He unbuttoned Phelps’s plaid shirt, exposing his chest. Impatient with the process—he was going for a growing sense of suspense initially, but he was on the clock—he ripped the rest of the shirt off.
“What are you doing?”
“Did you know I have such exquisite control of my magnetic fields that I can take you apart piece by piece while keeping you alive?” The clone ripped out Phelps’s heart, let it beat in his hand for Phelps to see, before tossing it in the grocery bag of the distracted, cell-phone-chatting lady trying to get by them with her groceries. She picked up the pace once she caught on to what was going on.
“I know, I know, you’re wondering how you can still be alive without a heart?” the clone said. “I’m rerouting the blood through the necessary blood vessels and shutting down the leaks, keeping the blood running just by fluctuating my magnetic field. Remarkable, huh?”
“Shit, man! Just let me die already, you sick fuck.”
“Now, would you call a piano virtuoso a sick fuck? Artistry is to be respected regardless of the medium,” he said, yanking out a rib and tossing it.” He winced at Phelps’s scream as if he’d hit an off key on the piano.
“But…” Phelps said, whining and panting.
“Oh, shut up already.” He yanked Phelps’s tongue out of his mouth and threw it across the windshield of a passing car. Then he turned his head to the side so only one ear was exposed to Phelps’s inarticulate hollering. “Amazing how you can dismember a guy in public and no one even notices. Everyone so caught up in their own personal dramas. They mean well, mind you. I’m sure someone would phone this in or take a sniper’s shot at me from a safe distance if it was in their skill set to do so. But no, it’s just the damn pressures of the daily grind. Probably explains why the world is going to hell in a hand basket,” he said, pulling out an eye next and tossing it. He gave his one ear a break by turning his head to the other side for this latest bout of relentless screaming agony on Phelps’s part. And he continued undeterred with his philosophical musings. “I mean what can anyone do but trust their leaders, right? And they’re all too easily bought. And that’s why the world has been the way it is for thousands of years.”
He levitated the frustrated Phelps off the ground and rotated him as if he were on a rotisserie, pulled out a kidney when Phelps’s back was to him and sent it flying. Phelps’s latest injured animal cries sounded eerily like the bizarre mating sounds of a previously unknown bird. “The man who just refuses to die! You show them, spunky!” the agent jeered.
The clone sighed. “I should probably explain the levitation trick.” He waved his hand dismissively, “Ah, but you already know the answer. Magnetic fields… I should really get a degree in the subject considering my natural propensities.”
He looked up at his masterwork, critically. “Hmm, something’s missing. I feel like my sculpture is off somehow. Oh, that’s it,” he said, flicking his fingers. “I forgot to dismember you, impale your ass on a wrought-iron fence, and send your head bouncing into traffic. Oh my, I hope I’m not getting soft in the head already. This many models rolling off the assembly line, stands to reason one or two is a bit defective.”
Phelps was too busy making strange wheezing, whelping sounds to give him much backtalk. A pity. What was the point of dying if you couldn’t go out with style?
The agent ripped one arm off his victim, then the other, and a leg, and then the other, sending each one flying. Despite the increased pain and suffering associated with these less-than-surgical procedures, Phelps’s moaning was petering off. And then the agent did as promised, planting Phelps’s torso on a fire-hydrant when he couldn’t find a wrought-iron fence. He twisted Phelps’s head off, sending it rolling into traffic like a soccer ball to bounce off one fender after another. It got kicked around the field a bit before a set of tires squished it like a coconut that had fallen a little too hard out of the tree.
The cybernetic agent sighed gazing back at the human fountain squirting blood out of his neck, attached to the fire hydrant. “I guess it’s finally time to die, Phelps.”
***
“I love games of hide-and-seek,” Preston said, continuing to terrorize the concealed customers of the Heavenly Aromas Café. His partner, not one for continuous small talk, just kept driving his fist through hidden compartments his EMF scanners were able to suss out readily enough and throwing the panicked, screaming youths into the center of the floor.
