State Machine

by Spangler, K. B.

  There.

  She sent a brief apology to her feet, and began to run.

  This time, her race through the streets wasn’t even close to her relentless pursuit of Noura. She kept herself one street over from Jordan, and was able to jog towards him at a sensible pace. There was no traffic to dodge, no pedestrians to run over. Jordan thought he was safe, and while his conversational colors kept a trace of her Southwestern turquoise, he was mostly focused on the professional blues of the police. Rachel had no problem cutting down one street to run parallel to him, and then taking the next turn to bump into him at the corner.

  “You’re lucky I like your uncle,” she said, as she clicked the cuffs on his left hand.

  He hit her.

  She saw it coming, and tracked the movement of his right fist as it came straight at her. But getting the cuffs on him had brought her in too close: it was either take it and keep her hold on the cuffs, or drop them and get out of his way, and she made the mistake of thinking, Hey, what’s one more fist to the face, anyhow?

  It wasn’t nearly as powerful as one of Hope’s insane haymakers, but her face was a step removed from ground beef and the new pain shooting through the old was astonishing. Rachel couldn’t help but sputter, and she yanked Jordan towards her by the handcuffs.

  Another mistake: he followed up by hitting her straight in the throat.

  She was sure it had been a lucky shot. Jordan had all of the fighting finesse of a kid on the playground. And she still went down, gasping for air.

  He kicked her in the face.

  Broken noses were a force unto themselves. Rachel curled up in a ball on the sidewalk, and tried to breathe around the blood. Her scans took on a fuzzy halo, and her brain got the message that if she wanted to pass out for a while, her body would be totally okay with that.

  She found her feet, and took off after Jordan.

  Rachel knew she was a sight. There were fewer pedestrians out this way, and more cars, and the sight of a bloodied, battered Chinese woman running like hell on fire was literally stopping traffic. Jordan had managed to put some distance between them, but he had nowhere to go and he knew it. One block south, he was standing on the edge of the road, searching for something—a taxi, a bus, anything!—to take him away from the Agent.

  Rachel kept going.

  She knew she didn’t have much left in the tank. Agent or not, she still needed air, and between her broken nose and the punch to her throat, she was doing an excellent impersonation of Darth Vader on the last lap of a four-minute mile.

  Just another block, she promised herself.

  Jordan looked over his shoulder and saw Rachel charging straight at him down the middle of the sidewalk. His colors went white in shock, then bloomed bright yellow in fear, and he picked up speed.

  There was nowhere to go, and he knew it. The street had turned into a four-lane straight shot, an overpass above the interstate entering the tunnel just below them, and Jordan wasn’t fast enough to get to the other side before she caught up.

  Rachel knew she had him.

  Except the panicky kid decided his best option was to hop the low concrete barrier.

  “Oh come on!” Rachel shouted.

  She stopped running the instant Jordan became his own hostage situation, the kid dangling himself above a highway full of traffic, his footing barely there on a tiny ledge, his arms wrapped around the thick metal handrail running along the top.

  “Jordan?” she shouted, as she sent a text to Santino’s phone that said something along the lines of Backup, now! and Where the fuck are you?

  “Stay away!” the kid shouted back at her. He was searching frantically for a way out, not realizing until too late that he trapped himself.

  “I am,” Rachel assured him. “I don’t want anything to happen to you. Let’s get you out of this.”

  “Leave! I’ll come back up once you’re gone!”

  “I can’t do that,” she said. “I can’t just walk away from a possible jumper. Regulations, you understand. What if your arms get tired? I have to be close enough to help you.

  “You’ve got all of the power here,” she assured him. She was inching closer to him, slow and steady. “All I can do is make sure I give you what you need. What do you need, Jordan?”

  The look the kid gave her was almost hot enough to sear her bruised skin. Rachel shrugged. “Listen, I have to try,” she said. “Give me something. We’ll make it work.”

