Cyber Witch

by Eddie R. Hicks

Ray’s face turned a shade of red. He clenched his fists and braced himself to reveal the news. “Well, it’s about your daughter, Arianna.”

  “She’s overseas on business, and you know that,” Norris said. “Well, I hope you do.”

  “Oh, I do.”

  “Good, you’d be a fucking terrible boyfriend to her if you didn’t and came here asking me what happened to her.”

  “Well that’s the thing; I did come here to ask you something about her.”

  Norris lifted a silver eyebrow. “And that is?”

  Ray felt his heart race. This is it, he thought. You can do this, man, you’ve been going over how to approach this all fucking night. “Call me old-fashioned, sir,” Ray finally spoke. “But, as Arianna’s father, I’d like to ask your permission to …”

  Ray paused. His nerves were getting the better of him.

  “To what? Spit it out, boy.”

  He took a long deep breath. “I want to marry Arianna.”

  Norris burst out laughing, slapped his hand on his leg, stopped, looked up at Ray, and then laughed again. Well, that’s a no. Fuck me.

  Norris stood from his seat, walking past Ray, and moving to the fridge, still laughing. The feeling of defeat hit Ray in the chest hard. He stood still and embraced his epic loss, unable to turn and face Arianna’s laughing father.

  When Norris returned to the table, he held two cans of beer. He offered one to Ray. He looked at it and winced briefly, shaking his head. “Oh, I—”

  “Ray, shut the fuck up and drink it,” Norris cut in and forced the cold can covered in condensation into Ray’s hand. “I don’t want my daughter marrying some pussy-ass man. So, man up and drink. Prove to me you’re worthy.”

  A ray of hope materialized. Without a second thought, he found the pull tab on the can with his index finger and cracked it open. The hissing sound of the can followed, then a second one when Norris opened his. Ray hesitated for a moment to drink. Not because he didn’t like to, but because he was supposed to go to work soon. Returning to the job after a break with a beer in you was a bad image. But if this was what it would take to get Norris’ blessing.

  Ray downed the cold golden colored fluid within the can and then pulled it away from his lips with a proud grin. “Did I pass the test?”

  “Well, I guess.” Norris shrugged, before sipping his beer. “I’ve never seen Arianna so happy over the last five years, and I’d be lying if I said you had nothing to do with it.”

  Ray’s chest warmed upon hearing those words. “Thank you!”

  “You encouraged her to work at Yoshida when she thought she wouldn’t get the job. Fast forward to today, and now she’s some big-time manager broking deals out in the EU. And this house? Fuck, we didn’t earn it, but Yoshida likes to treat their employees.”

  “So basically, you’re saying my personality indirectly got you all this.”

  “I’m saying you made my daughter happy. Happy people are motivated to do stuff with their lives.” Norris’s facial expression underwent a change. It was a concerning thing for Ray to watch. “Which brings me to you, Ray.”

  “What about me?”

  Norris placed his beer can on the kitchen table and faced Ray with arms folded over his chest. “What are you doing with your life? Still wasting it at the Alliance Star?”

  “It’s the biggest news outlet in the city.”

  “Are you proud of what you do?”

  “Being a seeker of the truth and reporting it? Yes!”

  Norris snorted. “Don’t make me laugh.”

  “I think I did that earlier.”

  “Yeah, so don’t make me do it again,” Norris said. “Truth and the news aren’t typically things that go together.”

  “I don’t report fake news.”

  “Everyone does and has been since the turn of this century. People don’t have time to read newspapers magazines or tune into a news station at a specific time. Easier to check your social media feeds and follow the rabbit hole of links.”

  Ray took a final gulp of his drink. “Some people do, that’s why we still exist.”

  “That number is dropping.” Norris waved an index finger at Ray. “The only reason print news isn’t dead is because of the third world war. People figured out real quick you couldn’t read the news when your city was without power for weeks. But the war is over and has been over for decades. Your sales dropped and now you got corporations and government bodies spending money to keep your business afloat, for a price, to make them look good.”

