State Machine

by Spangler, K. B.

  He let her move into him so she could use his eyes as her own. Seeing through Phil’s eyes was a novel experience. The closest she came to normal vision was when she was walking about in her digital avatar, and that provided a rather flattened three-dimensional perspective on the world. She had forgotten how limited normal vision was until the room and its occupants showed up as mere shapes made up of curves, planes, and angles.

  “What?” Phil asked, as he picked up on a thread of sadness moving into her mood.

  “Nothing!” she said quickly.

  Not quickly enough: Phil had spotted it, the comparison between old-time silent films versus IMAX theaters with stadium seating.

  “It’s not that bad!” Phil said defensively.

  “What isn’t?” Santino asked.

  “She’s…” Phil gestured with a hand before Rachel grabbed it and clapped it back down on her forehead. “She pities us poor unevolved lesser beings.”

  “Hey!” Jason threw a pizza crust at her. She tracked it from Phil’s perspective, which meant she missed it by a mile as she tried to knock it out of the air. “Santino’s the only one here who’s unevolved.”

  “Jason!” Rachel and Phil spoke as one, appalled.

  “It’s fine,” Santino said. Rachel was thankful that she wasn’t running emotions: that tone of voice wasn’t used for any purpose other than polite social camouflage.

  “We’ll get you a chip,” she said, reaching over to pat Santino on his knee. “As soon as we get this mess sorted out, you’ll be the first one we put under the knife.”

  “They use a stereotactic craniotomy,” he said. “Not a lot of knives.”

  Normally, Rachel would have jumped on him for the nerd comment, but she just patted his knee again. “See?” she said. “You’ll make a better cyborg than any of us.”

  “It’s fine!” he insisted. “Hanlon will never let anyone make new cyborgs. Not OACET-class cyborgs, at least. I’m just glad I get to work with you guys.”

  “Hanlon gave th’ technology to Congress. The U.S. government owns it. As soon as they realize we’re invaluable, they’ll make more of us. And we’ll insist on you,” Rachel said, pointing at her partner. “We need new blood to stay alive. Oth’rwise, you know, that thing will happen where we all turn into dumb-ass Disney executives… Groupthink! Can’t have groupthing...groupthink. Not if we want to do something real. If we stay...uh...flexible, OACET might actually be able to make things change. F’r once. Break up this shitty gridlock of a political system.”

  The sober part of Rachel’s brain warned her to keep quiet. When certain topics came up, she had a policy of sealing her mouth shut. Religion, politics, taxes (oh Lord, don’t let them get me started on the Army), she was a firm believer that anyone willing to discuss these topics had already made up their mind on them, and there was nothing she could say to change their opinion.

  She usually wasn’t remembering someone else’s stoner high in real time.

  “’kay, listen,” she said. “Nothing changes. Politicians, they get into office and stay there. It doesn’t matter what they do—they’ll be there forever. Look at Hanlon. Everybody knows what he did, an’ nobody cares. He smiles an’ looks pretty for the cameras, an’ they’ll let him go on forever.”

  “Everybody doesn’t know,” Phil said. “Not yet. The news will break any day now.” Anxiety ran across his fingertips, but her buzz was too strong, and she instinctively pushed her sense of peace straight back into him. He sighed, and submitted to the sensation. “Damn, that’s good,” he said, his voice slowing almost immediately. “But it’s another week, maybe three at most, an’ then everybody will know. If we’re lucky, we’ll finally get enough public pressure to force Congress to move on him.”

  “Won’t happen,” she muttered. “Never happen. Tell ’em, Santino. Microwave memory. Ding! and the story’s done.”

  “Microwave memory?”

  “That’s what I call the general public’s attention span,” Santino replied to Jason, eager to direct the conversation away from what he was sure he would never have. “Rachel liked the sound of it. It’s when stories heat up really quickly, but are over and forgotten within days. Once the first news story done, the media and the public move on to the next one.”

