Skyway Angel

by James K. Douglas

  “We certainly will,” I said, standing. “You certainly seem more equipped to dispense justice than we are.” I extended a hand toward him.

  He reached out his hand to clasp mine, but his little finger and ring finger remained curled inward, landing in the palm of my bionic hand. He noticed me noticing, saying, “Nerve damage. I caught a piece of shrapnel just above my elbow in the service.”

  “Mind if I ask why you haven’t repaired it?”

  “Never seen a point,” he said, with a slight smile. “It never got in the way of squeezing a trigger.” I smiled back, hiding my disdain for his callousness. “Where’d you lose yours?” he asked.

  “ME building. Working security during the Humanity First terrorist bombing a while back.” I wasn’t proud of the fact that I used to work security for Marshall Engineering, but it served our purposes to let Patel assume we were potential allies.

  “I heard about that. Dr. Marshall certainly put a swift end to that group.”

  “He certainly did,” I said, not entirely faking the grin I showed him.

  I took the first Skyway exit I could find, circling back around to the Ultramarine building. Cassdan didn’t appreciate the jog, but I wanted to know about the protest Patel had mentioned. If he even suspected a friend of Angela’s might be connected to it, it sounded like it was worth a look.

  Encircling the base of the dark blue building were a dozen or so police officers, each one in the new armor. They stood at attention, rifles held in front of them. A single officer stood out from the circle, a white stripe across each shoulder denoting a rank above the rest. Unlike the others, the commander only carried a sidearm, which was still firmly in its holster.

  With the officers maintaining a perimeter that included the sidewalk, the thirty or so protestors present were forced to do their chanting in the street. Signs reading “FREE THE SLAVES” and “UPHOLD THE 13th” were held high in organic and bionic hands. Under loose fitting flannel shirts and jackets the edges of kevlar vests could be seen on a few of them. A young woman adjusted hers with one hand while pumping a fist in the air, calling “LET THEM GO, LET THEM GO“ in unison with the crowd.

  Half a block beyond the political scene, a large transport was parked on the side of the road. Once, the vehicle may have been a city bus, but that was long before shingles of scrap steel had been welded to the outer hull and all the windows had been replaced with metal blinds. An older man in military fatigues sat on the top of the bus, staring down at a phone he held in both hands. He seemed to lean slightly left and right, matching the movements of a small drone buzzing around above the event with a camera duct taped to its underside. The officer to the right of the commander shifted his finger closer to his weapon’s trigger when the flying machine started to move toward him.

  “What in the holy hell is this about?” I asked, to no one in particular.

  “The abuses of the upper class!” yelled back a young woman from the crowd.

  “Well, that answers that,” Cassdan commented. “Let’s get moving.”

  “Angela enlisted a clean cut man to help her with a problem that for some reason might have pissed off the head of security at this building, and you don’t think this might be relevant?”

  “What I think is I’d rather not get involved with a bunch of dumb kids that are about to get themselves shot.”

  I noticed one of the officers readjust his stance, while another slightly stretched his neck. Cassdan was right. These cops were getting antsy. They had every physical advantage they could have, but inside those suits they were all still human, prone to human error.

  A young man with a dirty mop of red hair bent over, reaching toward the ground. With a cheap metal hand, he pulled free a fist-sized rock that had become wedged in the slight gap between the road and the sidewalk. As he drew back to take aim at the officer to the right of the white striped commander, I took off toward him, pushing my way through the crowd.

  Running has never been a strength of mine. I wasn’t fast enough to stop him from lunging forward and smashing the stone across the officer’s protective mask. I wasn’t close by when the butt of the cop’s gun knocked the breath from the protester and dropped him to the ground gasping for air. Though the crowd began to part, I was still a full stride away when the barrel of the assault rifle lowered to take aim at the young man’s head. My last step carried me in front of the weapon, where I slid to a stop, my hands raised in a silent plea for calm.

  I watched in near disbelief as the officer squeezed the trigger.

