“Oh good,” Jer replied. “I was worried.”
Max smirked. “Don’t lie. I know you care.”
“Don’t have to lie,” Jer said. “Don’t care about you and not hiding it.”
“Come on,” Max said. “You the prince of second chances. I’m shackled because of you, and you still can’t throw me a bone?”
“Fine,” Jer said. “But I’m not letting you in on anymore plans. I know you. You’ll change sides again the first chance you get to save your hide.”
“You’re wrong, Jer,” Max said. “I’m a changed man. I love monsters now. Hell of a lot nicer than the folks who write my paychecks.”
“You should know that the rumors are true, Max,” Jer said. “Transhumana Monstrare is in everyone. It’s just been suppressed. Jasper’s breakthrough was isolating the specific genes that allow it to be unleashed at will.”
“Shit,” Max said, his mouth gaping. “That changes everything.”
“Understatement of the century,” Evangeline added.
“So it’s true,” Dakota said, interrupting, uninvited to the conversation.
Jer, Max, and Evangeline stared at her like she’d just told a cringe-worthy ‘dad’ joke.
“What?” Dakota asked. “I’m curious.”
It was bad enough that the ones he cared about ended up in this situation as part of his plans and scheming to fix things. The fact that they were stuck riding to their doom with the embodiment of his poor choices manifested in Dakota’s presence only added insult to injury.
“We’re all about to die protecting the monsters and humans we care about,” Jer said. “Would you mind giving us these last few moments?”
“You all must hate me,” Dakota said, not paying heed to Jer’s request for semi-privacy. “God knows I deserve it. I did betray you, but you do realize it was in my programming to do so, right?”
“Sure,” Jer offered. “We get it. That doesn’t make it okay, though. Betrayal is one of the hardest things to recover from, let alone forgive. Surely you can understand that, right?”
“I do,” Dakota said. “Which leaves us with one question. What’s a monster? Over the last twenty-four hours I’ve changed my mind. A monster isn’t a beast. Or a creature with horns and fangs and cloven hooves. From what I’ve seen, a monster is more likely to be a soft and fearful any-man, with his or her finger on the trigger. Someone who can’t accept that times change.”
Jer kept his eyes on Dakota, not sure where she was going with this. “What do you mean by ‘what’s a monster?’”
“The word has so many meanings. It can be used in a positive way, negative, derogatorily, with encouragement, such as when a person trying to motivate you calls you a ‘beast’ as motivation. As a word, it represents power at the same time that it can represent being an outcast or even an embodiment of something to be disgusted by. In other words, a monster is everything and nothing. A monster is loved and hated. If betraying you means I’m a monster in a negative way, it also means I’m just as easily capable of being a monster in a good way. If I can do something that elicits hate, then I can do something that elicits love as well.”
“There’s a thin line between love and hate,” Jer said.
“And that line’s called family.”
Jer smiled. “Which you’ve never had, right?” Jer asks. “I’m sorry about that.”
“I was manufactured in a town in Indiana with a population of seven-hundred, Doctor Bennington—”
He interrupted her. “Jer,” he corrected. “I mean after all that we’ve been through, you still don’t know that’s my father’s name. I’m Jer, and even if you did turn out to be a traitor…” His voice trailed off, unsure what else to say.
Dakota blushed, nodded. “Okay. Sorry. Jer.”
“Are you actually even trained in psychiatry?”
“Part of my programming, yes. Needed to be believable. And no, I never knew what family was until I met you, Evangeline, and Damiana. I wish I’d met Mira. Even Max is like the redheaded bastard stepchild everyone gives a hard time to, even though you all still care about him. I’m not even that.”
“Let me guess. Your programmer wasn’t familiar with our profession?” Jer asked.
“Only thing he knew about doctors is that he thinks they’re the kind of people who lend you an umbrella and then want it back the minute it rains,” she says.
“What the hell does that mean?” Jer asked.
“I have no idea,” Dakota said as she hung her head. “But I wish I had an umbrella for the imminent shitstorm that’s about to go down.”
