I’d asked Persephone how they’d spun the events at Logan and found out it was being treated as an attack by Red Sword. The bodies had been recovered by our “friends” in the government, and everyone who had seen something they shouldn’t have were being intimidated or bribed into compliance.
It was a national disaster, but would last for a week before the next round of celebrity marriages and break-ups distracted America from the event. The people killed in the attack, the flight attendants and security personnel, were just collateral damage from the Carnevale’s feud with the Society and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
Monstrous.
I couldn’t spend much time thinking on them, though, since I was too busy thinking on Gordon. If he really was my father, there was no way Persephone should be sending me to meet with him. They were too intelligent to risk triggering a relapse of my memories or a sudden burst of principle that might interfere with my taking him out. Avoiding people making moral stands was the whole reason Letters existed, after all.
Then there was the fact that Persephone knew about me and Marissa. That made our relationship dangerous. I forced those thoughts from my head as we arrived at the sixth floor sub-basement’s elevator doors. According to the schedule I’d been given in my briefing, I had less than a day to get my IRD updated and my face reconstructed before they were going to have me flown out on a rented private jet for Italy.
Tapping the up button on the side of the elevator, I muttered, “The wonders of Black Technology.”
“Afraid of going under the knife again?” Marissa asked.
“No,” I said, watching the elevator doors slide open before stepping in. “Not really.”
Marissa followed me in as the elevator doors closed behind us. “Liar.”
I hit the button for the second sub-basement level. “Very much so.”
The ride only took a few seconds. When the doors opened, I was greeted by a sharp contrast to Delphi’s messy server rooms. Medical’s halls were a bright white, filled with laboratories, micro-clinics, and two operating theatres. It was a miniature hospital and dozens of people worked here. I knew that the pharmacy was routinely raided for pills, at least six of the people here were petitioning the doctors to get help for dying relatives, and quite a few of the staff had shady pasts.
F’s body was somewhere here, as were the other dead Letters’ remains. Their cybernetics were being removed, wrapped up, and put away for re-use. If you died before your term was up as a Letter, your body would be disposed of along with all of your memories. Your past, whatever it was, simply ceased to matter. But then again, wasn’t that what it was like with everyone?
“G, are you OK with hunting Gordon?” Marissa asked, whispering.
“Shh,” I said, shaking my head. “Not here.”
I looked to one of the security cameras surveying us.
Big Sister was watching.
Marissa nodded. “Right.”
Searching the halls, I quickly found the man I was looking for. He was located in a glass room with a strange MRI-looking machine next to a bunch of computer consoles that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a set of a sci-fi movie. The walls were covered with holographic displays of a human male’s interior as well as abbreviations I did not know the meaning of. Doctor Gerard Saint Croix, head of Medical, was standing at one of the panels, calling up a series of images of the human brain that I found vaguely disquieting.
Gerard was, in simple terms, a beautiful man. A tall, broad-shouldered, muscular, lean, African American with a shaved head, he looked more like an actor playing a doctor than an actual one. Gerard wore a white coat over a pair of blue slacks and a simple white button-down shirt.
“What’s up, Doc?” I said, heading into the room and giving a half-hearted wave.
Gerard waved back, not bothering to look up from his console. “Good to see you, G. Right on time.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t keep you waiting. You’re my favorite doctor here.”
“That’s not what some of the staff say,” Gerard said, smiling. “Doctor Perkins asked about you.”
Marissa frowned.
“She’s a lovely woman,” I said. “But I’m not interested.”
“Of course,” Gerard said. I wasn’t lying that he was my favorite doctor. He was one of the few people who treated Letters like we were human. Doctor Perkins had made numerous sexual overtures to the better-looking males among us, but that was because she didn’t think of us as people.
Just handsome machines.
“Hello, Marissa,” Gerard said, walking over and giving her a hug. “I understand you had quite the ordeal at the airport.”
“I survived.”
Gerard nodded. “If you need psychological counselling, we have a new therapist on staff who is quite good at her job.”
Marissa tried not to snort. “Thanks, I’m fine.”
“As you wish.” Gerard turned back to me. “We’re on a tight time schedule given recent events, so we had better get started. You should remove your shirt and any metal objects from your pockets.”
“Uh, I hate to interrupt, but what’s going to happen to me, precisely?” I asked, not exactly comfortable with how fast this was all going down.
“Nothing too extreme,” Gerard said, tapping the MRI-looking machine. “This is going to handle most of it. We’re going to reach into your brain and remove your existing IRD implant before replacing it with a new one in a single easy pair of injections. From there, we’ll be installing the new nano-machine weave into your cranium. It’ll allow us to directly program—”
“English?” I pleaded.
“We’re giving you a new model computer in your brain and making you look like F.”
“Ah. Just making sure we were still going with that.”
“Will he go back to looking like his old self after this?” Marissa asked. “Because that’s not really possible with most plastic surgery.”
“We can do that here,” Gerard said, giving a reassuring smile. Almost too reassuring. Nice guys didn’t work at the International Refugee Society. Ironic as that may be. “We wouldn’t want to screw up your Reassignment, would we?”
