The Privateer
A Tech-noir short story by Mickey Fisher
Genzo laid the gun case on top of the bar and opened it to show Novi the contents.
“Type 89 Japanese assault rifle. Barrel’s a bit shorter. Carbon composite scope. Other than that, looks pretty normal, right? Until you see what’s under the hood.”
He lifted the gun out, his thick-muscled body framed by the wall of colored sake bottles behind him. The speakeasy didn’t open for a couple more hours. It was just the two of them now, per the com-link.
Novi watched as he raised it to his shoulder and took aim at the front door, the move inching up his cuffs, revealing sleeves of tattoos that ran down to his wrists. He flicked a switch to activate the firing mechanism and it came to life with a hum. “You can track and target an augmented individual via their e-signature from three miles away. Instead of bullets it fires an EMP that fries their systems without damaging the living tissue. Shuts em down right on the spot.”
He handed it to Novi and she expertly ejected the magazine to look inside. The space where the bullets normally go had been gutted, replaced by electrolytic capacitors. She slapped it back in and Genzo said, “SDF prototype. Straight from Japan.”
Novi asked, “When did they start making them?”
“Right after the Pentagon started upgrading their soldiers,” Genzo said. “The war of the future is coming, in case you haven’t heard.”
Novi didn’t bother to tell him. The war of the future started a long time ago.
She aimed the barrel at a point on the opposite wall of the empty bar.
Genzo took off his sport coat, spread his arms out. Said, “Activate the scope.”
Novi pointed the barrel at him, put the viewfinder to her eye. She flicked a switch near her right thumb and the scope lit up. Through it, she could see a series of microchips embedded underneath his tattoos. Invisible to the naked eye, now they shimmered and pulsed with different colors. She lowered the gun.
“You’re augmented,” Novi said.
Genzo said, “Got my first one, couldn’t stop.”
“What do they do?”
He grinned, said, “Come to my place after, I’ll show you.”
Novi rolled her eyes. Corny motherfucker. She said, “I wanna test the EMP. If it works like you say it does I’ll transfer the crypto to your account.”
“ Trust me,” Genzo said. “It works.”
The door behind her opened and Novi spun around, on high alert. A mountain of a man entered the bar and casually locked the door behind him. Stuffed into a suit, tatted up like Genzo. Gun bulge in his jacket.
Genzo clocked her uneasiness, and said, “He’s with me.”
Novi put the gun back in the case and started for the door. “Deal was we meet alone.”
She got two steps from the door when the mountain, Daishin, stepped into her path. She heard the unmistakeable click of the hammer going back on a revolver and turned to see Genzo holding a .357. Retro special. “I turned down other buyers for you,” Genzo said. “So, how about you transfer that money.”
As a counter offer, Novi slammed her right foot back into Daishin’s knee, shattering it in an instant. As all three hundred and fifty pounds of him crumbled to the floor Novi jumped on the bar and raced toward Genzo. He fired shot after shot, tracking behind her, shattering sake bottles that rained down multi-colored shards behind her but never quite catching up.
She vaulted off the bar and smashed her heel into his chest, sending him crashing through the bathroom door. She grabbed the modified assault rifle and turned to make her escape when a gunshot blew a grapefruit sized hole in her right thigh. Daishin had managed to get a shot off from his sprawled out position on the floor, blood spurting from his compound fracture.
Novi looked down at the hole in her leg. Beneath her biker leathers was a layer of synthetic skin. Beneath that the wiring and carbon fiber gears of her prosthetic were exposed.
Genzo saw it too.
“You’re augmented.” Genzo said, stunned.
Before Daishin could off get another shot Novi launched herself off her right foot, covering ten yards from a standing position and kicked his head clean through the neon glass of the jukebox just behind him. She turned back toward Genzo, raised the rifle, and flicked the switch to arm it.
He tried to crawl away, saying, “Wait, wait, wait —“
Novi took aim and pulled the trigger.
The EMP rippled through his skin, frying the implants that went dark in the scope.
She lowered the gun again.
“You’re right,” Novi said. “It works.”
***
The apartment was a temporary rental. She was flush with cash from selling off Genzo’s gun so she sprang for a view of the Brooklyn Bridge and automated everything.
If she wanted to go shopping, all she had to do was step out of her clothes and into her closet, where a Miracle Mirror projected different outfits onto her body. With a verbal command she could “buy” it and a couple of hours later it was 3D printed to her specs and delivered to her apartment. Sitting at her makeup mirror, she tapped the Miracle stylus to her lips and watched as various shades rolled over her lips in waves, until she landed on one that she liked.
