Theme Planet (13 page)

You
are not my saviour!
she screamed, then.
Not
my
FUCKING
SAVIOUR, DO YOU HEAR?

Zi left; and Amba heard her
hollow laughter rattling off like dice made from human knuckles on the tin-lid
of a pauper’s coffin. On the bed, Amba sat up and put her head in her hands.

Am I going crazy
?

This is not part of being an
android.

This is nothing to do with the
Anarchy Models.

Zi, well, Zi is something else...

Again, she considered destroying
the FRIEND. It sat on the dresser, small and black and harmless looking. But it
was dangerous.
She
was dangerous. Zi was the most dangerous weapon ever
created. But it wasn’t supposed to
speak
to her; to mock her, taunt her,
drive her insane with its challenge. And Zi would never speak of why she was
created; what, in fact, was her ultimate purpose.

Amba had once broken into a
high-security Oblivion Gov
Unit
and
hijacked the files on Anarchy. She’d wanted to know...
more.
It had been
a quest, not so much about identity, as about
understanding.
She wished
to understand herself - at a basic level. At basic concept. At basic construct.

Amba was, to all intents and
purposes, human. She had the same genetic core. But her bones were blended with
a natural titanium alloy produced by special glands in her throat. Her muscles
were harder, stronger, woven with Kevlar. Her internal organs were lined with
chitin taken from insect DNA. She was impervious to most toxins, including
radiation. And her brain synapses operated at a constant higher rate than a “normal”
human creature. Amba was hard. Harder than hard. She was the perfect soldier.
The perfect killer. And yet...

Nowhere in the files was there
mention of Zi.

Zi, her happy, friendly,
bio-encoded FRIEND.

Zi was a weapon. She wasn’t
supposed to have a... personality.

Zi was a bug in the code. A worm
in the apple core. A glitch in the matrix.

And, whether Amba liked it or
not, Zi was here to stay...

“Why can’t I be human?”

Because you are not.

“Why can I not live a simple
human life?”

Because they despise you.

“How can I escape?”

Then she lay on the bed, and she
cried, and she dreamt of a time when she would find a man, find the right man,
a man to love, and he would kiss her and hold her in the darkness and tell her
not to be frightened. Everything would be all right. And they would breakfast
in sunlight. They would laugh together at things that were funny, and cry
together at things that were sad. They would go for meals at posh restaurants.
They would visit the cinema and eat popcorn and hot-dogs, then go out for
drinks to discuss the themes in the film. They would visit friends and tell
stories and drink wine and laugh long into the night. Then, when they settled
down, she would get pregnant and she would have a child...

have a child...

a pretty little girl...

and buy a house...

A house with a pale blue door.

~ * ~

“Twenty minutes, Ma’am.”

Amba nodded and shouldered her
pack. She looked around the crappy hotel room for the last time. She would
never come back to this room - a place she’d called home for three months whilst
she completed a series of missions. No. Now, it was time to move on. Now she
had a new job. Six hits. On Theme Planet...

And then what?

She smiled, a sour, bitter smile.

And then nothing. Keep on going.
Keep moving. Keep on killing.

Until
they
killed her.

Amba stepped out the door and it
gave a rattling
click
behind her. The corridor was plush, with fake
rich-gilt wallpaper and semi-liquid carpets;
fake, like me,
she thought.
She walked down the long corridor to the sicklift, which dropped her to ground
floor and reception. As she stepped from the sicklift Amba scanned reception,
clocking the two men who’d followed her previously -either for Oblivion or...
for somebody else. It didn’t matter. It was irrelevant. If they made a move,
she’d waste them.

Amba moved out into the sunshine.
Northside LLA was a heaving termite heap of activity. The roads, both upper and
lower levels, were crammed with traffic belching eco-fumes. Snakes of people
streamed down footwalks and the whole overpopulated mess was a bustling chaos
of bustling hellside.

Amba sighed, licked her lips,
subtly checked her pursuers, and stepped into the snakes.

Was sucked into their blood.

Swallowed by their venom.

~ * ~

The Theme Planet
Shuttle was on time. The Theme Planet Shuttle was
always on time. Amba stood at the fifty-foot-high windows watching the huge
passenger liner coming in to land, jets belching fire, the throb of the Shuttle’s
matrix engines pulsing through the floor, through her boots.

Amba finished her coffee, where
the cheap beans left a bitter taste, and dropping the cup into a CheeryBin (“Hey-hey-hey!
Thank you, ma’am, for not littering! Have a
neeeee
ice day!”) headed for
the restrooms, signified by door images of a woman and various female alien
life-forms. And a red blob.

The restroom was deserted, and
Amba moved to a cubicle, hung her pack on the back of the door, dropped her
pants and pissed, head to one side, listening. There came a
click.
Heavy
boots trod slowly on bathroom tiles.

Amba pulled up her pants and
gently lifted her pack. She lowered it to her back, tightening both straps,
eyes narrowing. Her nostrils twitched. Whoever was out there was
male.
There came the tiniest of sounds; the sound of something well-oiled, steel,
threaded. Like a nut and bolt. Like a silencer being fastened to a pistol...

