Prologue The night of October 3 was a cool, brisk night, the reason why the boy on the sidewalk wore black jeans and a plain, thin black hoodie over a plain black t-shirt. He kept the hood down, so as not to appear suspicious, which he wasn’t. It was simply that he, being 17 years old and walking by himself in the middle of the night, was generally viewed as suspicious by the public, a stereotype shared by everyone in America, if not the world. He was an orphan, but he wasn’t surviving on the streets. Even if he was, nobody would get near him, due to his air of cold remove. No, his home was a small house, a foster home, at 2158 Webster Avenue, a relatively okay part of town. He was out way after curfew, but he didn’t care. It wasn’t the first time he had stayed out, and they rarely noticed, or even cared, at the foster home. Besides, his birthday was in thirteen minutes, and he didn’t feel like celebrating it at home, if “celebrating” could even be the word used. He turned right from Addison Street onto Center Street, passing the construction site. He meant to go straight down to Kirkpatrick Street and start heading back to the foster home. He planned to be back by fifteen after, so he could “celebrate” his birthday while he walked. But that all changed the moment he passed by the construction site. The boy walked past the construction site with barely a thought. He had walked by here many times before, and always with the common fantastical misconception that he could take on anything that appeared from there, be it a common mugger or a monster. And, on this particular night, he would get his chance to prove himself to his fantasies. The boy was almost past the construction site, at Elmore Street, when a heavily muscled arm, covered in tattoos, wrapped around his neck. He didn’t even have time to yell before the arm yanked him backward and up, so he was dangling inches above the ground and pressed into a body thick with muscles. “Well, well, well,” a man’s voice said from behind him. It didn’t sound like it belonged to the heavily muscled man cutting off his oxygen supply, nor was it coming from the right place. A man, smaller and more slender than the one holding him now, sauntered slowly into view. “What do we have here?” He chuckled. “I love saying that line. It sounds cheesy and all, but it’s so fun to say.” The boy’s only response was a gurgle. The man sighed. “Put him down, Brock,” he ordered. “I don’t want him dead until I’ve explained what we’re here to do.” The man named Brock complied, but kept a hand twist-ed into the boy’s hoodie. The boy looked back at him, and was rewarded with a bald, severely scarred head and a rough shove. “Focus on the boss.” Brock’s voice was rough and gravelly, and contained not a trace of emotion. “Now,” said the boss, “empty your pockets.” The boy just stared. “W-wha...uh…m-my p-pockets are e-empty…” The boss set his jaw and nodded at Brock. The boy never saw it coming. The knife buried itself up to the hilt in the back of his head, driving through the occipital lobe of the brain, which was the visual and sensory association areas of the brain, and slicing through the emotional area. The boy’s eyes widened, and then saw no more. Brock yanked out the knife and the boy crumpled to the ground. He crouched down and wiped the blade clean on the boy’s hoodie, then felt for a pulse. He grunted in satisfaction when he found none. The boss stood and watched. “Search him, and then get rid of the body.”
Brock said nothing, just turned his attention back to the body as the boss walked away. He rifled through the boy’s pockets, finding absolutely nothing. He cursed under his breath. The boss would be furious. He stood up. Scanning around for witnesses, Brock picked up the boy’s body and walked quickly and quietly into the construction site. There he dumped the body with minor effort under an unfinished building; the boy weighed very little, maybe 140 pounds. Then, checking again for witnesses, he crept out of the construction site and disappeared down Elmore Street. Not one of them ever saw the black Mustang hidden in the shadows across the street.
