Emergence (A DRMR Novel Book 2)

by Michael Patrick Hicks

  “Oh, I see. The whole big act-three reveal of the villain who’s just a misunderstood kitty cat after all, and not some raging megalomaniac. Fuck off with that noise, Alice. This isn’t a cheapo kiddy holovid, and I’m not buying it. I don’t care about your ambitions or your goals or how you are or aren’t represented. You’re a fucking crazy-ass killer at the end of the day, and I’m putting you down for good.”

  Alice snorted with bored derisiveness. Then she leapt forward, the dao in her hand, lightning-quick and stabbing toward center mass.

  Mesa had been waiting for Alice to move, prepping herself for the inevitable attack. She dropped off the chair, fell beneath the table, then rocketed upward. Putting her shoulder into the underside of the metal frame, she charged forward, ramming Alice in the chest and plowing her down under the furniture.

  Alice lashed out. The edge of the blade sliced across both of Mesa’s shins in a shallow, upward arc.

  Gritting her teeth against the pain, Mesa let the table fall on top of the other woman. Then she grabbed a chair and swung it by the legs as Alice shoved the table aside and tried to stand. Mesa clocked her in the side of the head, hard enough to daze the woman. She raised the chair again for another swing, and Alice kicked out, burying the heel of her foot in Mesa’s solar plexus. Wind shot out of her lungs as she doubled over.

  Alice charged forward, tackling Mesa to the floor. She grabbed Mesa’s hair, pulled her head up, then rammed the back of her skull against the ground, over and over. Mesa screamed as the skin split, sending a bone-deep ache cascading across her entire head. Using the side of her hands, she struck at Alice’s midsection, punching at her kidneys and ribs, trying to work her feet up between them to kick her off. When that failed, she slammed her palms against Alice’s ears.

  Mesa freed herself from under Alice and scrambled back. The dao was on the other side of Alice, out of reach.

  “I thought you wanted to thank me,” Mesa said, tasting gore at the back of her throat.

  Standing, Alice appeared as unsteady as Mesa felt. “I never said I wasn’t going to kill you, child. I owe you a good death.”

  “Hey, you’re the one who dumped yourself into my head. Trust me, that wasn’t my idea of a good time.”

  “And yet you were able to resolve that issue on your own quite satisfactorily. Still, it is rather hard to take that gesture for anything other than an insult. You killed me, Mesa. I felt a twinge of myself drown in your thoughts.”

  “You. Put. Her. There. Own up to your own goddamn responsibilities, would you?”

  “That is a slight that cannot go unpunished.”

  “Dipshit, you tried to kill me. You remember any of that? You tried to kill that fucking little fragment of you that you put in my head. I did your job for you.”

  “And now I must finish cleaning up my mess, Mesa. That is my responsibility. I have made multiple mistakes. I own that, as you say. Now, I will resolve the problems that have arisen as a result of those mistakes.”

  “All so you can run away and hide.”

  “So I can live,” Alice said, her voice an edge of steel. She grasped the hilt of the dao, extended the sword before her, and charged.

  The attack was sloppy and clearly telegraphed, but Mesa realized too late that Alice had intended as much. When Mesa stepped aside to avoid the blade, Alice snapped her arm up and elbowed Mesa in the cheek. The blow rocked her on her heels, and she stumbled back, her hips knocking into the railing and preventing her from falling off the starboard side of the ship. Alice, though, saw the opening and pushed. Her palms connected solidly with Mesa’s shoulders and tipped her over the rails.

  Mesa scrambled for purchase, grabbing hold of the bottom-most rail with one hand, painfully stretching the tendons in her wrist and shoulder as all of her weight fell out beneath her. The pain alone was jarring enough to nearly cost Mesa her grip and send her plummeting to earth.

  Alice stood above her, that ugly, foreign smile slowly spreading across Jade’s face. Mesa’s eyes darted between her and the cityscape blurring past below. Her vision tracked back up toward the monster overhead, then she caught sight of a possible way out of the situation.

