pavarti went to work in the finance industry for several international law firms.

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  The Zealot

  by Christopher Godsoe

  Summary: Six months ago, Tobin Maldovan was in charge of a manhunt for an enigmatic hacker named ATLAS. He lost his man near the Canadian border after a high speed chase, but not before ATLAS pulled strings to transfer the woman Tobin loves across the country, hampering any chance at reconciliation. With ATLAS having escaped his jurisdiction, Tobin had nothing left but to follow his wife to California, seeking reassignment at the West Coast cyberterrorism field office. His reputation precedes him, and he has drawn the case pursuing a man the media has taken to calling "The Zealot." As usual, Tobin pours himself into his work, but the work becomes personal in ways that he never would have imagined.

  "You know, this would go a whole lot faster if you'd talk a little."

  "Maybe for you, Dru. But the more attention I pay to you, the less I pay to what's going on out there." Tobin Maldovan gestured towards the windshield of the land cruiser they were staked out in. "We're here to find out information. This isn't a date."

  "Don't be condescending."

  "I don't know any other way to be. I told you, I don't want to talk about my personal life. And since we're partners, and I don't have any information about our case that you don't, I don't see that we have a great deal to discuss. I hate small talk. I'd rather we do the job we were sent here to do. Is that all right?"

  Dru hated not knowing anything about him. It was hard enough for her to overlook his cybernetic eyes, glinting moonlight as he turned back to the display panel on their cruiser, but to not have any real glimpse of humanity from him made her feel like she was working with an android.

  She tried not to think about the bottle of alcohol waiting in her freezer, how much she missed the bite of it against her throat. Not given to confession, she wouldn't admit that the reason she was trying to get him to talk wasn't because she thought he was interesting, but because she wanted the distraction. Needed the distraction.

  "Look, there he is."

  Tobin was already out the door in the moment it took her to reel in her thoughts.

  Dru snatched her gun from the center console and dashed after him. She hadn't seen the man as Tobin had, but owing to his augmented vision, that wasn't much of a surprise. Tobin Maldovan was cold, had a reputation for being ruthless, but Dru had learned to respect his instincts over their six months together as partners.

  By the time she caught up to him, crouching behind a door frame with a decent line of sight to the office building on the opposing side of the street, her breath broke from her lungs in ragged gasps. Tobin looked at her with an expression of disappointment, and she didn't bother to defend herself. She was a police officer, not an ex Special Forces commando who continued to train as though anticipating a call to active deployment at any moment.

  Dru scanned the building, every window lit in the fluorescent blue-white psychologists recommended for maximum productivity. People strode with purpose along every floor, driven more by the prospect of unemployment than the choices in lighting, the third shift of some global technology empire that never slept.

  Her SideARM, a miniature processing unit connected to the displays embedded in her contact lenses, had already tagged most of them, their identities broadcasting through an encrypted wireless signal for law enforcement and rescue personnel. Translucent rectangles hovered over their heads, a menu with additional information sliding down if she focused on any of them for more than a moment. Far too many were augmented for this to be a random selection by The Zealot.

  A man walked near the windowed front wall of the building, and Dru decided to pass the time by reading up on his augmentation. Tobin could deride her for reading a magazine when they were supposed to be paying attention, but he would have no way of seeing her access the information on Mr. Larry Johnson's cerebral web implant. The implant, according to the file, was a primitive design, one that had been implanted in his youth as a means to "cure" his seizures. The implant had been disabled when he reached adulthood, but it still broadcast its signature, shouting to anyone with the clearance to hear and betraying his privacy for the rest of his life.

  Most of his coworkers had similar body modifications, the vast majority of them surgeries to correct some deficiency or restore function lost due to an accident. What a broken people we must have been, she thought, before science allowed us to cheat nature and fate. These people just wanted to live their lives, and the same implants that allowed them to do so came with hooks, legal provisions Dru had a hard time justifying at that moment.

  She looked away, acutely aware that delving into people's lives in order to alleviate her boredom constituted an abuse of her power. Her gaze landed on Tobin, to the translucent tag hanging over his head, and the sadness in her grew a little more.

  Tobin blinked. He never blinked, it was one of the things that bugged Dru about him. His cybernetic eyeballs had no need to be lubricated in that way, even if the shrapnel that had originally claimed his eyes hadn't also been responsible for removing his tear ducts. For him to begin again now must mean he was remembering back to before his implants.

  She thought about the animosity augmented humans garnered in some circles, and wondered how they must feel having someone out there like the man they were chasing. They called him The Zealot because his modus operandi included forcibly removing augmentations from his victims prior to killing them in an attempt to rid the world of implants, which he saw as an abomination. Tobin was an FBI agent, trained in hand to hand combat and trusted with the ability to use deadly force. If it bothered him that this monster was still out on the streets, deep down on some level that only manifested in his regressing back to subconscious biological ticks, Dru couldn't imagine what day to day life must be like for the people in the building in front of them.

