Digital Plague

XXXIX Day Ten: I Should Have Been Killing Monks

Right, I thought, that’s goddamn fair. For a few moments I sat and stared blearily at the door, happy to not move. This was fitting. After all that, I was going to be torn to pieces by the last of Kev’s Monks, fifty or so still in the complex. We’d slipped past them and they’d arrived too late to save their boss, but here I was, the consolation prize.

In a strange way, I thought it was only right that Kev have his revenge. I’d led him down into Westminster Abbey and he’d died sitting on a bare concrete floor, one of Dennis Squalor’s digital avatars grinning down at him. Now I was sitting on a cold floor, high up this time but close enough. I sat there immobile. My arms weighed a hundred pounds each, useless lengths of bone and flesh, and the thought of moving them made my head ache.

Doors were being slammed open, glass shattering.

My eyes found Happling. The big man was staring at the ceiling, eyes wide open, mouth drifting. Blood had pooled around him, black and shiny, like oil. His hands were still curled into loose fists-the motherfucker was pissed off even in death. I thought of Hense again, and wondered if Captain Happling would show up again someday, grinning and asking me if I felt fast.

I wondered if all the cops I’d killed were going to come back one day.

I could hear the Monks approaching. As I stared at Happling, my heart unexpectedly began to pound in terror. They were going to crowd into the room with their blank, white faces, put their plastic hands on me, and tear me apart in silence, in complete silence.

Glancing at the door, I lunged forward and started dragging myself toward Happling. Sputtering bloody spit onto the floor, I slapped my hands onto him, pushing into his clothes and prying his Roon from his lifeless fingers. I flinched, with every movement expecting him to surge up and grab me, laughing and grinning blood. I found three extra clips in his front pocket, his body still warm beneath the clothes. I checked the chamber of the gun as I pushed myself as far back as I could get, opposite the door but on a slight angle, so when they came in I wouldn’t immediately be in their field of vision-though the Monks had heat vision and night vision and every fucking digital bell and whistle the tech of five years ago could offer, so I wasn’t sure how much my old tricks would help me. I’d never actually beaten a Monk in a fight, much less a squad of them. It didn’t matter. I racked the chamber and laid my extra clips in my lap and tried not to do the math that told me I didn’t have enough ammunition for fifty-four Monks. Trembling, I raised the gun and waited.

Time had stopped. I struggled to hold the gun up and stay ready while the echo of approaching steps seemed to get louder but never arrive. There was no talking, no shouting or other sounds. Just boots clicking on the hard floor, slowing as they got closer. I assumed they knew exactly where Kev was: his brain had been killed but his chassis still hummed with electronic life, sending out beacons, scanning frequencies. An immortality of deaf and dumb.

Doors slammed in the distance, and then there was total silence. They were just feet away, creeping toward me, probably scanning my heat signature and suddenly getting cautious. You could put a brain into billions of yen of technology, but you couldn’t improve the brain-put an asshole into a Monk chassis and he was still an asshole. Still, these were the assholes who’d survived. Through their initial conversion, through months or years of involuntary servitude, screaming endlessly inside, and then through the Monk Riots and the SSF’s steady attempt to wipe them out, they’d managed to remain sane enough to function.

I cleared my mind. I saw a line of trees at night, a dark wall of rustling leaves in the wind. I had no idea where I’d ever seen trees, but there they were. I felt everything drain away as I imagined it, just the soft sawing of the branches in the breeze, nothing else, no sound, no light, just me. My hands steadied, my breathing slowed, and my vision narrowed to the door, excluding Happling’s symmetric corpse and Gatz’s twisted form in a heap against the wall. Gatz’s white face was staring at me, and it took all my concentration to ignore it.

When they came, they came fast, two at a time materializing from thin air and bursting through the door. I fired once on instinct and the first Monk’s face exploded in a spray of white coolant. It crumpled to the floor as if it had just remembered it was a fucking ton of alloys and plastic. The second one leaped over the first with a graceful, silent move that was almost beautiful. I tracked it upward with a small tick of my wrist and put two shells into its face while it was still in midair. The range was about six feet. You’d have to paralyze me for me to miss at six feet.

