“Orlando, I’ll wave both my hands at you like this. What color will I be, Misha?”
“Black. You’re the bad-ass Robocop drone, solid black metal.”
She waved her hands at him again. “Just like that, babe. What will he look like?” she asked Misha.
“Kind of like a Volkswagen bus, but with armor and weaponry. Basic transport vehicle, flies with thrusters, a propeller, and a retractable chopper blade, travels on the ground with treads.”
“Jesus. Do you really think he can do this?”
Misha shrugged. “He’s probably no more or less qualified to operate it than Kat would have been. If we can get his brainwaves into it, we should be good to go. He’s…he’s not stupid.” He suddenly put his arm out to Orlando’s shoulder, and Tasha saw the old Misha she used to know, his eyes filling with tears as he said with great emotion, “You can do this, I know you can. Follow her to the house. Open your bay doors when she brings the bodies out. Blast anybody who tries to hurt her or Kat.” Misha choked once. “I know you love her, and she loves you. You can do this.”
Some of the fear left Orlando’s face. He clutched Misha’s hand, then Tasha’s as well, and nodded out to where Kat stood frozen inside flames the color and shape of a ruby, doing timeless battle with a dragon. “We’ll get both of them out,” he said. “Now go, and make this happen.”
Misha logged off.
They sat cross-legged next to each other and Tasha took his hand. He kissed her once, and she recalled how her father used to kiss her mother in the morning before going off to work. It had seemed perfunctory and casual at the time, and she wondered occasionally if the romance had gone completely from their lives, but she realized now that such a kiss wasn’t casual or meaningless…no, that level of intimacy and knowledge, of comfort and relaxed association with another was the essence of love, the kind of love she wanted, anyway.
“Let’s go kick some bad-guy ass,” she said.
He nodded. A little smile played at the corner of his mouth. “That’s what a city guardsman does,” he said.
……….
First: Dislocation. Disassociation. Disturbance.
A headache, piercing. It came and it went. Darkness –
– then light.
It looked like a parking garage. Or a warehouse. She saw, she heard, she thought. She was conscious. But she didn’t feel. Her skin had disappeared. She was encased in two meters of robot killing machine. No – she was two meters of robot killing machine.
“Orlando?” She thought the words. Or she said them, she wasn’t sure. No response.
“Misha?”
“Right here, Tash. You are online and hot. Wow. It worked.” She tried not to be disturbed by the incredulity in his voice.
“Where’s Orlando?”
“Orlando? Buddy?” Misha’s voice stayed calm. “Say a little something if you’re with us, buddy. Take your time, we’re not in a big hurry.” Long pause. “Actually we are in kind of a hurry, you worthless mass of non-corporeal pixels.”
She heard a throat clearing, then, “Damn you. Damn you, Misha. All of you…outsiders.” Another long pause. Tasha kept her mouth shut, giving Orlando a chance to acclimate. Misha apparently decided to do likewise. “Not you…Tasha,” Orlando finally said. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean that about you.”
“Okay,” Misha said, “now that we’re all awake, Orlando, I need you to start your engines.”
There were three transport vehicles in the garage, all of them inert. “Orlando,” Tasha said, “which vehicle is yours?”
“Flash your lights for the lady, Orlando.”
“I…I don’t know how to do that.”
“Just think, flash lights. Come on, give it a try.”
The lights on the center vehicle flashed on and off, then again. Then they blinked incessantly.
“You can stop flashing the lights now, Orlando. Try starting your engines.”
Tasha walked on powerful feet, heavy but nimble, toward the vehicle, stood in front of it, turned with her back toward it. She heard its motors hum to life. “Tasha,” Misha said, “I’m sending GPS coordinates and automatic directions to where your bodies should be located. You should have a visual map in the upper right hand of your field of vision. Please confirm.”
She saw it, a grid of city streets, too small to read. “I have it. How do I make it bigger?”
“Think or say, Enlarge map, or Shrink map. Okay?”
