Chapter 2: Bunker Bangin'

A diminutive Japanese girl stood blocking her exit. Her face looked downright adorable, straight out of an anime no less; till I glanced at her body.

Her torso, thighs and arms were covered in matt dull-blue neosteel plates and hexagonal pieces of beige ceramic armor; it did not look like an exo-suit; she had had parts of herself removed and replaced. She turned her elfin teenage face toward me and now I could see that it was marred by one hideous cybernetic eye that looked terribly out of place. All her bionic upgrades were mismatched, and looked twisted and ugly; but they clearly screamed ‘custom military-spec’.

The girl lifted her arm and took a swipe at Sandra; my instincts flared, leaping forward so fast it even surprised me, I managed to push Sandra aside just in time. The assassin’s arm smashed into a steel cabinet beside the door and left a deep imprint; I’d no doubt Sandra’s head would have been instantly crushed had the fist connected.

The assassin ignored Sandra, and raised her right arm in my direction. At that point, I noticed she had did not have a right hand — I was staring down the barrel of a fucking miniaturized anti-tank railgun.

You must have heard of the “bullet-time” effect; it’s when everything slows down to a crawl. Some people experience something akin to their lives flashing before their eyes when they were in danger; but it wasn’t like that.

Time literally slowed, it felt sluggish and everything around me moved like comical slow-motion footage.

I could see the rail-projectile leaving the gun’s barrel and it was tunneling toward me through the air — only that it was moving a speed that I could dodge; I ducked to the right and took three steps toward the assassin; and everything suddenly exploded back into realtime.

Railguns are silent. But when stuff gets hit at Mach 6 by a billowing cloud of flechettes, it makes an incredibly deafening boom. Plus there’s my bed and wall, which was shredded into a cloud of slivers and particles.

Slashing my right hand diagonally as hard as I could, I was hoping to maybe disable her gun-hand; being half-blinded didn’t help, but my badly executed kungfu chop did connect; and I heard a squishy crunchy sound.

Only then I realised her gunhand ought to be made of hardened neosteel, so the crushing sound should not make any sense.

‘Oh god, that’s ... that’s “Massacre” Midori!” Beth sputtered.

Midori looked confused as hell that her shot had missed. She looked annoyingly at her gunhand. The barrel was bent and crushed, it looked like someone had placed it on an anvil and given it a couple of good whacks.

Wait. What? As usual my brain was still catching up. That was me! I smacked the barrel and it got ... crushed?

‘Fucking useless piece of shit!’ Midori cursed, ‘one shot and it loses its integrity.’

I did not correct her assumption; did she not see me strike her gun?

‘Old fashioned way then,’ she grinned at me, and reached behind her back, I heard the tell-tale snik-snak and hum. Of course, she’d had a backup weapon — a foldable plasma-edged sword; colloquially known in the ghetto as a ‘laser katana.’

With no warning, she lunged and took a swipe that would have decapitated me instantly. I instinctively ducked at the very last second — the blade whizzed harmlessly by my face and dug a ten inch trough into the med facility wall.

Midori was incredibly fast; her bionic ware gave her an unnatural grace, speed and strength. She followed her initial strike with a sequence of three or four deadly strikes at my naked body. The blade was fast, I could barely see it whiz through the air.

But I was somehow ... faster.

And I seemed to get only faster still as her attacks progressed. I’d barely dodged the first flurry of attacks; but after that I began to see her wind ups; her motions began to look predictable. This was something I did not question at that time; but the usual abilities of an unhealthy middle-aged shut-in virt-programmer definitely did not include fending off attacks by mafia sanctioned cyber assassins.

We danced across the room, and her attacks were precise and efficient; she gave no mind to collateral damage; bits and pieces of medical equipment were strewn about the floor, many in several pieces with glowing edges cleaved through them by the plasma blade.

Beth and Sandra were often in the way; I’d managed to push them aside quite a few times whilst dodging.

Midori clearly frustrated, started swinging recklessly and her arm would probably have decapitated Sandra if it’d connected. I had barely managed to get Sandra out of the way again, by shoving her to the floor. That blow almost hit me; it was the closest that Midori ever got during the encounter though.

