by Fox Lockster
Helicopters hovered above the spectacle, recording it all for the viewers at home. They were the ones lucky enough to be strapped into their interactive viewing chairs, their bodily fluids being cycled and shared through the local network. Some claimed that it was unclean to share vital fluids in this fashion, but it was only the viewbound who had to worry about their blood flowing through the veins of several hundred other people, and they certainly weren't in any position to complain.
At first there had been protests against the idea of turning people into sedentary viewing machines, but the general public soon came around when they realized that it more than took care of the problem of what to do with the criminals. There had been so many criminals for a while there, the usual murders, rapists and burglars of course, but as the Motherland's powers had grown, thousands of misguided fools became criminals through all sorts of acts of rebellion.
Many had tried to refused to be chipped, or had taken their chips out. Those were the early chips of course, the ones that could be removed relatively easily by a doctor. The more recent chips merged with skull tissues within minutes of implantation and would require extensive brain surgery to remove.
The 'unchipped' as they were called were still rumored to exist, but virtually nobody of any social standing actually knew an unchipped person. There were stories that the unchipped never presented their babies for chipping or genetic analysis, a fact that made the law abiding citizenry regard them with a kind of horror. How selfish must they be to deny their children the chance to have genetic illnesses corrected and dealt with, not to mention depriving them of the excellent programming that the Che'Bro beamed, free of charge, directly into the brains of every child in the nation.
ATTENTION! ILLICIT ACTIVITIES HAVE BEEN DETECTED!
The warning boomed throughout the ears of the crowd, although not a sound could be heard outside their heads.
“Fuck,” X swore under her breath, slipping the small computational device back into its hip holster and preparing to make a run for it. Around the edges of the crowd she could see the silver crime bots beginning to crawl over the people. Most seemed unaware as the small multi jointed scaly creatures crawled over their bodies and slid into their ears, checking for illicit programs. Millions of them could be deployed at any moment through the city's grid system, so there was no time to loose. As the sprinkled sliver wave made its way through the crowd, she set off at a run, deploying a light electric field over her outer armor, a gauzy metal mesh which covered her from neck to toe, fashioned in the latest styles to look like normal clothing, but providing some resistance to various forms of mechanical attack. As she broke through the layer of crime bots, several tried to attach to her, but were repelled by the field and sent arcing through the air, screeching fiendishly as their tiny circuits were overloaded.
“Fuck, damn, fuck,” X kept swearing even as she ran through the maze of streets, using the landscape both vertically and horizontally to her advantage. A wall was not an obstacle, it was a launching pad, a balcony a stepping stone to greater heights. With one hand she grasped a railing and used it to spin her body up to the second floor of a building where she scaled a down pipe in mere seconds. From there she ran across the roofs of the residential blocks, uniform cubes with barely a meter's space between them, until a single power line provided a slide down near street level. X was no fighter, but she was all runner.
She spied an old manhole that still gave access to the waterways of the city and relief flooded her body. The incident would have been caught on camera, there was no doubt about it. She was going to have to change her face yet again. “Damn,” she swore once more. She had just gotten used to the one she was wearing too. She dived underground into the relative safety of the waterways and kept running through the foul channels until she was certain she hadn't been followed down there.
With just a few thoughts, she scrolled through the applications on her frontal lobe chip. Bringing up the law enforcement program, she could see the red blips that signified patrols on the surface. By the looks of things, she had a while to go before the excitement cleared. Settling up against a handy concrete pillar she closed her eyes and zoned out of existence.
Chapter 5 | Hunter Y
Y's violet eyes scanned the area. It was largely desolate, the crowd had obediently dissipated at the command of the Che'Bro, but he had remained behind having been assigned the bounty and therefore task of ridding the country of the rebel who had caused such disruption and embarrassment for the Prime Minister.
His lips curled up into a sneer as he thought of the rebel. He enjoyed hunting these rebels. He likened it to the way his great great grandfather had shot lions in the African continent when he was a young man. Both were wily, smart, fast, and dangerous. Killing a rebel was a triumph, and he would take a special pleasure in killing this one.
He reviewed the footage again, laughing without humor as the shapely woman broke through the bot shield with the electrical field blazing around her like an unholy aura. She was a delightful specimen. It was almost a pity that he was going to kill her.
A silver biomechanical sniffer dog was scanning the area with painstaking precision, sucking particles into its body where they were processed by highly efficient nanoprocessors. There was little to do but wait, and Y was content to wait for the moment. He leaned up against a building, cutting an impressive figure with his black hair flowing like a cloak over his shoulders and the sun glinting off the body armor which both protected his body and defined his musculature.
Y was handsome, and he knew it. His face had been carefully sculpted from the finest flesh replica tissues and was designed to be irresistible to women and men alike. His jaw was strong, his cheekbones were high, and unlikely purple eyes flashed in their dark sockets telling a story of unimaginable cruelty and passion for death to those who gazed into them.
