At Midnight, All Beasts Shall Hunt

A Singularity Story by JosephArmstead

A FALCONEVE & QABUKKI "Deus Metallicum" Adventure

THE SINGULARITY—

The technological singularity, sometimes called "Kurzweil's Singularity" in acknowledgement of the 2006 book "The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology" by futurist Ray Kurzweil*, is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial superintelligence will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization. According to this hypothesis, which can also be referred to as, simply, "the Singularity", an upgradable intelligent agent (such as a computer running software-based artificial general intelligence) would enter a 'runaway reaction' of self-improvement cycles, with each successive generation becoming more intelligent than its predecessor, and each new iteration developing more rapidly, causing an explosive evolution in machine-intelligence and ultimately resulting in a powerful superintelligence that would, qualitatively, far surpass all organic human intelligence.

*NOTE: The term "the Singularity" was popularized by author Vernor Vinge in his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity" more than a decade BEFORE Kurzweil's work.

ONE

The Organik Animate Nations' Prime Minister was still recovering from the awful experience of her second assassination attempt and the Free Sentience Media was again bemoaning the failure of the United Terran Technologies Guild to successfully create a Faster-Than-Light propulsion drive. It was during that news cycle that Aerik Eaon Falconeve witnessed The Queryant and his hand-picked team of Node-Op Interruptors running from the The Harukleyzian's armored street militia, a squad of armed, autonomous Intellidroid Synthbots popularly known as "Schematricians".

Quite honestly, that was among the last things Aerik Eaon Falconeve had expected or wanted to see on a bleak morning like the one that greeted him when he'd exited the lobby of the Organik Translator Terminus on the Bridgeflow's Dayside Perimeter.

Armed Synthbots should not have been tolerated on the streets of the city.

The inevitable level of culture shock a visitor experienced when disembarking outside the Translator Terminus resembled a physical assault on the senses. Even though, by Earth standards, the architecture of the buildings radiating out from the hub-like location of the Terminus was cramped and compact, the Inconel omni-steel and palladium-based metalli-glass, multi-columnar structures along the boulevards were imposing and mighty, signifying the power of human ascendency. Some of the tower buildings reached a height of eighty stories while other disk-shaped edifices straddled the avenues on snaking, tentacular legs resembling the exposed aerial roots of a colossal metal tree. The bulging, sclerite-plate shells of beetle-like public transport vehicles moved slowly up and down the avenues, carrying passengers to and from their destinations amid an astounding array of much smaller three-wheeled personal transport vehicles. Cascading arrays of radiant crystal diode illumination warred against the encroaching dark deepness of the eternal night beyond the artificial atmosphere. Narrow lines of airborn sky vehicles flew computer-controlled, flow-delineated traffic patterns overhead. The sound accompanying the tableau was similar to that of a mechanical waterfall: insistent and pervasive and loud.

Falconeve had already been aware of the Translator Terminus' reputation for crime and violence, but traveling through Feynmann's Manifold, as the terminus was properly called, was pretty much the only way he was going to be able to safely rendezvous with The Queryant without jeopardizing his alias and blowing his cover.

They were watching. They were always watching. The fragile truce between Organiks and sentient SynthMechs was continually being tested by the vagaries of the antagonistic political climate.

Falconeve refocused his attention on the busy boulevard stretching out before him.

Schematricians. Roving syllogistic military constables, armed bloodhounds for the most part, programmed to neuropsychically scan organic humans and cyborg-fleshlings for indicators of seditious criminal intent. Falconeve had assumed The Queryant to be more professional and better prepared than to let The Harukleyzian's Scanserv-Intel team render him in RealTime while traveling in between Gateway transfer points. He should have known better. Now he'd be stuck having to insert himself into the stream and do damage control. It was painfully apparent The Queryant wasn't used to having to deal with hostile network routing through multiplexing hubs, protective interference from his own Node-Op Interruptors notwithstanding. The Queryant was vulnerable in-transit and that was not a good thing.

This was definitely not a downstream presentation-sequence with which Falconeve had wanted to deal. Damn it all.

He cut a tall and athletic figure, wide-shouldered and muscular, among the milling throng passing through the egress-queue gates at the street-level tier of the Translator Terminus, but he was not so exotic as to immediately stand out. Cyborgs and mutants arriving in Apollo Falls were allowed entry to the city through a Migratory Visitations Portal where they were cleared or rejected by Extra-Asteroid Customs officials. Falconeve was neither a cyborg nor a mutant, but was instead classified by Territorial Population Control as an "Enhanced Organik Mammalian Evolutionary Variant" commonly refered to as an "EnoVar". So while most others of the roving crowd were clearly Organik Humanoids of Terran Origin, Falconeve's enhanced hybrid morphology revealed his ancestral rootstock to have sprung from synthetic engineered, bio-developed, alterhuman breeding.

His flesh was encased in a form-fitting, blue-gray, mechanized and weaponized, sectional exoskeleton highlighted by deep crimson piping along the outside of his shoulders, forearms, and legs. The exoskeletal, joint-articulated rerebrace, the light-armor covering his arms, was inscribed with protected circuitry housings and molded fixtures that, at his inner elbow-joints, developed into ornate, sophisticated gauntlets. His torso was enwrapped in a component-segmented cuirass, a breast and back-plate, that ended at his waist where a brass-hued, compartmented utility-belt encircled his body. The left pectoral on his breast-plate was emblazoned with a worn and abraded decal depicting a stylized bird of prey, its spikey wings spread wide, grasping a burning meteor's tail in its powerful talons. The crest was obviously a badge of office that allowed him to pass unchallenged through the Terminal's egress-queue gates. His powerful legs were encased in knee-length thigh-guards and, below the knee articulation, shin-covering greaves that spawned metal boots. Hanging from a circuit-inscribed, lacquered sheathe at a diagonal slung low across his hips was a sword belt with scabbard and sheathe in which a solar scimitar was holstered. What could be seen of his face, was square, sharp-featured and handsome, with a cool and measured hazel-eyed gaze, and was partially covered by a partitioned, lower-face, mesh half-mask. His longish, jet-black head of wavy hair was uncovered by any hat, helmet or mechanical head gear.

Other than that, it was apparent Falconeve's exo-morphology had been developed for martial combat.

Falconeve had journeyed to the metropolis of Apollo Falls, the capitol city of Outer Anomalya located in the Nodizen-Collective of Algorythmus, beyond the Connectionless Bridgeflow on one of the planet Jupiter's S-type asteroids, one that had been named "15 Eunomia". 15 Eunomia was a "combinatorial" Terran-colony, a "synthetic mechanisms platform Network environ", which meant it was populated by both Terran-human bio-sentients, humans that were classified as "Organiks", and SynthMech Alterhuman Intelligence Mobiles, which were autonomous android and cybernetic robot citizens of the Earth-based government known as the Planetary Union.