  “Yeah,” Rachel said. “News doesn’t stick. An’ politicians are startin’ to use that. It’s political theater…they can get away with the worst shit, as long as they know something juicier will come along tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know. I think Phil might be right,” Santino said. “Yes, it’s only the really crazy stories that have any sticking power with the public these days—it’s got to be flat-out drama to capture the public’s attention—but OACET’s always been one of those stories. When the news of what Hanlon did to you comes out, it might be enough to permanently sway public sympathy.”

  “Or,” Rachel muttered, “remind them they’re fuckin’ terrified of us.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about,” Jason said. “They already think we’re ticking bombs waiting to explode. Learning what Hanlon did might backfire on us.”

  That got her attention. It was sincere, and Jason usually didn’t do sincere. Honest, yes, the man was brutally honest, but his honesty was his armor. Sincerity cost him; she flipped on visuals for a brief peek at his mood, and found he was deeply gray with sharp jagged points of yellow, misery and fright all the way down to his charcoal core.

  “It’ll be okay,” she said, pushing good feelings—comfort, security—at him. Their casual connection wasn’t deep enough, and he waved them aside. “No,” she insisted, struggling to face at him while still keeping her head in the cradle of Phil’s lap. “It’ll be okay! We’ve done everything right. We’ve built alliances, we’ve proven we can function within society. We’ve done everything right!”

  “All it takes is one,” Jason said. “One big fuck-up, and all of that goodwill is gone. We’re relying on the public’s perception of us to keep us safe, but they can’t remember what happened yesterday when there’s new bullshit being screamed at them all the damned time.”

  “That’s a risk,” she admitted. “Big risk. It’s okay, though. We try.”

  “Trying isn’t enough,” he muttered. “We’re still human. We try, but we still fuckin’ fail! Hanlon just has to wait until one of us gets caught.”

  “Same applies to Hanlon,” Santino said. “He’s made too many mistakes with OACET. You’ve spent the last year showing the public that he’s a monster and you’re not. The brainwashing story might be the last straw.”

  “Hope so,” Rachel muttered, and turned off visuals again to relax in the soft dark. “We’ve got nothing left in our anti-Hanlon arsenal after that.”

  “Nothing?” Curiosity moved from Phil into Rachel, nudging her forward.

  “Well, no. There’s some stuff left,” she admitted, riding Phil’s emotions as much as the memory of the perfect high. “Hanlon’s rich an’ powerful. There’s always something shady goin’ on with people like him. You can bet Mulcahy’s looking for proof that he’s… I dunno. Funding the Contras with information stolen from the Democratic National Committee or somethin’.”

  “We’re with you,” Santino said.

  “I don’t need to turn on emotions,” she threatened. “You’re patronizing me, I can tell.”

  “Yeah, but we’re also interested,” Phil said as he poked her in the middle of her forehead. “You never talk about this stuff.”

  “Where was I?”

  “Hanlon. Government conspiracies. The contemptible state of today’s media and the public’s attention span.”

  “Eh,” Rachel grunted. “Whatever. Doesn’t matter anyhow. Thirty years from now, we’ll probably be braggin’ to our grandkids about the good old days when news cycles lasted for whole days instead of measly minutes. Same ol’ song, forever.”

  “Except now there’s us,” Jason said.

  “Yeah,” Rachel said, smiling. “Now there’s us. We’re differen
t.”

  “Well,” Phil said. “Today, we’re different. Maybe those grandkids will think we’re soooo boring with our cute first-gen brainchips.”

  “Yeah, but today, we are different,” Rachel said. “There’s never been anything like us before, not in Washington. Not in politics. We’re a sea change. An’ America needs a sea change.”

  “Mr. Smith the Talking Atomic Bomb goes to Washington?” Santino asked.

  “Exactly!” Rachel said, nodding so hard that she broke skin contact with Phil. The buzz vanished and her headache returned, albeit much subdued. “Oh! Phil, you’re a miracle worker,” she said, and flipped on visuals. The men appeared around her, bemused in blues and purples.

