by PJ Manney
He faced a choice. Smash into the face of Qi Jiguang’s rock? Or let go at the right time as the cable and planks swung down and jump, trying to time his descent for the least damage possible? He estimated the trajectory and impact zone on the rock face. It was a jagged and uneven surface, sure to split his body in half. He guessed the drop’s distance. Gravity would do its worst.
He chose the rock face. In a half second, he put the planks between himself and the face and hit it full force. The planks cushioned his head. But a space between the planks made a wedge. It broke his torso right at the waist. His legs dangled and wiggled, trying to find purchase, but with no leverage to lift his legs, he couldn’t push against the rocks with his feet. After useless bicycling, he let his legs dangle. But he still had use of his arms and upper torso. He tried to climb the rope, but he made it only a few feet. More skin ripped from his hands and arms, leaving only metal on metal, and he began to slip slowly down the cable. He gave up and slid as far as he could.
Releasing his grip, he jumped a few feet onto the rocks below. But without the use of his legs, he lay in a crumpled heap at the base of the rock face. And the tide was coming in.
Offshore, he saw a signal light from what looked like a fishing boat. His attackers messaged with a light back. These guys were old-school.
As he tried to figure out if the light was a Chinese equivalent of Morse code, there was a small flare and a WHOOSH from the distance. Suddenly, the rocks above him exploded and crashed onto his already broken body. He did an accounting: legs useless, spine broken at waist, arms crushed and dangling. His battery, meshnet, and communications worked. That was something.
He waited for their next move while sending all the data he could back to the team. He knew the rest of his comrades had their hands full with his new meat body, but he needed all the data analysis he could manage to find Dr. Who. If he failed, they’d lose their chance to save her, and he was desperate not to let that happen.
After 20.7 minutes, a dinghy came to rest at the base of the rocks. A man jumped out of the dinghy and came straight for Tom 2.
Time to play dead. Tom 2 made anything that still worked look like it didn’t. His only thought: Take me with you.
A deep voice, from the area of the dinghy, yelled in Wenzhou dialect, “Well? Broken or not?”
Tom 2 was shifted, dangled, inspected. He released all his joints and didn’t move or focus his eyes. He looked like a life-sized marionette.
In a high-pitched voice, the man holding him answered, “Nothing works.” He tried to lift Tom 2. “This thing’s heavy! Help me.”
“Leave it for the tide,” said Deep Voice.
“You’re nuts,” said High Voice. “One cousin has a doll factory and another does electronics. They could copy this in a week. Think of the money we’ll make. Better than whale shark, tuna, even kidnapping!”
“We need to get rid of it before we hand off the hakgwei,” said Deep Voice. “Don’t want trouble.”
A quick search of hakgwei found it as a derogatory Mandarin term for a dark-skinned foreigner, literally “black ghost.”
Cai/Ye was correct. The fishing boat carried Dr. Who. And it sounded like they had her alive.
Tom 2 heard footsteps, then had a sense of being dragged by four arms, even though his tactile sensors were offline.
“Watch out!” said Deep Voice.
They dropped him and leapt for higher ground. Tom 2 heard the wave coming in, then the gurgle of water in his circuits. Qi Jiguang’s lesson was clear. Beware of wannabe pirates, regardless of who they worked for. Real pirates would have done a better job.
Then, silence. His audio apparatus had failed. He had failed. He would never find Dr. Who.
Then, nothing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The body of Edwin Rosero, a.k.a. Tom, awoke to music. Disturbed’s angry symphonic cover of “The Sound of Silence” should have been playing from his private server, but instead, songs that he had never heard before invaded his head: the Game’s “El Chapo” featuring Skrillex, Kendrick Lamar’s “The Blacker the Berry,” J. Cole, Future, Pitbull, Lighter Shade of Brown. The overlapping beats made him woozy. A torrent of input flooded this body’s undamaged auditory complex, stimulated by his server.
He hadn’t expected this brain to do that.
His head and torso were raised, allowing the surgical inflammation to drain. Looking down his body, he saw limbs. He looked down at his right foot and willed it to move. It twitched.
