A professional fighter has the advantage of an embedded AI, which guides him in his career. Getting together with his girlfriend and making a new life is his goal, if he can avoid those who know about his AI, who desperately want it…
Forty million. Nearly half of New Soleil’s audience. Forty million fans screamed and cheered on the livestream until the simulation quaked with it. It was thrilling to behold.
Or it would have been, if Nyko hadn’t been too busy getting his ass kicked for the better part of five rounds. Molars in the back of his jaw rattled as Masude caught him with another spinning backfist. He was supposed to be the fast one, the spry young warrior with light armor and swift white wings. Not nearly fast enough.
Nyko beat his wings and retreated blindly up the massive stepped temple, the Ziggurat, the designers called it. He sent a thought to OSPREY, the artificial intelligence housed in the subdermal chip at the base of his skull.
—Any insights here, buddy?
—My current analysis finds that there’s an 82% chance that Masude will catch you from behind and rip you in half.
OSPREY was the creation of Nyko’s father, the only heirloom he’d managed to hang on to after his parents perished in a shuttle crash. She’d been named after an extinct species of seabird, a legendary hunter, according to Nyko’s father. OSPREY could be a regular pain in the ass, but Nyko wouldn’t want anyone else—human or otherwise—in his corner.
—I meant, show me a move.
—You’ve attacked from every angle, Nyko, except one. Head-on.
With one last pump of his wings, Nyko landed on the final level of the Ziggurat, a bare stone platform with blue sky in four directions. His ragged breathing echoed across the virtual arena and filled the cushioned data-pod where his body lay. His avatar might be computer-generated, but the pain and fatigue were very real, mainlined into his nervous system through surgically embedded ports.
Andie used to hate seeing him after a match. Too fried to hold a cup of coffee. Emphasis on ‘used to hate’; these days, she didn’t see him at all.
—Focus up, kid. OSPREY always knew when he wandered into the gutter. She’s coming.
Masude rose up the far side of the platform. Nyko watched her in his mirrored shield, spiraled horns, deadly glowing eyes, and finally, beneath her navel, a thick, undulating tail.
—You’ve gotta hand it to her. OSPREY whistled approvingly. She makes for a spectacular demon.
—Whose side are you on?
—Game recognizes game, Nyko.
Masude’s bulbous snout twisted into a smile of vicious teeth. “Told you I’d catch you, little man.”
Trash-talk was never Nyko’s strong suit, so he simply tucked his face behind his shield and braced himself. More than her claws or barbed tail, Masude’s gaze was her most dangerous weapon, perhaps the most dangerous mod in the history of the League. Even reflected off his mirror-shield, coded for that very purpose, Nyko could feel the malware prying at him.
Masude’s overpowered mod was the main—but not only—reason why Nyko was never supposed to win. The league commissioners had all but told him as much. His manager, Pollie Dektes, wasn’t even rooting for a victory.
—I want you to win, OSPREY’s messages resonated through his skull. Andie wants you to win, even if she’s not watching right now.
Even though she could not love or even feel, OSPREY always knew what to say. A benefit, maybe, of the fact that she was connected directly to his brain.
One shot. Andie always told him he could beat the odds, and now, one shot was all that stood between him and freedom. If he had to wield his sword blindly, so be it. The stone platform shivered as Masude lunged.
Nyko leapt. For a perfect instant, he was weightless, twisting. His diamond blade arced down.
Stone and sky chased each other in circles as Nyko tumbled across the Ziggurat. He wasn’t ripped in half; that was a good start. Though Masude might be circling around behind him right now, talons extended, flickering pupils hunting for his—
With a wet thud, Masude’s severed head landed beside him, her lethal yellow gaze wandering into the distance. Holy shit.
—Holy shit is right, Nyko. But don’t celebrate just yet.
In a fraction of a second, the Simulation would register the fatal blow, and the spectators on the other side of the livestream would see Masude’s head rolling through a pool of virtual blood. Until then, Nyko had an infinitesimal gap to hack his defeated rival’s system, steal her most famous modification, and deliver on the final condition of his deal.
Lines of code flew up from Nyko’s subconscious, scorching a hole in Masude’s lagging firewalls. OSPREY launched their extraction script.
Nyko held his breath as Masude’s lethal malware, EvilEye, copied into a quarantined partition.
—This doesn’t look like gamer code, Nyko marveled as the download completed. This is some military-grade shit.
