The Sentient Collector (The Sentient Trilogy Book 1)

by Ian Williams

  The dreams induced by a dose of D-Stims were the most vivid she had ever experienced. The flavour she always used caused dreams particularly high in memory content. In these she never had to worry about bringing up two younger brothers without their parents there. All she had to do was enjoy being with her mum and dad once again. At least until she would eventually wake up.

  With nothing but grains and left-over sugar swimming at the bottom of the cup, she decided to get on with her day. Her intention, before sitting to a sub-standard cup of coffee, had been to take money that was not hers. The target had ordered a full English breakfast, which seemed to her the least advisable thing for him to order, considering his already weighty appearance. This had been the reason she picked him out of the many there; he was unlikely to catch her if she were found out.

  Before she could turn away from the window and find her target again, she caught her reflection in the window. The sweet little eleven year old girl sitting with her parents that she had remembered only moments earlier had changed a lot in the twelve years since then. Her long blonde hair had been coloured flame red and made to stick up nearly an inch in height in the middle. The rest was shaved short. Along with her Mohican haircut she had also taken to wearing thick black eyeliner that framed her big blue eyes like a coal beach surrounding a small ocean.

  Of course this was all to add to the transformation she had undergone over the last twelve years, to become something that resembled how she felt inside. It was not so much hatred that boiled up inside of her, but deeply entrenched feelings of resentment. The world, or the city at least, had simply forgotten about her family, left ignored in the rural wilderness.

  People had been tempted into the cities by the many promises Simova had made about their new advanced technology and unlimited energy for all. As a result, the rural areas had quickly been left unchecked and almost entirely emptied of people. It had been quick too, leaving a sudden vacuum of power that no-one had filled since – apart from the criminal gangs who stayed behind. Without having had a chance to join the rest of the population in their race to live in the city, people like her had been left to fend for themselves. She very quickly decided that gang life was not for her.

  After her parents had died she too had seen no alternative but to venture into the urban sprawls. She had since risen from the ashes of her parent’s demise and created a new identity in the process. Her name was now Phoenix and her hair now resembled flames. Anyone that messed with her or her brothers would soon know just how far she would go to protect them. Her appearance served as a warning to all.

  The reflections of those behind her moved unexpectedly, rousing her from her daydream. She quickly spun around in her seat and saw that her target was gone, though his bag still remained slung over the back of the chair. The man had left his table and was nowhere to be seen. She realised there was only one place he could be, except she had no desire to check the men’s toilet to be sure.

  She pushed her coffee cup aside and pulled her own bag off the table and over her right shoulder. Just inside the flap was a can of spray, which lacked any label or instructions. It was not filled with deodorant or hairspray anymore, but something much more interesting and infinitely more illegal. She removed the can and then walked calmly over to her target’s table.

  No-one questioned her at all, even when she stopped by the man’s bag and began to rummage inside. Her appearance made her instantly noticeable and yet this rarely mattered when no-one ever really looked anymore. She could commit most crimes and nobody had a clue. As an outsider, born and raised outside of any city, she was unknown to the spying system. Because of this the Simova network had no record of her and her family.

  Besides, her boss had made it difficult for the city’s systems to keep track of her by giving her a small gift, a hand-sized yellow box that interfered with any attempts to probe her activities. It sat silently in her pocket and, although small, it allowed her more freedom than most – for a limited time each use, of course.

  Stuffed inside the man’s bag was a small see-through screen, discarded at the bottom. The man’s main device had gone with him to the toilet, probably wrapped around his arm. She gave it a quick once over and was relieved to see that, even if only the man’s back-up device, it still suited her purpose. The opportunity to carry out her plan had finally arrived.

  After a quick shake of the can in her hand, she began to spray a light coating over the device. It required little delicacy on her part, all of the complexity came from what was sticking to the plastic and waiting to do its job. For now she only had to make sure the screen was entirely covered before moving on. She then replaced the device in the bag and walked away.

  Once outside the café she pulled out her own device – this one much older than the norm – and activated it. She then waited for the man to return to his table. Looking through the window meant she could run if it went wrong. The minute it did, the Simova network would be notified and the police would soon arrive.

  The man eventually arrived and began to tidy up his table. He checked his wrist screen and then grabbed his bag and jogged to the counter. His reaction suggested he was late for something. Great! I’ll have to do it while mobile, Phoenix thought.

  When the man exited the café and turned right, he walked straight across her path. She tried not to look at him and instead turned as if to walk the other way before then following him. Staying at a distance of no more than three metres, she checked the status on her own device. Her screen sat within a black plastic case and looked far less than up-to-date. It was still capable enough for her means. Except, her trusty spray of nano-circuitry infused polymer had not formed the correct circuitry to communicate with her device, as it was supposed to. Newer tech never suffered such setbacks.

  Toward the end of the second street she followed him down, something suddenly changed. It was actually working! Her screen lit up and the message ‘connected’ appeared, filling her with excitement. The man’s device could now be controlled by her, to do with as she wished, as long as she stayed close enough.

