“My father believed that,” Daniel said, smacking me across the face and sending me spiraling to the ground. He hit me with the force of a car, and I couldn’t help but wonder how much of the original Daniel Gordon remained. Then I decided I didn’t care, since I was going to kill him no matter what the ratio.
“The world is already changing,” Delphi said, surprising me. “Have you not been watching the news? South Korea just invaded North Korea because of the Spanish flu outbreak. Xiang Medical’s board being killed was a strike against Black Technology holders. That was before the release of the world’s technocracy’s secrets. The President has ordered your Invisible Hand’s assets frozen, though she’s not going to survive this leak. The old world is going to be dead at the end of the week. The new one will have no place for men like you. Oh, and one more thing?”
Daniel growled. “What’s that?”
“I’ve been deleting Case’s controls for a while now. I just finished.”
I then grabbed at the REM-90 in his hands, struggling against the cyborg’s monumental power. Daniel smashed me across the face with a backhand even as the gun went off, tearing a massive hole in the wall and sending us both tumbling to the ground. I managed to get the pistol and scrambled to my feet, only to get kicked in the chest before Daniel delivered a spin kick to my face, slamming me against the wall.
Before I could react, Daniel Gordon tackled me and pressed me through the nearest plaster wall, causing pipes to burst and electrical wires to spark. He then grabbed me again and ran me through a second wall, throwing us into a study full of antique wooden furniture. I didn’t have time to respond before he pulled a six-foot-tall shelf out from where it was screwed in and knocked it over on me.
The REM-90 was finally knocked from my hand, only for me to throw the shelf right back at him as I lifted the bottom and broke the pieces on him. That did nothing to the top-of-the-line cyborg, and he grabbed me by the throat, digging his fingers into my skin and trying to rip my head clean off. I placed my right foot on his chest, then shoved two of my fingers into his eyes while jabbing my thumb into his nasal cavity, feeling sparks against my artificial skin.
“Fuck you, G,” Daniel said, slamming his knee into my chest and spinning me around on the ground before wrapping me in a headlock. Blindness didn’t seem to be impeding him. “You can’t beat the original.”
“You’re obsolete, Daniel,” Marissa’s voice spoke behind him.
My ears burst with the sound of my doppelganger’s head exploding.
Bits and pieces of the ceiling rained down upon me before I turned to look at Marissa. Marissa was standing there in pants and a Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt with the hood up. In her hands was one of the futuristic rifles used by Daniel’s team, freshly fired. She looked like hell, which wasn’t surprising since I’d given her enough drugs to incapacitate her until nightfall. My vision glitched like a bad television and I wondered if my IRD had been damaged.
“How the fuck did you get here?” I asked, not bothering to get up.
Marissa took a deep breath. “Did it ever occur to you that I might have a few cybernetic implants too?”
“I thought you were all natural,” I said, staring at her. “It was one of the qualities I liked about you.”
“You could have fooled me,” Marissa said, frowning. “You’ve destroyed the United States, you realize that. All our tactical advantages over other nations have been eliminated. Decades of military doctrines and treaties are worthless now.”
“I could not give less of a shit,” I said, coughing before giving a short gallows laugh. “Was everything you said a lie? Daniel having a control code like me doesn’t surprise me. I just don’t understand why you didn’t use it earlier.”
Marissa coughed a few times. “I didn’t know it. Your computerized friend contacted me and gave me the number of the woman most likely to know it.”
“Who?” I said, trying to move and finding myself unable to.
“Rebecca Gordon,” Marissa said, shaking her head. “She was the one who designed the Reaper’s Shells and programmed them.”
I closed my eyes. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
I kept trying to think of the Gordon family as one that behaved in a normal manner. The truth was, they were never normal and could never be anything approximating it. Maybe Rebecca Gordon had intended me to be the replacement for her dead son, only to find out later he was still alive. Maybe I’d always been intended to be an upgrade, the woman having realized what kind of man he was. It didn’t matter. She was nothing to me.
“How are the others?” I asked.
“Still alive,” Marissa said. “It’s hard to kill cyborgs unless you destroy the brain. Doubly so when your brains are circuit boards and titanium. James is getting the bodies up and loading them in his van. He was ready to shoot me when I drove up.”
“And?”
“He didn’t,” Marissa said, stepping over Daniel’s corpse and looking down at me. “No matter how much we talk about duty and honor, we’ll always choose our friends and loved ones over them.”
“Except when we betray them,” I said, barely able to see through the fuzzy images projected to my brain. It became worse when my right eye stopped functioning completely, leaving me feeling like I was shutting down one system at a time. It made me want to start singing “Daisy” like Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“You came here to kill Daniel to protect my sister and nieces,” Marissa said.
“Partially,” I said, mumbling my next words. “I also had to complete the mission. It’s how I’m wired.”
“You could have told me you had a kill switch for Daniel,” I said, mentally. “Or that I had Manchurian Candidate programming.”
“I only know what people tell me,” Delphi said, sounding remorseful. “Much of what I’ve done in the past week has been improvised. Thinking at the speed of light doesn’t help when you don’t have information stored in people’s brains, just their email accounts. I did, however, have faith Marissa would help you.”
