Chapter One: Creatures of Scorn — Part 1
The Future Condition
This event occurs sixteen years from now…
A parade of bodyguards surrounded the armored limousine as it proceeded along its thoroughfare between rows of onlookers and protestors. There were more protestors along the presidential routes than had been present during any other presidential term of office in the history of the United States. Despite the placation of the press, the absence caused by violations of constitutional law established by the ruling party, justified, of course, by its need to keep Middle America realizing it was indeed in the minority, the number of protestors was growing. Security, therefore, had become considerable and tight, and included four layers of local, state, national, and specially trained forces, all guarding the presidential limousine as it moved into the shadows of towering buildings inspired by so many eras of architecture and set in business motivated strip of downtown Phoenix.
The President, his hair graying, stared out at the onlookers with their war opposition posters, purple hair, various body piercings, gay pride stickers, and black combat boots, and noticed that among them were the working middle class, veterans, and the working poor: a growing number of greater concern than the eccentric minorities of days gone by. He considered the safety of his position and smugly enjoyed his financial and social superiority. They had no power, after all, over the federal government while he stood in office. As he passed a young blue haired mother, mother, and daughter team sporting a sign painted in bright green ‘Peace Now!’ the president ran his fingers along the leather interior, wondering if he should have it reupholstered, and if he could arrange to kill the cows with his own hands. The presidential armored car, a massive black limousine whose windows were one inch thick and heavily tinted, carried its single passenger along the barricaded road, scheduled and chosen randomly just hours before by a computer that ran isolated in a shielded cage of tungsten copper alloy, whose operator was a young chimpanzee freed from a research facility and placed in a reserve for primates who had been raised among humes. Armored against bullets and bombs, its engine a quiet, well tended example of North American reliability, the interior insulated against teargas and nerve agents, its atmosphere almost completely self contained, no force on the planet could hope to harm the person inside.
No angry left wing Vegan nut job bent on ending a war for oil would be able to burn, gas, bomb, or shoot their way into the presidential limousine. It hadn’t occurred to the President that any of them would consider it. Not much occurred to the President, generally, as he had his values, and those values, however irrational, were most notably inflexible.
Nobody had been prepared for the armored soldier falling from above. His feet spread out to help guide him to his target below. Wielding a massive two handed sword, the assassin had timed his fall perfectly so that he would collide with the passenger section of the limousine, striking violently from the right side. The armored assassin fell some ninety stories, slamming into the top of the armored car with uncanny accuracy. The car buckled during the impact, shattering the street beneath it and coming to a violent and brutal halt. The driver had been thrown forward against his restraints, and the airbag, having discharged unexpectedly, knocked the man completely unconscious. There were a few cheers from the crowd, but they were short lived, and replaced by shock and awe. The awe at witnessing the death of the President was quickly replaced by the shock of realization that the Vice President, who would now be replacing his mentor in office, would probably be far worse a representative of the people than his predecessor.
Secret Service, the CIA, FBI, and local authorities moved in quickly on the limousine, weapons pointed out toward the startled crowd, trying to find accomplices, unable, at the moment, to see any relationship between the thinning crowd and the bulk of metal purged in the impact crater that had once been the top of the President’s limo. The armor of the soldier was so distinctive, it made the suicide assassin look more machine than man. At least one younger service agent had been focused on the car, trying to maintain the futile hope that inside the crushed wreckage, the man whose life he was responsible for might somehow be alive. The passenger side door had been crushed out in the collision, and as he approached, the young man, dark skinned, his suit perfect, his wiry frame tensed to the bitter edge, fell to one knee, to get a better look inside. Too young to fully comprehend the psychological impact of viewing a body crushed and sandwiched between the seat and the roof of the car, and further skewered from head to groin by a sword that spanned a length of nearly five feet, and whose tip was buried deep into the seat beneath the body, the young man expelled the contents of his stomach onto the pavement, and nearly passed out over his own vomit.
The assassin, as it turned out, was not dead. The creature, a bald, pale man with eye balls that were either solid black or else were replaced by biomechanical spheres of a solid color, pulled his sword violently from the hood of the car, stood, joints complaining, blood trickling through his armor, and began to walk away from the car, moving, apparently, toward his next target. Bullets began flying at him, and one even managed to strike his armor, glancing violently off his shoulder into the street. The blow had knocked his shoulder forward, and now he turned toward the source of bullet, misinterpreting the rare hit as an actual threat. The young man still on his knees on the ground fired three more rounds into the assassin, a little trickle of bloody spittle flowing from the left corner of his mouth. Though these last three bullets simply lost their energy and fell from the air as they drew close, the assassin threw his sword straight for the man’s head, intent on finishing him.
