Glass was designed to operate in fugue: only when he slept could he vaguely remember who he once was. The naked body, the face. The warm skin. If someone said his name he would, for a moment, cock his head, as if it were familiar. Occasionally, fractional images would slip past the software blocks and he would see a beautiful young black woman, her eyes shining, her smile big, and he would know—however briefly—that the smile was for him. Who is she? he would wonder, and then the memory would fold and collapse back into a brain that had been whittled and wicked of its curiosity with every iteration that took him closer to what his maker intended him to be: the perfect assassin.
Another memory slipped past, and for a moment, Glass was in a forest, the ground covered with leaves, a bow in his hand and a deer in his sights, sipping from a brook—and then it vanished. Glass didn’t ponder his amnesia; whatever he had once been, that was long ago. His mission was the pickup. And after that he would get another mission. And after that, he would get another.
He lived in a six-foot-by-six-foot maintenance pod on the outskirts of Chicago. It was fifteen feet tall, just enough to allow him to extend his frame fully. He hung upside down while he slept; this allowed the blood to pool in his brain and relieve the hydraulic pump and oxygenator by twenty-five percent, prolonging its life. The stretching also allowed the electrostatic tissue—his muscle now—to remain uncontracted. A constant oil mist, recycled from a basin below, kept the tissue hydrated, increasing Glass’s strength and speed by five percent.
The target was fifteen miles away and moving. How he tracked this, Glass didn’t know. He just did.
He lowered himself to the ground as gracefully as a primate. He shrank his body to six and a half feet, a normal height, and shrouded himself in a ghillie suit that approximated a trench coat. He grabbed a rifle, which he quickly disassembled and attached to a mount fixed onto his exposed carbon-fiber back.
The door slid open. Per instructions, Glass went dark, and he would remain so for the rest of the mission. All communication was cut, even to the Northern Star, his Commander and Creator.
He was on the outskirts of the city. It was night. He passed a pack of coyotes sniffing through the trash; no ears twitched and none looked up. They didn’t notice.
= = =
Among its billions of calculations and assessments, the Northern Star—Dr. Evan Lindo, the Will—noted that Mike Glass had gone dark. Because of the implant and the degradation of Glass’s brain tissue over the years, one of Dr. Lindo’s reverberations calculated that there was an eighty-seven percent likelihood that Glass was dead. He would have to send a team of Minors to the maintenance pod.
Lindo was one and also millions. His expanded consciousness was like two facing mirrors and their endless reflection into infinity. It was always him, but some of him was far away, and some of him was close.
A close Lindo—maybe even the one that was tucked inside his skull—felt sadness. They had a long and storied history, Evan and Mike. Glass had been integral to Evan’s rule. And there was a time when Evan had been hopeful that he and Glass could be toge—
He rebelled against you, another one of him said. This one was further away. Colder, more logical. Not ensnared by emotion.
“Yes,” the close Lindo said. “But I understand why.”
Lindo had rebuilt him so he would never rebel again.
Justin-01 is alive. Many of him said this, some in horror, others in surprise, a crisscross game of telephone around the globe. All these sentiments reached the primary. In his container, five miles underground, Evan’s shriveled frame shook for a moment, but his face remained placid. Justin was a threat, but he could also be salvation. His mind rolled through the possibilities, assembling the outcomes of different actions, his forecasts bolstered by the equivalent of four billion CPUs.
Justin-01 was beckoned by Vanessa Raimey, the Consciousness Module. Unlike the Pieces, which expanded Evan’s mind, Vanessa was unmodified. The Pieces were massively powerful, but they were also dumb—the Forced Autism that made them so useful had also lobotomized them into idiot savants. Vanessa’s aptitude was reason and coercion. She kept the Pieces in line and on task. Without her, they would consume Evan. He had been there before, at the beginning of the civil war, and he had almost died from their wants and needs. But with her, all was calm. With her, Evan could pursue his true thirst: knowledge.