  “I’m not like my colleagues,” Ray said as his now empty beer can joined the one Norris left on the table. “I will get the truth out, regardless of what my editor tells me. And, if he says no, I still have my blog, which has quite a few followers I might add.”

  “What? That old hacker page you used to run?”

  “Well, the page is gone, but I still maintain the blog and archived all the leaks I came across or hacked during my younger days.”

  “Just watch yourself, Ray.” Norris’ tone changed to a concerned one. “We live in an age where telling the truth will make you a homeless person dwelling in the streets, or a dead body on the roadside.”

  “My days of hacking and reporting the edgy corporate secrets are over,” Ray said. “I just report hard news and make sure it’s the truth, no matter how painful it is to accept.”

  “I don’t want my daughter to be a widow, and I don’t want to see her career at Yoshida end because you said something they didn’t like. But … I also don’t like a person that deceives the masses, which is exactly what you will have to do to prevent one of the above from happening.”

  Norris might as well just come out and said it. Quit your job because I don’t want my daughter marrying your kind. Not likely Ray would do that however, he wasn’t qualified for anything else in life. Maybe coding, but that doesn’t pay the bills, not out here in LA at least.

  Speaking of coding. Ray tapped the side of the error messaging dishwasher. “Still giving you problems, huh?”

  Norris nodded, standing behind Ray as he kneeled, searching for the dishwashers control panel. “Yeah, some tech said it crashed during an update. Going to wait for someone to come and repair it.”

  “You know, I could write a temporary fix if that’s the case.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s Yoshida tech. If I can hack it, I can also reprogram it, or in this case program a software patch to fix it—”

  The ringing of Ray’s phone interrupted their chat. He pulled it out, raising its screen to his face, the name Piper Taylor flashed on the caller display. His eyes opened wide.

  “Sorry,” Ray said as he hastily got back to his feet. “I got to take this!”

  Ray took the call and stepped out of the kitchen into the hall. Piper’s face and black pixie cut hair appeared on his screen.

  “Ray, what are you doing?” she asked in her kiwi accent.

  “Talking with my future father-in-law.”

  “So, you did it, huh?”

  “Haven’t asked her yet, just was asking for permission.”

  “Great. So, news tip coming at you. There’s a hostage crisis going on and it might involve warlocks.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Bunch of IWs stormed an apartment, shots fired, don’t know the rest. I was heading there but was asked to be on standby. Some new RW on the team named Estrella Rodriguez wants to try her hand at this and will probably fail. Either way, this might be a story for you.”

  “I’m on it.” When the call ended, Ray returned to the kitchen, placing the phone back in his pocket, facing Norris. “Hey, listen, man, I got to go. Thanks for the beer.”

  Norris gave him an approving nod. “News scoop?”

  “You know it, and I assure you, it will be the truth as long as I’m writing it.”

  Seven

  Estrella

  Being pinned down by bullets shot from the weapons of warlocks was no fun. Stressful too, but mostly not a fun exp
erience. The slugs that came plowing at them, out from the opened apartment suite door didn’t travel in a straight line. They curved as they passed the threshold into the halls, bullet bending as they called it.

  Why aim your weapon at your target when you have the powers of an IW? Just shoot and use your gifts to make bullets make a sharp turn in midair. It wasn’t safe for Estrella and Marcus to remain with their backs to the wall next to the door. It wasn’t cover, maybe if they’d had been engaged with human targets, yes, but bullet bending warlocks?

  New overlays flashed ahead of Estrella’s vision as her combat HUD activated.

  Geoffrey detected one warlock that covered their body with an electrokinesis sphere. The British sounding AI voice revealed the findings in her head. I am detecting the presence of a defensive electrical barrier.

  Well, that’s just fan-fucking-tastic.

  The current weapon’s load out of you and—

  Yeah, yeah, our bullets are just going to hit that barrier now.

  There was a delay in the rate of fire. Estrella’s graphical overlay informed her that the two targets inside were most likely reloading. It was time for her to act, and she had until they finished reloading to do it.

