The Lab (Agent Six of Hearts) Read online

  “Well, just remember that in fifty years, I’ll be gone. That world is not my problem. But you’ll still be here then. You have to live in the City that we’re saving. Remember that.”

  Six nodded. It was quicker than arguing about such issues.

  King glanced down again at the document Six had given him. “And you’ll outlive me by a very long time if you keep getting mission results this good. This is first-class work. No known sightings? No one saw you at all?”

  Six shook his head.

  “A job well done, as usual,” King said with a smile, taking off his monocle. “Excellently done, in fact. The Jokers will be pleased.”

  Six didn’t know who the Jokers were, though he suspected King did. They supplied key intelligence for missions, they made significant contributions to the Deck’s funds, and they chose which agents worked for the organization.

  “The usual amount will be transferred to your account,” King said.

  Six nodded again.

  “Excellent.” King took the sheet of paper and placed it in a tray for filing. Then he opened a desk drawer and produced a large black folder. “And in the meantime, here’s a hard copy of your mission details for tomorrow.”

  Six didn’t pick up the folder. “I read the e-brief,” he said. “I know them.”

  “I know you do. Take it anyway.”

  “It increases the risk for me to have it on paper,” Six said. “Why keep it written down when I know it all in my head?”

  “Because it increases the risk for me to keep it here,” King said. “You can memorize all those codes and numbers—the other agents can’t. And if I don’t print out missions for you and I do for everyone else, that would draw attention to both of us. We don’t want that, do we?”

  Six shivered. He knew King was right. Too much scrutiny and the Spades might discover who he was or, worse, the Lab might find him—and he didn’t want to think about the consequences of that.

  King shrugged. “You are much better at defending yourself than I am. The times you needed me to look after you are long gone. You’re looking after me now.”

  Six looked at him in surprise. King rarely mentioned their history. If people knew that King had found Six as a baby and subsequently raised him, there would be many questions asked. King had said it was safer for both of them to appear neutral.

  “Destroy it if you have to, but take it,” King continued.

  Six couldn’t argue with that. He took the folder.

  “You’ll be back for your makeover at 0600 hours tomorrow?”

  “Of course,” Six said. He slipped back out the door without another word.

  CHAOSONIC

  An hour later Six was back in the fog. The wind was blowing from the south, where most of the industrial activity and factories were, so the air was thick with pollution. He was completely enveloped in the dark carbon stain.

  The fog shortened life expectancy dramatically. While almost all houses had a ChaoSonic air-cleansing apparatus installed in their vents, the average lifespan of a human being had dropped by nearly twenty years since Takeover, when the grey mist had become permanent.

  Of course, the rich lived longer. They had implants that oxygenated their blood so they wouldn’t strain their lungs trying to drain life out of the rotting air. At the other end of the spectrum, there were billions of homeless people who rarely lived to see their mid-thirties. Then there were the hippies. They lived in the tiny parks dotted throughout the City. The GM trees were efficient at cleansing carbon dioxide out of air, it was true, but the hippies didn’t live long, either. Six knew that gradual asphyxiation was just one of the many ways to die in the City.

  Six’s lungs were more efficient at processing the tainted air than those of probably anyone else in the City. Under his skin there were slender scraps of DNA from those very same GM trees—Six could draw a little life from carbon dioxide as well as oxygen, so he managed to get more from the air than most other people.

  Well, he thought, as he looked at the starving man asleep on the concrete and the rich teenager buzzing by on his motorized wheelchair, everyone gets dealt their hand. Some people have it good; some people, bad. And even if I wished that things were different, they wouldn’t be.

  So forget it. This is an unproductive line of thought.

  The trouble was, for all his mental, physical, and financial advantages, on a day like today, when the southern wind was blowing, he could hardly see through the fog. His 20/20 vision, however useful most of the time, did not make him an X-ray machine—Six couldn’t see more than a few meters ahead through this fog any more than he could see through the brick and mortar wall to the side of him. But he probably had a better chance of not bumping into people than most other pedestrians, because of his quick reflexes.

