Chromed- Upgrade

by Richard Parry

  “Cigarettes.” Mason stepped out into the howling rain.

  He found cigarettes three blocks away, an old convenience store set within crumbling brick walls. The water hissed and spat, driving into his eyes, and he almost missed the doorway, the sign above it a blank rectangle, the words faded and lost. The door tore from the frame as he opened it.

  Mason took shelter inside. The blue from the fusion reactor on the back of his suit pushed a soft light through the store, a soft cape spreading around him. Old magazines sat on shelves, rotten pages loose, glossy stars lost to history on the ancient covers.

  Magazines. Now there’s a thing the world hadn’t seen for years. Not where Mason walked, anyway. Sadie might still know a place or two to buy them, but the market for unlinked entertainment couldn’t be large enough to justify the work.

  Bonus Round. Sadie. It’d been a mistake to bring her along. Another bad call in a really bad day. She was a damn illegal, or close to. When the Syndicate Registration Act passed, she’d be getting a link or a free trip to jail. He shouldn’t care, except…

  It’s not fair. You picked her up from her home, a place you blew to pieces, and dragged her to a ruin dead people named Richland. You can tell yourself you were doing the right thing, but the right thing would have been to walk away.

  Mason strode the aisles. He ignored products scattered across the ground. The cigarettes were huddled on a rack, packs covered with writing. He picked one up.

  What the hell is a Surgeon General? And where the good goddamn is Richland?

  The town wasn’t on any map he had stored in the overlay. He came up empty every time he tried to search for it. He’d found a Richmond, but Richland? Ghosts and echoes.

  Mason looked around the store, taking in the aisles and their products. Brands stacked in shelves from companies he didn’t recognize.

  “Carter,” he said out loud, “how old is this place?”

  The link was empty, gone, no reply coming. What had she said?

  It’s got a sort of grid of its own.

  Water dripped from his hair. Mason stared into the rain, pulling the plastic wrapping from one of the packs of cigarettes. Marlboros, the soy bacon of cigarettes. He lit one, taking a long pull before blowing smoke. The sweet smell of burning tobacco shouldered its way through stale air, like the cigarettes were trying to get Richland to remember what people were like.

  How did a place stop existing? The stores were old, but there weren’t signs of looting. The shelves were stocked, products standing or falling where they’d been left. A whole town had stood here one day, and then the next day, nothing.

  Where did all the people go?

  The fusion reactor at his back hummed soft and low, the suit idle. Mason watched the rain, the lattice tugging as he remembered. Mason grabbed a dirty plastic bag from one of the checkouts, tossing cigarette boxes into it. No one had stood at the checkout for years beyond counting.

  It’s a place that doesn’t exist.

  Mason walked into the rain, switching his optics to infrared. His overlay pulled structures shrouded by rain’s cloak into focus. In the distance, curved stacks caught his eye.

  My God.

  It was an old nuclear facility. Looking back the way he’d come, he made out the break in the wall where he’d left the others. Mason remembered Laia’s eyes, and the way she’d looked at him.

  Do you trust me, Mason Floyd?

  What with?

  With your life.

  “Carter, where have you sent us?” The rain didn’t answer.

  Mason set off at a jog, the armor hissing under the rain as he made his way toward the stacks shouldering the load of the sky. What had Carter said just before the link dropped?

  I’m sorry.

  The twin cooling towers were old, a crack running up the left one. Trees at the edge of the facility were blasted, ancient, dead. Nothing grew here and hadn’t for a long time. Mason breathed hard, the run longer than he’d expected. The lattice shuddered under his skin, tasting the rads peeling off from the building in front of him.

  It was only a few stories tall, windows empty, most broken. Like the rest of Richland, no signage remained to tell him what people called it. But Mason knew what it was. A fission power plant. The best answer people had before Apsel’s clean reactor tech arrived.

  He walked through the main door of the facility, the rain lashing at his back, a squall following him inside. Mason stood in the gloom of the first room. An old sign, covered with verdigris and dirt, claimed this was a RECEPTION. A desk slouched, a chair in rotted ruins behind it.

