Time Heist

by Anthony Vicino

  He tossed a tiny silver brick into my lap.

  "What's thi—" I started to say when the brick melted into a pool of silver that spread up my arm. A cold burn shocked my system, instigating an immediate pulse of panic that accompanied the rat-a-tat-tat of my heart firing on full-auto.

  The liquid spread quickly, a raging fire leaping from nerve to nerve, racing north and south along the axis of my body, covering everything in its path.

  I tried to scream, but all that came out was a shudder.

  The ice reached my throat. Panic hit a climax. A bunker-busting, galaxy-destroying blast of pure, unadulterated I'm-going-to-be-buried-alive panic.

  I blinked hard and fast. Droplets of sweat dripping down my cheek were absorbed into the plague encasing me in a silver tomb.

  Why had we trusted Lou? Stupid.

  But then the liquid slid across my retina, obscuring the world in a silver sheen, like moonlight reflected off a field of virgin snow.

  It closed the loop. Covered my body entirely. Then shot a silver dagger through my pupil.

  A fine-tipped needle plunged down my optic nerve and rippled through my temporal lobe before finding something in my brain it liked.

  My nanocomp.

  It latched on, a parasite lighting up my world in the most beautiful way imaginable. Panic and fear were expelled, leaving in their place a new sensation I had no words for.

  The silver bubble popped. The world returned to the vaguest semblance of normal. Ash and Raines shook away their disorientation. A silver film covered their skin; they sparkled. It looked like a light coat of sweat, but the exposed flesh on my arm suggested it was something else.

  Lou leaned against the door of the Peregrine, smiling with a perverse sense of self-satisfaction. I burst out of my chair and was across the room with his throat in my hand as if Zeus himself had thrust a lightning bolt up my ass and set me to hyper-speed.

  "What is this?" I tightened my grip on Lou's throat and lifted him into the air, which by all accounts was a new trick for me.

  "Compliments of Mr. Cross." Lou choked the words out; his cheeks warbled with the effort. I put him down, but kept my grip on his throat. "It's called the OMNI-suit."

  "Is that supposed to mean something to me?"

  "Overlaid Musculo-Neural Interface."

  I gave a blank look.

  "It's a nanite suit of armor," Lou sighed. "Syncs with your nanocomp, ya know? Makes you faster, smarter, stronger. Shit, right now you're practically a superhero."

  Lou didn't understand he should have led off with that before throwing us into a pit of oh my God, I'm going to die.

  I released Lou and turned to Raines, who was rolling her neck to the side and going through a range of motion exercises with her shoulders.

  "Cool," she said.

  "Cross figured you'd need some help if you're gonna go vigilante on Division HQ, yeah?"

  "How'd he know we were coming here?"

  "Call it a hunch."

  "That's one hell of a hunch."

  Lou shrugged and smiled.

  Regardless of how Cross had known, he had a point. Until that very moment, I hadn't formulated what could be considered a good plan for getting into the building. A combination of pure rage and no-longer-youthful exuberance wouldn't be sufficient for the task at hand.

  Ash hopped in place, crackling with potential energy. "Thanks."

  "Where's mine?" Hamilton abandoned his attempt to blend into the wall now that he was certain Lou wasn't there to kill us all.

  "Who's the suit?" Lou asked.

  "Derek Hamilton," the younger man said.

  Lou studied him with the cool indifference of a man accustomed to a harsher pedigree of life. "Charmed."

  Hamilton turned to me. "Well?"

  "Well what? You won't need a suit from in here."

  "What do you mean? I'm coming to help."

  Lou snorted. "For all the good that'll do."

  "I've been trained by Division Security." Hamilton crossed the jet and stood in front of the door, effectively blocking my exit. "I won't be a liability."

  "Doesn't matter. You're not coming."

  "Why?"

  "We're here to stop Malcolm." Raines stepped between us and put her hand on Hamilton's shoulder. She used the tone of voice that suggested she was manipulating him with her unique form of voodoo. "But we need you and your connections to stop Jennings. You can't help us if you get shot."

