I don’t want to involve civilians. It’s too easy to imagine accidentally shooting a kid who called in sick to school. Yet I need a place to recharge, my batteries are low.
“That house needs forty thousand dollars in roof repairs,” Silvia mutters, pulling herself up on tiptoes to look over the fence.
I frown. “That’s awfully specific. Is that … some new power you’ve been granted?”
“What? No!” She clasps her hands to her chest and flickers backwards. “I’m a home inspector.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that she had a job before … that … happened to her.
“That’s a good job for you to have,” I say.
She blushes. “Mama helped me pick it out as a career. Home inspections are still too complex to automate—not that you can’t get a scanner to find termite infestations, but then you need a separate scanner to check for roof integrity and another AI for electrical wiring, and at that point you need truckfuls of equipment. Simpler to send me and a couple of handhelds. Plus, Vala pointed out I’d get to work alone.”
Clearly working alone is—was—a major benefit of the job as far as she’s concerned. Which, I suppose, for a woman with panic disorder, is a bonus. No bosses breathing down your neck, and if the day gets too much for you, you hole up in a closet until the medications kick in.
“Anyway, that house is empty.” She hugs herself against the fence at a weird angle. Has her new body got some built-in biological urge to press herself up against things?
“How sure are you that it’s empty?”
“Pretty sure? That leaky roof’s dumping water straight into the living room. Any squatters in there are too far gone to care about intruders.”
There’s no better news than finding the person you’re tasked to escort is also competent. And this house has a garage, which is even better: assuming Herbie gets here, we can make the transfer in privacy. “Good work, Silvia.”
“Baby steps.” She gives me a wan smile. “Break it down into pieces for me. I can cope if I don’t look at the big picture.”
“I’ll keep it tiny.” I consult one of my never-used databases—according to the intel expert I bought it from, this database lists all the satellite passovers. Feed it a set of coordinates and a time, and it’ll tell you when any significant cameras are watching. I pay her a fortune because she theoretically knows about the dark satellites that governments won’t acknowledge exist.
Of course I’ve never had a way to verify her data. Or even a need for it. Until today, paying her subscription fee felt like paranoia.
With both the IAC and the IAC’s enemy after me, my every paranoid preparation has become justified.
I look down at the timer; it’s supposedly accurate to within fifteen seconds. Which seemed acceptable when I sat in my lab, but that lag seems crazy dangerous in the field. Still, we’ve lucked out; an empty satellite window’s opening up in forty seconds, and there aren’t any delivery drones in sight.
Silvia’s looking to me for instructions so she doesn’t freak out. I display the countdown timer.
“Okay,” I say, popping slats off the fence. “When this hits zero, we’ll get to the door and open it so we don’t leave a mess—”
She leaps through the gap, sailing high across the lawn, and smashes through the door in a spray of glass.
“What the f—” I cut off my frustrated shout, because she’s made enough noise already. She’s in the house’s rear entryway, standing atop the wrecked door, staring down at it dumbfounded. Her gaze snags on the anemone-like hairs on her legs.
She stomps on the ruined door. Her foot punches through the floor; she yanks herself free, ready to run—
“Silvia.”
I speak authoritatively enough to get her attention.
I stride calmly across the yard.
The sun’s out, and so are the satellites. Maybe the photos they take won’t be analyzed enough to notice the fugitive body-hacker with a crushed arm strolling across a lawn.
But I know that if I dash across to Silvia like this is something we should panic about, she’ll panic.
“Okay.” I hold up both hands in surrender. Her eyes focus on mangled Charybdis; I lower it as though it’s unworthy of her attention. “So we’ve learned something new about the way your body works.”
“That it fucking doesn’t listen?”
Telling her to keep quiet would inspire anger. Instead, I step over the door to set what’s left of it back in the frame, noting happily how prior scavengers have disabled the house’s security alarms.
“No,” I say. “Your body’s got different instincts, is all. I think it’s unhooked.”
