Shift

by Robert Lenz, Jacob Hunter

  I popped my HUD glasses on and ran a query against a contact list I’d saved. Sure enough Tony appeared, without a last name and quite obviously a bogus residence. Luckily, Tony often visited a high class bar where he received most of his business. I queried the name of the bar, "High Castle" and saw that it still existed in the same place, fortunately light rail adjacent. Figuring that was my best place to start, I set a vibration alarm on my HUD for 40 minutes, laid across the bench, and closed my eyes. The nap would be nice, it would hopefully center my thoughts.

  Chapter 13

  I awoke to the chime of an incoming light rail, indicating that my hearing had returned. Drugs these days. Temporary paralysis AND loss of hearing. What will they think of next, an actual recreational use for the stuff? Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I peered down the railway and saw the familiar triangle of three front lights forming as it hummed its way towards the station. Several people were around me and I instinctively checked for my glasses. They weren't the best on the market but could fetch enough money for some junkie to get his fix for at least a few weeks.

  I found them on the floor, underneath the bench. I must have dropped them when I fell asleep. The light rail arrived and I hopped on. The trip was nondescript and I was at my destination a short while later. The bar "High Castle" was only about a block away from my stop, indicated by bright neon lights on a sign was easily 50 feet in the air. The bar wasn't particularly interesting on the outside and looked like a normal building, albeit a bit run down. Some people were standing outside the entrance, probably trying to get some fresh air. They barely noticed as I pushed past them, continuing to idly chat about some recent event. I was surprised they didn't give me a dirty look as my attire for this establishment was sub-par. My suspicions were confirmed the instant I walked through the doors, several heads turning to look at me with distaste.

  I really didn't care. I bee-lined towards the bar and ordered a whiskey, neat. A classic.

  "So Cal tipped you off huh?" A familiar voice skirted through the other conversations and slapped me in the face. I spun around to be greeted by the man that had asked me to take a ride with him in his black town car.

  "Don't I know you?" I responded. My drink arrived and the bar attendant scanned the card that had 5000 credits loaded on it. I smiled, enjoying spending another person's money on booze. My friendly kidnapper didn't seem to notice.

  "You should. I'm Tony. We've spent a lot of time together," he said as he took a seat next to me. I decided I should as well and took a load off, squaring up to my new buddy. He then stuck his hand out, as if to shake. As if this was some friendly get together of old chums. I ignored it.

  "Tony huh? Tony was a short man with a limp and one ugly face. You are nothing like that. Stop pulling my leg, I'm here to meet the real Tony."

  I attempted a swig at my drink, but coughed at its immediate harshness. The man across from me snickered and said, "They've certainly come down in quality here."

  He then gave me a serious look. "Look, I have to keep my identity tight and my character act even tighter. Ask me something Tony, and only Tony, would know."

  Ok, I thought. This guy wants to play a game. At least he's buying drinks. "Sure, friend. Why the hell did you leave Julio and Cal high and dry ten years ago?" My anger surged. "Why did you leave two very trustworthy men to deal with the situation that you personally fucked up?" I guess that one had weighed on me for some time, as my rage unexpectedly spilled out.

  'Tony' gave me an apologetic look. He seemed like he remembered the event. A couple nearby us slid their chairs away at my sudden outburst. Tony then leaned in and said "The deal went sour because Cal was the inside man. Julio was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I know you don't want to hear this but Cal isn't your friend. He isn't anyone's friend. Well, he might be the government's friend but I wouldn't even count on that. He just does what is best for him. I mean, he did leave you to die in his apartment right?"

  I stared at his face for a moment and replied, "How did you know that?" Tony tapped his data jack. "It wasn't just Julio in your body."

  My jaw went slack and I continued to stare at him.

  "Look, I didn't want to be the one to tell you this. Cal is not your friend anymore. He is basically selling you out to the government. Not in the way of a bounty hunter but more as a way to fund his operations. The government offers small rewards for tips on anarchists. Or revolutionists. Or really anybody that opposes them. Cal feeds them little encrypted messages to preserve his identity but provides small bits of information about you. One of those bits of data was how to jack into you over wireless and assume control."

  He paused and took a breath. "You're basically a Pounder or a Sharper, just with a bit more free will."

  And he released the breath. "I'm sorry." Tony then looked away for a second and then said, "You can think of me as the upgraded Tony. The real Tony is long dead and I have taken his place. I found a doctor, you know, one of those amputee-fetish guys? Well, he provided some physical upgrades to me for my services. He had parts available and the smarts and electronics to hook them up. That is why I went off the grid for a bit. To have these operations and to heal. I don't think of myself as the original Tony anymore, but a new and improved one."

  I dropped my drink, the glass shattering as it hit the floor. A cleaningbot shot out of some unknown place and began sucking up the mess. The patrons didn't even flinch or give me a sidelong glance. Two things were at the forefront of my thoughts: I'm a glorified Pounder, and I was being heavily confused by the man in front of me claiming to be Tony.

