Electric Church

III THEY THINK THAT BECAUSE THEY ARE GODS

We both froze. The Monk was about half a block behind us, its scary-pale skin shining in the moonlight, its glasses mirroring night, nothing but blackness. It was fucking smiling, false teeth dull in the weak light, its eyes just humorless shadows.

Nad vibrated next to me, stiff, making a soft choking sound. My head hummed, struggling to throw off the booze, my heart pounding with a sudden adrenaline dump-pumped up and exhausted at the same time, the prefight warmup I’d been through too many times to count.

“No thanks,” Nad whispered.

“Ah, Mr. Muller,” the Monk said, its smile widening-the fucking cyborg was grinning at us. “I insist.”

I stepped in front of Nad. I didn’t feel drunk anymore. “Sorry, friend,” I said coldly, in my best pissing-contest voice. “He said he wasn’t interested.”

The Monk didn’t move, but I had a sudden sense that it shifted its attention from Nad to me. After a second its head twitched slightly, and it spoke to me.

“Avery Cates,” it said, still grinning. “Twenty-seven years of age. Last official record logged with SSF dated eight years ago. You’re quite a mystery man these days, Mr. Cates. But you’ve been busy, haven’t you? Murder-for-hire, robbery, smuggling, theft of many varieties. Mainly murder, though. Oh, yes, you’re quite famous, aren’t you? Tell me,” it said, taking a step forward, “do you think you’re going to have enough time to ask forgiveness for all of your sins? Let me bring you to the end of time, Mr. Cates. Let me save you.”

In a second everything had shifted. One moment, I was defending my old friend. The next, the Tin Man was talking to me. And I knew Nad was in no shape to defend anyone. I kept my eyes on the fucking machine, standing on the permanently damp street, the ancient, rotting buildings rising up like canyon walls ready to bury us. The usual dance wasn’t happening: Normally you could tell the other guy was just as scared as you were. The Monk didn’t give that vibe. The fucking Monk didn’t give any vibe, and the vacuum standing in front of me was suddenly disconcerting in its blankness.

But that was okay. I hadn’t become so famous-in certain circles-by accident. I smiled.

“Immortal don’t mean invulnerable, friend,” I said clearly. “Two more steps and your own plan for salvation might not work out exactly the way you thought.”

One thing you learned early in New York was to never appear weak. Never look afraid. Never admit defeat. Defeat was you choosing to spare someone’s life, or choosing to be magnanimous for a change, let things slide. Maybe they didn’t believe the tough-guy act, but it put a little seed of doubt in their brains.

I was twenty-seven. I was old. All my brothers were dead. Nad and Kev Gatz were my only old friends left. Most of us died before we were twenty. I had no reason to fear the Monk, of course, and yet inexplicable fear poisoned me as I stood there. But I chalked up a lot of my longevity to never showing fear-so fuck this pile of circuitry and surgery.

It paused. On a human, I would have interpreted this as weakness, hesitation. The Monk, though, might very well have been analyzing new data, or simply taking the moment to do a few more computer analyses. This was just a Monk; there was no reason to worry. Me, I kill people. No bones about it: That’s what I do. The Monks just talked you to death.

I had a sudden flash of memory: some lucky bastard sprinting from a bar raid, somehow getting past the noses of dozens of Stormers and System Pigs and breaking free into the night, passing by a trio of Monks. A gesture, so far away I hadn’t been able to make it out, and the lucky bastard going down, disappearing.

I steadied myself and flexed my hands. My brain told me the Monk wasn’t a threat, none of them were, but my gut told me this was a fight, and I knew how to deal with situations like this. I didn’t move. I didn’t have superhuman reflexes, and movement just telegraphed intention. I stood perfectly still and watched it. Nad started clucking in his throat again.

When the Monk moved, it moved faster than I thought possible, but I was ready, even as part of my mind sputtered in shock. Its hands came up, each with an automatic gleaming wetly. Its robe billowed out, catching a draft-but it was strangely silent. There was no grunt of effort, no shout of triumph, nothing. It was like watching a Vid with the sound off.

People think the best thing to do when a gun is pulled on you is dive to one side, but that doesn’t work. A patient Gunner, a trained Gunner, doesn’t come up shooting. He comes up, tracks your movements, and chooses the best time to pull the trigger. You don’t shoot at where your target was, you shoot at where he’s going to be. You only shoot blind when you’re desperate. I used my head. It was the only reason I was still alive.

