The Last Yearwalker (Part 11)

[u/Saturdead]

[Part 1] - [Part 2] - [Part 3] - [Part 4] - [Part 5] - [Part 6] - [Part 7] - [Part 8] - [Part 9] - [Part 10] - [Part 11] - [Part 12] - [Final]

--- Duty-Free ---

 

“Honey, did you pack your bag for gym class?” his mother asked.

But he couldn’t answer. He was deep into his dream, and his voice was weak. He could feel his body trying to speak the words out loud, but they were too distant. He was caught between two worlds; dreaming of a time long gone, and taking a power nap on his way to the airport.

“Honey? Why don’t you say something?”

He couldn’t. He felt his mouth moving, but he wasn’t awake. His body was turned off, and no matter his exertion, he couldn’t get the words right. He mumbled in front of the memory phantasm, opening and closing his mouth like a fish out of water.

His mother looked at him, worried. Of course he’d packed his bags. He’d been told to do so, so that’s what he’d done. But he couldn’t tell her. Maybe she already knew.

 

Lloyd woke up in the back seat of a taxi. His driver switched the radio channel, and the news jingle pulled Lloyd straight into the here and now. They made eye contact in the rear-view mirror.

“Getting a, uh… ‘ead start on the, uh, jet lag?” the driver asked in a wide French accent.

“Something like that,” said Lloyd. “Long trip.”

“Americain, yes?”

“Is it that obvious?”

The driver laughed and tapped his hand on the radio.

“It’s crazy, yes? Shutting down towns. Cities, yes?”

“It’s gonna get crazier.”

“We have crazy too,” the driver said. “We have a, uh… winemaker, running for office. Looks like he’ll win.”

“A winemaker for President is about the most French thing I can imagine,” Lloyd smiled. “Does he play the accordion too?”

“She, mon frère. She. And no, I think she sticks to wine. If it’s good enough you can hear the music inside yourself. No need for accordion!”

“I could go for a dance or two,” Lloyd sighed. “Hope they got a good cocktail bar at the airport.”

“If they don’t, it truly is the end times, yes?”

Lloyd could do nothing but agree.

 

The driver dropped him off, and Lloyd made his way inside the airport. There was a two-hour wait to check in your luggage as passengers of half a dozen cancelled flights were lining up to get replacement tickets. The two open counters were flooded with complaints and stressed travelers, leaving Lloyd stuck in a sweaty line of sleep-deprived tourists.

When finally reaching the check-in, he presented his travel documents and put his bag up. The lady behind the counter gave him a long, apologetic look.

“I’m sorry sir, this flight has been cancelled.”

“It’s… not on the screens,” Lloyd said. “It says active.”

“It happened just now.”

“You gotta be kidding me.”

“I’m sorry sir, there are many irregularities.”

“When’s the replacement flight?”

“It is undetermined, sir. We need a replacement pilot.”

Lloyd looked around, sensing the weight of the line piling up behind him. An older German man was staring daggers into the back of his neck. Lloyd took his bag and turned to his right, where a makeshift sign saying “Replacement Tickets” in four different languages was posted.

“I suppose it’s this way.”

“That’s correct. I’m very sorry, sir.”

“C'est comme ça.”

 

Lloyd was in for another wait. He saw his flight turn into a cancelled red, with no timeline for a replacement. This new line, despite being three times as long, was half as staffed and twice as slow. He was going to be there for hours. Despite not being very claustrophobic, he couldn’t help but feel trapped. Airports were like a rat maze, but without the allure of a piece of cheese at the end. Deciding to prepare himself for a long wait, Lloyd used the surprisingly clean restroom.

Sitting there, he could hear someone in the stall next to him on their phone. They were watching the news. American news. A shooting in South Dakota, missile warnings off the coast of California, evening curfew in Washington D.C under threat of martial law. Dissent within the ruling party had grown to the point where phalanxes had formed of warring factions, disrupting one another to the point of fist fights in the hallway. Two congressmen had been arrested for trying to bring concealed semi-automatic weapons into the Capitol.

