by Peter Watts
And then ET brings it, motherfucker.
In that first second I’m surprised by how human it looks. Sure, the legs have too many joints and the arms don’t have any—more like segmented tentacles with hands, like Doc Ock from Spider-Man—but there’s two of each, right where they’re supposed to be. Kind of a helmet on top with two compound clusters of orange lights where you’d expect eyes. It’s all metal, though, so I’m thinking either robot or armor.
And then it fires, point-blank, and I’m flat on my back and I should be dead but I’m not. In the next second it’s on me like a fucking panther and I can see the meat inside all that metal: grayish, translucent, like a jellyfish. Dim brownish orange blobs deep inside that have to be organs, four thick fleshy tentacles flailing out the back. And one part of me’s thinking What the hell kind of armor leaves your guts exposed, but another part’s thinking Those guts are the last thing you’re ever gonna see, asshole—because I’m already down, man, without firing a shot, it caught me flat-footed and flipped me like a bug on its back. And it should be game over right there, but then it just—
Hesitates. Bobs its head, or whatever you call that wedge-shaped thing with the lights. We almost get the sense it’s sniffing the air, trying to get a fix on some strange new smell. And that little hesitation, that one or two seconds’ grace—that’s enough for a comeback. We grab that fucker by the horns, we jam—
I, of course. I mean I.
I grab that fucker by the horns, I jam my pistol into the gray goo and start firing. The thing pulls away, makes this whistling sound—cold, winter-wind sound—and I’m back up just like that, the alien brings its weapon up again but I block, I jab, I don’t even think about it. The suit’s got its own reflexes, force multipliers, motion multipliers. Turns a flinch into a right hook. It barely waits for me to move before responding, I could almost swear it’s moving me. I lift that alien motherfucker over my head and pitch it off the roof like I was throwing a Hacky Sack.
So much for the bogeyman, bitch. So much for the monster under the bed. So much for the thing in the closet.
I don’t know what Prophet was going on about. This suit is fucking awesome.
PERFECTION2
When we released the first CryNet Nanosuit four years ago, we described it as “battle armor perfected.” That wasn’t just our opinion: In a scant two months the N1 had become the armor of choice for military and paramilitary forces around the globe, winning an unprecedented 9.8 rating from Urban Pacifier and taking home Jane’s prestigious Platinum Award for Infantry Support Technology. All of which left we at CryNet with a bit of a problem: How do you improve on perfection?
This time, we perfected the soldier.
Not that we’ve ignored the hardware, mind you. Our latest offering comes with all the bleeding-edge features you’d expect from CryNet: rad-hardened ceramic epidermis, dynamic Faraday mesh for unsurpassed EMP shielding, state-of-the-art countercurrent heat-exchangers for thermoneutrality in firestorms and LOx spills alike. CryNet remains at the forefront of Moore’s law—and maybe a little bit beyond.
But anyone can engineer machinery. It is the soldier within that remains the heart of CryNet’s products and our highest priority. The human mind has always been the greatest strength of an augmented infantry—and also its greatest weakness. For no matter how sharp the intellect, no matter how great the courage, the men and women in these chassis are only flesh and blood. They can grow tired. They can quail in the face of overwhelming odds—and even the most dedicated can hesitate for that crucial half second that makes the difference between victory and defeat. They are human. Our technology shields them from outside threats, but it cannot protect them from their own frailty.
Until now.
For the first time, combat armor not only protects your soldiers but also improves them: immunizes them against fear and fatigue, keeps them razor-sharp around the clock, feeds real-time tactical telemetry from a thousand sources directly into the brain. CryNet has created something that is more than man, more than machine: something that shares the strengths of both and the weaknesses of neither.
Introducing the CryNet Nanosuit2.0.
Perfection squared.
Of course, if I’d known what the suit could do up front I wouldn’t have bothered going upstairs in the first place. I would’ve just punched my way through a wall. Live and learn.
