I sprint like a rogue virus through the city of ash-grey streets and neon-lit slums, the buildings looming out of the landscape like silicon blocks on a motherboard while roads dart and entwine between them, little channels of information and bursting light in this world of concrete and metal.

My transport was destroyed three blocks back so my feet rush across the road among swerving programs and protocols that yell at me with a chorus of horns as they tilt dangerously near to the pavement. But my mission's more important than these people: it's a poorer district and nobody in those is truly useful to the functioning of the city – replaceable by another dull worker, some flittering plod that will do the same inspid job day after day.

An especially stubborn program frittering through the ground hits my side, a ragged beast that cuts the air into pieces as it roars along, and it goes into a spin and lifts me up into a nearby shop peddling run-down pieces of software and hand-me down attachments for those that can't afford proper upgrades for their cybernetics. There's a lot of screaming.

While the tinkering of broken glass is still suspended in midair, my hand grabs my weapon and fired off several pellets of sharp bytes at the bastard piece trash that hit me. One of the trajectories grazes the target and it jerks in fear but stutters gamely on even as the corruption spreads through its frame and everybody around shrinks back at the choking stench. I figure it'll find some dank alley to slowly decay once it realizes that it has no more use – just another piece of poisoned, aged programming with its place or purpose taken, obsolete.

Sure, it's callous, but that's not my fault. That's just the way I was programmed. Considering my mission and situation, that crash could have been an entirely intentional act of sabotage. After my carriage having a short and disastrous meeting with that bulky iron transport rushing out at just the wrong – or right – moment, I'm not going to take chances. I'm just doing as my protocol tells me.

(It's not like it was some higher-function program, anyway, with choice and free will and perks and capabilities, but some obviously outdated piece - driving like a blind nightmare - so I'm saving the city a little expense and a lot of paperwork by having it deleted quick and early.)

As I drag out of the wreck I run a systems check on my surroundings and then, belatedly, myself.

Repair teams shall be here within the minute, but I don't have time for them and their twenty-nine kilos of paperwork. Although my protocols have been shaken up, at least I'm in one piece – though an off-kilter piece with several broken ribs and a cracked bone rubbing its ache against my thigh. I divert the pain signal elsewhere.  All the other systems – heartbeat registering a rushing tempo, Criminal Identification System, internal GPS and news updates – are working fine as usual, although my gender is still frustratingly vague. I swear I'll fix that at my next yearly check-up, but gender frustrations aside I'm generally pleased with my looks, the slight polygonal style of my form aside – I have a smile edged and clear as a cleaned knife and I rather like the impression it leaves.

I'm not standing like some low-grade security ghost while I'm doing this, of course. Any proper model these days has multi-tasking function and I've already planned a new route:  it jumps across the hanging rooftops above where the – well, the insurgents lie, proof that even apparently true citizens can ignore the laws of our city. It's befuddling how the people, the humans that programs like me are sworn and built to protect can simply do things so contrary to their survival and wellbeing.

My course's plotted out for me like a red ribbon in my head, so my doctrine launches my feet and shifts my hands as they grab and pull at the fixings at the eastside of the shop – the plumbing and wires extend all the way up in some demented mess designed by a mad prophet. The shop's neon sign blinks drunkenly in the daylight, still valiantly advertising services from the shop crushed and destroyed by that reckless wreck. My hair whips in the wind, the hairs brushing against the nape of my neck, an irritating distraction. I concentrate on the ribbon clinging to the side of the building, following the fluttering trail and only that – everything else is partitioned in the square steel box where I place all the processes not useful to me, packing them away like spare luggage. Only the climb is important, only the climb exists.

My body pushes up over the roof with mechanical fluency and rolls up to a running start. The patchmeal constructions that their occupants call houses are empty husks sewn into the stonework, harsh as the lives of their owners. The citizens that built these things aren't likely to stay here except when they want to sleep, but you don't want to encounter people like those if you can avoid it. I move on, quickly, through and over the jutting projections, my feet ringing out a staccato beat (some part of me is always recording and analyzing the sounds I make, a petty but jarring glitch) on the rusted iron and concrete.

Up here like some spider's baroque web there's a whole grand network of runways, feeble rickety things interconnected in a complexity and skill that would make even a true engineer jealous. I don't understand how they do it. The ribbon dances and dips along the buildings, and there is the thud of footsteps and the low crash as I land after each jump and leap.

The ribbon's thinning now, and I'm allowed back into my body: I take control of the rhythm of my feet as I clatter down a set of iron stairs fixed to the side of the building. My destination is on the far side of the street; I see the dead pixels and warped distances that are proof of the attack on my perceptions and senses, and through me an assault on the city. A patch like this, only a little stranger, could easily disrupt the programs ferrying supplies through the city and twist the protocols guiding them. Just a bit more and it could bring this section of the city tumbling down like so much dead iron.

I jump over the railing and crack one of my ankles on the flat pavement. It's irrelevant – I'm close now and the reduction in my speed will make no difference. My weapon's in my hand, now loaded with firewalls and coding bound to make a unpleasant experience to any person or thing waiting for me.

There is small distortion as I pass through the corrupted surroundings, jarring thinking a little. The moment's over and I stop at the door, considering my options.  There are limits to what my programming can perform, and my programming was advising me to wait for backup in a buzzing electronic voice. The best I can do is delay him.

But standard time for backup to arrive is three minutes in this district. A bomb can be prepped and launched in half that time.

I swing the door open – it obeys the twin urges of gravity and my weight– and there's the room and the detonator and the Virus, me standing in the middle of all it.

My gun snapped right to - a part of my programming taking over my arm and bringing it to bear. The rest of me followed, facing but not looking at the Virus.

