The Black Spire Sting

Five hundred meters, six hundred, eight. The protective goggles display alternated between the altimeter and the date and time. Radiating green, January 6th, 2020, and 0100 hours flashed bright enough to dry the tears in my right eye. While my left remained an afterthought of no bodily concern, not anymore. It would be a good idea to adjust the brightness, but a heavy heart sank deep in my chest - there is no time for that now. A buildup of strain begins to seep through to the corners of my skull, increasing along with the altitude, another symptom of pre-job jitters. My inner monologue suddenly voiced itself, a sign that my limits have been tested, or maybe, a sign that something is about to go wrong.

“Not enough time to rub my eye either.” I grunted.

Above the sounds outside the fuselage of air being divided, a burst of static masked the voice of Casper and his query in a nonplussed tone.

“Bell? Repeat, over.”

“I said, how much time do you figure?”

Casper sat across from me, microphone head between his fingers. He was the team lead of our current crew, ‘Mir’. He was a quiet one. I worked with other Caspers before, but this Casper always carried an air of intensity, silent but deadly. I struggled a smile under my mask as I endeavored to maintain composure, but ultimately, failed. A glow that projected through the smog outside revealed Casper’s dead grey eyes staring through me, as if he had read my mind. His eyes sent a chill down my spine. I cleared my throat as the silence grew awkward. I felt embarrassed, more so now, realizing this was the third time I asked the question.

In my headset, wriggled the billowing tone of Mel’s breath as he chanced yet another pass at me.

“Just enough time for you to slip out of that jumpsuit. And for you and me to do the tangle, baby Bell.” He slied a line, whilst creeping into my view.

I shot a well calculated fist to the submental space of his throat, light enough to cause no real damage, but hard enough to teach a well-deserved lesson.

“Fuck off, pig.”

A set of green text scrolled across my vision and judging from the stillness of the crew, they received the message too. It was from “Matt”, the boss of whom no one has ever met, and of whom will give us a big fat paycheck. As I read the text, I felt Casper’s dead gaze as he continued to stare from behind the screen.

Cut the chatter. Mast crew has drawn BS-Sec from roof access. Mir, you are green for go. Drop in 2min. Let’s get to work.

The timer counted down as we approached the roof landing atop Black Spire Tower. At an altitude of thirteen hundred meters, the helicopter traversed the monolithic skyscraper owned by its namesake Black Spire, a lesser-known subsidiary of “that big mega-corporation that starts with an ‘A’”. I twitched my lower eyelid twice to engage the I-TECH Optic-Eye and another to enable the night-sight soft lens. As Casper, Mel, and I rappelled from the helicopter to the landing below, I ran the plan again for the umpteenth time in my head.

The job was simple, Mast crew was tasked as a distraction in the lower levels to ward off BS-Sec from our entry point. Mir crew, which was Casper, Mel, and I, were tasked with the B and E of Black Spire’s cloud storage server room on floor 169 and to destroy their artificial intelligence matrix. Should be a piece of cake. Casper and Mel ran ahead and marched down the roof access into the main building, they were the muscle, and I was the brain, the one to deal with the tech and the system blowout.

I pulled the data cable from the built-in mini-comp on my left shoulder and attached it to the optic plug on my left temple. With a fraction of a thought, I pulled up the building schematics on my goggle display and sent the info and server room location to Casper and Mel, whilst simultaneously breaching Black Spire’s firewall. With pre-written commands set on auto-run, my micro comp masked our ID signatures as one of BS-Sec’s personnel, which left our presence unknown to the security systems and made our journey to the server room a breeze. It seemed all too easy.

When we reached the server room on level 169, an access panel was the only thing that stood in our way. With a micro scrambler script in my comp, I would be able to breach the system in a matter of seconds, even if I had brute forced it. I knelt and placed two fingers on my temple as I ran the scrambler to produce the three number code needed for the access panel. Of course, this was all for show and didn’t speed up the process whatsoever, but I am a woman of style, and this is my goddamn show. The door slid open as the access code ‘169’ flashed in green on the panel display. I scoffed in disbelief. Casper and Mel with rifles drawn, filed in to secure the room. When it was safe, Casper waved me inside.

The server room was a joke; besides the omission of server cabinets, the room had no servers either. In the center, stood an eight-foot-tall cylinder that reeked of ozone. This must have held the AI. I got to work. I went to the side and typed an ‘open’ command on the cylinder’s panel to have easier access to the system. The cylinder clicked and shot out a bunch of steam. Along with the rush of escaping gas, an unexpected sound of liquid sloshed within. The steam cleared and revealed that the cylinder housed a child, enmeshed with a network of wires and cables that pierced near every inch of its skin. I stood gritting my teeth, as this was all gravely unexpected. Mel broke the silence by voicing exactly what I was thinking.

“What the fuck is this?! I did not sign up to kill some kid!”

In response, Casper shot his eyes towards Mel and I, and opened fire. Mel was the first to drop as I saw a spray of red burst from between his eyes. I was next. Despite the muzzle flash as a result of combusted gas escaping the gun barrel, I felt colder and colder. It took a few seconds before my body registered that I was dying and shot excruciating pain throughout my abdomen. As I tried to crawl away, I coughed blood. Casper kicked me in the gut and flipped me onto my back. I stared into the barrel of his gun and the cold grey eyes behind it. I closed my eyes as I accepted my fate.

The crack of metal on glass forced my eyes agape once more as I witnessed Casper, the traitor, bashed open the cylinder containing the child and ripped it out of its wire web. A rush of coolant flooded the server room floor and washed over me, stinging my eye. Casper with one hand, picked me up by my throat and thrusted me into the cylinder chamber and stabbed the series of wires that once connected the kid into my body and one into my temple port. Unable to move, I watched as Casper grabbed the child and left me to die. On my ocular display, the micro-comp began running an overload script designed for the supposed AI. Smoke and steam began to appear as I felt my body begin to tingle and my blood began to boil. My vision started to wane as the last thing I saw was the flash of green text over the goggle display.

You did good. It’s nothing personal kid, it’s only business.