Mirage

In the beginning there was emptiness. Two dozen heads-up layers blinked “running diagnostics” all at once. Diagnostics were great, thought Adrian, but he needed his eyes. Ears would also be helpful. At least the feels were back online. No part of his overengineered body felt good. Mirage filaments were stitching things back together as best they could, but there was a lot to stitch. Gyros informed Adrian he was moving a hundred kilometers an hour in one direction – and bouncing around in the others.

Sense weaves in his skin felt something coming in much faster than that. It wasn’t a kiss. He rolled left. The false kisses kept coming. Adrian kept rolling. His environment consisted mostly of twisted metal. That complicated things, but Adrian was good at getting out of the way. It was his schtick. Mirage sinew twitched faster than people saw.

Adrian would love to see more than diagnostic messages.

His optic subsystems produced a wire model from bouncing radar pulses sent out by fleshweave transmitters. He wasn’t in his aerodyne anymore. That had been obvious even without the radio map. He was in a train car – one of the big 333s: triple deck, triple wide, triple long. Those ran through the Deep, threading superstructure roots in the lowest metropolitan foundation layers. Buildings a couple kilometers tall went down far.

If an aerodyne autopilot got Adrian from skimming pink clouds to the inside of a moving 333, alive, more than a few AI competency gating regulations had been “finessed.” It was fortunate for him that his employers could afford the best. Mirage Sympath Category 3 genes were one in a billion or two, however, and that gave employers incentives to pay for the best.

It also incentivized pursuers to bring expensive kits. Adrian slipped around a lot of black market bullets. His fabulous, fibrous body could take a surprising number of hits, but it was even better to take an infinite number of misses. The polymer ceramic metal skeleton anchoring his mirage sinews could punch through steel. Great! Adrian still needed to know where those slabs were standing.

His attackers knew how to confuse his radio pulses. Even though their loadouts lacked mirage tech, what tech they carried was Spook Plus Plus. In direct contests of strength, they would overpower him. They also had more hard points. One meaning of “mirage” was that it moved too fast to see. Another meant when it wasn’t moving too fast, what observers saw was human. Humans didn’t have hard point weapon mounts – and neither did Adrian.

His mirage wasn’t even capped: MSC3-2.

MSC3-3 was expensive as fuck. His employers would get him there eventually. Not using the full potential of his protein lottery slam dunk (the highest category possible at birth) presented some steep opportunity costs of its own. Someday they might throw down for the expensive as fuck squared protein pair rebalancing required to reach MSC4.

He’d have to live that long. Was this a test? His pursuers were sophisticated enough to know mirage tech would drive a non-sympath insane in a couple hours – then reject their bodies and kill them. Even among sympaths, the fibers were grown to spec and non-transferrable. Adrian was a high value asset, all right; but not a high value target.

In truth, he was a glorified male escort. Taking him out would not cripple his employer. Capturing him would not transfer actionable trade secrets. His pursuers were therefore his employers testing him; rivals with faulty intelligence; or, rivals who believed Adrian carried something more valuable than himself.

The first two couldn’t be ruled out, but were improbable. The last option was baffling. What could he be carrying? His precious jewels were a third their original size, smooth as apple skin, and had effectively become solid, hardened rubber (ironic?). Even if a few seeds remained preserved inside, they couldn’t improve a tube baby’s odds in the protein pair lottery.

If anyone had brushed up against him and slipped something into a pocket surreptitiously, not only were they good at their job – all their hard work was lost. The extravagantly luxurious designer fabrics which previously wrapped his flawless body had been vaporized in explosions. Fuck! His hair was probably a mess, too. Adrian didn’t have the luxury of sifting through recorded memories to find reverse pick-pockets just yet, though.

There were more black market bullets to dodge.

The radio map finally filled in. Of course, it had only been about two seconds. The car was mixed use: passengers on the upper two decks; cargo on the lower one. Adrian didn’t remember crashing through a polymer glass sky dome, atrium, and ceiling; but having done so would explain how he got where he was.

The impact of whatever pieces of his aerodyne vehicle that had managed to reach the train wouldn’t have been pleasant for passengers. Sorry about that. The decks were probably nearly empty anyway, and most residents of the foundation layers were chopped up reassemblies of aggressive kits, themselves. None of them were pretty – but pretty didn’t survive long enough to board a train two kilometers underground.

Unless it was named Adrian.

The glorified male escort chuckled. Laughter helped. He was naked, his hair was a mess, and his radio bounces had identified at least four Spook Plus Plus cyborgs gunning for him with black market bang bangs. Still, the odds had improved. When all this started, Adrian faced a half dozen high performance air transports full of who knew what. Adrian’s own high performance air transport’s AI had shed pursuers well enough to turn this into a fair fight.

The wireframe image of a big ass girl leaned out from the top deck’s wreckage. Her heavy points anchored one big ass gun. Maybe she said something before opening fire. Adrian wouldn’t have heard it. He felt the heavy rounds coming down, though, and put himself somewhere the hell else. One of his original pursuers didn’t get out of the way in time.

Adrian gained nothing by fighting it out here, and fled forward through the car. Distance was time. The more time, the more of his mirage tech wonder boy self would come back online. The carrier wave transmitters in his skin were active. His heads-up panels displayed their interfaces. It was difficult to make anything out against the gray murk feeding through his eyes, however. Adrian would file a feature request with Salamander: when main visuals were fucked, black them out during reinitialization.

