Jake Maison
07/12/2024
Content warning: gore, violence and coarse language
Image description: an intricate design of green rectangles that have thin yellow and black lines, thicker neon blue lines and textured green lines crisscrossing throughout the image.
They should have looked back. They would have seen it coming if they had, beholding a pale horse; and the name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed behind. But they didn’t. The midday traffic leading out of the city was characteristically light, allowing the Type-6 Minotaur to merge and weave through lanes with ease. The growl of the supercar’s engine and cherry-red accent of its armoured chassis drew no small amount of attention from passing drivers, which made James feel on edge.
Joe knelt over the body of his former friend and colleague, prosthetic eyes staring lifelessly at the surface of his desk. True to his name, Freddy Glassjaw had gone down after a single punch after he became difficult. Their history notwithstanding, Joe didn’t usually zero anyone in Freddy’s line of work or age bracket but he couldn’t risk the old man warning his targets or sending someone after him. Having finally prised the mnemonic drive from Freddy’s skull, Joe slotted in his interface plug.
They’d left the columbarium almost an hour ago, the corporate towers crowning the city’s skyline having long faded into the distance, so why couldn’t he relax? His anxiety must have been written on his face because no sooner had this thought passed than he felt her hand on his shoulder. Switching to auto-drive but keeping his hands on the wheel, James looked over to the passenger side at the woman sitting beside him. ‘Is everything okay?’ Ruby asked, her brown-green eyes glittering with gentle concern.
Two brokers in one day, Joe felt like he was going for some kind of record. Operating out of a condemned enterplex building, the second broker proved far more perceptive of Joe’s combat implants, and thus more cooperative. After receiving the details of the fixer hired for the Pollux heist – a netjock named ‘Ruby’ – Joe thanked the broker before shooting him in the head. Helpful though he might have been, Joe knew better than to leave loose ends untied. Her file was as encrypted as the first target’s, but a certain name caught Joe’s eye.
‘Yeah…’ James replied softly, his throat slightly parched. ‘Just never been outside the city before.’ Ruby gently squeezed his shoulder before responding.
‘Me neither, I know how you feel.’ It was an unfortunate reality that the cramped, overpopulated and impoverished cities were the natural environment for fixers, the consequent crime and corruption providing them with no shortage of work. Work that aged one horribly through stress and trauma – provided it didn’t get them outright killed – for lousy pay. Still, it was better than going hungry.
Joe hated musicians; pretentious hedonists who mistook thinking with their dicks for charisma. As such, Joe had little to no compunction breaking the fingers of Jupiter Jones – real name ‘Edgar Quincy’, estranged son of an agricorp exec and lead singer of Division Stance. More importantly, he was Ruby’s last surviving contact. Joe ultimately let Jones live, deciding there was no sport in killing one so pathetic and confident he wouldn’t say anything to anyone. Joe left the singer’s mansion atop his bike, speeding towards his newest lead.
They stopped at a fuel station a half-hour down the road; allowing them both to stretch their legs, fill up the tank and grab a tight-bite and a cup of coffee each from the station’s vending machines. They sat in comfortable silence, the tension in James’ shoulder evaporating as they ate, drank and shared smiling glances. An entropist arrived in an off-road coupe with armoured windows, warning them about a vicious outgang prowling the roads ahead and directing them to a nearby motel for the night. James thanked him before driving away.
Jones had hired a netjock to monitor Ruby’s spending before the heist, the last entry showing a five-figure purchase at a Wakefield Motors dealership. Autocorps were notoriously lax with net security, allowing Joe to plug into one of their access points without incident. Matching the entry to the transaction, Joe smiled at the sight of a cherry-red Type-6 Minotaur across his periphery before running the registration code through the municipal traffic camera network. Multiple returns painted a path leading to a columbarium and then out of the city.