“No,” I said, coldly. “We wouldn’t.”
Gerard said. “Don’t worry, this is all well-tested technology.”
“On whom?”
“That’s classified.”
Of course. “Well, it’s not like I have a choice, do I?”
“There’s always a choice,” Gerard said. “Just not always a good one.”
It was a surprisingly observant statement from a man I thought of as primarily good for brainwashing people into obedience.
That was when Marissa’s cellphone beeped. She checked it and looked at me. “Sorry, they need me downstairs. I’ll see you after your surgery.”
“Try not to be too freaked out,” I said, smiling.
“I’ll try.”
Marissa turned around and departed the room, leaving me alone with Doctor Saint Croix.
“You should break up with her,” Gerard said, surprising me.
“What?” I turned to him.
Gerard went to some nearby machines and started calibrating them. “There’s nowhere healthy a relationship between a Letter and an Assistant can go.”
I sat down on the side of the machine that was, apparently, going to do brain and facial reconstruction surgery on me. “Does everyone know?”
“No,” Gerard said, sighing. “But you’re not exactly hiding it, either. People notice when a Letter is happy. Persephone certainly picked up on it.”
“I can deal with Persephone.”
“Can you?”
That was a good question and the answer was, honestly, no.
I narrowed my eyes. “What do you care?”
“Do you know how I got involved here?”
“No,” I said, starting to take off my shirt. “But everyone has a story.”
“Mine started innocuously enough. I was a surgeon
, newly graduated, and ready to take the world on by storm. I had a family, fiancé, and money. There’s places where being a Saint Croix will get you everything free.”
“Oh, the tragedy of your story.”
“It becomes more so through my own fault. I didn’t handle the pressure well and took pills to cope with them. This led to the usual domino of mistakes: failure, disgrace, and ultimately my innocent family paying the price. The Society offered to clear me of all charges and make it seem like someone else was responsible.”
“So you took it?”
“Yes.” Gerard got a haunted look in his eye. “I started working for them exclusively, installing their bits of hardware in agents like you and the Discipline unit. It was good for a while. My fiancé even came back to me and we got married. We were thinking about having kids when I started to notice she was always taking the Society’s side whenever I confided in her things she shouldn’t know about.”
I got a bad feeling I knew where this was going. “What happened?”
“They’d taken her and conditioned her. They’d turned her into a mole who existed to make sure I was safe and content in my new job.”
“That’s not Marissa. Persephone has made it clear she doesn’t want us involved.”
“That’s what you think, but can you be for sure? Is there a better way to bind you to the Society than to have you in love with your loyal Assistant?”
I stared at him. “It isn’t like that.”
“You know she’s conditioned, G. Anything you might feel for her is going to be at least, partially, artificial. She deserves better. So do you.”
I tossed my shirt to one side. “I don’t know if anything I feel isn’t artificial. What happened to your wife, anyway?”
Gerard paused. “I rejected Amanda… so she committed suicide.”
I closed my eyes. “Begin the procedure.”
Chapter Ten
I was hoping the procedure’s anesthesia would keep me from dreaming, but it was not to be. Normally, I would have welcomed more visions of the past, but these weren’t of my days before the mind-wipe. No, these were the one set of memories I wanted nothing to do with.
The Factory.
The place I was forged.
It was six months before I awoke in the metal room for the first time, after my mind had been wiped but before I’d been cleared as a Letter. It was here I was conditioned to be a soldier for the International Refugee Society and where the process was at its flimsiest. I often got flashbacks from this time, each more terrifying than the last.
This night, I was standing in a close-quarters combat (CQC) pose in a two-story concrete room lit by fluorescent lights. There was a large Karma Corp logo on one of the pillars holding up the ceiling with a red-letter 17 underneath it. I was surrounded by an audience full of people with shaved heads and identical army green t-shirts with camo pants.
I, too, had my head shaved, but my shirt had a stylized G on it where the others didn’t. I was covered in sweat and my body ached all over, but I was feeling only a fraction of the pain due to the heavy drugs coursing through my system. I’d been hit numerous times but was still at near-peak capacity. I would need to be. This was my third fight of the evening and my opponent was fresh.
Standing across from me was F, in a similar pose and attire. F looked ten years younger, which confused me, but he had a focused look of determination on his face. I had no doubt he was ready to kill me, and if they had ordered me to do so, I would have done the same to him. The trainers wouldn’t like if I killed him, though, so I focused instead on planning ways to disable him.
It was… difficult.
“You’re not going to win,” F said, his voice somehow both empty and cocky at once.
I didn’t respond.
He wasn’t worth it.
On the second level of the concrete room, I saw a balcony full of a different sort of guests. There were military men and women, corporate executives, politicians, and individuals I knew to be doctors and scientists from their participation in the experiments on us.
Doctor Marcus Gordon walked in front of the balcony from my right side, carrying a stopwatch. He was wearing a lab coat with a little splotch of blood at the bottom, making him look menacing in an understated way. His appearance here might have been an accurate reflection of past events or just my mind cobbling together various disparate elements into a coherent whole.