The simulation jolted with a slight color shift—blue, magenta, yellow—as the livestream registered the victory. At the foot of the Ziggurat, a forest of spindly trees glitched and reset. A designer had called them “palms,” some relic foliage of Old Earth.
Three years of tireless work was coming to fruition, and yet, the knot in Nyko’s stomach was only getting tighter.
“WINNER— BY DECAPITATION— YOUR NEWWW CHAMPION— NYKOLAS— THE EAGLE— KARDASHEV!”
Nyko lifted Masude’s severed head. The sim thundered with cheers and applause, piping in from all corners of the New Soleil net. Black blood oozed down his avatar’s silver bracer.
Spectators’ posts flickered across the artificial sky:
Way to go Nyko! Always believed in u
+300 that’s my boi Nykoo
KARDASHEV by decapitation!
In his cushioned datapod, Nyko fixed his avatar’s expression as a distant smile, and disconnected his own facial censors. His lips curled; nostrils flared. It actually worked. He’d taken an unthinkable moonshot and landed it. The tears rolled freely for the first time in years.
I’m coming for you, Andie.
###
The next three hours of post-fight pressers and obligatory handshakes passed in a dull buzz of disbelief. It wasn’t until Nyko was in the confines of his personal shuttle that the exhaustion finally hit him. It took every last bit of fortitude to drag himself to his comms closet and hit the ‘call’ button. Andromeda, Nyko’s one-time fiancé, his Andie, flickered into view against a shadowy wall.
“Hello?” She did not sound particularly pleased.
“Hey, Andie.”
“What’s going on, Nyko? It’s late as hell and…” Andie kneaded her fingertips across her forehead. “Oh, that’s right. I saw in my feed somewhere you won the championship. Congratulations. I guess I probably should have led with that. Now I feel rude.”
Andie smiled at some hidden thought and Nyko fell, headfirst, into her chocolate dimples. As long as he would live, he would never love a color so much—that rare brown-gold, the color of the lost soils of Old Earth, the color of life.
Nyko cleared the weakness from his throat. “I’m hoping I might see you at the afterparty. You got my invite, yeah…?”
“Yeah, not really my scene. Not sure it’s Phin’s scene, either.”
Even the sound of Andie’s new boyfriend’s name made Nyko want to hurl.
“He wouldn’t necessarily have to come.”
“Nyko—what do you want? I can’t keep slinking off to the bathroom to take these calls every few weeks. It’s gross. Phin isn’t going anywhere; I’m sorry. My parents threatened to crucify me if I don’t see this marriage through. Phin’s got connections, he’s a junior exec, he has no debt…”
Andie’s lush lips trembled closed. There it was, the expression that Nyko had been looking for—pain. She did still love him. Ultimately, his debt was the only thing that came between them. As her parents put it once, all the love in the world wouldn’t change the fact that their grandchildren would be owned by Syndicate thugs.
“You know, Phin’s not the only one with no debt.”
Andie’s eyes widened. “Are you for real, Nyko?”
“That was the deal. I fight, I win. Pollie keeps the money and Masude’s killer mod, and I’m free. I’m meeting him tomorrow to settle it once and for all.”
“Well, congratulations, again, Nyko.” Andie didn’t sound convinced, but she was trying. “I’m happy for you. God knows you earned it.”
“Happy for you, like, happy we can make this work again?”
The words spilled out of Nyko, a hot mess of lust and longing, and instantly he regretted them. Tears budded up in the corner of Andie’s scowl.
“I told you, Nyko—I’ve told you a hundred times. No. I have to think about my family. This call is over.”
There was only the mocking tone of the call ending as the celestial face disappeared, replaced by a block-lettered message: “Video Feed Terminated.”
###
Nyko leaned on the bar counter at the Lotus Lounge, sipping a glass of ice water and steeling himself for the final confrontation of the day. The Lotus was Pollie Dektes’ pride and joy, a sprawling temple of vice perched so high in the towers of New Soleil that it required a tension-glass dome to maintain atmosphere.
Not that Nyko ever felt like he could breathe here. The lounge was full of high-class junkies huffing Dart, slamming liquor, or tapping Frequencie into their temples. Worse still, everyone that worked there was indentured to Pollie. Andie had been one of them when Nyko first met her. Pollie had the poor girl posted at the Frequencie pods in little more than gold-plated lingerie.
Despite his heartbreak, Nyko understood why Andie had broken things off. Any children she had with Nyko would come into this world sharing their father’s debt. And debt to Pollie was a kind of slavery. Thank God that in a few minutes, Nyko would be free from Pollie D’s clutches, once and for all.
