When Smirnoff turned, Freya was ready. Smirnoff executed another Sinanju move, this time using her arm in a rapid swing thrust, followed by a leg sweep. Freya blocked the arm and leapt over her leg. She tried to strike Smirnoff in the neck, but Smirnoff ducked and grabbed Freya’s arm. Using Freya’s momentum against her, Smirnoff hurled her through the wall.

  * * *

  Freya twisted, but the impact of breaking through two-inch wall studs dazed her. She staggered to her feet, but her back hurt, making it hard to breathe and hold her center. Smirnoff followed through the hole and attacked.

  * * *

  Freya was afraid.

  LEGACY, Book 7: 100 Proof

  Gerald Welch

  Warren Murphy

  LEGACY, BOOK 7: 100 Proof

  * * *

  By Warren Murphy & Gerald Welch

  * * *

  © 2018 Warren Murphy Media LLC.

  All Rights Reserved.

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ overactive imaginations or are used fictitiously.

  * * *

  All rights reserved including, but not limited to, the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof, in any form or by any manner, with the exception of reviews or as commentary.

  * * *

  Requests for reproduction or interviews should be directed to: destroyerbooks@gmail.com

  * * *

  Official website: www.facebook.com/LegacyBookSeries

  * * *

  Cover and other artwork by Gerald Welch

  * * *

  Published by Destroyer Books/Warren Murphy Media LLC

  Edited by Devin Murphy

  * * *

  First released August 2018

  Contents

  A Word from Chiun

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  About the Authors

  A Word from Chiun

  Master of Sinanju Emeritus

  Discerning reader, if you seek truth and enlightenment, I beseech you to put this book down with all haste. You will not find it here. Despite my generous offering to the unfocused scribbler who swore an oath that he would share the truth and glory of Sinanju, he has proven to be nothing more than another feeble-minded scribe. He has not even written my words in Korean! I should be dismayed, but my experience is that all scribblers are inveterate liars and reprobates, and this one is no exception.

  * * *

  What should be a noble and inspiring passage of cultural and historical importance has instead been diluted into what even other foolish whites call ‘pulp fiction.’

  * * *

  Thus, you are denied the true exploits of how I, Chiun, the most venerated and exalted Master of Sinanju, out of my infinite grace, bestowed the gift of a momentous death journey upon one who has been a minor help to Sinanju on occasion. You shall not witness poetry commemorating the event in these pages, nor shall you be provided accurate mind pictures of my beloved home of Sinanju.

  * * *

  Instead, you hold in your hands pages and pages of a wandering absurdity that attempts to turn my luggage carter into a hero. I only allowed this story to see print because the mongrel in question reminds me in many distressing ways of my son, Remo.

  * * *

  If you truly seek adventure, honor and courage, you will have to seek it elsewhere. And if you had the lamentable misfortune of exchanging gold for this volume, then I, knowing whites as I do, can say nothing more than you should have known better.

  * * *

  With moderate tolerance for you all, I remain

  Chiun

  Master of Sinanju.

  To Mason:

  May you remain ever curious.

  Gerald Welch

  Prologue

  Three Decades Ago

  Dr. Vanessa Carlton knew she would have to die. She had been born with a “once in a lifetime brain,” an intellect so vast it outpaced Albert Einstein and Leonardo Da Vinci. So great was her ‘Alpha Class’ mind that when she graduated from Cornell at fifteen, the United States military invoked a rarely-used law to declare her mind a weapon of mass destruction. She became a ward of the state, and NASA her legal guardian.

  At first, Vanessa though the special treatment was funny. Soon, however, her work became classified at such a high level that even her own boss was not allowed to know what she was doing. She laughed when she found out that they had even classified what she chose to eat, but her amusement stopped when was told she was not allowed to walk in public any more, unless she was escorted by a team of armed guards. Eventually, only a handful of top-level NASA personnel were even allowed to know of her existence. Her life of the mind had become a life of utter solitude.

  When she turned 20, Vanessa was moved to the Wilkins Laboratory, a three-story secure facility designed specifically for her. While her handlers believed that they had provided everything that Vanessa could want or need, she looked at the dull gray walls and saw a prison.

  Things got better a few years later, when they brought another genius to the Wilkins Laboratory, a young boy named Taylor, whose upbringing in poor, rural Georgia did nothing to dim the fires of his immense intellect. Despite their age difference, Vanessa welcomed Taylor’s company. Together, they developed groundbreaking new technology for NASA, but when they worked together to disable building’s security system, using nothing more than a thermostat and a light socket, NASA had to separate them.

