The Harmony Paradox (Virtual Immortality Book 2)

by Matthew S. Cox

Bright blue flashes from the tracked bot’s rifle acted like a lighthouse in the unending rain of bug innards, and led him to the beautiful sight of the silvery micro-tank. As the girls got close, it ceased shooting, likely to avoid hitting people. Hayley and Alyssa reached clean floor first and raced to the entrance doors. Kathy slid up behind him; he took her hand and they ducked around the bot. Eldon, somehow managing to run backward over the slick of bug innards without falling, kept shooting into the onrushing wave. As soon as he passed the tank bot, it opened fire again.

  Kenny sprinted down the last section of hallway, which remained mercifully bug-free, to the front doors. He gave Kathy a light push and whirled around to check on Eldon, who hustled over. Azure flashes appeared in time with the tracked bot’s rifle discharging. The deep report of its cannon drowned out the soft hums of orb bot lasers.

  “Hey!” shouted Hayley from outside. “Get out of there!”

  A childish yelp of surprise followed.

  Thok.

  “Dad!” shouted Hayley. “Some primitive kid just shot me with an arrow.”

  Kenny almost bashed the door off its hinges to get outside.

  Four brown-skinned children stood in the bed of the truck, evidently having been caught rooting around. All had long, wild black hair. The oldest, a boy of about fifteen, wore a skirt made from several patches of squealer hide. A leather strap, likely an old belt, crossed his bare chest, connected to a quiver made from a plastic prewar soda bottle full of arrows, both metal and wood that hung at his hip. He carried a green camouflage compound bow, with an arrow nocked.

  To his right, a younger and thinner boy had one foot up on the side of the truck bed, an arrow loaded and aimed at Alyssa. The perhaps twelve-year-old didn’t seem to have anything on under a poncho made out of an old blue comforter with a hole cut for his head. The end, which dangled around the level of his shins, frayed like it had been dragged on the ground for quite some time. That, plus its overall decay made it seem like he’d been wearing it for a few years.

  Near the tailgate, a girl of about ten held an empty bow in her outstretched left arm, her right hand back, fingers open, posture frozen in the instant of loosing her shot. She stared in awe at Hayley. An old power cable, the plug dangling from the knot at her belly, held up a few scraps of cloth and paper in a pathetic attempt to make a skirt. It served more as decoration than clothing, though the belt did support a squealer leather quiver with a few more arrows in it. Both her wrists and both ankles sported what at first he thought to be a vast array of cheap plastic bracelets, though after a second of looking at her, he recognized them as what people before the war had used to tie their beer cans together, six at a time. A few small handprints marked the dust on her bare chest.

  Her lip quivered as she stared at Hayley. “Lo siento. Fue un accidente. Me asustaste. Por favor, no me mates.”

  The smallest of the tribal kids, a boy who couldn’t have been older than eight, stood away from his effort to open one of the locked boxes. He didn’t have any clothing, though the length and thickness of his hair almost made up for it. The prints on the girl’s chest matched up with his hands when he clung to her from behind and tried to pull her down to safety.

  Thunder continued from the tracked bot’s machinegun behind them.

  Hayley pointed at the ground. An arrow lay at her feet, which had likely bounced off her vest. She raised her pistol at the girl who shot her. “That’s our stuff.”

  The oldest boy shifted his bow toward Hayley.

  Alyssa pointed her gun at the kids as well. “Bajen esas cosas.”

  Kathy held her rifle up, but kept it across her chest, and raised her voice at the Scrags. “Put those things down. Bajen esas cosas ahora mismo.” She took a step closer. “That goes for you two as well, girls.”

  Kenny moved up to Alyssa’s side; he didn’t aim his rifle at the kids in the truck, but held it in such a way as to make a warning obvious.

  The tribal children glanced from their bows to the firearms pointed at them, and their courage evaporated. The smallest boy kept trying to pull the girl to the truck bed.

  “Lower those damn weapons,” yelled Eldon. He leaned at them in a manner more akin to ‘pissed off dad’ than combatant. “18 Baja esas malditas armas.”

  The Scrag kids (and Alyssa) jumped at his sudden loud command. As soon as the two boys relaxed their bowstrings, Hayley and Alyssa holstered their pistols.