  Hamilton studied Raines' hand on his shoulder. His face scrunched in concentration, weighing the pros and cons of her argument. Finally, and remarkably, despite Raines' prodding, he said, "No. I'm coming."

  "Good. Glad you see rea—wait..." I paused. "What?"

  "I'm coming," he repeated.

  Yeah, that's what I thought he'd said. Strange. I'd never seen anybody resist Raines' coaxing. Judging by the look on her face, she hadn't either.

  "Fine." I sighed and gestured to Lou. "Give him a suit."

  Hamilton smirked and turned to face Lou. As he did, I punched him in the back of the head where the spine connects to the skull. His body immediately powered down. His legs buckled and he toppled. With amplified reflexes I hopped forward and caught the young District Leader before he smashed face first into the ground.

  "Nice," Lou said.

  "Was that really necessary?" Raines asked.

  "You tried your way. I tried mine." I stepped over Hamilton's prone body, out the Peregrine's open door, and into the cool night air. "Now, unless there are any more objections, what do you say we go stop the bad guys?”

  ***

  Lou had sold the OMNI-suit short. We weren't superheroes; we were gods.

  Ash, who played on a different level of nanite upgrades altogether, blurred between the platoon of soldiers guarding the first floor of the Division building with speeds bordering on teleportation. She was a ghostly apparition, appearing long enough to incapacitate her target before phasing to the next with hands moving at atomic speeds.

  When the dust settled, the only people still standing were on Team Ash.

  We skipped the elevator and took the stairs. Under normal circumstances, ascending the fifty-eight floors separating us from the Stream mainframe would have, at best, put me into cardiac arrest. But now, I'd transformed into something better. Legs churned the ground beneath me in an effortless sprint.

  Five floors shy of our destination, two men poked their heads over the railing and showered us with blue globs of energy that destroyed chunks of flooring with atmosphere-scorching power. We weaved in and through the projectiles as if they were in slow motion.

  Raines summited the stairs first.

  When I arrived, seventeen nanoseconds later, the soldiers were lying on their backs, guns cracked in half beside them.

  Raines panted, not from the exertion of sprinting stairs, or snapping the two guards like pencils, but from unfiltered adrenaline pumping through her system.

  "This is fantastic," she said.

  I couldn't disagree.

  The thought of going back to being a mere human, or rather, an artificial intelligence housed in a human body, would be insufferable. That thought piggybacked on the sobering reminder that regardless of how this ended, I'd be dead by the end of the night.

  Less than an hour left on my Life Tracker. A number that shouldn't matter to one of my kind. Under normal circumstances I could be transferred into a Mobius Cube and wait to be uploaded to a new host.

  These weren't normal circumstances, however. Malcolm's virus years earlier had altered my neural network. There was no cube calibrated for its unique features. No place for my mind to go.

  I was going to die. Years spent as a human had prepared me for that reality. Saving Diana was the only thing driving me forward now. Stopping xenocide wasn't bad motivation, either.

  Raines pressed her nose to a glass window overlooking the adjacent hall. I knew the layout of that building too well. I'd sprinted through those halls in my dreams, only to arrive ten second
s late, too many times.

  Too late to save Diana.

  Raines kicked the door off its hinges and strode into the hall with an air of invincibility. A row of soldiers lined the opposite end of the hall.

  Everything paused. Perfect stillness.

  And then chaos.

  The soldiers released a barrage of blue bolts with the familiar click and whoosh of displaced energy. Raines pirouetted through the minefield of bullets. Ash joined in the dance as they ricocheted off the walls, flipping and spinning like gymnasts through the moving maze of bullets.

  Certain I couldn't do any of that nonsense, even with the OMNI-suit, I stayed in the doorway leading to the stairs.

  They'd cut the distance to the soldiers by half when the world exploded.

  A demon made of fire, smoke, and broken dreams erupted, consuming the hall in a fireball that burned white and then blue. The inferno ignited the air itself.

  Raines and Ash disappeared into the flame. Devoured by the beast.

  My OMNI-suit dilated time to the point that it almost stopped moving altogether.

  "No!" I managed two steps towards the blast thanks to the super-speed afforded by the suit. But speed didn't matter when those steps were in the wrong direction.

