I look at today’s hands. Thelma and Louise’s primary design considerations are to blend in—if it would cause a bulge or a joint that couldn’t pass for baseline human, it has to go. Alas, despite the fact that my prosthetics need their own sensors and storage, circuits are far bulkier than nerves, leaving the manufacturer with the unfortunate design consideration of having to pack more functionality into a cramped space.
So the artificial muscles have to be thin enough to be strapped over batteries molded to look like biceps. The sensors jammed into the remaining crevices must be small and underpowered. I’m capped at a percentage multiplier of human speeds because the muscles have to mimic human movement convincingly.
Thelma and Louise feel like I’m trying to imitate a body I’ve already amputated.
Opposite Cat hops down from her charger to vacuum my neck. I wriggle. I never taught her that trick—she’s just learned to vacuum me when I’m stressed out. I could dig around in her neural networks to root out her motivations, but then I’d find some pragmatic rationale like my body temperature rises when I’m upset and I shed more skin flakes.
I prefer to think she harbors some affection for me. So I “pet” her, thumbing the reset button on her neck to send her back to her charge dock.
Slightly more relaxed, I buckle a pair of .45s to my hips; Thelma and Louise can draw and target independently. That’s something, at least. And my showroom legs have a few tricks, though my sensors will be almost useless underneath the blue jeans. This button-down shirt’s too light, lacking my body armor’s reassuring weight.
I don’t bother putting on clothes in the lab unless I know I have visitors, which I never do. In combat, I’m naked beneath my protective layers of body armor.
Putting on clothes feels like attending a masquerade.
I take my motorbike—a Harley so elderly it’s grandfathered in under St. Louis’s otherwise-strict auto-drive rules. It’s so old it doesn’t have onboard computers to log where I travel, which can be handy on the occasions I want to disable my GPSes so my location traces won’t be subpoenable in a court case. (They could piece my route together from the images the auto-drive cars snap as they navigate the roads, of course. Or by scanning social-media accounts to find people posting photos of the old-timey guy on the gas-powered bike. There’s no way to go completely dark these days; the best you can do is make it difficult to track you.)
I roar my Harley into gear and head out to the first staged rendezvous at the Express Mart, feeling underpowered and underequipped for a $3-million mission.
* * *
The meetup locale is Shaky Joe’s, a biker bar on St. Louis’s edge. I walk in as the opening band bursts into an uncomfortable flourish of crunchy guitar chords; they’re working a little too hard for the room. Tonight’s crowd has come here to have a beer, blow off some steam, maybe find a cheerful fuck.
I close my eyes, breathe in. There’s too many people here. I should pop a tranquilizer, but I need to be sharp in case something happens.
The crowd looks cheerfully scraggly, as I’d expect them to in this day and age. They’re mostly ex-truckers who still haven’t figured out what to do twenty years after the self-driving trucks rolled out and devastated America’s economy. That little technological achievement rendered 6 percent of America’s workforce redundant, though the trucker culture remains; some have become spare-parts mechanics, others have taken to doing small jobs for anyone who’ll pay ’em beer money in the underground economy. A too-significant number have curled up inside any bar that’ll let them drink themselves to death on their government stipend.
Yet though America’s remaining blue-collar work is drying up, destroyed by increasing automation, there’ll always be a residue of folks who bellow out old Kid Rock songs—even though Kid Rock was in a wheelchair when they were teenagers.
These bandana-wearing motherfuckers are America’s new Amish, and they’d stomp my ass hard if they noticed my prosthetic armaments. They’d take my technology as a challenge, another souped-up replacement for human skill, and some drunk asshole would see whether he could take me down before my defenses came online.
And what would happen then? Would I have to kill someone if they all rushed me?
I stare out at the crowd, calculating threat responses, unable to make eye contact because I keep envisioning myself hurting them.
“Hey, sailor.” A pretty redheaded white girl curls her arms around my bicep. I freeze, not encouraging her; Thelma’s batteries generate heat akin to body warmth, and I’ve got a millimeter-thick pseudoflesh layer that’ll pass on casual touch, but if this girl squeezes she’ll discover unyielding titanium beneath her fingers.
