Dark Planet: Stolen Dreams by Frank Shewmake

Stone was tired.

His shift had ended hours ago, he should be home in bed, but an only your wildest dreams kind of tip from Search about a Dealer selling a new synth called Tease was enough bring him to the Haight this late. If Search's information was good, they stood to make a lot of credit. The kind of credit you could retire on, provided he could net the dealer, and deliver him or her intact to a licensed synth-lab, so the lab could strip mine the poor hack's brain for the synth formula. And possibly the biggest if of all ... was evading the Collective's AIs. An awful lot of "ifs" ... maybe too damned many.

Enough credit to retire on, Stone kept repeating in his head like a mantra, and before too long he wasn't thinking about the risks, but how to spend his credit.

And if the AIs somehow caught on, well, he could say he'd stumbled into the situation and had to act. That's what the Collective wanted from their officers. Always alert, always ready to protect and serve the public's best interest. AIs didn't know how to spend credit, and an AI sure as hell didn't retire. It was recycled, so it didn't care about rewards, just arrests and conviction quotas. Every year new regulations got added, fewer officers hired, and more and more decisions, were being turned over to the AI's to make. They called them the Silent Partners, the Collective's Conscience, and the most laughable of all, the Public's Guardian. Well, no one was telling him what to do anymore. It was time to cash in, and get out. God help Search if the street-smart, net-wise strung-out bastard was jamming him up. He would make the little shit pay.

Stone could feel the veins in his neck and temple beginning to throb. Choke it back, he ordered himself, taking several deep breaths.

Stone turned onto a deserted side street and was abruptly bathed in the garish prismatic flicker of light erupting from a store front. He cursed himself for not walking closer to the curb. He could have avoided this. He toyed with the idea of activating his duty beacon, making him invisible to the store's sensors, but it would immediately notify the Collectives AI's of his location. Not something he really wanted to do. Anyway, if anyone was watching he'd appear to be just another citizen out for a walk.

The store was a body-salon, its front one huge 2D-screen advertising the trendiest rages in body sculpting, and hottest new face-overs modeled after the current reigning Holo-stars. He casually made his way down the street. Just ahead he could see the alley's dark mouth yawning open on to the street.

Show time.

Stone hesitated before entering the alleyway, looking one way then another, in case someone was watching. He didn't want anyone believing he was anything but a nervous buyer. With a final glance over his shoulder Stone slowly pushed into the grayness.

Whoever they are, they picked a good place, he thought suspiciously.

This part of the Haight was ancient. The buildings and the streets had changed little in the past hundred and fifty years. About a third of the way down the alley, he slipped into doorway that afforded him a good view of the narrow lane, and settled in for what promised to be a long night. Running his tongue lengthwise across the roof of his mouth, Stone activated the command implants in his teeth, then tongued an incisor initiating a passive Vigilance routine, and relaxed.

An uneventful hour later he was starting to think this was a waste of time. Maybe he should call it quits and get some sleep. Tomorrow was going to be a busy day. He and the kid were taking the tube up to Tahoe for a little skiing, something he wasn't really looking forward to. Sure, he enjoyed seeing his son -- as few and as short as those occasions were, but he'd known for a long time he wasn't any good at playing dad. He could never leave the past. No, he had to bring up his ex-wife, then the arguing began. Hell, it didn't matter to his son that he still loved his mother. All the kid, hell he was grown man, wanted was for both of them to get on with their lives. But it always ended up the same way with him apologizing, then getting pissed at himself for losing his wife and son to the damned job. Sometimes it was all he could do to hold it altogether. Sometimes he just wanted let his anger have its way, letting it lose to purge itself. Sometimes ... but not tonight.