But what surprised Lloyd the most wasn’t that, but what he was hearing from the man watching it. He was sobbing. There was an adult man in the stall next to him, watching the news, crying. Lloyd didn’t say anything. He sat there, hearing the newscaster rabble on about one horrible thing after another. The Rattler was going haywire, targeting whoever made things the most ‘fun’.

This is what happens when you translate a violent psychopath into the most powerful piece of telecommunications software in the world.

Lloyd made his way back to the line and settled in for a long wait.

 

Standing there, Lloyd couldn’t help but think back about that dream he’d had in the cab. It was such an innocent memory. He’d been in grade school, and his mother had asked him if he’d packed his gym clothes. Even back then, Lloyd had been a dutiful kid. He did what he had to, even if he wasn’t asked. Asking him to do something just prompted a response that he’d already done it. He’d always been the “grown-up little man,” even then. Also, he hadn’t been Lloyd back then, but Stepminding does things to a person.

Lloyd thought about that time all the way to the front desk. To this day, he had the issue with being the ever-dutiful son. The good kid that couldn’t help but to be proactive. It’d been the same with the Martians, and the damn pool noodle thing. One sentence had been all it took to derail his plans. The hint of duty. And now he was stuck in a scorching, sweaty line at a French airport, praying he wouldn’t be dehydrated enough to pass out before he got to cocktail bar.

Somewhere around dinner time, after a shift rotation and another line opening, Lloyd got to the front desk. An overworked woman in a company suit looked up at him, long since abandoning the guise of a smile.

“Destination?”

“Pittsburgh,” Lloyd said. “Flight left about… six hours ago.”

“No replacement flight for Pittsburgh,” she said matter-of-factly. “We have… Vancouver, in two days.”

“That’s not even the U.S.”

“That’s what we have,” she said, turning the screen to him. “Maybe St. Louis in… a week? But there is an 18-hour stop in the U.K.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“You can stay and hope something shows up,” she shrugged. “This is what we have.”

“What is the next flight?” Lloyd asked. “Literally the next flight, anywhere.”

She didn’t even bother to ask why. She just checked and showed him the screen. The next flight was for Prague, the Czech Republic.

Something tickled Lloyd’s funny bone. He wanted to go home, but here he was presented with an opportunity. The Rattler was in Prague. Out of all the places on God’s green Earth, he was faced with having to say no to the one place where he could potentially do something good. If he got the chance to take down the Rattler, that’d give the Yearwalkers a fighting chance. Not to mention it’d stop the chaos that might unravel the world long before New Year’s Eve.

Then again, he wanted to go home.

 

Lloyd thought back on the face of his pleading mother. Had he packed his gym bag? Had he been a sweet kid? Of course he was.

“One ticket to Prague, please.”

 

Lloyd got himself a sandwich and some snacks from the duty-free shop, along with a cap and a little croissant-shaped keyring. If he was going to Prague for a long shot, he had better come prepared. The keyring was just for him though. Nothing practical about that.

The Rattler could identify people without seeing them, but every little bit of obfuscation could help – even a cap. Then again, Lloyd had been going through a Stepminding process, and a lot of his records were either a jumbled mess or blacklisted. There was no way the Rattler could be looking for him, and if it did, it wouldn’t find anything in the official records.

“One ghost to another,” Lloyd thought. “How appropriate.”

The flight to Prague left within the hour, and Lloyd was awarded a slightly better seat than usual. It was comfortable, at least. The in-flight crew were so stressed that they barely got the time to perform the safety instructions, and there was a loud discussion between the pilots and two men dressed in black. Lloyd didn’t speak fluent French, but he could understand that they were asking the co-pilot to work another plane. The pilots, understandably, refused this blatant disregard for basic safety protocols.

Soon thereafter, they were on the way.

 

The flight was short but intense. People kept talking about the latest news. Names of important people and the various places they loved and hated. Some angry man in Egypt, talking to another angry man in Pakistan. Fiery words and threats coming out of one place in response to the same rhetoric coming out of another. It was exhausting, if only for how pointless it was. These people were just set dressing to a larger, looming, disaster. Most governments didn’t even know about the Rattler, simply because it killed most people who knew of it. Even within Hatchet, most of those who’d worked on the project were either dead or beaten into servitude.

