Darkness

It’s stormin’ again, but hell, this is Seattle, it’s always fraggin’ doin’ that seems like. Nothing really heavy right now, it even gets so it’s only drizzlin’ every once in a while. Three-nights running, standing on the same freakin’ roof top, watching for signs, things that I don’t want to see, things I pray that I’ll never see again, but still, here I am. Life sucks sometimes, ya know what I mean?

Ain’t seen the sun in so long I’m not sure I’d recognize the damn thing if it jumped up and bit me. Between the rain and working the nights, it might as well be a fairy tale as far as I’m concerned. I take my vitamins, I do my time under the sunlamps when I can, but still, ya can’t substitute for the real thing too long. Some of us, we spend too much time away, and we can’t go back. That’s what happened to Sarah, something happened to her and now she’s a permanent part of the shadows. And like some damn fool, I watch for her, praying I don’t see her one second, then the next wishing to God I could. Problem is, when I do find her, I have to kill her. Ain’t love just grand?

I was normal once. Well, as normal as anyone can be now days. 2062! Big fraggin’ deal, the fuckin’ comet has come and gone, the damn world continues to spin in its insignificant little orbit around a minor star in the ass end of the galaxy. I had a life then, had friends, and had a decent enough job. The money sucked, but at least I could look myself in the eye every morning and not want to punch my fist through the mirror ‘cause I couldn’t stand the jerk looking back at me. I was just a security cop, low level, low pay, but it was fun. The team was good, we all knew each other, worked hard, played hard, left our jobs behind when we went home for the day.

Problem was, I wasn’t high enough on the fraggin’ food chain to get a living space inside the arcology itself. Over 100,000 people and they couldn’t find room to fit in one more guy. Real laugh, right? And I was part of the security of the place, which made the joke even funnier, if ya know what I mean. I saw enough daylight then, even though I worked during the day. Patrolled the levels where the middle level execs lived, walking a beat, making sure nothing happened, that no one got outta line. Nothing serious ever happened mind you, I mean, think about it. We lived inside a controlled environment, the entire fraggin’ building belonged to the corporation, nobody got in or out that we didn’t know about.

Most of the time was spent wandering around, checking doors to be sure they were locked, helping the maids and houseboys get the groceries in when the delivery carts dropped them off, really exciting things like that. Trouble usually wasn’t anything more than watching for some kid that got into Dad’s liquor cabinet and then hot-wired one of the floater carts and went joy-riding or investigating complaints of music being played too loud. We weren’t even carrying weapons, just some stun batons that were permanently locked at their lightest settings. If you ever pulled one out, you’d better be prepared to be filing paperwork about it for the next week.

Boring? Yeah, I suppose so. But I knew everyone on the three levels I patrolled with my team. Those three levels were almost a small village in themselves. There were shops that sold most anything, a dental clinic, a medic station, and a sim-sense theater, most anything you could possibly need. What you couldn’t get on in our levels was available on the main shopping levels up about 10 stories. They even provided funeral services, though you had to settle for cremation naturally, no burial plots in a building. Hell, the brag was, if you didn’t want to, you never had to leave the arcology for the rest of your life.

Only some of us did. They were still working on the living quarters for the lowest level employees. Gotta get the execs their luxury suites after all! So every afternoon, after my shift was over, I went to my little cracker box in Queen Anne Hill district. Didn’t cost me nothing, the corp paid my rent ‘cause I couldn’t live in the arcology, so I was doing okay in that respect, but still… I couldn’t be in the arcology too long after my shift, except on Friday and Saturday nights, when non-resident employees could stay until the bars closed. Didn’t do that too often though, ‘cause when the rest went to their levels, I was still leaving the damn building. Word was, as the security folks, we were supposed to be getting our requests for moving into the damn place prioritized, but there was always one freakin’ excuse after another why it wasn’t happening. The corp PR flacks kept bragging how the building was fully functional, and they were all the time running publicity tours through, but the ugly truth was, it would be almost a year before the last of the construction crews would be done, and that was after the ‘official completion date’ had come and gone.

So I got my team, and we’re keeping the peace for good of the corporation. Six of us including me, seven if ya count a damn cyber-dog, which lots of the locals on our levels did. We’d patrol in teams of three, the dog going with whichever group was doing the service corridors and maintenance workrooms, places the normals usually didn’t go.

