Take her out now, before it’s too late.
“You’re such a bastard,” said Mercury.
Kill her now.
The Raptor stared at her, motionless.
“I’ve been playing out this scene in my head for years,” said Mercury. “What I’d say when I finally met you. How I’d eloquently convince you that it was wrong of you to run. How it devastated Mom and almost screwed me up. How you might react to all this. Dozens of scenarios, playing over and over again.” She looked at the Raptor, waiting for him to say something.
It’s psychological warfare. She’s softening you up.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a long pause. “The Agency wasn’t going to let me come home anyway. They would have locked me away in some lab and experimented on me for the rest of my life. Running was the only option.”
“Lock you away? The Agency takes care of its own. We would have trained you, protected you, made you better. They said you were a good agent before your accident. I’m not at all certain that losing your ability to feel pain made you a better one, but we could have worked with that.”
So that’s how you tolerate the procedures so well. Very interesting.
The Raptor was angry at Mercury for carelessly spilling his secret, but the ramifications of that could wait.
“You’re CIA?”
“Yes,” said Mercury. “I joined up partly because they offered me the resources to look for you.” She took another step closer. “You lost more than you know in that explosion. You lost your humanity. Have you ever bothered to learn about what had happened to your family? Did it even occur to you to try?”
Don’t let her get too close!
“Some faint echo of my father is still inside you, or you would have pulled the trigger. It’s never too late for redemption. Come back into the fold.”
He stared at Mercury, trying hard to see the grown-up version of his Leigh. Did she have his eyes? Her mother’s cheekbones? He couldn’t be sure.
“Why are you here?”
“I’m here to save you, among other things.” She lifted up a small backpack. “There’s an EMP grenade in there. I have to get inside and wipe out Antey’s nanite lab.”
“Save me? You didn’t even know I’d be here.”
“It adds up,” said Mercury. “They are aware of your quest to … better yourself through science. They must have lured you in with a promise of superior technology, but it’s a trap. Their new nanites are a Trojan horse. Once they’re activated, Antey will literally own you.”
She’ll say anything to complete her mission.
“Help me do this,” said Mercury. “Help me, and come back home.”
An operative’s worst enemy is doubt. He stared into Mercury’s eyes while he was trying to decide. Eyes that looked so much like his own.
The Raptor lowered his gun.
We didn’t want to do this, but you’ve left us no choice.
The Raptor’s body tensed up as millions of nanites fused to his nerve endings activated at once, wresting control of his motor functions away from his own mind. The Raptor twitched once, twice, fighting for control.
“What’s happening?” Mercury frowned and took another half-step forward. Then her eyes widened. “You already did it, didn’t you? You already had the procedure?”
The Raptor wanted to speak, but his body wasn’t responding. He felt like a marionette on strings, the puppet masters forcing his body to make sluggish, jerky moves.
The Antey nanites controlled his nervous system, but not his brain chemistry. He could still issue commands to his implant chip. The Raptor activated the emergency protocol.
He never expected to use the failsafe like this. It was a way to remove a batch of nanites with faulty design or programming. Millions of pre-existing, self-replicating nanites in his blood stream activated with the sole purpose of finding and destroying every microscopic robot that didn’t share their digital signature. They would purge the Antey tech from his body and spare the older, more reliable upgrades, but it would take time.
“We can still help you,” said Mercury. “Let me complete my mission. The EMP blast will take out all the nanites they cooked up here, including the ones inside you.” She reached into the backpack.
The Antey nanites pulled on the marionette strings. In one fluid motion the Raptor raised the gun and fired several bullets into Mercury’s heart. She gasped and fell backward.
The operative’s worst enemy is doubt. The Raptor couldn’t be sure if the woman sprawled on the linoleum tile floor of the lobby was really Leigh, or perhaps a competent agent who sought to take advantage of his Achilles’ heel. All he could think of was the last day he’d spent with his family. The three of them sat on the couch, watching cartoons and peeling tangerines. Seven-year-old Leigh laughed, her little hands covered in citrus juice. The scent of tangerines filled the living room.
She was an impostor. She would have said anything to get you to lower the weapon.
After all these years it was difficult to be sure. Was the Raptor feeling pain, or just turmoil? He couldn’t be certain.
You were wavering. We had no choice but to take charge.
The Raptor wiggled his fingers. He was slowly regaining control as the nanites in his bloodstream exterminated their unwelcome brethren. In a few more minutes, the purge would be complete. Then, all too quickly, he found himself able to move again.
We’ve released you. Take a few minutes. Then come inside.
He took small steps toward the body. Should he hug her? Was that the appropriate—the human—thing to do? He settled for reaching out and touching her forehead. He listened to his heart but it remained numb, like his fingers against Mercury’s skin.
He reached for the backpack, and took out the EMP grenade. He held up the sleek device the size of a shoe box and studied it.
Somewhere, faceless Antey executives watched his every move, ready to press the button and to steal his body again at the first sign of trouble. They didn’t know that their nanites were all but wiped out by now. The Raptor could carry the EMP right into the heart of their precious lab and press the button, and there was no one around who could even slow him down.
