Chapter Fifteen: Things go boom some more
It is just past dawn. The air outside is so foggy you can hardly see the building across the street. A few early morning walkers stumble through the dim, fog enshrouded streets and the occasional car goes past, but on the whole it is very quiet. The fog seems to muffle all sound, blocking you off and keeping you remote and detached from the world.
I am not remote and detached, though, with my earpiece linkup attached. And I'd never take it off, so I am never remote or detached or alone. I like the feeling, of being connected. Thousands of little details about the world that previously would have gone right by me I now pick up, and all because of my connected to the world. The matrix.
I wonder if I will ever see the 'real world'. I find I don't really care. The matrix is my real world, the world in which I was designed to operate to the best of my parameters. I am a sentient program, and so presumably that program could be downloaded into some sort of machine body in the outside world, if the situation required it. I would almost prefer if that would never happen, though. This is my world, and I like it that way.
I request a coffee, sent up by a human runner and employee of the agency. A double latte, from a Starbucks in a building just across the intersection. I may not technically need it to wake up, since I never sleep, but a caffeine fix in the morning is a hard habit to break. I'm not addicted to the caffeine, no agent is allowed to have such weakness as an addiction in their program, but I still like to drink the occasional latte.
The human runner knocks on my door. I get up and open it, taking my coffee with a brief 'thank you', to the tired looking girl, on internship from one of the local colleges, most likely. I reflect momentarily that a few short weeks ago I had been much like her. Though, I like to think that I had better clothes sense. And taste in books, I realize as I access the human worker's records, out of curiosity. I used to be something like her. Things were different now. Now, I was different.
For one, I looked just a bit older now. I looked an age such that it was impossible to guess my true age. My experiences have aged me, though mentally much more so than physically. I don't really age at all physically, as my physical program is of course reset each time I transfer hosts.
I stop this train of thought, and switch to a new one as I sip my coffee and do my work on the internet. I check the current agency files on the Merovingian. He has been the subject of a major crackdown this month, and I have been following the news of the battles between him and the agency.
The fires that had swept through parts of the Southern California Sector were partially a result of those battles. They destroyed a number of the Merovingian's holdings, placing him on at least partially shaky ground with the human authorities in the area. He had lots of holdings, and money, and supplies, under a number of different aliases. We were aiming to make it difficult for some of his aliases, and thus himself.
I allowed myself a thin smile as I read of the meetings between the lead agent, Jones, and the twins. Lots of damage all around. But the Merovingian and his lackeys take the damage harder. Though not without quite a bit of civilian casualties. This operation would continue until the cost in casualties outweighs the damage done to the Merovingian. It hasn't, yet, and so the battles continue.
High in the building across the street, in a block of offices not yet open, Sean sits getting a rocket launcher ready to fire. He crouched down below the window and behind the desk in the office, hoping no one has decided to come into work early this morning and surprise him.
Sean still hasn't got used to the idea of shooting on sight anyone who has the bad luck to come across him while he's in the matrix. He has seen many people die in the last month, and has had enough close calls with agents both in training simulations and in the real matrix to reflexively shoot on sigh. He hates doing it, but does it anyway. It's better than dying.
The first time Sean actually shot someone in the matrix he threw up afterwards. It was a nighttime run and a late partier had seen them, and recognized the captain from America's Most Wanted, or something, and had started shouting. The training taught Sean that that was exactly the type of situation likely to attract an agent. So Sean had put three metal slugs in the man's belly. He whispered 'sorry' as they ran for it, but it didn't help.
Sean keeps telling himself that it is self defense, pure and simple. Kill them before they become agents and kill you. This doesn't help either. So Sean just turns off his feelings, or locks them away, or something, and does what he has to do, all the while telling himself that it is for the best. He is working for a cause. And someday, if they are lucky, that cause will prevail and everyone would be freed and the machines would all die and he wouldn't have to kill anyone ever again.
Sean finishes loading and preparing the rocket launcher and brings it to bear on his shoulder, propping the end of it on the edge of the window sill. Earlier he had slid open the window, so that it wouldn't break and shatter distractingly all over him when he fired. He picks out a target, a particular window on the third floor, and waits.
The blueprints of the building that Zip found show the room he is aiming at, with his second shot, is a big conference room. His first target is the lobby, to block off some exits from the building and entry for mundane police and possibly National Guard should they be called in. Zip could just as easily have pinpointed the agents' positions in the building and had him aim for them, but killing them once like that wouldn't be any help, and would even be dangerous as the agents would re-spawn somewhere else and there would be a delay between their reappearance and Zip's letting everyone know where they were.
Delays could be deadly. That was another thing Sean had learned in training.
His cellphone is laid out on the floor beside him. Sean listens for the single ring that will tell him everyone is in position and ready, his finger held carefully to one side of the trigger.