  Chapter 5

  I felt the bullets slam into my stomach. The shockwave spread through my organs as I instinctively grabbed for the gun, crushing the barrel in my bionic hand. I returned fire by ejecting my breakfast all over his shoes. He jumped back from me, trying to avoid the mess. I couldn’t see his face, but I’m sure he was horrified by my incredibly authentic depiction of a sea cucumber’s ultimate defense tactic. My bet was that I did more damage than he did.

  Gun shots are deafeningly loud. Through the ring in my ears, I heard the commander’s robotic voice ordering the officers to lower their weapons. I clutched my stomach as the protesters began to disperse.

  I felt hands on my shoulders, pulling me backward as more hands took me by the backs of my knees. I was in no condition to resist them as they lifted me from the ground, carrying me away.

  Staring at a grey sky, I struggled for breath. The small drone passed by above me, escaping with us. Droplets of rain sprinkled my face. I closed my eyes and clenched my jaw against the pain.

  “Get him inside,” I heard a voice call out.

  My back landed on a cushioned mat. I opened my eyes to see bionic arms drawing back from me and a crowd standing around me. A woman took Cassdan’s hand to hurry him up into the side door of the bus. The engine came to life, sending a shudder through the vehicle. As the woman slammed the door, we began to move.

  “Get the kit,” said the old man in fatigues, kneeling down beside me. He unzipped my fleece vest and jerked it open. “What the hell is this?” he asked.

  He pulled up my tee shirt to double check what he was seeing. There were no holes in the shirt, or the vest. My stomach was sore beyond belief, but relatively undamaged. There was going to be one hell of a bruise later, though.

  “Buckypaper,” I said, in answer to his question. “It’s a carbon nanotube based material, two hundred and fifty times stronger than steel, practically unbreakable.” I grabbed the edge of my vest with my bionic hand and gave it a firm tug to make my point. “Woven into cloth it makes for decent protection, as long as I don’t get shot or stabbed anywhere other than the vest.”

  He offered me a hand. I took it, letting my artificial arm cover for what my abdominal muscles weren’t up for. I still winced at the pain.

  “I’d say we owe you one,” he commented, clapping me on the shoulder. “Those cops are psychos.”

  I felt my brow draw up, my jaw tense. “Are you familiar with the Humanity First movement?”

  “Whoa, man.” He drew back, putting his hands up to emphasize his innocence. “We’re nothing like those guys. We accept all kinds here.”

  “I already figured that out, but do you remember what happened to that group?”

  “Yeah, after they bombed Marshall Engineering, M.E. security and the cops wiped them out. They hunted ’em down like dogs and passed out bullets like Halloween candy.”

  I unconsciously flexed my bionic arm. “Frankly, Humanity First deserved it, but my point is that when your boy over there clocked a cop in the head, they had all the excuse they needed.”

  He let out a nervous laugh. “Yeah, we were lucky to get out alive.”

  I shook my head at the stupidity. “What I’m saying is that these cops clearly aren’t psychos. They’re not villains. They’re not stormtroopers. They’re just people doing their jobs. They’re human, and they’re going to make mistakes. And sometimes, they’re going to overreact, so maybe next time leave the hotheads o
n the bus, because the cops won’t always go so easy on you.”

  He cleared his throat. “I hear what you're saying, and we still owe you one. Is there any way we can repay you?”

  “You can start by telling me who you are and what that protest was all about.”

  “My name’s Thomas Tomlinson, but you can call me Tom-Tom. I only use the full name for the by-line.” He spread his arms to gesture to the room around him. “You have the pleasure of standing in the middle of the Free Information Resistance Network, a news network and activist organization.”

  He held out his hand and a young woman placed a digital pad in it, already switched to a streaming feed of the events. The letters “F.I.R.N.” were displayed in red in the top corner of a video of me getting shot as I protected the protester. I was glad the drone never got a clear view of my face, but less than happy about how thin my hair looked from that angle.