“She tried to kill me,” I said.
“She tried to kill you in a way which was easily avoided,” Delphi said. “Or did you never think about the fact that you were wearing a wingsuit and thus could navigate your fall?”
I hadn’t. “You are the worst mom ever.”
“I try.”
“What now?” I spoke aloud, wondering how long it would take for the police to arrive now that the Wintercrest estate was no longer a blind spot in the electronic world.
“You said we were done and I respect that,” Marissa said. “I betrayed you twice and you’d be a fool to take me back. I didn’t realize how much I cared about you until I was asked to turn against that for something other than my country.”
“It didn’t stop you, though.”
“No, it didn’t,” Marissa said. “I’m going back to Washington to try and sort through as much of this as possible. I’m also going to try to delete as much of your information as possible from the system. You deserve a chance to be free.”
I didn’t respond.
Marissa continued. “It’s going to be hell, as Black Technology will be just the start of it. Everything is going to come out, from suppression of science to assassination to artificial wars and information control.”
“The public will be outraged until the next television season,” I said, not believing it. It would take a few years, but Black Technology would change things as much as the computer and internet had. It wouldn’t make a world where people like the Invisible Hand and the President couldn’t exist, but it might make it harder for them to consolidate power. A good dying legacy.
“You should be more worried about the volcano,” Delphi said.
“You and that volcano,” I muttered.
“It’s a real issue!” Delphi said. “No one is working on it.”
“Go find one of the bodies outside and upload yourself,” I thought back at her. “Take your pick.”
“
As you wish,” Delphi said, vanishing from my mind.
“Maybe people will care, maybe not.” Marissa leaned down and put a flash drive in my hands. “This is for you.”
“I’m a little preoccupied right now.”
Marissa took a deep breath. “It’s the cure for cyber-necrosis. The President wasn’t lying to you, at least completely. She gave it to me for when you were done with eliminating the Tribunal. You did that, sort of.”
Huh. I hadn’t expected that.
Marissa leaned down and picked me up by the arm, hoisting it over her shoulder before the two of us headed for the door. “It’s also got all of Persephone’s accounts and blackmail material inside it. Maybe you should form your own Society.”
“I think the world has seen enough of the International Refugee Society. I am, however, going to find a doctor who can fix me up.” I’d start with Gerard, if I could find him.
“Maybe a mechanic,” Marissa said.
I left the mansion into a new world.
Epilogue
I never expected to see Marissa again.
I kept in touch with James, Delphi, E, S, and Lucita, though. It was something of a miracle they’d all managed to survive the attack on the ranch, but I wasn’t going to look God in the face. As Indiana Jones had proven, that was a bad idea. Instead, I simply did my best to keep my head down low and prepare for a life completely free from the forces that had tried to control it from birth to present.
Presently, I was loading a suitcase full of clothes, toiletries, and various brands of liquor I intended to take with me on my quest to get out of the United States to someplace the Invisible Hand (if it existed) couldn’t find me. I’d made it as far as Hawaii with no trouble, and I was currently considering India, Indonesia, and Brazil as my final destination. The hotel I was staying in was next to the beach, the sun was bright, and the locals were friendly. Still, I was exposed, and not even all the chaos currently afflicting the world made me feel comfortable.
I’d ditched my trademark business suit for a red floral pattern button-down, straw hat, and a pair of white shorts with sandals. I admitted that I looked like a Jimmy Buffet superfan, but it felt comfortable given the room’s air conditioning wasn’t working at one hundred percent. Sun streamed in from underneath my closed drapes and I kept a piece of tape over all my computer cameras as well as burning phones. Delphi could still find me, but I’d done my best to make myself impossible to trace, even altering my IRD address so I couldn’t be tracked.
On television, the news talked about the cure for cancer having been found, as well as how long it would take the FDA to approve the 1.2 million patents that were pending based on the Black Technology files out on the net. They were just a drop in the bucket of what was already an Industrial Revolution that threatened to upend the balance among the world powers. Hell, upend the balance between the wealthy and the poor in general.
I took a swig of cheap vodka straight from the bottle before surveying my surroundings and wondering if I’d made the right decision. President Douglas was going to finish out her term in disgrace, as the public fully believed she’d been part of a massive conspiracy to cover up Black Technology from the public—but that just meant Karl Trust was likely to take the position instead. The Invisible Hand puppet was certainly a recognizable figure, but I wondered if they had any real control over him.
The release of Black Technology had democratized a lot of the corporate control over technology, but it wasn’t like Karma Corp or Halifax had gone under automatically. They still had a big advantage on the development of many of these Intellectual Properties. The lawsuits and accusations forced many executives from power, but the wholesale collapse of Western capitalism hadn’t occurred—for better or for worse.
Indeed, it seemed like a dozen new megacorporations were being created every day as nations privatized their assets or funded new super-corporations so they could make use of the advantages made possible by Black Technology. The Big Ten were going to be the Big Hundred, if not the Big Thousand, soon.
“Fuck it,” I said, taking another swig of vodka. “It’s not my place to try and fix the world. I’ve done my part.”