  Many of the managers and team leaders probably lived in the building, better to be available at a moment's notice should the company need them. It felt like a cage to Dru, to have your existence so wholly owned that you could never get free of it. Little more than indenturement, she thought. It was no life for her.

  Then, the building erupted. The blast came in stages, the first report emanating from deep within.

  Tobin threw them away from the open doorframe an instant before it became a funnel for shrapnel, barely escaping behind a heavy industrial milling machine a few steps away. Hollow and low, the following blasts were more crisp and defined as the building exploded outward with fewer obstructions between the blast and her ears.

  Dru blacked out.

  She woke later to a concussion and ears that probably wouldn't be able to pick up silent conversation for days. She felt the ringing in them more than heard it, saw the shifting landscape more than she could understand Tobin yelling to her that they had to go.

  He frowned when she didn't move and cast her over his shoulder as he made their escape.

  The building listed to one side, though in her condition she couldn't tell w
hich. Everything blurred for the next few moments, bouncing left and right, up and down, with more sound than her head could bear. Mercifully, she blacked out again for a few minutes, only waking for good when medical personnel brought her back with smelling salts.

  Tobin was nowhere to be seen.

  Against the EMT's wishes, she climbed from the mobile examination table, brushing aside the automated scanning arm as she made her way towards the rising column of smoke a few hundred yards away.

  She found him inside the blasted out building, still holding its verticality by some miracle. Many of the walls were missing large chunks, but the overall structure remained. Tobin picked through the rubble along the first floor, walking a grid and scanning each section with his augmented vision. Seeing him, so uninterested in anything but the charred refuse on the floor, caused something in Dru to snap.

  "Couldn't be bothered to see if I was all right?"

  He answered without looking up. "You were fine. There wasn't anything I could do for you, so I came here to begin processing the crime scene while there are still meaningful heat signatures to pick up. I knew you would find me when you were up and around."

  Dru clenched her fists, bit her tongue. She reminded herself that Tobin was ex military, tried to make her peace with how he probably saw his actions as pragmatism, but it felt an awful lot like his not giving a shit.

  She swallowed her frustration, tried to think of things from his perspective. Everything he said was true, and the fury in her was clouding her judgment. She told herself that he waited around for her to wake up for a little while, then decided to work on the crime scene. She knew better, but the lie quenched her anger enough to push the red from her vision.

  "Fine. Yeah, I'm fine."

  Tobin looked up at her, and nodded.

  "Good. I found a few things that might be important."

  Dru, careful to not disturb anything of significance, made her way over to him.

  "Yeah? What did you come up with?"

  Tobin waved a hand in front of his face, as though swatting a mosquito. From that direction, slides of information materialized into her view, projected by her augmented reality contact lenses as though floating a few feet in front of her. She reached up, the miniscule cameras embedded into the lenses recognizing her hands and allowing her to shuffle the files as though real.

  There were spectrographic analysis reports hyperlinked to referenced locations in a separate folder containing thousands of images and videos. When Dru ran her hand down, scrolling to the bottom of the stack, she saw that it was being continually updated by the neuroNet implant grafted to the base of Tobin's skull, inserting images and forensic data on the fly as he captured it with his eyes.

  "Well, this sure takes all the fun out of police work." Apparently she was feeling fine. Her sense of humor had returned.

  "We still have our work cut out for us. There's always a lot of information at a crime scene, but very little of this helps determine if this psycho blew himself up or managed to escape."

  Dru sorted through the overlays, finding one with identified bodies. Partial dental records, facial recognition, and any other visual means of identification had already been applied. Dru scanned the identified remains, some of them little more than blackened parcels of meat. None of them matched their suspect, the man they had been tracking. The man they had seen enter the building.

  The Zealot.

  Dru could only skim the data due to the vast flow of it.

  "All of these people, murdered. Just because they wanted to take advantage of technology to improve their lives." She shook her head at the waste of life before returning to the list. A name caught her eye, but she couldn't stop the shuffling display in front of her in time for a second look, and had to backtrack to find it.

  "Tobin."

  "Yeah? Have something?"

  "I think so. One of the implants in this room is still broadcasting its identification tag."

  "And?"

  "It might be nothing, but the name is from a recent victim of The Zealot."

  "Let me see."

  Dru cast the document over to Tobin, who, after a glance, began stepping over refuse and corpses towards the Northeast corner of the building, near the entrance. He kneeled next to a blackened chunk of slag, and, after a moment of examination, picked it up.

  "This is the piece. It matches the description of the ankle joint that went missing in the Janell Sceptre case."

