Bring Me the Head of the Buddha

by Bloom, A. D.

  Bring Me the Head

  of the Buddha

  By A.D. Bloom

  Copyright 2011 – All rights reserved.

  This book is dedicated to my parents, who gave me life and taught me to respect it.

  -Prologue-

  The last great war fought over who's god was a better god lasted only days because the crisis and the carnage birthed the Global Secular Alliance. Citing humanity's bloody history and our nearly infinite capacity for murder in a deity's name, the multinational G.S.A. declared all religions crimes against humanity and smote anyone who disagreed.

  Pope Pious XIV refused to be taken alive. His final moments streamed across the Internet as his last, martyred breaths urged the formation of a worldwide Catholic resistance.

  Half the Muslim world burned, but the G.S.A. claimed no responsibility for those crude nuclear detonations. They blamed Hindu madmen and dropped inertia bombs on them from orbit.

  Jerusalem united in a futile last stand before the G.S.A.'s Sun Gun reached down from the heavens with a brilliant, blinding, luminous lance of monochrome light and obliterated the ancient city.

  Most accepted the G.S.A.'s claim that they were saving humanity from itself.

  In place of God, the G.S.A. offered mankind ever-advancing technologies, wide-spread prosperity, and self-worship in a world of near-limitless consumer, sexual, and narcotic pleasures.

  It seemed like a good deal.

  PART ONE

  -1-

  Casper hid in the shadow of an unmarked delivery van and used his Locko Loco decoder to work the door of a Brazilian luxury sportster while behind him on the AniLux coated facade of Polly's Pleasure Palace a fifty-foot-tall image of Hi-5, the megastar Queen of PornoPop, karate-chopped the air as she rhymed and used her world-renowned, singular appendage to impale a supermodel who dangled off her, defying gravity and giving credence to the widespread rumor that Hi-5's surgically grafted tool was of extraterrestrial origin.

  It seemed like her Hi-ness was always there whenever Casper stole a car. That suited him fine because wherever she was doing one of her routines on the side of a building, people were watching her and not Casper.

  Tonight, however, when the G.S.A. surveillance imaging team and their unmarked white van arrived in Baccha Bay City's Free Economic Zone, the FEZ, and began to scan the Ocho House, neo-hippie collective with high energy emissions, the first thing they noticed wasn't Hi-5. The first thing they noticed was that the FEZ was a very dangerous place to leave your car unattended.

  Within five minutes of their arrival, a skinny kid in a hoodie strolled up, glanced left and right, and began working the locks on a hundred thousand Amero, Brazilian MotoVai sportster not more than a yard away. Goddie insurgents like Morituri and White Sunday were their focus, not auto-thieves, so they didn't bother to call local enforcement. They just laughed at Casper, cracked jokes about the impact of Baccha Bay City's cuts to educational funding, and warmed up their jumbo magnetrons for a gonad-zapping, high-energy, active scan of Ocho House.

  While Casper's Locko Loco cycled through cryptographic sequences, he smoked Blue Dream sativa from a jade bowl and tried to look like the Brazilian sports car was his. Casper laughed because he knew that was ridiculous. The car was a hundred thousand Amero piece of sculpted, ultralight, automotive technology, and Casper was well-aware that he looked like a hood-rat with an overgrown crew cut and a busted AniLux hoodie.

  The animated pulses of electricity and the sparks that were supposed to speed over the retro circuit board patterns printed on his hoodie barely moved at all now. If he leaned up against a bank of wireless power sockets, then he could get the electric blue sparks to move in slow motion once more, but unless it was unnaturally energized it was almost just a plain old inanimate garment now. Even if the motion coating was still working right, Casper was sure his jacket wasn't what the driver of this fine car would wear. People who drive cars like this MotoVai Sportster wear suits, he thought. Casper told himself he'd try to save some money so that he could buy one of those suits and maybe wear it to steal even nicer cars.

  After Casper delivered the MotoVai to someone else who could find a buyer or strip it, he wouldn't make that much money, but he didn't steal cars for the money. Casper had found something he was good at, and though he'd never admit it, the feeling of being good at something was worth more to him than money. It made him feel like he was worth something himself.

