by S. B. Divya
“What do you have planned for tonight, cardo?” Welga subvocalized on their private channel. “Something worth deploying our full swarm?”
Connor raised his eyebrows suggestively in response.
Welga smiled and reached for the pitcher of water on the conference table beside her. A spasm rocked her arm. The entire pitcher tipped, sending water coursing over the edge and onto her lap.
“Goddamn it!”
Ammanuel raised an eyebrow before blanking on whatever they had on their visual. Connor narrowed his eyes.
“What was that?” he asked aloud.
Welga attempted to brush the water from her leggings. Smart-fabric dried fast, but too much liquid would fry its ability to transform. “Me being clumsy?”
He sent his next message via encrypted channel, in text: Bullshit. You’re never clumsy. And your arm jerked. It’s obvious in the top-down feed.
She sent her reply the same way: It’s nothing.
And how do you know that? he wrote back. Tremors are a classic side effect, and you’re coming off a brand-new, superfast zip.
Zips don’t have side effects anymore, remember?
That was what the designers had said about flow, too. Those final days of her mother’s life, watching Mama waste away, unable to swallow—Welga shuddered at the memory. Her mother had died from flow, not zips, but worry gnawed at her.
“This is the fourth time you’ve had a muscle spasm correlated with post-pill usage in the past two weeks,” Por Qué said.
Welga repressed a growl. She sent a reply to Connor. I have three months left on my contract. If it happens again after that, I’ll publicize my data. In the meantime, I’m not wasting my coin on a specialist.
That’s a long time to leave a pill-related symptom unreported. Connor’s expression softened. His fingertips twitched as he generated more text. I haven’t had to worry about you getting hurt in years. Don’t make me start again.
Christ, his look reminded her of her father’s in the weeks before Mama passed. His guilt trip was a shitty tactic, but his concern was genuine. While she’d been with ATAI and MARSOC, he’d been at a JIA desk watching over her and her squad, helping them find targets, routes, and enemies. It couldn’t have been easy.
Fine, I’ll send it to Nithya, she conceded. She’ll look at it for free, and if she thinks I need to take it seriously, then I’ll go further.
Welga’s sister-in-law designed juvers, not zips, but she was an expert-rated biogeneticist. Whether she’d give Welga any real input didn’t matter, as long as it kept Connor and Por Qué from nagging her.
“Por Qué, send my muscle spasm data to Nithya Balachandran,” she subvocalized, “with a note that she can make it low priority.”
People didn’t get shitty side effects from pills, not these days, not unless they went too cheap. Her team’s supply came from highly rated expert designs backed by deep-pocket funders like Briella Jackson. Her genome had tested compatible with zips, juvers, and buffs before she joined the Marines. She closed her eyes and remembered her mother’s dying body covered in scarlet patches and weeping sores. Mama died of an early flow design, genetically incompatible and poorly tested, one of millions of cases that led to global riots and then new laws. Those regulations from the seventies required pills to undergo thorough evaluation before the designs could be sold. They also provided a pressure valve for violence, allowing protesters to advertise their causes by attacking funders directly, rather than going after police or private property.
Her tremors couldn’t come from pills. Totally different symptoms from her mother’s. Totally different enhancement, too. She knew what dying looked like, and this wasn’t it.
WELGA
14. The recognition of intelligence lies at the root of our humanity. How we treat other intelligent life, therefore, reflects upon ourselves. If we wish to continue progressing as a life-form, we must push the envelope of our morality beyond the species.
—The Machinehood Manifesto, March 20, 2095
Fifteen minutes before Jackson’s meeting ended, they dosed themselves with regular quad-zips. No sense wasting the good stuff while sitting in traffic—but Purity Now didn’t attack during the transition from the office building to the car. Probably didn’t want to reuse the same site as Death to Bots, she thought. The chance of attack inside the convention center doubled as a result.
During the long, dull ride, the boss swapped their assignments. Connor would take point this time, with Welga on Jackson and Ammanuel still in the rear. With swarms of microcameras everywhere, no one could sneak up from behind, and the tipping public preferred a frontal attack with style.
Welga had fought Purity Now before. They often came up with something inventive, though she and her team would have an unfair advantage—for action and tips—with Jackson’s new pills. Near the end of their ride, the funder personally handed out another batch of them. Jackson timed it perfectly to their arrival at the Ramaswamy Convention Center.
The organic shapes of the massive building contrasted with the blocky residential hives that surrounded them. Engineered tree trunks formed the framework. Glass panes filled the spaces between them, their tints ranging from clear to smoky gray depending on the sun’s angle. Maintenance moth-bots flitted by, moving from one trunk to the next, and shepherded the necessary insects and nutrients for the trees’ health. Chennai had built the modern wonder of the world in hopes of drawing business from its sister city, Bengaluru. The strategy had worked until other major cities followed suit. Singapore now boasted the largest bioengineered building in the world, but this one never failed to amaze.