He hears the dull throbbing noise of an approaching helicopter. That means Abdiel has held up her part of the plan. Sure, the use of a helicopter in an assault on the agents was cliché, both in the movie and with the real life resistance, but they were going to use one anyway. Some things became cliché because they worked. That did mean the agents expected an attack by helicopter and knew how to respond, of course. But it still worked well to draw attention.
The phone rings once. Sean lays his finger on the trigger, aims at the first of his chosen targets, and squeezes.
Abdiel picks up a helicopter with built-in really big gun in the construct, and then Zip loads her and the helicopter into the matrix proper to pick up Jax. He is waiting on a rooftop right next to where the helicopter appears, a few blocks from the agent's building, and sprints for the side door of the chopper as Abdiel starts it up.
"Hey, Jax," Abdiel, yells over the noise of the rotors as he climbs in and takes his place behind the big gun, "Thanks again for doing this."
"No problem," Jax yells back, and then puts the headset with ear protection and radio to Abdiel on over his spiked yellow hair. "My ship's stuck doing basic patrol and recruit search in Cleveland," he continues in a more normal voice over the radio, "There's absolutely nothing happening there. I was going crazy from the lack of action. This'll be fun." Jax grins manically.
"I hope so," says Abdiel, and pulls the helicopter up and off of the roof. "Let's go and get 'em."
She pilots the chopper straight towards the agency building. She gets a visual of it and right on cue, the front lobby explodes. Sean with his rocket propelled grenade launcher, getting the agent's attention. Another grenade arches across the street and explodes against the building, blowing out a gaping hole. Abdiel stays well above the building next door, out of danger from Sean's grenades. Jax lets off a few rounds towards the agent's building, letting the agents know they are there and waiting for some action. They are not disappointed.
Three agents burst out of the building below them and onto the roof. Abdiel wheels the helicopter around to give Jax a better shot.
"Wahoo!" Jax yells as he squeezes the trigger, sending round after round towards the agents, forcing them to move fast to avoid the constant hail of bullets.
"Got one!" he screams as one of the agents jerks and falls to the roof, blood spraying from its chest. As it hits the roof, the agent reverts with crackling green light to the form of some random and stone dead person.
The other two agents are behind cover now, and firing at the helicopter. Abdiel twists it around to make for a harder target and takes off away from the agent's building. Jax keeps firing, both at the agents and at any random person he sees on the street below that might turn into an agent.
The agents give chase, as Abdiel knew they would. She carefully regulates the speed of the chopper, letting them stay close, but not too close, looking for that perfect distance to incite them to keep trailing her.
"There's four now," Jax says over their intercom, keeping up a steady stream of bullets spraying down towards the agents. He smiles wildly. This is much better than monitoring message boards or running around Cleveland.
"Good," Abdiel says through gritted teeth, "That's four less that Kami and Chowder will have to deal with." She tries to concentrate on her flying, weaving in and out of the San Francisco skyscrapers just above their rooftops. The agents follow, leaping from roof to roof, occasionally firing at the chopper, but more often getting fired at by Jax. He hits them once in a while, Abdiel knows, as he yells some noisy variant of 'wahoo' through the intercom each time. More often, he hits unlucky pod people who are unfortunate enough to be in the area.
After five or six blocks of this, the agents manage to shoot out a critical part of the hydraulics system. Emergency lights show red on the control board and sirens blare in the cockpit.
"We're goin' down," yells Abdiel. "Get ready to ditch!"
"Got it," says Jax, steadying himself against the machine gun as the helicopter weaves and shudders.
Abdiel sets the helicopter on a downward path towards the bay, and climbs back into the main bay with Jax. The leap from the helicopter onto the roof of a building, thankfully one without agents on it. Abdiel rolls and comes back up on her feet, quickly getting her bearings. The helicopter crashes into the bay, straight into an expensive looking sailboat which promptly bursts into flames and sinks.
Jax already has his cellphone out, talking with the operator on his ship and getting the location of an exit. He gives Abdiel a thumbs up.
"See ya," he yells, taking off running. The plan, which so far is going perfectly for them at least, calls for the two of them to split up once the helicopter is down and further give the agents more targets to chase.
Abdiel waves, taking out her own cellphone and calling Zip.
"Operator," she hears over the phone.
"It's me," she says, scanning for agents.
"Hey, Abdiel. Nice flying. Got the planned exit all ready for you. You got two agents on your tail, across the street and moving in your direction."
"Got it," she says. "See you on the other side." She clicks off the phone, takes out her gun, and runs for it.
Kami waits with Chowder on the roof of an adjoining building, cellphone out and in her leather gloved hand. She and Chowder are staying under the cover of a large air conditioning unit, waiting for the signal.