A slight risk; she might get mad at me leaving questions hanging for her to answer. Fortunately, her curious outweighs her furious. “Unhooked from what?”
“I think the reason your body is so fast, and efficient, and such a viable combat entity,” I say, layering on the positives, “is because it operates on unconscious thought. You envision what you want to do, your body makes the rest happen without your input. Basically, you’re operating on phenomenal autopiloting.”
“It’s a stupid design! I don’t want my body on autopilot!”
“Except parts of us have operated on autopilot all along. You never thought much about walking, did you? Those careful decisions about balance and foot placement your muscles have to make? After a while, getting from one place to another just happens.”
“No. That’s different. I choose when to get up, I choose when to walk.”
“Now you’re one level abstracted. I don’t think you actually decide to walk anymore.” I remembered her loping along the woods beside me, never glancing down at the brush at her feet. “You decide where you want to be, and your body decides how to get there. You control what happens, just not how. And if we can control—”
I’m slammed backwards so hard my feet leave furrows in the wooden floor. Scylla and Charybdis have intercepted her blow as she shoved me backwards, readouts blaring how much biological damage she’d have done if my systems hadn’t intercepted—
If I hadn’t upgraded my hand-to-hand combat routines, I would have been dead twice over today.
“You think it’s good to have my thoughts manifest?” Charybdis jerks up to deflect a roundhouse so powerful that Silvia’s fist shears off the alloy cowling. “I—”
She rolls away from me with a ninja’s deftness, curls herself into a shivering ball. I shunt away the emergency warnings flooding into my HUD to lower my arms, stand at a respectful distance.
She sniffles, staring glumly at the peeling floral wallpaper. “You see?”
I’m terrified the wrong response will provoke another assault, so I nod.
My internal clocks are showing how long it’s been since Silvia first assaulted the cops—and each passing minute brings us closer to getting caught. Yet I wait by her side for one minute, then three, then five—listening to her muttering calmness mantras, then fervent prayers, then calmness mantras.
You can’t rush someone back to calmness. Yet leaving her to do something else would dump more guilt upon her, reminding her how she has to be taken care of and shoving her deeper into a panic cycle, so …
I wait. Like there was nothing I’d rather be doing in the world than crouching by her side.
And honestly, it’s nice to have company. I should be planning, but I tune out most of my usual paranoia to concentrate on being present for her. (Though I do check my sensors long enough to ensure there’s no evidence of recent occupancy: no dwindling areas of body heat, no breathing noises within detection range.)
At five minutes and forty-two seconds, she sniffles. “Can you see if there’s a towel left in the bathroom closet upstairs? Or maybe a shower curtain left in the tub?”
I’m not about to question her need for fabric right now, so I head upstairs—sure enough, she’s correctly ascertained this place has an upstairs bathroom, but everything’s been stripped. Even the wires and copper p
iping are gone.
When I come down, shrugging apologetically, she’s hugging her legs tight, restraining herself. “When I panicked before, I hurt people. Now when I panic, I could kill people. And that makes me more panicky, and it’s not a good feedback loop, it’s not…”
“You’re also a terrible operative.”
She grants me a sly, sideways glance. “I see you’ve figured out knocking me off my train of thought helps.”
“That’s just my natural sarcasm. And listen, Silvia, I want to have this discussion, but right now I need to recharge my batteries in case we get into more fights. And I need to see if I can get my car here without being seen. What say we go somewhere I can plug in?”
“Baby steps?” She gives me an appreciative nod, which looks odd when her human head tilts on her knotted macramé body. “You listen, Mat. That’s a rare skill.”
Why am I blushing? “I’m just good with owner’s manuals.”
I extend my good hand without thinking. Neither of us let go as we walk into the living room.
“Watch out for syringes,” she says.
It’s a total disaster. The plaster walls have been punched in where robbers cut out the smartwall upgrades. The stucco ceiling bulges low, stained an unhealthy brown.
