Rune Zero: A Cyberpunk Thriller (Rune Universe) Read online

  Rune Zero

  A Rune Universe Prequel

  Hugo Huesca

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Copyright ©By Hugo Huesca. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business,

  events, or locales, is purely coincidental.

  Thank you for reading my book. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought

  the book, or perhaps tell your friends about it.

  Thank you so much for your support.

  -Hugo Huesca

  Chapter 1

  Angelica Morrow was married to a dead man and she did not know it. In fact, she was talking to him on the phone.

  “Have you already scheduled the chef for the Palmer’s dinner next week?” she asked him as the door to the apartment opened automatically to let her in.

  The interior was pristine and minimalistic in a way only a very rich couple could afford. A cat-sized cleaning drone still lingered in a corner of the lounge; when it registered Angelica’s signal, it rushed to the nearest vent and disappeared without fuss, just like she liked it. Drones, unlike children, were meant to neither be seen nor heard.

  “I have it on my VA, it will handle it,” her husband, Xavier Morrow, told her over the phone. His voice was pristine and clear and very much alive-sounding.

  “That program is a time-bomb,” she chided him. “Half the time it forgets to schedule your meetings and the other half it schedules them with the wrong people.”

  There was a second of uncomfortable silence as she left her fur coat (the fur was created from caribou’s stem cells, thank you very much. Angelica was head of her Humane Society charter) over the zen-inspired sofa and walked to the bar counter at the edge of the room. There, a silver plate with a glass of champagne waited for her, just like she wanted.

  She didn’t even like champagne that much. It was the principle of it.

  “It’s still experimental,” her dear husband was defending his Virtual Assistant. The poor schmuck really thought she had a problem with the VA.

  No, hun, the problem is with you, she thought. You and your over-sized Italian suit I have to stare at for hours at every dinner we go to.

  “It’s supposed to learn my speaking patterns, just like the butler did.”

  “We had to program the butler,” Angelica reminded him without actually paying attention to the conversation. She sipped the champagne glass —she didn’t even know what it was called, just that it was expensive— and let herself relax.

  Her favorite music —an electro-jazz variation that was all the rage in her social club— started to blare on the speakers of every room in the house and the lighting dimmed to a dawn-like imitation as the ceiling transformed itself into a postmodernist interpretation of a purple and orange sunset.

  It was good to be home.

  “What’s for dinner today, darling?” Xavier said over the phone.

  Angelica rolled her eyes. Like he didn’t know already. Their Home app on their smartphones had the schedule already programmed for the entire week. The food was prepared at her favorite restaurant a mile from the apartment and brought over by drones. Their own drones would gather the food and present it at the appropriate time.

  Xavier may be as droll as watching lettuce sprout, but he had his advantages.

  “Check it out yourself,” she told him, “I’m going to take my bath now.”

  It would be already waiting for her, at the perfect temperature, with her favorite salts mixed in the water. It was her favorite part of her day. She would let the warm, pink water cover her skin and the bubbles rise around her neck and arms while she watched her favorite show over the bathroom’s screens.

  Just thinking about it made her smile.

  She walked to the bedroom first, where her silk bathrobe waited for her. She tossed her work-clothes to the bed (the drones would get them while she bathed) and changed into the robe. All the while, her husband chattered in her ear like an insecure ghost.

  “Alright, darling. Sorry to bother you. It’s just, I’m nervous about this meeting, is all. I haven’t felt like myself for a while, you know?”

  In her mind, some of the pink bubbles popped. It wasn’t her job to be a cheerleader for her husband. He had made that clear himself. Angelica had barely enough patience to handle the incompetence in her own business operations, she had very little left for her husband. Couldn’t the middle-age crisis wait a few years more?

  “You’ll do fine,” she said after exhaling loudly —the phone filtered that faux-pass automatically—, “you’re the best persuader in the business.”

  “That I am,” Xavier laughed jovially.

  The bathroom door was closed to preserve the humidity levels in the rest of the apartment. Angelica squirmed with pleasure and disrobed. Her bikini area was instantly pixelated by the software’s algorithms. Her skin was dark gold and her hair was platinum. Both hair and skin were colored in her favorite boutique.

  She didn’t think modern boutiques were the human equivalent of getting a paint job for your car, but David Terrance surely did.

  She opened the door while her husband rattled on about the Duval meeting. She wasn’t listening anymore, she was merely looking for an exit to the conversation that would let her start to truly enjoy her bath.

  The bathroom was covered in a perfumed cloud of vapor and bubbles. The tub waited for her like a decadent lover. It was porcelain, engraved with gold. Her skin combined perfectly with it.

  She was halfway through the bathroom, enjoying the feel of the vapor over her skin, when she realized there was another smell mixed with the perfumed vapor.

  Something coppery.

  “—The entire deal could be hanging by a thread if Duval gets cold feet—” her husband was saying from a far-away place. She ignored him and walked the remaining steps towards the tub.

