by M. Van
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty-one
Chapter twenty-two
Chapter twenty-three
Chapter twenty-four
Chapter twenty-five
Chapter twenty-six
Chapter twenty-seven
Chapter twenty-eight
Chapter twenty-nine
Chapter thirty
More
Other books
Recall
M. VAN
Recall
M. VAN
Copyright ©2017 by M. Van. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental. Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.
42Links Publishing
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Cover design by Ramona & Adrian Marc
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Edited by Book helpline
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All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-90-827447-1-2
Chapter one
A warm breeze wafted up from far below and stirred a few strands of my hair. The airflow released by the relief valves littering the ground level trailed up along the high-rises and added to the already uncomfortable humid temperatures. Even as I stood on the roof of this tall building, the hot gushes of steam that rushed up from the vents originating from within the deepest regions of this planet’s core dampened my skin.
I ignored the tangy heat as my gaze shifted over the tightly clustered buildings and narrow streets that crisscrossed their way into the center of the City of Umbras—one of the last four known remaining cities and part of the Combined Districts of Tenebrae.
Colorful arrays of lights bathed the buildings in a sugar-candy brightness for reasons unknown to me, except that the visual distortions helped to hide the fact that most of the structures had seen better days. This city was falling apart along with the rest of the planet. If it weren’t for the deteriorating buildings or the wastelands just beyond the borders of the protective dome, then surely the sun taking its first steps toward the red giant phase hovering ninety-five million miles above our heads would give away that this planet was dying.
The massive shiny disk looked to be so close that it seemed as if it were on a collision course, but then the sun hadn’t been that distant lifeline that it used to be for a long time.
Most of the sun’s hydrogen inside its core had been exhausted and converted into helium. This helium caused the pressure in the core to rise, resulting in a massive increase in the sun’s output of heat and luminosity. This left the city bathing in a bright reddish-orange hue.
It would probably still be over a billion years before the sun would start the red giant phase, but the effects had already been devastating. The planet had turned into a wasteland unable to sustain human life, and if it weren’t for the dome shields protecting our cities, we all would have been gone a long time by now.
The communications device lodged in my ear beeped, and neon-green letters flashed across the lenses of the heads-up display strapped to my head. The black-tinted shades looked like goggles covering most of my face and were strapped around my head with a wide band to support its weight. They provided me with the information and advanced vision needed to complete the missions assigned to me.
I glanced up at the dome and switched to the enhanced-vision setting of my heads-up to see the individual energy particles that created the shield. Combined, those particles protected us from outside heat and radiation.
The com device beeped again, and I redirected my attention to the message that blinked across the screen of my heads-up: “Target en route, be advised.” Sightseeing was over, and I took a deep breath, if only to pretend to calm my nerves.
As an artificial representation, calm nerves—or rather, anxiety—wasn’t something I needed to worry about. Although the materials used by the bioprinter to construct this body were very much human—the synthesized brain programmed to control this vessel wasn’t. Still, I saw no harm in pretending to be more than just a thing sometimes, and apparently neither did my CPU.
I straightened while my eyes roamed the multitude of colors that glistened in the windows of the tall blocks of concrete. The lights bounced off the glass in a colorful rainbow, creating the illusion of a beautiful city plastered over the crumbling layers of rock and cement. The rays spread across the city skyline until they hit the dome’s grimy, soot-covered surface.
Exposure to millennia’s worth of polluted steam rising from the inner workings of the planet caused the dome to be barely see-through, but in a way, that helped to hide the wastelands beyond and the reality of a dying planet. But the dirt wouldn’t prevent the sun from bathing the city in a red haze.
I lined my sight on the end of an alley wedged between the buildings, where the bright spotlights couldn’t reach ground level. My heads-up compensated for the darkness, switching to a green spectrum that opened a world of tossed-over garbage cans, discarded boxes, more trash, and a drifter or two. There was a twitch in the spectrum, going from black to green, and the heads-up zoomed in automatically.
Even at this distance, it wasn’t hard to see the young man running down the alley as he headed straight for the building I was standing on. The young man panted franticly as he whipped his head to look over his shoulder before facing the front again. I took in the old, rundown garments and crappy shoes. Blood trickled down his shirt, and it left stains on the collar next to a tear in the fabric that revealed his hairless chest. He ran to me without having any inkling that I was there.
From a previous encounter of the night, I could piece together an image of the surprise that would seize the man’s face the moment I revealed myself, or should I say the horror. The fright in his eyes, the quaver in his voice as he begged for my forgiveness, seemed unavoidable.