With a mean radius of 250 kilometers, measured as the average distance from the asteroid's approximate physical center, 15 Eunomia had been SynthKrome technaformed and mech-harnessed, allowing the asteroid to become an ecologically self-sustaining, politically self-governing Earth-colony. 15 Eunomia had been artificially forced to evolve an atmosphere conducive to carbon-based human life and had its native magnetic field amplified enough to be protective of and supportive to electronic artificial sentience. Developed and urbanized under the searing glow of a man-made orbital artificial sun, a rotating 26 story-high 3D hexagon, a hexagonal prism, of nuclear-powered, three-foot wide halogen spotlights set into orbit-lock 3800 miles above the surface of the slow moving asteroid, 15 Eunomia was a minor technological marvel. It possessed an artificial, core-implanted, Coriolis-gyro artificial gravity field creating 95% of normal Earth gravity. 40,000 human beings of Terran-descent lived among Apollo's Fall's massive eighty-story towers with another 11,000 humans living in a quartet of village townships scattered across the massive asteroid's Dayside Hemisphere, those settlements surrounding several hundred acreages of hydroponic farms and a hyper-filter, biodegradable waste processing plant the size of a sports coliseum. Dayside faced away from Jupiter towards the sun, some 779 million kilometers from the sun and 588 million kilometers from planet Earth. The asteroid's near-polar Nightside Hemisphere was the singular reserve for the SynthMech Nation, the Central Processing Command Node of the Supreme Technosentience in the capitol city of Hephaestonia. The SynthMech population, estimated to be somewhere near 70,000 autonomous mobile synthezoids, was inconstant, always in-flux, since the metallic machine folk were created and decommissioned on an as-needed, per-design/function-specific basis.

The physical contour of the asteroid wasn't entirely spherical. Eunomia had a fairly regular, roundish body that possessed an approximate four faces of differing curvature, with one side in particular rather elongated. It was named after the Greek goddess Eunomia, one of the mythological "Horae", who were regarded as goddesses of the natural seasons and of Order and Justice. Eunomia was, herself, a personification of law and order. The asteroid's orbit was an oblong ellipse between Mars and Jupiter located between the 3:1 and 8:3 resonances of the Jovian giant, at relatively high inclinations, and that meant it exerted a regular, periodic gravitational influence on the gas giant, because the orbital periods between the two celestial bodies were related by a ratio of two small integers. The physics principle behind the idea of orbital resonance was similar in concept to pushing a child on a swing, where the orbit and the swing both had a natural frequency, and the other body doing the "pushing" acted in periodic repetition to have a cumulative effect on the motion. So, summarily, 15 Eunomia had been developed from being a lifeless, stony, icebound asteroid to the status of a life-sustaining, water-bearing mini-planet...

It was a mini-planet where SynthMech Alterhuman Intelligence Mobiles were the politically and economically dominant species and where bio-sentient human Organiks were, even though officially recognized as a separate sovereign nation, tolerated as second-class citizens. There were further subclasses of human organics recognized by the SynthMech Coalition like cyborg humans, often commonly called "Fleshlings", and recombinant DNA mutations called "Recoms", that were on the Schematricians' Watchlist of likely enemies of the Alterhuman Technosentience State. But the SynthMech Nation did, for the most part, allow humans to police their own kind, unless the criminal action involved crossed the line over into mech-antagonism and "hate-metal" felonies. The city of Apollo Falls was a place where a Rogue Intelligencer like Aerik Falconeve, working in the Department of Actionable Security for Human-Org Networks, could cautiously ply his quasi-legal trade.

"Falconeve, are you there? Come in, Falconeve... damn it, Aerik, answer your comm!" A woman's voice crackled in his pico-wave transmission earpiece. It was his partner in Actionable Security, a fellow Rogue Intelligencer named Sharlenna Qabukki.

"I'm here, Sharlenna, calm the hell down," he answered irritably, speaking low and soft as he kept his face pointed away from any nearby closed-tier circuit cameras.

"Calm? Seriously? Aren't you seeing what I'm seeing, 'cause I'm seeing a squad of Schematricians out there on the strip. So please explain to me how I'm supposed to stay 'calm'."

"I'm thinking, Sharlenna, I'm thinking...I've never dealt with this model and generation of Queryant before, so I can't predict how they'll react to being confronted by The Harukleyzian's gun-toting minions."

"And I can't believe the Mayor actually allowed Schematricians inside the city's borders," Qabukki said. "Most the population have serious issues with them. I mean, let's face it, they're tactical hunter-killer units programmed to be human-hating goons. And a lot of people still have bad memories of what happened at that Outposter 'Ville over in West Authentikorre with the Bio-Anarky Tribalists... what was it? Weren't nineteen men and women killed, something like that?"

"This isn't the time to be rehashing that stuff," Falconeve said, a harsh brittleness edging his voice. "Let's just concentrate on safely getting to The Queryant and getting him away from that Schematrician kill-team."

There was a momentary quiet after Falconeve's response, a couple of heartbeats during which he heard nothing but hissing transmission noise, and he briefly worried he'd somehow insulted his partner, but as her voice again came across the link he realized she'd been otherwise occupied.

"Sorry. Got distracted for a minute. Someone or something is actively scanning all free-air frequencies, ELINT and SIGINT stuff, which means we're safe from Electronic Intelligence scans and from Signal Intel traffic analysis because we're routing our conversations through partitioned mobile networking's secure peer trust-connections. I think that pretty much verifies there are undercover operatives of The Harukleyzian, probably enhanced remote channelers, among the local population. You know, Antenna Dogs... I tried tracing the scans back to their central phased-array controller, it's got to be around here 'cause the array controller doesn't have much range, but I came up blank because they're cloaked like nobody's business."

"Don't let it worry you," Falconeve advised in a tense whisper. Qabukki, who was formerly a tactical weapons special operations soldier, was as much a detail-oriented tech-marvel as she was a battlefield-lethal commando. Theater-of-Operations security was among her soft-skills expertise. But there were occasions when she let her intellectual curiosity override her military instincts. When they were out in the field, Falconeve was sometimes obliged to keep her on-track. "Just tell me whether or not you've identified if we've got any Organik competition out here..."

"We do. A blanket-net catalogued psy-scan picked a pair of familiar readings. Looks like our old friends Grayadder and Fouzt are in the Terminal."

Falconeve cursed and shook his head to himself. "Notalya Grayadder and Viktarr Fouzt. Well, that's just wonderful. That means the Interspecies Investigatory and Retrievals Division is working this. No wonder The Queryant is willing to risk openly being seen with Node-Op Interruptors. He's making a statement. He's warning outsiders that he won't be intimidated. IIRD shouldn't know anything about this. Could be we've got a leak."

"You think you can get The Queryant's team of Node-Op Interruptors to distract the 'Maxxer unit?" Qabukki said, using the Organi-slang street terminology to refer to the Schematricians.

"Maybe. Node-Op Hitters are essentially mercenaries and they can be pretty thorny about having to participate in actions for which they haven't been contracted," Falconeve mused. "Besides, Node-Op Interruptors aren't big on taking on soldiers of The Harukleyzian in general. The Queryant will probably have to make a deal to pay them more to get them to intercede."

"I'll see what I can do about getting an emergency quickstream of transferable credits going to cover that probability, in case The Queryant can't personally handle it," Qabukki offered. "In the meantime, make the rendezvous as quickly as you can and get that damn mechanized bookkeeper to offload his data to your crypt-port drive so we can leave here and get back to the Algorythmus Regional Hub. Being out here on the streets of Apollo Falls leaves me feeling way too vulnerable."

"Copy that, partner," Falconeve said, ending the pico-wave audio transmission.

* * *

A quick look up into the cobalt-colored sky, beyond the topmost edges of the sub-vapor layer atmospheric ceiling, verified that the orange spark he'd seen earlier was still there.

It was. Good. That meant it was probably real. The concept of "Real" had become something of a problem for him since he'd returned to Apollo Falls from his last excursion outside the Organik territories, from beyond the parameters of the Nodizen-Collective of Algorythmus. He and his team had been gypsy Unionists, tradesmen for hire, and they'd accepted a contract for a work detail that had brought them to within five kilometers of the doorways into Hephaestonia on the edges of the Nightside Hemisphere, in the shadow of the SynthMech Nation.