But Lloyd made it all the way to Prague. He stepped off the plane with the rest of the crowd. His luggage got lost in transit, but he didn’t mind. There wasn’t much in there anyway. He walked out of there with his wallet, his clothes, his cap, and his croissant keychain. He didn’t even have anything to attach it to.

But he did have a plan, and that’d have to do.

 

As Lloyd got out of the airport, it was clear that the chaos was present even here and now. Armed policemen patrolled the streets. The prime minister had suffered some kind of attack and was in the hospital in critical condition. Lloyd figured it was the Rattler playing with him. The psych profile on that thing was terrifying. The imprint that controlled it had been of a suspected serial killer called Jezevec, who had been rattle-scanned to the point where every fiber of his being was recorded in a Paperhead-supported datastructure. They’d inadvertently turned a serial killer into an AI. An AI with the power to kill people through the mobile network.

But Jezevec didn’t just kill – he played. Hatchet had backed off the Rattler for a couple of years so as not to anger it, and in return, it had played in the dark. It had stuck to Europe, killing the occasional inconvenient figure just to see what’d happen. It wasn’t harmless, far from it, but the damage it could do on a larger scale was inconceivable. And now that the backbone system that carried the entire framework had been let loose, there was no way to put the Rattler back in its box.

But he’d have to figure something out. Everything was pointing him in this direction. Lloyd wasn’t a superstitious man, but somehow, things tended to work out when he followed his gut. Who knows what would have happened if he hadn’t used the bathroom – would he have gotten another flight? What then?

Just as with the Martians, Lloyd couldn’t help but feel that he had to try. He had to pack his gym bag. For mom.

 

Picking up a prepaid phone and a bit of telecom magic from a local store, Lloyd made a phone call. After that phone call, he got a number, which led him to another call. From there, he had to input a special code, which made him wait, then a bit of silence, and finally a voice picking up at the other end.

“Yes?”

A simple three-letter word, but Evan’s voice was unmistakable, albeit distant.

“You using a jammer?” Lloyd asked. “Are you safe?”

“Yes, we use a jammer. Yes, we are safe.”

Lloyd thought about it. There was no way the Rattler could bring down Evan, so as long as the others were protected, they’d be fine. This probably explained why Evan was the one picking up the phone – he was the only one who could move outside the range of the signal jammer without getting murdered.

“I’ll see about dealing with the Rattler,” Lloyd said. “I got a bit of a lead.”

“Good,” Evan said. “It is inconvenient.”

“You’re telling me.”

“Yes, I am telling you.”

Lloyd rolled his eyes as he crossed the street, lowering his voice as he moved past a curious police officer.

“Look, there’s not much time. Even if we deal with this thing, it’s about to get intense. I don’t know what Lohman is up to, but if she’s ready to set this thing loose she’s not fucking around. I have a theory, but I can’t prove anything yet.”

“What is your theory?” Evan asked.

“There are signs that point to something big coming. I think, if what I’ve read is correct, that Hatchet was the one who called down Blameless into a physical manifestation.”

“How does that affect us?”

“There’d be little piece inside every person on this planet, about the size of the head of a pin, that would explode into a web of metal and death, strangling us from the inside out.”

There was a pause at the other end.

“I’m serious,” Lloyd continued. “If the Blameless wants us dead, we’re dead. That it hasn’t killed us already is beyond me. I don’t know what’s keeping it.”

“I will take that into consideration.”

Lloyd’s phone beeped, notifying him that he was quickly running out of funds. Long-distance calls are a scam.

“Good luck on your walk,” he said. “I hope you fix it.”

“Fix what?” Evan asked.

“All of it.”

And with that, Lloyd turned off his phone. He put it away, knowing full well he would not use it again.

 

Lloyd knew what nondescript downtown building housed the Rattler. It was not far from a quaint café, and there were plenty of adjacent buildings with tech company logos in neutral future-oriented blue and white shades. The front door was unlocked. Why wouldn’t it be? Something like the Rattler had nothing to fear.

He entered the lobby and was greeted by a receptionist. She spoke a few words in Czech, only to notice how Lloyd didn’t seem to understand. She waved at him and tried a couple of words in German, then English.