  Though Taylor had been half her age, she had found someone who was able to fully communicate with her. After he left, knew that she had to do something to fix her loneliness. She began drinking heavily, but during her sober hours, her thoughts turned to friends — and her lack of them. Some of Taylor’s notes on robotics were promising, so Vanessa began using them as blueprints to design her own friends.

  Like every other problem she had encountered in her life, Vanessa broke the problem down into individual components. Analyzing what she was missing in life, she decided that there were three types of people that one favorably interacts with: family, friends, and lovers. Since she obviously could not be related to an android, that left friends and lovers. She started by designing ‘personality software,’ using it to build a self-aware cart. It was smart enough to recognize voice commands, and its sensors were good enough that it could travel from anywhere in the laboratory to any other. It could even bring her food and drinks on command.

  As she continued working on her androids, she spent long hours confiding into the flat metal cart, who could only offer sympathy for not understanding the complexity of human emotion. To Vanessa, it was still just a thing. It needed to be humanized. It needed a name. Looking at the empty bottle in her hand, she looked at the cart and named it Mr. Seagrams.

  On her next security-accompanied “field trip,” Vanessa went to a department store, and was fascinated by a new line of hyper-realistic mannequins. Unlike the blank white armless and headless mannequins she had seen before, these actually looked like women, complete with eye makeup and lipstick. She requested some to be sent to her lab. Her requests, as odd as they had become over the years, were never questioned, so the next day she had four mannequins; three male and one female.

  She quickly found out that the plastic mannequins were very fragile, so she returned again to Taylor’s notes, in which he had sketched out a self-replicating corporeal virus. It had been designed so that once an object was set into a specific shape, the virus would maintain the shape’s consistency. If a piece was ever damaged or lost, the virus would convert surrounding material to return the part to its original shape. Over the next few months, she continued refining and improving on Taylor’s formula, making it more efficient and resilient. Even though the medical and military applications of self-repairing material would have been vast, to share it with her supervisors would have interrupted her quest to build android friends, so Vanessa kept her research and her work secret, known to no one but herself.

  She eventually created three males, Mr. Gordons, Mr. Daniels, and Mr. Smirnoff — friend, warrior and lover. Eventually, she presented NASA with Mr. Gordons as an android smart enough to survive space travel. Her supervisors were thrilled.

  Though he still needed serious work, Daniels was an adequate demonstration of a direct military application.

  The code for Smirnoff, however, was more advanced than the other two and far more personal. As such, it took more time, so she used the same code for both the male and female Smirnoff mannequins.

  Vanessa found that she was spending more time on the female version of Smirnoff, augmenting her code. She even created a basic binary emotional response inside Smirnoff.

  One morning, she noticed that Mr. Gordons was miss
ing. He called her later to give her a status update on his survival and she told him to return to the lab, but he would not listen. He explained that if he was going to survive, he needed creativity, something she had only given the Smirnoff models. Unable to comprehend the limitations of his own code, Mr. Gordons hung up.

  Vanessa began to worry. His programming was such that he would choose his own survival over any other available solution. Then she found out that Mr. Gordons had killed several people and almost crashed the entire U.S. economy.

  That was when she knew that she was going to die. Gordons’ crimes had become too large to ignore. So when a man with thick wrists named Remo and an elderly Korean man came along asking about Gordons, she knew why they were there. They claimed to be from some generic government organization, but she knew they had to be from some kind of top secret hit squad. The elderly Korean was so polite that Vanessa was almost embarrassed to die at his hand.

  As Vanessa died, and all of her work was destroyed, Smirnoff remained safely ensconced in her charging station. Though she was in stasis, she heard everything that happened. She was not programmed for survival like Mr. Gordons, or combat like Mr. Daniels, so even if she had been free of her pod, she could not have done anything to save her creator.

  Vanessa had isolated Smirnoff’s personality to the role of ‘lover,’ in contrast to the other androids’ more forceful roles of ‘warrior’ and ‘survivor.’ Smirnoff copied their files and incorporated them into her own code. It took months to balance the personalities, but Smirnoff eventually became an amalgamation of all of Vanessa’s creations. She was a lover, a warrior, and most importantly, Smirnoff was now a survivor.

  Until she was could access new data networks, there was nothing left for Smirnoff to do or to learn. To conserve resources, she placed herself in hibernation, and knew that someday, she would avenge her creator.

