Chapter 2
TARGET ACQUIRED
From where he walks to my left and slightly behind, I hear my handler curse as a strange wobble overlays the forest with ripples for a few seconds. A high sound descends into a bass-note thrum. It abates slowly, while shivers travel up my legs from the soles of my boots.
I glance at him.
“That’s probably the scheduled boosting of the LHC,” he mumbles, while looking around us at the trees. “Normal.” His left hand has a stranglehold on a branch.
It sounds as if he’s trying to convince himself. Does he think I don’t understand?
LHC equals Large Hadron Collider. That explains the other weirdness recently.
This is worse. Being here, among the trees, makes a difference. Not that my remembered past is anything but recent.
“Wait.” He splays his fingers, palm downward, like an owner commanding a dog.
Glancing rays of the last light of day dapple me as I rotate my arm. Sutures and scars dominate my skin. One set of marks encircles my left forearm. What am I made of, and where do I come from? These are questions that I mean to have answered.
Am I human or merely a jigsaw of misbegotten parts?
This is my first outing, and I plan to use it well, and diabolically…love that word. Diabolical.
“Here we are. Priority One target, Simon Tarrant, is in that house, Struct Four,” whispers my handler, a thirty-three-year-old ex-marine called… What is his name? I can’t remember. I might’ve been told to forget.
My asshole masters rummage through my mind and fuck with it constantly, though I’ve figured out ways around it.
I clench my fist, but quietly, not wanting to be noticed. If they suspect my simmering annoyance, this day might go badly.
Priority one overrides my thoughts, and I know why that happens and hate it, but I look in the direction of his outstretched arm.
I’m still hating, but I look. I can do both.
We are hidden in the trees on a ridge above two houses.
Through the sunset-haloed branches and a gap in the trees, I zero in on a fence line between the pair of two-story houses.
Two women face each other. They’re chatting, judging by their mouth movements.
I can read some of what they say. Reading lips has been useful these past days.
One of my self-taught skills I’ve kept hidden.
The one on the left is Hailey Tarrant. The daughter of my target.
I’m supposed to kill her father and anyone who gets in the way. The priority order and the training forced on me makes my fingers itch to close around her throat and crush it.
Forced.
Not voluntary. They talked around us, unfettered, thinking we were dumb.
I am not.
Cracked memories drag themselves from the detritus of my brain when I least expect them.
Knives plunge into the flesh of fellow structs as we wrestle. There were four of us.
The fire of pretend guns in VR. The fire of real ones as they test our resilience to bullet strikes. The shock as they hit. The disintegration of our targets when we get to shoot.
The drone of looped words burrowing into my ears.
The drip of an IV line, heavy with blue drugs. The bright rectangles of ceiling lights hurt my eyes. Electric shocks arc up my arms and legs until I spasm and scream.
“Try this? That worked on Three. We should be consistent. More subjects would help.”
Pieced-together snippets of conversation are laced with pain and spit and cries.
Others suffered with me.
The trees rustle back into my reality, as does the rasp of my handler’s breathing.
The women blur as a new memory pokes at me like a sharp stick piercing a wound. A disturbing memory. Something about the daughter is familiar.
“Got that?” he insists. He’s been asking, and I’ve lost track of how many times. “Fuck. Forgot you can’t talk. They’d better fix that ’cause this is a problem, you being mute. Nod?”
I nod, grunt, and I smile inside. Pretense is everything.
“Good. Come midnight we will be going down there and terminating her and everyone in that house. Or you will. It’ll be your first, Struct Four? First girl for you? I mean to kill not to fuck.” He chuckles as if this is funny.
I nod. That is humor? I make a note. My handler finds killing girls funny and implies he has done it himself.
He chuckles. “We should get you a cake. Get some hooker to blow you. Get you a cake and one candle? We’d have to blindfold her so she doesn’t see your ugly face.
Maybe kill her afterward, too?” He laughs.
“This outing is so off label, I should be wiping my own fucking memory. Anyway, relax and sleep until I wake you. Sleep now. That’s a command. ”
I resist for a few seconds. The more practice I get at resisting orders the better I become at it, then I lie down among the leaves and close my eyes.
Something about the girl nags me. Maybe the shape of her ass as she leans on the fence and cocks her hip?
She waves at me, younger, happier, then runs away. I chase her. I’ve got a hard-on and I’m praying she doesn’t notice. I’m lighter than I am now. I’m thinking about how to get into her pants and how can I get her undressed. The memory fades.
I still have a dick? I do. I’ve felt it before.
Nevertheless, I double check with my hand. The wreckage in my head makes me doubt things. I do have one, though an unsettling feeling makes me dubious about my ownership of it. Is this cock mine or somebody else’s? They call me Struct Four, but I’ve heard another, longer name used for us.
Frankenstruct. I turn the word over. The derivation of it is obvious. My brain got it in one second when I first heard it.
They assembled us from different body parts, which means I am a jigsaw man.
But whose brain do I have? They trained me to kill and obey orders.
Not to think. Thinking about things is more fun.
I resist the sleep order for as long as I can, subtly crushing my hands into fists then releasing them, over and over, while I ruminate over what I am.
Always, I question things. I question therefore I exist.
What if my dick comes from an alien or a chicken? Annnnd…do chickens have dicks?
Why do I know about Frankenstein and Shakespeare when my handler has the intelligence of the aforementioned chicken?
The dry leaves and twigs crunch under me as I shift onto my side. I stare at the insides of my eyelids and count chickens until sleep crashes in and delivers me into the black.