The Machine Killer

by D L Young

  The two men were young, sloppily dressed, and had the feral, half-starved look of fighting dogs. Pharma freaks, she guessed, jonesing for a fix. They shoved her deeper into the alley, their backs to the avenue, blocking her from the view of passersby, none of whom stopped or even looked in her direction.

  Beatrice looked the pair up and down, then rolled her eyes. “Boys, you really don’t want to do this.” Her voice was controlled and firm. A show of confidence might be all she needed to back them down. She didn’t want to fight. A fight brought attention, and attention was something you didn’t want when you were tailing someone.

  Her lack of fear seemed to confuse them. The pair shot each other uncertain glances.

  Beatrice stared them down. “You’re going to let me walk past. All right?” She pulled a sheaf of hard currency from her jacket pocket. “You can have this. All you have to do is let me by.”

  The shorter one rocked back and forth nervously on the balls of feet. The taller one rubbed the tips of his thumbs and forefingers together in quick, manic strokes. It was anybody’s guess what they were on. Home-fabbed narco labs offered hundreds of flavors. They were everywhere these days, and about as easy to find as a taco stand.

  She stepped forward, her hand extended with the cash. The shorter one turned sideways, giving her space. She slid by, handing over the notes. She’d almost exited the alley when a hand came down hard on her shoulder, yanking her backwards and off her feet.

  She flailed and fell hard against the pavement. They stood over her, their bodies tense, hands balled into fists. She sat in a rainwater puddle, legs splayed out, her rear smarting where she’d landed.

  “She’s got jewelry, I bet,” the shorter one said.

  “And those specs. I bet those specs are worth a shitload.”

  She checked the state of her clothes. Her pants and the lower portion of her jacket were soaked with filthy water, probably ruined. Turning her face upward, she gave them an annoyed look.

  “The specs are fake, you fucking amateurs.” She gripped her jacket lapels. “But this…this is Versace.” She stood up from the puddle and cracked the knuckles of her right hand. “Do you know how often a client buys me Versace?” The junkies sneered at her. “Almost never,” she said.

  The taller one rushed her and the world instantly went into slow motion. Surging adrenaline triggered designer neurochems, amping her senses, reflexes, and muscle strength. She caught him on the point of the chin with a punch he never saw coming. Her granitelike fist—the bones of her hands hardened by a series of nanotech treatments in Brazil—collided against his jaw, shattering it like a sheet of ice struck with a hammer. Her attacker dropped to the ground, a heap of arms and legs, the lower portion of his face grotesquely misshapen.

  Beatrice stepped over the fallen junkie. The shorter one’s eyes went large and white, his mouth hanging open in disbelief.

  Beatrice cracked the knuckles of her left hand.

  “Choices,” she said calmly. “Life’s a series of choices, kid. And the way I see it, right now you’ve got two.” She motioned toward the ground. “One: you can try to avenge your buddy here.” She wrinkled her nose, shook her head. “Personally, I wouldn’t recommend it. Or two: you can turn around, run out of this alley, and save yourself a trip to the hospital.”

  He was gone before she’d finished the sentence. She brushed her hands against her rear, straightened her sleeves and jacket tails, and sighed. “Versace,” she muttered at the unconscious man lying in a puddle.

  Minutes later, she caught back up with her target. The salaryman had parked himself at a ramen stand, a plastic cup of beer in front of him. The seat next to him was open. She sat down just as the noodle man placed a steaming bowl in front of him.

  He recognized her on a double take and set down his chopsticks. “You?”

  “Me,” she said.

  He noticed her wet, damaged clothes. “What happened to you?”

  “Slipped and fell.” She lifted her chin at the noodle man, then tilted her head toward the salaryman. “Same as he’s having.”

  The salaryman furrowed his brow. “Wait a second. Were you following me?”

  “Good ramen here?”

  He blinked. “Best in the City.”

  “So you’re on board, I take it?”

  He nodded slowly. “How did you know?”

  “This looked like a post-decision snack to me. And you didn’t strike me as the stupid type who’d say no.”

  He straightened up. “What type do I strike you as?”

