Bounty hunter by TheFearMaster on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

story written by 666markofthebeast666
artwork by TheFearMaster

"

Her survival was an unintended consequence, a second order effect of a universe not quite sufficiently dispassionate to lack a sense of irony. The geno brigades of the intracorporate conflicts of the 22nd century had been intended to be disposable. Not expendable; all people were expendable in the eyes of the corporations; disposable. Discarding sabot munitions for for a series of plausibly deniable conflicts. If war was a continuation of politics by other means, then surely covert operations were a continuation of business by other means.

Gene-resequenced, crammed with combat modifications and implants, transformed (perhaps mutilated was a better word) into angels of death that were both more, and less than human. Valkyrie could not have been a better unit designation if the nameless salaryman who’d chosen it, no doubt because it had a certain resonance that would ring through a slideshow presentation, had instead been fully aware of the true poignancy of their choice.

Valkyrie, from the Old Norse Valkyrja, means “chooser of the slain”. And so they had been, choosing who would live and who would die in one mission after another where as often as not the choice had been themselves. And why not? Their ovaries scraped out to make more room for heart and lung augmentation, their mammaries repurposed into combat stimulant manufacturing glands, their soulless mechanical eyes staring out of perfect bodies that had nothing to live for but battle and death. Their only future was the collective one; to realize their destiny as the corpses that would build the bridge over which their fellow corporate citizens would stride to a brighter tomorrow. Sacrifices laying themselves down willingly on the altar of progress.

How hard was it to turn a woman into a weapon? How hard could it be to repurpose her matronly instincts for nurturing, protection, and self-sacrifice into the fulcrums that could repurpose her into a warrior that would kill or die without a moment’s hesitation.

It had been trivial, of course. A wise and terrible man (or course it was a man) once said that; “If you reduce a person’s information sources to one channel, then just keep broadcasting the same message on that one channel, sooner or later they will accept it as the truth.”

Raised in a collective creche, removed from their parents, and raised from birth on a steady diet of corporate hymns and disturbing lessons about the inhumanity of their enemies, by the time she and her sisters were eighteen they couldn’t wait to be unleashed on the slags from Weyland-Yutani, or Tessier-Ashpool, or any of the other of the multitude of corps whose lack of basic human decency made it necessary for them to be annihilated. Only the Tyrell Corporation could be trusted with the future of humanity, because only the Tyrell Corporation could be trusted to redesign the humans themselves; to redesign them into what God should have intended.

Ironically, however, it wasn’t really all the psychoconditioning that made the Valkyrie into such perfect warmachines, imbued with the capacity for rapid and brilliant individual thought without hindering their ability to kill and die without hesitation. It was the dopamine.

Some corporate flack had seen a study that proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that happy workers did better work. That made things simple. What did soldiers do? They killed, and they died. The best soldiers would have to enjoy it. Genetic alterations in the Valkyrie’s neurophysiology insured an excess of dopamine receptors would yield women that were constantly, instinctively, inevitably striving for the most extreme experiences they could have to feed their insatiable hunger for their own endorphins. After that it was a simple matter to fetishize their taste in pleasure to violence and death, including their own.

It was all so logical, so coldly calculated, and yet, so humane. Didn’t the death of a soldier who wanted to die matter less than that of a soldier who wanted to live? Their masters certainly thought so, as their combat record could attest. During the “time of troubles” as the endless corporate wars of the early 22nd century were so genteelly referred to, her Valkyrie brigade had taken 99.9997% casualties. She had lost 2,999 sisters, who lived now only in her memory.

One interesting aspect of corporate rule was that they did not believe in exceptionalism, nor did they attempt to profit from it. Human beings, their lives, hopes, dreams, and deaths could naturally be reduced to statistics. Anything that existed outside of these parameters wasn’t a proper or useful part of an overall corporate strategy designed to maximize profitability while minimizing risk.

3,000 super warriors prepared to follow any order without hesitation were an asset. One traumatized girl packed with expensive augmetics with a life-support maintenance cost in excess of most research projects was a liability. And what do corporations do with liabilities and unwanted costs? They externalized them.

At 28 years old, already a ten-year veteran of the most brutal human conflict of the 22nd century, the last Valkyrie was literally thrown naked into the street by her creators. Her body and mind were crisscrossed by the scars of that conflict. She’d lost count of the number of times she’d been blown apart and somehow by the providence of cruel miracles, put back together again. Every person, every woman she’d ever known, or loved, or made love to, had died, for the most part screaming in agony / ecstasy as they’d been designed and programmed to do like the barely-human warmachines they were.

Given the upkeep cost of her cybernetics, the corporation did not expect her to last a week. That was when she’d met Decka.

Decka. Lovely Decka. It hadn’t been her that had found the Valkyrie directly, of course. That dubious honor went to a trio of hapless biowaste scavengers indentured to the numbers gang and working for a local 26. When she came down the chute into the cesspool at the base of the Tyrell arcology 40 sub levels deep in the underhive the scavs caught her augmetics on their scanners right away.

They’d thought they’d struck it rich when they pulled the beautiful young cyborg out of the slurry, but joy turned to horror when they realized that none of the standard inhibitors worked on her. The one she let live took her to his 26, and the 26 (after an initial misunderstanding that was rectified when she removed one of his bodyguard’s spines and beat the other one to death with it) had referred her to Decka.