By the time I reoriented on the door two more were through. I managed to knock down the first one with a shot into its nose, but the second swerved around it and was on me from the side. I swung my arm around just as it landed next to me and fired three times into its abdomen, knocking it back, but before I could make a kill shot two more were diving for me. I rolled, screaming in tearing pain, and slammed myself into the corner, bringing my arm up as a Monk with horrible, cancerous rust welts eating through its latex face landed with a earthquake-like jolt nearly on top of me. As I pulled the trigger it batted my arm aside and the shot took off its molded ear and part of its face, the ruined fake skin torn away to reveal the corroded alloy beneath. It grinned as it lashed out a hand and clasped my wrist painfully.

“Too slow, Meat,” it hissed, the words melted and ruined in its rusted, damaged mouth.

It squeezed my hand open and my gun dropped to the floor with a dead-sounding thud, and then another Monk was at my opposite side and a third was between them. The blank, identical faces peered at me, one pair of scratched sunglasses and two pairs of whirring, delicate camera eyes. Up close, I could see how time had treated them-their fake skin scratched and pocked with collision damage, the little servos of their eyes sounding labored and sluggish, their clothes filthy and tattered without any attempt at repair. So much, I thought, for immortality.

Two more leaped in behind them, and I knew I was dead. There were too many, and they were too fast. A lot of noise suddenly welled up outside the door, hard to identify. An off-rhythm pounding vibrated through the floor, as if someone were lazily hurling cannonballs at the building.

The Monk’s hands were on me, tightening.

“All this time I was killing cops,” I said, panting, “I should have been killing Monks.”

Rusty smiled down at me. “Your turn, Meat. Your fucking-”

The Monk jerked upward as if an invisible thread had been drawn taut. Everything paused for a second, and then Rusty leaped up and backward, sailing away from me and smashing into the far wall hard enough to shake the room and bring chunks of drywall down onto the Monk as it slid to the floor. The Monks around me whirled as one and then all four rose into the air stiffly, arms dropping to their sides, and smashed into the concrete ceiling, dropping back to the floor in front of me in a broken heap.

I didn’t try to move, certain I wouldn’t be able to anyway. Standing there, pale and haggard but calm, was Bendix, his terrible scar torn open and bleeding, one arm hanging loose at his side. He looked back into the corridor and then at me.

“Mr. Cates, you are one lucky bastard.”

He crossed over to where Ty Kieth’s body lay and stood there a moment, staring down at the Techie. Four more people entered the room behind him, young, round-faced kids in spiffy suits and long coats, three men and a woman. They were all binary, like the triplets I’d killed a week before-pale white skin and black hair. They hung back and watched Bendix like he was the Big Dog in the room. “Well, that’s done, at least,” he said. “It’s a waste, of course. Kieth should have been working for us. With us. A brain like that could have been accomplishing amazing things, properly funded. Properly channeled.”

I snorted and was amazed I had the energy to be amused. Properly fucking channeled. That was hilarious.

He glanced at me, and at once I found myself paralyzed by an invisible fist, almost unable to breathe. Just do it, I thought savagely. Just get it over with and fuck all this bullshit.

“You are a lucky man, Mr. Cates,” he said, turning and walking toward me. “You have a guardian angel. When I was dispatched on this mission I was given very specific orders, and I was given discretion to kill you if it seemed necessary for the survival of the human race-that’s a technical term, you know, SHR. In any scenario wherein I deemed your death not to be necessary for the survival of the human race, I was directed to leave you alive. You’re a Person of Interest, Mr. Cates, at least to Director Marin, and for the time being we are still taking Director Marin’s requests seriously. Though the time for that is fading, I think.”

He leaned in close, his open wound wet and puckered near my nose. I imagined I could smell him, but the fact was I couldn’t push enough air through my ruined nose to smell anything. His eyes were a little yellowed, dry and used up.

“You do not,” he said as I dropped back to the floor in a heap, “seem all that interesting.”

Turning, he waved his good hand in the air as he walked away. “The human race will, apparently, survive,” he said. “And the King Worm can fucking collect his own trash.” He spun out the door and his fellow psionics turned without looking at me, without saying anything, and followed. I lay where I was and watched him go, and then it was just me and my old friends. Nothing’s changed, I thought. It’s still assholes in nice suits running the world.