* * *
There was no Ray Garrison.
* * *
There was only Bloodshot.
* * *
The sleek, high-tech, black-bladed, polycarbonate knife slid through Bloodshot’s skin, the blade disappearing into the flesh with little resistance. He hit the ground hard, spasming as though he was having a fit. His veins blackening, muscles twitching as his flesh atrophied, the nanites in his blood hacked by the knife’s payload.
Tibbs stepped out of the shadowed alley that ran alongside Gina’s house, looking down dispassionately at his prey. That was the problem with Dalton. Everything was a performance. The man was a glory hound, even if that glory was just his master’s approval. Sometimes you just needed to slip in, do the job and get out again. No fuss, no mess.
“Tagged him,” Tibbs said, speaking into his throat mic. “You should have the signal in three.”
CHAPTER 38
Harting couldn’t help but smile. There was only so long that one of his creations could defy him. He was standing in the ops center, with a nervous Eric next to him. They were bathed in the artificial light from the monitors. The large central screen flickered to life as it received the feed from the anti-nanite knife. The screen showed Bloodshot’s struggling biometrics and the diagnostic information from the tech in his body as the nanites fought a losing battle against the knife’s invading payload.
“Here we go. Shut him down,” Harting told the techs. Now he would have to decide what was or wasn’t salvageable, and whether or not that included the meat and malfunctioning hard drive that used to be Ray Garrison. This wasn’t Pinocchio, he didn’t need his puppet realizing that he wasn’t a real boy, after all.
* * *
Tibbs looked down at the small transceiver in the hilt of the anti-nanite knife as it bloomed open like a high-tech flower. A small LCD screen counted down. Three. Two. One. Bloodshot seized up, spine bent. It looked like a grand mal, except for the blue lightning that rippled through his body underneath the skin. Then Bloodshot was very, very still. His eyes had rolled up inside his head, his veins and muscles were slowly returning to normal, the atrophy apparently leaking away.
Tibbs moved closer to him, standing directly over his victim, satisfied that Bloodshot was down for the count.
CHAPTER 39
It was raining. A lot. The gutters ran deep with overflowing water, steam rising from the grates. KT leaned against a concrete pillar. The bullet had only grazed her leg. It hurt but it didn’t affect her movement. She had her white, piped, roll-neck jacket zipped up high enough to cover her breathing implant. One side of the street was a concrete silo-like warehouse, the other a series of run-down office buildings. According to Gonzalez, Wigans was here to meet with the Chinese about the possibility of them providing sanctuary and funding. KT had nothing personal against Wigans but she didn’t like the idea of a guy like that working with a competitor nation.
KT dropped something next to the steaming vent when she saw the warehouse’s rear door open. She put a cigarette between her lips and started searching through the pockets of her jacket. Wigans, accompanied by three bodyguards, stepped out into the pouring rain. The tech geek was wearing a hat, a ridiculous patterned woolly jumper and striped trousers that wouldn’t have been out of place if worn by a circus clown.
Wigans and his security moved down the street toward her. She had positioned herself between the entrance to the warehouse and the two black Mercedes G-wagons that her earlier surveillance of Wigans had shown them using. She saw him notice her but then put his eyes down. That’s it, KT thought, I’m just a girl, no threat whatsoever. His security barely even looked her way.
“Excuse me? Lighter?” she asked as they passed her. If his security were good then they would just hustle him on, ignoring her, and she would have to switch to plan B.
They weren’t.
Wigans stopped. The three guards looked less than pleased but they took up positions watching the street. Looking everywhere but at the soaked damsel in distress needing a light.
“Allow me,” Wigans said producing a lighter, cupping his hand to light her cigarette.
KT inhaled deeply, the breathing apparatus implanted in her neck scrubbing all the poisons out from the carcinogenic smoke. She smiled at him. Wigans smiled back. She suspected he didn’t get much attention from women. She exhaled smoke all over him. Wigans blinked. She could see him trying to play it cool. Then he coughed. He was breathing more shallowly.
