Chapter two, Rowland. He woke up suddenly aware of two equally pressing problems. The acids worn off and eight people are here to kill me. Both of these facts concerned him equally. He couldn't remember his name or where exactly he was, which made the impending killed him all the more concerning. He opened his eyes, his vision was blurry and unfocused. His head felt filled with sand. Roland, Oh ship, that's my name. Roland wondered how long he'd been asleep.
He reflexively triggered his deck before the dim firing of a synapse reminded him that he'd permanently disabled his data connection well a long time ago, million two or twenty six minutes. His hindbrain, what Roland called the acres of microscopic processors and data banks, spun into his blood. Spat the knowledge out, unbidden into his conscious mind. Roland tried to curse, but wound up spitting out a wad of brackish flim instead. His eyes settled on a quarter full
bottle of fungus whiskey. He grabbed it, drained it, and rooted around on the table where he'd found it until his digging turned up a sheet of acid. He ripped the sheet in half, ate one half and pasted the other on his sweat damp chest. Roland's brain didn't wait for the acid to do its job. Nanomachines couriered the lysurgic diethyl acid directly to his synapses. The drugs took cold in a matter of seconds. Acid softened the world around him. His hindbrains running commentary faded into a sort
of generalized hyper awareness of the world around him. He sighed, relaxed, and remembered a woman hovered over him, her hands on his shoulders, her knees on either side of his body. Sweat dripped down from her short black hair on to his face and chest. Her pupils were the size of dinner plates. She smelled like acid and desire. She smiled, revealing a row of damascus steel teeth. Roland pulled himself out of the memory. He felt the strike team advance.
His hindbrain generated a map of the approaching assassins. They were still a solid minute from his hovel. There were six men and two women on the team. If he'd wanted a micro seconds focus could have told him which members of the group were vegetarians, where two of the team were on their minstrel cycles and how recently each of their firearms had been cleaned and oiled. But Roland didn't care about that information. He was trying to remember where he left his gun. The one room hut Roland
occupied was best described as squalid. He knew he'd lived there for quite a long time, although he wasn't sure if the home was his in any legal sense of the word. It's one room held a filthy mattress, a hot plate, several dozen empty bottles of liquor, and a tinkling carpet of spent whippets. A large knife was embedded in the door. Roland couldn't remember why he knew he'd had a gun at one point, even though he couldn't
currently find it. He stood up, still wobbly from the massive dose of g h B he'd taken with his nightly tequila, and started kicking at the piles of bottles and drug paraphernalia in the hope that one of them might contain his gun. He found some bullets after a few seconds search, at the bottom of a folder's coffee tin that was half filled with marijuana. Next to the tin was a large metal bowl of stagnant water. Roland
glanced in and caught sight of his own reflection. His black skin looked ashen and clammy, unusually pale, he thought, but he didn't recall enough about himself to know if that was really true. His face was long and drawn, with wide, jutting cheekbones and apache uneven beard. His head was covered in stubble. The center of his face was
dominated by a crooked, heavily scarred nose. Roland had no recollection of why it was scarred, but he knew the injury must have happened back before the army filled him with chrome. He turned away from his reflection and continued to search through the house, scattering food and crusted plates, empty coke bags, an old fashioned print pornography into even less organized piles. No dice did I pawn it? He wondered. As his machine assisted edetic memory warred with his profound intoxication.
Roland was now conscious enough to remember that not remembering much was pretty normal for him, and he should really worry more about the assassin's coming to kill him. Oh ship right, the strike team was just fifty meters out. Now. He felt a gust of wind d and in the same way felt As two of the men began to assemble a large sound cannon behind a rocky hill that faced his hovel, he guessed it was a Callahan Mark
thirty eight. Roland didn't know how he knew the weapon's name, but he knew it could burn out even his armored synapses with a few seconds of continuous fire. One man was on overwatch for the Callahan team. He carried a
two bore Ruger fusion anti vehicular rifle. The mingling odors of fierce sweat and baby formula wafting off him triggered since memories of someone holding a newborn infant, Roland guessed the man must have a kid back home, a kid he's scared of leaving fatherless of some chromed out asset had phileas him. That was useful data. He filed it away in the chunk of his brain least likely to lose that information. Over the next four seconds, Roland's memory
was real good in four second chunks. Over the next pico second, he caught equally informative whiffs of the others. It was enough to suggest that two of the women in the main assault team were lovers and they'd both had millspecks subdermal armor implanted recently. The acrid scent of
fresh suitures hung heavy in the air around them. Roland could also tell that one of the men in the assault party took heavy testosterone supplements, either because of a genetic abnormality or because he'd been assigned female at birth. The fourth man was moderately addicted to ephedric's and riding into battle on a high stimulant wave. The last member of the assault team was the only one to give
Roland any pause. He could guess the man's heightened weight six foot five hundred and forty pounds from the sound of his footfalls. Roland could smell the sig Sour five hundred submachine gun in his hands, but otherwise the man was a sensory blank, no sweat, no hydraulics, and black to thermographic sensors. The man was chromed, not so heavily as Roland, of course, but the competent and well armed squad he led might be enough to narrow the gap. We're in the shooting shit, shit, shit did I leave
that gun? The static balance in the air chain changed as the Overwatch team warmed up their sound cannon. The assault team was close, now barely a hundred feet out, waiting in the cover provided by several large bowlders at the base of the rise that held Roland's ramshackle home.
