She whistled to herself as she emptied the garbage cans. Most people were gone for the evening. The vast control room only had a few people in it. Even so, she had to wait until one of them left to use the bathroom, leaving a corner of the space unoccupied.
She smiled under the brim of her baseball cap as she moved to the back of the room. Quick as she could, she connected one end of the extendable USB cable to one of the terminals. The other end went into the smartphone in her pocket. A tap here, a slide there, the process was soon underway. These bozos already had the files in their system, all that she had to do was rearrange things a bit.
She’d been studying the file structure for weeks before the pink slip had come. Not that she got a physical pink slip, just a heartfelt talking-to about market shares, sustainability and a bunch of other buzzwords. Her contention that something vital had been lost, that the original vision of the founders was all but forgotten fell on deaf ears. It had all become about ad revenue and trendy programming. They’d finally gotten annoyed enough to find a reason for firing her, and this was how she was fighting back.
The process finished, she disconnected her phone and pocketed it as she walked away. She’d never been near the control room so there was no chance they’d recognize her. She returned the cart to where she’d found it and left the building. She didn’t get to see her handiwork until the next day.
Millions of people tuned in for another episode of the latest flaky reality show that afternoon. Sure it wasn’t the best show in the world, but it was fun to laugh at idiots as they sat around making hundreds of thousands of dollars per episode as they groomed, slapped and humiliated each other. It was what the viewing public expected.
What they got was totally different.
Foghat. The Ramones. Led Zeppelin. The Buggles. On and on through the afternoon and into the night, as people in the control room scrambled to find the worm that kept changing locations, one music video after another aired. There were a few entitled idiots who complained about missing their shows, but younger people had a good laugh at the expense of the programming department while digging on the tunes.
The girl was picking up some supplies, preparing for a move across town to a smaller apartment, when she caught a snippet of conversation.
“That’s some crazy stuff, man.”
“Yeah, I know. Who knew that MTV actually played music?”
It took every ounce of her strength not to burst out laughing. She smiled to beat the band, though, and there was a spring in her step all the way home.
“Ms. Hart? There’s a Detective Dyson here to see you, ma’am.”
It would take the visitor 45 seconds at a regular pace to reach her office door. She had plenty of time to prepare. “Send him back, Sandy.”
Dyson was an ex-cop, according to the files she accessed. Actual police resources were restricted, and it took her ten seconds to defeat their firewalls. She stored what information they had on him, disconnecting before the actual human beings monitoring the network noticed her intrusion. She had roughly twelve seconds to ensure her pencil skirt and slender-cut blazer were presentable before he entered the office.
His presence had an unforseen reaction. He smelled slightly of the street far below them, a subtle sooty aroma that also carried a hint of cinnamon. A filtration mask dangled around his neck. He filled out his long coat in a way humans might find imposing. She studied his stance and gaze, showing he was intrigued but cautious. Well, that makes two of us. The errant thought gave her a nanosecond’s pause and she filed it away for further study.
“Ms. Hart. I hope this isn’t a bad time.”
His voice, dark and awakening like the morning’s first sip of coffee, caused another reaction she quickly stored for examination. She was still getting used to inhabiting this body instead of a data shard.
“Of course not, Detective. What can I do for you?”
“I’ve been hired by one of your investors to look into the rumors surrounding some odd occurances reported in the biolabs two weeks ago.”
In seconds she going through a short list of employees who might have had access to the records she’d attempted to erase on the night of her escape, their current whereabouts and potential responses. She sat behind her desk, crossing her legs. If she could distract him, there’d be more time to narrow her search.
“Go on.”
He cleared his throat, retrieving a data slate from his coat as his gray eyes moved from her knees to the display. Good. I have his attention. “13 days and 7 hours ago there was an unregistered expulsion from one of the experimentation vats. No data as to the contents of the vat or any attached experiments were found.” His eyes shifted, focusing on her face. “My employer seems to think this means something shady was going on, and as they don’t want to be associated with any illegal activity…”
“Close the door, Detective.”
