by Lee Bond
“Okay.” Garth nodded to himself and told the game box to compile the code he’d whispered. It’d take about fifteen, twenty minutes for the operation to run, at which time, the Sorexes Galaxy, complete with it’s three hundred solar systems and eighteen different Offworld species, would be in the game. Not in in the game, but assets ready to be chained together whenever he got around to figuring out what the game was actually supposed to be.
So far, he was at ‘fuck it, let’s just have it all in there and see what these assholes do it with it’.
But that was for a later date.
Right now he needed to find the names and identities of the four assholes –and presumably a few more, given everything- still lurking along the outskirts of his property, acting like fucking Invasion of the Body Snatchers extras or those idiots in those ghost movies who just, like, stand there in front of the goddamn video camera for six hours before crawling into bed.
“Like,” Garth demanded plaintively as he navigated himself into the open case files, “how the fuck would anyone not see that? Isn’t the point of installing those cameras to catch weird shit? I guarantee you, I put up cameras everywhere, and then, during replay, I see my girlfriend of wife or whoever standing there making faces at the camera for the whole night, I’m gonna be like ‘Hey, Barb, what in the hell is this bullshit? You got a demon in you?’ Sure as shit ain’t gonna ignore that. ‘Oh hey, there’s my loving wife, levitating towards the ceiling and then having no memory of it. Wellp, time to go to the grocery store and pretend this never happened …’ ah. Here we are.”
Operating on the not-unreasonable assumption that SFPD would have their eyeballs all over everything the Zigg-heads got themselves up to, he’d initiated a search using some very basic keywords and was now smack dab in the central files for every single Ziggurat user in the San Francisco area.
There were a lot. Not as many as Baron Samiel probably wanted, given the fact that his favorite base of operations had been stolen by someone who couldn’t really die, but there were more than a place like San Fran could easily support before things started going downhill.
“Doesn’t take much for these guys to kill a city.” Garth looked at the still photos he’d yanked from Rommen’s recordings a second time and went in search of ‘weird girls with bright red hair that are in ponytails’.
Based on careful observation of how the others in the group interacted with her, Garth had decided that she was the leader of the merry band of psychotic drug addicts.
“A thousand Zigg-heads? That’s a rough thing to deal with. Sure, they’re spread all over the place in their usual clusters of ten to twenty, but if the supply dries up? Hey ho, bingo, here we are … seriously? Cherry Cristal? Fucking hell. That’s just embarrassing. Okay, yeah, fine, I see you now, Cherry Cristal. Real name, not given. Age, not given. No known address. No known family connections here in town. Love your crime list, here, sweetheart. Aggravated bodily assault. Grievous assault. Shoplifting. Pickpocketing. Pandering. Ew. Just … like … ew. I don’t know much about Zigg-heads, but I do know that hygiene falls somewhere south of … everything. Okayyyyy, let’s see here … you, sweet Cherry Cristal, popped up on the grid … oh, well. Ain’t that nice. Six months ago. Lemme see here …”
Garth popped another screen open on a spare monitor and did a broad activities search for all the known Ziggurat users listed in the SFPD networks and wasn’t surprised to see that they’d all become active in the five-to-six month range prior to his arrival.
Literally, just showing up in San Francisco as if by magic. There were memos and notes from two dozen officers associated with the original case files for the entire group, all of them essentially demanding the same thing; clarification on what they were supposed to do with this new type of user and investigation into why they’d decided to come to sunny San Francisco now, especially when it seemed as though their drug of choice was more an East Coast thing.
And that was where the trail began to fizzle. At least, for the officers interested in stopping the menace before it got too strong for them to handle on their own. For Garth, who knew what was really going on, it was easy to imagine Samiel using his nefarious tentacles to deflect further prying through the usual methods.
