I had to flash my undercover detective badge to three cops on the way home to avoid tickets and to convince one that I was undercover as a drunken street racer (it’s technically true!). I masterfully drift into my complex’s parking lot, expertly calculating exactly how fast the pedestrians in my way would be able to dodge as I brilliantly slide to a stop, only barely smashing my entire front bumper into the brick wall. Eh, who gives a fuck, I’m rich, and the bricks’ll grow back. As I stumble out of my car, I’m hit with the feeling that something is horribly wrong, and it might have something to do with the screaming mob of tenants emerging from the front door of the apartment complex.
I unzip my leather jacket, straighten my badass fedora (a REAL one, not a fucking trilby like douches wear!) and march fearlessly to the scene. The revolving automatic window panel thing slides open as I walk in and stand heroically in the revolvingautomaticwindowpanelthingway, pulling my hat down slightly over my eyes to drop a sexy shadow over them like the cool-guy character in a fighting game. God, I’m such a fucking badass! If I had a pussy it’d be gushing for me right now.
Filled with confidence, I wave super enticingly to the cute Asian girl at the front desk as I walk by, but she’s too busy hunching over a TeleCop and tearing a piece of his tongue half-off like a piece of taffy mid-kiss, so I just go “Nice!” as I pass by to make sure she realizes how impressed I am by her skills. This is my kind of woman! She rises when she hears me speak, her motion more like a marionette doll being jerked to a standing position than a human woman rising to her feet, which starts to concern me a bit. Her head snaps into place last, her bangs falling to the side and revealing two dilated glowing blue eyes that, despite matching her blood-soaked LED lip/nails chans, probably aren’t a good sign, especially not when they’re locked directly into mine. An inhuman grin crawls spider-like across her delicate face, fresh crimson ooze both sparkling on her teeth and leaking from the side of her glowing lips.
The disemboweled convulsing body of the Telecop falls to the ground, where she nonchalantly crushes his head like a grape beneath her heel. I’m still horny, but if I’m being honest, I’m starting to get a wee bit concerned. I whip out my Telaphone, “Veronica, run a scan on the… uh… her. Human? Cyborg? ART?”
“Master,” Veronica replies in her sultry British way, “the target is 100% human. The only-” She’s interrupted as a second TeleCop rushes in. I frantically leap out of the way as he unloads a clip into her, hitting her right arm, shoulder and hand. Her hand takes the brunt of the damage, her right index finger flat out snapping off like a knock-off Gundam figure, but despite the cloud of blood surrounding her she seems totally unfazed. She calmly and mechanically rotates her head to face her attacker and leaps panther-like, seizing his neck with her left hand and slamming him to the ground. His empty revolver bounces harmlessly across the linoleum from the impact. A gurgling shriek fills the room followed by the stench of fresh blood. The scream ends as the cop’s throat is torn out of his neck with the ease of a Philly cheesesteak breaking through the bottom of a greasy paper bag.
“As I was saying, Master Blake,” Veronica continues, “the only mechanical enhancements I am detecting through the phone’s scanners are cosmetic chans on her finger-slash-toenails and lips.”
“That-that’s fucking impossible, Veronica,” I spit in reply. “Are you fucking seeing this right now? Are you?” Right on cue, the head of the recently deceased goes flying over my head, hitting the revolving window panel thing behind me and sliding stump-side first down the glass front, leaving a gnarly blood n’ brains smear behind.
“My sensors were installed in this custom Police Telaphone by you, Master. They do not lie. I am offended that you would question your own greatness; oh! It is nearly sacrilege!”
“I programmed you too well,” I say with a smirk. “D-damn fuckin’ straight. Something extra fucked up is going on here, then. I hate to say it, but Veronica–call in for Pneumat support. Don’t mention the fact it’s a mid-twenties woman no taller than the desk I need help with. Just tell them Godzilla’s attacking my apartment or something. Or even just God, or just zilla. I don’t care. J-just make it sound cool.” No sooner can I finish my request for backup than does the femme fatale turn to face me again. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
I back into the revolving door (RIGHT, THAT’S WHAT IT’S FUCKING CALLED!). It doesn’t revolve. I push it, it doesn’t open; I pull it, it doesn’t ope–
Oop. There’s a severed head blocking it shut. Maldita puta culo cabeza muerte. I kick the head but that just gets the mushy stumpy head leaky stuff stuck in the mechanism worse and it moves for a second, then totally stops. Fucking shit, I’m stuck in here–and being the lobby of a Telecom built building like everything else in this fuckin’ district I know for damn well that this door and the entire wall of windows are Flexiglass for security, meaning anything short of a nuke going off ten feet away isn’t going to do shit. I don’t think I’ll be able to hold out for backup at this rate.