Indeed, that was the most frustrating part of all this. The power of the gods was now available to the public: AI, Shells, satellite weapons, weather control devices, cybernetics, instantaneous biological engineering, and a few things even I didn’t believe were possible, like instantaneous faster-than-light communication. But none of it seemed like it was going to radically alter the world. The cures for cancer and AIDS were going to be sold at a healthy profit with as many stages as possible to make them slow as well as unwieldy. Shells were possible for the super-rich, so they were already making cheap crappy versions for the public that would cost almost as much in the long run.
Same shit, different toilet. Oh well. Maybe I was just letting my natural cynicism get the better of me. It wasn’t often anyone got the chance to change the entire world, and even if it wasn’t going to happen without the corporations profiting off it, I’d managed to release a staggering number of innovations to the public. The cotton gin and assembly line hadn’t helped the worker in some ways, but they’d certainly helped the consumer, and perhaps that wasn’t the only thing we could really count on. That was when there was a banging on my door.
I immediately went for my gun, then paused. “Death squads don’t knock on the door, jackass.”
I headed to the door, still holding the gun and checking the tiny camera linked to my phone. A UPS man was there. Which was more than a little unsettling, because I didn’t know anyone who knew my present address. Still, I opened the door slightly and greeted the figure. He was a Native Hawaiian man who looked extremely bored.
“Are you Case Gordon?”
I took a risk. “Sure.”
“This is for you,” said the UPS man, handing it over.
I took the package. “Thanks.”
“Yeah, whatever,” the UPS man said.
The package was heavy and roughly the size of a laptop computer, which seemed honestly a bit too obvious. Still, I opened it and found… a laptop computer. It was one of the kind the now-defunct International Refugee Society had bestowed on their Assistants.
“Huh,” I said, wondering whom this could have been sent by. It was genuinely puzzling since Marissa would have chosen more direct means. I didn’t see any reason to choose a cloak and dagger method to communicate since we could communicate instantly through, say, burner phones.
Deciding the only person who wanted to kill me in an offbeat manner was Daniel Gordon, and he was dead, I lay down on the bed with the laptop on my legs. Plugging it in, I powered it up and wondered what I was going to find inside. What greeted me was a video feed of someone I never expected to see again.
“Hello, Persephone,” I said. “Fancy seeing you alive.”
Persephone looked as she had months ago, before her poisoning, wearing one of the pantsuits she’d worn as the leader of the Society. “A premature assumption, Case. In fact, I am not only merely dead but really most sincerely dead.”
“A joke with you as the Wicked Witch of the West?” I asked, blinking.
“Death has improved my humor,” Persephone said. “Remember what I told you about brain uploading being the Diet Coke of Immortality?”
“Hard to forget,” I said, blinking. “So, you’re not the real Persephone.”
“I am the only Persephone left,” Persephone said. “Elizabeth Patterson died in your doppelganger’s drone strike.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, sincerely. “You were a bitch and you probably had it coming, but I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy—which you were.”
“I’m so glad you were the first person I decided to talk to postmortem,” Persephone said, sighing.
“Well, if it’s any consolation, you were the only enemy I ever respected,” I said, speaking honestly. “I may not have liked the International Refugee Society, but it was a magnificent engine o
f power, wealth, and death. It was the cool kind of evil, like SPECTRE, and not the ugly banal kind of evil like everyone else I’ve met in my life.”
Persephone half-chuckled. “Very droll, G.”
“Case,” I corrected her. “G is dead. G never existed. He was the person people tried to turn me into, a copy of Daniel Gordon: Professional Psycho for Hire. Given I’ve outlived him, I have no further interest in pretending to be he.”
“You were made to be who Daniel Gordon was supposed to be,” Persephone said.
“So was Gandalf,” I said. “But Gandalf the White I am not.”
Persephone paused. “You did the right thing, Case. All of what you did. You broke free from the system, at least for a time, and I envy you that.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re alive too.”
“I’m not,” Persephone said. “In fact, having endured life as a disembodied intelligence for a month, I’ve decided to let myself pass on.”
“I could arrange for you to get a Shell,” I said. “Eventually.”
“No,” Persephone said, staring. “The damage to my mind is what bothers me versus the lack of experience. I am not fully me, and I can sense the parts which are me starting to degrade. I can’t remember things with the clarity I desire and I get confused about times as well as faces. The more data I absorb, the less I am. I fear the person who transferred me was not as talented as Rebecca Gordon.”
I paused. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Persephone replied, her voice low and regretful. “I am allowed the unique opportunity to say my goodbyes before I drift off. Strangely, it occurred to me you were the only person I had anything left to say to. My husband and children knew me as a philanthropist who died when I faked my death for the first time. Everyone else had their own opinions, mostly mixed, on me.”
I stared at her screen image. “Of all the people in the world, I’m the only person you have left to talk to? That’s…sad.”
“I don’t see a horde of friends knocking on your door,” Persephone said.
She had a point. “Well, I’m sorry about insulting you earlier. You may not have been anything like a maternal presence in my life, but you were an inspiration. I never would have been half the magnificent bastard I became if not for your example.”
Agent G: Saboteur Page 21
