Shyft Read online

  I see him decide what he’s going to do before he even moves: a flat-handed chop to my brachial plexus, where my shoulder and neck meet, drop me with a single blow. He’s trying to end this quickly with as little trauma as possible. Got to appreciate that in a bruiser.

  His hand hangs in the air forever, a gentle lob that I let get close before leaning back just enough to feel the breeze on my neck as his fingernails swipe by. I’d be amazed at how easy this is, but I’ve been living a micro-second at a time so long now, I barely remember when I wasn't able to dodge like a prescient ninja.

  Even still, I need to end this. I’ve got him beat as long as he thinks he can’t lose, but once he stops being cute, my skyn is no match for his.

  I lunge forward, following his swinging arm, pull my weapon left handed and press into him, wedge his arm between my chest and the soft plates covering his torso, and jam the barrel into the faint bump where his chin should be. The gun’s warmed up and ready to fire just as his eyes widen in surprise.

  “You so much as clear your throat,” I say to his massive nostrils, “We take what's left of your Cortex back to the station and see what it has to say.” He doesn't move. I take that as agreement. “Galvan—” I don't know what he's doing, likely just standing there. Possibly with his mouth open.

  No response. I hope he hasn't passed out. I can't take my eyes off the tank to check on him. “Detective Wiser!”

  “What—you’re—what do you want me to do?” He asks, breathless. He’s scared. I need to keep him present, keep him focused. I can’t give this tank even a second’s opening to act.

  “Do you have your weapon out?”

  There's a rustling of cloth and a soft thrum as his gun recognizes him and readies itself.

  “I do now.”

  “Safety off?”

  The weapon sounds ready. The tank rolls his eyes.

  “If the gentleman moves, kindly shoot him in the cranium.”

  “Affirmative,” Wiser says, his voice barely in control.

  “Your bullets won’t stop me,” the tank says. The courtesy has dropped from his voice. He’s pissed.

  “An incendiary AP will.” There’s a pause, then Galvan’s weapon thrums a deep bass as the ammo setting changes.

  The tank sneers down at me, trying to see for himself if I've set my gun to fire armour piercing rounds, but he can't see the display from way up there.

  “This'll do three rounds a second,” I say. “How many you think I’ll need until one of them hits something important?”

  “OK, OK,” he says. “You got me. Now what’s the plan, tough guy?”

  That’s a good question. What is the plan? Just because I can think fast doesn’t help me come up with brilliant ideas. All the power in the world is useless if I don’t know how to use it.

  I jump back, out of the tank's considerable reach, keeping my weapon on him. Thumb it to AP.

  The tank scowls at the noise.

  I need to get him out of the way so we can use the elevator to reach the arKade, but I can’t just leave him down here. That skyn is far too dangerous.

  “Turn around,” I order, “kneel and interlace your hands on that lump you call a head.”

  He considers it for a moment but complies. Turns to face the elevator doors, sinks to his knees and puts his hands around the back of his head. Sounds like wet leather creaking. Even kneeling he's almost as tall as I am.

  I check in with Galvan to make sure he’s covering me, holster my weapon, take my binders off my belt, step forward and seal one side against the bouncer's solid right wrist. My eye catches something embedded in the tank's neck, hidden under the curve of stopsuit right about where he’d affix a cuff, but it doesn’t look like any cuff I’ve ever seen. It’s a gunmetal disc the size of a small coin with a shiny black bump in the centre. Maybe some kind of external transmitter, a built-in antenna that can't just be pulled off like a cuff. It'd make sense to include a hardened communication system in a state of the art combat skyn.

  I'm still pondering the odd ring as I wrap my hand around his left wrist and pull to secure the binders.

  The elevator doors shiver and pull apart with a drawn out chime like thunder in the distance. I glance up at the movement, tighten my grip on his wrist. Crouch to put the tank between me and whoever’s in there. If that’s a transmitter on his neck, he would’ve sounded the alarm the second he noticed us. Called for back up.

  Like I should have done.