  She dropped down, searching the body of the first warlock she put down. Traces of its brains and blood still made a mess of Marcus’ face. From the dead hands of the warlock, she pulled his rifle and stared toward Marcus and his hands holding his standard-issue police pistol, a LY-65 semi-auto. Marcus was seconds away from returning fire. He needed to not do that.

  “Give me your gun,” she said to him.

  Marcus looked at her, his eyebrows lifting with confusion. “What?”

  “It’s useless against an electrokinesis barrier.”

  There was a moment of hesitation, but Marcus caved in and hurled his sidearm in the air, sending it spiraling into the cyborg speed and reflexes of Estrella’s synthetic hand. Three weapons lay before Estrella, her semi-auto, Marcus’s sidearm, and the dead warlock’s rifle. She glanced at her NC gauntlet while commanding the utility nanite swarm within her to remain hot.

  Geoffrey, I need a shotgun with a big boom that could break the barrier.

  I got just the thing, please standby.

  A blue and white display flashed in her eyesight, visible only to her, listing a small menu of nano printable weapons her AI could produce on the spot, given it had access to enough raw materials. Like the three weapons at her knees. She selected the sleek, lightweight, black, and shiny Equalizer, a 12-gauge shotgun.

  A second notification appeared, a warning stating it would consume at least one utility nanite swarm to nano print. She selected the confirm button.

  Nano printing weapon, please stand by.

  Light dazzled her NC gauntlet as she waved it above the three weapons on the floor, and a single swarm of utility nanites within her body pooled into her right arm. Tiny distribution tubes within her gauntlet pricked the flesh on her arm like needles. They collected the nanites, sending them into the gauntlet, then out of it like a spray from an aerosol can, onto the weapons below.

  Atom by atom, molecule by molecule, the three weapons were dismantled, seemingly liquefied into three blobs of gray goo. The three blobs of goo came together, forming one large blob, and then formed into the shape of the 12-gauge shotgun. In three seconds, Estrella turned a rifle, and two semi-autos, into a shotgun. Marcus looked on with intrigue. It looked like she performed a magic trick. But to her and the AI in her head, it was state-of-the-art nanotechnology at work. Basically, tech magic.

  Estrella got to her feet with the newly forged shotgun held firmly in her hands.

  Marcus pointed at it. “I’ll never understand how your kind does that so easily.”

  She smiled at him. “Magic.”

  Alert, Geoffrey cut in. Utility, nanite count is low.

  Like a gun, Estrella’s RW body needed to be fully loaded for dangerous situations, loaded with nanites. The swarm used to forge the shotgun were dead, their batteries drained to perform the complex task. She split her synthetic arm open, accessing its small storage space, and pulled out a fresh nanite tube, it was one of five she had remaining.

  A switch on the side of the tube deployed a syringe injector. She took a quick deep breath, bracing herself for the sudden pain that was about to commence, and stabbed her thigh with the device. A single swarm of nanites entered her body, and Geoffrey established a connection with them, relaying the message to her.

  Estrella readied her second magic trick for the night, after browsing through her list of pre-programmed commands to issue to nanites. She grinned at the new screen that clouded her vision.

  Overdrive

  Nanites alter brain chemistry while enhancing cyberware to slow perception of time and increase movement speed.

  Min. nanite swarm(s) required: 1

  Nanite swarm(s) remaining: 1

  Geoffrey hit me with an overdrive boost.

  She felt the newly injected nanites go to work. They quickly swarmed to various parts of her body, making slight alterations to her synthetic bones, adjusting the chemistry in her brain, and releasing combat enhancement chemicals into her blood. Estrella’s world froze in time.

  Marcus’s lips were open but remained that way. It looked like he was trying to say something, a warning perhaps? Too late now, the overdrive was active, and any words said during this mode would come out like long grumbles of sounds.

  Estrella went charging into the unit with a raised twelve gauge, cocking it as she went. A single shotgun shell was inside the weapon, waiting for the trigger to be pulled. She came within firing range of one of the two bullet-bending warlocks.

