MAKER SPACE
K.B. Spangler
Smashwords Edition License Notes
Copyright 2014 K.B. Spangler.
Maker Space is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events are the creations of the author. Settings are either fictional or have been adapted from locations in and around Washington, D.C. for purposes of storytelling. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental, with the exception of Tuckerizations used with permission. All characters, places, and events are set in the world of A Girl and Her Fed, found online at agirlandherfed.com
Cover art by Rose Loughran of Red Moon Rising, at redmoonrising.org
This file was sold online via ebook distribution networks using Smashwords, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in printed or electronic form without permission from the author. If you have received a copy of this file via any source other than the original point of distribution, please visit agirlandherfed.com to learn more.
“Radical tech groups generally take very seriously the ethical principles regulating their internal organizational dynamics. But, most importantly, these principles are mirrored in the very same services they run and in the ways they are designed. Although their services might look similar to what corporate servers offer . . . they are inspired to the values of openness (e.g., open standards, open process and open architecture), horizontal collaboration, and decentralization. Rather than profit, they put at the center the user and his/her right to anonymity, autonomy, free expression and knowledge sharing.”
Stefania Milan of The Citizen Lab
“The Guardians of the Internet?”
ONE
LOVELY. SHE HAD BEEN LOVELY, a twist of auburn hair pulled across her head like a princess, her white dress as crisp as the autumn morning. She had smiled at him before looking down and away, and had stepped lightly through the open door of a coffee shop.
His was a staircase wit and he realized, too late, that maybe he should have followed her. He caught himself before he turned back. Two blocks later, he found another coffee shop and went inside; something with ice to take the heat from him, and to purchase ten minutes of time at a seat by the front window. If he could arrange to bump into her again, good. If not, well, he was on his break anyhow.
He tugged at the knot of his tie as he watched for a slip of white in the crowd. She was gone, probably forever, but those who passed by were entertainment enough. The professionals in their tight suits. Tourists, overlarge bags weighing them down. Those sinister teenagers, killing time, pretending to smoke... He sipped his coffee and smiled; he had never looked like that, he was sure.
Some of those in the street suddenly stopped and turned to look back down the road in the direction of the woman in white.
He felt the tremor through his feet, a sharp but slow rumble that came up from the ground. He glanced around, then back out at the street. Earthquake? No, those outside had fallen but the ground beneath them was solid. A spray of dust flew over them, striking against their faces, their eyes…
He was out of the coffee shop before he knew it, helping one of the tourists regain her feet, pulling her back into the store as the rumbling clouds swept by. She was coughing, grabbing at his sleeve and begging for her husband. He pushed her into someone’s open arms and went back outside, his face pressed into the crook of his arm to block the dust, searching for a man on the ground.
The glass caught him first, ripping up and over the left side of his body. It blew past him, shoved against him, went through him… He knew he was falling but he didn’t know why; he tried to catch himself but his hands wouldn’t move.
His chest struck flat against a lamppost, then the sidewalk. He rolled twice, a bundle of odd limbs, and came to rest against a shattered car. His right eye stared up at the burning husk of the coffee house and he thought he smelled barbecue.
The sound of a third explosion came from up the street.
TWO
THE GARDEN DEFIED THE LAWS of nature. Rachel Peng didn’t know much about plants, but she knew tulips shouldn’t bloom in mid-October. She was sure it should have taken the jasmine more than two months to be trained up the new trellises, or to spill down from the arbor in a cascade of white flowers. And she didn’t even want to think about those roses.
Rachel ran a scan through her own front yard and saw the pansies by the mailbox were about to bloom. And, hiding behind the new hedge of hollies Santino had put in as a barrier between themselves and their next-door neighbor, Mrs. Wagner lay in wait.
Nope, Rachel thought.
She shifted her path mid-stride, moving smoothly from road to grass, and then down the rough gravel of the train embankment. This jogging path was a bit of a deathtrap. If the stones didn’t kick out from under her, the perpetual unpredictability of Washington D.C.’s commuter rail might grind her shins to paste. The risk was worth it: she had nothing but scorn for those folks who plugged themselves into music or movies during their workouts. If you didn’t enjoy something enough to experience it, why bother?
Still, there was a huge difference between being aware and being an idiot. Rachel threaded an autoscript through the warning devices on the nearby railroad crossings to give her a few miles’ notice if a train came along.
She hopped up on one of the rails and ran along the bright metal for several hundred yards before her legs began to ache, then dropped back to the ground and pushed herself until she had to slow to a jog. It was getting easier. She was gradually beating her body back into its old Army shape, when she used to introduce new recruits to Afghanistan with a casual ten-mile sprint. Thirty, if they got mouthy.
Her implant flashed a warning from a railroad crossing to the east, and Rachel threw a casual scan towards the train coming up the tracks. It was moving slowly, and she had plenty of time to scramble down the embankment and over the security fence before it passed.
All trains had names. Rachel hadn’t known this until she had found this jogging path and had learned to recognize each train as it flew by. The RFID tags on this one put it as the Sweet Clementine out of Glenmont Station, an older train, and one that somehow seemed a little proud of itself—
Rachel stomped on that thought, hard. Anthropomorphize a couple of fire trucks as a kid, and you found yourself doing the same damn thing as an adult once the trains started talking back.
She put in a few more miles to kill time, then looped around and retraced the tracks towards her house. As soon as she got within range, she threw another scan through her front yard, hoping to find an easy way home.
And Mrs. Wagner was still lurking behind the hedge.
