by Damien Boyes
“I’ll run out there and give them a target,” I say, holding up the assault rifle. “I haven’t fired one of these in years, you’ll be better off shooting. Just make sure when they poke their heads up, you get them first.”
Boaja’s eyes widen slightly but he shakes his head. “You would be dead before you cleared cover,” he says, his voice soft and deep. He raises his weapon and stalks back across the warehouse floor toward where Fate and Standards are at a temporary stalemate. The two soldiers take up position behind him and I trail along. “We will take point,” Boaja says to me over his shoulder. “Wait for the signal. Understood?”
“Yeah,” I say. He’ll get no argument from me. Better than acting as a human target for Fate. Besides, he can probably dodge bullets.
I check my weapon again, let them get a few steps ahead, and wait for battle to start. It doesn’t take long.
Boaja and his soldiers pick up speed, racing along the wall separating the barracks area from the warehouse. The Standards agents are still lying on the open warehouse floor with their nervous systems incapacitated and their power armour overloaded. They’re helpless. Stray bullet magnets.
The instant before Boaja and the sisters reach the edge of the wall and break cover, Xiao’s voice booms through the cavernous room. “Agent Wiser, concentrate fire. Now!”
Boaja and the two girls fly into the open as Xiao’s last syllable echoes in the huge room. They open fire immediately, still running, squeezing tight bursts of gunfire at the Fate agents.
Boaja twists and I hear Fate’s return fire. Bullets seem to pass through the tiny man as he spins and flips backward, up and over another hail of bullets that spank puckers in the soft wall on the other side of the barracks.
He zigs and contorts himself around the shots, but fast as he is, he can’t dodge forever.
As he lands a single crack sounds from across the room and craters his chest.
The sisters don’t flinch. They’ve already taken out two of the Fate agents who poked out to snipe at Boaja. That just leaves Sòng, her partner, and one last Fate agent. Even still, I’m not sure we can beat them.
I race into the clearing as the stack of shyfts Sòng has been hiding behind explodes. Wiser has Standards focusing their fire on Sòng, forcing her to act. Her crowd-control stunner has to be ready by now. She’s been calculating the perfect time to move but we can’t give her the chance to plan. We need to keep her reacting.
Ahead of me, the two sisters break and sprint directly at Sòng. She’s scrambling from cover, swinging her neuralizer up and around at them. They’re on a suicide mission. Draw Fate’s fire, make Sòng use her weapon on them. Without the threat of Sòng’s paralysing gun, Standards should be able to handle her.
Sòng ‘s fast. One instant the neuralizer is down at her side and then it’s up, the business end fixed on the sisters with nothing in between.
I keep running, trying to stay out of the stunner’s line of fire, leap over Boaja’s ragged skyn and swing out, angling closer to the outer wall to take cover behind a lonely quad-stack of white barrels.
Just as I’m about to drop and plant my back against the meagre protection of stacked shipping plastic, Sòng’s partner slides out from the other side, a smile on his face and a gun in his hand.
Shit.
My shoes squeak on the tacky floor as I jerk to the side and impulsively dive toward the blue floor. The bullet sears across my scalp and I land in an awkward roll, slamming my head against the barrels, sprawled out flat, blood streaming over my ear. My rifle lands with a thud and bounces out of reach. Wasn’t graceful, and I can’t defend myself anymore and my head’s on fire, but I earned another second.
There’s a crack and a wailing hum and the sisters break in opposite directions. They’ve barely separated when the lead soldier drops like someone flipped her switch, but the other one’s still moving, must have dodged the beam. Her weapon’s up, trained on Sòng—who’s hauling the glowing end of the nerualizer around to catch her first.
There can’t be much time left on the neuralizer charge, they don’t last long. Maybe another second, maybe two, but without another shot, Sòng isn’t as much of a threat.
Sure, I’ll be dead, Sòng’s partner will have shot me plenty by then, but Wiser and Standards should be able to clean up.