A small group of women made their way past him on the opposite side of the street and cast sidelong glances at him, giggling amongst themselves. Y grinned. He thought perhaps he had the pleasure of one of their bodies, the blond one with large breasts looked familiar. Then again, so many looked exactly the same these days, it was impossible to tell.
His ogling was cut short as the sniffer dog ran up to him, wagging its biomechanical tail wildly and clutching a print out between its teeth. Y took the printout from its mouth and tossed it a small silicone meat treat, which it wolfed down eagerly, sitting down in front of him and wagging its tail hopefully from side to side, waiting for another instruction, or perhaps another treat. The creature was out of luck however, his master was thoroughly engrossed in the report that had been compiled on the rebel. It was an impressive litany of disruption and evasion, though thus far she had gone unpunished for a single crime. She wasn't even registered on the Che'Bro's databases, and in the field where here name should have been was nothing but an 'X'.
As he took in the impressive row of zeros on the bounty figure, Y grinned. This was going to be both profitable and fun.
Chapter 6 | A Quick Kill
Y did not dally in getting on the trail of the rebel X. Just minutes after the site analysis was completed things were picking up. An unchipped target had been detected in a nearby area and Y was speeding towards it, dodging the sparse traffic with ease, glancing down occasionally at the little purple moniker which represented the anomaly on his tracking screen as he draw closer and closer.
He was on the rebel almost before the rebel knew it. The roar from the powerful engine was a dead give away though, and upon hearing it, the figure broke into a run. From his gait and height, Y could tell that this wasn't the woman he was after, in fact it appeared to be a young man. Probably one looking out for the woman. “Two birds with one stone,” Y muttered under his breath as he drew his weapon, locked on to the running target, and sent a flurry of bullets in his direction, his hair billowing out behind him as the speeder drew him closer to his victim with each successive shot, the last delivered to the spine at point blan
k range.
It was over in seconds. The few walking around the fallen man seemed not to see him even as he gurgled his last breaths, the blood bubbling from his arteries into his lungs and flowing out onto the concrete. Y dismounted and kicked him over onto his back. Looking down at the dead man, he realized he was really more of a boy. The rebel's dead brown eyes gazed up at him, still filled with fear and shock. Something like the shadow of guilt passed over Y's heart momentarily before he reached down and cut a lock of the young man's hair, holding it up with a gleeful smile. This would do nicely for his collection.
Chapter 7 | X Meets Y
As Y combed the streets of the city he was largely unaware of the playfully malevolent force drawing him in. From a rooftop, X watched Y stride down the street, his easy athletic gait drawing the attention of every woman he passed by. It was sickening the way they fawned and melted at his merest glance, even more sickening was the way she felt some primal part of herself responding in the same way.
Soon he was out of sight, too close to the building to observe. She waited patiently, knowing that he was tracking the beacon she had placed in the center of the roof top, knowing that in mere seconds he would be in her grasp. The Che'Bro's hunters always worked alone, it was their greatest strength and their greatest weakness. Ostensibly it was to increase efficiency, but X had a theory that it was more likely connected with it being impossible for two hunters to be present in the same place at the same time without their egos merging into a super ego force that would destroy the world as they knew it. She smiled wryly at the thought as she waited, crouched and ready.
True to hunter form, it was not long before a flash of light burst up beside the building and Y flew up above her, disengaged the jet pack which had eased his ascent smoothly, and casually fell the last couple of feet to the hard concrete of the rooftop with a laugh.
Whirling upon him, X's eyes flashed with pure venom. He may be pretty, but he was a hunter. He cared nothing for the lives he took, this was pure sport to him. It was tempting to kill him, but she needed something from him first. This was no mere game for her, hunters were upper tier operatives of the Che'Bro. They carried coding that no other citizen did, and if she hoped to bring the Che'Bro down, she needed those codes. Little did Y know that now he was in close proximity to her, her equipment was analyzing his at lightening speed, copying the coding and storing it for later use.
Y laughed again, a deeply amused sound as he recognized his prey. Their eyes still locked on one another, Y took his gun out of the holster and laid it on the ground with a symbolic flourish. He would kill her with his bare hands, it was always better that way.
X was not impressed by the gesture, her upper lip curled in derision. “You might want to keep that handy, tin man,” she mocked him, circling around out of his reach. Y's brows drew together in a frown, and he bared gritted teeth in a growl of aggression as he lunged towards her, his muscled body flowing smoothly towards her focused entirely on one cause.
She laughed and simply took several steps back, arching in a backwards flip off the side of the building, falling the short distance to the building next door and landing once more in a crouch. Y hurtled off the edge of the building entirely, recovering just in time to tuck and land safely a few feet from her. As they righted themselves and faced off once more, a soft alert buzzing against her thigh informed her that the download was complete.
