Speaker 1: Chapter two, Rowland. He woke up suddenly aware of two
Speaker 1: equally pressing problems. The acids worn off and eight people
Speaker 1: are here to kill me. Both of these facts concerned
Speaker 1: him equally. He couldn't remember his name or where exactly
Speaker 1: he was, which made the impending killed him all the
Speaker 1: more concerning. He opened his eyes, his vision was blurry
Speaker 1: and unfocused. His head felt filled with sand. Roland, Oh ship,
Speaker 1: that's my name. Roland wondered how long he'd been asleep.
Speaker 1: He reflexively triggered his deck before the dim firing of
Speaker 1: a synapse reminded him that he'd permanently disabled his data
Speaker 1: connection well a long time ago, million two or twenty
Speaker 1: six minutes. His hindbrain, what Roland called the acres of
Speaker 1: microscopic processors and data banks, spun into his blood. Spat
Speaker 1: the knowledge out, unbidden into his conscious mind. Roland tried
Speaker 1: to curse, but wound up spitting out a wad of
Speaker 1: brackish flim instead. His eyes settled on a quarter full
Speaker 1: bottle of fungus whiskey. He grabbed it, drained it, and
Speaker 1: rooted around on the table where he'd found it until
Speaker 1: his digging turned up a sheet of acid. He ripped
Speaker 1: the sheet in half, ate one half and pasted the
Speaker 1: other on his sweat damp chest. Roland's brain didn't wait
Speaker 1: for the acid to do its job. Nanomachines couriered the
Speaker 1: lysurgic diethyl acid directly to his synapses. The drugs took
Speaker 1: cold in a matter of seconds. Acid softened the world
Speaker 1: around him. His hindbrains running commentary faded into a sort
Speaker 1: of generalized hyper awareness of the world around him. He sighed, relaxed,
Speaker 1: and remembered a woman hovered over him, her hands on
Speaker 1: his shoulders, her knees on either side of his body.
Speaker 1: Sweat dripped down from her short black hair on to
Speaker 1: his face and chest. Her pupils were the size of
Speaker 1: dinner plates. She smelled like acid and desire. She smiled,
Speaker 1: revealing a row of damascus steel teeth. Roland pulled himself
Speaker 1: out of the memory. He felt the strike team advance.
Speaker 1: His hindbrain generated a map of the approaching assassins. They
Speaker 1: were still a solid minute from his hovel. There were
Speaker 1: six men and two women on the team. If he'd
Speaker 1: wanted a micro seconds focus could have told him which
Speaker 1: members of the group were vegetarians, where two of the
Speaker 1: team were on their minstrel cycles and how recently each
Speaker 1: of their firearms had been cleaned and oiled. But Roland
Speaker 1: didn't care about that information. He was trying to remember
Speaker 1: where he left his gun. The one room hut Roland
Speaker 1: occupied was best described as squalid. He knew he'd lived
Speaker 1: there for quite a long time, although he wasn't sure
Speaker 1: if the home was his in any legal sense of
Speaker 1: the word. It's one room held a filthy mattress, a
Speaker 1: hot plate, several dozen empty bottles of liquor, and a
Speaker 1: tinkling carpet of spent whippets. A large knife was embedded
Speaker 1: in the door. Roland couldn't remember why he knew he'd
Speaker 1: had a gun at one point, even though he couldn't
Speaker 1: currently find it. He stood up, still wobbly from the
Speaker 1: massive dose of g h B he'd taken with his
Speaker 1: nightly tequila, and started kicking at the piles of bottles
Speaker 1: and drug paraphernalia in the hope that one of them
Speaker 1: might contain his gun. He found some bullets after a
Speaker 1: few seconds search, at the bottom of a folder's coffee
Speaker 1: tin that was half filled with marijuana. Next to the
Speaker 1: tin was a large metal bowl of stagnant water. Roland
Speaker 1: glanced in and caught sight of his own reflection. His
Speaker 1: black skin looked ashen and clammy, unusually pale, he thought,
Speaker 1: but he didn't recall enough about himself to know if
Speaker 1: that was really true. His face was long and drawn,
Speaker 1: with wide, jutting cheekbones and apache uneven beard. His head
Speaker 1: was covered in stubble. The center of his face was
Speaker 1: dominated by a crooked, heavily scarred nose. Roland had no
Speaker 1: recollection of why it was scarred, but he knew the
Speaker 1: injury must have happened back before the army filled him
Speaker 1: with chrome. He turned away from his reflection and continued
Speaker 1: to search through the house, scattering food and crusted plates,
Speaker 1: empty coke bags, an old fashioned print pornography into even
Speaker 1: less organized piles. No dice did I pawn it? He wondered.