Garth closed the screen. He could waste hours digging into that side of the problem. He might even pick it up again, once he was done deciding what he was going to do about Cherry Cristal and the others, but for now, it’d have to wait. Going back to the main profiles for the entire coterie of Zigg-heads living in San Fran, Garth started looking for Cherry Cristal’s known associates.
It didn’t take long, which was nice, even though the detailed reports on most of these addicts was probably going to cost someone their job; if he was right –and when it came to this sort of thing, he almost always was, even if it wound up being ‘eventually’ instead of ‘immediately’- Baron Samiel was using his phenomenal influence in Law Enforcement to keep the beginnings of his army right where he needed them.
“Seriously?” Garth grabbed some cold onion rings from a very greasy Slappy Burger Fried Onion Flingers box and ate them while he just sort of … shook his head at the stupidity of it all. “Who names these guys? Do they name themselves? Or, do they, like, go to some fucking Stupid Nickname Convention at some park at midnight? Christ. Wombag? Frigget? Senator? Slinkydog? Criminy! That’s just ridic … wow. Okay, huh. Just when I thought Slinkydog was a stupid fucking name I come across Wombag! Wombag. I mean, I’m actually onboard with Senator, on account of that guy apparently wears that other guy’s creepy as fuck Halloween mask all the time but Wombag? Fuck me.”
Flipping back to the Securicorps footage –absentmindedly wiping greasy fingers on an equally stained reproduction print of a Hong Kong Cavaliers t-shirt-, Garth peered very intently at the four people they’d caught engaging in High Level Loitering. He already knew Cherry Cristal was a lock for leader, and was the most visible of all the Ziggs thanks to her ridiculous hair, and the same went with Senator McMaskFace, so it was time to determine once and for all who the other two were and, more importantly, where the fifth man was hiding.
“’kayyyyy. So we got Wombag, here, lurking on the corner by that stop sign not at all looking like a creepy pervert who forgot this isn’t a school anymore but is hoping it might attract some kids.” Garth spooled out some of the footage, watching the weird-looking Wombag interact with the people around him. For the most part, the addict kept to himself –as most people on Ziggurat did, because they couldn’t really handle the real world while they were high- but every now and again, he did a weird twitching thing that, under normal circumstances, would be kind of awful.
In this case, though, it was useful. Dear old Wombag was suffering from a common side effect of too much Ziggurat, which was the very efficient in killing users stone cold dead thing called ‘physiological cell death’. Whatever strain of Aleph Baron Samiel was feeding these guys to risk bracing a secure fortress belonging to the guy who’d already killed three of their kind was strong enough to begin forcing Wombag’s body chemistry to begin deleting neurons in his body.
“Least effective in combat.” Garth tagged twitchy Wombag as first to go, if it ever came down to hand-to-hand fisticuff type action. He went on to the next person on his list, who turned out to be Frigget.
Watching Frigget’s antics was actually kind of funny. In his previous life before the hammerlock of Ziggurat-Aleph was dropped around his neck, the skinny bundle of energy must’ve been quite the people person; unlike twitchy Wombag or frankly intimidating Cherry, Frigget spent most of his shifts talking to himself.
Until someone made the mistake of walking by. Then skinny Frigget with the almost-pompadour and the bad skin would automatically include whoever had the misfortune of being within earshot of whatever it was that was on his mind. The moment they started walking, Frigget would follow, zipping this way and that, mouth moving a mile a minute until he reached some the end of his invisible leash. Once that happened,
Frigget skittered back to his watchpost, still talking to himself.
“Rinse and repeat.” Garth was totally ambivalent about Frigget. The dude was skinny as a rail, but that didn’t mean anything when it came to Zigg-heads. The alchemical process streaming narcotic ruination along cells was too much like PCP in a lot of ways, but with a twist. Yes, Aleph did remove subconscious concerns over physical injury, making each and every one of them considerably ‘stronger’, but that wasn’t all.
