MISC 1: Santa Calibre

An exploration of mysticism and consciousness in a quick Cyberpunk flash-fic!

She unscrews one of the panels carefully, opening up the weapon’s innards. It’s sleek, black and sexy, a little engine of ballistic destruction, weighing about twenty pounds and capable of holding forty 5.56mm rounds at a time and send them almost six-hundred yards with tremendous precision at a rate of 40 rounds per minute in burst form, and 600 in fully automatic firing potential. It is also, despite its positive qualities, designed by a bunch of assholes who figured out an excellent way to manufacture more of them for the same customers. There’s just enough processing power in a micro-computer in the weapon’s stock and handle to recognize its registered user’s fingerprints and bio-rhythms, help compensate for recoil with automated springs in the stock, and force the gun to fuck itself to death after two years. Once it’s exceeded a specific amount of time, a switch flips in the brain of the handheld beast that causes it to start degrading, at first increasing the recoil in small increments, then twitching the suspension in the stock in a way that causes increasing chances of a jam, and finally releasing the magazine from the gun at semi-random intervals while firing by flipping the safety on and off.

Most who purchase the gun expect this gradual degradation, accepting the eventual loss of the valuable tool for the sake of its tremendous performance while “healthy”. It doesn’t hurt, either, that they get a discount if they bring the weapon back to a Homeland Security store or one of its many subsidiaries; 11% off your next purchase of a powerful, sexy, efficient tool of destruction and home-defense. Never mind the expose that revealed that half of all resold weapons are guns whose internal programs degraded their performance in the first place, with fresh serial numbers printed on them, a nice spit-shine and a quick reset of its programs. Buy three guns for the production cost of one, and a repeat customer besides.

It’s not easy to access, either. The chip, despite how integral it is, is damn fragile, and only extremely specialized tools whose blueprints are copyrighted by Homeland can open up the gun without pulling the chip into pieces (and wiping the gun’s warranty, of course). She had to pay close to a thousand eddies just to buy the blueprint for the screwdriver shape off a former employee, and then had to jailbreak her printer to make it (jailbreak it again, actually: sneaky fuckers posted an update while she had it briefly connected to wireless and almost fried the poor machine). With the tool, though, it’s easy enough to open up the gun and bare its wiring and circuitry to the light and, most importantly, add to it.

She’s already modified the grip for a much larger hand, a change that made it easier to modify the rest of the gun to take rocket-propelled projectiles rather than regular ignition bullets and add a new barrel with modifiable rifling to alter the trajectory of a shot mid trigger-pull. The gun looks modified, but Karas has done her best to keep the aesthetic as close to the original as possible on request. Into the now-open compartment in the center of the weapon’s body, she slowly and carefully connects a small, sideways cylinder of black plastic and hardened ceramics. Inside it lies a considerably larger mechanism, disconnected from any form of wireless connection to protect it from outside interference but equipped with the latest in hardware. She organizes it so that it can access the pre-existing circuitry, especially the release mechanism for the magazine’s safety and the suspension in the stock made to modify aim and the gun’s jam probability. What was once theirs can be hers, and with a little help from a friend, she’s sure she can use the saboteur’s arsenal hidden in the gun for its own benefit.

Having placed the new processor onto the gun, she turns to the being that will inhabit it.

In Karas’ eyes, she sits in the corner of the room, shrouded in shadow but too covered in golden edges and red stains to ever be invisible. Sensing her attention, the interface turns to look at her, two red skulls bleeding tears of blood down a golden skull that the being has for a head, hidden beneath the hood of a hoodie ripped half to shreds. It smiles always, without lips to cover its teeth, a series of pistol rounds arranged along a human jaw that shouldn’t fit them, but does. It’s fingers clack loudly against each other as they shift, as if subconsciously gripping something between the barrels that make up its skeletal hands. Beneath the hoodie, belts of shotgun shells and rifle rounds like ribs hanging from a pillar of interlocked rounds that make up its spine. Despite how thin it looks, there’s a weight to the creature, the pieces of leather and ragged, shrapnel-filled skin filled out by invisible muscles and mass, taking the eight-foot creature from a dead skeleton to something vital, sickly but powerful, thin but long and sharp and strong. As she moves, standing from where she was laying like a jaguar in the jungle, the hoodie and jeans, ripped to shreds and blood stained, shift into long, shadowy robes, flickering between the wounded victim and the holy patron in between eye-blinks.

It approaches Karas, gun barrels for fingers trailing shadow and cordite through the air, gunpowder flowing from it like sand and smoke as it walks. Carefully, lovingly, Santa Calibre (Polvora?) caresses the long scar along Karas’ forehead, long healed. She doesn’t smile at the gesture, staring into the grinning skull passively, showing no fear.

