The Cyborg Chronicles (The Future Chronicles)

by Peralta, Samuel

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  Patty Jansen lives in Sydney, Australia, where she spends most of her time writing science fiction and fantasy. Her story This Peaceful State of War placed first in the second quarter of the Writers of the Future contest and was published in their 27th anthology. She has also sold fiction to genre magazines such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Redstone SF and Aurealis.

  Her novels include Shifting Reality, The Far Horizon, Charlotte’s Army and Fire & Ice, Dust & Rain and Blood & Tears dark fantasy).

  Patty is a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and the cooperative that makes up Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and she has also written non-fiction.

  Patty is on Twitter (@pattyjansen), Facebook, LinkedIn, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Google+ and blogs at: http://pattyjansen.com/

  Dyad

  by David Bruns

  THEY ARRIVED IN AN UNMARKED ‘62 Chevy, a newer model with maglev roller wheels and high-efficiency fuel cells. Pretty nice ride for cops, even for Tech Division.

  From my fourth-floor office window, I watched a stocky man emerge from the passenger side, stretch his arms over his head, and yawn widely. He had the kind of body type that off the rack clothing was not kind to: long barrel-shaped torso, ape-like arms, stumpy legs. His head was topped by a mop of unruly salt and pepper hair, and he sported a mustache that was visible even from this distance.

  His partner was a younger man. Dark, intense, with vaguely Asian features, he wore a fashionable para-military suit favored by law enforcement types, the double-breasted kind that fastened high up on the shoulder and had false epaulets.

  I turned back to my desk and slipped on my heads-up display set, accessing the company’s cybernetic license file with the eyescan. Probably just an unannounced inspection, but with the feds, you never knew. Sally, my in-house counsel, usually handled all contact with Tech Div, but she was out today. It was TaylorTech company policy that no one talk to Tech Div except Legal or me. I had maybe ten minutes before the receptionist would send them my way.

  I scanned the file. Ninety-seven open cyber-tech licenses, thirty-seven approved since our last inspection, no violations, one warning for unauthorized access to cyber-tech by a new employee. All in all, a pretty respectable record. I let out a sigh of relief; at least they weren’t here about a violation. I knew other CEOs of cyber-tech firms who would kill for a tech licensing record that clean.

  The red light in the corner of the display flashed twice. I accessed the call, and the receptionist’s face, a pretty Latina who wore her dark hair in a thick braid over her shoulder, floated over the image of the license file. She was new, so my system prompted me that her name was Lucia, and that she preferred to be called Lucy.

  “Dr. Taylor, there are two agents from the Federal Technical Enforcement Division here to see you.” Her use of the full name of FTED, or Tech Div, as they were normally called, showed how new she was to the company. Still, she was cute. From the time my father founded the company, he’d always said it was better to have beauty rather than brains at the front desk. I knew it was sexist, but that was Dad, and besides, it worked. I’m sure Lucy’s pretty face had managed to buy me a few extra minutes.

  I returned her smile. “Thank you, Lucy. Please escort them to my office.”

  I got out from behind my desk and slipped on my suit jacket. How I wished Sally was here. She’d been with the company forever and knew just how to handle these kinds of unannounced meetings. When Dad was still alive he’d have her over to the house and they’d reminisce about the early days of Tech Div, when the government agency acted more like bounty hunters, not the bureaucrats they were today.

  I slipped the jacket back off. Better to look casual.

  Lucy appeared in my doorway and knocked gently on the jamb. “Dr. Taylor, may I present Agents Davos and Lee.” Lucy was a few inches taller than the stocky official, the one in the poorly fitted suit. Up close, I could see the man had a grandfatherly face, a handlebar mustache, and…a cybernetic eye. My confidence went up a notch. It was always better to deal with someone who benefited from cybernetic technology.

  The short agent strode forward with his hand outstretched. “Dr. Taylor, what a pleasure. Emmanuel Davos. Friends call me Manny.” His grip was dry and firm.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Manny.” I turned to the second agent. “Dr. Michael Taylor, and you are?”