  Her mind was split between her senses. Sirens, growing louder by the moment; Jordan’s colors, tripping between fear and panic; the pain of her broken nose, her face, her feet where she had run straight through the thin soles of her shoes…

  Jordan saw the truck coming before she did. She had her scans fixed on him, not on the traffic beneath him, and it was only when she saw the complex colors of hope well up within him did she stop to look around.

  “Oh my God,” she gasped. “Jordan, don’t!”

  Fuck Hollywood, she thought. Fuck those movies where the hero leaps from the bridge onto the speeding semi…

  Jordan readied himself to jump.

  She almost didn’t make it. She wouldn’t have, if Jordan hadn’t decided at the very last moment that he was about to do something irrecoverably, unsurvivably stupid, and hesitated.

  It was just enough time for Rachel to grab the back of his shirt.

  She hauled, throwing all of her weight and muscle into keeping him on the ledge. Fabric tore, but you get what you pay for: Jordan’s expensive dress shirt held together long enough for Rachel to wrap both arms around his waist.

  She couldn’t lift him over the barrier, and Jordan was too heavy to hold up on her own. The kid spun in her arms to grab the handrail, and Rachel seized the cuff dangling from his left hand. The handrail was too thick around to accept the cuff—her own wrist wasn’t. She jammed her right arm through the gap between the concrete barrier and the handrail, and ratcheted the cuff shut. Short of a key or an amputation, neither of them was going anywhere.

  She heard the sounds of sirens dying, of Santino shouting, and her heart lifted to find her partner running towards her. In another minute, ninety seconds at the most, none of this would be her responsibility anymore.

  Rachel turned her full cyborg stare on Jordan. His colors, already yellow and trembling, blanched as the bloodied woman with the cold, unmoving eyes glared at him.

  “You are so fucking lucky I like your uncle.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  He was the picture-perfect image of a broken man forced to pack up his office. If he hadn’t been wearing Santino’s glasses and a Bluetooth headset, Rachel might have actually believed that ex-Senator Richard Hanlon hadn’t meant to reactivate the burner phone.

  “What!” she snapped, as her avatar stepped into the open air beside him.

  He would never go to prison.

  If Rachel had had any lingering doubts about whether the justice system could hold Hanlon accountable, the last seventy-two hours had dispelled those forever. Jordan Summerville’s full confession that Hanlon had masterminded the entire scheme wasn’t supported by the physical evidence. Nobody actually believed that a Secret Service agent and a twenty-five-year-old kid could hire a master thief, let alone an elite team of hit men, but there were emails on Jordan’s home computer showing that he and Alimoren were responsible for the White House break-in and its aftermath.

  However, according to Hanlon, the damage was done.

  Hanlon had put on a brave face, and had marched to his last press conference as a sitting Senator. He said that he was unable to serve as an effective political representative, not when the news cycles continued to churn out misinformation about his role in Recent Unsavory Events. He had been involved, yes, but on the periphery! Someone at his company had officially sanctioned the mental conditioning of those poor young people who had grown up to become OACET Agents, but not him. Nor was he responsible for Mitch Alimoren’s murder. His heart went out to poor Alimoren’s family, but those f
iles on Alimoren’s laptop proved he was involved—oh, and don’t forget that Jordan Summerville’s DNA was on Joanna Reed’s body, so pretending Jordan was an innocent child was ludicrous—but Hanlon’s own involvement in these horrific events was circumstantial. In spite of this, he felt he could not remain a public figure. Not when such problematic news stories continued to pop up. This…gossip…distracted from his obligations as a Senator. He could not, in good conscience, remain in office when he was so frequently singled out within the media.

  It was a lovely speech, short and to the point: Hanlon had decided to resign.

  Everyone in OACET had watched it live.

  Nobody had cheered.

  “Why doesn’t this feel like a victory?” she had asked Mulcahy, standing cold and silent beside her.

  “Because if Hanlon’s not responsible, the only other group that’s been involved in each event is OACET,” he replied. “He’s implied everything that’s been said about him is slander, and he’s stepping down because we’ll never stop coming after him.”

