Humble Beginnings

by Greg Alldredge

  Rollin saw the female’s body. Her death was no accident. The hacker’s neck was bruised… squeezed just like Kano’s… but somehow, he survived, and she didn’t. Rollin never found the proof, but the chances Kano killed her were significantly higher than the theory of another VR accident. He’d never heard of virtual strangulation.

  T’all darted out of sight behind the dark-skinned aliens. Rollin stumbled after her. Arms bracing himself like a drunken gravity-sick ship’s crew on shore leave. The bulkhead became his best ally in staying upright.

  If he was fully functional, he could have outrun her in seconds. Damaged as he was, he barely kept up. If she focused on running, she would have outpaced him easy. Instead she kept turning her head to track him. Each time she did, Rollin gained a little ground. Did the female taunt me into following her?

  She ran into a VR game suite. Rollin took the briefest moment to stop when he entered the doorway, coming face to face with a hologram zombie, arms outstretched ready to attack. “Damn game…” he cursed while nearly drawing his weapon.

  With so many people surviving on basic assistance, an escape from reality became much more important. For the masses, a VR world of their choosing had replaced the boredom of reality. When a person’s real life sucked, it only made sense to remake yourself into something better… even if it was all just electrons firing into your skull.

  With no feed, none of the virtual things going on around him were visible. He only saw people strapped into VR couches, twitching while they fought the harmless zombie hoards.

  The station, the races, even the classes, had different levels of augmented and virtual reality. It all came down to what a person could afford, or what their brain could handle. When it came to technology, not all peoples were created equally.

  The hair stood on the back of Rollin’s neck. Something was wrong in this dark room. Even if he couldn’t put his finger on it, his body forced him to react. He pulled his service weapon from the holster.

  Keyed to his implants, it would only work for him. Sensors in his body would be relayed to the weapon, and the device would autoselect the correct ammunition for the target. The problem was, with the connection severed, Rollin didn’t know if the thing would work or not.

  He manually shifted to a slug thrower. The kinetic force of a bullet hitting flesh would slow most creatures.

  The laser sight cut into the dark recesses of the space, but he couldn’t find a target.

  Without warning, his information feed kicked back in, flooding his brain with information. The shock to his system sent his body down with a clank of metal on metal, his mind crashing under the load.

  Chapter II:

  The stench of death jolted Rollin from his downtime. His head hurt. Through closed eyes, the flash of light matched up with the crack of power arcs and sparks. Forcing his eyes open, he found himself lying in a pool of blood and vomit, possibly his own.

  Bolts of electricity flashed from the lighting panels in the low ceiling. They danced their way down the walls, searching out ground. Each arc matched up with a deadly buzzing. The paneling that made the room pretty didn’t survive the… Rollin wasn’t sure what happened to him or the room. From the fallen suspended ceiling, something bad, the best he could tell. Possibly a blast… some sort of overpressure hit the place hard.

  Somehow, he landed at the back of the room, back against the farthest wall from the entrance. From the floor, it was impossible to see the complete damage to the room, VR tables, or the people they held. The bloody hand that dangled not far from his face didn’t bode well for the other inhabitants of the station.

  His coms were down. He had no flow of information from the net, no news service, no outside contact… His world now consisted of this room. One thing was certain, his head still hurt like he’d had an evac tool buried deep in his skull. From the floor, he could see the door leading into the VR suite had remained shut. The indicator light flashed red like a quick heartbeat, telling him the room was locked down.

  Cybernetic implants responded; artificial limbs moved at his command. He could stand, arms worked, he flexed his fingers testing them. Aural and vision systems seemed intact. He pulled up his body’s heads-up display and checked for malfunctions. Other than the loss of coms, most systems seemed in the green. Most troubling aspect: he lost time, nearly a full rotation of the station, eight Earth hours were missing from his internal clock. That was a lifetime for some.

  Something attacked the station, hit it hard, but Rollin had no information concerning the damage or even the extent of the causalities. For now, he was safe. There was still gravity, blood and sparks fell to the floor, so the station must still be rotating. He only hoped the structural integrity was maintained. He hated to think there might be hard vacuum waiting for him outside his confined room. A quick sniff of the air told him the air recyclers must be working. If they had failed when he lost consciousness, he would have never survived long enough to wake up.

  No matter how bad things were, he was for the moment still alive and functioning.

  The nearest VR table held a bloody body. Cold to the touch. He didn’t need to check for life. The alien was torn apart. Rollin never had the internal files a tech like Mal carried, but his implant held examples of wounds different attacks might cause. He didn’t need the exemplars… The body on the couch had been torn apart by what looked like an animal. The one discernible bite mark looked like a Patapay could have caused it… possibly a human or a humanlike alien. His world had shifted into the unbelievable.

  By the time he’d worked his way to the door, he’d checked all twenty bodies in the room. A quick inspection revealed the other occupants sprawled on the VR couches with the same condition. The only description that came to Rollin’s mind was torn apart and partially eaten by a humanoid creature.

  At the moment, Rollin couldn’t think of a worse way to go… eaten alive.