  “You’re fun when you’re stoned,” her partner told her, grinning.

  “I’ve seen each and every one of you drunk,” she retorted. “Don’t laugh at me unless you want me to queue up the video of last year’s Christmas party.”

  She dusted herself off and moved to the couch, grabbing what was left of her soda on the way.

  “No, it’s interesting,” Phil said. “You never talk about politics.”

  “Because it’s pointless. We don’t have a political system. We have a holding pattern,” Rachel said. “It’s all about creating new and exciting methods to game that holding pattern so a handful of people make progress while the rest of us stay stuck in the same place. It’s pretty depressing.

  “I think…” Rachel took a moment to run through her next words, looking for bumps in the road. “I think I’m glad we’re taking the fight home. We might be able to shake up the system. There’s nothing that’s not completely fucked-up about how OACET was created, and it was all done legally. It could still happen, if Hanlon comes up with a different technology and gets his hands on another group of dumb kids! It’s time somebody does something about that, and...”

  She trailed off. This had all sounded so much better when she was stoned.

  “Well,” she finished weakly. “The way things are going, that somebody is probably OACET.”

  “It’d be nice,” Phil said. “Not the legal fucked-up part. The part about how we might be able to keep this from happening to anybody else.”

  “Yeah,” Rachel said. “I don’t know if it’d make all of this worth it, but it definitely would help me sleep at night.”

  “All right,” Santino said. “Rachel? Ready for another round of scans?”

  She groaned, and tried to sink into the sofa before Santino dragged her back to the fragment.

  Another hour, and after Lulu’s safeguards tripped a second time, Rachel declared she was done. The fragment was stored in its black box, and the box transferred to the pocket of Rachel’s suitcoat.

  The four of them cleaned up the trash and closed down the lab, and made their way towards the parking lot in a small, sleepy group.

  It was by chance that the blister on Rachel’s heel chose that moment to pop.

  Thanks, Noura, she grumbled to herself, as she grabbed a light pole to steady herself and nudge her feet as far down into the toes of her boots as they could go.

  Jason was walking beside her, and was paying enough attention to feel her mood shift. “You okay?”

  Jenna Noura…

  And then Rachel remembered what she had wanted to ask Jason.

  “You need to teach me how to erase something from a computer,” she told him.

  His colors turned orange. “You haven’t figured that out yet?”

  “And not leave any marks.”

  Most of the yellow turned to white: apparently, this was not as easy as it sounded. “Rachel—”

  “It’s important,” she said quietly. “The woman who broke into the White House recognized me.”

  “So? You’ve been in the news a bunch of times.”

  “Put me and six other Chinese women together, Jason. Could you pick me out of that lineup?”

  “Yeah,” he said, yellow surprise pushing out the shock and scorn. “Of course.”

  “Well…” She hadn’t expected his fast and honest answer. “Aren’t you special? I’m going to assume there’s a file out there somewhere with my picture in it. Maybe there’s other information that we shouldn’t leave floating around.”

  “Damn,” he muttered. “Fine. Call me. Not tomorrow—I’m jammed until the party at the White House. Maybe the day after tomorrow. You should know how to do this by now.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m a truly shitty cyborg,” she muttered, “Just teach me this.”

  “All right,” he agreed, as Santino shouted at them to hurry up.

  NINE

  This would be their last year in the OACET mansion. The lowest bidders had been scrambling to transform the husk of an old post office into a new headquarters for the cyborgs. It was shaping up to be spectacular, government contractors notwithstanding. Mare Murphy had argued to Congress that if OACET was to serve as the public face of American technology, they should receive a building to match their status. The underlying theme of And you owe us! had sealed the deal, and an abandoned postal hub near Judiciary Square was being retrofitted to the Agents’ specifications. The design would incorporate the best of both worlds, with the original neoclassical architecture preserved, and the crumbling plasterwork rebuilt over a complex web of structured wiring and point-to-point cabling. From a cyborg’s perspective, the building would sing.

  Rachel was sure she’d loathe it.