She grips the anti-agent device on one of its edges in her other hand, holding it tight to her chest. She, and the rest of her crew, still wasn't entirely sure what it was supposed to do, despite the thorough working over Zip and Ajax had given it.
They had examined it first very thoroughly as code on the computer screens of the ship. Finding nothing dangerous, to humans at least, they had loaded up Abdiel into the construct with it to check it out. Nothing bad had happened to her. It was obvious how it worked; there was one large red button to push when an agent came in range. There was a little red light to show when an agent was in range.
Other than that, it was pretty boring. Abdiel wasn't able to get it to do anything in the construct by itself. Zip had then loaded up their training agent, made from the stripped down code of one of the real agents, which was carefully made to be non-sentient and not truly dangerous.
When the training agent appeared the light had started blinking red, and so Abdiel pushed the button. Nothing happened, at least at first. And then the training agent went into a spasm and dropped to the floor, its code degrading.
Zip was a little pissed that they had broken their simulated agent, but everyone else was somewhere between ecstatic and not really believing it. They hoped that it worked on a true agent as well as it did on their stripped-down version of one.
Attempts to copy and past the device didn't really work. The resulting pasted device's code was corrupt and the device itself didn't work. At least, the light didn't come on when Zip had initialized another copy of their training agent file.
This meant that they would only have one real weapon against the agents. Some bad language resulted from this revelation, mostly directed at the Merovingian. Zip suspected some kind of copy protection, but couldn't isolate any of the code that might have been causing the disruption in the copy and paste attempts.
Their plan for attack, which was mostly Kami's and Ajax's plan, was built around this device working as it was supposed to. This was to be a quick strike, with a very clear objective. Once that objective as attained, everyone was to get the hell out of there and away from the agents as fast as they could.
Kami's main objective was to get revenge, whenever and however she could. Everything else was of no consequence, aside from ensuring none of the rest of her crew died. Theta had been the closest anyone had ever gotten to her, but right behind him in that ranking was Ajax, Abdiel, Chowder, Zip, and recently even Sean. She was ready to give her own life to save theirs, if she could. And as long as she could get revenge first.
Ajax had to twist her arm quite a bit to get her to agree to the condition that if she encountered some other agent first, she would just use the device on it and get the hell out of there. Only after that did he finally go along with her idea.
She stares intently at their target building, the stronghold of the agents. She is ready, ready to get in there and kill every last one of them as many times as she can. Especially Renee. What did the Oracle call her, again? Kami tries to remember. L-something. Lee. That's it. Kami dismisses that thought. When she sees her, Kami will call her Renee. She has to know if there is anything of Renee at all left in that cold shell of a killer.
A program. Kami still can't get over it. Why did she do it? It was beyond anything Kami could imagine that a human being could willingly go over to the side of the machines. And especially that one could become an agent.
She must not have understood. She must have been forced into it, or tricked, or something along those lines. Kami just couldn't believe Renee of all people would freely do that. Renee had always been such a hippie tree hugger freedom lover type. Always mad at the government, no matter who was in power. And now she is a program designed to keep humankind penned up and docile like so much cattle destined for the slaughterhouse.
Kami's cellphone rings once in her hand, startling her out of her dark thoughts.
"You ready?" says Chowder.
Kami nods once as she clips the cellphone to her belt and watches for the explosion, proof that Sean has succeeded in his role.
Fire blossoms from the middle lower front of the building, spreading petals of flame and raining debris down on to the road and early morning traffic below.
"Let's go," says Kami. She takes a deep breath, and Chowder and she sprints out from behind the air conditioning unit and towards the edge of the roof.
Kami keeps her eyes on the roof of the next building, concentrating and trying to focus on the unreality of the matrix and that because of that what she was about to do was indeed possible.
She leapt off the roof and the world seemed to move around her, rearranging itself so that she did not move but the roof of the agents headquarters maneuvered itself to land under her feet. Beside her, Chowder made the jump just as easily.
It was true what they said in the movie about the first jump. Kami fell her first time, as did everyone she had ever met, along with everyone she had ever heard of. She also fell the next twelve times. On the thirteenth she managed to put herself through a window on the building she was aiming at. The resulting lack of totally shredded skin from the glass somehow made her realize at some level that this was, indeed, fake. The next try, she made it all the way to the next roof. After that, she only missed if she was unable to concentrate the amount needed to overcome the rules of the matrix.
Kami and Chowder land on the roof with perfect form. They run straight past the helipad and towards the roof elevator and stairs.
Sean frantically reloads with trembling fingers. That last grenade killed some people, he thinks. He heard some screams, at least, even from his high window. The sounds of the helicopter have diminished, but not in a way that sounds like a sudden crash. That means the plan is working.
