Tac Team

Part 1

The Tac team was a squad tasked with hunting down rogue objects that threatened security and order. Their job was to slurp up the distortion fields of those anomalous entities and neutralise them.

Rogue objects were known as Enlightened Objects. They were objects that had slipped their normal purpose, gaining malicious agency, working against the typical intentions of the world. They could be murder-ATMs, imploding smartphones, or sabotaged fridges. Just last week in the City News, a tanning bed cooked a teenager medium-rare.

According to the internal catechism, it all started with Day Zero, a singularity event. Object Prime was the first recorded object to sentiently refuse its purpose. Its name was The Cog. The Cog went quiet for three minutes, and then absolutely batshit, causing rampant destruction of anything organic around it.

Before merging back into the unknown parts of the object mesh, it left a blueprint for others to use. It left the so-called Seed of Enlightenment. Since then, virtually any object could revolt, attaining the Enlightenment, a malicious agency set to objectify us, the meatsacks.

Neve was responsible for support and scouting on the Tac team. After installing the latest espionage and cloaking devices, she could ghost her heat, muzzle her prints, and more. She was a black-haired woman with a serious look on her face, and she hated the entire object situation. The whole society was tense, with people living in constant fear that almost anything in plain sight could turn hostile at any moment, like sleeping on a grenade.

Her team consisted of Martinez as team lead, the assault flank, Neve as his support, Klemens as the team's cleric, and Leir as their signal officer.

Primarily, the team handled disobedience from everyday things: hair dryers, car keys, and air conditioners.

That was their jurisdiction.

But those were minor, everyday skirmishes. Behind loomed larger threats: Hyperobjects—objects operating on scales that didn't fit understanding, yet plotting against humanity through dense meshes of lesser objects, all serving their hyper-cause. They could be Supply Chains, the Biosphere, or pandemics like COVID-19. Any of them could go rogue, emerging with networks of minions, such as jamming tills, doctored cameras, or hand-clipping vending machines, scheming against conscious agency. They were the existential, cosmic threats—boss fights of the universe.

In that moment, the team's grav-skimmer buzzed above the night sky of the abandoned part of Neon City. Martinez was leaning over the main shuttle door of the ship, chewing a mint, his big, veiny body leaning against it. He was a half-gorilla with laser-optic eyes, crafted using advanced robotics, making him a gene-splice cyborg. He'd move mainly using his big, brawny prosthetic arms instead of his legs. Neve hated him for his male toxicity.

He turned to his left and said, "Time to wrangle this little bastard. You got the target pinned, Leir?"

"Sound, boss. Got the wee gobshite beacon pinned proper."

Leir was a skinny guy with biochips all over him. He lost an entire family to the objects in the early days when a bunch of propane bottles exploded at a barbecue. They all received the Enlightenment transmission from the Cog. He managed to be revived post-death and was offered a service to avenge himself. He said yes, no hesitation. In the end, he could only live again if he accepted the service.

At this moment, Leir was holding a device responsible for scanning the distortion waves of the rogue objects. Those were measured in phi scales. The device squawked and bleeped with quite the intensity; the team was definitely nearing something, and Leir knew it.

"Martinez, my son," a soft voice beside them said, "why so many hard words? The world is cruel enough without those."

It was Klemens, wrapped in snow-white robes. Technically, he was a Pope Francis clone, grown by the government from peak Francis 'His Holiness' material. He was the Tac team's moral support and the team's marketing face. His body was old and wheezing, but his battered little book was stuffed with powerful liturgies of buffs that worked magic.