He got a floorplan from the train’s network, dialed up the contrast to make it pop against gray, and rescaled his radio wire frame to match. The circumstances of his arrival had brought down blast doors between all the cars. His polymer ceramic skeleton couldn’t punch through that much steel. Hacks wouldn’t save him, either. The doors dropped because shit got serious and required containment. They were purely mechanical.

Adrian’s options were to go up and out the hole in the roof; to make a hole out the side; or to make a hole in the floor. Up risked games with the ogress and her big ass gun. Down, he would have fantastic cover. The floor plates would be tough to get through, however, and those maglev fields were no joke. Adrian’s options reduced to going out the side. The cargo floor had no need for sightseeing windows or fake display screens, but there were ventilation grates.

There were also emergency exits. Those could be released either manually or through network interface hijinks. Adrian spun a special purpose persona up on the mirage wires in his head, layered it onto the train’s network, and set it to the task of opening all of the doors in the car – emergency, service, or other – at once.

Then he locked them open.

Bullets coming through walls suggested the conflict had reduced to a three way between himself, the ogress, and one of his original pursuers. Probably the team captain. Adrian was faster than they were – by a lot. They were better armed than he was – by a lot. As long as no camp got reinforcements, Adrian could win by staying several steps ahead until he had fully recovered.

He raced to the second farthest exit. The ogress was a local, and would know the huge car’s layout by heart. Expecting him to try and survive in the tunnels, she would aim to cut him off at the closest jump. Rounds punched through walls in conformance with that prediction. Adrian doubted his rude intrusion provoked her into such a fury. She had likely concluded anyone being chased by so much Spook Plus Plus tech was valuable. The away team captain wouldn’t know the car’s layout, but had the chops to get a floorplan from the network, too.

At what had been the second farthest emergency exit, but which was presently right in front of him, Adrian braced an arm on the door frame. Bullets were still flying, but his pursuers were more at odds with one another than him. After all, he had no black market bullets.

Adrian’s legs could match the train’s speed. At its closest, the tunnel wall was three meters away – but distances varied. His next trick depended on getting everything just right. Adrian loved stunts like this. Usually, he had all his equipment in working order when performing them. With only radio bounces to resolve surfaces, he was a mirage bat instead of a mirage jumping spider.

Plenty could go wrong.

Bullets got closer. Plenty was going to go wrong either way.

Adrian jumped out, up, and back. Making a go of things in the tunnels was a romantic notion… for another day. He’d be surrounded by the worst of the worst gangs, and it was a long way to the surface. His skin weaves were tough enough to stop bullets. Retail bullets, yes, but that counted enough to allow the soles of his feet to survive impact with concrete at a hundred kilometers per hour, no problem. He skidded, almost skated, as his legs compressed against the wall – then sprang back toward the train.

Ping ponging between the tunnel and train, Adrian ended up four cars back. It barely took ten seconds. In the last of those, he misjudged curves and overshot. Dropping onto the middle of the roof, he slid backwards and banged the leading edge of the sky dome. That deflected him to one side.

Falling off the car wouldn’t give him the start he needed to reach the wall and ricochet. He’d hit the ground instead, too fast – and too close to the activated levitation plates. Mirage handled magnetic fields much better than mundane tech, but he’d still get fried. Supernatural finger strength, jacked up a notch by necessity, deformed the skin of the train enough to hold him in place.

Adrian flipped forward. Passengers in the car below would shoot for any reason. Sure enough, bullets punctured the train’s skin and impacted against cement. 333s supplied the superstructures above with just about everything. Their loads were often over-tall, so the tunnels provided plenty of clearance. Complacency would lead to disaster, however. Adrian paid close attention to radio bounces as he padded across the cars ahead of him. No one was getting through the blast doors. If anyone who had just taken a few shots wanted to join the chase, they’d have to come out of the train themselves.

No one came out.

Crouching in the shadow of the sky dome one car back from his original impact, Adrian waited for his eyes to get a little clearer. Most of the fog had lifted, but he couldn’t enhance his vision yet. He wanted to see things clearly. The ogress had probably prevailed against the away team captain. The size of her equipment would have been dispositive one-on-one.

Adrian initially expected her to believe he was trying to get into the tunnels. If he hadn’t fucked up the landing a few cars back, she might have held on to that belief. But he had fucked up, and the ogress might have friends elsewhere in the train. Her gun could shoot through the roof easily, and his radio pings wouldn’t see the rounds coming. She would have to know he was there, of course. Her ears were probably working, though, and she could turn up the input volume.

If everything had been in working order, Adrian could have run forward instead of back and avoided this issue entirely. Everything hadn’t been in working order, but he still wanted to reach the engine. The train’s controls would be most vulnerable to his tech there – and he could persuade the crew to go along with his plan.

The crew knew something went down but hadn’t hit the breaks. That implied they intended to divert to a reinforced depot. Adrian flashed through high-contrast maps on internal displays. Yes, he knew where they were going. But the commanders responsible for planning his abduction could look at the same maps. Adrian did not want the train stopping anywhere predictable.

If it didn’t stop at all – yeah, that would be great.