Rune Zero: A Cyberpunk Thriller (Rune Universe)

by Hugo Huesca

  John came into the room a second later, closed it behind him, and pushed a wooden drawer in front of the door which was busy exploding in a shower of splinters. The drawer bought them time, the wolf couldn’t easily get a hold of it through the remains of the door, since it lacked thumbs.

  The other members of the pack were running right then through the stairs, though, judging by the noise.

  “You almost broke my hand again!” said David. It came more like a whine than he intended.

  “It’s just sprained, don’t be so dramatic,” said John as he looked around the room. He grabbed a small bed and pushed it in front of the drawer, then he grabbed the other side and raised it with a grunt. “You would be unconscious if you had fallen on a broken hand.”

  They were in a guest room, more expensive than any apartment where David had slept in his entire life. He had no time to admire the expensive wall-tv, though, he was looking at the locked-up window. It had black steel bars on their side. An archaic security measure that was probably a remnant of the times when the house had been built.

  “You still have your gun?” said David. The drawer shook with the impact of a metal body flying against it and only thanks to the extra weight of the bed did it manage to stay in place.

  John didn’t ask what David’s plan was, he got it instantly. He drew his gun —David covered his ears with his hands— and shot at the bars’ joints to the wall with perfect marksmanship. He shot six times and then the entire row of bars fell to the ground.

  David hopped his way to the window, drew it open, and climbed outside. Behind the exterior’s frame, a beaded rim extended along the wall, big enough to step on. Just barely.

  David couldn’t step on his mangled leg, so he grabbed hold of the window’s frame and then held to a tiny decorative beam. He had to use his fingernails, but he was clinging for dear life. A second later, John followed him on the other side, a window between them. He did so just in time. A wolf-like projectile propelled like a torpedo out the window, barely had enough time to look at the two men holding on to the beam and rail, and then smashed to the ground underneath them at high speed.

  “They can’t follow us here!” David screamed. He felt a mix of terror and triumph. Another wolf jumped out of the window. It clawed furiously at the beaded rim, managed to held for an instant, tore a piece of concrete with its heavy paws, and fell tumbling to the ground, where its pack member was just standing up, stunned.

  “Don’t stay to find out, move!”

  David’s forearms were burning with effort. His hand was pulsating so painfully it almost masked the pain of his leg. Every time he took a sideway step, he saw rivulets of blood fall down his jeans and to the black grass beneath him.

  The next window was close and a child could’ve reached it. But so did the remaining wolves, David could see them just as he was getting ready to open it, shadows with shining red eyes, waiting for him.

  Yeah, no way I’m getting there.

  Farther away was a balcony. If only he could reach it… Perhaps they could fight the wolves there, try to throw them out when they pounded. Yeah, all the four remaining murder machines. Great plan.

  It was the only one he had, though.

  David kept moving, but every sideway step he took was getting harder and harder. He was essentially sliding over the beam, his useless leg dangling all the way. Every couple of feet, it would smash his knee against the concrete and send waves of pain to the mangled mess of his lower leg. David was so pumped with adrenaline that the pain made him claw harder to the beam, clench his teeth, and take two more steps. His heart was beating so quickly that the only sound he could hear through the ringing in his ears was his own heartbeat.

  It sounded desperate.

  Beneath him, the two wolves on the ground were following John’s movement, their mouths open with anticipation. One tried to climb the wall using its claws, but it slid under its own weight. It managed to throw a bite at John’s feet that almost caught him, though.

  “Hurry up!” he screamed at the hacker.

  David’s throat burned with each breath he took. He lost a nail somewhere along the way and the blood made his hand slippery. His sight was blurry, and he could barely hold onto, let alone move.

  “You’re so close, Terrance! Grab the rail, just one long step, go!”

  David could see it, it was so close he could almost touch it…

  But he was at his limit. Letting go of one hand to grab the rail would make him fall. He could not let go of the beam.

  The wolves on the ground were getting better at climbing. If he stopped moving, he was going to die either way.

  He wasn’t going to surrender without trying.

  David slid sideways with his entire body, and he let go of the beam. He extended his arms as far as he could and jumped off his good leg. For a second, he was suspended in the air, completely separated from the house’s walls.

  His hand slipped and he fell for an agonizing instant before his other hand caught the balcony’s rail. His entire weight pulled on it and then the pain was so high and so sudden that his vision went black and he forgot to scream.

  It was the sprained one. Tough luck, then. There was not enough force of willpower in the world to let him hold on to the rail. His finger slipped, one by one, almost in slow motion…

  John Derry jumped, too, but he had both his legs to catapult him diagonally to the balcony. He lurched forward like an Olympic swimmer, caught the rail with his left arm and with his right grabbed at David’s from his armpit.

  Both men dangled from the balcony as John Derry fought as hard as he could against gravity pulling the barely-conscious David to the garden beneath them, where the two cyberwolves snapped at their feet.

  John barely managed to push David’s over the rail and the hacker fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes. He hit his head with the parquet, but by then his body barely registered the extra pain. He moaned and turned around, trying to stand, but his body refused.

  This is as far as I go, he realized.

