When she got off at the stop by the tower, she didn’t follow the path to the statue of the founder, the fancy stairs, and the memorial plaque of the assassination she now suspected was Evie’s doing. Instead, she followed a winding route lined with bushes and decorated hedges that smelled sweet and earthy. It was meant for employees to destress offline, and she took advantage of the lack of security measures. She followed through until the bushes gave way to complicated holograms of reeds and grasses that stretched upward as tall as a person, through imitations of deciduous trees with leaves changing just before the fall, all the way to the terminus at the access door locked tight behind worker identification. She stared at the door for a moment, booted up her hack, and let the code cascade. When the door swung wide to greet her, she slipped inside. There were a few maintenance guys nearby, but they were busy scrolling through memory chips on their breaks, and she passed unnoticed. So far, so good. She headed down the hall, past a security cage that hosted countless cleaning supplies and automated bots on standby—every evening, they’d set off in a grand display to scrub every inch of the tower. When Mal reached the stairs, she took them two at a time.
Ten floors up, she entered the filing floor for a mid-tier law firm, a gleam of sweat budding on her skin. The people there assumed she was a courier on a delivery run when they saw the small bag slung over her shoulder, and paid little attention. They were overworked interns neck-deep in case files, and none of them spared the time to double-check whether she really belonged. If they had any hopes of advancement in the firm, a single late report would spell the premature end of their careers, and it was a fact Mal exploited. She knew the weight of the capitalist boot intimately, but it was enlightening to see those white-collar workers with an eternal lack of sleep and poor hygiene care. They were the same as the people in the outskirts, whether they recognized it or not. It was no wonder the mercenaries who found a single shred of success fighting against the system were enshrined in the minds of the masses as an ideal with action figures, brand deals, and feature-length films. The best-selling type of memory chip for the last few decades were merc gigs where viewers were able to pretend they were the badass wielding change at the end of a barrel. It was opium for anyone discontent with their lots in life who were unable or unwilling to get their own hands dirty.
Malory didn’t linger. Her targets were high above making decisions that affected the entirety of New Detroit and beyond, so she found her way to a service tunnel by the elevator and scaled the ladder rungs ever upward. Her hands clasped one metal bar after another cast in the orange glow of utility lights, and she felt the implant grow impatient. It wanted to speed her advance, to get on with the murder, and it wiggled like a parasite in the folds of her brain. It massaged and manipulated the synapses to fire in the ways it wanted, and it left her with a massive headache. She wasn’t okay being led along as a puppet, willing or not, and she hoped a few dead executives were enough to satiate its cravings, at least for a while. She wanted to hunker down and dedicate herself to the search for her sister, but its influence was all-encompassing, and she hadn’t been able to fight back since she was reduced to a few frayed threads after killing Banks. If she kept letting it push her forward break-neck into oblivion, she was terrified there would be nothing left; she barely recognized herself anymore, but she still wished to own a cabin with Nadia one day, and used that as a bulwark to preserve what little she could.
When the ladder ended, she was in another bland maintenance tunnel, and Malory followed it to its exit on an upscale hotel floor for visiting middle-managers. She doubted she resembled the usual clientele, but the maids made no effort to bar her progress or report her as an undesirable. They had their own tasks. She watched one of them work as she went, using supplies from a cart to sanitize door knobs, mirrors, and all the frequently used surfaces. When Mal approached and peered into the open room, the maid was busy changing out the sheets for something fresh. All of the tasks had been automated ages ago, but they charged a premium fee for the human touch. Anything to squeeze another credit where they could. The shareholders needed the newest AV models, and they were going to get it. The whole thing disgusted Mal, and she had to resist helping the poor woman finish faster. She was planning to help another way, by lopping off a few heads of the snake. It’d take a while for them to regrow, and in the process, she hoped the company would change. Learn from their mistakes, or at least be fearful of what would come if they pushed too far, too hard. It was a naive expectation, but the Prophet had done it so long ago, and the method was proven.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
From the hotel, Mal rode an express elevator all the way up to the meeting floor. It was direct access for the convenience of the self-important managerial class, and there were no identity checks. It was assumed anyone nefarious would have been handled long before they found themselves where people slept. When the ghost appeared at her side, it smiled, the previous encounter with the Stranger forgotten—Evie needed the carnage, and the influence grew to a fever pitch. Mal’s heartbeat fluttered against her rib cage in time to her steps and she was coiled like an overstressed spring. If there wasn’t a release soon, she was going to explode, so she walked to the first conference room she saw with heavy steps—there was no one standing in the way. She kicked the door open and drew the Lantern. The implant spat out little blue labels for everyone seated at the table and deemed them all guilty and beyond salvation; Mal squeezed the trigger, boring a fat hole through a suited chest, and then moved onto the next. There were nine in total, and their lives were ended in a matter of seconds, splattering the complimentary food with viscera and gore. She reloaded the pistol and headed off for more.