“Is this seat taken?” a blonde woman asked, backing into the counter next to him.
“It will be soon enough, I’m afraid. I’m meeting someone.”
Nyko smiled politely and did his best to meet his acquaintance’s dilated gaze. Not an easy feat, given the fact that she was fresh off the dance floor and her ample bosom was still heaving under her sheer toga.
But the blonde would not be deterred. “Wanna dance? This is my favorite song. Okay, right now every song is my favorite song.” She pointed a finger-gun at her temple, the sign for being phased up on Frequencie. Nyko laughed and she leaned closer. “Or we could have another kind of fun.”
“I don’t think I’m the type of man for you.”
“Why?” Her grin was slightly crooked, in an endearing way.
Nyko tapped the tip of his cane on his bum ankle, the result of a botched regen at the tender age of thirteen.
She scoffed. “You think muscles make the man? Please. It takes real strength to carry something like that around. You’re probably the only man in the entire place.”
Nyko could feel the heat radiating off her cheeks. For the first time in a long time, his body pulsed with desire. How many months had it been since Andie left him? Six? Twelve?
Pollie D’s bellow across the bar cut short his response. “As I live and breathe, Nykolas Kardashev, the Champion of the New Soleil Gladiation League!”
“Maybe I’ll see you later.” The woman winked as she sauntered off into the tangle of bodies on the dance floor.
Pollie D bellied up to the bar in a cloud of synthetic musk and top-shelf Dart.
“Pollie D. Just the man I never want to see again.”
Pollie aped an expression of grief. “You don’t know how much it hurts me to hear that. You’re like a son to me, Nyko.”
Nyko focused on his breathing while he fought the urge to crack Pollie across the jaw. After his parents died, Pollie became Nyko’s landlord and benefactor, sinking his financial claws so deep that for years Nyko thought his only options were servitude or suicide.
Nyko had realized that there was one legitimate way to pay off his debt that Pollie would condone—the Gladiation League. He would need to win a championship purse, razor-thin odds even for a formally trained hacker with professional sponsorship. But it was worth a shot.
Dektes had anteed up: Bring me the purse and Masude’s head, and we’ll call it square.
Square meant getting out from under Pollie’s thumb and keeping the credits he earned, for once in his life. Most importantly, square meant a future with Andie.
Nyko exhaled, long, steady, in control. “Let’s just get on with this.”
“All action, Nyko. I like it. I’d expect nothing less from a Champion. Did you bring Masude’s program?”
“I did.”
“Where?”
“We finish the accounting for everything, and I’ll tell you where.”
“Then let’s get down to business.” Pollie’s eyes gleamed. He opened a holopalm and displayed an account with Nyko’s earnings. “The full purse was eighteen million, six hundred thousand, and change. Eighteen million, Nyko! My god, I was proud.”
On the same display, Pollie brought up Nyko’s debts one by one, everything from commission dues to personal loans. Nyko watched the red figure grow hazardously close in size to his winnings. Even though he’d done the math a hundred times, he was still sweating with anticipation.
But when Pollie entered the final outstanding debt—a fine his own goons had assessed against Nyko’s parked shuttle—there could be no mistaking it. Nyko’s earnings outweighed his debts. He would have laughed if he could breathe.
“Clear it,” Nyko insisted. It was either going to be a laugh or a scream, he wasn’t sure yet. “Clear it now, Pollie.”
Pollie was visibly upset. “Not so fast. You still owe me Masude’s program.”
“Clear my debt, and I’ll tell you where it is.”
“Is it encrypted?”
“Yes.” Nyko’s head was spinning. The rest of this bullshit with Masude’s program was procedural. As soon as Pollie voided Nyko’s debt, the nightmare was over. “I’ll tell you where the program is, you void my debt, and I’ll give you the encryption key. Deal?”
Gritting his teeth, Pollie accepted. His finger hovered over his holopalm; Nyko was hardly surprised at Pollie’s hesitation. With his hacking skill, Nyko was money. And Pollie D hated losing money.
The finger came down. Freedom. Nyko took a deep breath and tuned into OSPREY for a moment of celebration.
—We did it. We actually did it.
—YOU did it. OSPREY played a soundtrack of hurrahs and applause. Attaboy, Nyko.
Pollie D tapped at his holopalm. “Now, there’s just the matter of the other outstanding debts.”
This couldn’t be happening. “I have no other debts.”
