Soul Fire

By: Bloodsword

The Call

He let a slow streamer of oil smoke ease from a nostril as he stared into the distance.  Instantly the streamer was in a fight for its life with the sluicing downpour, the fifth such opening of the skies today.  Idly he turned his attention from the horizon to that streamer, a twisting cable of grey and black as it danced between the fat, oily drops of fetid rain for its life.

"Hey Mac," the embedded commlink in his mastoid bone came to life with a thrum of vibration.  "If you're done feeling sorry for yourself, I've got something coming in over the dark net."

Sighing, Mac took one last pull on his cigarette before flicking it off into the gloom.  Then he was standing.

As humans go, he was tall for his kind, his normally unruly blue-black hair plastered to his skull by the unrelenting downpour, his face scarred and his skin pallid from a lack of sunlight.  He might have been handsome once, before the scarring, perhaps even pretty but now ... Now his face was a grim mask chiseled from battered ivory that more often than not sent people scurrying away from him than sauntering towards.  It was an appearance only enhanced by his icy blue gaze, hard as diamond and cold as a polar wind, stabbing this way and that as it tried to pierce the gloom.

Pulling the black oilskin longcoat closer around his muscular frame, Mac took one last look skyward.  As he did, the clouds parted for a brief moment and he saw into the early evening sky.

Instantly his eyes were drawn to the moon.  Or, rather, its shattered remnants.

For decades Humanity had worried that the Earth would get hit by a planet killer like the one that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs, killing every man, woman and child on its surface.  That paranoia had spawned fiction and movies, asteroid shelters and survivalist cults.  In the end, however, the big rock the size of a continent that came from the sky that could've killed the Human Race, didn't hit the Earth at all.

It hit the moon.

For all the damage that the moon's destruction caused, the asteroid might as well have hit the Earth.  The gravity field connecting the two was thrown into flux as massive chunks of the ancient satellite were blasted free by the impact.  That flux, in turn, caused equally massive tidal waves, shifts in the tectonic plates and a permanent compression of the planet's inner core by nearly 2%.   The survivors called the event by what it did to the planet: the Crush.

The resulting shrinkage of the planet's diameter, combined with the tsunamis and shifting tectonic plates, caused seas to slosh out of their beds and cover nearly 60% of the planet's habitable surface.  Within minutes of the impact, the planet's coastal cities were obliterated and continental interiors became inland seas, mile-high waves washing everything before them with unrelenting and unimaginable force.

Earth as they had known it, was gone.  Along with it, nearly eight billion of it's ten billion occupants. Another billion died shortly afterwards, from injury, disease, and starvation.  Not to mention the chunks of the moon that made their devastating way down to the planet's already battered surface, adding insult to injury with impacts that made the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs look like a pebble into a puddle.

Mac couldn't help grimacing at that thought.  Everything he had ever known had died in the cataclysm.  Including himself.  

A small-time thug and enforcer for a big-time organized crime syndicate, he had been breaking legs when the moon was struck.  Seconds later he was buried under tons of rubble, crushed, bleeding and dying as the city shuddered in its own death throes around him.  With a final dust-filled gasp, and blood-choked cough, he had felt his life slip away as it all faded into darkness.

Then he woke up in a small, dimly lit medical cubical, skin burning and insides itching.  'You have been saved!' the medic that attended him had said.  'Courtesy of Central.  Now all that you are, belongs to them.'

Central.  What was left of Earth's governments banded together into a single, dominating unit that now controlled everything on the planet, from food, medical supplies, to shelter and clean air.  It was all theirs and you paid a premium to get it.

If that wasn't bad enough, when Mac asked the medic what he meant, the answer sent an icy chill through his reconstructed body.  Desperate for everything from laborers to soldiers, Central had sent out its rescue teams to recover as many people from the wreckage as possible, living or recently deceased.  Then they used enough nano-technology to make a cyborg envious to put them back together again.

More nano-tech than man, Mac was supposed to take the role of Central enforcer, a type of low-level cop that roamed the ruined shells of once-great cities that managed to avoid the flooding and earthquakes brought on by the Crush.  There the enforcers would do Central's dirty work, keeping dissidents oppressed and spreading the good word of the government's benevolence.

