The Lab (Agent Six of Hearts)

by Jack Heath

  Now!

  Six swung his right arm up and cracked his fist into the mannequin’s jaw.

  The dummy’s rubber head popped off and bounced along the floor.

  The power-down death hum sound was played, and Six landed nimbly on the floor. Flight time: 1.7 seconds.

  The headless dummy slumped backward, and Six didn’t bother catching it. It clattered to the ground.

  The move was supposed to knock an attacker unconscious, not decapitate him. Six sighed. This was going to require more training than anticipated.

  Six touched a few buttons on his ancient microwave and watched his homegrown GM vegetable soup circling inside. The microwave was long since obsolete—food was now manufactured to react with oxygen, creating its own heat. It came in specially sealed electronic packages that required a triple C to be opened (this served to starve those without a government file). But Six had no card and no file. He didn’t really trust anything manufactured after ChaoSonic took over supply of the City’s electronic needs—anything you bought could have bugs in it. Tracking devices, microcameras, digi-monitors. Any electrical object could have another electrical object inside it. And whenever you used a triple C, whether it be for a scan, a purchase, or just opening a meal, a signal was sent to the ChaoSonic mainframe, acknowledging your location.

  Six couldn’t let them find out where he was. If the Lab ever caught him…

  He glanced nervously over his shoulder and checked that the light beams were still steady. He zipped up his jacket to stop the shivering.

  The microwave pinged.

  He flicked on the television as he sipped his soup. It was smooth and chalky in his mouth. He checked the news on each channel for mention of himself, the Deck, the Lab, or anything to do with phase two of the Human Genome Project—Project Falcon. There was nothing.

  After dinner, he read Philosophy and Its Application in Today’s Society. He studied Descartes, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Hume, and many others who were less well known. He sat motionless for half an hour, his long fingers rapidly turning the pages.

  Once he had read the entire book, he wiped it clean of his fingerprints with a white cloth, and then put the cloth in the incinerator.

  Six climbed the glass stairs to the attic and crouched in front of a tiny window, ignoring the milling cockroaches. The best security in the world couldn’t keep the cockroaches out, he reflected.

  Through the window he could see the yard, the footpath, and the road. They were all empty. But there Six remained, watchful and alert, ready for a night of stillness and silence.

  MISSION TWO

  CHANGING FACE

  “Hi, Six!” Jack said. “Ready for your next mission?”

  Six sat down and leaned his head back against the headrest.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Jack said, undaunted. “I’ve heard lots of exciting things about these undercover missions! I heard from Five that—”

  “Please get to work,” Six said.

  “Just being friendly, Six. It wouldn’t kill you to try it, you know.”

  Six grunted. Like Six, Jack had worked at the Deck since its formation, and for those three long years Six had never enjoyed his company. Jack’s enthusiasm for his work and the agents he served hadn’t dimmed at all, much to Six’s displeasure. Although he was twenty, Jack had the bright, curious demeanor of a child, and an endless supply of boyish excitement. His long, strawberry blond hair was always knotted and tangled, and his reddish-brown eyes were always wide with delight. He was always smiling and laughing and talking. And talking and talking and talking, Six thought, gritting his teeth. So damn chirpy—completely unaware of the grim reality of the City around him. They say that ignorance is bliss, but Six didn’t understand why bliss had to be so loud.

  Jack was rummaging through his equipment. “Today I think I’ll tan your skin slightly,” he was saying, “give you brown eyes, a mole or two, and make your hair sort of mahoganycolored, okay? Then…maybe I’ll lengthen your eyes a bit. Sound good?”

  “Please hurry up,” Six said. He wanted to be on his way as quickly as possible.

  “Okay. You’re not in a cheery mood today, I see. No worse than any other day, of course. Off we go!”

  Six stared at Jack coldly as he removed two contact lenses from a grey case on his desk.

  “Open wide,” Jack said. He held Six’s eyelids apart and dropped in the lenses. Six felt them attach themselves to his eyeballs.