Marcus addressed the people above us. “Stage two of our program has done what no regimen of training has accomplished in a millennium of war: standardized the human soldier. Each of our prospective Letters, male or female, is equal in terms of strength, speed, agility, and yes, even intelligence. Experience, however, cannot be compensated for and is the difference between a hardened veteran versus a Letter.”
I was getting really annoyed at having to keep my combat readiness pose, but the emotions seemed distant.
Stunted.
“How do we know this is going to be an accurate reflection of their fighting skills?” one of the general says.
Marcus snorted. “You’ve seen actual soldiers fight, gentlemen. You can tell for yourselves when someone is faking.”
That seemed to satisfy the general, but a female colonel said, “We have experienced soldiers, Doctor. If they’re superior to your lab rats, why should we replace them?”
“You’ll see the answer to that,” Marcus replied, smiling. He gave us a brief glance. “Fight.”
F, or perhaps it was better to say the future F, moved faster than any normal human being and harder. A punch from him would take a normal man’s head off. I ducked mine out of the way, and delivered a brutal series of retaliatory punches to his chest. It was like hitting iron. The future F spun around to strike me in the face, only for me to grab his arm and with a swift twist, break it.
Then I kicked his kneecap and broke it, too.
Then I threw him over my shoulder and placed my foot against his neck.
My instincts told me to break it.
I didn’t.
This time.
“Twelve seconds,” Marcus said, checking his stop watch. “As you can see, we’re not faking the damage they’ll take.”
“Is he going to be… processed? He’s not much use like this,” one of the executives said, trying to find a euphemism for killing a broken soldier.
“It’ll be healed in two weeks,” Marcus said. “Another benefit of our program. But before you ask—no, it’s not available for soldiers in general. It’s built into the Letters. We are, however, willing to work on it with sufficient funding.”
The colonel said, “I want to see him fight another Letter. The other winner.”
Marcus looked up and nodded. “S, please come forward.”
Everything started to get blurry and I wondered if that was part of the memory or something related to the fact that it was a dream. They were sticking an updated IRD into my brain right now and I didn’t know what that was doing to my head. The room started to spin around me, but I managed to focus on S regardless. Beautiful even with a shaved head, black eye, busted lip, and broken nose from her earlier fights that evening.
I couldn’t remember the next few minutes.
But I lost.
Badly.
My next memory was being inside an infirmary, underneath a plastic oxygen tent filling my surroundings with gases designed to accelerate my body’s healing. I had a mask over my face to keep me from breathing them in. I was barely conscious but sensed a presence in the room. Was it Doctor Marcus? Someone else?
I didn’t know.
However, the presence was comforting to me.
Comforting but sad.
Pitying.
“You should have hit her harder,” the voice said. “I can’t protect you if they think you’re weak.”
I didn’t respond, instead looking through the gases and plastic at the indistinct figure before me.
“I’d say think of your family, but we both know you don’
t remember them at this stage. Know that they love you, though, and you love them. I’m diluting your dosage for your next round of treatments. That should allow more of who you are to survive.”
I lifted my hand and put it on the side of the oxygen tent, muttering something that had no meaning to me in the present but something that meant a great deal to my past self: “I am not who you think I am.”
“Get some sleep.” The figure just turned and walked away.
“Rebecca,” I mumbled. “I am not…”
And then I wasn’t there anymore.
I was somewhere else.
The office was absolutely beautiful. Two glass walls overlooked a Japanese garden on the second floor of a Karma Corp building in Sweden. The carpet was blue shag, which went well with the blue leather on both the chair I was sitting on as well as the couch behind me.
I was sitting in front of a desk with a glass of brandy in my hands, listening to a black-haired man in an Italian sport coat prattle on about his golf game. I was dressed in the attire of an upper-mid-level executive and wearing a wig styled on John F. Kennedy Jr.’s trademark style. There was a flat screen television set on behind him, playing the movie Memento, starring Guy Pearce. The movie hadn’t been playing in my real memories, I was sure, but was now for some reason.
I knew where I was.
My first kill.
Or was it my second?
Or even fifth?
It was hard to tell.
“And that’s when I said, ‘Finish blowing me and I’ll tell you about sexism in the workplace.’ I swear, she was an awful caddy, but the service of that country club was like nothing I’ve ever experienced anywhere else.”
I struggled to remain interested in the misogynist douchebag’s statement. “If what you’re saying is true, that’s definitely the club to join.”
“Pfft,” the man, Aaron Stevens, gave a dismissive wave. “You think that’s unbelievable? I could tell you shit that would make your hair turn white. The kind of stuff that goes on here is enough to make Stratton Oakmont look tame.”
I had no idea what he was talking about but faked interest. It was a Saturday and the two of us were largely alone in the office. This location was in the process of being shut down due to widespread speculation of securities fraud. It was all true, but Aaron believed, correctly, that he was going to be protected from prosecution.
Agent G: Infiltrator Page 8
