by Brian Savage
He was almost to the small pedestrian gate and larger gasser gate when an alarm sounded. Red lights attached to the wall began flashing. The three guards on the outside of the pedestrian entrance raised their rifles and backed up behind mobile bulletproof shields that rose from the ground around the small door. They scanned left to right, unsure of what to expect, knowing only that a threat approached.
Jack ducked behind the nearest tree. Crouching down, he moved along the trunk until he could see the gates. He looked behind him, to and fro, only seeing confused looks on the faces of people eating lunch or walking by.
Then he heard it. The low hum of the small blades of an aerial. He looked around quickly, trying to track it. Out of nowhere, a white streak crashed through the trees, throwing branches and leaves every which way. It bounced its nose off the concrete, righted itself, and beelined straight for the pedestrian gate like a mad hornet.
“Threat front!” screamed one of the security officers, but before they could even raise their rifles, the aerial contacted the first shield, exploding into a ball of fire.
Realizing the inevitable, Jack had ducked behind the tree just in time. The shockwave from the explosion shook the oak to the roots. He peeked out from behind the tree, to where the impact had occurred. The first shield was completely mangled, twisted and torn, sticking up from the ground at an odd angle. The shield was malfunctioning, attempting to retract back into the ground. Due to the damage, it was unable to retract more than a few inches before raising back out and trying again.
Jack couldn’t see anything of the guard that had been behind the front barrier. He knew from experience that the only remnants he would likely find would be his bones, shards stuck into everything else like some morbid kind of shrapnel. He could see the other two guards sprawled out, still partly behind their barriers, which appeared to have fared better than the one that had taken the direct hit. The two closest park trees were smoldering and steaming; the near constant rain made it almost impossible for anything to really catch on fire anymore.
He made his way to the blast site, weapon in hand, hopping from tree to tree. He maintained his alertness, scanning for a secondary attack, which was a common tactic. He made his way to the fallen officers and began rendering aid. One had his left arm almost completely blown off. It hung by a meaty thread, blood pulsing from the stump. Jack ripped open the officer’s first aid kit, slamming his knee down on the point where the arm met the shoulder. He holstered his weapon and grabbed the tourniquet from the pouch.
“Can you hear me? Hey, asshole, next time take the tourniquet out of the package; it goes on a lot faster,” Jack said, but to no response. The guy was out cold.
The other officer was coming around. Jack looked him over as he tightened the windlass of the newly applied tourniquet. “You alright?” he called to the officer.
The officer groaned and sat up. The left side of his face had a few second-degree burns, but nothing that seemed very life threatening. “Hey, talk to me. You alright?” Jack raised his voice a bit louder this time. He secured the windlass in place and checked the rest of the limbs.
“Yeah,” the other officer said, coughing. “Where’s Ben?”
“This guy?” Jack asked, undoing the Velcro on the officer’s vest and pulling his shirt up.
“No, he was…” the officer trailed off, noticing the rent shield bouncing up and down.
“Oh, fuck. BEN!” he screamed. He started crying and continued screaming his name, like he thought Ben was going to pop out from behind a tree shouting, “Gotcha!”
Jack finished the assessment on the downed officer. He stood up and walked over to the screaming officer. Jack knelt in front of him and slapped him hard.
“Look, get a hold of your fucking self. Ben is gone. Your other buddy isn’t far behind, so if you can walk, I need you to get the fuck up and help me get him inside, got it?”
The officer stared at him blankly, tears spilling down his face. “Yeah. Yeah, okay,” he said.
Jack stood up and offered a hand to the officer. Refusing it, the officer shakily pushed himself up to his knees, then stood. He had lost his hat, and a small trickle of blood was dripping from the corner of his lip. Jack hoped it had been the blast and not the slap he’d administered. He kinda felt bad for hitting him so hard.
The security officer grabbed the other officer’s one good arm, and Jack struggled with the slippery stump of what was left of the other. They hoisted the unconscious officer up between them and pulled him toward the door to the pedestrian entrance. They moved along, kicking out at chunks of concrete and unidentifiable metal, to keep from tripping over them. Once at the door, Jack gave three heavy kicks and shouted, “We need help out here!” The door was quickly opened, and two security guards ushered them in.
“Where’s your medic?” Jack barked at one of the guards.
“Here!” another guard answered, throwing down a large bag.
Jack grabbed the bag before the medic could say anything else and tore it open.
“Hey! What the hell are you doing?!” he said, about to snatch the bag back.
“Check that tourniquet and make sure it didn’t move. We carried him in here by the stump,” Jack ordered.
The medic, having been given orders all his life and able to recognize someone who was so clearly in control, followed the order. Jack finally found what he was looking for in a bag labeled, “Breathing.” He pulled out a three-and-a-quarter-inch long, ten-gauge needle, housed in a plastic tube.
“Tourniquet is tight, he has distal pulses in his good arm, breathing is rapid and unilateral,” the medic said out loud, as he cut the clothing away from the fallen officer’s chest. “You going to decompress?” he asked Jack.