A cobalt-blue flicker at the edge of Stone's vision pulled him back from the edge of self-recrimination. The Vigilance routine alerted him that the building's vagrant sensors were aware of him and was about to report him for loitering. Stone pressed his hand to the door's ident-pad. It scanned his palm reading the police matrix imbedded there, and the flickering light ceased. He slowly counted to ten, waiting for the Collective's AI dispatcher to contact him. When it didn't, he breathed a sigh of relief. The building's security system was an older model. Thank God for old building and cheap landlords. All he needed was to have to explain to a dumbass AI what he was doing here in the middle of the night, out of his patrol zone, and off-duty.

To pass the time, Stone accessed the Collective's Ops channel and tuned in, but soon grew bored listening to the barrage of burglary and public nuisance calls. Tonguing a rear molar, he ran a Riddle routine unscrambling Ops' secure command channels. No sooner had he tapped in when his Watchdog implant awakened inside him, announcing he was in violation of several Collective regulations. Two quick flicks of his tongue fed the Watchdog a simple Forget routine, and it ceased its yapping. If the Bay Area Police Collective ever discovered he knew how to fool their Watchdogs, he was done. They would feed him a few dozen Strip Mine Moles, take his implants, and a few million brain cells just for good measure. Then they'd lock him away in Citizen Rehab facility for a couple of years.

But for more than twenty years now they hadn't found out about his little bags of dirty tricks, so why should he start worrying now?

He continued scanning the command channels for anything interesting, but it was just more of the same, so he tuned it out. It didn't take much to be filed on these days. Something as simple as accepting a free soy-dog, or unintentionally scowling at a citizen, and an officer was liable to be brought up before the Internal Affairs AI. His grandfather used to say it was the "trickle-down effect," then flashing him an evil grin he would add, "Shit always runs downhill, boy. Don't you know that?"

Yeah, some things never quite change, he thought wearily.

Before the world wide market collapse in '51, a younger, directionless version of himself volunteered for the Federal Services, hoping to make something of himself. But for the next twelve years the hill just got steeper and the shit got deeper. A hundred and sixty-five million Americans out of work, food and 'Right to Work' riots engulfed cities across the country, and several Western states even tried to secede from the Republic. The nation was drowning in it. Then the Unification Powers Act of '52 was passed, and overnight the term 'Constitutional Government' lost all meaning. The Country's new leaders desperately and ruthlessly sought to hold the Republic together, regardless of the cost. So while the rest of the country was going down the toilet, he had had it real sweet.

Two years into his tour he was transferred into the Special Ops Policy Enforcement Unit. Absolutely nothing was spared keeping the men and women of Special Ops happy, absolutely nothing. Those who kept 'The Bosses' in power lived in a little oasis of pre-collapse luxury, and part of his reward was exposure to previously restricted and experimental technologies. He was given implants of un- or barely-tested nanoengineered smart-systems. Not everyone took to the implants, but for Stone they fit like a glove. They amped up his five senses, adding a few more just for good measure, but there was a price to pay for living in paradise and being a little more than human. The price was the memory of what he'd done during some of those years in the Policy Enforcement Unit. He could remember the training, being stationed all over, but not any of the missions he'd gone on. The Bosses had said it was for his own good, that he didn't need to know everything.

Like everyone else, he'd heard rumors of horrible crimes committed against the populace. The government denied it all, of course, but Stone suspected much if not all of it had happened. What else could explain the gaps in his memory?

Yeah, some things never changed.

He was thirty when he left the Services. They deactivated him, so to speak, and he drifted around just as directionless as the day he'd joined up. It was about this time he began to write down his Unification experiences. He could remember everything except for those gaps, and when he plumbed the depths of those memories too deeply, razor-edged walls of obsidian rose, shredding memory like flesh from bone down to the very marrow of his soul. Sometimes hellish visions would ooze out between the cracks and begin to pool, but before he could gaze into those dark waters the walls would crash down, obliterating all thought and leaving him physically ill for days.

