Butcher Block Green

by Eric Kramer

  Which is why it had taken almost half of the year to travel thirty kilometers undetected. A third of that distance still separated Heme from the epithelial cells’ location.

  Heme scanned the chrysalis’ system status, watching as the craft’s skin blended with its surroundings.

  “Chrysalis looks good, Gun. No sensors have tripped. Not reading any alarms going off on the building’s skin. It seems the chrysalis’ membrane is having trouble maintaining our camouflage at this speed. Keep an eye on it, will you?”

  “I am on it, Heme. There is some lipid bilayer instability, but the chrysalis is adapting well.”

  We’re too far away. He’s going to be long gone by the time we’re in range.

  The chrysalis seemed to sense the urgency of her thought and pushed itself even faster. It was blazing now, adapting and blending seamlessly as it glided from building to overhang to strut, pseudopods flashing from point to point. Heme’s timer showed another forty-five seconds to the quickest firing opportunity, assuming their target was still in the area.

  “Heme, we are moving too fast. I am starting to see a few sensor triggers. New Philadelphia will figure out we are here and, when it does, Atmadja will know, too. The chrysalis cannot keep up with the mimicry at this pace.”

  “Just do the best you can, Gun. We’re almost there. It’s worth the exposure risk. I’m going to try to pull some data from that area.”

  Opening a meshwork of proxies, Heme accessed the net through the narrow-beam satellite transponder, broadcasting within the spectrum of background radiation. According to the techs, the transponder was uncrackable.

  Yeah right.

  Heme started the timer for thirty seconds, unwilling to risk additional exposure.

  Come on, find me a target…

  The window of opportunity for a real-time target lock was small … if it even still existed.

  The broadcast connection locked and Heme honed in on the DNA’s location. She sent data miners flying through the system, pulling the area’s metadata for the previous two days. Her timer clicked to twenty-nine as she terminated the connection.

  The implant in the back of Heme’s skull grew hot as it processed the petabyte of data the data miners had grabbed.

  “Okay, Gun. I need ballistics estimates accounting for wind drift. It’s going to be hell to do. We’ll need to skip off the draft this traffic around us is generating, so we need flight plans for every vehicle coming through this airspace for the next five minutes.”

  “Affirmative. Calculations are underway. There is a lot between us and the target’s potential location.”

  “I know. Keep on it. I want a real-time firing solution on my HUD from now on, in case something weird happens.”

  “We are ten seconds from the outer limits of projectile range. I will keep you updated.”

  Heme’s retinal display pulsed a notification in the corner of her eye and, for a moment, her heart rate elevated again.

  She opened the notification, and a crude two-dimensional video began playback.

  Wow, that’s an old camera…

  Curious, Heme pulled up the device’s tech specs as an odd, amorphous figure appeared on screen. Heme froze the image. Her implant enhanced it, but it was still difficult to make out. She cycled through the image’s metadata, recompiling the video. The image shifted, sharpening into focus.

  A slight, unassuming man stood in the center of a large hive of microdrones. Heme watched, impatient, as Gun ran an analysis of the drone cloud.

  “There has to be millions of them, Gun. What are they?”

  “Around six hundred and eighty million. The drone cloud is a camo array, but the way it is functioning is impossible. The cloud is doing things far beyond what its processing mass should allow it to do. The microdrones are catching every skin cell, every hair, every exhaled bacteria and genetic material, and destroying it.”

  “Okay, I don’t see how that’s too difficult. We have microdrones that do the same.”

  “Yes, but look at the metadata. They are acting like a school of fish to also create a near-perfect projection of what is around them. It is a flawless invisibility cloak. Better than that: it is a perfect mimic of whatever our target wants to be.”

  “But … that’s impossible! Even that many microdrones don’t have the combined computational ability to do all that at once! It breaks the laws of physics: computational ability is directly proportional to total mass. Those drones can’t weigh more than what … nine hundred grams altogether?”

  “Exactly.”

