The Harmony Paradox

by Matthew S. Cox

  ‹Network Error: No signal found.›

  Incoming bullets skittered across the road mere feet to his right, kicking up puffs of grey dust.

  “Kurotai-sama!” shouted Saburo. “He is gone. You are in the open.” The big man lunged at him, seizing him by the shoulder of his suit jacket and flinging him into the side of the armored limo.

  More bullets rained down, causing Shuji’s corpse to twitch and Saburo to roar. Disregarding the fresh gout of blood spraying from his left shoulder, the six-foot-and-change security man one-handed his assault rifle, aiming over the limo. Azure muzzle flare belched from the weapon, the relatively slow rate of fire on the large-bore rifle hammered Masaru’s ears. Though he couldn’t see what happened behind the car, the look of satisfaction on Saburo’s face assured him whatever dishonorable wretch had desecrated Shuji’s body had paid for his indiscretion.

  Masaru glared at the signal error text floating across his field of vision. In a best-case scenario, if he could get his friend’s body to a medical center within two minutes, they might be able to revive him. The brain might last for three, but it would take the medtechs some time to start working. Out in the middle of nowhere, with no signal… even if he had signal, it would take a MedVan longer than two minutes to reach them.

  Masaru slumped, ass on cold pavement, back against hard armor plates, and stared at Shuji’s limp body. His hair didn’t even stir in the wind, too caked with blood.

  His only true friend would stay dead.

  Over control mechanisms for construction equipment.

  “Fuc―”

  Thump.

  Ryo staggered backward, a thin line of smoke lanced into his chest like a spear, fire sputtering from the point of contact. Before the giant man could even look down, most of his torso exploded in a shower of gore. His upper body and a few inches of smoking spine sailed skyward before careening into a heap a few feet away. Legs and hips fell over backward.

  A high-pitched male scream came from the direction of the car, followed by the clank of boots on metal. Saburo swore and hurried to change magazines. Footsteps scuffed up toward the back end of the limp.

  Masaru sensed someone about to jump down from the roof. He grasped the handle of his Nano katana and activated his speedware as the first traces of shadow fell over him. A skinny man in rags, bare chest covered by a bandolier made of old power cables and canvas pouches, came drifting downward after jumping off the limo.

  “Die!” roared Masaru. He leapt to his feet while drawing his blade into an upward swing.

  The gleaming transparent-blue edge caught the man below the left hip, slicing flesh and bone with little resistance before exiting the right side of the neck. Other than a thin red line, the body showed no sign of trauma until his right foot struck the ground, at which point the head, half the torso, and left arm slid apart from the rest of him, pulled down by weight.

  Masaru spun to his left at a hint of motion encroaching on his peripheral vision. Two more men in tattered rags rounded the corner of the limo, raising submachine guns in Saburo’s direction. They hadn’t yet reacted to Masaru’s presence, or the separating body of their associate.

  He shifted his stance to face them and sprang forward; his sword still high from the first killing strike, he grasped it in both hands and pulled a downstroke into the head of the left attacker. Before any change appeared in the man’s expression, Masaru slid to his right and thrust the sword into the chest of the second man. At the instant the tsuba touched skin―the katana rammed as deep as possible―the submachine gun erupted with blue flames. Masaru twisted to the side, glaring down at four slugs passing with the speed of a casually thrown ball. He thrust his shoulder into the vagrant, knocking him off his feet, yanked the katana free, and took the dead man’s head before the corpse hit the ground. The thrust to the heart had killed him, but the beheading made a statement.

  Sensing no imminent threats, Masaru’s speedware cut off to spare his nerves from wireburn.

  The bisected man collapsed to the ground with a wet splatter while the attacker nearest Masaru screamed. The downward slash had severed the man’s body in half from the top of his skull to a little below the base of the neck. Nano cut so clean, the man survived for two seconds, frantically trying to hold the two halves of his head from sliding apart.

  Masaru glared as the man’s futile battle succumbed to lost consciousness, and he fell.

  Saburo’s bellow of, “Bastard sons of unclean dogs,” came before the pop-pop of a double tap.