  OACET’s temporary headquarters were located outside of the city proper, in an old mansion on a hill overlooking the Potomac River. The mansion had been seized in a drug raid in the 1980s, and had remained unsold and uninhabited until it had been turned over to OACET the year before. During its decades of vacancy, the government used the mansion as a property overflow warehouse. Security was tight, but it had been used much in the way of a family storage unit: rarely, and largely ignored unless something went wrong.

  The mansion was a comfort in the way of an old pair of jeans, a favorite song on the radio. It was crammed to the rafters with the accumulated clutter of three decades of asset forfeiture, with everything from oil paintings to catering equipment to the occasional speedboat shoved into every square inch of available space. OACET had cleaned the mansion as best they could, and had reminded the many federal agencies who used the place as a dumping ground to auction off some of the valuables that had been gathering dust. Unfortunately, as soon as space was cleared, new items flooded in to fill it. The federal government abhorred a vacuum, especially one located within easy driving distance.

  Rachel picked a cautious path up a rear staircase. A tumble of antique rugs had been left there, courtesy of the FBI’s Art Crime Team. She scaled three flights like a mountain goat, then paused at the top to take in the chaos below. In the early days of occupation, the Agents would have had the rugs sorted and stacked in the solarium within hours. Lately, it had become harder to find Agents with enough spare time to handle the routine housekeeping needed to control the mess. Almost everyone in the collective had assignments which kept them out of the mansion during the workday. Their fledgling hivemind no longer needed a hive to survive. She knew this was progress, but she still felt the loss.

  Time to buy my sapphire, she reminded herself. Down in the medical lab, a small pink sapphire was waiting on four final payments to the Department of the Treasury. She had picked out the stone when they had first moved into the mansion, its electron resonance a peaceful note within her mind. It had been more expensive than she had expected, and she wasn’t sure what she’d do with it (either a necklace or a ring, that was a given; she couldn’t afford a second sapphire to make a matched set of earrings), but she’d be glad to have it once the mansion was no longer home.

  She passed through two sets of mahogany doors and the upper floor of the atrium to end in the west wing. Back in the mansion’s prime, this area had been set aside for guests, and the top floor was made up of massive bedrooms and overdone en suites. The doors down the length of the hallway stood
open, the clatter of keyboards and muffled media blending with her footsteps into white noise.

  Correction: one door was closed.

  Rachel knocked on this door, a politeness they maintained for the toddler usually found playing in the confines of a deep marble soaker tub converted to a crib. Avery was the child of two Agents, and this had placed her parents in the unique position of two telepaths raising a non-telepathic daughter. Mako and Carlota had realized early on that their daughter wouldn’t be exposed to language unless the Agents made the effort to talk when around her, and this had been a rule since the day Avery was born.

  It took her parents a little extra time to realize that they needed to impose more rules. The Agents hadn’t fully recognized how many social norms they had phased out of their repertoire. Agents didn’t bother with doorbells or phones. They spoke and laughed and shouted at things no one else could see. They manipulated and twisted technology as their needs demanded, usually without physically touching the machines. When they were interacting with non-Agents, they tried to keep these behaviors in check, but Avery had three hundred and fifty convenient babysitters who allowed themselves to be themselves within the safety of the mansion. Hence, the closed door and its printed sign:

  THE OUTSIDE WORLD BEGINS HERE

  “Who is it?” The voice came, loud and booming, from within the cavernous bedroom on the other side of the thick mahogany door.

  “It’s Aunt Rachel,” she said, smiling. Mako had known she was coming from the moment she was within a mile of the mansion.

  The door opened, and a giant black man with a familiar core of forest green greeted her. “Rachel! Good to see you! Please come in!”

  She stepped into the room, and Mako Hill grabbed her in a bear hug. He was open in a way his cousin could never be: Matt Hill had been to hard places, but Mako was still soft. At least, as soft as a seven-foot-tall, three-hundred-pound mountain of weightlifter’s muscle could ever be.