  The agent climbed over the rail and landed on his feet. He drew his gun and held it in front of them. The balcony was separated from the house’s interior by a wide window with red drapes behind them. There was no movement inside. He stepped over the right side and slid open the window.

  That small bit of training saved his life. As soon as the window opened, a hail of bullets tore the glass apart, right in the middle of the balcony and at chest’s height. The glass didn’t explode, but David and John were showered in tiny glass pieces nonetheless.

  John waited until the shooting stopped and then he crouched and jumped in. He threw the curtains away with one hand and with the other he opened fire.

  David’s lost sight of the agent behind the fluttering of the curtains.

  The shooting stopped. David closed his eyes. He opened them again. A blurry figure was standing over him, gun in hand.

  Chapter 12

  The figure put the gun away and carried David like a small child, tossing him over his shoulder.

  “Don’t go unconscious yet, Terrance,” John Derry muttered. Or perhaps he yelled it, David had no way of knowing. “I still need you.”

  “You always say the most romantic things,” said David.

  The agent brought him inside. It was the main room. A golden chandelier dangled from the room and bathed everything in a golden light. Paintings that would’ve been at home in the Louvre adorned the walls and the bed could’ve easily fit an entire party.

  Instead, it had a sleeping figure surrounded by medical equipment, with VR glasses laying on the pillow next to him. At the side of the bed was a bulky machine the size of a fridge. It was connected by heavy cables to the walls and to the figure lying on the bed. The machine had a bullet hole right in the middle of it and electricity crisped around the metallic surface, invisible.

  “The wolves can’t come inside,” John explained, “because this is the private sanctuary of Florian Dervaux. Which hi
s wife was faithfully protecting for him.”

  “Fuck you,” came a faint whisper from a corner of the room away from David’s field of vision.

  John propped him against the bed and then he could see her. Charli Dervaux had been shot four times in her torso. Her white dress was red now. Her pale face was covered with streaks of blood, dirt, and snot. A pistol lay forgotten by her feet, empty and useless.

  “Yeah, you too, lady,” John told her.

  The agent turned to David, crouching a bit to be on his level.

  “That machine is way too big to be just life support, Terrance. And the house’s signal is stronger here. This is your specialty, right? Can you tell me what’s going on?”

  “You just stumbled on the real killer,” David told him. He looked at Charli, who was breathing heavily and slowly, slumped on the wall on the opposite side of him. “Isn’t that right, Charli?”

  “Stay away from him,” Charli told them. She tried to go for her gun, but her wounds were too severe. She winced and her breathing accelerated.

  “You’re dying,” David pointed out.

  “No shit.”

  “Call an ambulance, John,” David told the agent. “We kinda need one.”

  “On it,” the agent was typing furiously on his phone. “Now, what do you mean this is the real killer? Florian Dervaux is a vegetable.”

  “I brought him back,” Charli coughed. “I helped him live again.”

  David propped himself up and climbed on the bed to take a better look at Florian Dervaux. The man’s face was that of a living skeleton, with a thin layer of skin barely covering his skull. His eyes were sunk and dark and he had a long scar crossing his forehead and scalp. His hair was shaved off and his skin was dry and cracked.

  Not one of his best choices for someone who two days ago —give or take— killed three men.

  “Stay away from him!” Charli repeated. “I’ll call the wolves…”

  “That would be a bad idea,” said John. “My gun still has bullets.” He pointed it at Florian’s body.

  “You dare… you can’t do that,” she told him. “That’s illegal.”

  “Madam, we’re a bit past the illegal phase right now.” He glanced back at David, who was examining a scar in Florian’s skull with interest. “I don’t think that man can kill anyone, though.”

  “He’s dead,” David told him. “His brain is missing. Only the machines are keeping him alive.”

  “You did this to him?” John asked Charli Dervaux.

  She tried to laugh, but her face contorted with pain. “I… made him immortal…”

  “Terrance, is this lady saying what I think she’s saying?”

  David nodded. “She did the same procedure she used to make those wolves, to him. She used Florian’s brain as a mold for a mechanical version. It’s right here, by the way. That’s his brain.”

  He pointed a trembling finger at the bulky machine by the bed.

  The implication was staggering. If Odin had truly managed to build a mechanical brain… with a real personality inside… Society would never be the same. They were on the verge of a new era.

  A human mind built out of hardware and digital data. He couldn’t imagine how expensive it must’ve been. But expensive discoveries were cheaper with the passage of time.

  How would the world look like ten years from now?

  “You carved him open,” muttered John, “and what —turned him into a drone?”

  “My husband is alive,” Charli said. She spat blood. “He’s… watching over me. The first one to survive the procedure. He did it. For me.”

  “Terrance?”

  Yes, the possibilities were staggering. A new society, without the fear of death, alive as long as the Internet lasted. It was, sadly, just a fantasy.

  Reality is always dirtier.

  “Sorry, Charli,” David told her. “Your husband is dead. The thing inside that machine may think he’s your husband. But your husband was the meaty thing you took out of this body’s skull. He’s gone.”