Speaker 1: As his machine assisted edetic memory warred with his profound intoxication.
Speaker 1: Roland was now conscious enough to remember that not remembering
Speaker 1: much was pretty normal for him, and he should really
Speaker 1: worry more about the assassin's coming to kill him. Oh
Speaker 1: ship right, the strike team was just fifty meters out. Now.
Speaker 1: He felt a gust of wind d and in the
Speaker 1: same way felt As two of the men began to
Speaker 1: assemble a large sound cannon behind a rocky hill that
Speaker 1: faced his hovel, he guessed it was a Callahan Mark
Speaker 1: thirty eight. Roland didn't know how he knew the weapon's name,
Speaker 1: but he knew it could burn out even his armored
Speaker 1: synapses with a few seconds of continuous fire. One man
Speaker 1: was on overwatch for the Callahan team. He carried a
Speaker 1: two bore Ruger fusion anti vehicular rifle. The mingling odors
Speaker 1: of fierce sweat and baby formula wafting off him triggered
Speaker 1: since memories of someone holding a newborn infant, Roland guessed
Speaker 1: the man must have a kid back home, a kid
Speaker 1: he's scared of leaving fatherless of some chromed out asset
Speaker 1: had phileas him. That was useful data. He filed it
Speaker 1: away in the chunk of his brain least likely to
Speaker 1: lose that information. Over the next four seconds, Roland's memory
Speaker 1: was real good in four second chunks. Over the next
Speaker 1: pico second, he caught equally informative whiffs of the others.
Speaker 1: It was enough to suggest that two of the women
Speaker 1: in the main assault team were lovers and they'd both
Speaker 1: had millspecks subdermal armor implanted recently. The acrid scent of
Speaker 1: fresh suitures hung heavy in the air around them. Roland
Speaker 1: could also tell that one of the men in the
Speaker 1: assault party took heavy testosterone supplements, either because of a
Speaker 1: genetic abnormality or because he'd been assigned female at birth.
Speaker 1: The fourth man was moderately addicted to ephedric's and riding
Speaker 1: into battle on a high stimulant wave. The last member
Speaker 1: of the assault team was the only one to give
Speaker 1: Roland any pause. He could guess the man's heightened weight
Speaker 1: six foot five hundred and forty pounds from the sound
Speaker 1: of his footfalls. Roland could smell the sig Sour five
Speaker 1: hundred submachine gun in his hands, but otherwise the man
Speaker 1: was a sensory blank, no sweat, no hydraulics, and black
Speaker 1: to thermographic sensors. The man was chromed, not so heavily
Speaker 1: as Roland, of course, but the competent and well armed
Speaker 1: squad he led might be enough to narrow the gap.
Speaker 1: We're in the shooting shit, shit, shit did I leave
Speaker 1: that gun? The static balance in the air chain changed
Speaker 1: as the Overwatch team warmed up their sound cannon. The
Speaker 1: assault team was close, now barely a hundred feet out,
Speaker 1: waiting in the cover provided by several large bowlders at
Speaker 1: the base of the rise that held Roland's ramshackle home.
Speaker 1: He knew how this fight would go. They'd unleashed the
Speaker 1: Callahan for a good five seconds while the killed team
Speaker 1: moved into position and kicked in the door next the
Speaker 1: big bruiser and the two women would enter, while the
Speaker 1: remainder of the assault team fanned out to cover the sides.
Speaker 1: Textbook post human kill team tactics. He thought he didn't
Speaker 1: actually remember any of the fights this conclusion was based on,
Speaker 1: but he'd clearly lived through similar encounters, and if he
Speaker 1: trusted his body and hindbrain, he would again. Roland finished
Speaker 1: searching the apocalyptic ruin that was his kitchen sink. The
Speaker 1: pile of plates had been large enough to hide a
Speaker 1: short barrel, a R ten, but his gun wasn't there either.