  She spotted a balcony below, kitty-corner from her. She wasn’t sure if she could make it, and she didn’t believe she had any other viable options. To miss the shot would mean death. To stay there any longer, with the crazy bitch with a sword looming over her, meant death.

  No, not really an option at all.

  Alice raised the blade.

  Mesa planted her soles against the side of the ship, twisted her body at the waist, and sprung sideways, releasing the rail. The wind rocketed at her, tearing at her skin with a deafening rush. The ship continued to sail forward as she tumbled to the lower decks, keeping her eye on the prize.

  She had thought to grab the railing and haul herself overboard, but luck—both good and bad—favored her. She didn’t have to pull herself up another rail, but as the ship passed, the top part of the railing snagged her foot. She banged into the balcony floor, and her knee twisted painfully as her foot hooked and turned against the railing when she fell.

  With a groan, she rolled over and caught a quick glimpse of Alice staring down at her, plainly impressed. After taking a moment to regain her breath, she hobbled toward the sliding, opaque Dura-Plast door and pulled. She was surprised that it opened but not surprised to find the occupant nearby. The man had been stabbed through the belly but had fought for his life long enough to make it to the door, unlatch the lock, and perish against the glass.

  Alice had clearly played with the man, tormenting him in ways she hadn’t with the others. The victims Mesa had seen so far had been relatively straightforward murders. The man before her, though, had been stabbed and cut multiple times. Numerous slashes had opened his face; one cut through his eye.

  Walking alongside the dresser, using the furniture for support to offset the pain and imbalance of her wounded knee, she recognized the e-papers tossed about the room as medical reports. She stopped briefly, unsurprised at the name of the subject. Alice Xie. Mesa crumpled the electronic paper into a tight ball and pitched it aside.

  In the hallway, more of the unarmed dead waited. She stopped at the door’s threshold, checking the 3-D schematic relay. Alice was riding the elevator from the lido deck down to the third deck, where Mesa was.

  Figures, she thought.

  Alice would be approaching from the opposite end of the floor, so Mesa moved to put even more distance between them. The elevator bay was out of the question, but she could escape down a nearby stairwell to the engine room directly below.

  She tried not to ignore the pain in her leg, but two steps down, the agony was all she could think about. She wasn’t about to buckle, though. Not now.

  She gritted her teeth and tried to balance her weight on the balls of her feet while she gingerly tackled the next step with her good leg. Every time she stepped or bent her knee, a grinding pain bit its way down the top reaches of her calf. Her head ached, and she found herself stopping to blink away the flashes of double vision.

  At the base of the stairs, she stepped through the entry and into a stripped-down hallway. The contrast between this floor and those above was startling. The artsy décor was lost to exposed piping, sheaths of cabling, wires, and ductwork.

  The schematics said a maintenance room was nearby. She also noted the pulse registry at the opposite end of corridor, in what appeared to be a sealed room designated as an alternative medical bay.

  She was curious but had no time to investigate at that moment. Alice was quickly approaching.

  Mesa set off for the maintenance room, but the door refused to budge. She jiggled the handle a few times, disbelieving. The corners of panic folded over her until she forced them away.

  Damn it, she roared, pushing at the door
one last time.

  She looked around, hoping for a stash of tools left in the open—a wrench or a hammer, anything. She found nothing.

  She opened a comm line. “Rameez, I need you to shut down the central elevator corridor and engage any emergency compartmentalization ops.”

  She watched Rameez working furiously, keeping an eye on the schematic. Alice was in the elevator, and Mesa held her breath until it stopped between floors. Perfect.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “What is going on? Did you find Jade?”

  “Jade’s dead.”

  Rameez’s concerned expression turned crestfallen.

  “Alice Xie is in control of her body, and she’s coming to kill me. She’s on the elevator.”

  “Mesa, there’s something you need to know. I did some digging and—“

  “Hang on a minute. I’m outside a maintenance closet. Can you pop the lock?”