Enlarge map, she thought…it grew much bigger. A flashing green red light in the Clayallee District jumped out at her. She had heard of that area, kind of a ritzy one. “Where are we right now?”
“South side of town, a warehouse area near Lichtenrade.” You’re not far, less than ten klicks. You two will be airborne and moving fast. Stay above the treeline and you’ll be fine. Berlin isn’t known for its high rises. If you pick up any police pursuit, ignore it. They’ll be streetbound and slow. After you get the bodies, I’ll give you your new coordinates.”
His voice was methodical and precise. It calmed her down as a large overhead door opened in the warehouse. She saw lights in the darkness outside in the city.
“Time to go, Tasha,” Misha calmly said. “Think fly, and blast off, robo-chick. Orlando, you do likewise and stay on your lady’s tail.”
She stared out into the night of Berlin. The first time she had come to this city, it had been with the thought of becoming a famous fashion model. Now she was encased in armor and about to rescue her broken, fragile body.
And Kat’s.
“Uh…what do I do, Misha?”
“You know what to do,” he told her. “Think – fly.”
“Fly,” she whispered.
She flew.
……….
She spat out the warehouse garage door like a bullet, and almost ran into a delivery van on the street. Forcing herself to elevate, she shot up into the night sky like a rocket – then plummeted back down toward earth just as fast. Then back up again, this time doing a somersault in mid-air… “My God, Misha, you were right. This really is…intuitive.”
“Thank the big brains for that, not me. Now come on, Orlando, get a little more elevation.”
Tasha flipped around in mid-air to spot her boyfriend. He was in the form of a cargo van, squat and black, and was lumbering after her at some ten meters elevation. She played with some of her vision toys, zooming in and out on him, using nightscope, infrared, and x-ray. X-ray was amazing, giving her a peek inside the vehicle. No driver, of course. Orlando’s consciousness was somehow embedded in its computer. Or was its computer. Or something. “How you doing there, babe?” she asked him.
“I…I…” She hoped he wasn’t about to have a schizoid break with reality – whatever reality was. “I can do this,” he muttered mechanically, probably more to himself than to her.
“Yes you can,” Misha said. “Lets get moving, you two. We need to make this quick and dirty and get these vehicles back ASAP.”
“Roger that,” Tasha said, grinning inwardly. She doubted if the “face” on her kick-ass robot changed. But it might. Hell, who knew what tricks it might have up its sleeve.
She focused on the blinking light and coordinates on the city grid, off in the ritzy Clayallee district. It would be kind of fun to blast into that part of town, rockets blazing. Or not. She decided she would do what Misha told her to do, no deviations.
“That’s good, you two. Good elevation, nice speed. Estimated time of arrival is approx six minutes.”
“Roger that,” she muttered again.
“Who is Roger?” Orlando said.
“Its, uh…it’s an expression,” she told him.
The night was dark, moonless, and cloudy, which she decided was a good thing. With infrared capabilities she had no problem seeing, but onlookers would be less likely to spot them. And what if she did? She wasn’t much bigger than a large man, a basketball player, maybe, so their eye would not be drawn to her but to the flying vehicle behind her. Most p
eople would probably just think “military” or “police” and then their minds would wander to more pressing concerns, work and romance…or where their character should go in the online RPG they would play later that night…
Stay focused, she told herself. Their objective was approaching.
It was a two story townhouse in the district where, she had read in a guidebook on her way to Berlin, so long ago it seemed, the bigwig Nazis used to live in the 1930s and 40s. She imagined Yuri would enjoy that, living in the house that the Goebbels family or such-like once owned.
“Heads up,” Misha told them. “The house will be highlighted for you in green on your viewscreen.”
Sure enough it was. A shimmering viridian outline, almost like Christmas light, blinked around the perimeter of the steep-roofed house.
“Pull up,” he said. “Hover above it.”
It was becoming second-nature now, controlling her robot body. If she could feel at home in the pixilated information that was her character in Brutalia, the hard skin that was this flying, killing drone was basically little different. She lacked sensation she was accustomed to, the feel of air temperature on skin, the jiggle of breasts and the creak of neck and joints, but this thing was still her, at least for the moment. She pulled up and hovered.
