by Linda Nagata
Kendrick slides his palm sideways through the air and the woman lowers the tablet, tapping to stop the video.
“Powerful instinct you have,” Kendrick observes.
I meet his gaze, because I need to show him I’m not afraid of what he can do to me, even though I am. “It’s like I went crazy. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? I had a breakdown, and it was just coincidence that the jets came when they did.”
“No, Lieutenant. That’s not what I’m thinking. I’m thinking you were justified in filing a complaint with Guidance. I’m thinking exactly what you suggested before: that someone fucked with your skullcap. That someone who knows you, who knows exactly how your brain works, and who knew what was coming, decided to save your life by hacking into your skullcap, subtly at first, but finally flooding your brain with panic juice. If not for that Good Samaritan, you would be dead. You almost died anyway, despite that Good Samaritan, when you made the dumbass decision to go back for Lin.”
Who? I wonder. How?
Then anger crashes in. “That’s shit,” I tell him. “That’s just a crazy story. Who could do that? No one could! And I bet there’s no evidence, is there? The skullcap keeps a record of every tweak. Every time a neuron is stimulated to produce a hormone, there’s a record. Did you find a record like that?”
“Not exactly,” Kendrick admits. “What we found was a big, glaring absence of any activity from the time you woke up, until just before the first missile hit.”
“What are you saying? The record was deleted?”
He shakes his head. “A deletion leaves traces. It’s more likely the record-keeping function was disabled and no record was ever made.”
“How could someone do that?”
“No clue. But this someone pulled a similar hack on your angel during the roadside firefight you had the day before.”
“When our LCS was cut off from Guidance?”
“Right. It was like your hacker wanted that firefight to happen; like he wanted to make sure you didn’t get an order to stand down.”
“That’s the same thing I wanted.” I don’t know why I admit this. I should be trying to look innocent... but how can I? They already know what I was feeling that day.
Kendrick shows his teeth in what might be a smile. “I’m a hundred and ten percent sure you didn’t engineer any of this, Shelley. You’re smart enough to get by, but you’re not smart enough to hack your own head.”
This is a fair assessment.
“Do you think it was someone in Guidance?” I ask him.
The woman speaks for the first time. “It wasn’t Guidance, Shelley.”
Goosebumps prickle across my skin as I turn in disbelief to meet her steady blue gaze. “Delphi?”
She nods, but she doesn’t smile. Delphi was always a serious woman.
I stare at her, astonished, because she’s spent more time inside my head than anyone, but I don’t know her. Delphi’s voice is comfort and counsel and I’ve trusted that voice with my life, literally, time after time, but until now, I’ve never seen her face, and I still don’t know her name, because Delphi is a code name. Soldiers know their handlers as a voice, a presence, nothing more.
Her eyes look into mine without wavering. “I would never have played with you like that, Shelley. You know it.”
I have to nod, because it’s true. I know she would never have done that to me.
“If I had known what was coming,” she says, “I would have told you. I would have gotten you out early. If there had been some five-star general standing over me, warning me not to say a word, I would have told you anyway.”
“I believe you.” If I can’t trust Delphi, who can I trust? “So what happened?”
“I don’t know.” Her gaze drifts to my new legs. “The King David incidents—”
“That’s just Ransom’s stupid term.”
“It’s as good as any. The incidents have been a subject of study for months. How can you know what you know?”
“God whispers in my ear.”
“Or into your skullcap. We pulled the data every time. We found indications of missing data, but nothing as absolute as the absence this last time.”
“You’re saying someone’s been fucking with me all the time I was over there.”
Again, she gazes at my titanium legs. “I want to believe that, because the other explanations I’ve heard use magical terms like ‘precognition’ and ‘clairvoyance,’ and ‘God.’”
“You don’t believe in God, Delphi?”
Her gaze rises to meet mine. “I didn’t use to.”
~~~
It’s the end of the afternoon and I’m finishing my hour in physical therapy when a message from Command pops up on my overlay, with a notation appended that it’s been copied to my dot-mil address. Someone wants to make sure I get this one. It informs me that I’ve been transferred into an experimental program aimed at developing the abilities of LCS soldiers with cyber enhancements. The program’s director is Colonel Steven Kendrick, making him my new commanding officer. I didn’t know our meeting was a job interview, but I must have done okay. Either that, or Kendrick just wants to keep me close while he figures out who’s playing games inside my head.
~~~
I’m back in the hospital bed. My overlay tells me it’s 0152—the perfect time of night for thinking strange thoughts. Somewhere deep down in my mind I’m aware of a tremor of panic, but the skullnet bricks it up. I watch its glowing icon while imagining my real self down at the bottom of a black pit, trapped in a little, lightless room, and screaming like any other soul confined in Hell.
But if my real self is locked away, what does that make me?
I know the answer. I’m a body-snatching emo-junkie so well-managed by my skullnet that the screams of my own damned soul are easy to ignore. But there is someone out there who can get inside my head. Am I haunted by a hacker? Or is it God?
A call comes through on my overlay.
