Free Darkness & Light by Dean Murray Page B

Reflections piece to fill that need,
but I really wanted to branch out, so "Backlash" began to
evolve.
    Jerome may be the kind of bit villain that
nobody expects to remember after the final page, but he sure was
fun to write.
    Sadly, "Backlash" is the final story
in  Darkness and Light , but before I
leave you to the business of reading it I wanted to take just a
moment and thank you again for your support. Hopefully if you've
made it this far, something in at least one of the stories
resonated with you. If you did enjoy one or more of the stories
please help spread the word. Forums, reviews-either on the big
sites like Amazon and Barnes and Noble or just on your blog, all
help. The question of how many of the stories currently rattling
around in my head get written in the next few years depends in no
small part on my fans and the way in which they spread the word
about my writing.
    So once again, thanks-I can't wait to sit
down again with everyone so I can tell you what happens next.
     

     
Backlash

    Jerome pulled the clutch in with two fingers
of his left hand, and goosed the throttle as he dropped a gear. The
gleaming black bullet bike shot forward with a surge as though
trying to buck him off. The yellow four-door coupe that'd been
loitering in the fast lane disappeared behind him with gratifying
speed.
    The assignments from the idiots at Central
usually ended up being nothing more than a wild goose chase. Still,
the assignments did get him briefly away from the shrinks running
observation duty and back onto his bike.
    Of course the knowledge that those same
armchair dweebs would be analyzing everything he heard or saw while
out on assignment did tend to suck most of the fun out of even his
brief moments of freedom.
    The needle on the speedometer crept up
towards 110 and Jerome felt a grimace pull at the corners of his
mouth as he started to run out of open freeway. Up ahead some idiot
cut off a semi, and the physics module in the chip located just
behind his right collarbone went into overdrive. The results surged
out on scores of fiber optic lines, and he shot towards a transient
gap between the semi and a minivan, accelerating all the way.
    His normal, unaided gray matter was screaming
that there wasn't enough space to permit the bike safe passage, but
at these speeds his chip was ramped up all the way to combat mode,
and it hadn't ever been wrong before.
    A split second later the difference in
relative velocities of the two vehicles opened up the space just
enough to permit a one in a thousand chance of survival. The
slipstreams of the two vehicles hammered at him with a fury the
bike's windshield wasn't able to fully redirect and then he was
clear.
    He was getting soft. Too much time stuck away
from the action, too many fruitless missions. There'd been a moment
there where he'd felt his muscles starting to tighten up, to fight
the synthetic fibers lacing his being.
    Those computer-controlled artificial muscles
could've ripped his skeleton apart, but that tended to be rather
hard on the operatives in whom they were installed. Standard
procedure was for the eggheads to ensure the governors stepped
things down to something that wouldn't over stress normal
bones.
    Of course that introduced other
complications, like interference from the human host whose
genetically wired reflexes didn't understand that survival lay in
not jostling the elbow of the cybernetic henchman trying to keep
him from being wrapped around the back corner of some soccer mom's
urban limo.
    The psycho babblers would take him to task
later for having unnecessarily risked an important asset, but they
didn't understand. The only way to be sure you could still ride the
edge was by testing it. If you didn't test it, then you never knew
you'd fallen off until after you found yourself up against a flesh
beast some staffer puke had been confident was still weeks away
from degeneration.
    Loss to degenerate form containment was the
number one explanation