Manny took the seat opposite me. Agent Lee sat across from Portia. My wife’s fingers crept onto my lap and seized my hand. I saw Manny’s cybernetic eye focus on a tablet he was holding. The screen on the far wall lit up, showing a grid of headshots of teachers from Emma’s school.
Manny cleared his throat. “Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, thank you for coming in today. Tech Div really appreciates your help—”
“Can we just cut to the chase?” I asked. Seeing how upset Portia was made all my fear fade away. I needed to be strong for her.
“I understand, sir,” Manny said in a soothing tone. “Let’s get to it, then. As we discussed in your office, we’re investigating the Stiles case and we may have traced a lead to your daughter’s school.”
Portia frowned. “What is the connection between Congressman Stiles’ assistant and Emma’s school?” Her voice was soft and thick from crying.
Agent Lee answered in his clipped, accusing tone. “Stealth cyborgs tend to operate in pairs, called “dyads,” to perform software updates or minor repairs on each other. The models we’re dealing with in this instance are very specialized, very sophisticated, human-like in almost every way.” He glared across the table at me. I met his gaze without flinching.
“And you think his partner is someone at St. Barnaby’s?” Portia asked.
“A school, especially a high-end one like St. Barnaby’s, is an ideal cover,” said Manny. “Any lab or business—like your husband’s—is going to be licensed and monitored continuously. A school, on the other hand, has most of the same equipment as a lab, but not under the same regulatory control. We know that Stiles’ assistant made regular trips to St. Barnaby’s as part of his assigned duties.”
I pursed my lips. What Manny was saying made a lot of sense. The labs at St. Barnaby’s were state-of-the-art facilities, a lot of it supplied by TaylorTech.
“So how can we help, Manny?” I asked.
He nodded and the grandfatherly smile returned. “That’s the spirit, Doc.” He consulted his tablet again and the grid of pictures was reduced to four headshots, three men and one woman. “We’ve narrowed the suspects down to these four. All in their late twenties or early thirties, all with no children.” He rattled off their names and what subjects they taught, but they were just names to me. Portia handled most of the interaction with Emma’s school.
“I don’t recognize any of them,” I said. “Maybe if I was able to interact with them I could detect a flaw or a tic that would give them away. I’m sure as a cybernetic professional I could find something.”
Manny looked me in the eye. “Do you think so, Doc? That would really be a big help to us.”
I smiled. “Sure, I’m happy to help, Manny.” I slid my chair back and tugged on Portia’s hand.
His tablet beeped and he dropped his gaze to the table. The corners of his mouth tightened.
“You know, there’s just one more thing I need to tell you about, Doc. Just sit back down a minute.” He folded his hands on the table and waited for us to pull our chairs back in. Manny never took his eyes off me. “I guess I should be embarrassed about this, but I haven’t been completely honest with you, Doc.”
I sat very still. I tried to swallow, but my mouth had gone dry.
“Oh?” I managed to choke out. Agent Lee leaned toward me and Portia’s fingers went rigid in my hand.
“We pulled your daughter’s DNA profile from the FBI database and we compared it to a sample from you that Agent Lee took from the back of our car. They don’t match, Doc. How do you explain that?”
I let go of Portia’s hand and sat up in my chair. “How dare you! I demand—”
“Let’s just skip the indignation, Doc, and focus on the facts here. I did some digging in your background and found out you spent two years overseas.”
“I ran our operation in China. That’s public knowledge.”
“You were in the hospital when you were there, right?”
I had been sick with a rare strain of the bird flu and nearly died. I’d been so ill that I barely remembered any of it. “That’s right. I was in the hospital for almost a month. I nearly died.” What I didn’t say was that the illness was also the reason why it had been so hard for Portia to get pregnant.
“Nearly died, Doc?”
“What are you saying?”