Speaker 1: Funck Nuts, He cursed. The profanity brought a tiny serotonin spike,
Speaker 1: and Roland felt himself calm down even as the noose
Speaker 1: tightened around him. His combat wetware did most of its
Speaker 1: work in the moments before meat met metal, so Roland
Speaker 1: closed his eyes, slumped his shoulders, and relaxed while it
Speaker 1: cross indexed his memories of past firefights with his current
Speaker 1: sensory data. A moment later, Roland was presented with three
Speaker 1: potential counter assault strategies. He selected the one that sounded
Speaker 1: like the most fun. The Callahan fired, blanketing his home
Speaker 1: and much of the area beyond it in a web
Speaker 1: of noise designed to assault and eventually fry the synapses
Speaker 1: of anyone dumb enough to stand too long in its wake.
Speaker 1: Payne lashed from Roland's inner ear and sparked out to
Speaker 1: every nerve in his body. It would have been enough
Speaker 1: to leave a strong man curled on the ground, shifting
Speaker 1: his guts out, but Roland just felt a distant ache.
Speaker 1: His experience of the damage was more akin to seeing
Speaker 1: the check engine light on a car than true agony.
Speaker 1: He was aware that if he waited too long, the
Speaker 1: sonic weapon would blow out the pain dampners on his
Speaker 1: spinal nerve gates. Lucky for him, the assault team didn't
Speaker 1: wait that long. Roland felt the big man arc his
Speaker 1: leg up to kick in the door, trumpled in and
Speaker 1: Roland lunged left. This helped him avoid the first spray
Speaker 1: of covering fire. As the chromed man and both women
Speaker 1: barreled inside, Roland flung himself into the hovel's main structural
Speaker 1: support beam, which ran up the building's left wall. He
Speaker 1: hit it with the rough speed and force of a
Speaker 1: light truck going twenty miles an hour. His momentum carried
Speaker 1: him and half the left wall into the rocky ground outside.
Speaker 1: Roland's filthy little home tottered and swayed. It collapsed, first
Speaker 1: on the left side and then on the right. As
Speaker 1: the whole structure failed. Roland was already up. With a
Speaker 1: jagged piece of two by four in his hands. He
Speaker 1: rushed the ephedric's addict, holding down the left flank. The
Speaker 1: man got two shots off, and to his credit, both
Speaker 1: hit right where Roland's original heart had been, and then
Speaker 1: Roland was on him. He shoved the wood into the
Speaker 1: meat of the man's face. It gouged off enough flesh
Speaker 1: to philippine glass and shattered the poor fellow's jaw. He
Speaker 1: went down hard. Roland smelled the familiar scent of antihimiragic
Speaker 1: nano machines. As they rushed to save the man's life.
Speaker 1: He caught a slight sour whiff of the cheap clotting
Speaker 1: agents in the man's blood. Roland guessed it was Traumax brand,
Speaker 1: which was convenient. Traumax had based their whole line off
Speaker 1: a piece of Brazilian military wet weare that itself was
Speaker 1: based on a crude synthesis of horseshoe crab blood. The
Speaker 1: organs worked well enough unless you happen to be an
Speaker 1: amphetamine attitude suffered massive tissue damage, then your Tromax unit
Speaker 1: would flood your synapses with ad aenocene to knock you
Speaker 1: out rather than risk pushing more amphetamines on your stressed heart.
Speaker 1: Something in the smell of the man's blood set off
Speaker 1: a powerful sense memory buried deep in Roland's hippocampus vine
Speaker 1: slashing his face boiling jungle heat, and his fist connecting
Speaker 1: with the face of a heavily armed young woman, her
Speaker 1: orbital bone broken to the blow. He smelled her blood
Speaker 1: meat the air, and she dropped, dropped, dropped. The memory
Speaker 1: flashed by, free of context and the time it took
Speaker 1: the other man to hit the ground. It was frustrating
Speaker 1: to only remember the what of an action and not
Speaker 1: the why or the after it was like knowing how
Speaker 1: to ride a bike without remembering who'd taught you, and
Speaker 1: when only for everything. Roland found it somewhat unsettling. A
Speaker 1: twelve gage slug hit him in the face. It dug deep,
Speaker 1: hit reinforced bone and stopped. The little machines and roll
Speaker 1: Land's blood were already cutting it apart by the time
Speaker 1: he stopped musing and bounded over to the other flank man.
Speaker 1: Roland chucked the two by four hard as he ran.