  Heme frowned as she inspected the image. “How is this camera even picking up the drones? Even the most basic privacy clouds have image alteration these days.”

  She pulled up a couple dozen other feeds from the same moment. All were three dimensional, allowing her to walk around her subject, inspecting it down to the microscopic level. The feeds showed an elderly woman with synthetic legs, guiding a shopping cart filled with food bars. Heme cross-referenced the time and GPS location. Exactly the same spot. She zoomed in, magnifying until the old woman’s cratered skin filled her vision, the root of a single hair follicle coming into focus.

  Heme returned to the old camera’s video stream. Exact same timestamp. Exact same GPS tag. She switched back. Watched as the woman tottered forward, almost dragged along by the powered cart. Below her, sidewalk sensors flared as they registered hundreds of hits of old skin cells falling to the ground. She pulled one of them up, and the woman’s ID and history spilled across her vision.

  Impossible.

  The old woman was a one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old cyborg, retired after forty years in a water distillation plant. Heme switched back to the other video. And back again. Superimposed them. Drone clouds were able to collect genetic material that sloughed off their target … but to produce new genetic material as part of a completely perfect cover? No microdrone cloud camouflage could withstand close microscopic scrutiny. The physical computational mass needed to create that kind of a screen would make the cloud too heavy.

  Impossible.

  Impossible.

  Impossible because that level of sophistication in a drone cloud didn’t exist. Impossible because, if it did exist, that level of security would never allow a street cleaner to recover a subject’s real genetic material.

  Heme stared at the old camera’s footage. But there it was. A man with a drone cloud where every other sensor and camera showed an old woman coming home from the grocery store. A man who, at the very moment frozen on screen, was blithely unaware of two epithelial cells wafting past the safety net of his drone cloud. She focused on the lower right of the stilled image, advanced the video. Watched as a mouse-sized cleaner advanced across the path of the figure, polishing the sidewalk.

  “Gun, inventory our ammo supply. Wake it all up. Everything we have. Make sure it’s ready to fire. We may be engaging soon. And send a tightbeam to command to let them know we’re hot. Just the minimum for positive target ID and engagement: Butcher Block Green.”

  “Yes, Heme. Sending Butcher Block Green via tightbeam. I am deploying now. Brace yourself. Might hurt a bit.”

  The weapon blossomed out of Heme’s back, elongating and hardening. Her chest popped open as Gun accessed the armory, exposing glistening silver tubes. Heme winced; her spine had never quite healed where the engineers had mounted Gun.

  “Gun, we need to recalibrate the tracking software. Real-time now. No need to stutter the data collection. New target is this ID.”

  Heme uploaded the old woman’s DNA into the ballistics module.

  She turned her attention back to the video. She needed verification—proof—before she committed. Scanning her HUD, she saw the old camera’s tech readout winking at her. Heme pulled it into her main viewpoint and immediately saw her answer.

  The camera was old, one of the oldest that could still interface with the network. It lacked any computational, analytical, or rendering capacity. Instead, it did something that was now v
ery novel: it reproduced exactly what appeared before its lens, in an unaugmented human’s visible light spectrum. The target’s drone cloud could manipulate the datastream for everything except this camera, because it was too old to understand the drone’s language.

  Heme checked the timer. Six minutes and thirty-six seconds since Gun had woken her. Thirty-six seconds of wasted time due to her indecision. Time to act.

  She took a deep breath, steeling herself.

  “Gun, what’s my shot percentage?”

  “A shot from this far away is doable, but you will need full access to the net. I have the exposure risk at fifteen percent.”

  “Good enough for me. I’m plugging in.”

  Heme connected.

  The full spectrum of the net hit her, and her brain came to life. The net was as vital for life as blood to a modern human. To feel it after so many months sent unbidden tears streaming down Heme’s face. Her eyes may have been replaced with ocular implants, but her tear ducts were still intact.