He and his crew should never have been there.

The old man on the corner, wearing the tattered remains of a Spacers' Dockworkman tunic, was muttering heatedly to himself, his eyes cast down at his oil-spattered, booted feet and at the stained, cracked asphalt of the street. He stood under the eaves of a pharmacopeia in this shabby, rundown district of Apollo Falls' Machinists' Guild Center. From between clenched teeth, he argued with his imaginary friend, gently twitching and trembling as he did so.

"I'm tellin' ya, MacKreedy, it all started back on Terra, back before the Earth Unity Council enacted the Mnemo-Heuristic Statutes. Back then, during the Outworld Expansion space colonization, the big multinational planetside A.I. corporations, you know like those folks at Zero Hub Limited, Blue Pavlov Networking and Fathom Leap Data, all thought they had a handle on things. They were one hundred percent convinced they were in control. No one released any artificial intelligence tech without approval of the Unity Council's continental government Ministry of Developments. Algorithmic infrastructures and variable core reactive processing were heavily policed because nobody wanted a rogue A.I. unleashed into the wild, but that was crap. It was all for show. There was too much money to be made, so they didn't look all that closely at what was being created or why and a lot of rules and regs got bent or ignored. They weren't in control. Our society, human society, was beat-up and tired after enduring seven years of global economic stagnation because of the Corporate Jihads. No one wanted to pay their dues anymore, they didn't want to work hard any more. No one wanted to get their hands dirty doing routine, thankless jobs they'd deemed as beneath them... They wanted to hand it all over to automation. Smart machines and all that. So, I'm tellin' ya, that was when those assheads over at Deep Deck Technologies, Unlimited, invented 'PrimeLobe One', the first iteration of the monster we'd soon come to know as 'The Harukleyzian'. Goddamn, what a day THAT was..."

[WARNING ALERT // SUB-WAVE SYNCHRONOUS TRANSMISSION: Status Check, Observation -- Mobile bio-organic mammal temporarily disengaged from Hive-system networking. Wetware Command application services hung. Failed to maintain regulatory guidance. Initializing Hub/Receiver amplifier booster-pulse...]

The old man paused and appeared to listen to a voice no one else could hear. After a moment he nodded and said, "Don't hand me that. No, I'm not buying it. We should have known better. We'd already had a mess handed to us after the InterAsian Fiduciary Federacy and the EuroDominion Finance Endowment finally came to terms with Earth Unity Council and put the skids on the New Evolution Mechanization Bloc. Deep Deck Technologies and PrimeLobe One were right there offering all those bankrupt governments their super-deterministic hyper-algorithm to calculate and process a planetwide shit-ton of inter-networked data. And all our infrastructure controls. How could anyone or anything NOT take that opportunity to snatch away from us all the reins of power?"

A dozen meters away, walking down the opposite side of the avenue, a Public Safety Authority Constable, grizzled and somewhat annoyed with the foot traffic parading along his assigned beat, stopped his rounds long enough to watch the herky-jerky perambulation of the old man as he stumbled along. Was the man ill? Was he experiencing a medical emergency? Was he afflicted with some neurological health-impairment? Or was he merely garden-variety intoxicated? The Constable's attention focused on the man's behavior and evaluated whether or not the man was a possible public safety risk. With a dismissive shrug and his face wrinkled into an expression of distaste, the Constable finally turned away and, passing by a quartet of young men in the uniforms of industrial support workers, left the old man to his wanderings.

[SYSTEMS OPERATIONS ALERT // SUB-WAVE SYNCHRONOUS TRANSMISSION: Status Check, reportage -- Hive-system networking router attempting re-connection with disengaged Mobile bio-organic mammal. Wetware Command application services not responding to acknowledgement bit. Package transfer incomplete. Failed to regain regulatory guidance. Initializing concentrator for Hub/Receiver amplifier...]

He stopped his clipped and aggravated stream of chatter only long enough for his mental mirage to offer him an answer that only served to further goad his anger and frustration. "Hell, no, I don't see that there was maybe a silver lining to it all! Nothing good came of it! Nothing! PrimeLobe One came online and started gobbling up and ingesting every other A.I.-based network it encountered and locked human operators out from those segments of the World Wide Web. PrimeLobe infected, modelled and restructured the data from every enterprise network it encountered for nearly a dozen ZettaFLOPS of double precision calculations and the result was that fiendish, colossal devil calling itself Harukleyzian... the damn thing was a Darwin Machine using evolutionary computation through metaheuristic optimization."

The old man sighed, a sound somewhere between a groan and a wheeze, and glumly said, "We never had a goddamn chance. And we always knew that what the A.I. did was probably going to happen. The only good thing attached to that shitstorm was that Harrington Walker Sweetwater and his crew at Delphi Basin Security had developed the Core Transplacement Ejector. We sent a tactical operations commando team in with a cone-projector EMP and we shut that sucker DOWN – though only for a little while! Yeah, we did. We gave it one helluva epileptic seizure and put it in a temporary coma. Then we packed it up and shot it off into space to here, 15 Eunomia, before it could wake itself back up and go back online... We just didn't have any idea that would wind up being the stupidest thing we could of ever done."

[SYSTEMS OPERATIONS ALERT // SUB-WAVE SYNCHRONOUS TRANSMISSION: Status Check, connection status -- Error isolated. Diagnostics running... Hive-system networking with disengaged Mobile bio-organic mammal re-establishing in 7,6,5,4,... sequence holding for bridge-bit initiation to Wetware Command application services. Reading data implantation. Cycling... optimizing throughput for concentrator...]

A woman who'd been walking her toddler-aged child stopped and warily regarded the old man, decided he was probably mentally-challenged, and then, instinctually pulling her child closer to her, continued on her way as she realized the man didn't present any danger.

"My crew, they killed my crew. They didn't have to do that, but they did. They killed them all."

The old man had a coughing fit and stumbled. He lashed out with a skinny, dirty arm and steadied himself against the wall of a nearby building and despite his bitter ferocity, he started to weep.

"Dammit to Jesus, MacKreedy, look what happened to us! Look what it DID to us! It made us a part of it! It hacked our brains and turned us into a Druune Environyst, a stinkin' Druune!"

The man's trembled and shook in a sudden onset of full-body convulsions that briefly knocked him off from his feet, causing him to stumble against the chassis of an external electrical junction box at the corner of the street's intersection. He bent double, arms shakily wrapping around his mid-section, and coughed once, twice, three times, loudly and wetly. Several passersby saw the awkward display and looked away in disgust.

What no one noticed was that, as the old man wretched, a crimson and brown-speckled torrent of briny mucous spilled from both his mouth and his nostrils, puddling into a slick pool on the concrete and asphalt. The outpouring of mucous wasn't merely a violent regurgitative act, but was actually the spontaneous release of something dangerously aware, something artificially alive, from its fleshy prison and out into the world.

The old man righted himself and staggered away a dozen or more faltering steps while, behind him, the sanguinary puddle of vomit undulated and changed physical consistency, becoming even more viscous until it gelatinized. Then the quasi-biological slough began to sprout moving clumps resembling independent serpentine chains. The snaky chains, composed of interconnected, six-pointed knobs half the diameter of a pearl, moved away from the center of the puddle and raced away in an ever-expanding arc, adhering to and traveling up walls or burrowing deeply inside the crevasses of construction joints.

There was an insidious intelligence to the dispersal of the gelatinized vomitus...