Amaranth.
Named after a flower that grew on Mount Olympus.
A flower that never died.
In a few months, maybe sooner, she’d blow through her savings and have to go looking for work again. Novi thought of it like surfing. You paddle out, catch the wave, spend a few glorious moments riding it to the shore. Then you did the whole thing over again. The job was the only thing that matched the seven meter monsters in Iquique for thrills, but dancing came close to the freedom.
***
Macedon was packed with people standing shoulder to shoulder on both floors. The “hundred year floods” that covered much of the Lower Manhattan once a year had receded and people were ready to blow off steam. Street level was for lounging and drinking, with mechanical hookahs piping Stratus through glass tubes that carried the colored smoke into the lungs of its users. Their exhalations lent the atmosphere a perpetual haze.
As Novi weaved through the crowd a young woman with an LED tattoo of a panther on her neck locked eyes with her for a brief moment before turning back to her friends. The LED panther shifted, moving around the woman’s neck, stalking Novi like prey. Promising.
As she descended the stairs to the lower level a waitress offered her a bowl of silver dust. Novi dipped her fingers in and traced the dust in long lines over her face and neck, then a racing stripe down the center of her chest.
The dust is why she came to Macedon.
It transmitted bio-photons as sonic signals, using the bodies on the dance floor to create a collective symphony. The silicon processors that lined the dance floor turned the crowd’s mood into music that was ever-evolving, flowing from joy, to euphoria, to desire, then back again. It was a communal experience, primal in a way that was hard to get in the world outside.
There were people, like the Neo-Luddites, who bemoaned the loss of human connection due to the merging of technology and the human body. You could find them in coffee shops and record stores, listening to vinyl, talking about how much better they felt after deactivating their social media accounts. They were harmless and, truth be told, pretty fucking boring.
Then there were the more dangerous elements, like the extremist evangelical movement called Days of Noh, the cult who believed that augmentation was a “technological flood” that would destroy mankind, much like the one that Noah and his family survived. In these end times, the “antichrist” would appear, leading to armageddon. After which, of course, they would survive and rebuild civilization for the glory of God.
The most zealous among them stockpiled weapons and marked their bodies with a sign of their own in the form of a Bible verse, Matthew 24:38. “For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing of what would happen until the flood came and took them away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.” The whole thing would have been laughable if it wasn’t accompanied by targeted harassment and bursts of violence toward augers, violence that often went unpunished because public sentiment was on their side.
The future was terrifying for some people.
For Novi, merging body with machine was a means to an end. Technology like the Direct-Neural Interface had opened up heretofore undiscovered opportunities for pleasure.
The partners she met at Macedon, at least the ones she took home, were people she had already connected with on a subsurface level, sometimes without ever saying a word from the moment they met on the dance floor to the moment, hours, or days later, when they left her bed.
***
She was by herself that night when she came home carrying takeout butter chicken only to find a man named Callan Cobb waiting for her inside her apartment, sitting in an armchair by the window in the dark.
Callan said, “I believe you have something that belongs to me.”
The modded out Type 89 she took from Genzo.
She said, “I was going to pay him for it. Then he tried to kill me. So, I charged him the “stupid” tax. If you want it back —”
Callan said, “I’m the one who bought it.”
The auctions were blind, she never knew who was on the other end. It didn’t make sense that he’d buy his own gun back from her. Her mind raced through the angles.
Callan said, “I just want to talk. Have a seat.”
Trying to be friendly. He didn’t look all that friendly, with his subcutaneous implants flickering occasionally on his neck and forearm. Little beacons in the dark, stimulating his serotonin levels. Maybe they made him happier on the inside but he looked sinister as fuck and Novi had a feeling he designed it for just that effect. Calming him while unnerving others.
Callan said, “Novi, if I wanted you dead, it would have already happened.”
He had a point.
Somewhere nearby there were at least two other people with eyes on her.
Buying and selling classified tech on the black market wasn’t exactly a long term plan for good health. To get to his level, you had to be a little paranoid. Callan was well-protected and he was strategic. Way more careful than she was. If she was still alive that meant he needed her.
Novi took a seat. Said, “You want to offer me a chance to work it off.”
Callan smiled. “Now that you mention it —“
“What’s the job?”