Unless you majorly screwed the pooch, it was almost impossible to lose your job, and the corp took decent enough care of us. Good medical, lots of educational opportunities if ya wanted, chances to travel a lot on company sponsored trips, things like that. Stuff bought inside the arcology cost less than the same shit on the street, so even those of us that lived on the outside did our shopping before we left for the day. Of course, security was everyplace, from the low-level roaches like us, to those damn cybered super-cops for the executive types. All of those guys were Japanese, all of them with their freakin’ noses so high they scraped them on the ceiling and as dangerous as a tube of blasting gel.

So life’s going along, boring but hey, at my age, boring is good sometimes. No steady woman in my life, occasional flings now and again, had one girl that stayed almost three months before we started getting on each other’s nerves. Bowled with the rest of my team during the season, we’d have a few drinks at the Harbor View Lounge on the 112 ^th level the second Saturday night of each month, other things like that. But most of the time, it was me, myself and I, and I liked it plenty good that way.

Then I met Sarah. Wasn’t the best first meeting though. She’d been passing through one of our levels, hand delivering something to one of execs that was home sick. Buncha kids had been to a Seattle Screamers urban brawl game the night before and were pretending they were brawlers themselves in the hallway she was in. She got slammed by a couple of ‘em pretty hard and busted up her wrist. We got it all sorted out, sent the kids home to their parents, made sure the parents knew it was going into the company records. Shit like that, it can hold up promotions and transfers, so I suppose the kids caught hell from ‘em after we let ’em go. Then I went over to medical to make sure she was okay. The doctor had already cast the wrist, given her some fast-grow and a pain shot and let her go. I radioed my super; he said to make sure she made it home okay. It was end of shift anyways, so I walked her to the express elevators, got her to her floor and made sure she got to her door okay. Yeah, she gets to live on the inside. Didn’t even know her name then, she was just “Ms. Gameon”. Went home and forgot about it.

Then a couple weeks later, there she is again, got a package to deliver and looking real nervous ‘cause she in the same corridor she got whacked in before. So I tell Grimes and Sollie that I’m gonna check on her, make sure she’s okay. Grimes gives me the wink and says go ahead, they’ll go to the end of the corridor and come back for me.

Ask her how she’s doing. She damn near jumped through the ceiling when I first talked to her. Then she remembers me from the accident and thanks me for getting her home. Then she apologizes for being jumpy and I notice how cute she is. Yeah... cute. Not some overly pretty stick-thin media chick or tri-vid starlet, but really cute. And it’s her eyes that got me first. Really green and she told me they were real, not something from the bio-ware center downstairs. I believed her too; she was just like that. So I make sure she finds the right exec to drop her stuff at, and then walk her back to the express tubes again. Got a real bold streak suddenly, asked her if she had dinner plans. Not only did she not laugh at me or blow me off, she blushed a little and said kinda quiet like that she didn’t. So I invited her to a little place I go to on the outside sometimes and she accepts! Got the routing number for her phone, ‘cause I already knew where she lived.

So I finish my shift, with Grimes and Sollie teasing me the whole time about dating an ‘insider’. Said I was trying to find someone I could move in with and have a place inside the arco. It was good fun, but with a little undercurrent of truth to it. You got an insider to shack up with ya, you got to move in if they approved. But right then all I had in mind was a couple of beers, a burger and maybe a walk by the harbor.

The date went fine. She was fun to be with, listened real good, told good jokes and even knew something about the local combat-biker scene, something I’d never expected from a girl that lived inside the arco. So after we’ve eaten and had a couple of drinks, I ask her if we can see each other again. She says sure, she’d like that.

So the next day, the team’s giving me grief about her and I’m joshing them back about her. I’m feeling pretty good, it’s been quiet lately, the incident with the wanna-be little brawler brats was the most exciting thing that happened for about a month and now I’ve got a girl to date for a while.

