Act 1: Dreams
Prologue
The crowded streets of Hong Kong bustled with activity.
A press of human bodies writhed against itself, each person frantic to get to his own destination—each equally sure that his own personal mission was of utmost importance. A granfalloon noisy chaos butted its collective head against itself, making no progress whatsoever. Humanity pushed itself through the spaces in its own city and between the cracks in its monumental buildings.
Above the noisome mesh of limbs and voices, a net of moving steel and silcon hovered—sometimes jutting down into the press like a hypodermic needle, sometimes rising up from within like a malfunctioning prosthetic. Sundry antennae sprouted from the backs of the metallic swarm, each relaying messages on its own encryption wavelength.
Some were mediabots, designed to search for anything newsworthy and to report back to their human journalists. Others—loud commercial 'droids—shrieked carefully-tailored commercial slogans in English, Cantonese, Mandarin and Japanese, taking credit account numbers and distributing commerce sites on cyberspace. Dark spy 'droids drifted quietly in between their ostentatious comrades to follow unsuspecting businessmen.
Seamlessly integrated, the weave of steel and flesh. Their dance so perfect it might have been choreographed, none would suspect that the two halves of the city were anything other than symbiotic. As if nothing could disrupt the balance.
As if there had never been a Robot War.
Mechanical carapaces reflected the smog-smothered ruby light that bled from the setting sun in the west. Behind a forest of towering space-scrapers perched above an undergrowth of smaller, older buildings, the natural sun retreated. The eastern sector of the city had already fallen into the artifical twilight of buzzing neon illumination. Bars, clubs, theaters, restaurants and store fronts all flung their light into the smoke and mist of the evening.
Chun-Yuen Loeng strolled through the demi-light, easily threading his way through the pell-mell. The bronze buttons that dotted the front of his dark blue Hong Kong civil police uniform jacket reflected the erratic light of the city's neon second-sun. A deep slash promising a permanent scar peeked from underneath the hem of his right sleeve with each step.
He didn't mind; as far as Chun-Yuen was concerned, the injury was a badge of honor. Besides, better a scar than a robotic hand—especially when robots had been responsible for the injury in the first place. When the machines in his patrol district had malfunctioned last year, his standard-issue stun baton had been little enough defense. In protecting the fleeing workers in the neuro-chip plant on B block, his right hand had nearly been severed.
These days he carried a tactical-issue light laser rifle, purchased at his own expense with the compensatory payment for sustaining an injury in the line of duty. The weapon—as much as his officer's badge—smoothed a path for him amongst the din and crowd.
Chun-Yuen let his gaze slide back and forth across the patchwork of light and shadows. His patrol had been uneventful so far, but vigilance was his constant responsibility.
Hm? The officer slowed his pace and stopped near the entrance to an alley. Though few places in the city were ever truly dark, the penumbra that clutched this narrow space between buildings threatened the need of Chun-Yuen's scarce-used flashlight.
There, half-crouched in a rare shadow, a human form staggered.
Bent double, as if with agony, it shivered. Chun-Yuen flipped the safety off his rifle and slowly moved forward—drug addicts could be unpredictable in their response to law enforcement, and the officer had no intention of surviving the robot riots just to be knifed by some junkie.
"Hello," he called. As he drew closer, the other man's features became clearer. An unruly mop of raven-hued hair topped a face obscured behind filthy hands and matted by a dark, coagulated substance that looked like blood. The last rays of the setting sun stained the figure in sanguine shades. The man didn't answer Chun-Yuen's greeting.
He he been assaulted? Impossible! Chun-Yuen himself had patrolled this area not five minutes ago and left a roving patrol-bot in the area. Any disturbance would surely have tripped the machine's alert systems. Anything as noisy or unruly as an assault would be difficult to hide from the sensitive patrol-bot.
He tapped the earpiece the connected him to his small network of patrol-bots, and received several confirmation beeps in different tones. All twelve reported in their standard "no problem here" pattern. Chun-Yuen frowned and quickened his pace. He was within a few steps of the unfortunate man, now.
"Hey there. Are you okay?" he asked.
No response, again. The man continued to shiver. Chun-Yuen tapped the top button on his coat twice to activate the medical-response team posted to this area, and absently noted that the black, American-style biker's jacket that the man wore was torn in many places and stained with more than merely dust and age. What was that he was sitting on? A riot shield? Maybe the man had stolen it from a downed officer during the Robot War.
Chun-Yuen's brow furrowed. "I'm a police officer. Nobody can hurt you now. Tell me what happened. Were you attacked?"
The man's head jerked up, and a pair of battered sunglasses toppled from their precarious perch on his forehead and clattered to the ground. Chun-Yuen's eyes narrowed. Was that a glint of metal he had seen between the folds of the man's jacket? Perhaps this was no simple junkie—a weapon and a riot shield pointed more towards one of the anarchists that had taken hold of the city in the days that followed the onset of the recent riots.
He hardened his voice. "Stand up slowly, with your hands above your head. If you are badly injured, tell me now so that the medical teams can alert the hospital." Once more, no response. He repeated himself in English, and then in Mandarin in case the man was a citizen of the mainland.
The derelict began to chuckle in a low, weird tone. Chun-Yuen raised his rifle and crooked his elbow slightly, speaking into the transmitter at his wrist. "This is officer Loeng, reporting from the corner of Lok Ku and Tang, behind the Old Tai Shing building—"
Abruptly, the man exploded into motion, interrupting Chun-Yuen's report.