  “Agent Lee,” he said in a clipped, no-nonsense tone. His dark eyes flickered over my face, stilling my smile.

  “Pleasure,” I said. He offered the barest of handshakes, as if my touch was somehow unpleasant to him.

  “Wow, what an office,” Manny exclaimed, making his way to my bookshelf. He pointed at the picture of my family. Me, Portia, and Emma, who was four at the time, at Disney World, all of us wearing Mickey Mouse ears and smiling like idiots. “Dr. Taylor, your wife is a knockout. How many years have you two been together?”

  “Call me Mike, please. We’ve been together ten years. That’s Portia, my wife, and Emma.” I moved further down the bookcase and touched a picture with four photos of Emma: a sonogram, Emma as a baby with Portia, her kindergarten school picture, and a recent portrait with missing front teeth. “That’s my little girl,” I said. “She’s almost seven now.”

  Manny reached for the heavy frame. “May I?”

  “Of course,” I replied, handing the picture to him. “That’s what they’re there for.” Manny’s cyber-eye flickered as he focused on the photographs. I tried to ignore Agent Lee lurking by the door.

  “You know what I like about this?” Manny said, then continued on without stopping. “It’s real. Digital pictures just don’t do it for me. I’m a traditionalist.” He leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “He thinks I’m an old fart.” Manny jerked his head toward Lee.

  “Well, that’s my Portia for you,” I said with a laugh. “She likes her traditions. You should see our house—full of antiques.”

  Manny was studying Emma’s baby picture. “I wasn’t in the delivery room when any of my kids were born. My wife didn’t want me there. She’s old-fashioned, too, I guess.” He winked at me. “Just as well, I’m not good with blood. Probably would have fainted anyway.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I missed Emma’s birth. I was out of the country on business and she showed up three weeks early. Even today, with all our technology, we can’t predict when a baby will show up. It’s something I’ll always regret.”

  Manny put the picture back on the shelf. “Don’t sweat it, Doc. You guys’ll have another one, right? You’ll get your shot.” He walked over to the sitting area on the far side of my office and sat down without asking.

  I followed along, taking a seat opposite him. “That’s the shame of it, Manny. Emma is and always will be an only child. It took almost four years for Portia to get pregnant the first time, and the doctors said there’s no possibility of another child.”

  “Too bad, Doc. That’s just too bad.” When Manny sat hunched forward in his chair he looked a little bit like a friendly garden gnome. He poured himself a cup of coffee from the carafe Lucy had left us and offered it to Lee, who shook his head. Manny shrugged and dropped in two lumps of sugar. He sat back, stirring the coffee slowly.

  “Well, you’re probably wondering why we stopped by today, Doc,” Manny said.

  I forced a smile. “Well, I figured we were due for an inspection.”

  “You’ve heard about Congressman Stiles and his criminal activity?” Lee said. I made a conscious effort not to react to Lee’s accusin
g tone.

  “Cybergate? Surely you don’t think my company had anything to do with that,” I replied, trying to put some fire in my tone. I turned to Manny. “We run a clean operation here, Manny. Our licensing record is nearly spotless.”

  Manny tugged on one handlebar of his mustache. His cybernetic eye focused on me. “You know why they call it Cybergate? Back in the 70s—1970s, I mean—there was this political scandal called Watergate. It had nothing to do with gates or water, Watergate was a hotel. Huge deal—the President actually resigned over it—and ever since, scandals in the US are labeled “gate,” even though it means nothing.”

  I stared at Manny. His human eye met my gaze. His cyber eye flicked over my features. Sweat prickled the back of my neck as I wondered what sort of processing enhancements he had installed in that eye. Stay calm. You have nothing to hide.

  “Tell us what you know about the Stiles case,” Lee said in that same hard tone.

  “Just what I see on the news,” I said, trying to meet Lee’s flinty glare. “The congressman’s been accused of violating COAT, by keeping a full-up model as a domestic. I believe the unit was his personal assistant.”