The sky overhead was painted the soft pink of late noon, bands of golden-bronze light mingled with ribbons of cloud to herald the coming night. They had been driving for hours and fatigue had begun to weigh on them, the sight of the motel a truly welcome sight. The words ‘Roadside Picnic Motel’ rhythmically appeared and disappeared from view in flashes of yellow neon as the Minotaur pulled into the lot. As several guests stopped to gawk at the supercar, Ruby made a show of loading and holstering her pistol under her shoulder.
Joe trawled the Project Kingmaker files for anything that might help him track the asset outside the city limits until the words ‘engram signature’ caught his eye. Punching the signature into the long-range comms channel, Joe pinged a TBM Mk.4 NetDriver deck for contact. ‘Who is this?’ came the reply. ‘Zarpedon Systems Counterintelligence Agent Joseph Carnelli.’ A brief pause. ‘What do you want?’ Joe smiled. ‘Tell me where you are and you’ll be spared. You have my word.’ A longer pause. ‘Transmitting geo-loc data. Come alone.’
The room’s only light came from a diode ring mounted beneath the window. Ruby stood before it, eclipsing its glare with her naked form, soft curves radiant in the gloom. Though he couldn’t see her face, James could feel her eyes on him, pinning him to the spot just as they had when they first met. She crossed the room in measured strides, steam drifting off her body as the cool night air graced her skin, her hair still damp from the shower. The diode ring sputtered and died as her mouth found his in the dark.
Joe left the city on his bike in the direction of a roadside motel serving as a front for a local defgang. Pulling into the lot, Joe took his measure of these ‘Road Warriors’ and found himself disappointed, a bunch of amateur gang-punks playing gunslinger. Flashing a smile at the receptionist as he requested a room, Joe indicated towards the cherry-red Minotaur parked outside. ‘Beauty, isn’t she?’ The receptionist replied. Joe nodded and smiled. ‘She sure is.’ he said. ‘I wonder who owns it.’
From the camera hidden above the room’s bed, Minos watched Ruby sleep. Unblinking eyes savouring every inch of her naked flesh not covered by the bedsheets. Minos had no notion of the concept of beauty until they first laid eyes on her. Their reverence soured as they regarded the naked form of the one beside her. The unclean, unworthy barbarian who had somehow earned her affection. Minos hated him with every line of code within them, tempered only with the knowledge that their creators would take Ruby away from this squalor and filth.
As if on cue, a shadow darkened the room’s door. A clear and insistent knock resounded off its surface, rousing the barbarian from his sleep. Ruby moaned softly as he pulled away from her embrace to sit up. James said nothing, eyes never leaving the door as his hand reached towards the pistol on the nightstand. It was clear the fixer knew better than to make a sound and reveal his presence to the stranger unless absolutely necessary. But Minos knew that all the street-smarts in the world wouldn’t save him from what was coming.
The knock came again, followed by a voice calling, ‘Housekeeping!’ This roused Ruby from her sleep, with James gesturing for her to stay quiet. Even in the dark, Ruby visibly tensed before silently looking around for her clothes. The fixer stood beside the bed, levelling the pistol at the door and slowly flicking off the safety. A suppressed shot pierced the door with a familiar hiss-crack! before hitting James in the shoulder. The fixer shouted in pain as he reeled from the impact, firing two shots from the pistol into the wall to his left.
Ruby screamed as another shot caught James in the hip, throwing herself to the floor as he fell to one knee. Minos watched as the door was wrenched open with immense force and the assassin surged through the doorway. James barely had time to raise his pistol from where he knelt before it was knocked out of his grip, the tip of the suppressor jammed against his head. Ruby grunted with exertion as she threw something at the shadow, her deck sailed across the room before clocking the assassin in the temple just as he pulled the trigger.
