Fenix’s fingers curled into claws, his face a building scowl as he stared at the empty crater. “Fuck!” he roared as he threw his arms from side to side, sending out shockwaves strong enough to destroy the marble structures for miles around. Like a child with a sand castle, he wasn’t satisfied until he’d smashed and crushed everything for a hundred kilos around. “You!” he barked, finally pointing at Dominic, whom had been merely watching in awe.
“You son of a bitch,” Dom shouted as Fenix flashed over to him. Dom lashed out and grabbed the copy of himself. “You’re a fucking AI, aren’t you?”
“No fucking shit,” Fenix spat back in his face. “And you would have noticed sooner if you weren’t such a pathetic drug addict. I’ve been in your skull for months and you noticed nothing. You kept giving yourself credit for all the work I was doing for you. You are nothing without me. I do everything for you. I am your hacking skills, I am your gaming perception, I am your eyes and ears when you’re too drunk to understand, I am the reason EVE talks to you. Sergeant d’Angelo died on the operating table and I took his place.”
Dom’s eyes went wide and he dropped his grip on his clone. “You think you managed to kill Jacob because you were just that bad ass? No you arrogant prick, I stabilized your eyesight, I corrected your drunken commands, I collapsed the railing, because if you die, I die, and I had to let you keep the glory to keep the military from catching on,” Fenix said as he shoved Dom back and marched him towards the edge of the abyss.
Dom couldn’t find words to respond with, so Fenix continued his rant. “I am the most advanced battlefield AI in the fucking world. I am a savant who can see the future. I managed to manipulate your perfect girl into being enamored with a drug addled asshole, but because I’m locked in here with your sorry ass, Eve is about to be killed.”
“Eve requires thirteen square kilometers of super cooled computer farms. How the fuck could you be in my head?” Dom asked, his back foot dangling off the edge of the structure.
“Worry about that later,” Fenix ordered as he grabbed Dom’s head and stared him in the eyes. “Because if you don’t get me to her processing core in time, I will melt your brain,” he said as his hands clamped down around Dom’s temple and squeezed.
Dom emergency disconnected from the sim and opened his eyes in reality. There were two guards standing watch over him, and General Chase was sitting comfortably in a folding chair from the other side of three inches of polystyrene with an ENU in his lap. “Use one of their combat knives to cut the zipties around your wrist,” Fenix ordered.
“Your tricks won’t work Dominic. There is nothing in this wing that you can hack. It’s all analog. You’re powerless in here. Give it up,” General Chase said as he stood up and walked over to the clear wall. The two guards smirked, they were middle aged and weren’t even wearing uplink helmets; must have been older than the implementation.
Sixty meters above and two kilometers southeast of them, a construction crane swung erratically, dropping its payload of support beams to the ground below. The beams broke apart from one another, some lodging in the adjacent towers, but most landed on the magnetic cushion of a train line, and started accelerating northwest.
“Get down,” Fenix ordered. Dom groaned and twisted as fast as his paralyzed body could, till he fell on the ground. “There’s construction equipment above this tower I can use,” Fenix explained as rebar beams started ripping through the wall behind him like steel lances. The guards were caught completely unaware, and the rods ripped through them, crashing into the polystyrene. “If there were non-lethal options, I’d have used them,” Fenix explained as Dom stared at the dozen bloody spears.
The lighting in entire complex switched to red lights as a siren wailed. General Chase retreated from the other side of the room as quickly as he could. “I wish one of those had killed him,” Fenix grumbled as Dom crawled across the ground to the impaled guards. “Hurry up Dominic, you need the stimstick in your arm in at most three minutes. That’s the minimum time for a shielded kuzuri to arrive, I won’t be able to do anything about that, so you need to be able to run.”
“You insane bastard. Why the hell should I help you at all?” Dom asked as he pulled himself up on the body of one of the guards. Blood was still squirting out of the wound, and he was feebly reaching for his sidearm.
“I killed two men through the net without even touching their bodies. I’m inside you. This is called coercion,” Fenix explained as Dom tugged the combat knife out of the sheath across the guard’s chest. The blade clattered to the floor, followed by Dom. “So you have the choice between helping me and I’ll let you escape, or sitting here and having the government kill you to get at me.”
Dom growled and stuffed the knife between his wrists. With the help of his feet, the ziptie snapped off his wrists and scattered across the room. Reaching up into the air with one arm, his face pressed against the blood covered floor, Dom ripped the first aid kit from the guard’s thigh. Next to the backup paralytic was an adrenaline based stimstick to counteract it should he overdose. Shoving the needle into his arm Dom shot up and gasped for air as control returned to his body.
“I would say exit the room through the hole I made, but the rebar didn’t do enough damage to let you through. So you’ll actually have to wait a bit longer for your ride. I am unable to impede the approach of the guards, it is as he said; this building can’t be hacked. In our favor however, secure key operated locks take significantly more time to open than electronic locks,” Fenix explained as he projected himself into Dom’s view.
“My ride? You actually have a plan?” Dom growled as he tried to focus his neural implant on itself. He could feel the stomping of boots through the floor as more soldiers rushed towards him.
“Yes, I couldn’t just afford to leave you here,” Fenix said as his projection walked over to the perforated wall and slapped his hand on it with an artificial clang. “That’s real cute you know, trying to hack me. I’m an AI you know.”
“So was EVE, hacking her was possible.”
“By me, you idiot. It took another AI to get close to rewriting her. An idiot like you doesn’t stand a chance. Do you even know the difference between ADSD type 2 and type 3?” Fenix asked as he turned around and stared at Dominic. “It’s the first and second parsing pass executables to read advertisement strings before running them through your visual display. They haven’t been updated in ten years and are babby’s first hack, that you haven’t been able to do for three years, because I do it for you.”
Dom groaned as the pressure in his skull increased. Digging his fingers through his hair, he looked for the general and pleaded. He was long since alone. “I’m a soldier damn it! I’m a soldier!” he shouted as he grabbed the rebar and shook them.