  The vapor uncovered the surface of the water then, and she realized it wasn’t pastel pink, but crimson. And floating under it, barely visible under the red and the vapor, lay the torn body of a man.

  His head was missing. But she could recognize that oversized Italian suit anywhere.

  Angelica screeched in terror, her eyes bulging in her head. She tried to run backward and slipped over the bathroom’s tiles. She broke her leg with the fall when she smashed against the cold floor.

  She screamed like she was being chased by death itself.

  She very well may have been. Because all the while, over her mini-speaker in her ear, she could hear her dead, decapitated husband’s voice talking to her:

  “Darling? Darling, are you alright? What happened? Where are you, darling? Oh god, where am I? I can’t see, darling… I can’t see!”

  Time froze all over the bathroom and the naked, crying lady on its floor. Then, reality dissolved around them in a cloud of green pixels and only darkness remained. It switched to white not long after.

  “Well?” asked a male’s voice. “What do you think?”

  The young agent looked away from the white screen-wall of the briefing room and locked eyes with his boss. The man, one Brandon Kelsov, was well into his forties and his face was covered in lines of expression. It clashed with the smooth face —half-way through his twenties— of special agent
John Derry.

  “Yes, I can see why we may need an expert,” said John. His boss nodded.

  “Angelica Morrow is cooperating fully,” Kelsov explained, “but the press will hear about it sooner or later.”

  “You want it handled with discretion? I don’t think we can afford discretion after the murder of a State’s Senator.”

  Brandon sighed and passed a trembling hand over his forehead. It was common knowledge in the Department that he wouldn’t last much longer in the job. It was cases like this that aged him. After all, while John Derry’s job was just to find the culprits, Kelsov had to ensure the power vacuum left by Morrow’s death wouldn’t create an explosive decompression, politically speaking.

  “That’s why I’m making you handle it,” Kelsov told his pupil. “Get me someone to point my finger at. And find how they did it, Derry. We barely handled the last AI panic, we can’t afford another collapse.”

  “It’s near elections,” nodded John, without a hint of sarcasm. He stood up, ready to leave.

  “I got you an expert,” said Kelsov. He took out his tablet from his coat pocket and transferred an archive to John.

  John got his own tablet out. On the sleek, black case three letters were engraved, as well as a symbol. The letters were “CIA.”

  “A criminal?” asked John, glancing at the archive in his screen. It wasn’t an incriminatory question. It was a request for clarification.

  “One of the best,” confirmed Kelsov. “He’s doing time for cybernetic fraud and tax evasion. I’m sure he’s going to jump at the chance to shave a couple decades off of that.”

  “Understood,” said John. He waited in case his boss wanted to add something, then he walked out of the room.

  The Hound, some of his co-workers called him, when there wasn’t any chance he would hear. He never let a prey go.

  John Derry climbed into his self-driven car and manually inputted the address of the Grandhaven Detention Center. He tossed the CIA-issued tablet to the co-pilot seat and watched the road like a hawk. He would have time to read the files on the road.

  Over the tablet’s screen, two words topped the long list of criminal charges and psychological analysis. A name.

  David Terrance.

  Chapter 2

  He would never get used to the orange fabric. It was in the solitude of his cell where the scratchy surface was the most unbearable, when he had nothing to distract him from the sensation over his skin.

  If only he had a computer to distract him…

  David Terrance sighed and forced himself to focus in his book. The paperbacks were the only thing that let him stay sane while he was locked up in his cell.

  But it was so slow. He was used to the blasting speed of the net, the blinding flashes of code. Used to a million different sources of stimulation fighting for his attention at the same time, while he multi-tasked over them all.

  He needed stimuli like a fish needs water. And in prison, stimuli was at a premium. Hell, he had managed to resist talking to the other inmates for the first week before he couldn’t abstain any longer and erupted into the cafeteria like a half-starved castaway finding his first McDonalds. He needed someone to talk to. Even human interaction was better than nothing.

  The book was called UBIK. He tossed it aside when he realized he hadn’t been actually reading anything for the last chapters. He knew the ending anyway.

  He paced the dusty floor of his cell while mentally working on his treatise. He was already seven chapters in and he expected to complete the sixth volume by the time of his release. If he ever bothered to write it, he expected it to be something akin to the Communist Manifesto for the excellent people at the SMU Computer Science division.

  I’m beginning to daydream again, he realized.

  The bottle of pills was already half-empty and it wasn’t close to the end of the month. David sighed, counting them again like he suspected someone was stealing the pills from him. Still the same as last time he counted.

  He could never be sure, anyway.

  The label on the bottle put “P.K.D.” in black typewriter letters. He downed one of the pills and smiled with pleasure as his mind settled into a zen-like state.

  It felt like those precious seconds of utter peace after an orgasm.