It had sounded almost exactly like his old life.  Except now he was a government employee, paid not in money but with upgrades and mods to his nanites that kept him alive and functional.

"Mac," the voice said insistently inside his ear.  "You coming or not?  This one sounds important."

Heaving another sigh as he dropped his eyes from the sky, Mac turned and walked the short distance to the battered metal door serving as roof top entrance to the building he was currently standing on.  Pushing it aside, he stepped in to a small chamber filled to overflowing with outdated electronics.  Behind a rather oversized console sat a wizened dwarf sans legs in a wheelchair, his face nearly hidden behind thick old style glasses.

As he stepped through the door, those glasses twisted towards him.

"Took you long enough," the voice from his ear said, this time in  real life, gruffer and filled with more gravelly annoyance.

"Stow it," Mac growled, his voice dusty and carrying a hint of metal.  "What's so damn important that it gets to interrupt my morning smoke?"

"First, it's three in the afternoon, you idiot," the dwarf said, turning back to the console to reach out with stubby fingers.  He touched a series of studs and a screen lit up with a repeating message.

"Second, it's a call from Central."  The dwarf turned those glasses back towards Mac.

"You're getting activated!"

The Job

Mac felt his face tighten involuntarily.

Getting activated, Central code speak for one of their rescues getting to prove they were worth all the effort of bringing back from the dead.  It meant they had something they wanted him to do, something too dirty for their actual cops and soldiers to do.

Something down in the ruins, where the monsters roamed.

That thought tightened Mac's face even further.  When you dealt with monsters, you sent in your own.  The one thing that hadn't changed from the old world to the new.  Thanks to all the tech keeping him alive courtesy of Central, he was the monster they were sending to deal with the ones they didn't own yet.

"Payment?" he grated and the dwarf shook his head.

"Why it always about the payment first with you?" he asked, looking away from the console to give Mac an exaggerated stare through those thick lenses.

"Because I like having my reason for doing something stupid first, before knowing just how stupid I have to be to do it," Mac quickly fired back.

The dwarf's mouth worked silently for a moment as he mulled that one over.  Then he was shrugging and turning back to the console.

"Suit yourself."  A toggle was flipped and additional information spilled out onto the screen.  Immediately the dwarf was whistling in appreciation.  

"Damn.  This is actually impressive for once."

"Spit it out," Mac commanded.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Here you go, pal, something worth risking your nanite-sized nuts for: six months free upgrades to your firmware, a full year of software upgrades and one maintenance cycle."

Mac's eyes narrowed as he listened to the dwarf recite the list.  In a world starved for resources, thanks mostly to Central's iron fist having a choke hold on the flow from top to bottom, it was a king's ransom that they were willing to pay for whatever they wanted him to do.

Time to find out just what the hell that was.

"The job?" he asked with that same thoughtful expression on his scarred face.

The dwarf leaned closer to the screen to peer at the running lines of text.

"Well, if you want to believe the description, which I don't, it says you need to track down a group of Wet Earth activists that have stolen a piece of Central tech from a research facility in New Denver."

Mac frowned.  Wet Earth?  Weren't those the wack jobs that believed Humanity should resettle to the bottom of the sea or some such bullshit?  What were they doing in New Denver, supposedly one of the most secure cities in what was left of North America, stealing tech from what was probably one of the most secure facilities in Central's network of research sites?

"What does the Dark Net say is really in play here?" he asked, his frown unwavering.

"First, that it wasn't Wet Earth," the dwarf reported, looking at a second screen.  "Those floaters don't have the connections or the brains to crack into a Central research site.  Most likely Splinter agents."

Splinter; Central's only true competition, a shadowy black market government operating on the fringes of society in an effort to somehow get Humanity's remnants off their doomed world and to one of its former colonies in space.  They had begun operating shortly after Central began putting the planet's remaining resources under their 'benevolent' control.  Ruthless and efficient, any enforcers that encountered their agents down in the ruins usually ended up floating face down.