  She saw the electrokinetic barrier, a bubble of electrical bolts cocooning the bald warlock gangster. She kept running at the warlock, he too looked like he was frozen in time, as was his partner, still reloading his weapon to the right of her. In reality, Estrella was moving fast, so fast that bullets shot at her moved slow enough for her to sidestep them and watch as they inched past her with translucent shockwaves in their wake, smile, then return to her charge at the warlock.

  She was a 100-pound woman, holding a 6-pound shotgun, moving faster than bullets. At those speeds, she didn’t need to shoot the warlock in the chest, to penetrate the electrokinetic barrier, although she did, as her fist driving into his face would have done the trick. It also would have hurt like hell and require her nanites to work harder to reduce or repair any damage to her.

  The now-dead warlock was flying backward, bits of gore ejected out a huge exit wound in his back made a grisly mess of the wall behind him. Like everything else around Estrella, the warlock’s body moved backward slowly, his screams sounded like a long grumble, and the blast of the shotgun sounded like a rocket ship taking off into space.

  A second cock of the shotgun primed it for its second shot. She spun to the right, spotting the next warlock, his hands still inserting the clip into his pistol. She lifted the shotgun’s barrel, lining up the perfect headshot. She pulled the trigger. Another loud rocket ship roar echoed, and another slow-moving shotgun shell ejected.

  She saw in slow motion what happened to someone’s head when they took a close-range 12-gauge blast to the face. It broke apart into nothing, face vanishing, then the forehead, ears, everything just battered into pieces of flesh, bone, and pink with a spray of red traveling in directions away from Estrella. It was disgusting, yet satisfying, continual vengeance for those that lost her lives to the gang. Her parents would be proud if they were still around today.

  Nanite swarm efficiency is down to 46 percent, Geoffrey reported.

  Understood, cancel overdrive.

  Estrella exited the bullet time world, returning to the normal one. The two bodies of the gunned down warlocks finally fell to the floor, painted with gore and crimson. There were still two warlocks in the unit, and she needed to conserve her limited stock of nanites. She pulled out a second nanotube, injecting herself with it; there were now a swa
rm and a half of nanites swimming inside her body. She repeated the task twice more, littering the floor with spent nanotubes.

  Nanite swarm(s) remaining: 3.5

  Bullets from a washroom came flying at her; she dove into cover behind a couch in the living room, cocked the shotgun, and returned fire with a thunderous roar. The warlock hiding in the washroom vanished behind the wall, evading her weapon’s less than effective shots, given the long-range. Estrella continued cocking and firing anyway, the warlock continued bending their bullets from their cover, sending the stuffing inside the couch up into the air.

  The shotgun wasn’t going to do shit, and neither would Marcus’s help as she had to use his gun to nano print it. She tossed the twelve gauge to the floor, pushed her right hand dressed in the NC gauntlet forward, and selected an offensive nanite ability from her internal tactical menu.

  Incinerate

  Nanites burns selected target from the inside out

  Min. nanite swarm(s) required: 3

  Nanite swarm(s) remaining: 3.5

  She released a spray of nanites from the gauntlet, flying through the air. They were almost invisible to the naked eye, and not detected by the bullet-bending warlock still hiding in the washroom.

  Like a swarm of microscopic angry bees, the flying nanite swarms found the hiding warlock and entered every orifice in his head. Once inside his body, the three swarms executed their pre-programmed instructions, making every particle in the warlock’s body they found spin fast. Screams of horror left the washroom, and soon afterward came a warlock engulfed in raging flames, flailing his arms about to pat them out.

  He tried to roll the flames out, and when that didn’t work, he screamed for help, but none of it came. IWs knew never to touch a comrade-in-arms whose body is under attack from an RW nanite swarm or three. Estrella could easily make it spread like a virus if there were enough swarms with battery power left. She was saddened to see that nobody fell for it. There was a moment of silence as Estrella’s eyes scanned the unit, searching for the last remaining red wireframe figure. She couldn’t see it. It made her breathing unstable. Geoffrey scanned and highlighted five targets, four of them were down. There was another at large and it broke out of the threat detector highlight.