I did not enjoy this part of the job, not that I enjoyed any part of this job. But it’s not as if I were supposed to have any emotional attachment to these things. It’s not as if they’d haunt me in my dreams or gnaw at my conscience. I didn’t have a conscience; I wasn’t a conscientious being. After my shift, I would return to the Tenebrae Enforcer Department and have my mind wiped clean of the day’s events.
My artificial brain would be hooked up to the central mainframe located in a room that had been dubbed “Memory Junction” by the human law enforcement officers, and whatever was about to happen would be erased from my mind—reset, back to original parameters, every fraction of my day gone.
The slapping of footsteps, the sound enhanced by my heads-up, increased as the young man got closer. Behind him, I could hear the heavy tread of my partner’s boots. With my enhanced vision, I could tell the man’s eyes were wide with fear as his hand reached to wipe a mop of hair from his forehead. His face looked strained, and his muscles worked throughout his body, while sweat mixed with the blood on his shirt.
I edged the tip of my boots closer to the edge of the ledge. A variation of information trickled down the lenses of my heads-up and was fed into my centra
l processing unit. It ranged from the man’s running speed to the distance from my position to the ground along with gravitational pull and intended trajectory. For a moment, I took it all in and then took that final step over the edge.
Except for the hair on my head and the barely exposed skin of my face, my body was protected from the muggy air rushing by. Letters scrolled across my lenses, informing me of my descent and viable options. I slightly spread my arms to balance my fall.
My bodysuit was made of an armor reduced to an atomic-scale honeycomb lattice that protected me from most assault weapons available, and the built-in exoskeleton could absorb most forces my limbs could be exposed to.
My boots clanked on a metal emergency staircase bolted to the building normally used as an escape route. The structure moaned under my weight. As my knees flexed, I grabbed the railing and used my momentum to fling my legs over and continued my drop.
In the street below, the man still hadn’t noticed me, and he reacted in shock when I landed in a crouched position right in front of him. His arms flailed as he struggled to stop his running pace. Before he could collide with me, I stretched my leg, swung it around without raising from my crouch, and connected with the man’s shins.
The man still had some momentum going, and my kick sent him careening past me before he fell to the ground. Without effort, I kept my movement going into a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn to face the body crashing to the asphalt. He cried out when his bare flesh scraped the concrete, and he hit the ground.
Behind me, I heard my partner’s footsteps slow to a steady walk. He knew I had control, although the young man in front of me didn’t seem convinced of that. He scrambled to his feet, his mouth twisted into a sneer. An all-or-nothing battle cry bounced off the buildings as he shouted his defiance. The knife he held in his right hand shone bright green from behind my display.
I ducked underneath his swing, jabbed him with a fist in his stomach, and grabbed the arm holding the knife. The man grunted but didn’t relent, and I planted a flat palm against his nose. Blood gushed down into his mouth and chin when I whirled around him, gripping the arm behind his back, wrenching until it snapped.
He fell to his knees, screaming in pain while I took the knife from his hand and dumped it into a nearby garbage can. For good measure, I kicked him. The blow forced him on his back, and I placed my thick-soled boot on his chest. His rib cage rose and fell with the man’s ragged breath, and I waited for my partner to step in.
“Enforcer 959,” my partner called out as he stepped closer. At the mention of my formal designation, I turned my head. My partner for that night had been Enforcer 877. Because of his lower number, he had seniority. It meant he had been built before me, but that didn’t mean he had more experience. Like me, he had his brain wiped clean every night, and his skills were mere programming: just like mine.
Enforcer 877 looked disheveled, his face was streaked with grime, and he had removed his heads-up display. I sensed an almost shocked sensation, but since I couldn’t feel shock, I dismissed it as a misfire in my circuitry. Still, I had never seen an enforcer without his heads-up, not that I would remember anyway. Even in this dark alley, his pupils were nonexistent, leaving his irises an overwhelming bright blue. Those blue eyes staring back at me caused an image to flash across my mind. The sharp-edged features of a young woman appeared vividly before my eyes and I had to blink twice to refocus.
The fact that I could even remember this image was an anomaly. Every night after our shifts as enforcers, we were expected to report back to the Tenebrae Enforcer Department headquarters, or TED, for short. There they wiped all nonessential information from our CPUs at Memory Junction. As far as I was aware—as far as anyone was aware—this process had a one hundred percent success rate. It had never failed, except for this one faint residual image that seemed stuck in my head.
The tech guy at the station had been unsuccessful in removing the image of the young woman. Eventually, I’d told him that I couldn’t remember what he was talking about and had given him the impression that he had succeeded. For some reason, the picture and the fact that I knew about it remained stuck in my mainframe, but after the numerous failures to remove it, I had decided to act as if the issue were solved.