  Three orbs zoomed out of the mall, heading for the truck, followed by the much slower tracked bot.

  The Scrag girl shouted, “19 Dioses de la muerte! Ella no puede morir!”

  “20 Milpiés. vienen cientos de ellos,” said Kenny. “Sentensen, agarrense de algo.”

  All four of the children gasped. The eldest raised his bow again, but pointed it at the mall entrance. The other three looked too frightened to move.

  “What?” yelled Alyssa. “They shot Hayley and you’re telling them to stay? Did she just call her a goddess of death?”

  “I’m not throwing them to the bugs.” He blinked at her. “She thinks Hayley can’t die. The armor… and the millipedes are still behind us.”

  Standing there coated in yellow slime with dark squiggly bits of millipede insides clinging to her, Alyssa seemed to have forgotten all about them. Color drained out of her face. “Umm. Are those things going to come outside?”

  The Scrag children stared at Kenny for a fraction of a second before cowering down in the truck bed.

  “Everyone in, now.” Kenny headed to the tailgate. “Eldon, gimme a hand with that bot.”

  “On it.” He handed the horse statuette to Kathy.

  Four brown faces peered at him from among the boxes. The smallest boy leapt over the side and ran to the arrow. After retrieving it, he sprinted back to the truck, climbed the tire, and took cover among the cargo.

  Kathy ushered the girls into the truck and jumped in behind them. When the tracked bot arrived, Kenny and Eldon hauled it up and put it in the bed. As the first wave of millipedes reached the front doors, the Scrag kids shouted warnings in rapid Spanish. Kenny ran around, leapt into the driver’s seat, and hit the power button. The second Eldon’s ass touched cushion, he stomped on the accelerator and chirped the tires in reverse. Nasir wedged himself against the passenger-side wall, as if touching Kathy at all would coat him in deadly neurotoxin. The Scrag kids tumbled into a heap at the innermost part of the truck bed, legs in the air. They recovered and scrabbled for handholds.

  Once he felt he’d reached a safe enough distance to do so, Kenny slowed to a stop, pulled a K turn, and took off. The four kids in back rolled across the bed and slid up against the tailgate. The millipedes seemed to lose interest once they strayed fully into sunlight. A writhing mass of black lingered at the door of the mall for a little while before receding into shadow.

  “Whoa,” said Eldon.

  “I… I think I’m gonna throw up.” Hayley hunched forward, holding her arms away from touching herself or anything else. “I’m covered in ick.”

  “Me too,” muttered Alyssa. “This is so nasty. It’s like I went swimming in scrambled eggs.”

  Hayley gagged.

  “There’s a piece in your hair…” Nasir leaned over and plucked a hunk of white matter from the back of Hayley’s head. He squeezed it between his fingers before tossing it out the window. “Kinda feels like crab meat… are those things edible?”

  Hayley shuddered, and threw up in her lap.

  As soon as the smell of vomit pervaded the cabin, Alyssa lost her lunch as well. Kathy clamped a hand over her mouth. Kenny’s throat churned, but he’d smelled worse out here. Eldon, in a fully-sealed helmet, hummed merrily to himself.

  Kenny rolled down the windows and rubbed his throbbing shoulder. It didn’t even bother him that one of the girls had shot him by accident; they were alive and unhurt. He tried to breathe as little as possible and shifted his gaze to the rearview mirror. The older teen boy stared at him with a guarded challenge, while the younger on
es’ expressions made him think they considered themselves ‘captured.’ The smallest boy, however, howled with glee at the sensation of being in a working vehicle, like a Monwyn fan finally getting to ride on the back of a dragon.

  Ugh. Great.

  “Dad.” Hayley coughed and sniffled. “Can we stop? The slime soaked through my clothes. It’s like everywhere.” She shivered, and whispered, “everywhere.”

