This is the worst thing that will ever happen to you.

  What do you do next?

  -Translation from the sole remaining monument of the Original, date unknown

  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  “I use meat bullets to hunt metal men.”

  Laughter explodes across the dingy bar, fugitives from five different systems howling into their assorted cups of distilled coolant masquerading as drinks. An angry Parinthian, ocular tattoos zagging across his irises in a tribal pattern of lavender whorls, clenches his fists into meaty clubs. He’s missing one finger on the right and two on the left, fleshy gaps like empty teeth. I place him from the system’s barely habitable inner planet, not one of the cleaner Jovian moons. Likely an escaped convict-miner, sentenced from birth to delve out Parinth’s famed novacrystals, he clearly does not appreciate my honest answer to his question.

  “What’s that then,” he spits in Neutral, the constantly shifting trade patois of humanity scattered across light years, “you sit in our homsaf and talk jokes when asked what you do? You trying to make a fukndik out of me?”

  I swallow his epithet with the last of my Isbor brandy, the same vile concoction everyone else is drinking dressed up in a slightly fancier label and stand up from my stool, sliding the cloudy glass at the zoned-out bartender. I’ve never seen him sampling his wares, but he radiates the vague grasp on reality of a serious chemhead.

  He catches it in a smooth, economical motion that belies the dazed look in his eyes, barely pausing in his futile task of wiping the scuffed wooden surface clean from the omnipresent slime-molds. It’s a task I’ve not seen satisfactorily completed in the three months I’ve been frequenting this particular shithole, but I’m sure in his present chemical wonderland he’s more than happy to keep trying.

  In front of me, the Parinthian tenses.

  “Look, friend,” I begin, hands held low in a non-threatening posture, “you asked what I do-”

  The Parinthian, clearly uninterested in anything other than primal communication, sends his right fist flashing at my face almost before the interrupted phrase leaves my mouth.

  Fighting’s the most common entertainment on this scab in reality called Castor II, so his attack isn’t unexpected. In fact, today, I’m counting on it.

  I flex a mental muscle, causing specially-modified glands in my body to deliver a quickdose of one of the Protectorate’s most heavily guarded biochemical secrets into my veins - alacrity. Icy lightning darts from axon to neuron, chemical reactions multiply a hundredfold across my cells, and time crystallizes around me thanks to my suddenly overclocked nervous system.

  The Parinthian’s fist, his missing finger a slightly darker gap in the wall of thin-scarred skin, seems to float in front of me, closing the separation with continental drift urgency. Feeling as if I have all the time in the world, next I trigger brawn, boosting my muscles with a surge from unchained mitochondrial engines. Compared to alacrity, brawn augments are trivially easy to acquire, since strength without speed means nothing. Employers in the Protectorate frequently require brawn for manual labor tasks; a cover I’d adopted more than once in the past. Five minutes from now isn’t going to be fun, once the comedown hits and I’m forced to deal with the cramps and stiffness of too much lactic acid build-up, but right now I need the edge to take advantage of alacrity.

  I lean slightly to my left, bones creaking under the strain as the combat cocktails move me almost ten times faster than an augless human. I could count the Parinthian’s pores if I wanted, but I don’t, because my eyes are twitching over to the bartender, my hands already spreading apart in webs of flesh to trigger the impulse guns masquerading as my arms.

  Small chunks of aerodynamically formed flesh shoot out from my palms in a staccato scream towards the hunched over figure, caught mid-glass-polish, propelled by bladder contractions from an auxiliary organ connected to my lungs. My now-depleted pulmonary system burns with a sudden demand for oxygen, but it’s not important. I can run for an hour on anabolic if I need to. What I need right now is for one of the striated muscle tissue bullets wrapped around viral memetic payloads woven through my DNA to hit.

  It's like I told the Parinthian.

  Meat bullets for metal men.

  A stutter-stop fraction of time later, part of the scene changes. Behind the length of battered hardwood, the bartender is halfway through transformation, his outer layer of synthetic skin peeling aside to reveal the composite alloy chassis beneath, his “bones” already collapsing into a dense agglutination of strange metal - a near instantaneous response to my attack. Thin, faceted protrusions emerge from multiple ports in the sphere like a blacksmith’s puzzle solving itself, movements even quicker than my own, and lock into what I recognize as an all-too-familiar configuration; an unnatural gathering of slender appendages sprouting seemingly randomly in all directions, an inhuman logic designed for non-organic efficiencies.

  I suppress my atavistic shudder and make a mental note for the visual recording cells in my right eye. Target confirmed - an original Mk.1 FS (fully sentient) Stalker in Danger Close mode.

