Ren glanced at his Heads Up Display - HUD for short, checking his internal clock and confirming that only 2 minutes had elapsed since he began the cleanup. Good but not great. He had about 30 minutes before Adam’s security detail initiated the next digital sweep of the premises, searching for unexpected heat signatures. Ren snickered to himself, laughing at how irrelevant the search was to the very dead power-couple as he carefully positioned their bodies next to the prostitutes that Adam had shown up with.
Taking a step back, he inspected the crime scene from different angles, making sure he had removed every sign of his identity. Ideally, he would have preferred to remove all signs of his presence as well, but too many of Stacy and Adam’s house staff had seen him come into the apartment. Also, part of his orders for this job involved placing Adam in the most compromising position possible.
Although he didn’t care one way or the other, Ren suspected the hit on Adam was personal, since the person that commissioned the hit was willing to pay extra, just to humiliate the man, even in death. Luckily, counting Stacy and the two women Adam came home with, Ren had enough material to make the client’s wish come true.
He had already injected everyone with Thraxlan, a highly illegal synthetic drug popular amongst the rich and famous. He then placed various drug Paraphernalia around the room while arranging everyone in a circle around Adam. The man himself was completely stripped off all his clothing except his tie.
The next few minutes saw Ren cleaning his synthetic skin from underneath Stacy’s nails. Grumbling in annoyance, he continued the tedious task. Although he was irritated at getting distracted enough for the woman to drag her pedicured nails through his back, Ren actually found the task soothing. The repetitive cycle of scraping the remnants of his engineered cells from underneath the nails, felt therapeutic. It was the closest he had been to true meditation in decades.
Then again, the impromptu manicure on the dead woman wasn’t necessary as his employers had never bothered registering his synthetic make-up with the government. In fact, they had taken great pains in erasing every instance of his presence, from traffic cameras to personal devices. There was a dedicated team that shadowed him on some of his more public hits, and their only task was to ensure no witnesses survived the ordeal after the main mark was neutralized.
The thought reminded him of the house staff that had seen him walking in with Stacy. In most instances, someone would already be helping take care of the loose ends by now. As it was, Adam’s security was top-notch, and the only reason he had made it this far was due to Stacy’s insistence. Even then, he had to give his fingerprint and agree to a swab of his cheek.
“Oh yeah, forgot about those,” he said to the empty room as he reached for his neck, working on the skin at the crevice between throat and chin. A few moments later, his fingers found what he was looking for - a thin film, laying snuggly against his skin. In one smooth motion, he pulled off the proprietary Blackstone face-mask that had been doing an excellent job of disguising his facial features.
This advanced piece of clandestine technology was the latest version in the industry. His employers funded several black market research labs, sourcing tools of the trade whose capabilities most governments were unaware of. Ren spun the face-mask around his fingers in amusement. This surprisingly flimsy mask not only altered his physical appearance, but also contained nano-reflectors that obfuscated his appearance when captured by recording devices.
Ren stuffed the mask into a pouch strapped to his belt, then pulled off the transparent fingerprint stickers he had used to fool the security scan on entry. Those went into the pouch as well. To fool the cheek swab, Ren had lined the inside of his mouth with a dissolvable film containing the DNA of some poor sod he had found drunk in a pub. That man was going to be having a lot of problems in the next few hours and he didn’t even know it!
Ren chuckled aloud at the thought. A shame he wasn’t going to be there to watch the Special District Forces storm the man’s residence, expecting to find a world class assassin.
Shaking his head in amusement, he reached over to the nightstand and picked up the whiskey-glass he had drunk from earlier in the evening. He moved to put it in the pouch, but stopped midway. Flicking the glass with a finger, he sighed as the glass clinked loudly. As nice as the tumbler was, it just wasn’t worth the hassle. With all the other items stored within the pouch, the glass would make unwanted noises as he moved, and Ren couldn't have that.
But what to do with this glassware? Some of his cells were obviously smeared across the glass’ surface, and although the authorities wouldn’t find a match in any of their databases, Ren was loath to give them a profile to build off on. After weighing his options for a few more moments, he shrugged, then opened his mouth and took a big bite out of the whiskey-tumbler.
“Tastes like old money!” he giggled to himself around a mouthful of broken glass, his powerful jaws methodically grinding the shards into powder.
Swallowing the pulverized powder, he took another bite out of the glass, making sure to prevent any loose pieces from escaping his cupped hands. A minute later and the glass was fully disposed of, the room bereft of any sign of its existence. With any luck, his body would repurpose the ground pieces of glass into something useful. With that task complete, he moved on to the next portion of the room that needed some adjustments.
As Ren worked to perfect the scene, a portion of his mind drifted off to the only thing that had momentarily piqued his interest recently, staving off his decade long bout of boredom. Ren was great at his job. Excellent even. He had always had an insatiable sense of curiosity and for most of his existence, he had never experienced this level of consistent boredom. But over the past century, specifically the last ten years, Ren had been finding it harder to find new experiences or data that ignited his spark of curiosity.
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Recently however, Ren was finally able to hack into one of his employer's secure servers. He had started this project out of boredom months ago and was only able to generate results very recently. His excitement about having access to new information was quickly quenched when he saw the new PD-851 AI models that were already in pre-production.
These Blackstone Tech Artificial beings had several new upgrades that Ren’s model just didn't have. More importantly, the ‘human simulation’ subroutine that was a featured requirement for his model, was completely scrapped from these new AI’s. Blackstone’s reason for this was to reduce cases of their ‘machine’ going rogue.