"That makes more sense.  What did they grab?"

"Something the data files code name 'Soul Fire', a cold-fusion fueled energy-to-matter device."  The dwarf paused to look even closer at the screen.  "Huh.  Apparently it has the ability to convert energy into any type of matter you want.  Food, clothing, air, spare parts for a machine, whatever you program it with."

Abruptly the dwarf rocked back in his wheelchair, making the ancient device creak in protest.

"Holy hell, Mac.  If Splinter got their hands on that kind of tech, it could ..."

"Change everything!" Mac finished for him, his face a grim mask.  "Central would lose its control over all the resources and people could truly start living again."

"No wonder Central's willing to pay through the nose to get it back," the dwarf said.  Then he was frowning himself as his console clicked from within before a small door opened on the side.

On small metal wheels that squeaked as they helped extend a telescoping metal arm, a rack came out of the door.  On it was a heavy, dust-covered slug thrower, with four magazines sitting in storage shelves along the side.

"Man, they really are desperate!" the dwarf exclaimed, staring at the weapon.  "They are actually issuing you a weapon for this one."

Mac's frown deepened as he stared at the old gun, a remnant of the world before the Crush.  He had used guns like that when he was enforcing for that mob boss he used to work for.  He also knew they were strictly forbidden in the new world, not even their cops getting them.  Only soldiers had weapons issued to them, and only for actual combat situations.

Which meant the Dark Net was right.  You don't use a gun on activists.  You use a gun on Splinter agents.

"How many enforcers have they activated for the job?" he asked quietly, lifting his gaze from the gun to the dwarf.

"What?" the dwarf stammered, still staring at the weapon.

"I said, how many enforcers are they calling up?"

"Um ..." the dwarf finally managed to tear his eyes off the gun and look back at his screens.  Only to whistle in astonishment.

"Holy shit," he said, his voice trailing off as he now stared at the screen.

"How many, damn you!" Mac barked.

"All of them," the dwarf finally answered, looking over at Mac, his eyes wide through his thick glasses.

"Central is activating all of them!"

The Decision

Despite himself, Mac felt a muscle in his jaw ripple.

Of course they were.  Central expected most of them to fail and die at the hands of the enemy agents, that's why.  Even with a lifetime of fighting dirty like he had before the Crush, he ran the very real risk of doing the same and becoming fish food.  For good reason: it was a suicide mission.

If this Soul Fire thing could truly take cheap and virtually free cold fusion and transform the energy into matter, Central's universe would fall apart.  Even as Splinter's dream to save Humanity got real legs for the first time since it came into being.  It was something worth fighting for ... worth dying for.  If Splinter agents truly had Soul Fire, they wouldn't give it up without one hell of a fight.

"Penalty for refusal?" he quietly asked.

That earned him another hard look from the dwarf.

"Refusing to answer a Central call-up?  Are you out of your nanite-infested brain?  Buddy, they frickin' own your ass.  Lock, stock and a nanite-filled barrel.  You can't refuse."

"But what if I do?" Mac pressed.  He wasn't so thrilled to be throwing away his second life so frivolously, even if it was a daily torment with the nanites making his guts itch and his necrotic skin burn.  If anything, he'd gladly throw his artificial existence into the ocean and return to the darkness to find release from the torment.  But he certainly wasn't willing to die to help Central out, regardless of the hold they had on him.

After a couple of second looks at him, the dwarf finally looked back at the screen.

"Huh, they actually have one," he noted.  "I didn't think they would."  Peering closer, he quickly read then:

"Immediate revocation of all access to their nanite network."

Revocation of access.  That meant he'd be cut off from upgrades and patches, something the nanites needed almost daily to keep his failing body alive.  Basically they would be sentencing him to death, and a slow and very painful death at that.  The the nanites would hyper-stimulate his nerves in the area they were maintaining before they went cold, sending vicious surges of agony raging through his body as they did.  Then they would shut down and with them, his body, tissue after tissue, organ after organ.  Until, with a final systemic collapse of all of his bodily functions, he would die, already rotting from within.

