Z14 (2 page)

"Okay, you creepy robot bastard, it's on its way. We're done here."

"I'm not a robot. But yes, I was assembled outside of wedlock to the best of my knowledge." Another process running inside what I erroneously but unavoidably refer to as my brain indicated that my account had just been credited by the expected amount.

"You've got your money," said the old man. "I said we're done."

I could almost visualise the fat blob of flesh reaching for the disconnect button. "We're not done," I said. The words dripped menace. Silence from the other end, which I filled. "Fatality Corp may be short a chief exec, but they still have a contract of their own out on you."

He would have already suspected I was the one who'd taken that contract. Not just because I'd brought it up, but also because I take on almost all contracts. This planet had a thriving assassination industry when I arrived on the scene, until I got involved and monopolised it. I can get through three or four kills a day. I never fail, I never stop, I never, well, rarely rest. I'm the assassin of choice for the discerning contract setter. It helps, of course, that I'm almost the only assassin left on the planet. I killed most of the rest – my own little side-project to quite literally cut down the competition. Many of those I didn't kill found alternative careers. Flipping burgers may be boring, but it's not
usually
something I'll kill you for. The few die-hards still in the game, well, they will indeed die hard.

"You'll never find me!" His sudden desperation was almost palpable, but he wasn't even convincing himself.

"I found you last week," I said. How odd, my face was smirking. I swear, I lose control of it sometimes.

"What do you mea – "

The call cut off because I sent a remote signal to detonate the explosive charge I'd left under his chair a week ago. Smashing through walls and laying waste to entire armed encampments to reach my target is fun, I cheerfully admit, but sometimes the subtle, stealthy approach is almost downright sexy. Sexy? What the hell is wrong with me? There's no way I should have thoughts like that.

Job done, though. Now I almost hope the – quite rightly – affronted Fatality Corp refuse to pay up. Try it you evil shits, I dare you.

Referring to other entities as evil when I’m a genuine killing machine – who, worse, kills for money – might sound like the garbage-bot calling the sewage-droid dirty, but it wasn’t a bug in my morality processing, a contracted hypocrisy virus or some such techno-babble. No, my records indicate that I can claim with a high degree of certainty that I've only gone after nasty bastards in my life. Well, I can't speak for my whole life, because I have no idea how old I am; what my date of manufacture was, or even what I’ve been doing for all but the last five years of my existence. Guards, soldiers and assorted others die by my hand when I'm going for a target I deem worthy of death, but that's just tough shit for them for working for scum – I'm not going to lose any regenerative cycles over it.

And yet, humans put out contracts on all sorts of other humans, be they good, bad or totally amoral, and I take on almost all contracts, this is true. The thing is, it’s possible to do a contract backwards. If some utter arsehole puts out a contact on a ‘little Timmy’ type, I pay the would-be employer a visit instead. I have extensive abilities, both electronics-based and physical, to hack and poke into many aspects of people's private lives and I've deemed myself the proverbial judge and executioner. I don't need to be the jury too, that's just twelve more middlemen to cut out.

Every now and then some idiot seems to forget that I'm like some sort of avenging Santa Claus – yes, it seems Saint Nick came along on the colony ships. It’s like I check their ‘Dear Santa, please can you kill...’ list and know if they've been angelic or demonic. If they show up on my inner litmus test as acidic to society I can go and hack and poke
them
. Generally though, these days, the message has gone out that you only try to have someone killed if you've got good reason. Sure, the people ordering the hits are rarely any better than the target themselves, but more often than not a contract with their name on it pops through my metaphoric letterbox before too long. I try not to kill paying customers if I reckon there's a good chance someone else will pay me to do it later anyway. Besides, this is Deliverance; there aren’t exactly many ‘little Timmy’’ types around.

Fatality Corp and their rivals, the newly decapitated Murder Funtime Association were a special pair of cases. Squabbling over the business of death and misery they were in, they'd had a little falling out and each had ordered the deaths of the other's chief exec. They were – hah, emphasis on were – little more than gang bosses in suits, running companies that televised various death-based games in the subjugated towns and cities around the planet's capital, Boram Bay.

Ah, and what a planet this is. Deliverance, most people call it, because the people were basically delivered here. Records of Earth show us this is a very similar place to the home planet – eerily so, say some. To me it seems pretty obvious this planet has been terraformed; customised to our, I mean the humans’, liking. Just a little theory of mine, although I couldn't tell you who, how or why. It certainly wasn't the humans, as they don't even really know how they ended up here. Something we share in common. One day, back in the Earth year twenty twenty-three, more than thirty million people were scooped up from Earth and carried off aboard a fleet of spaceships. Aboard those ships they lived and died over the course of generations, before arriving here and watching in awe as their spaceships automatically converted themselves into efficient little colony creation centres.

Now, one obvious oddity about that story is that Earth's entire space fleet consisted at the time of a couple of private orbital pleasure craft and a scientific research ship, that had crashed into the moon. Carrying tens of millions of people to however far across the galaxy Deliverance is, has been estimated as being a feat Earth could not have achieved in less than three hundred years from that point in time. People tend to make of that what they will. Personally, I've added extraterrestrials to my ‘mysterious terraformers’ theory. Strangely, whoever did it imparted nothing of themselves, or their plans, to their guests-come-captives.