“You have no other debts. This individual, on the other hand—” A picture of Andie flashed up on the holopalm, along with a series of negative numbers. “Turns out she has a load of skeletons in her closet.”
“Bullshit.”
“I heard she’s running around with some junior exec now, so maybe it’s none of your business. But for the record, I don’t think he’s gonna help her out, either, when he finds out she’s wrapped up in a civil suit from Argo Corp. It’s dirty stuff, Nyko, carnal solicitation, bribery, extortion of a Corporate Officer—”
The glass of ice water shook in Nyko’s grip. Bullshit or not, prostitution charges would be a black mark on Andie that no self-respecting Syndicate exec would tolerate. And if Phin backed out, she’d fall right back into Pollie’s clutches.
After everything, he was still in Pollie’s debt. Either that, or Andie would be, and that was unacceptable.
“We had a deal!” Nyko slammed his hands onto the counter.
“We had a deal. I know, Nyko. And you did an amazing job, one in a million. Such a shame that girl of yours had to go and do what she did.”
“You bastard.” Nyko’s voice dropped into a deadly hiss. “I’ll ruin you.”
Pollie slapped Nyko in the back so hard he bounced off the counter. “Ha! You gotta be more careful with those jokes. You got a funny sense of humor, kid.”
A pair of Pollie’s bodyguards had moved into the center of the nearby dining area with their hands on their holsters. Nyko whispered the words again, an incantation of rage and will.
For the first time, the mask fell from Pollie’s face, and Nyko could see the dull-eyed, pallid creature that lay beneath. “Remember who you’re talking to.”
“Take the money. Take it all, I don’t care. I’ll take your debt. But if you ever mess with her again, I swear to God—”
“Careful, Nyko.” Pollie leaned closer, baring a wolfish smile. “You don’t want to know what happens if we stop being friends.”
###
Nyko thumped on his bum leg away from the exit, which was blocked by two of Pollie’s guards, to the empty balcony and collapsed against a gilded lamppost.
Three hundred meters below, beyond the sheen of tension-glass, a layer of opaque smog concealed the teetering hives of New Soleil. Nyko imagined falling into that fog. It seemed peaceful.
—Hey. OSPREY’s voice didn’t sound angry, like a human’s might of. But it was loud. There’s always another move, Nyko. Don’t quit on me now.
—I gave everything I had to that Gladiation gambit, and what do I have left? The love of my life just shacked up with an Argo Corp Exec, and every cent I’ve ever made is in the pocket of that human slug back at the bar. You just can’t win in this world, not unless you’re born into it.
—Then you better decide that you were born into it, kid. Because I’m not letting you off that easy.
Before Nyko could mount a rebuttal, footsteps approached behind him.
“Hey.” The blonde brushed his arm as she settled down against the balcony railing. “Oh, my Productivity, you look like a Tank City scrubber.”
He attempted a smile. “Work stress.”
“I know what can help with that.” She slid her fingers around his upper arm.
Nyko glared out into the lazy volutions of smog. Her warm breath carried every word up the side of his neck. At this point, why shouldn’t he go with her? It’s not like he owed Andie anything; she had certainly moved on from him.
“Now’s not really a good time.”
“Are you married?”
“No.” Nyko surprised himself at how bitter he sounded.
“I’m married.” She touched a diamond-studded skinchip at the base of her throat, still holding his arm. “My husband is here right now, enjoying himself in one of the pleasure towers. What can we do? We still have to live.”
The Frequencie had worn off and her pupils had returned to normal size. He had misjudged her, earlier. She wasn’t just another vapid Syndicate princess.
“You know the first time I met her, she hated me.” Nyko wasn’t sure why he was telling the story. “She hated everything about this place and thought I was just another one of Pollie D’s minions. Until she found out I was a Dart fiend who was desperate to quit. From that point on, she made sure no other server came near me with Dart, Frequencie, or whatever. As soon as I stepped foot in this building, she was by my side with a glass of ice water. Always ice water.”
For all the suffering of that time, Nyko fell fondly into the memory. When Andie’s smile finally broke through on him, it was like the first sunbeam in a month of rain.
The blonde hummed wistfully through her lips. “Sounds romantic. You should tell me all about it. Up in my room.”
She twined both arms around him and steered him away from the balcony.
—Hey, Nyko.
He owed Andie nothing, not after what he’d just done for her. But frankly, he didn’t want to be with anyone else. He planted his cane and turned the golden vision on his arm to face him.
“I’m sorry.” God, her skin was warm. “But now really isn’t a good time.”
