by Damien Boyes
Standards may think they’re invincible, but they don’t understand. Will never understand. Not until they’ve experienced for themselves what a Revved mind can do.
There’s another shot from inside and another electric pop as the final drone disintegrates above. Now we’re totally blind.
I drag myself to my feet and stagger back to the fallen agents. The blast blackened and buckled the containers five metres above them. They were out of the kill zone, but just.
The tab shows they’re all still alive, but Doyle needs a medic. Urgently. We don’t have time to get cute with more bots or wait for back-up. This needs to end.
I bend and yank two more grenades off a dazed agent.
“Detective Gage,” Galvan calls from the ground, his voice breaking into a raspy cough. He’s on all fours, struggling to rise. “What are you doing?”
Behind him, the two agents positioned at the other corridor are watching. One holds a compress to his nose. Another has the pieces of a ruined weapon field-stripped in front of him. Both are unsure what to do next.
I set one grenade at the minimum two-second countdown with maximum flash and the other at three seconds with a higher concussive blast. Both timers are shorter than the military specs recommend, but the specs don’t take into account enemies that have millisecond reaction times.
Galvan’s on his feet. His legs aren’t steady, but he’s up.
“Detective Gage,” he says. “Stand down.”
“Nope,” I say.
“I’m giving you a direct order.” He advances a step.
“Write me up.”
“Finsbury, this is your last warning. I am now in command of this operation and I order you to stand down.”
“And do what? Five of the best-trained and equipped agents and the most powerful AMP in the Union have just been taken out by two hostiles that can move faster than you think. What are your orders?”
He shakes his head. “I—”
“That’s what I thought. You don’t have time to think. You need to act. Now.”
“No—we’ll wait for back-up, shut down the flight path, take them from above.”
“They’re stalling us. Whatever they’re doing in there won’t wait.”
The ground begins to shake as another plane comes in for a landing. Galvan yells something but his voice is drowned out by the engine wash. I wait until it’s almost directly overhead then step back, trigger the countdowns and hurl the longer-timed grenade up and over the containers, hoping I put enough weight on it to make it to the middle corridor, and that the roar of the engines will mask any sound it makes. Then, as the plane passes and the noise dissipates, I whip the shorter timed grenade down the corridor, banking it off the metal wall with a loud clang.
20:53:06:03. I draw my weapon, watch the milliseconds pass on my console.
20:53:07:03. I imagine the cyphers turning at the sound of the grenade banging down the corridor, the one further away swinging back to cover her path, while the nearer leans out again, aiming to swat the incoming explosive back the way it came with a bullet.
20:53:08:01. I turn and start down the corridor, covering my eyes, shielding them from the deafening white blast that flashbulbs the containers as the shorter-timed grenade ignites before the cypher can shoot it, and sprint down corridor as fast as my legs will move.
20:53:07:57. I’m halfway down the corridor when the second grenade blows.
The blast rockets the cypher out of hiding. With the Revv cranked as high as it will go, she seems to hang in the air. There’s an instant of recognition in her eyes as she sees me coming, but there’s nothing she can do to stop herself from compressing against the metal wall and bouncing hard to the ground.
I put four bullets into her chest as I advance, have to hope the blast put the other one down as well.
I make it to the perpendicular corridor, sink onto my haunches and put my back against the cool plastic next to the corner. The cypher next to me isn’t moving. Her blood glimmers like oil on the pavement. I stretch out my foot and drag her weapon away and toss it back the way I came. She doesn’t move.
I flip my head around the corner for a quick look. There’s a crater halfway along the corridor and a body on the other side, facedown, motionless. I rise, stalk the length of the corridor with my weapon raised, and put four rounds into her back at close range. Satisfied she isn’t getting up I bend and pull her gun free. Down the long corridor the two remaining mostly-healthy agents are watching. I motion the all clear. They stand and move up toward me, crouched over their weapons.
The sweep only caught two cyphers entering the yard, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more.
Six containers line each side of the short corridor. Twelve sets of swinging doors. The light here is dim but I can make out footprints massed around one, fourth one in from where I’m standing. It isn’t locked. Something thumps from inside. Another cypher.
I raise my weapon, covering the container door.
Galvan emerges from the opposite corridor, his weapon raised. Pointed at me.
“I’m hereby charging you with operational misconduct under the Toronto Police Services Act,” he yells across the corridor. “Disobeying a direct order.”
“You need your gun for a misconduct charge?”
He looks hard at his gun, like he isn’t sure how it got into his hand, but keeps it on me.
“Lower your weapon,” he yells.
“There’s another cypher—”
“You’re Revved—who knows what else you’ve let into your head. I can’t trust you—”
“Now’s not the time—”
I don’t finish my sentence. There’s a split second hiss before a container between us bucks and bursts its doors open. I see the explosion move through the air as a shimmering ribbon of distortion before it hits and knocks me back on my ass.
Then the fireworks start. Glowing motes spraying from the smouldering container, like shooting stars, searing into the blacktop and blackening the nearby containers. Yellow-grey smoke billows into the corridor, filling the air with the acrid tang of burning plastic and roasting meat.