  The Cybernetic Organism Anti-Trafficking Act of 2052, better known as COAT, was passed after an entire community in Pennsylvania was slaughtered at the hands of a malfunctioning cyborg, a poorly integrated Russian model with unauthorized military upgrades. It took an entire company of Marines to neutralize it. No one in the news focused on the poor quality of the integration work or the fact that military programming in a civilian model was already illegal. No one talked about all the good work being done by cyborgs in healthcare or in menial service jobs. All they saw was a robot killing machine.

  Dad was still alive then and testified before Congress as an industry expert, but it was no use. After a year of political wrangling, COAT was signed by the president. The law limited cybernetic implants in humans to 22.5 percent of the person’s body volume—essentially one limb and one internal organ. Anyone with more than the legally allotted amount of cyber-tech in their bodies had two choices: get in compliance or get a kill switch installed in your hardware in case you went berserk at some point.

  Complete cybernetic organisms, or “full-ups,” were outlawed entirely. By the late 2040s, the business of producing full-ups had just started, mostly high-end units to rich people, but cutting-edge labs were doing some pretty remarkable stuff. Some even claimed by combining human consciousness and cyber-tech they were making next generation humans.

  COAT also resulted in the formation of Tech Div, whose first duty was to neutralize full-up cyborgs—the law actually used the word “neutralize.” The ones that didn’t come in voluntarily were hunted down with extreme prejudice and a cottage industry of ‘borg bounty hunters sprang up to make a killing on the government dime. A few of the more popular characters even had their own reality TV shows. Getting “borged” became popular slang for getting killed.

  Manny had stopped stirring his coffee. “Do you know anything about how the congressman might have obtained a full-up cyborg?”

  So that’s it. They thought TaylorTech was involved in black market cyborg trafficking.

  Where there’s a need, there would always be someone to fill it—even if it meant coloring outside the lines of legality. The black market for cyborg full-up integration was thriving, and integrators needed cybernetic parts, parts from a company like TaylorTech.

  I allowed a note of indignation to enter my voice. “Manny, we run a clean operation. We comply with the letter—and the intent—of every federal law on cyborg trafficking. I don’t know where the congressman got his full-up cyborg, but it wasn’t from TaylorTech.”

  Manny tapped the spoon against the rim of his coffee cup and paused to take a sip. “I believe you, Doc. But you have to understand that this ‘borg the congressman had was no black market hack job. This was a primo model.” He rested the cup on the table and pulled his jacket aside to show his service revolver, a Glock EMP that fired electro-magnetic pulse rounds specially designed to paralyze the neural network of a cyborg. He stroked the butt of the pistol.

  “I’ve been around a lot longer than junior there. I lived through the bad old days when we were taking down two, sometimes three or four ‘borgs a day. Doc, I’m telling you that I have never seen a model this good.” He lowered his voice. “The congressman claims that even he didn’t know.”

  I laughed and sat back in my chair. The perfect cyborg, the model so good you couldn’t tell it apart from a human. Ones with warm skin, hair and nails that grew, and even bled if you cut them. An urban legend that would not die—along with the perpetual motion machine and Elvis sightings. “C’mon, Manny, I’m in the cyborg parts business and I’m here to tell you, the technology is just not there. I can always tell.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that.” Manny nodded his head and turned to Lee. “Didn’t I say that Dr. Taylor would be able to help us? He’s a professional and you owe me fifty bucks, Agent Lee.” Lee’s lip curled at Manny, but he said nothing.

  I slid forward until my butt was balanced on the edge of the chair. “Help you with what? I mean, I’m happy to help Tech Div, but there’s legal liability—”

  “Doc, I have to confess something,” Manny said. “We didn’t come here to look at your licenses. We came to talk to you about a problem at your daughter’s school.”

  “What? St. Barnaby’s?” I stood suddenly and Lee mirrored my movements, poised to come at me.

