Division Zero (28 page)

“An optimist.” He bowed. “You continue to surprise me.”

Ducking around the A3V, Kirsten squeezed between its nose and the building on her way to the front door, marveling at the fact they had not crashed into the wall. Like most apartment towers, it had a lobby full of mail slots―relics from the days before the dawn of delivery droids. The clerk, if you could call it that, consisted of an android torso mounted on a post behind a small façade of a counter, a first-generation receptionist. Over the years, the veneer disintegrated into a sea of imitation marble chips that clustered at the base like eager spectators come to witness the building’s gradual decay.

The limbless doll twitched at random, sending spirals of dust through the air. As Kirsten got closer, it sparked into a flurry of activity, emitting a series of mangled digitized noises as it tried to speak. Rats zoomed in all directions at the sudden disturbance, making her jump with a startled cry and half-trip over a fallen fake plant. Collecting her wits, she turned away from the antediluvian droid and strode to the elevator. The metal corpse shuddered, trying to face her as she crossed the dreary room. As the doors closed, the destroyed doll reset to face forward with a final digitized crackle.

“Va…ood ..ay…”

Kirsten sighed. “It’s almost sad.”

Dorian glanced at her reflection in the elevator door. “What, the doll?”

“I know it was never a real person, but it still makes me think of a place that life forgot about.”

“Uncanny Valley.”

She raised an eyebrow at him, punching the button for the eighty-eighth floor. “What?”

“The more something tries to look human, the creepier it gets. There’s a point where it goes from looking obviously false to feeling just a little off. That ‘not quite right’ appearance triggers an adverse emotional reaction. They call it the Uncanny Valley.”

“Well aren’t you just the font of useless info, Doctor Marsh.”

He chuckled. “Don’t much hear about it much anymore, what with the Mayas running around. It was a scary day when they figured out how to overcome it.”

She looked at him, pondering his feelings on dolls, but said nothing. Behind her, through the clear glass pod, she looked out over the modular one-room cube dwellings that packed the first forty floors. Higher up, standard apartments followed; the farther she went, the larger they got. By the time the elevator hit the eighty-eighth floor, they made Kirsten’s apartment look chintzy, though that did not say much.

A bleak, pea-green hallway with dingy carpet the color of cattail reeds led past yellowing light fixtures that saturated the area with an unnatural hue and sapped the joy from the air. Up ahead, techs swarmed around a door like hornets. At her approach, their friendly banter came to a stop as all eyes moved to her amid the uncomfortable silence.

“You know it would almost be nice to stop a room with everyone trying to imagine me naked rather than worrying about what I was going to do to their brains.” Her whisper caused Dorian to burst into laughter.

He leaned over, still chuckling. “Maybe one day you should try it just to see what they do.”

Her glare started on him before it fell on the techs. “What, you guys haven’t seen someone from Division 0 before?” Her voice got louder with each word. “I hope someone remembered the torches and pitchforks. Or maybe you want to throw me in a river to see if I float?”

The crew looked away, dispersing back to their previous tasks. Kirsten wanted to think they noticed their rudeness, but accepted they probably did not want to piss her off even more.

She ducked the yellow tape into the apartment, still frowning. “Which one of you villagers is the senior?”

A thin black man in a blue jumpsuit approached and saluted. “That’d be me, Agent, Samuel Grier, Tech Four.”

He looked down from a considerable height advantage, but still leaned his weight away from her out of nerves. She tried not to dwell on it; the mood had already been set.

She offered a sweet, sugary smile. “Have you found anything?”

Her tone disarmed him to a degree, and his body language relaxed. By appearance alone, thinking of her as dangerous seemed silly.

“The usual so far. Found some design files on his terminal that look way beyond what an actuator installer would have made.”

“Are you sure he made them?”

“Ninety-nine percent. The neural memory trace shows the files are the end result of an evolutionary process.”

“Umm, what?”

“She’s a natural blonde.” Dorian smiled at Grier.

“The memory shows that the file was created very small and expanded over numerous iterated saves… err sorry… He made the file as a blank and then added to it each time he saved it over the course of several weeks.”

“Okay, anything else?”

“We also found evidence of vid calls erased from the system. This guy was good enough to cover his tracks. We can’t tell who he called without taking the neural memory core of his terminal back to the lab, but the frequency of those calls increased quite a bit in the week before he was killed.”

“Thanks.” Kirsten glanced at the room. “Please let me know if you find anything else that might shed some light on why he was killed or what he was up to.”

Tech Grier saluted again and returned to his crew. Kirsten roamed the small three-room apartment, sweeping the area with her psionic senses in search of any trace of a lingering presence. To her dismay, she found nothing.

“I don’t feel a damn thing.”

Dorian nodded in agreement.

“Well this was a giant waste of time; Eze isn’t going to be happy.”

“What now?” asked Dorian.

“Intera is hiding something. I can’t read that fast but I saw enough to get the feeling the tool at HR wasn’t giving me the whole story. I want to see if the guy from Division 9 can find anything out of this file, or maybe dive into their network and go hunting.”

The late afternoon sun ducked behind a distant skyscraper as she walked out into a brisk breeze. She closed her eyes, basking in the momentary caress nature still managed to send through the city.

“K, look out!” Dorian yelled.

The sound of two ballistic firearms chirping to life made her stop breathing for a second.

She turned, expecting a pair of punks about to mug her, instead finding two tall men in black coats with sunglasses. She opened her mind to their surface thoughts.

Her image hovered in their minds, rotating above a holo terminal―a security vid from the Intera building.

That’s the one, kill her.

Shame, she’s kinda cute.

Five hundred grand is pretty hot, and I’ll take hot over cute.