  The Locko Loco was taking longer than usual.

  Casper took another pull off his jade bowl, felt himself relax, and leaned on the van. That's better, he thought. Now the decoder should work. Just a matter of attitude. Casper's hand brushed against the side of the van behind him, and he noticed the surface was warm, almost hot.

  Casper felt his nads tingling. He stared down at the front of his jeans. His nads were the closest thing he had to a precognitive sense. Usually that tingle meant it was Time To Go.

  Casper pressed his palm against the side of the van. Not only was it warm, it gave his palm pins and needles. He was about to explore this oddity with his other palm when he was shocked to see that the AniLux circuit patterns on his jacket were animated again. The blue sparks weren't just moving slowly, they were zipping ten times faster then they ever had when it was new. The animation was brighter than it had ever been before, too; the blue sparks were burning like little lightning bolts. Suddenly, the printed circuit patterns all lit up at once and Casper's hoodie flared bright in the darkness, drawing glances from clubbers lined-up across the street. Then his hoodie went completely dark, and the glowing blue mazes were all that his eyes could see.

  He took another hit off his bowl to look inconspicuous – just another good citizen of Baccha Bay City getting high in the FEZ.

  The Locko Loco beeped soft notes of success. When the gull-wing door opened, Casper grinned, put his hood up, and got in.

  The surveillance techs had rolled in shits and giggles watching Casper stare at his zapped gonads and his radar-reanimated hoodie during the scan. They were considering calling local enforcement just to see what Casper did when they arrived, but then the human recognition systems found something so important inside the freshly-imaged Ocho House that everything on their consoles beeped and lit up at once. They forgot all about Casper Grey and thought about the promotions they might get for their discovery – an insurgent high up on the target of opportunity blacklist – one Alvin Dock Ellis, a.k.a. the Buddha.

  As Casper and the MotoVai got away clean and drove away into the garish, pupil-contracting glitter of the FEZ, the G.S.A. surveillance imaging team received new orders straight from Director Delvaux's office – make no further scans, return to base, and make no reports.

  When they returned to the G.S.A.'s Ziggurat, all three of them were given promotions with a double-grade pay boost, sent to supervise teams on different continents, and whisked off to their new jobs on high-speed transports within the hour. The underpaid surveillance technicians knew better than to ask questions, but they all suspected that very soon everybody inside Ocho House would be dead or wishing they were.

  -2-

  The G.S.A.'s towering Ziggurat cast a long shadow over Baccha Bay City. It was a one hundred and twenty story step-pyramid, built in three massive, blocky levels, and it was easily over a quarter-mile wide at its base. It was a monument to power, the architectural expression of hierarchy.

  The first Ziggurats that humanity built, thousands of years ago, expressed the power of those at the top levels by placing them closest to the gods. There was irony in this – the Ziggurat had become the ever-visible symbol of Global Secular Alliance operations in all the largest cities of all the Alliance's member nations.

&nb
sp; The most common structures in the few remaining nations of the world that were not G.S.A. members were mud huts, corrugated tin lean-to shelters, and caves.

  Sixty-nine stories above Baccha Bay City, looking out the smoky, pink-tinted, translucent XinCryst walls of the Ziggurat, Operator-In-Training Bonnie Levi-Mei sat upright on an examination table in a medical bay on the Ziggurat's South face, overlooking both the toxic chromium sand dunes and the glittering waters of the bay.

  Bonnie was in pain. She was always in pain since G.S.A. gave her the new eye, and sometimes even the narco-derms couldn't cut through it. Being in pain or being doped up were usually her only two options.

  Bonnie lost her original eye, a kidney, and part of a lung to a bomb set by her own boyfriend who turned out to be a Morituri insurgent. She'd liked him, even trusted him, and the fact that he lied to her, manipulated her, stole her work ID, and used it to plant a bomb in the restaurant where she worked wounded her as much as the nails he'd wrapped around the bomb. She sat in a hospital bed for weeks, sweating buckets in her sleep, twitching when she was awake, and slapping on narco-derms as often as she could. Bonnie wondered if she'd ever trust anyone again until a G.S.A. Security Services recruiter showed up and corrected her doctor's diagnosis of her condition.

