WARDEN 2
CHRONICLES OF A CYBORG 2
Isaac Hooke
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1
Rhea strode across the pristine, asphalt-surfaced streets of Aradne. Behind her followed an angry mob of Rust Towners intent on gathering illegally, among other acts of civil disobedience.
She was on her way to confront the mayor, who was currently in session with his counselors, if the leaks to the streaming sites were to be believed. Earlier, she had joined the Rust Towners rioting at the main gates; hackers had overridden the gate controls, opening them, and forcing the security robots to form a chain of bodies in front of the opening. In the ensuing violence, the rioters had broken through and stormed the city. Rhea had quickly taken charge of the situation, using her fame and her followers to gather the rioters before too much damage could be inflicted against the properties closest to the entrance. Aradne defense robots had arrested a few of the more disorderly among them, but for the most part the mechanical monstrosities remained on the sidelines and left them alone. Rhea wished she could take full credit for that, but she knew the defense force’s public image had a part to play: many citizens of Aradne would be watching live streams of the event, some transmitted from the rioters themselves, others from residents observing from the balconies of nearby towers.
Rhea herself was live-streaming from her own point of view at that very moment. She had been famous for a short while: her actions in Rust Town against the bioweapons had netted her several million social media followers. However, she had been banned from broadcasting on most of the major platforms shortly thereafter, including VidTube, but that didn’t stop her from using alternatives such as SubverseTube. She didn’t have as many followers as before on these smaller platforms, but those she did have were a dedicated group: real fans who routinely disseminated her broadcasts to the larger platforms, risking bans themselves.
Rhea kept expecting the Net to go down in the current neighborhood, blocking live streams entirely, but everything remained online. Still, Rhea had no doubt that any recordings of the event would be scrubbed from the major streaming sites by evening, and perhaps even SubverseTube, which made the defense robots that mirrored the path of her and those with her all the more menacing. She did her best to ignore them: the two-legged mechs equipped with electrolasers, missiles, and plasma turrets; the smaller infantry robots with the grenade launchers attached to their shoulders and the twin rifle muzzles protruding from their forearms; and lastly the octocopter drones hovering overhead, their wicked laser turrets tracking different members of the crowd, ready to fire on command.
“Well, at least they’re giving us an escort fit for royalty,” Will grumbled above the chanting crowd from her right side.
Rhea offered her friend a grim glance. He still wore his hair in long dreadlocks. He’d grown out his beard however and had begun to braid the tips of the chin area so as to form mini dreadlocks of their own. The thin visor of his AR goggles sat just above his eyes, below his brows. He wore a black and gray uniform with a utility belt, and other than his fists, had no weapons. None of the others with her were armed, either—all pistols, rifles and bladed implements had been confiscated at the entrance by the defense robots. Those who had not willingly surrendered their arms were among the arrested.
Before she could answer Will, Horatio, who was standing on the other side of her, spoke up: “I wouldn’t precisely call this an escort fit for royalty. Fit for criminals, perhaps. If we were royalty, those guns would be tracking the buildings and streets beyond; instead, they’re pointed directly at us.”
“I was being sarcastic,” Will clarified.
“Oh,” Horatio said. The robot’s face was a black oval with a gray visor for eyes and a grill for a mouth. Two antennae on top completed the look. Below, its body was all servomotors and polycarbonate tubes—a motley of gray and yellow.
Her own body was similar in design, but more metallic than gray or yellow. Of course, it was currently concealed by the clothing she wore—those dull gray fatigues with the hooded cloak layered on top. Her exposed face was the only part of her that was sheathed in artificial skin. She used to keep her features hidden within her raised hood to hide the fact she was a cyborg, but now she wore her synthetic skin openly in the slums, and here. Not even the unsavory residents would dare attack the Warden of Rust Town. That was what the slum denizens called her. They considered her a hero for the bravery she had shown against the invading bioweapons, a bravery that had not been forgotten despite all the videos of her actions being scrubbed from the Net. The residents of Rust Town were the ones who had been responsible for pooling their money and resources to upgrade her body after she had been sliced and diced into near oblivion by the bioweapons.
Normally, she wore a retractable bladed weapon called the X2-59 on her right wrist, a weapon that, when deployed, sparked with electricity generated by electrolasers built into the hilt. But she’d left that behind when she departed to join the rioters—she didn’t want to risk losing it to Aradne’s defense forces. And seeing as she wasn’t quite ready to fight those forces…
Rhea returned her attention to the street ahead, and the buildings that lined either side. Their surfaces glimmering beneath the mid-afternoon sun, the serene, crystalline towers of Aradne proved an odd counterpoint to the shouting residents of the slums behind her. The structures had windows that were cut from sapphires, a substance that lent itself extremely well to some of the more fantastically engineered skyscrapers, some of which took
