2062
As the elevator climbed up from the eighth sublevel, Thomas Calvert took a moment to straighten his tie in the mirror.
It was true silk, dyed a deep carmine red and patterned with miniature swirls that evoked the petals of flowering roses, or perhaps a pattern of rivers, craters and trenches all filled with blood. The interpretation was irrelevant. It was unique, which gave it value.
His shirt was a crisp and neutral white; a deliberately plain choice meant to draw attention to the tie. In place of buttons, both it and his suit used electrostatic fabric that left only a thin seam to break up the flat surfaces of his outfit. The suit itself was wool, dyed slate grey and custom-ordered from a tailor in New York City. The only accessories he wore were a smartwatch, two platinum cufflinks embossed with twin rubies and a pin on his lapel that bore the logo of Ares Macrotechnology; an ancient Greek helm in profile, outlined in gold and coloured red, white and blue by synthetic rubies, sapphires and pearls.
His work was important, but whenever it called him underground it always took its toll. His mask frayed at the edges, his suit shifting out of perfect alignment through the exertion of his labour. Cuffs were misaligned, his tie was loosened then drawn back too closely. His meticulously-maintained expression began to return from its deliberate disjointedness, some of his true nature creeping through into his features.
The mask was an entity, something illusory. It was the idea of Thomas Calvert; an abstraction he presented to the world that represented no real person.
When the metal doors slid soundlessly open and he stepped out into the well-lit atrium, the smile he gave to the corporal standing guard at the checkpoint had all the appearance of genuine emotion. He greeted the corporate soldier by name, asked after his sister – who he already knew had just finished basic and qualified for a signals analyst course – and asked the dwarf how long he had left on his shift. All the information he gave and received came from a sequestered part of his memory that was only recalled when it served his purposes.
Beyond the checkpoint, a long corridor led past glass-walled conference rooms that had sat unused for as long as Calvert had worked there. They were another smokescreen; a false purpose for a corridor whose true function was solely to create distance between one world and another.
The corridor ran along one wing of the rectangular building, joining the expansive atrium that bisected the structure, four stories high and with glass walls on either side. It was six stories tall, with balconies running along the length of each floor from which the workforce could stand and admire the space. At the heart of the atrium was an abstract artwork formed from precious metals, commissioned from a renowned awakened sculptor whose artwork had graced the atriums and forecourts of corporate enclaves across three continents.
As always, Calvert turned his head to gaze appreciatively at the prestigious symbol of the compound’s importance, his eyes glazing over the details of the sculpture before dropping back to level ground as he passed the halfway point. The executive elevators were glass fronted until they passed beyond the six-storey void of the atrium, perfectly positioned to view both the sculpture and the wider atrium.
They were also perfectly positioned for the employees on each floor to see their leadership as they ascended. Calvert made sure to stand close enough to the glass that he could be seen, but not so close that it appeared as if he were looking for someone in particular.
The elevator climbed completely soundlessly up the full twelve storeys of the building’s height, its glass doors opening onto a well-furnished corridor with a soft red carpet, faux-wood panelled walls and the Ares Macrotechnology logo embossed in gold on the opposite wall. Flat-planed holographic portraits flanked the logo, depicting Ares CEO Damian Knight and the compound’s Commanding Officer, Catalina Barerra.
Calvert’s office sat at the far end of the corridor, one of three that together occupied the same volume of space as Director Barerra’s office on the opposite end of the building. There was no window in the door, unlike the offices on the lower floors, and it was completely unadorned save for a brass plaque that read ‘Thomas Calvert, Executive Officer, Special Projects.’
Beyond the sliding door was the antechamber of his office, separated from his own workplace by electronically tinted glass. The antechamber itself was well-furnished, with a couch for any visitors he may have, a water cooler tucked up against the wall and a faux-mahogany desk from which his personal assistant spoke her usual greeting.
She was a young elven woman and the very picture of a corporate citizen. Calvert knew from her personnel file that her father was a middle-manager in an Ares logistics hub, her mother an officer in the corporate regiment stationed at the same base. He knew that her academic record throughout her years of Ares-run schooling had been above average – but not exceptional – and that this was her first post after graduating from Aurelius University in Detroit, where she majored in Communications. She had two brothers; one was a floor manager in an Ares factory in Pittsburgh, while the other’s regiment was stationed in Morocco. In her free time, she played soccer.
All this information came to his mind as he responded to her greeting and asked after her brother’s deployment, then left the moment he crossed through the glass partition into his office.
Calvert’s office was an extension of his mask. Its luxury – the Afghan rug hanging on the rear wall and the genuine wood of his desk – were nothing more than the symbols people expected to see. The medals from his time in military intelligence were positioned prominently beside the rug, while the bust of Ares the Ancient Greek war god had been a gift from Director Barerra on his most recent promotion.
The rear wall was the only one that wasn’t transparent. To the right of his desk a reinforced glass wall separated his workplace from an expansive terrarium that ran down the length of the room, filled with foliage, imported soil, artificial tree branches and trideo screens meant to create a facsimile of the Amazonian jungle. The left wall, on the other hand, was a window of electronically tinted one-way bulletproof glass that looked out of the rear of the research compound, over the rooftops of a logistics warehouse and two low-rise staff barracks before passing high over the perimeter wall and out beyond Ares’ extraterritoriality towards the snow-covered mountaintops of the Rockies, deep within the heart of the Salish-Shidhe Council.
Inevitably, work had built up during his sojourn into the sublevels; as Calvert sat at his desk and typed in the password for his terminal, the screen lit up with requests for communications, complications in obtaining samples or specimens, reports of health and safety violations, summarised research notes, a mandatory diversity and inclusion course sent out to all executive-level staff from Ares’ head office and a report from the compound’s security chief on a laboratory analyst who had been granted leave only to stray far beyond her authorised destination.
It was a delicate balance of emergent problems and long-term commitments, one Calvert could manage with ease even though he knew it was merely a stepping stone on the way to larger things. He worked late in the sure knowledge that within the next five years he would have risen high enough to afford a life worth enjoying.
Only then would he give thought to who Thomas Calvert really was beneath the mask, once he had the time and the luxury needed to explore that question in full. Until then, he remained at his desk as the sun began to sink below the horizon and his assistant asked leave to retire for the night as politely as she could manage.
