Hello again, and welcome to chapter two. Let me just say that the reaction I expected to receive from the community was nowhere near the reaction I got from the community - I expected Twist to be pretty much ignored. Instead, I’ve been getting a whole bunch of good feedback from you guys. Thanks a bunch! That’s the kind of thing that keeps me up until six in the morning just so I can pump out my next article for no apparent reason. Keep sending in your thoughts!
Anyway, er, chapter two is not exactly, say, as exciting as the first. Not all of them will be. But when you go to a movie or read a book, of course not all of it will have action, especially not at the beginning. I don’t know if that’s what made you guys like chapter one or not, the fact that JC died and whatnot, but honestly, there’s plenty more where that came from. We just have to get through a few plot / dialogue / exposition chapters first. Wait! Don’t quit! Nooooo!
--- --- --- --- CHAPTER TWO
--- --- --- ---
Dominic stared at himself in the mirror.
There he was, under that dirt and blood. Thirty three years of living. Thirteen years of fighting. And most of it might as well be going down the drain with the running water.
He paused for a moment, stared blankly at himself. It had been a while since he paid any attention to his body. Stubble was growing on his face. He smelled, and he knew it. His hands were still dirty from the last mission...
The last mission. Jesus, he thought. The airfield. Might as well be the last one of all time. His band of soldiers lacked morale completely. They had spent the last week camped together in a New York warehouse block. Oh, they all had homes, but they couldn't return to them. Couldn't face their families now. Too much on everyone's mind. They just wanted to sit. And think. And stare at themselves in the mirror. Wondering where the hell it all went.
Dom leaned over the bathroom sink, shirtless, splashing water over his face. He tried to wash the fatigue out, to get a clear thought process... they had already wasted a week sitting there. He knew they had to do something.
Hell, Dom Bishop was the closest thing to leadership his group had, and he knew it. Their commander was killed at the airfield by a bunch of UNATCO troops, himself and the rest of his group barely escaping from the docks...
He could remember the look on his commander's face. Vividly. Dom watched the bullets tear across the poor guy's chest.
But he knew that was over now, it was the past, nothing could be done, they had to worry about now, and what to do next. He threw a shirt on, pulled off a quick shave with a bare razor blade, swearing every time he cut himself, and left the grungy bathroom, returning to the others. He stood in the doorway there, staring at them. Watching them talk quietly, sleep, eat from the provisions. One of them walked by and handed him a foil container full of soup, or oatmeal, or whatever it was, something a bit liquidy.
Their commander said the NSF were not terrorists because their objective was not to fight. But their objective was also not to blow their time in an empty building, feeling sorry for themselves.
"This is bullshit," he said, loudly, making sure everyone heard him. A dead silence hung in the air after that. Everyone looked at him. One of them, Brian, a small, energetic guy, came from around a corner, eating the same stuff from a similar container.
"I don't know, it's pretty good to me, Dom."
Bishop looked down at the soup/oatmeal in his hand. He threw it down onto a table, discarding it. "No. This. Look at us. What are we doing?"
They looked at each other. There were seven of them, not including himself: Brian, Jake, Albert, Sandra, Mitch, Jess, Geo... they all looked up to him, knowing if there was anybody who knew what he was talking about, it would be Dom... but at the same time, sharing a certain contempt, or curiosity. Dom had not been with them his whole NSF career. He was only with them one mission. The last one. And it failed. So now here he was, their commander telling the squad to put complete trust in him... but how could they do it, after a disaster like that? This mix of their emotion only created something deep and empty in their eyes as they looked at him, unknowing, only hoping.
Dom shivered, and continued. "We're wasting our time, that's what we're doing. We're not getting anything done."
"What are we supposed to do?" Al burst out, suddenly irritated. "You're telling us to do something. Right? So what do we do?"
"We get up and realize we're still the NSF. We can contact the others. We can put this back together."
Al buried his head in his hands, curling up against the wall. "And then what?"