I could see Manny’s cyber-eye working as he focused on my features. He probably had upgrades that allowed him to monitor all my vitals with a single glance. A trickle of cold sweat ran down my back and I felt Portia shift her body ever so slightly away from me.
Manny’s gaze never wavered. “I’m saying that maybe you’re a cyborg, Doc. I’m saying maybe you died in China and they transferred your consciousness into a machine. At least, that’s my theory.”
The bare gray concrete walls seemed a lot closer and I was having a hard time catching my breath. This wasn’t happening. I’d heard the internet conspiracy stories about people being taken by Tech Div because they were suspected of being some kind of advanced cyborg, but they were just urban legends.
“That’s one theory,” Manny said. “Here’s another.”
Manny tapped the tablet again and the viewscreen showed Emma’s school picture. She had a wide smile and her two front teeth were missing. It was my favorite picture of her.
“Meet Kimberly Sanchez. Abducted from a hospital in Chicago on March 14, 2057—the same day she was born.”
“That’s Emma’s birthday,” I said.
Manny nodded. Portia’s face went very still.
I laughed. “Are you seriously suggesting that Emma is not our baby? Look, I was there for the pregnancy—my wife got as big as a house! There were doctor’s appointments and sonograms—”
“Did you ever meet your wife’s doctor?”
“Well, no, but she—”
“You told me you weren’t there for the birth and now it sounds like you never went to a sonogram—”
Portia’s hand reached for mine. There was a strength to her grip that made me stop speaking. She had a faint smile on her face as she leaned across the space between us. She planted a kiss on my temple, then her lips slid down until they were next to my ear.
“I’m sorry,” she breathed.
When Portia moved, it was like a blur. She vaulted across the table, both feet landing on Agent Lee’s chest, smashing him back against the wall. Her momentum carried her across the room, and she wrenched open the door.
The shot from Manny’s gun caught her between the shoulder blades, just above where the neck of her dress scooped down. The same place that I liked to kiss her when I got out of bed in the morning and she was still sleeping. A crackle of blue light surrounded her entire body as the EMP charge deployed.
Portia collapsed to the ground as if her bones had turned to jelly.
The report from the pistol robbed me of my hearing, leaving only a high-pitched whine. Manny’s grandfatherly face had gone hard, with deep creases around his eyes and lips. He smiled to himself as he slid the Glock back into its holster. I saw him mouth a word.
Gotcha.
The afternoon sun felt warm on the back of my neck when I left the Tech Div office. On the sidewalk, I peered into the faces of people passing by, wondering if any of them were full-up cyborgs.
How could I not have known?
I blinked back the tears that started to cloud my vision.
After they took Portia’s body away, the kindly-faced Manny returned. He asked me a lot of questions that I answered as best I could. I kept staring at the spot by the door where Portia had fallen, her body encased in crackling blue light, so still she looked as if she was asleep. Manny seemed genuinely sympathetic as he explained how they had narrowed the dyad suspects down to Portia and me.
“How did you know it wasn’t me?” I asked.
Manny tapped his temple next to his cybernetic eye. “This little baby has turned me into a walking polygraph. I can measure heart rate, respiration, pupil dilation, all in real time. Sh
e was good, I’ll give her that, but a real ‘borg hunter knows his prey.” He shot a look at the doorway where he’d gunned down my wife. “Her responses were completely human, but our bit of detective work on your daughter’s DNA? That was something she couldn’t fake.”
“So that’s real? Emma’s not my daughter?”
Manny held up his hands. “We’ve been in touch with Child Services, and for the time being, Emma will stay with you until we can work out the details with Chicago. It’s in our best interest to keep this situation as quiet as possible.” Manny cleared his throat. “Look, Doc, I’ll get a car to take you home.”
I gathered my strength and stood, my legs quivering beneath me. “No, I’ll have my limo pick me up.”
I blinked back the tears again, and then the limo was there in front of me, idling by the curb. Our driver, George, stepped out and held the door for me. “Are we waiting for Mrs. Taylor, sir?”