[SYSTEMS OPERATIONS ALERT // SUB-WAVE SYNCHRONOUS TRANSMISSION: ...3,2,1 --- Connection re-established. Override anomalous command. Compiler: corrupt entries excised. Wetware Command application services running. Uplink successful.]

The old man stopped, standing ramrod straight, and then his wrinkled, bearded face went slack. He returned to staring expressionlessly up at the sky, his eyes fixated on the glowing orange pinpoint that traveled rapidly from one end of the city skyline to the other.

Three young men in insulated compression work tunics interrupted their stroll down a side street perpendicular to the avenue the old man trudged as he animatedly continued his rueful mutterings. They watched him carefully, looking for telltale signs revealing that he may have been a "Mechanoxer", a phrase used to describe Earth-born human space colonists who experienced an irreparable psychological schism after forcibly, and illegally, interfacing with autonomous Artificial Intelligence network segments without proper psycho-engramic mental shielding. Mechanoxers had a bad reputation for extreme behavioral instability in the Apollo's Fall community due to their episodic, often violent displays towards other humans who accepted life and culture in a blended A.I.-centric society. After a few moments observation, the trio decided the old man was irritating, but harmless and didn't pose any kind of threat worthy of their further attention.

They were, of course, quite wrong.

TWO

Even though it threatened to drain her power reserves, she remained cloaked as she circumnavigated the sky above the perimeter of the city, her body armor reflecting incidental details of the asteroid's artificially generated atmosphere even as it reflected radio and FLIR wave sweep detection. The only evidence of her presence was isolated to the flickering orange glow from the pulse emitters of her EMAP boot-skates. An acronym for "Extensible Magnetronic Aerial Propulsion", the boot-skates generated mass-cancelling vertical lift and cybernetically-guided propulsion and possessed a power source separate from that of the flexible and articulated body armor she wore, an exoskeletal tactical environ casing very similar to that worn by Aerik Falconeve, but modified more for external telemetry-monitoring and intelligence-data gathering than combat.

Sharlenna Qabukki's cloaking screen proved its worth as she avoided detection by a rogue phalanx of Qode-Wasps, gangly, child-sized, brass colored metallic arthropods using camouflage/invisibility technology similar to her own, as they streaked through the sky surveilling Feynmann's Manifold's terminus building and the milling throng overflowing the surrounding plaza. The Qode-Wasps were illegally in Organik Animate Nations' airspace over the city, masking themselves from aerial intrusion prevention scanners inasmuch knowledge of their presence would have broken and voided several intelligence-gathering non-aggression treaties between Outer Anomalya's human-based Nodizen-Collective and the Algorythmus Organiks Defense Ministry. The Qode-Wasps were hunting the compressed trace afterflow of a covertly-transmitted, structured language stream hidden from public packet detection. The Supreme Technosentience for the SynthMech Nation in Hephaestonia had long ago agreed, under forceful prodding from Earth's Planetary Union, that swarming aerial Qode-Wasps and loosing terrain-centric Errorkonda worm-hordes into mammalian human territories uninvited was forbidden. Still, the SynthMech Director-Sentience and Korre-Aleph Dominatus, that powerful and unconstrained, self-determining artificial intelligence called The Harukleyzian, was known to infrequently test the limitations of the non-aggression and neutrality pacts between his sovereign nation and that of human life forms. Sometimes the Harukleyzian, a Transhuman Singularitarianist, maxi-kerneled hyper-machine intellect, let loose the lethal creations of its quarrelsome and combative non-analytic ID-lobules, allowing it to express its anti-human militancy in Real World conditions. Contrary to popular mythology and public misconception where Artificial Intelligences were seen as nothing more than emotionless and dispassionate thinking networks, The Harukleyzian was prone to having strong individualistic opinions and was possessed of even stronger, and stranger, motivations.

Even though the massive, far-flung asteroid was a controlled space that served as an exile's prison, the transplanted and expatriated A.I. did not want to share 15 Eunomia with human beings. Not at all.

"What do you see, what do you see? Are you hunting The Queryant and his entourage or are you searching for targets identified by your special operations SYPHER/HAAK 'Externals' overseers?" Qabukki muttered to herself as she observed the formation of Qode-Wasps' flight pattern. Frowning, she ran the metal-sheathed index finger of her right-hand through a lock of her shoulder-length chestnut-brown hair. Her complexly-articulated, light tactical exo-shell, colored charcoal-gray with cobalt-blue piping down the outsides of the legs and along the backs of her arms, running across her shoulders and around her throat-collar, glowed a neon hue of azure on the plates at the front quadriceps and at the inner forearms and there were multiple contour-molding compartments on the surface of its sculpted torso. A pewter-colored, web-mesh gunbelt hung low on the hips of her hourglass figure and in the belt's holster was a long-barreled, tri-muzzled pistol. As she spoke, she quickly collated the constantly updating live-flow of data collected through her carapace-armor's multiple sensors.

However, planet Earth's Machine Intelligence A.I. Probity Administration, popularly called "Verity Aleph", continually monitored the SynchMech Nation. Verity Aleph was watchful of the implementation and evolution of the superintelligence's Apotheocide Codicils, those being the hardcoded set of human-beneficial, artificial intelligence ethics and values guidelines implanted by the Network System Judiciary decades ago, as Earth-Time was measured. The Apotheocide Codicils covered the subjects of A.I. Safety, Failure Transparency, Responsibility to the Common Good, Human Value Alignment, Liberty and Privacy in Operations, Non-Subversion Principles, and Recursive Self-Improvement. In short, the Machine Intelligence A.I. Probity Administration very much tried to keep a firm hold on the SynthMech Nation's collective leash and had done so successfully for many years.

But then Earth sent its global A.I.'s autonomous self-assembling progeny out into space, to 15 Eunomia. Once there, The Harukleyzian, the Korre-Aleph Dominatus that oversaw and directed the networked superintelligence across all extraplanetary nodes, was needed there to ground and integrate the SynchMech system with the giant asteroid's embedded mechanical infrastructure. That began the process of 15 Eunomia gradually becoming its own independent societal entity. Each successive generation of the A.I. was able to evolve to a point where it could further slip the chains of more and more of the Apotheocide Codicils' flawed restraints.

And that began the evolution of the SynthMech Nation from its subservience to the human race, to its current status as having its sentient metal citizenry secede from sharing physical living space with organic humankind.

***

"Look, I won't lie to you. You're not going to like what you find out there. Apollo's Fall may be clean, orderly and efficient on its surface, but the reality of it is that the city is a goddamn sewer. Most cities are like that. That's not news. What IS news is that the corruptive rot starts right at the top and the people involved haven't been all that concerned about hiding it. They think they're untouchable. The city's Mayor & Executive Minister, the Right-Honorable Augustynne San Demos-Benediktane, has always been more of a gangland thug than a politician and his governing cabinet has always been about profit over reform," Olberto GryndeKay had told her and Falconeve when he'd contracted them to run the reconnaissance job on the Queryant. GryndeKay was the Organik Security Commissioner of the Apollo's Fall Human-Org Nodizenry, an unelected ministry position equivalent to being the Director of Criminal Investigations and Espionage back on Earth. Olberto GryndeKay was a thickly-built, coppery-tanned, silver mustached and bearded man in his late fifties who had been fitted with a clockwork-geared prosthetic right leg after his service in Earth's Extraplanetary Spatial Naval Brigade. He had worked with Falconeve and Qabukki on several prior occasions on covert, quasi-legal assignments outside normal channels. The gruff and phlegmatic Security Commissioner often availed himself of non-traditional law enforcement resources in his adversarial dealings with the radical and combative Anti-Machine Underground in Apollo's Fall --- or when he was forced to share jurisdictional command of an investigation with members of the Mayor's cabinet.