Sure enough, there are syringes scattered on the floor.
“Let’s check the basement,” I say. “If they haven’t stolen the wires to the solar panels, we can get power.”
One of the benefits of solar panels on repossessed houses was that banks could sell the excess power back to the electrical companies, so the houses wouldn’t be a total loss—which had been a decent business deal, back before deep-well batteries and superefficient solar power had made the bottom fall out of the electricity market.
I head down into the basement. Silvia holds back. “Do you mind scouting that first, Mat? That place looks like Buffalo Bill’s hideout.”
I replay her last sentence to make sure I heard her correctly. “You’ve seen Silence of the Lambs?”
She stiffens, worried I’m mocking her. “Well, it’s Vala who likes the horror movies, but … yes. I watch old movies to calm me down. Grungy old period pieces that take forever to watch. It’s silly, I know, but it’s how I relax.”
“It’s not silly. But come on down. There’s nobody here. I would have taken care of that.”
“Oh. Good.”
The basement is crawling with silverfish—and sure enough, a slightly less dirty oven-sized space indicates the thieves have made off with the household battery. Yet the stubby wires leading down from the far less stealable solar panels are still usable; I hot-wire a connection.
It feels so good to see my battery indicators glowing green. This isn’t a fast-charge station, but the panels should top me off in an hour—too long for people looking to escape a manhunt.
I can drop that to fifteen minutes if I’m willing to drain power from the electrical grid. Better. Herbie should have arrived by then.
“So what’s our next step?” Silvia asks. She can’t stay in the basement—she literally can’t. The moment her feet touch the slimy, moss-covered floor, she leaps instinctively to safety. She crouches on the staircase, hugging her chest to her knees, looking at me anxiously.
“I’ve sent a request for my car to get here. If everything goes right, it’ll arrive soon.”
“And if not?”
That “if not” is our biggest concern. My car Herbie has pulled out of its parking spot, unbeknownst to the city AI.
Putting an unregistered vehicle on the road is highly illegal, but I’m already hip-deep in lawbreaking. The bigger problem is that if Herbie gets close enough to another smartcar, that car might notify the city AI about the unregistered vehicle.
Or a cop on patrol spots Herbie’s also highly illegal digital rooftop paint job that, from a drone-sized distance, makes Herbie look like the roads he’s traveling on. And what are the odds a cop will be in the neighborhood now that the NJPD have instigated a manhunt?
Hell. The right passerby might snap a picture of Herbie’s illegal digital paint job, allowing the real-time police photo analyst–AIs to catch it. The chances of Herbie getting here undetected are somewhere around 16 percent—the same depressing odds as losing at Russian roulette.
“If not, we won’t know what happened,” I say. “I don’t dare open up another internet connection with Herbie—”
“You call him Herbie?” She shoots me a little heart gesture. “Like Herbie the Love Bug?”
“Oh, you got that reference too?” I suppress an urge to ask her whether she’s seen the Lohan abomination of a remake, or the good one with Buddy Hackett. “But I can’t open up an internet connection; if they catch Herbie, and he sends a distress signal back to me, the cops might trace it. As it is, he’s engineered to set himself on fire if he shows up on the city AI—a little overzealous, maybe, but better safe than sorry. Which means Herbie’ll be useless if he gets into the slightest fender bender.”
She whistles in nervous amazement. “You programmed in all that on the way here?”
“No. I had a backup plan ready to execute.”
“You had a secret car parked in place with preprogrammed software to avoid police manhunts?”
“Technically, I had it prepped to avoid entanglements with a superior enemy who could trace me on the internet—but that turns out to have a significant constabulary overlap, yes.”
She relaxes, her trust in me unsettling. I don’t tell her my plan if Herbie doesn’t arrive, which is a pathetic “Hole up in the basement and hope blowing up four cop cars hasn’t motivated the NJPD enough to do a door-to-door search.”