  “He’s let us turn him into a martyr,” she realized.

  “It was his best option,” Mulcahy said.

  And that had put her mental hamster back on its wheel.

  Rachel had paced, and thought, and had written it all down in a brand-new notepad, and reviewed those notes again, and had finally brought her theory to Santino. As he listened, her partner took on a halo of bright red rage, and she knew she was right.

  Hanlon had waited two whole days after the press conference to slide the battery back into the burner phone.

  Rachel and Santino had anticipated the call. After all, why carry out an elaborate master plan if you can’t delight in the details? If Rachel had had her way, she’d have surged that battery and turned the phone into a hollow plastic wafer, but she rarely had her own way anymore. (Hiveminds. What an unwieldy bitch of a thing.) So when Hanlon called, she stepped into her avatar, and then into the open air of his office.

  “Agent Peng? What a—”

  “No, it’s not a surprise. Go ahead. Gloat. I’m recording this for Agents Mulcahy, Glassman, and Murphy. They couldn’t make it. They’re busy with Senate hearings. You know how it is.

  “Oh, sorry,” she said, with a little sigh. “My bad. You knew how it was.”

  Hanlon’s eyes narrowed.

  “Yeah,” she said. “We got you on that point. You can tell yourself you swept the awards, if it makes you feel better, but you’re still going back to California thanks to us.”

  “I don’t know what you—”

  “Shut up.” Rachel cut him off again. “I love how you’re able to see me now, by the way. What’s your excuse? You heard about Santino’s prototype, and finally managed to get your own pair of glasses to work?”

  “Of course,” he said, settling himself on a corner of his desk.

  “Right. Whatever. Listen, I’ll make this short. We both know you’re not going to incriminate yourself, so I’ll do the talking. You can…I don’t know, cough three times or something if I get it wrong, okay?”

  She began to pace the length of Hanlon’s office. It was nowhere as nice as Summerville’s, but that was simply a matter of scale. Normal people would still find it overly opulent, with its old wood and marble, and far too many framed awards. Its large arched window had a view of a grassy park. She wondered who had used Hanlon’s office before him, and who would come after.

  The system kept turning.

  “Let’s just recognize I’m outraged by this entire case,” Rachel said. She felt Santino’s hands on her own, back in their kitchen, as he shoved paper towels in her fists to keep her from ripping open her own palms with her fingernails. “So when I say that I’m pissed that you tried to manipulate me into taking down OACET, that’s me cranking it up to eleven.

  There was the slightest twitch at the corner of Hanlon’s mouth. She couldn’t tell if it was the beginnings of a smile, or irritation that she had figured it out.

  “This past year must have been really hard on you,” she said. “Knowing that we were sitting on the brainwashing scandal. You must have been doing the same thing we were—watching reporters close in on the information, see how close they were getting to the truth… The cover story that someone else in your organization made a command decision would work for a little while, but there’re too many documents out there with your signature on them, too many of your former employees who have gone missing… Most are probably dead, but I bet one or two of them went into hiding once they realized what you were capable of. It’d be really inconvenient for them to turn up and bust your lies.

  “And while this was happening, you were also starting to lose your supporters. Your alliance with the telecommunications industry was beginning to fail, because you’d made promises you couldn’t keep. Some of them were starting to look at OACET as a solution instead of a problem. Randy Summerville? Must have hurt when he stopped returning your calls. He was spending time with Judge Edwards—Remember him? He used to be on your team, too—and toying around with different strategies that could resolve the OACET crisis. You probably freaked when you realized none of these strategies included you.

  “I bet that’s when you decided to recruit Jordan,” Rachel said. “Wouldn’t have been hard. Kid went everywhere with his uncle. He was also rabidly anti-OACET; fifteen minutes on Google could have told you that. He must have looked like a gift from God.

  “So you snatched him up. Told him to delete all of his online history that was anti-OACET—you and I know you can’t get pee out of the public swimming pool, but he probably didn’t—and he started feeding you information from inside Summerville’s office.”