“No, thank you, George.” I slid into the back seat, the black leather cool and comforting. The car door closed gently behind me, shutting out the city noise.
“Home, sir?” George’s eyes were blue in the rearview mirror.
“Yes—no. To Emma’s school.”
“Very good, sir.”
I lacked the energy to walk into the school, so I sat in the back seat with the window rolled down, waiting for Emma outside the stone gates of St. Barnaby’s. She had her hair in pigtails today and they bounced off her shoulders as she laughed. When Emma saw the limo, she broke off from her friends and ran toward the car. She stopped when she saw my face in the window.
“Where’s Mommy?”
I popped open the door. “C’mon in, peanut.”
Emma dumped her book bag on the floor as I closed the door behind her. The car pulled away from the curb. I must have looked horrible, because she reached out and touched my face.
“What’s wrong, Daddy? It’s Mommy, isn’t it? She said something might happen.”
“It’s—what? What did your mother say, exactly?”
“She said that if anything happened to her, I was supposed to give you a picture to make you feel better.”
I relaxed. Emma drew constantly and that’s exactly the kind of thing Portia would have said to her. There was no need to go into Portia’s death right this instant; I needed to think this thing through before I tried to explain it to a six-year-old.
“Would you draw me a picture, sweetie? I would like that very much.”
Emma pulled her sketch pad and a box of colored pencils from her backpack and set to work. The scratching of pencil on paper had a hypnotic quality to it. I closed my eyes and rested my aching head back against the cushions. I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew the car was outside our front door and George was holding the car door open for me. Emma was still hard at work on her picture.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “You can finish that inside, peanut.”
“You can’t see until it’s all done, Daddy.” She slapped the cover of her sketch pad shut.
I covered my eyes and tried to laugh, glad to be focusing on anything besides telling my little girl her mother was never coming home.
The cook had left a plate of cookies on the counter for Emma’s afternoon snack, but the girl ignored them. She plunked her backpack on a chair and resumed her drawing. I watched the way her forehead crinkled up in concentration and the ends of her pigtails flicked against the paper. The cookie I had thrust into my mouth tasted like ashes.
I’ll let her finish her picture, then I’ll tell her. When the image of my little girl went glassy with tears, I went into the living room, sank into the soft cushions of my easy chair, and closed my eyes.
Breathe in, breathe out. You can do this. Emma needs you.
“Daddy? It’s done.”
I opened my eyes. Emma’s pictures were normally princesses or animals, with lots of pinks and purples. This one was geometric, with sharp lines and exact colors. In the center ran a vertical column of what looked like Chinese characters.
I frowned. Was she learning Chinese now? Christ, I don’t even know what she’s taking in school. How will I ever do this alone?
“That’s... good, peanut. I don’t think I have one like this.” I swallowed hard, pushing her pigtails back over her shoulders, grateful for anything to preserve this moment of innocence before I crushed her little world. “I need to tell you something, sweetie. It’s about Mommy.”
“Do you like it?” she asked, ignoring me. She plunked her finger down on the string of vertical characters. “It’s a magic picture. Look right here.” She stood on her tiptoes and gripped my shoulder with both hands as she leaned in, her whisper a ticklish warmth against my ear.
A four syllable word. Something in a foreign language.
The picture shifted in my vision, the lines morphing into a three-dimensional pattern. A low hum started at the base of my neck, and a tingling sensation spread across my forehead. My breath hitched in my throat.
“Daddy?”
A line of text ran across the lower limit of my vision:
Activation sequence complete. Downloading extraction plan.
A Word from David Bruns
“Dyad” is all about the surprise ending. As a reader, I love that feeling when I’m absolutely sure I’ve got a story figured out, and then the author does a literary ninja move that leaves me flat-footed.
As a writer, surprise endings are a nightmarishly difficult balancing act. Too much foreshadowing and you give away the ending; too little and the “surprise” looks you’ve pulled a fast one on your reader.