  When he finally saw the ChaoSonic patrol up ahead, he had to make a fast decision.

  They were only about five meters away from him.

  “Your triple C, please,” the patrol leader said to a woman in front of Six. He looked like a giant, skinny cockroach, with his black breathing apparatus, reflective orange goggles, and clawlike armored gloves.

  Six was in trouble. He couldn’t use his fake triple C—it was flagged. Yesterday he’d tried it during a random check, and the alarms had gone off. The cockroach-men had immediately drawn their weapons; Six had been lucky to survive the encounter.

  Should he try to bluff his way through, make up some excuse for not having his ChaoSonic Citizen Card on him? Should he locate a man with a similar face and body, and steal his?

  Could he try to slip through the checkpoint unnoticed? The crowd of people was particularly dense here. But the guards would be expecting that—they’d have a way of dealing with anyone who tried to escape.

  Six looked around him. He was very close to the checkpoint. He must have passed some security officers already. It was their job to arrest or kill those who bolted when they saw the checkpoint. He hadn’t seen anything—maybe they were plainclothes security, or maybe they were too far away in the fog for him to see. Or there were digi-cams designed to photograph anyone who tried to escape so they could be filed by face-scan and located later.

  “Your triple C, please,” the cockroach said again, this time to a homeless man. The man pulled a grimy card out from one of his tattered socks, and handed it over. The guard scanned it and handed it back, with a grating “Thank you.”

  Six knew he had few options. He couldn’t bluff his way through; at the very least they’d photograph him, and he was too close to the Deck to allow that to happen. If ChaoSonic found the Deck headquarters, none of the agents would last very long.

  He could take them by surprise and fight his way through, or he could turn back and face whatever resistance lay that way.

  Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Six knew that this proverb made more sense than most. He had no idea what was behind him, yet he could see the four soldiercockroaches in front of him. It would seem that logic was on the proverb’s side—except that whatever hostile forces waited behind him, there would be at least as many in front.

  And there was another problem. Although ChaoSonic insisted that random triple C tests were just to make sure that everyone had a card and was therefore receiving equal benefits from the company, Six suspected that they had a secret agenda. It wasn’t just to ensure that everyone was catalogued; it was also to weed out Deck agents. And Six could feel the rising panic in the pit of his stomach when he thought about his own secret suspicion: They might be looking specifically for him.

  The Lab was a division of ChaoSonic. If they had somehow worked out who he was, they would be scouring the City for him.

  And if that were the case, he wouldn’t be able to fight his way past them. Against these soldiers he would not have the element of surprise. They would have been well briefed about his capabilities; even if they didn’t know specifics, just a quick study of his history would be enough to warn them to be heavily armed if they expe
cted to encounter him.

  “Your triple C, please,” the guard asked Six coldly.

  “Sure,” Six said smoothly, his heart pounding like a drum. “I know I have it here somewhere…”

  Six reached a hand into his pocket, shuffled it around, and pulled it out again, reaching towards the soldier. Before the soldier had time to realize that Six wasn’t holding anything at all, Six had snatched the guard’s gun from its holster and was firing it into the air.

  People screamed and started to run away from the checkpoint. Suddenly Six was at the back of a mass of people—running, they thought, for their lives.

  The guard lunged forward to grab Six, but his hands gripped empty air. Six had vanished.

  Suddenly the airwaves were thick with transmissions, and guards’ radios crackled all around.

  “Suspect sighted.”

  “Where?”

  “I lost him in the crowd.”

  “Don’t let anybody leave! Establish a perimeter!”

  But it was too late for that. There were only ten guards, and more than three hundred people. The guards were well equipped to handle one or two people trying to escape, but not a whole herd of civilians running for their lives.

  “Open fire! Kill them all!”

  “No!” a voice crackled. “He’ll be gone by now.”

  From his vantage point around the corner, Six breathed a sigh of relief. But he wasn’t altogether satisfied—they were still much too close to the Deck.