After about a minute or two of unsuccessful attacks, Midori paused; she was sweating from exertion; I could see heat waves rising from her body as her robotic bits vented the excess heat. A frustrated grimace contorted her pixie-like face and she growled.

“‘Impossible! You dodged everything! What kata software are you running?’

“Look ... uh maybe you got the wrong guy?” I started lamely.

“No mistakes here Kieran Trent. We don’t know why you’re still alive. But I’ve never missed a mark.”

I saw her subvocalize something. Backup. I realized. She was calling for backup. Midori heaved her katana in position and charged at me again.

This had to end now, before the others arrive. Her downward slash was telegraphed clearly, but my heightened senses told me it was a feint; she was going to change her swing mid-stroke and disembowel me when I dodged.

Almost too easily, I stepped aside and smacked the blade out of her hand — I followed through by swiveling my hips and then clumsily kicking as hard as I could at her knee. Maybe I could knock her over and we could make a run for it.

My kick sheared off her entire neosteel leg below the knee; her bionic calf went flying across the room. Midori was sent sprawling and crashed head first into the wall.

Well shit.

I stared at my hand in amazement. No time. We had to move.

Quickly, grabbing some clothes off the floor, I hustled the two girls out of the ward.

“We have to go, now!” I yelled at the two.

Sandra was babbling deliriously. “No ... no! This is bad! It’s nothing to do with me. I’ll explain ... they’ll understand!”

Beth was surprisingly calm; she was holding up well. She understood the situation and calmly replied, “We’ll follow you. I hope you have a plan.”

I commanded Sandra to shut up and follow me — she instantly snapped her jaws shut and obeyed. My strange control over her was still in place.

Holding a bundle of clothes, we streaked out of St. Hanon’s Hospital Ark, whilst bemused medical staff stood around and watched.

Fortunately, there was an AeroTaxi right at the exit; we all bundled in and took off. Looking through the back windshield, I noticed several black aeroships unloading what looked like a dozen armed figures at the door of St. Hanon’s.

I hunkered down in my seat and we shot off into the night sky.

The world is super-connected, digital traces are left behind every second, the automated Aerotaxi we were on was no exception. Whilst customer data is supposed to be encrypted and protected under the Global Data Act; it wouldn’t take much for the Matriarchy to persuade AirUber to reveal our location. I figured we had an hour, give or take before the next kill squad swooped in on us.

Us? Crap. Somehow I had got these two girls involved.

Sandra’s forehead was vibrating with rage; I could tell she was fighting my command to not speak. Beth was silent but she was occasionally stealing glances at me. I met her eyes and noticed she was nervously trying to get something out.

‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Careful. These cabs are monitored.’

‘They know who we are right?’ Beth whispered.

I nodded, ‘Wouldn’t take much for them to pull the hospital manifest.’

‘We’re dead then. There’s nowhere to go. The Matriarchy controls everything.’ she whimpered.

‘Brooke!’ she suddenly gasped. ‘My sister! We’ve got to grab her! She’s all I’ve got. She won’t be able to make it on her own.”

Things were getting more complicated. What about Sandra? Doesn’t she have family too? It would only be fair if she had a say too.

But I didn’t want screaming hysterics, so turning to Sandra, I said, ‘Ok, you need to calm down. Now tell me if you have any family. A partner perhaps?’

Sandra’s eyes visibly dimmed and her tightly clenched body relaxed.

‘Not really. All I have is the job. I’m too busy paying off my medical school debt to have any social life. My deadbeat dad died years ago. Don’t know where my mum is, we haven’t spoken in years.’

Ok. That made things simpler. All we had to do is quickly snatch Beth’s sister and make it to my hideaway.

Paranoid me had a safe house all decked out. And why would a middling programmer have a safe house you might ask? Ever since I started taking ‘greyer’ contracts for anonymous clients; I’d started planning for contingencies. Plus I wouldn’t be able to explain the extra money anyway, so I sunk it into the Dark Netscape making lots of interesting purchases for my hidey hole.