By the time Strong and Silent unearthed Gaddy, Gaddy had a big smile on his face. He pressed enter on his virtual keyboard.
The two agents turned on one another like pit bulls in a dog fighting ring.
The biohackers, without a womb-like enclosure to protect them anymore, fled the establishment. This time out the actual exits as opposed to the hidden chambers. Two cannons rotated up out of the floor at a push of a button behind the bar. Two by two, the ones who didn’t elect to go out the door crawled inside the barrels and shot themselves high into the air, out over the street, and into the trees. They didn’t exactly land. They just engaged their jetpacks and were off, the wings outstretched above them like a hang-gliding parachute, but hard and fast. The proprietary tech had kept most of the constantly worn safety gear incognito until time for the moths to crawl out of the cocoons.
Once the last of them went airborne, that would just leave the two pawns in the café to slug it out.
In the middle of putting dents in the walls, sending each other flying with each punch or drop kick or roundhouse kick, the agents came back on line again, counter-hacked. One of the Sexy Six, from Sabrina’s entourage, did it.
Everyone had fled the bar by then, except for one. They yanked Ike out of the cannon before he could get underway and one of the pawns dangled him off the ground. “What kind of example are we to make of you, I wonder?” Preston said. His silent buddy holding Ike up just smiled menacingly.
“Do you know who I am, you moron?” Ike blurted. “Do you really want major corporations coming after you for frustrating their moon development colony? Hell, this project has the backing of China! Do you seriously want to entertain a war with those guys?”
“Here’s the thing, Ike. Considering such big picture consequences is really above my paygrade. Though if I had to venture a guess, I’d say sometimes the ones who make the most ruckus are doing so to draw fire from the others. We are pawns, after all.” He finished straightening himself in front of the mirror against the far wall, whose cracks made it somewhat difficult to judge how put together he really was.
“Set him down,” Preston said to his silent partner. “I think I have just the thing to give Ike a sendoff to be remembered.”
His partner shoved him into a wooden chair real hard. Preston wasn’t sure if it was Ike’s hip that had cracked or the wooden chair. Not that it mattered. Preston wet his thumb with his tongue and wiped it across Ike’s forehead. The reaction started immediately, eating away at him, burning. Ike jumped up and screamed. Ran to the mirror for reassurance. Guess it wasn’t his hip.
“What, what is it? Nano?”
“Nah, we’re really not that advanced. Just pawns on this chessboard, so probably no one figured we were worth the investment. No, it’s just spit. My digestive juices are a bit more potent than most. It’ll eat you down to floorboard in a matter of minutes. But hey, if you can find something to neutralize it, you’re free to go. Seems only sporting.”
With a nod to his companion, the two agents stepped out of the café, walking towards Preston’s beamer. “Shouldn’t we be filming his demise?” Strong and Silent said.
“Nah, the surveillance cameras in the shop’ll do that for us. Those kids like to gather intel nearly as much as we do.”
Inside the café, Ike poured coffee on his face, ran the faucet over himself. The reaction wasn’t slowing. He ran into the street desperate to find some solution that would work.
Up the street he sighted a Home Depot. Ran inside. Straight to the paint section. Forced opened a can of
paint with a screwdriver and poured it over his head. Didn’t even wait to see if it had any effect. Just ran toward the next dim ray of hope.
The caustic chemicals aisle. Probably not the smartest choice on the face of things, but for all he knew the catalyst eating its way through him right now had a base PH, not an acidic PH. He let out a yell as the chemicals poured over him. Like he said, bad idea.
He finally found a bag of lye. Tore it open. Rolled around in it. Probably the worst idea ever. Damn if it didn’t stop the reaction. The people in the store had already called the cops and the fire department. Ambulances were arriving too. Good. He could relax now. He’d be disfigured the rest of his life, but what the hell? The moon project he was working on wasn’t happening without him. He’d use that leverage to buy himself a spot on the moon. They’d probably want him there anyway as a safety measure. That would limit the amount of faces fighting back disgust every time they looked at him.
