The Harmony Paradox (Virtual Immortality Book 2)

by Matthew S. Cox

  Hardin’s virtual face tinted green from the left side. 「Yes, Zero. That one you worked with on the moon. Agent Wren. She said she has an important message about something you’d asked her to look into.」

  The chimpanzee gave her two thumbs up and tapped its head.

  She blinked. “Don’t tell me you know what I’m saying?”

  It nodded, patted the bars, and made a praying gesture with its hands.

  Nina twisted around to look at the rhesus monkeys on the other side of the room. They appeared to be acting like rhesus monkeys, oblivious to what went on in the room. Again, she glanced at the chimpanzee. “You understand English.” It nodded. I’m… wow. Whatever. “Fine. Someone please deal with this… umm… creature.” She popped the door off the cage and heaved it aside. It hit the ground with a heavy thud that shook the floor.

  The chimpanzee lowered itself out of the enclosure, ambled over to the table, and picked up a datapad. Within a few seconds, it had opened a word processing app, and typed, ‹I am Francis. I have extra brain parts. Electronic. I am not dangerous.›

  “What will they do next?” Nina shook her head.

  Francis flipped the datapad back to look at it, typed, and spun it around for her to see again. ‹Why humans put small humans in cage?›

  “Greed.”

  More typing. ‹Evil. May I leave, too? Do not like this place.›

  Nina grabbed a random field operative and glanced at his chest. “Sergeant Cooper, please do something with”―she gestured at the chimpanzee―”Francis. Bring him to the university or something.” 「Go ahead, sir. Patch her through.」

  Francis gave a thumbs-up, tucked the datapad under his arm, and reached up with his other hand to hold Cooper’s.

  She paced around the table twice before needing to get far away from the box of fetid clothes, and headed to the lounge by the elevators. The air hung thick with the smell of ‘child,’ but none remained, all likely en route to the nearest Amaranth medical building. The more time she spent with Division 9, the less idyllic her view of the UCF became. Things seemed a lot more like the police state the fringers claimed, but at least when it came to children, the government tended to bend over backward and spare no expense. Coddle the kids and they become loyal citizens, I guess. Still, police state or not, it beat starving in the sewers of Minsk, or whatever other cities they’d been rounded up in. ACC security forces tended to deal with dissidents in a rather ham-handed faction. Damn miracle they’d survived at all.

  She closed her eyes, letting anger and sorrow wash over her. Maybe I should’ve listened to Dad. If I knew what kind of shit I’d see in this job… Every damn time it gets worse. Soul-eating. Nina stared up at flickering overhead lights that cast the lab in a baleful glow as though they drained the life out of everything they touched. Can something go right for once? Can I feel like I am making some difference?

  「Nina!」 The smiling blonde, blue-eyed Division 0 agent appeared in another small virtual window, this one dead center in her vision and high. With only a bust to look at, the woman could pass for a young teenager. Her bright expression and naïve idealism didn’t help that either. 「Sorry if this is a bad time, you look pissed… You, umm, told me to let you know if any ghosts told me about, uhh…」

  Though on an intellectual level, she knew her ‘heart’ was a mechanical device circulating blood for her living brain and spinal cord, Nina’s body gave her the sense of it racing, pulse pounding in her head. So easy to forget what I’ve become sometimes. 「You… found him?」

  Agent Kirsten Wren, Division 0, I-Ops, bowed her head. 「I’ve got a spirit next to me who says she was killed five weeks ago by a huge aug with a curved blade for a right hand and a giant hammer for a left.」

  「The Russian.」 The walls closed in around her. Nina couldn’t stand another instant of being in this place… of not racing off to find the man who’d almost killed her, the man who had killed her dreams, and her Vincent. 「Where is he?」

  「Stardance said he wasn’t Russian.」 Kirsten glanced left, muttering to someone. 「He was… singing something like Italian.」

  Nina thought about the case file from the Division 2 detective who’d been killed trying to catch him. The suspect had a thing for classical music. Belted out opera sometimes while eviscerating prostitutes. She shifted her focus to Hardin’s panel, her intention limiting outbound to only him. 「I’ve gotta deal with something.