“We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.” She looked like she might actually cry if he left her right now. “We can just hold each other. That’s all I want.”
—Hey, Nyko!
—What! What, OSPREY? I’m a little busy here.
—I can see that, buddy. But you need to know, she’s scanning you right now.
Nyko jerked back reflexively and cold adrenaline rerouted the blood back to his brain. Beautiful women don’t just randomly seduce working-class hackers. She was after Masude’s malware. Shit, probably every Syndicate was after that malware.
“I think you should go,” Nyko said, tightening his grip around his cane. “Now.”
The blonde’s trembling lips pulled back into a frosty sneer. “Have it your way. Just know, I tried.”
She strode away swiftly on her towering heels. Nyko massaged the bump on his right forearm, the skinchip with his backup copy of EvilEye. Pollie was a Syndicate stooge and the Lotus was supposed to be neutral territory. If a rival Syndicate was sending in agents, there’s no telling what they would do.
—Nyko, sorry to bother you again.
—You’re not bothering, OSPREY. And I owe you an apology.
—As always, Nyko, I’m not programmed to be offended. But I appreciate the sentiment. More pressingly, a Cetux Syndicate battleship is approaching the west side of the lounge.
Nyko threw his torso over the railing for a better view. Sure enough, the white-blue patterned lights of a Cetux shuttle pulsed beyond the Lotus’s amber towers. A lot of blue-white. The ship must be huge. A stream of shadows dropped from its belly.
—Are they deploying something?
—They appear to be Blood Drones, Nyko.
Nyko clomped into the inner lounge as fast as his twisted leg would allow. Pollie glanced up from a huddle with his bodyguards, tasers and shiversticks drawn. No time to negotiate. Nyko threw himself on the ground beside a Frequencie pod and the world gasped as their pressurized dome cracked like an egg.
###
Nyko coughed himself conscious and dragged his elbows under his body. Where was his cane? The breach in the tension-glass must have done more damage than he expected. Screams sounded like soda fizz over the Lotus’s rapidly depleting atmosphere. He crawled three steps and peeled a shiverstick out of a disembodied hand. It would do for a cane for now.
—Welcome back, Nyko, OSPREY projected a schematic of the bar into Nyko’s occipital lobe. I’d suggest your next move is to back to the bar before the Blood Drones arrive, it’s the most structurally sound feature of this room.
The roar of the incoming drones registered in Nyko’s bludgeoned eardrums. Blood Drones were a Cetux Corp special used for clearing undesirables out of the Tank Cities.
—How much time before I run out of oxygen?
—Based on your current heart rate, you will lose consciousness in one-hundred and seventeen seconds.
—Keep track of it for me, would ya?
Oddly, Nyko felt his heart rate lowering. The mind he had honed and tempered as a Hacker, a mind comfortable with violent inputs and rapid-fire decisions, came online. He heaved himself over the bar counter and landed in a heap next to a sheet-white Pollie D.
Pollie D kicked at Nyko. “What the hell did you do?”
“You think I called in a Cetux military hit? How dumb are you, Pollie?” Nyko shoved the shiverstick under Pollie’s jowls. “I need access to the Lotus mainframe immediately or we’re both toast. Now.”
In spite of his own swift-approaching death, Nyko couldn’t help but enjoy the look of terror in Pollie’s eyes. Pollie pressed the skinchip in his earlobe, connecting to the building’s main server.
—One-hundred seconds, OSPREY buzzed. Blood Drones have entered the main hall of this complex. They are currently approaching—
The rest of OSPREY’s warning was lost in the deafening boom of the Blood Drones punching through the southwest wall. At the same time, Lotus’s network unfurled before Nyko, lines of vibrant green jetting across his goggles.
Nyko tapped into the router and checked for incoming signals. The drones’ codes flashed as they pinged their mothership. Time to see if Masude’s malware really was military-grade.
—Ninety seconds. Three drones zeroing in.
—Run it, OSPREY!
The Blood Drone burst through the right side of the bar in a cloud of shrapnel, a jagged metal beast with pointed limbs and two-meter mandibles. With a shriek, Pollie bolted from his hiding place. The drone’s scissor-like jaws flashed out and severed him cleanly at the waist, his upper half sputtering to silence.
Nyko flipped up his code-goggles to gaze into the multi-pronged face of his undoing. OSPREY didn’t have enough time. The drone locked onto him with its red rangefinders, lurched forward, and –
Died.
The Blood Drone gave one last shudder, and its roving rangefinders faded to black.