“Yeah, it’s not good for you,” she told him.
Wigans’s eyes rolled up into his head, his knees buckling, and he collapsed into the gutter, right next to the gas grenade. Neither Wigans nor his security team had noticed the grenade’s halothane vapour mixing with the steam from the vent. She winked down at him as he passed out.
The guards started to move.
KT flicked the cigarette into the eye of the first one, distracting him in an explosion of sparks. Filthy habit, she thought. He flinched, his hand moving to cover his eye but far too late. There was a solid metallic click as she extended the spring-loaded baton. She hit the first guard in the knee, he screamed out and went down on the now broken joint, then she caught him in the face with the return swing, breaking his jawbone, sending teeth flying out of his mouth and snapping his head round. He hit the ground, hard, face down in the gutter. KT found herself hoping, vaguely, that he didn’t drown.
The second guard charged her. She spun low, out of his way, swinging the baton round to crack him in the ankle, breaking it and taking him off his feet. He flew through the air to face plant in the street. KT was a little surprised to see him trying to get up. She hit him in the back of the head hard enough to split his skull. He slumped to the ground.
The third guard was on her, swinging wild haymakers. They were slow but looked powerful enough to take her head off if any of them actually connected. The kick to the chest caught her by surprise, however. She hit the ground but rolled back up onto her feet in one smooth action. The guard had followed her into the halothane vapour. His swings became even wilder, easier to dodge. She ducked one and pushed his arm, swinging him round. He staggered, stumbling around like a punch-drunk boxer. She grabbed his arm, used it to swing up and wrap her legs around his neck, taking him to the ground. She scissor strangled him until the blood drained from his face and he succumbed to unconsciousness.
KT got back up onto her feet and looked down at the guard.
“Lame,” she muttered. She had needed the workout. It was clear that she was carrying around a lot of pent-up aggression but Wigans’s security detail had not proven the challenge that she had been looking for.
She reached down and grabbed Wigans by the collar, pulled him out from under one of his unconscious bodyguards and started dragging him down the street.
CHAPTER 40
Bloodshot stood alone in a white room devoid of windows and door. He was barefoot but wearing white trousers and a T-shirt of the kind you would see in a psychiatric facility. Just for a moment he wondered if he was mad, that all of this insanity involving cyborgs and nanites was just a delusion. The result of too much time in the field. Operators rarely talked of it but they all knew deep down that the body and the mind had limits. Too often they operated on the edge of those limits, and you could only do so for so long before something broke. The only problem with the idea of it being a delusion was where all the detail had come from. He understood tech as it applied to his job but RST was the stuff of science fiction.
“Garrison.”
Bloodshot turned around. Harting was standing there. He hated the doctor using his real name. It sounded obscene, somehow, after everything he had put Bloodshot through. The games he had played with memory, the torture of seeing his wife killed over and over again.
Except she’s not your wife anymore.
“You did this,” Bloodshot breathed.
Then he charged Harting. Swinging for him he went straight through, almost losing his balance in t
he process. Harting was a ghost.
“You’re in your own head,” Harting told him calmly. Because of course he was.
“What is this?” Bloodshot demanded.
* * *
Harting was standing amid an array of cameras designed to take a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree image of his body. The image could then be digitized and projected into the mental, virtual reality construct that the, now slaved, microprocessors in Bloodshot’s nanites had created. The surrounding screens displayed the image back to Harting, a technological hall of mirrors.
“A neural space where we can talk in private.” Harting appeared to be talking to the empty laboratory but in the “neural space” Bloodshot would be able to see and hear him.
* * *
Bloodshot shook his head, prowling around Harting like a wild animal, all his training, every instinct searching for a weakness, something, anything he could use.
“Well, isn’t that lucky for you,” he growled.
The image of Harting pursed his lips.
