Our species is a never-ending garbage fire.

No matter how far we progress, how much we learn, and how good we become at spoiling ourselves useless, it always comes back to killing.

Even here, in what most people in the megacity would consider a holy place, I opened the door to find nothing but cold death and dry blood. I lowered my shotgun, letting it hang absently from one hand as I stepped into the temple. The gunfighting had been over long before I got there, replaced by an oppressive amount of solemn quiet.

Streams of incense smoke still coiled upward from various corners of the main room, but a little patchouli couldn’t mask lingering smells of cordite and iron. This was a massacre by the numbers. Not a robbery, but a dynamic entry. Total breach-and-clear job.

> Jakob? Please explain what we're seeing.

I ignored the voice in my head. His curiosity would have to wait.

The attackers killed the Clerics first. That much was obvious.

Harmless pacifists, living in the temple as part of their Covenant, hiding away from ganger life or a stim addiction. Poor bastards got caught right in the middle of their morning meditation. Some of the corpses were still kneeling on their prayer pillows. Frozen, pale figures in the world's grimmest statuary.

Stepping toward the nearest hallway, I saw the first signs of an actual fight. The temple’s Paladins, each with entry wounds in their foreheads.

At least they'd had time to grab their rifles. The Paladins had gotten a couple of shots in before they all ate it, too. But six armed clergymen weren't enough to stop whatever force had come through the door.

Moving down the hall and peering into side rooms, I found every inch of the place littered with bloody boot prints and shell casings.

At the end of the hall, I scooped a handful of brass from the polished com-crete floor. 10mm HotStop cartridges. Brutal and expensive. The kind of ammo you use when you want to end a life with one pull of the trigger, regardless of what kind of subdermal armor or cybernetic wetgear is on the receiving end.

Tipping my hand, I let the casings tinkle back to the floor before kicking the burned-out husk of a stun grenade across a synthetic grass prayer mat.

These monks never had a chance.

All the high-end hardware was a dead giveaway. There might as well have been a note saying ‘mass murder provided courtesy of Greysen Security, ZLC’. Bunch of no-neck, jack-booted smoothbrains.

A familiar sickness turned in my stomach. I’d spent a year as a GreySec employ before moving over to Edison Motors, and twelve months in the uniform left scars on my soul that implants and chems could never erase.

Visions of Mount Weather flooded in, reminding me that they'd signed lifetime leases inside my head. Memories that explained why a scripting geek accustomed to a posh corpo life at Edison could walk through a scene like this without puking his guts out.

It wasn't because joining the Order a few weeks ago had given me supernatural coping skills. All they'd given me was my own orange robes, a voice in my head, and a mission.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Nope. I was keeping it together because I'd seen this before. Different surroundings. Different time. But still...this.

I shook my head and kept walking. There were enough ghosts in this place. No need to resurrect mine.

The sanctum at the heart of the temple hadn’t been spared GreySec's violence. Not as many bodies at my feet in here — only a few Simsattvas, the temple honchos — but a hell of a lot of smashed-up tech. Their MiniMax altar was completely savaged, and a lot of hardware was missing from the server racks set against the wall.

Whatever the GreySecs left behind was unusable. Piles of shattered graphene boards and wires on the floor made it clear that they'd taken a breaching hammer to whatever they hadn’t seized.

Letting out a deep sigh, I rested my shotgun on my shoulder.

“What now?” I said to the empty room.

> One sec, bud. Calculating.

That was the voice in my head again — an A.I.-powered neurocom app named Koan. He'd been installed only a few days ago as part of my own Covenant with the Order. The ceremony had involved hooking my brain up to a MiniMax setup just like the one shattered all over the floor in front of me.

I had agreed to it, but it was more of one of those 'take any skyport in a storm' situations.

“Any day now,” I mumbled to my embedded companion.

I didn’t need to talk out loud to interact with Koan, but doing so made me feel less alone. It took the edge off of him living in the processor attached to my brain and felt more like a conversation with an actual person.

And frankly, I didn’t give a damn if anyone thought it was weird. Not that it was all that strange for street-level Hope Megacity.

Finally, some text popped up in my field of vision, narrated by Koan’s always-pleasant voice:

> Quest updated! Seek the Sacred Child at Vilk’s Temple of the Ordered Construct, Palace Park District (0/1). Distance: 23.6 km, as the drone flies.

Considering the salient bloodbath at our feet, Koan’s cheery tone irked me. By being linked to my nervous system, he knew what I knew, saw what I saw, and his optimism in the face of our situation seemed wrong. And I felt wrong for envying his unshakable A.I. demeanor.

I scratched the tight fade of hair around my ear. “Hm. What are the odds that the other temple is all shot to hell, too?”

> I dunno. Pretty low. So sayeth MiniMax.

“So sayeth. Right.”

> Embrace the Game State, Jakob!

I shook my head. “I’m trying.”

After a short silence, Koan chimed in with another question.

> Jakob. What is a 'HotStop'?

I scoffed. "Unlimited access to my brain, and you have to ask me about a bullet?"

> It's not unlimited. Some of the memories you're referencing now are buried quite deep. I can't fully access them.

"Good. Leave them alone," I said, bending down to examine one of the dead Simsattvas.

After a short search, I lifted a fully-expanded HotStop round from the pile of bloody robes. Like a metal sea anemone about two inches across, with spikes so sharp that I had to be careful handling it even with my cybernetic fingers.

"This is a HotStop, Koan. A bullet filled with metallic nanofluid. When it hits, it crystallizes into a ball of tiny spikes. Against bare flesh, it turns into a meat shredder. When it hits armor or bone, these spikes shatter. Become their own projectiles."

Half the spikes had broken off the expanded bullet, probably after hitting the back of its victim's skull. I silently hoped Koan wouldn't ask me to flip the body over so he could examine the exit wound.

> No need for that. But you could tell me why this bullet is tied to your memories of the Summit Riots. You have so many buried memories there, Jakob.

"Maybe later." I sighed, tossing the HotStop to the floor. "Now's not the time."

Taking a final, lingering look at the mess, I mourned the loss of the one good thing about being banished from Edison's employ and putting on the orange robes. Namely, that I wouldn’t have to deal with this kind of shit any more.

That was the plan, anyway. But this is Hope Megacity. We're selfish, angry animals.

And it always comes back to killing.