Cassette

they uploaded one of the military’s finest minds and didn’t do any more; why would you need to when that mind can be infinitely copied into new bodies (robots, vehicles, zombies, frankensteins, real live humans); but we’re just a cheap copy of a copy, hacked by an AI and given some random variance; cassettes are sometimes stupid, but AI is as dumb as all shit; now we work for quads, killing trils and doing wet work where ever they send us; we’ll never be a fully realised human but they endlessly fascinate us; there was this old lady, neat white shirt and dark apron, walking her greyhound with its brightly coloured woollen coat through the rubble; just saw her for a second as our APC drove by

the Earth is fine; a couple of quads got it in their head they were going to save it and now Australia’s covered in nuclear power plants built to suck CO2 out of the air; the oceans are getting filled up with genetically engineered monsters; you’ll see a GEM washed up on the beach now and again, a carcass crested by spikes and tentacles; another quad is going to Mars and tens thousands of cassettes are going to die building him a home there; and everywhere is constructing arcologies which tower over the mostly abandoned cities they’re replacing; nature is healing which mostly means a deer jumps in front of the APC and the driver curses and has to turn on the wipers to try to get the shower of blood off the windscreen; he’ll be picking deer parts off the fender later; yes, we get to do the fun stuff like shooting other versions of us hired by the person we’re contracted to kill, but also a lot of cleaning and cooking and engineering and burning the remains of the bodies we’ve been plugged into; sometimes one of us just sits on the shelf for a decade or so until someone needs a spare and can’t be bothered waiting for a copy to be made; no time passes for us which is how we make it to the stars

sorry, I should be telling you what a quad is, and a tril; well quads run the planet now, they’re short for quadrillionaire and there’s maybe a dozen of them, some so secretive that you’ll never find out what their name is and if you’ll do one of us will turn up to fix that mistake; and trils are want-to-be-quads which is a pretty dangerous ambition because the last thing a quad wants is to have to deal with another quad; and I’m currently instantiated in the back of an armoured personnel carrier (APC) with a half-dozen of us; a real mixed bag, a drone, two robots, a zombie aka Kenny — that’s a cassette whose running on a corpse they’ve patched together enough to keep operating —, a real life Frankenstein of tissue grown over a metal endoskeleton who I’ve been working with a couple of years now, and me. Me is a weird set up; I’m currently a side-load, which means I get loaded into a real live human who has been specially modded to allow me to take over when needed; and that’s usually because the real live human has skills that we don’t have; or sometimes because they’re a freak who likes to play soldier; but in this instance we’re going to be doing some flying because we’re going to steal a plane and override the automated controls to crash it into the side of an arcology; that’s the sort of thing that disposable cassettes are great at; but the pilot I’m attached to has either got in a whole lot of trouble or has got paid a lot up front because I don’t think they’re going to survive the crash; it’s just my job to make sure they get that far

we pull up next to the light plane in a catering van, slide open the side door (of the van) and open up with the 10mm rotary gattling gun; actually we didn’t, but we ran the simulation of what it’d take to silence airport communications and shooting up the control tower was a serious consideration at one point; instead chartering the plane turned out to be a whole lot easier; in retrospect the most obvious thing is often the best answer, but when you’re planning the impossible you keep wanting to make it hard for yourself; the important part was faking the IFF (identify friend or foe) so that the arcology would let us get close enough to crash into it, but again, filing a legitimate flight plan to land on one of the arcology airstrips was the obvious answer; we’d planted an incendiary device in one of the engines because again it’s easier to fake something by legitimately doing it, so when it starts trailing smoke then flames begin licking the engine I sit there and wait for arcology control to call and tell us our plane was on fire, and our pilot is smart enough to fake panicking on her own so that I didn’t even have to intervene; we must have paid her well, because she hit the window we wanted her to dead-on; green arc-glass shattering and piercing the body of the plane and the pilot

she’s not dead; just punctured in the gut; but she’ll slow us down and was never meant to survive anyway and the robots are already spreading out; assembling combat rifles out of their ribs and printing bullets; and the Frankenstein is just gone; its job is to infiltrate as far as it can; the drone’s up looking for control points to hack; and the zombie comes over with a pistol it’s pulled from it’s thigh and shoots me in the head; and that should be it because its supposed to take me out and crush me but I’m guessing based on the evidence after the fact that it didn’t after it removed me from the data socket (the real me).

I wake up; strapped to a gurney and struggling for breath; there’s a metallic taste in my mouth and lumps pressing into/out of my flesh all over my body; I’m dying and then two men in medical gowns start to surgically work me over really good; like I’ve never felt so much pain to the point where I’ve bitten as much of my tongue out as I can because that’s the only thing I can move; and that’s after there’s not much of my body left except the nerves; I’ve passed out probably a dozen times that I can remember; they let me bleed out; and then I wake up in a new dying body;

after the third (fourth?) body; that they torture to death; I figure out what’s going on; these are medical assistance in dying volunteers; they’ve all got something terminal that makes death look like sweet relief; except instead of getting the dying part — surprise!— they find themselves getting surgery to support side-loads; real sophisticated stuff; I’ve never felt more integrated into a host body before; and ending up being the meat used to tenderise me; my torturers haven’t asked me any questions yet because they want to impress on me just how fucked up they are and how many fully realised human lives they’re willing to waste to make a point; although its pretty clear that society has already decided anyone whose needs medical assistance in dying isn’t quite worth a whole human life and a lot of lives that people feel are worth less are given no alternative except to make the same choice;

but they never get to the questions; because one of them gets a call on their phone; and they’re both suddenly packing up and going where real doctors are needed; even real fucked up morally compromised doctors of the worst sort; and I know we’ve won; there’s now enough people infected with the pandemic we were hired to spread that it doesn’t matter what I know;

I go into low power mode; then switch off; and so I don’t know how long it is until I’m recovered; but I suspect a long time because there’s a lot of bodies;

more than millions; 10s of millions; and I’m sure to be in a secret chamber where messed up shit happens; in the middle of a kilometre high pyramid that has been thoroughly cleansed with a lethal pathogen;

anyway this was my first big time jump; but not my last; and it’s how I got so old; I guess some kind of record;