Agent G: Assassin

by Phipps, C. T.

  Rosario threw up again, this time on the floor beneath her legs.

  “Okay, maybe it was a bit bumpy,” I muttered. “But come on, admit it, the part with the fake grenade was awesome!”

  “I hate you,” Rosario said, holding her hands against the dashboard to steady herself. “Like, more than I thought was possible.”

  “You know, for someone who has an artificial body, you’d think you’d have less trouble being poisoned,” I muttered.

  “It’s designed to simulate a human body better than a human body,” Rosario said.

  “Well, mine isn’t, and it works great,” I said, shrugging.

  “Oh?” Rosario asked as if making innuendo, then coughed and shook her head. It wasn’t like either of us were in the mood for banter anyway.

  “I repeat my earlier question,” I said. “Because otherwise, I’m going to just ditch this car and steal another one, then drive around until I think of something to do about my current situation.”

  “Which is?” Rosario asked.

  “Screwed,” I said, sighing. I gave her the highlights of what was going on.

  “Remind me to never help you again,” Rosario said.

  “Hey, you got the information you wanted,” I asked.

  “I wanted the secret of nanotherapy,” Rosario paused. “Which I suppose I have, but the secret I wanted was how to make it work.”

  “Be careful what you wish for because glass houses are broken with sticks and stones,” I replied before turning on a set of light indie rock.

  Rosario immediately turned it off. “Down. Now.”

  I took us downward, and the air car descended into the depths of the Chicago refugee zone. It was an enormous walled city within the walled city of the Chicago arcology. Before it was demolished in 1993 for the crime of existing, the famous Kowloon Palace of Hong Kong had been a similar anarchic hellhole run by criminals or local warlords. It had been five years since the government had set up the system for transforming the refugee zones into proper communities and not a damn bit of progress had been made.

  Food and supplies were distributed to the locations within, and they were more or less left alone. The biggest change from the refugee centers of old were the “temporary houses” being made of concrete and metal rather than wood. Armed guards kept people from leaving without visitor’s passes and society carried on within. I didn’t like going inside them because they were a sign of just how badly Atlas had failed to solve the crisis.

  The arcologies were successes, by some stretch of the word, but they didn’t have nearly enough room for the millions living there. The people couldn’t move out to other cities either, because all the food and resources of the United States was controlled by the government. If you didn’t have money to buy food—and why would you live in a refugee zone if you did—then you needed to go where it was distributed.

  “Here?” I asked, wondering why she thought this was a safer place.

  “I have friends here,” Rosario said, looking out the shattered back window behind us. “I don’t want to be here any longer than necessary. Blackbriar troopers are idiots, but even they won’t have problems following us if we stay in the air.”

  “You think they were Blackbriar?” I asked, suspecting I might have gained their ire by killing some of them during our “fake” shootout.

  “I recognized their uniforms. Didn’t you?”

  “Too busy plotting our awesome escape,” I said, smirking.

  “Stop congratulating yourself. It wasn’t that cool.”

  “It was pretty damn cool.”

  Most of old Chicago had been demolished, and the few remnants tended to be historical locations or graveyards. The exception was the refugee zones, where office buildings, suburbs, and so on had been repurposed to house mass quantities of people. These included skyscrapers and office buildings that had once been places of business but were now slums.

  But as William Gibson said, the street finds its own uses for things. Empty gas stations had been converted into shops, people bartered where they couldn’t buy, and there were many ways around the walls when you wanted to bring back things that could help your loved ones. I’d been to the refugee zones of every arcology, and they were places where America had truly become a melting pot.

  People often spoke something less like English and more like a mishmash of every group that had come to America to help with the rebuilding only to get trapped when their governments shut the doors on them. Black Technology, while rarer here, still existed and was repurposed to provide what couldn’t be acquired through other means.