  She took a breath. She knew she was rushing ahead, tripping over her words, and prayed Hanlon would think she was simply furious.

  Not terrified. Of course she wasn’t terrified. Not of this man who had nearly managed to ruin her life a second time...

  She took another breath.

  “You knew Mulcahy stuck the Hippos on you,” she said, once she had found her equilibrium. “They’ve been watching you for months, but you couldn’t do anything about them without tipping your hand. All you could do was convince some poor kid to hire a thief for the greater good.

  “What did you tell him? That the Mechanism would solve all of your problems? That it contained knowledge from an ancient civilization that would save the world? Damn, you got lucky you found someone so young and stupid, didn’t you?”

  Hanlon did a funny thing with an eye as he turned away to begin packing another box. It might have been a wink; she couldn’t be sure.

  “So, we get it,” she said. “We get that you wanted the fragment of the Mechanism, and that when Noura screwed the pooch, you put your backup plan into action. We get that you were playing the news cycle to bow out with your reputation intact.

  “And…” Rachel paused. Her avatar glanced around Hanlon’s office, looking for the nearest concrete, before she laughed aloud at her mistake. It was an odd, grating laugh, and she had the impression that Hanlon’s colors moved slightly towards an uncertain orange. “…we get that I’m the reason you told Alimoren to bring my team into the case. We didn’t need to work the White House robbery—we shouldn’t have been there! But I’ve been kicking you since the Glazer incident, and you decided that as long as you were leaving, you’d try and take me down on the way out.

  “If it had worked, you’d have struck a serious blow to OACET, and probably removed me from the battlefield. Incriminated me, and put me in jail, or worse. And you would have bought yourself some more time.”

  “Oh?” Hanlon cocked his head, feigning interest. “How so?”

  Rachel wanted to rant, wanted to get it out of her system, wanted to tell Hanlon that she knew!

  She couldn’t.

  Hanlon wasn’t the only one who had to worry about self-incrimination. Mulcahy, Josh, Mare…everyone in OACET’s Administration would watch this confrontation with Hanlon. And since she was o
ut-of-body, she couldn’t easily throw up a shield to block anything that might have been recording from Hanlon’s end. She didn’t detect any equipment within his office, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. She knew she wasn’t a very good cyborg.

  Hanlon knew that, too. In fact, he had counted on it.

  Jordan Summerville had admitted that he was Noura’s contact. He had been the one to meet the cat burglar when she came to town. Noura had insisted that she manage her own security, so Jordan never saw her except at predetermined meeting places. The Dupont Circle Farmers’ Market had been one of these, where they had planned for Noura to deliver the fragment of the Mechanism.

  Jordan had also said that while he had been the one who gave Noura the phone with the details of the White House and other necessary information, the phone had originally come to him from Hanlon.

  Rachel had been rather proud of herself when she found the first layer of files on that phone. She was notoriously bad with technology, right? But there it was, a hidden file, with a little piece of text that would incriminate her, and she had been the one to find it.

  If Rachel had never found that phone, the Secret Service would have run it through their data processors and turned up a digital ton of misinformation about OACET. This would have caused problems, sure, but they had handled misinformation before.

  On the other hand...

  If Rachel managed to find the phone, and if she found that one file with her information in it, Hanlon had assumed she would erase that one line which implied she would help Noura escape. Once the Secret Service got their hands on the phone and ran it through their data processors, they’d find evidence of tampering. They would recover the deleted information, and then dig deeper to find the red herring files he had buried.

  It would be easier to believe the information in those files if it could be proven that an Agent already had something to hide.

  It was a series of might-have-happeneds that would have come from a single moment of panic, and not knowing how data storage and retrieval worked. If she had stumbled into Hanlon’s trap, she could have undone a year’s worth of work to prove that OACET could be trusted. At best, she’d have been asked to leave the MPD; at worst, the public’s fears about OACET would have been confirmed.