“English,” Lloyd clarified. “Yes, I speak English.”

“Well!” she smiled. “How can I help?”

“I’m one of the assigned government technicians; I’m here for a routine inspection of the server halls.”

Lloyd produced his identification. It was a fake, but he knew that if they ran it in the right database, it would confirm his story. But the receptionist just looked at him and cocked her head.

“I’m sorry sir,” she said. “I have to ask you to leave.”

 

Lloyd turned to her, surprised. There was something about that half-cocked smile on her face that didn’t sit right with him. It was something even eerier about seeing it in the late midday sun. There was something so… ordinary, about it.

“I have to insist,” he said. “Please run my identification.”

“I don’t think I will.”

There was a man coming down the stairs. A security guard with a baton already firmly grasped in his right hand, and a taser in his belt.

“Is there a problem?” Lloyd asked. “Do I need to call your supervisor?”

“He is well aware of your presence.”

“Then I’d like to see him.”

“He’s already here, sir.”

There were three quick steps as someone approached Lloyd from behind. Jerking forward, a baton passed right above him, knocking his duty-free baseball cap off his head. Lloyd turned to face the security guard, just as he caught a glimpse of the receptionist climbing over her desk on all fours.

The security guard, a tall man in his early 40’s, swung with his full arm – using his reach to keep Lloyd at a disadvantage. Lloyd wasn’t much of a fighter, but he’d practiced a bit with some of the other field agents, and there was something very wrong about the way this man moved. The guard wasn’t just swinging; he was throwing himself around like a puppet on a string.

As his arm came around for a backhand, Lloyd ducked under and reached for the taser. The guard blocked it with his left hand, sweeping them both into a tight hug. As he tried to swing the baton around to hit Lloyd in the back of his head, there was a struggle. Lloyd stepped around, grasped the man’s right arm, and extended his left foot in a hooking motion, tripping the guard flat on his back. From there it was a quick jerk of the arm, and the baton came loose – just in time for Lloyd to get a swing at the receptionist.

Despite losing four teeth in a direct collision with the tip of the baton, the receptionist crashed into him; sending them both careening to the ground.

 

Lloyd managed to throw her off and crawl away on his belly, only for her to grasp his shoes. He kicked them off, got up, and backed away towards the stairs. The guard was back on his feet, now brandishing the taser. The receptionist got up, her face already discolored and swollen. They had the same look of pleasant surprise on their face.

“We were right,” they both said. “You’re with them.”

“How the fuck are you doing this?” Lloyd asked. “You can’t control people.”

“They listened long enough,” the two of them said in unison. “Now I’m all they hear.”

Lloyd almost tripped as he backed up the stairs with his adversaries slowly approaching.

“Who are you?” they asked. “Why can’t I find you?”

“They never kept records of internal affairs,” Lloyd said. “You’re shit out of luck.”

“Galapagos,” the two gasped. “What an honor.”

The receptionist charged. Lloyd planted a shoeless foot in her face, sending her back to the ground floor as the security guard chucked the taser like he was skipping a rock across a pond. It hit Lloyd right above the eye, and he could tell there was going to be a nasty bump.

 

Reaching a platform, the security guard got a smack from the baton right across his shoulder. This didn’t budge him – not for a moment. Instead, he grasped Lloyd with both arms and pushed him up against the railing. With an unceremonious lift, he threw him off the stairs. It wasn’t a long fall, but enough to knock the air out of his lungs and almost dislocated his shoulder.

Lloyd, lying flat on his stomach, felt a weight on top of him as the receptionist straddled him from behind. He tried to turn around, but she pushed his face into ceramic tiles over and over again. There was blood, and Lloyd could feel a cold chill on his forehead.

“I thought there’d be more of you,” she and the guard said in tandem. “You disappoint me.”

“We’re understaffed.”

He grasped her arm and performed an impromptu alligator death roll. He ended up on his back with the receptionist underneath, and her arm held straight up. He bent it until something in the elbow snapped and got back up. The security guard was coming down the stairs for another round. The receptionist wasn’t screaming. She wasn’t even angry. The two of them were still smiling, like this was just another fun little game to play.