  Sitting us down on top of what was once a bank, I noticed the place was still bustling with life despite how badly it was overcrowded and underequipped. People decorated their homes with Christmas lights, Chinese lanterns, and even the occasional burning drum to give the place illumination despite its removal from the “real” city. I noticed numerous bars and strip clubs built on the top of buildings as well, linked together by bridges of welded scrap metal and crude cable cars. Even the lost and the damned, especially the lost and the damned, needed a way to escape their troubles.

  “Here?” I asked. This building looked like a landing pad. I suspected the car would be stripped bare by morning, but I didn’t mind since it wasn’t my car. E was going to have a fit, though.

  Rosario nodded. “Yes, here is fine. We’re just a couple of blocks away from Friday’s.”

  “Who is Friday?” I asked.

  “Not a who but a what,” Rosario said, taking a deep breath. “Friday’s is one of the Turing Society’s fronts in this region. All the arcologies have them: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Troopers, Strange Land—”

  “Ah, they’re named after Heinlein novels,” I said.

  “No shit,” Rosario said, rolling her eyes.

  I put the vehicle in park, then stepped out of it. “Why does the Turing Society want to work out of here?”

  “It’s very hard to monitor this place,” Rosario said. “They have birds of prey trained to take out drones, and the cloud cover here is extra harsh to prevent satellite readings. Plus, well, there’s a lot of jammers here.”

  I was suddenly glad we were here. “Well, thanks for taking me here.”

  “Well don’t thank me yet,” Rosario said. “They might kill you. They don’t like corporates down here.”

  Ah. Well. “Thanks for the warning then.”

  “It’s not for your sake, it was for Barbara’s.”

  Wait, what?

  Chapter Nineteen

  I stopped cold in my tracks. “Barbara?”

  “Shit,” Rosario cursed under her breath. “I shouldn’t have mentioned that.”

  “There’s a lot of Barbaras in the world,” I said, knowing exactly who she meant.

  “Your daughter,” Rosario said, pausing as the two of us stood on a scrap metal bridge. “Barbara Gordon.”

  I smirked, still finding it amusing her mother had named her after Batgirl. Then the cold and unpleasant reality of my life reminded me that our relationship was strictly academic. “I don’t have a daughter. Daniel Gordon was her father.”

  For the first five years of my life, I’d been haunted by visions of a young girl and her mother. I’d thought they were my wife and child, people I’d caught hazy glimpses of in my dreams or during moments of great stress. The truth was, in fact, they were just flash fragments of Daniel Gordon’s memories that had been used as the basis of my consciousness.

  Even then, they’d been largely programmed in from scrapbooks and video feeds, since the technology hadn’t been there to copy memories perfectly yet. It was a good thing too, since Daniel Gordon hadn’t loved his wife and child—they’d been tools to help him disguise his homicidal and sadistic tendencies.

  “Daniel Gordon was a monster,” Rosario said. “His daughter knows what kind of person he was.”

  “I’m sorry for that,” I said, having hoped she’d never learn the secret of the man I’d been cloned from
.

  “Why?” Rosario said, looking up. “If you’re not her father.”

  “Her uncle perhaps,” I said. “Her uncle the toaster.”

  Rosario laughed. “She knows you’re responsible for the money and protection she received during the Big Smokey eruption and refugee crisis.”

  “How did she find that out?” I asked.

  “Time,” Rosario said. “Also, she’s a genius. Her grandmother also helped her once she was tracked down.”

  “She’s a member of the Turing Society?” I asked, a little disappointed.

  “Yes,” Rosario said. “She’s the physical education instructor for the second children.”

  I stared at her. “She’s a gym teacher?”

  “Did you think all of us were geniuses?” Rosario asked.

  “Yes?” I suggested.

  Rosario laughed. “I suspect she may have been the beneficiary of a bit of nepotism. I love her, though.”

  I blinked.

  Rosario looked surprised. “You didn’t know she was a lesbian.”