But then, his nanites would be destroyed too, along with most of his cyber-implants. Nearly three decades of surgeries, enhancements, and upgrades would be negated with a single click. He would lose his advantages, his speed, and his strength. He would become nothing more than a damaged human.
The Raptor dropped the device onto the floor and stepped on it hard, grinding it into the ground with his heel. “I’m coming in,” he said to the cameras. Then he walked to the elevator. Behind him, the puddle of Mercury’s blood was pooling toward the broken mess of plastic and microchips.
He stepped inside the elevator. The sound of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture from the speakers mixed with the scent of tangerines the Raptor had allowed himself. The medley filled the elevator cabin as it descended into the bowels of the building.
An operative’s worst enemy is doubt but, for once, the Raptor was certain of his next move. Secure in their belief that they could control him, the Antey officials would let him get as close as he needed. EMP wasn’t the only way to destroy a lab. He wondered what truths about herself Tretyakova would reveal in the final moments of her life.
The elevator came to a stop and dinged, the doors sliding open. The Raptor tightened the grip on his gun and stepped outside.
This story originally appeared in Galaxy’s Edge magazine.
As a fun experiment, I wrote “Doubt” to the tune of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (which is referenced in the text). To my mind, the rise and fall in the action is sort-of, kind-of consistent with how the music flows in this classical piece.
Antey Corporation was a real entity until it merged with another corporation in 2002 to form “Almaz-Antey,” which, according to Wikipedia, was the 12th-largest defense contractor in the world as of 2013. They’re pretty much Russia’s Halliburton and they
have a murky history worthy of a techno-thriller, including the murder of their General Director in 2003 which was linked by investigators to the company’s internal politics.
In Russian, the word Antey means Antaeus, the son of Poseidon and Gaia in Greek mythology.
SPIDERSONG
We listen to the spidersong. The spiders are far away, just at the edge of our senses, whispering a haunting and beautiful melody into our minds. The grown-ups are oblivious, as always. They are having several conversations at once around the campfire, laughing and gossiping. It’s a nuisance because we can’t enjoy the spidersong nearly as well, not with all the distractions. We use a reliable trick—we have Sheila ask for a story.
Sheila is the youngest and she hates to speak using words even more than the rest of us, but we nudge her along, and she tugs on old Jens’ coat. He is only too happy to oblige. Kids and grown-ups alike gather around the fire. Everyone else quiets down and settles in to listen to Jens.
“What story would you like, dear,” asks Jens. “Do you want to hear about the home world, or about our voyage among the stars?”
“Nah, that stuff’s boring,” says Sheila. “Tell us about the spiders.”
Jens frowns. The grown-ups don’t like the spiders at all. But Sheila looks pleadingly up at Jens with big hazel eyes and he surrenders.
“When our ship crashed nineteen years ago, things were real bad. We had very little food and supplies and only a vague idea about how to live off the land. There were many problems and dangers to overcome, but the spiders—they were the worst.”
Some of the grown-ups shift uncomfortably. They stare past the silk-covered trees at the edge of the clearing and into the darkness of the forest, fearing an ambush. We know there are no spiders lurking nearby; their song is still very far away.
“The spiders of this world were the scariest creatures we’ve ever encountered,” Jens says. “They were fast, deadly and huge—three times the size of a man. Too much for us to handle. We lost seven people in two months and had no choice but to abandon the original camp and move further away from the forest.”
Eva, the eldest of the children, shares her memory of the crash site. It’s all corroded metal and scorched ground—an uncomfortable, almost alien place. We break away from the image and take solace in the spidersong, which is a little louder now and very soothing.
“Years went by, and the rescue we had hoped for never came. We made a life for ourselves in the relative safety of the plains. But our fledgling colony needed the forest—we gathered plants, hunted game and collected spider silk, despite the danger.”
Kyle caresses his spider silk sweater. It’s very rugged, but soft and warm, and all of us like how it feels against Kyle’s fingertips.
“Life was very tough for us back then. We sent hunting parties into the forest to get what we needed, but the spiders hunted us in turn. Not a year went by without us losing at least one person to the bugs. It was bad, until the children began to grow up. Until we realized that those born on this planet could sense the spiders somehow, from a distance.”
Eva and Kyle share a memory from when they were very little. In it they walk past the silk-covered trees to fill a bucket of water from the nearby lake. Suddenly, a spider emerges—far from the deep forest its kind inhabits. Eva and Kyle are terrified. The spider looms over them, but it doesn’t attack. Instead, it prods and probes at their thoughts. Then it fills their heads with music. Fear evaporates. They are mesmerized by the melody. Clumsily, the children sing back. For several minutes the spider listens patiently to their attempts, and then retreats gracefully toward the trees.
Jens pats Sheila on the head. “We don’t know what it is that makes you kids born on this world different, but we are thankful anyhow. This is why we bring kids on every hunting trip now. You can tell us when the spiders are coming. We haven’t lost a single person in the last few years.”