I must replace her, he thought, this time to himself, not across his entire consciousness. But he couldn’t yet. But . . . Justin. If I harvested him, then . . .
He let this seed of thought expand, the Consciousness Module be damned. All of the Northern Star served him.
He is a threat, one of the ones far away said.
Yes. He is the King Sleeper. For a moment, Evan felt something outside his consciousness, within his physical body. His consciousness gasped in excitement. He felt . . . nerves. A bit of uncertainty in a world he had made certain.
From the military base north of the city, he dispatched five Level 5 Tank Minors to retrieve Justin. On another feed he alerted the resident giant, Alan Kove, of the situation—and warned him to quit drinking.
Next he sent information on this threat to China Girl, a Version 13 Tank Minor who lay a mere fifty feet from Evan’s physical body. She was his personal assistant—and she would be promoted to assassin now that Glass was dead.
Five miles up and one mile away, Evan readied a plane to whisk her away and bring the King Sleeper back to him.
= = =
Glass was three miles from the target’s last known location. He moved at a speed difficult to register with human eyes, sometimes running on two feet, other times aiding his gait by driving forward with his powerful arms like a cheetah. Glass used the alleyways between the skyscrapers as his path; instead of turning, he’d leap to a wall and push himself off in the other direction, never reducing speed. Dust and trash whipped in his wake.
The mega-cities were clogged with civilians—Chicago had over forty million residents—but most of the time they were inside, online. There were still bars, there were still restaurants, but the real world was plain crackers compared to the cake a person’s synapses could absorb in cyberspace. The vibrant colors, the limitless time sucks, and the beautiful people—even at work—had changed people’s expectations. Their online lives were a movie, even if the fleshy shells in their stuffy apartments were covered in eczema and hadn’t been washed in days.
Glass passed hundreds of civilians on his way to the pickup, and their reaction was always the same: delayed fear. They would jump to the ground and yelp, paralyzed, then look for the danger that they had sensed but not seen—the danger that was already a block away. But Glass saw them all. He had exceptional night vision, and to fully utilize his speed, he processed images at five hundred frames per second. He saw what no other creature could: a hummingbird flapping its wings, a projectile barreling his way. It was part of what made Glass so exceptional, and why Evan had kept him for so long: with the same modifications, most humans would stroke out and die.
A lone man walked through one of the few parks, clearing his head from the day’s work, and his eyes caught what could have been the tail end of a jacket. Or was it a bat? Death passed him unnoticed.
= = =
Justin took ten minutes to leave his apartment, and that was too long. He heard the vehicle approach just as he was about to exit the main door. Vehicles were rare—they required fuel and were unavailable to civilians. Justin had no doubt that Lindo’s soldiers had arrived.
He sprinted toward the back exit. He knew it was useless, that the Tank Minors were too fast, too strong, but he wasn’t going to go down without a fight. His whole life had been a fight, a battle to survive, a war to stay unknown and hidden. At the very least they wouldn’t get his mind. He’d kill himself if he had to. He understood the stakes. He had lived in the darkness before.
A hover-rover erupted off the back of the vehicle, a circular, propeller-driven drone that sent the Tank Minors
images of their surroundings in x-ray, infrared, night vision, and standard. They immediately spotted Justin as he fled away through back alleys.
One of the Tank Minors exploded through the building, knocking the metal doors off the hinges of both the front and back exits. Tenants opened their doors only to cast their eyes down and close them when they saw what had made the commotion.
The technology for bionic prosthetics had changed drastically in the past thirty-five years. The military started with Tank Majors simply because they didn’t have the technology to make the prosthetic arms, legs, and body any smaller. The old Tank Majors were built out of dense armor, gears, hydraulics, and chains. They vibrated like a Harley when they revved up for war.
But the Tank Minors were built out of electrostatic tissue—an off-white, oily material that used electrical current to expand and contract, and which could be shaped to mimic human musculature. The Tank Minors were assigned levels based on their power. A Level 2 was twice as strong as a Level 1, a Level 4 twice that of a Level 2, and so on. Quickness followed the same trajectory: a higher level Tank Major was more explosive and agile.