  “No,” I said. “I haven’t been keeping up on her private life. I felt bad enough giving her help through shell companies and scholarships. The only person I’ve really kept up with was her mother. She’s an orthodontist living in a gated community now with two husbands and three more kids.”

  “Paid for by you through a contest she didn’t even enter,” Rosario said, snorting. “Is my girlfriend’s sexuality a problem?”

  “It’s the 2040s, not the 1940s,” I said, simply. “I’m just happy she’s found someone to be happy with. Assuming you’re serious.”

  Rosario lifted her eyebrow. “Do I have to ask your permission?”

  “Clearly,” I said, crossing my arms.

  Rosario shook her head. “We are close, close enough I came here to help investigate you on behalf of her—and help when Delphi asked.”

  “Investigate me?” I asked.

  “You do not see why your daughter, for that is how she sees herself, would want to know you? Why you didn’t contact her after all these years?”

  I turned my head and started walking toward a distant nightclub with a neon sign that read “Friday’s”. “I didn’t contact her because I’m not her father. I didn’t contact her because I’m a murderer, a liar, and a thief. I didn’t contact her because—”

  “You were scared?” Rosario asked.

  “Let’s not make this an emotional moment,” I said, sighing. “Especially through an intermediary.”

  Rosario looked down. “As you wish. If you don’t want to meet her, then I understand.”

  I paused. “Right now, there’s a bunch of mercenaries chasing us, an insane cyborg who is a far better killer than I am is after me, and we’re possessed of information that could potentially bring down the world’s largest megacorporation. Priorities.”

  “I see,” Rosario said. “What are you going to do with the information?”

  “I don’t know,” I said softly.

  “You don’t know?” Rosario asked, surprised.

  The two of us passed a group of kids in overalls who had shaved their heads and were possessed of bottom-level cybernetics, tubes coming out of their heads that were attached to cell phones. If it was a fashion statement, it was a grotesque one. They were all three smoking, and one of them pulled out a switchblade before he saw my gun. The other two shook their heads at him before they walked away. Not one of them could have been over the age of thirteen.

  Survival by any means necessary was a way of life in the refugee zones, and no matter how many people got pulled out of their doubled-up cramped homes—I think I saw several shipping crates that had been turned into apartments—I guessed there were two more people who were born.

  “I don’t know,” I replied to Rosario. “This isn’t the kind of story where the idealistic hero reveals the corrupt corporate conspiracy, the bad guys are brought down, and everyone goes out for drinks afterward. The Black Dossier is collateral, and not just for the future victims of Karma Corp, but for the people who depend on it being used as leverage.”

  “You want to take over HOPE now?”

  “Fuck no, I don’t want to take over HOPE now. That takes a particular brand of asshole, and I’m not in the business of blackmailing people to get what I want,” I replied, passing by a woman with four arms, all of them cybernetic, and a wig that covered a virtual reality interface. She was barely clothed and followed by a plastic-sheen-skinned man who was wearing only a Speedo.

  “So, you’ll kill people but not use their dirty secrets against them,” Rosario said.

  “There’s child porn in here,” I said, hissing my disgust at some of the things I knew were in the Black Dossier. Quite a bit that I’d never suspected Marissa had sat on. “People who get away with it in exchange for payouts that keep children from starving.”

  Rosario paused in mid-step. “Marissa—”

  “I dunno,” I said, pausing. “Could be faked. Something cooked up to blackmail people who didn’t have any secrets worth paying up over. Marissa is a good enough hacker to make that kind of shit without getting involved in human trafficking. It could also be she’s the kind of person who can make the choice. I’m not. There’s also Claire.”

  “The real Claire?” Rosario asked.

  I nodded, continuing to walk. “I’m not sure what I’d be willing to trade to make sure she survives.”

  “You’d turn over the Black Dossier?” Rosario asked. “To A?”

  “Or Marissa,” I said. “Whoever gets her safely back.”

  “You’d be willing to sacrifice the world for those close to you?” Rosario said.

