Chương 86: Interlude - A Childhood Curriculum

Timestamp: Kelly, nine years old. At nine Kelly crouched in a corner of a half-collapsed transit substation near the outskirts. Rust flaked from a beam overhead, and dog-sized rodents moved somewhere behind a broken tile partition. She pressed a sphere smaller than her hand against her chest, and it hummed under her fingers, making the air around her feel too light. A wall at the far end burst inward. A broad-shouldered man came through, faster than his size allowed.

A second figure dropped through a new hole in the ceiling. Boots followed, then gunfire. A soldier near a collapsed stairwell shouted into a comm, "Confirmed above Elite! Both of them! One at least 80 EQ, maybe more!" His voice cracked, and a section of the building folded over him. The broad-shouldered man laughed and struck a support pillar with a backhand. The pillar broke. The second figure grabbed a soldier and hurled him through a partition. Beyond that barrier, people screamed. Their voices stopped.

A woman dragged herself toward a gap in the outer masonry, one leg twisted behind her. The laughing man stepped over her. The other kicked a length of rebar, and it spun and hit her before she reached the gap. She stopped moving. A slab of concrete broke loose above Kelly. It drifted sideways and missed her. Dust hung in the air instead of falling. She kept her hands around the sphere and took shallow sips of air that tasted like smoke and blood.

Kelly's entire life was one long seminar on avoiding the Upper Echelon, anyone who smelled like them, and anyone who sold them coffee. From the time she could walk, the lesson was avoid the law, obviously. Next were the people who wrote the law, followed by those who paid them. After that came the private militias with their logos stitched on the sleeves, and finally the neighborhoods those militias patrolled. It was a nesting doll of people to run from.

The Demigods moved through the world with a casual planet-cracking social gravity usually associated with collapsing stars. Bystanders with a net worth under six figures were atmospheric dust to anyone even closely associated with their inner circle, and if your net worth could be counted with a dollar menu? Forget about it. Kelly had once heard of a man in a suit worth more than a city block order a city block vaporized, because the traffic delay was impacting his annual projections.

Collateral damage was just confetti to their parade. Once, her only interactions had been variations on 'flee' and 'bleed.' A childhood curriculum of ducking for cover and sprinting. Their attention usually arrived in a screaming package of gunfire and boot heels. A raid on a squat. A 'sanitation sweep' of a market. A corporate patrol deciding her face looked suspicious from three hundred meters. Every visit from them was the same.

A pretty light show in the sky advertised who was about to ruin your day, followed by the very loud, very expensive argument they were having with someone else. They never cared who was underneath, and cared even less who got in the way. She'd never had a conversation with one. Never been in a room where one wasn't actively trying to turn her into a red stain on the pavement. And then the time loops started, and her hatred for them grew.

Her hatred for Han Cybernetics, Genecorp, Crystal Nanotech, and even Vaughn, her employer, grew. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. The loops showed her the machinery. She witnessed firsthand how little they cared about the lives of everyone who wasn't them. She saw the decisions being made. She had witnessed firsthand the results of strategy calls made in bunkers where they wrote off entire sectors as unsalvageable.

She watched the casualty projections get approved because the alternative was diverting resources from a research project studying the magic eating through the walls. She listened to the cold, static-filled comms traffic where field teams were ordered to hold a line, knowing it would kill them, because the data from their last moments of combat was valuable. She saw the reports where civilians were categorized as either a resource to be secured or an obstacle to be cleared.

This direct exposure began to color her view of the powers that be in general. Anyone in charge. Any authority. This 'Ren' was a partner of Dr. Haider's organization. More than that, he was a retired enforcer for the very people who sat at the top of all the inhabited worlds. Dr. Haider was different. Kelly chewed on that fact. He was like her. A nobody. A person who started with nothing but the wiring in his skull and the sheer, bloody-minded genius to use it. He clawed his way to relevance.

That was a language she understood. He worked for the Upper Echelon on occasion, when their money was good, but he wasn't a part of them. Not in any real way. This made him a contractor. A specialist. In the same way a postman worked for everyone on a route, or a demolition expert worked for the highest bidder. Nobody blames the shaped charge for the building it collapses. You blame the architect who paid for it. Painting Haider and his organization with the same broad, filthy brush as the Upper Echelon felt wrong.

It was lazy. More than that, it felt unfair—to him, and to the organization he'd built. This mansion-turned-building of operations was his creation, carved out of the collapsing world. He built it from scrap and stubbornness. He hired people who could do things, not people who knew which fork to use at an executive dinner. That mattered. To lump them together was intellectually dishonest. And if there was one thing Kelly hated more than corporate overlords, it was bad data.

The reunion with Jennie dangled there, a shiny lure. Tempting. Always tempting. Getting to Jennie was the point. But while she was here, the intern saw other uses for the place; her focus was on the facility itself. Kelly was here to use this place. She was going to run the augment training for everything it was worth and collect every bit of intel they had.

A civil war was set to erupt in the dome smothering the east grid later today, and any of the strongest maniacs to crawl out of that bloodbath would be useful against the order god's angel. It wouldn't hurt to vet their manpower before she drafted them. Training with an outer member of the Upper Echelon was a rare opportunity. The man was a war veteran. Kelly had initially rolled her eyes at the title. Which war? The Augment Wars? The AI Coups? The Final Tüin Engagements? Or the savage off-world skirmishes?

It was all the same war with different logos stamped on the artillery. Each conflict was a masterpiece of organized murder that left famous corpses in its wake, every battle a factory for legends built on corpses. She'd never heard of this 'Ren', but his resume was probably written in the scars of everyone dumb enough to stand in his way. The experience would be invaluable. She'd get to learn how they moved when they weren't just leveling a city block. She'd see where the seams were in their augmented perfection.

It was a chance to study the blueprint of the people who'd spent her life making her run. She had vaporized one of those smug, overpowered, untouchable walking tax exemptions once. The terraforming cube had turned him and his personal guard into a brief, expanding sphere of component atoms. Vaporizing them with the cube was fun—a bright flash, a neat crater, no mess. But that was remote work. Impersonal. It was like ordering takeout. Punching one, though? That was home cooking.

She'd always wanted to punch the 1% in the face. She wanted to be there for the moment their perfect, augmented brain processed that the scenery had just broken their nose.