  I may think faster than he does, but it doesn’t make me smarter.

  No one comes. The elevator doors are wide enough now I can see it’s empty. There’s no back up. Then wha—

  The tank flexes his body and pulls with his left arm. The one I’ve got in a death grip.

  I resist but it’s like trying to arm-wrestle a constructionbot. He’s made of carbon-weave muscle and reinforced bone with enough power to lift a tractor, and I’m only flesh and blood. I can’t beat him in a war of strength.

  My mind flashes forward and I see myself crumpled in a broken heap against the elevator wall as he stands, turns and pounces on Galvan.

  Adrenaline spikes, surges through my Revved Cortex like a lightning strike, stretching and sharpening my already crisp vision to a point. Time dilates even further. My heartbeat stalls like a frozen wave, poised to crash. Combat training takes over, triaging threats, assessing options, and I give into it.

  Galvan gasps a long slow note of horror behind me.

  I let the tank’s arm carry me for a fraction of a second, and as I’m pulled I bring up my knee. Then I open my fingers. Momentum carries my kneecap into the soft spot at the base of his skull, just above the disc, impacts with a satisfying crunch of boulders in a rock crusher. He grunts and falls forward but catches himself with his free arm before his face hits the elevator wall.

  I slide down his back and land on my feet, push away and get my hand on my weapon.

  “Want to try that again?” I ask, trying to keep the tension out of my voice.

  He groans but straightens and laces his fingers behind his head.

  I breathe in through my nose, long enough that it seems my chest will burst and then the fight or flight hits a crescendo and fades. Once my hands have stopped shaking, I reach out and tentatively grab the tank's left wrist. He doesn’t resist as I pull it down behind his back, stretch the binders out to their highest setting and lock him in.

  I motion to the disc on the tank's neck, check over my shoulder for Galvan's assessment. He squints at it, leans in for a closer look, gives me an unsure shrug.

  “I've already contacted the team upstairs,” the tank states from the floor. “You got lucky down here somehow, but you won't make it out of the elevator. Then I'll be up and we'll have the opportunity for another conversation.”

  “I figured you might feel that way.” I extract my tab and scan his pattern through his retinas.

  As expected, it comes back empty. A cypher. A killing machine in a disposable body. The top threat on the Ministry of Human Standard’s long list of offences.

  “I can't have you just follow us up,” I say. “It seems to me that shooting you in the head would be our simplest course of action here. And since you're not registered under COPA, there wouldn't even be that much paperwork.” If this fazes him, he doesn’t show it.

  “We could call for back-up,” Galvan says dryly from behind me. “They could deal with him, and we could all go up together.”

  Which isn't such a bad idea at this point, except for the waiting. HQ will have already noted our weapons have been drawn. I’m ignoring the AMP’s call humming on my tab, but they'll be on the way as it is. I can’t risk Galvan getting hurt, he’s come far enough. He can wait down here and come up when the TAC arrives to clean up the mess.

  “Call ‘em,” I say to Galvan, and then to the tank. “One last request. If you wouldn't mind coming around the corner here? I prefer if you weren’t out here scaring the locals.”

  “Help me up?” he asks.


  Even with those cuffs on, you could probably take us both if I let him get close enough. “I'm going to keep my distance.”

  He grunts, heaves one massive foot out from under his ass, hauls himself to his feet and trundles out of the elevator. We back off as he approaches and I ask Galvan for his binders.

  “Hold the elevator,” I say to Galvan. “I’m going to find somewhere to secure this guy and I’ll be right back. Then you’ll go watch him until help arrives.”

  Galvan swallows hard but nods and I guide the tank around the corner and into a stairwell leading down to the parking levels. I keep him well ahead of me and have him stop on the landing between floors, keeping half a flight between us. “Kneel and put your head on the floor. I’m going to secure your ankles and someone will be along soon to gather you up.”

  He doesn’t kneel and scowls at me instead, arms and shoulders in full flex. I hear a low groan, like a ship’s timbers straining in a storm, as the binders on his wrists lose their structural integrity.