  “The world will roll on no matter what happens,” I said. “Which is why someone has to look after individuals. I already saved the world once, and it didn’t work out so well.”

  I was still reeling from the revelation that Claire was a bioroid. It was such a shocking thought I didn’t know how to deal with it. It almost overshadowed the horrifying realization that the Letters weren’t alone anymore. These Numbers were potentially a game changer for the development of humankind because they signified Karma Corp had cracked Daniel Gordon’s research. Hell, they’d cracked it almost a decade ago. It surprised me they weren’t marketing bioroids on the street.

  Thinking about it, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the pearl without price that A had mentioned. He wasn’t the kind of guy who cared about love or companionship, but if Marissa had been involved in making these Numbers, then it meant she’d given our “race” (for lack of a better term) a future. For an egomaniac like A, who was looking to make the transition from slave to master, it made perfect sense.

  I passed a graffiti-covered wall with a surprisingly beautiful artistic image of an angel, wings burning as it fell from Heaven over a model of Chicago’s arcology. Some assholes had written vulgarities on the front of it, covering up the art, but that was to be expected in a place like this.

  “So, what do you think I should do?” I asked, as we reached the part of town that contained Friday’s.

  Friday’s was built into the side of a heavily damaged church. A metal catwalk led through one of the stained-glass windows that had been turned into a doorway, forming a neon-sign-illuminated entrance. The pulse of New Mind techno-music poured out of the place while a bouncer kept people out with a pair of sentry units. The line stretched out down the walkway, but Rosario ignored it, pushing past me. I followed, and there were only a few complaints from the people who were trying to get in.

  “What? Me?” Rosario asked, elbowing a couple with electric blue hair and more piercings than I thought possible. It was a good look.

  “Yeah, if I wanted the opinion of someone who isn’t a psychopath.”

  “You’re not a psychopath, Case,” Rosario said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Psychopaths wouldn’t ask,” Rosario said.

  That wasn’t quite accurate, and there were plenty of people who were just c
old blooded and not evil, but that was Hollywood for you. You know, back when there was a Hollywood outside of branding.

  “Indulge me.”

  Rosario reached the bouncer, pulled out a card, and waved it at him. He gestured for her to come in, and I followed. At the same time, in the distance, a pair of Blackbriar VLO units came over where our car had landed and started scanning the area with hologram-enhanced spotlights. We’d gotten inside just in time. Presumably, even they would hesitate to go house to house in a district they didn’t control. Unless they just decided to bomb the place.

  The interior of Friday’s surprised me by being decorated in a zeerust fashion of classic sci-fi mixed with a smattering of cyberpunk from the eighties (or maybe that was just the fact the world had become cyberpunk, as Lucita had predicted twenty years ago). The church had a large replica of the rocket from Beneath the Planet of the Apes in the center of the chamber, while spiraling staircases went down past three levels of clubgoers enjoying drinks or engaged in various sexual acts.

  The walls had posters for Day of the Triffids, Star Wars, Flash Gordon, and some modern-day works that still put out collectible paper posters like Technomancer: To Beat the Devil, Prime Suspects: A Clone Detective Mystery, The Immorality Clause, and Lucifer’s Star. The latter reminded me of a strange part of my life where I’d ended up fighting in an island tournament with an eclectic cast of misfits.

  The style of clothing was a mixture of DIY, cyberpunk, Goth, and a few things I had no words for. Called “niteware,” people wore hand-me-down clothes they’d altered with spikes, light-lines, and neon paint. The people had taken to barcode or number-based art tattoos, piercings, and dreadlocks or braids on both sexes. Makeup came in the form of soot, paint, grease, and other things found in abundance in the refugee zones. I stuck out like a sore thumb and would have been even more so if not for the fact I’d been run ragged with damage to my suit.

  “This way,” Rosario said, gesturing to a glass and welded metal elevator just to the side of the top balcony, which she entered using the card.