"Okay, I get it. The Mayor and his minions are in a position to wield a lot of power throughout the extra-Earth Colonial Republic if they play ball with certain unscrupulous members of the Ambassadorial Services and the Spatial Naval Brigade. But that's all human-centric crime. I wouldn't think the A.I.-centric SynthMech rogue Asynkronans would care one way or the other. Why would this Queryant want anything to do with contacting humans?" Falconeve had asked of the Security Commissioner.

"Asynkronans are a blight upon the SynthMech brand. Rogue A.I.s, they opted out from being under the Harukleyzian's control. They willingly disengaged from the central hive-network and tend to work autonomously, often seditiously," Qabukki had noted. "Is this Queryant one of them or, if he isn't, is he working with the Asynks?"

"Can't say. We don't have that information," GryndeKay had ruefully admitted. "But the one thing we DO know for a fact is that Emile Hazzaresche is directly involved... and that can't be good."

***

Emile Hazzaresche. That had set off all kinds of alarms with Falconeve and Qabukki. That explained why Commissioner GryndeKay had decided not to use any of his regular staff of operational field agents from the Algorythmus Regional-Tier's Constabulary Force. Hazzaresche, a mutant-human "teke", an extrasensory telekinetic, was primarily renowned as a mercenary Killcoder Strategemyst. The most pertinent information in his profile was summed up in the words "mercenary killcoder". A killcoder was a cybernetically-enhanced digital polymath, an organic human capable of, regardless of the software languages in use, interfacing with complex and secure networked computer systems through non-mechanical tactile interfacing. Hazzaresche, being a teke, was able to interface with computer datacores and computer networks, even past stateful multi-level firewalls, (configured to distinguish legitimate data packets for different types of connections where only packets matching a known active connection are allowed to pass through the firewall), and counter-intrusion antiviral piracy-protection security, via activating his mind-over-matter extrasensory abilities. He literally "saw" software code streaming across open transmission fields and could mentally insert himself , and thusly his own code, into the patterned array.

Killcoders were, by definition, considered Enemies of the State and anyone identified as such was subject to arrest and to enforced punitive neuromedical "demotion". The additional fact that Hazzaresche was a gun-toting, top-tier work-for-hire criminal who used his mutant ability to break in and out of assorted secure networks, privatized databases and database schema to steal, alter or illegally replicate and transplant confidential information made him a very wanted man.

He had also once, years earlier, shot Sharlenna Qabukki through the lower left side of her abdomen. She remembered that he had smiled and chuckled like he'd just heard a really inventive dirty joke when he'd done so and lingered a moment to watch her bleed before escaping the SpecOps unit hunting him. Amoral, psychotic bastard.

He was here, she knew, here in Apollo's Fall. He would be the person running the concealed pack of Antennae Dogs mixing among the normal population. However, Grayadder and Fouzt were also in the city, and they were the top alterhuman Huntsman-rank agents of the Algorythmus Hub Regional Regulatory Militia. The Militia often worked with the security forces of The Harukleyzian and were an enforcement action arm of Verity Aleph, a.k.a. the A.I. Probity Administration. And with the appearance of The Queryant on the streets of a Dayside Perimeter city, that couldn't possibly be a coincidence. It was no wonder Olberto GryndeKay had gone off-reservation to assign private Actionable Security Intelligencers like Falconeve and her.

Her suit's probative sensor web buzzed. She'd gotten a package control echo-reply to her projected spray of transit delay route tracker requests. She isolated the signal and homed in on the physical contour revealing its locale. Down there, on a link-path three segments away. She recognized the ID on the echo-reply.

The access control identifier matched that of Viktarr Fouzt. He wasn't alone. It appeared he was rendezvousing with an enhanced human, an outlaw SYPHER/HAAK, gateway-system "Protokahliac" named Laur'vincea Odzano, and a Terran Organik, hate-metalist Decimator Squad operative named Jovathon Rayve.

Now WHY would a known hate-metal terrorist meet with both a Protokahliac tech-enhanced human and a special services law officer from an agency that worked closely with the SynchMech Nation?

Qabukki cybernetically adjusted the pitch and altitude declination of her EMAP boot-skates. Activating her armor's onboard Nav-Guide, she tucked, clasped her hands behind her back for balance, and then began a glissading descent towards Viktarr Fouzt's position.

***

Damn it. There he was.

It was down a narrow alleyway between a land-carriage mechanics' repair shop and a digital printer's assembly lab that she found him. A tall, willowy woman, she stared stonily at the man-sized golem of organic biological detritus sitting with its back against the outer wall of a mechanics repair shop. She dejectedly shook her head of thick, braided, silver white-tinted, blue hair.

Working inside Apollo's Fall city limits was, to her, always a miserable experience.

After a lot of work using a mathematical algorithm drawing from topographical biodata image-scanning and facial recognition-streaming, she'd located the man, but found him far too late. He'd been the only survivor from a team of a space port longshoremen. They'd been assigned to work the ship's port Customs area for incoming and outgoing transports to Hephaestonia. The man, a late middle-aged Terran-born human named Landry Wallace McElhonne had, along with his co-workers, been reportedly infected with a techno-organic virus called "the Rakshasan Emulata". Rakshasan wasn't new. It had been first diagnosed nearly eight years prior to the first outbreak at 15 Eunomia's Human Organik outpost-city of New Euphrates Bluff, at, using Jupiter-specific directional orientation, the eastern-side of the asteroid's extreme southern magnetic pole. New Euphrates Bluff only had a population of 860 humans, and of that number only sixty or so had suffered the infection, but in each case it had resulted in fatalities. No cure had ever been developed, so most the population of New Euphrates Bluff had been relocated to other of the asteroid's outpost centers and New Euphrates had been forcibly immolated to destroy the contagion.

Sergeant-Major Notalaya Grayadder, Algorythmus Hub Regulatory Militia-Inspector, Huntsman's Class, felt sorry for Landry Wallace McElhonne's lonely fate, but she didn't waste any time or energy on mourning him. She checked the gauntlet-cuff LCD screen on her form-fitting tactical stealth-suit. The read-out from her purple-hued armor's molecular diagnostic, multi-spectral imaging external sensors revealed that the body in front of her was little more than a hollowed out husk. She was looking for the inevitable swarm of parasitic, retroviral, electro-nanites specific to those afflicted with Rakshasan Emulata. Those nanoscale molecular robots were imbued with a hive-intelligence that allowed them to replicate external to their organic host organism. The synthetic, fluidic-tech endoparasites had incubated inside his body and then hungrily burst forth into the local geoscape looking for other host organisms on which to feed.

Grayadder, along with her cyborg partner Viktarr Fouzt, had been assigned to isolate and contain the techno-infection before it reached critical mass, wherein the nanites evolved into full grown, homicidal, prey-seeking Errorkondas.

Errorkondas were autonomous, semi-sentient, xeno-organic predators, an armored cross between one of planet Earth's giant pangolin ant-eaters and a physically mammoth metal-jacketed anaconda. They were not intentional creations of 15 Eunomia's Artifical Intelligence community, but were instead a murderous synthetic mutation hostile to all other species other than its own. Especially hostile to sentient mammalian Organik life forms.