  “Yeah… couple minutes.” Kenny looked down from the mirror to the rear viewscreen and zoomed in on the receding mall. “I don’t want any thousand-legged surprises.”

  fter levelling off at six hundred feet, Nina set the black, unmarked patrol craft to auto-drive. The Navcon reported a nine-minute flight to the Division 2 facility housing the morgue. She brought up a terminal panel and thought the name Paul Estrada into the search field. Within a few seconds, two satellite panels opened on either side of the first. A man’s life unfurled before her eyes. No police record, married to Valerie Cortez, no children. After two minutes of poring over his files, the worst she could find on him consisted of a handful of noise complaints from the apartment below.

  The man’s work performance painted a long history of ‘meh.’ She quirked an eyebrow at a payment plan associated with a debt of Ͼ187,410. A bit of digging on that showed he’d committed a slight miscalculation with an attempt to play the stock market. He had evidently made purchases based on expected value of stock that wound up taking a hard nosedive. The man didn’t seem like a chronic gambler though. He hadn’t touched stocks since, and that kick in the financial balls had occurred two years and five months ago. His payments had been regular, not late.

  Unless he just finally cracked at having such a monstrous financial burden and nothing to show for it.

  She started a traffic pattern analysis, which attempted to hunt down any access to the GlobeNet from him that wound up connecting to an endpoint outside of the UCF. With that going, and nothing even remotely interesting in his file, she let her head back and closed her eyes. The digital representation of Estrada’s life seemed almost too bland to believe, but also too bland to be fake. Anyone looking at this guy from an espionage standpoint would think him an invented person. Only a newbie would’ve made this as a false persona… unless that’s what they wanted us to think. Maybe they assumed we’d take him at face value because he’s so unremarkable, and did that on purpose knowing we’d never expect them to be that obvious. Ugh. Circular reasoning sucks. In her gut, she didn’t think Estrada worked for the ACC. While a determined operator could fake a person’s records all the way back to birth, including pictures of grade school art projects his parents put online, it seemed an awful lot of work to infiltrate a shipping company… and then to have the guy flame out on some flavor-of-the-week street chem.

  Beep.

  Nina lifted her head and glanced at the screen. The net trace showed thousands of transmissions which all showed ‘endpoint does not exist,’ a sure sign of a chimeric address. She checked a few at random, and they all appeared to have headed to a geographic address range associated with Mexico. Where exactly inside Mexico though, she couldn’t tell.

  This guy’s been sending data to the ACC for… She scrolled over the list of hits, checking dates. A little over two months. Always from the home terminal, and always around seven at night. Like as soon as he gets home, he checks in.

  “Ops, this is Lieutenant Duchenne.”

  A generically handsome man in his middle twenties with brown hair and skin appeared on a holo-panel in the car. “Go ahead, lieutenant.”

  “I need a site team to Tower 147, apartment 26-33, Sector 8071. The scene should be reasonably secure. Div 1’s been in and out already. Primary focus is any data they can extract from the terminal.” She glanced at the Navcon showing arrival at the Division 2 facility in twenty-seven seconds. “I doubt it, but there’s a small chance this guy could be ACC, so proceed with due caution.”

  “Understood, lieutenant.” The man nodded. “Anything else?”

  “That’s all.”

  He disconnected.

  Nina oscillated between disbelief that the ACC could set up such an obvious spy who’d gone undetected for this long, and the worry that there could be thousands like him everywhere under Division 9’s collective noses. As soon as I’m done here, I should try to track down anyone who might remember him from grade school… see if Paul Estrada really existed.

  The patrol craft landed itself on the roof of the Division 2 Regional Tech Center. Nina got out, letting the gull wing door close on its own as she walked off. A short elevator ride brought her to the fourth sub-basement and a long, white corridor that smelled of antiseptic. Dim lighting and a minimum of furnishings made her feel like she’d walked into the setting of a horror holo. Five steps in, she found herself shivering at the over-amped air conditioning.

  Plain white doors, labelled A to F lined both walls, A, C, and E on the left. She walked the length, some fifty meters, to an open area where the hallway split off in either direction and an enormous U-shaped desk similar to a nurse’s station dominated the wall opposite the corridor she’d emerged from. Behind it sat a thick-bodied man with curly black hair in a white lab coat and a tiny dark-skinned woman who she’d have taken for a thirteen-year-old if not for her generous chest.

  “Hello,” said the man. “Name’s Oliver. Haven’t seen you before.”

