Читать книгу The Puzzler’s War - Eyal Kless - Страница 10

I only let myself cry once, that very night. I found a secluded ruin and with a little reverse engineering, managed to spark a fire from the power sword, although it did cost me too many energy cells and I promised myself to try and do it the old-fashioned way the next time around. Then I cleared the bone and skewered the meat on several sticks from the broken bow so the meat would cook faster. I’d only resorted to cannibalism three times before, and it was never a cherished culinary experience. This time was no exception. As the human flesh sizzled and cooked, I moved away from the circle of fire and found a dark corner, where I curled into a ball and sobbed quietly.

I was only a toddler when the Paralytic Plague, known as the Purple Plague, struck our town. Victims lost control of their bodies, then their respiration systems, and they fought to breathe until they died. My father and three brothers were gone in less than forty-eight hours, and I still remembered my little brother’s body being wheeled away to the local crematorium. My mother was not affected, but I was already developing high fever and had lost control of my arms and legs. The doctors moved me to a large hall where many lay waiting to die.

I’ve heard the story from my mother so many times, I’m sure my memory is as false as it is vivid. But I remember a group of men and women walking into the hall. They wore thick bio suits and blue facial masks even inside their helmets. Each carried a temperature-controlled medibag imprinted with the glowing logo of Tarakan. They quickly dispersed among the sick and dying. One of them, the only one who was also wearing old-fashioned spectacles inside the protection of his helmet, came and sat by my bed. He spoke in a soft tone of voice, almost a whisper, to my mother and told her he was from Tarakan University and that he had an experimental vaccine for the plague, but that it was not fully tested yet. The vaccine could kill me or it could cure me, and my mother had less than a minute to decide whether he should administer it to me or move to the next patient.

After watching her three sons and husband die, my mother didn’t hesitate. She told me years later that she had made a pact with herself that if I died, she would take her own life. The Tarakan doctor administered the vaccine by touching the fevered skin of my stomach with a metal object. I remember sweet coolness spreading quickly through my body. The next day I was on my feet. Out of 822 patients who got the vaccine, 645 survived.

My mother, a tax consultant by trade, applied for Tarakan residency the following week. Luckily, Tarakan was still accepting ordinary people back then. We moved to the City of Towers within a year, even though her trade was not needed there. She took any jobs they assigned her to, all below her skill and pay levels, but she never complained. Her sole ambition was for me to become a full Tarakan citizen.

I tried. I really did. But the shock of losing my family was too great. My mother worked hard and tried, without success, to compensate for the trauma we’d both endured. On the brink of adolescence, I became notoriously short-tempered. The puzzles and riddles were especially infuriating to me, and one day I threw a puzzle box at my teacher’s head, and someone came to speak to my mother. I was sure we were going to be sent away, but the Tarakan talent scout had a different idea. I was sent to the newly formed military academy and became a professional Tarakan soldier, eventually rising to the rank of colonel major.

These were pre–Guardian Angel days, when Tarakan still followed the international treaties forbidding them from using clones as soldiers. Keeping Tarakan assets safe meant biological humans had to do the soldiering. That was my job, more or less. I worked my way up the ranks not by solving odd puzzles but the old-fashioned way; killing Tarakan’s enemies.

I watched as Tarakan expanded and flourished, but I also saw the looming shadows and growing threats as other countries’ jealousy turned to fear, which festered to deep loathing and eventually hate. There were terror attacks, acts of sabotage, cybertheft, and even the danger of direct hostilities to many Tarakan assets around the globe.

When the decision was finally made, I helped train the first Guardian Angels. Well, trained is not the right word for it, as they knew how to fight from the moment they were created, but I did make them march in beautiful formations and sent them on countless black ops. It did not take me long to realise they were the future and I was becoming obsolete.

Eventually, it was my time for an early retirement. I never married, never had children—never had the urge, frankly—and was not big on friends, either. I had seen enough of the world to satisfy my need to travel without those endless boring vacations retired people take. So, it was either sit around in an undistinguished two-bedroom flat somewhere in the Eastern Spires till I died, or accept a second offer from the Tarakan security agency and become a hibernating agent, or a sleeper. When the offer came, I didn’t hesitate.

I thought I’d already seen it all, but the training to become a sleeper was a whole different ball game. You left everything and everyone behind, your body included, and uploaded your consciousness into Adam. You would wake up in different vessels, on different continents, countries, and cultures, knowing only who you were, what your alias was, and, most of the time, your mission. Despite what the name suggests, you didn’t actually spend your time there sleeping. The downtime was filled with training and briefings, teaching, virtual vacations, assignment preps, and a few more activities designed to keep you from losing your mind.

Once in the physical world, I could never recall the full details of my past operations, a needed security measure should I have fallen captive, but I did know the missions were getting significantly more aggressive as time passed. From simple data theft or blackmail to high-risk sabotage, kidnappings of major political figures, and high-profile assassinations. I even lit the spark, via a well-placed chemical bomb and several misleading fingerprints, to a major war in the Middle East, causing seven figures in casualties and the breakup of two regional powers.

Was I always on the just side? Hell if I knew. Many of my missions were on the shady side of the moral scale, and in my reports, as I remembered them, I mentioned more than once that aggressive subterfuge and iron-fist diplomacy led only to shortterm gains at best. We were becoming the bad guy for too many global players, and although they were weaker and far behind us on the technology scale, their combined force was a real threat.

Now I sat among the ruins of mankind. From what I gathered, they … well, we, as a species, seemed to have somehow survived Armageddon only to continue to fight and kill each other over and over again. Tarakan, the shining-bright gem of humanity, was destroyed. All I’d worked for and risked was for nothing. Billions of people had died, and those who were spared simply picked up a gun or a sword or even a club and kept at it.

Yet here I was. Someone had downloaded me into this vessel and given me a mission, so there must be some hope. I wiped away the tears and walked back to the fire, where the meat was slowly turning black, then sat down, picked up a stick, blew carefully on the meat, and chewed off a mouthful. The taste matched my mood.

Tomorrow would be a new day. I would find a way to reach the City of Towers and find out what my mission was. Tarakan was defeated, but perhaps it was not dead yet.