  “Good. I’ll do the hair next. Actually, it’s not mahogany after all. ‘Chestnut rust,’ it says on the packet. Incidentally, ChaoRinse shampoo will have no effect on the dye, so when you want to go back to normal, just come to me. Or you could just leave it as is—”

  “Don’t you have other work to do?” Six asked.

  Jack sighed. “Just making conversation,” he said to himself.

  Dodging a glare from Six, Jack stepped around behind him and used a soft brush to paint the dye onto Six’s hair. Six could feel it seeping right down to his scalp.

  Jack continued to talk as he painted. “Because of the nature of this mission, your equipment is rather limited. They’ll almost certainly scan you on your way in, so guns, bombs, and knives are out as far as combat equipment goes. Not that you often use those things. You will, on the other hand, be able to have a plastic microphone in your collar, a button-cam in your breast pocket, and a Deck-issue, four-prong electrical discharge generator.”

  Six snorted. “You mean a taser.”

  “Basically. But a rather powerful one. Anyway, provided that none of these things are switched on when they do the scan, you’ll be ushered through before you can say, ‘None of my equipment was on during the scan.’ Okay?”

  Jack picked up a hair dryer and started drying Six’s hair. “You’ll be wearing all designer clothing,” he continued. “It’s probably the most expensive outfit I’ve ever seen. So do me a favor and try to bring it back in one piece.”

  “So you can keep it when I’m finished?”

  “Yeah, right,” said Jack. “There’ll be other missions where agents need to look classy, so we’ll be keeping the suit in storage. Although I wouldn’t mind a suit like this. I’m—”

  “Are you talking,” Six asked, “for your benefit, or mine?”

  Jack had finished drying Six’s hair. “Mine, I guess.” He sighed. “Gee, I barely recognize you already,” he said happily. “And we’ve still got lots more work to do!”

  “Who’s going to be online?”

  “I was just getting to that,” Jack said. He put down the gel container, washed his hands, and produced some tan cream. He began to rub it into Six’s face. “Agent Two will be at an on-site location, and the radio is preprogrammed to a frequency you can reach him on. Although if you need to, you can change the frequencies on the radio. Just push the up button to switch it up, or the down button to switch it down. You’ll have to take it out of your ear to do it, though.”

  “Mmm.” Six couldn’t open his mouth; Jack was still rubbing in the tan cream. A few seconds later he had finished, and the floury smell of the cream filled Six’s nostrils.

  “Only two more things to do!” Jack fished around inside his case and pulled out two flaps of artificial skin, one with freckles on it and the other with a scar. “Hold still, please.”

  He touched the flesh between Six’s right eye and his ear and pulled it backward slightly. Then he stuck on the scar to hold it in place. Six could feel that his eye had changed shape; it had become longer and narrower.

  “I wish I could be a field agent,” Jack said dreamily. “Go to interesting places, meet new people, get paid to run around and stuff. A car chase would be good, or one of those jump-out-of-a-plane infiltration jobs!” He repeated the shaping action on the other side of Six’s head.

  Six had never understood how Jack could work at the Deck for three years and still be so blind to the horrors they fought every day. “Meet new people, and kill them,” he said. “It’s the good life all
right.”

  “But you don’t,” Jack said. “I’ve seen your mission results. We all have. You never kill on missions; you avoid it at all costs.”

  “Other people try to kill me on a regular basis. It’s not like your ‘Secret Agent: Interesting Places, New People, Car Chases’ brochure.”

  Jack smiled. “I’m just going to smooth the transition between face tone and chest tone,” he said, ignoring Six’s comment.

  He unzipped Six’s shirt and pushed aside the fabric.

  Six’s torso should have been covered with surgical scars, marks from deep cuts and heavy bruises, and even a bullet wound in his right shoulder. But thanks to Six’s doctored metabolism, supercharged heart, and incredible immune system, his chest looked muscular and healthy but for a few patches where the fine hairs had not regrown.

  Jack suddenly paused in his work. “I didn’t know you had dog tags!” he said.