So now I’m alone on the roof. Sun’s high, midmorning. The clouds have blown away but the world smolders and flickers around me like fucking Gehenna; I can see little fires guttering all over the lawn. I can see a couple of tanks, too, neither in what you’d call pristine condition. One’s burning; the other’s been flipped on its back. Some green statue of a horse-mounted soldier surveys the wreckage, one of those memorials they always put up after we’ve kicked ass in someone else’s backyard.
No sign of the bogeyman. Which means it walked away from my bullets, the beating I laid on it, and a three-story fall. Tough little fucker after all, gelatin constitution notwithstanding.
And of course there’s still that glowing little To-Do list hanging in the air off my left eye, 89 SOUTH ST #17, NEW YORK, NY. A little blue hexagon floats in front of me, a magic compass that always seems to points to SOUTH ST no matter where I turn. Even gives me a range to go with the bearing. I saccade the icon.
Manhattan glows in blocky top-down Mercator over in the lower-left corner of the BUD. I’m still in Battery Park. Hell, I’m barely in Battery Park, I’m still on the waterfront. Old customs warehouse, according to the database. Just to the east the park ends and the city begins; someone’s put up a big wall keeping one from the other, massive interlocking dominoes of raw cement topped with razor wire. On the other side, halfway up a thirty-floor apartment building, someone’s strung graffitied sheets between two balconies: HELP US.
I head down.
A lot to learn about this second skin. Fortunately it comes with a default training-wheels mode, shows me dropdown menus, nifty little options for maxing armor or boosting speed. I make my way through a wasteland ravaged by an enemy that travels among the fucking stars, learning to crawl. Waypoint icons and luminous threads guide me through all the craters and corpses.
More icons flicker at the corner of my eye: comm interface, if I’m reading them right. Sure enough, False Prophet pipes up a moment later: The whole park’s been locked down, he tells me. High-voltage perimeter, limited access, unmanned smart guns at every gate programmed to shoot first and never ask questions. Even in these nanothreads I might not make it through, not in my current—suboptimal condition, is the way he puts it.
The waypoints shake themselves into a new configuration, detour me through an ancient circular structure across the park. Castle Clinton, the database says. The only way out. I’ve never heard of the place. I barely even remember the president.
Remember, I’m still a virgin when it comes to the local politics. I know things are fucked generally, but I still don’t know how completely fucked things are for me personally. I’m still living in some cozy little fantasy world where I show up at the nearest checkpoint, write my serial number on the wall with a grease pencil, and get an escort to Nathan Gould’s front door by way of a Mobile Infirmary. I’m still thinking these aliens—wherever they’re from, whatever they’re here for—have at least inspired us to forget our petty differences and unite against the common enemy. Surely we’re all allies now, if not bosom buddies.
But the N2’s got its own comm center, and it’s not only smart enough to decrypt your freqs, but also smart enough to figure out which specific chatter is mission-relevant. I’m really impressed when it first starts doing that—I had no idea our voice-rec tech was anywhere near that good—but my waregasm evaporates the moment I realize that you’re all trying to kill me.
Actually you’re all trying to kill Prophet, but you don’t know that he’s saved you the trouble and the hit is out on anyone in a high-tech muscle suit. Apparently it’s a “biohazard.” Lockhart says
so. I’ve never heard of this Lockhart but he seems to be calling the shots. It sounds like most of the grunts on the ground would be gunning for me anyway; judging by the chatter, Prophet’s taken out more of them than the aliens have.
I don’t know how much of this is gospel and how much is bullshit. It would be nice if False Prophet’s eavesdropping skills were up to providing a little context, but it just routes me the raw feeds without comment. All I know is, I’m not going to be shaking hands with any of these guys on the way out. Maybe I can hole up somewhere, call in, try and work things out from a safe distance. I clear my throat experimentally; I try a few words. Nothing comes out. Oh. Right.
I wonder how you say don’t shoot in Semaphore.
Cobalt Four isn’t calling in. They’re blaming that on Prophet, too. Cobalt Seven calls in fresh bodies from the waterline: More of those marine special ops, they say. No more survivors. That would be my squad, you assholes, and I know for a fact that whatever else Prophet may have done before we traded lives, he had nothing to do with—
Wait a second: No more survivors.