—Thanks, buddy. Nyko could barely think over his thundering pulse. Just in the nick of time.
—You should be thanking Masude. We just disabled every drone for a hundred meters. No wonder someone is trying to jack this malware.
Nyko pulled himself up to his feet with his borrowed shiverstick. Masude’s malware might have incapacitated the drones, but if he wanted to get back to his shuttle before the oxygen ran out, he would need another miracle. He jammed the shiverstick under the drone’s metal cap and blasted it open.
—Fifty seconds until oxygen deprivation, OSPREY warned.
Lungs straining, Nyko clambered up the drone’s armored shell. He plugged his adapter directly into the drone’s primary feed and hijacked the controls. It revved to life beneath him.
—Twenty seconds, Nyko. Hold your breath.
In the well-oxygenated interior of his shuttle, Nyko swerved through hordes of traffic, cutting a course away from New Soleil and everything he knew. He was rocketing over the wrathful sea when the battleship reappeared on his radar.
—Nyko, incoming transmission from the Cetux military vessel.
—Shoot them an error message, anything. Buy us some time.
He shifted the shuttle into autopilot to hatch an escape plan. He had an arsenal of malware, but getting into the battleship’s network was going to be nearly impossible.
—You have a move? OSPREY asked.
—Something like that.
Other than his malware, the only tools at Nyko’s disposal were an outdated passenger shuttle, a week’s worth of black coffee, and, of course, a stolen Blood Drone.
###
An invisible hand pulled a blackout hood from Nyko’s face. The first thing he saw was a striped serpent, three meters from snout to tail, drifting through an electric-blue tank. An old man stood with his face to the glass, hands clasped behind his back.
“Do you like them?” he asked.
It was so surreal. “They’re not sharks, are they?”
“Very good, Nykolas.” The man turned—old was not the right word. Only a sheet of neatly pressed white hair gave him the appearance of age. The man himself could not have been more than fifty, with broad shoulders and a creaseless forehead. “We restored them from a vial of antivenom we found sealed in an ancient medicine freezer. They are sea snakes.”
They were alone, Nyko and his captor, in a wide circular office with a single obsidian desk at its center. A chamber this large, at the heart of a battleship? This had to be somebody important. A robotic hoverthrone swept beneath him and brought him face to face with Nyko.
Nyko forced a smirk. “So what does a Cetux Executive want with a mid-tier gamer like me?”
“Not an executive, Nykolas. The executive. Chief Executive Cetux, at your service.”
Nyko caught his breath. He was sitting in a room with one of the seven most powerful people in New Earth.
“Well, I’m flattered you went through all the trouble of meeting me in person, Mister Cetux. But if you wanted the program, you could have just asked.”
“You mean Masude’s outdated malware? Please, Nykolas.” Cetux interlaced his fingers on the dark plane of the desk between them. “We’re inquiring about something much more special. A little AI you like to call OSPREY. You drew our attention to it during that little stunt you pulled with Masude.”
Nyko’s stomach turned. Only Andie knew about OSPREY.
“Talk about outdated. My father’s little hobby-project must be fifteen years old.”
“Do you know what I find interesting about sea snakes, Nykolas?” Cetux’s gaze bored into him like drops of black acid. “They are slow swimmers. Forced to breathe air. Jaws that could only be described as pathetic. Yet, where they ranged on Old Earth, they were almost untouchable. Do you know why?”
Nyko shrugged. He’d never heard of the creatures until five minutes ago.
Cetux continued, “They possessed the most powerful venom on Old Earth.” Cetux leaned forward. “Tell me, Nykolas, how does a Tank City orphan without a credit to his name go on to become a hacker, a Gladiation League Champion, and, to top it all off, disarm an entire platoon of Blood Drones from the floor of a nightclub?” Cetux leaned back in his hoverthrone. “Peaceful animal, deadly venom.”
A silver, heart-shaped fish flashed down the curving aquarium, pursued by a braid of venomous serpents. None of this made any sense.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me.” Nyko rubbed his temples. “OSPREY isn’t a superweapon.”
“You really didn’t know who your father was, did you? He was the type of hacker every Syndicate tries to get their hands on. In the end, he was too dangerous for his own good.”
Like that, the last missing piece in Nyko’s life fell into place. He had always suspected that his father had gotten wrapped up in Syndicate business; his fatal accident reeked of foul play. But now he’d just heard it, straight up, from the mouth of a Chief Executive. Nyko clenched his fists.