The arrangement was simple; Decka was a fixer. Making connections was her function. She was like a nexus point in the ley lines of the underworld. Maintaining neutrality was everything, and the best way to do so was naturally to be neutral in such a way that a violation was invariably a fatal mistake. Ensuring that the mistakes of others became fatal ones was Val’s line (for so she had taken to calling herself after the word electood into her cheek beneath the barcode) stock-in-trade.

A partnership was obvious. Decka had the connections necessary to get Val the maintenance and support that her hypermodified body needed. Val had the claws, ‘flexes, and killer instinct that Decka needed to work without fear of retaliation. They were very different in some ways. Although Val was nearly thirty and looked it, Decka was almost ninety and looked twenty. She had her genetic code reset every year by genetic surgeons in an annual pilgrimage to the genewrights of Macau that was holier to her than the Hajj. Val was constantly looking for trouble to feed her dopamine habit courting chaos and violence like lovers, whereas Decka wanted life to be ordered and quiet.

There were similarities, however. A thirst for new experiences, a passionate joie de vivre, a profound curiosity. Taken for all in all the differences and the similarities were enough to build a relationship on, and once Val had saved Decka’s life it was inevitable. They were mentor and protector, master and servant, maiden, mother, crone, and lovers through it all.

It was Decka who had bought her the dancer in the dark. The little holo that was so like the one that had been the only “toy” she had ever had as child. Of course it wasn’t given to them by the corp. It was issued to them and set to display basic katas and stances of a dozen lethal hand to hand combat systems - Jeet Kune Do, Krav Maga, Escrima, Aikijutsu, and more.

It had been X23, or Violet, as she preferred to be called, that had realized at 12 years old, what the device was really for. She busted into it’s core code and unlocked the dancer… the dancer in the dark. In an instant the tool of death became a wonder to the weapons with the bodies of little girls. The dancer in the dark was a music box that played sweet melodies from two centuries ago. The little holo figure stopped demonstrating nerve strikes and started dancing. The girls gathered about it in wonder after lights out and taught themselves ballet when the masters weren’t watching. As she learned arabesque and chasse, dancing the Nutcracker in the dark, her thermoptic vision turning shadows into light she staked out her own piece of her soul.

Violet had been one of the last to die, her spine blown out during a mission in Malaysia. Her augmetics kept her alive, which meant the task of administering the final mercy fell to Val. Friends since birth, lovers for almost a decade, their tears intermingling as Val put her PDW to the temple of one of the last people who could ever understand her and love her in spite of all and sent her into the dark praying that the last thing she felt was the feeling of their lips pressed together and not the discarding sabot caseless round punching through her armored cranium.

Ever since then the little holo… the dancer in the dark… had been Violet to Val. Now she danced forever. When Decka had found the battered old holo music box at an underground vintage market in Kanagawa prefecture and bought it for Val without haggling, that was when she knew, truly knew, that she was loved again.

It had made finding Decka blown to shreds a week later even harder. The perpetrators had been very, very skilled. Striking during one of the rare moments when Val wasn’t at her side, which meant that they’d been observing the pair for some time without being seen, no mean feat in and of itself. Add to that they’d penetrated Decka’s considerable home defense systems without so much as setting off a sleeper alarm, and had taken her by surprise. Val knew she’d been taken by surprise because a lot of the bruising was pre-mortem, which meant they’d captured her alive; something that Decka had sworn would never happen; and then tortured her and violated her before they blew her lovely body apart.

The hunt for Decka’s killers had taken Val down dark and twisted paths. She’d personally killed almost every one of Decka’s associates looking for the traitor. For all she knew she’d actually found them and tortured them to death without their ever confessing. One of the very first had been Ishmael, who had provided consulting on their electronic security. After Val had torn off all his fingernails and started on his toes with him still protesting his innocence he’d asked the only sensible question: “What will it take for you to believe I didn’t do this?”

Of course her answer had been indicative of her madness: “If you die claiming your were innocent I’ll believe you when the last breath leaves your body.” That had been a long night.

Unsurprisingly, brutally murdering everyone in sight didn’t lead her to Decka’s killers. It did, however, force her to learn a whole new skillset; Finding people who did not want to be found. It was a lucky acquisition as well, because without Decka’s money and connections, Val was on her own supplying for herself for the first time. Paridoxically, as her augmetics passed from being beyond the state of the art to obsolete their maintenance cost went up, not down. The right bounties paid VERY well.

Of course, the bounties that paid the best were valuable for a reason… too many hunters had already died trying to retrieve them for many more to be interested. To Val this was fine… she might need the NuYen to stay alive, but with revenge seemingly increasingly hopeless, the endorphins - the fix - was the only reason to live anyway.

So she sat in her 122nd floor flat and looked into the augmented eyes of the bounty that she’d soon play the most dangerous game with; betting her death against his life. As her milgrade cyborg maintenance suite filled her with the supplements and chemicals that would allow her to live and fight another day she wondered if this bounty would finally be the one to release her - to grant her the final mercy as she had given it to Violet almost a decade ago now.

Ajax, her worthless tomcat meows for kitty chow as her joint drops ash on the floor.

“You don’t give a shit whether I live or die, do you, you worthless piece of shit?” She asks the moggie in her sweetest tone as he scratches behind his kerchief. His mewling response sounds like a conversation to her.

“That’s alright,” she confesses, taking a long drag preparatory to disconnecting from her life support and encasing herself in her battlesuit.

“If I’m honest, neither do I.”