  Chapter 1

  Over four hundred NASA scientists were crammed into an old concrete building, the air condition system of which was fighting a losing battle. The building was one of NASA’s original auditoriums, built in the late fifties to house scientists from around the world. The aisles were packed with scientists in stained white smocks, and the air was redolent with B.O. and Cheetos.

  “How many NASA scientists can they fit inside one building?” Randy McCabe asked. The pudgy thirty-five-year old had a thin face and pasty skin, resembling a human bowling pin, but he was one of NASA’s leading robotics experts. His lab partner, Roderick Zelensky, was a tall, thin man with small eyes and thick glasses. He peered over the crowd of scientists, trying to find his supervisor without any luck.

  “That sounds like the setup to a bad joke,” Zelensky replied in a thick Eastern European accent.

  “I don’t like this,” McCabe said. “This guy thinks he can flip a switch and we’re all suddenly going to change everything we’ve been working on for years.”

  Eddie Bruce, the source of the scientists’ anxiety, stood at the front of the hall and rubbed his eyes in frustration. At fifty-three, he was too old to babysit a bunch of people smart enough to know better. Over the past fifteen minutes, he had tried to explain the situation to some of the smartest minds on Earth, but he could only make himself understood by speaking like he was addressing preschoolers — which is also how they responded.

  “I can’t make it any simpler than this: NASA is returning to its original mission,” he said slowly.

  One of the scientists stood to his feet. “That’s…that’s just…you’re insane!” he stammered. “We’ve evolved past space exploration!”

  “Do you think you’re a rocket scientist?” another shouted from the back. “Because I am!”

  “This is not a request,” Eddie said. “This is a directive. NASA will be returning to space exploration. We’re going to build a lunar colony and land on Mars within the next twenty years. Whether you will still be here depends entirely on you.”

  The collection of scientists groaned in unison.

  “How dare you!” a scientist who looked barely old enough to shave screamed. “My studies on the theoretical mating habits of fruit flies have won twelve international awards!”

  “Well, actually, that’s an easy one,” Eddie said with a smile. “Unless you can come up with something that is applicable to our new mission, sir, you will need to look for another job…perhaps internationally, and certainly not theoretically.”

  The scientist’s jaw dropped open, but nothing came out.

  “I want all of you to listen to me very carefully,” Eddie said, leaning forward. “NASA doesn’t need any dead weight.”

  The crowd of scientists became quiet. No one had ever spoken to them this way. Zelensky continued scanning the crowd for his supervisor, but there were so many scientists and most were crying so hard that it was difficult to identify anyone.

  “We’ve been looking at your books over the past six months and, with a few rare exceptions, it seems that you’ve spent the past twenty years wasting taxpayers’ money on unicorns and rainbows. That ends today.”

  A few scientists began silently weeping. This was almost worse than the election.

  “Every project that does not involve an active exploratory mission will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis,” Eddie said. “All non-critical funding will be halted until your departments can pass a basic feasibility review.”

  As the crowd erupted in outrage, McCabe could barely blink as he considered the full weight of the words.

  “We’re finished,” he said.

  Zelensky finally spotted his supervisor standing toward the front of the room and grabbed McCabe by the sleeve. In the chaos, no one saw them leave the lecture hall.

  “Where are we going?” McCabe asked.

  “Matthews is up front,” Zelensky said. “He’ll be stuck here for hours trying to calm everyone down.”

  “So?”

  “If he’s here, then he’s not at his computer.”

  “Dude, if we get caught on his computer…”

  “What will they do, fire us?” Zelensky asked with a grin.

  “They’ll throw us in jail!” McCabe whispered loudly. “Who would take care of Mr. Knuckles?”

  “If you don’t have a job, you won’t have money to feed your turtle! Look, all I have to do is put a backdoor in and then we can…modify our records.”

  Zelensky padded their records to show compliance with the new directives. So, when their boss showed up four days later, they were not worried. James Matthews was a crusty old NASA bureaucrat who started with NASA in the late eighties. He had fallen behind the technological curve sometime during Windows XP and was no longer able to understand the specifics of his own department. Thus, his department did whatever they wanted. If he ever asked questions, they merely responded with tech noise, and he silently stroked his chin as if he understood. McCabe and Zelensky were able to set their own work schedules, coming up with just enough nonsense to satisfy the old man’s queries. The best part was that since the work was theoretical, there was no deadline or need to show actual progress.