“Yeah,” Jack replied. He felt along the officer’s left collar bone until he was halfway between the two ends. He then pressed hard into the chest muscle, finding the second and third rib. Locating the spot between the two ribs, he placed the needle on the officer’s chest and pushed it all the way to the hub. An audible hiss escaped the needle and the officer gasped. Both sides of his chest began to raise more regularly.
Jack sat back on his ass and leaned back onto his arms, taking a breath. “I think he is out of danger for now, but he needs a hospital,” he said to no one in particular. He looked back at the security team medic, who was taping the needle to the officer’s chest.
“Where did you get your training, D.I.E.?” the medic asked him, not looking up.
“No. The army,” he said. The medic nodded in response. He re-appraised Jack with a knowing and more respectful look.
Jack pushed himself up and stood. He still needed to get back to the office. A team in white scrubs and with a rolling litter came through the door, across the carpeted floor of the security checkpoint. The medic began briefing the newly arrived medical personnel on the status of the more serious of the two patients.
The other officer that had been outside when the aerial had impacted the barrier was leaning against the wall further in the office. He had his head down, one hand covering his eyes.
Jack headed for the door on the far side of the small room. The officer looked up as he passed. “Hey, agent…”
Jack stopped, turning to face the officer.
“I’m sorry I hesitated out there. My training was better than that. I’m better than that.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jack said, waving his hand dismissively.
“Thanks for helping us out, you probably saved his life,” the guard said.
“Don’t mention it. You guys be safe.” Jack continued toward the door. Pausing, he waited for the light above the door to turn green, indicating the scanner hidden somewhere in the room had identified his necessary credentials to pass.
The door swung open and out, revealing the courtyard to the capital building of City Prime. Jack stood for a minute, taking in the view. The black spire, sparkling with drops of rain, raised seemingly unending before him, disappearing into the
clouds. Throughout the courtyard, large, artistic sculptures moved with collected rainwater. Manmade waterfalls spinning wheels, others moving giant umbrellas in slow circles, people walking beneath them engaging in conversations, staying out of the rain.
Jack turned to his left, following the wall. The door he had just entered through was closed and no longer even perceptible on this side of the wall. Agents weren’t told they could not enter through the front entrance of the capital building, but it was discouraged. Discouraged with the words, “We made you guys your very own entrance for your convenience.”
The agents’ entrance was a stairwell on the side of the building. Their offices were the first floor of the basement. Their gym and shooting ranges were the floor below, and below that were cells and interrogation rooms used by the agents as necessary. He walked a quarter-turn around the building, before cutting across a manicured lawn containing raised flower beds, directly toward the capital building. Against the side of the building, a small sidewalk led along the curving glass until he got to a delivery area at the back of the building. The sidewalk split, continuing down a set of concrete steps, and snaking around to a second stairway that stopped short at a covered parking area for agent gassers. He started down the steps against the building. The rain didn’t drain well at the bottom and sloshed beneath his feet as he came to stand before the rust-colored door.
Jack waited two seconds, before the light above turned green, allowing him access. He pushed his way inside to a long, dark hallway, the light above him not switching on and illuminating until ten feet or so down the hall. The walls of the hallway were glassed-in rooms, containing row after row of servers. These servers were the combined computing power that powered the black implants. The servers hummed, with red lights constantly illuminated, and green lights blinking on and off, showing their connectivity. The floor was steel grating—the kind of steel grating that felt like it was constantly moving and bouncy beneath your feet as you walked on it. The kind that made loud, echoing noises. Jack could see power lines and pipes running a foot beneath. Couldn’t even give us an actual floor, he thought humorously. Gotta trim the budget on the only department that never makes any money.
Jack walked quickly down the hall, each light above flipping on one step out of the ring of light from the one behind. The hall was a hundred from end to end. One hundred meters of row after row of servers, fifty deep. Jack didn’t bother to do the math. He thought about the old videos, the doomsday preachers that spoke of a technological take over. Bullshit, he thought dryly. All this computing power still needed people. He glanced to the left. He couldn’t tell why, but he felt an almost threatening presence from the red and green blinking lights. He thought about the digital monster people were terrified was going to take their jobs. Robots who would take over the simple and repetitive tasks people hated doing anyway, but did over and over again until the day they died. If a robot had actually replaced them turning that bolt, taking that order, or mopping that floor, what great things would they have accomplished? The answer only came after the civil war, when automation and people started working together.
At the end of the hall, another door with another light. There was no pause in Jack’s step. The door opened two steps before he would have smacked right into it. Jack stepped out and continued right along the steel grate, this time suspended above the gym and shooting ranges. The grate wrapped all the way around the inner footprint of the building above. To the outside and on his right were the offices each pair of agents worked from. Spacious and lit well, you could almost forget that you were directly under a building stacked hundreds of stories above. Jack shook off the thought of it all coming crashing down on his head. He probably wouldn’t feel anything if that happened anyway.
