Bryce

by Derek D. Bass
December 1, 1997
 

Inside the drab, sparsely-furnished motel room, Brother Damien knelt at the foot of his small, dingy bed. He prayed on this night as he did every night, offering praise and thanks to God, and humbly asking for the continued wisdom to seek out His enemies and the strength to defeat them. His hands were clasped tightly together as he silently recited prayer after prayer at a feverish pace. As Damien prayed, a strange feeling drifted up the back of his neck. Instinctively, one hand reached for the small silver cross always present around his neck, while the other hand smoothly retrieved his shotgun from where it lay across his cot. A moment's concentration revealed the true nature of the thick, clinging sensation now hovering about the room. Damien set the shotgun aside and began a prayer that would purify himself and his surroundings. As the first syllables crossed his lips, the sensation's intensity began to fade, disappearing completely within seconds. Satisfied that the tranquility of the room had been restored, and confident that he had closed a certain pair of prying eyes, Brother Damien returned to his silent devotions...

*** Within his lab, Bryce erupted in rage. He ripped the VR helmet from his head and threw it across the room, unsatisfied by the sharp crack of broken electronics that he knew he would have to spend precious time fixing before he could use the helmet again. Suddenly weary, he stepped to a nearby sink, splashing water on his face.  He contemplated the gaunt face and bloodshot eyes he faced in the mirror. His efforts of the past 96 hours were showing. Spying on Pax's new companions should have been the easy part of this whole ordeal, after the trouble he had gone through just to locate them. He could not locate Pax directly, having learned that lesson on his very first attempt. His triangulation program had reacted badly with the defense programs that Pax had set up to cover his tracks. In fact, the resultant backlash not only thoroughly corrupted the program he had used, but sensory overload through the helmet had nearly driven him mad. As it was, there was still a nagging buzzing left over in the back of his head that got worse whenever he even tried to think of Pax.

And now this, albeit minor, setback. Bryce didn't understand how the dark Chorister had crashed his new program so easily, especially since an initial scan had detected no electronic devices in the room. His whole opinion of the Celestial Chorus could be summed up in three words: smoke and mirrors. There had to be a trick to it, he thought. E-M cloaked resonance generator, most likely. Something to work on later. Bryce was still proud of his new locator program, whose trinary-based AI had enabled him to find one of Pax's protectors without Bryce himself knowing exactly who he was looking for. A virtual reality program working from a digital map of the city got him inside the room. But the man inside seemed to be alert to his presence, and before he could begin gathering any hard information on Pax's whereabouts, he found his senses unceremoniously dumped back into his own lab, the antiseptic sting in his nostrils personifying his failure this evening. Bryce angrily resigned himself to repairing the damage caused to his equipment during his brief tantrum, and figuring out a new way to find the people Pax had allied with, and through them, Pax himself.

The sooner he found Pax, the sooner he could have vengeance for Pax's betrayals. The sooner he found Pax, the sooner he could rid himself of the buzzing in his head, which had grown into a numbing, near-blinding pain that was always with him now, preventing him from thinking of anything else... ***
 

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