She turns to face me, her eyes aflame with primal bloodlust. I knew karma would get me for all the times I hit on her in a setting where she couldn’t get away with telling me off, but I thought said karma would come with, like, a kick in the nuts or something. This is a little overkill, Universe! Eyes locked with me again, her tongue emerges from her glowing lips, eagerly lapping up the blood from her fingers and her well-manicured glowing green nails as she slowly approaches me. She opens her mouth to speak, and, for a moment, it looks like the real her is about to shine through and ask for help–but all that comes out is a primal noise almost like a dial-up tone from an antique modem, and then some demonic baritone babbling in a nonexistent language. This is it, then, this is how I die.
…or is it? “Veronica, are you still synchronized to my contacts?”
“Yes, master. All two hundred and seventeen of them.”
“No, dear, I mean my CONTACTS.”
“Of course, master. All two hun--”
“THE FUCKING MODIFIED CLEAR PRESCRIPTION THINGS I PUT IN MY EYES, VERONICA. TH-THE NEUROS INTERFACE THING. THE CONTNETS.”
“Oh, those contacts. Yes, Master. I’ve reconnected to them.”
“Okay, so, the right one is totaled, I assume, but can you see if the programming for the mods I did to the left one is still accessible?” I did some super illegal shit to these things that Tela wouldn’t activate them for me, probably because they’re illegal as hell, but…
“Yes, Master. I’m exactly as you’ve left me. It also appears the mechanism in question is still functioning in your right contact as well, despite the damage, though I wouldn’t recommend it--”
“G-good. I’ll have to get the rest of my chan goodies back later too, come to think of it, since you’re jailbroken and I can again. Link me up to both of the eyeball thingies in the meantime and standby to fire.”
The possessed terror comes up to me and looks up at me like she’s going to attack. I grab her by the collar with just my left arm and lift her up to my level. “You look like that one girl from Kill Bill right now. Was it Bill? Or Kill? Anyway, I d-dig the vibe, why don’t we forget this whole demonic possession shtick and go grab a dr-drink and maybe see a mo—“ She very rudely cuts me off with a shriek and then even more rudely cuts off my wrist. Oop.
“VERONICAAAAA!!! What the bloody fuck did she just d-do!?”
“She quickly broke out of your grasp, breaking your left wrist. That’s why you’re on the ground now with a broken wrist. Also, the bone is through the skin--”
“Thanks, Captain Obvious.”
“You asked, Master.”
“...that I did.” I stumble back to my feet, using my right wrist to help myself up. Guess there’s no going easy here–I’m going to have to result to dangerously modified and highly illegal chans after all. The moment I’ve regained my center, she jumps like a damn panther again, her contorted bloody form barreling down at me with her left hand extended and ready to strike. This is my only shot, I guess.
“OPTIC BLAST!” I shout to activate my OcuLasers (ocular lasers, get it? I’m the best). Bright red high-powered zero point lasers fire from my modded ContNETs, the result of weeks of design and building and more millions of dollars than I’d like to admit. My fucked-up right NeurOS contact couldn’t take it and explodes in a cloud of burgundy reality-glitching mess, torching the rest of my eye-socket with it and sending a painful high-voltage pulse through my entire body that brings me to my knees.
On the other side of the attack, her collarbone bursts into flames, but she’s still just as crazed and entirely unfazed. She leaps at me again, managing to jump several feet over my head as she comes down towards me, claws bared. Clearly regular tactics aren’t going to work. I wait for her to scream and then–BAM! Laser right through the mouth, up through the top of the head, into the brain, and out the other side--burn marks in the ceiling where the beam pierced through the top of her head and kept going.
Despite the superhuman strength, the moment her brain is fried she loses all control. Her controlled leap turns into a blind tumble, knocking me over still in the process… but she collapses onto me with the impact one would expect from a tiny mid-twenties girl instead of from a human tank. I rise, now covered in blood and brain matter, adrenaline pumping and heart pounding too hard for any of the inevitable pain or psychological trauma to have kicked in yet.
I push her body off of me and roll over onto her back. The scene hits me like nothing I’ve ever seen in my time on the force… Oozing bullet holes all over. Torched collarbone exposed, skin peeled around it like shredded paper. Eyes rolled back into the head, focused intently on nothing. Foam cascading from her twitching lips, a froth of blood and saliva pooling across the sterile white floor. Smoking holes in the top of her head, brain matter dripping out amidst the cloud of singed human-hair smell. I have to turn away to vomit several times. I’ve been through a lot of shit, but this–this is too much.
Struggling to regain my balance and vision, I continue the autopsy, gathering all of my professionalism and trying to disassociate enough from the terror of the scene to gather any clues that might prove useful. Even after death, all of her muscles are spasming wildly and seemed to be all “activated” all at once, bulging more than a bodybuilder’s with a post-workout pump, but… this was all over! Her calves, her fingers, anywhere there was a single muscle. It’s like her entire body had been sent into hyperdrive.