  Cassdan stepped forward. “Listen, Spider Jerusalem, we’re glad you and the hippie squad are standing up to “The Man,” but we’re in the middle of something we need to get back to. So, if you wouldn’t mind pulling this Mystery Machine over, we have work to do.”

  I stepped close to Cassdan and spoke quietly. “Considering how all over the map your references just were, I’m going to assume you’re too distraught to see that these people might actually be useful for finding Angela’s killer.”

  “Fine,” he said, looking away, “do your thing.”

  I turned back to Tom-Tom but before I could speak, he asked, “Did you say Angela?”

  “You knew her?”

  “Well, sort of.” He had a seat on one of the few benches left in the old bus. “We were working on a project together.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but when’s the last time you took in a play?”

  The creases at the corners of his eyes deepened as his eyes narrowed. “Is that code for something, or are you not taking this seriously?”

  “Just checking something,” I said, taking the seat opposite him. “Tell me about this project you two were working on.”

  “That’s some top secret stuff, man. I’m not sure if I can help you with that.”

  “I save Hothead’s life, and you can’t tell me what you’re working on?”

  “Well, no man, it’s obvious what we’re working on. I just don’t know if I know the facts you want to know, you know?”

  I felt my right cheek raise as my eye narrowed, teeth showing in a grimace of confusion. “Listen, I’ve been a bit busy the last couple of weeks. Let’s just assume that I’m not up on current events and just start from the beginning. Okay?”

  He smiled at that. “Okay, what we’re talking about is the big project, the whole reason FIRN exists. We’re talking about getting inside, taking the system on, and using the voice of the press to free the corporate slaves!”

  “Corporate slaves? You mean like hourly workers, factory drones?”

  “What? No, man. We got nothing against a man with a job. I mean literal slaves! Forced labor hidden away in the lower levels of these corporate skyscrapers.”

  “How does that work?”

  “Prison labor, man. Cops go out, stirring up trouble in the streets and arresting anyone that stands up to them. They get two minutes in front of a judge before they’re carted off to a for-profit prison, and since it’s perfectly legal to use prisoners for zero wage labor, they ship these people off to work in the corporate mines, so to speak.”

  “That’s certainly despicable, but so far it all seems pretty above board.”

  “Yeah, that’s the way it seems, but when you really start looking at the thread count of this wool they’re pulling over your eyes, it all starts to unravel. See, the people that get sent to the corporate factories all have one thing in common, nobody on the outside. They’ve got no one waiting on them, so when they never come back out, nobody causes a fuss, nobody but us!”

  “So, no one is coming back out of the building, even after they’ve served their time?”

  “That’s what I’m saying, man. Nobody comes back out. Release papers get filed, names get written out of the books, but no actual real life person leaves the building. They’re still locked up, lost in the system, nobodies working for nothing. They’re invisible, man, true corporate slave labor.”

  Cassdan’s eye was starting to twitch. “I’m really not digging how much this old white guy is throwing around the word ‘slave,’” he said.

  “I don’t use the term lightly, man,” Tom-Tom responded. “This is the real deal. They’re trying to slip this antebellum bullcrap in right under our noses and tell us it’s daisies. We don’t stand for that, man.”

  “Where does Angela fit into this?” my client asked.

  Tom-Tom took a breath and looked away. “A little over a month ago I get this email from somebody claiming to be Angela Vidales, but you know how it is. Anybody can be anybody on the Internet, and I’m not looking to get scammed, you know?” He didn’t wait for a response. “She says to me she’s been following the vlog and she thinks it's all true, says she’s going to do some investigating on her own. She says she’ll get back to me in a couple of days, when she knows more.” He stood from his seat, starting to pace a small track. “A couple of days go by, and I’m about to write the whole thing off when she gets in touch again, saying she’s seen the whole thing. She says she wants to meet in person.”

  “And what happened?” I asked.

