Rainy season had hit, and Lyn stood in the dark and wet in front of the Simon building. It was late, about 11.30pm. Just about the time the security would be changing shifts. Perfect time for Lyn. They would be off guard and disorganised right now.
Jacob Simon was her target. CEO of one of the many BioTech companies that had shot up in the past few years. While the others were simply mundane in their malevolence; pushing brain chips on people who can't afford them in a hope to recoup their money in home repossession and debt, Lyn had a special hatred reserved for Simon.
In Lyn's eyes he was nothing short of a villain. The kind of man who owed his fortune and comfy way of life to his parents and their hard work. The kind of man who firebombed health clinics in his youth was now somehow the head of a major biotechnology healthcare company.
It was all a farce, a conspiracy. Lyn knew it. She had seen the reports. She had seen the level of Mercury used in their 'treatments'. Enough to cause irreversible damage in just long enough of a time frame that the company would never be connected, unless you were shown, and Charon had shown her.
Charon was the voice in Lyn's head, sending her encrypted messages directly to her brain chip. They had given her the information no one else would, information that powerful and malevolent forces want kept from the people. Charon had made her understand, in a way that cut through the endless nuance and complexity and arrived at a concise truth that no one should reject. Everything Charon told and showed her made so much sense, just sounded so right. They had shown her exactly what must be done.
Simon must die, and after him the others would fall. The reign of plutocratic capitalists would end and the government would install fair regulations to keep anyone from suffering at the hand of treatments like Simon's. Charon had said so.
Charon had taught Lyn other things too. Things like how to use a submachine gun, how to make improvised explosives and how to bypass the integrated security in the Simon building. She was ready.
The rain pouring on her short red hair, she walked confidently toward the Simon building.
89 floors of glass and steel stood between her and Jacob, along with enough armed security to give a SWAT team trouble. They wouldn't deter her though. She had Charon on her side.
In the spacious foyer of the Simon building, it was a lone security guard behind the front desk that saw her first; a petite redhead soaked from the rain in a trench coat several sizes too big for her. He had just barely time to make eye contact before a hail of bullets punched through the glass doors and into his own skull. The door shattered, and Lyn walked inside, her demeanour unaffected by the first murder of the evening. She pulled out a flat circular device from inside her coat and slid it across the faux marble floor of the high-ceilinged lobby. It was a communications dampener, another gift from Charon. It scrambled the most commonly used commercial radio and microwaves along with WiFi signals in a local radius. No one would be calling for help for the next twenty minutes. More than enough time.
From around a corner Lyn heard a lift door open, and promptly two more security personnel entered her line of sight. With Charon guiding her arm and eye, she opened fire on them both, armed with a modified Steyr TMP that linked with her brain chip.
An advanced ballistics module installed on the firearm linked to the visual centres of her brain, providing an overlay of where bullets would hit to her own eyes. That, combined with Charon's own target processing working in her brain chip meant she would never miss.
Reloading, she walked over to the lift. Waving her hand in front of the screen by the lift door, she called the express elevator. As the numbers quickly counted down from 89, a thought entered her head, a thought from Charon. The dampener wouldn't disable the CCTV. Security would see her in the lift, disable it, and wait for reinforcements to arrive. Her mission would fail there and then, trapped in a cage with no way out.
Take the stairs Charon told her. To the third floor. Kill those at the security hub. Take elevator then.
Without hesitation she turned toward the emergency stairwell doors.
Several flights of stairs later, Lyn found herself in a maze of office cubicles and locked doors. She kept moving though, she knew the way. Charon had given her access to the floor plans, gifting her with a cognitive map of the entire building. Coming to an end of a row of cubicles and desks, she spotted a door on the right-side wall, leading to the security hub. She stopped. She had received another thought from Charon. Throw a grenade.
There was still some distance between herself and the hub, a distance filled with desks and cubicles. A perfect place for someone to hide. Lyn reached into her coat, pulling out a jar filled with homemade explosives. No sooner was she lighting the fuse did Lyn realise she had thrown it without thinking. Charon had done the thinking for her, taking direct control of her arm muscles in an effort to land it in the most effective place. Crouching behind a desk she waited for the sound of detonation. The blast reached her ears, along with the sounds of screaming and yelling. Lyn reached out from the cover of the desk, offloading an entire magazine into the cloud of smoke the bomb kicked up. It had settled slightly when Lyn was on the move again. As she walked through the row of cubicles toward the hub, she saw what was left of the guards. Several people lay dead. A couple severed and mutilated from the blast, and another from gunshot wounds.