“I … don’t want to ask this question,” she asks. “But … where do we head to when—”
“If.”
“—if Herbie gets here?”
I was hoping she wouldn’t ask that. “That’s the big issue. I need a repair shop, stat. We can’t use mine.”
“So call a friend?”
“I don’t have a lot of friends, Silvia.” I glance away, because I know the pitying look she’s giving me. “I’ve got the woman who set me up with this—Trish. We have secret communication channels, but I don’t know how well they’ll hold up against the IAC.”
“We could head to my sister’s apartment,” she says. “She and Mama, they’re not—really equipped to deal with this scenario, but they’ve always had good ideas for me—”
“Does your sister have access to a prosthetic armament repair lab?”
“She has access to a lab.” I perk up. “A chocolate lab. His name’s Biscuit, and he’s adorable.”
After an awkward pause, she scuttles backwards up the stairs and hides behind the doorframe—which seems weird, until I realize she’s got no filter between what she wants to do and what she does. When she embarrasses herself with a bad joke, her body retreats.
“It’s funny,” I call after her. “It’s just … you know … timing. It’s okay, nobody gets my sense of humor either.”
She creeps back down. “Sorry. But Vala, she’s … she’s loyal. She’d hide us for as long as it took. And maybe, she could help you understand how to handle me.”
“Attention, Silvia Maldonado.”
The voice is tinny, coming from a speaker upstairs the raiders must have forgotten to ransack. Even diminished, it’s still monotone, robotic, hateful. Silvia grabs my arm tightly enough to leave finger-shaped imprints in the remaining cowling.
“If you are not Silvia Maldonado, mention this to no one. Speak of this, and we will slaughter your social circle and leave you grieving. Message begins for Silvia.
“We have detected an abrupt electrical drain on the grid from this house, which our models predict with a sixty-four point seven percent probability is Mathew recharging his batteries after the firefight.”
“They know,” she whispers, curling in tighter to me. “They know.”
“They’re guessing.”
“We have analyzed both y
our personalities. Our models show an eighty-seven point six percent probability you and Mathew have already discussed making contact with Tricia Malachai. If not, the next greatest likelihood of contact is Vala Maldonado. We have already placed surveillance around these targets as well as the next ten most likely sources on your lists.
“We know where you will flee.”
The mechanical voice speaks evenly, emphasizing our names when it speaks as though dropping variables into a template. It does not threaten; it concludes, map software naming a destination.
A person might have compassion. This manhunter-AI only has expected outcomes.
I extend Charybdis’s hand so Silvia can take it; she crumples what’s left of my fingers.
“We have access to your therapy records, Silvia Maldonado. We know what harm you fear will happen to your mother and sister. You can avoid that harm by surrendering to the police within the next twenty-four hours and remaining in custody until we retrieve you.
“You belong to the IAC, Silvia Maldonado. Surrender before you discover what we can do to everyone you love.”
* * *
Silvia leans back against the stairway banister, her tendriled body sliding down to the floor, her human hands clapped over her eyes. It’s as if she’s shrinking into nothing.
She’s surrendering.
I can’t blame her. I should have realized they’d go after her family. I’d seen that time and time again in the service; our intelligence would alert us to bold rebels who were standing up against the terrorists.
“We’ll know if they’re serious in a week,” my supervisors told me.
Because the terrorists never went after the rebels. They went after their daughters. People who weren’t cowed by bullets quailed when the gun was aimed at their grandfather’s head.
Not that it usually came to that. There’d be photos left on your doorstep of your son playing with friends. Strangers inquiring about your cousin’s health. Even that gentle pressure made good people cave.
How could Silvia resist when her family was endangered?
I hover over her, uncertain whether to pat her shoulder or to bring my therapy-AIs online to walk me through comforting her. Yet that’s too impersonal; I know the AI scripts lead to better results, but reading off the suggested topics always makes me feel like a telemarketer.
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