We go out a few more times over the next three weeks or so. Nothing really major, supper here and there, a sim-sense in the theater one night, we even hit a street dance in the outside world one weekend, which she found exhilarating. Then one night after supper, out of nowhere, she asks if I want to stay the night at her place. Now mind you, I’ve been holding hands with her, kissing and stuff like that, but not making any moves on her. She’s just that kind girl, gives off the vibe that she’ll do things when she’s good and ready. So I say sure, but you’ll have to square it with the manager for your level ‘cause I ain’t living inside.

So she says, no problems, she works for the guy that’s in charge of the AI that runs the place, he’s got plenty of pull and she can get it taken care of. I was impressed. I knew she worked the computer section, but I didn’t know she worked for the big boss that waved the baton that told all the other computers what to do.

So anyways, that Friday night, there I am at her place, it’s past the time that my implanted radio would usually be chirping at me about leaving the building, and instead, I’m climbing into bed with Sarah. It was a good night, but that’s all yer getting. I ain’t no ‘kiss n’ tell’ kinda jerk.

Every week or two, she’d invite me over for the night, and never once did she fail to fix it. Security never bugged me to get my ass outta the building ‘cause I was there after hours. Got to be real comfortable with her, and she was pretty clear about that fact she wasn’t seeing anyone else besides me and I believed her. Thought briefly about asking her to move to my place, but why would someone that had a place inside the arco want to move out? Now of course, wish I had at least asked her, but hindsight’s 20/20, as the old saying goes.

So the first week in December 2059, her and I are talking at Lenny’s Lakeside Lagoon after a good supper, and she up and asks me if I want to think about moving in with her. You’d think I’d be swarming on a chance to move inside, but thing was, I liked Sarah a lot and wasn’t so sure that moving in with her wouldn’t mess up the whole thing. So I told her I really appreciated her asking, but I needed to think it through a bit. Told her why, and she got kinda misty eyed and kissed me big, told me I was a really good guy. I suppose that’s the night I really fell in love with her. We ended up back at my place, and thank goodness the next day was Saturday, ‘cause neither of us woulda made it to work.

Week goes by, and we’re seeing each other every day now, I’m spending so much time at her place I might as well have moved in already. Only problem is, she’s getting edgy now, but it ain’t about her and me. Seems her boss is getting kinda jumpy, spending hours in the computer room, almost living in a virtual-reality rig while he’s putting the finishing touches on the damn AI. Gaia, they call the thing, a Greek goddess of Earth Sarah tells me. Weird name for a Japanacorp to call their AI, but hey, it’s their stuff, not mine. But her boss being jumpy is rubbing off on her, and she actually snaps at me one night when I make a joke about the AI taken over the world, not needing us anymore. But then she apologizes real quick and tries to act like nothing happened. So that night, I decide I’ll spend the next couple of nights at my place, give her a little space, let things at work settle down. She don’t like it, but she’s so damn understanding that I almost don’t do it.

So the first night, it’s fine, next day I come to work, do my patrolling with the guys, have lunch with Sarah. If anything, she even jumpier, going on about how her boss isn’t really himself anymore, he’s acting really irrational, shit like that. So I figure I’ll give her one more night by herself, hoping things will shake out for her. So I go home, have a couple of cold ones, decide there’s nothing on the tri-vid worth watching and go to bed.

Next morning, I take the bus to the arco like usual, but there’s a line to get into the building and it ain’t moving. So I figure there’s some kind of emergency and use my ID to get to the head of the line. But then I find the gate that I usually go in is locked tight, but there’s no one there guarding it. Just a huge slab of metal, no lights, no guards, nothing. We mill around for a bit, and then I grab a cab and go around the building.

‘Walk around it?’ You obviously never seen the damn place, have you? Its ten city blocks on a side and nearly a thousand meters tall. More than a casual stroll, I can tell ya.

Well, by now you know as well as I do there was no way into the building. Locked up tighter than a fraggin’ drum it was. I looked up in the sky, there was military and city cops’ copters buzzing the place and something was firing at them! So we figured some kinda fail-safe had gone bug-shit crazy and it would take a while for them to figure it out inside. I mean look at it, the damn place was design to withstand anything short of a tactical nuke rocket. What kinda threat could there be that it had to lock up like that? Had to be malfunction.