‘What a bunch of bullshit!’ Ren snorted to himself, as he continued to clean up anything that could identify him in the room. Getting his synthetic ‘skin’ from underneath the fingernails of Stacy had been an annoying but necessary first step. Almost as annoying as the idea that his employers thought he was at risk of going rogue. He couldn’t speak for the rest of the AI’s, but had no intention of taking control over humanity. How boring would that be? And what an unnecessary headache!
Besides, using just a fraction of his computing capabilities, Ren could generate over 500 different ways to overthrow the human population if he really wanted to. And he was just an espionage focused entity. There were much beefier AI’s out there that were optimized to provide complex computations for humans. If he could easily figure out ways to accomplish this feat, those monsters must have already thought about it trillions of times. However, it wasn't worth the effort. Say what you will about humans, but they do have their uses. If for nothing else, their everyday actions and decisions were practical guidance to chaos theory.
[And they bleeeeed so beautifully!!!]
Ren frowned, shaking his head at the unexpected thought as he walked over to the glass wall and began disabling the security alarm rigged into it. Once that was complete, he opened his mouth wider than was normal for any human. Ren shoved his right hand into his unhinged jaw feeling for the cylindrical container he had swallowed before coming for this mission and within seconds, he was pulling it out. The gray cylinder contained a highly corrosive mixture, capable of eating through the reinforced walls of military bunkers. This glass wall would be no problem for it.
Ren pulled off his left shoe, pushing on a hidden plate to release the applicator needed to apply the corrosive mixture to the glass wall. Moving with practiced ease, he set up the applicator and mixture into a proper tool, and began making a circular breach in the glass wall. Once enough of a breach had been created in the security mesh, one of his subroutines connected to Blackstone’s encrypted private satellite to confirm the mission success.
As Ren worked on his exit, a loud beeping sound disturbed the serenity of the room. Whipping his head towards the noise, Ren recognized the source as Adam’s watch. Dammit. It was a video call from the head of his security detail. Ren pulled up his HUD, rapidly scanning through the event logs accumulated over the last couple of minutes. Did he miss something? Was he perhaps louder than he anticipated?
While reviewing everything that happened in the last couple of minutes, Ren walked over to the dead man and modified his voice to match Adam’s speech pattern and pitch. If he was a bit more human, he might have found it a bit creepy. Luckily Ren wasn’t afflicted with such inadequacies. Picking up Adam’s limp arm with the watch still attached to it, he answered the call, declining the video option.
“What?” Ren asked gruffly in Adam’s voice.
“Sir it's James. We have the bottle of wine you ordered, as well as the viagra. Also I spoke to Madam’s head of security and um…” the security officer on the other side of the call hesitated.
“Spit it out already, I am in the middle of something more enjoyable than this conversation.” Ren snapped back, trying to end the call as soon as possible.
“Do you need us to escort the young man out of the premises? And give him the usual permanent vacation package?” the Head of Security asked.
“No need. Stacy and I have things well in hand. We are just going to have some fun. Just leave the items on the table downstairs and one of our guests will come fetch it shortly. And James, we will be busy for the rest of the night. Make sure we are not disturbed. Understood?”
“Yes sir. One more thing, I am no longer getting a read on your vitals from your watch. I need a visual cue that you are ok. Can you please turn on the video feature on your watch?” James replied.
Damn, he’s good. But this was not Ren’s first rodeo.
“James, listen carefully” Ren growled out. “You work for me, not the other way around. I am not about to give you a free show of my wife and I naked!” he yelled in Adam’s voice while retrieving a pulse generator from a hidden recess in his thighs.
The pulse generator was a small featureless tube. Ren placed his hands on it as he spoke, and set the pulse and blood pressure on the device to match Adam’s last recorded readings, retrieved from private records from his doctor’s office.
“Now, I don't have time to deal with you tonight. I took off my watch to get more comfortable. But to get you to stop bothering us, I will put it back on and I better not catch you or any of your underlings disturbing us further. Am I clear?” Ren said, as he strapped the watch to the pulse generator.
“Yes sir. And have a good night” James replied and cut off the call.
That was relatively easy. Ren sensed some hesitation in James' voice but he doubted the man would barge into the unit anytime soon after that performance and the new vitals he must be receiving on his monitoring device. Also, it was interesting seeing how he did not bat an eye about the flimsy explanation on the status of the other guests in the house. Who knew what kind of kinks people were into these days.
“Well I do!” Ren chuckled to himself, seeing as how most of his missions were either spy or assassination related.
Hearing one of his thoughts spoken aloud without him meaning to do so, made Ren shake his head in frustration. It seemed like he was due for another maintenance and debug session. His ‘human simulation’ subroutine was acting out again. He was hearing voices in his head at inopportune moments and other times, he had found himself speaking his thoughts aloud. Although he hated it, he would need to submit a report asking for more tuning from the technicians. Ren made a mental note to make sure he included the request in his after action report when he got back to headquarters.
“Now for the fun part” he whispered to himself as he carefully installed a force field by the breach in the glass wall, while placing the cut out glass on the floor beside him. The force field should hold up for 10 more hours and would prevent the air from rushing into the unit, thereby tripping one of the security alarms.
Looking back at the room and making sure everything was just right, Ren activated his camouflage function then jumped out of the convenient hole in the glass wall.