Mask of Humanity

The Void of Space

The golden strand of light reaching towards Earth was, in galactic scales, almost within touching distance. It sparked and seethed, humming and twisting as it anticipated the end of its journey.

Back at Heaven Actual, Angels and Denizens waited, ready to finally tick the necessary boxes and throw the various levers. Across the millions of planets within the Divine Empire, Immortal Corporations signed contracts and calculated profits while Sects and Clans briefed their Marked for the final time, telling them to seize all they could, kill their rivals, put only themselves and their people first. Parents told their children for what would be the hundredth and thousandth times of the great opportunities they had found in their own long-ago attempts, extracting promises from their eager progeny to go and find the same and make even better use of them, while bidding tearful or stern farewells.

The last entrant would soon be forcefully inducted and the Great Game begin.

The eyes of many Divines turned at this moment towards the small planet called Earth. It contained some far-flung survivors of a controversial race, humanity. Some intended to exterminate the humans quickly, while others planned to capture the humans and use them in the hunt for the fabled Keys.

These eyes were cold and ancient and had only their own interests in mind.

The golden light pressed on towards its target, the hungry machine that was Heaven impatient to begin the next iteration of the endless Game.

New London

Zero-Twelve crept towards its own target, the Del Brougnie Mansion.

People flowed in and out through the main entrance, a large opening within the mall surrounded by shops and restaurants and clubs.

There were two large statues on either side of the opening, as well as a number of guards. The guards wore white robes over their bullet-proof vests, and had light weaponry tucked discreetly into holsters. They looked around attentively, but most of that attention was on checking the ID’s of those seeking to enter and trying to give out a vibe of polite welcome to the guests, all of whom were significantly higher on the social ladder than they. Threat Analysis dismissed them and all the other humans entirely.

The statues were more of a problem, because they weren’t statues. Menacing, insectile shapes, but twisted up into odd positions as though mid-dance. Underneath the white powder covering them, a dusting which had bonded to their outer layer to give them a faux-stone texture, they were all metal and tough rubber. Combat bots.

These were fully into looking-good mode, all weapons retracted and ports closed.

Zero-Twelve settled into a corner on the ceiling across from the entrance. Nicolai and the other Modules found the statuesque combat bots a strange choice of guard. The entrance was the spot most likely to bear the brunt of any surprise attack, but those bots wouldn’t be able to respond effectively to such an attack, not twisted up as they were.

The Governor pinged the handlers, saying that they were in position and requesting permission to engage.

There was a pause. It lasted longer than was usual.

A moment later the Modules tensed as they detected something large and powerful stir in the local cyberspace, a behemoth in the virtual depths. Cyberwarfare immediately recognised it as the Tower Central AI, which clearly knew they were within and was looking to establish contact. The only way it could know was because someone had told it. Cyberwarfare kept them well hidden whilst the Governor ignored the Tower Central AI’s wide-area communication attempts, instead pinging the handlers through heavily encrypted channels to ask what was going on.

‘Due to contractual obligations we have had to inform the stakeholders of this tower of your activities, who have in turn informed the Tower Central AI. Permission to engage has not been granted, I repeat, you do not have permission to engage and are required to wait,’ the voice crackled into Zero-Twelve’s composite mind in response to the Governors inquiries.

The Modules were confused and concerned. Even the Governor seemed a bit put off. The Tower Central AI would not be happy about their presence and it was not likely to be helpful; quite the opposite.

Typically, if there would be a need to inform local shareholders of the killbot’s activity prior to a hit, Zero-Twelve would be made aware of this eventuality. But this factor had not been mentioned in any of the preliminary briefings, nor had it been included in the final briefing and data-packets. The Governor was rapid-fire communicating with the handlers, or at least attempting to. It was being stonewalled and continually told to wait.

Something was off, very off. Nicolai felt it in his metaphysical gut, but where the other Module’s were worried, he instead began to perk up with interest. The reason for that was simple.

