Myth Gods Tech - Omnibus Edition: Science Fiction Meets Greek Mythology In The God Complex Universe (27 page)

It was
impossible to miss, any living thing would have been dead by that
time, or at least severely crippled.

The
cobra was something else. She was stunned for a second or two, but
she rebundled her neck and bit again, this time driving her teeth
deep in the warden’s flesh.

Leo slid
past the struggling man and ran out of the prison door.

Chapter 19:// Grouping up

As the user
carried himself past the monitor station, the daemons decided a
reunion was in order.

httpd> The layout is classified, can’t access
it.

armd>
Anyone have any more bright ideas?

fingerd> Sure. Let’s call our number, parrotd will pick it
up and tell us where he is.

armd>
You idiot. We can’t call without a smartphone ourselves.

eyed>
For once, the idiot might be right. There’s a phone on the guard
station.

An arrow
showed up on the veil, and the user was too tired and in pain to
disagree with it. He shoved himself towards the guard station area.
It was filled with monitors. He could see in crisp bone-crunching
detail the cobra munching on the big blue bastard.

“
Poor bastard,” Leo sighed and closed the door behind
him.

The user
picked up his walkman with glee and clipped it in place.

walkmand> Handshake. Whazza?

httpd> You’ll get the logs at the next sync cycle. Now
quick, make the user call up his phone.

The
walkman shuffled to a rarely played MP3, a silly pop song from some
forgotten teenage idol that sang, “I lost my phone and I can’t find
it, leave me alone cause I can’t fight it.”

“
WTF,” the user said in acronym but then he had an
epiphany.

He
called up his own number, heard the phone ringing. He grabbed the
access card lying on the desk, left the landline dialling, and
found the inmate storage area. He shuffled a bit with one good arm
but he managed to find his things, exchange his clothes for the
prison wear and pick up his phone.

parrotd> Handshake. I’ll be the session leader.

The rest
of the daemons ACKnowledged. Only armd was silent.

Chapter 20:// Falling apart

Leo bled
all over the pavement but at some point it clotted and was
marginally better. It hurt more now, but he had no idea how to
bandage himself. He’d tried to google some instructions but for
some reason his phone refused to connect to any
networks.

Could it
be the cops blocking his devices?

He tried
to remember every cop show he’d ever seen, and thought that it was
best that way, since they could track him from his phone, his
paycards, everything.

He was
very tired and acking. A driverless cab drove parallel to him,
slowing down at his speed, hoping he would hail it. He really
wanted to just jump in and let it take him home. Or at least, to
Jimmy’s home. He would have done so, but the cab would probably
detect his injury and alert a hospital, which would instantly flag
him as a fugitive. He let it drive past and pick up speed
again.

He
gritted his teeth and tried to walk like a normal person on the
street. It was dark, but the various LED lights from storefronts
and a moderate amount of pedestrian traffic made the roads pretty
normal. He wouldn’t stand out, nor would he be blocked
anywhere.

Eventually, he reached Jimmy’s house and propped himself on
the street corner. He was tired, and could easily imagine himself
dropping on his friend’s couch and sleeping for a week. He felt
weird, dizzy, as if the bite on his leg had left him with no blood
to speak of, exhausted, feverish.

His
trusty walkman shuffled to an old movie soundtrack, the melody of
suspense and a gradual build of tension. It felt just like any spy
movie ever. In his haze, his ear twitched up and he looked around
the street.

There
was a car across the entrance to the building, with two bored
people inside it.

Just
like any cop movie ever.

“
Shit!” Leo spat out and put his back to the wall.

He
couldn’t go to Jimmy’s. It was being watched. All the cops had to
do to figure out his closest acquaintances was to look up his
social profile. There were some fellow people at work, but Amazing
Jimmy was clearly his best friend. Any half-witted cop would set a
trap for him there.

Surely
Jimmy had no idea, but even if he did, what could he do against
them?

Leo
didn’t really want to run away from the police. Hell, in his state,
he would happily turn himself in and let them treat him medically,
as it was expected. Noone believed him that he hadn’t murdered the
mayor, but at least they would keep him alive till the
trial.

But that
thing… That cobra, who got inside an augmented-proof jail cell, who
took down an Ares Security prison warden (bastard or not, he was
trained and equipped), and who might still be looking to kill
him.

That
snake wasn’t natural. It couldn’t have been natural. It was
something straight out of a science fiction B movie.

He
wobbled a bit and pushed his face against the wall. What if the
cobra had already killed him and he was simply hallucinating? Are
cobras poisonous?

God he
felt so alone.

Chapter 21:// Hanging on

“
Cobras are Elapids, a type of poisonous snake
with hollow fangs fixed to the top jaw at the front of the mouth.
These snakes cannot hold their fangs down on prey so they inject
venom through their fangs, according to the San Diego
Zoo.”

The
homeless man’s face was illuminated by his phone’s display. He
turned it around for Leo to see for himself.

“
Well, shit,” Leo said and threw himself on the man’s
carpet.

The
“carpet” was made of wet cardboard and various scraps of cloth.
George the bum had welcomed him in his spot, which was relatively
dry and covered from the chilly wind. He’d spared a dirty blanket
for him as well. He had no food, but he assured Leo that he could
get some soup tomorrow morning from some good people a couple of
roads down.

Homeless
people knew what it was like to have nothing left, so they shared
whatever they had with new arrivals. A few decades ago it was
unheard of to see homeless people in Athens. It was something you
only saw in movies, the filth of the big city, its underbelly of
poverty.

