Twitcher: An Illustrated Dystopian Cyberpunk Tale of Revenge and Redemption

by Kaleb Schad

  The six hours of crawling along the Little Marek until it met the Veil felt longer than the two years Tyler had spent living alone in the woods. Calling it a giant tent was too simple. Rather, it was as if a silk curtain had been draped over the High Lanes. Ultra-light spines arced thousands of meters into the sky, the material bowing between them in graceful dips. Hundreds of barges and airships overhead stood in line waiting for entry. Ahead the port opened for transports, the veil pulled back to allow ships through, then dropping closed behind them. The tugboat slowed on approach.

  It was a second Cerebus Gate, Tyler thought. The first keeps out the Midlands. The second keeps out the lowlifes.

  “Complete silence,” Sara whispered.

  Everyone huddled, wrapping their cloaks and arms around dangling metal that might clank.

  Tyler tightened his grip on his Mark 37.

  “What is it?” the boy whispered.

  Twelve AI drones flew up to the barge and began methodically scanning each container’s data panel while two gun ships hovered off starboard. Sixty seconds later, Tyler felt the tug begin pulling again.

  It was only once they were through the Veil that Tyler understood why there was a Veil at all. At first, he thought the High Lanes had an odd, but pleasant smell, then he realized it was that, for the first time in his life, he wasn’t smelling anything at all. No smoke from the Slag Belt in Michigan or the ever-burning forest fires in the Midlands. No detritus rot.

  Even with the material filtering it, the setting sunlight seemed somehow brighter, purer, more honest. He blinded his Sakanaya eye with his palm. The colors! Reds brighter than blood. Blues so rich he could drink them.

  But nothing prepared him for the people. So many people. Talking. Shopping. And their clothes. Brands and styles he’d only ever seen in syncasts, like Cülo Smart Cloaks that reshaped themselves based on thousands of templates (additional purchase required) or Haggemeister Handbags with exclusive self-selecting feed system (“Search No More”).

  The number of people was unnerving. How would you know whom to watch out for? Who was dangerous and who wasn’t? Some of them rode in wooden rickshaws, canvas tarps over the top. Tyler had heard that High Laners would bring a lucky few Skimmers up to do tasks like that, that they liked having humans do work that robots could easily do. It got the Skimmers into the High Lanes and gave them the one thing they never imagined having, a job. And hell, it seemed only fair that a human might steal back a robot’s job. After all, hadn’t they stolen enough from us leading up to the Great Divestment?

  Holograms spun up and took form across every skyscraper Tyler could see. Advertisements for clothing and restaurants, companies and brands he’d never heard of. LSM Insurance. Liberty Conglomerate Bank (“Funding Dreams, Industry and Freedom”). Aero-Sail (“The Future of Transportation”).

  And food carts. It was as if nobody used nutrient sacs here, but instead wanted—could afford—solids every day.

  He caught himself from cussing when he recognized his own face in one of the holograms. It was a LCNC newscast, the headline “Twitcher Terror at Cerebus Gate North” marching a perimeter around the building. A woman newscaster was speaking and with his Sakanaya’s magnification he could read the subtitles. “…unclear, but it’s suspected the assault was connected to recent terror operations aimed at extending the Resource Gap. With us to discuss is Dr. Emily Arenson, from the Resource Gap Policy Institute.” The hologram cut from Tyler’s face to a woman with blond hair and tiny cybernetic beads inserted around her cheek bones. A building passed in front of the hologram and when Tyler could read it again, the woman was saying, “…everything we possibly can to end the Cullings. Nobody, and I mean nobody, wants this tragic policy to continue any longer than it must. Unfortunately, the reality that instigated the need—the very stability of this last free nation in North America—hasn’t changed. However, we are very close to a new solution…” The river turned and he could no longer see the news feed.

  So that was how they were spinning it. Terror to extend the Resource Gap. It made sense. They couldn’t hide the Cerebus attack. Too many High Laners worked there. Was this fame? Your face twenty meters tall? Millions of people now knew who he was. They thought he was changing their world, wrecking their status quo, even though he couldn’t care less about their status or its quo. What would they think when he blew up one of the Big Seven CEOs? And used a yet-unheard-of weapon to do it. That last thought…it tasted like copper. Maybe murder was enough. Maybe the yet-unheard-of weapon wasn’t necessary? Maybe it should be set free so it could stay unheard of?