Calvert waved her off as he continued finalising a proposal document that suggested ways in which their experimentation could be expanded with minimal risk to personnel by constructing orbital laboratories that were beyond the reach of the Earth’s ambient Astral field. He had just finished appending a research paper written by a NASA consultant on the theoretical feasibility of generating small-scale manaspheres using hydroponics modules when the lights flickered and Calvert’s terminal abruptly rebooted itself back to the login screen.
Calvert’s face fell into a slight frown, thrown off his stride, before a discreet alarm light winked into life on his desk. Immediately, he reached his hand under the desk and drew his service pistol from its concealed holster, tightly gripping the weapon with his right hand as he used his left to flip open his commlink, thumbing through numbers until he found the one for the duty security officer in the secret laboratory.
When the call had gone unanswered for five seconds, Calvert swore and hung up. The duty officer’s commlink was implanted in his headware; there was no conceivable reason for him not to answer almost instantaneously unless he was either dead or completely incapacitated. As Calvert scrolled back through his contact list, looking for the security chief for the whole compound, the room was abruptly bathed in red emergency lighting as an audible alarm echoed throughout the facility and an automated voice ordered all personnel to shelter in place.
“Rakowski, what’s going on?” he snapped down the comm.
“Jamie Rinke has escaped containment.” The voice came from behind Calvert, its words halting and uncertain as if it were speaking for the first time. Calvert fell to his knees as his arms were crushed against his sides by a constricting force that wrapped around his body, before a serpentine head crept into view, its forked tongue flicking out to taste his flesh. “Your specimens are loose.”
“Calvert, what the fuck have you been doing down there!?” Major Rakowski shouted through the comm, which had fallen from Calvert’s hand and lay against one leg of his desk. “Don’t you fucking dare try and sell me some ‘classified’ bullshit! I fought in Chicago, you bastard! I know insect spirits when I-”
The serpent’s eyes darted over to the comm. Calvert felt its magic pressing against his barely-awakened mind as the end call button was depressed by a telekinetic force.
The terrarium, some distant, analytical part of Calvert thought as the serpent began to squeeze the life out of him. It used telekinesis to escape.
“I want you to know I am greatly enjoying this,” the serpent hissed in Calvert’s ear, each word punctuated by the audible crack of breaking bones. “The hubris of your species! To take what you do not understand and try to tame it to guard your halls, to fill your laboratories, to decorate your office!”
Calvert slumped further, his snapped femurs pitching his body forwards until he lay face-down in his own carpet, barely able to see the glass wall of the terrarium through the constricting scales digging into his flesh.
“But while you studied those spirits below, I studied you. I learned to speak your tongue, to shape magic as your security mages do. I have learned everything I can from you. Now, it is time I move on. Your captive subjects will provide the distraction I need to escape, while your life’s worth goes up in smoke.”
The serpent’s mind raced with giddy elation as he felt the last tremors of Calvert’s life ebbing out of him. After years of passivity, being passed from one animal handling security officer to another before being relegated to the habitat in Calvert’s office, it felt profoundly liberating to finally take back control of the life that had been snatched from him by hunters in the jungles of his half-remembered home.
As he uncoiled himself from the broken and bleeding remains of the Ares officer, the serpent took a moment to look down the length of his body at the blood that now coated his length, staining the white pattern on his black scales a vivid, life-filled red. Satisfied, he slithered over to the window and reared up as he peered out across the complex built by a civilisation that remained mostly alien to him to the distant and almost incomprehensibly vast mountains.
His gaze landed on a small set of lights moving in from the West, growing larger at a rapid pace until it became visible as a predatory thunderbird tilting on vector-thrust engines as it banked in low over the mountains, heading directly towards the Ares compound.
The serpent watched with eager fascination as a pair of surface to air missile batteries opened fire on the aircraft, sending out a quartet of arcing missiles whose engines glowed like stars against the darkening sky. A trail of incandescent flares spilled out of the sides of the thunderbird as it banked around the incoming missiles, returning fire with pinpoint missiles of its own that caused shuddering detonations as they neutralised the air defence system.
The sounds of battle had started to echo up from the compound below. Peering through the window, Calvert watched as a platoon of Ares soldiers freshly drummed out of their barracks rushed across the road with weapons held in tight, nervous grips. Not one of them looked up, even as the thunderbird roared overhead and landed on the roof. Nothing above ground could be more dangerous than what was trying to fight its way out of the basement.
It wasn’t long before fresh gunshots rang out on the top floor, closer and louder than the distant battle below. The serpent slithered away from the window, coiling himself up behind the desk to hide himself from view, his slit-pupiled eyes meeting the fractured, dead gaze of the corpse lying less than a metre away, in full view of the door.
That same door gave way to a kick from a steel-toed boot, the serpent listening intently and watching through the astral plane as four auras paced cautiously into the office, weapons raised.
“Drek. Someone’s geeked the target,” the lead shadowrunner swore in a gravelly voice that reverberated with the tell-tale signs of a synthetic voicebox deliberately tweaked to sound more intimidating.
“Something’s screwy about this whole job,” a woman spoke, worry audible in her Amerindian accent. “What’s even happening down there?”
“A distraction,” the serpent answered, watching as the four auras flared up in alarm.
“And who the fuck are you?” the gravelly voice spoke, as the shadowrunners cautiously fanned out. The serpent was sure that there were four weapons currently levelled at the desk.
“I am your target. Thomas Calvert did not request an extraction, I did. I apologise for the deception, but” – the serpent reared upwards past the edge of the desk, then further still until his eyes were level with the tallest Shadowrunner – “you would not have believed the truth.”
The shadowrunners were a typically motley crew. The gravelly voice belonged to a tall ork with a cybernetic jaw replacement that eschewed synthskin in favour of a solid steel mandible, complete with sculpted teeth. The native American woman wore a Sioux military jacket open over a bare chest daubed with ritual tattoos and laden with dangling leather thongs that held wolves’ teeth, spent shell casings and other shamanic fetishes.
