Gamma Protocol (106)

[106]

The greenhouse air clung to Fulton's skin as she stepped through the entrance. Too warm, too humid, too alive. Summer's territory always felt like walking into something's lungs.

"You look terrible," Elder Summer said without turning around. She was bent over something that might have been a tomato plant, fingers moving through soil with practiced efficiency. Golden hair moved in wind that didn't exist, catching light from the city below.

Fulton didn’t answer, pretending she had remained unshaken by recent events. "I need information," she said instead.

"About?" Summer straightened, brushed dirt from her hands, and produced two paper cups from somewhere. Steam rose from both, carrying a smell that made Fulton's nose wrinkle.

"Gamma-Priority designation." Fulton took the offered cup. Drank without thinking, barely registering the flavor.

Summer’s amusement died slightly. “This must really be bothering you if you haven’t even complained about my coffee.”

It was only then that Fulton realized what she’d just drank. The beverage sat in the paper cup, looking like motor-oil, smelling like fertilizer, and now that she’d thought back on it, the taste was somehow worse than both. “How do you drink this.” Not a question. Fulton stared at the cup like it had personally offended her.

“There was a man I worked for,” Summer said. Her voice had gone flat. “A long time ago, back when I was human, back when E-Class were our biggest concern. I had a title. Something with ‘assistant’ in it, sanitized, clean, professional. What it really meant was that I was Mr Davis’ whore.”

The word landed like a bomb, and Fulton went very still.

“Mr Davis had very specific tastes, and the least bothersome of them was coffee. Every morning I'd arrive an hour before everyone else,” Summer continued. Her hands moved as she spoke, fingers tracing patterns in empty air. Muscle memory from over a century ago. “It was a very specific process. Exact measurements, precise temperature, timing down to the second. There were cameras because he liked to watch, or maybe because he got off on it, I never really learnt the answer to that.” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “The first step was putting on a fancy silk apron that was worth more than my apartment. Then I’d watch my hands with some bad scentless soaps, and I’d take this cute little digital scale to weigh 12 grams of beans while I set the water to heat to 93 degrees Celsius in a convection plate.” 

Her hands began to move with the familiarity of someone who’d done it a thousand times. “I’d place the paper filter in the dripper, rinse, then grind the beans in a ceramic burr that had a crack on the handle and would always nick me if I didn’t grab it the right way. The texture had to be like table salt, medium fine he called it. I’d set the dripper in this tiny pot that could only hold enough for a little over a cup, and put it on a scale. I’d measure 40 grams of water to wet the grounds, and sing ‘twinkle-twinkle little star’ because it was exactly thirty seconds.”

Summer’s jaw had tightened, and Fulton could feel the faint vibration of power pulsing through the building as the foliage within responded. “The pours had to be slow and steady, making sure the total weight didn’t go over 120 grams. Then a second time to 200 grams.” 

“I had to do it steadily, without shaking, and never pouring on the filter’s walls. Then I’d warm the cup. I had a twinkle-twinkle song to do it right before I poured the coffee in and waited for another repetition to let it rest. No sugar, no milk. And he would know if I ever messed up because he’d watch through the CCTV in the kitchenette. If I ever made a mistake, the cup would be thrown down the drain, the cost docked from my salary, and then I’d try again. And again. And again. Until it was perfect.” Tilting her head, her smile widened ever so slightly. “The coffee was some brand I don’t remember anymore, but I remember the smell, so rich it felt like heaven, and I remember how Mr Davis checked the CCTV every day to make sure I hadn’t touched a single gram of it. The coffee I was allowed to drink was the decaf from the intern’s break room ten floors down. This-” She raised her cup. “-is something I’ve spent the past century putting together, and it tastes worse than that crap ever did.”

Fulton stared at the cup, then blinked. “But why?” Was the only thing she could think of asking.

The coldness evaporated into a tickling laugh. “Because with every trillionaire executive tripping over themselves to purchase some of my personal ‘high-quality’ blend, Mr Davis rolls a little harder in his grave.”

It was the sort of answer Fulton had grown to expect out of her fellow elder, something childish taken to the extreme. Normally she would’ve scoffed or chided such a whimsical approach, yet in all her years not once had Summer talked about her past, and the gesture clearly had not been done lightly. 

