Rationality Zero

by Guillen, JM

  I had seen how this could go. More than once, the Facility had sent me to take deal with someone just like Billy, someone who had grown into an adult.

  That was the stuff of nightmares.

  One day, his mom took him to the park. I watched, waiting for my moment. Eventually she was chatting up some other mothers, not paying attention. I engaged some of the tech I had docked into my Crown, and completely faded from the sight of anyone near.

  I scooped the boy up, gave him an injection so that he would lose consciousness, and disappeared with him.

  I was like a ghost.

  I hated that I had to inject him; but that didn’t change protocols. I had to haul him away before his mother saw, and before he got the chance to pull some Irrational stunt.

  It could be my life if I took a misstep. That or worse.

  Most Irrats first “awaken” under stress. It’s a well-documented fact, and it makes extractions like this all the more difficult. There are hundreds of accounts of a botched mission where the asset believed themselves to be in the clear, only to find that things were spiraling far, far out of their control.

  There’s almost nothing worse than believing you have some kid that you are taking in, and suddenly he starts speaking words that make your mind melt, sounds the rip into you like talons of blood and darkness. It can happen— that and far more.

  There’s a reason that protocols are in place.

  I ruined his parents’ lives forever. I check in. I can't help it. Eventually, they’ll probably get a divorce. The mother has tried suicide, twice.

  Of course, they’ll never see their son again. That door is shut forever. I took him to his handler. The boy they remembered was lost the moment I took him.

  His handler was waiting for me in a fucking black van. How cliché is that?

  I wasn’t a half block away before I received the emergency communique, across all channels. It was garbled, and wasn’t using Facility protocols. There was an otherworldly shrieking that rent through my Crown, garbled with static and electronic noise.

  It was the man in the van.

  Immediately, I had a second communique.

  Asset 108. It hadn’t been a system message; it had been one of the Designates. We require your attention. Please advance to the following coordinates.

  Copy that. I was already on the move, adrenaline souring my stomach as I raced back to the van.

  I hadn’t stepped three meters before the Designates patched the data to my Crown. Because of the neural interface, the coordinates appeared in my field of vision, a burning blue indicator of direction. Of course, it only existed in my mind, but it could be damned useful.

  Telemetry reads local Rationality at negative five and sinking. The Designate’s voice was calm, almost preternaturally so. Negative 6.

  Can you give me a direct telemetry reading to my Crown? I was getting close; if the Irrat boy was going to cause any large shifts, I wanted to know it.

  Affirmative. Be advised that non-local telemetry readings may vary by a factor—

  I am aware. Thank you.

  The Designate said nothing. In the upper left corner of my vision I saw the number flicker into existence, in a blazing orange.

  Then, I heard the screams.

  They were sounds that belonged nowhere in the human world, wet cries of agony and terror, unlike anything I had ever heard. As I rounded the corner, the van tipped up, over a foot off the ground, as something dented it from the inside.

  I drew the only weapons I had— two pistols with no real upgrades. This type of mission really didn’t often call for weaponry, and so I hadn’t spec’d for it.

  Foolish me.

  The scream came again, along with a bellowing roar that made my bones shake. This time, the scream cut off, with a sudden, wet finality.

  Does telemetry have a status on the operative in the vehicle? One benefit of the Crown was communication at the speed of thought.

  Negative. The Designate sounded almost placid, as if nothing was amiss. All Crown function has ceased. Asset is assumed lost.

  “Well, gloves off then,” I muttered as I took aim at the van. I had equipped packets that might help me here, things like neuralware that augmented speed and reflexes. As I didn’t want to meet with whatever was bellowing within the van, I riddled its sides with bullets, hoping to solve the problem before it spilled into the streets.

  That is not what happened.

  Instead, the front window glass of the van exploded outwards, in a shower of shards and slivers. With that explosion, amidst the sharpness and sound was…

  Bill Iverson?