I can’t hurt her. I can’t.
“Buy a girl a drink?” she asks.
“Sorry.” I scan the crowd for Trish. “I’ve got a date.”
“Damn right ya do, dipshit. It’s me.”
I look down at the girl’s face for the first time. Fresh razor burn peeks out from beneath a layer of discreet foundation makeup. But Trish’s lips have been painted a deep kissable burgundy, her sharp cheeks softened with rouge; and instead of her usual off-the-shoulder cocktail dress to show off her stubbled legs, she’s wearing the obligatory hip-hugger blue jeans and leather vest that the other local girls are wearing.
Her ample cleavage? Also shaven clean.
She’s unsettlingly feminine, going bare-armed to show off the tribal military tattoos laced around her pale biceps—yet she manages to make the gun tucked into her leather boots seem stylish.
“You, uh…” I stammer. “That’s a…”
She snorts a laugh, gets up on tiptoes to kiss me on the cheek. “I told you I was gonna pass, silly.” Then she flicks her long red fingernails across her denuded cheeks if to say, I know, crazy, right?
Trish normally sports a thin fuzzy beard and mustache in addition to her long auburn hair. Some of the other body-hackers have tried gossiping with me about her “real” gender—but Trish asked me to call her “she.” That makes her a she as far as I’m concerned. I mean, I cut off my legs to replace them with hardware, what right do I have to judge anyone else’s body?
Still, it’s a little weird seeing her pretending to be something she’s not. There’s a scattering of other bearded female-reading guests here, and some very masculine men with child-bearing hips—as long as you’re willing to pound Budweisers and root for the Cardinals, nobody cares much what you look like.
But Trish has completely altered her appearance. If I didn’t recognize her, no one will.
She keeps her head down as she leads me to a wooden booth whittled away by carved graffiti. Her not working the crowd gives me the heebie-jeebies. I imagine saying hello to a stranger without Trish serving as social lubricant, then realize maybe I rely on Trish too heavily to curate my social life.
She slides into the booth like a dancer.
“You … you look good.” Which she does, but I’m not thrilled; seeing Trish like this has the squirmy, distant charm of realizing your little sister could be thought of as “cute.”
“I spruce up nice.” She buffs her fingernails on her collar. “So what date are we on? Fourth or fifth?”
“We’re…” I frown. “We’re not dating.”
“We are tonight.” She looks around at the crowd; a handful pay vague attention to us. “I’m happy to be here, you’re grumpy; everyone’s assuming I’ve gotten bored with you, so I’ve dragged you out somewhere dangerous to see if you’ll lighten up. Once we start negotiating, they’ll assume we’re arguing because you’re no fun.”
It’s a nice bone thrown in my direction: she knows I’m nervous the crowd might figure out what I am, so she’s framing how they view this meeting in romantic-comedy terms. (Because oh God does Trish love terrible rom-coms.)
I respond in my best Harrison Ford deadpan, “I’m fun.”
She shakes her head. “You have the potential to be fun. But do you know how I know you’re falling short of that
goal?”
“How?”
She reaches across the table to cup my gloved hand. “When a girl tells you to buy her a drink, son, you buy her a drink.”
That “son” is comforting. It’s Trish’s quiet way of reinforcing how she’s flirting with me to project the illusion that we’re a couple. Which is good; she’s a lesbian, I’m half machinery, we’re not meant to work out.
“I was waiting for you to introduce me to the bartender,” I demur.
She wriggles uncomfortably. “Yeah, I don’t … I don’t know her.”
“You don’t know the bartender here?”
Her eyes narrow as she scowls. “Of course not. That’s why I chose this place. But even glammed up as I am, someone might still recognize me—so seriously, sweetie, buy me a drink? No—buy me multiple drinks.”
“Okay, okay,” I mutter. “I didn’t know there was a place you didn’t know the bartender.”