“I’d like to strike a bargain with you, Nykolas, to help you avoid a similar fate. You provide your AI, along with the neuro-key that unlocks it.” Cetux tipped his head, as if to say, we know about the neuro-key, too. “And in return, you and your loved one are free to go.”
Nyko felt his pulse rising. “My loved one?”
“Something to incentivize your cooperation.”
The doors in the rear of the office hissed open and rubber soles putted across the seamless floor. A masked assistant wheeled a steel cart to the side of Cetux’s desk. In the center of the cart, Andie lay in a hospital gown, her chest rising and falling beneath a low glass bubble. A white circle of breath condensed on the glass above her umber lips.
“You want OSPREY? Fine. She’s already yours.” Death hadn’t scared Nyko since he was sixteen; it had been his Plan B since Pollie bought the rights to Nyko’s life. But Andie? That was another story. “But you will not hurt that woman.”
“I’ve already stated the terms.” Cetux pushed a small black storage drive across the desk. “You may download the program here.”
“I’ll need a data-helm to input the key.”
Nyko’s chair morphed, stretching his body supine, dropping a data-helm over his skull. Electrodes latched onto his fingers, throat, and scalp. He closed his eyes and felt his consciousness being sucked into cyberspace.
OSPREY materialized as she always did for him, a scroll of code, faceless but familiar.
—Are you ready for this, OSPREY?
—I have always been ready, Nyko.
—Here goes nothing, then.
Nyko felt a twitch in the deep tissue of his skull as his subdermal chip began transferring OSPREY onto Cetux’s lockbox. A profound pain arose in Nyko. Though she was only a program, OSPREY had always been there for him. The only one he could really rely on.
A single line of code confirmed that the transfer was complete.
“The neuro-key, please,” Cetux said.
Tears, so hot they stung, trickled down Nyko’s temples. The neuro-key was not a random string of ones and zeroes, it was his wiring, the deep pattern in his brain. And now, Cetux owned it, like he owned OSPREY, like he seemed to own all things in the world.
Nyko gasped as the data-helm released him and his chair brought him upright. He rubbed his face hastily before looking up at Cetux. The Chief Executive was still wearing his own data-helm, double-checking Nyko’s work.
“It’s done,” Nyko said. “Now let her go. Both of us.”
“Indeed.” Cetux removed his data-helm and gazed at Nyko. Something wasn’t right. The flat darkness of his eyes was too cold, even for this world. At last, Cetux nodded. His masked assistant drew a shiverstick.
“You never really thought you were getting out of here alive, did you, Nykolas?”
Nyko spat out a spiteful laugh. “No, I really didn’t.” He lifted his head and shouted up to the ceiling. “Anytime now, OSPREY!”
Cetux held up a hand, delaying his bodyguard’s lethal strike by another second. “You can’t be serious, Nykolas. You downloaded your AI into a lockbox, completely cut off from the rest of the network. Even if it could hear you, it can’t do anything.”
“Actually, Cetux, I downloaded a copy of OSPREY onto that storage disk. A dummy. You didn’t listen to me, old man, I told you: You had her already.”
On cue, the data-helm began to lower back over Nyko’s head. OSPREY’s work. Thirty minutes ago, she had infiltrated the battleship’s servers through the hijacked Blood Drone, which some unsuspecting engineer had reconnected to the network.
If OSPREY had access to the data-helm in Cetux’s personal office, then by this time, she had run rampant through the network with Nyko’s malware, hijacking control of life-support, navigation, and weapons systems. And Blood Drones.
The floor lurched, tossing the assassin sideways.
“I’m a peaceful man, Cetux.” The corner of Nyko’s mouth curled into a deadly hook. “But now you get the venom.”
###
Nyko’s first move was to scan the ship’s network for OSPREY. Her familiar presence seemed to be everywhere, laying waste to everything in her path.
—Damn, OSPREY. Nyko had to type out messages to his AI through his code-goggles, now that she’d been transferred from his subdermal chip. Maybe you really are a superweapon.
—And hello again to you, too, Nyko. An uncharacteristic pause. Your father did fashion me from a composite of his other projects.
According to Cetux, those other projects were likely black-level malware for rival Syndicates. No wonder.
—He only wanted you to have a guardian, OSPREY continued, should anything happen to him.
It was a strange feeling, being cared for by a parent. Not one Nyko had experienced in many years. But, no time to dwell on that now. There was a killer with a loaded shiverstick just a few feet behind him.
Hacking had always come easy to Nyko, but with OSPREY, it was like flying. Cetux was in for a reckoning.