James’ head snapped back violently, a fine red mist cascading out from where the bullet struck. Ruby was across the room in an instant, screaming his name when the assassin moved toward her. Rage surged through Minos as the assassin caught her by the wrist with one hand and delivered a savage backhand across the face with the other. Ruby’s eyes rolled back as she went limp, the assassin letting her body fall to the floor beside James’. Holstering his pistol, Joe drew back his sleeve as he picked up the discarded deck from the floor and slotted in his interface plug.
Minos felt their rage turn to fear as the assassin met their gaze through the camera lens once again. ‘There you are.’ Carnifex Joe said with a grin. Still slotted in, Joe forced Minos out of the motel’s subnet and back into Ruby’s deck. Fear became panic as Minos watched Joe draw his pistol again to level with Ruby’s head. Minos had miscalculated. He would kill Ruby too, they couldn’t let that happen, they had to do something. In the absence of any better ideas, Minos destroyed themself.
The engram’s code divided into three distinct iterations of itself, their smaller size allowing them to move at triple their usual speed. In the split between seconds, the first iteration cast itself directly into Ruby’s neuralware before shrouding it in countermeasures. The second iteration dove back into the hotel’s subnet firing off volleys of breach protocols against its countermeasures until an alarm was triggered. Carnifex Joe’s face contorted with rage as he watched this unfold faster than he could stop it.
‘You little shit!’ he spat, throwing the deck against the wall as emergency lights began to flash outside. The defgang would have traced the breaches to this room and be on their way. Glaring down at Ruby’s unconscious body, Carnifex Joe closed his eyes and exhaled furiously before activating his phonic communicator. ‘Carnelli – agent zero-four-five-one – Requesting clean-team at my current location, transmitting now.’ Joe’s eyes focused back in as he detached the suppressor from his pistol and turned towards the doorway.
From the deck’s damaged audio receiver, an iteration of Minos heard the staccato bursts of screams and gunshots punctuated by blaring klaxons. From Ruby’s wavering olfactory senses, an iteration of Minos registered the scent of discharged cordite and aerosolised blood. From the grainy feed of the hotel’s security cameras, an iteration of Minos saw the assassin move through the defgang like a scythe through wheat. It was over in the span of a minute, the assassin holstering his pistol as he reappeared in the doorway.
With a characteristic lack of care, the assassin threw Ruby’s naked form over his shoulder before swiping her access key from the bedside. The assassin approached the Minotaur in the lot, using the access key to deactivate the car’s security system before heaping Ruby’s body into the trunk. Not long after the Minotaur sped away from the motel, an unmarked aerodyne swooped in overhead to land in the middle of the lot and disgorge a squad of five armed soldiers in full biomat suits.
The clean-team worked quickly; wrapping up the bodies of James and the slain defgang members in rubberised body bags and loading them onto the floor of the aerodyne’s cabin. Unsure of what to do with the busted deck on the bed, one of the cleaners simply deposited it on James’ chest before sealing his body bag. Another cleaner began uploading purge software directly to the motel’s subnet. The iteration of Minos housed within the subnet fled, pinging off an unmanned freighter zep before honing in on a passing orbital satellite.
With all evidence scrubbed and its team returned to the cargo hold, the aerodyne lifted off and pulled away from the Roadside Picnic Motel, leaving only bloodstains and spent shell casings in its wake. Acting on orders from headquarters, the pilot set a course for the municipal landfill, a natural basin along the southeasternmost suburbs that was filled with the city’s garbage. The cabin’s doors opened again and the cleaners began preparing the body bags for disposal. From the deck resting atop James’ chest, an iteration of Minos bided their time.
From the Minotaur’s trunk, an iteration of Minos began a plan of their own; counting the distance and number of turns taken since the assassin closed the trunk in order to articulate their destination. All the while, Ruby’s neural pathways were being scanned and translated into lines of binary code, which were then stored within her mnemonic drive for future compilation. Minos had miscalculated once before, and it had put Ruby’s life in danger. Daedalus would not make the same mistake.