Trish knows everyone. You can’t go out to dinner with her without a waiter waving hello. And during drinks she’ll stumble across an old buddy she hasn’t seen in years, then compress the last decade’s worth of history into a brief conversation so expertly this distant acquaintance will walk away believing Trish is their best friend.
Yet somehow, despite the fact that she’s spent half the night introducing you to other people, you always feel like Trish came out just to see you.
As I push my way through the crowd to the bar, I note the bartender’s presence—at the hip bars downtown, the bartender would be a pleasant old-timey statement, their sign they could afford to pay someone for what amounted to performance art. At Shaky Joe’s, the bartender’s an old Mexican woman who I suspect has been working the counter since long before the drinkbots put bartenders out of business, and will work here until she’s dead. These truckers would turn any drinkbot into a piñata.
The bartender’s presence is both reassuring and troublesome: a bog-standard drinkbot would never overpour Wild Turkey as flagrantly, but on the other hand a bot has zero chance of noticing my electronic hands.
By the time I get back to Trish the younger guys are eyeing her, wondering if they should take a shot. I sit down, glaring at them; they fold.
“So … three million?” I ask, sliding the drink over.
“They’re looking for a very specific skill set.”
“I don’t have skills worth three million for two hours,” I tell her. “That’s Yak-level money.”
She sips her drink, avoiding eye contact. “Funny you mention that…”
I’m halfway to my feet before she grabs me hard enough that my limbs ask me whether to flip into violence mode. I realize she’s chosen the bar not only because the band’s noisy enough to drown out casual eavesdropping, but also because I won’t dare make a scene leaving.
“It’s not a direct contract with the International Access Consortium,” she whispers, speaking quickly—and I’d still stomp away if it wasn’t for that sliver of hurt in her blue eyes asking, Do you think I’d hurt you? “I wouldn’t set you up with the Yak. I wouldn’t set my worst enemy up with the Yak. There’s some lines even I wouldn’t cross.”
“So who—”
“Sit down,” she hisses. The crowd’s staring because Trish’s hair is practically standing on end.
The Yak does that to people.
I lower myself back down. She hands out apologetic smiles to the crowd.
“Fifth date, and we won’t make our sixth,” she whispers, her fingers trembling. “Are you gonna drink that drink? I’m gonna drink mine.”
“I don’t drink alcohol,” I inform her. “I get enough brain damage in the course of combat. And I’ll get more damaged getting involved with the Yak. So what the hell are you doing getting involved with the IAC? You’re better off flying under their radar, because if they notice you, well…”
Rumor was the Yak paid world-class prices … the first time. After that, they dug up deep blackmail to get past employees involved in increasingly sordid missions, because the Yak viewed its independent operatives as an ablative meat-shield. You only got involved with the Yak if you were balls-in-the-garbage-disposal desperate.
“I’m not on their radar,” she says. “But Ancillary Force is.”
I’m not good with politics. But Trish is, and we are about to enter into a complex web of alliances where she thinks she can come out on top.
And $3 million, well … that’s enough to stash in a bank and collect interest. It wouldn’t be enough to retire on—not yet. But it would be enough that the cash from my future jobs could go towards saving for a future, instead of endlessly dribbling down into the maintenance sinkhole.
Three million dollars could be enough to, at some point, stop shooting people for a living.
“Let me explain,” she says.
I gulp the Wild Turkey.
* * *
“You know Ancillary Force, right?”
“That’s Donnie’s outfit, isn’t it? He—”
I splutter, realizing my fingers are massaging my temples. Just mentioning Donnie’s name has made me tense enough to kickstart Thelma and Louise into auto-soothe mode.
Trish looks into her empty glass disconsolately, wanting more. “So you know Donnie.”
I sigh. “He loves me.”
Remember when I talked about the novice body-hackers who hang with me to feel badass? The ones who my email filters filter out when I’m in a bad mood?
Donnie’s the king of those.
