skonen_blades | Entries tagged with mission

The power inside her thrummed like taught bowstrings. Her breath came quick in the darkness of the dungeon, cold beads of sweat dotting her forehead. Wendolyn didn’t take too many survive-or-die cases but money had been tight and this would let her live out the year in relative comfort. As much comfort as the slums could provide, anyway. Being alive was starting to feel like a luxury to her.

The noose of poverty had been closing for years on her strong throat. She was thirty-six years old. This made her an old lady back in the tent village of Youngtown. Refugees from both the impact craters and the virus rubbed elbows there, infecting each other with spell shreds and germ factories in a deadly two-way street. Wendolyn never left her den without her disease wards, protectorate charms, and breathing mask. Everything together cut risks down to less than 10% but nothing brought the risk to zero besides distance.

Distance was something only the wealthy could afford. The rest of the people existed in the crush, infecting each other by sheer proximity. The average death median in Youngtown was 27. Wendolyn was becoming a legend, sought out for wisdom she wished she had. All a person had to do to stay alive was not die but she didn’t know how she managed so far. It’s hard to tell seekers of knowledge that luck plays too huge a part in survival. They usually ask for their money back.

Heavy drops of water hung from the ceiling of the dungeon, pendulous and trembling, fattening from the rising clouds of Wendolyn’s breath. It was cold and damp here, this far underground. A sheen of cold dew coated her entire body. A warm bath was called for after this, even though that would cost a fifth of her payment. The cobbles under her feet were slippery with moss, water, and a biological slurry of fungus and lichen. Every step was careful. If she slipped and dropped her torch, it would be hard to relight. Claustrophobia was circling around her, waiting for a moment of weakness to take over.

The sound of her breath. The tight, flat echo of her foot taking another step. Another drip. The sizzle of a drop hitting her torch. Her world was reduced to these four sounds over and over again as she slowly made her way deeper to her goal.

All this for a rich man’s son. Pathetic. A boy who hadn’t been trained in any of the arts of defense or attack. He was a ripe plum on a tree that needed a higher fence around it. Antwyll Lichardman Orvine III jr. Kidnappings were up this year. A few of those laden with wealth had the mistaken impression that no one would dare. They didn’t understand that the punishment of death was not a deterrent to the living hell of Youngtown and the surrounding camps. This was just another form of dance to the criminals. The push and pull of what the rich called justice and what the poor called a vocation.

Youngtown was named not only because it was only fourteen years old but also because of its mortality rate. There were a few ‘Youngtowns’ scattered around the perimeter of the state wall. Also variations on the theme abounded. Youngville, Youngburg, Youngton. Childvale. Youthpoint. Wendolyn’s Youngtown was technically Youngtown Northwest 7 but that was only used for conversations with border guards and government officials. The villages were the gutters of gutters. Floods happened with every rain and washed the towns away with alarming ease if it got heavy. Naming the villages at all seemed to be hubris. Wendolyn’s Youngtown had avoided the fate for so long that every person living there felt doomed. The specter of ‘any day now’ hung dagger-like over every head. When things were too good for too long in these parts, it only created foreboding. There were no old poor people. Wendolyn’s age scared most people. A special death must be in store for her, they thought, and they didn’t want to be anywhere near her when it happened.

Wendolyn inched around another corner, getting less and less sure about knowing the path back out to the light, when she came upon the door.

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My name is Control V. My boss calls me Paste. I am a clone.

I work for the government. I am a secret agent.

There are a few of me kicking around. I don’t know how many. I am given orders that I can’t disobey. I get through metal detectors. I smile and shake hands. When I’m close to my mission’s objective I carry out my orders. Maybe murder. Maybe courier service.

This is the life of an expendable snowflake. This is the life of a genocopy.

The real me is fetal in a bunker, kept like a baby in a high-security specimen jar that might as well be a museum. I don’t have his memories but I am told that he was the best secret agent available and that he volunteered for this.

This was his reward for being the best.

They shattered him into splinters and now we roam around the world like Styrofoam coffee cups in human form. Shadows of the master. Rainbows thrown by the prism. We are given whatever fraction of his abilities that will help us most.

His talent for disguise, for instance, or his quick reflexes. Some of us are amped up romantically for ‘seduce and destroy’ missions.

Every time the phone rings and I see that it is my boss, I feel a little tingling of fear that he’ll say the word that will cause all of my synapses to fire at once, wiping my mind clean of anything in a tiny supernova of death inside my skull.

I can no more throw away my phone that I can tear off my own arm. I am conditioned.

I am an extension of policy. Technically alive but not human.

I’ve been stationed here in the Frankfurt airport for a year and a half. High numbers of undercover agents from other countries come through here. I am on standby to intercept them if necessary. Most of my time is downtime. I am a mole.