  Her body tingling with new virtual sensation, Heme pushed into the net’s pulse and saw the massed buildings, each bottomless pools of real-time data about the humanity they contained. Not wasting time, Heme altered input variables and datastreams. Tangled spider webs of traffic flight plans filled the air around her, time-space position tracked and predicted down to the microsecond. Air currents, sunlight, and shadow patterns were converted by her implants into smells and feelings caressing her now non-existent skin.

  It was so tempting to get lost, but Atmadja would have a lock on her within seconds if she delayed. She didn’t have to look far. The genetic trail of the old woman lit up like it was radioactive. She tracked her via cached video footage until she caught up to the present time.

  There.

  Heme zoomed in, marveling at the quality of the information emitting from the old woman. New Philadelphia was ID-ing her as Isouah Tamben. It looked so real and deep … there was nothing superficial about the target’s data.

  Without warning, the old woman on the video was gone. Heme stopped her preparations, startled. Scanning back in desperation, she searched the sensory feeds, but there was no video evidence that the woman had ever existed, except for her own data stores inside the chrysalis.

  “Gun! She’s disappeared! You have anything on the network?”

  “Negative. It is as though she never walked through here.”

  Panicked, Heme went back to the moment the woman disappeared. A strange fluctuation in the datastream caused her to pause. Heme looked closer at the data, filtering it through an emulation of the old camera that had captured the first video of the target.

  Heme’s occipital implant grew hot, but she forced it to keep rendering the air current and sunlight distortions around the old lady.

  “Look,” said Gun. “The drone cloud … it split in two. Here, let me tag them.”

  The distortions lit up, outlined on Heme’s display as Gun tracked them.

  “I think they are unique enough that we can create a better emulation, one that uses the data distortions to image a visual of the drone cloud. What do you think, Gun?”

  “Already on it. Take a look. We are back on target.”

  Gun zoomed in one of the distortions, settling on a young boy, about fourteen years old.

  It hovered for a second, and then the boy split.

  It wasn’t visual, it was just noticeable in the datastream. The visuals showed the old woman laboring onward with her cart, while the boy kept walking until he turned a corner, out of view. The datastream had him in two locations, though: one proceeding around the corner and one maintaining position where the drone cloud had settled around him. Heme watched the old woman as she approached the place where the split drone cloud waited. The old woman entered the cloud and disappeared. Heme focused, heart in her throat, waiting.

  Ten seconds passed. Fifteen. She could feel the target slipping out of her fingers, but she forced herself to relax.

  As if by magic, the boy reappeared, exactly in the same place as the old woman disappeared.

  “Gun! ID??”

  “Raan Idlewild. Fourteen years old. No trace of the old woman ever being here. Not a replication. Somehow that drone cloud has taken over the boy’s ID.”

  “Look at that, Gun. Incredible. The street is picking up the boy’s skin cells. Those drones have assimilated every nuance of the boy’s biological markers.”

  “They have seamlessly integrated into New Philadelphia’s tracking of the boy. New Philadelphia is tracking our target as if he has been this boy all day. It is attributing the boy’s activities to the target. This should not be possible.” Gun’s synthetic voice sounded awed.

  “No wonder there’s such depth to the target’s camouflage. Even deep probing can’t unearth anything, because the drone cloud is mimicking actual people and leapfrogging between them, using and discarding their network history and data like … like disposable clothing!”

  Heme recalibrated ballistics and tracking while she rescanned using the new DNA marker. For all she knew, while they were losing time reviewing the old footage, the target had shifted again.

  If he has shifted again … If he’s somehow realized I’ve discovered him, I’ll never find him again.

  Almost as soon as the fear rose, she picked the boy’s markers up from some biodegradable sensors in a coffee cup. The target was in a bake shop a block down the street.

  Definitely the target. The actual boy had turned off the street. Somehow the real boy had stopped broadcasting, and the target’s drones had taken over.

  Impossible.

  The constant assault of incredulity was beginning to sap her energy.

  “Gun, we can’t waste any more time. I think this is our only chance. Load a Needle.”

  “Loading.”

