by Linda Nagata
It’s a big room, so we’re able to set the cot up between the foot of Tran’s bed and the closets.
Despite the presence of the bodyguard outside the door, we’re uneasy all afternoon, tensing every time we hear footsteps in the hall. 1800 rolls around and Logan orders dinner—room service from the hotel across the street. God knows what that costs.
He sends the bodyguard home.
Just past 1930, Tran finally wakes up, surprised to find himself still alive. As he sits up, a slow smile spreads across his face. “Hey, this means we get to do another mission.”
I contemplate holding a pillow over his idiot face until he stops kicking.
Logan would probably interfere.
“Is it okay if I open network access?” Tran wants to know.
Logan and I answer together, “No!”
• • • •
We set up a watch rotation. Tran volunteers to go first. I let him, though I’m suspicious it’s a scheme to get access to Issam’s farsights so he can get out in the Cloud without directly violating orders. As I set a wake-up signal, I hear him asking Issam to look up reviews of The Shattered, which I’m pretty sure is a comic.
“Don’t log into anything,” I warn him.
“If I do, I’ll make a new account.”
I cut that idea off at the roots. “Issam, don’t let him use your farsights, and if he threatens you, just wake me up.”
Tran rolls his eyes, but Issam frowns, not at all sure if we’re joking. I shut myself down—
—and wake up on schedule.
The room is dim but not dark. Despite his leg wound, Tran is up, pacing between the foot of the cot and the door, his M4 held muzzle-down in the crook of his arm. He looks over at me. “You’re early.”
“Just a couple of minutes.”
Logan is asleep in what was Tran’s bed, while Issam is snoring on the cot.
“Sitrep?” I ask Tran.
“Nothing to report.”
I clomp and creak to the toilet. “How’s the leg?” I ask him when I come out again.
He flashes a grin. “Like I keep telling you, I’m good.”
I shake my head as I get out my HITR. “Secure your weapon, soldier, and go to sleep.”
Tran takes over the bed and checks out. I sit in the recliner with the HITR across my lap, listening to activity in the hall. After forty minutes or so, Issam starts dreaming. It’s a bad dream. He’s twitching and breathing in little gasps. I watch him for a few seconds. Then he sits up so suddenly he startles me out of my chair. Even in the dim light, I see the whites of his eyes, wide with panic. His right hand grabs at his throat, and then he’s on his feet. His gasps change to constricted whoops as he lurches past me toward the door.
I’m so shocked, I step out of the way. But he doesn’t make it to the door. Outside the toilet, he goes down. He’s on hands and knees, drool running from his mouth as he struggles to breathe. I step past him, lean into the bathroom to hit a call button I remember seeing there, and then I hit the light. Issam lifts his head, looking at me with bulging eyes, his throat swollen. I don’t think he’s getting any air at all. I step past him, throw the door open, and yell down the hallway, “Emergency! We’ve got an emergency!”
The nurse on duty comes running. It takes only seconds for her to reach us, but Issam is already on his back, on the floor, his whole body trembling with spasms. The nurse is speaking out loud, using her farsights to summon an emergency team while she tries to establish an airway.
By this time, Tran and Logan are both awake and all the lights in the room are on. There’s nothing we can do, so we stay out of the way while the medical team works.
In the end, there’s nothing anyone can do, and Issam’s lifeless body gets wheeled away on a gurney.
“It’s like the secretary of defense,” Tran says as a janitor cleans the floor. “Remember I told you about that? He collapsed while giving a speech and nothing the paramedics did could revive him.”
“Did you ever hear what he died of?”
“Yeah. I looked it up before we left. Acute asthma attack associated with a severe allergic reaction.”
“Shit,” Logan whispers, because that’s exactly what Issam’s death looked like—and the attending physician confirms it when he stops by later in the night to talk with us.
I ask him what caused the allergic reaction.
He doesn’t know. He can’t even guess. He’s never seen anything like it before.