Mac grimaced.  He had seen a couple of his fellow enforcers die that way, punishment for failing the tasks Central had given them.  It had been gruesome to watch, never mind to feel.  It truly was the worst way to go.  While the upgrades and updates were the carrot in this equation, the threat of revocation was definitely the stick.

"Fine," he said before spitting in distaste.  "Key in my acknowledgement.  But I'm not taking that."  He pointed at the gun.  "If I take these bastards down, I'm doing it my way."

"What?? No, you don't mean ..."

"Yeah, I do mean.  Break out the link cable and set up a connection to the world net."

"Yeesh!" The dwarf shuddered even as he rolled to the side and began fishing some antiquated fiber-op cabling out of a storage bin.  "It always creeps me out when you go in."  He jacked one end into a socket on the console before rolling back and handing the other to Mac.

"Besides, how do you know that they'll even have a presence in the net?"

Taking the end, Mac smiled thinly.

"They cracked into a secure facility, didn't they?  As far as I know, every Central facility is hardwired into the world net, which they also completely control, for communication purposes.  To defeat the systems protecting it, they would've needed to do a part of it electronically.  The most logical spot for that is the communication grid, which opens to the outside."

Mac paused long enough to plug the jack in his hand into a handy socket built into the base of his skull.  There was a 'snik' as it settled into place followed by a brief wave of disorientation as the neural network in his brain synchronized with the cable's signal.

"So I'm going to use that network to track them down.  All I have to do is find their electronic foot print and follow it right to their hidey hole."  Mac smiled thinly.  "Saves me a physical trip down into Old Denver."

"I'd rather roll down there on these creaky-ass wheels than do what you do, pal," the dwarf replied with a grimace.

Mac's smile broadened slightly at seeing the dwarf's discomfort.  Then the smile was gone as he began focusing his mind.

The technical term in Central medical science for individuals that were accidentally 'modified' by their nanite reconstruction was aberration.  Usually the modified individual was deemed a resuscitation failure and terminated.  But in Mac's case, he had managed to hide his accidental modification from the periodic maintenance sweeps Central ran on his status and avoided termination.  It was a good thing; the modification allowed him to do some pretty spectacular things.  Like what he was about to do.

Mac felt the itching on his insides intensify as he mentally commanded the nanites infesting his body to begin the transformation, converting his very flesh into energy.  In retrospect, he had often wondered what his modification was.  Was it the ability to temporarily take control of his nanites?  Or was it their ability to convert him into energy and back again a short time later?

Either way, it made what he was about to do that much easier.  Which was physically jumping into the world net like a certain ancient science fiction character he had heard about once.  'Time to go in like Flynn,' he thought and, with pressure from his mind, he focused on the jack connecting him to the network.  Then, with a falling sensation, the real world was gone and he was streaking through a world of flashing lights and shifting darkness.

Welcome to the World net!

Transport

As it always did, there was a moment of shifting in his perceptions as he adjusted to being in the net.  Logically, being a cloud of directed energy, he shouldn't even have perceptions.  How it was possible, he didn't know.  Nor did he want to.  He just accepted that he could.

The darkness twisted in on itself even as more motes of light darted past.  As it did, he could feel himself moving, streaking forward as he traveled along what was likely the cable connecting him to the net.  As he did, a series of numbers appeared in the upper right hand of his visual field as they always did, starting at 30 minutes and counting downward.  'Alright, pal, you're on the clock,' he thought.

30 minutes to get to where he needed to go before the nanites began to revert his energy body back into flesh.  Before he could get there, though, he needed to actually enter the net.  Which, a heart beat and a flare of light later, he did.

To describe it as a vast open space would've been not completely accurate.  Yet that's how it felt to Mac as he exited the conduit and slowed to a stop.  A vast open space of indeterminate light and shape with motes of light dashing everywhere.  Thankfully it didn't have to stay that way.

With a thought, Mac willed a plane to appear, a flat surface that stretched into the distance in every direction including the one he just came from.  Then he was putting faces and bodies to the motes of light that were moving all around him even as he gave the virtual presences he felt on either side substance by giving them shape and structure.