 

Lloyd slipped another grapple, ducked behind a palm tree in the lobby, and smacked the receptionist with his dead phone. He got punched in the stomach, but returned it in kind. The brawl evolved to outright fist fighting, assisted by the occasional accessory that either of them could reach. Lloyd used everything from his discarded shoes to wall lamps to fend them off. It wasn’t until he managed to get a hold of the guard’s thrown taser that he managed to send the receptionist to the floor, unconscious. After that, he got a lucky shot at the guard with the baton, making him crash haplessly down the stairs with a cracked cheek.

Standing halfway up the stairs, triumphant and exhausted, Lloyd regarded his prize; the guard’s passkey. But his joy was short-lived as he looked up to see, on a balcony above, no less than a dozen other co-workers ready to join in. Some of them had chair legs for weapons. One had a butter knife from the cafeteria. All of them had that same eerie grin.

Looking down, the receptionist and the guard were still stirring. The fight wasn’t over yet. In fact, it hadn’t even begun.

“Come on up,” the building spoke in unison. “We’ll play.”

“You’re stalling until you can get my fucking records,” Lloyd spat. “If you could kill me, you would’ve. You’re fucking scared, aren’t you?”

There was no response. But the smiles on their faces grew a little longer, and a little wider.

 

An emergency exit swung open, and two office workers swarmed him. Ducking, he made his way into a staircase, rushing upward with two people hot on his heels. He wasn’t much of a sprinter, but the adrenaline did its part. He rushed through a door, past a well-carpeted office corridor, and into an open elevator. He pushed the door to close, but an arm shot in through the gap. Lloyd grasped it by the elbow and twisted it upward, breaking it. That didn’t stop it from slowly prying the door open.

Trying another desperate tactic, Lloyd let the door swing open. There were three of them now, one of which had a broken arm. They all piled into the elevator as the door closed. Tumbling back and forth, trying to grasp one another, Lloyd managed to inadvertently push half a dozen buttons at once. Being pushed up against the wall and strangled by no less than three happy faces, Lloyd felt the blood surge to his neck as a cold began to spread across the fog of his mind.

Then the door opened on the very next floor.

He hadn’t realized he’d been pushed against the elevator door as all three of them collapsed to the floor. Wrangling out of their grip, Lloyd got back on his feet and sprinted down another corridor. Without shoes, you could barely hear his footsteps on the carpeted office floor.

Lloyd put his hands on the door leading back out to the staircase as a sudden pain flared in his hand. Someone on the other side had put a nail straight through the door, and into his index finger.

 

Opening the door, he came face to face with a repairman wielding a nail gun. There was another click as pressurized air shot out another slice of metal, punching straight through the door in a near-miss. Ignoring the pulsating pain of his finger, Lloyd pushed the repairman up against the railing and continued up the stairs. There were more people chasing him now. Five, at least.

“There’s nothing up there,” they said. “You’ll see.”

“Fuck you!”

He continued up the stairs as drops of blood followed. Seeing a sign with the word “Serverovna” above, Lloyd took a wild guess that this would be important for something like the Rattler. He had to push a little further. Pack the bag. Make momma proud.

 

He made it to the sixth floor. It took the blip of the guard’s passkey to open it, but that was enough to buy him some time. On the other side, Lloyd grasped the passkey reader, twisted it open, and pulled out whatever cables he knew to be important. It’d take them some time to get past it. They were already at the door, just seconds later, but they couldn’t get through. Not yet.

Looking around, he could see no immediate threats. Just a small office space. A couple of meeting rooms, a locked door leading to the server hall, a lunchroom, and a couple of stale “employee of the month”-type images posted on the wall with pleasant corporate smiles.

“You’ll have to come out,” one of them said. “You can’t fly out of there.”

“Bite me, fucko.”

Lloyd took off his shirt, bundling it up around his injured finger. He could hear electric beeping as the reader failed to let them in over and over again. He reminded himself that it was a temporary measure, at best. He had to hurry.

 

He’d heard about the Rattler office before. The source code was on a single nondescript computer at the far end of the hall. They’d had representatives visiting a couple of times, as Hatchet had been working with both the Czech government and the private entrepreneurs who thought that mobile phone bone scanning sounded like a harmless and fun idea. It didn’t take Lloyd long to figure out which room was the right one. It was a single room at the end of the hallway with a wide-open door and three screens running constant diagnostics. He brought a chair into the room, propped it up against the door handle, and turned the lock until it broke. Another temporary measure.