Finally, he wound up in San Francisco, where he met Joslyn. She was a student and ten years younger than he was. To her, he was a hero of the Unification. From the first moment they spoke he hadn't stood a chance. She swept him right off his feet. Six months later they married. It was like being reborn, but it didn't end there. Soon he applied to the newly formed Bay Area Police Collective, and because of his veteran status he was hired immediately.

He had it all, the love of a woman who idolized him and a career that gave him purpose, but even more surprises awaited him. While being fitted with Collective smart-systems, his Special Ops implants had suddenly come to life. Not all at once, but in a short time he regained complete use of them, and he kept his mouth shut about it. It was one thing to believe that his old bosses had him fixed to protect themselves, but it was a totally different matter to think what they would do if they thought one of their soldiers hadn't stayed fixed.

A year later, Ryan was born. God, how he loved that boy. At first he'd found time to balance career and family, but slowly he'd begun spending more time on the job, until his life became the job.

Joslyn had stood by him, initially. She use to say that her "hero" was doing what he knew how to do best. But then her adoration turned to hate. Right up to the end, he'd been blind to what was going on around him. Blind until the day she'd voided their marriage contract, and walked out with his son.

Stone's mood became blacker and blacker, as he relived every failed attempt to reconcile with Joslyn, or in dealing with anyone outside the Collective. Years wasted and for what? A tax-free pension, life time medical, and a future filled with self-loathing for giving himself to a lover who would discard him when his usefulness ended.

A slight ringing in Stone's ears interrupted his wallow in self-pity. The Vigilance routine was alerting him to something outside the range of his normal hearing. Gently stroking another tooth, Stone expanded his range to include the intruder.

An emotionless male voice spoke. "Come on. He won't be here for an hour. We got time."

A woozy female answered, "shit, don't you think about anything else?"

"Nope," the male voice said coldly, "and, if you think I'm going to flash for the Tease if you don't, you might as well catch the tube back to San Jose, right now."

"Hey, that's wack! You didn't say anything about doing a trade," she replied angrily, but there was an empty quality to her voice that made her protest seem practiced.

Silence.

Stone isolated, then amplified, the couple's audio with a few motions of his tongue. He heard the scuff of plasti-leather on pavement, as they backed up against a wall. The man's heavy breathing like dimming lights signaled the play had begun. The soft whisper of rustling fabrics as the two pressed their bodies together sounded like a curtain being drawn. The woman's passionless monologue of moans and sighs built to audience-like applause ending the performance. The scripts for these one-act street plays were always the same: bad.

Stone set the routine to resuming its normal watch mode, excising the couple's sex play, but monitored them for vocalized threat patterns. After a while he could make out the pair's backlit outlines as they crept deeper into the alley. He'd seen theater like this acted out so many times he felt nothing but a generic contempt. The gender changed, as did the roles. It was becoming impossible to tell who the real victims were, he thought, as he bitterly compared it to his own life. Both were getting what they wanted, or so they believed. So in reality, predator and prey were the same.

God help him if he ever voiced any of those sentiments aloud. The psych AI's would creep up on him like a virus, have him committed and charged with psychically brutalizing the public, or some such bullshit. It was a wonder he passed the quarterly psych probes -- he suspected it had more than a little to do with the memory implants the government had so graciously given him.

Yeah, I should be real thankful, he thought resentfully.

Soon, more people, odd-looking people, began drifting into the alley. Not the typical synth-heads he would have expected. He needed a closer look. Stroking a molar in a series of practiced motions awakened his Chameleon routine, and he crept noiselessly from his hiding place. Stone's skin darkened to match his clothes, and within moments anyone watching would have sworn he'd simply disappeared. Stone boosted his audio and visual-acuity by fifty percent. He was still a good half a block away, but he could see a pair of suits clutching their briefcases as if they were life preservers. These guys were definitely out of their element. Next came a frightened looking trio: an old woman flanked by a young couple linked arm and arm. Stone was willing to bet they hadn't ventured out of their arcology after ten o'clock in years, and they were definitely not the types to dabble in illicit synthetic drugs.

