by Gary Dejean
The reporter is still commenting: “… a scene of absolute chaos here today at the thirteenth precinct, where Dr. Morgan Zhu is still held, after a day, and as you can see, this incredible sight appears to…”
Chloe explodes: “What the fuck?!”
The three of them are too stunned to notice, in the courtyard, that Morgan’s automated van boots up, driving away on its own.
A few minutes later, Morgan rolls out the front door of the precinct, escorted by a straight line of drones forming a shield wall and providing suppressing fire between her and the policemen entrenched in the parking lot. The scene is a war zone, hundreds of bullet impacts rendering the police cars unrecognizable, shattered glass, foam and glitter everywhere.
The automated van drives up the street and the lateral door opens, the ramp for the wheelchair coming down just as Morgan reaches the sidewalk. She enters the vehicle, which starts driving before the door is shut. And as soon as she’s away, the drones cease fire, their central processors fried by a security exploit.
Suddenly, silence befalls the precinct once more. The moans of wounded policemen snapping out of shock those who were spared, no one launches in pursuit, every vehicle in the parking lot a potential deadly trap.
Once the precinct is secure, Major Hanzo walks into the surveillance room. Humiliated NICA agents are reviewing past video surveillance in great detail, looking for a cause or culprit, when one of them spots David talking through the ventilation grate the night before. “There! This one,” bawls the agent, “he’s making contact!” The face recognition software brings up David’s social status next to him.
The air is electric. The Major calls Angelo on his encrypted radio. “Status report,” he demands.
From their training hangar, feeling awkward in civilian clothes, the Latino fresh from his date is running diagnostics over the entire system, his team of technicians having forsaken as well any plans they had for the night. “She routed through the console to bypass the encryption,” he tells the Major. “It must’ve taken hours…”
The commanding officer sounds skeptical. “She designed it,” he reveals. “What about the suits, are they compromised?”
“Diagnostics are clean,” quickly replies the overseer.
“Run them again.”
“Yes, sir.”
Not easily bored, David is sitting on his living room couch, watching a TV report on New Year’s Eve celebrations around the world. Manila will of course be among the first cities to enter the new year, while countries on the other side of the planet are just waking up to this day. The father finds comfort in the banality of the program, letting his thoughts drift in the back of his mind.
Suddenly, the door gets rammed open by NICA agents who invade the room. Dimaguiba emerges from the group, placing a firm hand on David’s shoulder to sit him back down.
“David Patel?” he asks.
“Yes?”
“We’re here on a matter of national security. Where is your son?”
David’s blood suddenly turns cold, the anticipated fear of this moment giving directions to his thoughts. “In his room,” he answers candidly, adding with hopes of clarifications for Jake’s missing hours: “why?”
Pistols drawn, agents rush in to check both bedrooms, but that of the child is empty, a curtain waving in a draft through the open window. “Target is on the move,” inform the agents.
Under the cover of night, Jake is standing on the rooftop of the opposing building, cargo shorts and a hoodie grabbed from his wardrobe on. Through the open window of the living room, he can clearly see Agent Dimaguiba questioning David, and when the agent moves out of sight, infrared sensors still let him follow his movements.
His feet in rooftop gravel, the boy leans down to grab a pebble, gauging its weight in his hand. Despite the noise of traffic, he can even make out their conversation: “Trust me, Mr. Patel,” threatens Dimaguiba, “if you don’t tell us what you know, you’re going to regret it.”
David is still sat on the couch, surrounded by menacing agents, when Dimaguiba pulls his gun out. He’s just about to point it at the father when a pebble bounces off the window ledge and hits him straight in the face, shattering the lens of his optical implant.
The terrified father has, once more, no idea what’s going on, unlike Dimaguiba who rushes to the window, his on-board processor replaying the last minute and extrapolating the pebble’s trajectory.
Thinking that the cover of darkness is enough to keep him concealed, Jake is having a laugh, until Dimaguiba points a finger at him. “He’s on the roof!” shouts the agent.