“It’s here, in New York. You’ll be part of a three person team.”
Novi’s father taught her, “Three can keep a secret if two are dead.” She was eleven years old when he was killed at the anniversary of the protests in Santiago. Her family was forced into hiding until she and her mother managed to make their way to the states, only to be denied political asylum at the border. It seemed like every time they put their trust in someone, they paid the price for it. So, over the years, she learned to keep her circle small. When her mother died it became a circle of one. “I don’t do teams.”
“You do now.”
***
Two weeks later Novi was cruising along the Hudson River on her Interceptor, headed for a cabin in Westchester. Callan’s team was holing up there. She was the newbie, which meant trust was going to be an issue.
They were waiting for her near a campfire out back of the house, on a bluff overlooking the river. Simeon was Callan’s driver. Augmented with ocular implants that let him visually detect changes in a person’s body chemistry, heat signature, heart rate, and more. “Basically a built-in lie detector.”
Letting her know not to bullshit him. Fair enough.
But Novi said, “ Seems like a waste if you don’t have night vision, infra-red, telescopic targeting…”
Simeon smiled, said, “Accurate up to two thousand meters.” Impressed she knew her hardware.
Simeon’s girlfriend, Lela, was the other member of the team. She explained that her augmentation was called, “Targeted neuroplasticity training.” It enhances my ability to learn cognitive skills, cryptography, data analysis, foreign languages.”
Novi said, “How many languages do you speak?”
Lela said, “All of them.”
They swapped war stories. Jobs gone haywire, run-ins with Days of Noh militia types.
Lela told her they had just finished another job for Callan, hijacking a truck filled with an experimental nootropic that military was testing on their service members, a drug that allowed them to suppress their fear responses in combat. They kept a few samples for fun.
Novi asked, “Does it work?”
“Don’t get him started,” Lela said.
Simeon explained, saying, “I told her I’d give her ten thousand dollars if she let me shoot the cherry off of her cigarette from two hundred yards. If she could take the drug and calm herself down long enough not to move while I’m doing it.”
Lela said, “No fucking way.”
“Come on,” Simeon said, goading her.
“What if your hand shakes?”
Novi found herself saying, “I’ll do it.”
She could see Simeon grinning through the flames. “You’re serious?”
“Do you have one on you?”
He reached in his pocket and fished out a tiny packet with a silver pill. She held it up to the light. The color reminded her of the dust at Macedon. She opened it, palmed the pill, kicked it back with a swig of beer from her bottle. “How long does it take to kick in?”
Minutes later, she was standing a couple hundred paces away from the campfire, near a cluster of live oaks. There was no way Simeon could see her from here without the infra-red. She had done a lot of stupid things over the years and this was pretty fucking high on the list.
She lit the cigarette and took a couple of puffs to get the cherry glowing, then put it between her lips and turned sideways, with the tree just behind her.
From the darkness, she heard Simeon calling out, “Hold still.”
She imagined him zeroing in on her, what it might look like to have a digital targeting system embedded in your lenses, summoned from your consciousness by your brain, working in concert with the DNI. She imagined him raising the Sig Sauer pistol he was holding and she calmed her breathing. Her heart was beating normally. She was calm, cool, and collected.
She felt the bullet whiz past her lips before she heard the shot. The embers from the cherry floated to the ground. The bullet was embedded in the bark behind her.
When she came walking out of the darkness, Simeon gave her a high five and Lela shook her head. Simeon asked, “Did the drug work?”
“Don’t know.” She held up the pill between her thumb and forefinger. “I didn’t take it.”
Again, stunned silence.
Then they busted out with the kind of deep, guttural laughter you just can’t fake.
Simeon said, “Did they augment your balls, too? Jesus Christ.”
Novi sat back and sipped her beer, satisfied.
Normal people would call that kind of thing reckless.
But, normal people wouldn’t have agreed to help steal a billion dollars worth of research and development data from a 3rd Offset Division think tank ten miles up the river.
***
Lela planned the heist, working from blueprints and spider drone recon footage of the McKinney Cognitive Genomics Lab. Callan’s cyber team had breached their servers and found encrypted files referring to a classified project called Origen, a genetic engineering procedure that could rapidly increase the computational power of the human brain.
This was the holy grail for defense ministries around the world. Superhuman strength would be increasingly less important as militaries transitioned to autonomous warfighters. But, a person whose decision making skills could rival the speed of deep learning AI while still operating from a human ethical and moral matrix would be invaluable for decades to come.