What was so unique about this synth that these straight citizens would risk public censure, loss of their credit ratings, and class privilege? If they wanted to get high, or experience living on the edge, why not indulge in the plethora of legal synthetics or virtuals like everyone else? It just didn't make any sense.

He found a good spot, next to a commercial trash-compactor, to watch the scene.

Soon I'll have you, and you'll be my ticket away from this wack job, and maybe, just maybe Joslyn and me can ... don't start that bullshit now. Keep yourself focused, don't become distracted, or you'll flat-line this thing. Work out a way to take down the dealer and don't let anyone else get hurt.

He could feel his heartbeat and breathing begin to slow in response to the suggestion, as if someone had toggled a switch in his mind. A plan began to crystallize in his head, and suddenly he couldn't remember what had distracted him.

Another half-hour past and the dealer still hadn't shown. Twenty people now milled around in tight little knots just inside the alley's mouth, waiting nervously. There was something missing from this picture, but Stone couldn't quite lay a finger on it. Then it came to him. The raw party atmosphere so intrinsically part of these gatherings was missing. Only a handful of people were excited, but they were eager first-timers, and the main topic among them, of course, was Tease and the impending visit of the 'Man'. The others lined up against the alley's wall like battered old store fronts badly in need of a fresh coat of paint. They spoke to themselves in hushed tones, as if they were in a church or shrine. The old woman kept repeating a weird phrase to herself: 'Please, help me find them. Please!' The couple were oblivious to her, as if they were off in a world of their own.

Before Stone had a chance to give this any more thought, he heard footsteps echoing from the direction he'd entered the alley. Everyone turned to see who was coming and became silent. This was it. Stone freed his police-issue neural stunner from its holster, ticked the intensity to an almost lethal level, and re-holstered it. Better to play it safe; after all, who knew how serious this might get? Immediately, his Watchdog implant began barking its objection to the force level he'd chosen. Oh, how he'd love to get his hands on the son-of-a-bitch who developed the implant. After a flurry of tongue strokes he fed the Watchdog another Forget sequence bone, silencing it.

From the alley's mouth people gradually began drifting deeper into its depths toward the sound of the footsteps. At the head of the silent procession were the old woman and her young escorts, still arm in arm. She strained feebly against their hold.

As Stone stared closely at her he, involuntarily took a deep breath. Her face was a mask of angelic serenity of such passion that for a moment Stone imagined she might unfurl great white feathery wings, flinging her attendants aside and take flight. Now where the hell had that thought come from? Stone yawned and leaned against the compactor dreamily staring skyward at the stars, inhaling deeply. A scent like roses filled his nostrils.

A deep sense of euphoria overwhelmed him, sweeping him up into its gushy embrace. Stone was about to step out and join the procession filing passed him now when his Vigilance routine shrieked its alarm, gluing him to the spot.

A syrupy emotional fog clung to his consciousness like honey to his fingers. His vision blurred. Colored lights exploded like fireworks at the fringe of his vision. He couldn't stop looking up. He tried to shake his head hoping to clear away the syrupy fog, but it was as if the air around him had suddenly turned to slush. It took all his concentration to merely lower his head, and what Stone saw made him wish he was still stargazing. Everyone in the alley lay in heaps on top of each other. Sweet Jesus ... someone was using an airborne neural agent.

Abruptly high-pitched voices began chattering from everywhere. The voices rose and fell like screams from some theme park thrill ride. Then he realized he wasn't hearing the voices with his flesh and blood, but from inside his head. He was picking up someone's localized high-band transmission. What the fuck was happening to him? His implants were supposed to protect him from shit like this. If they got to him now he was dead for sure.

Finally, he realized what was happening: all his internal alert messages were firing at once. His systems were going crazy. Panic gripped him. He desperately wanted his stunner in hand, so he could at least defend himself against what was coming.

