Ole Eagle Eye-Next Gen
It was a tiny green bag fashioned of yarn with a white yarn cross, ornate but not fancy enough to be called embroidery, sewn into the front panel. More of the yarn had been used to make a chain that tied the bag to it’s owner’s neck. This was the Ole Eagle Eye. Why he would have anything other then his three hundred year old Dog Tags and a golden eagle pendant that always hung by a thick snake chain from his neck was beyond them. This did not fit the profile. The profile had not changed in over a hundred years. What could have caused a shift now?
Inside that bag was a lock of hair, it was a brilliant natural copper color that only young red headed children have before it darkens to auburn later in their lives. That did not give the bag the weight it had in the hand though. Something else was inside it. Two small packets made of tissue fell out into the hand of the man in the suit who watched the proceedures they performed on the Ole Eagle Eye. He carefully opened each one and looked down at the small nine millimeter bullet and the much larger round meant for a rifle. Each one was stained with blood and had been put in the tissue while the blood was still wet.
“Wake him up a little. I have questions.”
“I’ve been awake since you took that off my neck Birkham.”
“First off what’s this then?”
“Kid’s first haircut. She put that away about three days after she stopped crying about it. I didn’t know it was in there until a bit ago.”
“The bullets?”
“First one I dug out of her is the nine millimeter. That big fellow there had my name on it and she dug it out with a pair of eyebrow tweezers and a lot of very unladylike words back about eighteen months ago. The day afterwards she put both bullets and the hair in that thing and tied it around my neck. I’d rather you put things back where you found them Birkham.”
“Certainly.”
The man called Birkham by Ole Eagle Eye knew certainty of death when he heard it in a mans voice or saw it in his enemy’s eye. He also knew that to have Ole Eagle Eye as an enemy was Death. No mercy nor any pity would be expected and if he tried to escape that would only make it worse. The oldest hunter on the planet did not look fondly on cowardly actions.
So he reassembled the sort of medicine bag and returned it carefully to the neck of it’s owner without fouling any of the tubes, needles or equipment maintaining Ole Eagle Eye’s well being while his Nanotech was updated. Then he bowed respectfully and exited the laboratory swiftly as he could without seeming to run. He supposed that Ole Eagle Eye knew he was afraid anyway. You didn’t get to be the oldest surviving hunter on the planet without knowing more then everyone wished you knew about just about everything. Still a little bit of his dignity seemingly had survived the very extremely bad idea that it was to mess with any business that Ole Eagle Eye deemed ‘personal.’
The Lab rats had no intention of messing with that object now that the minder of their subject had been frightened off by a death glare from said subject. Ole Eagle Eye smirked inside his mind, though nothing reached his face. He knew that those far from the touch of death flinched and then got back to their tiny little existences. They thought nothing of it and they were not cowards for putting aside the frightening things. They were more attached to life then anything else. That made them so very different then he was. So different that while the concept of what he was had been made eerily clear in their science, their essence of self knew no such thing and understood not a word.
He sensed something and his inner self turned towards the feeling with something that was almost a gasp of pleasure. For a moment he lost it, then there it was again. A tingling feeling of recognition ran over his nerves and the deeper parts of his brain that only stayed awake all the way when he killed awakened just enough to turn their blank black eye sockets towards this thing that they all sensed. Ah it was her then. His inner selves closed their black empty eye sockets with smiles on their faces. Her they knew, and her they liked. She was just about the only thing they cared for other then causing the extinction of anything else that he or his present minders aimed him at.
She entered the lab and looked up at the screens that showed his present health and the rate of loaded new nanites and extracted elder generation nanites. Both should be about at half now. He flicked an eye at the waiting female and the lab rat went to invite her into the lab. Though they practiced it as a matter of course, with such virulent strains of nanites flowing in and out of him, sterility was not a thing of necessity. She was allowed to come to his side without a mask, gloves, or any surgical getup of any kind. He knew that had they offered it they would have been refuted anyway as she was not one for the trappings of hospitals and laboratories of any kind. They held no pleasant memories for her.
“How many billions is halfway I wonder?”
The voice she spoke in dropped her age from the aparent hard twenty five down to the soft furry nineteen that she actually was without the leather safety wear and the hard and dark makeup she chose when she went out among those who might know him or his reputation.
“Two hundred sixty five billion give or take a million.”
“That is a fairly accurate guestamate but sometimes more will generate as soon as they are in the subject should they be required to in order to do their functions. So until they stabilize about three days from now no one will know how many new gen nanites are actually in the subject ‘Ole Eagle Eye.’Then they should be stabilized, though he will need some amount of watching until about the fifth day when he is completely acclimitized to this new model.”
She nodded at the lab rat and went over to a corner where she leaned up against the walls and waited paitiently. Hours from now when his nanites were properly replaced and he was removed from the set up that replaced them she would still be patiently waiting, and not a single hair would have shifted in any way shape or form. The hunter’s trance was originally something only yogi’s in the far jungles of distant lands and very disciplined soldiers with more then their share of nanites could manage. The Hunter’s Trance meant to meditate in the far distance while keeping all the senses jacked around to high and the body prepared to respond to any event that might occur. This female had learned it as well as many other aspects of the Hunter’s persona at his side during the last seven years eight months and thirteen days since their first encounter.
