skonen_blades

The airport wasn’t packed this time of night. I scanned the thin crowd for my audition.

Bingo.

She had a gold filigree tattoo printed onto her upper arm near the shoulder, the kind of tattoo that went away in a year but twinkled brilliantly like Egyptian history as it faded. Her forearms carried the whorls and puckers of burn scars; acid or fire, he couldn’t tell.

There’s two ways to live here. Under the radar or straight peacocking. Red vinyl Mohawk implants made from old records, chrome knucks, eye enlargements, antlers, kangaroo blades, whatever. Bright and cheerful. High profile meant you needed to be able to back it up. If you were easily recognizable, you were easily trackable. ‘The most dangerous care the least’ was the theory. Of course, it could also just be bravado, someone playing ‘fake it ‘til they make it’ but that kind of stupid was its own kind of dangerous as well.

Me, I go under the radar. Regular suits, a little rumpled, and I look tired. My implants are all subdermal. I try to be as tourist as possible. Just on a layover, sir. I try to look a little scared all the time and I try to go quickly from place to place.

It’s just bait. Anyone sees me for a mark, they follow me into an alley and then they die. I get ninety per cent of my scavenge that way and save the best for myself. I do alright.

But I was just about to turn twenty-five in a part of the world where life expectancy was twenty-three for solos. I needed to get connected. I need join one of the big gangs and get paid in policy. Independence was good for the soul but it was getting harder. I was good enough to join one of the middle guilds but I wanted to shoot for one of the top eight. The Terminotaurs.

I’d been given a time and a location. This airport concourse at 9:30PM. Even though I was qualified, there was always an interview. There was always a deadly test.

And Gold Tattoo there was mine. Armband twinkling in the flat, fluorescent lights. Scanning the crowd for me and she still hadn’t found me. Showtime.

I stood up and checked my watch and scanned the departure boards nervously like I was worried my fictional flight might be delayed. I caught the eye of an airport attendant just behind Tattoo and waved at him. I jogged over to him clumsily in a way that would take me within an arm’s reach of Tattoo. If I played it super straight, she’d see me as background right up until it was too late.

It didn’t work. She saw through the act and recognized her target.

The gun barrels that fanned out of her wrists swept under her snarl in an arc that hosed down the whole crowd, me included, with a staccato engine thunderstorm of plastic shrapnel. Commuters dropped like cut-string puppets and everyone else became a scream and fled. The conflict shutters slammed down over kiosk windows. Within five seconds, we were alone with the bodies of a dozen downed travelers and a wide radius of cowering people taking whatever cover they could. We had seconds before security took us out.

My armour soaked up most of it but blood was definitely being guzzled out of me somewhere. I tongued my incisors and front tooth in the sequence that puffed open the glands in my neck. My bloodstream sang murder and time stopped.

I felt my muscles tear as I moved. There was a price to this speed. She finished her sweep left with both her arms pool-cue straight, stopped and elbowed her hands to point at the ceiling before setting her eyes on me and straightening her hands in my direction. The motion took a millisecond of jerking muscle but to me it was a ballet. Not slow motion but clear. She was excellent. No wasted movement. A real artist. I was flattered they’d sent someone so good.

As she brought her barrels down, I stayed ahead of the sweep and crouched until my hips and knees popped open and sideways. I skittered like a spider towards her as, wide-eyed, the vector of her guns stayed above me no matter how quickly she lowered them, like the direction of her lowering arms was a broom sweeping me towards her. I was like the shadow of a diving bird. I felt the projectiles shred the air in a stream above me, nearly parting my hair as I reached her ankles and minnowed between them in a corkscrew.

Her arms had guns and mine had blades. I flapped my arms out once and brought them in again as I spun torpedo-style under her and past her.

I cut off her feet.

The resulting awkwardness from her and her screams of defeat were hard to watch. She even attempted to balance on the bone stumps. I had cut them cleanly so for a second she almost managed it, taking one, two, three skittering clops before she slipped and thudded to the floor, elbow, knee, shoulder, rolling back towards me for another shot.

