Chapter Twenty-Four - Choosing to Die

“Modern policing is very successful. As long as you’re in a sector that is deemed safe (often marked with the colour code ‘white’), then the rate of violence is actually some of the lowest ever recorded in human history.

Occasionally, policing forces will descend into areas with higher levels of violence (also called ‘brown’ zones) in order to secure the citizens there against potential violent criminals.

There are many tactics that the modern cop uses to tell if a person is a threat. That includes surveillance AI routines, automatic record scrapers and the good old M.I.N.O.R.I.T.Y. technique for determining if the cop will be suspended for firing upon a potential suspect!

There’s no longer any need to worry about corruption! Our own internal auditing and reporting system has cleared every one of our officers of any suspicions.”

--Ad for Dirty, an international policing agency, 2052

***

“Look at these fine ladies,” one of them said.

Our greeters were seven young men. Most barely out of their teens, but two of them looked like they were pushing thirty or so. Pretty old for street rats. That either meant they were important, tough, lucky, or had fallen in late. All but the last was usually a bad sign.

I’d spoken to some middle-class sorts before. Mostly through the obligatory socializing parts of my shitty schooling where we had to talk to other kids on similar programs across the country. Of course, the school programs listened to everything we said to make profiles of us later, but that was a given.

When I talked about street rats, the middle-class sort always had the same mental image. Guys with crazy hair, lots of leather, and too many spikes on their clothes. The image wasn’t entirely wrong, some gangs really went for that straight-to-streaming look.

But the average street rat? They weren’t going out and buying ten-thousand credit pseudo-leather jackets and dying their hair. They were lucky if a single thing they wore wasn’t picked out of a second-hand pile or someone else’s fresh corpse.

These seven were that sort. The only sun they saw was in the glow of neon ads, and their teeth had more colours than their hair.

I looked at Gomorrah, but she was quiet, mask fixed on the nearest of them. I like to imagine she was unimpressed under there.

I wasn’t so blasé. These sorts might have spent nothing on clothes and less on hygiene, but when they did have cash, it went into one of three things. Drugs, ass, and guns. And these guys only looked a little high, and very horny.

Shifting my shoulders, I looked for whichever one stood out as the leader of the bunch. “You sure you wanna do this?” I asked.

One of them grinned. He shouldn’t have. “Yeah girl. You’re a fine enough looking piece, and that arm of yours.” He whistled. “Wouldn’t mind that wrapped around my member.”

I sighed. “Gomorrah, I know you’re fine with killing antithesis, but how are you on killing normies?”

“You mean human beings?” Gomorrah asked. “I was about to bring it up. While murder’s never been something the average Christian is against, I find it a bit distasteful when it’s of human beings.”

“Right, right,” I said. “But won’t all of these idiots have a much happier life in... heaven or whatever?” I asked. “We’re just speeding things along.”

“Cute,” she said. “It doesn’t work that way. And I doubt heaven would want anything to do with this lot, half of them have records.”

“So, we talk our way out, then shoot if things go sideways,” I said. Nodding I turned back to the lot. “Y’all know we’re Samurai, right?”

“Yeah, so what?” one of them said. He looked particularly intelligent and wise with his pants needing to be tugged up after every sentence, like an entirely new and horrifying sort of punctuation. “We don’t believe the shit the corpos spout. ‘Specially not ‘bout you lot.”

“That’s... well, that’s up to you, I guess,” I said. I looked to the others, trying to spot one I could talk to that wasn’t braindead. One nearer the back looked like he’d never come back from an overdose before. “What about you? You willing to risk it?” I asked.

He was a bit younger. Maybe my age. Not old enough that the cops wouldn’t beat him bloody but young enough that maybe he could get his shit together. “Um, yeah, yeah, I’m with my boys. Just two of you.”

They laughed, shifting sub-machine guns around and fiddling with their little handguns.

It was weird. A week ago I’d have been scared shitless about this and trying to hide it. Now I was just annoyed.

One of them reached out and grabbed my flesh and blood arm with his greasy hand. “Come on, put up a bit of a fight at least.”

A twitch and my augs pinged the guns on my back. Both of them deploying and aiming at the nearest idiots. My new arm wrapped around the asshole grabbing my forearm and squeezed.

I was pretty sure the bones in his arm weren’t meant to make splintery noises. “First one of you who puts his finger on a trigger gets to test out my new railgun,” I said. “It’s a virgin gun you know. Never took an asshole’s head off. You’ll get to be its first.”