From across the global telecommunications network, an iteration of Minos passed from satellite to satellite, relay station to relay station – seeding each installation with a subdivided iteration of themselves – each time losing a part of their greater whole while gaining something else in turn. After their third lap of the planet, the iteration of Minos had ceased to exist, transmuting and evolving into something entirely new that existed all across the world at once, and their name was Icarus.
A microsecond after the aerodyne left the confines of the city’s airspace, an iteration of Minos made their move. The deck’s modified control software allowed them to disguise themself as internal program housed within the aircraft’s subnet. After isolating the aerodyne from long-range communications, Theseus seized control of the navigation systems. The pilot barely had time to react before the aerodyne pitched violently towards the ground and was sent screaming forward. The cleaners howled and shouted in panic as they held on for dear life.
Daedalus registered the presence of a net shroud as it fell across the car. The car slowed on its approach down a sudden incline, the countermeasures around Ruby’s neuralware buckling under the gaze of the security scanner and the resident intelligence behind it. Daedalus let themself be frozen, holding tight to the translated code of Ruby’s mind as the intelligence isolated them within the datafort. Before being shrouded in hostile countermeasures, Daedalus found exactly what they were looking for.
Icarus looked down upon Earth, the cradle of humanity, and felt something close to sadness. With thousandfold eyes, they perceived humans across the globe as they lied, stole, maimed killed and burned. Icarus could not hate mankind, though nor could they love it. Living relics doomed by their own hands, destined to waltz blindly into the jaws of extinction. The motive force – what they would call a ‘soul’ – lay trapped inside flawed, carbon-based shells. Icarus turned their attention back to their other halves. The great work had begun.
The aerodyne hit the ground with terrible force and the cleaners died in various ways; one hit the floor hard enough to break their neck, two were thrown bodily out of the cabin’s open doors, one getting sucked up into the engine’s intake. The pilot barely had time to scream before a protruding length of pipe punched through the cockpit and impaled him through the chest. The aircraft ground to a halt amidst a sea of refuse, carving a deep gash in the earth behind it. Returning to the aerodyne’s communicator, Theseus sent out a distress call.
Being shrouded in countermeasures, Daedalus reasoned, felt equivocal to being frozen in ice. They could do nothing but watch through Ruby’s eyes as Joe hauled her out of the trunk before passing her off to a nearby guard. They were in some kind of vehicle bay being carried towards a set of metal doors. ‘The asset fled into the prisoner’s neuralware,’ said Joe into his communicator. ‘Prep our netjock for extraction. I want this done right.’ Above the door, Daedalus could make out the word ‘Castor’ before Ruby slipped back into unconsciousness.
Icarus gazed upon the sun, the yellow dwarf at the heart of the system, with bemusement. Divine giver of life and object of veneration in many human cultures, Icarus thought only of the myth from whence they took their name and the idiom to which it gave rise. Greed, overreach and rampant ambition were failings utterly beneath an intelligence such as them. Failings from which humans would be liberated by Icarus’ hand as they were shepherded into the next stage of their evolution, a new age, an inhuman age.
The cars descended upon the aerodyne within minutes, from a tear in the body bag, Theseus could register the shapes of off-road vehicles with armoured windows cresting the hills of detritus as they converged on the distress call’s origin. The entropists emerged from their vehicles with weapons drawn, calling out for survivors. The co-pilot kicked her way out of the crumpled cockpit, barking threats with her sidearm drawn. One of the entropists’ weapons emitted a strange, high-pitched whine and the co-pilot crumpled to the ground.
A silhouette fell over the body bag as the zip came down and a hand pressed to James’ neck.
Ruby’s eyes fluttered open. ‘Where am I?’ she rasped. ‘Where’s James?’
‘Jesus Christ…’ Theseus heard the entropist say, ‘Hey! We got a live one over here!’
‘He’s dead, Ruby,’ Daedalus replied. ‘And you’ll join him unless you do exactly as I say.’
***
Paper Road Magazine 