Emergence (A DRMR Novel Book 2) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise for CONVERGENCE

  Praise for Consumption

  About EMERGENCE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  A Note From The Author

  Acknowledgements

  Other Works

  About the Author

  About Consumption

  Praise for CONVERGENCE

  An Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award 2013 Quarter-Finalist

  “From the opening page of Convergence I was hooked. The dystopian world building is well done and the descriptions are vivid. The technology is imaginary and different...great characters and plenty of suspense/action.” - Nicholas Sansbury Smith, author of Extinction Horizon and the Orbs series

  “Convergence is fast-paced, full of action and a thrilling ride from start to finish. There is violence, depth of feeling, explosions, car chases and tenderness. The book has everything and is perfect for those who like their SciFi gritty, edgy and realistic.” – J.S. Collyer, author of Zero

  “[A] smart splice of espionage and science fiction. ... frighteningly realistic. Well-drawn characters, excellent pacing, and constant surprises make this a great cautionary tale about technology and its abuses.” - Publisher’s Weekly

  “A cyberpunk thrillride through a future America under Chinese rule. The conflict between the humanity of the main character, Jonah, and the things he has had to do to survive in this harsh new world makes ‘Convergence’ an absolute pleasure to read.” – SciFi365.net

  Praise for Consumption

  “Your stomach will turn, your throat will restrict, and jaw will clench tighter than a bull’s arsehole in fly season.” – S. Elliot Brandis, author of Irradiated and Once Upon A Time At The End Of The World

  “…wonderfully macabre! Cleverly thought out, I was both disgusted and excited by this tale. This a MUST read for horror fans.” – Great Book Escapes

  “Hicks takes the reader to some twisted, nightmarish places and if you’re a horror fan with a strong constitution, add Consumption to your reading list – you won’t regret it.” – Teri Polen, Books & Such

  “Consumption is wonderfully paced and a real treat for horror fans. …I read it with the lights off and my Kindle screen turned up, and it was a totally immersive and satisfying experience.” – Franklin Kendrick, author of The Entity series.

  About EMERGENCE

  Still recovering from the events that befell her in Los Angeles, Mesa Everitt is learning how to rebuild her life.

  The murder of a memorialist enclave changes all of that and sets into motion a series of violence that forces her into hiding.

  Hunted by a squad of corporate mercenaries, with the lives of her friends and family in danger, Mesa has no one to turn to, but she holds a dark secret inside her skull. She has no knowledge of that secret, but it is worth killing for.

  The ghosts of her haunted, forgotten past are about to emerge.

  Emergence

  Copyright © 2015 by Michael Patrick Hicks. All rights reserved.

  First Edition: April 2015

  [email protected]

  www.MichaelPatrickHicks.com

  Newsletter: http://bit.ly/1H8slIg

  Edited by Red Adept

  www.RedAdeptPublishing.com

  Cover and Formatting by Streetlight Graphics

  www.StreetlightGraphics.com

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  Sex and death flowed freely, amped up across the nightclub’s bio-fi. The emotions and sensations were intoxicating. The music was loud; the bodies, sweaty. Strangers ground against one another, riding the waves of euphoria.

  Mesa Everitt felt a body press against her, and she tilted her hips back, swiveling her waist, waving her hands above her head. The response was instant, and she smiled, leaning her weight against the handsome stranger. With a sloppy-drunk grin plastered on his face, her boyfriend, Kaizhou, watched Mesa dancing. Eyes wide, pupils small, he enjoyed the show. Then he stepped up and embraced her, stealing her back from the strange man.

  “This is amazing,” she said.

  His tongue flicked against hers, nearly in sync with the strumming pound of an electric cello and the blasted riff of a synthetic piano. She locked her arms around his neck, staving off a wave of dizziness. Strange hands moved across her hips, but she didn’t care. Couldn’t care.

  Watching, their friend Jade danced with an easy rhythm, her skin glistening under the pulsating lights. She disappeared briefly as a wave of artificial smoke crossed over her. Moving bodies generated air currents strong enough to part the foggy vapor before it could fully enshroud her. In those few seconds of her slight disappearance, she had found a companion.

  Center stage, on a large floating platform above them, Muzyakimo Aki sang. His voice was powerful for such a slim, meek-looking man. He wore thick black frames, and his hair had been dyed multiple colors—purple, yellow, and red—against his natural black. His eyebrows were bushy, nearly a unibrow, and his gaunt face was pockmarked. But his voice… the rich timbre lulled listeners, ensnaring them in a rapture that demanded attention and seriousness. Like Aki himself, his music was a study of contrasts. Every verse, every chorus, each solo, and the chords themselves meant something different to each listener.