Chun-Yuen fell back into a defensive kneel, his rifle leveled at the man's chest. The man sprang out of his crouch and stood tall, arm pointed at the Chun-Yuen. The officer almost smirked—it was an empty hand. This guy must be pretty wasted to not even realize he wasn't even holding his gun.
Too quick to be human, the man dropped and grabbed the silvery dish upon which he'd been leaning. Sure enough, it looked like a riot shield, complete with the dark tinted slot through which one could see to the other side.
"Drop your weapon!" Chun-Yuen barked. As the man reached beneath his jacket, the officer squeezed the trigger. A barely-audible whine combined with a deep hiss, and the air tore away from the space where the laser beam passed, visible as a burning golden thread in the polluted air.
What?
The brick of the wall exploded behind Chun-Yuen: the laser beam had been reflected. The shield's near-perfect chrome color hadn't even been darkened in the spot where his laser had hit. Immediately, the man flung its shield aside and pointed its right arm at Chun-Yuen. This time, it wasn't empty. Chun-Yuen prepared to roll out of the way, but stopped, tense. The man wasn't moving.
Too-bright eyes seemed to glow in the twilight, hawk-blue. They burned—either feverish or drug-addled. In the man's left hand was a long scarf the color of noon sunlight, surprisingly clean in contrast with the rest of him. In his right hand—or rather, enveloping it, Chun-Yuen saw—was a large, bulbous crimson device.
Shit. A plasma gun. His adversary had officially graduated from simple anarchist to top-level illegal weapons smuggler. What the hell was going on here? Chun-Yuen's earpice squawked indignantly as twelve patrol bots suddenly abandoned their posts and rushed to investigate his laser-rifle discharge. Overlaid on that was a fugue of other officers' voices, all calling enroute to his location.
Chun-Yuen was both tense and mesmerized—light shifted deep behind the lens at the end of the man's contraband plasma gun. It trembled, as though the man fought an internal battle, and could not decide whether to attack or not.
"Take it easy," Chun-Yuen said, taking care to modulate his voice to non-threatening levels. He lowered the barrel of his own gun a fraction of an inch. "I'm not going to hurt you. See?"
His nose involuntarily wrinkled. Rather than the sour smell of stale sweat, cheap liquor and drug-induced vomit that he had come to expect from such urchins as this, a vaporous miasma that stank of motor oil and an unplaceable, coppery scent filled the alley.
The plasma gun slowly drooped, and the man's eyes focused upon Chun-Yuen, although they did not lose their fever-brightness. The voice that spoke was cracked, grating. Barely human, and weighted with suffering.
"Itaiyo."
Chun-Yuen's mind raced. The man was speaking in a language that was neither Mandarin, Cantonese, English or Korean, and so, unintelligible to the police officer. It had the syllabic sound of Japanese. Chun-Yuen committed the sounds the man had spoken to memory, and said the one phrase he knew in Japanese.
"Watashi wa nihongo o hanashimasen." I don't speak Japanese.
The man fell forward to his knees, and caught himself from further descent on his hands.
His hands!
Chun-Yuen blinked and stifled a gasp. The egg-shaped plasma gun over the man's right arm had disappeared. Now there remained only a metallic crimson gauntlet. Surely he had been wearing no gloves?
"Itaiyo." This time, it was barely a whisper.
"Let me help you," Chun-Yuen suggested, hoping that the tone of his voice would convey his intentions. "You don't look well. That wound on your head—"
There was a flash of silver and crimson fire—a bolt of light in the shadows—and the man had gone as suddenly as the wind. Shield, scarf, and grimy man in the torn jacket had all vanished instantaneously. Chun-Yuen looked over his shoulder and then back at the space the man had occupied.
Not only a contraband weapons smuggler, but also using restricted teleport tech?
The rhythmic stamp of tactical boots marked the arrival of Tam Lei, one of Chun-Yuen's fellow officers. Behind him were half a dozen of Chun-Yuen's own patrol-bots, as well as a miniature swarm of the Tam's.
"Loeng, you okay?" Officer Lei's voice was controlled, but tight with concern.
"Fine," he replied. "Just had a run-in with the weirdest shit I've seen all month, though." As he cancelled medical personnel and emergency officer response through his comlink and sent his patrol bots back to their routes, he recounted the strange events to Tam. As he repeated the strange man's only words, his earpiece chirped with an automatic translation.
"Itaiyo. Japanese: It hurts. TransLabor Interpretation Services. Thank you."
Tam smirked. "Huh. A drugged-out greaser with military-grade weapons and experimental teleport tech? Pretty far-out. Maybe you saw a ghost, instead!"
Chun-Yuen colored with annoyance for a moment, then chuckled.
"Some ghost," he laughed. "Guess we need to have an exorcist down here."
The rest of the officers joined in the laughter before departing their separate ways, returning to their patrol routes. The alley fell back into a light-hazed shade.
As Chun-Yuen turned his back to finish his own shift, a mournful whistling tune drifted from above the Old Tai Shing building. The hair at the base of his neck stood up, and goosebumps scraped the inside of his uniform sleeves. His scar ached. Despite the rush of bustling citizenry mere meters away, he suddenly felt very alone.
He chuckled again, less certainly. "Yeah . . . some ghost."