I can’t see Galvan through the heat and smoke, but I hear him.
His screams start slow, shocked cries of pain that quickly devolve to a momentary wail of wordless agony. Then nothing. He was closer than I was, right in the blast path.
I lurch up, try to get to him, but the heat’s too intense.
Instead I spin and race past the two agents standing in the corridor, watching the container burn, around the corner where the TAC teams are still setting up a perimeter, dealing with the injured Feds, and back up the opposite corridor to where Galvan is lying, facing the sky, eyes glassy, half his body reduced to a smouldering ruin.
What have I done?
StatUS-ID
[fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]
SysDate
[16:41:51. Sunday, January 19, 2059]
Wiser keeps me waiting in the interview room for the rest of the afternoon. No one comes to check on me. No one brings me lunch or lets me out of the room to urinate.
Eventually a woman comes in, leaves the door open behind her. She’s wearing a deep blue pantsuit with her hair tucked under a muted grey hijab. Must be Staff Inspector Chaddah.
She drapes a burgundy woman’s coat over the table and sits in the chair opposite me, keeps her back rod-straight, levels her eyes at me and says, “I didn’t imagine we’d ever end up here.”
“Me either,” I say, venting a frustrating afternoon staring at a blank wall, not knowing what’s happening outside, not knowing if Dora’s okay. “Not that I know who the hell you are. Or why the hell you’ve held me here for the better part of eight hours without so much as a glass of water or a bathroom break.”
Her sharp eyebrows crease. “I wasn’t aware you hadn’t been tended to. Since the Ministry moved in, my oversight has been curtailed. I’ll have a word with the head of Standards about following protocol in the future.”
“You mean Special Agent Wiser? He’s the one who put me in here.”
She rests her hands on the table, presses her fingers together. “You two have a history.”
“Seems I have a history with everyone. A history everyone remembers me but me.”
She looks down her crooked nose at me. “I’m Staff Inspector Chaddah.”
“I figured.” I say with a shrug. At this point, I don’t care who she is or what she wants. I just want out of here. That fragment’s still out there. I have to make sure Dora’s okay. “Are you here to ask me more about the shit I haven’t done or can I go?”
She nods. “The AMP says we don’t have enough to hold you. Galvan wants to keep you for the full seventy-two hours out of spite. I’m the tie breaker.”
“And?”
“I want you to convince me.”
“Of what?”
“That it’s in my best interest to let you go.”
“How do I do that?”
She cocks her head and her eyebrows lower. “Be honest with me.”
“You must have been listening to my conversation with Agent Wiser,” I say. “You know everything there is.”
“Not everything,” she replies.
“What else do you want to know?”
She considers me a moment. “Do you know why I recruited you when you returned last time?”
I shake my head. “I didn’t know you had.”
She nods, her face unreadable. “I wanted you in the Psychorithm Crime Unit,” she says, “not only because you were a decorated soldier and a model law enforcement officer, but because you knew the pain of dying. I thought you could help people.” Her eyes flash. “But you thought it was beneath you. Thought bringing closure to the trauma of lost memory was a waste of your time.”
How could that be? I know what’s it’s like to have a life I don’t remember.
I know how it’s affected me, how it’s hurt Dora. Could I have really been so callous? Wiser said I used to erase people all the time, killed illegally skynned people for sport.
I’d never do that, never treat anyone’s memories so lightly.
Memories make people.
“You didn’t trust us, Finsbury,” Chaddah says. “You didn’t trust me. Yet you come to us with a fantastic tale about a superintelligence. Why should I trust you now?”
After eight hours in here, hearing Finsbury’s name at the end of another accusation hits me like I’ve stuck my finger in a light socket. “Don’t call me that. I’m not him.”
“You may not be the man I recruited, but you are Finsbury Gage.”
“I’m not. You said so yourself, Finsbury Gage was a fuck-up. I’m not him.”
“You were investigating your wife’s murder, just as you now investigating your own. You can’t let injustice lie. You are the same person, separated only by time and circumstance.” That’s what I’m afraid of—that whatever was inside him, that made him go wrong, is also in me.
“I’m not him,” I say again, quieter.
“You are your choices,” she answers, pauses then says, “What do you know about Fate?”
Them again. Why’s everyone so hot on Fate? “Like I said, nothing.”
She looks at me, swallows. “You were in contact with them.”
“I don’t know anything about Fate or have the first idea who I’d contact even if I wanted to. Why are you so interested in them, anyway.”
She purses her lips. “Fate is opening operations here, Mr. Gibson, and while most of the world sees them as a benign, or even positive force, those of us who have seen who they truly are want no part in the future they’re offering.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You once saw what the life of an Ancestor truly is. The constant competition, the incessant pull. The people who give themselves to Fate become slaves programmed to enjoy their servitude. We had the evidence, and Fate had it quashed under copyright. We had to destroy it. You were involved with Fate, somehow. You were helping them. I want to know: are you still?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know anything about Fate beyond what was on the news a year ago.”
She stares at me for a long minute, then pushes the jacket she brought in at me. “Take this, it’s cold outside. You’re not being charged at this time.”