I drag backwards on the sticky blue floor, my right ear dull with blood, and immediately realize I won’t get away from Sòng’s partner scrambling on my ass. Instead, I dig in my tight pocket for Dora’s gun. If I’m going down, I’m gonna go fighting.
I don’t get it out.
The Fate agent rounds the barrels with his gun already aimed, the black muzzle dead set between my eyes.
There’s a shot. No, more than one.
From an automatic, not a pistol.
A whir of energy swings above me and the agent’s face freezes in a smug grimace. His face stays the same but his eyes scream shock and confusion as he topples and lands beside me, gun still in his hand, his muscles contracted tight by Sòng’s neuralizer.
I roll and see the last soldier. She’s down, but she hit Sòng. Severed her spinal column but kept the head intact. Knocked Sòng’s body out from under her. She must have glanced her partner with the stun beam as she fell.
Sòng’s still moving, but just from the neck up. I’m lying almost parallel with her, about a hundred meters away. Blood fountains from a hole in her throat.
She turns her head and pierces me with a stare. She’s caught, her mind ripe for Standards’ to dig their thumbs in. Her mind could hold a treasure trove of intelligence about Fate’s plans.
Luckily for Fate, Standards doesn’t know that and they throw everything they have at her.
That’s the difference between Xiao and Standards: Xiao operates with the precision of a scalpel, while Standards blindly hurls blunt objects.
Sòng’s face flickers with a shocked relief as a hailstorm of grenades peppers the floor around her, and she crumples a smile at me as the explosions tear her apart.
StatUS-ID
[a646:d17e:8670:511f::Finsbury/D//GAGE]
SysDate
[19:10:57. Sunday, May 5, 2058]
We had Xiao.
He’s a wanted criminal. A terrorist.
And I let him go.
We used Galvan’s cypher sweep to track Xiao’s operation to a biolab in the city’s fab ring and came at him with everything we had. Still wasn’t enough. Xiao’s soldiers kept four of Standards’ strike teams in a holding position until I broke through and crashed a chance meeting between Xiao and Eka.
We’d come at just the right time. After everything I’d done to find the man who killed my wife, it was cornering Xiao that finally lead me to him.
Eka ran, and I had only a fraction of a second to make a choice. Stay, arrest Xiao and let Eka escape, or give up everything and chase him down.
I made the only choice I could. I chased after Eka’s fleeing Sküte until it lead me to a neighbourhood of apartment blocks in the west end. I’m standing in front of his building now, watched the skyn I discovered meeting with Xiao slide through the front doors in a hurry.
All at once my quest to find Eka—to find Amit Johari, the man who killed Connie and I—is over.
I’ve got him.
The sudden elation burns with giddy anger in my throat and I can’t help but laugh.
After all this, I’ve got him. Almost by accident.
I let myself feel this moment. It took sacrificing everything I was, but I made it. I’m struck by the shivering anticipation of vengeance for Connie. How it will feel when it’s all done—and resist the fear about what comes after.
Eka lives in an eighteen-storey apartment building on a corner lot with a large lawn and lots of trees. It’s triangular with squared-off corners, rust coloured brick muted by phovo film. A small iron fence surrounds the grounds. It’s more decorative than anything, wouldn’t keep a determined third-grader out. The parking lot out back is nearly full a
nd open to the road. I don’t see any sign of security. No one would mistake this for anything other than another well past its prime but well-maintained mid-century apartment building on a street full of them. Perfect camouflage for a renegade superintelligence. Hiding in plain sight in the suburbs.
I move up the front walk and only get halfway to Eka’s wide sliding glass front door before it slides open and three skyns stride out into the crisp evening air to meet me—a Native American male, the black guy I chased here, and a white woman taller than either of the men. They’re in street clothes, armoured underneath, carrying small-calibre suppressed handguns designed to make as little noise as possible. These aren’t the lumbering zombies he sent last time—they flood out of the front doors like rushing water, all fluid motion and economy of movement. Like physics made human.