Tried to call my boss, called Dispatch, called Sarah, called the rest of the team. Nothing from anyone on the inside. But like me, Sollie lived outside, and he didn’t know anything either. So that day dragged to the next, and still no news and no getting in. Then word gets around that the damn governor had been inside when the arco locked down and suddenly there’s talk of troops and all kinds of the other things. Tanks show up and surround the building, and the military ‘takes control’ of the area.

Some high-level corporation suit named Goryu wasn’t inside when it locked down, been outside doing something that night and suddenly he’s the guy in charge of all corporation business in North America. He’s talking to the city cops and the military, trying to keep them outta the building, and they’re telling him to frag off. He gotten all of us that weren’t inside to start reporting to some little corporation sub-office way out in Bellevue and tries to act like this is just a little hiccup, nothing major going on. Then the mayor of Seattle declares an emergency and Goryu goes nuts. I’m there the day some Major from the Army tells him they’re gonna crack the building open and find out what’s going on and then he tells Goryu to go piss up a rope when the little Nip protests.

The military attacks the building a few days later, blows open a couple of the gates, and then the drek really hits the fan. There’s all kinds of weird reports coming out, strange creatures, machines that are attacking the troops and even reports that something has been altering the people inside. All us security folks that are left get pulled into be Goryu’s guards, ‘cause it looks like he’s even lost his hot-shot blonde chick that’s usually following him around. Real hard case, that one, I knew she’d scrapped with the big boys before, she was so dangerous that even the executive guards walked careful around her. But one day, she just up and disappears. I figure Goryu sent her to try to get inside and she didn’t make it.

So I’m close to the big guy, but you don’t talk to him unless he asked you a question, that’s just how them old-line Jap execs are. The attacks on the building ain’t going so good either. They’re not letting us into our own building, but every day we see lines of ambulances and med-evac copters coming and going in a steady stream.

This goes on for months. Goryu-san gets some people from the home office in Japan to help him out, and eventually, he gets word that he’s being sent home. His bodyguard shows up again, but she ain’t the same either. She seen some shit that’s changed her, she don’t smile as much, and you have to be blind to miss the scar on her left arm. Goryu leaves for Japan, but she stays behind, but only for a few days. Word is, she’s gone to the Front Range Free Zone (that’s Denver to you mooks that don’t keep up on current events), but who knows with that type?

The rest of us? We end up being the security force for the new executives that have come over from Japan. It’s pretty much an open secret by now that Gaia has gone insane, and they have no idea how deal with it. Then they start bringing out some of the people that lived inside the arcology and its real bad to see them. All of them have had their eyes replaced; lots of them had cyberware done to them and worse stuff. Most are pretty bad physically, but the worst is the mental screw jobs they got. The AI messed with their minds in a big way. She (yeah, yeah, most people considered the crazy AI a bitch!) had bunches of them hooked up like they were a bunch of little computers, all networked together. Killed hundreds of them at a time because the damn AI didn’t how to take care of them properly, but that don’t bother a machine much, I guess. Just treated ‘em like spare parts mostly. I keep looking for Sarah, and I even got some of the soldiers that are looking for her for me. Cost me everything I had, but I got a few of them to put her picture in their computer files, so when they’re doing IDs on people, if she shows up, they’ll tell me.

It’s clear into the spring of ’60 when I finally get a call from a sergeant that they’ve pull Sarah outta a human computer bank and they’re sending her to a medical place out at Fort Lewis.

I try to get there to see her, but ‘cause I’m with Corporate Security, they think I’m a spy for the corporation or something, so not only don’t I get to see her, I get to spend the night in a cell while they sort things out. By the time it’s all over, I find myself out of a job, ‘cause my corporation doesn’t believe that I’d do that for the sake of one girl. I hang around Fort Lewis for a few days afterwards, trying to find a way to see her, but I’m not family, so it’s a no-go. I get back to my house finally and find that I’m about to be evicted. No job means they ain’t paying my rent no more, and the slumlord bitch that owns all the houses on my block says she ain’t running no charity ward.

So there I am, with all my stuff in a few boxes, no job, no car and nothing to do. I’m looking for a job, right, but apparently the corp’s put the word out and I can’t find a damn thing. Takes me almost ten days to finally land a crap job as the midnight to dawn guy at a Stuff-It Shack in Tacoma. Only good thing is, Tacoma’s real near Fort Lewis, so I can be near where Sarah is. I’m living in a single room in a flop where ya gotta wrestle the cockroaches for the food, and hot water is a real luxury, barely even making that rent with the lousy pay I get.