• • • •
At this point we all just want to get out of the hospital, but we are asked to wait until morning when the administrative staff comes in. So we sit in the room and talk about what happened. None of us believe it was an accident. But why was Issam the only victim? Why are the rest of us still alive?
Tran says, “It was like that with the secretary of defense. Just him. No one else, in a crowded auditorium.”
“Maybe Issam was poisoned earlier,” Logan says. “Maybe it was the bodyguard and it just took time.”
Maybe.
• • • •
In the morning, we’re reclassified as outpatients. They provide me and Tran with decent-looking civilian clothes, and we get to move across the street to the associated hotel. Issam spent a night there—that worries me—but he only died when I insisted he stay under my protection.
A private subterranean tunnel connects the two buildings. We emerge in a small underground lobby furnished with chairs, a propane fireplace, and a checkin desk staffed by two smiling men and a dour woman. There is no direct access to the outside, but there is a single elevator, and across the room from it, a closed, windowless door labeled with a sign in many languages advising MAIN LOBBY THIS WAY.
Safe to assume this is the secure entrance. Convenient, since we’re transporting our HITRs open-carry and our pistols on display in their holsters. The dour woman at the desk greets us in excellent, if unsmiling, English. “Welcome, sirs. Your suite is ready. We do politely ask that your weapons be restricted to your rooms.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She doesn’t ask for IDs, biometrics, or account information, so I have to assume we’re still operating on Leonid’s credit. We’re handed key cards. They’re an old-fashioned means to open a door, but they have the advantage of being anonymous, unlike biometric locks.
“You are on a secure floor,” the woman tells us. “Access to your room is only through this lobby. The elevator will not accept any unregistered guests or stop on any other floors.”
We step aboard the elevator. There is no keypad. The doors close and we ascend nonstop to our room on the thirty-second floor.
We are in a one-bedroom suite at the end of the hall, furnished in simple, modern luxury. There is only one window. It’s floor-to-ceiling, but it’s just twenty centimeters wide and made of heavy glass. Hard to shoot through. Probably hard to blast through.
We investigate the suite with weapons drawn.
There is a bathroom off the front room, another off the bedroom. We clear them all and check the closets. When we’re done, Tran looks around in satisfaction. “This,” he announces, “is a step closer to a superhero hangout. Beats the hell out of the barracks at C-FHEIT.” He grabs the remote, flops on one of the two beds, and turns on the TV. “How long are we here for?”
“Tonight, if we’re lucky.” I head back to the front room.
“Hey, they have sex workers here,” he calls after me. “Licensed, bonded. Come to the room. Is that a security violation?”
“Yes.” I project my voice to make sure I’m heard. The effort makes my throat itch and threatens to start me coughing all over again, so I step back to the door to escape the need to shout. Tran has limited his search to women. He’s scrolling through their profiles. Logan is looking too. It’s an impressive selection. “Issam is dead. We don’t know how they got to him. We don’t want them getting to us.”
“Yeah, but we can’t squat in this room forever.”
“We’ve been here f
ive minutes. Anyway, I want to wait for Papa to turn up.”
Tran pauses the selection. He looks at me with a wary gaze. “You’re not trying to cut some deal to work with Papa?”
“No.”
“Good. Because we are ETM—if Kanoa doesn’t kill us.”
“Kanoa already left you for dead,” Logan says, surprising me with his bitterness. “Your corpse would be food for crows by now if Papa hadn’t gotten us out of there.”
Tran returns his gaze to the TV. In a quiet voice he says, “For right now, I’m gonna believe he didn’t have options, okay?” He resumes scrolling, but his enthusiasm is gone.
I go back to the living room, where I turn an armchair to face the door and then occupy it with my HITR in my lap and my pistol in a chest holster.
“Logan!”
“Sir!”
“There’s a TV out here too. Check if it can access feeds from the hallway security cameras.”
I’m not paranoid.
Well, I am.
Why shouldn’t I be? We have enemies and I don’t even know who most of them are. All I know is they’re out there. They got to Issam. They can get to us.