"And then we fight back, people. We do what we've been doing from the-"
"Dammit, Dom, we're civilians," Mitch remarked in an uncomfortable tone. "Look at us, we're not the military, we're not even trained. We're civilians, doing what we can to make a difference."
"Right, and then someone gets killed, and you all suddenly want to back out?"
"Yes!" Al shouted. "We're not in this to get slaughtered!"
Dom stared at him. "So then you expect to make a difference by sitting in an empty room, eating shit, basking in your own self-pity."
Everyone was quiet. Jake, off in a corner, buried in shadow, shook his head. Sandra rested her head on his shoulder.
There was a very long, very uncomfortable pause. Nobody wanted to say anything any more. Nobody knew what to say.
Brian shuffled over, pointing to the container on the table. "You gunna eat that?"
Dom ignored him. "Look, I know the commander told you to put your trust in me, and I know how hard it is to trust someone you don't even know. But John and I knew each other since the beginning. He trusted me. I'm not asking you to blindly trust me now. I just want you to put a little faith in me. We'll contact whatever of the NSF is left out there. And you're right, we're civilians. But we're not making a difference here. You can't expect to make a difference or fight for a cause without fighting. And I'm sorry if none of you are willing to do that."
At that he disappeared from the room, not knowing how to feel about what just happened. He wanted to know what was going through all their minds, but he couldn't. All he could do was ask favors of them, and hope to get something back. The entire thing was a game of hope.
Geo looked over to Jess.
"I'm forty five years old. I have a wife and two daughters." He hung his head, and let out a deep breath. "I'm too old for this."
Nobody said anything after that. Dead silence hung over everything.
--- --- --- ---
"Here." Gunther shambled into Joseph Manderley's UNATCO HQ office, Denton's corpse hanging over his shoulder. He flung it onto the desk like a cat would bring a dead mouse to a doorstep.
Manderley looked from his book, first up at the massive Gunther Hermann, then down at the seeping body on his desk. He shot up from his chair, eyes wide. "My God, get him out of here!"
"I thought you'd like to see it in person," Gunther said. Nano-aug humor. "Only took one shot. He was weak. He got what he deserved."
"Right, okay, and good job, agent, but please, get this thing the hell off of my desk and out of my office!"
"Of course." He picked the body up with one hand, like it was a rag doll, carrying it back out of the room. Manderley looked down at his freshly bloodstained desk, ran one hand through his grey hair, and swore softly. Something was wrong with that man, Manderley knew it since the beginning, but he was a good agent, he got the job done. He wasn't going to suddenly abandon UNATCO for the NSF, like both Denton brothers did, so he was worth keeping. Anyone was worth keeping, now. He would recruit someone with a history of aggravated assault as long as they wouldn't just defect.
Gunther was right, Manderley thought as he sank back in his chair, trying to continue to read his book, while at the same time, trying to stay away from the spilled liquid on his desk. Denton was weak. Both him and his brother were nothing but an incredible waste of money.
JC and Paul were more human than machine. That was what was wrong with them. They got confused too easily, they thought they were following the right path. That's the difference between JC and Gunther. You take JC, and what is he? He's a human, with mechanical implants. So naturally, he'll have human emotion. He sees all aspects of things, everything is carefully thought about, carefully chosen. They try to make sure they have their morals in order, and so on. But then you look at agent Hermann, and what is he? He's mostly robot. Every part of him has some kind of augmentation. What does a robot see? A robot sees reason and order. There's no emotional response; It's do-what-ordered-to-do and respond-to-current-situation-to-see-that-orders-are-carried-out. That's it. That's what made a good soldier. It wasn't emotion, it wasn't "doing the right thing." It was following orders. It was not asking questions. And that's what JC got wrong.
JC would've still been alive and well if he didn't ask any questions.
If he were more robot than human.