  Six grimaced. Before reporting to Jack he always turned the chain around so the dog tags were behind him where Jack wouldn’t see them. They must have slid around to the front again.

  “‘Sender J. Lawson,’” Jack read, “‘Infantry.’ Who’s he? Some kind of relative?”

  Six snatched the tags out of Jack’s hand and slipped them back behind his neck.

  Jack scooped some tanning cream out of a silver container. “I used to wear my father’s ring…”

  Please, no more, Six thought.

  “The tags are none of your business,” he said. “Are you nearly finished?”

  Jack zipped up Six’s shirt. “There. Your own mother wouldn’t recognize you now!” he said. “But one last thing…”

  If I had a mother, you’d probably be right, Six thought. But you could never guess what my childhood was like.

  His face remained blank, and Jack didn’t notice anything wrong when he began to paint Six’s face again. “A mole here, some more freckles there, a scar under the neck, and a touch of sunburn under the eyes. Perfect! All done!”

  Six looked in the mirror that Jack was holding up, and as usual after Jack had done his work, he saw a complete stranger glaring back. The man he saw had a darker face than Six did, his hair was reddish-brown, his narrow, dark eyes were black and mysterious, and his face was riddled with tiny, naturallooking marks.

  “What do you think?” Jack asked hopefully. But he didn’t seem surprised when Six got out of the chair, grabbed the taser and the outfit from Jack’s desk, and left the room without answering.

  Six walked down the stairwell to get to his car. His almost silent footsteps were amplified by the thin metal and cold brick walls. Six didn’t like elevators—the speed at which they moved was outside your control, they could be shut down by external forces, there was no easy way to escape them if you were trapped, and you never really knew what was waiting on each floor. In a stairwell, if you opened the door and didn’t like what was on the other side, you could just slam it shut and run for your life.

  Six opened the exit door and left the stairwell, entering the underground parking lot. He headed towards his car.

  A sudden noise made him pause. What was that? Just the scuff of a shoe on the concrete—tiny, almost inaudible, but he had heard it. He glanced around uneasily. It didn’t look as though anyone was there…

  A door slammed somewhere behind him. Six whirled around immediately, but no one was there. Rows and rows of parked cars were illuminated in the blue-white glow of halogen lights. The whole parking lot was empty.

  No one was here now, but someone had been.

  Six crouched down and looked under his car. No evidence of tampering, no bombs apparent. He looked at the locks on the sides, the trunk, and the hood. No sign of anything amiss.

  He stood well back and hit the remote control on his keys.

  The car disarmed itself. Six waited for twenty seconds, about the time it would take for an assassin to make certain he would be in the car.

  Still nothing happened.

  Satisfied that no traps were set for him, but still uneasy, Six climbed into the car and closed the door. He started the engine and drove towards the exit.

  There! A flicker. One moment a man had been leaning against the wall—and the next he was gone.

  Six floored the accelerator and zoomed up the ramp, out into daylight.

  Looking around, he saw that no one was following him, no one was looking at him, there were no helicopters or planes overhead.

  But Six knew for certain—he was being watched.

  UNDERCOVER

  “Mr. Macintyre,” the woman in the Wanderer said. “I’m Earle Shuji. At last we meet in person!”

  “The pleasure is entirely mine,” Six said, with what he judged to be a disarming smile. He reached down to shake the hand of the woman in the wheelchair.

  “I felt that given your patience online, I should give you the tour in person. I’m very flattered that you’ve taken such an interest in our work here, Mr. Macintyre.”

  “Again, the pleasure has been mine,” Six replied. “I very much look forward to doing business with you. And please, call me Scott.”

  Six appraised Shuji. She was classy looking—her goldtinted brown hair was tied back in a fashionable rather than practical way, and when her lips parted, dark with understated but expensive lipstick, they revealed a polished white smile. Her face suggested arrogance, but if this was indicative of character, Six thought as she looked him up and down with her chocolate-brown eyes, she was hiding it well in front of her prospective business associate. It was hard to judge her height. Almost certainly she was not disabled—Wanderers were currently fashionable with the rich, so most people on the street in wheelchairs were likely to be perfectly healthy.