I fix my gaze on my encyclopedia icon and think, Search skullnet. A list of articles displays, but I want the manual. I hear Logan moving and then the soft electronic sigh of the monitor coming to life.
He says, “We need to make peace with Kanoa.”
“Just now, you didn’t sound like you want peace.”
“I don’t want him hunting us down.”
“We’ll work it out.”
“Confirming cameras in the hallway. Nice. They allow alerts. I’m setting it to go off anytime someone appears on the floor.”
I hope this isn’t a party floor.
I lean back, my creaky robot feet stretched out in front of me, and I start to read about my skullnet.
• • • •
A skullnet has two discrete tasks: reading brain activity, and adjusting it. Reading is a passive function that lets it track emotions and monitor patterns of thoughts flashing across the brain’s neural synapses. It’s what lets me “talk” in a telepathic sense, converting simple thoughts into synthesized words. In contrast, adjustment is active: It signals the microbeads to affect mood, or ready state. Adjustment is what lets the Red reach into my head and play me like a puppet.
After an hour reading through the manual, I decide I don’t need to get rid of the skullnet after all. I can keep the skullnet’s passive functions. I can even keep the active functions, the ones that I control with my thoughts. All I need to do is stop the Red from getting inside my head, and I can do that by snipping out the skullnet’s receiver.
It’s a simple solution. Elegant. Easy. Except that right now I’m existing on a baseline level of brain stimulation overseen by the embedded AI residing in the skullnet’s hardware. It’s the AI’s task to continuously monitor and adjust my mood to keep me humming along no matter what unforgiveable acts I commit. I could just leave that function in place, but I don’t really know what the limits of the program are—and once the receiver is out, I won’t be able to adjust it. I decide it’s safer to shut the baseline function down. The idea scares the shit out of me, but what else can I do?
• • • •
A well-equipped first aid kit is part of the standard gear any soldier carries. I get mine out of my pack and go through it, making sure I have everything I need. Scalpel, scissors, gloves, sterile wipes, gauze, wound glue. After patching up Tran, I’m low on wound glue, but there’s enough left for what I need.
Tran is still in the bedroom, watching something on TV. But Logan is stretched out on the couch. He lifts his head, gives me a suspicious look. “What are you doing?”
“Enhancing security.” I gather what I need, head into the bathroom, and close the door.
My lifestyle choices aside, I’m not a fan of pain. As I contemplate what I’m about to do, my heart rate and blood pressure climb.
I take off my shirt. Put a hotel towel around my shoulders. Then I run my finger along my scalp above my right ear until I find two slight bumps just under the skin, a centimeter apart. The one in front is the skullnet’s transmitter, positioned for easy communication with my overlay. I don’t want to damage the transmitter. The other bump is the receiver. I scrub the area with a disinfecting wipe. Then I break the scalpel out of its sterile wrapping.
The mistake most people make about the Red is to think of it as something human. It’s not. It doesn’t get frustrated, angry, or vindictive. If a tactic doesn’t work, if a pawn refuses to cooperate, if a task fails to execute, the Red learns from it and moves on. If the Red was human, I’d probably get dropped from ETM for what I’m about to do. But my guess is the Red will just recalculate my specs as a useful tool in its inventory.
I lean close to the mirror.
Deep breath.
I get the scalpel into position to cut, but the angle is bad and working in the mirror is disorienting. So I straighten up again and, working as fast as I can, I make two shallow incisions by feel, slicing loose a flap of skin above the receiver. Blood wells out, oozing in bright red streams that drain past my ear, down my neck, and drip onto the towel. Hurts. I try not to think about it, but shit. So many nerve endings in the skin. Pain is relative, for sure. I’ve felt pain a lot worse than this, but I’m not going to deny this sucks.
I stick a fingertip under the flap and probe for the receiver. It’s smaller than a rice grain. I try to get my finger under it, but it’s embedded in the meat. I try to get the tip of the scalpel under it, but I can’t see what I’m doing.