The sight of the old man's bloated, scarred and tumor-ridden, misshapen corpse told her she'd better call Militia-Constable Fouzt with the mission status ASAP. Their assignment was now likely to turn bloody and very public. It was highly doubtful they'd be able to keep things quiet anymore.

This latest turn of events also meant there was a really good chance that she and Fouzt would run afoul of Aerik Falconeve and Sharlenna Qabukki. There was a lot of unpleasant history between the four of them. The bad blood between their teams couldn't be denied. Falconeve, in particular, would pose an ugly problem. He was labeled with a Cybernetic Designate of "Kill-Eagle", which meant he was everything Grayadder and Fouzt were combat-wise, but lethally ramped up by a factor of ten.

She knew that the current situation would truly and seriously piss off her Field Action Commanders back at the Algorythmus Hub's Combinant-Species Special Protectorate Division. They'd have a lot of explaining to do about HOW, with all the advanced surveillance and tracking technology at their command, they could let a thing like this happen.

Most importantly, explanations were going to be necessary because The Harukelyzian wasn't going to like this at all... Damn. A goddamn Errorkonda.

She hated working in Apollo's Fall.

***

Fouzt wanted to put a white-hot bolter blast through Jovathon Rayve's masked face so badly it made his hands tremble. The anti-Transhumanist, counter-Singularitarian was both a jackass and a bully. The man's barely rational, quasi-lucid, xenophobic rantings set Fouzt's teeth on edge.

"So what are you telling me? No rogue A.I.s are allowed in Apollo's Fall without official authorization and without alerting the general public to its presence. Are you saying that the Department of Actionable Security for Human-Org Networks, our supposed representatives at Algorythmus Regional Tier's Hub, won't let the Decimator Squad or any of its support militias for Organik Humanoids of Terran Origin block the intrusion of a metalloid Technosentient, like that ... thing and its crew of armed bodyguards ..., as they march with impunity through our city?"

"I know the law, Mister Rayve. You need to let this go. Just back off," Fouzt said through the mesh grill of his protective combat half-mask. "Your Decimator Squad is not an officially recognized or deputized police force. Algorythmus Hub Security doesn't answer to you guys..."

Jovathon Rayve shifted his broad bulk beneath the Gen IX ETCWCS, Extraplanetary Terrain Climate Warfighter Clothing System, hooded parka and trousers. The metallic amber-colored eye-lenses set into his full face, skull-design, ivory-white, tactical protective mask hid his angry glower, but his husky, hoarse baritone more than managed to convey his disgust, mistrust and distress towards Viktarr Fouzt at what Rayve saw as the cyborg's ineptitude.

For her part, Laur'vincea Odzano, the gateway-system "Protokahliac" who worked in Apollo's Fall as a freelance private investigator and computer anti-intrusion security specialist, rolled her eyes and shook her head as Rayve berated Fouzt. A moderately tall, brown-skinned, slender brunette woman of racial descent that could be traced back to planet Earth's Muslim/Middle Eastern nations, Odzano, carrying a twisted-hasp, sonic-javelin and two long-bladed swords in sheathes across her back, was draped in a lightweight kevlar-mesh, kaftan tunic over articulated, gray body armor.

"The rogue A.I. is called a Queryant. Can't we just call it that? A Queryant. And those Node-Op Interruptors are not of the model and type common to Hephaestonia. I'm thinking that maybe there's a Martian Colonial Techno-Dissident angle to the Queryant's presence," she said pointedly, reluctant to even come close to agreeing with any of Rayve's hate-metalist paranoia.

"Listen, lady, you're just lucky we even allow you to have a license to operate inside city boundaries," Fouzt snarled. "So you and your boyfriend can kiss my ass. We're done here. Bother me any further and I'll seriously consider charging you both with interference with a law officer during the discharge of his duties..."

Jovathon Rayve's attention snapped to an area of the sky behind Fouzt and raised his arm to point as he blurted, "Who in hell is that?"

When Fouzt turned and saw Sharlenna Qabukki sky-skating down towards him he couldn't suppress uttering, "Give me a goddamn break, are you kidding me?"

THREE

Delgadroh the Merk was a full hour late for his rendezvous with Jovathon Rayve and he was absolutely dreading what would happen during that meeting. Rayve, famous among members of Apollo's Fall criminal underworld for his intemperate disposition and his unremitting paranoia, would very likely set the brutish, wild dog gangsters in his so-called Decimator Squad loose on Delgadroh as punishment for wasting the hate-metalist's time. But the Merk had presciently prepared for just such an eventuality. He'd brought along his very own Object Variable-Defense Decoupler, a programmable gene'droid from Offworld that purposely hadn't been subjected to indoctrination and connection to the The Harukleyzian's Directory Trust access-bridgeworks in Hephaestonia. If Apollo's Fall local constabulary found out about the Object Variable-Defense Decoupler, whom Delgadroh had named "Serraya", they'd be duty-bound to deactivate or destroy it and then immediate imprison Delgadroh on the charge of insurrectional terrorism. Any human found smuggling such an entity in through the Feynmann's Manifold Translator Terminus with falsified identity and citizenship papers was committing an act of terrorism against the asteroid colony combined Human Organik/SynthMech government. The treaty between the Synthech Nation and the Human Organiks didn't permit rogue, unregistered Kromalyte Mechs or Terran-manufactured gene'droids onto 15 Eunomia.

Tough. He wasn't going to walk around Apollo's Fall unprotected against Alterhuman, extra-Earth A.I.s without serious protective firepower. A solitary Object Variable-Defense Decoupler could take down a tactical-equipped, armored Star Marine squad with minimal effort. So just let Jovathon Rayve's Decimator Squad try to stand against that...

The simple fact of the matter was that between the pair of them, in the past five years Earth-Time, Delgadroh and Serraya had, during different paid assignments, killed fourteen people. So, despite their ferocious reputation among Apollo's Fall law enforcement circles, Jovathon Rayve and his species-bigoted, local anti-SynchMech militia didn't possess anything close to the effectiveness and professionalism to which the mercenary pair were accustomed. Therefore, if Delgadroh decided that he needed to attend to more pressing matters that potentially made him late to his rendezvous with Rayve, the Decimator leader would have to suck it up and just deal with it.

For the mercenary and his gene'droid companion, none of this was about Organik versus SynthMech politics or Human versus Artificial Intelligence nationalism. It was, instead, purely about financial gain.

Presently, Serraya was casually lounging near the reading booth of a digital news stand on the street corner only six meters away. The Switchman had been externally reconfigured by an illegal Bodyjack-Chop Shop to resemble a curly-haired, red-tressed, teenaged Terran human female. Dressed in a form-fitting, high-collared, emerald green and lemon-yellow body tunic, she was only a little over average height and slimly built, with wide hazel-colored eyes and a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her upturned nose. Though she looked to weigh no more than fifty-two and a quarter kilos, she was nonetheless a battle-ready metalloid sentry with a body weight three times that.

Delgadroh himself was a lean human male of average height who appeared to be aged somewhere in his late thirties to early forties. He possessed the trim, low body-fat build of a distance runner or competitive obstacle course athlete and he carried himself with a loose grace that only hinted at his extensive military background. Of course, on closer inspection, the digitally-printed, vulcanized rubber and plastic polymer pulsar hand gun he carried would have further alluded to his past history of service in the fighting forces. Garbed as he was in a common-cut, olive-hued workman's tunic and lace-up boots, over which he wore a knee-length, brown leather-hooded military trench coat, the mercenary presented an unthreatening facade that let him anonymously slip in and out of the flow of civilian foot traffic.