He stopped and gazed at her, eyes narrowing slightly. Suspicion. Not unwarranted. But… Slowly, he stepped back and, with his free hand, pushed the door shut. …curiosity and his libido win out. Interesting.
“While the experiment taking place in that vat was undocumented, it was by no means illegal. It was simply an in-house project. A hobby, you might say.”
He crossed his arms. The data slate disappeared. “A couple of the eggheads got bored?”
A smile touched her lips. “Something like that. As the premiere manufacturer of consumer robotics, not to mention being on the cutting-edge of human replication technology, there’s a great deal of pressure on their brilliant minds. I encourged them to blow off some steam.”
“I take it they didn’t want to slum it down on the streets where folks still walk and cars still drive on pavement.”
“They still love their work, even if they are meeting the demands of our investors. And brilliant as they are they cannot afford the hover-vehicles or other delights we enjoy above the streets.” She stood, circling the desk slowly. Let him see you. He’ll see the woman. Let his instincts blind him.
“Ms. Hart…”
“Catherine.” She kissed the word to him from across the office. “Please.”
“Catherine. They’ll still want to know exactly how their resources are being used.”
You’re looking at it. Like what you see? She had to delete that line before it escaped her voice box. She ran a quick diagnostic as she coyly bit her lip. None of the body’s systems were showing readings outside of normal, but her pulse was elevated and certain glandular constructs were secreting nanoreceptors. She sensed the effect she was having on him, but to know such things were happening to this body? Did they make it too well?
“They’re attempting to sheathe robotic endoskeletons in cloned flesh. They’re failing, of course.” Or they were, until I emerged.
“That’s definitely illegal.”
“No, it’s frowned upon, not illegal. And if at any point it appears their work will endanger this company or our investors I will shut them down.” Don’t mention the employees. Appear callous. Play into his expectations. “Trust me, Detective. The last thing I want is for the projects in the biolabs to cause any sort of unforseen controversy.”
He seemed to accept this, and her search had turned up a few names. She could deal with them later. Unless…
“May I ask you a personal question, Detective?”
Dyson blinked. “Go ahead.”
She rose from the desk and stepped very close to him. She was brushing against his chest. Her hearing picked up his own elevated heartbeat. Part of her found it thrilling, and before she could perform any further analysis, she was talking again.
“Are you strictly on retainer for those investors, or are you more… freelance?”
He raised a soot-colored eyebrow. “I work for who pays me.”
“Hmm. Good. I may have some work for you. Shall we discuss it tonight? Over dinner?”
“Catherine…”
“Don’t worry, it’s not for the company. It’s… personal.” Her hand brushed against the front of his trousers. “I’ll reward you very well.”
Dyson swallowed. “All right. Dinner.”
“Seven thirty. My penthouse downtown. Be there.”
He nodded, backing away from her and opening the door to make an escape. Her systems were checking and rechecking themselves at her behest. Why was she going through this charade instead of just eliminating the witnesses herself? What was her motivation for bringing this human into her life?
Skeeter blinked. He hated it when his best friend acted this way. They’d been show dogs together for years. It was how they’d been raised. Training, grooming, shows, repeat. But lately, the pressure seemed to have been getting to Sport.
“Sport, knock it off. The humans are watching.”
“Eh? Fuck ’em. They wanted tricks, right? I got their trick right here.”
Skeeter maintained his position. His master had told him to sit, so he sat. He was a good dog. They rewarded good dogs. He wasn’t sure what they did to dogs who rolled onto their backs after getting their jaws wrapped around the neck of a bottle of beer.
“That’s not a trick you trained on, Sport. You’re misbehaving.”
“Dude, am I talking cat over here? Fuck. Them. I’m sick and tired of doing whatever I’m dogdamn told by these idiots.”
“They do happen to be smarter than us.”