  It, for the Stalker is surely an ‘it’ now, powers up its dispersion field in a flickering green haze, blowing apart four unsuspecting bar denizens and half the bar in a spherical mist of atomized matter. Fortunately, the Stalker’s field initialization was ‘near instantaneous,’ not ‘instant.’ My distraction with the Parinthian worked according to plan, three months of inserting myself into the background of the bar as just another regular face giving me the precious few slivers of time I needed, and two of my virals are already inside the impenetrable field.

  The Stalker’s secondary defense system activates, a burst of magnetic force erupting from its leftmost limb cluster, and another eight drinkers are blended from the inside out as metal from their traditionally augmented arms, legs, torsos and eyes rips out of their bodies at an appreciable fraction of the speed of sound, disintegrating against the field in squelching thumps. All around us wall panels creak and tear against their mountings, metal bracings slamming against rapidly weakening polymer barriers.

  The magnetic pulse does nothing to stop me or my virals, though. The Protectorate has learned over the years, has been forced to learn over the centuries-long fight against the Ascendants, and every upgrade in my body is entirely biological. The lessons were bought in blood, and sure, I need constant maintenance to counteract the cancers caused by such extensive gene-editing, but it’s a small price to pay for a job worth doing. Sending another AI into well-deserved oblivion. My sculpted bio-missiles continue their unerring journey towards the Stalker’s core.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Harsh blue light flares like a miniature arc generator, the Stalker engaging a last ditch defense with its main particle accelerator, but I aimed well and dodged even better. The brief ray of tormented space only has time to wipe away one of my projectiles, along with the Parinthian’s upper torso in a crackle of ozone and scorched meat. I’m already rolling across the floor to confuse the Stalker’s tracking algorithms for another vital few microseconds in case it tries to take me out again, ignoring the shattered glass digging into my shoulder and back. Nothing my body’s overboosted healing mechanisms can’t deal with.

  My remaining projectile finally contacts the sphere in splattering slow motion, cultured toxic enzymes degrading the Stalker’s outer armor to create an insertion gap for the viral, and I turn my roll into a bursting leap over what remains of the bar, directly at the urchin-spiked killing machine, muscles and ligaments just beginning their chemical complaints about my quicksilver acceleration. Scuffed wood passes beneath me in agonizing slowness, the Stalker’s dispersion field filling my entire vision with its flickering green oblivion, and then the viral finally penetrates. The Stalker’s limbs go limp under the memetic assault, the field winking out like a pricked soap bubble. I land next to the asymmetrical construct in a sliding crouch.

  Moment of truth.

  The Protectorate techies claim they’ve discovered a way to remove a Stalker’s memory core without triggering its self-destruct sequence and I’m the lucky test subject who gets to validate their research. Normally, I’d wipe the Stalker with a memetic kill shot, scrubbing its processors before it can overload the null-point singularity reactor centering its core as it disintegrates everything in the surrounding two kilometers and irradiates everything else another eight kilometers beyond that. Turns out Ascendant Intelligences don’t like others messing with their toys, especially toys we might reverse-engineer.

  If we can actually capture a sentient unit, however, interrogate it, learn from it, it might prove a decisive advantage in humanity’s unceasing war against them. Might allow us to finally rid ourselves of their scourge for good.

  Of course, taking down a Stalker who doesn’t want to be found is no easy task, one only a few people in the Protectorate can pull off, so here I am, ready and willing to risk sudden obliteration for a chance to prove the techies right.

  I quickly slap my hand against the Stalker’s twitching shell in a complicated pattern that took weeks to memorize, an insane drummer’s syncopated beat. Theoretically, the vibrations should synchronize inside the Stalker’s physical architecture as an analog hack to trigger the memory core’s maintenance routine, exposing it from the combat chassis while the memetic virals stall its processing nodes just long enough to prevent a self-immolation any martyr would envy.

  Theoretically.

  A very tense microsecond passes, most of it spent wondering if under the effects of alacrity I’ll notice when the explosion happens, and then the Stalker gives one last shudder and goes completely still, forced to compress its intelligence into the memory core or suffer identity decohesion from the viral ravaging its outer layers. Soundlessly, a hatch slides open on the side of the main chassis and extrudes a small cube of intricately etched grey metal, no larger than a six-sided die, dropping it into my waiting hand. It’s much heavier than it looks, a dense block of incomprehensible thought. A sad puff of coolant gas wafts out after it.