  Another attacker off in the distance gurgled.

  The big man staggered into the side of the limo and held on. The one Masaru beheaded had evidently managed to land a few bullets into Saburo before his body had realized he’d died and stopped moving. His security man shot a moaning figure on the ground again while grumbling curses under his breath.

  Masaru shifted, glancing over the limo’s roof at a field of smashed buildings. Few survived with more than a single story of piecemeal walls upright, the devastation to the point he couldn’t even tell what sort of buildings they had been. At least fourteen dead lay scattered among the rubble they had tried to take cover in. Dark trails of blood ran down smashed concrete walls caked in a thick layer of silt. A massive rifle-shaped weapon lay near a filthy dead man wearing a beige JSDF armored vest.

  Twenty-millimeter rocket rifle… Masaru’s eyebrows furrowed. Where did these scraps get that from?

  Ryo and Saburo had done themselves proud, killing seven to one, plus whatever had fallen out of sight.

  He glanced down at Ryo’s corpse… or at least his legs, staring until the pool of red under the bisected man ceased expanding. Masaru’s mind refused to process the scene.

  “Are you injured, sir?” asked Saburo.

  Masaru winced at the pain in his left side, only now aware of it again. “A scratch.” He pulled a stimpak from his belt case and took a step toward Saburo, offering it. “You need this far more than I.”

  The big man shifted to face him, smiling. “You are most gen―”

  Saburo’s head rocked, the right side blasted open in a sluice of brain and skull fragments.

  Masaru dove to the ground as the distant crack of a sniper’s rifle echoed over the ruined city. He huddled against the car, confident its armor would stop the bullet given the timbre of its rapport. His gaze went from straight ahead down a wide-open street to left at another cluster of ruined buildings. Behind him, more of the same continued into a hazy distance for about seven blocks, after which a standing wall of dust obscured his view.

  Of course, he had studied Hiroshima and Nagasaki in grade school. Until the Corporate War of 2092, Japan had been the only nation to suffer a nuclear attack perpetrated by a foreign threat. The Six Minute War, fought five years prior to that, didn’t count. The tiny device detonated in Tehran had been set off by the Iranian military, not Israel as they had claimed.

  He wondered if this is what it had been like afterward, though neither of those ancient cities had been as grand as Miyakonojo of 2097, when North Korean infiltrators had set off a series of ‘backpack nukes.’ Compared to the virtual tour his seventh-grade class had taken through the ‘ruins of Hiroshima,’ this place embodied a deeper melancholia. Perhaps because the modern buildings had resisted to a greater degree and the land hadn’t been utterly flattened.

  Sniper… He tried again to access his NetMini, but received the same signal error. The limo was a lost cause; its only remaining use consisted of being a bulletproof wall. He crawled to where Saburo fell and slid his katana back in the scabbard until it locked in with a click. While he hadn’t spent much time practicing with firearms, he wasn’t about to attempt to take on a sniper with a sword.

  “Hold on, friend.” He stared at Shuji’s corpse. “I will not leave you to rot here. I must deal with this nuisance first.”

  Masaru examined the rifle, a Daito series chambered in 15mm, as big a slug as handheld firearms took. The ammo counter showed fourteen shots remai
ning. Near the display, a single rubber button activated a four-by-four inch holo-panel. A few seconds later, he had the weapons’ optics linked to his headware over a wireless connection.

  He duck-walked closer to the rear of the limo and pushed the rifle up over the trunk near the back window. The video feed appeared in a floating virtual panel, fed into his optic nerves along nanometer-thick platinum wires. Bands of static crawled up and down, distorting the image somewhat, but not so much where he couldn’t use it to aim.

  Amid the field of ruin stretching out on the passenger side of the limo, only three buildings stood taller than two stories. The nearest, with five floors remaining, ranged at 272 meters. Beyond it, at 304 meters, a slimmer tower that had to have been an office building managed to keep six floors. Chunks of plasticrete dangled on rebar, wobbling as the entire structure shifted in the breeze. No… too unstable. Only a fool would dare. He sighted in on the third building, which the rifle indicated at 608 meters. Floor by floor, he swept. On the seventh, he caught an orange glimmer along a patch of pale grey wall. Fire.