Welga trailed her fingers along the rough reddish-brown bark of the doorframe tree as they moved inside. The ceiling soared above them, its screen projecting an image of the sky outside. Springy, low-growing moss formed the floors. The primal smells of soil and petrichor and growing plants permeated the air.
In the lobby, heads turned. Other shield teams’ astonishment followed their unusual speed through the expansive area and down the hallway to the main auditorium. Welga allowed a satisfied grin to spread across her face. If Briella Jackson hadn’t wanted to advertise her new zip design, she wouldn’t have given it to them.
Jackson took her position at the lectern. Welga moved to stand below her, in front of the stage and facing the auditorium. Connor and Ammanuel took the wings. An attack here showed low probability—the world would be focused on the speech itself and irate at interruptions, never mind bystander injuries—but they launched their microdrones anyway. Welga scanned the audience members for known troublemakers. The seats were full. People crowded in the back, standing against the wall. All the bots in the room were registered caregivers.
The lights dimmed. Jackson began to speak. Welga only half listened to the words, a hemorrhage of biotech terms that she had little familiarity with. Jackson talked about pushing the frontiers of drug-based modification for humanity, about selective funding of projects and teams with high ratings, and about modeling and testing.
Welga understood snippets from conversations with Nithya, her sister-in-law, as well what she’d learned from her own mother.
“Blah blah blah, drugs and pills are great,” Connor said in their private stream.
She suppressed a snicker.
Jackson kept going with some bullshit about how they were poised at the cusp of humanity’s next great leap, bringing biotech in line with robotics and beyond.
“The same crap we’ve been fed for decades,” Welga subvocalized to Connor. “Promised again and again but never delivered.”
“It has to happen eventually, right? Either we keep up with the machines, or someone will finally figure out how to make them sentient, and they’ll take over.”
“There’s a third option: we keep going as we have been, with people supporting the machines who do the real work,” Welga said.
Soldiers like her, or exfactors with good financial backing, had augmented their bodies, but even with rap
id-healing pills and modern medicine, surgical alteration of humans was difficult and expensive. Also, nobody wanted to be a cyborg. That became a dirty word after the fifties, when people used body modifications to compete with machines. The resurgence in jobs for construction, surgery, farming, and other physical labor lasted until those workers’ bodies started breaking down, rejecting the augmentations or injuring their natural parts. Those who could reverse the changes escaped the worst, but plenty of others lost their lives too young.
After that, the workforce had resorted to half measures. Mechs like her father limited themselves to exoskeletons, virtual-reality visors, and haptic gloves to manipulate machinery. Researchers like her mother took cognitive-enhancement drugs and pills. When that had proven insufficient to compete with the WAIs, people turned into bot-nannies—glorified babysitters to accompany the intelligent machines that did the real work.
The promised land, always a few years out of reach, was to keep people human—mostly organic and outwardly the same—while enabling them to be as fast/strong/smart/reliable as the bots and WAIs. By some magic of biogenetic manipulation—not permanent, of course, lest humanity pollute the intentions of its Creator—everyone would become super capable. Or enter the leisure class. Or ascend to some digital faux godhood.
Welga would believe it when it happened. The market for enhancement pills and refined mech technology kept the funders rich, the designers employed, and the gigsters scrambling for work. Not dying wasn’t the same as having a fulfilling life. She’d applied to college thinking to follow in Mama’s footsteps and get a good, reliable living as a biogeneticist. When it turned out she couldn’t compete without using flow, she’d found meaning in the service. What started as a default turned into a vocation and then a mission. Even in 2078, very few female candidates passed the MARSOC assessment and selection tests, but Welga had always been strong. Martial arts. Dance. Fending off bullies who came after her little brother—all of it paid off in the Marine Corps. She thought she’d found her calling by defending the weak, protecting her country and its allies. She hadn’t expected betrayal from above.
Roaring applause shook her from old grooves of thought. Briella Jackson had finished her speech. Clearly not everyone shared Welga’s cynicism about the future.
A door to the side of the stage opened. Three people—the next speaker and two shields in coordinating turn-of-the-century outfits—entered and stood near the wall. Welga, Connor, and Ammanuel formed a triangle around Jackson, with Connor in front. They exited through the side door and sped through hallways to the adjacent hotel. Jackson would take most of her meetings from her room and didn’t have another public appearance for five hours. She’d probably order her meals from the in-room kitchen, too. They’d have little to do once they got her inside.
As they walked, the zip made Welga twitch at every nearby motion. Other than a small crowd at registration, the convention center was mostly empty. Tracking showed the bulk of the attendees in the main hall, listening to the next speaker. The map in Welga’s visual showed white dots for all the bots along their path. Some had already turned red, meaning that Platinum’s intel had discovered weapons on them. Many of those belonged to private citizens and would have no connection to protest groups. Humans appeared in green or gray—civilians and staff, no exfactors or registered protesters to deal with. Their primary concern now were the service bots, which could be hacked or modified to attack.
They entered an elevator. Welga’s muscles buzzed from the forced stillness. A tendon in her neck twitched. She tilted her head back to stretch it. The four of them formed a sexy two-dimensional pyramid in the mirrored ceiling.