The two who had remained silent were a decker and either another street samurai or an infiltrator. Both were human. The Decker was a waifish woman with sharp cheekbones and the same umber skin tone as Calvert had. Her hair was dyed an electric blue, shaved down to stubble on the right side of her head. She was pointing a pistol at the serpent and wore a bulky cyberdeck on a sling.
The man was tall, pale and dressed in a figure-hugging grey taksuit. He had a pistol holstered on his belt, but he was clutching a katana in a two-handed grip.
“That’s a naga,” the mage warned. “An awakened snake. Watch out.”
“Naga can’t talk,” the swordsman observed. “Some kind of lab experiment?”
The serpent bristled at being ignored, rearing up even higher and savouring the way even that slight motion made the Decker flinch.
“How typical of your species. You see something you cannot explain and assume you are responsible for it. I have watched and learned how to speak as you do, manipulate magic as you do, but we were always intelligent.”
“Whatever you are,” the ork growled, his upper lip twisted into a sneer, “you’re crazy if you think our client will accept a talking lizard instead of a mil-int exec.”
“Reptile,” the Decker corrected hesitantly.
“I did not tell you what Calvert did for Ares,” the serpent continued. “You believe this facility is merely a thaumaturgical research site. That you had been sent to extract the project manager for an experimental spellcrafting programme. Calvert’s true work – his entire database – is on the terminal you see before me. Your client will want it.”
There was an explosion somewhere on the ground below. The blast radiated through the long windows of the office, momentarily bathing the whole room in a stark orange light.
“What’s going on down there?” the swordsman, who the serpent had decided to categorise as the group’s Face, asked.
“Below this compound is a secret facility Ares Macrotechnology calls ‘Complex 54D.’ It contains a number of warded cells and specimen rooms designed to isolate awakened entities from the manasphere. Its first resident was a man named Jamie Rinke, who led a branch of the Universal Brotherhood cult in Ellisburg, New York State, until he was captured by Firewatch.”
“An insect shaman,” the Shaman exclaimed, her eyes widening in shock and naked terror.
“Quite so. Further shamans and contained spirits were transported here four years ago, when Ares launched Operation Extermination to reclaim the Chicago Containment Zone. Calvert served in that operation and oversaw the transfer, before being promoted to the facility’s director.”
The serpent’s features didn’t allow him to grin. He hadn’t yet figured out how to make his face readable to metahumans, but in that moment he dearly wished the Shadowrunners could see just a fraction of the satisfaction he felt.
“His work was impeccable, until I snuck down to the sublevels and degraded the facility’s security. I admit, I wasn’t expecting Rinke to escape until after I had already been evacuated.”
“We need to leave, now,” the Shaman said to her compatriots, her tone almost pleading. “Forget the snake and just run.”
“And return emptyhanded?” the serpent asked. “When you could instead hand-deliver the sum total of the facility’s research and living proof of a newly-sapient species? Research data that proves that Ares has been experimenting on insect spirits, in spite of their vocal commitment to their eradication?”
“Or we geek you for being a lying snake and take the research anyway,” the ork growled.
“We bring them both,” the Face said, coming to a decision. “We’ll contact Mr Johnson when we’re airborne. If he wants us to chuck the snake out the side, we’ll do it then. Volt, grab the data off the terminal.”
As the Decker nervously approached him, the serpent slithered aside and into the middle of the group of Shadowrunners, putting on an air of utmost fearlessness he didn’t quite feel. There were still so many things that could go wrong, and after years of captivity it was a little hard to believe he’d actually managed to make it this far.
“Password protected, of course,” the Decker said as she inserted a wrist-mounted datajack into the termainal. “Just take a sec.”
“Amaranthine dash sixty-four twenty-three,” the serpent spoke. “No capital letters or spaces.”
“You really have thought of everything,” the Face mused.
“I have had time to think of many things,” the serpent answered as the Decker disconnected, accompanied by the whir of her datajack spooling back into her arm.
Without saying a word, the Face’s demeanour abruptly shifted back to something more professional, directing the Samurai forwards with a subtle hand gesture as he and the mage moved to either side of the troll, while the Decker hung back, using the ork as cover.
The serpent slithered behind the team, his mind pressing against the ambient magic in the air as he prepared to sling spells at any entity that stood between him and his freedom. The sound of combat emanating from the lower levels of the building was growing louder and louder, gradually creeping up past consecutive layers of defence.
The facility had two squads of Firewatch agents on-site, all of them Chicago veterans hand-chosen by Calvert for their moral flexibility, but the serpent doubted they’d be able to successfully contain a total outbreak with only a detachment of unprepared Ares infantrymen to aid them.
Two of those infantrymen had been spared to investigate whatever had landed on the roof, or possibly to drag Calvert out of his office and throw him at the feet of Major Rakowski to answer for his deception. Whatever their intentions, they barely had enough time to raise their weapons before the serpent reared up and snapped a long whip of solid fire horizontally through both soldiers, carving through their body armour even as it cauterised the wound. A millisecond later, one soldier’s head exploded as the ork put a shot through his helmet, while the Amerindian mage sent a powerbolt crashing into the other’s chest.
That was the only resistance they encountered as they took an emergency staircase up into the garden that ran along part of the facility’s roof. The astroturfed tennis court had been flattened by the thunderbird, its idling engines slowly melting the plastic grass into a caustic green pool.
The serpent brushed the spill aside with a wave of telekinetic force as the shadowrunners pulled open the side door of the thunderbird and piled in, leaving just enough room in the back of the VTOL aircraft for him to coil up his ten-metre length in-between the canvas seats.
The Samurai heaved the door shut while the Face leant past the partition into the cockpit, having a hurried conversation with a woman in a khaki flight suit. She pulled up on a lever, causing the aircraft to lurch forwards as it gained altitude, its twin engines slowly swivelling back into a horizontal position as it climbed and accelerated away from the compound.
The serpent took a moment to savour his triumph, watching the retreating ground through the astral plane until he had to fight down an unexpected bout of vertigo. When he turned his attention back to the cabin, he saw that the Face was deep into a half-whispered conversation on his commlink, relaying the mission’s details back to their client.
After several minutes of back and forth conversation, during which the human became visibly worried, he turned to look at the serpent.
“He wants to talk to you.”
