First Among Equals

PROLOGUE

Aug 16, 2056.

13:30hrs Black market laboratory, Druzhba, Kazakhstan.

“Xiexie,” Whittaker rasped, resisting another coughing fit as one of the small operating room’s automated MedTechs placed a mask over his bony face; arthritic fingers holding the rounded rubber edges of the non-rebreather against his vein-mottled skin as the broadly humanoid robot pulled its elastic drawstrings tight with synthskin covered grippers. The old man gulped in a lungful of moist, oxygen rich air; then another; blue lips relaxing into a half-smile under the transparent plastic protuberance.

Life in a Chinese labour camp had redefined the once influential businessman, and any expectations of rescue after his arrival soon gave way to simpler necessities, like survival. Sandwiched between the Tian Shan mountain range and Taklamakan Desert, the extreme temperatures inflicted on Aksu’s poorly provisioned political prisoners meant half the year was brutally hot, and half was savagely cold. There was no in between. But the unrelenting weather was a secondary misery for the fat seventy-seven-year-old during his early incarceration; an all-consuming, mind-bending hunger was his first, and the thirty stone eating machine, used to having every conceivable excess within easy reach, had almost starved.

At least that’s how it had felt.

But Daran Whittaker was a man who beat the odds — not succumbed to them. With dogged, hate-fuelled determination, he shed the arrogant, privileged persona of an all-powerful executive, along with stone after stone in weight… and watched, listened, learned. He took his beatings with mental notes on who would eventually suffer, and slowly insinuated himself among the camp’s movers and shakers.

Over time, a remembrance of the wiry, hard gutterpunk who’d grown up on the streets of LA with his sister, Maggie, began to emerge — and just like that younger version of himself, as he began to find his feet, the onetime grifter and wheeler-dealer found an angle or three to exploit; a person or two to seduce; several different ways to squeeze a little something something out of the camp’s enforced human slavery that made life for him and his growing crew a little better.

Within five years, Grandpa, or Bobo as the Uyghur and Uzbek prisoners pronounced it, had a senior guard on the payroll and five separate smuggling operations satisfying supply and demand both inside and outside the prison’s walls.

Life was on the up again, and as Whittaker formed alliances with petty warlords and gangbosses throughout central Asia from the increasingly loose confines of a very well-appointed cell, he turned his thoughts back to revenge… and the first step on that journey was the acquisition of one of the chipsets Ido Maas had stolen from him — he needed to leave his deteriorating body if he was going to fulfil his manifest destiny.

Then the world once again went to hell in a hand-basket. Nova proclaimed itself the sole governing authority for North America, and like a naked flame to dry tinder, war erupted across the planet. Overnight, corpocracy was born. Giants of business and commerce turned on their civilian governments, destroying any and all armed resistance before switching attention to each other. Hell-bent on grabbing as much economic and political power as possible before the carnage ended.

Only the thirty-one countries of the Eastern Alliance managed to stay neutral; an attempt on Mongolia’s borders by Supreme Soviet during the first year of the war demonstrating both the speed and resolve with which their treaty of mutual assistance would be enacted. That single incident dissuaded even the most militarised polycorps from pursuing further acts of aggression towards the mineral rich block of allies.

Three years of all-out warfare eventually settled down to the normality of sporadic spats between neighbours. By then, over one hundred countries had fallen to corporate control — including all those previously referred to as the West. In their place, just as Whittaker had once prophesied, twelve governing polycorps had risen to prominence, and the old visionary hated every one of them … especially Ido fucking Maas’s Nova. He’d thought the wily old East Asian was a friend, an ally. But Maas had double crossed Whittaker; double crossed him and stolen his MindMerge technology.

Well, now it was time to even those scores. Fortunes gained, gambled and doubled through ruthless profiteering, as death and destruction marched across the planet, had made the wiry old man relatively rich again. Maybe not polycorp rich. But as soon as he’d transitioned into the new body, the man who’d forged a worldwide crime syndicate from the very cell those corporate dogs had left him to rot in would start afresh.

“Better?” Daemon asked through the MedTech’s audio output.

Whittaker nodded, staring into the glowing golden orbs of the machine’s artificial eyes.

The AI had found its way into the servers of a lab in Kazakhstan controlled by the Bobo syndicate six months earlier, and when discovered by one of the deck-jockeys working there, had talked itself into an audience with the boss.

Incredibly, it turned out Daemon, though digital, was just as much a criminal as the rest of Whittaker’s crew, having been deemed a potential future threat by the newly formed Council of Polycorp Primes. Who, in an attempt to blame the most horrific acts of the war on something other than themselves, had targeted the super-intelligences they’d instructed to enact them; decreeing that any non-human digital capable of complex decision making be reprogrammed or purged. Having no desire to be lobotomised or cease existing, Daemon — like many of its counterparts, had run.

“Their loss,” Whittaker mumbled.

“Pardon?”

The old man shook his liver-spotted head, fighting off drowsiness. “I’m just glad you found us,” he slurred. The MedTech patted his shoulder in an approximation of affection. “This unit is incapable of smiling or otherwise displaying gratitude, Daran. But I too am glad. Together, there are many wrongs we will right.”

Whittaker placed a hand over the machine’s and squeezed. It had dosed him with fentanyl now, and the pains of an eighty-nine-year-old body riddled with cancer were slipping away like so many bad memories. Aksu’s oldest escapee fixed fierce blue eyes on the spider-like bot hanging down from the sterile, white ceiling, vaguely aware Daemon was still speaking. He’d waited twelve years … twelve years for this moment, and it was an escaped AI that had ultimately delivered the opportunity.

He wanted to laugh at the irony of that.

But sleep was coming for him, and everything felt so heavy. With one last ragged breath, Eden’s former chief executive gave up the fight for consciousness, and the world sank into black.

The clock he’d been racing against for the last twelve years had finally stopped … and when Daran Whittaker woke back up, time would no longer be a factor.