Somewhere deep in his mind he knew what he was now seeing was just an exercise in controlling his perception.  It could stay a shapeless space and he'd still be able to move about it with equal ease.  Either way, it made him feel better to make the place look more like a, well, ... place.

Buildings appeared on either side as the plane between them became a road, not horribly detailed but Mac didn't need detail.  Just reference points.  The motes became avatars representing their users, usually Central techno-flunkies, ghostly shapes vaguely man-shaped as they moved around him.

Then two in bright red were stopping in front of him with a silent demand to halt and show his identification.  Instantly he recognized them as Central net security routines, having run into them a number of times before.  Mac stifled a mental sigh as he called up his enforcer ident.  Even here, in this place of perception and light, Central controlled everything.  There was no escape.

The routines scanned his indent, a set of floating blue numbers that he had hovering in front of him then shifted to the side to let him by.  The ident was enough to grant him access to the Central-controlled net but not much more than that.  Even as he looked from side to side, he could see several access points amongst the buildings protected by clusters of the red shapes, marking communication links from various Central facilities into the net.  Those were sealed to him, requiring much higher access protocols than a lowly grunt like him would have to get into.

It was as he continued forward and looked to his left that he spotted it.  An access point literally crawling with security, the shimmering arch that he used to mark them looking a little worse for wear.  'That must be it,' he thought as he shifted towards it.  Only to find a virtual wall of red blocking his way.  'Yup, that would be the access point that got breached,' he mused as he backed off and the wall faded.  He then began to look around.

Like in real life with footprints, electronic footprints were virtually impossible to detect unless you knew what you were looking for.  Here, in this place, they would appear as a blur on a surface almost like a smudge, where the code had been altered or affected.

There!  Just to the right of the damaged access arch, there was one.  Mac found himself nodding in appreciation.  It wasn't very big, meaning that whoever tracked through here was good, very good.  But not good enough to be completely invisible to his eyes.  Scanning around the original footprint, it didn't take him long to find another, and another, a trail of them leading away from the access point.

Focusing on the trail, Mac followed it, moving quickly across the artificial landscape.  At that speed, it didn't take him long to reach a non-Central access point, represented by a glowing disk on the ground.  A glance at his timer showed 20 minutes remaining.  Plenty of time to check out the access point and see where it led.  So he stepped onto the disk and immediately felt himself being pulled out of the net.  'Wonder where I'm going?' he thought as he entered another dark-filled conduit.

Then he was taking physical shape by an open data port on the back of a small personal computer.  What?  No, not yet!  But it was too late; the nanites were already reverting him back to solid matter.

Hastily he crouched in the shadows behind the desk holding the computer in the hopes of not getting spotted.  When a few seconds went by without an alarm being sounded, he let a sigh of relief ease through his nostrils before leaning forward enough to peer around the corner.

Immediately a chill swept through him at what he saw.  A room filled with Splinter agents, their lean forms wrapped in black as they stood around an ungainly looking device on a table, talking in low voices.  Then a door to the room opened and children, ranging from five to eleven or twelve, flooded in with happy cries.  Dressed in rags and emaciated to the point of looking skeletal, Mac knew from experience that these kids were starving to death thanks in great part to poverty and neglect, castoffs from Central's gleaming world on top of the mountains.

Seeing them he knew he was in Old Denver, partially flooded and mostly destroyed by the Crush, a perfect hiding place for enemy agents looking to avoid Central detection.  Then all thought was pushed aside by astonishment as the machine began to hum and food began to appear in front of it.

It was the Soul Fire device!  The agents were using it's energy-to-matter matrix to make food!  And, as he watched the Splinter agents began to unhesitatingly hand out the food in armfuls to the children, he could feel Central's hold on this place slip a little.

"Enforcer Thomas McAvoy," a voice said in his ear, one that didn't belong to the dwarf.  "We know your location in Old Denver.  Do you have the activists in sight?"