Jacob McKinney and his late wife Maya were at the forefront of this research until she passed away from a brain tumor that destroyed her mind long before it took her body. Judging from the files that Callan’s hackers discovered, Jacob had resumed their life’s work and was seeing some pretty astonishing results. Whoever subcontracted the job to Callan was looking to level up in the brainpower department and willing to pay top dollar.
Lela relayed the findings from a recent round of testing that revealed an IQ score nearly a hundred standard deviations above average. “That’s pure grey matter, no DNI required,” she sighed. “I’m already fucking obsolete.”
***
Novi and Simeon Trojan Horsed their way through the guard gate inside a driverless delivery cube. Inside the perimeter Simeon used his ocular implants to replicate a stolen retinal scan which he used on a bio-metric reader on the loading dock door. A spider drone traveled ahead along the ceiling once they were inside, giving them eyes and ears through the corridor, alerting them to private military contractors working security. Lela ran the whole thing from a secured van nearby, acting as their eyes and ears.
The idea was to make it as far as they could toward the server room where the data before engaging the PMC’s, holding on to the element of surprise for as long as possible.
It didn’t last long.
There were eight of them in total, men and woman, probably all ex-military.
Novi’s primary goal during the firefight was to cover Simeon long enough so that he could scan their way through the next section of the building.
Fire.
Clear the corridor.
Scan through with his ocular lenses.
Move on.
If the guards were augmented Novi couldn’t tell. She made quick work of them, switching from her Caracal 9mm to hand to hand, to whatever she could get her hands on in the moment. She had reservations about killing civilians but PMC’s got no such consideration.
She had seen what companies like Obsidian did to people back home.
People like her father.
He was a poetry professor, thoughtful and soft-spoken, who couldn’t turn a blind eye to suffering. In 2024 he took to the streets with a million other people on the five year anniversary of the protests in Santiago and found himself caught between extremists on both sides. When the violence broke out he was arrested by PMC’s from Obsidian and charged as a dissident. He died in custody. No cause of death was given and nobody was ever held accountable.
The US government had been outsourcing to these companies more and more for this very reason. They weren’t constrained by trivialities like constitutional authority or oversight. They could operate freely in the gray zone and never suffer the consequences, as long as the right people were in office. With the money they made the right people were always in office. As far as Novi was concerned, PMC’s were opportunists, just like her. You make your money, you take your chances.
A sweep of her prosthetic sent the last guard flipping end over end and she finished him off with two quick shots to the head. The building was secure, at least until their backup arrived.
After a quick reload, Simeon scanned their way into the last secured room, where a bookish man in his late forties raised his hands in surrender. Novi recognized him right away as the think tank’s lead researcher, Jacob McKinney.
Looking down the barrel of Simeon’s pistol he told them he would cooperate, that they could take whatever they wanted. When Novi told him what they were looking for Jacob hesitated for the briefest second before claiming to have destroyed the database.
Simeon’s ocular implants rotated, reading his biomarkers. “You’re lying.”
When Jacob protested again Simeon smashed the butt of his gun down hard on Jacob’s head, unleashing a fount of blood from just above his eye. Novi heard a whimper from a hidden space between stacks of servers. Novi raised her gun and Jacob said, “Wait, don’t hurt her.” Turning to the servers, he said, “It’s all right, Violet. You can come out.”
A terrified seven-year-old girl stepped out from behind the racks and ran to Jacob’s arms, burying her face in his chest. She looked tiny in her tennis shoes and jeans with patches modeled after the planets in our solar system. Simeon’s irises flickered as he studied her and whatever he was looking at had rendered him speechless.
Novi said, “What is it?”
Simeon said, “We’re taking both of them.”
***
Lela pulled into a secured warehouse in a rundown section of Red Hook, near the water, and parked the van next to a collection of other nondescript vehicles Callan used for work. She and Simeon left Novi behind to guard Jacob and the girl while they met up with Callan.
The job had gone sideways. Two hostages. One of them was a kid.
When they were finally alone, Jacob said, “I’m begging you to let us go.”
Novi said, “I can’t do that.”
“She’s not what you think she is.”
“Who is she?”
“My daughter.”
“You were experimenting on your own kid?”
“Not me. Her mother. Look, I just want her to have a normal life.”
Novi said, “That’s not my problem,” and slammed the back door of the van shut, locking them both inside.