  “It was her, man! It was really her! The most well known woman in the city shows up in person for a meeting with me. She was wearing some no-brand bionics and a raincoat, but there was no mistaking it. It really was her.”

  “Go on.”

  “So, we’re sitting here, right on this bus and she lays it all out for me. She says she approached some V.P. at Ultramarine saying she wanted to pre-scout the building for an upcoming photo shoot with the new Slim armor, you know, like get the lay of the land and figure out the lighting. So he goes and takes her on a personal tour of the building, all trying to impress her and stuff. After enough time goes by, she says she’s got to run off to the little ladies room, but instead she slips down to the lower levels, and she sees everything, absolutely everything.

  “And I’m just sitting there listening to this whole thing thinking this lady’s putting her whole career and maybe even her life on the line to look into this. But man, this kid had more journalistic integrity than any old man I’ve ever met.”

  “But what did she see?” I pressed.

  “Worst case scenario, man. They’re keeping people in tiny cells, making them sleep on a mat on the floor. They’re guarded day and night by armed security and beaten if they step an inch out of line.” Tom-Tom threw his hands up. “All of this, just because they found a way to make human labor cheaper than machines.”

  “So, she brought you back some evidence, and then what?”

  “No, man. No evidence. They scanned her for cameras and recording devices before they let her go anywhere. She couldn’t get anything except an eye witness account, and some good that would do. The cops would never listen to some crossover model. We needed hard evidence.” He sighed. “And she said she was going to get it.”

  “How?” I asked. “What was her plan?”

  He sat back down, hanging his head. “She never said, and that was all nearly a month ago. She checked in occasionally, dropped me an email to say she’s working on it, but never gave me any details. As dangerous as it obviously was, she probably figured I’d try to talk her out of it.”

  Cassdan cursed. I sat back and crossed my arms, trying to think of a next move. If even half of what Tom-Tom was saying were true, trying to push things with Ultramarine would be a waste of time. With the kind of pull they had, we might end up as forced prison labor ourselves, or at the least we’d be cooling our heels in a jail cell until they double checked everything to make sure no evidence had leaked.

  Evidence. If Angela had managed to get any, she had used someone to d
o it, probably the same someone that had been looking for her days before she was thrown from her own window. A person with access to power armor could have easily murdered a model. The suit also would have prevented him from leaving any fingerprints or DNA at the scene. On the other hand, with the police so quickly ruling it a suicide, they certainly weren’t looking for a suspect or evidence connected to one.

  Nothing yet had explained the zombie horde, either. Attacks like that cost money. A power armored cop or a bionically enhanced hitman could have killed Angela, but they would have needed backing to pay for that kind of heavy cyber attack. Until we managed to find a way to track down our suspect, we needed to approach the situation from another angle. We needed to find the hacker.

  “Cassdan, what are the chances that the hacker or hackers that came after April are in the security team at Ultramarine.”

  “Slim to none, I’d say,” he answered. “A corporate payroll hacker would have full use of massive corporate systems and networks. Zombies are the kind of things you use against a corporation, not in defense of one.”

  “How many hackers do you know that can do something on that scale?”

  “Personally, I’d say I know about twenty, but that’s worldwide. Something like this is best paid for in person, and locally I only know of two. One of them is me.”

  “So where do we find the other one?”

  “At this time of day, there’s only one place to look.” His eyes narrowed. “I should warn you, though, it’s a bad place, one of the worst rat holes in the city. I never go there, not unless I absolutely have to.”

  Chapter 6

  Despite the growing traffic, Tom-Tom was kind enough to save us a twelve block walk. The bus’s door scraped open and Cassdan stepped out. I thanked Tom-Tom for the ride. He reminded me to watch my back.

  The sidewalk was getting crowded. Dress shirted sales reps and floor managers shuffled their way home while casually dressed factory workers made their way to their twelve hour night shifts. A dozen small restaurants lined the street, advertising their names in neon. Those who had time enough to stop for food stood in long lines, looking over a list of options on digital boards behind the counters.