Now it
was common. George the bum had found refuge under a bridge.
Whatever little he scraped by, he brought here. As for his
smartphone, it was part of a humanitarian initiative.

“
Here, stuff this in,” George said as he gave Leo some sofa
sponge to put under his clothes. He had tore out handfuls of it and
kept it in a trashbag. “For insulation, stuff as much as you can,
it’ll keep ya warm.”

Leo did,
and he said, “Thanks. How come you have a phone?”

George
gripped the device in his dirty hands and rubbed it gently. “Oh
this. Well, it’s a gift from the city. Last year, Mr. Stergiou the
mayor, bless his heart, announced a program to give out a phone to
every homeless person in the city. People needed them, he’d said,
to look for jobs, to communicate with others, to find out about the
efforts of the various charities. If an employer calls, how are you
gonna answer without a phone?”

“
The mayor did all that?” Leo asked and gulped.

“
Bless his heart.”

Leo
stared at some flashing video billboard in the distance and fought
back the tears.

“
Yeah… Bless his heart.”

Chapter 22:// Calling around

“
This is
not what I had in mind for a first date,” said Katerina.

Leo
grunted and managed to stay upright with the help of George. “If
you had, you’d be a really weird woman. Did you bring the
soup?”

“
Yeah,” Katerina said, holding her coat close to her in the
chilly weather. She gave the hot soup to Leo who passed it on to
George. It steamed in his hands and the homeless man took in the
aroma and the heat, savouring it.

“
Thank you, beautiful lady,” George said. Then his expression
turned sour. “Your friend needs help.”

Katerina
took in the dour condition Leo was in, and helped him along the
way.

“
Wasn’t sure you’d come,” Leo said quietly.

“
You are no murderer. I believe you when you say you are
getting framed,” she said with conviction.

“
How can you be so sure? You barely know me.”

“
When you stop seeing with ARs and search engines and
artificial eyes, you learn to rely on your intuition. I would have
darted out of the clinic’s backlot the minute you came close to me
if you were a dangerous man.”

They
walked with frequent stops. Leo was feeling sick, his heart was
beating fast.

parrotd> OK, radio silence is over boys. We need to find a
way to help the user.

The PAN
was keeping all wireless communication to a minimum, to avoid
detection. Parrotd had blocked all outside network access, that’s
why the user had needed the homeless man’s phone to search about
the poison and call up the waitress.

httpd> I’m pretty much useless.

parrotd> We can’t risk even a trickle of data,
sorry.

httpd> ACK.

armd>
I’m useless too.

There
was a delay in parrotd’s response. He already knew what had
happened and why, the others had shared logs already, and he could
understand the arm daemon’s problem. A controlling entity with
nothing to control over is meaningless. And in the world of
computers, there are no meaningless stuff. It all gets
erased.

parrotd> Look man, there is a gap in our logs from the
time of the murder. I know it seems you are responsible, but I also
know that I owe you the benefit of the doubt. You destroyed
yourself in order to keep the user safe, and ultimately, that’s the
only thing that matters. You are not useless. Sure, you have no
functioning servos and stuff, but neither do we. Even fingerd who
is a one-trick-pony managed to come up with an idea a few hours
ago. If he can, then so can you.

armd>
So you’re saying that I can beat a moron in brainstorming.
Great.

eyed>
He won’t help. I still think he is the one responsible for it. He
is an evil hand.

parrotd> Shut up or I’ll kill your processes before you
can say 01.

armd>
So we can’t get any new data.

httpd> Nada.

armd>
Then let’s see what data we already have with us.

eyed>
This is more than selfies and some google searches you barbarian
hotheaded evil hand. This is a medical issue.

armd>
Then let’s ask the guy who handles medical issues.

parrotd> Nobody handl- Oh! This is brilliant! Armd you are
brilliant!

Leo took
in a short breath, clutched his heart and collapsed on the
street.

Chapter 23:// Pumping up

sugard>
Handshake. Hello again. Oh, this isn’t good at all.

parrotd> Give me your files.

While
sugard
read the updated logs,
parrotd
parsed through the medical
files that resided in the synthetic insulin gland’s memory. He
skipped the fuzzy logic rules that he used to calculate the dosage
and went straight to the text files. They contained pretty much any
side-effect and condition related to insulin and glucagon, the two
things the gland maintained in the user’s body at optimum levels.
He was about to give up when he found some data about countering
poison.

parrotd> Here! This is it. Can a spike of insulin counter
a poison?

sugard> It could, but only if it was a beta blocker
poisoning, as you see here.

parrotd> But the symptoms match.

sugard> Yes, I am reading a clear case of hyperkalemia.
This is unusual for a snake bite.

httpd> There is nothing usual about that snake!

parrotd> You are right. It must have been bioengineered,
for increased strength and size. It’s possible it has added effects
to its poison bite. Like a paralysing agent from other venoms found
in nature.

eyed>
So the insulin can cure the poison?

parrotd> No, but it can negate the added paralysing agent
that cobra had and help the user’s immune system fight just the
venom itself.

sugard> I’m not certain that’ll work.

parrotd> Pump him now!

sugard> I cannot take any action that would jeopardise the
health of the user.

armd>
Oh I would punch you now if I could.

sugard> I’m hard coded. Unlike the rest of those softies,
the source code does not give you root access to me. You can’t
force me to do anything.