X laughed as relief rushed through her. Just being near him made her nervous, though she would have never admitted it to anyone, lest of all herself. This man smelt of pure unadulterated death. That wasn't going to stop her toying with him though.
“Didn't the Che'Bro teach you about gravity?” She taunted him again. Y found himself suddenly very much wishing that he had not left his gun up on the building above. With a growl he rushed at her again, but she evaded him once more, ducking under his outstretched arm, ripping one of his monitoring devices from the outer shell of his armor then making good her escape, skipping from roof top to roof top like a monkey, swinging from ledges, rolling over rails, and allowing the twin forces of momentum and gravity to describe her path to safety.
Y could do little more than gape after her. He had underestimated her stamina and her speed, and where he was heavy and weighed down with weapons and armor, she was light, with a great ass. In less than a minute he had lost sight of her amongst the shining spires and domes that crested the city's buildings.
The sun was beginning to set, sending golden rays gleaming over the cityscape and bathing everything in a warm glow. They fell upon his handsome face, highlighting his violet gaze as he stared in the direction she had gone, his arms folded across his broad chest as his lips parted in a low chuckle and a murmur.
“You are mine.”
Chapter 8 | Sabotage
In spite of Y's pursuit, and the departure of the Black Guard, all was not yet lost. X was now standing at the precipice of achieving her goal, lurking outside the great central building of the Che' Bro dressed in a bustier and skirt two sizes too small and a blond wig that allowed her to fit in with the other peroxided secretaries. X clutched at the key containing the designer virus she had simulated from Y's coding, wedged it firmly into her cleavage, put a wiggle in her hips and began to totter towards the entrance of the building which rose, stark and impressive before her, a concrete behemoth which effectively blocked out most of the sun along the water front.
Small slitted windows admitted a little light into the building, but were not large enough to allow a human being to pass through in one piece. The Che'Bro took a very practical approach to security, so there was only one point of entry to the building, and all who entered passed through various screening devices as well as human security officers, armed to the teeth with various devices. It was said to be the most secure building in all the land, but as X had predicted, it was not difficult to gain entry.
“Oh!” she gasped as she 'dropped' her 'security card' in front of the officer at the door. She then spent a minute or two groping around on the ground trying to retrieve it, gasping prettily from the exertion. Bent at the waist, her posterior wriggled around clad in the tight material that left very little to the imagination. Evidently a gentleman, the officer finally knelt down and picked up the card, getting an eyeful of cleavage as he handed it to her.
“Oh thank you!” X chirruped as she tried to rise once more without falling over completely. By the time she gained her footing again she was simply waved through by the man who now seemed to be 10% flesh, 90% lecherous grin. She clutching her little purse and giggled nervously as she proceeded into the building which was filled with row upon row of cubicles, each filled with a human working away at a computer.
Finding a suitable victim did not take long. Spying the perfect mark, X wiggled her way over to a cubicle where an office junior was hard at work. “Hello,” she smiled brightly.
The mousy young man squinted up at her cleavage. “Hi,” he replied, looking befuddled as to why such a gorgeous woman was speaking to him.
“I'm Julie, I was sent here to take some notes?” she said, her voice honey and candy melting all over him.
“Er, really?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” she assured him, pretending to search in her purse for the authorization. As she fumbled about, a few items of cosmetics tumbled out and she took the opportunity to repeat her earlier performance, squealing and diving after them with the eagerness of a hawk upon a field mouse. Scrambling around on her hands and knees she crawled under his desk to chase a lipstick which had rolled that way.
With the junior's eyes fixed on her bountiful ass, she was able to slip the key out of her cleavage and plug it into one of the ports on the back of his hard drive. It blinked, once, then again to show that it had activated, and then settled into dull gray obscurity as the code it held began to leech into the system.
“Oh my, I am such a klutz,” she giggled, standing up again, flustered and adjusting her clothing which was now properly askew. S
he was fixing the issue of her skirt riding up high and revealing lace topped stockings when the main doors opened once more, and a tall, heavily armed man strode into the building.
She sensed him before she saw him, instinct alerting her to the arrival of the hunter. He stalked amongst the workers, his eyes sweeping the room for signs of the rebel. X shook her blond hair out further and hid behind it, giggling flirtatiously with the office junior who was gazing at her with a dazed grin on his face as Y looked the room over.
She had set her chip to run an emulation of the standard chip program and in her present state, she seemed no different from any of the other chipped citizens. She soon realized that the hunter had no idea where she was, and with a wry twist of her lips, decided to have a little fun before she made her escape. Wending her way through the crowd, she laid her hand on the hunter's arm and smiled brightly.
“Hello Sir. Can I help you?” she asked, fluttering her long fake eye lashes.
Y glanced down at her, then did a double take as his height gave him the advantage of an unfettered view down her top. “I am here on official business, I have reason to believe that a rebel is here,” he said, his tone clipped and efficient.