He’d lost consciousness. By the time he opened his eyes he was in the gurney being wheeled toward the ambulance. He engaged his virtual reality wrap around screen and resumed work on the moon station. He couldn’t afford to let assholes like this get in his way.
FIFTEEN
“God, what is the world coming to? It’s like the solution to everything is violence. It’s grotesque.” Ethan threw the remote down that paused the broadcast feed from the internet biohacker website to the big screen TV. He’d just reviewed the footage of the massacre or, more accurately speaking, partly aborted massacre at The Heavenly Aromas Café undertaken by Sabrina’s pawns.
He turned toward the bound, naked Thomas Feynman, wrists and ankles tied to opposite poles suspending him a foot or so off the ground. Feynman’s eyes were glazed, and his mouth was drooling from Ethan taking an acetylene torch to his bare chest to play games of tic-tac-toe against himself with. Ethan flicked on the torch, started in with his latest game, which meant Thomas Feynman was screaming to the seven heavens and beyond again. “Tell you what,” Ethan said, “I’ll stop with the tic-tac-toe games as soon as I actually win one of these things.”
“Please, I’ll tell you anything.”
“You will? Well, that’s more than I’ve gotten from my last two wives. I suppose that warrants some sort of consideration.”
Ethan set down the torch. “Tell me honestly, is my English accent just killing the whole sadist thing for you?”
“No, it’s kind of sexy.”
“So are you, if you don’t mind me saying? What kind of CEO looks like a Playgirl model?” Thomas had the kind of body contouring that would have made Michelangelo’s David weep. His platinum blond hair cut loose and his shimmering blue eyes lent him an almost doll-like appearance with their perfection. Ethan had to remind himself that the whole point he was here was to eliminate the latest CEO overseeing old-world-technologies that the new-world-technologies cabal that Sabrina belonged to wanted out of the way. Thomas Feynman headed up centralized media interests, which were now going head to head with internet companies and the likes of Facebook.
“I inherited the business from my father when he died in a tragic car accident.”
“Which you caused, no doubt.”
“No doubt.” Thomas continued to speak in a breathy, worn-out fashion, as if just hanging on to consciousness by a hair.
“Well, the good news is this scene will play better to the techno-thriller erotica crowd, assuming the niche actually exists. I’m sure it does. And, no worries, I’ll send the attached software along with the broadcast so they can change my form to female if homoerotica really isn’t there thing.”
“It’ll be good to go out on a good note for a change.”
“Now, here’s the crux of my real problem.” Ethan turned back to the screen. “It’s bad enough I’m now technically working for the bastards that are doing that to the good guys,” he said, pointing to the frozen image of Gaddy rolling in a mound of lye on the Home Depot floor. “But Sabrina’s pawns, that’s the cybernetic agents, have me beat on the whole sadistic torturer thing. Christ, they even have better banter. It’s just embarrassing. I’m going to have to change it up somehow. Find a whole new niche for myself.”
“But I saw your earlier films.” Thomas glanced at the entourage of cameras flying about them or just hovering in place, covering the action from all angles, managing to stay out of one another’s way or pixel right over the other cameras with the piece of the image that should be there in its absence. “You were never the sadistic torturer. You were just the unstoppable hacker cutting through whatever electronic or human resistance got in your way.”
“Yeah, I had to change it up. Viewers these days, if you don’t keep them on their toes... Besides, they need a bit of a character arc, or it doesn’t make for compelling drama, it’s just news footage.”
“I got you.” Thomas fell silent and his eyes dropped to the ground as he thought about it. His head popped back up at the first idea. “You could try pleading with your victims to please make you desist from being a serial sadist. To find something to say, to do, anything that’ll break the trance. That it’s eating you up inside. You’re not sure you can go on living like this…”
Ethan paced to help him think through the proposition, pumping more blood to his brain. Cracked his knuckles repeatedly. “God, that’s great. That’s brilliant! Yeah, yeah, let’s go with that.” He looked up, surprised, “Why are you being so accommodating?” That’s when he saw Thomas’s hard on.