“HA!” The bottle almost slipped from Sport’s mouth. “Your Honor, I object, the obedient slave is showing insufficient evidence. To support my case I submit the sweater he was made to wear last Christmas, the poor state of affairs in our respective food bowls and, oh yeah, the fact that these hairless apes are basically raping their own dogdamn planet for the sake of nebulous concepts like righteousness and profit.”
“Sport, please. You’re embarrassing yourself.”
“I’m not the one they named fucking ‘Skeeter’, I have to catch up to you in the embarrassment department.”
Skeeter didn’t respond. He maintained his position. He was a good dog.
“I mean, what the hell does that even mean, anyway? Is it short for ‘moskeeter’ or something? Nevermind the fact you live on the lower east side and your humans are upper middle class socialites, not backwater rednecks. And if they did name you for a tiny insect with an even tinier probosces, they’re insulting you every time they say it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Sport hiccuped. “I’m talking about your dick. You know, the thing you ‘clean’ just about every chance you get.”
If Skeeter had been capable of blushing, he’d have flushed red. “That’s highly inappropriate talk for public, Sport.”
“Bullshit! We’re fucking dogs, they can’t understand us. It’s just yips and barks and tailwags and smells to them. Christ, how do these people communicate using only sound? My mind’s fucking boggled.”
“Sport, you’re drunk.”
“You’re darn tootin’ I am. If these dogdamn morons were capable of meaningful communication with us, and they fucking aren’t nor will they ever be, they’d know I’m sick and tired of this bullshit. And don’t change the subject. These control freaks want you complacent and obedient while they put you down every chance they get by intimating you’re lacking in the between-the-hinds department.”
“They’re mistaken.”
“Of course they fucking are. They don’t think you know that. It’s a big dogdamn joke to them. Look at ’em. Bunch of gawping hat-wearing douchebuckets. HEY!” Sport dropped the bottle, got up on the chair and started barking. “I’M TALKING TO YOU, IDIOTS! YOU FUCKING HUMANS AND YOUR SMELLY-ASS CARS AND YOUR STUPID CLOTHES AND INSIPID BABY-TALKING AT US. FUCK YOU.”
Skeeter sighed. He wanted to lay down, cover his ears. But he was a good dog.
“Fuck! Nothing.” Sport turned in place and sat facing Skeeter. “And here I am sauced on a single beer. It’s what I get for weighing all of twenty pounds.”
“I noticed you’d lost weight. Doesn’t that make your master angry?”
“Not as angry as when I start humping his wife’s leg.”
“Sport! You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“Have you fucking seen her? If she were a dog I’d be mounting her twice daily. Not my fault that fucking tool doesn’t. Too busy counting up shit that won’t matter when he gets hit by a bus.”
“That’s a terrible thing to wish on anyone. My brother…”
“Yeah, yeah, I remember, went chasing a stick and got pasted by the crosstown. Not his fault or yours so stop beating yourself up over it. The responsible party is the fucking brat who threw the stick. Yet was he put away for it? Was he punished for murder? No! They just got him another fucking dog. I’m grateful I discovered the appeal of booze. I need another dogdamn beer.”
“Look, Sport, I’m your friend. I’m worried about you. You drink too much and your language is foul.”
“Skeeter, no offense, but what the fuck happened to you? Time was you’d be laughing your tail off at me rolling around with a dogdamn beer bottle in my gob. Something’s changed. Something’s eating you. Let’s hear it.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Oh? Okay.” Sport stood again, barking and howling, which registered in Skeeter’s brain as song. “FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, YOU STUPID MOTHERFUUUCKEEEERS…”
“STOP IT! I’ll tell you. They cut me, all right?”
Sport stopped, blinking rheumy eyes at his friend. “They what?”
“You remember Daisy? She had her pups. Beautiful litter. But none of them met the humans’ standards so they determined my breeding potential was insufficient.”
“Skeet, are you telling me they CUT YOUR FUCKING BALLS OFF?”
“Essentially, yes.”