Get a grip. Don't be stupid, he ordered himself. Sit tight and concentrate on activating your duty beacon.

But no matter how hard he tried he couldn't get his tongue to move the few millimeters necessary to activate the beacon. The whole inside of his mouth had gone numb. These weren't the tactics of some back-alley chemist and his crew trying to make names for themselves. They didn't use airborne psychotropics to scramble their customers' brains and rendering them helpless. They were organized pros, and he was in over his head. He tried even harder to make the beacon active. Ominously, the squealing voices subsided into a steady hum, like bees around a hive. He was on his own.

One by one his flickering alert lights flashed off allowing him a hazy view of his surroundings. Stone blinked in disbelief at what he saw. Four angelic beings garbed in flowing white robes walking amongst the bodies strewn about the alley. Each held a long glowing wand in its hand. As the angels touched the wands to the heads of the dead or unconscious the tips of their wands would begin to glow. Stone squeezed his eyes shut, praying to God it was just a side effect of whatever agent was working on him, and that when he opened them again the strange vision would disappear. Stone snapped his eyes wide. Oh shit, still there!

The angels leisurely strolled amongst the bodies, stopping only at those that caused their wands to pulse a bloody red. Every time the angels repeated this process the whispering voices inside his head grew in intensity. As the whisper hum subsided he imagined he heard the angels talking to each other, but couldn't quite make out what was said. Stone began to recite a childhood prayer to a God he had stopped believing in long ago as the angel nearest him waved its wand in his direction. The wand pulsed a sickly orange color, and the angel stepped in closer, holding its wand in front of him like a flaming sword, and spoke.

"I've got a hot one here," said a muffled female voice . "Holy shit, this guy is in the gold range. A real killer." As the wand came within inches of Stone's face it pulsed with a golden hue.

Golden Range. Suddenly he knew exactly what he blundered into. A fucking Snatcher ring, and he was the catch of the night. He'd arrested Mem-trippers before, and they were the worst kind of addict there was, feeding off other peoples lives. To them nothing compared to the raw visceral rush of re-living someone else's life or death, and Gold was the absolute best there was. Memory theft was considered so immoral, the punishment was a total brain-wipe and reprogramming, but Snatchers were rarely caught because they left no witnesses.

He could feel a drop of sweat rolled off his brow and down the bridge of his nose. In a few weeks his memories would turn up on the black-market, to be bought by anyone who wanted them. Maybe he could buy them back, he told himself sarcastically, if he remembered them being taken, but knew he wouldn't. These thieves were smart -- they probably implanted a false craving for a new synth called Tease into their victims, and got them to spread the word. That stupid bastard Search had either heard about it or had fallen victim himself. Stone hope it was the latter, the little shit. As the angelic figure drew closer its image dissolved into that of someone wearing an ill-fitting white enviro-suit.

"This is the richest vein I've ever come across. A goddamned motherload," the woman said.

The witch waved her glowing wand back and forth as if she was casting a spell over him. Golden light danced like flames off her suit's reflective face plate. The Snatcher held the wand a few millimeters from his left eye, then studied some read-outs on her wrist-comp. Suddenly there was a pin-prick of pain as she injected something into his eye. Even before Stone felt it he knew what it was: a nanoscopic implant. Like an evasive itch it worked its way towards his memory centers, polarizing the synaptic junctions as it went. Waves of nausea washed over him as the side of his face grew numb. How could he have been so fucking stupid to fall into a trap like this?

The Snatcher stepped back and checked her wrist-comp. Stone could make out his distorted reflection in her face-plate; his face was frozen in a look of openmouthed, wide-eyed terror, one side of his face drooping grotesquely.

In some weird way Stone knew he had been through this before. Without warning, the muscles of his right arm began to tingle, and as if it had a will all its own, his hand crept closer to the holstered stunner under his jacket. His med-systems were doing their best to counter the neural inhibitors, but by the time they did their job it would be too late. His past would be gone. Something hot and salty dripped over his upper lip into mouth. Blood!