The immense colony ships were like tiny, flat planets, containing simulated Earth-like environments inside unimaginably large domes, that each housed up to a million people. There were resources aplenty within these environments and the people were able to build shanty towns inside their domes and exist in relative comfort – standards which, for many, were vast improvements over their living conditions on Earth. Animals, tools and all kinds of human technology had been brought along from Earth, too. Nobody knew how they had ended up on board the ships, nor what had happened to Earth – a collective amnesia affected every single one of them. One second they were on Earth, the next they just became aware that they were wandering around inside an artificial environment, with month-long chunks of their memories missing. Call me an unimaginative machine, but I cannot begin to picture the scale of the chaos, fear and panic that would have erupted as people came to their senses and began to wonder just what the fuck was going on. The conditions aboard ship may have been comfortable, but the rioting would not have been.

The people who had been taken – kidnapped or rescued, depending on your world view – had been spirited away in the cultural groups they lived in on Earth, and then scattered around Deliverance in those same groups; their ships landing and bedding down in geographical regions much like those they had come from. It really was very strange. Nobody had seen anybody or anything from off-planet since.

Technology has mostly been stagnant since the people – from every conceivable stratum of Earth society – found themselves aboard the mysterious space fleet. There's been the odd advance here and there, mostly in weapons technology, but then there's also been the odd slip in important fields like medicine and health care. Oh, and a somewhat relevant and perplexing point of self-interest: Cyborg technology hadn't been invented on Earth, to the best of anyone's knowledge. Even robotics had stalled in its infancy. And yet, here I am baby, doing my thing, amassing a vast personal fortune, and looking for a way to get to Earth. I would happily place a large amount of that personal wealth of mine on a bet that I was created by my theorised terraforming extraterrestrial kidnappers. It'd be nice to find out one day. I
will
find out one day.

Early life on Deliverance must have come somewhere close to the original kidnap generation's awakening for being what I'll severely understate as ‘confusing’. Humans have always asked, ‘Why?’ but they have rarely had to wonder, ‘Where?’ and, ‘How?’ and, ‘Just what the hell?’ at the same time before. I can forgive them for having so much on their plate that they let imagination and originality pass them by when they came to name their new, what, countries? States? Enclaves? Whatever they were, they named them such exciting things as New America, New Europe and New Australia. I think there were three New Americas at one point. After a few years of settling in to their new home, people looked at their neighbours in New Whatever and decided they had more of Widget X than they themselves did. Innumerable mini-wars kicked off and quickly merged into a chaotic global conflict, and New This 'n That fell in smoke and chaos. The old cultural boundaries were swished around with the flow of blood and people, and the battered survivors of the Settler Wars eventually calmed down, realising they were on the brink of total collapse and extinction – on Deliverance, at least. New settlements spread like a rash all around the planet and the original colony-cities began to flourish. New America II in particular outgrew, and soon outgunned just about everybody else, and, as it sought to exert its influence, the period known as The Last Great Gold Rush began – violently, of course. New America II was soon to be renamed Boram Bay, in honour of the man who finally ‘united’ the planet, albeit by crushing and subjugating almost everything and everyone that wasn’t him.

Here we are, very nearly two hundred years later. The colonies are cities and towns, there’s industry, science and, more importantly to the masses, television and Deliverance’s own version of the World Wide Web called the ‘net. Oh, and Boram Bay is the heart of a heartless empire that still dominates the world. The people of most of the rest of the planet are basically here for the needs and entertainment of the Overlords of Boram Bay. I could probably put a stop to that, but it's not high on my list of priorities right now.

After centuries of shaky starts humanity on Deliverance is thriving, although only a select few reap the benefits. If anybody cared what I thought, I’d say it was business as usual by human standards.

Okay, I decided, time to go into that regenerative cycle. Stacked at the back of the cave were tins of various foods. To regenerate, my body needs something from which to create the new skin, flesh, etcetera. When I heal, I make use of a part of me that is akin to a digestive system, but my creators had neglected to mention much in my databases and files about how it worked. All I knew was that the food I consumed was used – without any waste – to create an artificial stem-cell matrix; a thick white substance which, via many millions of micro-pores in my alloy skeleton, could be secreted to damaged areas of my outer body. Over the course of a few hours, that substance would solidify into skin, muscle, hair, cartilage, teeth – whatever was required.

As long as I had consumed enough nutrients, my stinging bullet wounds would be gone by morning – with not so much as a puckered little scar remaining. The healing process would also push out any bullets that were still lodged in me. Generally foreign bodies were repelled as the white goo solidified. Whether there were limits to my healing abilities, I wasn’t sure. I’d never been ‘hurt’ enough to test the system to the extreme.

Oh well, busy day tomorrow. I was sure there would be a scrabble amongst the minor ‘bosses’ of Boram Bay, as soon as news of my two hits spread. That power scramble should generate more contracts, so I’d be needing my beauty sleep. Night night me, sleep tight.

I finished healing and ‘woke’ with the dawn. I checked my email, scanned the 'net for contracts and checked the status of the three porn sites I host – hey, I've got a lot of spare storage and processing power inside me, and it's a nice little earner – and stepped outside.

I might have been surprised that there was a small, adult, human male in a white lab coat dying on the grass outside my cave, but surprise is one of a number of human fallibilities that I don't mimic. Judging by the interesting and doubtless very painful angles at which the man's limbs and spine were twisted, it was clear that he’d fallen onto the little grass-covered, yet rocky ledge outside my cave. He must have been climbing down the almost sheer cliff face, when he had slipped and arrived on my doorstep, a bit sooner and more forcefully than he had planned. It was slightly disturbing that any potential cry he'd emitted, and the inevitable thud of his impact hadn't roused me from my pseudo-slumber, but, here he was. Although he wouldn't be a ‘he’ for much longer, judging by the virtually imperceptible breathing and the amount of blood seeping into the grass.