  The tiny orange numeral in the upper field of my vision slipped to a ‘negative seven’ as tentacles of mist and darkness thundered from the inside of the van. There was an odd whispering sound that came with it, a sound like something that the mad might whisper in the dark of night. I could see eyes, furious eyes that burned with a feral hatred as the wisps of darkness coursed along on the wind.

  For a moment, they looked squarely at me. I could hear the whispers more clearly then, words of hatred and sharpness. I reeled backwards from the force of it, dropping one of my guns.

  “The EquATiOn is NoT cOmPlEtE.” The words were venomous, made my ears bleed. I almost stumbled from the weight of them, crushing me. “It is BeCauSE of yOur kINd. YoU wiLl rEPeNt, ManLInG. YoU wIlL kNow LAmEnTATiOn.”

  Then, the abomination that had been Bill Iverson swarmed around me, and the entire world was hollow darkness and fanged mist. Every place it touched my skin was a cold, empty twilight, and ten thousand wailings of the mad sliced at my mind.

  Then, he was gone.

  Rationality Zero, re-established. Baselines holding. The Designate’s voice cascaded through me, and seemed sweet, almost calming. I realized that I had no idea how long I had been lying on the ground.

  The target is lost. I looked at the van, swearing silently to myself. Do you want me to pursue?

  Negative, Asset. The Designate’s tone was neither encouraging nor damning. Your dossier is complete. I will give you the coordinates for debriefing.

  I gave the van one last look as I left, and shuddered.

  It is events like those that make me content with sometimes forgetting who I am. I couldn't live with certain kinds of knowledge twenty-four hours a day for the rest of my life. I’d crack in no time. Billy Iverson is just one example, and there are worse.

  There are definitely worse.

  3

  I stepped out of the alleyway, trying not to pay attention to the large doorman eyeing me as I left. I had been wrong. He couldn't break me in two.

  I, on the other hand, could make him disappear. Vanish and spend the rest of his life screaming. There was an entire world behind the one he lived in, a world that he knew nothing about. He did his best to seem tough and formidable, but he was a child when compared to even a simple assignment of mine.

  “Night, buddy,” I nodded cheerily towards him as I walked away.

  The man did not smile.

  The nightly fog was rolling in and the city was aglow in muted light. As I wandered I began to feel my way through the mist in my mind, looking for the initial portions of the dossier.

  Surely the data had been ported to me by now.

  As I walked, it was as if there was a blazing flash of memory and recognition. I smiled as I thought about the girl; the blonde I had been trying to remember.

  Anya. Anya Petrova.

  I didn't have the full packet in my Crown yet, but I could call up parts of the dossier. I would be in a three-person cadre: me, Anya, and one of my closest friends, Wyatt Guthrie.

  Of course they were assets as well.

  “Wyatt Guthrie,” I mumbled to myself, smiling ruefully. “We’ll be lucky to get out alive.”

  People like Wyatt, like Anya, were my real friends. That is to say, yes, I know them in my regular life, and yes, we are quite close, even if none of us can ever exactly recall why we are so close.

 
There’s simply a bond, one we cannot deny. It’s wound into our neural architecture, and we all acknowledge it, it our own ways. Sometimes, when “active,” we all have a laugh about the lengths our sleeping selves go to preserve the secret that we are all hiding— a secret that none of us may acknowledge.

  Our lives are vastly different than most.

  That was one reason why I knew I would probably never see Caprice again. She wasn’t one of us. She was a backdrop, an extra. She was part of my life that didn’t actually matter.

  Even if I did ever see her again, a woman like Caprice couldn’t ever be anything more than a diversion. Non-assets cause problems. If I were to even casually invite Caprice back to my place, she could a liability.

  A danger.

  This was all in my training architecture, of course, stored in my Crown. We were warned against ‘normal’ relationships, and our habitual subroutines would push us away from that. After all, relationships could create no end of problems.

