Free The Eternal Prison by Jeff Somers

move.”
     
“A man after my own heart,” Ruberto muttered.
     
My eyes kept sweeping the sheet. “That’s a huge storage and UPS. I’ve never seen an uninterrupted power supply that heavy.”
     
“The Prime is not mobile,” Neely said immediately. “Its hardware demands keep it stationary.”
     
I nodded and looked back at them. Ruberto was smiling and nodding his round head a little, as if something on his desktop amused him a great deal. Neely had his dark little eyes locked on me, those brutal hands steepled in front of him. Fucking government. They all thought they were civilization itself, salvation in human form—the cops, the Undersecretaries, and now their fucking flunkies the Spooks. They were all just gangsters.
     
“How do I kill the Prime, then?”
     
Neely gave me a flat, unimpressed stare. “You can’t just waltz in, put a bullet into some black box, and that’s it. The Prime is a fucking complex, it’s a building unto itself, several floors below ground. Server banks, big pieces of tech. Generators, signal boosters, an army of Techies. The Prime is Moscow, practically. There’s, of course, ancillary security.” He shrugged. “In the form of his Worms, the Internal Affairs elite officers. The Worms. ”
     
“Also avatars,” Ruberto said softly.
     
“Also avatars,” Neely agreed without expression, his dead eyes staring at me. I stared back for a moment, the words hanging there between us.
     
“Excuse me?”
     
“That’s what Marin’s doing. That’s what this is all about, ” Ruberto said, his eyes popping open while the rest of him remained perfectly still. Around us, the whine of displacement shifted down a bit, which meant we were near our destination. “That fucking insane dictator is making the System Security Force into an army of avatars—digital intelligences ripped right out of the brains of real, actual cops. He can mass-produce copies, each one with all the skills and memories of the original. Plus —”
     
“Programming,” Neely said.
     
“Programming,” Ruberto echoed. “They’re like the original cops—look the same, act the same—but the fucking maniac can insert instructions into their templates. So not only are his cops—his fucking army of cops—inexhaustible and replaceable, but he can control them.”
     
“This is what the prick’s doing,” Neely interjected.
     
“We estimate that about half the force has so far been transformed,” Ruberto said, suddenly standing up, his plump little body almost bouncing as he began to pace, his hands pushed deep into his pockets. “This is what we’re fighting against. He has displayed bad faith.”
     
Neely stared at me for a moment, silent. I looked around, knowing this was not going to end well for me. They weren’t going to send any of their own into the saw blade—why not send Cates? We keep throwing him into the fire, and he somehow crawls out.
     
“So the Prime is the installation,” I said slowly, feeling my way through it. “It’s not just a single fancy avatar. It’s the whole fucking—what, building? City block? City? ” Silently, I fervently hoped they did not tell me Marin’s Prime was an entire fucking city.
     
“The Kremlin,” Ruberto said, sounding distracted as he paced. “The whole building,” Neely offered. “Whole thing has to be fucking nuked to take him out.”
     
“We’re launching an offensive to take Moscow,” Ruberto said briskly, returning to his seat. “The general staff is not optimistic. Moscow’s defenses are extensive, and it’s historically been a tough nut to crack.”
     
I took his word for that.
     
“So you’re insurance,” Neely finished. “We’ll try to get in, bomb the fucking place to hell. In case we can’t, you go in, tear him down local.”
     
It was curious, how stupid they thought I was. “And if I’m sitting there with my thumb up my ass when you break through the lines and start bombing?”
     
“You are being compensated, ” Ruberto said, sounding exasperated. They always thought it was all about