Jer chuckled and reached out a hand to touch Dakota’s forearm and comfort her, ignoring Max and Evangeline’s look of disapproval. “It means you’ve actually got your own identity, Dakota,” Jer said.
Dakota looked up with a reluctant smile. She turned her hand over and grasped his wrist in a warm embrace.
“You know who you are,” Jer added.
“Yeah,” Dakota said. “A frightened little girl who’s in monster purgatory on the eve of Armageddon.”
Jer smirked. “Don’t be so melodramatic.”
“You scared?” Dakota asked.
“Hell no,” Jer said. “I’m absolutely terrified.”
“Sorry about contributing to that,” Dakota offered. “I-I, they made me,” Dakota said.
Jer sniffed. “The words that so many have used to justify misdeeds over the centuries. I expected better of you.”
“How could you? You didn’t know I was a Synth.”
Their eyes met.
“Even after I found out,” Jer said, “I hoped and thought you were different. Thought maybe that the human brain you’re modeled after might poke its head out and you would become something more than a killing machine. Guess I was wrong.”
“If it hadn’t been for you, that may have been true,” Dakota said, defending herself. “But when we were together, something happened. Maybe it was just a short-circuit. A malfunction in my programming. A software glitch. But it happened.”
“What happened?” Jer asked. “You still betrayed us.”
She nodded. “I did. And because of your compassion, I’ve realized something.”
“That you’re nothing more than your programming after all?”
“No,” Dakota replied. “That once you know both right and wrong, you get to—”
The light-armored vehicle jolted to a stop, cutting their intimate conversation short. The back hatch opened, and GenAdvance soldiers pulled Jer, Evangeline, and Max out onto the ground by the shackles around their ankles and wrists. When Jer looked up, nursing the scrapes and bruises from being dragged onto the pavement, he saw that they were at Purgatory Bridge, and the scene before him was a nightmare-scape far worse than he could have imagined.
31
Pincer
On the South Brother Island side of Purgatory Bridge, GenAdvance soldiers were lined up en masse, ready to charge with the most advanced weaponry the world had to offer and more than enough firepower to wipe out every living thing on the other side of the bridge. On the North Brother Island side, armed-monsters, the fiercest and bravest among them, were trapped at the edge of the bridge, flanked by a Pharma police perimeter. There was nowhere for them to go. They had no option but to fight, which was exactly what Jakoff and Perle wanted, an excuse to wipe them out and destroy all knowledge of Jasper’s discovery in the process.
With little left to do except hope that the plans he set in motion with Damiana, Lavenza, Ambrose, and Mira reached fruition, Jer turned his earpiece toward Jakoff and Perle to eavesdrop.
“What are your orders on the head-shrink?” Jakoff asked Perle.
“You despise him, correct?” Perle asked.
Jakoff nodded. “Yes, sir. If it were up to me, I’d end him now. We don’t need loose ends.”
“You’ve done well, Jakoff, but you need to learn how to use the situation, no matter how dire, to your advantage. I fully intend for you to end him, but I want it done in a manner
that makes it look like he was killed by a monster during the battle. That way, the survivors don’t go and build a monument to him or name a holiday or street after him.”
The two devious men chortled together at his comment.
“What about the monsters’ families?” Jakoff asked. “Do I have your permission to…have them caught in the crossfire, unfortunate tragedy befalling them?”
“Families,” Perle scoffed. “You’re funny and you don’t even know it, Jakoff. Wipe them out. No remains. The last thing we need is any rumor whatsoever about Transhumana Monstrare being universal getting out. End it here and now.”
Jakoff gloated in pleasure as he turned to give the order to Pike and her kill-squad. “Level them,” Jakoff ordered Pike and her dragon-monster. “Leave no survivors!”
Pike sneered with pleasure and took up the rear of the advancing troops.