If someone else from my squad made it out we could get this straightened out in no time. Castle Clinton it is.
There are pieces on the ground. Oh, look: a Jackal semi-auto, barely used. That could come in handy. Oh, look: the arm and torso of the guy who barely used it. It is not wearing an army uniform. Not real army, anyway.
CELL. CryNet Enforcement and Local Logistics.
I know these guys. Psychopathic mall cops with a bigger weapons allowance than most medium-sized countries. They make Xi look downright patriotic. Who the fuck put them in charge?
By now I’m picking my way through a field of flattened tents and plastic urine-colored Quonset huts, EMAC logos and red crosses stenciled onto their sides. I poke my head into one: a few stripped cots, a toppled IV pole. Sheets balled up in a corner, stained with blood and snot.
Castle Clinton squats just past the ghost camp like a red-brick mesa. It’s ancient and it’s seen better days, but for the time being it’s still standing. I approach from behind. A woman talks somewhere in the distance—the kind of soothing vacuous voice you hear over PA systems in shopping malls—but I can’t hear what she’s saying over all the comm chatter about how everyone’s going to frag the shit out of me the moment I show my face.
Bootsteps, crunching just around the bend. I duck behind another war memorial—big granite cookie-cutter, this time—a moment before he comes into view. He’s got the head of a spider with glowing orange eyes, one of those full-face helmets with the quadroptic lenses and the built-in respirator. He obviously thinks he’s some serious lethal hotshot, but he’s got so many belts of flashbangs and bullets wrapped around him he looks more like a vending machine than a killing machine. He unbuckles the gear around his waist and unzips for a piss against the wall. I figure now might be a good time to try out the N2’s cloaking option. I sacc’ the icon and watch my hands melt away into the background.
Not just my hands. Not just me. The shotgun I just scavenged melts away as well.
It takes a moment for that to sink in. I haven’t worn a cloak since Annapolis but I know the tech: fast-fractal pattern-matching, Bayesian wraparounds. Same basic thing an octopus does when it wants to blend in. But this Jackal doesn’t pack a cloak, and neither do the ammo and supply clips I’ve scrounged, and all of that’s just turned clearer than glass. The only thing I know that could do that even in theory would be some kind of lensing field, and anything that could bend light around that much volume would need the magnets from a cyclotron to shape the field and a CAESAR reactor to power it.
What the fuck kind of secret lab did this suit come out of?
I step out from behind the memorial (UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, the plaque says; Hey Roger, what are the odds?) just as the merc zips up and turns around. He looks right through me, turns on his heel, and ambles innocently back the way he came.
I almost let it go to my head. I almost miss the little shrinking bar down in the lower-right corner of my eye, don’t notice it at all until the whole readout goes red. By the time I clue in I’m already starting to cast a shadow. I barely get back behind the cookie-cutter in time.
The Urinating Soldier hesitates, looks back over his shoulder. Grunts. Keeps going.
So. How long did that last: twenty seconds, thirty? No such thing as a free lunch. The power bar’s creeping back, though. The cloak recharges.
Someone screams.
No: Parchman screams. My squadmate screams. And then he stops. And in between there’s a gunshot.
From inside the castle.
The cloak’s not quite recharged yet but I’m moving anyway, hugging that curved brick wall, closing on the main gate. But it’s the flatbed parked in front that catches my eye; it’s the bodies piled on top of it.
Some of them are in camo.
Heavy doors clank open around the curve; I flatten back against the wall as a couple of spider-headed mercs carry Parchman down the steps and sling him onto the flatbed like a fucking sandbag. The N2’s got a zoom option but I don’t need it to see the burns on Parchman’s arms, or the cuts on the soles of his bare feet. I’ve seen those marks before. Those are the marks of special rendition. Those are the marks of interrogations that might not fit comfortably under the rubric of international law. No biggie, they told us in basic. Everyone does it.
They never said anything about the neat little hole in Parchman’s temple, though.