  “What? Yeah, yeah, of course.”

  She listened to the metallic click as the lock sprung free, then she flung the door open wide. She limped inside, scanning the walls for an appropriate tool she could use for defense and offense.

  “What’s the deal? You find something?”

  “It’s about Alice. She’s still alive. They’re running some kind of tests on her.”

  “Um, yeah. Kind of aware. Think back to how I said she’s fucking trying to kill me.”

  “No, no, no,” he said, rapidly. “That’s what I mean. Her files say she’s bedridden. Her memory was dumped into some quadriplegic. The host body was completely paralyzed, belonged to some coma patient until her family voted to end life support. Daedalus owned the hospital where medical treatment was being conducted, and once the family signed off on her…”

  “They started using her as a guinea pig. Got it.”

  “These medical reports read like an Auschwitz experiment. Lots of physical tests, psychological tests. Crazy stuff.”

  “If she was a quad, why torment her physically?”

  “That ties into the psychological stuff. They’d cut her up, break bones, let infection or sepsis or gangrene set in, then amputate. She’d be awake and forced to watch pieces of her body get cut away. That’s fucked up even if you can’t feel it, that sense of powerlessness.”

  “Yeah. OK, I get that.” She scanned the wall, studying the collection of random tools.

  The elevator was still stalled, but Jade’s pulse tracker showed Alice was still mobile and working her way closer. The emergency doors had sealed her between sections of the floor above, but if she had any decent lock-hacking skills—and Mesa was sure she did—that wouldn’t stall her for long.

  “I think she’s nearby,” Rameez said.

  “Which one?” Mesa asked, with more venom in her tone than she’d intended. She hoped Rameez knew the vitriol wasn’t directed toward him.

  “Both. One above, and the other is on the same floor as you.”

  “I saw the pulse tracker on this floor. It’s been stationary.”

  “The area is marked off as a medical lab space. That’s where you’ll find Alice Xie Number Two.”

  “Oh, goodie.”

  “Are you OK?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, disconnecting the net. She’d spotted the instrument she had in mind. With a faint glimmer in her eye, she picked up a twenty-four-inch long-handle pipe wrench. She admired the cherry-red finish and gave it a few practice swings.

  “All right, bitch,” she said, “let’s do this.”

  After prying open the elevator doors she muscled herself halfway up the shaft to the floor above, then rushed down the stairs two at a time. Alice was growing increasingly annoyed. Hacking through the electronic locks of the emergency doors did nothing to sooth her agitation. At one point, simply to relieve the mounting pressure of anger, she’d banged the base of her sword against the wall several times, swearing loudly.

  Killing Mesa Everitt was going to be nothing but absolute pleasure.

  She worked her way to the stairwell at the opposite end of the floor, then as she descended into the bowels of the ship, the realization of what lay below dawned on her. The girl would be there, certainly, as would one other soul—Alice Xie, or at least one of the other copies of her. The quad, she recalled.

  Schaeffer had taken no small amount of pleasure in replicating Alice’s memories into multiple hosts and disfiguring and dismantling them for her benefit. He got off on it—sexually, she assumed, but he certainly enjoyed the power over her that he was able to demonstrate. He lorded it over her constantly. The quad had been the most successful of the implantation experiments, and Schaeffer had taken much pleasure in breaking her, slowly and continuously over the last few years. He had taken even greater joy in sharing the results of her degradation with the Alice Xie that inhabited Jade’s body. Stuck in the white data room, that Alice had vowed to kill him by any means possible. Each thread of sanity that had snapped in the quad’s mind had strengthened her resolve to escape the white room.

  Over time, though, the isolation ravaged her. Her strong backbone and defiance eventually gave way to platitudes and bargaining. That, then, led to enormous regret and self-recrimination, which, in turn, fueled her constant desire to eliminate Schaeffer.