If we could get to my offgrid safe house; we’d just might be able to make it for the foreseeable future.

The Aerotaxi landed in a really shitty area we call Shutter Town. Buried right at the bottom of the stacks upon stacks of buildings, hardly any sunlight filtered down here. Shutter Town was the literal bottom of the barrel.

My nose wrinkled at the smells; greasy fried food, sewage and human sweat. We had landed near one of the huge industrial scrap piles; old vehicles (some really old ones that still ran on land), broken appliances, piles of rusty cabling and twisted metal bits that coalesced into a giant mountainous heap several stories high. When I spotted something that looked like an arm sticking out, I quickly decided not to look any closer.

Adjacent to the piles were stacks of dilapidated shacks that looked like they were going to collapse any moment. I guess city municipal codes didn’t apply here, or simply the Corporations couldn’t make any money off the poor and didn’t give a fuck either way.

The shacks were abuzz with activity; exotic cooking spices wafted through the air, the shrill screech of grinding metal was interspersed with loud thumps and yelling in several languages I did not understand.

Handwritten signs and blinking neon lighting advertised bionic arms affixed at below official Corp rates, cybermedia pirate boxtops, dead virtual pets revived and pre-owned sexbots. Yeech. I’d never really bought stuff from a retail store before, I’d only ever shopped online; this seemed entirely archaic and unfamiliar.

It looked like the primary industry here was recycling and makeshift appliances or bionics for the folks who couldn’t afford the regular Corporation stuff.

A loud thump that came from one of the shacks and the ground shook a bit.

Bethany picked out that shack from the general mishmash and hustled both of us toward it. We ducked into a surprisingly neat and clean workshop.

‘Wait here... ‘ Beth said, ‘I’ll go explain the situation to her.’

Sandra and I looked around, pausing to pick up curious knick knacks scattered across the multitudes of shelving and countertops. The place wasn’t very large, but it was packed full of stuff; and everything looked custom and patched together from bits of other stuff. I picked up what looked like a micro-radiator except it had bits of a hairdryer, heat gun and toaster fused together.

I heard motorised whirring and quickly put down what I’d been inspecting, I looked toward the curtains that separated this room from the one in the back.

It was a mechanical monstrosity. A stitched together Frankenstein of an exoskeleton. It was seven feet tall, with two spindly arms that ended in several curious looking tools; the legs had several more joints than a normal biped’s and the feet looked like mecha tank tracks. Cradled in the middle of the torso was a beautiful blonde girl; except her body was clearly withering away from atrophy. Her arms were emaciated, her torso was hunched and twisted. Looking down, I realized she didn’t have all her legs. They ended as stumps just below the kneecaps. And she was tiny, if her face did not betray her age, I would have guessed she was still a child.

Multi-spectrum Antibiotic Resistance Syndrome. MARS, the genetically engineered pandemic had taken out a fifth of the population in the Prussian Co-op. Those that survived gave birth to people like her. Most children died when they were toddlers.

My look of horror and pity must have showed, for it immediately darkened her brows.

‘Done gawking yet?’ Brooke growled.

‘Sorry.’ I said, ‘uhhh ... this is a cool workshop.’ I tried to recover.

‘Forget it. Beth told me everything. Let me get this straight.’ she stated.

‘So you took your oversized libido and manhood and raped my innocent sister. Then that girl raped her ... and blackmailed you to ass rape my sister, which you gladly did and then you mind controlled that girl and revenge raped her in turn for my sister. And the Femkuza showed up and you casually defeat a murderous bionic Blossom assassin with your bare hands and now they want to I kill us too and our lives are ruined because of you. And you want us to trust and follow you to your hidey hole so that we don’t get dismembered by the Matriarchs. You, a mysterious John Doe with which we know nothing about that turned up unconscious at a mobster hospital last night. Did I get that right?’

‘Ummm ... yes?’ I replied, nervously drumming my fingers on the countertop. This was going badly.

‘Very well. I’ll get my things.” she replied bruquesely, and wheeled back behind the curtains.