  She walked up to the counter. “Lieutenant Duchenne, Division 9. I’m here to see the coroner about inquest 24190412C6.”

  The small woman stiffened, and seemed committed out of nowhere to not making eye contact. Division 9 strikes again. Nina no longer took it as an automatic assumption of her having a doll body, but rather the reputation of her department.

  “Sure, one sec, lieutenant.” Oliver tapped holographic keys for a moment and then gestured to his right. “Down the other hallway here. You want Room H. I’ll send a note to Doctor Charles. He’ll be there in a minute or so.”

  Nina offered a polite smile. “Thanks.”

  Room H sat behind the first door on the right, opposite Room G, a decent way down the hallway from the intersection by the desk. Nina walked in to an even colder space where heavy square cooler doors covered three walls. Two procedure tables occupied the center of the otherwise open area. On either side of the entry door sat a small cubicle assembly with four desks each.

  She waited, pacing, for a few minutes before the door slid open with a hiss, admitting a freakishly tall man with a smooth, shiny, bald head and great white caterpillar eyebrows. He looked to be well into his fifties, and his skin was as dark as she’d ever seen a person. The top of her head didn’t even reach his pectorals, though the man appeared quite far from muscular.

  “Good morning, lieutenant.” He smiled.

  She’d expected a deeper voice; hearing him sound so ‘normal’ caught her off guard.

  “I understand you’re looking into Mr. Estrada?”

  She nodded. “Yes, that’s correct. In the report, it mentions that you detected an unexpected data burst?”

  “That’s correct. What was it?” He crossed the room and grasped the handle of one of the coolers on the topmost row.

  “We weren’t able to trace the exact destination. The transmission went to a chimeric address.”

  Doctor Charles pulled the door open and a motorized shelf extended bearing a sheet-covered body. Pale blue light came on inside the white slab, casting a man’s body in shadow on the linen. The tray finished extending and lowered to the height of an average table. “My understanding of that word relates to genetics, I’m afraid your use of it baffles me.”

  Nina approached as he pulled back the sheet. “A chimeric address is an illusion. It’s a high security protocol scheme where the sending and receiving nodes only connect for brief periods using ever-changing addresses based on the clock cycle and encryption key. Twenty times a second, the destination node randomly generates a network address that it listens on. A sending node with the same encryptio
n key will generate the same series of codes based on the time. That network address exists only for a fraction of a second, and a single transmission can span many thousands of different network addresses.”

  “Oh.” Doctor Charles whistled. “And I thought my job was difficult.”

  “What can you tell me about Mr. Estrada here? There isn’t much in his file.”

  “Well… The deceased had elevated levels of Placinil in his system at the time of death. Based on a few detected impurities, I think he was more likely taking Harmony.”

  “I thought they were the same drug?” Nina raised an eyebrow. “Just called Harmony when you bought it from some random guy on the street and Placinil when it came from a legitimate channel.”

  “A bit of misinformation.” The doctor smiled. “There are subtle chemical differences. Placinil is an anti-anxiety medication. It does not generate as pronounced a ‘high.’ Harmony starts off as Placinil, which is typically stolen or obtained under false pretenses. It’s treated with a few additional chemicals that enhance the effect enough to create the artificial plateau of contentment. While by the standards of most recreational chem users, a Harmony high is tame, but it can last for hours.”

  “By tame, you mean the user doesn’t experience hallucinations, altered personality, or delusions?” Nina’s gaze settled on the pattern of six bullet wounds in Paul Estrada’s chest, courtesy of Division 1. “This man charged at the police… after apparently becoming unglued enough to go on a shooting spree.”

  “I haven’t taken it myself, but from what I have read, Harmony makes the user ‘feel great’ for anywhere between four to eight hours depending on tolerance. And by feel great, I mean someone under a dosage sufficient to get high could be given news that their mother just died and they’d feel happy for her. Almost nothing can bother them until they come down.” Fluffy white eyebrows crept upward. “The drug’s only withdrawal symptom we’ve been able to find consists of a somewhat stronger state of depression, though I believe that is a psychological aftershock more than a chemical dependency. After the user has experienced a state where ‘everything is awesome all the time,’ reality is crushing.”