Chapter Seven: The Delivery Man

 

Washington Hilton Hotel Ballroom, Washington DC (Four Years Ago)

6:30 p.m., 4 June 2089

 

President Wilson has not been seen in public for many months. The event is a special fundraiser of his major donors in the District. It is a tuxedo affair for the men and little black dress affair for the women.

He mingles in the crowd with his Secret Service detail close. They move him from the VIP section of the banquet, with its one hundred major donors, to the general area, where thousands of people wait behind a partition—smiling, cheering, and reaching out their hands to greet him. He immediately walks to them. Wilson shakes hands with a large smile on his face.

A man in a red fedora extends his hand towards the president. The man is smiling, unthreatening, but instead of shaking the president's hand, he reaches in and pokes him in the center of his chest with an index finger.

"The finger of God," he says and starts to walk backwards.

President Wilson is unnerved, and his Secret Service detail is already calling in on their ear-sets to apprehend the man. The man seems to be enveloped by the crowd. Plainclothes Secret Servicemen rush into the crowd from three different sides. The man ducks down into the mass of people. They can't see him. The three Secret Servicemen reach the spot and all there is, lying on the ground, is the red fedora. The man is gone.

The lead Secret Service agent takes no chances. They surround the president and whisk him out of a side door to the secure parking lot and into the presidential limousine. Agents swarm into the banquet hall to detain the entire body of attendees.

 

The White House, Washington DC

12 noon, 3 April 2093

 

"My dear visitors, you must now consider yourselves to be members of the initiated. You must never refer to this grand tek-city as Washington DC or even simply DC. That is the language of the unsophisticated. There are forty thousand cities in America, but there is only one District." Those are the lines of "Mr. District," the tek-city's self-appointed tourism czar.

President Wilson remembers the "finger of God" incident. He touches his chest, but focuses his attention back to his two division heads.

"I don't want your divisions distracted by trivialities. I don't want to hear about wormhole weapons, or imaginary bases on Mars, or anything else. Deployment! When I was Homeland Director, I wrote a report for the President and Vice President.

"We don't have enough enlisted troops to fight a three-front war, which is my mandate, and the Joint Chiefs' recommendation to simply re-instate the draft is foolish. We can't re-institute such a thing after more than a century. No one would comply, neither in the tek-cities nor the outer tek–cities. And most of them we wouldn't want in our military forces under any circumstances. We have a growing sub-culture, and I'm not talking about the Jew-Christians. The problem is having the bodies, the units, to fill as many military uniforms as possible.

"Do you know why I'm planning to go to this juvenile summit in Russia?" the President asks. "Because I need to see with my own eyes the tek that our enemies have. They'll show it off out of national vanity. I need to see where they are; anything we haven't gotten from our spy services. If it comes down to a man-to-man battle, we lose. No one has more people than the CHINs and the Caliphate, who since absorbing Western Europe, have more people than us. So it comes down to superior tek."

Mr. West, a sleek man with silver, braided hair, speaks first. "Sir, I want you to know that you will have all the units you need. We're calling them anthro-droids. They don't just look human; their systems are self-sustaining, self-repairing, and they're virtually sentient."

The other man scoffs. "Robots can't be self-aware," Mr. Garrison says. He is a relatively small man. "I can talk to a pet and fool myself into believing it understands me, but it doesn't."

"Sir, we have a standing robot army now," West continues. "And with the auxiliary tek from the program, we will also be able to create the latest advanced mech robot shock troops, robot-suits for our human soldiers, and also be able to create temporary cyborgs, as needed, for any military deployment."

"Mr. President, all robots are vulnerable to EMP attacks—" Garrison adds before being interrupted.

"Not these units."

"What about hack-attacks from enemy tek-heads? Use our own robot forces against us."

"That is not possible, Mr. President."

"Biologic units are the best option for any real, major war, sir."

The President verbally steps in. "Gentlemen, the purpose of Project New People is to give this country all options. Whether it's a robot army, cyborg army, cybernetically-enhanced army,"—he turns to Garrison—"clone army or MML army, we need it all. Whether it is our successors or theirs in the future, this country must be prepared and ready for all threats, using everything we have. That is, and will always be, our primary duty to the American people."