I threw myself forward and down, pulling Nad down with me. It’s usually the last place a Gunner expects, and that buys you a second or two. With other adversaries, a second or two is often enough to change the equation. With the Monk, it just meant that Nad got shot twice in the chest as he fell on top of me.

The only chance I had of staying alive was to keep moving. Nad was a heavy piece of dead fucking weight, though, and as I tried rolling to my left he weighed me down. By the time I finally broke free of him, his sticky blood all over me, debris from the street sticking to my soaked clothes, I was sure the headshot was coming-except no, it wouldn’t be a headshot. They needed the brain. I panted, scrabbling, ripping a fingernail on the concrete, get up get up-If I’d been in the Monk’s shoes, I’d have been able to take at least three shots by the time I rolled behind cover; I winced spasmodically, imagining the impact.

Then, somehow, I was behind a trashcan, still alive, filthy but breathing. I came up with my own gun. Worrying about why I was still alive would come later. With the copper smell of blood in my nose, I swallowed puke and forced myself to be still. I peered over the trashcan and got ready to sell myself dear.

I wasn’t alone anymore. The alley held me, the Monk, Nad’s corpse, and someone else-and the mystery of my survival was clear: An unknown quantity had entered the equation, and the Monk was playing it safe for the moment. I couldn’t see the new person clearly; he was on the other side of the Monk backlit in the wash of streetlight. I knew two things right away: The sound of shots fired didn’t faze him in the least, and the Monk had forgotten all about me. This led me to conclude that the new guy was a System Pig, an SSF officer. I didn’t relax at all. If it had just been a Crusher walking a beat, it wouldn’t have worried me, but in my experience, the elite SSF officers never improved situations, and their presence usually increased my personal chances of getting killed. Everyone complained that the System Cops thought they were gods, but I thought, fuck, they think that because they are gods.

They try to teach all the young kids that the SSF exists to protect them from dangerous fuckers like me, but that isn’t really true. Most of those kids are going to grow up to be dangerous fuckers like me, anyway, since there’s nothing much else to do these days if you want to eat. So the SSF is really there to fuck with everyone on the bottom 99 percent of the pyramid.

Cowering behind my trashcan, fully aware that I should be dead already, I was for the first time in my life glad that the SSF existed. And that the System Pigs were such fucking badasses. Nad was dead, but maybe this guy could help keep me alive. And then I thought of the last few weeks, of all the money and effort I’d had to put into distancing the name Avery Cates from a dead SSF officer shot on the East Side in a botched assasination, and dread replaced my relief, black tendrils inching through the cracks.

They started talking. It gave me time to think, but how fucking weird. The Monk and the System Pig (taking a break from busting heads for shakedown money) meet in a dark alley, guns drawn, and start chatting. I knew they were frisking each other for backup and telecom, making sure they weren’t each going to have a goddamn army on their heads if they made the wrong move, but it was still creepy.

Time to think. Why in fuck had the Monk killed Nad? The answer was fucking surreal, but it stared at me. The Monk was recruiting him. I’d heard the rumors, and I knew a little something about anatomy-when the Monks had been a fairly new phenomenon there’d been all sorts of articles about them in the Vids, the underground, off-net Vids, technical specs and theoretical designs and treatises on brain chemistry and how a human brain could be transferred from a skull to a CPU. You could shoot a man dead in an alley and have him up and running in a Monk body in a few hours, with minimal brain damage. Damage that maybe could be fixed through circuitry, who the fuck knew. Someone you used to pal around with, get high with, woke up one day feeling spiritual and signed up for their metal body, for no reason, and next thing you knew they were doing the ritual introduction, Hiya, I used to be your pal, now I’m a Tin Man, let me chew your ear about eternity for a while. Except now I knew the reason. And people like Nad-people like us-were meaningless, in the grand scheme. No one would miss us, no one would bother investigating us.

It’d killed Nad Muller to recruit him. Nad was going to wake up tomorrow a Monk. And me? I got the feeling I hadn’t been chosen.

I had better things to think about, like lines of sight and escape routes. I needed contact with a System Pig like I needed a hole in my head, and here were both possibilities staring me in the face. It was a banner fucking night. I wished fervently that Kev Gatz had hung around, the fucking freak. He would have come in handy. I squeezed my gun tightly to keep my hand from trembling.

“Hello, officer,” the Monk said, calm and cool. “This man appears to have been attacked.”

Motherfucker, I thought, it’s just buying time.