Captain Turk, a Level 5, barreled after Justin-01. He had been a Tank Minor in one form or another for over ten years and had grown up in the Northern Star age. He was loyal to Lindo and felt that a unified, global government after the oil collapse had proven to be a good thing. The economy was stable, the wild had reclaimed the suburban sprawl, population was decreasing as people turned to avatars instead of flesh for pleasure, and crime was down because of the truth and myth that he was always watching.
I see the target. Turk’s thought transmitted to the rest of his team through the same interface—the Mindlink—that gave him the ability to control his bionic body.
One Minor stayed at the vehicle, and the other three ran wide to collapse back in and cordon off all paths of escape. They were instructed to take the target alive and uninjured, so the rifles stayed in the truck. They very rarely needed them.
Turk saw the target one hundred yards ahead, slipping through the alleys. He shrank that gap to fifty yards in two seconds. Justin’s lungs screamed, his legs felt like rubber, and he could hear his pursuer’s rapid footsteps behind him, but he refused to turn around.
And so he was unaware when, half a second later, Turk’s head left his shoulders. Glass had arrived.
Glass was a Level 12 Tank Minor. He had been designed by a genius, a man encased in a bomb shelter five miles below Washington, D.C., a man who, in ten thousand years of solitary thought, had developed ways to build and manufacture that otherwise wouldn’t have existed for a millennium. Glass was a product of this genius, unrecognizable as a human—and because of that, the physical limitations of humans no longer applied.
The hover-rover didn’t detect Glass because he had no heat signature; and Tank Minor Turk didn’t see Glass because Glass was twenty feet above him, effortlessly hurtling from one balcony to another, something that Turk could do only in jittery bursts.
Turk’s head was easily separated from his body thanks to a carbon fiber retractable blade located near Glass’s hand. Glass had one in each arm, motorized and easily replaceable. Having eliminated the immediate threat, Glass continued his pursuit of his target on the ground. Behind him, Turk’s limp body tumbled end over end, and his head crashed into the side of a dumpster.
The other Minors were unaware of Glass, but they registered Turk’s flatline. They converged on Justin’s heat signature with their vehicle just behind them. Real-time data was sent to the Northern Star.
Justin exited the alley and was immediately tackled by one of the Minors. The Minor lifted him up off the ground.
“What did you do? What did you do?” the Minor screamed, his grip hard enough to break bones. The truck screeched to a halt and the other two Minors ran in from opposites sides, each at a full sprint.
Mike Glass is pursuing. Leave immediately, the Northern Star echoed through their heads.
Justin couldn’t hear this, but he saw the Minor’s expression change from anger to fear. “Go, go, go!” the Minor screamed. He dragged Justin to the truck like an unruly child and threw him in back. One Minor climbed into a .50 caliber turret on top and aimed the rifle into the dark maw of the alley. The other two quickly loaded machine guns racked in the truck. The hover-rover flew above them and now slowly drifted over the alley, cycling through all of its visions, trying to out the sniper.
Two snaps of orange light shot from the alley. The hover-rover exploded out of the air, and in Justin’s periphery, he saw the legs of the Minor in the turret go slack. The Minor slowly slid down into the foot well, and Justin saw why: the back of his head was missing.
“What the fuck, what the fuck!” shouted the Minor who had tackled Justin. He and the other Minor were pressed against the truck, opposite the alley. “Thompson, get us out of here!”
Thompson—the driver, apparently—had tucked himself out of sight. He shifted the truck into gear—but suddenly three holes punched through the passenger-side door and Thompson was no longer moving. The truck idled forward slowly. The two Minors outside walked with it, hunched out of sight.
“Kid, help us,” the tackler said to Justin.
For Justin, everything was in slow motion. He turned from the alley and looked at the Minors. He could just see the top of the tackler’s head. “Stop the car. Push Thompson out,” the man pleaded.
Justin heard himself say, “Are you serious?”