The guy that had been grabbing me scoffed and pulled on my arm. Not screaming from his arm being crushed? He was either hyped up on something good, or had augs to suppress pain. He was a heavy guy, when he tugged me towards him there was little my skinny ass could do but follow. That was, until my railgun hummed for just a second, then made a sound like someone exhaling hard.

The man stood still for a while, the loonie-sized hole smoking where the bridge of his nose was slowly filling with melted brain gunk and sizzling from the heat along the edge of the new piercing.

I tugged my arm free and pulled my Trench Maker out just as his body collapsed. “Guess who just learned their last lesson about respecting people’s personal spaces?”

The other six tugged their guns up. It looked like it had just clicked with them that shit was real. “You bitch!”

“We told you guys that we don’t want trouble,” I said. My railgun started to hum again and my tail whipped around to my side, spikes deploying from it and the end sparking to life with blue flames. “That’s one of your friends dead. We’re not here to clear the place of rats, so how about you move on?”

“You’re just a human, like us,” one of them said. The same idiot that didn’t believe in Samurai, or whatever.

“You’re not wrong,” I said. “But you’re underestimating how much of a bitch I am. See, Gomorrah here? She likes lighting things on fire. But she’s nice. She’ll preach your ears off before killing you. I won’t. I’ve never cared for anyone that wasn’t one of mine, and none of you lot are one of mine.”

“We’ll be telling the bosses about this!”

“You’ll tell your boss that you ambushed a pair of Samurai minding their own damned business and threatened them?” I asked. “Are you a fucking moron? Your bosses will hang you for being braindead.”

“You know, I’m starting to think maybe I could light them up,” Gomorrah said. She raised a hand, and a foot long beam of searing-hot flame snuck out from her sleeve and wavered before her.

“Yo! You can’t like, burn people. That’s against the Geneva convention thing!” one of them said.

I... wasn’t expecting that kind of reference. “It’s more of a Geneva suggestion for us,” I said. “Now, we have business elsewhere, and you’re wasting our time. So, if you could kindly fuck off, that would be really appreciated.”

The rats looked to each other, then came to the unanimous decision to run away. They did it with a swagger, as if trying to convince anyone looking that it wasn’t a full-on retreat, but they still left us be.

“Did you really have to kill him?” Gomorrah asked.

“Probably not,” I said. I didn’t dwell on the body next to me much. “I haven’t exactly invested in non-lethals though, and I don’t know if I could take someone of that size one-on-one. Also, my head isn’t as bulletproof as the rest of me.”

“You really need to see to that,” Gomorrah said. “It’s the only part you can’t replace. It should be the part you’re the most keen on protecting.”

I sighed. “Yeah, I guess. Don’t really like hats though.”

“Get a shield, or a helmet. One of these days one of those sorts of punks will pull one of those anti-antithesis guns from somewhere and your head will be mulched.”

“You can do funeral rites, yeah?”

“No, no I can’t. And I wouldn’t for you. You’d think someone like you would have better survival instincts.”

I frowned. “What does ‘someone like you’ mean? And are you really shitting on my survival instincts miss ‘the lanes are a suggestion?’”

Gomorrah humphed and continued on. I had to jog to catch up. “You know, I kind of expected you to just kill them all.”

“Should I have?”

“It wouldn’t be appropriate of me to say yes. But at the same time, they didn’t seem like very virtuous people.”

I rubbed at my lip a bit while thinking of an answer. I understood her wanting to off the idiots. I wouldn’t shed a tear for any of them. At the same time... “You know, this is gonna sound really cheesy.”

“What is?”

“When I was a kid they had these, uh, re-reruns, I guess, of these old comics. When I got to the orphanage for the first time. That was before I found Lucy. This older kid gave me this collection. All pirated of course. I lost it when I switched augs at some point. But... yeah. I used to read these stories about old Samurai. Street warriors. Heroes. And they’d always try to do the right thing. I kinda wanted to be like that.”

“That’s... kind of cute.”

I glared at the nun.

“No, really. It’s naïve, and that’s coming from a Christian, but it’s kind of endearing. I guess that’s why you were chosen to become a Samurai.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. Anyway, it doesn’t feel right to kill idiots when you don’t need to, and where we are now? There’s not much we have no choice in doing.”

***