“Here, let me make this easier, help you see it from my perspective.”
Harting tapped at a screen on his prosthetic arm.
The white walls of the non-room fell away as geometric shapes, building blocks, appeared and burst open, assembling themselves into a rudimentary wireframe landscape. The floor dropped away, stretching and reshaping. The primitive wireframe geometry became more refined, more detailed, gaining a higher resolution, turning into boats, stalls, seaside houses, boutique hotels, quaint restaurants. All of it as eerily familiar as the feeling that nothing about Bloodshot’s life was actually real. Mountain ranges grew out of the horizon like time-lapse photography of fungal growths. Water flooded in and the world became textured, detailed, full of light and shadow, until Bloodshot was standing on the fishing pier in the little coastal Californian town that he’d visited with Gina just after the Mombasa job. Except now it appeared he hadn’t visited there at all, which would explain why he had never known, or couldn’t remember, the name of the place.
The whole scene was perfectly still, nothing and nobody moved. It was like being in a photograph. The people running the stalls, the other visitors, the kids playing, the ocean waves, were frozen, even the seagulls in the air. Harting tapped the screen on his prosthetic arm once again and, like a god, breathed life into this world. Bloodshot heard the waves rolling in, gulls on the wing, felt the breeze against his skin. It was near perfect verisimilitude. His senses could not differentiate between this and the real world.
“This is all for you,” Harting told him. He almost sounded as though he felt Bloodshot should feel grateful. After all, not everyone gets their own customized world.
“You used me. To kill.” And this was the thing he didn’t quite understand. His job as an operator had literally been this. He hunted bad guys. People who threatened their way of life. Harting would only have gone through this charade if he had wanted Bloodshot to kill the wrong people. People who did not necessarily deserve it. Though from what he had seen of Axe and Baris, they had been far from angels. So why go through this? Unless Harting just liked playing god.
“Yes. You are preternaturally good at it,” Harting told him. His presence here, in this place, a violation of Bloodshot’s memories of Gina, however false those memories had subsequently proven to be.
“You made me think they murdered my wife.” Except that I was good at killing before that, he thought. Though not nearly as well motivated.
“Revenge is a big part of the alchemy that goes into your character,” Harting told him.
This made a degree of sense. He had been one of those who had signed up with the Corps in the wake of 9/11. A foot soldier in the war against terror. Though now he wondered if that was what had actually happened, or just more programming. Was he really a blank slate, a revenge machine created from the ground up? Was this how other humans felt? In the end he had no basis for comparison. Was the weapon that was Bloodshot all he really was at the end of the day?
“Who was I?” Bloodshot demanded. “Where is my family?”
“The reason this project has been so successful is in part because a lot of what I’ve told you is true,” Harting explained.
Despite himself Bloodshot was pathetically grateful for some glimpse of an actual identity, something real. This only angered him further, however. Harting playing god once again. Doling out actual reality one spoonful at a time. Bloodshot wanted to kill him as much, if not more than he had Baris or Axe. Then he found himself wondering if this was just another trick, another piece of the simulation.
“Your body was donated to us by the military because no family claimed it,” Harting continued. “War was your drug, Ray, you loved it.”
“Yeah, well, things change,” Bloodshot said, more than a little defensively. Somewhere he knew this to be true. This was real. This was the reason Gina had left him, because, at heart, fighting his war, the thrill of it, being in the shit, was more important to him than her.
“Sure. Things like the weather. The seasons. You know what doesn’t change?” Harting asked. Bloodshot was sure he wasn’t going to like the answer to the rhetorical question. “Guys like you. You like living in the box, Ray. You like the structure... you need the structure.”
“Don’t tell me what I need,” Bloodshot snapped. In some ways he was relieved that Harting hadn’t said that he enjoyed the killing. He didn’t want to examine that thought too closely.