I push back my chair, stand. My legs are twitchy after hours of sitting.
“Before you go,” Chaddah says. “I want you to tell me one thing: what is it you’re looking for?”
This catches me off guard. “What do you mean?”
“This investigation into your past. What do you hope to accomplish?”
“I want to fill the blank pages in my head. Everyone I meet has a different story about who I used to be, about the things I did. I want to know for myself. I want the truth of who I became.”
She raises a thick eyebrow. “Why?”
“Why? Why do I want to know who I am, what I’m capable of? Would you like to live with your memory full of holes?”
Her chest rises and falls and she reaches up and smoothes an errant lock of ebony hair back under her headscarf. “There are a great many things in my head I wish I didn’t remember,” she states. “You are alive. Against all odds. You’ve cheated death twice, are you willing to gamble your life on a third? What about the lives of those you care for?”
I can’t read her, can’t tell if she’s playing me or if she’s trying to nudge me toward a decision. Trying to warn me.
“Is that a threat?”
“The opposite, Finsbury,” she says, her voice gentle. “If you’re correct about what’s hunting you, you’re in danger. As are those close to you. You’ve done what you can, but now the time has come to take what you’ve found, be satisfied with it, and move on with your life. Remaining in this city can only bring more pain.”
First Dora and now Chaddah. They both think I should run. Considering how scared Wiser was when he heard a superintelligence was after me, the advice is starting to make sense.
I rest my hand on the jacket. “Thanks for this,” I say, and as I move to pick it up she puts her hand on the jacket as well, stopping me.
“Take it and don’t come back,” she says. “There’s nothing left for you here.”
I nod and she lifts her arm, stands and steps aside. I walk past her, through the station floor and out into the night.
Now to find Dora and figure out what we do next.
StatUS-ID
[a646:d17e:8670:511f::Finsbury/D//GAGE]
SysDate
[07:32:53. Monday, April 29, 2058]
Clean-up and the initial investigation at the drone yard lasts all night and into the morning.
The planes have already started their early rush as I trudge past the inert drones, moving from the crime scene toward the sun rising over the yard gates, my clothes stiff with Galvan’s dried blood.
I backtrack through the maze of containers, past the streams of scurrying Standards and Service personnel, their vehicles and scattered equipment. I duck under the showtape, shoulder through the assembled media scrum—with their hovering cameras knocking each other to get the best angle, their microphones jostling for a sound bite—keep my mouth shut at the shouted questions and flag a passing Sküte.
The door slides open and I fall into the cab. For the first time since the accident I’m tired. More than tired—I’m wrung out. My head is heavy, my feet encased in wet sand, like someone cranked gravity up by half.
All I want to do is lie down and switch my brain off. Or shyft the pain away.
The paramedics came and went hours ago, bundled up the wounded agents and rolled them out on stretchers to medevac hoppers waiting in the yard. Galvan was a tougher case. He had been cooked alive, smelled like someone had thrown a barbeque but hadn’t bothered to unwrap any of the meat before tossing it on the grill.
The molten shower ruined his legs, fused his stopsuit to the lower half of his body, chewed holes into his abdomen and melted the flesh from
his hands where he tried to slap away the fire. I had his head propped up on my lap and was trying to keep him conscious when he shuddered and stopped breathing.
I performed CPR, doing compressions while one of the TAC officers forced breath into his lungs every thirty seconds until the medics finally arrived and relieved us.
I sat in the dirt, back slouched against the cold plastic of a shipping container, and watched as they restarted his heart, intubated him, jammed IVs in his arms, pumped fluids and oxygen and painkillers into his veins, then wrapped him in a burnbag, hurried him to the hopper they’d left running just inside the yard, rose in a burst of dust, and sped off to a waiting trauma unit.
They said he had fifty/fifty to survive the day. He’s still in surgery. We won’t know anything for hours.
Chaddah arrived in time to watch Galvan take off, held her headscarf down to keep it from flying away in the hopper’s wash. She scanned the scene, narrowed her eyes and came straight to me for a sitrep. So I told her. Told her everything, the words falling from my lips in a worn out monotone.
I told her about Xiao’s link shield suddenly evaporating, the sweep pinging like mad and the teams rushing off to intercept
Told her about my arriving late, how the cyphers toyed with the agents, blew the grenade back in Doyle’s face.
Told her how Galvan ordered me to stand down, how I’d ignored him, incapacitated the cyphers, all except one.
Then the explosion.
She listened, unblinking, her lips growing tighter the entire time, and when I was done, she turned and walked away to confer with the forensic techs at the burned out container. I followed her over, stepping around the curdled blood and discarded emergency supplies where the EMTs had tended to Galvan.
The fire had done its job. The inside of the container had been, for a few minutes anyway, a massive furnace. There wasn’t much in the way of evidence left, only blackened chunks and lumps and debris.
The fire had been a failsafe, a tool of last resort. Nano-thermite canisters had lined the inside of the container and the initial explosion ignited them all, sent them in to an uncontrollable meltdown that shot the interior temperature of the container to about half that of sun’s surface.