  The DRMRs on the dance floor were transmitting freely, their lithe figures awash in the experiences of varied pasts. For the last hour and a half, Mesa had been submerged in the lives of others. Aki’s music pulsed through her, and she swam through the crowd’s associated memory cues streaming across the bio-fi. The sadness and joy of more than a hundred strangers pushed through her DRMR implant. She mourned the loss of a beloved pet then was caught up in the throes of a first orgasm and the loss of virginity. She felt the pride of a first A in school and the crushing defeat of a first F after the tedium of studying for a complex exam. She remembered the first time this particular Aki song came across the entertainment comm, but only a snippet had played before Mom interrupted with a list of chores. Then she shared outrage over illegal whale hunts and fishery raids by corpo suits, and Aki’s music was very nearly a call to arms.

  She soaked up the experiences and memories, none of them hers.

  Onstage, the synthetic
dancers bumped and ground, dancing against one another. They were older models, appearing human in only the most superficial ways. With slender arms and legs, as well as jointed fingers and toes, the dancers were clearly artificial. Inhuman. Their skin was shiny egg-white plastic moldings, and a cool electric-blue ring encircled their cybernetic eyes. Facial features were barely defined. Their designer had instead opted for the subtle impression of a face pressed into smooth, flat planes. The aesthetic was both undeniably beautiful and disconcerting. The dancers were logged in to the bio-fi feed, and their mimicry captures were set to resemble movements of people in the crowd. They danced with cybernetic abandon but with a computerized off-set that forced a stutter to their steps.

  For a brief, halting moment, Mesa rose above the crowd, her mind soaring higher than those around her. She could see the flashes of memory, the pattern of convergence that roped through each individual soul, tying one to another. The sight was electrifying and beautiful. Their thoughts jived against the laser-light show. Bodies slammed against one another; others held embraces. Slick human machines slid against one another, exchanging kisses and sweat, running fingers through the hair of strangers. Their subconscious echoed against the synthpop of Aki’s performance, the wails of electronic guitars, and the random interruptions of found noises turned into hyper-idealized artificialities. Mesa floated, briefly ethereal, long enough to see the man at the center of the convergence. Like a hollow void, he was disconnected from those around him. A black ember burning brightly, Muzyakimo Aki united everyone around him, yet stood apart from them all. Nothing flowed from or through him. He was a jetty, an interjection in the center of the convergence.

  Hands slid up Mesa’s flanks, and her mouth pressed tightly against Kaizhou’s, their tongues exploring one another’s. He held her with a promise to never let go. Discerning the flow of his memories from the tangled current of everyone else’s was impossible.

  She had tried posh a year ago and marijuana the year before that. Neither was remotely similar to the rush of hundreds of souls and thousands of memories amplified through the bio-fi’s feedback loop. She’d been high before, but the euphoria she felt at that moment was… exciting. She was truly high.

  Jade had joined them at some point. Mesa blinked with languid slowness, taking Jade’s arm and pulling her closer, so that both Jade and Kaizhou hugged her. Mesa enjoyed being between them, and she laughed as Jade’s companion pressed his way in, nuzzling at Jade’s long, glistening neck.

  The percussions drove on, deeper and deeper, pulsing harder and harder. The concussive shockwave of sound slowly degraded into a shrill siren before giving way to pure silence. A thin skein of fog blanketed the crowd as the lights powered down, plunging the club into darkness. And then the crowd exploded in cheers, screams, and applause. The dim houselights slowly warmed up, and beneath their soft glow, Aki waved at the crowd and nodded. He turned sharply and strode offstage without a word.

  “That was amazing,” Mesa said again. She wiped a bright-red streak of hair away from her eyes, pushing the trails of natural black behind her ears.

  She was sweaty and high, and her heart was hammering. She’d been dancing for two hours, and her throat was tight and sore from screaming along to the music and cheering for Aki. Her words were a harsh whisper, difficult to edge past her lips. She was exhausted and energized to the point of being hyper.

  Fingers danced up her arm, and she met the smiling face of Jade’s companion.

  “Cool tattoo,” he said, his index and middle finger slicking away the sweat as his digits traced the curve of a thick green dragon tail as it wrapped around a Gaelic cross.

  “Thanks,” she said, her throat constricting against the word in painful defiance. It came out husky and hollow. She tilted her body slightly away from him, leaning into Kaizhou enough to make it clear she didn’t want this stranger touching her. More, she didn’t want to discuss the tattoo.

  Her arm was a sleeve of color, but she didn’t remember getting the tattoo. She didn’t know why she had it or what it meant. And the why of all that was a whole other story she didn’t want to go into. Not there, not after Aki’s performance. She was already feeling the come-down, and she knew the stranger’s questions would make things worse and leave her uncomfortable.

  Her fingers laced between her Kaizhou’s, she said to him, “Let’s go.”