“There’s nothing left for you out there. You want to know where you shine?” Harting asked. It was another question that Bloodshot didn’t want to hear the answer to. “Where you are always the best version of you?” Harting continued and deep down Bloodshot knew the answer himself but didn’t want to acknowledge it. “With me. Here. In this world I built for you.”
Bloodshot stared at him, desperately trying to suppress the temptation of what Harting was offering.
“It’s not real...” he managed.
Harting smiled, as though he knew he had him now.
“You rescue the hostage. You spend a night with a woman who loves you. And you wake up with a new body and a clear purpose.”
Bloodshot started to pace, trying to process. Harting was right. Bloodshot knew he was right. It served both Ray Garrisons: the loving husband, the normal person he... pretended to want to be? And the righteous warrior who needed a reason (an excuse?) to fight.
There was just one problem.
Just a small problem.
Free will.
Bloodshot stopped pacing and wheeled to face Harting, stepping to him, getting in his face.
“No more. I’m done with this. I’m done with you,” Bloodshot told him. He would know it wasn’t real. He would know he was just going through the motions.
Harting let out a tired breath. A father disappointed in his son. A god exasperated by his creation.
“I wasn’t asking,” he told Bloodshot.
He held up his hand. Seemingly out of nowhere a remote control had appeared. Harting pressed the button.
* * *
And Bloodshot awoke to the cold reality of the resurrection room. He screamed as blades dug into his flesh searching for his vital arteries and vampiric machines sucked the tech-rich blood from the shell of his body.
CHAPTER 41
Wigans came to with a splitting headache and the realisation that he was on an aircraft.
“So, ow,” he said, opening his eyes. He was pleasantly surprised to find that the aircraft in question was a comfortable executive model and that he hadn’t been tied up, manacled, or otherwise restrained. The woman who had drugged him was seated opposite. She was very attractive but post-gassing Wigans was feeling considerably less debonair than pre-gassing Wigans had when he’d offered her a light.
“You’re...” he started.
She raised a finger to her lips and he fell silent, which was unusual. He liked talking when he was nervous, and he was positively frightened at the moment. The silence st
retched out until he couldn’t bear it anymore.
“My security?” he blurted out. “Because, y’know, for all their slightly thuggish nature they were nice enough guys. I mean you don’t expect people of that ilk to get along with the likes of me but...”
“They’ll live,” she interrupted.
The woman put some kind of a device down on the table between them. He didn’t immediately recognise it but a bit of abductive reasoning suggested that it was some kind of high-frequency white noise generator.
“We’re being listened to?” he asked.
She looked at him but didn’t say anything.
“Because if we’re being listened to in an aircraft that you’re using as a prisoner transport then surely it must belong to your employers, so why don’t you want them to hear us talking?”
She still didn’t saying anything, instead she pushed the neckline of her top down a little and Wigans could see the implant violating her flesh. Judging by its placement he guessed that it was some kind of breathing apparatus, which explained how she’d been able to stand in what, he now presumed, was halothane vapour. The sophistication of the implant also meant that he knew who she worked for. That was when he really became afraid.
“You work for RST, don’t you?” he asked. She had opened a port in the implant and plugged a jack in. The cable ran from the jack to a cheap knock-off tablet, presumably bought in the streets of Ciudad del Este. “You’re one of Harting’s creations, aren’t you?” That got her attention. She looked up at him sharply. “Look, I don’t mean to cause offense, it just sort of happens all by itself, but I have no wish to be thrown into a state of technological bondage—”
“Wigans—” she tried to interrupt but he was just getting started.
“I mean other sorts of bondage, depending on the circumstances, right person, right ambience... I mean, do you like... No, no, forget I asked that. I mean I’m not hitting on you. I mean, not that you’re not... Look this isn’t workplace harassment... not that I could, I mean you kicked everyone’s ass. I just literally can’t stop because I’m scared and I don’t want to be Harting’s slave,” he finished somewhat lamely.
Bloodshot--The Official Movie Novelization Page 17