“Wouldn’t it be better to just… forget that human?” She asked instead. “He’s long dead.”

“I subscribe to a less definitive view on death,” Summer replied with that shit-eating grin as if she knew some big secret no one else did. “But back to topic. What lines will CYPHER never cross?”

“The taboos,” Fulton said automatically. “CYPHER can't lie, can't allow control over live monsters outside designated testing.” Her mind raced, trying to follow Summer's logic. “Then there are the Free-Will Protocols, meaning it can't violate our autonomy or interfere with politics and humanity-designated property, except…” She stopped, looked harder. "Except none of them are hard lines.”

“Correct.” She smoothed her dress, a nervous gesture Fulton had never seen from her before. "Gamma-Priority is an internal flag meant to signify someone who could be deemed as critical infrastructure under the right circumstances."

The words felt like she’d just been slapped, and felt thankful to be sitting. “Are we…”

“No.” Summer cut her off. “Gamma designation is for something that might one day become critical for CYPHER itself.”

It was an absurd statement, it didn’t make any sense. “His growth rate is…” Impossible, incredible, concerning. “Considerable, but to be deemed critical to CYPHER?”

It had taken Axel two months from nothing to being able to survive Shadow in combat. The timeline was impossible by every metric she knew of. She’d trained the young assassin personally, even a defensive-specialist meguca would not have been able to win, not without at least a year’s worth of experience.

"I concur with the assessment. I can’t really gleam into CYPHER’s thoughts, but the reason might be related to this." Summer reached into her pocket. Produced a sphere, black and perfectly smooth, holding it out.

Fulton frowned and reached out to hold it, with just a touch she could tell it’d been polished into a perfect sphere. With a flick of her neuralink, she recreated a digital copy of the state the training room had been in. The floor had been littered with large obsidian chunks, but she’d been too distraught to even remember their existence. “You stole this.”

“Please,” Summer waved her off. “He left ‘samples’ all over the fourth district. And all of them are comparable to monster-materials.”

“That can’t be right,” Fulton said instantly, squeezing the orb with enough pressure that, were it true obsidian, it would’ve turned into dust.

She tightened her grip, increasing the pressure beyond the point normal steel alloys would’ve behaved less like a solid and more like paste. Nothing. Frowning, she held the golf-ball sized sphere between her thumb and forefinger and reduced the surface area of the force into a singular pinch. It cracked with the same amount of pressure that would’ve made graphene whimper. The same amount of pressure she’d needed to crack his armor during the encounter.

Her voice faltered. “It hasn’t degraded.”

“If I were in a mood to compare it to monster components, this little ball would be roughly what someone might get if they killed a D-Class Glass Crawler.” The elder smiled amusedly. “But rather than just drop a few hundred grams, I estimate he scattered a hundred kilos’ worth of his glass armor lying all over the fourth district. All of it from a singular transformation.” She laughed. “You, out of everyone in this city, should know the potential impact.”

Fulton’s eyes widened as she kept looking at the cracked golf-ball sized obsidian sphere.

The Third Wall’s reconstruction had been a slow and painful progression. Monster-materials were a crucial component in its construction, and not just any component would suffice. The structural integrity requirements were impossible through purely mundane metals, and not just any monster could provide what they needed. The past few decades had been a trickle of components and scrapping by and haggling every upstart meguca trying to swindle their way into a profit.

If Alex could create a hundred kilos of this every week, the timeline for a full reconstruction would be measurable in a few years rather than decades! “Combine this with his ability to absorb traits from monsters he kills and…” She’d read Shadow’s reports. If they could find other attributes to apply to this. Fulton jolted before she could finish the thought. “CYPHER sees him as a potential renewable resource.”

"It’s easy to imagine, isn’t it? Regular transformations in a controlled environment, harvesting what's produced, ensuring optimal output.” Summer laughed. “The boy seems eager enough to throw himself at danger anyway. Containment might be safer, making him work as a production meguca rather than a combatant. Why not? It would keep him controlled, useful but harmless.”

Fulton felt the weight of every word on her shoulders in a way that did not make any sense.