“Ma’am, this is LLA Shuttleport
Security. Can you step out of the cubicle, please?”

“I’m on the toilet, I have bad
stomach pains. What seems to be the problem, officer?” she said, flattening
herself to one side of the wall.

The door exploded with shards of
torn wood as five silenced bullets ate through the cubicle and shattered the
porcelain eco-toilet. Amba stepped back into the firing line and front-kicked
the door from its hinges. The door slammed into the man, throwing him back with
a grunt, and Amba dropped to one knee and peered out. There were four men in
black suits, all carrying guns, blinking fast and only just reacting to the
kicked door... Amba rolled forward, and as bullets started to
ping
around her, she took the silenced pistol from the hand of the man felled by
door, turned, steadied the pistol with both hands - cool, calm - delivered four
headshots in quick succession. Blood sprayed the walls and mirrors. Four men
hit the ground wetly, their skulls exploded. Pulped brain leaked across the
white tiles. Tongues lolled and popped eyeballs turned inwards. Skull shards
glistened like teeth.

Amba turned, grabbed the throat
of the man stunned by the door, and lifted him up, ramming him back against the
vanity mirror wall. The wall cracked under the impact, and the man struggled
for a moment in pain, confused, before regaining his composure and looking deep
into Amba’s eyes.

He glanced left, to his dead
comrades.

“It is you,” he said.

Amba tilted her head. “Explain.”

The man smiled, saliva strung
with blood. “Fuck you,” he said.

Amba lifted the silenced pistol,
and put a bullet through his kneecap. He went rigid for a moment, his breathing
becoming heavy and laboured, and he slumped back a little against the broken
mirror.

“Explain,” she repeated.

“No,” he croaked.

“Who do you work for?”

He stared into her eyes, and
despite his pain, there was an iron will there. He would not talk. Maybe
could
not talk. He either did not know answers, or he’d been fed braineeze drugs.
Amba gave a narrow smile, but there was no smile in her eyes. Shit. Or maybe,
maybe
he was just
tough.
She’d soon see how tough.

She lifted her right hand,
extended two slightly hooked fingers towards his eye, and watched as
understanding dawned. She would scoop out his eyeball and feed it to him.

“No...” he whispered.

“Tell me, fucker,” she hissed.

There came a clatter, and a woman
appeared with her daughter, who was perhaps ten years old. They were staring,
the woman’s mouth open in shock, a realisation of horror dawning in her wide
brown eyes. But the child stared at Amba in innocence, head tilted slightly to
one side as if analysing the android. She was getting a good long look, and it
was too much, and it was too bad. Amba’s arm snapped up, and at the end of it
was -

the gun.

She shot the child first. It was
always easier that way. If she’d shot the mother, she would have had to watch
the pain of realisation in the child’s eyes. So Amba got it done the hard way,
but also the easy way. She got it done
the right way.
The young girl
seemed to settle down on her haunches with a sigh, a kind of sad deflation, her
arms going floppy, a red hole in her forehead above one eye. The mother was turning
even at the
phzzt
of the silenced gun. Turning, mouth opening, breathing
in sharply to scream -

Amba fired twice, one bullet
through the lungs, killing the inhalation with a hiss, second bullet through
the woman’s mouth, destroying lips, teeth and tongue, then on through the back
of her skull. Killing her instantly. Blood spattered the wall in what auteurs
called
Picasso Piss.
She was dead before she hit the ground, with shards
of teeth and shredded tongue on her blood-drenched chin.

Back to the man. The goon. The
heavy. No time.
No time.

You’ve no time,
said Zi, and Amba knew it. He
had his hands raised. He understood. She gritted her teeth. Shot him through
his hand and eyeball. He bounced back onto a sink, which began gushing water,
then slithered to the floor. The water sounded like rainfall. Beautiful, sultry
rainfall.

Amba put another bullet in his
skull, then moved through the other attackers, delivering a second
blam
to each. She dropped the gun,
washed blood speckles from her hand, and on her way out stopped by the mother.
She stared for a moment.

Slowly, drawn by an invisible,
unstoppable cord, Amba’s head turned to the child. She was pretty. Beautiful,
even in death. Her eyes, like her mother’s, were large and circular and brown.
Amba licked her lips. Shit.
Shit.

She stepped over corpses and
closed the restroom door. Turning, her slender fingers closed over the digital
lock and crushed it, twisting. Locking it. Disabling it. Her slender fingers
were a lot stronger than they looked. A
lot.

She queued through passport
control, and unusually, her heart was beating fast. After all, this was just
another murder, just another killing, right? It was what she did. She did the
job, did the job well, did the killing well. End of story.
End of fucking
story.

She boarded the Shuttle. Was
shown to her comfy seat. Her face was impassive. And as she settled down,
settled back, watched a glass of water placed before her, rested back her head
against the comfortable headrest, and watched the surface of the water
disturbed
oh, so gently
by the Shuttle’s take-off - she thought back,
back to the girl, back to the bullet in the skull.