Instantly, two columns of red light fall on Jake, revealing the stealth dropship silently hovering above the street. Its two ruby searchlights look down at the boy with the ominous aspect of demonic eyes, the dark figure of the dropship cutting a patch in the crimson sky.
“Hold right there!” the Major shouts through loudspeakers.
Startled, Jake bolts, running to the adjacent building. The searchlights track him with only slight delay, as he tries to use rooftop equipment to break line of sight. The dropship goes after him, while down in the street police officers board their patrol cars to get in pursuit.
Built on a square grid like the rest of the platform, the residential block lets Jake jump with ease from rooftop to rooftop. Soon NICA helicopters reach the site, their dragonfly silhouettes shining their white searchlights on him.
The boy hears a beeping sound, followed by Morgan’s voice: “Jake, are you receiving?” she asks, the spectrometer of her sound-only call appearing in his field of view.
“Morgan?”
“I’ve opened a secure channel. They can’t hear us, Jake. You need to keep moving.”
“They’ve got my Dad!” the child yells, desperate, while running away from the vindictive searchlights.
“I know. Follow this route.”
Based on technology similar to the exoskeletons used by the task force, Jake’s new body has been designed to link with an overseer. Morgan brings up a GPS pathway in his heads up display.
“Woah!” the boy exclaims.
“Do you still have your phone?” the old woman asks.
“Should I toss it?”
“No. Keep it for now. They’re using it to track you.”
Eventually, Jake runs out of rooftops to jump onto. Twelve floors below him, smart cars buzz in all directions; he leans over the edge when a Secret Service helicopter flies up, its open side housing a sniper aiming at him with a portable Gauss canon.
The heavy rifle connected to his eye socket, the agent opens fire. His targeting mechanism unable to lock onto Jake, the magnetically accelerated bullet whizzes by, blasting a hole in the ventilation shaft behind the terrified boy. Other helicopter snipers open fire as well, blowing gravel upwards all around him.
“You need to get down to street level,” urges Morgan. “They won’t shoot you inside the crowd.”
Rushing to the other side of the building facing the shopping district, Jake leaps off, slowing his fall by swinging from neon insignia to commercial plasma screens. Devastating projectiles anticipate his movements imperfectly, and behind him the boy leaves a trail of sparks and exploding lights. When finally he lands on the pavement, surrounded by civilians filming the scene with their phones, the helicopters stop firing.
For a second, the boy gets a sense of relief, before Police cars swarm around the corner, quickly surrounding him in the middle of the four-way street. Encircled, he raises both hands above his head, as police officers get out of their vehicles to point their weapons at him.
NICA helicopters are shining their searchlights, the dropship nearing on his location. More and more patrol cars converge on his position, imbuing the child with a mixed feeling of fear and pride. An armored transport even enters the scene, its yard-high wheels sustaining the weight of a dozen men in heavy combat gear.
The police agents surrounding Jake are too focused on him to notice at first that the armored tra
nsport is gaining speed. Only when it knocks the first patrol car off its path do they turn around, quickly rendered white before they jump out of the way. Heading straight for Jake, the transport rolls over the encircling vehicles, squashing them under its mass like rotten fruits beneath a boot.
Jake leaps up, grabbing a ledge on the roof of the transport when it passes under him. The boy lands flat on the roof of the cavorting vehicle; rotating his wrist one hundred and eighty degrees, he gets face down and stabilizes himself with his feet. Now headed out of the cordon, he controls the vehicle remotely.
Meanwhile, inside the transport, special troops harnessed to their seats are shaken up like a Daiquiri.
“What the hell, man?” they shout at the driver, who’s trying every lever and button at his disposal.
“It’s not responding!” he cries, panicked, the driving wheel turning left and right with a life of its own.
Freed from immediate pursuers, Jake directs the massive vehicle into the public traffic, his eyes lain on a driverless double-decker bus full of commuting cadres. He lines up the transport next to the bus before jumping from one rooftop to the other, seizing control of both vehicles.