  She opened the channel to Kirsten again. 「He isn’t. It’s his street name. Hammer and sickle. Real name’s Bertrand Foster.」

  「Nina…」 The corner of Hardin’s lip tightened to a smirk. 「If you want this disillusion proceeding to hold, we’ve got to be thorough.

  His voice lowered, more ‘sympathetic parental figure’ than commander. 「I understand what you have to do, and won’t stand in your way; if you can get that psycho, go for it… but those kids deserve your full attention first.」

  「Wren, what’s the situation? Can that woman find him at will, or are we looking at a limited window?」 Nina shivered with restlessness, but wandered back into the room full of cages.

  “It’s kids,” muttered Sanchez to the blood-soaked Padilla, evidently assuming Nina had left. “All the chick doll operatives get like that with cases like this since they can’t have any. Don’t take it personally.”

  “Working on a psych degree in your spare time, Sanchez?” Nina glanced at him. “Maybe you should throw a little more time at your network skills so you can open a basic fucking lock.”

  Padilla stiffened, unable to make eye contact with her.

  The room fell quiet. Sanchez looked down. The field team got back to tearing the place apart file by file, room by room. Beyond the lab, two hallways full of offices and a dorm still waited.

  Nina tried not to let her need to run off and find Bertrand result in rushing what she had to do here. She opened a playback window; her systems kept a continuous recording of the past two hours, more if she enabled extended logging. From it, she isolated a still close-up of the desperate, pleading face Elizaveta had given her as soon as the girl had realized Nina could speak to her. She left the ‘please let me out of here’ picture open in the corner of her sight for motivation and to take her mind off Bertrand. 「Ops, send a cleanup team over to the Osiris Biotech tower to scrape up Drummond. I want D1 there in the morning to detain everyone in the building until we find out who exactly was involved with this project.」

  “Diaz and Simpson,” said Padilla, “Do a complete clone process on Price’s terminal. Hines, Romero, and Cooper, with me.” She headed down the left hallway, deeper into the facility.

  「Even their food service people?

  asked a man, on a voice-only channel.

  「Does anyone have a brain? Osiris employees only. Leave the contractors alone.

  Nina glowered. Elizaveta’s picture kept her from storming out.

  The medtechs reappeared, pulling out a semiconscious man and woman hooked up to gel sleeves to perform field-repairs on bullet wounds. Peach-hued goo flowed through clear hoses with a constant, repeating squish-click-hiss from small pumps.

  Kirsten finished a whispered conversation with thin air. 「She says she can find him whenever you want, but she’s not the most patient spirit I’ve met.」

  Nina patted the nearest medtech on the shoulder. “Thanks.” She looked at Kirsten’s avatar. 「This’ll take a while. I’ll vid you as soon as I can. Oh, and tell that ghost I know exactly how she feels.」

  our hours later, Nina crossed the main concourse of the Police Administrative Center, heading for the Division 0 wing. Psychobabble rattled around her head about how the communication barrier between the scientists and the non-English-speaking orphans made it easier for them to treat human beings as lab animals. As much as she couldn’t sit still anticipating finally tracking down Bertrand after almost two years, she’d ordered a replacement teddy (fluffy and white) and stopped by the Amaranth hospital where the children were under observati
on. Her guess proved right; the rotting bear had belonged to Elizaveta, who lit up at the sight of its replacement.

  Of the eight, only she and Pavel seemed unafraid of her. At first, she’d assumed the others feared she might hurt them after witnessing her display of anger and hurling cage doors, but Elizaveta had whispered the truth―they feared her position as a government police officer. None of them wanted to go back to jail. Despite Nina’s best attempt at projecting sincerity while explaining they were safe in the UCF, the children proved slow to trust, so she’d kept her visit short enough to verify they’d all been declared healthy. The doctors wanted to keep them a few days on nutrient-supplement IVs and perform standard psychological evaluations.

  In a scary-calm tone, Elizaveta explained she’d seen people shot and die before, and wouldn’t be upset if the same thing happened to the ‘bad doctors’ who’d put her in a cage. Nina had left it at telling her Doctor Rice had a skull-splitting headache. Still, the memory of the child’s imploring blue-eyed stare refused to leave her mind. The scrawny six-year-old blonde looked much happier in a clean hospital bed, but couldn’t hide her fear at what would happen to her. Being orphaned would’ve been frightening enough to a girl her age without being sent across the world and treated like an animal for lab testing.