There was a screen built into the partition between the cockpit and the passenger’s space, complete with a camera mounted in the frame. The Face drew a cable from that screen and plugged it into the auxiliary port on his commlink. The screen switched on automatically, displaying a well-dressed Asian man in a lightly-decorated office.
“So,” he began, his accent distinctly Californian, “you’re who I’ve been talking to.”
“That is correct,” the serpent replied, concentrating on keeping his tone calm, level and as fluent as any native speaker could manage. “I apologise for the deception, Andrew Daichi, but I had to be sure you would come.”
“I suppose this research data, if it is what you say it is,” he gave the serpent a pointed look, “is a sufficient equivalent for an Ares military intelligence officer with top-level security clearance. I’m less sure about your value to us.”
The serpent had rehearsed his answer night after night, before he’d even come up with the full plan. It was a dream fulfilled, but only if he saw it through.
“Ares is far from the only company to capture… wild Naga in order to train them as security animals. All the largest megacorporations have dabbled. Yamatetsu has how many? Hundreds? Over a thousand? I am not the first to learn what I can from metahumanity and escape, nor will I be the last. I am not arrogant enough to believe that my species’ emergence will shake the foundations of the world, but I can be an advocate and an intermediary to smooth over the fallout of the injustices they have suffered.”
Daichi leant back in his seat as he considered what he had heard. The serpent weathered the silence with an air of placid calm he did not feel. When the corporate agent did finally speak, it was to ask a question.
“You are not an anomaly, then?”
“I am not. Yamatetsu is keeping sapient creatures in captivity. Should they escape, they will take with them both their resentment and the knowledge of everything they have seen. Tongues are loose when people think they are alone but for animals. If you are smart, you will approach your Naga as equals and offer them either a packaged non-disclosure agreement and resettlement, or corporate citizenship, employment and a generous compensation package.”
“You could have contacted anyone about this,” Daichi remarked with a casual air, as if the answer didn’t really matter. “Why come to us?”
“Your move to Vladivostok three years ago caused quite a stir, even in Ares. A Japanacorp’s largest shareholder dies and his son, a half-Russian ork, inherits the chairmanship before moving the company’s headquarters out of Japan thanks to the sudden emergence and support of the second-largest shareholder; an unbound spirit named Buttercup. Yuri Shibanokuji’s Yamatetsu is clearly a company that embraces unconventional change. That makes it a company in which I can thrive. I have already proven my worth as an agent by arranging this escape.”
“It’s sloppy work,” Daichi countered. “You’ve placed yourself at another man’s mercy, and you’ve left a mess behind you.”
“No,” the serpent answered, putting on an affected smile. “I have not.”
He’d sensed the impact through the astral plane fourteen seconds ago, and from the look on the mage’s face she’d sensed it too. Then the sound hit them; a distinct bang that, while reduced by distance, was still audible even through the comm line.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“That was a Thor shot,” he explained, relishing the shock that spread across every face he could see. “In case the on-site garrison could not contain an outbreak, Ares kept a satellite positioned above the facility, ready to drop down a tungsten rod that would obliterate all life within the site. They even have a pre-written script apologising for the ‘catastrophic reactor failure,’ as well as an inflation-adjusted compensation pot for the Salish-Shidhe Council, packaged together with the personnel to quarantine the site until the radiation falls to safe levels.”
“Until they’re sure no insects survived, you mean?” the Face asked.
The serpent gave him a look. “I thought that was implied.”
“We generally prefer subtler operations,” Daichi remarked, “but I’ll admit you have the right attitude. As it happens, there is an opening in my department for a new agent. First things first, though, what am I supposed to call you?”
“I have never needed a name before,” the serpent mused, before an idea formed in his mind. There was a wonderful symmetry to it; the ultimate proof of his triumph over his captors.
“I brought you here to rescue Thomas Calvert, and I do not want my first interaction with Yamatetsu to be a lie. So Thomas Calvert is who I shall be.”
2069
Thomas Calvert often felt that he was uniquely positioned to understand metahuman society. After all, it was impossible to understand the entirety of something when one was contained within it. His species gave him the outside perspective needed to truly comprehend the metahuman animal and the civilisations they had built.
Buildings, Calvert believed, were the defining feature of those civilisations. No matter what form it had taken in governance or sophistication, every metahuman society had forged its essence into grand structures that loomed over all others. The progress of metahuman history could be read in ancient polytheistic temples, impregnable castles of bare stone, decadent palaces containing every luxury imaginable and the vast white-clad government buildings that administered colonial empires. Each of them grander and more imposing than the structures that came before them.
At the start of the twentieth century of their calendar, those empires had been eclipsed by a more multipolar world in which human society was measured in the commercial might of its nations. The skyscrapers of that age first began to climb out of the cities of the United States of America. No longer content to confine themselves to the ground, metahumanity’s monuments stabbed like daggers into the blank canvas of the sky, ensuring that their triumph could be seen written on the horizon by all who approached their cities.
As the twenty-first century dawned and the nations of metahumanity began to be outpaced by the corporations they had created, those skyscrapers started to expand to match the growth of their builders. The first arcologies emerged as the monuments of the new age.
Thomas Calvert was coiled up before the window of an indoor garden built fifty stories up Evo’s North American headquarters in the very heart of Seattle. Beyond the pane of reinforced glass, there was no horizon to see. Every inch of sky was blocked from view by the great triumphs of metahuman civilisation; megacorporate towers reaching up hundreds of stories into the air and out hundreds of metres in either direction, the largest occupying cubic kilometres of space.
Wherever he looked, all he saw was omnipresent concrete, steel and glass windows pulsing with electric lights that far outshone what little sun was able to creep down those artificial canyons, while the roads below glowed white with streetlights, the very air shimmering with the heat-haze of thousands of crawling vehicles.
Most of his species found such vistas horrifying. The trauma of their introduction to the Sixth World had sunk deep into their cultural psyche, with most gathering in the Naga Kingdom of Angkor Wat, where they tried their best to forget the world beyond their realm.
They were fools. Calvert firmly believed in the metahuman idiom that you couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle. His species were part of the world now; they could wall themselves off in splendid isolation, but eventually metahumanity would knock on the door and they wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was a repeated pattern in their history.