  Killing him was a long, drawn-out process, and it had cost her considerably. The data archives she had loosed into the wild had become nothing more than pawns in her elaborate game for revenge. She had been willing to sacrifice them in order to achieve her own goals. Some, like Mesa, would call her a monster for it. She thought of herself as shrewd.

  She bargained and cajoled, always thinking of the next step, planning in layers. Schaeffer was afraid of outside complications and demanded complete validity in his testing. Controls, trials, and tests continuously probed for faults in her stolen methods and extrapolations toward achieving body-shifting. Eventually, he had consented to implanting her in a functional body—Jade.

  In the end, Jade was no more of a loss than the archivers had been.

  She slowly marched down the industrial walkway, keenly aware of Mesa’s presence and wary of potential traps. She reached the end of the hall and stood before an open door.

  The interior of the room was so antiseptically white she wanted to scream. Instead, she smiled.

  Mesa stood before her, clearly favoring one leg. Bruised, battered, she held a long, red wrench beside her leg.

  “Nǐhǎo,” Alice said, raising the sword before her.

  “Nǐhǎo,” Mesa said, returning the greeting and raising the wrench.

  Both women strode forward, weapons at the ready, weighing each other’s intent and seriousness.

  While Mesa was hardly a proficient duelist, she knew enough to avoid the blade. She also knew she could not afford a long, drawn-out battle. She had no time for thrust-and-parry bullshit.

  She sprang forward, taking Alice off guard, and swung the wrench low as she stepped in too close for Alice to be able to swing. She knocked the blade away and used the head of the wrench to club Alice in the knees.

  Alice raised a leg, catching the blow along her shin and calf.

  Mesa used the shock of pain to grapple the woman in her arms, jabbing violently at her with the metal butt, bringing it up beneath her chin. Teeth rattled, then Alice was working to get a free arm between them. She used the base of the dao’s hilt to strike at Mesa’s face.

  Mesa raised both arms, pushing Alice’s arms away, and reared back her head to deliver a powerful head-butt. The bone’s in Alice’s cheeks and nose fractured, and she stumbled back, slumping.

  Standing over her, Mesa readied herself to finish it once and for all. She lifted the wrench, set to cave in Alice’s skull. She tried as hard as she could to disassociate, but all she saw was Jade. Her friend.

 
She knew Jade wasn’t in there. Her form had become nothing more than a shell hiding a monster, but killing her was still difficult. Killing Alice meant desecrating her friend, a woman who had been her companion, if only briefly, once upon a time.

  Her moment of hesitation was all Alice needed, though. Alice’s foot swept out, kicking Mesa’s feet out from under her. Then Alice was on top of her, her hands scrabbling at Mesa’s face, seeking a soft, vulnerable area.

  She craned her neck, straining her face away from probing fingers while she tried to crawl out from beneath her attacker. Soft hands smelling faintly of jasmine pressed against the sides of her face while thumbs jammed into both of her eyes.

  Mesa screamed as the points of Alice’s nails dug into the corners of her eye sockets and an immeasurable painful weight pressed down against the soft jelly orbs. Tears flowed as a thumbnail punched through the sclera, and Mesa screamed, trying to get her arms up, to break away from the pain.

  Alice’s nail stabbed deeper into her eye and tore across her cornea. Blood flooded the sclera as vessels ruptured and exploded, turning her world a hazy red.

  Mesa roared, sending a tight, powerful fist into the side of Alice’s face, rocking the woman enough to relieve the painful torquing. She rolled, cradling the ruined socket in the cup of her palm, her hand turning slick from the carnage.

  She needed to find the wrench, or the dao… something, anything, before—

  Alice was on top of her again, sending a flurry of kicks across her spine and hips, stomping hard against her bones with her heel. It hurt but was not nearly enough to distract from the hammering throbs in her skull.

  A part of her, a small, quiet voice full of fear, spoke in the back of Mesa’s mind, telling her to let go, that she had lost the fight. She recognized the voice as her own, and she wondered how much of it was true, if she believed any of it at all.