  The river made its final turn and this time Staern Tower rose, angular and enormous, ahead of them. A glass tooth so tall it seemed to chew at the Veil itself.

  “Hey kid, there’s Staern Tower,” Tyler said, but the boy didn’t answer.

  He was staring at a father and son walking on the promenade. The father looked at his son, laughing, then watched the passing barge. He seemed to be the same age as the kid and he carried a backpack while holding his father’s hand.

  The boy closed the camoflap, sat down and pulled his knees to his chest, wrapping his arms around his legs. He picked at the bandages on the stump of his left arm.

  Tyler looked back at the father and son. It was the boy’s left hand holding his father’s.

  From one container to another, this one a semi. Again in the back. Cargo on its way to Staern Tower. A package being delivered. A gift. But for whom?

  Before the bay door was raised, the Silent Uprising soldiers had pulsed the waiting forklift and security drones with EMPs, then did the same to the remaining drones in the receiving dock. Four of them wore adaptive camouflage.

  Tyler knelt, shielding the boy with his body. As Sara and the other soldiers moved into the docking bay, Tyler stood to follow. Blackness strangled his vision to a pinhole, his injured leg buckling. He fell into the wall, grasping the cargo rack before he collapsed. The boy held Tyler’s ammo belt with his one hand as if to catch him from falling.

  “Are you coming?” Sara called.

  “Don’t give up now,” the boy whispered. “You have a promise to keep.”

  Inside, Sara and the soldiers unfolded environmental suits from their backpacks and began pulling them on. They had painted their signature skull face with the “x” over the mouth on their ventilators. Sara looked at Tyler as she zipped hers up. Protection—they hoped—from the boy’s steganography once triggered. “I figured you wouldn’t need one,” she said.

  It wasn’t like waltzing through a residence tower in the Lower Skims. Staern Tower was one-hundred-twenty-floors, the top ten locked down with genetic-marker keys. And it was no accident that the lab was on floor one-hundred-eleven. So, elevator to one-oh-nine (as high as it goes), running and gunning from there. That was okay with Tyler. Do a little killing on the way up. If there was anything Tyler was good at…and maybe a few S.U.s would eat it during the trip. Save Tyler some ammo once they found him the recombinant.

  Tyler killed the elevator at one-oh-nine, popped the access hatch in the ceiling and pulled himself up. The plasma torch they handed him made quick work of the cinderblocks and ninety seconds later he had a one meter by one meter square cut into the stairwell, the scrap metal and concrete tucked quietly away in the elevator. Tyler had to admit, Sara’s plan seemed solid. Bypass the doors’ bio scanners by going through the wall.

  The four soldiers in adaptive camo went in first, shimmering ghosts, followed by the remainder of the squad, Sara and finally the boy. By the time he got through the opening, Sara had connected a mimic box to the genetic sniffer on the lock to the upper levels. Impressive tech, even if it could only be loaded and used once.

  “How are you doing this?” Tyler whispered. Access through the Veil, adaptive camouflage, mimic boxes with Malcolm Staern’s very own genetic signature—this was LCP spy shit.

  “You haven’t recognized me this whole time, have you?”

  Tyler tried to place her, but not
hing.

  “LCP Senator Lemira. New England Ward,” she said, holding out her hand as if to shake Tyler’s. “Pleasure to meet you.”

  “A fucking senator.”

  The LED panel above the sniffer turned green and the door spiraled open.

  “That’s the last of my tricks.” she said “From here on, it’s every man for himself.”

  Close now and Tyler knew the kid could feel it. The way he was pinching his lower lip, his amputated arm hugging his ribs. Wretched, wracking fear.

  This floor was bright. White molded plastic and shimmering chrome. Wayfinding screens woke as they passed, the stupid machines offering maps. “May I assist you in finding and killing my master?” No thanks. Got it covered.