But Orlando did not. The hovercraft zipped past her, jerking her about in its wake.
“Orlando!” Misha tried to keep the panic out of his voice. “What’s wrong?”
“I…uh – help!”
“Think, reverse thrust, big guy.” Misha tried to keep it light and cheery, and he was being awfully good to the Brutalia native, but Tasha knew her ex-boyfriend well, knew he would be much happier with Kat in the driver’s seat of that vehicle – any human, for that matter.
“Reverse thrust, there you go, Orlando, now bring it back to Tasha…try to avoid a collision, that’s it…”
She mentally crossed her fingers as she watched Orlando move back toward her in fits and starts, the vehicle juddering as it maneuvered, at one moment bay doors opening and closing as though in confusion. She hoped he didn’t accidentally fire off any weaponry, or at least not in her direction.
“There you go…that’s it…”
He had it. She breathed a sigh of relief, or she would if she had lungs to do it with. “Misha,” she said. “Where are the bodies? Me and Kat, I mean.”
“You two are in the basement, if our resonance imaging is correct, side-by side in hospital beds. Be careful when you pick them up. Your arms are hands are functional, potentially even moreso than that of a human, but your strength is off the charts. You could hurt them…yourself, I guess, yourself or Kat…if you’re not delicate about it.”
“Roger that,” she said.
She glanced again at the schematics of the house, which corner of the basement her body was in…then took stock of her weapons. Finger lasers. Grenades. Chest shotgun. A shotgun that pops out of my chest? When she thought the words, the barrel snapped out from her body, thrusting outward from between where her nipples would be. Eighty rounds of ammunition in her chest casing, more in Orlando’s hovercraft…
“What do I do? Ring the doorbell?”
“I was thinking just blast through the roof. It’s far enough from the basement that the bodies should be safe.”
No time like the present, she thought, shooting an impact grenade at the steep tiled roof.
The slate rooftop – and the night – erupted in fire. The flames glowed pure white Tasha’s night vision. Tweaking her visual capabilities allowed her to “see” through the smoke a hole in the roof more than big enough for her. She shot the robot drone into attic of the house and straight down, smashing through the attic’s floor. She was in a bedroom where a middle-aged man, nude, stood next to his bed clutching a pistol. Completely bald and undeniably obese, and surprised as hell, his penis stood remarkably at full attention, pushing up against the flesh of his sagging belly: the wonders of modern erectile enhancement chemistry, no doubt. The woman in the bed – young, buxom, beautiful – stared slack-jawed at the satin black robot that had smashed through the ceiling.
Ignore him, she thought, and move on – but his pistol was coming up and almost without thinking she raised a hand and fired her finger laser at him, the brilliant little dot like the point of a rapier against his forehead, piercing through the skull as though it were butter. A little circle of blood, smaller than the smallest coin, grew on his forehead, and the look of surprise and stupidity on his disgusting oligarch’s face delighted her. The corpulent criminal sagged to the floor.
The woman shrieked. Tasha “spoke,” the words booming like unleashed ordnance in the bedroom. “Don’t worry.” She tried to modulate the words better as a mirror cracked, shards of glass falling to the floor. “Get out of here as soon as you can.” A vase toppled from a bureau at the godlike eruption of her words.
She strode to the door on heavy mechanical feet. Her fingers found it difficult to operate the door’s knob, so she popped the shotgun up from her chest and blasted it to bits.
Just as well. On the other side were two gunsels, one of whom she knew, a despicable little Chechen who had grabbed her from behind more than once, feeling the place between her legs as he breathed against her neck. Drogi, they had called him. She remembered his breath, the smell of vodka, cigarettes, and currywurst. She remembered the feel of his thick sausage fingers inside her panties, rubbing her…disrespecting her.
