Forced Pair Read online

  Books by C. Ryan Bymaster

  The eMOTION Series:

  eMOTION: Forced Pair

  eMOTION: Hard Wired

  eMOTION: False Positive

  Forsaken: Ev and Ell

  eMOTION:

  Forced Pair

  By

  C. Ryan Bymaster

  Text copyright: C. Ryan Bymaster, 2013.

  All related characters and elements are copyrighted by the author.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the author.

  PROLOGUE

  She woke up, startled.

  Something was happening, something that had to do with her. It was one of those gut feelings. She was thirteen now, old enough to understand these gut feelings. These woman’s intuitions, she thought with a proud smile.

  Kasumi looked up to the pretty purple light in the corner of her new bedroom. It wasn’t flashing. That was weird. Maybe her gut had been wrong. After all, she was only thirteen.

  She sat up in her new bed and pulled down the dark satin sheets. And then she yawned, widely. She picked up her EB from where she had dropped it on the bed next to her when she’d nodded off and checked the screen.

  10:17 PM.

  She rubbed her face, not too vigorously, but just enough to wipe the sleep away. Apparently she didn’t rub hard enough as another yawn worked its way up and out. This time she caught a whiff of her breath.

  Whoa! Good thing she wouldn’t be having any visitors this late at night — all the doctors were home by now, their tests on her finished with for this day.

  She untangled her legs from the plush cover and sheets and slid them off the side of her thick mattress. When she stood on the thick beige carpet she gave her body a huge stretch, thinking herself a two-legged cat as she did, and then padded her way to her new living room and kitchen. Not many girls her age had their own living quarters like she did, but then again, many girls her age were still free to hang out with each other.

  She tossed her EB to the couch, maybe a little too hard, maybe a little too angrily, where it landed next to her phone. She bit her lower lip at the sight of the phone. She’d been using it less and less lately. Some of her friends still texted, but actually talking with them … She missed that. And she missed hearing her name. Everyone here at the new facility called her Fifth. It was a nickname from when she was younger and it had stuck with all of her mom’s coworkers. Especially the new ones, who looked at her like she was a walking Nikoli puzzle.

  Tomorrow she’d ask her mother if she could still talk to at least a few of her old friends. How else would she find out if Mei had finally decided to ask Teddy out? Unless it got posted in online she’d never know.

  She felt like growling. She hated being forced to stay in these rooms. She wanted to live a normal life. But she knew that would never be. Her mother would never allow it. Her mother’s company would never allow it.

  That thought made her actually growl in frustration.

  And then she giggled as she thought of herself as a cat again. Except, cats purred. Maybe more like a tiger, then. A caged tiger. A hungry tiger.

  She rummaged through her fridge, looking for anything to munch on. She shoved her face inside, the hunger in her stomach fighting the frosty air in her face. Sighing in defeat, she closed the door and then brought her hand up and tapped her lips, thinking.

  Ha!

  She pirouetted, twice, and perfectly — thank you very much — and stopped before a cupboard. With a flourish she opened the small door, dipped her hand inside, and magically produced a bag of microwavable popcorn.

  Butter flavor.

  She beeped in two and a half minutes and pushed start.

  Butter flavor. What, exactly, is butter flavor? Why not just use butter? Why flavor something with butter when the real thing actually existed.

  Health issues, she guessed.

  She stopped her philosophical monologue and checked the amount of time she had left before she was in butter-flavored heaven. Time enough to be proactive, she decided, and rushed to her room to pull out what she was going to wear tomorrow. It didn’t take long because she was a girl who knew what she wanted.

  Over her chair she’d carefully thrown, a pair of dark jeans that weren’t too tight and faded just right, a faded-to-perfection pink top with short sleeves, and a powder-blue jacket with cute stitching done in white along the hem and around the pockets. And, because she could, she tossed one bright pink sock and one electric green sock atop it all. And her new black leather low-top Vans with the wraparound shoestrings would complete the look.

  She fought back the growing sense of hopelessness that no one would see how cute she would be and was relieved when the microwave called out to her.

  Popcorn, salt, two Cokes, and heels up next to her bedazzled purse on her coffee table — oh man, forgot the napkins … oh well — she scrolled through her EB searching for a movie to throw onto her TV. She almost put on Lady and the Tramp — one of her favorites — but then thought better of it. She was thirteen. And now that she had her own TV, maybe something more age appropriate. She thumbed through her secret folder, absently dismissing each title without much thought. But then, oh! She loved Jean Reno films. It would have plenty of action and would be in French and English, two of the four languages she knew, English coming in a close second to her native Japanese.

  She wore a devious grin as she sent the movie from her EB to the big screen and settled back. Her toes were in the way and she wiggled them back and forth, too lazy and way too comfortable to move them. She tossed her EB to the side and settled in, one hand in the popcorn, one around a finger-numbing cold Coke.