If Donnie had his way, we’d be best buddies—and the problem is, Donnie’s just useful enough that I don’t feel comfortable telling him we aren’t. He’s almost as good at optimizing systems as I am—maybe better—so if I get stuck, Donnie’s someone who I can conference in when I need to squeeze extra performance out of compressed sight-models. (Which is fancy talk for “Not shooting people you didn’t mean to shoot.”)
And Donnie, well, he’s rich. I try not to sell out to people overmuch, as it makes me feel like a used-car salesman, but Donnie has all the new toys—I have to save for months before buying a replacement for Scylla or Charybdis, reading every review. But Donnie doesn’t think twice about ordering in a $500,000 Dyson-Grantha armatured leg prosthetic to see if it operates as smoothly as the ads claim. He tinkers on any piece of equipment that catches his fancy, taking it apart, improving his craft; if I need to test some prosthetics, no matter how obscure, Donnie can loan them to me.
(In fact, on some loan requests I suspect Donnie’s secretly bought equipment he didn’t own to avoid admitting that he didn’t have it.)
Trish cranes in, trying to get a look at my face under my head-massaging hands. “So … do you think Donnie runs a good organization?”
I start to order Thelma and Louise away, but the more I think about Donnie the more I realize they’re all that’s staving off a headache. “That depends.”
“On?”
“Which side of the paycheck you’re on.”
Because that’s the other problem with Donnie: he wants to be the biggest badass in town. I optimize for bystander safety; Donnie optimizes for maximum effect, ensuring every shot’s a splattery skull-breaker, gearing himself with the largest weapons it’s legally permissible to own.
Donnie’s been bugging me to go out on a mission for years, his eyes widening as he burbles at me: Think about how cool it would be! For us! The biggest badasses in the USA! Working together!
But I’ve seen how he tunes his IFF routines. He believes any potential danger should be shot. If they’re not dangerous, he asks, then why are they in a firefight?
Except he’s working local missions—with America’s unemployment rate nudging 43 percent thanks to automation, there’s plenty of riots that need quelling. Hell, in this bar alone there’s fifty ex-truckers who’d love to take a wrench to the auto-drive eighteen-wheelers. And the riots get worse if automated drones quell them, so having a human face on your walking armory has some benefits.
Unless they’re of the
opinion that anyone who fucks with them deserves a groin-shot kill.
Donnie’s casualty rate is higher than I could live with. Even if he’s on a no-kill mission, the man thinks it’s a giggle to put out someone’s eye with a rubber bullet. I’ve gotten queasy just rubbing titanium shoulders with him, let alone teaming up.
Trish nods. “Yeah. Well, Donnie’s got the history the Yak wants—he’s never failed a mission.”
“Because if he gets backed into a corner, he blows his way out with excess firepower?”
“And lawyers up afterwards.” Trish slumps. “Donnie keeps asking me for assignments. I don’t give him much. You hear me?”
I do. This industry’s too small to piss people off. Trish isn’t thrilled about dealing with him either, but she has to give him little leads or Donnie will know she’s not a fan. It takes a lot for Donnie to understand you’re not on his side, as he blithely assumes everyone adores him, but … neither Trish nor I have wanted to see what happens when you get on Donnie’s bad side.
“So you’re giving me a mission with the Yak and Donnie,” I say. “Why the hell would I want this?”
“Three million?”
“Three million’s bought you the time to explain.”
“All right.” She ticks off her reasons on her fingers. “First off, it’s three million if everything goes right. This is Donnie’s first mission for the Yak, and as far as he knows it’s a cakewalk—just babysit a package as it’s transferred off the docks in New York into a secure location. It’s three million if it goes clean, without any casualties—if there’s any conflict that makes the news, that reward drops to a million. Still extraordinary pay for two hours. If they can’t deliver the package, you get nothing.”
“So Donnie’s eager to ensure his first mission for the IAC goes well, and is willing to overpay to impress his new masters. Is there that much money in future IAC contracts?”
“It’s not so much the money as that Donnie thinks the IAC will let him cut loose. He wants those black-book contracts where he can really do some damage.”
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