  Nina clenched her fists, wanting to kill Dr. Rice all over again.

  The squeak of elevator doors brought her thoughts back to the present. Amid a sea of identical black patrol craft with narrow, clear bar lights on the roof, Kirsten stood waiting for her, flanked on either side by faint thermal anomalies. The one closer and on her right registered fifty-two degrees, six colder than the other.

  Kirsten pushed away from her car and stood as Nina approached. “Lieutenant.”

  “Agent.” Nina glanced at the exit ramp leading up to street level, five lanes with security booths across. “Thank you. You’re sure this is him?”

  A faint noise, warbling, hinting at a feminine voice but too weak to form words, caused a sensation like muscles Nina didn’t have in her neck tensing.

  Kirsten looked at the less intense cold spot. She held her hand as high as she could reach to indicate someone huge, then relaxed and sighed with annoyance. “Sorry I’m short. He’s… wow.” She nodded at nothing before looking to Nina. “’Bout seven feet tall or so. Two cybernetic arms double the size of a normal person’s, chest full of metal, mohawk, sword and a hammer for hands?”

  “Wonder how he touches himself.” A man’s voice picked at the edges of Nina’s electronic ears, sounding a hundred yards away yet speaking at a normal tone.

  Kirsten’s face went bright red. “Dorian!”

  Nina couldn’t find a scrap of humor under the weight on her heart, synthetic as it may be. “Yeah. That’s him.”

  “Stardance is extremely angry.” Kirsten grimaced. “That man… well. Be glad you can’t see what he did to her.”

  Phantom burning pain speared into Nina’s lower back. “I can guess. I got a real close look once. Tell her I’m sorry she’s dead and I survived.”

  Ephemeral warbling.

  Kirsten shot a scolding look at the non-space to her left. “That’s not it at all… Nina called it in. Her backup was already on the way there before she got hurt. It’s not that she was a cop and you’re poor that…” She nodded at something. “Ready? Stardance is angry enough to feel where he is.”

  “I’ve been ready for eighteen months.” Nina walked around to the passenger side door and got in.

  A man’s grumbling seemed to pass by her on the way to the back seat.

  Kirsten half-smiled, also subdued by the somber topic.

  Nina stared off into space, watching images of that night play across her mind as the car rolled up and out of the garage before taking flight. A dark alley lit in shades of metallic blue, the vendomat flying, useless bullets striking a chest covered in two layers of subdermal armor. As long as she’d carried her MCP50, with 15mm slugs more than double the diameter of the 6mm ammo her old Division 1 duty pistol had, she still had a mental hang up about guns. Despite the enormity of her Class 6 hand cannon, she expected bullets to bounce off whatever she shot.

  Buildings glided by on either side of the car. The occasional feminine murmur in the air came from the back seat. Every so often, a recognizable “left” or “there” came across in whisper.

  “I can go in with you if you want.” asked Kirsten. “Star’s a little angry at me for making her wait for you.”

  “You know all those rumors you hear about Division 9?”

  Kirsten looked over. “Yeah.”

  “I’m about to live up to them.” Nina glanced through her reflection on the video display serving as a window at a decaying skyscraper. “Should’ve figured he’d be in a disavowed sector. Tell her thank you for waiting.”

  “She can hear you.” A second later, Kirsten mumbled “yeah” at the back seat before glancing once more at Nina. “She understands.”

  The Navcon display on the dashboard showed the little yellow arrow indicating the patrol craft crossing into a blacked-out area of the map.

  “From what Stardance’s saying, this guy’s more machine than human. I could flatten him with one mind blast.” Kirsten cringed, bit her lip, and shrank in on herself. “Oh, crap. I’m sorry…”

  “It’s okay. I know what you mean.” Nina tapped two fingers on the handle above the door in a repetitive motion, trying to be meditative.

  Kirsten looked forward and made a sudden descending left that came within a second of more murmuring from behind. “I know how that sounded. Thanks for not being freaked out that I have that power.”