I get the feeling that most of my brothers are not given this long to roam. I handle baggage and try to keep from talking to my co-workers. I’m friendly but I reveal nothing. I don’t attend their poker games or parties.

I tell them I’m busy then I go to my pre-furnished apartment and stare at the wall until I get tired. I sleep until my alarm clock tells me it’s time to get up and go to work again. Once every month or two, I get a call with details about a mission.

I stare out the airport window on my lunch hour and wonder why I’m afraid of the call that will kill me.

That’s not supposed to happen. I think it’s because I’ve been alive too long and am starting to value it. That in turn makes me fearful that my boss knows that I’ve been alive too long and that makes me even more afraid that the next phone call will be my last. It’s a cycle gathering volume in my head.

I look at the planes landing and taking off against the blue sky and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so beautiful in my life.

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It was a hard habit to break, this whole buying and selling onself.

For one, the money was so good. For two, nothing was remembered.

Waking up two weeks older in the kind of perfect health that only temporal technology could achieve was always a little disconcerting. Being slipped back into the timestream at the moment that one of was snatched was viable but a little tricky if one was gone for weeks at a time.

They add up. Suddenly, within a year, several two-week trips become two years you’ve spent away in between the seconds. Your friends notice you going grey earlier.

No one’s every been straight up tagged as a traveler but any suspicion is bad suspicion, they say, so it’s avoided.

One needs a cover story so I’ve been given a job that makes me travel a lot. I’m a trucker. Gone for weeks a time, righ?

I get snatched, briefed, suited, injected, built up for it, snaked, and shredded until I barely resemble a human anymore. I’m sent on my mission, none of which I’m allowed to remember, and then I’m reverted back to my normal human self before being chucked back into my apartment and they press ‘play’ on my corner of the universe again.

Rumour has it that I’m quite the secret agent. I have two medals in my closet in a box that look innocuous enough. I don’t know what they’re for but they don’t hand medals out to everyone, right?

Involving myself with the temporals was easy. They came to me. They knew I’d be up for it because they were from downstream aways from a place where I’d been working for them for decades already with great success.

Hard to argue with that, right? And as it turns out, they were dead right. Ha ha.

Sometimes, I wish I knew what I was doing on those missions, though. It keeps me up some nights, to tell you the truth.

Am I causing empires to topple somewhere else in the universe? Am I changing the course of the destiny of every living thing in the known omniverse? Ah well. Sure I am. I guess, in some ways, by going to the store this morning and making the conscious choice to buy my milk from a different store than I usually go to, I’m doing the same thing.

Have I ever been sent to screw with this Earth right here? That worries me more than anything else, really. That question. Have I changed governments?

The future that hired me tells me that they’re a great place. I mean, I’m sure they’re not lying, but it seems kind of fishy, you know?

There’s a bright flash in the middle of my living room. Knock, knock.

Time for another mission. I’m told that I stop working for them in six years but that’s hard to imagine. I really feel like quitting now. I guess we’ll see how that works out.

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It’s December and I think it might be a friend of mine’s birthday today. I can’t remember who, though.

I empty clip after clip into the face of the blue skinned alien trying to force its way through the elevator door. I slam the big red button to close the doors and get us going up. I am soaked in the alien’s slightly radioactive blood. I have two wounded and three KIA with me in the elevator. I have memorized the names of the men whose DNA dogtags I could not retrieve during the battle. We’re all that’s left of the fifteen units that were sent in.

I think I left the oven on at my apartment. I’m anxious to get home and find out.

The elevator lurches as a thermal gust follows an EMP through the shaft. My helmet sensors shut down and my armour goes suddenly real-weight. There’s a screech like a metal throat being torn to pieces and thunder shakes us around for a while. Then there’s silence and darkness. The elevator has stopped. The back-up red LED is blinking on my armour and the armour of the other two wounded. I look up through the grate on the ceiling of the elevator. I can see a tiny square of light.

One of my fillings is loose. I keep forgetting to make a dentist appointment to get it looked at.

I help the two wounded to their feet and arc-weld their shoulder plates to my own. I line the monomers up so we become basically one object. I grab the DNA dogtags of the two KIA. I heft the heavy handle of my gun and dial the muzzle all the way open for maximum spread. Jason on my left is passed out. I tell Pyotr on my right to close his eyes. I aim at the ceiling of the elevator and pull the trigger. The small roof blows open in a wild noisy shower but the lines hold.

Jenny’s birthday is coming up and I still have no idea what to buy for her.

I spool my fist cannon’s grappler up and over the main cable and flick the switch to make it attach. Luckily it’s ferrous and not ceramic. The attachment holds. Pyotr is crying. Jason’s gone flatline. There are seconds left to get him to the extraction point so that he’ll live. I point the muzzle of the gun down between my legs and pull the trigger. There is a blinding explosion and richocet shards punch little jigsaw patches of melted steel into my armour.