  The noodle man placed her bowl and beer in front of her. “The type who’s buying me an early breakfast.” She grabbed a pair of chopsticks. “Don’t mind, do you? I’m all out of cash.”

  “Sure,” he muttered. “My pleasure.”

  She lowered her head to the bowl, slurped a mouthful of noodles. “Damn. Not bad.”

  The City teemed all around them, the noodle stand a tiny island in a flowing river of pedestrians.

  “So what now?” the salaryman asked.

  Beatrice slurped another mouthful, savoring the flavor. Maybe this salaryman was special and maybe he wasn’t, but he did know his ramen.

  “Now you grab a few hours’ sleep,” she replied. “Then we’ll go meet your crew.”

  6 - Target Practice

  After sunup, the mercenary woman Beatrice brought Maddox, bleary-eyed and sleep-deprived, to a section of the City near Pier 88. The place reminded him of the neighborhood he’d grown up in. It was that much of a shithole. Abandoned streets, silent as a graveyard. No pedestrians or ground cars. No food kiosks stood on corners. No holo women beckoned. No towering projected beer cans overlaid the crumbling facades of the dying buildings—only a chaos of faded graffiti tags. The separation of walkway and roadway was indistinguishable under a ragged carpet of throwaway plastics and sodden foamboard. The air was thick with moisture and the stink of rot. High above the low-rise structures stood the Twelfth Avenue Seawall, massive and towering, like some looming, disinterested god.

  The taxi had dropped them off five blocks short of their requested destination, its automated voice apologizing, informing them it had reached the limit of its service area. Maddox grumbled as he climbed out, though he wasn’t surprised. It was the kind of place automated taxis got disabled and stripped for parts in about two minutes. Dank, trashed-out seawall districts like Pier 88 were the City’s pocket anarchies, thinly populated by squatters and junkies and narcofabbers. As he stepped onto the walkway, Maddox’s specs kept flashing warnings about crime statistics and potential biohazards.

  He blinked them away.

  He wasn’t sure how long he’d slept the night before, tossing and turning until he finally nodded off, dozing for what seemed like a handful of minutes before the mercenary woman’s call had awakened him with a jolt, interrupting some weird dream about insects. Now she walked a step ahead of him, alert and taking in their surroundings. He stole a furtive glance at her eyes, the perfect irises a curiosity to the technician in him. He wondered what she saw with the implants, where she’d acquired them. Only the wealthiest could afford such enhancements, though even among the rich, specs were still the standard, the ubiquitous technology that had supplanted the cell phones and personal computing devices of a previous age. He’d once seen a news feature that attempted to explain the slower-than-expected adoption of tech that directly interfaced the optic nerve. The general reluctance to move from specs to ocular implants, a social scientist had claimed, was had less to do with its enormous expense than with the irreversible nature of the procedure, the huge leap of technological faith it required. Specs, after all, you could take on and off. If you got tired of one pair, you could toss them out and buy another. But once you upgraded to artificial eyes, that was it. There was no turning back. Very few, it seemed, were willing to take that irreversible step, to permanently connect their meat to the cybernetic.

  The hired fist Beatrice, who clearly held no such reservations, scanned the bloc
k, clad in black jeans, matching cotton undershirt, and a chestnut-colored leather jacket.

  “Next building on the right.” She motioned to an old warehouse, a dilapidated box-shaped structure sitting beyond an open lot of tangled weeds. Twists of steel rebar poked out from the overgrowth, hinting at the remains of a concrete foundation, hidden like some long-forgotten corpse.

  “You pick this location?” Maddox asked.

  She nodded. “Seemed out of the way enough. Street cams around here were torn down years ago. Cops never bothered to replace them.”

  “So where’d you find this crew?” Maddox asked.

  “I didn’t,” she said.

  “Then who did?”

  “Big boss man.”

  Maddox stopped. “An executive vice president handpicked a crew for a datajacking job?”

  She shrugged. “I know. Doesn’t smell right to me either.”

  “Did you ask him where he found them?”

  “Of course I asked. He didn’t want to give it up.”

  “So how’d he find you, then?”

  She hesitated. “I came highly recommended.”