Chapter 1 December 21, 2015 12:04 AM Project: HAWS – Humanized Active Weapons Systems Location: Classified Jason Xavier Lee shot bolt upright in bed and screamed. While the scream lasted only a few seconds, his heart rate and breathing took much longer to subside to a resting rate. When that finally happened, Jason thought clearly about the dream that just woke him up. I’ve had stranger dreams than that, Ja-son thought. I mean, getting stabbed really isn’t all that unusual, dream-wise. It was then that he noticed his surroundings. He sat stock still while his eyes played over the room. He was in a hos-pital. No, not a hospital. He didn’t know where he was. While he was in a hospital bed, and hooked up to hospital equipment, he wasn’t in a hospital. The room didn’t look quite right, and it was completely silent, except for the beeping of the heart monitor beside him. And there was no window. Jason didn’t like that. He looked down at himself. He wasn’t hooked up to any life support systems, except for the heart monitor, so he pulled away the wires, and got out of the bed. The monitor complained, flatlining, and Jason kicked the plug out of its socket. As he made his way to the door, he noticed his reflection in a mirror, so he stopped and examined himself. He face was pale, but he didn’t see any veins showing. He was also thinner than he remembered, but he didn’t feel malnourished. Just the opposite, actually. He even felt that he could see a golden glow around him, then dismissed this as how good he looked and felt. He then noticed his clothes. They were rumpled and slightly dirty, although it was hard to tell since the clothes were black. The left sleeve of his shirt was rolled up, apparently for the heart monitor, and he rolled it down. Then he noticed something brown and crusty on the right front side of the shirt, near his waist. He took a closer look, and then realized: There was a bloodstain on his shirt. Why was there a bloodstain? He didn’t know. He really didn’t care. He felt like leaving. He checked the wall, looking for a directory. Finding none, he walked to the door and opened it slowly. Beyond was a brightly lit, white corridor that smelled strongly of antiseptic. There were no windows out here either. As he opened the door, he heard a click emanate from the hinges. He barely had time to register the noise before an alarm sounded. A computerized voice rang out from speakers in the ceiling. “Attention. Subject 0151 is escaping. Capture and detain immediately. Use force if necessary. Do not kill. Repeat. DO NOT KILL.” Jason didn’t like the sound of that, especially the “Subject 0151” part. He didn’t like being anyone’s subject. He bolted. It was only a few seconds before he heard someone shout for him to stop or else. He looked back and saw two men in suits sprinting after him, slowly gaining. Their warning didn’t make him stop. Turning a corner, however, did. Three more suits were sprinting up the brightly lit corridor towards him. He turned around, since his odds were better against two instead of three, and then the two suits behind him turned the corner. They stopped. The one on the left was tall and thin, the exact opposite of his friend, and he took a step forward. He was only ten feet away. “Come back with us,” he shouted over the alarm. Jason had trouble hearing him, despite the fact that he was only yards away. “You’ll be fine. We promise.” Jason hesitated, and the man took his chance. He lunged forward, arms outstretched to grab Jason. But Jason moved with a speed he never knew he possessed, probably never did pos-sess. He dodged to the side, spinning 180 degrees to keep the
man in his line of sight. The man stumbled into the three suits that were running toward Jason earlier, and those three backed up instinctively to avoid being toppled. Jason forgot about the second man. While short, he was strong, and pinned Jason’s arms behind his back. Jason squirmed, but the man held fast. “Don’t struggle,” he growled. “You’ll only make things worse, worm.” Jason stopped struggling and turned his head so he could somewhat see the short man holding him. The man’s face morphed from what appeared to annoyance to something re-sembling disgust. Jason smiled at him. “You say I’ll make things worse, and then you call me worm?” He gave a short, humorless laugh, noticing that he couldn’t muster up any humor at all, not-ing the tall suit taking a few steps forward out of the corner of his eye, the others staying back. “Is today No Logic Day or something? Because logic is not taking hold here right now.” The man opened his mouth to shoot back a withering response, but Jason gave him no chance. He whipped his arms up, then out, twisting his wrists out of the possible holding range of the man’s fingers. The man released his wrists, and then lunged for him again, but Jason was already moving. He jumped up so he was parallel to the floor, and then kicked out both legs. They collided with the man’s chest, sending him skidding along the floor into the wall. Jason used the forward momentum to his advantage, rolling under the first man, the tall one, as he reached for him. Jason shot up and drove an elbow into the base of his skull. The man crumpled. The remaining three ganged up on him. Jason waited for them to get close, then drove a fist into the closest suit’s nose, and kicked out sideways at the man to his left, smashing his solar plexus. The third man grabbed Jason’s hood. He never had a chance to yank it. Jason, spun, lashing both arms back, knocking the man’s arm off his hood, and then launched an uppercut into his jaw. The man blocked the punch, knocking it cleanly to the left, and Jason spun with the momen-tum. Spinning, he drove his left leg in a perfect reverse round-house kick into the man’s chest, knocking the suit backward into the wall. He bounced off the wall a little, and Jason, still moving with his original momentum, ducked with a little spin as the man stumbled back towards him. The man tumbled over him, and Jason spun a little more quickly, and then, on instinct, threw out an open palm. The palm caught the man in the chest as he went down. It shouldn’t have had much effect, but a flash of golden light burst from his palm, and the man flew backward, bouncing off the opposite corridor wall to the one he had just bounced off of and ended up on top of the first, short, man, who was just starting to stand. Jason stared for a second. Where had that come from? Then his senses came back and he ran, again. Turning the next corner didn’t offer him an exit, and neither did the next. The third corner presented him with a set of double doors to the left and right, and an elevator ahead. He avoided the elevator. It would be too easy to trap him in there. He took the door to the left, expecting stairs. His mind registered the keypad and card reader next to the door, on the outside, just as the door clicked shut. He whirled and reached for the handle, but the door wouldn’t budge. Jason noticed a second panel by the doorknob. The door should never have opened in the first place. They were herding him, trapping him. He frowned slightly. Maybe he should have taken the elevator. Whoever these people were, he doubted they would expect him to take that. Jason turned back around. In front of him was another set of steel double doors, but these ones l