  Far Reach Station was home to over twenty-million souls, a mishmash of alien races. At last count, over twenty-three major races called the tin can in space home. Completion of the space station was a joint effort, the races segregated and finishing their own parts, the Rankins renting out space to the highest bidder. Many of the sections had been finished in a haphazard manner befitting the multitude of inhabitants.

  The Rankins tried to control the construction standards, but corners were constantly being cut to save time and cost. One item required for each internal space was a pressure door… and a control panel hard-wired into the station net. In case of emergency, this was a way of reaching out, the last lifeline for those stranded without information.

  Rollin stood, staring at the blank panel. He expected more from the emergency channel than the same static he received from his implant. He was disappointed but not too surprised. His last lifeline seemed the victim of some alien cost-cutting gone bad. Now he was stranded, alone with a shitload of dead bodies.

  The exit was in lockdown. The warning light still blinked a steady red pulse. The flashing light gave no information on what was waiting for him the far side of the door. Fire or loss of air was the most likely cause of the lockdown. He tested the door with the back of his hand and found it neither hot nor cold. “Damn insulation.”

  With the strength his mechanical arms gave him, he could force the locked door open — and find himself dead in seconds or free of the locked room. He wasn’t in a rush to discover how long he might survive vacuum. His cyborg implants did little to stop his flesh from burning.

  From the back of the dark room, an unfamiliar gurgling sound spread over the dead.

  For a split-second, Rollin thought he’d somehow missed a survivor. In the darkness, it was possible. Maybe some hidden room in the back of the VR suite for special customers.

  He turned and switched his optics to search for a heat source. There was none. The heat of the bodies blended in with the background. They’d been dead that long. The gurgling came once again. The hair stood on the back of his neck. He was not
alone.

  He was not immune to fear, he just rarely felt it. As far as he knew, there was no implant to remove emotions, but he did find he could suppress them with strong enough drink. Pity, he had no drink on him.

  Though dangerous for most, he found the world rather mundane. His implants gave him that large of an advantage over most creatures he came across. That was the reason for the extensive surgeries he’d endured over the years. To become a better… a more effective person.

  He switched to night vision. There, in the back of the room, he spotted movement.

  Training took over, pistol in hand. He pointed it at the floor, waiting for a target or threat to reveal itself. “You need to step out where I can see you,” Rollin called into the dark.

  The movement came from behind the farthest couch, a shambling body mass stepped out of the darkest part of the room.

  Something was not right. As soon as Rollin pulled his weapon, his targeting system kicked in. His vision was now partially blocked with a red “No Target” warning flashing in his visual cortex like it filled the room. With no target registered, his weapon would not fire.

  Back against the exit, he spotted movement from the nearest couches, as the bodies he’d just checked came back to life.

  “Stop, or I’ll shoot.” The flashing red words blinded him. Rollin needed to shut off the targeting system so he could find all the movement.

  The warning disappeared, clearing his vision.

  Now on manual override, he fingered the pistol to a wide-angle stun blast. Used mostly for crowd control, it would knock the crap out of most sentient life he knew of. There was no such thing as a warning shot.

  He fired.

  The standing creatures staggered a few steps backward, but even those nearest Rollin failed to go down.

  He was wrong, the bodies trapped with him were not the living dead. Somehow, they turned into Hisada… the race of reapers. Nanotech monsters from hell. The only creatures in the known ‘verse that collected and recycled the dead. The most feared and reviled race known. Each a walking horror of absorbed organic material… bodies held together and animated by some out of control alien nanotech. The nearest one had three arms and two heads protruding from the disgusting torso, covered in a disgusting mixture of blood and gray goo.

  Anyone that breathed feared the beasts that collected and animated the dead. His heart jumped into his throat, causing a shortness of breath.

  Rollin switched to pulse and rapid-fired at the monsters as they closed in.

  His attacks did nothing to stop the fiends. Against all odds, the power blasts didn’t work. The penetrating blast marks repaired themselves before his shocked eyes. The cop had never encountered the monsters before, but he knew enough from popular culture how to kill them. Technically, they could only be killed when the last of the nanotech was destroyed, which was near impossible. Maybe if he had an inferno rig, he could slow them down.

  Freaking out, he switched to slug thrower.

  He fired into the chest of the nearest shambling mass and scored a direct hit in the center mass. The three-armed monster didn’t pause. Rollin wrestled with the thing, struggling to keep away from the pair of jaws. The slime quickly covered Rollin’s body in the struggle for the weapon. Gray ooze splattered onto his face.

  He switched to anti-armor ammo. Made to stop a small tank or spacecraft, on the station, these rounds had limited use. There was a real chance they might pierce the hull. The real threat of explosive decompression caused another warning to flash in his mind.

  With a thought, he silenced the warning.

  Another blast of static hit Rollin like a freight train. The implanted system of controls for his body overloaded by the input. His back arched in pain.

  Before he fired the armor-piercing rounds, he lost control of his body implants and hit the floor. Muscles twitched from the mixed signals they received from his brain. The cyborg once again lost control of himself.