  They’re not going to hold him.

  I’m in trouble.

  My Cortex surges with adrenaline and I watch the stairwell brighten as my irises dilate. I can’t let him get close. I retreat as I reach for my gun and catch my heel on the stairs and stagger just as the composite gives. He grins and bursts up the stairs, coming at me with violence on his mind.

  He’s already covered half the distance between us before I get my weapon out and primed, no time to switch to AP.

  I fire, off balance, still retreating, panic driving me, hands trembling, and spasm on the trigger. The shot goes wide, hits the wall behind him in a cinderblock explosion.

  I shouldn’t have come here alone. Should have listened to Galvan about the back up. Should have let Standards send in that missile strike.

  I steady myself through the Revv, fire again, hit him square in the face and the slug impacts his forehead, rips through skin to expose a black skull but doesn’t slow him down.

  Reinforced skeleton. I was right.

  Likely the last thing I'll ever be right about.

  The tank’s lips split to reveal two ivory semi-circles of unbroken enamel as he realises I was bluffing about the armour piercers and then he's on me, nose to breathing-slits, his breath hot on my face. Fingers like thick wire coil around my throat. Thumbs press at the top and bottom of my windpipe.

  We topple like felled trees and slam the concrete, land with enough force to rip the air from my lungs. My arms are pinned against my chest, my weapon up near our faces. He doesn't care about the gun, he knows it can't hurt him. I angle it down and fire anyway, into his neck. The muzzle flash imprints itself on my vision, singes my jacket, burns my chin. The concussion roars in the enclosed space and echoes three times before it subsides.

  Blood trickles from the bullet hole, but not as much as there should be. He isn’t slowing. If anything, his grip tightens.

  My ears ring. Black vines creep in from the edges of my vision. Another second and he'll snap my neck. I wonder how long my Cortex will keep me conscious after the blood flow stops? Will my eyes still work? Will I get to watch when he rips my head off my shoulders and treats it like a soccer ball?

  I turn my head away and twitch my finger in rapid succession, firing again and again until, finally there’s a flat metal ping and his fingers go immediately slack. It’s then I realise I’m screaming.

  His entire weight sinks on me, like a bus settling on my chest. Even dead he might kill me. My ribs are compressed, forcing me to breathe in shallow gasps like a terrified rabbit.

  My arms are useless. I can't get leverage to push, but I can wiggle. I lean side-to-side, shift first to the left with no luck and then to the right, where the tank’s body slips a nudge and gives me a little more room to move. After rocking back and forth a few times I'm eventually able to squeeze my torso out from under him and pull my legs free.

  The tank is lying face down, neck a warren of bloody meat, upper body on the landing. Everything below the waist resting on the stairs. There's a small dent in the disc on the back of his neck. The bullet disabled whatever it was doing. Turned him off like a switch.

  Lucky fucking shot.

  My breath seeps out of me, thick with the smell of fear.

  I nearly died.

  Even with the Revv, with the world plodding along, the tank nearly finished me.

  But now I know. I know their weakness. All the muscle in the world can’t save them. That disc wasn’t just for intra-team communication, it’s more important than that. It has to be some kind of remote control, the skyn just a telepresence puppet. At a far higher fidelity than anything I’ve ever heard about, sure, but a puppet nonetheless.

  Up until now, attempting to cast into something as complex as a bioSkyn’s Cortex was considered impossible, streaming a human consciousness over the link far too bandwidth-intensive. Someone must have figured out a way around the data limitations.

  Hardly surprising. Nothing’s impossible anymore.

  I leave him there and find Galvan in the elevator, frantically scanning the control panel.

  “Finsbury,” he yells as I round the corner. “Get in here.”

  The elevator is chirping like mad and I break into a run as the doors start to close. Galvan reaches out and pounds the controls to no effect and I just manage to angle my body and skim through at the elevator seals shut.

  “You were supposed to wait for the back up,” I say.