  He didn’t bother pursuing it, sensing she knew as little about the gig as he did. And the more he learned, the less he liked, not that he’d liked it much in the first place. In his former life, Rooney had always handpicked the crews with great care, tapping only the most reliable, least-likely-to-screw-you-over types from across the City. Everybody knew Rooney. Everybody wanted to work with him. He was well liked, trusted.

  It had been a couple years since Rooney’s death. On some days the sense of loss felt distant and diminished with the passing of time. Maddox supposed that meant he was finally getting over it, though a part of him knew it was something he’d always carry, a disease in his veins, a sickness he was fated to live with but had no cure. On this particular morning, he was keenly aware of the void inside, the dread weighing down his soul. It was the job, he suspected, the way he was already thinking about how to approach it. Synapses firing down long-dormant, almost-forgotten pathways. Before every job, he and Rooney had always bounced ideas off of each other, weighing pros and cons of different intrusion apps and cloaking algorithms and so on. Now he had only himself to confer with.

  No, you don’t, boyo.

  Maddox smiled inwardly. The voice in his head wasn’t a ghost, he knew that. It was only a fabrication of his own damaged psyche, like a hologram that looked real but wasn’t, projected from the broken place inside him. Still, he didn’t mind that he couldn’t control when it came and went, that its presence meant some part of his brain had rewired itself to madness. If a bit of insanity kept a piece of Rooney alive and with him, then so be it. Everybody had some craziness they lived with, some inexplicable lunacy. At least his was a friend.

  They reached the warehouse, entered, and went up the stairs. Fallen plaster littered the steps, ancient and yellow and thin as rice paper. A few stubborn holdouts still clung to the walls in small, irregular patches. The exposed gray brick glistened with condensation.

  She took him to a room on the second level, a kind of balcony jutting out over the warehouse floor. A perch where supervisors had once watched over the workers. In the room they found the two others, a man and a kid.

  The man looked to be in his late forties, thick around the middle, olive-skinned, with a wide nose and shrewd eyes. He sported a pencil-thin mustache across his upper lip, his hair pulled back into a ponytail that hung just below his collar, its too-black-for-nature color a cheap dye job. He wore a gray suit with no shirt underneath, a trend Maddox saw lately around the dodgier edges of his neighborhood. Below the neck, the man’s torso was covered in tattoos, not a square centimeter of bare skin visible. As he rose from a folding chair, removing his specs and striding over, the nano-inked artwork came alive with animation. A twisting snake, a blinking lemon-sized eye. A wide grin flashed across the man’s face.

  “Chico Lozano,” the man said in a husky voice, a hustler’s twinkle in his eye. “At your service.” The man grinned at him like a broke pimp meeting a rich john. Everything about Lozano shouted low-rent hustler. He struck Maddox as the kind of greasy hood you saw selling knockoff watches out of a suitcase or trying to hook passersby outside of a sex show. Lozano extended a hand, and Maddox didn’t take it, lighting a cigarette instead. The hustler’s smile vanished at the snub.

  “So tell me, Lozano,” Maddox said, blowing smoke, “how exactly did you get roped into this gig?”

  “Did some off the books freelancing for the company a couple years back.” The hustler’s grin returned as he shrugged immodestly. “What can I say? They must have liked my work.”

  Maddox drew on his cigarette. “And what work would that be, exactly?”

  Lozano lifted his chin proudly. “I’m in the supply business. I get things for people. Weapons, jacking gear, narcotics. If you can name it, I can find it. You wanna stay awake for four days, I know a guy. You want the best datajacking gear in town, you call me.” He tapped his tattooed chest with a thumb. “Whatever you need, Chico Lozano can get it for you.”

  “Great,” Maddox said without enthusiasm.

  The kid, who hadn’t spoken a word yet, leaned against the balcony rail. Maddox looked the boy over. Bone-skinny and grimy-faced, his ragged clothes a couple sizes too big, the kid was pure street. His toffee skin, narrow eyes, and wide cheekbones suggested Korean heritage. “And who might you be?”

  “Tommy Park.”

  Maddox turned to Beatrice, raised his eyebrows. “What’s his story?”

  “Figured we might need a runner,” she said. “The kid came highly—”

  “Highly recommended,” Maddox interrupted. “Yeah, yeah.”