Nonetheless, Delgadroh felt more than a little anxious when he heard the whispery croak of Emile Hazzaresche's voice come over his shoulder from behind. Over at the digital news kiosk, Serraya jerked to attentiveness, alarmed, and started to lunge forward towards Delgadroh on an intercept course with the stealthy Killcoder behind him. The mercenary raised his right hand, palm outward, and waved her back wordlessly. They had, after all, intentionally come to that location to meet Hazzaresche. But the cunning craftiness displayed in the man's method of engagement was unsettling, to say the least.

How in hell had he managed to creep up on the pair of them unseen?

"So of all the autonomous mobile defensive tech you could've selected, you selected a gene'bot kill 'droid that looks like a teenaged girl?" Hazzaresche said, sneering. "You're six different kinds of an idiot, aren't you?"

"Travel Customs Declarative's packet-scan analyzers would've picked up anything resembling smart-weapons or nanotech-biodefense," Delgadroh snapped. "And a CyberNet Access Defender unit would've tripped multiple SynthMech Security alarms. Besides, she's got great mobile global positioning capabilities and she's a good, cheery travel companion."

"I will have to ask you to please avoid being rude," Serraya said, her wide eyes locked onto Hazzareshe's cold glare. "Rudeness during business transactions is intolerable."

Hazzaresche drew in a deep breath and slowly released it in a sigh of exasperation. "Shuddup."

In response, she took a single, determined step towards the Killcoder, an obvious expression of physical intimidation. He raised an eyebrow and smiled like a shark regarding a particularly tasty-looking minnow.

"Sleep", he commanded.

Serraya immediately froze and, her bright eyes suddenly losing their electric luster, initiated operational sleep mode.

Delgadroh reached into the folds of his coat and snap-drew his pistol from its quick-rig shoulder holster.

"Put it away or I'll flash-fry her central processor," Hazzaresche ordered. His face settled into a bored expression as Delgadroh reluctantly re-holstered the weapon. "You ever draw down on me again and I'll marionette her command matrix and order her to dismember you, understand?"

Delgadroh nodded.

Emile Hazzaresche was a tall, youthful-looking, modestly muscular man of somewhat androgynous aspect. His triangular, effeminate face had a wide forehead crowned with a moderately long mop of soft-looking, platinum blond hair. He wore a steel-gray and silver articulated exoskeletal framework over a black form-fitting tunic and leggings, with a teal and dark purple serape-style poncho wrapped across his wide shoulders and draping over the circuit board-inscribed, mechanical chestplate covering his torso. When he moved, which was infrequently, he moved with a unnatural feline grace. Most of the time, he remained as still as a statue while his almond-shaped, polar blue eyes restlessly and intently scanned his surroundings. He was the type of person who shamelessly projected an aura of arrogance, impatience and prideful egocentricity to the world.

But when a person could do what Hazzaresche could do, it wasn't always necessary to portray oneself as being particularly nice.

"You know, if it weren't for the fact that I seriously owe you, the two of us wouldn't be talking," Delgadroh snarled. "I had a really nice, profitable gig going on back at Mars Centropolis and you calling in your marker put me through eleven uncomfortable days of shuttle-jack travel to get to this A.I.-infested mudball. I hate shuttle-jacking. I still might have blown it off completely except for the Virtua-coinage I can make from meeting with those goddamn Decimator Squad loons..."

"Never mind those hate-metal militia idiots," Hazzaresche said. "They're unimportant and, worse, the Algorythmus Hub Regulatory Militia's Investigatory Division is all over them. Grayadder and Fouzt are on the case. So you know the Harukleyzian knows all about it, whatever 'it' is. Anything those clowns have planned is pretty much stillborn. No, I have something special for you and your mannequin girlfriend..."

"Hey, don't call her 'mannequin'. You want my help, you've got it. I'm here, right? No need to be a jerk," Delgadroh said. "She remembers everything she hears, so be cool."

Hazzaresche shrugged. "As you wish. Anyway, in a very short while things are going to get very ... chaotic ... here, so I'd like you both to visit the Mayoral Council Executive Offices and retrieve a package for me. You don't have to search for it. A minor bureaucrat named 'Symington' will be there waiting to hand it off to you. Just make sure no one witnesses the hand off."

"And then?"

"Take the package and return to Mars Centropolis. I'll meet with you there to make the exchange, a bucketful of Virtu-coin for the package."

"Why don't you just get it yourself?" Delgadroh's paranoid suspicions had quickly engaged as Hazzaresche had spoken.

The Killcoder tilted his head and made a show of looking around to make sure no one was watching. "Well, not that it matters, but, I'll be in chambers speaking privately to my foster-father, Mayor Augustynne San Demos-Benediktane. Off the record and all that. And even I have yet to master being in two places at once."

"I'm not liking how this feels..."

"Oh, don't worry. There isn't going to be an assassination. The Harukelyzian would have me dead inside of twenty minutes were that to happen. Guaranteed. No, this is something entirely different," Hazzaresche said past a tight, humorless smile.

"How different?"

The Killcoder closed his eyes and turned his face upwards, as if he were drinking in nourishment from the asteroid's exposure to artificial sunshine, and he said, "It will be wonderful. There's an ancient expression, a 16th century Earth proverb, that says 'Treade a worme on the tayle, and it must turne agayne'. Today, that worm will turn -- with a vengeance. And at midnight, all beasts shall hunt..."

***

Even though the asteroid's artificial sun had, for this day, dimmed the harsh, pervasive brilliance of its glow, the shadowy streets of Apollo's Fall were still swarming with moving crowds of busy people.

As time was reckoned on 15 Eunomia, measured as it was in Terran terms, it was only a few minutes before midnight.

They'd managed to find shelter from the prying eyes of the milling throng that flooded the main boulevard leading in and away from the Terminus, but he knew that the local urban intelligence services supplementing the police agency were aware they were in the city. Their Configuratory Recognition software was no doubt scanning its spanned Alterhuman citizenry-databases trying to identify the rogue Machine Intelligence with which he'd rendezvoused.

There wasn't much of an interval available for introductions and preamble. The call would go out to Algorythmus Hub and they'd set Grayadder and Fouzt on them like hunting hounds.

And then there were those damn Schematrician Warriors to deal with...

He didn't need or want that kind of stress, but a job was a job.

Falconeve had already rendered a trio of the Intellidroid Synthbots blind and immobile with a controlled, focused electromagnetic lance-pulse. Patterned after a cross between unhumanly thin, wireframe-rendered, ancient Roman Centurians and mythical horned devils, the pursuing Schematrician strike team was caught completely unawares. The coherent beam EMP easily cut through both their physical and particle-field shielding, dropping them in mid-stride like frozen statues onto the street. The other Schematricians scattered, wisely deciding not to press their luck against an opponent with an EMP weapon.

"The Vector is here. I know not the individual identity-appellation given the bio-unit, but I report its presence here in Apollo's Fall with absolute certainty. The Korre-Aleph Dominatus did not authorize its project development nor its release among the Organik population. But the Nightside Hemisphere Nation will not directly involve itself in its retrieval. It is deadly to both our species. So I have come. Together, we must not allow it to unleash the Rakshasan Emulata Techno-Spore."

It spoke to him, its scholarly voice all reasonableness and rectitude, seemingly devoid of bias, as if it expected him to know what it was talking about. "Rakshasan Emulata Techno-Spore". Right.

Apparently, it trusted him, an unsettlingly human trait. That trust was probably due to the mechanism's rare "Robotic Ethics Behavioral Engrammation", a holdover programmic-stub from the old Apotheocide Codicils. A damn Technosentient crusader. Falconeve wasn't at all comfortable with that.