Central; somehow they had located him despite his impromptu transport through the net.  Yet again he found himself silently raging against the nanites inside him that most likely ratted him out with some sort of homing signal.  Funny that they were still sticking to the story that the tech was stolen by Wet Earth floaters, though.

"Enforcer, respond," the voice commanded, becoming hard.

"Do you have the activists in sight?"

Crossroads

As the words echoed in his ear, Mac found himself hesitating.

Normally he would've answered immediately, confirming his location and calling for back up, if needed.  Going by the number of Splinter agents in the room in front of him, he would most definitely need it if he hoped to take the Soul Fire from them.

But there was something ... something about watching the Soul Fire feed kids that would've been dead in a couple weeks from starvation or some other cause that made him stay silent.  Why, he didn't know.  He had seen hundreds of starving kids before on other trips to the ruined cities on what was left of the continent.  They hadn't made him hesitate before.  So why was he now?

Was it because he was seeing them actually getting help?  Help from something other than from Central's ever reluctant hand?  Or was it seeing the Soul Fire in action, knowing that it could do so much more to help not just these kids, but everybody else forgotten by Central?

"I see you back there, enforcer," a quiet voice said from Mac's right and his head jerked towards it.

It was a Splinter agent not five feet from where he crouched, leaning against the wall with his arms folded across his chest in a deliberately casual pose.  Knowing that the agent had him dead to rights, Mac relaxed.

"So you do," he admitted.  "The question is, what are you going to do about it?"

The agent looked at him for a long moment then shrugged.

"Don't know, actually," he also admitted.  "Normally I would assume that a low level flunky like you was sent in as a spy so you can tell Central where we are.  Based on that, I'd shoot you in the face."  The agent paused slightly.  

"But I don't hear the transports coming in, carrying Central troops in an attempt to recover the Soul Fire.  So you haven't called it in yet.  Why not?"

Again Mac took a look at the children, some of them now hungrily eating.

"That thing will make a real difference down here, won't it," he asked and the agent looked over at the children and his fellow agents at work, feeding them.

"Yeah," he said and Mac could hear the hint of a smile in his voice.  "It really will."  He looked back at Mac.

"Sounds like you're trying to make a decision there, pal.  To call in the troops, get the Soul Fire back or destroyed and maintain the status quo.  Or to let us keep it and save what's left of Humanity from Central's greed and domination."  The agent cocked his head thoughtfully.

"So what will it be?" he asked.

Mac sighed.  In his decades of being a mob enforcer, he never had to make a moral decision, one that had ramifications on somebody other than himself.  And in a decade or so of being a Central enforcer, he hadn't had the opportunity to do so either.

Yet here it was, staring him in the face.

"Respond immediately, Enforcer McAvoy," the voice in his ear demanded.  "Or we will sever your connection to the network and you will die."

Again he sighed.  Rat the Splinter agents out and continue his tortured existence for a little while longer until Central eventually throws him to the dogs.  Or roll over on Central, let the agents go so they could help the masses and die a horrible death for his trouble.  'Yeah,' he darkly mused.  'Helluva decision for an old knee-breaker like me.'

Maybe it was time he actually made a good one.  'I should've died under that building,' he thought, slowly standing up.  'After living a life of crime, I would've deserved it.  Now ... now maybe I can die and it'll actually mean something.'

"If I were you guys, I'd relocate immediately," he said and the Splinter agent, who had been reaching for a weapon in response to Mac standing, paused.  "They've got my location and even if they drop me dead by disconnecting me, they'll still send troops here."

"We're already on our way out," the agent replied, folding his arms.  "Thanks.  You've done Humanity a great service.  But what will happen to you now?"

Mac shrugged.

"Not sure, actually," he said in a quiet voice.  "Can't figure I have much time ..."  Then, with a flash of light and bone-crushing pain, everything went black.

The agent was silent after watching the tall, lean enforcer drop to the ground to lay motionless, his thoughts in turmoil.  Then he was turning to his fellow agents.

"C'mon, boys, time to get moving," he urged as he walked towards them.

"A hero has just bought us some breathing room.  Let's make it count!"