  One way or another, this wasn’t a safe place to be. Six slipped into the fog, and escaped deeper into the City.

  THE WATCHER

  The house sat among its neighbors, as inconspicuous and ignored as an ant in its nest. It was small, functional, and had an armored appearance to it; there were dark metal sheets on the roof, and the windows were opaque. There was a security floodlight trained on the front yard, glaring suspiciously at the cars that droned past, waiting for trespassers on the lawn so it could blind them. There were alarms behind the door, adorned with numbered buttons, which sternly awaited the arrival of an intruder so they could swiftly electrocute him or her with small, sharp wires, stopping the heart instantly. A satellite dish on the roof moved in a slow circle, maintaining constant reception from all the mechanical creatures that drifted around Earth, invisible to the naked eye.

  A window near the front door suddenly became clear. Agent Six peered in through it, carefully scanning the room for anomalies. Satisfied that everything was how he’d left it, he clicked his remote control and placed it back in his pocket. The window became opaque again.

  Moments later, the front door rattled. One at a time, four different keys disarmed four locks. The door swung open, and Six typed in the nine-digit combination to turn off the alarm. The electric wires slid back patiently into their slots.

  Six walked methodically through the house, checking each room. Everything was as still as death. A vague, uncertain humming emanated from the refrigerator. Its LCD was blank. The television’s sole light, a tiny red dot, flicked on and off twice per second. There was one bed in the house—a firm, narrow bunk with a gun under the pillow.

  He found nothing out of the ordinary, so he went to the bookcase, where hundreds of dusty books squatted on shelves. The Politics of Modern Society—A Study of Anarchy; Warfare: Tools and Strategies; Whitman’s Encyclopedia of Physics and Chemistry; The World Since 2000. On a separate shelf rested titles of a different nature: The Human Genome Project; DNA and Genes; Splicing Genes to Affect Growth; Beyond IVF.

  He removed a copy of Philosophy and Its Application in Today’s Society from his pocket and placed it on the shelf. He had bought it before returning home. If philosophy is the wisdom of the world’s greatest thinkers, he had thought, then I should at least develop an understanding of it.

  Some of the books on the shelves were biographies, and some were biographies of people Six was sure could never have existed. Since Takeover, the line between fact and fiction had become so blurry that no one was sure who had actually existed and who had been made up for entertainment. Harry Houdini, Long John Silver, Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ, Hamlet, Bruce Wayne, Socrates, Sherlock Holmes, John McClane, Ludwig van Beethoven, James Bond, Eliot Ness, Adolf Hitler, Ned Kelly…who was real?

  Who knew what life had been like all those years ago? Who could be sure, when no one who had seen those times was now left alive to say?

  The computer perched on the edge of a black fiberglass desk, lights blinking as Six approached. Under the desk was a crisp, clean strip of carpet. Under the carpet was a steel trapdoor. Under the trapdoor was a shallow concrete pit, empty except for cockroach carcasses in the corners.

  Six pulled on a pair of latex gloves as he sat. A few clicks of the mouse, taps on the keys, and he was satisfied that he had been paid for today’s mission. He switched off the computer, peeled off his gloves, and tossed them into the steel garbage bin. The bin hummed unobtrusively as it heated the gloves, melting off Six’s fingerprints. No prints were left behind on the keyboard, either.

  Six walked down the hall to his training room. As he moved, narrow beams of light and shadows danced around his feet. They ducked and waved, weaving and playing in rings and loops around his legs.

  The light came from the mirrors that were placed in every room. Laser torches had been placed at the front and back doors, and their beams hummed right through the house, guided by the mirrors. If anything moved in any room, the beams would move or break, changing the lighting conditions throughout the house. If anyone was in the house, Six would know about it as soon as he or she moved.

  Six walked into his training room. It was cube shaped—about five meters on each side. Its walls were painted pristine white. The room contained a flat screen built into the wall, a digi-cam on a tripod, a black rubber mannequin bolted into an aluminum track that ran across the floor, and a black nylon jumpsuit with a stopwatch sewn into the wrist.