  Mason felt the lattice pull under his skin, pushing him toward the door. He almost listened. Mason shouldn’t be here. It wasn’t his problem.

  He reached into the fire. It burned white hot. The man inside the inferno thrashed, blind eye sockets gaping. Mason tore the door away, the squeal of hinges lost in the roar of the flames. His hand charred, catching on fire. The lattice thrashed, wanting to run.

  It’d do as it was told. Mason moved past the dead reception and deeper into the building. Ancient electronics struggled in a semblance of life, and a single ceiling lamp flickered to life, old, red, and tired. The light was flattened by the blue from the reactor at his back.

  Mason saw an old skeleton stretched out on the ground. There wasn’t any tissue or clothes left. Just the skeleton, wearing an old wrist watch, the crumbling plastic falling away. He picked up the watch, looking at the face. He rubbed grime away with the rubber tip of a gloved finger.

  Casio. A company he hadn’t heard of, one that didn’t exist anymore. Mason wondered which syndicate owned their IP and knew which model of watch replaced this one from decades ago.

  Mason tried to picture this as a place with people, doing their jobs. Trying to make a living. He imagined he knew what had happened. There were a lot of rads. None of that explained why no one knew of Richland, the memory of the city excised like cancer.

  He wondered how the person at his feet had died. He looked over the skeleton again, poking through the bones. Dust drifted, and he coughed. There. The bones of the rib cage were chipped and shattered. It was a small clue, hardly conclusive.

  Could be vermin. Could be gunfire. Mason looked around the dark room, red light seeping in from the ancient emergency light.

  Probably gunfire.

  Mason went further into the gloom, the blue of the reactor at his back casting shadows that caressed the walls. He keyed the suit’s lights, the chest plate throwing clean luminance from under the hard shell. The strong white light shoved back the dark. Mason froze as something scurried away at the edge of his sight.

  Rats that survived the cascade of radiation from a reactor breach didn’t exist outside of horror movies, did they?

  He followed the corridor to the end, walking past doors long gone. He paused at a gaping entrance, the edges ragged. Mason fingered the old metal, feeling the bend in it. So much time had passed, but the fingerprint of explosives was hard to miss. Someone had come here with a real hard-on for busting their way through.

  Who the hell breaks into a nuclear reactor?

  At the end of the corridor, old elevator doors stood open and broken. The shaft was dark, the car gone. As he walked closer, the light from the suit edged its way into the shaft, hard shadows thrown back from the cables hanging down.

  Mason stood at the edge, looking up. The machinery at the top of the shaft was mostly gone, an old gear wheel large and pitted hanging onto a warped clamp. He let his gaze fall down the shaft, the light from the suit stopping before the bottom.

  He reached for the ladder set into the wall of the shaft and started to climb down.

  The control room was old like everything else, but the bodies were different.

  They were dried husks, not skeletons. The rads here were higher. A normal would be dead by now. Mason’s lattice bunched and twitched under his skin. Nothing could live down here, not people, or the bacteria that fed on the dead.

  The
glass wall at the front of the room was shattered, a few pieces stuck in the frames. The suit’s light pushed into a vast chamber beyond, old girders spanning a pit sunk into the ground. Somewhere above, light from the sky broke through, the dimness of it lost against the suit’s brilliant light. Rain poured in, pattering against a massive concrete and steel structure standing vigil in the gloom.

  Meltdown. They’d put a lid where the reactor used to be.

  Mason’s overlay hissed with static, his optics hazing in a struggle with the radiation. He stepped over to a body. It wore armor. Nuclear plant workers didn’t wear armor. Not anywhere Mason had heard of. They wore safety coveralls and radiation warning badges.

  He stepped away from the body, looking at now-white fabric worn by another man face down on the ground. Shot in the back, body stretched out, hand reaching toward a control panel. Mason stepped to the panel, wiping away years of grime. There was only one thing of importance. A shutdown button.