Nausea overwhelmed him. He breathed deeply, trying to relax, hoping he wouldn’t retch uncontrollably. But he couldn’t reconcile the mental image he had of “Tom” with this body. He had been Peter Bernhardt. Then he had been surgically altered to look like Talia’s father, and that body became Thomas Paine. He even identified with the morphed digital image in Veronika’s Veil. But this was different. His skin was a bit darker than the cáfe con leche tint that, with melanotan pills, he had maintained as Thomas Paine. At his new height, he didn’t fit the bed. His feet dangled off the edge.
A wave of uncontrollable and fluid emotion broke on the sharp edges of his digital intellect. He was alive again. He was human.
But this wasn’t him. It couldn’t be him. Oh God. What had he done?
A cry escaped his lips, and his eyes filled with tears. He choked on the runoff in his throat. Without thinking, he tried to roll to his right to dry heave off the side of the bed, but the bed’s railing was up. He hit his head hard and bounced back onto his pillow. At least he had some control of his body, even if it was involuntary. He cried anew.
Then, remarkably, unbelievably, he felt something he hadn’t for a long time: an erection. What. The. Actual. Fuck. He was a weeping, confused, genitally aroused, unholy mess. He hadn’t thought about sex since he died, and he couldn’t help but wonder if Carter/Winter had gone through the same thing. Or was s/he still that much better at everything?
That’s when he noticed Veronika sitting to his left, a mixed reality unit over her eyes, her hands shaping the air. He tried to shift so the sheets wouldn’t outline his body so obviously, but he wasn’t successful.
Veronika smiled knowingly. “Dude, don’t mind me.”
He wasn’t sure if he was glad or embarrassed that she was here to see him in this condition. He tried speaking, but his lips and tongue felt like they weren’t connected.
“Ya . . . here?” he asked.
“Never left your side,” she said.
“Wha . . . ya . . . do . . . ” His words slurred.
“Hacking government and medical. Gotta dump all of Edwin Rosero’s identity, financials, and biometrics on file. He has to, like, disappear from anyplace I can reach.”
“Ya . . . know how?”
“Yeah. It’s one of the tricks Mama Who taught me.”
“Mama. Neva’ . . . tol’ me . . . how . . . ya know ha.”
“How well can you know anyone on the net?” Veronika winked.
“Pre . . . y well.” He tried to nod at her air-processing, but the nausea hit hard again. Not moving was the way to go.
“There’s always levels you can’t get to,” said Veronika. “So people give up, and like, work with what they’ve got. That causes lots of, like, false assumptions. I could have their minds and thoughts splayed out like a dissected cadaver for my study, but we all hold secrets even we can’t figure out.”
“Tha’ why . . . ya . . . follow me? Ya try ta . . . know me?”
“You got me.” She grinned.
“Who . . . makin’ . . . me now?”
“Who’s making your identity?” she asked.
“Ya,” he said. It was tiring to talk.
“No one,” said Veronika. “No records. No false ID. You’ll be a ghost. Rare in the First World. But with, like, something extra.”
She reached into her messenger bag and pulled out a plastic baggy. Inside was a miniscule ID tag, more microbullet than circuit board.
“Tag . . . ?” he asked.
<
br /> “Yeah, and release. Like a mountain lion. But the most connected lion ever. This little baby opens a lot of doors. And you’ll leave no trace.”
“Ha . . . do . . . ya . . . ?” He stopped, exhausted.
“How do I know? As sure as, well, you can’t be completely sure. I am dealing with, like clearances, privacy, deletion codes. I’d say, just kinda, like, I-know-my-shit sure.”
Who the fuck was this woman? Tom wondered. “How . . . ?”
“Never ask a woman her age. Or guess her mole friends.”
“Or . . . how ya make . . . mo-ney?” asked Tom.
Veronika grinned and kept working.