  <=OO=>

  “Rollin… wake up… what the hell happened?” He was certain Mal’s voice called to him from the fog of electronic distortion he found himself in. “I heard shots fired… Why did you fire your weapon?”

  “God, I need a drink.” His temples throbbed. Someone played his brain like a steel drum and a sledgehammer. Instinctively, he reached for his holster and found it empty. “Where’s my weapon?”

  “I’m not sure.” Mal quickly scanned the area. “Now is not the time…” Mal tried to help him up. He refused to open his eyes, afraid his implants might pop out of his skull.

  “It is always the right time for a drink.” He risked it and cracked open his right eye. The VR room was a mess. He found himself standing. Never expected the short human female to find the strength to lift his metal augmented body off the floor.

  She asked once more, “Why did you fire your weapon?” Mal’s voice was strained. Rollin sensed a fear in her he didn’t expect. That explained her newfound strength…

  That was when he remembered the monsters, the Hisada that attacked him. He reached for his weapon, but it wasn’t under his shoulder where it should be.

  “Rollin, tell me where your weapon is?” She kept asking damned questions.

  “Where are they?” He pointed about the room with his free hand.

  Mal searched the room. “The bodies are here.”

  And they were. The occupants of the VR couches lay there, blood coming from ears and noses. They all evidently died violent deaths, just like in the strange future Rollin had witnessed.

  “Get out of here… Let me handle this.” Mal pushed Rollin to the door.

  “Find my gun…” His mind wasn’t working, his system must be overloaded. It took all his concentration to reach the door.

  There wasn’t a single death this time. Rollin was the only survivor of this industrial accident. It looked like at least twenty people lay dead in that suite.

  Somehow Mal had reached the scene before the accident had been reported.

  That can’t be right. She heard weapons fire… Rollin was certain he was alone when the Hisada attacked him… They murdered the people in the room. They had to. How did they get on the station undetected?

  In his current state, Rollin didn’t make it far; the lightheadedness and overwhelming fear of the unknown drove him into the first dispersing unit he stumbled across. Kano always called them a bar… There was a time the two of them spent many hours plopped at one of the automatic tables, drinking until they passed out. Then Kano went and found sobriety without him.

  He ordered what passed for scotch in the hole-in-the-wall joint. There would always be time for a drink.

  One turned into many. He sipped the warming liquid as self-medication with the goal of relieving his intense pain, not intoxication. Stupefaction would come later. With something much stronger than Earth-type liquor.

  He’d lost time once more. It was one more impossible thing. His internal clock had been reset. He’d somehow jumped backward in time. The attack in the VR room and the tapes would not happen until the future. That was impossible. He had no record of what happened in the room.

  The cop stared at the half-full glass of liquor. His mind sufficiently numb to hide the voices that screamed at him. Something seriously wrong was happening to him, only he had trouble identifying the clues.

  “What the hell happened in there?” Mal’s voice spoke to him through the fog.

  “I don’t know…” Rollin spoke without looking up.

  “Bullshit. Show me your records.” The female tech slapped her palm on the table.

  “I don’t have any… They are missing.” Rollin reached for his drink.

  Faster than he expected, Mal stopped his hand. “I think you’ve had enough… and that’s impossible. There has to be a record.”

  “Tell me about it… I only have my natural memories, and I don’t trust them…” Rollin pressed his palm on the table and ordered another drink.

  “Why?” She let the drink pop out of the
auto-table.

  Rollin let out a deep sigh. “My former partner…”

  “Kano… you can say his name.”

  “…Kano loved old horror movies. He forced me to watch hundreds of them. We would get drunk and watch them together and laugh. I think I’m trapped in one now.” Rollin took a sip of the warming liquid.

  “What… like zombie movies?”

  For the first time, Rollin searched the small human’s face. His implants must be haywire, he got no reading from her. She showed no emotions. “Yeah… something like that.” Her features remained strangely familiar.

  “You know those old horror movies are not about the monsters… like the zombies. They are about humanity and our inability to come to grips with the unknown.” Mal took the glass Rollin let sit and gulped down the contents.

  “Strange you should say that. Kano always said the story was more about the best and worst kinds of humans. The monsters were just a plot device.”

  “Sounds like he was pretty smart.” She sat the glass back down.

  “Yeah… maybe I should have listened to him better when he went crazy.” Rollin wanted to shake his head, but there was no guarantee his skull would not topple from his neck.

  “Are you sure he was insane?”

  “Would a sane person go on constantly raving about ghosts in the machine?”

  “You still have that image of T’all as she entered Burke’s quarters?”

  “Yeah… it is all I have left of our visual evidence.” Impossible as it seemed, someone hacked his brain and deleted the evidence of the latest murder. Best he could tell, they had hit the mainframe as well. The station might truly be in danger, but not from the Hisada… if the station lost its computers. They were what kept the place going.

  “Scan it now…”

  Rollin did as told. He pulled up the file, the single image that he’d burned into his memory. The problem was, now, the tiny Dylier female no longer ignored the camera but stared directly into it. “How is that possible? She not only deleted the image, but she also recreated it…”