“Think of the possibilities!” Summer laughed, her tone was coy, a mix of honesty and teasing, as if it were little more than a joke. “I would’ve thought you’d be ecstatic by the news! CYPHER keeping an eye on the big bad monster wearing human skin! Maybe you could even convince it to keep him contained.”

She was right, of course she was, Fulton should’ve been relieved to hear this.

So why was this tightness in her chest?

The elder thought back to the training room, to that fist hovering just inches from her face. To that look in his eyes that held nothing but pain and fury.

An expression she remembered well from long ago.

“You did not cause the fall of Los Angeles.”

CYPHER’s words kept echoing in the back of Fulton’s mind.

“He’s not a monster, CYPHER and myself have verified that,” she said abruptly, unable to meet Summer’s gaze. “Treating him like something to be farmed would undermine everything the council stands for.”

“Oh?” The fellow elder looked at her with amusement. “But we’ve both felt his core, he’s no meguca. So if he’s also not a monster, then what is he? And I’m not talking about the silly little name that augmented doctor tossed his way.”

She had. It had not felt like a meguca’s core, and though it held many similarities to a monster’s, when he’d reverted to his human form she’d sensed something she’d never felt before. “I will not presume to know the answer to that. The council chose to treat him as a meguca, and we will.” She declared flatly, standing up. “I believe I’ve spent too long away from the Third District. I have duties to attend to.”

Summer took the lead towards the landing pad, walking calmly ahead as the foliage parted for them.

“For all my life I thought megucas were to monsters what monsters were to humans. We killed them, and grew stronger from the challenge, just how they grow more powerful with every human life they end.” She commented idly as she walked, glancing over at Fulton. “Yet the older I become, the less certain I am of this. Monsters seem to have the capacity for limitless growth. As if they have something we lack.”

That was a very sore point to bring up for any elder. Despite the gulf of power that existed between Summer and Fulton, even Fulton knew that it would take fifty elders and a miracle to kill an A-Class monster. The more powerful she grew the more powerless she felt in the face of those moving cataclysms.

“It is a waste to dwell on proofless hypotheticals,” Fulton spoke, perhaps to reassure herself more than anything. “Even Hecate gave up on trying to find an answer to that dilemma, and she’s the expert when it comes to cores and the underlying nature of our powers. If one could even call it that.”

It was like the talks about the shared dreams regarding orange jungles with green skies that all megucas possessed. No one had any answers to how or why they kept happening, why it was so universal. But Fulton had long since given up on finding an answer. Better to focus on what was tangible rather than meaningless dreams.

With a slight nod, Summer grew silent, staring out to the night sky.

Then she twitched. “Oh,” she said. “Well that’s interesting.”

Before Fulton could ask what she was talking about, she got a link, and a bad feeling.

---

The last crate hit the truck bed hard enough that Bear felt it through her boots. She could’ve helped load it but she wasn’t there to do the grunt work, that was the whole point of having brought muscle. As the meguca, she was here to make sure the corpo’s didn’t get any smart ideas, and also to make sure nothing with teeth decided the convoy looked like lunch.

Every vehicle was crammed so full there wasn’t room for people inside. Subsistence protein rations. Water tabs. Medical supplies that probably wouldn't be enough. The Third Wall loomed behind them like a steel middle finger to everything the Fourth District had been.

Except now the Fourth was legal. Legal. Like someone had waved a magic wand and decided the badlands were worth saving after all.

It still felt like bullshit.

"Last vehicle loaded." Vesper's voice cut through the noise, flat and professional. She stood near the lead truck with that datapad she was always glued to, cross-referencing shit against her neuralink like the world would end if the numbers didn't match.

Maybe it would. A week ago, it almost had.

Bear grunted. Didn't look at her directly. Professional cooperation. That's what the contract said, that was the only thing Vespi would tolerate.

Though they’d said they’d start on a clean slate, it still felt like Bear’s ex would’ve sold her soul if it’d meant not needing the Paw’s help.

And they needed the help, the convoy looked like shit. 

The Saints’ vehicles were held together with duct tape and prayers, most were more rust than paint. The only thing that looked half decent was the main truck which they’d reinforced with cobbled up pieces of scrap. Meanwhile the Paws’ were working mainly off of their bikes, but also the couple transport trucks they’d usually keep for stadium supplies. 