  Given the length of time since this city had been ashed, the only possible explanation for fire would be more vagrants. Whatever contained the fire sat too far back in the structure to be seen. Masaru found no trace of a sniper in any of the structures, but didn’t trust standing.

  “Forgive me, Maeda-san. I must wait for dark before I can carry you from this place.”

  The crunch of a footstep brought his attention back to ground level, thirty meters away. Blurry images in the scope window sharpened as the optics refocused.

  About twenty rag-clad men and women emerged from the rubble, all carrying either submachine guns or military combat rifles. The closest three figures had at least one cybernetic arm. A man who stooped to pick up the rocket rifle appeared to be made of banded dark blue plastisteel from the waist up. Rather than a human face, he’d opted for a stylized metal skull that made no pretense at anatomical correctness. The center of his plastisteel forehead had an engraving of the kanji for death, 死, filled in with black paint. If not for the man’s size―and the rocket-rifle coming to bear―Masaru would’ve laughed at him for looking like the villain from a child’s afternoon holo-vid show.

  Of course, laughing at psychotic cyber-freaks usually ended in violence.

  Masaru squeezed the trigger and discovered holding a Class 6 rifle up over one’s head made for a lousy shooting position. The massive firearm bucked straight out of his grip, though he took some pleasure in the roar of pain that followed. He fell over backward to recover the weapon, and stayed down.

  Sniper… somewhere. Twenty heavily armed augs. Masaru closed his eyes, debating a last stand to defend what remained of his friend. He doubted Shuji would want him to commit suicide, and he could always return later to recover the body. The augs blocked him off from heading northeast, though walking all the way back to Miyazaki City was hardly necessary. He only needed to travel far enough to find a signal, and could vid back to Kurotai for assistance.

  Masaru activated his speedware and sprang to his feet, holding the trigger down as he sprinted to the side. He swept the rifle over the approaching nomads, hitting somewhere between four and nine of them before his weapon went silent―out of ammo. Within a second of his grip releasing to drop the useless thing, a long, pointed bullet spiraled past his face. From the angle, he figured the sniper to be in the middle building, the one he had dismissed as too dangerous a perch.

  They are all insane.

  Masaru flung himself into a sprint, as fast as his neural wiring could force his muscles to contract. Muted detonations of gunfire went off behind him, accented by the occasional whistle of a near miss or the sharp tap of a slug hitting rubble somewhere nearby. He headed for the most intact building and jumped the wreckage of a car that had crashed into the doorway. Crouching, he let his speedware rest and peered back over a vehicle made before hover technology existed. Murky figures in the swirling dust approached, spreading out, but all heading toward him.

  Fortunately, time and looters had rendered the building he’d chosen a giant open space inside. He dashed across the ground floor, dove through an open window into the street behind it, and headed to the right. After passing the rubble of five structures that didn’t even come up to his waist, he crossed to an alley between four-story tall stacks of debris.

  An explosion of cats flew out of the debris lining the walls, scrambling to get away from him. Masaru’s speedware-boosted sprint pushed him past the cluster of felines before any of their paws caught a grip on the ground. He made a series of random turns, eventally finding cover in an underground area that appeared to have once been a parking garage.

  Heat in his arms and legs warned him he needed a break. His Kurotai Daimyo speedware represented close to the best hardware money could buy, but even it had its limits. Only the NSK had better, but the only way to get it without being one of them was to pull it out of a corpse… and fend off the resulting assassination attempts.

  Out of breath, muscles burning, Masaru took a seat on the hood of a tiny lime-green compact car. It hadn’t moved in so long, weeds encased it in a sarcophagus of vegetation. Barring some quite unusual circumstances, he figured every car in this place had to be about three centuries old.