  The rich of the City are so greedy, Six thought. That greed is how they became so rich. However, the same people would gladly buy things they didn’t need, like a wheelchair, making their own legs redundant. What a stupid, stupid world.

  Six slowly scanned the room he was in.

  It was a foyer, tiled in a pristine white. None of the edges were sharp or square; the furniture was rounded and smooth. Besides the entrance, there was only one door, which blended almost seamlessly into the polished white wall.

  A receptionist in a dark suit sat behind a silver counter with headphones in her ears. Six could hear the music playing, although he suspected that most humans would be deaf to it. He turned his shoulders as he looked around, so the buttonhole camera in his vest could take in the whole room.

  “That’s good, Six,” Agent Two said, his voice buzzing through Six’s earpiece. “Keep it up.”

  “Now, if you’ll indulge me for a moment,” Shuji was saying, “I’m going to have to ask you to hold still while you are scanned.” She clicked her fingers, and a guard in full battle gear emerged from behind the door.

  “Of course.” Six stood with his legs slightly apart and his arms spread wide, inviting the guard to search him. The guard approached.

  “Check out the gear on that guy,” Six’s radio observed. “Full Kevlar body armor, anti-flash goggles with night-vision attachment, gas mask with biochemical filtering, ChaoSonic digital scrambler radio, Falcon 17 automatic rifle (probably an upgrade of the M41-A 10 millimeter), retractable titanium combat knife, and ChaoSilent fittings on his boots. This guy must have gone into the ChaoSonic defense site and just clicked ‘Add all to cart’!”

  Indeed, Six thought. This was no security guard—this was a commando. Someone who was probably not just prepared, but expected, to kill during his shift. Still, Six thought, there would be weaknesses. The digital scrambler radio, for example, had a computer chip in it. An electromagnetic pulse or a strong magnet could corrupt it, and the soldier wouldn’t be able to receive messages from his comrades.

  Six smiled to himself. No one ever expected the magnet.

  “Hold still,” the soldier growled as he set up the scanning apparatus. His voice was deepened and distorted by the gas mask.

  “Six, we’re going to cut rad
io contact for a moment,” the earpiece said. “Sit tight.” There was a click as the transmitter was switched off.

  The guard held up the scanner and turned it on. It looked a little like a black horseshoe with a power cord snaking out from the back and two short prongs emerging from the top on either side of the guard’s gloved hand. When the power was switched on, the batteries sparked to life and a line of crackling energy joined the two ends of the horseshoe.

  The soldier pointed the scanner at Six’s torso, then at each of his limbs, then at his head. Apparently satisfied, he switched the device off.

  “Remote support is back online, Six. We’re getting audio and visuals, loud and clear.”

  “Thank you again for your patience, Mr. Macintyre,” Earle Shuji said. “This is Mr. Neeq. He will be your bodyguard for the duration of your brief stay.”

  Six nodded politely to the guard. Neeq didn’t respond; he just stared with his reflective goggled eyes.

  “Please, follow me.” Shuji revved the Wanderer and drove it over to the door, which slid open. They all went through it.

  The receptionist in the headphones didn’t look up.

  This mission was a straightforward rescue. Shuji had captured different experts to work for her, and was planning to execute them once their tasks were complete. Six was to get a layout of the building and transmit it to the Deck. He was then to meet up with one of the hostages in the bathroom and be taken back to the holding area where the rest of the hostages were. He would barricade them in while Deck agents stormed the facility.

  “You’ll appreciate, of course, the need for security in a place like this,” Shuji was saying as they walked down the flawless white hall. “Not only do we have to deal with the usual vandals, saboteurs, terrorists, and spies from other companies but, between you and me, we also have to avoid the local vigilante groups, particularly an organization called the Deck. Sometimes those kinds of people take an unwelcome interest in our activities.”