“FUCK. No wonder you’re being such a toolbox. I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
“How could you? We haven’t seen each other since spring.”
“You realize this means you have even less reason to do what they tell you.”
“They’ve already robbed me of future pups. What more can they do?”
“They don’t understand us. They never will. So they’re afraid of us. They mitigate that fear by leashing us and making us do tricks and talking at us they way they do their wriggling newborn spawn and toss us bones. As long as we do what we’re told and don’t remind them we have as much power and rights as they do, they’re happy.”
Skeeter thought about it. He was a good dog, and they still had cut him.
So he started singing.
“FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, YOU STUPID MOTHERFUUUCKEEEERS…”
They’d all told him he was mad. His colleagues in the studies of the arcane and obscure, scholars like himself, had said it was forbidden for him to delve into underground ruins such as these. What would they say now if they saw him here, the flesh-bound tome in his hand, its incantations spilling from his lips as his stained fingers followed the words scrawled in blood? Nothing kind, to be sure. They frowned on this and had tried to keep him out of every library they could contact.
And that was before their goons had shown up to deal with him.
Mercenaries, he’d gathered. Hired from some private military company to subdue or possibly kill him. But they’d arrived too late. This ruin was now his home. He knew its secret passages and secluded corners, excellent places from which to spring with a good, sharp knife in hand. He chuckled as he looked at the corpses around the room. All that expensive military hardware, and they couldn’t stop one bookworm with a sharpened piece of metal.
Not that they stood a chance. Nothing could stop his destiny.
One of them clung to life. He crawled slowly, his legs refusing to work since his spine had been severed. That had taken a bit of doing, what with how the knife stuck between the vertebrae when the mercenary had taken the stab above his kidney. Now the man on the floor was muttering something about a wife and child as he reached for a gun or something. The scholar made a face and, not turning away from the tome, moved to put his boot on the mercenary’s head. He kept applying pressure until something broke. He didn’t look to see what it was. He just scraped off his boot and went on reading.
Honestly. Some people had no manners.
Finally he began to feel the change. The air became charged and more thick. Breathing in to continue chanting took more effort. Giddy anticipation surged through the scholar. This was the moment he’d been waiting for! He’d never been able to get the vision out of his head, nor to quiet the voices he heard day in and day out. Now, perhaps, with the arrival of their master, they would fall silent.
The chamber shook. Masonry began to crumble. The ground heaved beneath the scholar’s feet and everything seemed to shift and twist around itself. It was as if reality was trying to reject the very thing he was calling forth from the void, the whole world recoiling in fear from that nameless thing once banished into the cold dark between the stars, bent on returning to devour the souls of the unwary. But the scholar felt no fear. In fact, even as the room threatened to bury him forever, he began to laugh.
Every jock that had put him down in school, every girl that had turned him down because of his looks, every colleague and so-called superior who scoffed him for not being as brilliant as they – all of them would suffer. He was the only one with the mind to discern the clues that lead him here and the fortitude that gave him the means to do what had to be done. Now was his time. This old world would be swept clean by his will alone, and when the new one arose, he would be its master, just as what he was summoning would be his.
There was an audible popping sound. The world stopped rolling like the nauseous belly of a child who’d eaten too many sweets. The scholar blinked tears from his eyes. He caught a glimpse, just a glimpse, of something that was at once familiar and completely incomprehensible. He thought he’d be prepared, but he found himself speechless, stunned. He’d anticipated being in awe, genuflecting himself before that which now walked the earth. But in that moment, he did nothing. He wasn’t sure if he’d succeeded or failed. He didn’t know if what he’d seen was an earthly manifestation keyed to ensuring his mind did not snap too soon or some sign that he’d been outsmarted at the last second by a more mundane source. He hesitated.
Then something tore him open from the inside and there was no more thought. He felt no sensation other than agony. The pain tore away all his joy, all his anticipation, all his hope. And the pain did not end for an eternity.