  “You really a datajacker, bruh?” The kid looked Maddox up and down.

  Maddox smoked. “I’m a security analyst.”

  Lozano slapped the kid on the back of the head. “Talk to the man with respect, boy. He’s not your bruh.”

  Tommy rubbed his head. “Hey! That hurt, asshole.” He turned again to Maddox. “I was hopin’ you could show me some stuff. Like maybe I could plug in and watch you work, pick up some tips and such.”

  Lozano slapped the kid again, harder. Tommy stumbled forward. “I had to listen to this nonsense for an hour already,” Lozano complained. “The kid thinks you’re going to show him the ropes. Teach him to be some hotshot jacker.” He made his hands into chatty puppets. “Won’t keep his mouth shut about it.”

  Tommy glared at the hustler. “Touch me again, fat-ass, and I’ll put a hole through ya.”

  “Haha!” Lozano laughed. “The little mouse makes a threat. I’m shitting my pantalones.”

  Maddox squeezed his eyes shut, pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. This was what he had to work with: a grimy street kid, a greasy hustler, and a tight-lipped musclewoman. Not exactly a dream crew, this bunch. What the hell had he signed up for?

  “So why don’t you, then?” Beatrice said, her voice raised.

  Tommy and Lozano stopped bickering and turned to her in unison. “Why not what?” Tommy asked.

  “Put a hole in him,” she answered.

  She removed a snub-nosed pistol from her jacket, then tilted her head toward Lozano. “You don’t have to take that shit from him, kid.” She held out the gun.

  The kid stared at the pistol, a carbon fiber Ruger, with wide, disbelieving eyes.

  “Hey,” Lozano protested. “Come on, now. It was just a little slap. To teach the kid some manners.” He laughed nervously, like he wasn’t sure if the woman was serious or not.

  Maddox didn’t see any humor in her artificial eyes. He flicked his cigarette off the balcony, and it landed with a soft hiss in a puddle of brown water.

  The kid stared at the gun and took a cautious step forward, a vengeful smile creasing his face.

  “Hey, Miss Beatrice!” Lozano pleaded, showing his palms and backing up a step. “You gonna do me over a slap to some stupid kid?” When she said
nothing in reply, he turned to Maddox. “I got connections, Mr. Maddox. All over the City. You tell me what you want, Chico can get it for you.”

  Tommy lunged for the Ruger. Beatrice snatched it away, leaving the kid empty-handed and staring at her like he’d just been robbed of chocolate cake on his birthday.

  “On second thought,” she said, “maybe we ought to see how well you can handle this before we let you use it.”

  The kid looked at her, confused.

  Motioning toward the emptiness of the warehouse floor, Beatrice said, “See that light fixture?” At the far end of the building, a rusted cage hung suspended from the ceiling, the last survivor of dozens of wire metal fixtures that had once illuminated the cavernous space. “One shot,” she continued, then handed the gun over to the kid.

  Tommy lifted his chin. “No worries.” Stepping to the edge of the room, he raised the gun. Lozano took a step backward, beads of sweat on his forehead and upper lip. Maddox watched the kid, noted the poor stance, the amateur’s grip. Tommy squeezed the trigger and nothing happened.

  “Safety,” Maddox and Beatrice said at the same time.

  “Oh, yeah, yeah, right.” The kid searched one side of the gun, then the other. He glanced over at Beatrice. “You sure it has one?”

  “Left side,” Beatrice called. “Little lever with a red dot.” Maddox thought he heard a note of suppressed laughter in her voice.

  “Got it, got it.” The kid flicked the safety, aimed again. He fired and the light fixture didn’t move. Cheeks reddening, he glance over at the mercenary woman. “One more?”

  Beatrice shook her head. “Hand it over.”

  The kid’s shoulders slumped. He returned the Ruger. “You weren’t really gonna let me shoot him, were you?”

  “Guess we’ll never find out.” Beatrice waved Lozano over. “All right. You’re up. One shot.”

  The hustler approached, smiling stiffly and making a generally poor show of pretending he knew all along she hadn’t been serious. “Sure. Let Chico show the kid how it’s done.” He took the gun, looked it over, then moved his eyes to Beatrice, fixing her with a hard stare.