  Mason looked back at the hero who’d died while trying to initiate safe shutdown. “You didn’t make it, did you?” His voice sounded thin to his own ears, the massive space of the reactor chamber beyond gobbling up the sound. Words didn’t have the strength to touch the concrete mass standing vigil in the dark. “You didn’t manage shutdown before these assholes shot you in the back.”

  Probably wouldn’t have mattered. Shutting down a live reactor wasn’t like turning off a switch. Still, the man had tried. He hadn’t run from danger, he’d run toward it, trying to stop…

  What? What had he known was coming?

  Mason paced to one of the armored men. The bodies were slumped, fallen in a loose huddle, no obvious marks on them. He grabbed one, wiping grime from the chest plate.

  “Jesus Christ.” Mason stood, stumbling back. The lattice shivered in sympathy.

  A gold falcon’s wing stared at him from the armor.

  It was when he reached the bottom of the elevator shaft for the climb back up the horde came for him. Bounding out of the dark, misshapen, hideous.

  He looped back the live feed from his optics to his overlay. The creatures were still there, not imagined bodies of the dead, but real monsters. They were humanoid, skulls lumpy and bulbous, wispy strands of hair clinging in places. Their arms were thin, teeth crooked and extending outside their lips. They were dressed in tattered rags and scraps of scavenged clothing.

  They howled and chittered at each other in the darkness.

  “Fellas,” said Mason. Were these … Jesus, were these people? “I’m pretty sure you don’t want to do this.”

  Eyes wide and black stared at him. One turned to another, clawed parody of a hand slashing at the air, then they rushed Mason.

  Overtime fell in place, natural as breathing, and he cranked the suit’s lights up high. The white was blinding, a cascade of brilliance burning pure against the warped bodies of the lost men and women before him.

  Mason charged, spinning and turning within their rush. He moved between them, striking hard and fast. The inductive tasers in the gauntlets fired, cycled, fired, again and again. One of the hunched people was thrown clear, Mason’s fist hitting it hard enough to knock it across the corridor. Another tangled with him, then convulsed and jerked as the reactive armor discharged into it.

  The blue of the reactor on his back burned bright.

  Two rushed him, and he slammed the blade of his hand into the neck of one. It dropped, the taser discharging. The other grabbed for his face. Mason pushed it away, stepping back. The edge of his boot was against the black of the elevator shaft. He stood, panting, overtime pulling the color from the faces around him. He felt rather than heard more of them coming from above, and up from the shaft below.

  How many? How many dead come for you, Mason?

  They surged at him, pushing him back.

  Mason fell, white and blue spinning against the shaft as he fell into the dark below. He fought as he fell, the tasers firing as he lashed out. He snagged an arm through the ladder at the side of the shaft, felt the jerk as the ancient metal sagged away from the wall. His boot slipped on a rung, and one of the creatures leaped from the wall to latch onto him. The reactive armor fired, the thing twitching, the smell of burnt flesh in the air.

  The ladder gave way, and Mason tumbled, lost, into the forgotten dark below.

  Chapter Thirty

  “How the fuck long does it take to get cigarettes?” Sadie crumpled the empty pack of Treasurers, lighting the last one between black lips. She blew smoke into the rain. Laia said a demon lived in the rain, so that fucker could get her second-hand smoke. “This company man of yours. Know what he’s doing?”

  She heard Haraway step closer. “Yes.”

  “That’s it? Just ‘yes?’” Sadie turned.

  Haraway shrugged casting her eyes to the floor. “He’s the best at what he does.”

  “What’s that?” Sadie took another pull, eyes darting to where Laia huddled in the corner. “Abducting people?”

  “No,” said Haraway. “He’s not very good at that at all.”

  Sadie coughed out a laugh. “No, I guess not. Still,” she turned back to the rain, “he knows how to show a lady a good time.”

  Haraway stood beside her. “This isn’t really what his mission is supposed to be.”

  Sadie gave her a little side-eye before looking back at Laia. She kept turning, taking in the black rifle leaning against the wall, the Apsel falcon on the stock. These company types even have a design crew for pleasing color palettes on their weapons. “Haraway?”