Eka knows I’m here, he’s sent out the shock troops. Three against one. They’ll be Revved, thinking to the edge of technology, each one living three or four seconds in the future.
Normally, against skyns like these, I’d be dead already. They’d have watched me charging up the front walk and had time to decide on the precise target for the single bullet they’d need to put me down.
Except I’ve got an advantage over all of them: they can’t see me. For some reason, I’m invisible to Eka’s omniscience. An orphan variable clanging around in his psychorithm. I hope anyway.
I pull my weapon and it thrums in my fist as it activates and sends out an alarm that an officer is in danger. The AMP will know where I am. Chaddah will have a squad out after me.
I just walked away from Xiao, single-handedly allowed the Service’s prize arrest to escape. It just came through on the feed: Boaja went down protecting her freedom. Him and two of his soldiers held off Standards long enough for Xiao and Lin Jia and all the other identical girls to escape via hoppers waiting on the roof. Drones followed for a short while, but suddenly all lost contact with DroneSense and performed emergency landings.
Xiao escaped, and I let him go.
The Service will be here soon to arrest me.
My career is over.
My life is over.
That’s fine with me, I only have one thing left to do.
The three cyphers fan out, moving like dancers, their bodies creeping toward me as our dashing rithms attempt to out-predict each other. I step into the Revv and plan out a precise shot at the cypher furthest from me, the native guy, figure that might confuse them, keep them guessing where I am.
I give reality some slack and my arm swings up as programmed, drawing a bead on his forehead. As I do, the skyns turn in unison, crouch low and sprint directly at me, converging from three different directions like pack animals on the hunt.
Their uncanny movement throws my aim off and I have to slide back into the Revv, try to figure a new plan. I dart to the side while targeting the closest cypher, line up a quick shot and fire on the run, moving full out to keep outside the cypher’s line of fire and shoot just before he does.
I watch my bullet streak toward him, stretched out like a silver spear, and see his dark eyes twitch in a microsecond of frustration before he tilts his head and the spear sears open his cheek and exits through his ear.
The bullet yanks his head around but doesn’t stop him, and they turn as one and pounce on me, triangulating my position by the sound of my shot. They can dodge my bullets, and each time I fire, I tell them exactly where I am.
Shit.
I can’t beat them.
I’m not going to kill Eka. I’m not getting anywhere near him.
This was all for nothing.
It can’t have been for nothing.
I jump on the Revv, searching for a way, for some miracle combination of actions that’ll allow me to disable three superhuman skyns under the control of a homicidal superintelligence.
The Revv just shrugs at me. Even it can’t work the impossible. I’m outmatched.
I can take one of them, maybe two, but the second I start shooting they will too. Even if I’m able to make two headshots, on the move, a half-second or so apart, those two shots will give the third cypher plenty of information to know exactly where I am.
I can’t win.
Fuck. What now?
Everything I’ve done to get here--everything I’ve sacrificed--wasted. I made a split second decision to gamble everything I had left to find Eka, and I failed.
It’s over. I have nothing left here.
I have to run.
No time for the perfect plan, I just act. My gun is pointed at the woman’s stomach, and I pull the trigger as I juke to the left, then back right and sprint as fast as I can away from the cyphers.
I don’t look back, feel a bullet whizz by my arm a fraction of a second before the sound of the muffled shot does.
I run for another five staccato heartbeats but no more shots come, then cut to the left and drop into a crouch on the grass next to the sidewalk, facing back the way I came, hold my breath and wait to see how they react. The cyphers aren’t following, they’re barely even moving. The woman is still standing, blood seeping from her stomach. They’ve lost my trail.
They must not be able to sense me this far away. I could maybe take them from here, try to line up two quick headshots, give me enough time to take the third.
I stand and the woman perks her head, twitches toward me and the other two move to follow. Even back here, they can sense me, and from this distance could probably twist around any shot I tried to make anyway.