The bathroom door opens. It’s Logan. “Your stress levels are going crazy—Jesus! ” he says when he sees the blood. “Have you finally cracked?”
I get the impression Logan does not approve of self-mutilation. He makes a quick grab for my right wrist, wanting to get the scalpel away from me, but I fall back. Blood drips on the floor. “I need your help.”
He is outraged. “Are you trying to take out your own skullnet?”
“Fuck, no. I’d need a surgeon to do that. I just want to take out the receiver.” I move back to the counter, trying to see the incision site in the mirror. “I thought it’d be easier than this.”
By this time, Tran has picked up on the excitement. He’s crowding in behind Logan, eyes wide. “Holy shit.”
“You can’t take out the receiver,” Logan says.
“I can. I am.” The pain is backing off. That’ll be my skullnet, pumping me up on adrenaline and natural pain-killers as it follows its baseline program. I’m going to miss that.
“How are you going to make adjustments to the skullnet?” Logan asks.
I tell him the truth. “I won’t need adjustments. I found a program in the manual that will wind down the baseline until it hits zero. So that’ll run, and then I’m on my own.”
“You’re serious?”
I press a square of gauze against the wound to slow the bleeding. “It’ll take twenty-one days for the program to run. Time for me to adjust. But the skullnet will still be there. It’ll still be able to assess my physical status, monitor my thought patterns. I’ll still be able to hit gen-com.”
“So you’re not dropping out of ETM?” Tran asks.
“No. I have the overlay. I can get orders that way. I just don’t want the Red inside my head, making me think it’s okay to drag us into another suicide mission.”
Tran trades a look with Logan. Then he asks, “What if you can’t handle things on your own?”
That’s the part that scares me. I scowl at my image in the mirror. “If it doesn’t work, I’ll just get rewired, right?” I turn to Logan again. “Come on. I don’t want to make another decision like I made in the UGF. This is the compromise solution.”
“Think what you’re giving up,” Logan says. “You won’t get any help staying focused or staying awake. You won’t get any narcotic effects. No stress abatement. No automatic sleep.”
“I�
�ll get by. Just like I used to when I was a civilian.”
“You’re not a civilian, Shelley. Civilians don’t pump RPGs into rooms full of people.”
“Just do it for me. I don’t want to cut my ear off.”
He still hesitates, while my blood seeps through the gauze and my temper flares. “You know what, Logan? Do it. That’s an order.”
“Fuck you.” But he grabs the pack of wipes anyway and cleans his hands. “Give me that.” He takes the scalpel. “And put your fucking head down on the counter.” I do it, pillowing my skull against the blood-soaked towel. “I should just cut your throat,” he says.
“Probably better all around.”
“Shut up.”
I feel his fingers press against my head. He’s not making any effort to be gentle. He trades the scalpel for the scissors. There’s a faint snip! and then he drops a tiny black lozenge on the counter in front of my eyes. “Hope we got the right one.”
I hope we did too. I think, You there?
“Gotcha,” Tran says.
And Logan, sounding disappointed: “Yeah, you’re still linked.”
He uses the wipes to clean up the blood, and then he glues the incision closed. The glue’s anesthetic kicks in right away. Other than numbness at the site of the incision, I don’t feel any different. Not yet.
• • • •
By the time I get out of the shower, I’m ready to take the next step. “We need to find out where we stand with Kanoa,” I announce. “Let’s get our network access back on.”
Tran has taken over the armchair facing the door. “Thank you, God!” he proclaims. “This living-in-my-own-head shit is killing me with boredom. And I need to order a new HITR. Express delivery. Why the hell did you let me drop mine, Shelley? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this stupid M4 if we get in serious trouble.”
“Aim?” Logan suggests.
He’s stretched out on the couch again, hugging his HITR. I push his feet off and sit down. My overlay is independent of my skullnet, so it’s unchanged by my recent modifications. I look for the network icon. It brightens under my gaze and a menu pops out. I return myself to full network access. Gen-com automatically links home.