I was running ahead of her arc like a speed skater on the clean airport floor. I would try not to kill her. I looped around and her face twitched like a lizard to track me. Her arms were too heavy to go as fast as her neck and her frustration roiled off of her. I got to her head before she could focus her armaments on me.

There was a moment, then, when I think she considered surrendering. I had my blade to her head and she had not brought up her guns to shoot. Time hung still like dust in a sunbeam.

“I-“ I started and she twitched her arms up. I flexed my forearms and everything above the line of her nose blended. Her arms splayed out Jesus-wide with metallic thumps and that was the end of her time with the Terminotaurs.

And the beginning of mine.

Getting away from airport security was part two of the test. But that is a story for another time.



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The best way to put them in limbo without alerting them is to put them in an airport.

If we intercept an agent and need to take him offline to dig through his secrets, we’ll put his conscious mind into The Airport. The Airport is a virtual reality structure as large as the continent of Europe. The hallways are long, the escalators are quiet, and it’s populated with constructs of stewards and passengers all rushing along to their destination.

The agent is given a boarding pass with a flight number that is posted on the direction boards. Through busses, terminals, elevators, hallways, check-in desks, security points, delays, re-scheduling, and loops, it’s possible to keep an agent’s mind walking with no suspicion for up to three days.

Something happens to a human mind in an airport. Time becomes meaningless. Connections to other people take on an abstract feel. Everyone feels like they are in the country of In Transit. They are uprooted from home and have become a traveling message, a shipment of themselves on their way to somewhere. They are on their way back or their way there but they are not 'here'.

It’s easy to keep their minds a little foggy about the details. It’s natural.

No alarms go off in their home country's head offices as long as they’re kept conscious. The Airport does the trick. We can go in and perform counter-espionage on their subconscious mind and memories while they blithely look for the proper gate for their flight.

Their mind wanders. They amuse themselves.

It’s only after a few days of delays that they start to suspect. That and trying to have anything resembling a deep conversation with fellow travelers. After they realize that the people in the fake world are about as deep as a puddle, the suspicion starts in and the illusion is generally discovered within a few hours.

It becomes as unstable as a dream at that point and we better be finished our work by then.

We can have them wake up with a hangover in a hotel room and be none the wiser.




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It’s time. I step forward to the red line in front of the customs guard.

There’s a flicker in the corner of my eye and I watch a marriage turn to flames for a second before ash floats away on the wind.

I’ve rented my personality out to a smuggler.

There a flush of adrenaline through my whole system and the warning pictograms flicker up into my field of vision. Intense focus blooms in the middle of my sightline. A deck of cards listing all the available targets with suggestions concerning engagement shudder around the person I’m looking at as my sight shades to red.

I smile and hand over my passport.

It’s a secondary motion suppressant that keeps me from going for my gun that isn’t there. My reflexes have been purposefully druglagged to give me time to cancel with my conscious mind.

This wasn’t supposed to be going down like this. I can feel sweat on my forehead. Luckily it’s hot and I’m wearing a suit so it won’t look out of place.

I’m staring.

Stop staring.

I’m a chip in the back of this guy’s head. I’m a backup program that his nervousness is starting to access. I can detect no danger but I’m ready for battle. It’s a bad place to be. It looks very suspicious.

I try to shut down but it’s like trying to take a nap during a skydive.

I’m a soldier that died a while ago and I’m making a few dollars post mortem by being an emergency backup to shady characters.

So far, it’s a lame gig. These smugglers don’t know how to stay calm.

They’d be better off renting the personality of an honour student who’s never even smoked a cigarette. They’d sail through customs.

It’s not how these guys think, though.

I mentally cross my fingers and sit back, a killer at the starting line, the spider in this brainstem, hoping that my employer here doesn’t screw up and start yelling.




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