The reflective surface bulged, then shattered. Glass rained over them.
Welga threw herself over Briella and pushed her to the floor. Ammanuel and Connor fired at the helmet-shaped drone that dropped from the ceiling.
“Por Qué, next floor, emergency stop!” Welga said.
A second drone appeared in the hole above. Welga shot it. The elevator doors parted. Connor ran out and around a corner. Welga pulled Jackson up and out of the enclosed space. Too much of a potential trap. Ammanuel stood in the doorway and shot upward into the elevator. Welga placed Jackson between herself and the wall.
“Troit, status!” Welga demanded.
“Bots amassing at the far end of the hall. I’m engaging.”
Welga expanded Connor’s feed. He fired at the first wave of machines. In another corner, she watched Ammanuel shoot at the elevator’s ceiling, the floor around them littered with shattered metal and plastic. The bots kept coming, one at a time through the hole, the words PURITY NOW stenciled in green on their sides.
Her map showed that they stood in an area of conference rooms. They hadn’t made it up to the residential section, nor would they until they cleared either the elevator or the way to the stairs.
She subvocalized to Hassan on the team channel, “Boss, what are the odds on that second elevator car?”
“We don’t have eyes in there. It’s moving, though.”
As if on cue, the second car’s doors parted. A person in a black suit stood inside.
Welga yelled, “Close the doors! Protest attack under way!”
Stupid civilian, you need to pay better attention to—
The figure moved at a blur, straight toward her and Jackson.
What? Welga blinked. I only have a sticky gun. She fired anyway. The pellet grazed the figure’s hip.
Goddamn, they’re fast!
A blade flashed in their hand.
Welga left Jackson and ran toward them. Knock them down.
They dodged.
Welga whirled.
They reached Jackson, slashed her throat, then stabbed up, right under the sternum.
What the fuck?
The blood brought forth all of Welga’s old combat instincts. She fired sticky pellets at the attacker until they toppled. Dark patches blossomed all over the enemy’s black suit. When their body stopped twitching, Welga approached. She hauled them off Jackson. Crimson stained the gray silk, but their client’s chest still rose and fell.
She scooped Jackson under the arms and dragged her away from the attack site. Ammanuel sprinted toward them, the elevator cleared at last.
“Cover me!” Welga ordered.
Ammanuel moved ahead of them. Gunfire from Connor continued in an erratic staccato.
“Boss, we need a room,” Welga subvocalized.
“Third door on your right,” Hassan replied.
It opened as they neared. She laid Jackson down gently, then yanked open her field kit.
“Por Qué, request access to Jackson’s vitals,” she said.
Ammanuel knelt on Jackson’s other side. They stanched the two wounds with pads as Welga rummaged for anything useful, like anticoagulants or topical juvers. Nothing. They were shields, not soldiers, and the kits had superficial crap like antibiotic ointment and bandages. Her display showed an alert from the medical team on its way to them. The juvers in her pocket were pills. Would they act fast enough to help? She slipped an internal wound-healer under Jackson’s tongue. Then, grasping at a stupid but desperate idea, she popped two of the pink surface-healers in her mouth, chewed them up, and spit them directly into Briella’s wound. Microcams swarmed at eye level, trying to get a close-up of her face, she guessed.
“Back off,” she said, glaring at them.
“Agent Troit is wounded,” Por Qué informed Welga.
Ammanuel moved to look after their teammate.
“Stay with Jackson,” Welga snapped at them.
The room was secure according to intel, but this job had gone so far sideways that she didn’t trust their information. She peered into the hallway. Both elevator cars stood with the doors locked open. Empty.
“Troit, retreat,” she ordered. “I’ll cover from here.”
They gave up real estate to the bots as Connor moved back, but the room’s door would provide a defensible bottleneck.
> “Inside,” Welga said to Connor.
She lobbed two sticky grenades into the crowd of approaching machines and slammed the door. That should buy them a few minutes. Whoever backed this had serious money, and it sure as hell wasn’t Purity Now.
A ten-centimeter gash ran across Connor’s left side. Welga couldn’t tell how deep, but Hassan would’ve flagged Connor’s health if it were in danger.
“Por Qué, set my shirt to basic.”
She tied the beige cloth over absorbent pads from Connor’s kit. She could see white around his irises. Pain or fear? Either way, he’d never experienced true combat before.
“Take all your juvers and two pain pills,” Welga said, extracting his pillbox from a pocket and pressing it into his hand.
You’ll be fine, she wanted to say. The world knew their personal relationship—that was one reason their fans loved them—but she wouldn’t betray his fear.
“Bots detected outside the door,” Por Qué said.
“Goddamn it,” Welga said. “Ammanuel, you cover the room. I’ll take the bots.”
“Jackson’s pulse is weak,” Connor announced on the team channel.
“Where the hell is the med team?” Welga spat.
Hassan replied, “They’re blocked. Elevators are locked down. We’re checking an emergency stairwell. Ramírez, the sooner you get the hallway clear of bots, the sooner they can get through.”