A hundred meters ahead, police cars are quickly lining up to deny him passage. Jake adjusts the trajectory of the bus, propelling the armored transport forward, so as to use it as a battering ram. Terrified commuters loaded under him serving as human shield, the boy drives through the police barrage like a record-breaker through a finish line.
Chloe and her friends are still stunned by the ongoing news reports. They’ve fallen back on the couch, passing the water-pipe around, when suddenly the young woman’s cellphone rings. Seeing an unknown caller, Chloe freaks out, jumping on her feet and holding her phone like a hot potato. Less impressed, Bill and Malcolm look at her with pity.
“It’s the pigs!” she whispers, placing her thumb over the camera.
“Babylon…” mumbles the rasta, high as a kite, reminded of conspiracy theories he heard growing up.
“Give me that,” Bill interjects, snatching the phone from Chloe’s hand.
He picks up the video call, very relaxed; Morgan appears on the screen, in some sort of metal container. “Bill?” she asks, surprised.
“Morgan! What’s up?” replies the biker, cheerful to find his friend alive and well.
Chloe freezes for a second. “Mom?” she whines, incredulous.
“Where’s Chloe?” asks Morgan.
“Oh, she’s right here,” Bill replies, twisting his wrist so mother and daughter can see each other. Chloe steps up; behind her, the rasta is waving to the camera.
“Malcolm, you’re here too!” Morgan rejoices. But her tone is as grim and serious as ever when she explains the reason for her call. “Listen,” she says, “David and Jake need our help.”
A few minutes later, Bill is sitting on his motorcycle, putting his helmet on. Chloe and Malcolm are walking toward the rasta’s car, a hand-assembled pile of salvaged parts. “Can you drive?” he asks, tossing his car keys to Chloe.
She’s too surprised to catch them, and the keys fall at her feet. “You want ME to drive?” she asks, doubtful.
Malcolm sits in the passenger seat. He opens the glove compartment, unfolding a keyboard, and pulls down a flat-screen attached to the ceiling. A mess of cords unfolds which he connects to the ports in his skull. “Well,” he says, “I’m gonna have my hands busy, so…”
Chloe picks up the keys, hesitant. Bill kick-starts his bike and rides toward the downtown platform. They’ve changed her bandages but the young woman still sits one-eyed behind the steering wheel, and follows the motorcycle out of the favellas to the best of her capacity.
David is getting cold sweats when agent Dimaguiba and one of his lookalikes escort him out of his apartment building and into their black government car. Dimaguiba takes the wheel. Sat in the back, David is desperately trying to think of a way to reach out to Jake.
The black car is just leaving when Bill gets in sighting distance. A few hundred meters behind, Chloe takes a quick turn, cutting across traffic to grab a shortcut. Malcolm starts hammering his keyboard. “Get closer!” he goads. “We need to bombard their ECU.”
Chloe is in the zone, slaloming between rickshaws and driverless cars toward the Secret Service vehicle. “Hey!” she rebuffs, “I can only see in 2D right now! And I’m high as fuck, so just chill, OK?”
She floors the accelerator and catches up to the sleek black sedan. Malcolm types feverishly on his keyboard, opening all kinds of applications on his tinkered desktop. On the car’s rooftop, a small circular antenna turns forward, locking onto the vehicle’s electronic control unit, and preparing to send thousands of requests per second.
Bill thrusts past them. Getting right to the government car, he motions David to put on his seat-belt. The father looks at him worriedly, and carefully obeys, when Agent Dimaguiba notices the motorcycle. The biker flips him a finger, before suddenly the car takes a steep turn, heading into a lamp-post. The agent in the passenger seat goes straight through the windshield as they collide, while Dimaguiba gets face down in the airbag.
Chloe drives by without stopping, stunned by the damage. Bill makes a U-turn, accelerating as he drifts closer to the totaled car and, using his momentum, punches through the side window, shattering Dimaguiba’s implants, nose and teeth, all at once.
