Rumors of War Part 1

It took me several seconds and a few long strides to reach my bedroom where I headed over the nightstand to the left.

A phone sat atop the tabletop, ringing continuously. I ignored it for now and pushed out of the drawers built into the nightstand. Within it was my mask. I needed it for the voice modulator, so without further ado, I wore it and plucked the receiver of the phone off it and raised it to my ear, straining the coiled, springy cable.

“Olsen Penthouse, how may I help you?” I said, a stranger's voice uttering the words.

“Shade, this is Lynx,” came the cold, frigid tone of my unit's commander.

“Ah, Lynx. You really told me to expect a call from you this morning,” he said to the woman, his voice just as flat.

“There’s been an order. We are going to be needing all hands on deck for this one. It's a sensitive op. I only got news of it yesterday, that was why I had you all on standby. This morning, confirmation came through for the go ahead. I need you to come in for the briefing.”

“Understood. Anything else?”

My inquiry was met with silence for a while, and I puzzled over what she was hesitating to tell me.

“Just get here ASAP,” she said, finally.

“I’ll be right there,” I said and she hung up.

I returned the receiver back to the cradle and reached out to M. “Can you find out what this is about?” I asked, wondering if she actually could.

“You would want me to go up against Cerberus again? My, you truly love me,” she said with stark sarcasm.

I rolled my eyes and began making my way around the penthouse, gathering everything I was going to need, from my wallet to my sidearm.

“You sound like you are not up to the challenge. What? Performance issues? Is Mr. Cerberus tiring you out Mrs. M,” he teased her, heading for the elevator.

“Oh, you have no leg to stand on with that one, Mr. Decade Old Dry Spell,” she fired back without an iota of mercy.

A sharp wince escaped me at the impact of her weaponized honesty and then I began to chuckle. “Let’s not go around throwing WMD's alright?”

“I’ll back off if ‘you’ back off first.

‘Fine, jeez. Prickly much, it was just some AI romance joke,” I said, then quickly continued before that could get under her skin. “Anyway, seriously can you do it?”

“Seriously, what do you take me for?” She retorted.

I sighed, realizing I hadn't escaped the repercussion of my words like I'd thought. Well, I've never been known to give up. This was a daily routine for M and I.

“I take you for a lady who can take to Cerberus with some straps and leather and show him who's boss,” I teased.

All jokes aside, I felt she could. Not literally, but I knew she was bigger and better than any man-made artificial intelligence and advanced enough to really show them who's boss.

“Technically I could,” she said, deciphering my true meaning, “but that wouldn't get past Cerberus. Not that he'd be able to do much to stop me, but he'd notice my interference. I doubt what you want is Stiff finding out that there's someone out there who's out to get him and in possession of an artificial intelligence digital life form that's light years beyond his little smart code.”

As I got into the elevator, I went over everything she said. It made sense. I knew I'd been right and she was indeed beyond Cerberus. Mindy had explained it to me last time that the reason why M had faced so much trouble against Stiff's and we'd had to go to such great lengths to hack the AI, was to avoid notice.

Cerberus learned from every experience and soon he'd have been able to predict everything we were about to do before we did them.

I pushed the bottom button for the garage floor and the elevator hummed and began its steady descent.

“I know you can access the organization’s system, but there must be something else you could do?”

M was silent for a while, the hum of the elevator filling in the void left by the absence of her voice. She could think billions of times faster than even the smartest alien, her processing cycles were in less than attoseconds.

So I could not help but wonder at what she'd been going over for a few minutes now.

I was about to call out to her when her huff resounded in my mind, announcing her return. She was speaking to me mentally now, rather than through the invisible and out of space, shrunk down matrix system.

When she spoke like that, via the latter means that is, which was mostly when there was no one around to hear who shouldn't be aware of her existence, her voice was literally disembodied.

But when she spoke through my mind, it was like a second being lived in my soul, and I started receiving thoughts I certainly did not think.

“I’m back,” she said, as the elevator settled with a gentle thud and the sliding doors opened.

“What had you AWOL?” I asked, stepping out.

“First of all, that's bad English. Yes, I know, ex-military. But even you military types are not immune to using military slang incorrectly,” she said. I shrugged, wondering why she was focusing on that now.

Well, she wouldn't be M if she did not correct me spontaneously at least fifty times daily.

Sometimes it was even for things I did not do wrong, or at least to my knowledge weren't wrong.

“Alright, so you wanted to know what exactly you're walking into. Well, I have good news and bad,” M informed me, finally saying what I wanted to hear.

“Well, I love good news, so hit me with the good news first,” I said, heading for section c of the parking garage, my boots making my steps audible as I traversed the hard floor of the underground.

“The good news was that I found a way to get you some information without having to get through Cerberus. I used social media accounts, online games, email backdoors, and other such digital networks you humans depend on so much to get into your teammates phones and laptops.”

“Well, that's good news. Did you succeed?”

“What do you take me for? I was unable to find anything from the devices of your other teammates, but I found something from Lynx’s.”

As we spoke I soon reached David's motorcycles. With the way I separated the two personalities I hoped it was a slipping slope towards dissociative identity disorder.

Grunting at the possibility of that happening, I got on the Triumph Tiger and got it started.

“I guess this is where the bad news comes in?” I asked M as I revved the motorcycle.

I was quite used to how good news and bad news operated now since I began this infiltration mission.

“Indeed,” M affirmed. “Clarke, there's no simple way of putting this.”

I zoomed off on the Triumph, waiting for her to continue. And it was only fate that saved me from dying when she said, “Stiff has made the first step in starting a war between the United States and the Continent of South America.”