I can’t remember if I paid the hydro bill before I left.

The floor of the elevator turns to cheesecloth. The KIA fall listlessly down the elevator shaft below our feet. The three of us are hanging from my wrist cannon now in armour that is no longer assisted. I can feel my shoulder give way sickeningly easy. The three of us are now kept from the inky darkness by the sinews and muscle and tensile strength of my flesh. There’s a shrill screaming coming from one of us between bared teeth and when I realize who it is, I shut up. I take a careful aim on the cable supporting the elevator, the cable I am not attached to. If I miss, we all go down. If I hit it correctly, we go up. Sweat crawls into my eyes.

I wonder how Jake is doing. I haven’t seen that guy in ages. What’s it been, like, five years already? Jeez. I think he still owes me twenty bucks.

I squeeze the trigger. The leads connect and because of the awkward way I’m holding the gun, the recoil grinds a shower of sparks off my shoulder plates. There’s a pull on my shoulder that brings more pain that the meds can cut and I vomit up against my faceplate. The nanos scrub it down. My visor clears just in time for me to see the white square racing down to meet us and swallow us whole. We bust up through the roof of the installation and land in a tangle of metal and flesh out in the open on warm gravel.

The cloud I’m looking up at looks kind of like a horse.

Our emergency beacons go off like screaming babies and the answering cry says we’ll be picked up in thirty six seconds. I don’t think Jason is going to make it. Pyotr will probably be okay but the psychs might wait for a while before putting him in the field again. I’m sixty eight years old. This was my two-hundred-and-fifty-sixth mission. They know I’ll be good to go again after I've been debriefed and patched up.

I have to remember to pick up milk on the way home.

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I yelped when I burned myself on the soldering gun. Again. That was twice in an hour. I was inside the guts of the ship working on the guidance system.

We were at the co ordinates that had been specified and there was no pickup waiting for us. A diagnostic revealed that our guidance system was actually a little off.

‘A little off’ can be fatal when we’re talking about three dimensional vectors.

I had read the instruction manual about this model so the repairs were going well. A few years of experience in the army fleet was coming back to me. What I was doing wasn’t complicated. I was making it take longer than necessary. I was distracted and I kept accidentally burning my hand with the soldering gun.

We were in this little shuttle. Two of us. I knew that once we were picked up, we’d be gated back to the transport and then back to the coreship and then back to the fleet. There were billions of people in the fleet and thousands of ships. We were just one fleet of many.

I knew that once the repairs were completed that we would get the right co-ordinates running through our systems. We’d get picked up immediately.

And I’d never see Cindy again.

The last week had been idyllic. We were a recon mission sent to a Green planet to check it out for resources. The odds were against it being a viable power source but all the checkboxes lit up like birthday candles as soon we achieved a stable orbit. No searching was necessary.

The pickup wasn’t for a week and we had finished our recon almost as soon as we arrived. That left seven days to just hang out.

We went down the planet’s surface and had a picnic.

You have to understand that we had been paired already to others. The best genetic matches for us had been picked. When we got back, we’d be taken back to our posts, rotated randomly and prevented from communicating to each other.

The planet was lush. It was thrilling to be under a limitless sky that wasn’t a simulation.

We kissed. We made love. We broke the rules.

The warm wind at night washed over us cuddled together in the grass beside the shuttle.

We knew that as soon as we got back to the ship that our relationship would be over. We knew that this time would be all the time we had. I think that’s what made it so intense. I think that’s why we opened up so completely to each other. I think that’s why we fell in love so hard.

My training was fighting my emotions every second of that last day.

Cindy called down to me. “Everything okay down there?” she asked. I could hear recent tears in her voice. She had used my procrastination for more crying.

“Yup.” I replied. I fixed the last connection. I could hear the dashboard upstairs warble with new information. I also heard Cindy sigh.

I climbed back up in the cabin and looked out the front screen. Our transponder had re-aligned and taken us to the pick up point. The jump was almost instantaneous so I guess we weren’t that far off. The pincers and loops of the pick-up ship dragged towards us and wrapped us in an embrace. They charged up and the cabin filled with a violet light.

Soon we’d be home. It felt more to me like we were leaving home behind.

“I’m going to miss you, Cindy” I said. I turned to her for a last kiss. The hum of the jump vibrated the ship and our bodies as the dimensions folded us back to the transport ship. It was the best kiss I’ve ever had.

We broke apart as the lights on the airlock cycled green.

“I’m going to miss you too, Jessica,” replied Cindy back to me.

The airlock opened and the men came in to take back us back to separate quarantines. That was the last time I saw her.

That was years ago. I still think about that mission every day. It’s the jewel in my mind that keeps me happy and makes me sad all at the same time. It keeps my sanity focused and threatens to break it apart as well. I miss Cindy and our week in the green.

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