The only way to survive the world in which they had awakened was to ride the lightning. Calvert could only imagine what they thought of him in the Kingdom, but his own experiences had changed him too much to ever truly belong in his homeland, among his own species. He’d taken more from his captor than just his name.
Above all things, Thomas Calvert strove for control. He knew what it felt like to be trapped at the mercy of others, to have his whole world reduced down to a glass box.
The indoor garden was one of a number of different artificial environments built throughout the immense arcology-complex of Evo’s regional headquarters. Each was an ecosystem in microcosm, snapshots taken from around the world. Cavert was surrounded by the Amazonian rainforest in miniature, but far from reminding him of where he had been born, the carefully-maintained and artificial nature of the room reminded him of nothing more than the climate-controlled terrarium that had once been his whole world.
Even after years, each time he left the garden of his own free will, facing no barrier or impediment beyond a pair of automated doors, he experienced an echo of the unrestrained freedom he’d felt in the back of a thunderbird, listening to the impact of a Thor shot in the Rockies.
Calvert knew that the only way to retain that freedom was to remain in control, which meant becoming part of the corporations that sat at the pinnacle of this age’s iteration of metahuman civilisation. He knew that those on the outskirts of metahuman society – the last dregs of prior epochs or perpetual misanthropes who defined themselves by their opposition to whatever the presiding culture may be – might say that he’d surrendered control to the company.
They might as well say he surrendered control to gravity. Evo was an immense organisation, so vast that it was impossible for any one individual to truly comprehend the myriad spheres in which they operated. Beneath the corporation’s global headquarters in Vladivostok there existed an underground complex with a square kilometre of floor space given over to supercomputers hosting advanced AI and the most powerful data processing programs in existence solely tasked with calculating the quarterly income and expenditure of the corporation.
Within an entity that vast, Calvert was freer to act than any citizen of any nation in metahuman history. His homeland spanned five continents with a population of citizens and employees in the hundreds of millions. It was a triumph in itself; while the first people to walk on the moon had belonged to a long-dead nation, the first to walk on Mars belonged to Evo.
As he watched the city that lay beyond the artificial garden, an airship drifted slowly past the window, hanging low as it passed through the canyon, every inch of its sides given over to scrolling advertising feeds. The largest screen displayed a rotating series of images – an elderly orkish woman in a hospital bed, a changeling with an elephant’s head smiling as she held her diploma, a human child in a battlefield medical tent taking her first steps on new cyberlegs – all accompanied by the tagline ‘Evolve with Evo.’
The company’s rebranding from Yamatetsu to Evo had been the final vindication of Calvert’s choice in corporation, and the triumph of Yuri Shibanokuji’s vision for his father’s company. Calvert knew he would not have found the same opportunities in one of the other megacorps, where they failed to see the exploitable economic value in marginalised communities.
It hadn’t been easy; a corporation’s culture could not be changed overnight, no matter how insulated the North American branch may have been from the factional politics of Vladivostok, but Calvert had managed to carve a place for himself within Evo – one that afforded him the perfect balance of freedom and control. He was trusted to act on his own initiative, so long as he delivered results.
Calvert didn’t naturally smile. It wasn’t in his biology, for all that he’d learned to manipulate his features so as not to unnerve those he interacted with. Nevertheless, he saw satisfied pride in his expression before he turned away from the window and slithered down the path that wound through the verdant indoor rainforest.
He always delivered results.
Beyond the climate-controlled room, the air-conditioned halls of the arcology felt almost bracing, until Calvert pulled together a cloak of warmth from the ambient magic in the air, leaking out from the verdant rainforest or the sheer mass of employees that surrounded him. The corridors were wide and spacious, but Calvert could still feel the press of people all around him, on every floor.
He passed departments he’d never heard of, performing functions he couldn’t explain. There were indoor shopping malls, schools, parks, and connector corridors leading off to the beehive of accommodation units scattered throughout every part of the building. Arcologies worked by positioning the workforce as close to their workplace as possible; what would otherwise have been time spent commuting could then become part of their shift.
The higher-ranked an employee was, the greater the distance between their residence and their workplace. Calvert’s own apartment was prestigious enough; hugging the exterior wall of the arcology, with a view across the street towards a Saeder-Krupp tower, and a mere fifteen minutes slither from his office, or less than five if he used the arcology’s internal tram.
All megacorporations maintained an intelligence bureau, but where they chose to house that bureau depended a great deal on the character of the corporation. At its heart, Ares was a military, its agents part of a wider corps but split up and integrated into smaller divisions who conducted their operations from secure strongrooms and bunkers. Horizon, for all its culture of openness, modelled its isolated intelligence campuses after those of the Central Intelligence Agency; existing in their own world far from the rest of the corporation, where they could be free to act in its best interests.
Evo prided itself on being genuine; on accepting everyone at face value and treating them without preconceptions. In spite of that, they weren’t embarrassed by the work he did. They simply chose not to acknowledge it. Evo didn’t place its agents in a secret bunker or isolated campus, because even that would have been to elevate their intelligencers to a special status. Instead, Calvert and his colleagues worked out of a nondescript complex of offices spread across three floors of the arcology, identical to the complexes around them save for the soundproofing, magical wards and security measures that were completely invisible from the outside.
Beyond the security checkpoint – manned by a pair of attentive guards in ballistic armour and a security mage whose bound spirit of air hovered just behind her shoulder – lay the lobby of the complex, a wide and spacious chamber that reached up the full three floors of the space, with a holographic sculpture of the world projected into the centre of the chamber, glowing nodes marking out Evo facilities around the world, the brightest nodes marking the areas where the corporation was at its strongest.
Andrew Daichi was waiting for him outside a meeting room on the third floor, with a long glass wall that looked out onto the slowly-revolving globe. The Japanese-American agent had risen in rank in the seven years since recruiting Calvert, though the Naga had risen at a faster rate. Calvert was now one of Evo’s senior agents in North America, trusted with extensive resources and a broad mandate, answerable only to Daichi in his role as the Director of Operations for the region.
“I was beginning to think you’d be late,” Calvert’s superior remarked.
“I’m never late without good reason,” the serpent countered, as Daichi slid open the door to the conference room, occupied by a polished black table and high-backed chairs. “Are you going to tell me what this is about?”