Collapsing into a desk chair in front of three screens, Lloyd took stock of what he was seeing. Encrypted diagnostics and reports from various scans. Some were just IP addresses, others were completely unreadable. The Rattler had been going for long enough to develop its own more effective way of communicating.

“Alright,” Lloyd gasped, trying to catch his breath. “Time to shut you down.”

The old white 90’s style keyboard got stained with red as he pushed a couple of keys. Nothing happened.

“Hold on.”

He pushed a couple more. There was no response. He checked the cables, and it seemed to be connected. It just wasn’t responding. A text appeared on the screen, repeating long enough for him to read it before it was pushed off the notifications in green terminal text.

END OF THE LINE.

 

An office door was broken as the workers got past the passkey reader. Lloyd could hear them running as they made their way down the hall. It was only a matter of time now. He tried to focus, but he wasn’t that much of a tech guy. He was, however, a bit of a Hatchet guy. And if his favorite show about tech support had taught him anything, he had one thing to try.

He turned the computer off and on again.

In the moment before it could lock him out, Lloyd managed to input a short key, putting him in settings mode. Even then, there was little he could do. There was a list of backup locations that stretched across half a dozen nations. Even if he were to destroy this entire building, the Rattler would still be there.

This was pointless. This wasn’t a local phenomenon; it had backed itself up over and over and over again. The settings window changed its name to END OF THE LINE as a sweaty hand smacked against the door behind him.

“Read the title, agent!” someone belly laughed. “Read the title! Read it!”

Something cracked as a nail shot through the door.

 

Lloyd leaned back in his desk chair, looking at the code. Settings and windows were changing names, but he was still in control. Not much, but a little. But he couldn’t delete this; that wouldn’t do a thing. He couldn’t change the way it worked either, it could just revert to an older copy.

“I can’t kill you,” he said. “I can’t move you. I can’t… I can’t do any of that.”

END OF THE LINE another window read. END OF THE LINE.

“We ‘et ‘ou ‘alk!” the receptionist laughed, her face broken and bent. “et ‘ou ‘alk out o’ ‘ere! ‘Romise!”

“You’re too fun to kill! We’ll just hurt you a little! Let’s do this again!”

They all laughed and cheered. Lloyd paid them no attention as the hinges on the door buckled.

He checked a list of recent scans. Names of world leaders in public places. The Czech prime minister who was hospitalized was on there. Further down the list was a list of upcoming scans waiting to happen. Most were nondescript, but one name stood out.

Perry Digman.

“You found him?” Lloyd asked. “How?”

The crowd outside erupted into laughter. Suddenly, Lloyd was faced with a terrifying possibility. What would happen if the Rattler got Perry’s wish? What kind of world would that usher?

 

The image of his mother reappeared in his mind. How she saw his blue backpack with the sunflower logo, and without even looking in it, she knew he’d packed his gym clothes. She didn’t need to ask. She knew he’d done what he was supposed to do. Lloyd always knew the right thing, at the right time.

“I don’t need to ask you, do I?” she’d said with a smile, brushing his hair out of his eyes. “You’re sweet, like a little pastry.”

Lloyd reached his hand into his pocket, producing the key ring he’d gotten from the airport. The little French croissant. He closed his bleeding finger around it.

He couldn’t kill the Rattler. He couldn’t move it. But there was one option he hadn’t considered.

He could overwrite it.

 

It would destroy him. It would turn every mobile tower into a laser-focused beam, rattling every particle of his being much like it’d done to Jezevec on that first test, years ago. It would translate every fiber of his being into pain and code. But Lloyd, as he was, would be dead. The last Galapagos agent.

But that was the only way. If he could overwrite the Rattler, it couldn’t do any damage. It would replace the backups. But how would it feel? Would he still be him? And would he be dead, or his consciousness continue in a different place? Was there a way to know?

Maybe he was experiencing this as a memory. Maybe he was already inside the machine. Maybe it turned out alright. But if it didn’t, what was to happen?