The mercs head back into the building, swapping stories about pukeheads and Susie Rottencrotch. They leave the gate open: doubled iron doors set into a stone arch, big square columns on each side like something out of a gladiator game. Their own personal coliseum.
If that’s how they want it …
I cloak again. I walk right through the gates of Castle Clinton, through an outer ring of trashed offices and gift shops. I find myself in an open circular compound full of crates and supplies, a ring of eighteenth-century cannons left over from the tourist season, and a couple of bloodstained plywood pallets outfitted with leather straps where arms and legs might go. And a bunch of CELLulites swapping bets on who’s going to take this Prophet asshole down.
And then the power bar goes red and my suit goes zzzzt and everyone falls silent as snow.
I look down at myself. There I am.
I don’t how many there are. A dozen. Two. It doesn’t matter. There could be a fucking regiment and they still wouldn’t stand a chance. I am the reaper, man, I am all four Horsemen, I am unstoppable. I spent my whole damn career training for toe-to-toe with the enemy and here they are: these paramilitary fuckwits, these mercenaries, these washed-out border guards and wannabes who never swore allegiance to any country or any cause or any thing but the highest fucking bidder. I remember the trampled tents, the broken stretchers, the dumpsters full of dead civilians. I remember the beaten corpses of my brothers-in-arms and it is not only my sacred duty to take these assholes out; it is my pleasure. I could fight them all day and be ready to dance all night. I am—
I am into it.
And to think that I might have missed it all if I’d let the cloak recharge just a little longer, or if the circuits had drawn just a little less power, or if I’d moved just a wee bit faster. I could have snuck through the Castle and made my way out of the park without any bloodshed at all. What a pity, huh?
I blame the suit.
SANTA’S LITTLE HELPER
When adapting to changing battlefield conditions, when improvising in the face of the unknown and the unknowable, the human brain is still the best computer on the planet. When it comes to the instantaneous processing and integration of thousands of simultaneous streams of data, however, it could use a bit of help.
That’s where the N2’s Semi-Autonomous NeuroTactical Augmentation AI comes in. Powered by a parasitic blood-glucose infusion and our optional electrolytic Ballard microstack, this tenth-generation nonsentient biochip is built around a 1013-synapse core that runs at
a blazing 1.5 BIPS. SANTA* instantly integrates remote telemetry and first-person input from up to six thousand distinct channels—ranging from full-spectrum EM to acoustic, barometric, and pheromonal—presenting clear, concise tactical summaries and recommendations via an interface integrated directly into the visual cortex. It can also assume the Nanosuit’s purely autonomic and regulatory functions in the event of somatic damage, or should mission priorities call for operations not consistent with the normal reflexes of the N2.
SANTA’s most truly innovative feature, however, is its ability to not only monitor the physical and emotional states of the soldier, but to actually optimize those states for mission success. SANTA continuously regulates dopamine, lactate, and corticosteroid levels, anticipates debilitating stress and fatigue reactions, and counteracts them before your troops even feel the urge to yawn.
Nor does SANTA stop at the mitigation of debilitating reactions; it actively augments beneficial ones. Adrenaline, GABA, and tricyclics are all maintained at optimal levels for lightning reflexes, maximal sensory acuity, and positive emotional state. Your forces will pursue their objectives with tireless and unswerving dedication for days on end.*
With SANTA in the battlefield, it’s like every day is Christmas!
*Phil: Marketing has serious doubts about this acronym. Worried that irony might not appeal to target demographic. Suggest something less “edgy”—how about Semi-autonomous Enhanced Combat Ops: Neurointegration and Delivery (SECOND) instead? Might be less offensive to the Christian community as well, since as I understand it Santa is one of their prophets or something.—Tom :) PS: We might also have to lose that ho-ho-ho effect on boot-up.
*Extended operation in battlefield-optimization mode is not recommended. Prolonged exposure to agonistic neuroinhibitors can result in long-term damage to metabolic systems. Soldiers should be regularly fed and rested for best long-term performance.