He is sure the agents are coming, but just wants to get this one last shot off. He tries to load up the weapon faster, but drops the grenade. It clatters on the floor and rolls a little ways away.
"Dammit," he mutters, and grabs it back up. At least it didn't explode right here in his face. He finally manages to stuff it in its proper place and picks the rocket powered grenade launcher up and aims.
He arms the weapon and squeezes the trigger. The fourth floor of the agent building explodes from the grenade, just as the door bursts open behind him.
Two agents enter the room, guns drawn. Sean drops his main weapons and jumps into cover behind the desk, fumbling for his own gun.
"Shitshitshit," he says under his breath. He waited too long. Sean turns and fires at the agents, who dodge his shots and fire right back, advancing across the office towards him. Sean is seized with an overwhelming desire to get out of there.
The agents are between him and the door. That means he goes out the window. Sean fires at the agents almost continually and runs for the open window. He throws himself out, trying to keep in mind his training and successful jumps. He twists around midair, getting his feet below him and ready to land.
Above him, one of the agents leans out of the window and fires straight down at Sean. One of the bullets hits.
Sean looses his concentration as pain sharper than anything he has ever felt blossoms in his left shoulder. This distracts him for a crucial second and he looses control of his fall, unable to concentrate on anything but the pain. He slams into the ground as he did the first time he tried the jump program. Unlike in the jump program, the pavement doesn't cushion his fall, but instead stops it abruptly. He splatters messily across the street, and dies instantly.
Above him, the agents each put a hand to their earpiece and transfer out to join the helicopter chase.
Kami and Chowder race towards the stairwell on the roof of the agent's building, guns out and ready. Chowder reaches the door of the stairwell first, and kicks it down, going in first. His job in this is mainly to protect Kami and draw fire from any agents in the building, so she can sneak in behind him and do her work with the device on any agent unlucky enough to be there.
There aren't any agents right there in the stairwell waiting for them, which is a small blessing. But it also means they will have to take longer to actively search for the agents and go to them. Chowder and Kami run down the stairs, jumping from landing to landing.
They ignore the top floors and go deeper into the building in search of agents. From study of the agents here in their building, they know that the higher floors are mostly for show. The main action starts on the eighth floor and on down through the sub-basement levels.
When Kami and Chowder reach the landing for the sixth floor, the door into the building opens. Two agents, one male and one female. Chowder hears Kami curse quietly and extremely fluently, and correctly guesses that the woman agent is the one they're after.
Chowder has had his gun ready since before he jumped on to the roof of this building and now he uses it. The agents blur, dodging the bullets.
One of the agents draws its gun.
"Oh, dammit," says Chowder, and half turns to try and draw it up the stairs after him, to let Kami get a chance to do whatever it is she is going to do with the device and the other agent.
It works. The male agent follows him, and Chowder runs up the stairs, just ahead of the agent's gunfire. He alternately shoots and ducks, pulling this agent's attention away from Kami so that she only has the one to deal with. For now.
Chowder runs out of bullets, before the agent does. He drops his gun and takes a fighting stance on one of the stairway landings.
The agent walks towards him, cracking its neck in preparation for the fight. At the last second, Chowder drops out of his stance and charges up the stairs, pulling out another gun. He knows he is definitely not the one, and isn't about to give up like that. It is certain death to stand and fight an agent. Which is exactly what Kami is trying to do. The thought pops into his head and he squashes it. Kami has that thing, that can destroy agents or something. She isn't going to die.
Chowder runs for the roof shooting behind him, the agent following. And gaining. On the twentieth floor, the agent catches up. It reaches out and grabs Chowder's leg, tripping him up and forcing him to fall on the stairs and drop his gun.
Here we go, thinks Chowder, as he kicks out at the agent and pulls his spare gun. He always carries a spare, or three. He twists around and fires at the agent, forcing it to stop what it is doing and dodge the horizontal rain of bullets coming its way. Chowder uses the opportunity to get to his feet and start backing up the stairs, still firing.
With a motion too fast to follow, the agent leaps forward, bullets smashing through its arm in the process, and grabs Chowder's arm. The agent jerks its hands and the gun is forced out of Chowder's hand. The agent keeps twisting and his arm snaps with a sickening crack.
Chowder kicks out at the agent, which absorbs the blow, and then grabs Chowder around the neck with its other hand. The agent lifts him into the air, and Chowder sees his death.
"No," he mouths, no sound coming out. The agent's face is impassive as it lifts Chowder over the side of the staircase railing, to dangle over twenty stories of empty space. The agent twists Chowder's gun out of his hands and brings it around, firing into Chowder's chest. Then he lets go, and Chowder falls to his death, completely unable to move and save himself as any freed mind should be able to do, if they don't have multiple gunshot wounds. But Chowder does, and so he dies.