First Among Equals

PROLOGUE

June 16, 2057.

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

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

       Life in a Chinese labour camp had redefined the once influential businessman, and any expectations of a rescue soon gave way to simpler necessities… like survival.

       Sandwiched between the Tian Shan Mountains 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 he’d felt.

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

       Over time, a remembrance of the wiry, hard-bodied 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 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, now pressing, step on that journey was the acquisition of one of the chipsets Ido Maas had stolen from him. His body was rapidly deteriorating, and if he was going to fulfil his manifest destiny, it was time to leave it behind.

       …That was when the world went to rat shit — again.

       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 all organised resistance before switching attention to each other — hell-bent on grabbing as much economic and political power as possible before the carnage ended.

Subsequently referred to as the Fiduciary Wars by the corpos and World War Three by everyone else, only the thirty-one countries of the Eastern Alliance managed to stay neutral; an early attempt on Mongolia’s northern borders by Supreme Soviet demonstrating both the speed and resolve with which their treaty of mutual assistance would be enacted.

       But across the rest of the planet, four and a half years of hostile acquisition, temporary alliances and forced mergers decimated cities, polluted atmospheres, and left much of the global population as unwanted refugees.

       By the time the Council of Polycorporate Presidents declared an era of peace and prosperity lay ahead, over ninety-six million people had died and one hundred countries fallen to corporate control — including all those previously referred to as the West. In their place, just as Whittaker had once prophesied, eleven 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 East Asian was a friend, an ally. But Maas had double crossed the once supremely powerful old executive; 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 ravaged 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 Bobo’s syndicate six months earlier, and when discovered by one of the deck-jockeys working there, talked itself into an audience with the boss.

Incredibly, it turned out Daemon, though digital, was just as much an outcast as the rest of Whittaker’s crew, having been deemed a threat to humanity by the newly formed Council who, in an attempt to blame the more horrific acts of the war on something other than themselves, had targeted the super-intelligences they’d instructed to enact them; decreeing all fully autonomous digital entities, or FADEs as they’d become known, be deprogrammed or purged.

       They’d already killed AI’s poster-girl, Sade Thorne. Well, the flesh and bone iteration of her at least… and 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. He fixed jaundiced eyes on the spider-like bot hanging down from the sterile, white ceiling, vaguely aware Daemon was still speaking.

       He’d waited fourteen years for this moment… fourteen years, 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 had finally stopped … and when Daran Whittaker woke back up, time would no longer be a factor.