The lab rats stared boldly at what they probably thought was his chosen method for meeting his desires. Then they saw the look in his eyes, which had gone from golden calm to a shade of wicked orange flame that indicated he was not at all pleased with their behavior. Were she what they assumed then they had no right to even glance her way and not expect instant disembowelment. They suddenly remembered what they were doing and with whom, and scrambled back to doing their work. He could sense the slight vibration in her that would be full blown laughter when they were out of this lab and alone together again.
She waited in the trance of the hunter’s meditation for what felt like a moon’s length or more. In reality she knew it was nothing even remotely as long, but just because she had the ability to use the Hunter’s patience did not mean that she liked doing it. A rich man’s child, before the low day when she met the Ole Eagle Eye, she had all the things in the world she could wish for as soon as the wish left her lips as long as her grades in the exams given her by her tutor passed muster with both her mother and father. She had for the most part lost the undesirable habits of a rich brat by now but this dislike of lengthy waits remained.
At last the five remaining hours of the transfer proceedure that required Ole Eagle Eye to be strapped to a gurney, and left hooked to machines including various pumps, and stabbed with needles, was over. She stepped up and lifted him of the gurney and he slid down right back into his old engineer’s boots. She buckled the buckles and snapped the snaps that held them on his feet. For a reason unknown to her that he might even explain should she ask, nanites could not be properly injected and set up in the body of someone wearing any steel items. The bullets had not touched his skin and were of the plain brass configuration that had been used since before even Ole Eagle Eye was born. Neither had caused a problem for him. She handed him his belt and his shirt, both of which he managed to put on himself, though he moved fairly slowly compared to Ole Eagle Eye on a normal day.
They walked outside and the doors closed behind him beofre she turned to him ready to address this situation she percieved as a danger.
“I know little one. I have been having these proceedures for the last sixteen hundred years give or take. Though those fools inside do not know that and think its my third or fourth exchange not nearly my twentieth.”
“But ever hundred years is what they said.”
“Before the tech was as good as it was now it was every twenty to forty years little one. Now it is every century or so. Someday they will simply create a self evolving nanite and I will not need to go through this again. Though I would suspect that such would still leave me at somewhat less then one hundred percent for a few days after each time the nanite population evolves.”
“Evolution would take place over a long period of time. I would wager that it would not weaken you like these exchanges do. You would probably not even notice unless an evolution took place that enhanced your performance or they drew your blood and ID’d the little insects for you in a lab.”
Ole Eagle Eye climbed abord the two wheeled transport that the little one favored that needed so much protective gear to ride on. With his amount of nanites he could be flung free of it at it’s top speed and make full contact many times with the pavement without death or even permanent scarring. She was very far down the enhancement scale from him, and had only had one injection of nanites in the entire time that he had been aquainted with her.
Back then she had just turned fourteen and was gravely contemplating the results of her body’s proper breeding functions. She had not panicked or screamed or cried in any way when this occurred, though those who knew child females suggested that she might when the time came. Instead she had asked him if he knew what was wrong with her, and he had replied simply that she was maturing into an adult female and that this happened on a variant schedule with all adult females until they reached a certain age, then the system would cease functioning.
She had asked him to take her to a place where the supplies used for such times were sold, then she had asked him to take her to the local nanite specialists. He had never until that time mentioned his own enhancements, though he speculated that the little one had guessed as normal humans could not perform in the same ways as he did for as long as he had without bringing about their own death or dismemberment. He discussed with her what she wanted to enhance and when she strait out replied that it was a preventative matter and not of his concern he had nearly not taken her to the second stop that day.
She was fourteen though in a world where one had to be eighteen to sign for ones own nanite proceedures. So it had been that he had signed and learned at the same time what ones she had chosen from the very myriad list available even here in the small community where they had found themselves when her time came. She had chosen to have a preventative sterilization and an extraction of her eggs for preservation should she wish to breed at a later time. The first nanites had a simple function. They would keep her ovaries from releasing any eggs as long as they remained active. The second batch of nanites swiftly evacuated a small amount of eggs, precisely twenty or so he later learned, that would be placed in a suspended state in preservative liquids meant for the keeping of healthy tissue over long years. The small container had twenty clear tubes made of unbreakable sterricell. Each had one egg though invisable to an unaltered eye, floating in the preservative liquid.
“Why?”
“In case I die before I breed willingly there are seven persons authorized to breed heirs for my father’s line out of those. Eight now I suppose since you are on the sheet as well after this.”
“Covering your possibilities. Good job little one.”
After that Ole Eagle Eye had seen what no one else would have noticed. Had she stayed just Daddy’s little girl no one would have seen what had lain dormant inside the outside until their fated meeting. None would have seen what he saw starting that day, that underneath the now budded breasts and past the shining white ribs, beat the heart of someone exactly and completely like him. It was why the eyeless ones saw her and smiled. Even in the midst of a killing frenzy they never smiled. They saw her or they sensed her even the littlest bit and they smiled. This was something that would have terrified a younger Ole Eagle Eye, but he had been walking around with the Eyeless ones inside him for so long now that nothing touched him with that level of terror anymore.
While they bent and leaned and shot around curves of the old road that led up to the spa she had promised to take him to he leaned against her, inhaling her scent, and the eyeless ones smiled.