He was uncomfortable, and it wasn’t just the surgery. How did he attract all these women with hidden agendas? The déjà vu was overwhelming. He wanted to disappear back into anesthetic oblivion. How had he done this again? Was this the universe’s fate for him? To repeat the same cycle of reincarnation into a new face, body, and technology and be used as a pawn until he could figure out the real game plan? Would he ever get off the wheel of samsara—the continual reincarnation cycle of birth and death—and stop having to save humanity from itself? And from him? Could he even save himself?
By asking, he knew he wasn’t headed for nirvana anytime soon.
Instead, he’d have to undergo physical therapy and mental acrobatics, again, to get this body up and running after its atrophy in the hospital unit—again. The tears came, again.
There was a knock on the door, and a familiar bald head poked in. When Steve saw Tom awake and responsive, he couldn’t help but smile. Steve was a great doctor, as attentive and skilled as they came. Tom just wished he were more supportive of the bigger picture.
“Checking in. How do you feel?” Steve asked.
“He . . . lp?” said Tom.
“Sucks to be him,” said Veronika. “But he’s speaking well. Forgot to tell him he shouldn’t bother trying.”
Tom tried to stick his tongue out at her, but the room spun and he stopped.
After a quick examination of Tom’s vitals, wounds, and neurological responses, Steve pulled up a rolling stool and sat near Tom’s head. “You’re healing remarkably well,” he said. “But you know that. And you know, probably better than I do, how I feel about all this.”
Tom simply nodded once. It was all he could manage.
“I want to stay and support Talia,” Steve continued. “But you continually challenge me with what it means to be a doctor. I know you’re in pain. But I’m in pain, too.” He gestured at Tom’s bandages around his head. “That’s my pain. I didn’t go into medicine to do this. I became a doctor to cure people of things that might kill them. So they could see their lives, and kids, and dreams become reality. Do you understand?”
Tom nodded once again.
“I’ll be here as long as you recuperate. But then I have to go. And take care of real people. I don’t know what that will mean for all of us. I’m sorry.”
Tom wasn’t up to arguing. Both left unsaid what might happen to Talia if Steve left. She would have to choose between them.
Tom closed his eyes to feign sleep. He didn’t have to pretend for long.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The first words Tom 2 heard were whispered in a deep, motherly, and familiar voice: “Anybody in there? You hooked up yet?”
Tom 2 swiveled a single working eye toward the sound. It was dark, so he turned on the infrared camera. Dr. Who’s red-washed face took up the camera’s entire frame. She held his head in her hands and was studying his eye socket in a meager shaft of light from the open seam between an ill-fitting door and doorframe.
Confirming first that he was hooked up to his satellite communications, he immediately sent another encrypted SOS to Ruth and Miss Gray Hat so they could get a GPS fix on him. They responded that they got both his earlier messages and were working on a way to free both him and Dr. Who.
His eye swiveled to the maximum of its range. They were in a tight storage closet filled with fishing gear, cleaning supplies, and paperwork. “You fixed me?”
At the sound of Thomas Paine’s gruff voice, Dr. Who’s eyes filled with tears. She whispered, “Oh, thank the good Lord in heaven. It is you!”
“How’d you know I was me?”
“I didn’t. But ya look so much like Peter Bernhardt. And in a sexbot? How in the hell didya do that? Didn’t know if it was some cruel joke or whether to laugh or cry.”
“Miss me?” asked the robot.
“You got no idea.” She sniffled. “Thought I’d never hear a friend’s voice again.”
“Missed you, too, Doc.” He wished he had hands and arms so he could pat and console her. “So what kind of mess do we have?”
“Not sure,” she whispered. “But I can fake my way ’round a circuit board and did some rewirin’. It was all there. Just jiggled around, salty and wet. Now you got one eye. One ear. Throat speakers weren’t damaged, but your jaw’s broken and mouth won’t move.” She pried opened his jaws and looked down his throat. “Pretty cushioned inside.” She lifted up a loose arm. It swung on broken hydraulics. “Not much else, sorry to say. Looks like this was a nice piece ’a work.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “We’re getting you out of here.”
“Hope so, baby.” She wiped her runny nose on her sleeve and didn’t look hopeful. “We have to stay in here till you figure it out. Only place they don’t got cameras or mics, I think.”
“How’d I end up with you?”