Then the truck rammed into an old light pole that hadn’t seen electricity in decades, and stopped. The alley was oblique to their position.
The other Minor opened the driver’s side door and pulled out Thompson. “Are we clear?” he asked. The tackler edged himself toward the back of the truck.
Justin’s senses were drowned in molasses; time had replaced seconds with minutes. His body screamed for him to open the door and run like hell—but his arms and legs stayed neatly at his sides, bound by invisible rope. His head could still turn, however, and he angled it toward the alley.
“Are we clear?” the Minor asked again. The tackler didn’t respond. He was looking past the rear bumper. Justin saw what the tackler did: a shape had formed in the dark. It looked like a man in a very baggy trench coat holding binoculars.
The tackler raised his rifle and put his sight on the man. “Stay right there!” he yelled. To the other Minor: “Cover me!” Back to the binocular man. “Stay right there, motherfucker, we see you!”
All the while, Justin thought: So strange to hear them afraid. They’re the boogeymen. What could be worse?
The silhouette didn’t retreat. Instead it grew by two feet—then settled back down to its original height. Justin blinked repeatedly. It was as if the dark of the alley was a prism, tricking his eyes into an optical illusion.
What is that thing? Justin thought to himself.
“Get down on the ground, motherfucker! NOW!” the tackler screamed.
YOU MUST GO NOW, the Northern Star transmitted to the Minors. YOU CANNO—
The silhouette blurred. The trench coat it wore shredded into a hundred pieces. Justin realized it wasn’t a jacket, it was some type of camouflage. And then the creature bounded toward them, the strange suit wild and flowing like a matador’s cape. It ate up the distance between the alley and truck in ten-foot increments.
The Minors stood up and fired. They were scared, but they were elite—they found their target, brass spilled from their rifles, the muzzles coughed red stars. But the silhouette was undeterred, and thirty feet away it leapt into the air, less high than fast, and flew over the vehicle.
What happened next took less than two seconds. Justin watched the thing arc over the truck, its ghillie suit fluttering behind it like a ragged cape. The two Minors were backpedaling, sighting in, firing, covering, retreating, and this gave Justin a perfect view when the silhouette landed through the tackler. The tackler fired into the air, his eyes wide, and suddenly he was covered in a snaggly mound of
cloth that shook like a paint mixer.
The last Minor circled to its back and continued to fire. For a fraction of a second, Justin saw eyes the size of saucers, green and rolling, regarding their next victim. And then the creature’s full body was revealed, and Justin understood why it was so hard to see: it shook like a turning fork. The Minor fired at it from a mere dozen feet away, but the insane vibration of the creature caused the bullets to ricochet. Then, in a single blinding movement, the Minor was in the air, a blade through his throat. His feet twitched, his eyes rolled to white, and then nothing. The silhouette slashed its hand out, completing the decapitation.
The strange, kinetic frenzy stopped as quickly as it had started. The tasseled camouflage fell back into a trench-like cape. The creature rose again, as it had in the alley, and Justin saw that its legs had been bent backward like a kangaroo’s. At the top of the arc the knee joints shifted forward, and the creature settled to its natural height.
The thing turned around and looked at the truck. Its eyes were four-inch lenses, rolling with green. Its face was a black mask—no nose or mouth, just a general shape.
For Justin, all the sound of the world was sucked into space as the creature walked toward the truck.
As if in final sacrifice, Justin closed his eyes and waited. The door opened.
“Do it,” Justin said.
There was no response. He cracked an eye open. The creature had stepped back. It was waiting.
After a moment, it scanned the surroundings. Justin could see that aside from the FLIR-type sensors for its eyes, it had no actual head. The mask was a crude facsimile; armor to protect the eyes. It looked back at Justin, and when Justin didn’t move, the being held out its hand. It was a matrix of metal, more air than material, framed like a honeycomb, incredibly strong and light. Bands of black thread— electrostatic tissue, Justin knew—were fully exposed to the elements.
The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition Page 72