***
The warehouse blurred and bent in her peripheral vision as the reality of her situation set in. Turning on Callan wasn’t an option. She’d have to burn New York for good and no matter where she went she would always be looking over her shoulder for him.
Aside from that, she kind of loved her life.
She was addicted to the rush of adrenaline that came with the job. She loved being able to buy whatever she wanted, when she wanted. She loved being able to sleep with whoever she desired without having to worry about making long term plans.
Besides, she tried taking up a cause once.
When she was in her early twenties she joined an activist collective called Signal. They managed to shut down Manhattan for a day by hacking into the city’s traffic system and bringing all five thousand of their driverless busses to a stop during rush hour. Their demand: a water delivery for Yemen, where tens of thousands of people were dying from the shortage. Not long after, Novi learned that the group’s leader had sold the water off to a private buyer in Jordan instead and made off with the profits, disappearing into the ether.
Disillusioned, she put her skills to use in other ways and made her name in the stolen tech black market with some fellow former Signal members. One of them inadvertently tipped off the authorities to the abandoned bodega they were working out of and when the SWAT team descended, it was everybody for themselves. A firefight broke out and she was shot in the leg.
Because she wasn’t a legal citizen, Novi wasn’t eligible for treatment that would have allowed her to keep part of her leg. Amputation below the knee was the only option. Because she was broke and augmentation was prohibitively expensive, a prosthesis wasn’t available to her. If she’d been born to wealthy parents on the Upper East Side who were looking to give their daughter an advantage in track and field she might have had a shot.
This was one of the primary moral and ethical concerns surrounding the field of augmentation. Critics argued that it was only going to exacerbate inequality, making it possible for the wealthy to gain an unfair advantage. And, in large part, that proved to be the case.
So, Novi concentrated on what she could. She developed her upper body strength, putting in hours at a climbing gym in Brooklyn. She studied Jiu Jitsu, taking on fighters twice her size and with all four limbs. More often than not they were no match for her grappling ability or ability to endure pain.
A few months later, Novi got a call from one of Callan’s counterparts, a former augmented special forces op named Renata. She offered Novi the chance to go back to work through the gift of augmentation, if Novi was willing to work off the cost.
Her prosthesis was made of lightweight carbon fiber, controlled by the DNI in her brain. Novi viewed it as a tool of the trade. Or, when necessary, a weapon. Like Renata told her, “A knife can cut bread for your family, or it can slit the throat of your enemy.”
Two years later, she paid off her debt and had the tracking system on her leg jailbroken.
She joined the ranks of the black market ronin, loyal only to their personal code. The more flexible your code, the more opportunities there were. She was earning more money than she ever imagined and enjoying a level of comfort and privilege she’d long been denied.
She was free.
After this job she would be free again.
***
An hour later, Novi stood with her back to the van door, watching Callan make small talk with a man in his 30’s named Pax. Military, or at least ex-military. She could tell from his stance, the way he kept his hands in front of him, ready to react. Simeon would have scanned him for a weapon so he wouldn’t be armed. But, she wouldn’t be surprised if he was resourceful enough to come up with one pretty quickly. She assumed he was the buyer.
Simeon told Novi to get Jacob and Violet out of the van and Novi did as she was told. She covered Jacob with her 9mm as Simeon dragged the girl over to Callan, who used a handheld DNA reader to grab a sample from inside the girl’s cheek. The room went silent as they waited for the result to come in. When it did, Callan turned to the man, confused, and said, “Non-human origin. Do you want me to run it again?”
The man, Pax, said, “That won’t be necessary. We’ll transfer the money now.”
When he stuck out his hand for Callan to shake, Novi saw the tattoo on his forearm.
Matthew 24:38.
Days of Noh.
Novi thought about all the nights she spent going down info-tube rabbit holes, watching videos, trying to understand where these people were coming from, their obsession with the apocalypse and the anti-christ, their fear of augmentation and people like her. What would they want with her? If past is prologue, they would do one of two things: turn her into a weapon, or kill her. Novi would have to live the rest of her life knowing this moment came and went and she did nothing. And, for what? What amount of money, what apartment overlooking the river or nights at Macedon would be worth that?
She raised her Caracal and aimed it Pax’s chest. His hands went up, on instinct.
Callan looked at her, seething. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“He’s Days of Noh.”
Pax stared hard at her and put his hands out in front of him. Calm and collected.