  “The security timeout started,” he responds, out of breath, as if he was the one who had just fought for his life and then sprinted twenty metres at full speed. “We would have had to get that thing back up here, make him plug in the code.”

  “That would have posed a problem,” I mutter. He stares at the blood on my jacket but doesn't probe further. “You called TAC?”

  “Full alert, the whole building will be on lockdown in ten.”

  “Good. When we get up there you wait in the elevator.”

  “What about security? The…thing down there said they'll be ready.”

  “Let me worry about that.” I say, no idea what to expect, but not worried by the thought at all. I can handle it. I know their secret. They’re all a bunch of puppets.

  With the Revv, I can cut their strings.

  The lights dim as we ascend, until the only source of illumination is the orange piping running around the elevator's seams.

  Then we stop moving and the doors open to reveal an inhuman spectacle like I've never considered possible.

  StatUS-ID

  [fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]

  SysDate

  [00:55:12. Saturday, January 18, 2059]

  I’m only fifty-eight hours old.

  Fifty-eight hours since I woke in a dingy basement with a new name and a new body, and discovered my old life was over. That I’d already been restored once from the accident that killed Connie and I.

  That I’d thrown my second chance away.

  Since then, I’ve been attacked—had a friend I don’t remember try to pry my mind out of my head.

  I learned I’ve been kicked off the Police Service in disgrace—accused of tampering with evidence and insubordination and possibly murder.

  I’ve met a bunch of people whose lives have also been ruined. People who have committed horrible crimes but have no memories of their actions. With every one of them convinced what happened to them, started with me. With decisions I made.

  Then I met my girlfriend, Doralai Wii. She’d been waiting for me to come back from the dead and run away with her. That was the hardest to believe. How could I start a new relationship with a woman I barely knew only weeks after Connie was ripped away from me?

  At first, I denied it all. Refused to believe I could be capable of any of those things, let alone all of them. I looked for excuses, for other people to blame. But I’ve seen the evidence for myself. Been confronted by people I hurt or betrayed.

  It’s all true. I became someone I don’t
recognize.

  I became the bad guy.

  As hard as all that is to accept, what’s worse is, him and I, we’re the same. The Finsbury Gage I don’t remember—the guy who did all those terrible things, made all those horrible decisions—he started out the same place I did. He lost his wife. He was restored. He suffered through the same grief and loss and confusion and anger I’m feeling now.

  He’s me.

  I’m him.

  If he could do all those things, hurt all those people, what’s to stop me from turning out just like he did?

  What if who I became is who I truly am?

  I can’t let that happen.

  I don’t want to end up like he did. Someone who hurts people, who abandons the people he loves. A hypocrite. A disgrace.

  A failure.

  As far as I can tell, the trouble started with my Restoration Counselling group: Dora, Shelt, Dub, Miranda, Tala, Carl and Elder. We all came together to help each other navigate the hazardous realities of digital resurrection, and we all ended up dead or stocked or in hiding.

  Shelt has been helping me. He’s just as invested as I am, because whatever it was I got into last time is still happening. Someone’s not just after me. Dora and Shelt are in danger too.

  The question is why.

  Two other people joined our counselling group at my last meeting. The meeting before I died or killed myself in some kind of gang fight. Vaelyn and Petra.

  Shelt believes whatever happened last time has to do with tainted shyfts. And Vaelyn is a Rithmist. She rolls shyfts for a living, creates code that Reszos use to manipulate their digital minds.

  Maybe it’s a coincidence. Or maybe her joining the group and the group going to shit are related.

  Only one way to find out.

  Shelt told me they’re regulars at the Fāngzhōu, a Reszo-only bar in Kensington Market, so I’m going to have a chat, see what they have to say for themselves.

  The bar’s in the south end of the old part of Kensington, just up from Dundas St., its entrance sheltered by a long black awning decorated with two glowing red hanzi, like a stickman chasing a runaway housebot. A bouncer stands easy at the entrance, hands buried deep in the pockets of a thick navy pea coat, collar turned up. His eyes fluoresce as I approach, and he waves me in with a jerk of his toque.