“Veronica, what do you make of this?”
“I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it, Master.”
I lean down and check her pulse: It’s still going somehow, though she’s got to be braindead—200 fucking beats per minute and winding down fast, so it’s hard to fathom how fast it must have been beating prior. A microscopic bit of weight is lifted from my shoulders as I realize she would have been dead soon without my intervention regardless.
Sirens outside, Telecop cars, backup. Great job guys, way to make it on time. At least the Detective was already on the scene to investigate everything AND do YOUR job, without your stupid little mech suits. Fucking dipshits.
I feel around inside her pockets. Right pants pocket, a peculiar little box… no, two of them, identical… plastic, with an empty slot for something inside. “RAPTURE GREEN - #00BF00” is written underneath the slot on each in a kind of dinky looking font. I flip one of the packages over, and—holy mierda—on the back? A logo of a skull with bleeding eyes, exactly like the one on my hand. The backup cops bust the door down as I collect a blood sample in my flask and pocket the empty packet, easier said than done with one good hand. Now that my adrenaline is gone, the full reality and impact of what just happened sets in. This was a normal young woman and SOMETHING gave her the ability and madness to wipe out two and snap my wrist off. Which, by the way, was going to require immediate medical attention.
I killed her. I killed a girl who, earlier this morning, was just a normal young adult waking up to her Tela singing a wake up song and messaging her friends before going to her boring desk job. She didn’t want to do this. She didn’t even know what she was doing. Her friends and family are going to hear on the news how something tragic happened where she worked, and they’ll text her, worried sick, convincing themselves everything is alright and they’re just being paranoid and her phone must just be dead or something, and then they’ll check the news and see her lying here on the ground, surrounded by corpses, her brains spilled across the floor, her mangled body sprawled sacrificially across the linoleum where I left her after killing her, and… fuck. I’m hyperventilating, and that’s counterproductive. I try to calm myself but my head won’t stop spinning, my vision won’t stop blurring, I can’t block out the stench of death and burned hair and fresh blood and rotting brains and I can’t block out the fact that it’s because of me.
This went deep and this would not be the start or the end of this. Somehow I was involved and somehow--if anyone could--I might have the potential to stop it. No matter what it fucking takes, I had to end this. I was supposed to take criminals out. To find the bodies of their victims, figure out the killer, and lock them up for leaving someone like this. I wasn’t supposed to be the one murdering a young woman at her part time job because some HTML drug was turning her into a demon. I’ve never had to kill a civilian before. It made me feel things I didn’t want to feel. I’d given up feeling things a long time ago in self-defense, so this was not okay, damn it.
I instinctively go to down the rest of my vodquila and instead get a taste of the massive pool of blood I’d stored in the flask as evidence, making me vomit again. I’m not sure if it’s that or the blood loss, but I finally get too dizzy and topple over next to her body, the bright ZPE lights above spinning faster to my one-eyed blurring vision than I could possibly hope to follow.
“Holy shit! Blake!? Are you—are you dead!?”
“I wish I was, Chad, b-because then I wouldn’t have to look at you.” His studly form towers over me, and from the look on his face as he glances around the literal bloodbath, he’s about to have a heart attack just seeing the aftermath.
“For some reason, I’m glad you’re okay, Blake,” he sighs, shaking his head and trying to seem nonchalant but clearly still shaken horribly. “Do you feel like giving me a run down of the scene?”
“Well, I was coming home from… uh… from getting… a… s-salad… and I walk in to see this girl demonically possessed and attacking a cop, and it’s all—“
All at once, the pain from my wrist being literally snapped off and my eyeball being popped like a water balloon at a porcupine orgy kicks in, and my composed speech turns to indistinct screaming.
“D-don’t worry, Blake, we’ve called an ambulance. They’ll be here any minute, okay? You can uh, tell me later. Assuming you survive. Which I am sure you will, don’t worry. Really. Probably. I hope. Oh god Blake, don’t die on me!”
As my head falls to the cold floor, I’m forced to take one last look back at the body and for the first time in five years my mind flashes back to that night that my hell had started, that night that the twisted, mangled corpse staring lifelessly into my teary eyes was the love of my life. And this time… this time I did it. I can’t blame Chad for this one, or Telecom, or anyone but myself… If she did have a lover--which, let’s face it, she had to, or she couldn’t possibly have resisted MY charms--he was going to feel what I’d felt that night. I’d be the one he’d drunkenly fantasize about hacking to pieces in the same way, the reason he has to drink himself out of reality for the rest of his life, the name he shouts before he passes out in a pile of his own vomit and prays to never wake up again. I’m his Chad.
It all goes to black as I finally lose consciousness.