What good’s being invisible if the person I’m trying to fight can hear my finger twitch on the trigger from a hundred metres away?
They stare in my direction for five minutes, five long, agonizing minutes that don’t end with Service cruisers rolling up or even a single drone appearing to check on my active shooter signal. The Service should have been here by now, which means Eka must have blocked my gun’s ThreatSafe signal from reaching Standards.
All of a sudden, the skyns spin like clockwork and file back into the building, leaving me out here. Eka doesn’t have anything to be afraid of. I can’t touch him.
I threw everything away.
A sickened shiver roils my stomach.
For nothing.
No—I can’t let it be for nothing. I have to find a way into that building.
Whatever it takes.
One way or another, Eka’s going to die.
StatUS-ID
[fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]
SysDate
[22:17:22. Sunday, January 19, 2059]
Sòng’s vaporized. Her partner’s on the floor next to me, his skyn overloaded by an accidental swipe from her extra-strength neruralizer beam. The four other Fate agents are down too.
We won.
I sit up and look down my body. I’m in one piece, except for the indentation across my scalp. It stings when I touch it but the blood has already slowed.
Wiser and what’s left of his team peek from cover. The officers Sòng had incapacitated when she arrived stir behind me as the neuralizer’s affect wears off. They’ll have to manually release from their inactive combat armour, but they’ll be okay.
Xiao and Ankur had enough time to get to the hoppers. Wiser will have drones on them already, but I’m sure Ankur will have a plan to evade the flurry of pursuit.
I let Xiao get away again—just like I did last time.
Is that what happened? Did the other me have a change of heart about Xiao, decide at the last second to help him escape? I’m doing my best not to end up like he did, but so far I’m following along pretty close in his footsteps. What if I’m destined to become the same person I was last time, the one who got so caught up in a quest for revenge, he threw his life—my life—away in the process? I’ve come to believe the other me was someone to despise, someone who piled bad decisions on top of bad decisions until they collapsed in on him, but I couldn’t have been all bad, could I? I mean, I am still me, I don’t feel like I’m a bad person. Could he have r
eally been so different?
What if, in trying so hard to avoid becoming who I was, I’m rejecting who I am?
It’s all too much. I don’t know what to think anymore, just have to take it one step at a time. That means dealing with Wiser
I get to my knees and stand, leave my weapon on the floor. I’m woozy but the vertigo quickly passes.
Sòng’s partner still hasn’t moved from the floor, but he’s following me with his eyes. I take two steps and kick the gun out of his hand and flash him a smile that says more than any quip I could make. We both know his head’s going to be on a table in Standard’s lab by breakfast.
Boaja is twenty metres away from us and I hurry over to him, splashing through the slick of bright red blood pooled on the blue floor. His eyes flicker and focus on me as I kneel beside him.
“Fate?” he whispers.
“Went boom,” I say.
He nods, then grabs me with his eyes. “Bring Eka,” he says.
“I will,” I tell him.
“Get away from him!” Wiser yells. He’s striding toward us, his weapon up, but not like he means it. The rest of Standards are securing the downed Fate agents and tending to fallen teammates. “You’re still under arrest.”
“He just saved your ass,” I say to Wiser as he approaches. “Cut him a break.”
“I’ll make sure I include that in my report, but one noble act doesn’t erase the crimes he’s committed. He’s wanted for more charges than I could list,” Wiser answers and comes to a stop a few paces away from us, far enough he could still get his weapon up if he needed to. “He could lead us to Xiao.”
“I don’t think he much cares about your charges,” I say. Contravening Human Standards laws is trivial next to Xiao’s battle for the survival of the human race.
Boaja creases a smile and the capillaries in his eyes burst as a crescendo of muffled pops blow in his skull.
I jerk back in surprise and land on my ass on the squishy floor, look up at Wiser. “Did his head just explode?” I ask.