  “Everybody sit down.” Manny, still sitting, flapped his hands until Lee and I both took our seats. “No one is in immediate danger, but we have reason to believe there is another full-up cyborg unit in your daughter’s school—pretty sure it’s one of the teachers. We’re interviewing all the parents to identify the suspect before we make our move.”

  “What are you trying to pull here, Manny?” I cursed myself for not calling Sally. I stood again. “I need to call my wife.”

  Manny raised his hands. “No need. We have a team of Tech Div agents at your home. She’ll meet us at the office.”

  “But Emma—”

  “The kids are on a field trip today. We have undercover agents escorting the class. Emma is as safe as she can be.”

  I poured myself a coffee and held the cup in my palm. The surface of the dark liquid quivered.

  “Doc, we need your help.” Manny wasn’t smiling, but his face was kind in a grandfatherly way. I suddenly missed my father. He would know what to do.

  “I need to call my legal—”

  Manny’s mustache fluttered as he blew out a breath of frustration. “Look, Doc. Here’s the deal: I can compel you to come in for questioning if that’s how you want to do it. You can call your lawyer, if that’s how you want to do it. Up to now, this is a request for your help to make your child safe from a stealth cyborg.”

  The ripples on the surface of my coffee grew larger. I set the cup on the table. “Okay, I’ll do it. Let me get my car—”

  “You can ride with us, Doc,” Manny said. “We’ll avoid the traffic. Parking’s a bitch downtown anyway.”

  I knew as soon as I got into the back of their vehicle that I’d made a mistake. The car door slammed shut with a solid thunk that told of extra reinforcement. I palmed my phone to call Portia. No signal. Manny rapped on the steel grating that separated the front and back seats.

  “The back seat’s a Faraday cage,” he said. “No signals go in, nothing goes out. Sorry about that, Doc.”

  I slumped back in my seat and watched the scenery fly by. Agent Lee had engaged the Tech Div transponder that gave him access to all the emergency lanes and priority traffic patterns. At least we were getting there quickly.

  When I was a kid, my dad used to watch reruns of an old cop show called Law and Order. I’m not sure what I expected the Tech Div “office” to look like, but the outside reminded me of a police station from the 1990s. All that disappeared when we walked inside. The moment the doors hissed shut behind
me, I felt a tingle of electrostatic energy and knew we had entered another EM-free zone. I didn’t bother getting my phone out; I knew I’d never get a signal.

  Manny led the way through the gleaming white halls, Agent Lee trailing me, and I just tried to hold it together. I could hear the barest trace of Lee’s even breathing behind me, but his steps were silent. He might have been ten feet back or right on my ass, I couldn’t tell. I resisted the urge to turn around.

  Manny swerved into a large open area filled with desks and other agents. He raised his hand to a man on the far side of the room and received a nod in reply. No one else even looked up as we passed by. Manny stopped at a door on the far wall and held it open for me.

  “Can you wait in here, Doc? I’ll just be a minute.”

  I could see rough horizontal stripes on the wall from the concrete forms. The ceiling was fitted with wall-to-wall light fixtures that allowed an even illumination through the whole room, but the light warmth was turned down to its coldest setting so everything looked stark and washed out. I shivered as I sat down behind the metal table in the center of the room and stared at the empty viewscreen on the wall.

  I don’t know how long it was before Manny came back, but he had Portia with him. I was barely out of my chair before she flew into my arms and pressed her face against my chest. I took a deep breath as I kissed the top of her head. Apples, my Portia always smelled faintly of apples.

  Manny stood on the other side of the table, rocking back and forth on his heels. Agent Lee leaned against the door jamb, watching us. I patted Portia on the back. “Honey, let’s just answer their questions and then go get Emma. Okay?”

  Portia nodded against my chest and I felt her take a final deep, trembling breath before she pushed away from me. My wife was a beautiful woman, but between the tears and the smeared makeup and the harsh lighting of the room, she looked as if she had aged a decade since I’d kissed her goodbye this morning. I held her chair for her as she sat down.