Talyesin's Tales

“You know, I was just thinking we were getting out of this too easily,” Ace says.

I put my fist into the face of one of the cyber-zombies and backflip over to stand back-to-back with him.

“Yeah, me too,” I say.

A big ugly cyber-zombie gets close enough and I jump up, grab some overhead pipes, and kick it square in what used to be its face. It stumbles back a bit, stops, and comes back for more.

Now, when I say cyber-zombies, I’m not talking about wave after wave of shambling undead horror with calculators imbedded in their skulls. I’m talking about corpses being used as vehicles for insane technology. Reanimated bodies with wires running up and down their bodies. Exoskeletal frameworks moving the limbs of what used to be human beings. Advanced, inhuman, homicidal AI replacing good old-fashioned homicidal humanity. They don’t shamble. The AI is too good. They move like normal goons, fast and strong and they don’t care about pain. If we’re lucky they don’t have any martial arts subroutines programmed into the main CPU.

I hate them.

Normal zombies, I’ve fought before. I don’t like them either. They’re a perversion of nature, brought to unlife by magic or chemistry. That’s fine by me. That’s some necromancer creating a horde of undead to serve him, or a voodoo priest enacting some measure of revenge, or some insane genius trying to loosen death’s icy grip.

Cyber-zombies are an experiment. The corpses are just pieces in the machine.

I kick another guy in the gut and he doubles over, but the AI is only responding to the physics of the kick. I pop my claws and slash at the wires running out of the head of one, sparks fly and it falls to the ground, convulsing.

“Go for their gear!” I yell.

“No shit, hon,” Kimmy says, but she’s smiling as she somersaults mid-air over me to kick a cyber-zombie in the back, shorting out the tech running the length of the spine.

Ace has taken the pile of goop and he’s scooping out little pieces with the remote, flinging them with that uncanny aim of his. The goop’s nanotech, programmed by the remote, forms knives and playing cards and shurikens mid-air, slicing wires, gumming up the gears in the exoskeletons, imbedding themselves deep into the main CPU lodged deep in the brain pan.

Problem is, there are dozens of them. I’m slashing at them, kicking at them, breaking legs and arms and spines. Kimmy’s on a rampage, kicking and punching, taking on four or five at a time, she’s a whirlwind of street-fighting. Too bad for her the AIs don’t respond to the flesh bits getting kicked in the balls. And the ones we don’t put down for good get up again, so we’ve got to put them down two or three times.

Anyhow, don’t ask me how, somehow, we manage to get most of them to stay down. Sparks are flying and some of them are still convulsing, but there are only four of them left, and they’re guarding Dr. Hi-Q. We’ve got some cuts and scrapes, but we’re okay. We’re just that good, I guess.

But Hi-Q’s got a bad news smile on his face. Bad news for us.

The four cyber-zombies left suddenly straighten up and a weird light starts to glow in their photoelectric eyes.

Hi-Q laughs, this high-pitched awful laugh. I hate it when they laugh.

“I’ve just uploaded an AI upgrade to their CPUs,” he explains. “In addition to being much smarter... they now have access to the powers their biological components possessed in life.”

“Swell,” Kimmy says, but she’s still smiling. She loves the life. She complains, but she’s never happier than when she has a chance to kick ass. We went on vacation last year, a week in mid-level Earth orbit. Just the two of us in a luxury spaceliner for a week. I’ve never seen her so miserable. Good thing for us the spaceliner got attacked by Johnny Giggles and his crew, otherwise we would have had the worst time.

The four cyber-zombies left start toward us. There’s a big guy with hard crusty bits on all his joints, a skinny guy who has these needle-sharp spines starting to grow out of his skin, a guy who has sparks of electricity running all over his body, and a girl who starts floating.

Ace uses the last of the goop to take out Flygirl, gluing her to the wall. I nail Spike in the face with both feet, and he slashes at me with his spine-covered hands. They slash across my ribs and I flip back out of the way. I see Kimmy heading for Sparky, arcs of electricity sparking all along his arms. He lets loose a bolt of electricity and she ducks right under it, bending over backwards to dodge it. She uses the move to spring-load a kick right into Sparky’s face. The sheer power of it sends Sparky stumbling back.

Right into the main console.

“NO!” Hi-Q screams.

Electricity sparks all along the console, overloading everything, including the containers with the victims inside. The containers explode in a shower of sparks and flying plasti-glass, the fluid inside gushing out into the lab. The victims shudder once and die. Sparky doesn’t get back up.

I break both of Spike’s legs and he stays down long enough for me to slash through the main CPU feed at the nape of his neck. I have just enough time to notice a little greenish vial on the back of his skull, then the Big Guy grabs me by the arm and swings me into Kimmy, hard enough to send us both crashing to the floor. We’re both up in less than a second.

“Oh honey, he did NOT just do that,” Kimmy says, curling her hands into fists and cracking her knuckles.

“Three against one, Ace,” I say across the room. “I like these odds.”

“Gimme a sec, son,” he answers, looking for something to throw.

Kimmy and I go into our routine of flips and kicks and somersaults, back and forth over and under the Big Guy. Against a normal goon, this would get him dizzy and disoriented and we’d slam him into a wall and that would be that. The AIs internal gyroscope keeps it from getting disoriented, so we’re a little out of luck their. But we manage to keep it from hitting either of us, and we’re getting in a few good kicks and punches and slashes of our own, but the Big Guy is just too big and too strong.

Then Ace starts letting loose a barrage of cyber tech and scavenged computer components. Kimmy and I dodge out of the way, jumping back in whenever Ace gives us a chance, kicking and slashing, pushing and shoving. Finally, finally, the Big Guy goes down to his hands and knees, the AI unable to compensate for our attacks.

The three of us, bleeding and beat up, start toward Dr. Hi-Q. He looks nervous.

“If you run, we’ll find you,” I say.

“Tell us where you got all this Praxis tech,” Ace adds.

“You think you’ve outsmarted me?” Hi-Q says. “I still have a trick left up my sleeve!”

We rush him but he pushes a button on his wrist and we tackle him. Kimmy slams him into the wall and knees him in the nuts. He lets out a funny little whimper and I let loose a snort of laughter. Behind us Ace says, “Um, son? You don’t want to be laughing just yet.”

We turn around and see the Big Guy getting up again. He’s close enough that I can see the little green vial on his head isn’t green any more, it’s empty. The Big Guy starts twitching and his muscles start inflating and the hard bits on his joints start growing into big thick spikes and the cybergear on his exterior gets absorbed into his skin as he grows beyond the metallic frame.

“You know what’s worse than cyber-zombies?” Kimmy asks.

“Super-powered cyber-zombies all hopped up on Boost?” I answer.

“I’ll say,” Ace adds. I look over at him and give him a little smile as the much Bigger Guy turns toward us, his head scraping the ceiling.

“And you thought we were getting out of this too easily,” I say.