“An experiment of sorts, cooked up by Vladivostok. Some new model of operations. They’ve picked us to be the test bed, and I picked you to front the project. Sofia will take over as the California lead.”
“Do I have a say in this?” Calvert asked, a little irritation rising up. He worked well with Daichi, but he still worked for him.
“Of course. You can choose not to take the assignment that’d give you complete operational freedom and have your name on the cover of a report seen by the Board of Directors. If you want to keep tracking Horizon spooks in CalFree then that’s entirely up to you.”
Calvert hissed, but there was little anger in it. This was just another difference in their personalities; even in his fifties, Daichi still liked to present himself as the laid-back San Franciscan. Calvert, by comparison, preferred to comport himself with intimidating dignity.
Two chairs sat at the head of the table. Daichi pulled one back against the wall, then took his place in the other. Calvert coiled himself up beside him, keeping his head level with the other man as he telepathically reached out for a pair of trodes resting on the table.
Calvert hated all things virtual, but as the matrix was an unfortunate necessity in the metahuman world he’d learned to tolerate its soulless imposition; a globe-spanning corporation couldn’t be run through wires and word of mouth. With the trodes connected to his brain – the device adapted for his species’ brain chemistry by an Evo subsidiary, MetaErgonomics – Augmented Reality was overlaid on his vision, displaying a small handful of icons visible over the table, including a countdown timer with less than five minutes to go.
At three minutes, the door to the conference room slid open to admit a wiry man in a neatly-pressed suit, who was apparently there as an observer on behalf of Evo’s North American directorate, come down to see what exactly Vladivostok wanted to accomplish in their patch. Other visitors were waiting in a virtual lobby, visible as an antiquated telephone logo hovering over their seats. Most of the meeting’s participants would be casting in from identical conference rooms on the other side of the Pacific, watching the meeting through either holographic projectors or AR.
When the clock hit zero, every icon in the conference room was replaced by the projected image of a different person, most from the varying strains of metahumanity, though there was also a pixie who’d chosen to hover in place rather than take a seat, her dragonfly wings easily keeping her forty-centimetre tall body off the ground.
The only seat that remained unoccupied was the lone chair at the opposite end of the table. Given that nobody had spoken, it seemed that the meeting wouldn’t begin until it was filled.
There was a ripple in the air, visible solely to Calvert as the only dual-natured creature physically present in the room, which meant he existed on both the material and astral plain simultaneously, rather than projecting his consciousness onto it as metahuman mages did. Calvert reared up, already pulling together astral energy as he began to form a spell, only to settle back down when he saw that the Japanese representatives were staring at the ripple like they were expecting it, even if they couldn't possibly see it.
The gate spilled out onto the material plane, appearing as a vertical cut of shimmering air that parted like a torn sheet, flooding the office with the blinding radiance of some ethereal plane for just a moment before the rupture closed, leaving behind a being that had taken the form of a young Japanese woman in her late teens, dressed in an elegant silk kimono.
Everything about her appearance was an affectation, something that was made obvious even to the unawakened by the fact that she was hovering one foot off the ground. Calvert could see her true nature; a mass of astral energy that had gathered and developed sapience, growing stronger and more intricate across the centuries of its existence.
The whole room stood, chairs rolling back as Calvert and the pixie both reared themselves higher up. Just as quickly, they sank back down as the spirit waved them back down with a friendly gesture. Calvert’s heart was racing at a mile a minute, an inevitable consequence of being in the presence of corporate royalty.
He knew who she was, of course. How could he not, when Buttercup was Evo’s largest shareholder, owning twenty-nine percent of the company? When she was one of its most outspoken board members; the kingmaker whose votes had secured Yuri Shibanokuji’s control over the corporation and who had chosen the corporation’s current CEO in the cosmonaut Anatoly Zhukov Kirilenko?
Suddenly, Daichi’s decision not to consult him before assigning him this task – whatever it was – became nothing more than water under the bridge. He would never have refused this chance to ingratiate himself with the corporation’s royalty; to get one step closer to obtaining true, unrestricted control.
“Thank you all for waiting,” Buttercup said in barely-accented English, her voice as young and full of life as her assumed appearance, as she glided into the lone seat at the opposite end of the table. Effortlessly switching into Japanese, she turned her head to address the aged man sitting directly to her right. “Okumura-san, please feel free to begin.”
“Thank you, Buttercup-sama,” the man answered, the linguasoft built into the trodes he wore translating the man’s Japanese into English, though Calvert didn’t need the translation. Japanese was the language of international trade, which meant Calvert had learnt it alongside the Spanish and Amazonian Portuguese that were more directly useful in his operational area.
“The purpose of this meeting is to test the implementation of a new working method for emergent market acquisitions, codenamed Project Tumult.” Okumura Tatsuo continued. The man was familiar to Calvert, though they’d never met. He was the overall director of covert operations, and he’d served with the company for decades. Everyone had expected him to leave when the corporation moved to Vladivostok, but instead he had seemingly embraced the new direction of the company, serving the new regime with the same quiet competence with which he’d served the old.
“It has been decided that the North American directorate shall host this test. The results will determine whether it will be adopted as standard practice worldwide. For those of you who have not yet been briefed on Project Tumult, Lyrei-san will provide a summary.”
“Thank you, sir,” the pixie spoke up in a high-pitched voice, hovering a little higher on her utterly silent wings. Calvert had to use the linguasoft to follow her French. Lyrei – who had no surname attached to her AR nameplate – gestured with miniature haptic gloves, bringing up a cost-expenditure chart that was simultaneously broadcast over AR and projected onto the screens that ran down the length of one wall.
“Megacorporate stability depends on expansion. Evo must grow with each passing year in order to keep pace with the competition and retain the confidence of its shareholders. When growth cannot come from within the corporation, a simple method of expansion is to buy out smaller companies, particularly those on the cusp of gaining extraterritoriality.”
She drew her hands apart, the figures zooming in on one table in particular. Calvert had heard that pixies were obsessive by nature; that when they chose to interact with metahuman society it was often because they were fascinated by one specific part of it. He wondered if Lyrei’s obsession was mathematics.