Speaker 1: The wood impacted above the assassin's temple with an audible crack,
Speaker 1: shattering the man's sphenoid bone. The battle drugs started to
Speaker 1: trickle into Roland's synapses. Now a cocktail of endorphins, oxytocin, serotonin,
Speaker 1: and epinephrin concocted to make violence as addictive as a
Speaker 1: fat rock of crystal meth. Roland instantly wanted more, and
Speaker 1: he knew he could trigger a greater dose by stomping
Speaker 1: on the downed man's skull and ending his life. He
Speaker 1: fought down the aarge and instead grabbed the man's a
Speaker 1: a thirty two combat shotgun, and rolled for cover behind
Speaker 1: a red rock boulder. He was almost fast enough, but
Speaker 1: either the overwatch man had some aftermarket parts Roland hadn't smelled,
Speaker 1: or all the hardcore drug abuse had done long term
Speaker 1: damage to his reflexes. Maybe no more crack binges, Roland thought.
Speaker 1: As a massive two bore slug ding most of his
Speaker 1: left shoulder out into the desert behind him, Roland belted
Speaker 1: out several fukwords as pain flooded the banks of his dampners,
Speaker 1: and just that second, with truly exquisite timing, the Callahan
Speaker 1: crew swiveled their weapon round and poured sonic fire at
Speaker 1: him from above. For refraction of a second, everything went dark.
Speaker 1: Roland's world was riotous, red, pain, and little else. If
Speaker 1: his body had required the input of his conscious mind,
Speaker 1: he would have been in a real pickle. During the
Speaker 1: milliseconds it took for his dampners to cut through the
Speaker 1: pain hayes, Roland's body dove ten feet to the left,
Speaker 1: enough to take him out of the Callahan spray and
Speaker 1: behind and outcropping of rocks. Two rounds cracked into the
Speaker 1: rock above his head. Roland came back to himself as
Speaker 1: the shards cut into his skin. He glanced down at
Speaker 1: the ruin of his shoulder, His little blood robots were
Speaker 1: already hard at work rebuilding the muscles, bones and sinews
Speaker 1: blown out by the giant's slug. A couple of seconds
Speaker 1: more and the limb would be usable again. But Rowland
Speaker 1: had a better idea. He used his intact arm as
Speaker 1: a flesh catapult and flung himself up over the boulder
Speaker 1: towards the Callahan and its three guardians. The man with
Speaker 1: the two boar fired again. Roland had known he would,
Speaker 1: and his hind brain had already calculated the ideal emotions
Speaker 1: to avoid the dozen most likely shot patterns. He sailed
Speaker 1: over the half pound bullets with ease and used the
Speaker 1: hand of his intact arm to rip his wounded arm
Speaker 1: free at the shoulder. Roland landed hard in front of
Speaker 1: the Callahan. He swung his own severed limb like a
Speaker 1: club and knocked the barrel to the left. Then he
Speaker 1: laid into the gun's crew with a mix of pounding
Speaker 1: swings from the arm and stomps to the other men's
Speaker 1: knees and ankles. Bone shattered, assassin screamed, The man with
Speaker 1: the two boar and the newborn child at home wavered
Speaker 1: and broke. Roland had expected this many normal humans, Even
Speaker 1: hardened veterans, found it nauseating and unsettling to see a
Speaker 1: man move as fast as he could move, add beating
Speaker 1: their friends half to death with a severed limb, and well,
Speaker 1: he'd predicted the guy would break. It's not your fault, buddy,
Speaker 1: Roland thought, as he watched the man run. Don't feel bad.
Speaker 1: He'd wanted to say that out loud, but he was
Speaker 1: having trouble working his vocal cords. In roughly seven seconds,
Speaker 1: Roland had eliminated five out of eight threats in the
Speaker 1: kill team. His hind brain predictions had given him six
Speaker 1: more seconds at least before the entry team cleared themselves
Speaker 1: from the debris of his collapsed hovel. But the other
Speaker 1: post human, the man who'd shone blank on most of
Speaker 1: Roland's senses, had freed himself faster. Roland realized this when
Speaker 1: a trio of fifty caliber slugs burst into his chest cavity.
Speaker 1: He dropped, avoiding the last three rounds of the burst,
Speaker 1: and rolled behind another pair of bowlders with his severed
Speaker 1: arm in hand. The two female assassins were close to
Speaker 1: freeing themselves now Roland could hear them struggle out through
Speaker 1: the vibrations of their bodies in the red sand. He
Speaker 1: couldn't see the other post human, but he'd triangulated his
Speaker 1: most likely location. Unfortunately, the other fucker had him dead
Speaker 1: to rights. If Roland broke cover, he'd be shot to pieces,
Speaker 1: maybe more pieces than his traumel Organs could put back together.