  Two minutes and three turns later they came to a massive room filled with bright colors and textured rugs. It sure didn’t look like a lab. It looked like a fucking nursery. Children’s toys, swirling patterns, color up and down the wall like splattered rainbows. On the far wall was what Tyler guessed was a two-way mirror and a door next to it.

  The kid stopped at the window. He was looking at a cylinder robot balanced on a ball, wrapped with a padded display that could animate all types of monsters and fun creatures to attack. Knock it over and it bounces back, spins around you and eggs you on.

  “I remember this room,” the boy said.

  Skimmers didn’t get toys growing up, not many at least. They got tranquilizers until they could get ported and then they got dreams. Tyler did remember one toy his mother had given him—a cracked screen from a data pad some High Laner must have thrown away. Tyler would trace his finger across it, careful not to cut himself, imagining he were controlling armies of military drones in some assault. One time, he’d taped a string from the end of it to his synport behind his ear. Professional now. The real deal. When his mother saw she’d said, “As if.”

  The door next to the two-way mirror opened and a woman in a blue and yellow lab coat walked through. She looked out the window and locked eyes with Tyler.

  No contest, right? A middle-aged lady-nerd outrunning a Twitcher? In her dreams. Sometimes dreams do come true.

  Tyler tried sprinting to the door into the nursery, but when his JACKK started pumping it felt as if the ninth gate of Hell had opened within his chest. He was sucking wind by the time he made it in, the woman long gone.

  He kicked open the door she’d passed through and when he put down his leg, his knee was throbbing. In the side alleys of his mind, he was surprised to remember what being mortal was like.

  It wasn’t just her. It was her plus four. And he’d found the lab. A long room divided lengthwise by white cabinets and stainless steel countertops covered with microscopes, microarray scanners, tubes, bulbs and fume hoods. All the shit a company needs to warp kids into weapons of mass destruction.

  Fuck this running stuff. Tyler skidded around the corner, raised his rifle and fired into the floor next to the woman. “Next one through your fucking skull,” he shouted. One of the other lab techs screamed. The woman stopped running. Held her hands over her head.

  Tyler was still panting when Sara walked up behind him. “I thought you were faster than that.”

  The lab tech was on her knees, her fingers laced behind her head, when the kid walked up. She looked at him as if concussed, her eyes grey and scattered, then pulling together into frightened focus. “Ben?”

  “Hello Ms. Kathy.”

  “Open it,” Tyler said. They were at the back of the lab now, a stainless steel door standing between them and the recombinant. Fingerprints smeared across the surface.

  Sara and the Silent Uprising soldiers held the other lab technicians at gunpoint, kneeling with their hands on their heads.

  “You can’t—“ the woman started to say.

  Tyler punched her in the stomach, catching her before she fell.

  “Please, Ms. Kathy,” the boy said. She’d said her name was Kathy Farris, Ph.D. in microbiology and genetic engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Where Progress Can’t Afford to Stop.

  “He won’t quit,” the boy said.

  Sara walked up behind Tyler. She’d been chatting—firmly—with the other four techs.

  “The recombinant is in there,” she said. The environmental suit gave her voice a robotic echo, her face hard to see behind the tinted visor.

  “I know.”

  “The recombinant,” Farris said. “How do you…”

  “Please,” the boy said.

  The scientist found her balance and pulled herself free from Tyler’s grip. She stepped over to the door. The genetic sniffer scanned her face and when the light over the door turned from red to green, she said, “Ben, don’t come in here.”

  Tyler had seen things in his life that to this day gave him nightmares, had done things no human should ever do to another human, but nothing had prepared him for what was in this lab. Was this what man was? Meat and sinew, engorged with blood and spastic efforts, but nothing of value? Rootless, vicious creatures?

  Tyler walked through the door and was surrounded by dead children.