  Nina spoke in a flat tone, her thoughts frozen on Vincent’s last seconds of life. “Right back at you. Most normals look at me like I’m going to twist them in half if they breathe too much of my air.”

  “Great, so you could both kill each other without any effort. Fantastic.” A ‘clap’ sounded right behind Nina’s head.

  Nina couldn’t help but half-smile. “Heh.”

  Kirsten looked at her. “Did you just hear Dorian?”

  “My ears are digital, remember? And sensitive. Guess that EVP stuff is true. The girl’s indecipherable though.”

  Female murmuring, louder, and tinged with emotion came from the back seat.

  “Stardance is a lot younger as a ghost. She said he’s in that alley.” Kirsten gave her a mournful look. “Are you sure you don’t want backup?”

  The air by Nina’s left shoulder got cooler as the man’s voice returned. “She needs to do this.”

  “You probably won’t want to watch.” Nina looked out and down. “Which alley?”

  Kirsten pointed at a gap between two buildings little more than steel skeletons with nuggets of concrete still clinging in spots. Holes in the floor slabs made it seem possible for someone to fall from the top story to the ground given a few lucky bounces on the way. Old furniture rotted in place, some hidden by tattered plastic sheeting hung by squatters attempting to live out here. A handful of active campfires dotted the upper levels. The sun had gone down only twenty minutes ago.

  “Descend to about forty feet, and I’ll hop out.”

  “Okay. I’ll hang back here. If you need me, just comm and we’ll come running.” Kirsten brought the car down to the level of the fourth floor.

  Murmuring emanated from the back seat.

  “What did she say?” Nina pushed the gull wing door on her side up, letting in a blast of warm, humid, garbage-laden air.

  “She said she’s going to watch and doesn’t care if you don’t want her to.”

  Nina looked at the back seat, focusing in on the warmer of the two cold spots. “No, that’s fine with me. Come on. You deserve this, too.”

  She jumped out, falling thirty-eight feet onto the top of a large boxy trash crusher with a resounding boom that echoed up and down the alley. Myofiber muscles in her legs and back absorbed the force of the landing, imparting a slight dent to the surface of the cube. Pige
ons exploded from everywhere, and a vagrant emitted a startled, drunken shout.

  Nina stood, took one step, and dropped to the plastisteel ground without a noise. The thermal anomaly hovered nearby. “I can’t understand you when you talk, but I can see where you’re standing because you’re cold. Lead the way.”

  Feminine murmuring lasted three seconds before the amorphous area of chill drifted off into the alley. Nina followed at a brisk walk. A few Frags poked out of garbage piles or plastiboard cartons to give her curious stares. Most of the time, her body looking, feeling, and behaving so close to still-normal human was amazing, the only thing sometimes that kept her going. Two-point-three miles into the center of a black zone however, her slender, athletic looks and ‘cute’ French nose were the opposite of helpful.

  The word ‘cute’ happened in her thoughts with Joey’s voice. He’d used it to describe her nose. She hadn’t told him about this side trip yet. He would have tried to talk her out of it, or more likely wanted to come and help. Damn adrenaline junkie. No, Bertie, you’re not killing another man I love.

  Three Frags, one with a cybernetic arm, emerged from the building on her left, assuming her a ‘rich bitch’ who’d gotten lost. It didn’t seem to strike them as strange that she walked deeper into the black, and didn’t look the least bit afraid. Their expressions (and gleaming blades) promised at best rape/robbery, and at worst, murder.

  As soon as the first man got within grabbing distance, Nina spun around and palmed his face in her right hand. She whirled into a kick at Metal-Arm as she hurled the first man headfirst into the ground. His skull burst like a rotten cantaloupe on impact; the other man crumpled over her leg like a bag of jelly and fish bones. The third man had barely registered the event in his expression by the time she’d recovered her stance and faced him.

  He managed to suck in a breath to scream before she drove a palm strike into his sternum to avoid putting her fist in him to the elbow. A crunching squish emanated from his torso; he slapped to the ground on his back, legs in the air, and slid thirty feet before vanishing under a mound of debris. The pile of appliances, furniture, and random shit someone threw out of the adjacent skyscraper shifted and collapsed forward, burying him deeper.