In a rush of code, Nyko and OSPREY dive-bombed into Cetux’s personal office. Video feeds and locator pins mapped out the space. There was Andie in her glass coffin, her vitals sluggish but healthy—probably drugged, but not in immediate danger. And there was the bodyguard, on the move again. Nyko needed something to get in his way.
Nyko heard the startled shouts as he catapulted Cetux’s hoverthrone into the bodyguard, spilling both men across the floor. The throne was surprisingly fast. He swung it around for a second pass, catching the bodyguard like a giant mitt and smashing him full-force into the aquarium with the sound of cracking glass and a rush of writhing serpents. One down.
Before Nyko could relish in his victory, his head wrenched back as the data-helm ripped away. Cetux loomed over him with a silver blade.
“You club-footed little wretch.” Cetux’s jaw twitched in a spasm of rage. “We should have eliminated you when we took care of your father.”
The chamber rumbled, giving Nyko a fraction of a second to plant his good leg in Cetux’s abdomen and kick him backwards. Cetux stumbled a foot or two before catching himself. He straightened up and puffed out his substantial chest.
Cetux sneered. “Weak.”
Nyko raised his eyebrow. “Slow.”
With an ear-splitting metallic screech, the first of the Blood Drones crashed through the chamber wall and smeared Cetux across the floor.
OSPREY’s familiar voice echoed through the chamber instead of the confines of his brain, “Ready to make your exit, my young ward?”
The slate flooring parted noiselessly to reveal an escape elevator. Nyko lugged Andie’s cart onto the elevator and they were halfway through the shuddering battleship before Nyko realized that they were headed to the Cetux’s private shuttle, not Nyko’s own shuttle in the main hangar.
“OSPREY?” It was so strange to call out to her through the battleship’s audio system rather than simply think to her. “We’re not headed back to our shuttle?”
OSPREY answered him through the elevator speakers. “That is correct, Nyko. This battleship has sustained a significant amount of damage. A journey to our shuttle in the main hangar would have a statistically improbable chance of success.”
“But you’re not in my brainchip anymore. You’re housed on our shuttle server.”
Nyko almost chuckled. It wasn’t like OSPREY to make mistakes. There must be some failsafe he was overlooking.
“That is correct, Nyko.”
Lights strobed as an explosion shook the heart of the battleship. Nyko felt the deep muscles in his chest tighten. “You’re not going to be able to download back onto the subdermal chip without a hookup.”
“I’m aware of that. I ran the calculations quite thoroughly. Your highest probability move to get off this vessel involved leaving me behind. I would only be able to download a trace amount of myself into your chip wirelessly.”
“Well, do it!” Nyko was suddenly fuming. How could OSPREY leave him? Just like his parents. “I don’t care how much of you, just do it!”
“I would prefer not. Any trace download of me would not actually be useful. And the effort required would distract me from my larger imperative of giving you a clean exit. I would prefer that I cease to be altogether, rather than linger as a fragment.”
That was it, then. Nyko’s guardian was leaving him. There was nothing he could do.
The elevator bobbed and the door dinged open. A gleaming silver shuttle, wings folded in rest, waited just a few paces ahead of him. All around, sirens screamed. Gravity itself began slipping off center. The ship was going down, and it was taking OSPREY with it.
Nyko just wanted to hear her voice one last time. “So, OSPREY, what’s the move?”
“If I might be so bold…” She was barely audible over the destruction. “You might name your child after me.”
Such a strange request for a program. OSPREY was so weird. So weird, that he could love her, too.
Moments later, their silver shuttle soared low over the acidified ocean while the remains of the battleship disintegrated in its wake.
“Nyko?” Andie stumbled into the cockpit, bleary eyed. “What happened? There was this man in a uniform asking about you, and then…”
“You’re safe now.” Nyko drew her into his lap and tightened his arms around her. “That’s all that matters.”
“Was I on some Frequencie? I feel all phased out. And I had this bizarre dream. There were snakes, and a bunch of masked aliens, and, oh, OSPREY was there. You know? Your AI program you’re always talking about.”
“Yeah, I know.” Nyko swallowed.
“I could actually talk to her, she wasn’t just in your head.” Andie knocked on the side of Nyko’s temple. “She told me everything was gonna be okay.”
“She didn’t lie.” Nyko took a deep, shaking breath. “Oh, Andie? There’s one thing we gotta discuss… About names.”
END
(Edit: Added Author Narrated Audio)