Sandra’s eyes were tearing and she was stifling a snigger.

‘Uh ... that was ... easy?’ I turned to Beth.

‘Brooke has always been the practical one.’ Beth explained. ‘Given an expiry date and consistently out-living expectations made her who she is. She’s stronger than she looks and brilliant to boot. We’re twins, but I got the lucky health genes. She knows what the Matriarchy can do. Midori was her customer. You’re the only one that seems to have a semblance of a plan ... so we will follow you.’

I nodded.

‘Sandra? You can speak now. I kind of strong-armed you into this ... I don’t really know how yet. But now is the time to speak if you don’t want to take your chances with us.’

Sandra’s demeanor remained surprisingly calm and she spoke carefully.

‘My father died to a single Blossom Assassin you know?’

‘He was part of a gun-running gang and almost rented me out to them as fucktoy. They made the mistake of offending the Matriarchs. They also hired themselves out as muscle and were holed out in their hideout, armed to the teeth. Didn’t make a difference. Thirty-five bodies. All torn to pieces; took them days to even figure out how many gang members died in that complex.’

‘And you took out an Assassin with your bare fists, naked, with your stupid hard-on flopping around, “accidentally” you say. Did you know I couldn’t even see you move? You were a damn blur.’

‘I’m steeped in debt, I have nowhere to run to and hide, no leverage, no one to protect me, nursing was all I had. You ... are my only option. So yes, I’ll take my chances with you. But later ... later, we’re going to have a long talk.’ Sandra concluded.

‘Yes, we’re all going to have a long talk,’ Brooke interrupted. She was now strapped into a smaller exoskeleton, one that gave her the same height as her sister. ‘This suit will only last a couple of hours. We need to get where we need to be or I’ll be deadweight.’

She had a large bag strapped to her robo-suit; which she opened and unceremoniously stuffed with several items from the countertops and shelves.

Then taking a slight wistful last look at her shop, she turned and strode out. We followed her into the muggy night air.

The good thing about the lower depths was the informal economy that ran the place. The air taxis here operated on the largely anonymous quyptocash basis; they stank and half the time you’d think you were going to die in a brilliant fireball, but they didn’t save your location and destination. All data was wiped at the end of each ride. Or so they said; my take was they couldn’t be bothered to pay data storage fees.

We headed for the docks where I had a small ancient hydrofoil stashed in a vacuum sealed Rent-A-Container. One of my earlier payments-in-lieu, right after I found the post-apocalyptic bunker we were headed too.

About three years ago, I had a contract to procure a set of geoscans from the rival of a rare earth conglomerate. Turns out the scans were outdated and no one had accessed them for over two decades. There weren’t any financially viable deposits, and I dutifully handed over the scans to my employer, with one small omission.

There was a small abandoned pre-War underground bunker located literally right in the middle of nowhere, deep in the woods but accessible by the river. Intrigued, I decided to remove all traces from both the original data on the target’s servers as well as and the copies I forwarded.

Over the next couple years, I visited the place surreptitiously; cleaned it out and stocked it full of survival stuff. Now that foresight was probably gonna save our lives.

The girls looked at the hydrofoil curiously; but didn’t question me and piled on quickly. I revved up the fusion motor and soon we were speeding upriver. The course was plotted automatically by the rather simple onboard microcontroller, we didn’t really need any data uplinks for this stretch. I had assumed the worse when I outfitted the little craft; what if satellite positioning was down? What if online maps were inaccessible? It was a fun thought experiment that seemed to be paying off.

Incredibly the girls had a smile plastered on their faces, lit clearly by the moonlight. The river splashed little droplets on them as we sped through the water; but rather than be annoyed, they seemed to relish it. Sandra was trailing her fingers in the water; Beth had her eyes closed savoring the breeze; even Brooke had stopped meddling with one of her gizmos and was staring pensively at the reflections in the wake of the boat.

These girls have had it tough whilst I had been relatively lucky; I used my programming/hacking skills to complete little ‘grey’ jobs that offered me largely anonymous paychecks from the Corporations. They didn’t want those transactions on their books; and the quyptocash I’d accumulated, promised early retirement if I squirreled most of it away.