At least Vesper’s people knew their job. Keep the perimeter clear, watch for flyers, put down anything stupid enough to test them. The routes were mostly clear. Mostly. In a district where ‘mostly’ meant you might only see a few F-Classes instead of a dozen.

“Moving out,” Bear called into the Paws channel. Her squad leaders pinged back confirmation. Everyone knew their positions.

Vesper climbed into the lead truck without a word, clearly too stressed over what she thought would be the harder half of the trajectory. Meanwhile, Bear swung onto her bike, the convoy rumbled forward, a slow procession through streets that still stank of corpse smoke from last week's surge. 

The ride was uneventful, no one had the balls to try anything with a convoy carrying this much firepower. It gave Bear ample room to split her attention between security protocols and her feeds. Habit from years of content creation. You didn't build a brand without constantly monitoring what was trending, what the algorithms were pushing, what the audience wanted.

The feeds had been saturated with the news of the fourth district’s legalization, nothing new. Everyone and their grandmother was trying to figure out what hot-take they could put out that might get them attention. Bear filtered it automatically, years of content creation teaching her how to separate signal from noise.

She'd been doing this since before most of these accounts existed. Arena fights, public spars, carefully curated violence that played well for the cameras. Building the Paws’ brand one viral clip at a time.

They were getting close now, maybe ten minutes out from the Saints sector. The buildings here were less collapsed, showing signs of recent cleanup. Debris pushed to the sides, streets made navigable.

FROST: Boss you watching First District feeds?
FROST: Something weird happening

Bear frowned. She didn't usually monitor First District channels because of the premiums, but Frost had good instincts. She expanded her filters, pulling up the entertainment aggregators she kept bookmarked for professional reasons. For the most part the First District content feeds looked normal, well, as normal as braindance content could be. Most of the trending stuff was the usual slop: “See the world through a de-extincted dog’s eyes” this or “Criminal almost got away with it, see the victim’s last moments” that.

Tonight did not seem any different from the usual stuff, at least not at first.

Then the trending feed updated.

Bear nearly missed a turn, swerving wildly to avoid plummeting into a wall.

“WHAT THE FUCK!?”

---

The neon sign was still flickering when I turned the corner. Motel 18, half the letters dead, the other half dying. The brick building wedged between the whorehouse and the pharmacy looked exactly the same as when I'd left. It looked worse for wear than I remembered it, yet still somehow in better condition than everything around it. For one the large metal plates covering the windows and doors was a definite upgrade, the scratchmarks on them were a bit concerning though. Inside, the water-damage stains on the ceiling had company now, new marks suggesting the building was barely holding together.

What I hadn’t been expecting was the crowd inside, the smell of stress and body odor thick in the air.

The place was packed, with people everywhere. Sitting on the steps, leaning against walls, clustered together under blankets. Most of them were asleep, others pretended to be. It brought a pang to the pit of my stomach, these were clearly people who’d lost their homes and were using the motel as an emergency shelter.

I pushed through the crowd. Nobody looked at me twice. Everyone was either asleep or focused on their own problems, their own exhaustion. 

And behind the counter, polishing what looked like a doorknob, was Grills.

She looked different. Someone had welded patches onto her frame, reinforced the joints that had been sparking last time. Her half-exposed metal skull gleamed under the flickering lights, empty camera eyes sweeping the lobby with mechanical precision. The impeccable maid uniform was still spotless despite everything.

Her head swiveled toward me the moment I stepped inside.

"Axel Garcia!” The crackling feminine voice cut through the noise of the crowded lobby. Her metal jaw opened and closed with that lipless mechanical enunciation I'd gotten used to. “Welcome back!”

Every head in the lobby turned to look at me.

I kept my expression neutral. “Hey, Grills.”

She set down the doorknob with a precise click, her movements smooth despite the glitchy pauses between actions. “Your room has been maintained to standard. There have been requests to reassign Room Zero-Three during your absence.”

I felt a knot of tension I hadn't realized I was carrying loosen slightly. “Yeah?”