"Everything will be kept out of the public eye, until deployed by you, sir," says West.

"We will deliver all the biological units you need, sir," Mr. Garrison says.

"We're not doing anything our enemies aren't. We just have to do it better."

"Yes, Mr. President," they both say.

 

The Outlands, Florida

10 a.m., 4 April 2093

 

Every state in the US has them—the Outlands. The outskirts of the tek-cities are technically part of the city, but for the average tek-dweller they are not. They are the border towns, the neo-suburbs; the places where people live who don't—or can't—live in the tek-cities for whatever reason, but work in the city. The Outlands are associated with "lower" classes, Jew-Christians, or the criminal-class. It's next to the tek-cities, but not a part of it really, and it isn't the crazy Trog-lands much further away. The buildings are not as tall, the tek is not as good, drones are not as frequent, lots of underutilized space, and the Metro lines don't go there. The government created the tek-cities. Random people created the Outlands outside of them.

The sky is very overcast today. Sprocket enters the sprawling two-story housing structure; it's spread out over two miles.

The Delivery Man arrives and exits his car. Most of the Outlands in America don't have auto-drive—these towns are not connected to the Grid—which is probably the main reason tek-dwellers don't come here (or like it); they can't get here. Tek-city dwellers don't know how to manually drive; the Grid does that.

He is a plain man, dressed in a purple office-suit with a white shirt, and a black hat, which is tilted down to conceal his face. In his right hand is a silver case. It doesn't take him long to get to the closest entrance of the two-story building mega-complex. He casually walks up to the second level. When he reaches a secluded spot between two apartment homes, he stops to wait, reading something on his palm tablet.

 

10:09 a.m.

 

Sprocket watches the man on the vid-cam feed on his tablet while sitting in his secure room. How exactly did it happen? Did his father even see this Delivery Man? Did he see his Man Made Out of String killer? The questions race through his mind and he remembers what Edison Blair told him. "I begged him not to go home. I begged so hard that if I could have come through his phone and grabbed him, I would have, but he didn't see the danger." Sprocket does know the danger. He wishes he was a fighter, but he'll have to save that for a nice dream. This is the closest he will ever get; the professionals will take over from here. He gets up and disappears down the secret stairway. Next destination: Canada—my new home.

 

The Delivery Man looks back and sees two men slowly coming around the corner, talking some kind of drug deal. He hears a door open and turns back. At the other end of the hallway, a woman puts one suitcase after another into the hallway and closes the door. She grabs them and starts towards him.

The hallways are narrow. The Delivery Man stands against the wall to give her a path to pass. He glances at the two men at the other end who continue their deal. They notice the woman too and follow his lead by moving closer to the wall.

A musical theme starts to play. The Delivery Man tilts up his hat and touches his ear to answer his phone. "Hello."

The woman throws a suitcase at him. The sonic explosion knocks the Delivery Man up and into the wall. He falls to the ground. The two men approach with their collapsible taser rifles and fire multiple electrical stun rounds times into his body. The contractor is down and out cold before he even knew what hit him.

A perfect take-down, an easy operation. Now "grab him and bag him."

One of the men reaches for the silver case. The Delivery Man's head turns and he swings his body around to kick the man. The first man is knocked off his feet and, before the second man can shoot at him again, the Delivery Man jumps to his feet and kicks again. The second man falls backwards to the floor. The Delivery Man grabs the silver case, spins, and throws it at the woman, hitting her in the face and knocking her to the ground as she drops the gun she was about to shoot him with.

From a door at the other end of the hallway, a third man steps out and fires at the Delivery Man with a tek-rifle. It hits the contract killer in the chest and sends him flying back through the air and crashing to the ground again. Goth Lila appears behind the third man with her own tek-rifle. They both run towards everyone.

The first man who was going to grab the silver case tries to do so again. The Delivery Man stands up again. The whole center of his office-suit is black, but he runs at them. A gun appears in his hand and he fires once; all the lights in the hallway go out.