  The recruiter told Bonnie that, in point of fact, she wasn't psychologically traumatized by explosives and betrayal, but rather, that she was experiencing a condition known as Feeling Shit Sorry For Yourself. The recruiter pointed out that the insurgents who'd done this to her called themselves 'Morituri,' and that was Latin for 'We Who Are About To Die.' Then she suggested an accelerated program of rehabilitation that involved hunting and killing the insurgents who'd maimed her.

  Bonnie signed on as a G.S.A. Operator, a covert counter-insurgent working for the Security Service.

  With cunning, guile, and ice water in their veins the G.S.A.'s Operators hunted the Morituri, White Sunday, the Angry Angels, and any of the other, innumerable insurgent groups fighting against the G.S.A..

  The Operators worked solo. Their motto was 'Nos Es Insula' – We Are Islands. Bonnie still had some major trust issues, so that suited her just fine.

  The eye that G.S.A. gave her wasn't the vat-grown replacement she'd imagined. This eye was Special. It could only be manufactured in a Zero-G, orbital fabrication lab, and it was a flawless crystal transducer. It converted a wide-ranging spectrum of energy into signals that fed directly into her rebuilt optic nerve. It was a perfect emerald, and it worked brilliantly. She could see more than most people had ever dreamed of, but when she used the emerald eye, it hurt. It always hurt.

  At the moment, her emerald eye was showing her just how the G.S.A. MedTech felt about her. She could easily distinguish the thermal differences caused by variations in the MedTech's blood flow across his body. She saw areas of his body she preferred not to think about glowing bright green as his eyes examined her in a manner that was anything but medical. This was not the examination she'd scheduled, and it was pissing her off.

  Her Eurasian features were distinctive, but it wasn't her multi-racial background that drew attention. Hapa were now commonplace, even in rural areas. It was a fortuitous accident of proportion in her features that made her stand out. She was simultaneously pretty and fierce.

  She looked much the same as she'd looked before a year of training as a covert counter-insurgent, but small things had changed. Fashionable highlights. More swagger in the walk. She'd lost some body fat and replaced it with muscle, and Bonnie was now a chesty bulldog of a woman. She was alluringly feminine, but it was clear there was power behind her five feet and five inches of height.

  The MedTech sensed something under the surface that scared him, and Bonnie saw the lurid green glow wane in his loins. She had some idea why and it made her want to grin.

  “Okay,” he said, “this might smart a little.”

  Whenever they say that, Bonnie thought, they know it's gonna hurt more than a little.

  The MedTech withdrew a diagnostic penlight from his breast pocket, and mercilessly shined it into Bonnie's emerald eye. She fought not to wince while the light bored into her skull. In moments, the NeuroMap scanners created a real-time, three dimensional representation of her nervous system.

  It was a disembodied arabesque of fine lines and color that glowed and scintillated, floating in mid-air. Bonnie's neural pathways between her optic nerve and her brain formed an array of surging streams that outshone all others. The bright penlight, only inches away, was cruelly over-stimulating, and although it made mapping easier for the diagnostic machines, it was painful. It was exquisitely painful.

  A new river of neural energy began to glow brighter than the surrounding system. This one began in her reptilian cortex, ran down her upper spine, through her shoulder and arm, and into her clenched right fist. The MedTech saw this new river threatening to overflow. There were enough of the glowing rivers forming and flowing from her reptilian cortex to suggest a lack of impulse control. In addition to this, Bonnie's chart showed a conspicuous lack of personal data that the MedTech had learned to recognize as the mark of an Operator, a Very Dangerous Asset. He withdrew the penlight from Bonnie's eye, driven by a sense of self-preservation that was rooted in the base of his own brain.

  The Medtech kept his eyes on Bonnie's nervous system as he spoke. “Well, I can't see any overloading or overflows in the NeuroMap that your system can't handle. NeuroMap never says shit about pain, and I have a feeling you don't either. So...” He paused, realizing he was in dangerous territory. Then he said, “If you could lean your head to the right for a moment...” She complied reflexively, and in a smooth, deft, almost singular movement he opened, stripped, and slapped a narcotic transdermal on the left side of Bonnie's neck.