It was too soon for anyone to understand what was happening, and when she barged into a second meeting, all the C-suite members were in various states of confusion. In the time it took for her to process the labels and harvest them all like chaff under a farmer’s scythe, life continued on inside the rest of ZenTech tower. Back on the hotel floor, a man who’d just closed a major acquisition deal over a new piece of late night media focused on creepy clowns was furiously masturbating to photos of his best friend’s wife. A floor directly below the onslaught, a man was crying in the handicapped toilet stall after learning he’d been diagnosed with lymphoma, and since the cause had been deemed separate from work-related activities, his ZenTech-issued insurance refused to cover treatment. Down in the lobby, one of the secretaries was sending messages on the network to her cousin she used to kiss when they were kids about a planned vacation to Luna Paradise and how she wanted to splurge to stay in the dome hotel that simulated protection from cosmic radiation. When everyone in the room was dead, Malory reloaded again and headed back into the hall. Just outside, she ran into an assistant that had come to investigate, but let them live when the implant deemed them innocent.
The assistant ran off in a panic, their eyes lit up calling for security. Time was tight, but the implant led ever forward. One more big fish, to really put the hurt on. Just one more, and she’d be done. She’d be free to escape into the depths of the city. There was a single office on that floor, designed to be close to all the activities and dealings, and Malory headed right for it. This one, though, had a security guard posted outside. Someone who had been close enough to violence in their assent up the corporate ladder to recognize gunshots, and they were primed and ready. Malory waited for a while for him to scan the other end of the hall before she came around the corner. She had no chance in a fair fight, and his helmet and body armor were top-of-the-line, so she aimed for the gap under his arm that was only visible because of the butt of the rifle as he twisted, and her aim held true. He slumped backwards against the door. When Mal walked up to him, she bent down and placed the gun under his chin. She fired again. Behind the door was the Chief Operating Officer, the man who ran the company’s day-to-day, and the one who ultimately signed off on the hit squad that killed her friends.
When she entered, he was seated at his desk and fastening the last few straps into place on a gas mask. Malory wasn’t fast enough. She raised the pistol just as he activated the custom security measures and flooded the room with toxic fumes. She shot him in the chest anyway, but the thick substance slithered down her throat and burned away at the scarred air sacs that processed oxygen like a wildfire. Malory went in further and shot him over and over and over again until his face was pulverized. There’d be no open casket for that sorry bastard. When it was done, she wrapped a primed grenade in his grasp to explode the moment they tried to move him, and fled. Everything reduced to a blur. When she found herself in an empty stairwell along the chosen escape route, she allowed herself to bend over double and devolved into a hacking fit that misted the smooth concrete with an abstract painting of red. She needed new lungs, but that didn’t bother her. She’d needed them since she was a kid, anyway, and if it was a sacrifice that managed to bring a moment’s reprieve from the influence of that maniacal ghost, it was worth it. She made it back to the street just as the lockdown started, and hoped the Doc would be impressed enough to front her an implant to breathe again.