"They have been dealt with."

“Dealt… with?”

“Your room has been maintained to standard.” She repeated.

It seemed like this would be one of those things that I would not get an answer to. “Great. Thanks.”

A guy near the counter, maybe mid-thirties with the desperate look of someone who'd been waiting hours, spoke up. “Wait, you're saying this guy gets a room while the rest of us are-”

Grills' head swiveled toward him with a mechanical whir. Her hand disappeared below the counter. Everyone behind him scrambled out of the way.

“We currently have no vacancies,” Grills said in that same cheerful monotone, the moment her hand came up everyone flinched. But rather than the usual shotgun, she was holding a scrap of paper with a three digit number scribbled onto it. “You may wait your turn. Current wait-time is-” Her head twitched, sparks flying out of her neck. “-Three months.”

The guy opened his mouth, looked at the other people gathered there who were emphatically shaking their head, then warily took the paper and sat down. 

I moved toward the hallway, shouldering past people who’d set down improvised sleeping arrangements in the corridors. Someone had set up what looked like a makeshift camp near the vending machines.

The familiar moldy smell hit me, but it was faint now, overwhelmed by the scent of too many people in too small a space. Room doors were closed, some with makeshift locks that hadn't been there before. I could hear voices through the thin walls, arguments, snoring, and conversations and the general noise of desperate people trying to survive.

Room 03's door was exactly as I'd left it. Boarded window, broken lock, the number slightly crooked.

I pushed it open.

Clean. Still clean. The bed had fresh sheets, the floor had been swept, and the bathroom didn't smell like death. Everything else was exactly how I remembered. Closing the door behind me I dropped the bag of ‘spoils’ next to the bed and used the chair to lock it into place, then just stood there for a moment, feeling the weight of the past month settle onto my shoulders.

The monster horde. Summer Strike. Elder Fulton. The district getting reclassified. CAM. And the D-Class fight.

The weight of it all fell down on me as I finally entered the one place that felt like I could finally unwind.

I was so tired I could barely think.

The bathroom called to me. I stripped off my clothes, leaving them in a pile on the floor, and turned on the shower.

It had hot water and that alone was a miracle. Actual hot water, not lukewarm or cold or whatever came out of emergency shelters. Hot water that didn't require credits or tokens or begging or came from an elder’s gracious hospitality or from an AI’s… whatever it was that CYPHER did. I couldn’t bring myself to be calm around CYPHER, it was just so… it was too much.

I stepped under the spray and just stood there, letting it wash away dried blood and sweat and grime I'd been carrying for longer than I wanted to think about. The heat sank into my muscles, loosening knots I'd forgotten existed.

My hands were shaking. Exhaustion or adrenaline crash or both.

I leaned against the shower wall, letting the water run over me, trying not to think about anything. When I came out it was as if my body had forgotten the last month’s worth of stress. There were too many things to deal with, sure, but that could wait until tomorrow.

The bed looked like heaven.

The bag of ‘loot’ sat next to it, the thing held not just the suit CYPHER had given me but also the D-Class’ horn and my scales. It had to be worth an insane amount of credits. All of it inside a garbage bag. The level of lack of responsibility was absurd, but it would have to do for the time being until I figured out what to do with it.

Organizing my stuff for tomorrow, I paused as I noted my tablet sitting on the nightstand, untouched exactly where I’d left it, yet as dust free as the rest of the room. It was plugged into the wall socket, full charge, the tiny LED blinking an angry orange meaning it had received a recent urgent message.

Against my better judgement, I unlocked the screen to check what it was showing.

There were too many messages to scroll through, a whole month’s worth. So I just jumped over to the one that had earned the tiny blinking light: A message from Vesper… I grimaced before I opened it, dreading what it might contain.

It was a link to an article.

UNIDENTIFIED FOURTH DISTRICT CRYPTID SAVES HUMAN IN HONEYHEX PUBLISHED BRAINDANCE

High-fidelity sensory recording captures impossible behavior of the so-called "Shush Monster" - CYPHER Sub-Node #5 refuses classification status

“Morning Axel can deal with this.”

I closed it off and went to sleep.

Authors Note: Internet got cut off, sorry for the delay!