The Immortality Game

“Slow down,” he cried at his car, whipping his head around to see what had happened to the only girl he’d ever felt anything more than lust for. A gaping hole marred the glittering perfection of the building. Oily smoke roiled out of the wound.

Tavik clapped his hands to his head. “Zoya. What have I done.”

He saw Boris’s cycle circling back toward the crash site. Taking the controls again, he spun the car hard around and accelerated groundward. He pinged Boris’s wireless.

«Yeah, boss?»

«Boris, get in there if you can and secure the cards. Bunny and I will watch the lobby in case they survived and make it down to ground level. And don’t hurt Zoya if she’s alive!»

«They might leave by one of the flyways.»

«Maybe,» Tavik said, allowing exasperation to creep into his mental voice, «but there are only three of us, so I’m playing the odds. Oh, and we all need to disable our wireless cards.»

«What! Are you crazy? Why?»

«You remember their invisible friend who called you. He’s already proven he can hurt us, maybe even kill us through our wireless. We have to shut it down.»

«How do we keep in touch?»

Tavik settled the air car into a recharge station on ground-level and glanced at the entrance doors on this side of the building.

«We’re just going to have to do the best we can. You know what we need; go for it. Once you have it, or if it just isn’t possible to do anything, head back to base and we’ll hook up eventually. Got it?»

«Yeah. I can’t see much through all the smoke. There are firebots spraying foam everywhere. I’m going in. Disabling my wireless now.»

«Good. Later.» Tavik ordered his own wireless to shut down and commanded the car doors to open. He turned to look in the back seat. “Coming or staying, Bunny?”

Moscow

Sunday, June 8, 2138

6:37 p.m. MSK

Zoya knew she should be stunned, even wanted to be stunned, anything to not have to face the unending insanity of this worst day of her life. The combat card wouldn’t let go of her mind. It flashed orders at her, pulsing with suggestions and seeming to slow time, along with the thudding of her heart. She saw lots of smoke through the car’s view screens, though as of yet the airtight vehicle still smelled only of leather and the sweat of the three occupants.

Crumpled in the seat next to her, Marcus was shaking his head and murmuring something unintelligible. The driver up front looked unconscious. Amazing, Zoya thought. This car must have some strong armor to survive such a crash.

Smoke swirled away from the front viewer as a thick white substance was sprayed across its surface. Zoya had never seen firebots in action, but she understood what they were, and even if she hadn’t known what was happening, the combat card was busy explaining. The most insistent directive from the card was to get the hell out of here, as she was on a level of the building restricted to Muckers without proper work clearances. Security would surely be here shortly.

She looked at Marcus and wondered again why this strange foreigner was following her around into danger that didn’t seem to have anything to do with him. The way he acted and the terrible shape he’d allowed his body to get into despite the advances in nanobot technology made her think of him almost like a child, though she guessed he might actually be a little older than herself. She weighed the idea of getting out of the car and leaving the young man behind. She had so much to do, and it seemed impossible to manage it all—escape this building she wasn’t allowed in; avoid the mafia assholes; somehow try to save any remaining family and friends. She reached out and shook Marcus’s shoulder. “Hey, you all right?”

Marcus groaned and held a hand to his forehead before looking up at her. He croaked something in English, and she didn’t have a translator card, nor was her love of old English rock sufficient to understand him.

Zoya shook her head. “Speak Russian. We need to get out now or security will catch us and hand us over to those thugs.”

A loud moan emanated from the front seat and the driver sat up, gripping his head with both hands.

“We’re…‌alive,” Marcus said, this time in his badly accented Russian.

“Only for a little while if we don’t go now,” Zoya said. She examined the view screen next to her and decided the fire was under control outside the vehicle there. “Door open!”

The door slid up and the heat seemed to suck the air from her lungs. Then the smoke poured in and set everyone to coughing. Zoya gripped Marcus’s arm and tugged. “Come on.”

Slowly Marcus began sliding out after her. Three firebots were still spraying white foam around the room, which looked like some of the rich apartments Zoya sometimes saw on vids featuring the wealthy classes. The outside wall was gone, the plastiglass a huge rectangle of jagged shards with black smoke roiling out into the early evening sky.