His life was dull.

Numbingly, endlessly dull. He had no agency, he made no choices, and in general he was relegated to the role of observer as Zero-Twelve acted.

It was only in moments of intense combat where he was truly pulled into action. The more things were going wrong, the more the careful plans of the Governor were falling apart, the more he would move to the fore. He was adept at recognising these moments, and he was sensing one just might be approaching. If he’d still had a mouth, he would have been grinning.

The combat bots hadn’t moved from their podiums. The majority of Zero-Twelve’s eyes were focused on those bots and its weapons were loaded and aimed right at them. But Zero-Twelve couldn’t engage. Not until they received permission from the handler. Those combat bots were lethal threats which would soon be informed Zero-Twelve lurked nearby. Nicolai felt the rising tension which in him manifested as a rising excitement, insomuch as he could feel excitement considering the scarring to the emotional centres of his brain. Shit was about to hit the metaphorical fan, and these were the moments he lived for. Some of the other Modules clustered closer to him, ever hungry to experience true human emotion.

The Governor, receiving no answers from the handlers, opted to allow the Tower Central AI to establish its connection.

YOU WILL NOT DAMAGE ME, it boomed at Zero-Twelve, as angry as an AI could be. YOU WILL NOT DAMAGE MY BUILDING. YOU WILL NOT DAMAGE MY RESIDENTS.

I AM ISSUING AN EVACUATION ORDER FOR FLOORS FIFTEEN, SIXTEEN, AND SEVENTEEN. YOU WILL WAIT FOR EVACUATION TO COMPLETE.

I cannot fulfil all of your requests, replied the Governor and Legal, linking together. I will avoid damaging you. I will take all measures to avoid unnecessary damage to the building and third parties, so long as these measures do not unduly affect the completion of my task. Waiting for evacuation to complete is unlikely to be possible. I will pass on your concerns to my immediate superiors.

The Central AI threw the virtual equivalent of a book of law at Zero-Twelve. That went straight to Legal which analysed it and threw the equivalent of two books of law back. The Central AI didn’t respond to that, clearly recognising that it wasn’t going to accomplish any immediate change with legal wrangling. It certainly wasn’t happy, but there was little it could do other than to begin purging Cyberwarfare and the other Modules from the systems they had hacked while they’d made their way inside, and sending an order for tower security to start moving to form a cordon outside the Del Brugnie mansion.

None of that mattered to Nicolai and the other Modules because the combat bots had, along with everyone else, received the Central AI’s evacuation order—THERE IS AN ARMED KILLBOT IN THE BUILDING—and had realised that they ought to be worried. With jerky clunks they began to shift into combat readiness, white dust exploding off from them to form chalky clouds. The humans around them reacted with confusion which rapidly turned into a panic that propelled them, screaming and yelling, in all directions.

Most of the combat bots’ weapons were fully retracted and would take a few seconds to emerge, but they had some quicker options, such as the machine guns on their forelimbs. Still, they didn’t know where Zero-Twelve was. Unmoving in its corner, it was invisible.

You have permission to engage, said the handler at the same time as one of the bots released an extremely powerful sonar ping. There was a cacophony of pained yells and surprised screams as the wave of sound popped human eardrums.

The ping washed over Zero-Twelve. The killbots outer covering which edited the light and sound contacting it to make it invisible was not able to properly edit and reproduce the deafening ping the combat bot had released. As a result parts of the sound bounced off Zero-Twelve instead of being sent through, and the two combat bots’ sophisticated microphone arrays would immediately detect these inconsistencies when the sonar pings returned, using them to work out roughly where Zero-Twelve was.

It would take the barest instant for them to raise their machine guns and blast the area. In the short period of time the composite mind had, it made a few decisions.

Observation and Legal performed an analysis of the humans in the collateral zone around the combat bots, which showed a collected maximum interest value of just over five and a half billion.