He made his way around a few agents leaned against the railing and talking, others bustling in and out of offices, holding stacks of papers and photographs. He could see a few below in the gym, lifting or running on the treadmills. About halfway down, he hit the ranges. There was a standard point-and-shoot range against the far wall, where multiple agents were engaging paper targets. Directly below him, he could see agents practicing room clearing in a variety of different types of rooms. They fired at random intervals at self-healing, robotic “bad guys” holding stun guns. The stun guns fired small darts that would give you an electric shock that was supposed to mimic the pain of an actual gunshot wound. The “baddies,” as they were known, were programmed with a 75 percent hit rate, and were surprisingly human-like in their movements. They were also programmed to fall whenever a round impacted their hex armor in a “critical” spot, like the head, heart, or pelvis. A pelvis shot would take them to the ground, but the baddie would continue firing if you didn’t follow it up with the head or heart.
The sporadic cracks of weapons firing were comforting. Jack made his way past glass office after glass office; each, he knew, contained the workspace of two agents. His office, and that of Brant’s, was just about halfway down the right side. Right near the crosswalk, which connected both sides of the walkway. There was only one of these. There didn’t used to be any. It took nearly one complaint per agent before they put the one in. Agents were still complaining.
Jack started noticing odd looks from the agents he passed on the walkway. At first, he dismissed it, but the cumulative notice he was receiving started making him wonder what was going on. He decided whatever it was wasn’t such a big deal or someone would have said something.
He stopped and turned right, pausing for a second as the door to his shared office slid open and the light clicked on. He walked in and immediately said, “Privacy,” the command which turned the clear glass to a cloudy white. The door of their office was positioned on the right side of the room. As he walked to his desk, at the far end of the room and set facing the door, he passed Brant’s empty desk, which was set facing the wall to his right.
The office was pretty bare. Two desks: chrome metal with a glass top, an industrial style of bygone days, with two chairs to match. A coat rack hung by the door, containing an extra jacket for each agent, and a shoulder holster that Jack thought might have been Brant’s, or his, or even from his old partner; he couldn’t really remember. Jack stood on the wrong side of his desk. The desk automatically displayed holographic notifications for emails, video messages, and voice messages that had been sent to his office while he was out. Each one took up a corner of his desk, each one with a different digital picture and red number that seemingly floated superimposed over that picture. The fourth corner of the desk was his work area. Activating that area would minimize the other three and pull up whatever research, report, or investigation material he had been working on prior to leaving the office.
He had a voice message and three emails. Jack liked to stay on top of the notifications, as the superimposed numbers bugged him. He hated seeing the numbers grow, and hated even more an inbox full of random shit he didn’t need. Anything important, he sent to his private email for use at home, and to a file on his workspace. Jack tapped the corner of his desk for voice messages, and the holographic image began shaking like pond water disturbed by a pebble as the call was played back.
“Agent Ripley, it has come to our attention that you were present for this afternoon’s attack on Third Ring, Gate One. Because of your proximity to the incident, and our belief that this incident was a deliberate attack by socialist sympathizers within City Prime, we are assigning the case to yourself and Agent Trapp. All current evidence has been forwarded to your inbox; please send your completed report and all findings to the head office, as soon as a desirable outcome is reached. Thank you.”
Jack had already expected the case to be given to him and Brant. He had watched the way the aerial had purposefully targeted the guards at the gate. Malfunctioning aerials didn’t make beelines for specific spots, they just exploded on the nearest asshole’s head.
Jack took a breath. When had he become so cynical?
He tapped the corner of his desk
that would pull up his emails. Three emails appeared, each with the standard head office “do not reply” email. All three were links for video files, which Jack knew would be attached to a digital case file just waiting for more input. He opened up the first link and saw a video stream from the camera just above the door. He could see all three guards as the red light began to flash and the barriers rose from the ground. The inevitable aerial came crashing through the trees, and Jack stopped it there. He swiped the video box to the bottom right corner of his desk, downloading it to his workspace. He opened the next one, which was almost an inverse of the previous one, probably from a camera attached to the closest tree. He downloaded that one as well.
The next one was different. The next one showed the inside of the aerial. He played it. The man he was seeing sat back in the tan leather seat, in a tan leather interior of the aerial, and held a digital hologram. The windows of the aerial had the privacy setting on, making them the same cloudy white as the windows in Jack’s office. The hologram floated just above the man’s right hand, his left extended across the back of the empty seat beside him. His legs were crossed, and one foot tapped to unheard music. Jack paused the video.
“Identification,” he said aloud. The computer automatically singled out the man’s face. It was familiar to Jack, but he couldn’t quite place it. He could tell by the suit, free of any corporate logo, that the man had money. The hologram in his hand, the part that was visible above the soft fingers and manicured nails, read, “Q3 Proj. Earn,” which Jack assumed meant ,“Third Quarter Projected Earnings.” Jack couldn’t see the man’s implant, but he assumed it was black. This man was a Corporate Official.
The computer displayed a name and title next to the man’s face. “Johanes Frond: Corporate Official, Mid-Western Alliance.”