thicker. He doubted there were stairs on the other side, but he didn’t have much choice. He shoved the doors out of the way – they were incredibly heavily, poorly balanced – and stopped. The door almost came back and smashed him in the shoulder, but he remembered it at the last second. The door slammed shut behind him – the sound made him cringe – and he crept forward. He appeared to be on a sort of observation platform. What it was for observing, however, was difficult to decipher. Jason stood up, hoping to see more. He did, and that “more” saw him. Directly below him was another suit. Jason’s eyes wid-ened and he began scrambling backward, and the suit started. The man opened his mouth to yell, but at that moment, at the worst possible moment, someone discovered the men Jason had incapacitated and hit the panic button. “Attention,” the comput-erized voice blared once again. “Subject 0151 has been deemed ex-tremely dangerous. Shoot on sight, and shoot to kill.” Jason froze, and the suit whipped out his pistol. The first shot rang off a pole nearby, showering Jason with sharp shards of metal, but the next one was on target, as well as the third. Jason took the first in the right shoulder but, again moving faster than he should have, dodged the second. He frowned momentarily at the nearly complete lack of pain from the bullet; it felt exactly like a poorly aimed punch. Then a bullet whizzed by his head, and he was brought back to reality, throwing himself back against the door, his breath leaving him in a whoosh as he collided. He couldn’t go back; the door was locked tight. His only option was forward, over and past the suit. Jason examined the bullet wound, and stared. There was no hole, just a golden-glowing patch of light where the hole should have been. As he watched, the patch shrunk, and then disappeared, leaving nothing behind. Not even a hole. Strangely enough, he wasn’t panicking. He had to be dreaming, he reasoned with himself as he regained his breath. Bullet holes don’t just disappear. But where was the bullet? Jason looked up. The round was lodged in the ceiling, glistening with his blood. Jason closed his eyes as he listened to the suit shout into his radio. What was he? Dreaming, probably, and he’d like to wake up. If this was a lucid dream, he should be able to wake himself up, right? He started imagining himself waking up, but he didn’t. He still felt the cold steel door, and this simply did not feel like a dream. Jason opened his eyes and stood up. Jason’s eyes glowed gold, but he didn’t notice. He only noticed a powerful warmth flooding through his nerve endings and into his brain. He realized he should be scared now, even frightened, but he wasn’t. He was also mesmerized by something gleaming silver directly in front of his nose. He stared at it, cross-eyed, and then backed up for a better look. Jason smiled faintly, still unable to feel much humor, as he realized what the item was. A bullet, just hovering there in front of his face. His smile faded slowly, or at least as slowly as he could fade away something that could barely be described as a smile, as he realized the reality of what appeared to have hap-pened. The bullet shouldn’t be hovering, obviously. Bullets don’t hover. Somehow, someway, he, or something else, had frozen time. He assumed it was himself, simply because of all the weird stuff he’d been doing in the past few minutes. He had stopped the bullet just in time, as well. A few milliseconds later and he would have had a hole for a face. Jason grimaced at that thought, realized he probably would have healed like his shoulder, decided he didn’t want to take that chance with his brain, and then smiled faintly again. If
this was him, this was awesome. He took a few steps forward to the ledge, and looked down at the man firing at him. He wasn’t moving, the gun pointed in Jason’s direction. Jason could still see the muzzle flash. Suddenly, there was a loud clang behind him, and a bang from the gun in front of him as time started again. Jason ducked instinctively, and then stopped as he realized he felt no breeze from the alleged bullet. He had managed to stop time after the bullet was fired, but before the sound from the gun reached him. Jason smiled again, wider this time, and, before the man could react, leaped off the ledge, slammed a fist into the suit’s face as he came down, and took off for the exit to his left as the man crumpled. He put his shoulder down and blasted through the doors (figuratively), fully expecting sunlight and guards armed with assault rifles. He received the latter, a line of guards with XM8 assault rifles, equipped with laser sights, flashlights, drum magazines, and acog scopes. These were undoubtedly the guys the last suit Jason met had called. Jason slid to a halt, trying to raise his hands above his head as he did so, and nearly succeeding in falling. He straight-ened, bracing himself for a barrage of gunfire, hoping he could freeze time as he had done before. He doubted it, but it was probably worth trying. “Jason Xavier Lee,” a powerful and unfamiliar voice emanated from behind the line of guards. A man, tall with brown hair graying above the ears, slid through the line of guards and stood facing Jason. Jason lowered his hands slightly as the man smiled. “It’s about time you woke up.” He waved at the guards to stand down, and then turned back to Jason. “Come with me. There’s a lot you need to know.” His smile disappeared. “And there’s a lot I need to know.”