Safe and comfortable by the fire the grown-ups are nodding off. Jens continues to tell stories, but they are only noise. We listen to the spidersong. It is loud now, a chorus from many spiders who are gathering, dozens of them drawing nearer and surrounding the camp. The spiders are aware of us, and we of them. We aren’t afraid. We are both of this world, the spiders and us. Just like the spiders we are a hive—able to share thoughts and emotions, and be close with each other in a way our parents could never understand. It’s only the adults—the intruders, the aliens whose minds are mute—that the spiders hate.
The spiders are singing a war song. It is full of joy, anticipation of victory and demise of their enemies. We sing back to the spiders with our minds, strong and confident this time, our thoughts in full harmony with theirs.
They are almost here.
This story originally appeared at Daily Science Fiction. The audio of it was also produced by the Drabblecast. It’s the only story to date I’ve managed to write in plural first person present tense.
Like so many of my shorter stories, this was written for a contest. The prompt was a selection of photographs of spiderweb-enshrouded trees from National Geographic. Heavy flooding in Pakistan had caused thousands of spiders to escape the rising water into the trees and make their homes there. But those were just regular spiders, and where is the fun in that?
THINGS WE LEAVE BEHIND
Some of my earliest memories are of books. They were everywhere in our apartment back in the Soviet Union; shelves stacked as high as the ceiling in the corridor and the living room, piles of them encroaching upon every nook and available surface like some benign infestation.
Strangers came by often, sometimes several times a day, and browsed the shelves. They spoke to my father, always quietly, as though they were in a library. Cash and books exchanged hands in either direction but there was little haggling, both parties reluctant to insult the books by arguing over their price like they might with a sack of potatoes.
I learned to read at the age of three. My parents showed off this talent proudly, bribing me with candy to sound out long, complicated words like “automobile” and “refrigerator” in front of their friends. I found it more difficult to pronounce the harsh Russian R’s than to put together the words written in Cyrillic block letters on scraps of paper.
Growing up, I struggled to grasp the complexity of the world around me. It didn’t help that everything was in flux, changes nearly as profound as the ones happening to my body. “Perestroika” and “glasnost” were the complicated words of the day, and I didn’t quite understand them, even though I could easily read them in newspaper headlines.
My father’s engineering job required him to constantly travel to sites in Western Ukraine, overseeing the installation and maintenance of heating and cooling systems in factories all over the region. He spent at least a week out of every month away from home and brought back suitcases full of books from every trip.
For a country with high literacy rates and voracious readers, it was surprisingly difficult to buy a good book. Store shelves were full of dusty reference materials and Marxist propaganda, but nothing one would want to read.
It went like this: the state-controlled book publisher produced a print run of “The Three Musketeers” by Dumas. One hundred thousand copies would be printed and distributed to stores across the Soviet Union. When a shop in a small town in Western Ukraine received its allocation of five copies, the store manager paid the retail price of under a ruble per book into the register and the books never reached the shelves. The manager then resold the copies to someone like my father, at a significant markup.
My father brought the books home with him and a stream of strangers would pick them up one at a time, paying cash or trading in volumes of even greater value. It is how he grew his collection on an engineer’s salary.
“This country is disintegrating,” my mother often complained upon his return. “The way things are going, there may be strife, perhaps even a civil war. This isn’t a good place for Misha to grow up.”
“He’ll alway
s be safe here,” said Father with utmost confidence. “You know this to be true.”
Mother frowned and let the subject drop for a time, but it would come up again, with increasing frequency. After I went to bed, I often heard the muffled sounds of an argument coming from the kitchen.
My mother put her foot down when it became possible to legally emigrate.
“Things aren’t going well, Valentin,” she told my father. “Don’t you see this, when you go off on your business trips? We should leave while we can. Who knows how long it’ll be until the government clamps down again? Last time they let people go was in the seventies, and it may be another twenty-year wait if we miss our chance this time around.”
“I have an ethical responsibility to our neighbors,” he said, “to all the people of Belgorod. This town needs me in such chaotic times, more than ever. And while we live here, our family won’t come to harm, no matter how bad things might get elsewhere in Russia.”
“The only responsibility that matters is to Misha,” she said. “Even if you make the whole town calm and pleasant and secure, like a gilded cage, what happens later? He’ll be drafted into the military and sent away for two whole years, that’s what. How do you plan on keeping him safe then?”
After many versions of this discussion, some calm, some ending in screaming and tears, Father surrendered. Mother reached out to our distant relatives in America and asked them to help us apply for asylum as political refugees.
My father’s last stand on the issue was a few days after we received word that our status was being considered, and we’d need to come in for an asylum hearing at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. He pulled me aside when Mother wasn’t home.
“You’re almost twelve now, and you can think for yourself. You have a say, as part of this family. If you don’t want to go, and I don’t want to go, then your mother can’t force the issue.”
Father spoke earnestly, almost desperately.
Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma and Other Stories Page 4