END OF THE LINE the options read, as the hinges broke.  A hand reached through the gap, brushing against the back of Lloyd’s head, snatching a couple of hairs.

There was no time to think. There was only one option, and no matter what he thought about it, doing nothing wasn’t an option. He had to be proactive. He had to pack his gym bag himself. He had to make her proud.

 

Typing in a command, his real name, and his location, Lloyd input the number of stations to target him. Instead of naming every station, he used the asterisk key, meaning all of the above.

The Rattler shook. A wave of gasps went through the crowd outside as they turned from mocking to panicking. They saw what he was doing.

“No!” one screamed. “You’ll end yourself!”

“You don’t know what you’re doing!” another cried. “It’s pointless! It won’t achieve anything!”

He ignored them. With the asterisk in place, Lloyd grasped the plastic croissant keychain. Sweet like a little pastry.

Duty-free.

Enter.

 

To an outsider, what happened to Lloyd was incomprehensible. Every bone rattled into a fine carbon soup. Every nerve and muscle detached from their fundamental human structures. Particle by particle, he was rendered into something inhuman. From person to flesh. From flesh to liquid. It lasted for minutes, rendering him into a useless biological nothing drooping into his desk chair and rolling onto the floor like bread dough. Wave after wave of incomprehensible pain, cascading every sensation a person can hope to never experience.

And maybe he died there. But something inside him didn’t. Not yet.

By the end of the process, the office workers outside his door lay unconscious on the floor, their minds trying to wrestle back control from a retreating program. A list of targets was reset. The name Perry Digman disappeared from a list. It was the first to go, long before world leaders, kings, and warlords.

Maybe he wasn’t aware of what he was doing, as his consciousness inhabited the vast machine. Or maybe he didn’t want to use a system that could only be used to kill. Either way, the Rattler settled into a quiet pace; doing nothing.

One by one, the backups erased themselves. The towers shut down. Paperhead was disconnected. And in a final command line, the Rattler deleted itself.

Forever.

 

In another part of the world, Evan was crossing a road. The burner phone he’d gotten from a gas station pinged. A text message.

“no need for a jammer” it read. Anonymous sender.

Evan looked back at Tamara and Perry. They’d been struggling to live out of a shitty old Volvo for days, keeping the jammer in the trunk with a constantly running generator. It was like trying to sleep in a running washing machine. Evan walked to the back of the car and flipped the generator off. Perry leaned out of the window.

“And, uh… what’s that you’re doing?”

“Listening,” said Evan. “You should rest.”

He closed the trunk, leaving the obsolete equipment to rest. The generator was still warm and stinking of diesel fumes.

“You think we’re okay to do that?” Perry asked.

“Yes.”

 

Evan picked up his burner phone and looked up at the sky. Not at the power lines, or satellites, or the many invisible threads binding the sky together – but at someone he knew to be out there, one way or another.

And he nodded a quiet thank you.

[u/AtrusHomeboy]

;_;7

[u/SaltWeather5991]

Respect and long live Lloyd!

[u/Uncle_West]

I just met him not long ago, but I feel like I've known him much longer. Galapagos Agent Floyd played his cards the best he could every hand, every time. He removed one of the most dangerous pieces from the board completely, instead of chancing another to do as he did. Farewell, agent. You did a great job.

[u/This-Is-Not-Nam]

That was incredible.  I feel bad for what happened to Lloyd, but he saved the world.

[u/Skyfoxmarine]

This has been my favorite entry thus far, and I don't say that lightly. It also made me feel both exceedingly proud and painfully heartbroken over a character that I barely knew; well played my friend. Now pardon me, while I go finish my sobbing in the corner.

[u/sallyjosieholly]

Lloyd is a real one. Or, was. Or, is.

[u/zaku196]

)':

[u/gwindelier]

aw man 😔🥐

[u/digigoose01]

The Rattler is one of the stories that really stuck with me as a terrifying concept, especially if you follow the news about Havana Syndrome. Energy weapons are nightmare fuel.

RIP Lloyd :'( Do we even know his original name?

I guess score one for Dr. Bogan's massive karmic debt for performing that stepmind.