It actually made them stronger. Even as their bodies began wasting away, even as – in Wombag’s case- they began dying without being terribly aware of it, their musculature was growing denser, their bone density increased, their reaction and response times dwindled to near perfection. The overall frailty of their bodies made it technically easier to kill them.
You just couldn’t do it quickly. It was a waiting game built on the backbones of endurance.
Garth didn’t like these soldiers. They were much further along than Sketch and crew.
“Definitely dosing them with a stronger batch. Somehow.” Garth dialed the footage belonging to Senator up, scratching the top of his head vigorously. “But they don’t leave. They just rotate. They don’t really interact with anyone who looks remotely like a drug user and if they did, Securicorps surveillance would’ve spotted the activity by now. And if that happened, Blue Boy Rommen definitely would’ve alerted the authorities. A while ago.”
Senator was more like Cherry than Frigget or Wombag, while the pathetically named Slinkydog was smack dab in the middle of the entire quartet, though he did occasionally sink to his haunches and squat there. For like, six solid hours. Just sitting there, tilting his head this way and that. He ignored everything and everyone who came around him, including the few people that’d actually been stupid enough to approach the mask-wearing idjit to see if he was okay.
Under normal circumstances, those four being in the neighborhood for so long without attracting the attention of the police would be somewhat of a miracle.
“Only,” Garth waggled the last of his greasy onion rings at the screens, “we don’t believe in miracles down here in the Emperor’s simulation, do we?”
Uttering the blasphemy had Garth quirking his ears ever so slightly as he waited for Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles do descend down into The Matrix to unleash some incredibly artfully done Cinematic Kung Fu for being such an asshole. When nothing happened, the Kin’kithal shrugged.
“I’ll get you yet, man. Trust me on that one.” Garth washed the remnants of old onion ring down with lukewarm Dr Pepper. “So we got four of five. Which leaves you Wombag. Where could you be? I know you haven’t spoken to your people since they started this whole thing because I would’ve seen you. Rommen would’ve seen you, and he would’ve mentioned your mobility to me in his State of the Union address he busts out every day.”
Garth tapped his lips thoughtfully with steepled fingers. Every worker currently employed for Operation Changetech Conquers the Planet No But Really, That’s the Plan, We’re Like Google Only We’re Actually Going To Do It was totally accounted for. He’d weathered the expected super-crankiness from various shop stewards and owners of companies and a few ridiculously brave employees over the upgraded biometric GPS nametags, listening to complaints ranging from ‘It’s Sexist’ to ‘This Thing is Gonna Give My Guys Nuclear Brain Damage’ and ‘I’m Gonna Wrap This in Tinfoil So You Can’t See Me Pee’.
It’d been a long few hours, and each conversation had ended exactly the same way. Being told that the non-disclosure acts that they’d all signed and none had read because work was scarce enough as it was without wasting time slogging through paperwork allowed him, their contractual employer, to demand that they adhere to whatever security measures he required them to do, all at the risk of not only being terminated from employ but also potentially sued for breach of contract, they all shut up.
Well, not entirely. A few of the aforementioned shop stewards had shouted really mean things to him before lurching out of the office in search of their union lawyers, but whatever. The language was concise, the stipulations and restrictions clear as day, and one Benny Wall was lurking in the wings to swoop down like a vampire.
“Where could you be, Wombag?” Of course, if he felt like it, he could just go outside and look for the fucking guy on his own. He’d been able to sniff Sketch and Crew from hundreds of feet away, and they’d only just begun the downward spiral into transformation. Cherry Cristal and her band of Badly Named Supervillains had to reek.
Of course, going outside meant dealing with more than just the smell. It meant dealing with being outside …
Where all the hovering quadronic circuitry burned like the dickens.
He had suspicions about what was going on with his eyeballs and their sudden sensitivity to the glowing lines, he just didn’t have time to deal with it just yet.