I flinch in alarm. The last time I saw the green icon of an incoming call was right before my life blew up. God calling from an unknown number. This time, though, my address book recognizes the caller. It’s my friend, Elliot Weber, notorious peace activist and contributing journalist to the War Machine website. I met Elliot that night I got arrested for walking with other citizens up Broadway. Elliot told me not to resist. I didn’t listen. Later, he let me post the video I’d made.
I accept the link and his voice is inside my head, breathy, panicked. “Shelley, say something,” he pleads. “Tell me I didn’t just call the hardware in a dead man’s head.”
A nervous laugh slips from my throat, but I keep it soft so the night staff won’t hear. “I think maybe you did.”
“Shelley.” He sounds like he’s about to fall over in relief. “I know you’re not okay, but at least you’re alive. I saw the show, all the way up to the end when the missile came in and the world caught on fire—”
“Elliot, what are you talking about?”
“—I thought that was it. The end. That there was no way you could survive that.”
“How do you know what happened? Who have you been talking to? Not my dad.” My dad hates Elliot, blaming him for my legal troubles.
“I told you, I saw the show.”
“What show?”
“Ah, geez. Where are you, Shelley?”
“In Texas.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Elliot, tell me about the show.”
“It’s called Linked Combat Squad: Dark Patrol. It’s a docu-drama. A reality show. Released yesterday. You had to know about it.”
“It’s about life in an LCS?”
“No. It’s about your LCS. Your combat squad. You didn’t know?”
It turns out that the army wasn’t just archiving the video recorded by my overlay. They combined it with video from helmet cams and surveillance cameras and put together a two hour reality show on life and conflict at Fort Dassari. Elliot tells me it ended with a bang.
“When the missile came in—” His voice breaks. “I thought there wouldn’t be enough of you left for a funeral. And then the show ended. It just ended. They didn’t say what had happened to you, or the other soldiers. They wanted a cliffhanger.”
“So you picked up your phone and called a dead man?”
“You’re not dead. Tell me what happened. Was the air attack real? Tell me if everyone survived it. Tell me what happened to you.”
“Is the show viral?” I ask him.
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen any numbers on it. I found it because I have an alert on your name. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have stumbled on it.”
It rattles me badly to think something like that exists out in public. I have strong opinions and I’m not shy about expressing them. Quietly, I ask, “How many of my rants made it onto the show?”
“The director likes drama. You were on a lot.”
“And the audience?”
He gets evasive. “You know how it is. A military show like that would tank in New York. So it’s playing mostly in . . .” His voice trails off in guilt.
“In Texas? Where people hate taxes but love wars?”
Elliot’s smart. He understands people, he understands systems, and he has an uncanny ability to find motives when all I can see is chaos. He’s a lot like Lissa in that, though the two would never admit they have anything in common. “Do you think you can come out here?” I ask him.
“To Texas? Shelley, you’re not dying, are you? You’re not calling me out there for a deathbed scene?”
I’m offended. “Why? You wouldn’t come if I was dying?”
“No! Of course I’d come. I just want to know first, that’s all. I want to be ready.”
“I’m not dying.”
“Okay. Good.”
“So will you come?”
“Yeah. Will there be a story for me?”
“Not one you can use.”
“Secret stuff, huh?”
“’Fraid so.”
“Well, it’s Texas, so I’ll find something to write about. The newest secessionist movement maybe, or a corrupt defense contractor.”
“Come soon, okay?”
“I’ll check my schedule. And Shelley?”
“Yeah?”
“I am so damn glad you’re still alive.”
~~~
On day three of my cyborg existence I meet the surgeon who put me together. The nursing staff speaks of Dr. Masoud in hushed tones, in awe of his genius, and sure that he’ll win a Nobel Prize one day, or at least be declared a saint.
I wait for Dr. Masoud in a procedure room, marooned in a reclining chair like the kind in a dentist’s office. There are no windows in the room, and the door is closed. The assistant who left me here worked some levers on my programmable wheelchair, collapsing its frame before stashing it against the wall to “get it out of the way.” He assured me the doctor would be right in, and then he left.
Five minutes have passed. Ten more go by, each one noted in my overlay. No doctor wants to show up on time—that could give the impression they’re underworked—but when the wait time stretches past twenty minutes I start developing an escape strategy, working out the stages I’ll need to undertake to reach my distant wheelchair. I’m about to try the first stage, swinging myself out of the dentist’s chair, when the door opens at last, admitting a tall, physically powerful man with light brown skin, a neat black mustache, and carefully combed black hair that gleams under the ceiling lights.
There’s something covetous in his gaze as he looks me over, but there’s anxiety, too. A lot of anxiety. Despite the chill of the room, tiny beads of sweat glisten at his hairline. I want to ask Delphi for an emotional assessment, but I’m not linked to Guidance anymore. For now, I’m on my own. I watch him, relaxed but wary.
“Lieutenant Shelley, I’m Benjamin Masoud. We’ve spent many hours in one another’s company, though I think you don’t remember.”
The long wait has left me irritable and the joke falls flat. My turn. “Dr. Masoud, I’m getting concerned that I still can’t use my legs—I mean my organic legs, what’s left of them. I can’t feel anything, and I can’t flex the muscles. The nurse explained it’s not nerve damage—”
“Nerve damage?” His heavy brows draw together. Clearly I’ve said the wrong thing. “Who suggested to you it was nerve damage?”
