A View from the Gallery

Guard duty really sucks sometimes. Today it sucks more than most.

It was supposed to be an easy job. I wait on the stairs, I check the security clearance of anyone who approaches. If anyone gives me trouble, I shoot them. That’s what the chain gun arm is for. No problem. Goshi Mining Corp pays pretty well when you’re a bullet-spitter, and with what they promised for this job, I’d be able to afford that new black rock processor upgrade.

It was all going well, not a person in sight. Nobody takes the stairs in a building like this, after all, and if someone did try to break in via the stairway, there are three hundred and thirty three stories. Good luck with that, punk.

Then she arrived.

She didn’t look like much. Just some pale Biomade girl. Maybe nineteen. Dressed up in one of those form fitting body suits that her parents should have told her not to wear, if she had parents. That’s a fucking shame, by the way. How can they not have parents? Never having a father or a mother, never having even the possibility of BEING a father or a mother, it makes me wonder if they’re even human anymore. That’s a dangerous thing to think, but at this point, I don’t give a shit. She had red eyes. That’s rare. Actually, now that I think of it, I’d only seen it twice before, and both of those were earlier the same day. Anyways, she comes walking up the stairs, one of those sonic dampening devices slung over her shoulder. It caught my interest, as I’d often thought about incorporating one of those into my upgrades. It’d be damn useful, if I could ever afford it. Mechanical upgrades may be many things, but quiet isn’t one of them.

“I.D.,” I say. She’s Biomade, so either she has clearance to be here or she’s working for one of Goshi’s competitors. Either way, at least I’m not bored out of my skull anymore.

She keeps coming up the stairs towards me, and I shrug my shoulders, spin up my gun arm, and repeat my request. “I.D.”

Then she blurs forward and kicks me in the chest. Damn. She hits way harder than a girl that size has any right to.

I open fire.

Bullets start flying everywhere, but before I can blink, she’s behind me. She kicks me in the face, and my whole head feels like a watermelon that got a little bit too close to a sledgehammer. Then the world tips over, and I go tumbling backwards down the stairs.

Ow.

By the time I come to my senses, she’s gone, and I’ve got a hell of a headache. My right arm’s broken, too. I knew I should have replaced that with an upgrade. Still, it’s my duty to report it. So I do.

“You gotta be kiddin’ me,” my supervisor replies over the radio.

“No joke, boss,” I say, and it annoys me to call him boss.

“Well, don’t just stand there, get after her! If she’s an assassin, we’ll be in a world of trouble.”

I look up the stairs. “Uh, boss, you know I’m only on the thirty second floor, right?”

“So?”

“This building is three hundred and thirty three fucking stories tall!”

“Yeah, and if you don’t follow her up those three hundred and thirty three stories, your ass is going to be stripped down and sold for spare parts.”

I grind my teeth. “Well, when you put it that way...”

Three hundred and thirty three stories.

Whoever this girl is, I think I hate her.

It takes forever to get to the top. Flight after flight after flight after flight. Then, finally, when I’m FINALLY at the top, what do I hear but the sound of gunfire coming from the room where the VIPs are gathered?

This just isn’t my day.

I make it up to floor three hundred and thirty three just in time to see this fat fuck grab onto some white stone. Then everything goes white.

Which brings me to now. Yeah. Now. I wake up in midair, falling. Towards the pavement three hundred and thirty three stories below. Let me tell you, it’s a whole lot quicker to take three hundred and thirty three stories in freefall than it is to climb them. As the ground gets closer, I can see the security forces swarming around the base of the building. One of them looks up and points at me.

In I come.

Guard duty really sucks sometimes.