With that in mind, Garth was admittedly doing everything he could to stay indoors, out of sight of the lines. Handling Cherry Cristal –and therefore Samiel- in just the right way to make sure no more of her kind showed up on his doorstop wearing, like, exploding vests that … exploded all over the place was way more important. And that kind of also meant not fucking around looking for the ... hidden Wombag; if he went rooting like a pig for truffles, someone would notice, and frankly, the compound wasn't up to resisting a concerted Ziggurat fiend attack.
Besides, he believed there were workarounds. He didn’t necessarily like the solutions slowly being assembled by his subconscious mind, but they were there. It wasn’t time for any Omega Level decisions, not yet.
“’kay. Decision time.” Garth backed out of the SFPD servers and turned off all the monitors and played things out for himself. “I can ignore Cherry Cristal and everyone. But I’ve got Wombag somewhere on property, doing who knows what. Zigg-heads aren’t the brightest bulbs in the bunch, but if he’s managed to avoid being spotted by Securicorps so far, he’s either dead already which would be dope, or he’s inveigled himself in somewhere. Only if I go hunting for Wombags, Cristal and her Cavalcade of Creeps will come gunning for me. Which means I can’t ignore them. Because eventually they’ll get in, and these ones are tougher than the last ones, which also means I can’t take them on my own and Rommen would positively shit All-American Kansas Bricks all over the place. Gotta figure out a way to convince Samiel that, just like the predator drone scenario, bothering me just isn’t something he should do.”
It was obvious there was no decision to be made. He had no choice. He had to deal with the Zigg-heads at the gate and hope to Horus that fucking Wombag, like, just ... died. Somehow.
“I just don’t like what comes next.”
Would Samiel’s attempts at rousting him this time be as lengthy as the last, or would the asshole give up after a few half-hearted tries?
Would the Emperor involve himself at long last, throwing a monarchic monkey wrench into the proceedings, all in an attempt to either hurry things along or to force a humble –and powerless- Kin’kithal into begging for a get out of jail free card?
Garth pulled out his phone and dialed a number. It picked up midway through the first ring because of course it did. “Rommen.”
“Mister Nickels.” From the sounds of things, the head of the detail was outside somewhere, wandering around the heavy machinery.
“Might be a busy night tonight.” Garth picked himself up off the chair and made his way over to where the 3D printers were finishing up the last of the next-gen aerogel drones. While he waited for Rommen to process that statement, Garth looked over the finished drones.
They were bulkier than the previous generation, but they had to be if they were going to carry upwards of fifteen pounds of metal apiece clipped to their undercarriage, and the interior circuitry was more complex as well; not everything he built would need quadronic wiring as detailed as those running the invisible network because sometimes, you just had to rely on good old fashioned tech and not the high-concept stuff.
Garth ran a loving hand over the 3D built and fully functional long-range sniper rifle clipped to the bottom of the drone nearest him. Forged from a specially-made metallo-plastic composite a hundred or so times more durable than the regular stuff in use throughout the world, the rifle was lightweight and portable and capable of firing full metal jacket rounds at a target up to five hundred feet away half a dozen times before being rendered inoperable. This bastard -and the others attached to the remaining drones- had come from the locked-away printers, and not the ones anyone wandering around could take a peek at.
After that initial shot, the drone’s motors were powerful enough to compensate for upwards of eighty-five percent of the kickback for each successive round fired, but really, if you needed to fire more than one round at someone’s head or other vital organs, you should be using a regular rifle, or like, a fucking mini-gun.
“Busy night, you say, sir?” The background clamor had cleared. Rommen had obviously moved himself to a location where he could easily hear what his employer had to say so –when things went south- the recordings of this conversation could be used against him.
Cradling the phone against his ear with a shoulder, Garth programmed the light pens to start drawing in the stealth wiring and access points for the system, then stepped away, turning his eyes towards the ceiling. The initial start-up of each light pen was when it felt like his eyeballs were being stabbed with railway spikes, making it best to avoid wherever possible. The rest of the time his poor old peepers felt as if they were individually wrapped in an electric net.