  The tidal wave of superheated air and redirected kinetic energy picked me up like an infinitesimal speck of dust in a hurricane, and threw me into the wall.

  I smashed through, falling into the stairwell. I tumbled down before slamming into a wall. My head rebounded, taking a chunk of smart-metal from the wall where it hit. Stunned, but otherwise undamaged, I let out the breath that had been shoved down my throat by the explosion.

  They'd booby trapped the hall, and we'd walked straight into it.

  Or, in the case of Raines and Ash, had done advanced aerial acrobatics into it, which was probably worse.

  Pain radiated down my spine and up my arm. I inspected the exposed skin of my hand. The OMNI-suit's silver sheen was gone. I'd broken my suit, but was otherwise undamaged.

  I doubted Raines or Ash had been so lucky.

  I grunted to my feet and ascended the stairs. Smoke billowed from burning metal, creating a gray haze that choked the air and obscured any sign of life from the other end of the corridor. I stepped into the fog and found a fist coming towards my face.

  It came so quickly I barely registered it and its intention to do me harm.

  I ducked, but too slowly. The knuckles caught me in the temple, redirecting my head into the wall. My world contracted and expanded. I held onto the ground, watching the world swirl from inside the fish bowl as the owner of the fist emerged from the smoke. A ghost in a suit.

  The ghost moved quickly, but without hurry. The three-piece suit it wore sat in stark juxtaposition to the warzone of the hall.

  Daniel Brandt.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Pistols At Dawn

  I've grown accustomed to the fact that my expectations very rarely coincide with reality. So it was hardly a surprise to find I'd wrongly assumed I'd seen the last of Brandt at the Precinct.

  "Didn't expect to see you here," I said, spitting a pink-tinted gob of saliva onto the soot-stained floor.

  "Life's full of little surprises, like that trick you pulled at the Precinct," he said, telegraphing his words with a kick directed at my ribs.

  I rolled sideways, narrowly evading his foot, but completely missing the follow-up, which buried a polished brown leather shoe in my gut. Sprawled out on the floor, the world vibrated like an insect's wings.

  "They didn't tell me you'd have that kind of tech," Brandt said, brushing away a light coat of dust that'd settled on the sleeve of his jacket. "So imagine my surprise when you walked out of the Precinct. No worries, though, you won't be walking out of here so easily."

  Brandt drew a nanite pistol from the holster at his side in a smooth, practiced motion. Light flashed off the barrel of the weapon as he pulled it level with my eyes. Still on my knees, I looked up at the Head of Division Security. I knew nothing about the man preparing to kill me.

  Death at the hands of a stranger stole the intimacy of the moment.

  He rested the muzzle of the gun on my forehead, cold and heavy. I didn't want to die like that. My life wasn't his to take.

  I did the only thing I could. I lunged forward and grabbed the barrel of the gun with one hand. With my other hand I grabbed his ankle.

  BLINK.

  Yanking another person into the Stream against their will takes an enormous amount of mental energy and practice. Practice I'd received thanks to years participating in Lucky Lou's nightly cage fights.

  Brandt wasn't prepared for such a desperate move and I got to him before he could pull the trigger. Any commands issued by his brain were terminated as I relocated the fight to a virtual arena.

  In the Stream, Brandt broke free of my grasp with the strength of a nanotized gorilla. I stumbled away, staggered by the effort required to keep him locked in the Stream with me. If he got out now, I'd find myself with a bullet lodged in my skull.

  "Why do you insist on doing this the hard way?" A long black blade slid from his palm.

  I imagined my own variation of the weapon, and it materialized in my hand. A flat green blade, the color of emeralds in ice; Diana's eyes. "Guess I'm just not ready to die."

  "Pity." Brandt darted forward, the point of his sword scraping lightly across the ground.

  I pivoted, weighting both legs equally, and took a shallow breath through my nose. The Stream inside Brandt's mind smelled heavily of cut wood. Sawdust. Warm and piney. A forest after rainfall. The thick air filled me, warming my throat and chest.