  Six slipped into the jumpsuit and flicked a switch on the watch. Circular patches on his wrists, elbows, hips, knees, and ankles began to glow. There were also glowing spots on his chest and his back, right in front of and behind his heart. Reaching into a breast pocket, Six removed a luminous adhesive disc and attached it to the side of his head.

  Crossing the room, he switched on the digi-cam. The flat screen on the wall flared into life, and immediately rendered an artificial image of Six. The copy mimicked his movements as he examined it. Its body was largely the same as his, but it had no face, fingers, or hair.

  The computer wasn’t really displaying him, Six knew. It was hypothesizing his movement and posture, based on the digi-cam’s readings of the signals from the glowing discs on the jumpsuit. If the camera were switched on while the jumpsuit was folded neatly on the floor, the screen would display Six as a tangled mess of broken bones.

  Six touched the screen, and a menu appeared. He selected UNARMED COMBAT DRILLS, STRIKING DRILLS, then COMBINATIONS. A list of strike types appeared, and Six chose AERIAL STRIKES, HOLDS, KICKS, and PUNCHES. He hit next.

  A list of thousands of files appeared in alphabetical order. Six selected quadruple strike back flip v2.5.

  LOADING appeared on the screen. Six approached the mannequin as its silvery eyes began to glow.

  This mannequin was Six’s training dummy. He had purchased it from a mercenary who specialized in torture, and he had made some special modifications himself. Inside were many broken circuits that would sound an alarm if they were connected. Six had wired the dummy up to function like a human body. Any strike to it that would cause pain to a human being triggered a distorted buzzer; any strike that would cause a human being to lose consciousness made a clear ping sound. Anything that would kill a human being caused the mannequin to power down, as a short hum, falling rapidly in pitch, was emitted.

  Six tested the dummy, putting his hands around its neck and squeezing. First came the buzzer (pain), then the ping (unconsciousness), then the dummy powered down (death). Everything seemed
satisfactory.

  The screen on the wall beeped. An image of Six appeared, crouching in front of a generic enemy soldier. When a blip was heard, the image sprang up into the air, slightly towards the soldier, and did a backflip in slow motion. On the way up, it punched the soldier in the abdomen with its left fist, and then used its right foot to push off his chest and fly higher. When it was on its back at the highest point, it put its left foot on the soldier’s face and pushed off again to finish the flip. When it was almost right-side up with its feet nearing the ground, it executed an uppercut to the soldier’s jaw, using the last moments of momentum from the spin to add power to the blow.

  Six’s image hit the ground in a crouch as the digital soldier staggered backward. Without pause, the image stood up, stepped forward, and neatly caught the soldier before he hit the ground. It held its opponent for a moment in a bear hug, with the soldier’s arms pinned against his sides and its right foot ready to trip him if he should struggle. Apparently satisfied that its opponent was unconscious, digital Six lowered him to the ground.

  The real Six nodded to himself. Excellent, he thought. I can have this sequence perfected before dinner.

  The dummy powered up and raised its rubber arms into a fighting stance. It slid along the aluminum track with a hydraulic hissing until it was in the center of the room.

  Six crouched, and waited for the computer’s signal.

  Blip.

  Six jumped forward. Only moments after his feet had left the ground, he had already punched the dummy in its synthetic midriff with his left fist. The rubber sank in slightly, the grating pain buzzer sounded, and the mannequin rolled backward along its track as it doubled over a little. Now hovering right above the dummy, Six slammed out his right foot and pushed off the mannequin’s torso. The pain buzzer sounded again, and Six lifted a little higher. Now he was facing the ceiling, and beginning to fall—the light fixtures were barely a meter above his face. He kicked the dummy in the head with his left heel and heard the rubber skull snap backward. The buzzer crackled again as he spun in the air, now upside down. The floor came into view from the top of his field of vision. Then the dummy’s feet dropped into his line of sight. Then waist. Then torso.