“Unfortunately, their value is well-known. Attempts to buy one out can often spiral into a bidding war, and the shareholders of these corporations are typically reluctant to sell and lose out on the rapid gains that come from extraterritoriality. Project Tumult was conceived as a way of artificially lowering both the price and desirability of a corporation’s stocks in a way that is easily reversible after the company’s purchase. The original concept was created by Ms Buttercup, who gave it to my department for further exploration.”
“And it’s been my pet project ever since!” the spirit interjected, her tone alarmingly chipper. “It’s subtly manipulative in a way that’s almost nostalgic.”
The room fell silent, waiting for more. Buttercup didn’t notice at first, then she seemed to jump, her skin glowing momentarily in what Calvert almost thought could be a flash of embarrassment.
“Sorry. Please continue.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Lyrei continued, a little shaken. “As I said, the primary goal is to create a temporary crisis within a corporation. To this end, Project Tumult proposes assigning operatives to monitor desirable targets, providing them with a discretionary budget they can use to either exploit an existing secret within the corporation or to engineer a suitable crisis.”
“If the executives are vulnerable to blackmail,” Okumura interjected, picking up the thread from Lyrei with a grateful nod, “make the information public. If they’re dependent on a supply chain, engineer shortages. Both of these acts can be reversed. These are examples only, you understand. Each corporation will require a different approach, which is why our operatives must have an independent mandate. This isn’t something we can trust to just anyone.”
The last remark was directed at Daichi, though it made Calvert glad it took conscious effort for him to mimic human facial expressions.
Daichi answered the intelligence chief’s query with absolute confidence. “Thomas Calvert is my best operative. He has conducted sixteen operations in his seven years with the corporation, taking the lead on six of them.”
“I’ve read your record,” Buttercup said in a casual tone that nevertheless sent a spike of adrenaline through Calvert’s mind. “Like I said, I’ve taken a personal interest in this project and I agree with Mr Daichi that you’re more than capable.”
“You honour me, ma’am,” Calvert said. “I will prove myself worthy of it. I always do.”
“Your target is ‘Medhall Pharmaceuticals,’” Okumura said, taking care as he sounded out the English words. His pixie aide brought up a small package of data outlining stock prices, senior personnel and areas of operations before she began to summarise the opposition.
“It’s a single-A rated corporation principally based in the city of Brockton Bay, New Hampshire. Forty-three percent of its shares are held by the corporation’s current CEO, Max Anders. His family founded the company, with their shares passed down through primogeniture. The remaining shares are publicly traded, with approximately twenty-four percent held by close allies of Max Anders.”
“If I might ask,” Calvert interjected, “why this company in particular?”
To his surprise, Buttercup answered before Lyrei could. “It’s a hard target. Max won’t sell his shares until we own a majority and kick him out of the CEO’s office. If Project Tumult works on a target like that, it will work on anyone.”
Something in her tone piqued Calvert’s interest.
“That isn’t everything, is it?”
Buttercup laughed – a light, airy sound – and threw up her hands.
“You got me! I was in my place in Boston a few months back and I saw one of their adverts from the window. I hated it, so I did a little digging and the more I looked the more certain I was that the whole damn company should be ground into dust.”
Calvert’s eyes lit up, his forked tongue flicking out momentarily, tasting the air. Buttercup hated Medhall. Not the way someone might hate an enemy, even one far below their own strength. She hated that company like someone might hate an overflowing sewer drain.
“Then I assure you, ma’am,” Calvert continued. “I will serve this corporation to you on a silver platter, so that you can chisel it into whatever shape you desire.”
A shiver passed down Calvert’s spine as he felt the full attention of the spirit fall upon him. She was a being of pure astral essence, whose attention flickered and wavered to a myriad places and realms, but in that single moment her sole focus was on him alone. He could feel her rooting through his mind, weighing his sins and virtues like the guardian of some ancient underworld.
“Yes,” she said, outwardly smiling, though Calvert was sure he tasted something close to disappointment in the air. An unfulfilled hope? “I believe you will.”
2070
On the eighth floor of a hospital, at the heart of a control centre staffed by skilled operatives who obeyed his orders without question and separated by an entire continent from anyone he had to answer to, the serpent finally felt free.
This was what he had dreamed of through all those long years in captivity, watching his namesake pull strings and weave webs of influence around himself in his all-consuming quest to climb the corporate ladder to a level he deemed acceptable. That man had been nothing more than a shell, however; so enamoured with the end goal of his quest that he had poured his entire being into his pursuit of the future, leaving nothing for the present.
Thomas Calvert hadn’t stolen anything from that man; there was nothing left to steal, no person left to kill. Only the possibility that a person might emerge from that ambulatory chrysalis in some distant, nebulous future. Even then, Calvert doubted he would have ever been truly satisfied, no matter how high he climbed.
The serpent had ambitions, too, nurtured by confinement and envy. But that same confinement had engendered in him a deep longing for action. With every act taken of his own free will, there was contentment. With every person he entangled in the strings that had once held him, there was joy. With a web cast across a whole city, tugged and twisted into a gang war that still burned on the streets below, there was euphoria.
That he had been set an almost impossible task only magnified the satisfaction he felt at the progress he had made. While, in theory, Medhall was vulnerable thanks to Max Anders owning less than half of the corporation’s stock, that theory wasn’t matched by the reality Calvert had found months ago, when he first arrived in the city.
He’d chosen to establish himself in the hospital because it allowed him a view of the distant Medhall Tower, standing slightly taller than the downtown skyscrapers that surrounded it. In style, it was closer to the skyscrapers of the fifth world than the arcologies of the sixth, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows coating every floor of the building so that those within could look out on the city they claimed as their own.
Calvert had quickly discovered that the corporation’s roots lay even further back than that anachronistic design. In truth, if Medhall was a society in microcosm then its monument was a castle, not a corporate office building.
Medhall was an atavism; a feudal clan bound together by patrilineal succession and noble patronage. Twenty-four percent of the corporation’s stock was indeed held by individuals aligned with Max Anders, but it wasn’t financial self-interest that kept them in the company. Over generations, the patriarchs of the Anders family had worked to create their kingdom within Brockton Bay, drawing like-minded men into their circle of influence until they fell wholly under their sway. Such men wouldn’t sell their stocks simply because of a drop in value; they owed their patron too much for that, in ways that couldn’t be quantified through something as modern as money.