  Bonnie didn't like being medicated without warning. It showed in her violated glare, but that glare turned quickly to a soft, narcotized gaze. “You would have said no if I'd asked,” the MedTech said. “Doctor's orders.”

  The Meds bound to receptors that were less upset about it than Bonnie. She thought it felt like an opiate with some synthetic mood elevators and a stimulant.

  “Isn't that better?” he said.

  Despite her annoyance, she heard herself say, “Thanks, Doc,” instead of the threats to his genitalia that were running through her head – the ones she wanted to deliver with the military-grade profanity she'd learned in the last year of training.

  “You're welcome,” he said, smiling and turning to withdraw something from the drawers of a waist-high, rolling steel cabinet behind him. “The more you use that little miracle of manufacturing in your eye-socket, the more it's going to hurt. So... I'm issuing you this bit of high-technology.” He held up what looked like a leather patch with a one-piece elastic strap.

  Bonnie recognized it, but didn't believe it. “An eye patch?” The narco-derm couldn't suppress the incredulity in her voice.

  “Aye, matey,” he said with newfound confidence, now that he was fairly sure she was good n' doped.

  Doped or not, she wasn't convinced. “You gotta be shittin' me, Doc.”

  “It's gonna save you lots of pain and meds. As you know, the crystalline transducer you chose to replace your eye with has to feed directly into the optic nerve or it just won't work worth a damn. So, until Technical Section can figure out some lossless way to modulate the input, this is your work-around.”

  “It's a damn eye patch, Doc. What about depth perception?”

  “It's shielded to block out the painful stuff, but it lets enough visible spectrum light through to give you depth perception.” Bonnie didn't look impressed. “It's the eye patch,” he said, “or a shitload of pain and narco-derms all the time. Take your pick.”

  On the way out the door of the Medical Bay, she could feel the Med-Tech watching her ass, and she was too doped to care.

  Before the glass doors parted to let her pass, Bonnie caught a glimpse of her reflection wearing the new eye patch. Badass, she thought. I'll have t
o dress down a little, look like someone who can't afford a new eye, but that suits me just fine.

  With the narcotic, the stimulant, and the mood-elevators from the derm working overtime, just about everything did.

  -3-

  Under the non-stop, wanton abandon of the FEZ, under the giant, dancing holographics, under the advertisements and PornoPop that played across the buildings and the sidewalks and the road, twenty-five feet sub-surface, three grim-faced men in unmarked, sealed environmental suits walked slowly but resolutely through the sewer, their legs spread wide with their feet on narrow, protruding ledges, testing the footing of each step with care.

  Unavoidable bioluminescent snotcicles, yard-long bacteria colonies, hung like thin, viscous, stringy stalactites from the top of the sewer every few feet. The glowing colonies draped over their shoulders as they passed, leaving trails on their suits that would, given enough time, eat clear through, exposing them to pharmaceutical-mutated pathogens yet to be cataloged by naturalists who were, by and large, wise enough to stay out of Baccha Bay City's sewers.

  They did their best to keep the cylinders of N-Hex neuro-toxic gas they carried out of the hanging, corrosive bacteria.

  Officially, the trio of G.S.A. Security Servicemen belonged to a unit that had no name, but they called themselves the Sandmen. The canisters they carried had to be kept clean because they were designed to mate with the terminal ends of drainage stacks that fed the sewer from the buildings above. A good seal was important. The N-Hex gas was only supposed to go where they wanted it to, and this morning they wanted it to go up into a subversive, neo-hippie collective called Ocho, recently discovered to be sheltering an insurgent high up on the target-of-opportunity Blacklist.

  To the Sandmen it was just lot 1737-78-A.

  Directly above the Sandmen and the sewers, inside a converted factory building surrounded by the glittering, never-ending parties of the FEZ, neo-hippie Charlie Horner of Ocho House wore an AniLux impregnated t-shirt with spinning mandalas, breathed from a bag of Sativa vapor, and had no idea he was about to die.