  Jade was lost in the attentions of her companion, but Mesa nudged her anyway and tugged at her fingers.

  “You coming?”

  Jade’s free hand was lost in the long hair of the man suckling at the joint of her neck and shoulder. She smiled and promised, “I’ll catch up later.” She gave Mesa’s hand a squeeze goodbye then turned to face the man behind her to continue their familiarization.

  The crowd was slowly thinning, but the bar and dance floor were still crowded. The club stank of sweat, spilt booze, and reefer. The floor was tacky. Mesa and Kaizhou jostled their way to the exit, shimmying between couples, gently pushing around others. Cold air blasted their hot bodies as they stepped outside. The physical force drew their breath away and frosted it in the early morning air.

  In the clear sky, bright stars and a full moon illuminated Mount Rainer in the distance, and closer, the Space Needle and the Seattle skyline glowed.

  “That’s fucking beautiful,” Mesa said.

  Kaizhou followed her gaze. Neither ever tired of the view. He took her in his arms and kissed her bare shoulder. She tilted her head so that their temples touched. A small sigh of happiness blossomed into a white puff before her lips.

  “You OK?” he asked.

  She slipped her hand into the back pocket of his jeans, warming her palm against the curve of flesh beneath the thin fabric. “Yeah, I’m good.”

  She traced the outlines of the stars, making imaginary constellations, connecting them across time and distance. She was the center of that convergence, with Kaizhou beside her. Somehow, some way, she imagined it all connecting back to Muzyakimo Aki, drawing him into her web and unraveling his secrets. Onstage, the man had been an inspiring enigma, and standing in the middle of the sidewalk outside the club, she dreamed of connecting with him, pouring her hopes into him, and pulling from him all of the details of his life so that she might wrap herself in his purpose and find an aim in life.

  “You sure you’re all right?”

  Her gaze, far-off and distant, snapped back into focus. Her eyes drew a bead on Kaizhou. She gave him a smile that washed away the troubled expression on his face, forcing a grin out of him.

  Playfully, she squeezed his bottom. “I’m fine,” she said.

  He leaned close, nose to nose with her. Their smiles widened, and for that evening at least, she found purpose.

  Later, she quietly disentangled herself from sodden bedsheets. Warm air blew from the ducts, but by the time it reached her, it felt cool against her bare, sweat-slicked skin. She wrapped herself in a chenille blanket and curled up in the plush leather chair in Kaizhou’s living room, hugging her legs close and resting her chin against the peaks of her kneecaps. She could make out the muffled sounds of his snores through the thin walls of the small apartment.

  The emotional ecstasy from Aki’s concert was dissipating, and she was crashing back to the baseline of normalcy. The emotional low bordered on depression simply because the highs of the night had been so far above. Such was the risk one bore for attending an Aki performance with guards willfully down to allow the bio-fi amplifiers unrestricted access to the DRMR enhancements. The memory was a powerful, jolting surge, exhausting in its exactness, and she didn’t risk replaying it.

  No matter how well one’s memories were stored and replayed, they never captured the lived experience exactly due to the lack of amplification. Anybody who’d been to one of Aki’s shows understood that risk, and all others were befuddled. The memories were a one-off, stored f
or enjoyment and reminiscing, but never replayed because the replay was hollow and untrue, cheapening the individual experience.

  She wiped away a tear, grateful for the memory and its freshness. The memory was truly her own, even if she lacked a wealth of experiences from which to draw cues and associations while lost in the throes of Aki’s music. She cried softly, but the tears were not of sadness.

  She knew she couldn’t go home in her wrecked state. Her nerves needed to settle, and the jitters needed to pass.

  Sporadic traffic passed below, separated by long intermissions. The dull rhythm was enough to make her eyes heavy then lull them closed.

  “Hey, wakey-wakey,” Kaizhou said, squeezing her shoulders. His thumbs made slow, long circles along the muscles above her collarbones. The massage was enough to wake her and pleasing enough to keep her eyes shut.

  “But I don’t wanna,” she said, mumbling the childish mantra and exaggerating her sleepiness. The daylight surprised her. Kaizhou stood next to her, still naked. She kissed his hipbone and buried her face against his belly, breathing in his scent.

  Slowly, Mesa unfolded herself from the chair, keeping herself wrapped up in the blanket, adoring its soft gentle comfort against her body. She gave him a peck on the cheek as she passed then began rounding up the trail of errant clothes.

  She frowned at the previous evening’s mini-skirt and halter top. The outfit was fine for a late night of clubbing but not exactly appropriate morning wear if she wanted to avoid the walk of shame.

  “I’m borrowing some sweats,” she called out as she pulled the drawstrings tight. Then she lost herself in one of his baggy University of Washington sweatshirts.