“I suggested it, and the nurse said—”
He cuts me off again. “This should have been explained to you. The nerves in your legs are perfectly healthy. What you are experiencing is an induced paralysis, to ensure that no stress is placed on the bone-titanium joint during the initial phase of the healing process.”
“Right. That’s exactly what the nurse said. My question is, aren’t we past the initial phase?” My upper-body strength is coming back with physical therapy, but that just emphasizes the deterioration in my lower body. “I need to start working my hip and thigh muscles, or they’re going to be so far gone I won’t be able to stand up at all, even if the robot legs work perfectly.”
“Robot legs?” This scandalizes him even more than the nerve damage. It’s like I’ve called his daughter ugly. “Lieutenant, the prosthetics you’ve been given aren’t robot parts. They’re state-of-the-art, human-integrated devices.”
I’m not sure I see the difference, but that wasn’t my question. “Sir, I am not asking you about the robot legs. I understand those don’t work right now, that they’ve been switched off, and that’s why they’re deadweight. I am asking you about my legs, what’s left of them. My physical therapy sessions need to address my legs and hips.”
His eyes narrow. I don’t think he’s used to being questioned. “No, it’s too soon to withdraw the paralytic.” He studies me for several seconds more, wondering, maybe, if he got the right patient. If I don’t play by his rule set, it might mess up his Frankenstein experiment, and he won’t get his Nobel Prize—but he doesn’t try to appease me. He goes after my ego instead. “A man like yourself naturally fears weakness and dependency, but you are fortunate, Lieutenant Shelley, because you will be able to recover.”
Fortunate? I contemplate that word as my gaze shifts to the robot legs. Fortunate. The idea makes me angry, but only because I know Masoud is right. Bad judgment, not bad fortune, put me in this chair, and I’m lucky to be alive. I’m lucky to be his experiment—though that doesn’t mean I have to like him.
I yield the argument with a shrug, chastened, if not quite grateful. Masoud accepts victory with a patronizing nod, and we begin anew.
“Let me show you the progress we’ve made,” he says, stepping over to a keyboard beneath a blank screen. A sequence of taps and swipes summons two 3-D projections into the screen. “These are color-enhanced and combined images, developed from the scans taken of your legs this morning.”
I see my bones: the old ones, bright white, and the new ones, deepest black. They meet in something like a dovetail joint. Pins lock them together.
Dr. Masoud taps another series of keys and the splice becomes wrapped in a flat gold ring maybe an inch high. Red and blue threads flow into it.
“This is the bio-electric interface.” He points at a blue thread. “I’m inducing nerve growth into the interface. Once that connection is established, signals from the motor nerves in your legs will be translated into electrical impulses received by the prosthetics. When that happens—and when the induced paralysis is withdrawn—you will regain sensation in the organic portion of your legs, and you will be able to operate the prosthetic using nerve impulses. With practice and physical therapy, you should be able to walk.”
He taps the keys again, and another layer is revealed on the image. This one shows the flesh around my stumps and outside of that, a small blue packet on the outside of each leg. Tubes penetrate the flesh, linking the packet to the flat gold ring of the bio-electric interface.
I look down at the thick plaster dressing on my right stump. I was okay with the images of my sp
liced bones, but the thought of these tubes penetrating my flesh repels me. They make me think of parasitic worms burrowing into my muscles.
Masoud must suspect I’m on edge because his voice becomes gentle, soothing: “The tubes are temporary. They’re used to introduce an infusion that maintains the paralysis while accelerating growth and recovery. They’ll stay in place for at least another week.”
The skullnet’s icon brightens, and the moment passes.
“When do I get to walk?”
“Two or three weeks—”
“Weeks?” I interrupt in real desperation.
“Yes. Biological processes take time. Today I just want to clean the surgical site and check the growth of the induced cuticle.”
I give him a stony look because he’s talking over my head.
He points again to the image. “Here, where the titanium posts emerge from your flesh. I’m inducing the growth of a cuticle, similar to the cuticles around your fingernails, though larger of course. This will discourage germs from seeping up the exposed bone.”
“The exposed titanium.”
“Yes.”
A nurse comes in and together they cut away the dressing, revealing a revolting junction of gray titanium and livid pink flesh mottled with dark bruises, yellow stains, and a white slough of dead skin cells. Lying alongside are the infusion packets and their wormlike tubes that disappear into my thighs.
And it stinks.
Nausea hits. “Fuck me,” I whisper.
“It takes getting used to,” the nurse says in an encouraging tone as he uses disinfectant to wipe up the mess.
I lie back and stare at the ceiling until Masoud reclaims my attention. “Your new legs aren’t permanent.”
This makes me sit up again. The nurse has finished cleaning my stumps. Now he’s wrapping up my right leg. So Dr. Masoud uses my left leg to demonstrate. He taps the titanium post that protrudes from my leg. “You see here, in the post? These are bolts. If they’re removed, the knee assembly can be detached for maintenance, or replacement.”