  “Sorry buddy,” she said, while her target walked along none-the-wiser. She began to filter through the man’s information. What she looked for was simple: his biometric records. These contained every identifying detail of an individual, exactly what the automated Simova network used when dealing with a person’s requests. With this she would fool the system into thinking her device was his, and she could use it to apply charges to him or even empty his savings, if she wished.

  At least that had been the plan. Unfortunately her pocket began to vibrate, which stopped her in her tracks. The boss was calling and he hated having to wait for an answer. He always insisted she wore her wrist screen at all times, and each time she had immediately placed the thing back in her pocket. She found it creepy, choosing instead to stick to her trusty, but old, tech.

  The connection to the device of the man ahead of her would have to be severed. He would be spared today. She pulled the curved screen from her pocket and fiddled with it until she had it the right way up. Before she could answer the call she had to switch on the scrambler that had been ruthlessly attached to the screen, cracking it in places. For such a seamless design it still felt overly bulky to her.

  “Where are you?” her boss, Anthony, asked. His face took up the whole screen and became stretched as the image curved away.

  “I’m out, why?”

  “I need you to check on something for me.”

  Phoenix watched as her target disappeared around the corner ahead of her. Not only had she watched her money vanish, but her day off too. “Fine, what?”

  “I can’t get through to anyone at one of the storage facilities. I want you to see what’s going on over there.”

  She realised immediately why he had called her instead of one of his own. Something had obviously gone wrong and he needed it kept quiet, otherwise his people would start asking questions. She was not part of his group. Instead she was his hire
d help. Choosing her meant the job would be done quickly and quietly. It was the least she could do, considering how he had taken her and her brother’s under his wing.

  “Can’t you send someone else?” she asked, just to make him say the words.

  “No, I need you to go. If something’s up I want to know.”

  “Where is it?”

  Anthony gave her the address and then waited for something. At first she struggled to work out what she may have missed. Then it hit her square in the centre of her distracted mind. She knew the place. Her brothers had both been working there. She had thought it the perfect place to keep them busy and out of trouble. After all it was nothing but a small warehouse where her boss’ storage facility was situated. If they were no longer answering then something had to be wrong. Unfortunately trouble never ventured far from her family.

  “Shit, Dillon and Sean were there,” she said.

  Her boss began to nod, with an apologetic smile creeping through. “I knew you’d want to go. I’ve sent two people to join you when you get there. Try and keep things quiet, I don’t want any trouble. What we’re doing is getting a real momentum behind it, so I can’t afford mistakes.”

  “I know. I’ll get it done. I’ll go straight there.”

  “Excellent,” Anthony said before ending the call.

  Phoenix removed the wrist screen and replaced it in her pocket. It was never going to stay attached to her arm for long. To her it felt like a cuff, or someone tightly gripping her, trapping her even. She had grown up completely disconnected from the world and saw no reason to change that. It was her only rule in life: don’t connect. Anthony had understood that when he took her and her brother’s off of the streets. Yet he still insisted on her using the wrist device. She suspected he may also be tracking her with it. If that were true then she had already broken her own rule.

  * * *

  Phoenix arrived at the warehouse twenty minutes later and was struck by the amount of attention it had garnered. No-one should have known about the place, so the presence of the police and a handful of other strangers meant only one thing; someone had cocked-up.

  She watched from the rear of a nearby building, while inside the warehouse people were messing around with her boss’ equipment. There were at least six people, that she could count, who were interested in the many computers stacked up inside. One of which kept himself away from the others. This man was acting suspiciously toward the end half of the row of computers.

  A footstep from behind caught her by surprise, leading her to turn and raise her fists. When she saw the man’s face she relaxed. “Jesus Pete, don’t sneak up like that,” she said.

  “Sorry Phoenix, thought I’d stay quiet,” Pete replied. He wiped his nose across the back of his hand and gestured to the man behind him. “This is Freddy.”

  “Honestly, I couldn’t care less,” Phoenix said. Freddy was one of her boss’ people, so she instantly disliked him. Her friends were mostly like her and had grown up away from the city, in small communities all but forgotten by the modern world. Freddy, unlike her and Pete, was not one of them. He was a member of her boss’s cult-like group and had only one concern in life; that of bringing forward some higher being that she neither cared hearing about nor believed had ever existed. In short, she did not trust him.

  “What do we do?” Pete asked.

  Phoenix peeked through the door of the warehouse as yet another person exited. She had been given brief glimpses like this every few minutes since arriving. What she could see was that the men inside were from Simova and they were taking the site apart, bit by bit. She had no idea why, and worst of all she saw no sign of her brothers.

  “We need to find the people we had here,” she said.

  “How do we do that, little lady?” Freddy said.

  Ignoring him entirely she moved on to telling her boss what she saw. She took out the wrist screen and waited for someone to answer. The delay was only down to the slow reaction of the scrambler – nothing more than a metal, coin-sized device drilled into the side of the screen. Without this the city would know who was at either end of these calls, and that would be bad for business.

