The God Paradox

1.1 - The End

12/25/3499

00:01

Christmas

The rain fell at an astonishing rate, and I could almost feel how icy the water was as it poured from the skies. Almost, because I was covered in the armor we called a uniform—brand new, a beauty. To penetrate its shielding, you'd need a heat beam approaching the temperature of the Sun's surface.

I wanted to say that the helicopter's rotor noise was deafening, but helicopters hadn't made noise since the 2300s when it no longer made sense for them to emit sounds. I only knew the sound because my father used to force me to watch those prehistoric action movies from the 2000s with him.

Every now and then, I felt a pang of nostalgia for the old days. Especially on holidays like this, when instead of celebrating with my family, I was heading straight to the headquarters of the world's largest corporation. Working? Not exactly—at least not in the office.

A band of terrorists had taken over the place. Access to high-tech weapons had become easy, albeit at a steep price. Life had become slightly more comfortable, leading to a decline in crime rates worldwide after the Fourth World War.

Nowadays, if there was a criminal on the streets, they were automatically considered a terrorist. Thanks to the government's surveillance level, the AIs could report you before you even committed a crime. Many people fought against these policies, but to me, it made sense. It had been this way since I was born, and I don't recall anyone complaining about security during my lifetime.

Today's incident was precisely one of those terrorism cases. We police officers worked very little—I myself had been idle for about three weeks due to my membership in the special operations team. Medicine had worked wonders, but no one had figured out how to revive the dead. Hence, they paid handsomely for risky jobs. After all, food had ceased to be an obstacle centuries ago.

Moreover, any luxury item—a house just for you or a flying car—cost millions, no joke. So, unless you lucked out and became rich, there was no escaping the life you were born into. That's why 95% of the world's population was complacent—30 billion people, simply insane. At least poverty had been eradicated.

It was hard to believe that the insane 2-mile-high structure was merely an office building. Regardless of the mode of transportation you used, you'd be guaranteed a long journey to reach the rooftop. Now that I thought about it, thank goodness we had masks; otherwise, we might not even be able to breathe up here.

"Attention, Soldier Daniel, do you copy?"

My boss spoke, visibly in a bad mood. He must have interrupted his Christmas night just for this.

"Yes, Sir Malek! What are the orders?"

I responded promptly, ready for another occasional mission.

"It's a group of 40. You five will have to deal with all of them. Authorization to activate your brain implants. The damn bastards killed all the hostages; only enemies remain."

He said it with regret—deaths had become somewhat rare in our world. Damn terrorists.

I closed my eyes and thought of the activation phrase.

"Apollo... Let's kick some ass!"
<<"Good evening, Sir! Merry Christmas! Initiating assault mode.">>

My body began to be controlled by Apollo, my AI companion. You see, each individual AI brain implant cost 5 million International Units (IU$, for simplicity). Most of the population would die without ever knowing how practical it is to have one of these talking inside your head—they made life easy. Every police officer was required to have one, provided by the state. If you counted the rest of my body implants and those of my team, our squad easily cost IU$1,000,000,000 including the pilots.