They spoke over implanted comms, telepathy with cyberware instead of psionics. Her eyes widened as she grabbed for her sidearm.

Their hands twitched, but nothing happened.

Dark and without power, their weapons remained quiet. Dorian stood a few yards to their left in the middle of the road, his hand extended toward them.

She heard their confusion.
What the fuck, these mags are new…

Kirsten’s E90 spat a bright blue beam of energy through the chest of the guy on the left as he gazed, astonished, at his inert weapon. The shot vaporized a four-inch wide patch of his coat and left a flame-lined tunnel a half-inch wide all the way through him. He gulped and shuddered, staring down as blood welled out of the hole and smothered the flames. He barely managed to look at his accomplice before his body fell backwards out of his ghost like a board, landing dead on the ground.

The other man threw his inoperable gun to the side and rushed at her. A pair of thirteen-inch blades slid out through the knuckles of both his hands as he charged in, roaring. She ducked the first stroke, leaping away as the blades on his right arm sparked into the corner of the building. Backpedaling, she raised her weapon, but he spun into a swipe with his left that gashed her across the forearm and knocked it out of her grip.

Kirsten gasped, clutching her arm in an attempt to slow the blood seeping through her fingers. Far too much adrenaline coursed through her for pain to take a foothold in her thoughts. He lunged at her with a wild side swing; she dove between two parked cars and scrambled on all fours into the road. Metal-on-metal rang behind her.

A shadow fell over her. She looked up at sun-streaked metal against the sky; blades at the end of a pair of outstretched arms as he came leaping over the car. With a shriek, she rolled on her back and raised her legs, kicking into him. Spittle misted her face as she knocked the wind from his lungs and arrested his killing dive. The razors swished past her face, close enough to feel the air they displaced. She turned her head to spare her nose as a thin line of crimson dribbled on her cheek from the blade that got her in the arm.

Shoving with both legs, she threw him onto the roof of the car. Before she could stand, he leapt in for a second try and she rolled under the vehicle with her face to the cold road. A sharp metal click came from where the blades scored the traction coating. He turned and bellowed, the glower on his face sending fear coursing through her. She had never seen a man so angry before; at least not one who still lived.

Hiding under a car where he could not fit afforded her enough protection to gather her thoughts. The crystal blue of Kirsten’s eyes faded to a brilliant white glow. Her attacker’s fury melted to fear a second before his thoughts scrambled. The mind blast she hurled into his cerebrum knocked his senses into a kaleidoscope of colors, fragrances, feelings, and sound.

She gathered herself to focus another blast, but he vanished amidst a blur of metallic green, the blaring of a horn, and the squealing of tires. Her eyes returned to normal as she whispered thanks to no one in particular for sparing her the experience of having to kill someone with a mind blast. After a few seconds of silence, a distant smash preceded the sound of many small objects falling onto the road.

Where her assailant had just been kneeling, a small green passenger car now sat tilted askew from the direction of the street. Wisps of smoke rose from its crumpled front end. Luminous green fluid leaked from its cryonic battery, forming a puddle on the ground that sent patches of frost crawling up the tires.

Dorian stood by the driver, wearing an apologetic grimace.

Kirsten dragged herself out from under the parked car. As soon as she put weight on her right arm, the pain of three cuts flared, sapping all strength from the limb. She bled as badly as if she had slashed her wrist; the feeling of it invading her consciousness made her shriek.

The driver of the green car looked back and forth from her to the pair of legs sticking up from a cluster of small street corner vending machines a few yards away.

“The damn car just swerved by itself, I swear I never saw you! Are you okay?”

The middle-aged man panicked at the crimson streaks on her pale hand, not seeing the wound hidden under the uniform. She gaped at him, in too much shock and pain to speak. Dorian put his hand on her shoulder. Both of the men spoke, but their words drowned in a haze of spinning until Dorian’s yell pierced her stupor.

“Kirsten, Stimpak!”

“Huh, what?” Her head turned left and right. “Dorian?”

The driver held her bloody hand. “No, Jimmy. Are you okay, miss?”

“Dammit, Kirsten, use a Stimpak.” Dorian shook her by the shoulder, shouting. “You are losing a lot of blood.”

“Holy shit, lady. Are you having a seizure?”

“I uhm…” She looked down at her belt. “…think I’ll be fine.”

Dorian stared, sucked in a breath, and squeezed the panic button on her forearm guard.

Reality solidified at long last. She took one of the red autoinjectors out of her belt case and pushed it into her skin until she heard the comforting hiss. A burst of coolness entered her arm; the slash marks filled with foamy blood for an instant, then shrank and drew closed as the nanobots sealed it. Twinges of pain ran up her arm like metal shards through her nerves as the veins mended. She winced, holding the limb tight to her chest until it passed.

Dorian whistled to get her attention. As soon as she looked at him, he pointed down at her E90 lying in the street.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me, it was
his
car.”

The man blinked at her. “Are you sure you’re feeling alright, officer?”

“I’m okay, Jimmy.” She held a hand up at him. “Just stay in your car until the patrol units get here.”

She trotted over to her weapon, then toward the moaning figure that had, up until a moment ago, been trying to kill her. He lay sprawled in the road, amid the contents of a broken corner vendomat.

Tiptoeing around plastic-wrapped snack cakes, instant cheeseburgers, feminine products, and scattered auto-cooled soda cans, she dragged him into a seated position with the laser pistol almost up his nose. Blood smeared down his face from a crown of glass fragments embedded across his hairline. Kneeling on the road at the time of impact, he had taken the car’s grille right in the face. Lucky for him, the driver obeyed the speed limit.

“Okay, asshole…” Kirsten stood over him with the laser. “It’s time for us to have some quality time.”