They, on the other hand were stuck in hand-to-mouth, barely above the poverty line jobs. Since the Corporations took over, the income divide had only widened. I’d bet they had never been on a large stretch of water before; the delight in their eyes was evident and hard to hide.

I had to do what was right by them. I had to figure out how to get out of this mess I got them into.

Beth stood up from her seat and sat down next to me. She laid her head on my shoulder; I was intrigued by the sudden gesture of intimacy.

She spoke quietly, ‘It’s all gone to hell; but here on this stretch of river, we can finally ... breathe? The cages that confined me and Brooke were invisible, yet no less soul-crushing. I think ... we’re running away not just from the Matriarchs but from our old lives too.’

‘I had an old life too.’ I replied. ‘It was cloistered. I shuttered myself from the world and practically lived in my apartment. And after they shot me, so many regrets tore through my mind.’

‘So you’re an anti-social hikikomori.’ she said, ‘but yet here you shouldering the responsibility for three girls.’

‘Yes, but it is my fault.’ I said looking at her with an unwavering gaze. ‘All this ... all this is my fault. I owe it to you all to find a way to fix it.

‘Kieran,’ Beth said gently, ‘Perhaps it is your fault. But you did take responsibility and did not run away. And you are trying to fix it. You did save us several times. Even Sandra knows that you pushed her out of way during the fight.’

I looked up. Sandra was staring at us silently, all I could see was her silhouette and little white glints reflected in her eyes.

‘I hardly know you. And this is funny saying out loud, since we have fucked like rabbits already. But I think ... I think we might have something more... ‘ Beth confessed.

This gorgeous girl was pouring her heart out; and I couldn’t believe it. At thirty-one, I’d never had a single real relationship; and now in the most precarious of times, I felt my heart flutter. My heartbeat began to race, I was elated and terrified at the same time.

Beth continued, ‘And you know what they say about your first time ... you never quite forget it.’ She looked up to me and smiled.

I reached out and hugged her closer. ‘Yes, I think we do have something.’ I told her. She leaned in for a kiss, and I happily obliged. ‘You were my first too.’ I confessed.

‘No way!’ she jerked back, ‘You’re handsome and have a horse cock! You could fuck all the nurses at St Hanon’s if they knew.’

‘Haha ... new me remember? I wasn’t like this before.’ I indicated to myself.

‘Well, at least you fucked one other nurse... ‘ she continued and her gaze led to Sandra who was still staring at us silently.

‘Sandra and I need to talk ... it’s your fault too.’ she got up and sat next to Sandra.

I was left out of their conversation, it was full of heated whispers and furious gestures. They were still deep in conversation when we arrived.

The hydrofoil began to slow down and we puttered toward a hidden cove. A ten minute hike into the woods and we would be there.

The entrance was behind a small knoll and deliberately covered in overgrowth; I made sure it stayed that way. In fact I’d planted more shrubbery and creepers all around just to make sure the entrance was all but invisible to the casual observer. The entrance was a blast door that I’d had painted green and oiled; the first thing I installed was a bio-lock that I’d had tweaked to fix what I had perceived were outdated security flaws. Behind that was the entry chamber followed by a larger, even thicker door. It was hell lugging the neosteel plates here to reinforce it even further, but back then my paranoia often outweighed my laziness.

After we’d entered and shut the inner door, Brooke seemed the most impressed, and gave me a smile of approval.

‘Not bad. I thought your safe house would be some stupid synthdrug hovel in another part of Shutter Town. This ... this is a freakin’ castle. A fort even.’ she grinned.

‘We’re home C:RI’ I announced. The lights came on, revealing a long dimly lit corridor that would lead to the ‘living room’. This was a bachelor pad; the walls and floor were bare concrete. There was a small, lonely, worn leather sofa sat in the middle, facing a huge viewscreen. The room was chilly; I had to manually head down to level 3 to turn the main mini-fusion reactor on. C:RI ran on low power mode when I wasn’t around.