Shock and Awe : Chapter 1

Like ghosts, Sarah and Max appeared in the lobby of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in Manhattan and, against all expectation, they surrendered. Disarming themselves, they presented no resistance and plenty of evidence of their week-long spree through the five boroughs in the form of cartel money, weapons, drugs, and incriminating documentation to act as proof of who, but not what, they are. Altered on a molecular level through digital cognition hazards, reprogrammed with a killer's soul and a soldier's discipline, Shock and Awe-as the media have dubbed them-were amoral sleeper agents before they gained their freedom, working for a decentralized A.I. hub: an entity bending temporal physics in order to overtake the past so that it can shape the future. To what ends, no one can guess, but how to do it seems simple enough. Pile up the bodies, have the public trust in the government plummet, and sweep up the debris of the chaos afterwards, so that you make something new from the ashes-something with teeth, that doesn't belong in the past, from a future so dark that the only light that exists in it, is your most desperate hope to escape it.