He knew how this fight would go. They'd unleashed the Callahan for a good five seconds while the killed team moved into position and kicked in the door next the big bruiser and the two women would enter, while the remainder of the assault team fanned out to cover the sides. Textbook post human kill team tactics. He thought he didn't actually remember any of the fights this conclusion was based on, but he'd clearly lived through similar encounters, and if he
trusted his body and hindbrain, he would again. Roland finished searching the apocalyptic ruin that was his kitchen sink. The pile of plates had been large enough to hide a short barrel, a R ten, but his gun wasn't there either. Funck Nuts, He cursed. The profanity brought a tiny serotonin spike, and Roland felt himself calm down even as the noose
tightened around him. His combat wetware did most of its work in the moments before meat met metal, so Roland closed his eyes, slumped his shoulders, and relaxed while it cross indexed his memories of past firefights with his current sensory data. A moment later, Roland was presented with three potential counter assault strategies. He selected the one that sounded
like the most fun. The Callahan fired, blanketing his home and much of the area beyond it in a web of noise designed to assault and eventually fry the synapses of anyone dumb enough to stand too long in its wake. Payne lashed from Roland's inner ear and sparked out to every nerve in his body. It would have been enough to leave a strong man curled on the ground, shifting his guts out, but Roland just felt a distant ache.
His experience of the damage was more akin to seeing the check engine light on a car than true agony. He was aware that if he waited too long, the sonic weapon would blow out the pain dampners on his spinal nerve gates. Lucky for him, the assault team didn't wait that long. Roland felt the big man arc his leg up to kick in the door, trumpled in and Roland lunged left. This helped him avoid the first spray
of covering fire. As the chromed man and both women barreled inside, Roland flung himself into the hovel's main structural support beam, which ran up the building's left wall. He hit it with the rough speed and force of a light truck going twenty miles an hour. His momentum carried him and half the left wall into the rocky ground outside. Roland's filthy little home tottered and swayed. It collapsed, first on the left side and then on the right. As
the whole structure failed. Roland was already up. With a jagged piece of two by four in his hands. He rushed the ephedric's addict, holding down the left flank. The man got two shots off, and to his credit, both hit right where Roland's original heart had been, and then Roland was on him. He shoved the wood into the meat of the man's face. It gouged off enough flesh to philippine glass and shattered the poor fellow's jaw. He went down hard. Roland smelled the familiar scent of antihimiragic
nano machines. As they rushed to save the man's life. He caught a slight sour whiff of the cheap clotting agents in the man's blood. Roland guessed it was Traumax brand, which was convenient. Traumax had based their whole line off a piece of Brazilian military wet weare that itself was
based on a crude synthesis of horseshoe crab blood. The organs worked well enough unless you happen to be an amphetamine attitude suffered massive tissue damage, then your Tromax unit would flood your synapses with ad aenocene to knock you out rather than risk pushing more amphetamines on your stressed heart.
Something in the smell of the man's blood set off a powerful sense memory buried deep in Roland's hippocampus vine slashing his face boiling jungle heat, and his fist connecting with the face of a heavily armed young woman, her orbital bone broken to the blow. He smelled her blood meat the air, and she dropped, dropped, dropped. The memory flashed by, free of context and the time it took
the other man to hit the ground. It was frustrating to only remember the what of an action and not the why or the after it was like knowing how to ride a bike without remembering who'd taught you, and when only for everything. Roland found it somewhat unsettling. A twelve gage slug hit him in the face. It dug deep, hit reinforced bone and stopped. The little machines and roll Land's blood were already cutting it apart by the time he stopped musing and bounded over to the other flank man.
Roland chucked the two by four hard as he ran. The wood impacted above the assassin's temple with an audible crack, shattering the man's sphenoid bone. The battle drugs started to trickle into Roland's synapses. Now a cocktail of endorphins, oxytocin, serotonin, and epinephrin concocted to make violence as addictive as a fat rock of crystal meth. Roland instantly wanted more, and he knew he could trigger a greater dose by stomping
on the downed man's skull and ending his life. He fought down the aarge and instead grabbed the man's a a thirty two combat shotgun, and rolled for cover behind a red rock boulder. He was almost fast enough, but either the overwatch man had some aftermarket parts Roland hadn't smelled, or all the hardcore drug abuse had done long term damage to his reflexes. Maybe no more crack binges, Roland thought.