  Brandt stepped within striking distance, and brought his weapon up in a sharp slash that split the air and everything in its path—a path which no longer included me.

  This was the tricky part. One false move and I'd be dead.

  BLINK.

  I yanked the Stream out from under Brandt. Having been on the receiving end of this maneuver, I could say Brandt was probably feeling gutted right about now. Or at least, that's what I hoped.

  We fell out of the Stream hard. My hand, still on his physical wrist, jerked sideways.

  The gun went off next to my head. It boomed.

  Thunder danced down the hall of my ear canal, rattling my brain cage. The nanite-tipped bullet passed within inches of my face. I looked up into Brandt's still partially glazed eyes.

  Before he could fully transition back, I submerged us once again.

  BLINK.

  The world of the Stream filtered past, depositing us in a landscape of jagged black data peaks, swords once more in hand.

  Daniel Brandt reeled from the confusion of rapidly shifting in and out of the Stream under my control. He didn't react as I swiveled left and buried my blade between his ribs.

  He gasped.

  The Stream collapsed around us. Back into reality and the smoke-hazed hall. Brandt clutched the invisible wound to his heart. He struggled for breath, fighting spasming lungs refusing to accept the truth that he wasn't actually dying.

  I pulled Brandt's wrist with me as I stood, twisting it towards the ceiling. My nanocomp dropped me out of hyper-speed, reverting time to its original trudging pace.

  Desperate, he threw himself forward, driving his forehead into my abdomen.

  The gun went off.

  Brandt grunted and stumbled back. I released my grip on his wrist. The Director of Division Security clutched his chest and stared down at his hands, painted with his own blood.

  He dropped to his knees and shook his head with annoyance.

  "Life's little surprises, huh?" he said, taking a wet, final breath.

  Brandt's pupils went out of focus and then rolled towards the ceiling as if somebody had hit the power button at the base of his skull.

  His muscles relaxed and his body slumped onto his side, blood still gushing from the bullet hole in his chest.

  A rose thorn of guilt pricked my conscience, but I didn't have
time or pity to waste on the former Director of Security.

  Streamers of light pierced the fog created from burning wreckage fouling the air with its acidic sting.

  "Raines?" I called out, stepping cautiously into the murk, afraid of taking another super-charged punch to the nose.

  Somebody groaned in response. My head buzzed from Brandt's gun going off next to my ear, but I managed to track the sound with a primitive form of echolocation.

  The fog separated and I found Raines sitting with her back to the wall, her head tilted awkwardly towards the ceiling. Ash knelt, brushing loose clumps of hair from the older woman's face.

  "Is she okay?" I asked, kneeling beside them, my face inches from Raines'. Her pupils drifted, water-filled marbles unable to make sense of the world.

  "I think so," Ash said. Her voice wobbled slightly, which inspired little confidence. "She took the blast hard, but I think she'll be fine."

  Discombobulation after taking an explosion at point-blank range seemed a fair compromise.

  I grabbed Raines' arms and stood, but Ash stopped me.

  "She's no good to us right now." Her voice was modulated, void of all feeling. "She's a liability."

  I shook my head, not caring that she was right. "I'm not leaving her."

  "We can't risk having to watch aft—"

  "Doesn't matter," I said, the vein in my neck throbbing with the exertion. "I won't leave her again."

  Ash opened her mouth, realized the futility, and closed it again.

  "Fine." She forced the word through the thin, tight line of her lips.

  I hoisted Raines, her body an insignificant weight in my hands. Her head lolled drunkenly, bobbing forward onto her chest. She mumbled a string of consonants without meaning.

  I turned to face the door barring our entrance to the mainframe. A dozen soldiers lay in various heaps across the floor. I recognized the tell-tale signs of Ash's handiwork.

  Supporting Raines with her arm over my shoulder, I edged towards the door, afraid if I approached too quickly it would startle the memories haunting the space beyond.

  Diana died in there.

  That truth hit me hard. Sapped my strength. Rooted me to the floor. The memory of that night reached out with razor-tipped fingernails, clawing and clutching at me. It tried to pull me back into the oblivion of its tormenting embrace.