In the back, his chest compressed by the collision, David is shaken. He takes off his seat-belt, grasping his chest and catching his breath. “Who are you?” he asks, terrified.
Bill opens his helmet visor, revealing his face to his friend, and pulls the car door open. “It’s me, you dumb-dumb!” he chuckles. “Come on!”
Still shaking, David gets out of the car and onto the bike, hugging Bill as they burn rubber and quickly leave the scene.
All the while, Jake is driving the bus at full speed, while controlling the armored transport between him and his pursuers. Swaying left and right all over the road, the heavy vehicle slams into police cars trying to close in.
Overhead, the stealth dropship is observing the fight, unmanned aerial vehicles deployed and locked onto Jake. Over Angelo’s shoulder, the Major studies the moves of the prototype, eager to confront it.
When the bus reaches the edge of the city platform, Jake hits the brakes, prompting its passengers to scream in a panic. The driverless double-decker skids sideways, barring the road to pursuers, while the boy jumps off and runs across the large pedestrian area.
Patrol cars circle the bus, parking at the entrance of the touristic viewpoint, and unleash a horde of agents on foot. The ground starts to rumble as they pull their guns out, the sight over the outskirts following the rails where the subway turns into a skytrain.
Unheeding the policemen’s injunction to stop and get on the ground, Jake jumps over the railing while they open fire. They run after him, leaning over the guardrail, expecting the train that they felt under their feet to have crushed the boy. But below, quickly carried into the distance, Jake has landed on the rooftop of the first wagon.
Fear washed away by his state of high alert, the little boy gets up. He can see the helicopters flying after him, but even at this distance he has no trouble overriding them. With only a few commands, he sends the NICA helicopters in a spin, focusing then his attention on the black aerial transport. Contrary to every other vehicles, the dropship doesn’t even appear highlighted by his interface.
Circumspect, Jake moves on. He jumps down between two wagons, Morgan still communicating with him. “Now’s a good time to ditch your phone, Jake,” she says.
The boy looks around, but there is little room in the narrow space between wagons, and nowhere to slide his phone stuck. He takes off one of his shoes, freeing his wheeled heel, and puts his phone inside before using the laces to attach it to one of the doors.
“Very good!” appreciates Morgan, seeing everything he sees. “Now, I want you to get off the train in five hundred meters. You can’t let the hel
icopters see you, Jake.”
The child looks down at the ground beneath him. It’s moving very fast. He’s scared.
“Jake?” Morgan insists, feeling his hesitation. “Don’t worry, my boy, you can do it. Three hundred meters.”
Jake uses cameras embedded in his fingertips to look under the train. There’s not a lot of space, but compared to the air-vents he crawled through, this poses no challenge, except for the ground moving at thirty meters per second. Mustering his courage, he climbs down, hanging to thin ledges like a lizard crawling on a wall; he gets under the train, his back to the ground, suspended over pointy rocks swooping by him at menacing speed.
“Alright, I see you’ve got this,” encourages Morgan. “Now don’t worry: the Little Blackjack can take it. One hundred meters.”
His feet facing the front of the train, and more than a little frightened, Jake pulls the hood of his sweater over his head.
“Now!” shouts Morgan.
Jake lets go, crossing his arms as he falls, burying his feet in gravel and sending it rattling against the train’s belly. Inside, blissfully ignorant commuters, puzzled by the helicopter searchlights scanning the wagons, share amused reactions to the ruckus.
When the train ends up moving over Jake, freeing the night sky over him, he can see, from under a blanket of sharp pebbles, the helicopters still chasing. A minute later he’s alone, getting up unscathed except for scratches on the coating of his titanium body, and a million holes in his clothes, gravel pouring from them as from a broken hourglass.
Following her mother’s instructions, Chloe has parked under a bridge. She’s stepped out of the car and looks at the city platform over them. From this narrow road at its bottom, the skyscrapers seem to be bending over like a gigantic hand about to squash an insect.