  At the moment, I couldn't tell what bothered me more. A long lost friend whom I thought betrayed my group, or knowing that I'm so deep into the shit that I might be unable to get out. For the first time in days, I sighed heavily. I didn't know what to do next.

  Tony ordered another drink and a replacement for me. "I do have some good news, my friend."

  Screw you, we aren't friends, I thought.

  He continued, "Because of the wireless connection to your data jack and the code to hack into your body, I was able to wipe the virus that affected your hearing. Well, it wasn't a virus per se, but you get the idea. Cal's drug also had a special Shift agent that rerouted your hearing receptors to something else. I didn't have time to explore that, I only just reverted what he had done."

  Ok, maybe we were becoming fast friends?

  I blinked at Tony, realization setting in. I’d received another dose of Shift. The first one somehow changed my genetic makeup, or mimicked, or hell I didn’t even know. It did something and gave me Rimer's identity to Persistence. Now I was being told that I’d received another dose that had caused me to go deaf, near-permanently. My mind began to race with an unfiltered stream of paranoia. Cal. Mind control. SALDA. Persistence. Rimer. Tony sensed this and halted my thoughts prematurely, "You want to stop the real Rimer. I can help you."

  I nodded slowly. "Explain."

  He looked as though he were about to start talking, when his eyes darted to the entrance and his jaw clapped shut with an audible click.

  "Not here, not now," he hissed through clenched teeth.

  I felt the room grow cold. The edges of my vision began to fuzz as I felt cold, icy fingers tremble their way across my brain and tickle it, as though being examined by an elderly doctor with long, skeletal fingers.

  "Uhh..." I started to mumble.

  "Faceless." Tony stated, eyes glued to the door.

  "Yyyooouuu aaarrreee, ttthhheee Rrriiimmmeeerrr," I felt skitter across my apathetically firing mental pathways. No sound had been uttered by the thing in the doorway, it had spoken to me telepathically. And why not? The damned monstrosity had no mouth.

  I opened my own to speak and was mentally slapped, hard. The thing was still in the doorway, unmoving. No, it had found the touch receptors in my face and activated them. I'm sure that, deep down, the effect was an amazing exercise in gene manipulation, given life by
a combination of telekinesis and telepathy. There were probably even several academic papers written on the topic, smart people in auditoriums or conference rooms both praising its merits and criticizing it under their breath. Those people weren't here though. They didn't feel the violation. My body felt sullied by this...thing.

  "Nnnooo ssspppeeeaaakkkiiinnnggg," its mind whispered to me. "CCCooommmeee wwwiiittthhh mmmeee. Nnnooottt mmmuuuccchhh tttiiimmmeee nnnooowww." it entreated me. "Yyyooouuu cccaaannn hhheeellllppp uuusss." It waited for a tick, then added somewhat pathetically, "Pppllleeeaaassseee."

  This gave me pause. At first I thought it was simply dabbling with my mind, sucking some sort of sick nourishment and then playing with me. But it wanted help? How the hell could I help it? Stories of this monster were told to little children to make them shit their pants just so that they'd stay in line. And it wanted my help? Now I was really confused. How could something with no features whatsoever look so saddened? So pathetic?

  In my moment of indecision, of confusion (of pity?), Tony took his chance and pulled out a large .44 magnum. He coolly leveled it at the Faceless that had stared at me with its blank face, drew a bead, and opened up a gaping hole in its forehead. Its head rocked backward, brain matter spewing back in great bloody gobs, painting the walls around the doorway. Odd, the splashes of blood and gore had a blue tinge to them, not red as I would've expected.

  "Let's get out of here, I’ve got a safe place nearby," he said calmly. The barflies stared with incredulity but made no move to stop us. I followed numbly along, stepping over the twitching body of the Faceless, heading out into the quiet, evening air.

  "Wild guess here but that Faceless wasn't yours, was it?" The question lingered in the air for a moment as I followed Tony. At first I thought he ignored me, but then he finally responded, "Sometimes you have to let things go, no matter how important."

  I gave him a puzzled look, but dropped the subject. My guess is that might have been one of his Faceless, and he seemed to have had an attachment to it. We walked in silence, first down a main road, then through several alleys, and finally down a staircase that took us underground. The hallways were dimly lit, and on each side were doorways with scratched in numbers. We entered door number '4'.

  "I own this entire building, but I always keep this apartment open for my personal use." The apartment was completely bare. A couple of cheap chairs were propped against the far wall but other than that, nothing. Tony grabbed the two chairs and set them down in the middle of the floor, facing each other. He took a seat on one and gestured for me to sit on the other. I obliged. Uh oh, I thought. He wants a serious discussion.

  Tony began to speak, as if re-telling a story. "I acquired the Faceless through one of my stints as a tradesmen in arms dealing. They really weren't that difficult to acquire but you needed something equally as dangerous as what you were selling. I won't go into who I got them from, that isn't important. I will say the man was highly interested in what I had to trade: weaponry. At the time, I had learned the government was involved in some mind-control type substances. After going through my contacts, I finally procured a vial of this stuff that supposedly would open up the victim's receptors to external input. With the advances of Persistence and being able to connect to other people, well, you get the idea."