She remembers finding the thing that became La Santa. Expired Homeland missile, for sale on the black market, forgotten in the haze of an auction. Why buy expired munitions that need to be broken down for parts when there’s whole automechs and powered exoskeletons for sale? She didn’t buy it either, but then, she wasn’t looking for its explosives, or non-igniting fuel, or even the engine that powered it. She wanted the mind of the beast, the thing that could smell fear and heat and the difference between the blood of one victim and another. A program designed to sift through a massive amount of information absorbed by the exhaust vents and scanners mid-flight to find a single target in a reinforced building, with a margin for error of less than three feet. She downloaded what was left after they’d disabled it and spent almost a month rebuilding it from the leftover code. Then she got to work modifying it.

The first addition was easy; most smartguns are designed to “paint” a target inside a cone in front of the gun, then track it and transmit that information to the rocket-propelled projectiles that fire out of the weapon. Marrying the guidance systems of the missile to the ranged application and data transmission of a smartgun’s onboard computer took less than a day. Tracker programs came easy, too; plenty of Hounds in the police get forcibly modified to provide accurate visual representations of scents and patterns they can track.

After that it was simple. She just had to make it alive.

Plant all of that knowledge of murder and hunting and death, mix in some medical programs rewritten to identify the most fragile areas in a body once scanned and the weaknesses of a living body, and the implant it all into a blank simple AI, and let it run in a simulation. It put her main server through its paces: cost her almost a quarter million eddies and one hell of a heist, but the blinking pillar beneath the floor of her home is capable of processing millions of terabytes per week and plenty more besides. She left it running overnight, then for a few nights, tweaking the stipulations of the simulation bit by bit: the AI was placed in an arena and told to guide other programs and simulated weapons-fire into a target and its weak points as efficiently as possible. Every time it succeeded, the simulation was altered slightly, given nuance and additional challenges; every time it failed, it reset and provided a negative input to the AI. It took a while to teach it not to just shoot seven thousand bullets in the same spot until the target “died”; Karas had to figure out how to teach it to aim for the weak points, and limit its access to “bullets” to train its efficiency.

Eventually, it learned. She gave it an interface. This was the face that it chose.

Now, she opens up the server and lets it out, connecting it to the cylinder-processor attached to the gun. She watches its interface as it moves, an immediate flicker of movement that leaves the specter of death touching the gun. A tiny fragment of itself is downloaded, a copy of some of its functions placed in the gun, pictured like a skeletal hand, its palm and bones of gun barrels and bullets and gunpowder smoke detaching from the main body like a doubled image and resting now in the gun.

“Is it done?” asks a deep, rolling voice from the doorway of the room.

“We’re almost finished,” Karas replies, tools whirring as she secures the processor, it’s battery, and the being mirrored within it.

“Who’s we?” asks the figure in the doorway, which barely fits through it for their sheer muscle mass and the cybernetics implanted into him. Bare skin and metal, tattoos and machinery, standing at six-foot eleven, with a slightly smaller head at the top of it, the one part of his body not wrapped in an exoskeleton. It’s impressive, especially considered how he’s technically reduced from his normal stature, the powered engines and high-calibre weaponry he usually carries absent in a more domestic setting.

“No one, Jacks” Karas replies. “I said I’m almost finished. Should be just another minute for the download to finish, and then I just need to finish securing it. The balance’s gonna be off, but the tracking system will make up for it easy, and with your general strength, the added weight will actually make it easier to use accurately. It’s not your usual gatling gun, though. Why the change?”

“Figured you’d want to work on something classic for once,” he laughs. “Fuck with something that’s classic Homeland image, not crazy nu-tech for once. Besides, most of my gear needs the exo-skeleton running at max to keep up with it. If it takes damage or gets hacked, I’m stuck without anything for a minute. Easier to just get out, pull a rifle and open fire than do full maintenance on the fly, right?”

“Amen,” Karas replies. “Take the time to do it right or don’t do it. And… that’s all the time I needed.”

Santa Calibre is gone now, back to the server and the simulation, running perpetually with new scenarios and challenges to keep it adapting as long as possible. What it left behind curls up comfortably in the gun, its appearance through Karas’ interface like a black, skinless serpent made of ammunition wrapping around the inside of the weapon. She takes it, checks the weight, looks down the sights, and then tosses the unloaded gun to Jacks.

“Good to work with?” He asks.

“Wait!” She says, remembering the final detail. “I don’t usually do this, you know, anonymity and all, but-“ she pulls a small chain out of the drawer, walking over to Jacks and the gun. She waits for him to lower it and, as he does, ties the thin chain around it, letting the small pendant at the end dangle off the side of the cylinder; a small, silver skull glinting in the light off the side of a black cannon.

“Now… now it’s ready,” she tells him, smiling at the snake within the weapon, at the beast in its harness, ready to hunt.