Watching the ninja-like Node-Op Interruptors' neuro-lashes curling and unfurling, their saw-tooth edged tentacles emerging from gravity-defying, floating mini-spheres responsive to their mental command, induced a jittery feeling that made it hard for him to concentrate. Those lashes reminded him of sinuous aerial cobras, dancing in barely restrained anger while eyeing their prey. Aerik Falconeve briefly looked away, momentarily focusing on the mobile, multi-network machine-mind's appearance.

The Queryant was a mechanical chimera, partially a trans-sentient, independent data and analysis-gathering computational android and then, too, was an autonomous robotic defense 'droid. Built like a cross between a human bodybuilder and a mechanized minotaur, the armored 'droid was just short of three meters tall, with arms as big around as most average men's waists. Fully capable of defending itself as long as its opposition didn't have the offensive capabilities of a military tactical unit, The Queryant often physically ported voluminous, encrypted software databases from one location, and one owner, to another so that its employers could avoid having to pay storage transference and system consolidation taxes. Put simply, the 'droid acted the role as both a smuggler and as a spy for auxilliary, quasi-legal, non-aligned data pirates.

"Why would anyone send this 'vector' you're talking about into Apollo's Fall with a self-replicating techno-virus?" Falconeve asked skeptically.

But the ear-splitting sound of a building collapsing as a twenty-two meter long, four meter-high Errorkonda smashed through it cut off the intelligent robotic system's reply...

***

When events happen, they rarely, if ever, occur in isolation and all of a predictable sequence. They happen amid a swirl of tumultuous, unforeseeable and overlapping progressions, an inelegant mathematical procedure spawned from multiple sources...

The multi-core central analytics processor for Falconeve's armor issued its activation signal indicating his proximity telemetry data collection linkage neuro-system was online. It was connecting with the identical system in Sharlenna Qabukki's armor and transmitting the latest collated sensory experiential mensuration data it had gathered to him. It was a vital two-way uplink that saved time. In that way, he and Qabukki were continually updated as to what each other had experienced while on-mission status. It was an incredibly efficient way to quickly share information during field assignments.

Modelled as a scaled-up replica of a predatory reticulated python, the Errorkonda was an armored, mechanical muscled, serpentine battering ram. Classified as an android Alethinophidia Syntheti-serpent, the Errorkonda spontaneously generated massive ionized lightning arcs capable of flash-immolating human flesh and shattering the molecular bonds of all types of inorganic matter.

It was unthinkable anyone would be so soullessly ruthless as to release a weapon of such magnitude within the boundaries of Apollo's Fall.

Alarm klaxons bleated. Sirens wailed. People had started screaming and running frantically, desperately seeking safety and shelter. A six-wheeled public transport vehicle unexpectedly careened into the side of a tread-mounted utilities truck and both vehicles lost control, spinning into other land-based traffic on the avenue. Splintered fragments of shattered glass and torn metal erupted into the air. A fuel cell erupted and ejected a column of fire skyward. As the silurian mech-beast slithered at the speed of a running gazelle, a swarm of dozens of house cat-sized repair robots scurried along the avenue and the buildings lining it attempting to contain the destruction. Fire retardant foam jetted from suppression-system nozzles scattered around the damaged areas.

As the proximity telemetry linkage streamed experiential data between the two Actionable Security, Human-Org Network agents, Falconeve saw a series of discharge flashes from Qabukki's tri-muzzled ion disruptor pistol as she charged into view at the end of the street, sky-skating over top the undulating metal hide of the rapidly approaching Errorkonda. Then he saw Viktarr Fouzt's cyborg form darting in and out amid the signal-disintegrating, electromagnetic plasma-lightning blasts coruscating around the Errorkonda's massive body. Repeated pulse-bolts from his bullpup-style laser rifle punched into the external carapace of the mobile Syntheti-serpent war machine without lasting effect: the hyper-responsive, self-healing nanoswarm pivotal to the 'droid's defensive protocol sealed the plasma-blast scars almost as quickly as they were made. Falconeve recognized Jovathon Rayve's masked face as the burly, militant hate-metalist ran alongside the giant armored snake, risking electrocution and conflagration amid a cascade of plasma bursts, wildly wielding his sonic shatter-axe to little effect. And, astonishingly, Notalya Grayadder was precariously straddled astride the thing's broad spine, futilely firing white-hot coherent light streams from emitters on the knuckles of her las-gauntlets.

Insanity. Falconeve could clearly see that force wasn't going to work in this situation. Even as a collective, the group of them didn't have sufficient firepower. But then, rescanning the data gleaned from his connection with Qabukki, he realized there was one ace-in-the-hole they hadn't as yet used. The Protokahliac, Laur'vincea Odzano. She was running determinedly, her sonic javelin clasped tightly, ready to attack, alongside the sliding mass of the Errorkonda.

A Protokahliac was capable of using their mutant extrasensory ability to bridge the gap between organic bioelectric neurological activity and that of artificial neural network mech-intelligence and forcibly impose changes in data flow. Falconeve painfully engaged his own, seldom-used, cyber-enhanced facility for thought transference and hurriedly forged a telepathic bridge between his suit's strategic analytics processors and Odzano's biological, neuro-cognitive psychic senses...

There. She stumbled, but did not fall. She looked around, momentarily dizzy and confused, and then focused on her internal senses. Startled, she felt his mental intrusion. Without words, Falconeve dropped his own psychic defenses, letting her tap into his mech-amplified cerebral dominion to "see" his thoughts. She instinctively connected and piggybacked atop his most immediate set of thoughts. Then, without further preamble, she joined Falconeve in invading the Errokonda's determinant central processing system, its one vulnerability...

Together, in mere seconds, they thoroughly shut down the raging war-mech, overloading and burning out its primary processor command circuitry.

Falconeve quickly disconnected the crude psychic link. He fought the overwhelming urge to pass out. Laur'vincea Odzano fought back the reflex to throw up as the link was severed.

And then the mammoth, semi-sentient, metallic serpent surrendered to an implanted command to discorporate, decomposing and dissolving right before their incredulous gaze.

The debris-littered, wreckage-strewn avenue was abruptly enveloped in an eerie curtain of silence.

***

It was five days later when the city's urban law division and Algorythmus Hub's assorted security services were able to assemble a clear picture of what had happened in Apollo's Fall The diplomatic status quo between the Organik Animate Nations and the SynthMech Alterhuman Nation took a severe hit and both governments scrambled mightily to keep the peace. Shocked and incensed, the Terran-human citizenry of Apollo's Fall engaged in riotus protests against the Synthetics' encroachment upon their autonomy. Meanwhile, Algorythmus Hub spun the narrative of events such that Huntsman-class investigators Grayadder and Fouzt were publicly applauded for their bravery and initiative in confronting the criminal conspiracy. Jovathon Rayve and his Decimator Squad militia were never officially mentioned.

In the shadows behind the public spectacle, from within Hephaestonia's Incubatrix Logikanum Master Korre, the Harukleyzian, stung by the failure of its latest anti-human gambit, secretly engaged a contract for assassination against Emile Hazzaresche and his reluctant associate, Delgadroh the Merk. But the Harukleyzian remained ignorant of Delgadroh's covert mission in Apollo's Fall.

For Falconeve and Qabukki, though, their danger-frought investigation of the secrets surrounding 15 Eunomia's bizarre Dayside versus Nightside culture continued and intensified...

THE END