  Another moment passed as Tobin used his implant to pull whatever additional data the implant had to broadcast.

  "It's definitely the same implant. All the serial numbers match up."

  Dru made her way over to his side.

  "But why would The Zealot bring the implant here?"

  "Not sure. Keep looking, see if you can find any of the other implants reported missing as part of the investigation."

  Dru nodded. "Will do. I'll also see if I can locate The Zealot's body anywhere. Or, at least identifiable chunks of it."

  A smirk fought through Tobin's stony expression. The Zealot had taken many lives, gaining a fair amount of notoriety for his habit of removing any augmentations or implants from his victims prior to killing them. Or, in some instances, as a means of killing them, if the implants were life sustaining. Judging by the extent of the defensive wounds found, this process most often would be performed without anesthesia, yet no DNA or clues of any kind were left. Considering the state of the art forensic tools at the FBI's disposal, this was a physical impossibility no one had yet explained.

  The working theory at home office, and this was how he had been given his name, was that The Zealot believed in keeping the human body pure, and saw augmentations or implants as an abomination under whatever religious tenets he held dear. At several of the sites, crosses and other assorted artifacts had been recovered which bore out this theory.

  Dru lifted the carbon composite skeleton of a human hand from the floor, bringing it into a shaft of light that had found an opening in one of the walls.

  "Take a look at this."

  Tobin focused on it, furrowing his brows. "Another match, but to a different victim."

  Tobin breathed deeply, exhaling through his nose in a controlled manner. He closed his eyes and tilted his head down, an affectation Dru understood from their time together as his way of clearing his mind before forcing a large amount of data through his implant. He only did this when he thought he knew what had happened, a "hunch," in cop-speak.

  Dru remained still, not wanting to distract him from a potential breakthrough.

  The cybernetic hand in her grasp glinted amber, late day sunlight off of black composite. Something about it struck her as odd. It wasn't that the hand looked human, manufacturers often matched shapes to what they considered "classic human architecture", but the complete lack of blood or human tissue. The blast would be responsible for much of the spider cracking tattooed over each of the composite bones, but there should still be evidence of skin or blood, as the model she held appeared to be a common under-skin replacement. It wasn't a model meant to augment a human's ability so much as it replaced a lost original.

  And then, making one of those X+3.14=Colonel Mustard did it in the library with the candlestick leaps of deductive reasoning, she had it. She turned to Tobin, about to open her mouth when she saw that his eyes were already open, wild with understanding.

  Tobin spoke first. "He steals the body parts to build androids."

  Dru expanded his sentence as though their minds were linked, "....and then controls them remotely. That's why he didn't hesitate to blow himself up. I thought something felt wrong about that, it didn't fit his MO."

  Clapping, barely audible over the first responder bustle outside of the blown-out building, came from a darkened corner of the lobby they occupied.

  Tobin turned, releasing the magnetic catches running vertically along the front of his jacket as he did so.

  Dru watched, the first traces of adrenaline in her blood tri
pping the latent psychoactive drugs she took every morning as part of her police protocol. Each molecule of the drug was safely stored away in a membrane, only unlockable by adrenaline to ensure that the effects were only administered when the drugs might save her life. The drug, a refined version of Methylphenidate, instantly overcranked her brain, allowing her perception of time to slow. She considered herself lucky that the concussive force of the blast had knocked her out earlier, causing her adrenal glands to shut down and preserving the latent chemicals in her blood stream for now, when she could use them.

  Tobin’s jacket flew open with the centrifugal force of his turn, leaving a slight gap between the garment and his gun, should he need it in a hurry.

  Her position in the room allowed her to see the form approaching from the shadows before Tobin completed his turn, and, in that half moment, he moved into the light enough for her to identify the robed figure that they had spent the past six months searching for.

  The Zealot.

  Her mind registered everything, the momentary hesitation as Tobin recognized him, then the second instant it took for him to snatch the cling-bonded handgun from the contact patch inside his jacket and level it at The Zealot. The bullet, released with a snap by the electromag slide atop the gun, did not hesitate.

  The Zealot didn't flinch as the bullet passed cleanly through him, exploding the plaster on the opposing wall directly behind his head.

  Tobin lowered the gun without a second shot.

  Dru couldn't understand why Tobin had stopped firing.

  "What are you doing? Take him down!"

  Tobin's voice was calm, "Dru, check the thermals."

  "Oh."

  The Zealot was invisible to the infrared spectrum of her SideARM contact lenses, meaning that not only was he not before them as a flesh and blood person, he wasn't a machine, either. He was hacked into their vision through augmented reality, a digital ghost.

  Once they were all on the same page, The Zealot spoke. "I recognize that you are largely an instrument of war, Agent Maldovan, so I thought meeting you corporally might detract from our ability to speak candidly with one another."