Metal clanged against metal as a woman, dressed in similar golden toned armor, put her hand out and stopped the sword in mid air. Where she had come from, no one could tell. Within seconds, the sword clanged against the ground, bouncing and twanging a couple of times before losing its energy and settling quietly. Bullets, now aimed at her, stopped around her head with much the same effect as they had for the assassin, falling to the ground harmlessly. The assassin, healing so fast one could visibly see the skin closing back into place, assessed her with his black, shiny eyes, and then began to move toward her, just as a machine bent on a task would move. He rolled, picking up his sword in passing, the tip flying for the young woman’s chest. His other hand, flying out in an attempt to get a grip on her and tear her to shreds, ended in sharp edges.
She braced herself, moving toward the assassin, the tip of the blade that had been at one point aligned with her face was beat aside with her armored forearm. She slammed into the assassin so fast that her actions seemed little more than a blur to onlookers. The sound of metal clanging against metal betrayed blows that could barely be registered by normal hume sight. Her own weapon, a vicious dagger that glinted with a hint of blue tinting, hit home even as she managed to get a grip on the assassin’s weapon wrist. Burying the dagger square into the face of the assassin, the girl let out a definite grunt of effort, trying to hold the assassin’s sword wrist with her free hand, while shielding her throat from the assassin’s grip with her shoulder and arm. The assassin said nothing, responded with no emotion, and continued to struggle to get his arms around her even as the young lady twisted the knife back and forth in the assassin’s brain.
The explosion that followed was so severe that it knocked all remaining bystanders and service agents off their feet. The limousine had been knocked four feet by the blast, and now lay in an untidy heap on the sidewalk, where its mass pinned a little girl and her two moms against the same brick and concrete building whose roof had been, just moments before, the point from which the assassin had dropped down from for the killing blow. Shaking off the remains and tossing aside the piece of arm and hand that still clutched the enemy sword, the woman, who was little more than an anonymous individual, still continued to ignore bullets flying in her direction, and was accompanied shortly by a second woman, who looked younger, and more attractive in many ways, than her partner.
“Orchid, sweetie, are you all right?” The new woman asked, holding what could have been a first aid kit or a bomb.
“The biodroid has been neutralized.” The woman, who must have been called Orchid, said, her voice shaky. “Diane, sugar, get those ladies out from under that wreckage so we can treat their wounds and then we’ll go find the Senator. He was supposed to be here to take care of this mess.” Orchid turned and found herself face to face with a woman she obviously despised, a third woman who had entered the setting with little consideration for local fire power. “Come to finish what your biodroid started?”
“That wasn’t one of my biodroids. You should have killed the people on the master list, Orchid, like Amber wanted you to do. If you had, this whole mess could have been avoided.”
“Damn it Ambria! What the hell are you talking about?” Orchid asked.
“I am talking about about the amplitude of the self aware. The responsibility for the start of this war, and for the victims it will claim, now rests with you.” Ambria said, vanishing, apparently, into thin air.
The Secret Service agent Orchid had just saved from certain death tried to tackle her from behind, and Orchid responded without moving, her defensive fields throwing the man away from her with twice the force he put into tackling her. The young man found himself slammed into a nearby brick wall with enough force to knock the wind completely from his body and break a couple of his ribs. The bullets, at this point, had stopped flying, except for the occasional desperate marksman firing from above or from the perimeter, all of them watching in shock as their bullets slowed and fell harmlessly before ever striking their targets. Diane bent down and grabbed the agent by his coat collar, pulling him upright and placing a small business card in his hand.
“I like your style, Mister, but we didn’t kill your tribal leader.” She said, “If you want to help keep more people from dying, please contact us, we need hands, and you seem to have the desire to use them.”
With that, the two women vanished, leaving behind survivors with more questions than answers. Across the planet, nearly three hundred leaders and ambassadors had been simultaneously assassinated. The Vice President had also been killed when a biodroid flew headfirst into the engine of Air Force One, tearing off the wing and sending the plane toppling into the icy mid Atlantic. News of such assassinations would dominate local and national news for many days to come, until, one by one, as nations began pointing fingers and preparing for wars with longtime enemies, the major leaders returned from the dead to their positions, taking over the tasks of government once thought vacant. That most of these leaders walked out of the very morgues their bodies had been interned in was creepy by any notions. That most of them were healing from their wounds as if they had never happened proved downright unnerving.
Regardless of the restoration of peace and the status quo the false sense of security that many of the citizens of Earth had come to accept as the norm — that erroneous belief that nobody could travel the galaxy and there would be no threat from extraterrestrials, hume or otherwise, was forever shattered, and hume life on Earth, though it would go on with only a slight stutter from a biological sense, would continue under a renewed global culture of quiet desperation.