  “Yes?”

  “What does a company man need with a BFG like that?” Sadie blew more smoke into the rain.

  “Don’t do that,” said Laia. “It doesn’t like it.”

  “What doesn’t?” asked Sadie.

  “The demon,” said Laia. “It knows you’re here when you do that. It’s trying to get in.”

  “The rain?” Sadie took a big draw on the cigarette and blew more smoke into the torrent. Don’t like that, do you? “It’s been trying all day.”

  “No,” said Laia. “Not like this.”

  Sadie frowned. The rain howled, and just for a moment, a squall walked sideways, just like a man. “Fucking fuck.” She grabbed the rifle, pulling it to her shoulder, yanking the charging handle.

  “What?” Haraway’s eyes were wide. “What is it?”

  Sadie ignored her, swinging the rifle through the gap in the wall. She sighted through the scope, pulling the trigger. The weapon clicked, a blue light highlighting the safety. Sadie flicked it off.

  “I thought you said you knew how to use that,” said Haraway.

  Sadie looked through the scope, into the rain. The company weapon felt heavy, and she imagined it was a sniper’s weapon. Her guitar was as heavy, but that felt alive. The rifle? It felt dead.

  It’s for killing. That’s all it’s ever done.

  The shapes in the rain were gone, the rangefinder in the scope finding no targets. “I could have sworn…”

  “What? Freeman, what did you see?” Haraway grabbed Sadie’s shoulder.

  “It’s probably nothing,” said Sadie. “Damn rain.”

  A creature swung inside, crashing into her and knocking the rifle away. It landed on her chest, clawed hands reaching for her throat. Saliva stretched between its teeth as it gnashed in her face. Sadie held it back, bringing her knee into its groin. It croaked, curling around its pain.

  Sadie scrambled out from underneath it, then kicked it in the head. “Motherfucker!” She brought her boot down on its face. It wasn’t human, or at least, not anymore. Disfigured and twisted, mottled skin stretched over bones.

  “Sadie!” Haraway fiddled with an SMG, trying to get the weapon to respond. “How does this work?” More creatures boiled out of the rain, pouring through the gap in the wall. The gun in Haraway’s hand roared its defiance, the rounds tearing and chewing bodies.

  The weapon stuttered dry, clicking over and over. Sadie placed a hand on top of the weapon
, pushing it to the floor. Haraway’s eyes were blank, uncomprehending as she stared at the pile of corpses.

  Sadie walked to Laia. “You okay?”

  “Yes.” The girl huddled in a blanket. “I told you, it knows you’re here when you do things like that.”

  Sadie picked up the rifle. “It knows, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” Sadie moved to the gap in the wall. “What’s it going to do next?”

  Before Laia could reply, something howled out in the rain.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Julian thought Reed Interactive was the best of all worlds. They had a good marketing division. Agents like himself had the freedom to work as the company needed. The benefits were excellent, and the company HQ was a marvel of design, all clean lines and open space. A haven from the world outside. No one here was messy or dirty, and they all worked together to raise the value of their stock options.

  And they made good products.

  The clean, off-white corridor stretched in front of him, empty and blank. Perfect. A team had probably spent hours working out what color it shouldn’t be before they’d landed on this one. It was like the whole building readied itself for an imprint, a slice of synthetic reality for whatever you needed it to be.

  Julian adjusted his sunglasses. He took out a pack of Camels, pulling one free with his lips and lighting it. He leaned against the corridor wall. What’s the game plan today?

  He’d gone pretty hard on the asset in their last session, using the pliers until there was nothing left of his mouth but blood and mucus. The tech would have put him back together by now. Julian took another pull on his cigarette, frowning. The asshole was resistant.

  Almost like he had nothing to tell. That was impossible, of course, because he could do things to people’s minds. Reed would do anything to get its hands on that technology. Create reality for people? Sure, there was a business model in that, but to change people, make them do what you wanted…