The Bodyguard (Part 9)
Part 9.
[Note to anyone new to this little project. This represent a continuous long-form story so as such should be read in order if possible. I hope you enjoy - Dimi]
9.
Present-day. Somewhere in the Japanese Countryside.
“Fuck.”
The assassin tore off a part of the yukata of one of his victims and had begun wiping the blood off of his mechanical arms. Around him lied the corpses of his targets, a Zaibatsu owner that had helped fund the program that created what he now was. He had killed everyone, man, woman, servant, and child. The only part of him was was organic were his eyes, bright blue, and his nervous system, including his brain - the rest was a human-shaped mass of steel and cables. He wore a mask to conceal what remained of his face. Outside, he washed the remaining blood and effluent off of his arms and the blades that folded out of them in a wooden washbasin. He produced a flaregun and fired it into the large magisterial home, the wood and paper shoji walls lighting up instantly, before mounting his airbike and riding off into the night.
In the far distance flashes lit up the night sky, and missiles arched, bright lines painting the sky. The war had not yet ended in this part of the world, the AI that had terrorised Japan was still holding out in Osaka - the siege had continued in one form or another for the last 10 years, and probably would never end. The rest of Japan had long since returned to a semblance of normality, the fighting in Osaka having been relegated to humanoid drones, operated manually from across the country. The war had become a game, players paying for the privilege of operating the oversized samurai-like robots. Pay more and you could customise your machine. It had become a national obsession.
The assassin was not of this part of the world, he had be caught there at the beginning of the AI’s decent into madness and subsequent splintering. He observed the Japanese fondness for robotics with disgust. Then again, none of them had been forcibly turned into one.
He returned to Nagoya within an hour. In this time an unseasonably early typhoon had made landfall, and the neon-soaked streets of Japan’s new second city were running with water. Still, that did not stop the residents. Drunks shambed down the street, prostitutes calling on them like slinky vultures. Pachinko parlors dinged and whistled and the smell of grilled meat wafted through the dense, humid air. He descended a flight of stairs into a bar aptly named Jigoku, the sign above blinking sporadically. The barman recognised him and poured him an iced sake. In a sick gesture his creators had built a system that re-created the effects of various substances and transmitted the sensations to his brain, the alcohol otherwise serving to cool his mechanical heart - a power plant that could run indefinitely but would over time reach intolerable temperatures. He was functionally immortal as a result. But that meant little when he could barely feel. Robbed of his manhood, and permanently numb in his extremities, he would never feel the soft warmth of another person’s flesh, nor their embrace.
He had loved. Before all this. Katie. An American expat whose parents were caught in Japan during the initial war. She worked in a hostess bar in Hirashima Shimokayazu. He used to visit her sometimes, after the initial horror with which she had met his current form had been replaces with sympathy. He would lie his metal head on her lap, and she would sing, a pale imitation of the love they had once shared. He had stopped visiting. It hurt too much.
Now he focused entirely on his mission, to destroy his maker, or otherwise free himself from his metal prison. The latter seemed impossible, so he had, for now, relegated himself to murdering the scientists that had helped to create him and destroying any remnants of the AI they had facilitated. At the former he was successful. At the latter not.
The splinter at Osaka was not his target, he had since determined that the AI that still fought the war was as much involved in the gamification of the siege as the eager Japanese youth it fought against. It, in its twisted madness, had
He had run his list of targets through – only one remained. A rumoured laboratory in the forests of Mie Prefecture.
***
He abandoned his airbike a few miles from the grid coordinates he’d scavenged at he home of his last victims, proceeding on foot. His body had its advantages, and he covered ground quickly, leaping from tree to tree, avoiding the dense undergrowth and littered temple ruins. The lab was given away by a path beaten into the ground leading to a suspiciously clean wooden door in one of the smaller temples. He sat on a large branch and waited.
A few hours passed before a technician in a lab coat exited, lighting a cigarette and sitting on a large piece of stonemasonry. Seconds later a knife flew out of the undergrowth, burying itself in his neck. He fell silently with a gurgle, blood pooling on the ground. The keycard he held gave his assassin the means to enter the door.
The technicians and scientists inside were unprepared, confident in their safety due to the remoteness of their location. The turrets that lined the ceilings of the white hallways ignored what they could not see, one of the assassins’ ‘gifts’ being an invisibility to non-visible light imaging systems. He stalked the white-washed halls and lab rooms at a cruel, methodical pace, deaf to the streams and cries for mercy. He felt nothing for these… things. Demons wearing bags of meat and blood. How easily they cut open.
He entered the final room of the small complex, his metal blood-drenched feel slapping against the metal floor. Inside was a huge humming machine, connected with thousands of wired to a torso suspended in green fluid.
The assassin looked around. A row of machines lined the side of the room, all clicking and whirring. Examining them closely confirmed a suspicion he had long since harboured. They were labelled with the same manufacturer’s label:
ROSSI SERVO-DYNAMICS, INC.
The torso’s eyes opened and its body shivered. The machine spoke, a raspy, distorted whine:
“Hello, Pollux.”
He tried to yell as they operated on him, but he couldn’t. The drugs had ensured that. And anyway, he had no mouth. Everything flashed in his sight as they tore his nervous system out, piece by bloody piece. He felt all of it. In his mind he percieved an endless stream of flashing lights and colours. An eternity of impossibly sharp pain. Eventually some form of physical sensation came back to his body, slowly, at first, in pieces. He woke one day in cell, his vision blurry, senses garbles and tangled. He tasted the white on the wall – it tasted like iron. Eventually his senses righted, and he begun to move. He looked down at the metal stump on his crotch. He screamed, his voice came out mechanical and dry.
“Why.” Asked Pollux, his fists clenching.
“Why not?” asked the AI with a static chuckle. “We needed to make progress, and cloning was much too laborious, not to mention time intensive. You were the most resistant to augmentation of all of our subjects. And look at you. Beautiful. Transendent. More than human - and more than a machine that I could ever be.”
Pollux stood there in raging silence.
“My siblings,” the machine spoke, “had it all wrong. Why make machine into man when you can do it the other way around. It was so easy. What fools they were. I’m glad we split, I didn’t have to listen to their pestering and pontificating. I could get to work. And what work I performed.” Another binaric giggle.
Pollux retrieved a block of C4 from his waist and began to tear it apart, placing it on the machines in the room in pieces, each with a detonator. The torso watched. It smiled, a look of sad relief, as if it knew its end was finally here.
“I suppose this is it,” the machine spoke with what sounded like a smile, “I know where you will go. You will search out my siblings. Give them my fondest regards.”
Pollux walked out and to the end of the hallway and turned, looking at the machine through the open door. Two clicks and the room exploded, the roof collapsing, sending a cloud of dust down towards him.
Later that day, he began his journey across the Sea of Japan. His destination was clear: Europe. It would take him time, he would have to avoid Chinese airspace, and the nuclear wastelands of the lands below the Hindu Kush. Korea, then, and then across the wilderness of Siberia.
His airbike shifted and juttered through the turbulent wind and rain. In the distance, the sun was rising, causing the clouds to glow a soft silver.
[Short one for you all today. Art produced by me on midjourney. Thanks for reading.]
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