  David realized Charli Dervaux would’ve killed him if she had the strength. Her face contorted in pain, raw denial, and anger. “How dare you! I didn’t kill my husband… He talks to me! I built a world for him…! I—”

  “It’s just an echo. Sorry, Charli. But you killed Florian Dervaux a long time ago. Senator Morrow called his wife, too, when this machine linked him over the Internet. He was a ghost, just like the Florian you talk to with these VR glasses.”

  “What are you talking about?” John exclaimed. “The machine has Florian’s memories? How in the hell did he kill Morrow or the others?”

  David slumped on the bed. It was terrifying, laying so close to a corpse that was somehow still living. But he was, oh, so tired…

  “The wolves. He’s connected to the network. He used the wolves… He must’ve tapped in on Morrow’s meeting with Dugall Tull. Florian… machine-Florian had the wolves follow them, then killed them. He brought the corpses to the same place where the wolves were built—”

  “Skyline,” whispered Charli, “he brought them to Skyline. The process is… automated by now. No persons were involved. He must’ve done it all on his own…”

  The woman seemed delirious from blood loss. But it fit with David’s theory. “He had a digital version built of them, not only to help him frame Dugall as the murderer, but to know Morrow’s complete plan.”

  “So, there are other things like Florian Dervaux just running around?”

  Charli shook her head. “We had tried before. With cadavers. They never lasted. The brain degenerated too quickly. Florian is the first, thanks to all these machines.”

  David imagined what Morrow’s ghost image must’ve felt if it was able to feel anything. Surrounded by blackness, all around him. Can’t see, can’t smell, can’t taste. Alone with his thoughts.

  All the while, his mind would have slowly crumbled around itself. Charli didn’t know it since she was only a businesswoman, but the brain is not only the information it contains. It has chemicals. It has deep biological connections. You can’t just take the information, run it in a special computer, and emulate a person.

  What you got, instead, was a monster that lived its life in a constant haze of darkness and terror, alone with its memories, while its mind dissolved.

  Someone —something— had tried to phone Wade Phillips after Morrow had been digitalized. Someone had called Angelica Morrow with her husband’s voice, still believing it was himself. Confused. Scared. Dying slowly all the while.

  David Terrance trembled, in the edge of panic. John returned him to reality:

  “Police are nearby. I can hear the sirens. With any luck, the ambulance isn’t far behind. I don’t want you to get any false hope, but I’ve seen lots of wounds in my time. If you’re alive by the time they load you up into the ambulance, you should make it.”

  By Charli’s expression, she was trying her best to just die already.

  John walked over to David. “Now, what do we do about Florian? The one inside this thing… I don’t think we can arrest a computer, after all.”

  “Leave him alone!” Charli resorted to pleading, this time. “He just wanted to protect me… to protect our legacy!”

  “A machine does not feel love, Charli,” a part of David told him that he was being unnecessarily cruel to a dying woman. But it wasn’t her he was trying to convince. It was himself. “Love is a chemical. Did you add glands into your machine? I don’t think you did—”

  “He killed for me…”

  “He killed to protect himself. How long until someone found out about your little operation? How do you think society would’ve reacted to your Frankenstein monster living in this machine…? You know already, don’t you. That’s what the Accountability Act was for. It wasn’t a loophole to make money on Wall Street. You wanted your husband to live forever. And he was trying to protect his ticket to do so.”

  That explained how Charli and Odin had spearheaded the initi
ative, and how she had found Morrow’s support in the first place.

  The chance at being immortal was too good to pass up.

  “And I’ll be just by his side,” she told him. Her voice was barely a faint whisper, now, but her eyes blazed. She wasn’t delirious. At least, not now. “I promise you… if something happens to him, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life… You’ll regret it. Forever…”

  Her head fell limply to the side and she was still.

  “Is she dead?” David asked.

  “Not yet,” John said, “but she will be, soon.”

  By now, David could already hear the sirens. The balcony was illuminated with blue and red light. “Get her to the ambulance,” he told John. “Death is no excuse to avoid going to jail.”

  John hesitated. “If she lives through this, she’s getting out of prison in a year, Terrance. All you have are suppositions and hypotheses. I believe what you’re saying, in a way… but in the other…”

  David got the agent’s meaning. It was hard to believe that inside a fridge-like machine was a human being. Or something close, at least. Close enough.

  A jury would never believe him. If Charli lived, she may manage to put him in jail for good.

  “Then, we’ll have to show them,” he said. “We have the archives. We have the wolves, have them examined. I’ll risk their lawyers. But I’m not a murderer. Get her to the hospital, John. I can survive a little longer, I don’t think I’m bleeding that much.”

  “Uh. Yeah… you’ve lost a ton of blood, Terrance. You may start to hallucinate, soon.” John seemed relieved, in a way. He half-ran to Charli’s immobile body and carried her. “But I agree with you. I want to see her face when we take down the Act for good.”

  “Wait a second…” David grabbed one of the cables, the big one that connected the machine to the walls. He tore it out of the machine. “The wolves should stay away from you, now.”

  “Hang on tight, I’ll be back soon.”

  John Derry left him alone, to the side of the zombie-like Florian Dervaux. One of the wolves was still by the door, but it just watched the agent go, stupidly, without moving.