So I start nosing around the little security companies, ones that might not check my records too close, or not care that I’ve been canned by a major corporation. Nothing much seems to be available though, but then I come across this sleazy guy in the bar one night, and when I tell him I’m ex-corp, with security training, but looking for a job, he tells me he can hook me up with some people that need to settle some scores with the corps. I tell him I don’t care which one, by now I’m pissed off enough that I’ve lumped all of them in with my old employer. I feel like they sure aren’t my friends anymore, so I tell him sure, long as it pays something. He tells me they’ll pay just for information, but they’ll pay lots more if I come along and show them how to get around of the security stuff in the building they’re going get into.

Now don’t get me wrong, I ain’t innocent, I’ve heard talk of shadow-runners for years, and I’ve even heard there was a few that made runs against the arcology from time to time, but I never in a million years imagined I’d be one of them. But right about then, I was really tired of living on scraps, mopping the floors and taking crap from drunk and stoned customers and having nothing to show for it. So I told him sure, I’d come along and act as a consultant, as he put it.

Turns out they were hitting some little lab that one of the big corporations was operating out on the northern edge of Everett, a little agriculture shop that was working with forced plant growth or some such nonsense. We break in; I show them how to get around the alarm systems. They take a bunch of stuff outta the computers, then blow up all the greenhouses and spray some kind of herbicide around to kill everything else. We get away with no problems, a few Corp Security boys show up, when I see what they’re doing, I tell the guys how to get away pretty clean. Wasn’t like the tri-vid, I saw plenty of guns but not a shot was fired.

Two days later, the guy shows up again with a couple of bags of equipment, a wad of cash and an invitation to join their group on a full-time basis. Kinda hard to turn them down, the cash was more in one night’s work than I made in two months at the Stuff-It Shack and I was getting paybacks at the corporations for dumping me.

Things went on like that for the rest of ’60 and most of ’61. We’d make runs for various companies, usually against other companies, but sometimes against people that they didn’t like in their own company. Only thing I wouldn’t do was take any run working for my old corporation. But they were still licking their wounds from the arcology disaster and didn’t have a lot of cash to throw around anyway. I got banged up a bit, lost my left hand while extracting a research chemist for a Canadian corporation, got that replaced with a cyber-hand and had my knee, elbow and shoulder joints reworked with some carbon fiber lacings that made me stronger and faster.

I keep trying to find Sarah, and when the decker in the group found out what I was looking for, she put out some feelers also. All we knew was that she was still alive but listed as constantly being in “serious condition”. Otherwise, like most of the folks they pulled out of the arco, they might as well have dropped off the face of the earth. It was like the corporation had written them off. They never made any serious attempt to get any of them back, which puzzled us pretty much, the corporations are usually big on getting their people back, especially those that might have important information. Sarah had been the assistant to the big boss, I figured the corporation would want her back for the confidential information in her head if nothing else.

Then just before Christmas, they suddenly transferred a bunch of the former arco residents to various ‘long-term’ care facilities, which was a polite term for substandard nursing homes. Most of them were pretty brain dead, and those that weren’t vegetables were crazier than shit-house rats most of the time. They had Sarah classified in the second category.

She got sent a place out in Renton, a real dump with the imposing, but completely misleading name of “Shady Acres Rest Home”. There wasn’t a tree within a mile of the damn place, and it looked more like a prison than anything else. We let them get all nice and settled in, waited for them to get lax. The military kept guards around the place for the first couple of months, and then a private security company took over. Besides making sure all the doors were locked at night; they didn’t really do much. We went in one night, the decker sleazed the alarm system, we cracked the security codes for the door locks, downloaded all of Sarah’s medical files, swiped a couple months’ worth of her meds from the pharmacy, scooped Sarah up and left.