  The round clicked out of its housing, sending a twinge down Heme’s body as Gun winched it out of her chest, chambering it in its own body.

  Her weapon’s excitement was palpable, the energy coursing through their link. Gun was a young artificial intelligence, with only a couple kills under her belt. She still didn’t have much experience residing in the genetically modified cat brain, which Heme preferred on her weapons for their natural hunter/killer instincts and focus. Gun’s inexperience interfacing with a feline nervous system meant that less desirable traits like skittishness and panic sometimes seeped through. However, the cat brain also made it easy to keep the ballistics platform relaxed. Heme mentally stroked Gun, soothing her as Gun peeled back the Needle’s protective coating.

  Heme accessed Gun’s armory, assessing inventory.

  “How many Needles do we have, Gun?” She knew the answer, but had to ask anyway. Protocol was important.

  “One Needle.”

  Most operators took three. She’d elected on a more diverse payload, given the length of the mission and the uncertainty of what she’d encounter.

  The Needle was a low-signature projectile that delivered a microscopic subdermal barb via a three-stage delivery vehicle. It had limited range and power, but it had excellent in-flight maneuverability as long as the wind was in their favor. After impact, the barb would eject its contents, and then degrade into unidentifiable components inside the target. Franklin Cartel’s bioengineers had impregnated the needle with a genotoxin that would reinitiate and accelerate her target’s progeria.

  “We are in range, Heme. One kilometer out. Would you like me to maintain vocal, or divert processing power to ballistics?”

  “Divert. I need everything you’ve got on this.”

  “Understood, Heme. Powering down the Broca’s module.”

  Gun dumped the projectile’s flight plan into Heme’s vision. She shook her head, frowning. A large, bulbous building, a series of enclosed catwalks, and three levels of New Philadelphia stood between them and the target. Difficult, but doable.

  Gun pinged her, letting Heme know the round was ready. Heme’s chest shuddered as Gun extended her barrel until it was
pressing against the chrysalis’ outer membrane—a smooth, single piece of liquid metal, save for a small bulge on the side, where Gun’s brain resided.

  Eying flight trajectories and hit probabilities, Heme selected a firing location and maneuvered the chrysalis to it.

  “There’s our spot, Gun. I’m tying us down.”

  The chrysalis anchored onto a heavy cable between two spires, its thick pseudopods bonding with the synth-steel filaments. The spires created a wind tunnel that funneled a torrent of air right at them, but the chrysalis’ gyroscopic nodes compensated well, keeping their firing position motionless. The wind’s contour would help carry the Needle about half way before the projectile would need to fire its second stage, which aided in reducing its trail and visibility.

  Gun pinged her again. She had acquired and initiated a target lock. Ballistics calculations surged through Heme’s mind, flight path probabilities unfolding before her like an explosion of streamers.

  “Prime the round, Gun.”

  A subtle pop followed a soft click as Gun’s barrel pierced the chrysalis’ membrane.

  “Target.”

  The young boy came into view, walking out of the coffee shop, heading underneath one of the walkways. Heme swore.

  “There’s too much physical artifact in between us. We need to punch through that top deck. Stack a Heavy on top of the Needle. Set it for five percent clockwise rotation at three hundred yards. I want to core out the deck; it should decrease our angle of attack and our flight time.”

  Gun warbled, and data streamed across Heme’s retina. She swore again, frustrated at the delays.

  “Turn your Broca’s module back on, Gun. I can’t read all that. You’ll have to compensate with your processing power. Divert some from the chrysalis if you have to.”

  “Back on, Heme. Based on flight patterns, our exposure risk estimate has increased to twenty-five point four percent.”

  “I don’t care. We’re taking the shot.”

  Heme pushed the warning out of her HUD, clearing her vision and focusing on the ballistics flight calculations. Heavy rounds had a maximum range of two thousand meters, able to punch through an entire building and still take out a target on the other side. The only downside was the huge path the Heavy cut in flight. It could be traced back to the origin, exposing the shooter.