She pointed beyond the closet door. “I’m in that room. They tried to fix ya, so they rinsed ya with fresh water and stuck ya in a giant bag of rice to dry out. Still in your hair.” She picked a few grains out from the strands as she spoke. “Kinda genius, thinkin’ ya was just a big waterlogged GO. But they couldn’t get ya to work, so they threw ya in here. I crawled into here with ya and cried loud, gave ’em a show, while I worked out what I could do.”
“Try to keep me with you,” said Tom 2. “All the communications are inside my head, but the CPU and boards are in my chest.”
“Torso’s hangin’ on by a couple of wires near the clavicle to the battery and processors. And don’t think I’m runnin’ your football outta here under my arm. Can barely walk.”
“We’ll see.” He quickly analyzed the schematics left in files from the Companibots hackers. There were small auxiliary batteries in the head, but how could she access them without tools? And he didn’t’ know if they were charged or how long they’d last. And could she uncouple the processors from the chest?
While he puzzled out the engineering, he asked, “Any idea why they took you?”
“Sure do.” Her eyes were downcast. She said no more.
He waited. Meanwhile, Miss Gray Hat messaged back that they had his coordinates, were analyzing possible destinations based on the ship’s travel vectors, and had a suggestion for him to ponder: What if they created a phantom ship?
Now there was an idea.
Dr. Who sighed and finally said, “I’m sorry, honey. They pumped me full ’a drugs. No idea how much I gave away. But I’m just bait, with some bonus pain for the independent financial and identity markets thrown in. Think I was supposed ta work on some blockchain business and mess things up generally, with them threatening ta take my kids, grandkids.” She looked like she might cry again.
“That’s not bonus pain,” said Tom 2. “That’s a huge thing they’re pulling off. It will change the balance of power in the world. So why are you bait?”
“It’s you they want. And here ya are,” she said.
“They’ve gone after all the copies of my message they can find. They’re demonizing me, changing my history, everything about me. I had to destroy the links to the Memory Palace and hide. What else can they do to me?”
“Not just you, sugar. Ya seen what’s left of the US?”
His head tried to snort, but the nasal sounds didn’t work.
“You’re part of a bigger plan,” she continued. “Don’t know
exactly. But they want to resurrect ya.”
“How? Why?” he asked.
“Don’t know,” said Dr. Who. “That’s all I could make of what they let slip.”
“Who are ‘they’?”
“The voices of some determined and frightened American assholes. Led by some awful lofty and effete voice I’d swear on my mama’s bosom was Carter Potsdam. But ya said ya destroyed the Memory Palace, so he’d be gone, too. Who else ya know talks ’bout you like that?”
“He copied himself and escaped. He’s even downloaded into a human female named Winter. But it’s Carter’s AHI pulling the strings.”
She looked stunned. “Never thought I’d live long enough to see that.”
“I’ve got a human body, too, back on the Zumwalt.”
She blew out a puff of air. “Damn, honey, I think you’re playin’ right into their plan.”
He received a single encrypted word from Miss Gray Hat: Diversion.
“Okay,” said Tom 2. “The gang thinks a phantom ship may work, and they want a diversion. I’m good at that. Turn my head around so I can see what’s in the closet.” She did, and he saw a mop and some rags. He applied a Chinese translation app to all the container labels: various cleaning supplies, a copious amount of paper saved for government-mandated recycling, and his dispensable parts, anything from the neck down that didn’t house the processors and batteries in his chest.
“They may come here soon. Deliver my dinner tray,” said Dr. Who.
“Then we work faster. Now open the closet door a centimeter and put my eye to it so I can see what’s in there.” The room had no windows, and the door was made of steel and had locks on both sides. It looked like they had stripped the room of anything obviously useful and left just a folding metal bed with a bare mattress and an old blanket.
He ran all the items and materials through a search engine, looking for any combination of supplies that might work to free them. Some search results were referenced with the Darwin Awards. They were handed out annually—and posthumously—to those who attempted stupid behaviors that got them removed from the gene pool. Perhaps he and Dr. Who would join their nominees shortly.