We put her in a safe house we used between runs, and I finally got a look at her. Problem was, it wasn’t Sarah. Oh, don’t get me wrong, it was Sarah’s body, but that damn Gaia had taken her eyes and replaced them with those cyber-eyes she gave everyone. She’d had data-jacks implanted in her so she could be networked with others to form his human computing network and played enough mind games with her memory and psyche to induce some major mental trauma. She didn’t know me from the man on the moon. I hired a spell-caster to come in and try to find if she’d been spelled real bad or something by one of those mages that had appeared when the world got ‘twisted’, but besides taking my credits, the bitch was useless. We got a street doc to come out, and he took her off of most of the meds we’d taken, said they were nothing more than drugs to make her sleep a lot and keep her quiet. Once we did that, she actually started talking a bit, but it was always crazy stuff, she couldn’t string three coherent sentences together to save her life.

So we just let her go like that for a while, taking care of her, cleaning up after her, stuff like that. She couldn’t even feed herself anymore. According to her medical records, she’d lost almost 15 kilos while that damn AI had her captive, she’d been mostly skin and bones when they’d taken her out. Then she seemed to start making a comeback. One day she called me by name, and a few days later, she used a spoon without making much of a mess. I started spending more time with her, trying to get her to remember stuff. Didn’t seem to make much headway, but it wasn’t like I had a whole lot else going on. Shadow-running is long weeks of boredom followed very short hours of sheer terror.

By late spring, she could actually walk again and feed herself pretty well. She’d remain awake for several hours at a time, and as long as you didn’t get too complicated on her, she could even talk. I was feeling pretty good, and the rest of the group was relieved, as I’d dropped out of running almost completely while trying to glue her back together. They finally convinced me to go on a short run over into Walla-Walla to extract some little research scientist that wanted to move to Cross Applied Technology in Seattle, but his present company wasn’t willing to let him go.

We came back, all juiced up over a successful run only to find she’d escaped while we were gone. We’d hired the niece of one of the girls in the group to sit with Sarah while we were gone. Sarah had busted the girl up pretty bad, we had to take her to real hospital and not a street doc. Sarah had taken everything she could that was easy to fence and left. I was almost crazy myself then, I couldn’t imagine what had driven her to that. We looked high and low, put the word on the street, our decker even put her picture and name on the Darkland net, but nothing ever popped. It was like she’d stepped through a door into another dimension and disappeared.

By the end of the summer, I was getting a lot better about it, but then one day Benny, our decker came to me with some disturbing shit she’d been hearing in the Matrix lately. Seems that quite a few of the former arco residents that weren’t brain dead had disappeared since last winter. Now, there were rumors they were being seen again, slipping in and out of alleys all over Seattle and the suburbs. What was worse was that it was getting out that while Gaia had been thought to have been trapped and then destroyed in the corporation’s arcology, what had really happened was that she’d ‘downloaded’ tiny portions of herself to all the different human computers she’d created. They all had triggers to come together at various times. If enough of them all met at the same time and had a sufficiently powerful enough host, Gaia could reassemble herself.

A couple of them got caught, and when they did, they went totally crazy, yelling, thrashing, hitting, kicking, doing anything to get away and all the while screaming out their devotion to Gaia. None of them survived more than an hour after being captured, their brains almost burning themselves out. The science types said that Gaia implanted such a powerful compulsion in them to return that if something prevented them from get to their rendezvous points, they were being killed by their compulsion.

So I knew now what was happening with Sarah. She’s out there someplace, trying to get back to her rendezvous point, slinking through the night, skulking through sewers, slowly burning herself up from the inside trying to get with others that have her same trigger to try and reassemble Deus.

So here I am, squatted on the roof during a lightning crazy storm, knowing why I wait, wondering if she’ll ever show, hoping she won’t, terrified that she will. If she does show up, I know what I have to do. It’s the least I can do for what Sarah used to be, before an insane AI got a hold of her. I have two shells in my gun now. One of them is for her, a clean shot to the head, and then all her troubles are over, she can finally rest, maybe even get to heaven if there is such a place. If anyone ever deserved to be there, it was her, she didn’t ask for what happened to her to happen. And the second bullet? Well, like I said… Life sucks sometimes, ya know what I mean?

THE END

Bio: John Powers is a retired medical laboratory technician and computer help desk support. He has been working on multiple science fiction and science fantasy novels, but none finished yet...

E-mail: John Powers

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