As Jakoff began marching toward Jer, he turned and pressed his earpiece with his shackled hands, causing the projected overlay of his crew to appear through his right iris. Jer’s biotech overlay showed Damiana leading monsters out of the underground and toward the North Brother Island side of the bridge. Mira was on the cusp of infiltrating GenAdvance Headquarters and making her way to the Satellite control room.
Projected on the overlay, Mira and her furies held fast just outside the satellite control room.
“Waiting on your signal,” she whispered over her comms interface to Jer.
“Not yet,” he replied.
“If we wait any longer, the battle will be unavoidable,” Mira warned.
“It’s a risk we have to take,” Jer whispered. “Without an accessible and translated version of Jasper’s formula, the breach won’t matter. No one will believe it unless they see it for themselves.”
“Holding off,” Mira replied. “But we’ve got seconds at most.”
“Understood.”
Jer clicked on a different part of his ear device and whispered. “How’s it looking, Ambrose?” he asked at the lowest volume he could manage.
“Why’re you whispering?” Ambrose asked.
“Not important,” Jer answered. “I need a status update.”
“We’re close,” Matthias interjected.
“Hurry up!” Jer said. “Mira’s furies are on the cusp of breaching the Satellite control room.”
“Thirty more seconds!” Ambrose said.
“Just do it,” Jer said and cut off the comms right as Jakoff reached him.
“Ready to watch your precious monsters be wiped out once and for all?” Jakoff asked as he loomed over Jer.
GenAdvance soldiers began mobilizing into formation, arming up, and readying to cross the bridge. Pike and her dragon-monster, along with her lone remaining smaller collared-monster, readied behind them.
“Gotta hand it to you,” Jer said. “You really outdid yourself this time. You won the day. The world gets to go on living in squalor, the truth will continue to be suppressed, and you get to keep your job. Congrats!”
“Who are you to judge? Just because we have different values doesn’t mean mine aren’t as meaningful as yours,” Jakoff said. “I happen to like that I feel no empathy. It makes it easier to sleep at night.”
Jer chuckled at that. “How convenient. And yet, how sad.”
“Meaning?”
“You don’t know what you’re missing out on.”
“How’s that?”
“Being in rapport with others doesn’t just mean that you feel their pain. It also means that you feel their joy. It means you take as much pleasure in their successes and as much hurt in their losses as they do. It means family.”
Jakoff’s lips curled up. “He’s stalling!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Finish this!”
Pike and the others began their march onto the bridge. The massive boot-laden footfalls echoed throughout both isles.
Jakoff glared at Jer for a few seconds more before spitting on his pants and storming away and toward the bridge to orchestrate his grand scheme, leaving Jer with Evangeline, Max, and Dakota, who was unshackled.
“I can’t believe I didn’t have a choice when it came to working for him,” Dakota said.
“Regrets?” Jer asked.
“I never finished my thoughts before,” Dakota replied. “You taught me that no matter what we’re programmed to do, biologically or technologically, we still get to choose what and who we are. I get to decide who I am.”
“That’s just not true, Dakota. You’re designed to follow orders and explode on command. Not much more to it than that.”
“You’re wrong,” Dakota said. “I’m the Synth that you believed in, the way you believe in monsters. Of all the things you say to your patients, there’s one thing that you have never wavered on. That we all have it in us to be good or evil.”
“Glad you understand that,” Jer said, “but it doesn’t matter. You can’t help but do what you’re programmed to do.”
“True, but no one said anything about how I carry my directives out.”
Jer’s eyes went wide.
“Thank you,” Dakota said.
“For what?” Jer asked.
“It would’ve been easy for you to terminate me, Doctor Bennington,” she said. “To not give me a chance. But you listened, like a good doctor, therapist, and lover. And you’ve given me a chance to be more than I was programmed to be.”
“Don’t read too much into it,” Jer warned. “Normally, I’m only into monster-girls.”
Dakota stared at Jer, and for an instant, her eyes looked human. “They made me do this,” she said. “I was programmed to betray you, but…I felt something.”
“You could’ve said something,” Jer said.
Dakota shook her head. “No. No I couldn’t,” she said.