  For a time, he breathed… and listened. Either he had lost his pursuers, or they had not bothered to chase him with any great determination. He scowled, hating his powerlessness at having to leave Shuji’s body to whatever fate awaited it at their hands. They did not seem too crazed, not like the half-human creatures roaming the Badlands in the West. He growled, low in his throat. He would return home, gather a force, and sweep this place clear.

  The Kami themselves could not wreak such vengeance upon those who have slain Maeda-san.

  In the stillness of the parking garage, he again tried his NetMini, but it refused to connect. He couldn’t even get the navigation applet to tell him where in Miyakonojo he stood. He hadn’t been paying too much attention to the flight, so picking a direction to walk based on any idea of ‘shortest route’ would be impossible. Fortunately, the compass worked, so he settled on south.

  He crept back up the ramp and peered around to make sure none of the augs had followed him. Once confident he remained alone, he walked along the side of the building down a narrow alley crammed with chunks of concrete and metal fragments too far destroyed to even guess at what sort of machine they’d come from.

  Moving reawakened the sting under his arm. One stimpak pressed into his ribs below the wound sealed it after a momentary itching tingle. He glanced at the belt case and counted six of the small, red autoinjectors left, but hoped not to need them. Revenge could wait. He would avoid conflict until he could come back properly equipped to destroy everything here. Being unclaimed territory―no one had bothered to try retaking the city in years―no other CEO in the area would care if Kurotai used Miyakonojo’s skeleton for ‘weapons testing.’

  Masaru continued west for a while, past a seemingly endless arrangement of old buildings. He had to be near the city center for it to have so many former high-rises, which implied he faced a walk of several miles. He set his stride, determined to return for Shuji.

  A pile of concrete debris at his left burst upward with a droning electronic chatter.

  Startled, Masaru sprang back, grasping the handle of his katana. He wheeled about to face the expanding cloud of dust and locked stares eye-to-camera with a nine-foot robot of red plastisteel.

  Rather than legs, it resembled an industrial forklift, only with wheels more befitting a rover designed for exploring new planets. Its upper body had a mostly-human shape, a torso and two arms ending in hydraulic pincers similar to those used on lifter exoskeletons. A simple box with a single large lens and several smaller sub-sensors comprised its head, and a bright white ‘Meiji’ kanji adorned the center of its chest.

  The machine lurched forward, tires as tall as his hips spitting concrete chips and debris to the rear. Masaru d
ove into a sideways somersault, evading a bashing strike. The Meiji bot swung with so much force its upper body rotated twice from the energy it had put behind it. The torso faced him two full seconds before the lower half steered, all four tires angling, to face him.

  Dents and scratches covered it; the thing had to be at least sixty years old. The last time he’d heard anything about Meiji bots, Daiichi-Fuso had bragged about rebuilding the areas abandoned since the war… but for whatever reason, the project withered and died.

  “Command, shutdown,” said Masaru.

  The Meiji ignored him, raising both its gripper claws and accelerating to about forty mph.

  Masaru’s speedware dragged time into slow motion, allowing him to roll again out of the way. The Meiji’s massive arms crashed together with a resounding clang inches away. Rubber scuffed on paving as it attempted to stop, but skidded into a fragment of wall. The building lacked even a full story; the impact echoed for blocks in all directions, drowned out by the resulting roar of the wall crumbling under the robot’s weight.

  The Meiji reversed and rotated once more to face him.

  Masaru sprinted at it, shouting a war cry as he drew the katana and leapt up onto its frame. His toes touched metal for a fraction of a second. He sprang again, slipping past a ponderous metal limb and slicing the head unit clean from atop the old construction bot.

  Sparks sprayed from the thin seam in the metal; a second later, the head slid down the glass-smooth cut and fell off. The Meiji went berserk, holding its seven-foot-long arms out to either side and rotating its torso as fast as the mechanism allowed. Masaru backed well away from the thing as it zoomed off in a random direction and crashed through another ruined building. A horrendous clamor of metal and concrete rang out, suggesting the floor failed and dumped the malfunctioning Meiji into the basement. Seconds later, the remaining three stories collapsed straight down like pancakes, sealing it in a tomb.