Suddenly a surge of disconnected memories flooded his head. It felt as if his skull would explode. Comrades from his service days floated like angry ghosts around the alley in full battle dress screaming only the way battle hardened soldiers could. Muscles throughout his body began to spasm, his heart slammed against his ribcage with such force Stone feared it would burst. Then as suddenly as it began, it ended, and a strange yet familiar sense of detachment came over him. They were stealing his memories, but it no longer bothered him. He was just too tired to care.

"Hey, control, something's ... not right here," said the Snatcher staring into her wrist-comp.

Then his fist landed home, shattering the face-plate of her suit.

A maelstrom of memory swirled around in his head until it devoured the real world around him. Shards of obsidian blackness rose up tearing at reality. It was impossible to hold any one thought for more than a second. Whited-suited Snatchers danced like marionettes around him. Jerking this way then that, as they desperately tried to avoid the dark wall of consuming stone. Past and present became one. He was screaming through the night sky, the roar of engines all around him, over a riot-torn ghetto shouting orders into his com-set. Flashes of a struggle swept passed him. Somewhere, someone was fighting for his life. Nearby he could hear the sound of splintering bone like a board being snapped across his knee. The whispering inside his head rose until it became a howl. Stone saw his hands in front of him. His stunner in one, and a piece of shiny white fabric clutched in the other. The vision changed, and he was bursting into a room full of people, and firing into them indiscriminately.

Stone tumbled out of control in an avalanche of memory. This wasn't his past, his life. No, not his! He couldn't have done those things! No one could have used him like that, could they? The dark avalanche slowed its crushing descent, and the visions simply ceased.
* * *

When Stone awoke, he was lying across his bed. He sat up, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. God, he felt good. He hadn't felt this rested in ... hell, he couldn't remember when.

Glancing at the clock, he cursed himself. If he didn't get moving he'd be late meeting Ryan. He really was looking forward to seeing the boy. It had been way too long since they had spent any real time together. Maybe he would try to set something up with him on a regular basis. Yeah, that's what he'd do, and maybe ... just maybe he could get Joslyn to come along one time; after all, she didn't hate him anymore. She just couldn't take the emotional baggage the job caused him to drag around all the time. Well, that could change too,.

He scooped up a first aid kit and some bloody bandages from the night stand, and dropped them in the disposal on his way to the bathroom. As he shaved he painfully admired the long red welt that stretched across his cheek. It had been a close thing with that dealer last night, he decided. He still couldn't figure out how he got away from him, or how he'd cut his hand for that matter. It all happened so fast. Well, there was always next time. Best to stop relying on whacked-out snitches like Search, or going in without back-up.

As Stone dressed he was already picturing Ryan and himself racing down the slopes. This was going to be one hell of a fun day he thought cheerfully. Maybe, if things went well between them, he could talk the kid into having dinner with him, too. Stone headed for the front door, picked up his stunner, and out of habit checked its charge. As he drew the weapon from its holster, his Watchdog implant immediately began threatening him with a violation.

He stared down at the weapon. Flecks of dried blood clung to its barrel, but he only noticed the selector set to maximum. That was strange. He couldn't remember drawing it, much less changing the stunner's setting. After a moment he decided the selector must have somehow slipped when he set it down last night, but Watchdog didn't care as it continued its pathetic howling. Stone flicked his tongue and shot it a Forget sequence to put it out of its misery. It was times like this he was grateful for his implants. They helped him stay out of trouble, and after all, there were some things the Collective just didn't need to know.

As he holstered the weapon he brushed away the dried blood. He was going to have to be more careful. Stone glanced at his watch. Shit, he was going to have to run to the station if he expected to be there on time. Ryan would never forgive him if he thought he'd forgotten their trip.

Back to the Planet's surface.