Maybe the last few lines in “Dyad” caught you off guard, or maybe not. All the same, I’m incredibly grateful to Samuel Peralta for the opportunity to try. We are fortunate to be writing and reading in a time where fiction of any length can be brought to life quickly and inexpensively. The Future Chronicles series is a great example of that trend.
I write science fiction and spy stories. If you enjoyed “Dyad” come visit me at www.davidbruns.com, and download a free Starter Library. You can also check out more short fiction, my sci-fi series, The Dream Guild Chronicles, and Weapons of Mass Deception, a novel of modern-day nuclear terrorism that seems less like fiction every time I open the newspaper.
Preservation
by Michael Patrick Hicks
KARI AKAGI SAT in the crook of a massive baobab tree, a rifle in her lap, roughly twenty meters above the low-lying plains of the Kruger National Park.
From her perch she could see the Olifants River, which divided the southern and northern regions of Kruger. The north was elephant country, and she watched as a herd bathed in the shallow depths and grazed along its banks.
There was a simple joy in watching the massive creatures live their lives, in seeing the young ones play.
Their life expectancy was too short for her liking, but the luckiest among them could live for fifty years or more. If the poachers didn’t get to them first.
Her morning had started with news of another rhino killing. The reserve had less than one hundred left, and there was a countdown hanging over the heads of the survivors. Each one dead drove the black market prices of their ever-scarcer horns higher and higher into the millions.
The news had woken her like a kick to the gut, and she’d wanted to rage at the rangers and volunteers who had fucked up and let this happen. Unfair, certainly, but her anger was palpable. Instead, she retreated and cut off her commNet, fuming.
She zoomed in on the Olifants, increasing the resolution of her blink-powered retinal upgrades and recorded the lackadaisical scene playing out below. This was a memory she wanted to keep.
Standing to stretch her torso, she set the rifle aside and raised her arms above her head, holding the pose for several deep breaths. Then she bent at the waist, stretching her spine, shoulders, and the muscles of her one remaining thigh, the flex deep enough that she was able to touch the two long blades that had replaced both feet.
Her
legs had been lost to an IED years ago. Her left leg, from the hip down, was a mechanized limb replacement system. Both high-grade prosthetics were equipped with hundreds of ultra-fast quantum-load microprocessors, hydraulics, rotors, flexions, actuators, and sensors. A neuronal interface allowed her to control each limb as if it were the real thing, and the built-in multi-directional response coordinators allowed her to move with ease and grace in virtually any environment.
With her chin practically touching the tough Kevlar shell of the artificial knee joint, she could feel the absorbed heat boiling off the deep blue fabric.
Although she was warm and hadn’t eaten real food in several days, she had little concern for dehydration or starvation. The military had seen to her well-being both before and after her mandatory four tours in Afghanistan and Syria. Keeping her in-country in such harsh climates that ranged from desert tundra to colder mountain terrain had required significant modifications to her meat suit.
Akagi’s innards had been replaced with artificial organs to regulate her body’s water loss, and nasal cavity inserts and heat exchangers implanted atop her jugular veins and neck arteries inhibited water loss that occurred through exhalation and perspiration. There were even filter systems installed in her bladder and large intestine to capture, concentrate, and store any water lost through digestive waste. In her rucksack was a three-month supply of hard-shelled, egg-shaped candies. Each one contained a liquid center and provided her with her daily requirement of nutrients and calories.
While the military had designed her to be an optimized soldier, she had found a more satisfying niche working as a wildlife ranger. The truth of it was, she had merely traded one war for another, exchanging a cause for a cause. Her cause, nowadays, just happened to have four legs and tusks or horns.
Rising from the stretch, she again lifted both arms over her head and pulled her torso first to the left, then the right, stretching her oblique abdominals.
The Cyborg Chronicles (The Future Chronicles) Page 29