  Two dozen stainless steel autopsy tables stood in the room, with drains between them and children of all ages and sizes on them. Tyler walked down the center of the room, unable to think, one foot in front of the other. Infants, teenagers, fat, thin. That one couldn’t be more than six-months old. That one, seven? Several were half dissected, their abdomens unfurled, organs stolen, secrets revealed. Most were deformed, cancerous lumps growing in awful places. One, the size of the body marking the child for only five or six years old, looked like an elderly man with sallow skin, creased and divided. The room might have been cold, but then again it might not have been. How could he be sure of anything when he was this numb? Tyler had to take shallow breaths, formalin fumes stinging his eye.

  “Holy hell,” Sara said. She stood just inside the door, next to the scientist.

  “Don’t let the boy—” Tyler was too late.

  The boy squeezed past Sara. He looked around, trying to grasp what he was seeing, then approached the boy with black hair on the table closest to the door. It looked as if he were being towed. Reeled in. The black-haired boy was partway through dissection, large sections flayed and raw, yellowed fat chunked around grey, bloodless muscles. A tray filled with the dead kid’s small intestine sat on a cart next to the body. The kid’s face remained, though. They hadn’t bothered closing his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Ben,” Farris whispered.

  “You said you were taking him home.”

  “You had to know.”

  “He kept asking to see his mom and dad, but you kept telling me to ask him to stay.”

  “What you do…this is important work,” she said. “You’ll understand one day.”

  The kid reached out a hand and touched the boy’s dead face.

  “I do, Ms. Kathy.”

  He looked at Tyler. “Get the recombinant.”

  “What are you going to do?” Farris whispered as Tyler and her walked to the far end of the lab. Spotlights over each table created pockets of brilliance divided by wedges of darkness. They stopped at a series of steel counters and cabinets lining the wall and the woman presented her face to the genetic sniffer on the center cabinet.

  “We have ephermycalthrizine in the lab,” she whispered. The light on the lock turned green and she put her hand to the lever, but didn’t open it. “For JACKKs. It’s new. Buy you years. I can help you, if you’ll help me.”

  Tyler shook his Mark 37 towards the cabinet.

  She opened the door and took a steel cylinder out of it, then inserted it into a plunger the size of a baby’s arm. Tyler took it from her, held it up and examined it.

  “So,” he said. “This is the bullet.”

  “You have no idea what you are doing,” she said. “A bullet only kills one person. That boy could kill millions.”

  “Tell us exactly what the overclock does,” Sara said.

  “You can’t be se
rious,” Farris said.

  The Silent Uprising soldiers had moved the four other technicians near the lab door and they were all in the research room again. The boy was standing between Sara and Tyler. Tyler held the recombinant.

  “Staern has the key,” Tyler said. “What is it? How does it work?”

  “Think of a nuclear bomb made out of ebola. The weapon detonates and trillions of genetic stegs are scattered on the wind and bury themselves in every living cell they contact. They replicate and spread from that person like a virus, but a virus that looks for any flaw in your DNA and amplifies it to its terminal. Mortis-models put die-off at twenty to thirty percent of the LCP population if unabated.”

  Sara held out her hand to Tyler for the recombinant, the glove and crinkled plastic suit spattered with reflections. The other hand held her gun.

  The boy was looking at him. Tyler remembered what the boy looked like in his cabin, kneeling in a pool of blood, of Tyler’s blood, and the scream he gave when Tyler attacked Eddie. Or in that field after the accident. Mud and a torn jumpsuit. A face contorted with fear and begging misery. Tyler looked at the hacked off arm and felt that the absence wasn’t only below the elbow. Hadn’t they taken enough? All of them.

  Tyler shook his head.

  “We had a deal,” Sara said.

  “Enough is enough,” Tyler said. “Hasn’t he had enough?”

  The boy kneeling on the side of the van, their orientation sideways, ninety-degrees toward wrong. More blood. Bathing in it. A blood bath.

  “You’re the onse that wants to take him upstairs and blow everyone away,” Sara said.

  If you can be counted on for anything, the boy had said.

  When Tyler didn’t answer, Sara said. “They deserve it. You know that.”

  “Don’t we?”

  “Oh, get off it. They kill by the thousands. They protect their own and seize any power they can and they keep it all for themselves. Nobody, not Skimmers, not the average High Laner. Not even an LCP senator can have any.”