  “Phoenix, what’s going on?” Anthony said.

  “This place is fucked. The police and Simova are here.”

  Anthony closed his eyes and lowered his face away from the screen. “They won’t get anywhere with it. Fine, we’ll just have to go on without it. What about our people?”

  “I haven’t seen them. I think the police took them.”

  The moment she finished talking, Anthony snapped back into full view. His eyes were wide and stared straight into the screen. Suddenly his tone changed. “That’s a mistake I cannot tolerate. They can’t be allowed to talk, do you understand me?”

  Phoenix did not like the way he had spoken about his own men, like they were now a threat. Whatever he was getting at, she had no intention of drawing his meaning out from his tone alone, he needed to spell it out. “What can I do?”

  “They’ll need to be dealt with.”

  “My brothers are with them. What exactly are you asking me to do?”

  “We’ll discuss that later. For now I want to know what these Simova people are up to. Get someone inside that warehouse.”

  The screen became clear as the video disappeared. Phoenix looked to her two accomplices and decided which of the two she should use as a decoy. Inevitably, Freddy got the short straw. “Freddy, go make a scene out front so I can sneak inside,” she said, smirking.

  To her surprise he leapt up and wondered off, without even questioning her motive for choosing him. Anthony’s people were weird. She watched as he strolled casually up to the two police officers standing guard outside the door. There was only a small police presence, so drawing them away would be easy. She just had to avoid the rest. The Simova guys inside were all too busy to notice anyway.

  One of the police officers spotted Freddy walking toward him and instantly raised his arm to his rifle. He then nudged the other officer, who did the same. “You need to start walking away right now, sir.”

  Freddy ignored them and continued to approach. Phoenix was impressed with his confidence, but not with his ignorance; the police would not hesitate to open fire with a round of Shock-bullets if they felt threatened. All he was doing was baiting them into firing. What use is a decoy if he’s shot before he’s done anything? she thought.

  “I’ll drop you if you don’t walk away,” the officer said.

  Thankfully Freddy had stopped just in time. He remained silent while the officers looked to each other. One of them even shrugged his shoulders to the other, just to cement their shared confusion. This was the chance Freddy had apparently been waiting for. He raised his left arm and shouted, “I serve Isaac!”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” the officer began.

  Phoenix was shocked to see that Freddy had brought a weapon with him. “What the hell is wrong with him?” she said, unintentionally copying the officer.

  Freddy released the pistol from the back of his trousers and pointed it straight at the officer who had spoken to him. Before either of them could react he pulled the trigger and then darted off down the street, laughing an insane cackle as he disappeared. The weapon had been surprisingly quiet too, like it had been fitted with a silencer.

  The officer fell to the floor as a red cloud puffed out of his chest. The round that hit him exploded on impact, punching a fist-sized hole through his protective vest. Except it had not finished there. As the officer slumped on the floor the bullet continued to tunnel through him with a sound similar to that of a dentist’s drill, until it burst out the other side and stuck in the brick wall behind.

  The other officer burst to life and began to chase Freddy as he sprinted away, still shouting oddities into the sky. The decoy had worked, although a man had needlessly died in the process.

  “I need back-up, suspect running toward the Mag-Lev line to the north of me,” the remaining officer
shouted into his wrist screen.

  Phoenix vowed she would make sure her boss knew exactly what Freddy had done when they returned to him. She would see to it that he be punished exactly where it would hurt. His kind had one major weakness: D-Stim dependence. More specifically the massively more addictive batch Anthony provided them with. She, on the other hand, bought hers elsewhere. Freddy would soon learn from his mistake when his supply of the dream drug suddenly stopped.

  She knew full well this was how Anthony kept people so devoted to his cause; they were easily manipulated when their dreams were designed to impart a desired emotion. It was no coincidence that his followers talked of a shared vision. Except what they had actually experienced was nothing more than clever chemistry in reality. She had done her best to keep herself and her brothers out of Anthony’s group.

  “Stay here and don’t do anything,” Phoenix said to Pete, who stood beside her with a pale and disturbed look across his face. Neither of them had ever seen one of Anthony’s people go quite so crazy, so quickly.

  Pete nodded and backed slowly around the corner. She then heard the obvious click of a D-Stim inhaler, puffing out its dream smoke. He would be useless to her now for at least ninety minutes. Thanks Pete! she thought.

  With one last check down the road, she felt ready to enter the warehouse. First she had to step across the legs of the deceased officer, still staring into space with lifeless and bloodied eyes. Such a sight would have traumatised her years ago. Now it was just another dreadful scene to add to the many others she had witnessed already.

  Inside the building, she was immediately covered by darkness. The large wall screen that had previously shown colourful, spinning and swirling shapes was off and no longer spreading light across the room. Instead a few small lights had been placed around the inside, all of which made use of the wireless power relay nearby.