  Fortunately for me, it seems the techies were right, and the surrounding frontier city continues its existence, blissfully unaware of how close to annihilation we all came. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding, then trigger null, clearing my system of brawn and alacrity. Time resumes its normal flow around me.

  Screams are just starting to fill the air, the surviving bar-denizens beginning their first shocked stumbles toward the exit, fires crackling through the now-obliterated room. I check my internal chrono - our explosion of cataclysmic violence took place in less than a second of human-standard time. From a non-alacrity enhanced perspective, the world must have shifted from normality to chaos in an eyeblink. In front of me, the Stalker’s combat shell shivers, then dissolves into an inert pile of dust - one of the anti-interrogation features the techies still haven’t managed to crack. Without an overload sequence, the null-point reactor dissipates harmlessly, higher dimension energies tucking themselves back into hidden corners of the universe.

  Weary now, I pocket the memory core and force myself to my feet, bruised muscles bitterly complaining about the demands of brawn boosted by alacrity. As usual, it feels like I just got out of a two hour shift in a twelve-G centrifuge, and climbing the dirty stairs up to street level seems impossible.

  I climb them anyway.

  If I knew how to quit, I wouldn’t be an Agent.

  Outside, dull crimson light replaces the flickering glowpanels of the bar. It’s another sullen day on Castor II, a planet little more than barely breathable atmosphere clinging to a collection of slime molds and methane, orbiting a red supergiant nearly twenty-five solar masses large. The Castor system sits on the very outskirts of the sprawling galactic civilization humanity has carved out for itself - the Protectorate - and just like any frontier world, it’s a dumping ground for outcasts and misfits. In two hundred years, once the terraforming takes hold, it might become a garden paradise, but today it’s just a tiny outpost holding several biofuel concerns, a rudimentary spaceport, and close to fifty million not-quite-lost souls; convicts and conmen and converts to the gospel of life unencumbered by rules or regulation or running water.

  About the only thing the Castor system has going for it is an erratic solar field that messes with any and all connections to the quantum datanet. As a result, the planet doesn’t enjoy instant information exchange with the rest of the Protectorate, contributing to its ass-end of nowhere lack of charm. Who wants to willingly wait an extra week for the rest of the galaxy’s non-priority messages to reach them?

  A perfect place for a Stalker to hide.

  Without alacrity, my thoughts rumble sluggishly through my head, ponderous rocks where just before lightning had crackled, and it takes me a moment to realize several local security officials are confronting me, weapons not quite pointed in my direction. I try to focus on them and ignore the stench of their unwashed uniforms.

  “What the fuknhel happened in there?”

  The speaker is a portly man with scar tissue covering half his face, either an industrial accident or the wrong end of a plasma burst. Taking in his ill-fitting uniform and rust-streaked projectile accelerator, my bet’s on the former.

  “I need-” I pause briefly, taken by a coughing fit, “I need a priority encrypted subspace comm. One with manual controls.”

  All three laugh, ugly jeers that echo along the rapidly emptying street, which tells me everything the locals already know about the local security forces.

  “And what you’ll get is an asskicking,” the one on the left says, a scrawny, rodent-looking man. The third one, still silent, nods and raises the butt of his weapon, intending to strike me.

  What is it with me and people wanting to fight? Is it my cheery expression? My upbeat emotional outlook? My distaste for ration bars?

  Probably just an occupational hazard of being an Agent.

  I don’t have time to explain why suicide is a bad life choice; instead I relax the controls on the back of my left hand, twisting it so the goons can see. An intricate symbol bursts into existence as my very cells rearrange themselves - blood red arcs mixing seamlessly with jagged angles of pure gold, an eye in an eye-twisting pattern, no mechtattoos involved, only pure bioengineering straight from the heart of the Protectorate’s darkest labs.

  The effect is immediate. There’s no one alive who would dare copy the insignia I’m displaying, mainly because those who try tend to vanish before their local cycle has time to complete another revolution.

  The goon with the raised gun stumbles and nearly falls, and all three darken their pants in an involuntary release of urine, intensifying the ongoing olfactory assault. I point a finger at the trio and try not to laugh when they cringe.

  “As a sworn Agent of Unusual Affairs who, due to unfortunate necessity, has been out of contact with my support team for over five months, I am ordering you to bring me a fucking comm,” I pause for a moment, stomach rumbling from the energy consumption I’d just forced on my body, then add, “and some food that doesn't taste like shit. Go.”

  The three nearly trip over themselves scrambling to obey, and seconds later I’m alone in the dirty street, the angry clouds my only companions. With a grateful sigh, I sink into a crouch.

  Time to contact Home.