The mission had an acceptable maximum collateral cost of ten billion, and there was no critical infrastructure nearby. On top of that, now the humans were damaged by the ping, their client would be on the hook to pay for medical treatment as the ping occurred defensively in response to an aggressive action the client had initiated. The medical fee had an expected cost of just a few hundred million, but that fee could reach significantly higher. Legal predicted the damages payout could climb to three billion depending on how the legal battle went. Looking at things pessimistically, killing everyone would only incur an additional cost of a couple billion.

So, it was an easy choice for the Governor as it ordered engagement with sufficient firepower to end things quickly with no care for further collateral.

Nicolai could all too easily imagine what the loved ones of those who would die would be told. By not investing in the best insurance premiums these people had accepted the risk of living on the Corporate Coast, a place where the free market manifested in physical form through actors like Zero-Twelve, armed with missiles and machine guns.

The Modules worked together, Nicolai fusing closer with Combat, Movement, Threat Analysis, Observation, Aiming and the Governor. With twinned hisses Zero-Twelve fired off a pair of missiles and at the same time raised its four gun-limbs and launched itself sideways away from the spot where it had been detected. That spot was blasted by heavy machine gun fire an instant later, the walls cratering and cracking, chunks of stone and metal sent flying.

The missiles surged towards their targets and Zero-Twelve saw the combat bots’ point-defence systems still struggling to fully activate and take aim. It drilled those point-defence systems with a burst of heavy machine gun rounds from all four of its gun-limbs, shredding them before they could do their job and target the missiles.

That was all the time needed for the missiles to reach their targets. One of the combat bots was caught dead-centre, the other on its shoulder. The missiles were designed specifically to destroy bots just like them and performed admirably.

With booms that shattered any human eardrums not already destroyed and great flashes of light, heat, and concussive shockwaves of force, the bots were transformed from lethal killing machines into a great deal of very expensive shrapnel which was flung at high speed in all directions.

Screams were silenced as the shrapnel impacted humans, which then led to more shrapnel as chunks of flesh and bone described an expanding circle of gore through the crowd. Research and Development chittered with bloodthirsty glee from its corner and attempted to snap numerous pictures, but was overruled by Observation and Legal.

One of Zero-Twelve’s gun-limbs shot out, the manipulator on the end catching a piece of shrapnel before it split the head of a nearby human, a young man. He wasn’t even at gold level. His interest payout, mostly a life insurance set up, would be minimal.

The Governor identified the pointless movement as being caused by Nicolai and warned him to stop such acts, lest it cut him from the mind meld. An empty threat. It knew it would need him in the situation to come.

Zero-Twelve flung itself across the space between the wall and the heavy metal doors. Those doors had begun to slide closed but two raised gun-limbs thundered as Zero-Twelve blasted at the walls where it knew the gears and cogs controlling the doors were. The rain of armour piercing explosive rounds made short work of the contraptions and the doors ground to a halt, smoke pouring from the torn walls. Zero-Twelve disappeared through the gap, a dancing shimmer of light.

Zero-Twelve knew the layout of the mansion and headed straight down the opulent main corridor towards the gigantic parlour that formed a square at the centre of the complex, where the Target was believed to be located. The few humans it encountered didn’t slow it at all as it smashed straight through them, flies on a windshield, and there were no bots or automated defences.

Two great double doors blocked its way, but a burst of gunfire broke them apart as Zero-Twelve charged towards the opening. Every Module was convinced this was the big moment and they began releasing their aids, living weaponry and countermeasures.

With a vast humming noise drones spat out from ports on Zero-Twelve’s back to form a cloud around it, keeping pace then jetting forwards into the room ahead. They came in a variety of sizes and shapes, different designs for different purposes.

These drones relayed what they saw when some of them entered through the door ahead of Zero-Twelve.

A great open area, stretching up and up through several floors, ringed by balconies. Small crowds of people were fleeing through exits on the sides.

In the centre there waited a group who looked more than ready, and in the centre of them, stood the Primary Target.