It had occurred to me that this could be some type of virus messing with my CPU. How else would I be able to remember why the tech guy hadn’t succeeded in erasing it? But this weird secret inside my head made my circuits tingle, and I wanted to keep it for myself. None of this made any sense considering my construct, but that had only inflamed my decision.
As if to draw my attention, 877 lifted his heads-up display for me to see.
“He got the jump on me,” he said. His low voice had a lot of bass and didn’t sound robotic as one might expect. Nor did he look anything else but human. We all did. The bioprinter that constructed our bodies used a set of human templates. This meant enforcers could look the same, but with the headgear covering most of our faces, it hadn’t occurred to me to compare. I wondered if I looked anything like 877.
My processor kicked in as my sensors scanned my partner: male, constructed two years ago, average height. As a rule, an enforcer was never allowed and technologically denied scanning his own body, so I couldn’t be sure, but 877 seemed to be taller than me, which suggested he had come from a different template.
Enforcer 877’s arm dropped to his side. “Handle the rest,” he said unapologetically.
I turned to the man on the ground, wedged underneath my boot, and waited for the information to scroll across my screen. As the bright-green letters appeared, I read them aloud.
“Thomas D. Laevis, you have been arrested by Enforcer 959 in the employment of the Tenebrae Enforcer Department under suspicion of stealing, looting, aggressive behavior, and acts of noncitizenship.” I paused for the information on my screen to accumulate. It sometimes took a while for an official to type out or dictate his verdict. Our programming didn’t allow for us to make our own rulings, so there was always a human judge on call to oversee our work.
“Considering the evidence, you have been found guilty of all the charges read to you. Prepare to hear your verdict,” I said.
There was another pause, and for some reason, I felt my throat clench. Maybe it had to do with the fact that I could guess the verdict. No other verdict had made it past mine or my partner’s lips the entire night. The man at my feet also seemed to know what was to come. He squirmed and jerked under my boot, trying for a way out.
Finally, the screen started to flow again. It wasn’t always the brightest officials on the other line at these hours of the night.
“Under the jurisdiction of the Combined Districts of Tenebrae you will be put to death so no further disruptions will come from your feeble mind. Enforcer 959, you have permission to validate the verdict.”
The green letters blinked once before they disappeared from my screen and left me faced with the man beneath my boot. He had stopped squirming. He knew it was too late. Permission had been granted, and that allowed me to deliver his verdict in every which way I deemed necessary. This included shooting him in the back if he attempted to run.
A shiver ran up my spine, and I sensed a strange buzz at the back of my skull. It forced me to close my eyes for a second in an attempt to register the sensation. Had I ever sensed anything like it? Could it be the thrilling vibe of the sixth kill of the night or maybe a couple of fried circuits? I wondered if I should tell the tech guy at Memory Junction after I got back.
“Enforcer 959,” 877 said. My eyes flashed open. I grabbed the weapon from my holster before the man on the ground could blink and fired twice. Two bullets embedded themselves in the man’s forehead. His body jerked, his eyes rolled back in their sockets, and the rise and fall of his chest ceased underneath my boot.
“Alert the Whitewashers,” 877 said. I complied and alerted the cleanup crew that was supposed to dispose of the body.
“We need to stop at the station for a n
ew heads-up display,” he added.
Before following my partner out of the alley, I glanced down at the lifeless body sprawled at my feet. It occurred to me that the man wasn’t a man at all. He looked too young to be a man. This body had belonged to a mere boy, and I had taken his life. The thought lingered for a moment as I stepped over the corpse and walked up to my partner.
Enforcer 877 watched as I strode up to him, staring at me with those bright blue eyes. Every time I looked at them, they had this weird effect on me, but I was not supposed to have any reaction to what I experienced—not at having killed that boy and not at 877’s eyes.
That picture of the woman reentered my mind. It was the only thing I had to keep me occupied after the events of my day had been purged from my system and I sat in my chair inside Memory Junction. Now it seemed to invade my mind while I worked. This wasn’t good.
These distractions could keep me from performing my duties to the utmost of my abilities. Still, for some reason, I had no compulsion to report the incident. If the tech guy found out, then fine, and he would purge the problem. If not, I would have something to occupy my nights.
Except for my training and information essential to performing my duties, all memories were removed, and I had analyzed what had remained to perfection. It had gotten kind of tedious, and I welcomed the variation in my thought patterns. But I hoped I would lose the memory of the boy by the end of my shift.
“Are you malfunctioning,” 877 asked as I stopped in front of him. Without giving him an answer, I tapped the side of my heads-up device. Green letters scrolled down the screen, and I took them in before I replied.
“Error log is clear.”
He cocked his head and watched me. His heads-up device had been damaged, and he couldn’t confirm my findings with his own scan.