  It was just when the movie started to pick up when she sat up suddenly. Yellow butter-flavored puffs fell into and around her lap, but she was beyond caring. Something … She turned her head slowly to the right, almost wishing her body would ignore her brain even as she told it to do so, and settled her eyes on the pretty purple light in the corner of the room.

  It was no longer pretty and purple. Oh, it was still purple, but when it flashed like it was flashing now, it was no longer pretty. Her gut feeling, her woman’s intuition, flared again.

  No, no, no, no!

  A series of noises, somewhere inside the building she was housed in, crept closer to her quarters. Loud, muffled sounds that echoed down the sterile corridors outside her rooms and through the concrete walls. She tried telling herself that they were nothing more than fireworks. She tried convincing herself that she was safe. She stood up, Coke and popcorn ruining the carpet as one bled and soaked into the others.

  She grabbed her purse, threw her phone in it, and then ran to her bedroom.

  She fought to control herself, to keep her mind focused, for one thing her mother had taught her was that if she didn’t control her emotions, bad things could happen.

  And if there was one thing Jean Reno taught her, it was that gunfire had a very peculiar, very particular sound, and that when you heard it, you needed to be ready.

  I

  In 2016, the U.S. government banned the practice of emotion tampering. The rest of the United Nations followed suit.

  Most people like to believe that some stalwart politician lobbied against the practice to protect their God-given rights to live a life in which the emotions they felt were indeed their own, and not some fabrication forced unwillingly upon their psyche. They wanted to believe that some concerned politician fought against the practice of allowing companies to use technologies that sent pulses out to influence, and even control, the population’s emotions. By any norm
al person’s standards, such technology infringed on an individual's rights and had no place being implemented on society.

  Truth was, that wasn’t entirely the case.

  The reason that had spawned the commercial application of such technology was the same reason that had shut it down. Capitalism. It simply created an unfair advantage for companies with the means to afford such technology.

  When the technology first came about, it was purely in the medical field. When electrical pulses stimulated parts of the brain, desired effects could be produced. Epilepsy, attention deficit disorders, even obsessive compulsive disorders could now be combated against by careful stimulations of the ailing patient’s brain. With successful trials and applications of this new field applications of the technology began to develop, blossoming into something completely different.

  It wasn’t an unknown practice, this subliminal means of suggestion by companies on their consumers. Movie theaters, for one, had long since practiced venting the smell of buttered popcorn throughout their ventilation systems, enticing watchers to purchase a tub of popcorn for ten dollars that set the theater back a mere thirty-five cents. So it was not much of a logical step to begin working and perfecting the art of creating and sending out impulses that triggered a feeling of hunger to achieve the same reaction, although this new practice was more … persuasive. What began as a revolutionary tool to help people with mental ailments went mainstream, became corrupted. Of course, emotional tampering was not a perfect science.

  Nothing ever is.

  High-end car dealerships would install eFields that induced a feeling of lowered inhibitions, thereby enticing shoppers to be more willing to fork out six-digit figures for a piece of metal on four rubber tires. Unfortunately, reports of high infidelity, an increase in gambling, and even the heavy use of illegal drugs began to become rampant in car salesmen in those very same facilities. When dealing with forced emotions, there would never be an exact outcome.

  And all the while, small companies that could not afford this new technology fell behind. More than a quarter of U.S. companies were forced to close their doors, unable to compete with the bigger businesses. For the first time in fifteen years, the United States saw a steady increase in job-displacement and a decrease in the average citizen’s disposable income.

  This is where big government stepped in. The Department of Unfair and Unwilling Practices sprang into existence. Strict guidelines regarding the illegal act of emotion tampering were pushed through congress, followed by DUUP agents authorized to uphold these new laws through any means necessary. It was one of the rare times when the government’s concern with capitalism had unintentionally protected its people from having their rights and emotions, subdued. An act against any person’s emotional state was declared an act of terrorism. And such acts were met by swift — and often deadly — force.

  Marion Dent should know. He had been a DUUPer. In fact, he’d been one of the best. And it wasn’t his military training that made him one of the best. Dent, or Mary to his friends — which meant nobody called him Mary — was clinically diagnosed as a sociopath at the early age of twelve. It wasn’t that he was a cold-blooded killer — no, that would come six years later along with an eight-digit bank account courtesy of the government. It was that his brain was wired differently, chemically incapable of producing more than a vestige of basic emotions. The perfect man to combat a society where emotion could be forced into one’s mind.

  He had been picked up by the U.S. government in his late teens. He’d first been poked and prodded, tested and studied. Scientists and psychoanalysts could not reproduce the effects that his brain produced, or could not produce, naturally. Not long after that he’d gone into covert and clandestine ops, and eventually became a prime candidate for the newly created DUUP. He was sent into suspected eTech facilities to eliminate emotion peddlers and forcers. These high-tech facilities employed their illegal technology to keep outsiders away, in methods that proved far more effective than razor-wire. Unless one knew the frequency with which these companies used to forcibly pair their emotions, one was defenseless.

  Unless one was incapable of being rendered incapacitated by emotions.