  If Caprice and I were serious, I would have her over often. Sooner or later, she would be around and I would have a dossier imported to my Crown.

  The world would change, then.

  There would be no rhyme or reason, but it would be time for her to go. No explanations. Get out, Caprice. I wouldn't care what we might have just been doing in bed.

  Even worse would be her coming in unannounced as I stepped from my white room. There I would stand, armed to the gills. I might be wearing next-gen body armor, guns synced with my nervous system, or have bags of tri-polymer explosives. Depending upon what Facility architecture I had that day, I might be only partially visible, extra-naturally graceful, or have almost any other combination of odd, reality altering effects.

  And Caprice? Caprice will mean shit to me. Caprice will be a problem. Caprice will know too much.

  Caprice will have to be liquidated.

  God damn, but I needed a cigarette. I stopped at one of the small shops that make Nob Hill famous and bought a pack. I didn't have any cash on me, but of course my card never runs out. I stepped back into the mist, and lit up.

  It tasted like heaven. I leaned back against the wall of the shop, and simply enjoyed it for a moment. This was probably the last moment of quiet I would have for a few days,

  It's funny, because when I'm ‘asleep,’ I don't smoke.

  When I was finished, I walked through the mist, not really paying attention to where my feet were taking me. My mind was still spinning, and I had learned, long ago, to trust my subconscious in these situations.

  I usually ‘knew’ more than I realized. Already, the unconscious parts of me were shifting into ‘active’ mode. For a bit, I would feel nudges, small intuitions that were guiding me down the path.

  I had been trained for this. It was best to go with the flow.

  This time, it seemed reasonable to wait at a MUNI station. I smiled at the thought, and sat down next to an older woman and waited. The sky started to sprinkle, just a little, but we were sheltered beneath the station. The woman chatted me up about the job she hated, all the while obviously wondering at the man in the expensively cut suit waiting for a Nob Hill bus.

  I drive luxury cars, and I look the part. But here I was. Why? I wasn't certain. It was almost a reflex action, like kicking a stone when you walk, or casually fiddling with the worn button on your shirt. I knew I had free will; I could stand up and walk away from the station. But this was where I belonged, it seemed. I was right in the groove.

  I had a thought and checked my wallet. Yes, of course I had a bus pass. It was a weekly pass; I had bought it…

  When had I bought it? What story had I told myself when I bought it, and why couldn’t I even remember the purchase?

  This was quite typical. I might have been walking around with this pass for a few weeks now and not realized it.

  The bus wasn't long in coming, and had an ad for the newest late night spy drama painted all along the side. There was a handsome actor, holding his pistol, while a beautiful, red haired woman wrapped herself around his leg.

  I sighed.

  I stepped onto the bus, and showed the older man my pass. He smiled at me, genuinely friendly.

  That's rare in a city this size.

  I wasn't alone, of course. The older woman sat across from me and down two. There was a young couple at the end of the bus, and two skaters, next to each other, but each lost in their headphones.

  I sat, choosing a seat that was equidistant from all of them. I could not say why, truly, only that it seemed like my seat. I sat and watched out the window, idly curious at where I was going.

  We had only driven past three stops when I heard a Designate's voice in my Crown. As always, her connection with me over the Lattice was like a cold river of ice pouring through my mind.

  Even though her words could be coming from thousands of miles away, she sounded as if she were right next to me.

  I will be joining you soon, Asset.

  Understood, Designate. I smiled at a young boy who stood with his mother. He looked a lot like Bill Iverson.

  No. Not worth thinking about.

  Just the fact of the Designate “touching” my system with hers left a lingering trace of her in my neuralware— a ‘fingerprint’ after a fashion. As I waited, I pulled up her trace in my Crown, mentally perusing the data more efficiently than one might read a book.

  Hmm. We had worked together before.

  We never had any names on any Designate— Wyatt joked that they didn’t have names, that they weren’t even human.