The team hits the ground as their optics engage—they are all wearing corneal lenses and see in both night- and infrared-vision. The hallway is dark, but they can see everything. He's gone. Lila notices an open door. Something metal hits the ground near them. Lila instinctively gets up in the dark and jumps over everyone to the front.

"Override! Shields!" All of theirs activate.

The grenade explodes and throws all of them back. Their "lobster-claw" shields saved them—the high-tek, collapsible shields popped out from the upper back portion of their body armor.

The team throws photo-grenades, and the entire hallway is instantaneously bright. The tek-rifleman fires a drone round which re-acquires the target and flies through the open door of one of the apartments. They hear the explosion. The other three team members run to the open door and throw in multiple stun grenades. The grenades explode in rapid succession; they can objects inside fall, shatter, and break.

The Delivery Man is in the bedroom in the apartment and is about to jump out the window. The window shatters. He's hit in the chest again and looks outside to see four more tek-riflemen firing at him from the parking lot. Every round hits its mark. He collapses to ground, falling to his back.

They want me alive—very unwise.

The team appears at the bedroom door with weapons aimed as they approach cautiously. One man scans the contractor's body for weapons.

"Nothing," says one of them. "He has a very faint heart beat."

"Do you see any body armor underneath his clothes?" asks another. "I don't see anything."

Two of them reach down to him to shackle his hands; the other two, his legs.

"Where's that silver case?" Lila asks.

The Delivery Man sits up. He breaks his hand shackles, grabs the first tek-rifleman, and throws him violently into Lila, sending them both falling out the bedroom entrance. He grabs the other man and woman by their necks, choking them.

The remaining man takes his rifle and smashes the butt of the weapon into the contractor's face, but nothing happens. He strikes again and again, each time with more force. The Delivery Man doesn't flinch and continues choking the two people to death. Lila appears and fires point-blank at his arm joint, blowing out his elbow and splattering blood. Both people are released and dropped, gasping for air. The Delivery Man leaps to his feet again and, with his other arm, hits Lila and the other man, sending both of them falling back across the room.

The man, who was almost choked to death, grabs the Delivery Man by the neck and now chokes him with the cybernetic-enhancement of his own body-armor gloves. The woman fires one electric round after another into the contractor's chest. The man notices something about the contract killer's eyes. The Delivery Man grabs the man's hands from his neck and everyone hears as the bones being crushed.

"Ahhh!" the man yells out as he's thrown across the room and the contractor kicks the woman back.

The Delivery Man grabs the single bed in the room with his super-strength and is about to—Lila swings her tek-rifle at the Delivery Man's head, with lightning speed and every ounce of force her enhanced body-armor can provide. Crack!

Lila extended the metal hook attachment at the tip of her rifle. With it, the tek-rifle can be used to cut, stab, or as a hook weapon. The Delivery Man feels his head wound with the hand of his good arm; the metal hook tip is fully embedded in his head. He yanks it out and they all hear something snap, the hook itself. His skin seems to be slipping from his skull. He reaches and starts to rip off his own face off—skin and dripping blood. Lila and her team watch in shock. They see it now—his metallic face.

"Take it down!" Lila yells. "No more non-lethal, deadly force!"

The other two members fire non-stop at it. The robot ignores them as it takes the tek-rifle, aims, and pulls the trigger rapidly.

"You need to be human to fire that, robot!" Lila has pulled her secondary weapon and the three of them fire.

The robot goes down again. It's not moving.

"Where's that case?" Lila yells. "Get it!"

The female team member runs out of the room. Lila looks at the wounded male team members. Actually, they're all wounded to some degree. Her body-armor is damaged in the back and arm areas, and something is cutting into her shoulder.

"Okay?" she asks.

"I'm okay," he says, but his hands are visibly crushed and bleeding.

The others arrive and the room fills up with more than a dozen armed team members.

"Keep your weapons on it," Lila says. "No, in fact—"

They all begin to fire non-stop at the robot and only stop when its body is smoldering. The smoke clears.

"There was something about his eyes," says the male team member with the crushed hands. "Something was off."

The female team member returns to the room with the case. "I got it."