Manderley rocked back in his chair, suddenly aware that his eyes weren't on his book at all, but instead staring thoughtfully at the wall in front of him. Sometimes he wondered if he were doing the right thing, taking bribes straight from the pockets of Bob Page, being the insider, keeping a normally good corporation under the influence of corruption. But then he would remember: What's making me money here? Doing the right thing, or doing what I'm told to do, and not asking questions? Frankly, he didn't care how this affected anyone else. He didn't care if he was now considered a "bad guy" on the game of life. He just wanted to be able to support himself and his family. If that meant taking bribes, then he'll take bribes.
Manderley finally returned to his book, a bit more calm and at peace than usual.
Humans were supposed to feel emotion. Humans were supposed to do the right thing, to feel guilty when causing hurt on other humans, to feel for the lives of other humans. It was nature.
But Manderley did not like feeling.
Manderley was a human, but he did not feel. So under the flesh and skin and organs and blood, what was Manderley?
No more than Gunther Hermann. Machine.
--- --- --- ---
Under sagging eyelids and dry eyes, under a tired body and worn flesh, underneath everything that ever amounted into a man and managed to get erased in a split second, somewhere deep down there, in the foggy gloom, there was a man named Jaime Reyes. Jaime watched his world from a suddenly distant point of view, lights and shapes suddenly indistinct and vague. The room was suddenly sterile. Everything was less alive.
They had just towed the body of JC Denton through Jaime’s medlab, so that they could take him down to the lower levels of the UNATCO building, where somewhere in some lab in the bowels of Liberty Island they’d probably disassemble his body and salvage what they could.
Jaime was a doctor. Jaime was not a murderer. He didn’t want to have anything else to do with this place. It had been corrupted a long time ago, and they were all blind to it until now.
Alex Jacobson, tall, thin guy, usually in charge of comm. equipment and other technologies Jaime didn’t really understand, stood next to him… Not knowing what to do. Reyes sank down into an office chair. He felt completely helpless.
“They killed more than JC, Alex.” Jaime looked up at him. Alex was staring at the door they brought JC through. Light reflected off his glasses, masking his eyes. There was an uncomfortable pause.
“We can still go to Hong Kong,” Alex said, turning to leave.
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugged. Then repeated himself: “We can still go to Hong Kong, Jaime.”
Reyes frowned, crossed his arms. “How? We won’t even be able to leave the building after this. And when we get to Hong Kong, we wouldn’t be able to find this Tracer Tong. That’s all JC gave us, Alex, a name. If he were still alive, I’m sure he would have contacted us, or had someone contact us. If there really is a Tracer Tong, and if he does what he does, it would be impossible to get within a mile of the man, let alone find where he is. We need someone that could get us in. Paul knew Tong. JC had Paul. We had JC. Now they’re both gone. We can’t go to Hong Kong, Alex.”
Alex stood halfway across the room, back turned. He took his glasses off, wiped them off on his shirt, replaced them, turned back around… “You’re wrong, Jaime. We already know who he is, where he is, and how to get to him. We have those connections.”
At that moment, UNATCO pilot Jock stepped into the room and looked at them both with a blandly serious expression. It almost seemed like nobody knew how to show some kind of emotion anymore. The world turned gray.
“Jaime,” Jock greeted. “I’m your pilot. I can get you to Tracer. We’ll go to Hong Kong.”
Maybe it was worth the risk, maybe it wasn’t. But when you have nothing to lose, risk means nothing, and everything just becomes chaos and luck. You could pull a gun in public just to see how the public reacted. Nobody would care. They would just walk by. Expressionless. The whole world turned to mechanical people, mechanical values. Nothing had impact on chaos and luck. Nothing had impact when there was nothing to lose. Trying to leave UNATCO unnoticed was like trying to dodge a bullet after it’s been fired at point blank range. If you’re not in a movie, if you don’t live in a changeable matrix of code, you can’t do it. But it was the only thing you could do when you had a gun to your head at point blank besides let it fire, wasn’t it? So what the hell. Leap. Maybe the hand holding the gun was a really bad shot.
Jaime smiled. He didn’t know why. “I hear there’s a place called the Lucky Money.”
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