  Stretching his neck, Dent looked over at the young Japanese girl sitting to his left on the plane. She was fast asleep.

  He was heading back to the U.S. to drop off the package. He was being paid handsomely, but no longer by the government. He’d burned that bridge three years ago. It had involved two bullets and a bottle of Crown Royale. The first and last time he would let emotions get in the way of a mission. His new employer was a stock mogul who’d made more in a day than an average family made in a year. His employer had been accused of fraud, insider trading, price manipulation, and production of illegal emotional software commonly referred to as eTech, to say the least. That all meant nothing to Dent. He’d been hired for a job, given a reason to do what he did so well. And he was doing it.

  The package stirred, her head rolling on her thin shoulders to fall against his arm. He shrugged it off. The cocktail he’d given her was a mix of strong sedatives provided by his employer. Dent didn’t ask, but his employer claimed the cocktail wouldn’t harm the package. As long as it made the delivery that much easier, Dent didn’t care. Besides, the hard part was over, all that was left was to make the drop and get paid.

  He flexed his right shoulder, rolled his arm slightly in the socket, and winced. He would have yet another souvenir from this mission.

  II

  He felt the bullet rip through his milk-silk protective under-armor. The hybrid material dissipated much of the impetus of the bullet, but the hot metal still sizzled and gouged a bloody-line across his right deltoid. He felt the pain before he’d heard the retort of the shot.

  That meant it had been close to his position. He hadn’t expected that they would have armed men this far out along the perimeter of the facility. He hadn’t been warned of this. In fact, that had been one of his many questions posed to his employer before he’d agreed to the terms and accepted the job.

  He rolled to the side, deeper into moonlighted shadows beneath a gingko tree and amidst the bending stems of fatsia plants. There were no floodlights out here, this far from the facility. There was no way he could have been seen. That meant there were other means of detection — heat, heartbeat, any number of mechanical or electrical devices — being employed by the facility. Possibly even mood-diagnosing equipment, but such technology was illegal, even here in Japan, and ineffectual against a person like Dent.

  Dent dug out a roll of duct tape from his small black canvas backpack then pulled and tore a strip free with his teeth. He maneuvered the silver strip between the tear in his shirt, wiped the blood with his thin woolen glove, and secured the tape over the wound. A sharp intake of breath was his only reaction to the self-induced pain.

  Ready to push on, he crab-walked through the vegetation, back and down a slight decline, over to his right, then back up the decline. It had taken him nearly seven minutes, but he’d managed to come up behind his shooter. The fool man was still in the same spot from which he’d fired. He was dressed in all dark hues except a white undershirt that peeked out from beneath a purple, blue, or black polo shirt. The undershirt called to the moon and its light, marking the man as an easy target in the darkness.

  Dent was sure the man had already called the incident in.

  Dent’s employer had insisted that lethal action only be taken if the situation had warranted it. The man with the luminescent strip of cloth below his neck and night-vision goggles atop his head had meant to kill Dent. Lethal response was required.

  Dent quietly shrugged off his backpack and raised his silenced Sig. He aimed for the man’s temple, made easier by the fact that the man still gazed back to where Dent had just been. The temple would result in a quicker death. Probably painless. What mattered to Dent was one tap, one drop.

  He depressed the trigger.

  He’d loaded the magazine with subso
nic polymer-cased rounds to ensure a silent infiltration. A quick rush of compressed air that sounded like a punctured car tire preceded a red and gray mist that was spit from the side of the man’s head. As the body dropped soundlessly to the wild grass beneath it, Dent reset his backpack and strode over to the lifeless mound.

  A handheld two-way radio clipped on the body’s right hip chirped.

  How many? A disembodied tinny voice asked in Japanese, an easy language for Dent, before the two-way chirped again.

  Two, maybe three? Another voice responded, followed by another chirp.

  Units seven and twelve, move southwest. Chirp.

  Nine? Chirp. Nine! Status? Chirp.

  Damn. Chirp. Perimeter, maintain twenty-foot buffer. Going field active in ten, repeat, ten seconds. Chirp.

  There were a few garbled responses, voices pitched with some varying degree of inflection. Dent bent down and unclipped the palm-sized two-way, turned the volume down to “1”, and continued his approach to the facility. As he made his way through the increasingly spaced out trees and the manicured blueberry bushes, he noticed a small blue light in the distance. That light was matched by others about a dozen paces out, forming a straight-as-an-arrow line around the perimeter of the facility. How bad they wanted to keep people like him out and trade secrets like the package in would determine how strong the eField was. If it were set too high, too strong, it may cause irrevocable damage to passersby, wounding them in ways a needle and thread could never fix.

  Dent prepared to rush the invisible barrier when he heard his confiscated two-way chirp. Move her to the secure bunker, the first voice ordered. No chances. Chirp.

  Dent had not planned on this. The package was supposed to be in one location, in a collection of rooms on the second floor. A location to which he had mentally and meticulously mapped his way. He needed to breach the facility now, and he needed new, updated information to complete the mission.