Lila is about to reach for it when the team starts firing again. She turns to see the robot on its feet again as it dives out the window. Team members run to the window and continue to fire at it.

"Target has escaped!" she yells into her wrist-comm. "Have our drones target anything moving on the ground within the perimeter. Use localized EMP rounds. Target is a robot, I repeat, target is a combat robot."

"Done," a voice on the other end says.

Lila looks around at everyone. "Damn!"

"Lila, we'll find it," one of them says.

"We have never lost a target before—never. Why isn't it showing up on sensors?" She is staring at her wrist display. "There's no movement outside." Lila runs to the window to look out and stops.

In the sky is the robot—floating away on a single balloon coming out of its head. There is a head, its "good" arm, and multiple spine-like attachments from its neck; the rest of its body is gone. Whether the damage to those body parts was too severe, or with them it would be too heavy to escape, all its body parts have to be found too. Her optics zoom in on its face. The robot's eyes must have done the same. It smiles at her, cocks its hand like a gun, and pretends to shoot her. It waves good-bye.

Lila clenches her teeth in anger—robot bastard. "It's outside in the air!" She runs from the window, but stops when she sees her team about to open the case. "How many times did we scan that?"

"Multiple times, all frequencies."

"We scanned him too, but didn't detect it was a robot." She speaks into her wrist-comm. "The robot is in the air. It's flying away eastward on a balloon. Shoot it down!" She looks at the case again. They all look at each other; everyone is thinking the same thing.

 

The "walker" enters the room. The thin robot surrogate approaches the silver suitcase. Its hands are bio-sim tek—they not only look like human hands, but have the same temperature as real ones with a real pulse.

Boom! The explosion destroys the entire section of the two-story complex. Other parts of the building begin to collapse like falling dominoes.

Lila and her team look at each other. They watch from an elevated point, a quarter mile away. A SUV drives up with more of the team.

"Nothing," the driver says, shaking his head. "No balloon and nothing on the ground or in the air."

"It was flying away on a balloon! How fast could it go?"

Another team member says, "Lila, we have to go now. Grid drones will be here any minute."

She shakes her head in disgust. They must leave immediately.

The robot got away.

 

Continuum Meeting, Secret Location

10 p.m., 4 April 2093

 

Lila is doing the debriefing. What went wrong? Everyone is standing for the hastily put together meeting in the darkened room. Pictures of the Delivery Man are on the wall vid-screen—before and after he ripped off his face.

"It wasn't a surrogate. It was autonomous and nothing external was controlling it," she says.

"Please explain the technical designations again for me," asks one of members.

"An android looks like a person, externally. A sim-droid is a robot made to look like a person externally and internally. We have them ourselves in our medical training schools. But ours are made to mimic life for study, not for anything else. This one was made for combat purposes. It was intelligent and adaptive. I believe that it could think."

"Think?" asks a female Continuum member.

"It tried to trick us. Made us think an item was important when the only purpose of that item was to kill all of us. It knew we had set a trap for it. It even knew to use a non-tek way to escape from us. The bomb wasn't only to kill us, but to destroy its personal vehicle too, and deprive us any possible intel from it. Mr. Robot got away using a balloon. We used that method ourselves. We still don't know how it fooled our sensors; they showed biological readings."

M is among the attendees. She has a thought. "Maybe you're over-thinking it and your scanners weren't fooled. We've been thinking that this Man Made Out of String is a code name. Maybe, it's more literal. Maybe the Delivery Man is the delivery mechanism."

"The Man Made Out of String is inside and that's what our scanners were reading?"

"Yes, and since we know now that the silver case was, in fact, a decoy, maybe its purpose was always to be used as a fail-safe weapon; not to destroy a captor primarily, but ensure that a captor would never be able to capture it, either of them. It simply improvised for this situation."

"This was more—more than advanced adaptive and improvisational artificial intelligence. It gloated. It was gloating as it escaped from us. It was like real human emotions."

"It's not human so its emotions can't be human—only an illusion."

"Maybe M," one of the male Continuum members says, "they have created a true quantum-brain robot, not like all the quasi-quants they have in use. They've been working on it for decades. The want to turn humans into killing machines and give killing machines emotions."