Speaker 1: All right, oh boy, to eat a bunch of lead
Speaker 1: and charge the bastards, deploy the meat rockets and run
Speaker 1: for a gun while they're blind. He suddenly remembered the
Speaker 1: spring loaded assault razor embedded in his left forearm, and
Speaker 1: then the twenty two millimeter grenade pistol buried in between
Speaker 1: his small intestine and his sigmoid coal. Did I remember
Speaker 1: to load it before shoving it in there? But before
Speaker 1: he could take any action, the firefight was interrupted by
Speaker 1: an oddly familiar voice. Hey, Roland, has its swinging. Roland
Speaker 1: hadn't smelled or heard this new man coming. The voice
Speaker 1: was very familiar. Roland felt a name on the tip
Speaker 1: of his tongue, but it just wouldn't come. Weapons down,
Speaker 1: lads and lasses. I've seen enough to guess the end.
Speaker 1: Roland smelled frustration, waft off. The two women, now free
Speaker 1: and angry, the other post human smelled like nothing, but
Speaker 1: Roland felt him lower his weapon. Some gray, dead strand
Speaker 1: of memory pulsed in the back of Roland's brain, and
Speaker 1: he guessed that it was safe for him to stand
Speaker 1: up now, So he did and put eyes on the
Speaker 1: mystery man. The fellow had a lopsided, squarish jaw with
Speaker 1: a very deliberate five o'clock shadow. His nose was thick
Speaker 1: and bulby. His red hair was tangled into dreadlocks that
Speaker 1: were more the result of in a tension than stylistic choice.
Speaker 1: He was tall, muscular, but lean, with a bare chest
Speaker 1: that was covered in tattoos of black snakes. They writhed
Speaker 1: in time with the beating of his heart. He wore
Speaker 1: nothing but a pair of red leather chaps and a broad,
Speaker 1: calm smile. His bare penis swung pingulous in the breeze.
Speaker 1: Both of his palms were extended out front and visible.
Speaker 1: It was the kind of gesture one used to calm
Speaker 1: an animal. Roland synapses fired and misfired, and a string
Speaker 1: of fragmented memories ran through his mind. He recalled a
Speaker 1: really good hot dog on a sunny day, push ups
Speaker 1: in the mud, searing pain in his genitals and the
Speaker 1: taste of shitty ditchweed. These memory fragments were all somehow
Speaker 1: tied to the man in front of him. It took
Speaker 1: Roland a moment, but as soon as he got a
Speaker 1: full look at those cold gray eyes, the man's name
Speaker 1: clicked in the place. Oh shit, he croaked, Jim. Roland
Speaker 1: hadn't spoken to a person in months, at least maybe longer.
Speaker 1: He sounded more like a suffering cat than an English
Speaker 1: speaking human. But Jim understood him, he said. Roland's side
Speaker 1: looked at his separate arm and crudely shoved it into place.
Speaker 1: It had clotted a bit, and his stubb burned as
Speaker 1: the tiny robots in his blood got to work reattaching
Speaker 1: his once in future limb. Jim, he said, again, sounding
Speaker 1: a bit less like a frog after a six day
Speaker 1: coke bne, you funked up my house man. That's not cool.
Speaker 1: Roland didn't know how long he'd known Jim. He couldn't
Speaker 1: even pin down the man's last name, but he was
Speaker 1: pretty sure they'd fought together back before the revolution, and
Speaker 1: he was certain they'd had a threesome with a devilishly handsome,
Speaker 1: spet SNAs man. He couldn't remember that guy's name or
Speaker 1: why they'd all been in Panama, but he didn't expect
Speaker 1: that was the sort of experience past him would have
Speaker 1: shared with someone who wasn't a friend. Do you remember me,
Speaker 1: Jim asked basically. Roland answered, good, because I got a
Speaker 1: favor to ask. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here. I hope
Speaker 1: you just enjoyed the chapter you listen to. I hope
Speaker 1: you enjoyed the chapters to come. If you would like
Speaker 1: to read the text version of this book either on
Speaker 1: the web or on your e reader as an e pub,
Speaker 1: you can find those on the website a t r
Speaker 1: book dot com. So again, the free ad free e
Speaker 1: pub and the text of every chapter will be on
Speaker 1: a t r book dot com. Thanks