Callan said, “I don’t give a fuck, he’s a client.”
Novi didn’t budge.
Callan could barely contain his rage. He said, “I’m going to give you one more chance to put that goddamn thing down. Do it.”
Novi said, “They leave with me.”
Callan said out loud, to no one in particular, “Kill her.”
On instinct, Novi dove out of the way, just as a shot rang out from somewhere on the upper catwalks of the warehouse.
Lela.
She’d forgotten about Lela.
Novi rolled behind one of the other vehicles, taking cover before the second shot rang out.
Callan and the others ran for cover as Violet ran for Jacob, both of them exposed in the crossfire.
Thinking quickly, Novi slammed her foot against the car in front of her and shoved it into place, covering the back of the van. She crouched low and made her way toward them while Lela tracked her, firing non-stop rounds from her hidden position above.
Novi yelled at Jacob, telling him take cover behind the van and drew Lela’s fire to give him a chance to make it. She had to get them out of there, and fast. The main office was forty yards away. If they could get there, she would make an exit route.
Then her Caracal emptied with a click.
Shit.
Novi made a run for the makeshift armory in the break room, trying to outpace Lela’s fire but none came. Instead, Simeon barreled into her from behind, smashing her through the break room door.
Simeon rolled her onto her back and delivered a heavy blow to her head, blurring her vision. Adrenaline surging, she used her augmented leg to launch him backward. She scrambled to her feet and squared off again. Simeon’s irises rotated, forming a prism. With the new lenses, he could see every kick or punch a split second before she could throw them, the way a fly avoids a flyswatter. She could take him to the ground again but that was only going to buy him time for help to arrive.
That’s when she saw it —
The modded out Type 89.
Before Simeon could recover and charge at her again, she flicked the switch to arm it and pulled the trigger, frying his augmented lenses. When he staggered forward, searching for her with his hands, she slammed the butt of the gun against his forehead, knocking him out cold.
Novi reloaded and took up a position behind the door frame. She saw Callan advancing on Jacob with a sidearm of his own.
So, Novi made her move, hoping to draw Lela’s fire along the way.
Launching off her augmented leg, she jumped to the top of one of the nearby vehicles and raced across the rooftops to close the distance. Lela’s shots rang out, punching fat holes in the cars beneath her feet. Just as they were about to catch up, Novi dove headfirst, firing on Callan and dropping him on the spot.
In the break in the chaos, she heard the warehouse door swing open and looked over just in time to see Pax escape. She wanted to chase him down but she still had Lela to worry about.
Then, she heard Lela yelling from the dark upper reaches of the warehouse.
Lela said, “Where’s Callan?”
Novi said, “Dead.”
Lela said, “What about Simeon? Is he dead, too?”
Simeon yelled from the break room, “Not yet.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” Lela said. “Before I change my mind.”
***
Novi pulled the Interceptor over in the Memory Grove on Staten Island. When the city ran out of burial space local officials reclaimed a piece of land by the river and offered family members a chance to purchase a tree with a small LED screen that displayed a loop of images and sounds from their life. She had agreed to transport them out of the city, but first they wanted to goodbye to Maya. She watched them pay their respects at the tree bearing a series of moving images from her life. She was beautiful, her fierce intelligence shining through her eyes.
Afterward, while the girl was busy studying the other memorials, Jacob explained to Novi that while he and his wife were in the process of working on the Origen Project, she developed a melanoma that spread from her skin to her brain. “First it attacked her frontal lobe. She began displaying signs of schizophrenia, drifting off into a fantasy world, spending more and more time on her own in a lab in the basement. She designed an embryo using her own stem cells, merging it with synthetic tissue, and kept it alive in an artificial womb. She started by targeting the genes for her disease, but the more detached she became from reality, the further she took her experiment. By the end, she had created something new. She believed that her sole purpose had been to pave the way for this new life form. One that would surpass us.”
That’s what Simeon was seeing through his ocular lens. Her bio-metrics didn’t look like ours because she wasn’t entirely human. Jacob saw her staring at Violet now. He said, “There are people out there who are going to see her as the beginning of the end for us. But, I think she might be our salvation.”
“Where will you go now?”
“I know someone out west who can help us.”
“How far west?”
“Los Angeles.”
Novi thought about her next move. New York was over, obviously. And truth be told, she was ready for a change.
She gave one last look at the city she loved.
Then imagined herself paddling out into the waves on the Pacific.