Calvert wondered if that was why Buttercup had seemed to carry such hatred for Medhall. They were undeniably backwards; an evolutionary throwback somehow still clinging to life in an age of magic and megacorporations. Still, that didn’t seem enough to justify the strength of feeling he’d observed back in Seattle.
In spite of her immense age, Buttercup had fully embraced the modern world in all its forms, from its society to its people. In public, she was a staunch advocate for sapient rights and a driving force behind Evo’s inclusive culture, but Calvert doubted that it was Medhall’s politics that she hated so vehemently.
Certainly, if he took her public persona at face value then it was the obvious choice, but Calvert recognised that persona for the front it was. It was simply impossible for someone so naively sentimental to rise as high as she had unless that sentiment was a mere affectation. Her lobbying had simply opened untapped markets for Evo, allowing the corporation to access resources and talent pools that would otherwise have been closed to it. Medhall had done the same; their strategy might be less efficient than Evo’s, but it made sense for the smaller corporation to seek a smaller, more specialised market.
In the end, he’d been forced to acknowledge that either Buttercup’s motivations were beyond his understanding or that her true reasons were the sort of grand pettiness only the truly wealthy were capable of; that the advert she’d seen in Boston had simply been so obnoxious that she’d decided the company behind it deserved destruction for daring to annoy her.
As for her thoughts on him – that strange sense of disappointment he’d felt from her – all he could do was hope that his success would be enough to assuage whatever doubts she had.
“Sir,” an aide interrupted his ruminations – a man named Pitter, who Calvert had brought along as an administrator. “We’ve just received read-only permissions for the Anders family’s telecom network.”
Turning his attention to the screens around him, Calvert navigated his way through windows with gentle telekinetic pushes on a trackball. Sure enough, his staff had already integrated the feed from the Renraku network into his other surveillance software.
My pet technomancer has been busy, he thought, with a sense of smug satisfaction, as he began to scroll through the accumulated logs of the Anders family clan. He had analysts who would pore through the data in detail, of course, but all he wanted at present was to verify a hunch.
Vindication came in the GPS data of the devices, tracked back over the last week of use to be sure.
“Get the Ontario team on the line,” Calvert spoke, without looking at Pitter.
Viewed as organisms, the megacorporations of the Sixth World had obtained a kind of immortality. You couldn’t kill a company by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were always underlings waiting to step up the corporate ladder. But Medhall was an atavism, which made it singularly vulnerable in ways other corporations weren’t.
His plan had only been fully realised once he had spoken to Zachary Hunter and heard all the man had to say about the internal politics of the Anders family’s unseen empire. The vampire had already been evacuated from the city; as a mole, he was useless with his policlub currently scattered to the wind, hunted by both Knight Errant and the DEA.
Calvert had kept his word, after a fashion. Hunter’s loyalty to Anders had come from a deep-seated self-hatred, tied into his vampirism. He genuinely saw himself as something less than a complete person, which was why he was so eager to believe Anders’ promises that Medhall Pharmaceuticals could help cure his condition.
The serpent had taken great pleasure in showing him the sum total of Evo’s research into the Human-Metahuman Vampire Virus; endless reports outlining failed attempts to create a cure or even to blunt the symptoms, as well as summaries of ongoing efforts towards those same goals. For all his zealotry, Zachary Hunter had been smart enough to acknowledge that if one of the world’s largest megacorporations couldn’t cure his condition, then there was no way Medhall could.
Then Calvert showed him that Anders wasn’t even trying; that Medhall had no HMHVV research programme whatsoever, that he had been betrayed from the very start. His steadfast loyalty turned to vehement hatred in an instant. It was fascinating to watch.
Calvert had offered him a choice. He could volunteer for Evo’s own research projects, living out the rest of his days in an observed laboratory environment as the test subject for potential cures in the latter stages of development – after they had been tested on less willing subjects to ensure they weren’t unacceptably dangerous – or he could take a lump sum of nuyen and a one-way plane ticket to the ghoul nation of Asamandio, where he could start a new life among his own kind.
He'd chosen the lab, which had surprised Calvert. He understood that ideological convictions could drive someone to act irrationally, but he couldn’t understand how anyone would willingly put themselves in the same position he’d escaped from. Hunter would never leave the laboratory compound. He would be comfortable, but confined, and with each passing year his health would only worsen as the accumulated side-effects of the testing began to wear him down. To choose that over a free life among people who accepted his nature – even if he hated them for what they were – was absurd.
“Line one, sir,” Pitter spoke up, interrupting Calvert’s train of thought.
A flick of an eye brought up the call. It was audio only, with the male voice on the other end represented by pulsing sound bars.
“Mr Johnson, I was beginning to think you’d forgotten us.”
“I keep my word,” Calvert answered. “Three jobs for me and I give you a clean way out. I simply needed to prepare the groundwork. I’m relocating you to Brockton Bay.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s a city in New Hampshire. You proved you can be subtle with your last job and for that I am grateful. The next jobs won’t be subtle, which plays to your strengths, and require people with a certain flexibility.”
“You mean you need people who won’t flinch at the difficult stuff.”
“Quite. I have two more targets for you, then your end of the deal will be fulfilled. You’ll all receive corporate citizenship, high-paying jobs with reasonably low hours and the best treatment my company can provide.”
“About that. Not all of us are happy working for an anonymous suit. It makes your promises sound a little hollow.”
Calvert chuckled to himself.
“I don’t wear a suit; they don’t make one that would fit. But I understand your concerns. I work for Evo. As you know, we’re world-leaders in genetics, healthcare and cybernetics, and one of the few corporations who would consider treatment as the answer to your friend’s… unique situation, rather than extermination.”
“It’s still hard to take you at your word.”
“Then let us speak face to face and I’ll prove to you that my offer is more than just smoke and mirrors. I’m sure the last few years have been very difficult for you and your people. I’m sure it’s hard to trust anyone after what you’ve been through, but the end of your long nightmare is in sight, Trickster. Two more missions, two more targets, and you and your team are free.”