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In some part of her mind, Lyn knew she should be disturbed by this. Some part of her should have reacted at what she was seeing and doing. She didn't though, and instead was overwhelmed with a unbreakable sense of determination and conviction in herself, only processing her actions in a surface and superficial way. She moved fluidly into the security hub room, identifying four more guards and firing with expert accuracy and discipline. As soon as they entered Lyn's vision Charon had processed that information and issued commands to her brain, turning her movements into an almost reflexive set of actions.
The room was clear, and there would be no more obstacles between her and Simon. She headed back to the lift.
The ride to the top floor was swift and quiet. Lyn checked her remaining ammunition and readied herself for confronting Simon. Security might have gotten itself together by now, and Simon may well be very protected in his office. With only two spare magazines for her firearm and one extra bomb, she had decided to remove her coat, revealing the body armour she wore underneath. Slipping the magazines into a pouch in the armour, she readied the bomb in her hand. The lift slowly ticked up floor after floor. As Lyn saw the numbers climb and climb on the screen by the door, she could almost feel a rising sense of euphoria build in her. She was close now, close to completing her mission. Close to changing the world for the better.
She almost felt excited, but wasn't. Excitement leads to a fast and erratic heartbeat, which leads to inaccuracy and a loss of control. Charon would not be having that, and had taken measures to prevent that possibility.
The lift doors opened, and Lyn's eye caught glimpse of a dark, funnel shaped hallway filled with armed guards with flashlights behind barricades waiting for her. A glimpse wasn't enough for her, but it was for Charon, who quickly told her body to move out the line of fire and press herself against a side wall of the lift and in some form of cover.
A huge volley of shotgun and submachine gun fire hurled itself toward the open lift door, smashing into the back wall of the lift. Lyn, still unfazed, waited for the sound of gunfire to subside. They would reload soon.
With the first sounds of magazines ejecting and shells being loaded, Charon again borrowed her body, flinging the last bomb into the centre of the crowd. Before it had time to hit the ground Lyn was out the lift, her gun pointed. She caught full view of the blast as it ripped through the crowed of guards. She should of seen the flash, but Charon filtered it out of her mind. Those further down the hall, unaffected by the homemade grenade were promptly shot by Lyn, falling back onto the translucent glass wall of Jacob's office.
No one was left, no one that could stop her now anyway. Shooting out the lock of the office door, she promptly entered Simon's office.
It was a huge, trapeze shaped room, with the far end widening until it reached the glass wall of the building.
Jacob was cowering behind his desk in the centre of the room, and upon spotting Lyn he jumped out firing an old six shooter revolver. He had managed to get one misplaced bullet out the chamber before Lyn reacted, firing in an arc that went from his right hand to his head. His hand was destroyed, and the sheer number of bullets that entered his head made him fall to the floor.
Lyn stood above Simon. He was slumped and lifeless on his office floor. 14 rounds were fired at his head. 12 hit, and next to nothing had remained of his wrinkly, artificially tanned face. Lyn had done it. Her mission was complete.
The authorities would be there in a matter of minutes to take her in, as Jacob's biometrics had a constant link to his private health provider. Despite the dampener, the moment his heart stopped they would know. The word was out. She didn't care though, in her mind she had set in a chain of events that would change the world and make things better for everyone. She was at utter nirvana.
It was at this euphoric state that Lyn felt a strange pang in the back of her head.
Several hundred miles away, a server stack in Utah executed the command 'disconnect softlink'. With that the euphoric warmth in Lyn's head was snapped away, replaced with a cold sense of lucidity. She hadn't slept in days, and hadn't eaten in longer still. Instantly she saw through the irrationality of the story Charon had fed her. Instantly she had come to the realisation of what she had done. Charon was gone from her mind and now she saw the grip it had a hold of her. The reports that implicated Jacob faded from her mind like they were nothing more than a dream, a delusion fed to her from a voice in her brain chip.
She franticly thought to turn herself in, tell someone that a rogue program took control of her mind. In these panicked thoughts, she began to froth at the mouth, and quickly collapsed on the floor next to Simon.
Before completely disconnecting, Charon gave her a parting gift. Her brain chip started to fry, and dopamine flooded into her synapses. The authorities would find a dead CEO and the woman who killed him. Lyn would be diagnosed as schizophrenic post mortem, caused by a faulty brain chip. Project Charon had completed its mission without error.