  I nodded my head. "Go on."

  Tony breathed, beginning to speak again on the exhale. "I think I sold the bio-weapon to Rimer, or someone directly under Rimer. Regardless, I think I might be part of the problem. I think I have enabled those people to jack into others, and control them."

  Tony raked his fingers through his hair, beads of sweat forming on his brow. "I've never told anyone this. Feels good."

  I nodded again and chipped in, "The blue lights."

  Tony's turn to nod. He then replied "That is the most noticeable sign. You see it behind their eyes typically. A lot of other things take on a blue tinge."

  "Their blood?" I inquired.

  "Exactly. Tissue, organs, skin, blood. All of it can turn blue-ish. Sometimes it is noticeable, sometimes it isn't. The infection takes time to manifest though." Tony looked down at the floor between his legs.

  It wasn't hard to put the pieces together about the Faceless and Tony. "Your Faceless had been infected. Shooting him was the only way to save him. You did the right thing." I put my hand on his shoulder as I said this.

  Tony didn't respond for a while, and I assumed he was deep in thought, remembering that hideous creature. Hideous to me, but obviously a strong friend to Tony. He finally looked up at me, staring.

  A flicker. The blue light. It sparkled lightly behind his eyes. Tony quickly shut his eyes and shuddered. I was speechless. Tony was infected. I eyed his gun in his holster on his side.

  "Tony," I said "we've got a problem."

  "Yes...I suppose we do,” he replied. "Before...ngghh....before we get into that however. I have a video you might be interested in." He groaned as he spoke.

  "Tony, I don't think now is..."

  "Shutup. Watch this," he said in clipped tones, visibly struggling. Traces of blue continued to flicker in and out of his eyes, giving him the appearance of a robot at the end of its life. His face began contorting in pain with each new appearance of the blue light.

  He reached into his front pocket and pulled out a small cylindrical device, not any longer than the length of my pinky finger. "Clip it to your glasses and play the contents," he said, voice quavering. As an afterthought, he said, "Don't worry, it's clean."

  The thought had crossed my mind, but I was too engrossed in his current struggle. Shrugging, I did as asked, clipping the tube onto my HUD and navigating to its contents. As promised, a video file lay inside, and my scanner found zero infections. Throwing caution to the wind, I opened the file.

  At first all I saw was static, as though it came from a feed off a cheap camera, the kind that directly fed into storage for later perusal. Then, it resolved into a plain, white room, with the faintest hint of a door cut into the wall. No windows were visible, though the room did seem to have a pillowy quality. Ah, the picture focused a bit more. It was a padded cell; this was an inmate's feed from a mental institution.

  The camera zoomed in on the lone inhabitant. It was Julio, and he was curled up in a fetal position in the corner of the room, completely static. As though he recognized that somebody had begun recording, he twitched, and sat bolt upright, cross-legged. His face was devoid of any emotion, simply staring forward as though attempting to burn an escape hole in the wall with his gaze.

  The faintest glimmer of a twitch traveled across his face, and his eyes closed, briefly. When they reopened, they were as Tony's currently were, alternating between dull and then sparking with hot light. This feed was in black and white, so I couldn't tell what color, but I knew. It was naturally blue. Whatever was happening to Tony had happened to Julio.

  And Julio was losing this battle, it seemed.

  He closed his eyes again and then reopened them. Streams of light visibly began to leak out, as though they were pent up inside him and trying to find the easiest way out. He began to swat at his head, hands finally landing on his temples and appearing to push. I'd seen people try to take care of headaches in this way. He was trying to contain the pain in his head. With visible effort he closed his eyes, but the light continued to glow through the lids. Each passing second seemed to increase the intensity of the glow, and then, reaching its breaking point. His eyelids vanished in a flash of light, apparently vaporized against the torrent of radiation that streamed through. His mouth opened in a wordless "O," obviously shrieking in pain. At that moment, I was extraordinarily happy that no sound accompanied this feed.

  He began pulling at his hair and I saw his hands come away with a few clumps. He opened his mouth to shriek again, and that damned light began to wisp from his open lips. Visible smoke began wafting from the crown of his head and he ran towards the door in a last ditch effort to get help. Without bei
ng able to actually see, he collided head on with the wall, the padding only able to do so much. He collapsed to the floor in a heap, continuing to twitch, continuing to emit that damned blue light.

  The smoke intensified and I cringed with each involuntary jerk of pain he experienced. The collar of his shirt burst into flame and the rest of his clothing was quickly consumed. He continued to flail wildly, but nothing he did would stop the flames that spread all over his body. It was at that point that I closed my eyes, killing the feed.

  So Julio had died, and Tony was likewise being affected. But, it seemed that he had regained control while my attention was elsewhere. Tony had found a chair and was sitting down, legs crossed, peering at me with the attention of an academic studying an experiment.