  “You ever see one when yer in the pisser, Hoss? Ever see a Designate smoke or cuss or even get a little mad?”

  This was an old argument with him. I knew he didn’t believe it, and neither did I, but it was all part of Wyatt. He loved hokey conspiracy theories, and delighted in claiming that the Designates were all grey aliens or reptilians here to secretly rule the Earth.

  We laughed, and that made it easier. We both knew it wasn’t true. The Designates were odd, yes. But they were every bit as human as we were. They simply had more tech— far more than a typical asset. As such, their behavior was just a little different. Crisp. Perfect.

  Too perfect.

  That was what threw Wyatt, of course. My friend was a rough and tumble barbarian, proud to have little class. Poking fun at the Designates was practically sport for the man.

  And, well, when one added the fact that we didn’t actually know much about the higher tier Designates, or what their agendas were…

  “We’re here to save the world. Obviously,” I muttered to myself, and the young boy gave me an odd look. I smiled at him, and then returned to the actual thought at hand.

  I had worked with this Designate on a few other occasions, according to the records in my Crown. She had always given me high marks during debriefings, and was fairly simple to work with— as far as such things go.

  Although it was also true that the last time I had worked with her had been something of a small catastrophe.

  For that assignment, I had a much larger cadre with me. We were headed to rural Mexico to take down a small cult that was growing there, “El Camino Oscuridad.” It was the worst kind of job, and we took five assets with us into the Yucatan.

  We only brought three out.

  The group was centered around a young Irrat who had the somewhat unique power of granting other Irrational gifts— at a terrible price. Initial reports seemed to show that the young man could channel Irrationality and chaos directly into the mind of another, irrefutably shattering their sanity.

  Then, depraved madness would seep into the crack of their consciousness. Eldritch abominations from the shadows of the world would whisper lost secrets into the mind of the broken one. They would learn forgotten names that no one should ever have spoken, and master complex rituals and bindings involving creatures that dwelt in the astral tides.

  These poor souls were literally killed and born again, birthed into a life where they were marionettes
of forsaken monstrosities.

  The cult had a truly twisted cosmology, centered around numeric patterns and comet trajectories, but their entire philosophy hinged on one horrifying fact.

  The world as we knew it would soon end, in blood and horror and madness. They believed that only one-third of humanity would survive, and that one third would live in a truly blighted world.

  As was typical, the cult had the means to stop such a catastrophe, but this involved ritual slayings and beckoning otherworldly abominations into the Rational world.

  They had to be stopped.

  It had been messy.

  The Designate had assigned my friend and once-mentor Gideon DuMarque as the Alpha for that particular mission, and we dismantled the group in a few days. We lost two good assets while in the Yucatan, and there was more than one point where we thought the entire mission might go south, but in the end, the cult had been liquidated.

  Unfortunately, the young Irrat escaped. As far as anyone knew, he was still at large.

  It was not a good memory. In fact, it was exactly the kind of memory that made me pleased to live in blissful ignorance most of my life.

  This assignment wouldn’t be like that one, I told myself.

  But of course, I had no way to be certain.

  4

  We were almost across town before the Designate stepped onto the bus. She did not meet my eye, did not smile. The Designate walked with an inhuman grace, pointedly ignoring everyone on the bus.

  She was beautiful, but efficient, cold. She sat directly across from me, and nodded crisply.

  Good evening, Asset 108. The words were cool in my mind, like an early spring breeze.

  Good evening, Designate.

  The Designate was a mandarin woman, with dark hair that gleamed. Her suit was perfect, and she was beautiful, although impossibly distant. Her long legs were crossed and she was looking at her tablet, probably reading the specifications for my dossier.

  This was exactly as it always was. The Designates always met with me in the strangest places: a bar, an abandoned warehouse, or a greasy spoon. Once, I had met this one in a strip club in the Tenderloin. She had sat across the room, at the bar, while I sat with one of the girls. The entire time, she was briefing me through my Crown.