  He knew it wouldn’t last. A year ago, a single pill would last him for weeks. Now, he counted himself lucky if it bought him half a day of solace.

  And the bottle was half-empty…

  David Terrance sat on the edge of his bed and returned to his book, enjoying the peace and quiet of his own mind like a normal person would enjoy a juicy steak after hours of exercise.

  He heard the steps over the concrete floor of the corridor long before he saw their owners. Two men, judging from the weight —could be women, he was only right half the time—. Seeing as the guards didn’t make their rounds at this hour of the night, it probably was a visitor.

  Since the steps didn’t end at Calderi’s (mob padrino) cell or at Gomez’s (Calderi’s accountant), it could mean only one thing.

  David Terrance stepped up, made a mental note of his current page, and did a couple of passes over the wrinkles in his orange overall.

  He had visitors.

  The guard, a young fellow whose name he couldn’t remember, arrived first. “Someone’s here to see you, Terrance. Be polite or we’ll have trouble.”

  David raised an eyebrow. He had never given the guards (or other inmates) an ounce of trouble. A fight would be a welcome break from the routine, a delicious jolt of adrenaline. It would also leave him crippled, or worse. He was a lightweight, an intellectual. Not a brawler.

  “Of course,” he told the guard, trying his best to look offended. The guard accepted this and stepped away from the cell. The doors slid open on their own without noise. Terrance could see the other inmates nearby watching the exchange with interest. They, too, needed their own dosage of stimuli, he guessed.

  David stepped out and was face to face with his visitor. The man was close to his age, perhaps older by one or two years. He had the complexion of a corn-fed marine and smelled of aftershave and cheap cologne. His face was nondescript, the kind you meet once and forget all about it.

  The government, then. CIA?

  “David Terrance,” the man said. He extended one hand that David shook automatically. “John Derry. I have an offer for you.”

  David faked a smile. “Let’s hear it. Why don’t you come over to my office?” He made a gesture towards his cell, but neither the guard nor the agent laughed.

  “Come with us, Terrance,” said the guard.

  They brought him to the visitor’s room, where John Derry handed him a tablet. “Your country has needs of your expertise, Terrance. Have a look at this video.”

  David raised his hands nervously, looking at the guard. “Is this some kind of setup? I’m not allowed near any kind of technology.”

  The guard and the agent exchanged looks.

  “Watch the video, Terrance. You have nothing to worry about.”

  Still, David made no move towards the tablet. John Derry shook his head and then turned it on himself, showing it to David like a salesman showing off his newest product.

  It was the same video Derry himself had watched with his boss. A woman walked into her house. She was extremely rich, at least from the perspective of someone like David, whose most expensive possession had been his computer.

  “Yesterday evening, Angelica Morrow, married to Senator Xavier Morrow, entered her house while talking to her husband on the phone. So far, she thinks nothing is out of the ordinary. Five minutes later, she walked into this…”

  The scene advanced like the plot of a b-movie. The woman walked into her bathroom, delving deep into a cloud of water vapor. When she reached the bathtub, she screamed and fell to the floor. The camera’s recording software gave a close-up of the bathtub, filtering the surrounding vapor as well as it could. It revealed a shredded body and a blood-covered tub. David turned hi
s eyes away.

  “Morrow spent the night in police custody while her house was thoroughly searched. They haven’t figured out how the body got to the bathtub. DNA tests have confirmed the body is, in fact, Senator Xavier Morrow. Angelica insists the man she was talking to on the telephone was her husband. His recording matches the Senator’s vocal records—”

  “Where was the call coming from?” David asked. He understood what was expected of him.

  And, truth being told, even if the body’s image made his stomach churn, it was better than lying in his bed, waiting to fall asleep.

  “A private server,” said John Derry, “paid for with street-bought, virtual currency. Untraceable. Whoever killed the Senator took his phone and re-directed it to the private server. It’s a known technique, used by ambassadors and criminal gangs alike. The NSA is working round the clock on a fix.”

  “And the tapes caught nothing? From before Angelica arrived, I mean.”

  “Someone hacked into them. The IP address came from the same server. They deleted the entire past couple of days from the server. When Angelica entered the house, the home-protocols came online and reset the cameras. We still have nothing, though.”

  David accepted those facts. He already knew something the agent had missed. Clear as day, actually. But first, they had a score to settle. Salary.

  “Elections coming up, right?” David muttered, more to himself than to his interloper. “Alright, I think I see where this is going. The current Administration can’t allow the public to know their Senators are vulnerable to a sloppy murder like this, right? The public’s good will is always drained after a war.

  “Police are known for their leaks,” he went on, “so they redirect the investigation to the professionals. You’re CIA, I presume.”

  “That is none of your business” said John. “You’re a convicted criminal. Almost sentenced for treason over stolen sensitive data. Instead, you’re spending your days in jail, away from any kind of technology. I believe we both have something the other needs.”