"Stop." I modulated my voice as to be almost expressionless, no emotion there but the will to carry out the law. If you're lucky sometimes these people can be dissuaded through basic physiological combat. Sometimes. If you're lucky.

I catch a little of the Virus (or at least that's what we call them. They prefer the name Humanists, or Luddites: traitorous propaganda) from the edge of my eye. It's inadvisable to stare at them straight on as some of them have designed or brought programs able to infect you through little more than eye-contact. Unfortunately, this lessens my intimidation factor. To compensate, I cocked my gun – needlessly, as it was already primed – and took a careful but firm step forwards.

"Step back! Go back!" He says. I pick up the minuscule wavering in his voice. "I've got the bomb!"

I can see the detail of his eyes flicking about, looking for more intruders, more programs. He expects me to have backup. This could be useful.

The edged smile creeps onto my face, the way it does whenever my programming spots something pleasing or when I should be feeling pleasure. My processes have already scanned the room and I see the bomb blinking like a lost star in the corner of the room, a good meter away from the Virus. Not quite ready, were you? Still in the midst of preparing to blow up a couple hundred innocents when I stumbled in? Shame your work's all to waste now, isn't it?

My runtime turns my smile up a notch and slips it into something more feral as I bring my head up more and advance a more smoothly. He flinches but his voice somehow becomes steadier, quicker, faster as he tries to squeeze five words into the space of one. "Are you going to drop that gun?"
"There should be oversight; there should be a judge, a jury! But there's not any of these if the wrong sort of people catch your eye! What we have is a discarded society of people who can't go to the streets, won't go to the streets and will never go to the streets simply because they- "

My head shakes for a millisecond as I stop five meters from him, the point at which parameters indicate that a miss is near impossible. I can never understand what these groups hope to achieve with their rhetoric. This is an industrial area on the night shift – a good several hundred workers will be slaving away here now to make their art, a good dozen factories birthing the machinery that enables all of us to live and work as we should, as a society should, alive. Those are the facts, half a thousand deaths. What could he say to that?

There's nothing more to know.

He catches something of this and his hands come above his head in the signal of defeat. "Fine. I'll stop." He declares, his voice with the odd wavering conviction that all these zealots have. There is sweat on his forehead. "But give me a trial and court. Or I'll jump for the bomb. How good's your aim? Your-" he spat "fucking programming?"

I consult my protocol – it takes the space of an instant, an atomic reaction - and then my finger is on the trigger and about to squeeze when I finally see what I am just too late to stop.

There is something held firm in his left palm, and has been ever since he put hands up in surrender.

And he's noticed that I noticed too.

"Catch." He says.

I caught it.

It looked harmless - there was no warning from my systems. Within that second-long gap without any defense, the virus spread though me quick as lightning.


^!


PrgmDeM. encountered

His hand is s/till moving.

Fri/FoeIdent. lost Chain_o_Cmmd .lost FieldDoct. lost  SocStruc. lost BckUP. lost

Instinctively, I raise my arm and le/vell the barrel of my gun at him.

Doctrine_0003 lost Doctrine_9410 lost Doctrine_ 6682 lost Doctrine_ 7010 lost

The bullet Carved a burn-ing-ing gash <-----> through his left (left) cheek>

Doctrine_0204 lost Doctrine_7935 lost Doctrine_0013 lost Doctrine_ lost

Doctrine_ lost

He flung out his hand – whether to protect himself or reach the detonator, I d</i>on't</i> know, be/cause
then I put 2wo more bullets through his sto/mach and his h/e/a/d

lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost lost

My frame twists and spasms, my knees kicking against the floor. A sliver of skin scrapes from my legs as they rub across the harsh material like wood meeting sandpaper.

I feel the silvery taste of corrupted data in my mouth, and throw up. It was confused, rough and stuck in my throat, pooling down on the floor in a splattering mess and stank like the burning metal of a crashed car. I pushed away from it, gagging.

My body's complaining and wheezing as my bones and muscles - once so distant and lifeless – spring to action with a vengeance. Every twitch of the thigh sends jagged edges through my mind and etches a bright shining trail behind my eyes.

Through the light I could see the body of the young man, his eyes open in death, warm human blood dripping from the torn corner of his mouth. His arm was lying at an angle across his torso, although it had done nothing to stop the bullets tearing a ragged hole through where his chest was. His eyes showed only dull surprise.

It hadn't been my fault. It was just my programming. Not my fault.

I stagger towards the body, choking a tinny scream when I put too much weight on my injured ankle. He refused to move, lying down there like he was dead.

I sat down.

It hadn't been my programming. Not now. Not since that - that taint ripped through me. Not since I'd been stripped down until only myself remained. I'd had the choice. I'd had the gun.

Nothing real was in those eyes now.

Something clicked in the corner of my eye.

I fumbled for the detonator, the slick plastic slipping in my hands. My thumb slid itself over the switch. I could hear the beep, a pulsing unchanging sound, strong and unrelenting as oblivion whole.

Beeeep beep beepbeep. Beeeep beep beepbeep.

The charge would take the surrounding block to pieces and reduce me to blank code, aimless and featureless and free, away from this.

Beeeeep beep beepbeep.

I looked down my fingers. They were tapping the rhythm onto my side, a simple one-two threefour, the reaction hardwired onto the arm. Same old glitch.

Beeeep beep beepbeep.

The same set of hands traveled up my body and tangled themselves in my hair, the strands wrapping around my fingers like small thin wires. I had hair. It felt nice.

I smiled.

A same old me, mostly. But free.

Beeeep be-

I pressed the button.

-e-

Everything's just so-

-p.

-right-

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