The shotgun blast had killed his companion, ripping him in two, but this one, this grotesque little molester, yet lived. He leaned back against a wall, clutching at his belly, trying to hold himself in one piece. His mouth, open and slack-jawed, tried to form words. She strode toward him, the shotgun barrel thrusting out toward him from her chest, and, bending, she pushed the end of the barrel into his open mouth.
“Do you remember Natasha? Do you remember her?”
Her voice was as loud as the voice of God. The creep’s trembling pleased her.
She pushed the barrel further into his mouth, back against his tonsils and down his throat. “You like that?” she boomed. “You enjoy that, little bitch?” Drogi would have cried if he hadn’t been going into shock.
She fired the shotgun. The head of the cheap foot-soldier blew into a thousand pieces and painted the wall red.
“Okay, Tasha.” Misha’s calm voice cut through the explosion of emotion that threatened to engulf her. “Eyes on the prize, girl. Go rescue yourself.”
Go rescue yourself…
His words made so much sense. She was important, and Kat was important. These vermin were nothing more than cockroaches…pointless to even kill them. Step on one and another appears, that is the nature of cockroaches. Best to just get away from them…
These thoughts went through her head as she smashed her way through the house down to the basement, ignoring the few cowering criminals she saw. She was on a mission to rescue herself.
Which might not be as easy as she hoped.
Her body was in the basement. There it was, unconscious and fragile in a bed hooked up to a console that had to be the Brutalia interface. Kat was in the bed next to her, smashed and broken. Tasha couldn’t bear to look at the poor girl, disfigured as she was.
And in between them was Yuri. He held a pistol, pointed casually at the head of Tasha’s body. He tried to appear calm, but the hand shook. She hoped he wouldn’t accidentally fire. “I heard you!” he shrieked, then tried to modulate his voice. “When you killed Drogi, I know who you are!”
She said nothing. Let him think what he would – she had to figure out how to keep him from shooting her body in the head.
“You bitch! You slut! You are nothing, do you understand? Nothing!”
Misha, she subvocalized, if he kills my body, will my, uh, personality still live…in Brutalia?
His voice rang clearly in her head. “You still exist in your brain, Tasha, inside the body before you. You’re not like Orlando, whose personality is permanently par
t of Brutalia’s software code. If that body dies…” Tasha heard the catch in his voice as he momentarily lost his cool. “…then you will die, too.”
And as soon as Yuri figured that out, he might just pull the trigger on her. She imagined this robot drone dropping before him, the satisfaction he would feel –
She put the shotgun on automatic and fired away, rounds exploding into his body as he was ripped apart – he got off one shot with the pistol –
And the round thudded dully into the pillow centimeters from Tasha’s head.
……….
She had carried Kat’s body up first, cradling the broken girl in her arms. She wanted to speak tender words to the fractured child in her arms but knew her voice would come out painfully loud. Kat had suffered far too much. Her face was…misshapen, to say the least. Her tiny body, purple with bruises, limbs bent with broken bones that hadn’t been properly tended to, was like the skeleton of a little bird inside the huge metallic arms of the robot drone now occupied by Tasha’s consciousness.
Above the house, Orlando hovered in the form of a dark, boxy aircraft. His bay doors were opened and she entered with Kat and the equipment that kept her plugged into the world of Brutalia. Then she returned to bring up her own body.
“You’ll have to speed it up a bit, Tash,” Misha told her. “We’re going to have company eventually.”
Yes, no doubt the authorities would be arriving soon. “How long has it been?” she asked her erstwhile boyfriend.
“A bit over three minutes since you blasted a hole in that roof.”
Her mind flickered across the events of the past three minutes, killing Yuri’s bastard henchmen…killing Yuri himself. And rescuing Kat.
And then she rescued herself, and led Orlando to the next glowing blip on her GPS readout.
……………
It was a warehouse in the Kreuzberg district, a collective of hackers and other internet rascals, friends of Brand’s who were more than happy to thumb their noses at the social system…and help a couple damsels-in-distress in the process. As Tasha unloaded Kat and her attached equipment, she reveled briefly in the awe the nerdy young hackers, mostly men, evinced toward her.
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