“Yeah, I’ve heard it all before. Not programmed for that,” Jer said. “Just a hundred and ten—”
“—fifteen,” Dakota said, correcting him. “A hundred and fifteen pounds of steel and aluminum designed by Francis Xavier Burke for the Veritas Corporation, acquired by GenAdvance during the privatization years. Synthetic humanoid, referred to as a Synth, rotary semi-conductor chipped cerebrum outfitted with twenty-four ounces of compressed oxygen.”
“Whoa. What!?!” Jer spat.
Evangeline and Max, who had been eavesdropping, looked over with panic in their eyes.
“Compressed what?” Damiana asked.
Dakota stopped talking. She took a second to stare at the three who peered back at her, as if it was the last time she would look upon their faces. She then pressed an index finger to each of their restraints, unlocking them, before turning and tearing off across the street, cutting a swath through the GenAdvance soldiers.
The soldiers were momentarily startled, but they reached for their weapons and dropped to their knees. They opened fire on Dakota.
Bullets hammered her body as she jerked and flailed. White liquid spurt from body shots as she continued on, nearing Jakoff and Perle. The two of them recoiled. The whites of their eyes became visible as Dakota harnessed a last burst of energy and crashed headlong into them. A retina-searing explosion rocked the streets and buildings. A mini-mushroom cloud rose up from an immense crater in the ground.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Evangeline said, her mouth drooping in disbelief.
“Holy fucksticks,” Max said. “Did that just happen?”
Jer stared on at the crater, shocked that his words had caused this, that his attempt to help her led to self-destruction. Yes, it was self-destruction meant to help others, but that’s not what he’d intended. Despite her betrayal, he wanted better for Dakota. This was not a victory in his eyes.
32
Last Breath
“Are you seeing this?” Max asked, nudging Jer.
Jer pulled himself out of his stupor and realized that chaos had taken over. The one thing he hadn’t planned for was the unpredictable, and yet, here it was, staring them all right in the fucking face.
Armed-monsters were engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Pharma cops at the North Brother Island side of the bridge, while Damiana’s underground monster-masses corralled the Pharma cops between them and the armed-monsters, trapping them.
GenAdvance soldiers were reeling from the explosion and without direction on the South Brother Island side. At the same time, Lavenza had arrived at the head of a parade of humans holding signs calling for a Monster Mash party, all while shouting, hollering, dancing, and shooting fireworks as they marched.
The scene was a total clusterfuck.
“This is not what I had in mind,” Jer said. “I was thinking something much more sleek and smooth. Something like one of those Ocean’s Eleven movies, you know, all clever and witty. This is…this is just…”
“Real,” Evangeline said, finishing his thought. “It’s fucking real and unreal.”
“You can say that again,” Max added.
“Please don’t,” Jer said as he noticed that Pike and her kill-squad had survived the blast. He quickly checked the transparent overlay and saw that the feed from Mira was distorted. The explosion was causing interference, and he had to get in closer to relay the finished formula. He switched over to the feed from Ambrose’s lab.
“It’s ready,” Ambrose said over comms.
“Send it to me, I’ll have to relay it,” Jer replied.
A second later, a beep dinged inside his interface, and a simplified equation projected in front of him. It was the Transhumana Monstrare formula, overlaid on top of a human DNA strand, revealing that human DNA strand fit with the branches.
“On me!” he then shouted to Evangeline and Max as he charged for the GenAdvance Headquarters building.
Pike spotted him and motioned for the small harpy-monster to intercept.
Jer snatched a plasma gun out of the hands of a deceased GenAdvance soldier and fired a round directly at Pike, but the shot veered left and hit the harpy-monster’s collar, causing it to fritz, shut down, and unlatch, falling to the ground with a clang. The harpy glanced down and saw that it was unexpectedly freed. After a brief second of shock, the harpy lunged in the opposite direction of Jer and struck at Pike with razor sharp claws, which missed but left behind six-inch deep rips in the asphalt.
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