“To be honest with you, I was hoping we could turn this into our Friday night thing.”
Ethan sighed. He pressed his palm into his forehead the way they say to clench a muscle super hard to force it to relax if it’s too tense. “I swear I’m just losing my footing in this world. It’s too sick for me to relate to anymore.”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to let it take you down. You can be good.”
Ethan gave him a funny look, then the other shoe dropped. “Oh, this is you getting me into character as the apologetic killer. Okay, good, good.” He gestured trying to think of the appropriate lines to say, tried to remember times in his life when he was truly grief stricken, how it affected his body, his posture, the distribution of tension across his façade. Damn, it was working. The tears were flowing to where he had to wipe them back. His face was more twisted up from the grimace of revulsion than a bull dog’s.
“You’ve got to help me,” Ethan pleaded tearfully, in between sobs. “I can’t go on like this. I feel like a monster, jacking off to reruns of my tortured victims.”
Thomas came on cue.
Ethan rolled his eyes heavenwards as he shook his head in disbelief. He tried not to let Thomas’s secondary agenda throw him from his character. “I go home and flog myself for my sins just so the physical pain will distract me from the psychological pain of becoming this thing.” He continued to speak as if spilling his mournful heart to a priest. Turned and ripped his shirt open to expose his back for dramatic effect. There were the signs of the self-flagellation. Procured, of course, in the moment, by his mindchip issuing orders to his skin nano, essentially rewriting their software on the fly. The nano was really just there so he’d never have to shower again or attend to his hygiene in any way, thus slowing him from his mission to rack up dead oligarch bodies.
Honestly, if he weren’t so in character, he doubted the chip could have pulled off the physical transformation, and probably would have desisted until it had a chance to analyze the short-circuit in his brain. The technology for such on-the-fly morphing was damn primitive compared to what Sabrina and the Magnificent Seven had at their disposal. But he had only gotten this far by studying the triple stranded DNA dynamics of the girls and initiating some initial experiments on the mini-fab attached to his mindchip, that allowed it to both modify itself and his genetic code. There was a time when he was rather full of himself for what the chip could do, having built it himself. These days, it was more cause for a humbler self-assessment as to his limitations than
a reason to feel like a god.
Ethan roared in rage and kicked over a stand with a Ming vase.
“Dude, that vase was worth like three million dollars.”
Ethan picked up the acetylene torch again, flicked it on and played another game of tic-tac-toe on Thomas’s chest.
Thomas was biting his lip this time and stifling the screaming as best he could. “You’re trying to get me to release the feelings of pain for you, because you can’t do it yourself,” he said. “You can’t find a release. It’s just building and building inside you until it explodes.” Thomas finally let out a scream at the end of his revelation, coinciding with the end of Ethan’s latest tic-tac-toe game played against himself.
With a roar Ethan hurtled the acetylene canister against the wall, which fell to the floor. He collapsed on the bed and smacked his knees hard with his open hands repeatedly, sobbing. “You’re right. If I don’t figure out how to become uncorked myself, I’ll put a bullet through my head to stop the pain.”
“What’s the thorn in your side? What or who is driving you to do this? Is it a demon within or a demon without?”
“It’s Sabrina,” he said after missing the beat, wiping his snivels. “She’s turned me into her bitch. I really just wanted to kill all oligarchs, and not play favorites. But now I’ve got to just get rid of the old-school ones in favor of the new-school ones, the Facebooks and Googles and Elon Musks of the world.”
“What power does she have over you?”
Ethan couldn’t stand being bottled up a moment longer. He ran over, grabbed the torch again, flicked it on, and proceeded with his next game of tic-tac-toe on Thomas’s chest. Thomas screamed until he could gain control of himself again. “I’m learning control, master. See? Better and better all the time.” Ethan started in on another tic-tac-toe game just to shut him up. The torch had to be adjusted to just a narrow burst to keep the pencil-like tic-tac-toe grid etchings on his chest from looking like they were painted on by crayons.
Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents Page 14