As a massive two bore slug ding most of his left shoulder out into the desert behind him, Roland belted out several fukwords as pain flooded the banks of his dampners, and just that second, with truly exquisite timing, the Callahan crew swiveled their weapon round and poured sonic fire at him from above. For refraction of a second, everything went dark. Roland's world was riotous, red, pain, and little else. If his body had required the input of his conscious mind,
he would have been in a real pickle. During the milliseconds it took for his dampners to cut through the pain hayes, Roland's body dove ten feet to the left, enough to take him out of the Callahan spray and behind and outcropping of rocks. Two rounds cracked into the rock above his head. Roland came back to himself as the shards cut into his skin. He glanced down at the ruin of his shoulder, His little blood robots were already hard at work rebuilding the muscles, bones and sinews
blown out by the giant's slug. A couple of seconds more and the limb would be usable again. But Rowland had a better idea. He used his intact arm as a flesh catapult and flung himself up over the boulder towards the Callahan and its three guardians. The man with the two boar fired again. Roland had known he would, and his hind brain had already calculated the ideal emotions
to avoid the dozen most likely shot patterns. He sailed over the half pound bullets with ease and used the hand of his intact arm to rip his wounded arm free at the shoulder. Roland landed hard in front of the Callahan. He swung his own severed limb like a club and knocked the barrel to the left. Then he laid into the gun's crew with a mix of pounding swings from the arm and stomps to the other men's
knees and ankles. Bone shattered, assassin screamed, The man with the two boar and the newborn child at home wavered and broke. Roland had expected this many normal humans, Even hardened veterans, found it nauseating and unsettling to see a man move as fast as he could move, add beating their friends half to death with a severed limb, and well, he'd predicted the guy would break. It's not your fault, buddy, Roland thought, as he watched the man run. Don't feel bad.
He'd wanted to say that out loud, but he was having trouble working his vocal cords. In roughly seven seconds, Roland had eliminated five out of eight threats in the kill team. His hind brain predictions had given him six more seconds at least before the entry team cleared themselves from the debris of his collapsed hovel. But the other post human, the man who'd shone blank on most of
Roland's senses, had freed himself faster. Roland realized this when a trio of fifty caliber slugs burst into his chest cavity. He dropped, avoiding the last three rounds of the burst, and rolled behind another pair of bowlders with his severed arm in hand. The two female assassins were close to freeing themselves now Roland could hear them struggle out through the vibrations of their bodies in the red sand. He couldn't see the other post human, but he'd triangulated his
most likely location. Unfortunately, the other fucker had him dead to rights. If Roland broke cover, he'd be shot to pieces, maybe more pieces than his traumel Organs could put back together. All right, oh boy, to eat a bunch of lead and charge the bastards, deploy the meat rockets and run for a gun while they're blind. He suddenly remembered the spring loaded assault razor embedded in his left forearm, and then the twenty two millimeter grenade pistol buried in between
his small intestine and his sigmoid coal. Did I remember to load it before shoving it in there? But before he could take any action, the firefight was interrupted by an oddly familiar voice. Hey, Roland, has its swinging. Roland hadn't smelled or heard this new man coming. The voice was very familiar. Roland felt a name on the tip of his tongue, but it just wouldn't come. Weapons down, lads and lasses. I've seen enough to guess the end.
Roland smelled frustration, waft off. The two women, now free and angry, the other post human smelled like nothing, but Roland felt him lower his weapon. Some gray, dead strand of memory pulsed in the back of Roland's brain, and he guessed that it was safe for him to stand up now, So he did and put eyes on the mystery man. The fellow had a lopsided, squarish jaw with a very deliberate five o'clock shadow. His nose was thick
and bulby. His red hair was tangled into dreadlocks that were more the result of in a tension than stylistic choice. He was tall, muscular, but lean, with a bare chest that was covered in tattoos of black snakes. They writhed in time with the beating of his heart. He wore nothing but a pair of red leather chaps and a broad, calm smile. His bare penis swung pingulous in the breeze. Both of his palms were extended out front and visible. It was the kind of gesture one used to calm
an animal. Roland synapses fired and misfired, and a string of fragmented memories ran through his mind. He recalled a really good hot dog on a sunny day, push ups in the mud, searing pain in his genitals and the taste of shitty ditchweed. These memory fragments were all somehow tied to the man in front of him. It took Roland a moment, but as soon as he got a full look at those cold gray eyes, the man's name
clicked in the place. Oh shit, he croaked, Jim. Roland hadn't spoken to a person in months, at least maybe longer. He sounded more like a suffering cat than an English speaking human. But Jim understood him, he said. Roland's side looked at his separate arm and crudely shoved it into place. It had clotted a bit, and his stubb burned as the tiny robots in his blood got to work reattaching his once in future limb. Jim, he said, again, sounding a bit less like a frog after a six day
coke bne, you funked up my house man. That's not cool. Roland didn't know how long he'd known Jim. He couldn't even pin down the man's last name, but he was pretty sure they'd fought together back before the revolution, and he was certain they'd had a threesome with a devilishly handsome, spet SNAs man. He couldn't remember that guy's name or why they'd all been in Panama, but he didn't expect that was the sort of experience past him would have
shared with someone who wasn't a friend. Do you remember me, Jim asked basically. Roland answered, good, because I got a favor to ask. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here. I hope you just enjoyed the chapter you listen to. I hope you enjoyed the chapters to come. If you would like to read the text version of this book either on the web or on your e reader as an e pub, you can find those on the website a t r book dot com. So again, the free ad free e pub and the text of every chapter will be on
a t r book dot com. Thanks