"But use such tek as a hit-man?" says someone else.

"Why not?" someone else adds. "It's something they would do."

Lila sighs. "The fact is we failed. I let it get away."

"You didn't fail," M says. "We know what it is now and we know what to look for."

"If they have one, they have many more. Also, the government has lifted the ban on robotic self-replication in the commercial industry."

"Which means they have already done so for the military and intel industry."

"If we could have just gotten our hands on that tek..." Lila could kick herself.

"You got the intel we needed. Others will take over from here. This Delivery Man will see us again."

"I still feel I failed."

"Lila, don't think that," M says. "The mission wasn't the Delivery man. The mission was the Man Made Out of String. We know a lot more now than we did before. The Delivery Man is an added bonus. And Lila, we have thinking robots too."

 

"The Cube," Secret Location

8:32 a.m., 5 April 2093

 

Mr. West tours the underground facility with his staff. They are sitting in an open air flying saucer-type hovercraft to survey the "warehouse." Robot arms make humanoid robots, one after another, on an assembly line. The room is filled from the ground to the ceiling with the units.

They leave the hovercraft and take the moving walkway back to executive offices. One of his deputies is waiting at the elevators with a man and woman he's never seen before.

A century ago, religious Americans named things of science after Greek and Roman gods. Today, Pagans name their machines from, as they would say, Jew-Christian mythology.

"Sir, you wanted to see Adam and Eve before you left."

West looks at the anthro-droids and grabs each of their wrists. "I can feel a pulse and warmth. We really can make them."

"We didn't make them, sir. Our robots did." She smiles. "They can make them look like any living thing in the world."

West is pleased, but he notices his chief security agent's face.

"What?"

"We had a breach yesterday, sir. Unauthorized people may have seen one of our independent models yesterday. We were only informed this morning."

"Independent models? What independent models? No unit is allowed out of my facility without my authorization."

"Special Services out of the White House commissioned some units for domestic and international operations recently."

"You mean black operations? This is unconscionable. I shut that interference down four years ago. The unauthorized personnel were whom exactly?"

"They may have been domestic terrorists." West mouth hangs open as he listens. "Sir, they wouldn't have even known what they saw, if they saw anything at all."

"We have an ultra-top secret program and we allow terrorists to see them?"

"They wouldn't have known what they saw, sir."

"Please tell me they weren't the Jew-Christian ones?"

The chief agent thinks for a moment. "They were, sir, but...what does that matter?"

"The sim-droid program was inspired by them! All this Jew-Christians are Trogs is all propaganda. None of it is true. Letting them see them is like announcing, at the top of our lungs, that we have dramatically upgraded our robotic forces. They'll do the same and they will not be foolish enough to show us what they come up with. Get me Special Services on the phone! We will cease all the black op nonsense with my robots. I'll speak with the President again if I have to. Wait...which program was it? What was compromised exactly?"

"There are hundreds of them, sir. It will take time to find out, but I will call now."

"It probably was the Delivery Man program, sir," another agent says.

West is speechless again. "That's our joint-op with Garrison on the New People Project. This is...worse. Not one ultra top-secret program compromised, but both, both our robotics and genetics warfare programs." West is in a state of near-panic. "I need the President on the phone, now! This is a priority, an emergency...urgent! And find me Garrison, too. Where is he? He couldn't have allowed this to happen on purpose. Where is he?"

"He is with the Homeland Director at the Lagoon, sir."

"He's with whom at the Lagoon?" West's face is red.

"An unscheduled tour, it was last minute, sir."

"The White House has never sent her here, to the Cube. Why is she there?"

"We don't know, sir."

"This is politics again, all of it. They don't respect us, this constant organic bigotry to the synthetic. All of us are robots in a way—you, me, all humankind. The human body is an organic machine. We're just using metal for flesh. My Program must be respected. It may be the savior of this country one day. Instead they send the Homeland Director, not here to the Cube to see our progress and accomplishments, but to Monster Lagoon to see the freak show."

 

 

The After Eden Series: Tek-Fall concludes in Episode II, Hell's Menagerie.