I hate the
NSA. They have been up my ass since this whole
nightmare started. Stewing in a "
secure location" with a
neck brace on for the last month has done nothing to improve my
disposition. I was as surprised as any of them. Hell, they saw the
video. I guess I should start at the beginning.
World opinion is a
bitch when you're a
politician these days. We have all these wonderful modern weapons, but if we use them to defend the country or sort out a
hotspot in some
backwater shithole, people freak the fuck out. Hell, its been 120 years since somebody even thought about a
nuke. Its
taboo. So, if your hands are tied by the lily-livered public, you go
black ops. And for the last 50 years, the secret defense industry has been swimming in cash. A few years at
MIT, half a week in
Quantico and a plane ride to
Langley started my career. I had more money than a
goddamn movie star, and I never used it. The work ate my life.
So, after working on some shitty
sat-recon analyzers and orbital
wiretaps, I landed the
holy grail of projects. I mean, this thing was so black it didn't even cast a
shadow. My first run in with
National Security occurred about an hour into the job application. They grilled me on why I was eating corned beef from
Brazil. How the fuck that was dangerous to the nation,
I don't know. Foreign influence I guess. Anyway, after 3 months of jumping through hoops for those clowns, I was in. An
X project.
I even got "
disappeared". They drugged me at work, hauled me off to "
The Shop" and stuck a
Witness Relocation guy in my apartment. 3 days later, my cat and about half my
Playboys arrived. I never really cared. I was
in.
Executive Order 2914-04 authorized the creation and use of
nonbiological constructs for the
elimination of
dire threats to national and global
security.
Assassin droids. I dropped a
gold brick in my shorts at the
briefing. The order came down a day ago, and 6 "
platforms" were waiting to go. My
cherry new job was to monitor
performance. I got to compile statistics on murderers. I found out later that I was a
replacement. There had been an accident.
It was 4 days before I saw one up close. Locked upright in its
port, it looked like an
NBA star painted
matte black. Taller and thinner than possible for a human, it stood about 8 feet tall with long thick
fingers. The most disturbing feature was the face, or lack there of. It looked like one of those
department store mannequins with all the details
ground off. No eyes, no ears, nothing. All that crap was done with
vibration sensors and
passive radar. Not one unsealed joint made this baby
all weather. The tiny
jack for diagnostics was on the right wrist. I ran my hand over the smooth
modular shell that covered
alloys I can't even begin to explain, and one
tiny gold star was stamped under the number 9 impression on the left shoulder. The comp geeks called it
Kill -9, some
archaic joke that was too
obscure to explain. It was the last in the
series. They had destroyed 1 and 2 in
combat tests against each other, and 3 was
decommissioned after crushing my predecessor. Official report said he knocked it into self defense mode. Word around the lab was it wasn't even turned
on.
The List occupied a 20 foot tall screen in the
Ops Center. These guys and gals got a
big red X from
Uncle Sam, and our job was to
cancel their subscriptions. I saw some
wild shit on those screens. Like the time 7
punched through the roof of an
APC and pulled
most of a South Asian general out the
ragged hole. When 5 jumped down nine
stories to land on his target
feet first. I spilled
hot coffee all over after 4 got hit with an
RPG and had to
bug out. The
SEAL team recovered him 36
miles away, running
full out, holding its own damn arm. The
no evidence routine checked out fine. The ones we all watched carefully were
Kill -9 missions.
9 did some
crazy shit. He stuck to
ceilings, he hid under
floors, he
jumped out windows and
kicked in doors. It got to be like watching a wild sci-fi vid. Kill-9 got
mop up jobs. When 4
screwed up in
China, 9 finished the job like it wasn't even
hard. Slowly but surely, 9
replaced the others. When they hauled it back to the
Shop, I always got first
dibs. Jacking up and ripping numbers, my report was
due 30 minutes after
recovery. Wiping the
gore off 9 was somebody else's problem. I never noticed the
bug.
We got to within five names of the end of
the List. A
goddamn cake walk in
Brazil was the straw that broke the
camel's back. 9 did a
HALO drop and landed
hard. The
GPS lock went
off-line, but the
uplink stayed on so we let him
run. He kept dropping
off target, distracted by
threats it would normally ignore. When he picked up the
gun, the whole room
hushed. They don't know how to use
guns. 9
did. Like a
master. The signal dropped 29.8
seconds later. 9 was
AWOL.
I like to describe what happened next as a
shitstorm. SEALS went in to recover him. No bot.
Delta Force did a
SAR mission. No bot but lots of
bodies. The NSA
locked us down and we all got the CIA's best
psychological examination. No bot. In the black ops world, this is
flush time.
Bye Bye Executive Order 2914-04.
So my new job is to help the Company
wash its hands of the whole thing. I got the job of
pulling the plug on 4 through 8. Heading back out to the
lab, I get a strange feeling. Call it
intuition or whatever. My skin was
crawling when I got there. Then I was looking at a
Ops Center production in living color. 9
dropped off the fucking ceiling and
pinned me 6 feet up a
concrete wall with its
oversized paw. By the
neck. Choking and scared, I see 9 turn to the
camera mounted behind the door. It regards me with its blank face and does some
crazy shit with its
free hand in front of me. It was all so quiet except for the
gagging noise I was making. 9 pushed forward on his hand and I
blacked out.
My neck
broke in 2 places. Turns out the crazy hand motions were
sign language.
Individual letters.
I C A M E F O R M Y B R O T H E R S
The lab was empty when they found me.