Free Up The Tower by J.P. Lantern Page A

eyes? They own all of us. Every part. I just...” Oscar shook his head, spitting out blood and another tooth. “Fingers in everything. Even if you didn’t come to kill me, they were gonna kill me.”
    Victor had heard it all before, and he didn’t have time for this.
    “Okay, then.”
    Overhead, he heard creaking and shouting. Busting, breaking noises. Then the wall caved in. He dived out of the way, dodging the two falling bodies, but the debris knocked against him hard all along his left side.
    Victor, groaning, stood up, favoring the one side. Oscar groaned too, the two fallen idiots right on top of him. A man and a woman, both young and bleeding from scrapes they took in the collapse.  The woman had one eye and tech all along one arm. The two had been fighting, maybe, and came in through the bad masonry of the wall.
    It was time to get out of here. He shot Oscar in the head—the blood and bone softly shuffling out of his skull—and limped quickly to the stairs.
    “Oh my god!”
    Victor stopped. At the hole, where everything had caved in, was a beautiful young woman, hand to her mouth. But she was beautiful in...in a way Victor didn’t understand.
    In the course of his job he had come across many women who were probably more beautiful than most of the others in the world. At the one-percent of the one-percent mark, beauty entered into an arena where even the slightest flaw marked someone down for being chosen by the most wealthy. Trillionaires never had wives over the age of thirty, and if they did, these women were supported and surrounded by such an amazing array of implants and tech that they could have funded the GDP of whole countries, back in the day when countries actually existed.
    This woman wasn’t that kind of beautiful. Her hair wrapped around her shoulders, a loose tangle. She was...she reminded him of something. In the way that a sunset would sometimes tug at his heart, in the way that he could not listen to rock and roll without pushing down the sensation of his bouncing legs. Something about her was wrapped around him, already, and seeing her had only woken that part of him.
    He put his gun away.
    “You need to get out of here,” he said up to the woman. “You need to do it right now.”
    She stepped down through the rubble, staring at Victor with a challenge in her eyes
    “Or what?” she asked. “Are you going to kill me? Fine. Kill me, then. I’m poor forever. I don’t care. Nothing matters when you’re poor. Haven’t you heard?”
    “No. There’s...there’s an earthquake. Very soon. We should go.”
    It struck him, this “we” he employed so casually. Still, she didn’t move—the young man underneath her in the rubble tried to glom onto her leg. Victor stepped forward and stomped down on his face.
    Watching this, the woman half-sprouted a protest, and then stopped. She smiled for a moment, and then stopped that as well. Victor grabbed her.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Ana.”
    “Okay, Ana. You really want to die?”
    “No. I was being—”
    “It doesn’t matter. You want to get out of this town?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then follow me, and let’s go.”
    She cooperated without any trouble or backtalk. A woman well-accustomed to being told what to do by a man in charge. He knew this about her; instinctively, he knew it.
    Outside, he put a hand to his ear. “Mike? Mike, are you there?”
    There was no response. The debris had probably damaged the circuitry somehow. Sometimes excessive noise overloaded the circuits. That wasn't supposed to happen, but that was the way with technology. Always frequent with wonders until it was dead weight in your head.
    “Mike, I'm heading to the rendezvous. I have the data. I'll see you in thirty minutes.”
    This was, he knew even then, rather wishful thinking.
    * * * * *
    “T his is my room,” said Samson. “Don’t break anything.”
    “No way.” The copbot slapped its metal fists together. “Only if there’s a bad guy’s face, huh