The old woman had more stamina than Rachel, who swore bitterly before giving up and jogging towards her own front door. (Sneaking in the back way was not an option; the people who owned the house behind hers kept a bulldog, all jowls and teeth.) The moment Rachel came into view, Mrs. Wagner popped up, smiling.
This time, she had a casserole dish.
“Hi, Mrs. Wagner,” Rachel said, stopping. Once, she had blown past her neighbor as fast as she could run, shouting and feigning a personal emergency. Mrs. Wagner had followed her up to Rachel’s front porch, and then leaned on the doorbell for an hour straight. Contact meant conversation.
“Rachel, Rachel,” Mrs. Wagner said, holding out the old Fiesta bakeware. Rachel had several formal titles, each of them unwieldy beasts in the mouth, and they all seemed to frighten her neighbor so Mrs. Wagner tended to just double down on her first name. “I was cooking, and I made a little something extra for you and your… For you and Officer Santino.”
“Thank you.” Rachel forced a smile. Mrs. Wagner’s cookies weren’t too bad, but anything that came in a casserole dish always tasted as thou
gh a cat had slept in it. The woman was also saturated in nervous yellows and oranges; if it weren’t for the flashes of wine-dark red spotting her neighbor’s conversational colors, Rachel would have scared the old woman off ages ago.
For a very brief period in early August, Rachel had been famous. Ten weeks later, only Mrs. Wagner seemed to remember her next-door neighbor had very nearly caught a couple of sociopaths. Microwave memory, Santino called it, that brief flash of public interest crisped quick and then discarded to make room for the next story in the news cycle.
Falling out of the public eye hadn’t bothered Rachel in the slightest. As one of the three hundred and fifty-ish cybernetically-augmented humans employed by the U.S. government, Rachel valued whatever anonymity she could find. She was relieved—delighted, actually—when the media had moved on from her to obsess over drones, Edward Snowden, and the NSA. Cyborgs were on the verge of becoming yesterday’s news.
She kept hoping Mrs. Wagner would forget about her, too. Rachel used to describe her relationship with her neighbor as “strained”, a short, quick word which allowed her to gloss over the times when Mrs. Wagner had spray-painted slurs across her house, or assaulted her with a golf club. But when Rachel had briefly become a local hero, Mrs. Wagner had apologized for how she had treated Rachel, and had been doing a matronly version of heavy penance ever since.
Mrs. Wagner meant well. The woman was still scared to death of Rachel, but there was always some wine red within her conversational colors to show she was sincerely trying to make Rachel’s life a little better.
Thus far, that wine red hue was the only thing that kept Rachel from outright strangling her.
Her neighbor pressed the casserole dish into Rachel’s hands. “It’s got butter in it. Make sure you eat it all,” Mrs. Wagner said. “You’re too thin.”
Rachel started to reply with that old joke about never being too rich, when Santino cracked an upstairs window.
“Hey Rachel?” her partner shouted. “Where’s the fire extinguisher?”
“I need to go,” Rachel said as she took the old Fiestaware from her neighbor. “Thanks. I’ll drop off the plate after I wash it.”
Mrs. Wagner’s conversational colors had shifted to the vivid orange of sudden apprehension. “I’ll call the fire department.”
“It’s fine,” Rachel said, backing away as quickly as she could. “We’re cops. We’ll take care of it.”
She scooted through her front door and locked it behind her. When she turned, she found Raul Santino sprawled on the stairs, laughing in good-humored purples.
“I don’t know which of you I should murder first,” Rachel growled.
“It seemed like you needed an escape,” he said.
“Yeah, but she threatened to call the—oh God,” she sighed, as a plea to 911 sailed out from Mrs. Wagner’s home line. “She actually called them.”
“Put me through to the same operator,” Santino said, holding up his cell. “I’ll fix this.”
Rachel followed the signal through the emergency router to its destination, and connected the operator’s direct line to Santino’s phone. “Done,” she said. “I’ll be in the shower. If the fire department is coming, tell them to pick up milk on the way.”
Her partner, his phone pressed to his ear, nodded.
Rachel dropped the casserole dish beside him and pushed on up the stairs. She took a moment to enjoy the morning sunlight streaming through her bedroom windows; she had the master suite with its spacious private bathroom and southern exposure. When he had first moved in, Santino complained that his bedroom was all the way down the hall and offered no light for his plants. Rachel had told him to suck it up and start a garden if he wanted greenery so badly. He might pay rent, but it was her house, and they weren’t switching just because he wanted more ferns. She was sure the new fairy kingdom barely disguised as landscaping was Santino’s polite way of telling her to go fuck herself, but the joke was on him—the house had been reappraised the week before and had magically acquired an additional forty grand in equity.
And that was in spite of the ruin they had made of her kitchen.
She closed the bedroom door and made sure to set a privacy message before stripping off her jogging suit. An Agent forgot to set that message only once, and then never again. Every cyborg had a story of that single heart-stopping instant when, oh, for example, you were sitting naked on the toilet after an especially offensive five-bean salad, and someone from Accounting decided to pop in and ask whether you still needed that copy of last year’s Form 1040A.
Not that they were still dropping in on each other without calling ahead, but hard-won lessons tended to stick. They had all done their fair share of hard learning over the past year as they adapted to their new lives.
Everything about the Agents was new.
Newish, really. By this point, the Agents were past the worst of the discovery phase, and anyone outside of the Program who cared to know about the Agents of the Office of Adaptive and Complementary Enhancement Technologies was familiar with their story. The Agents had decided to go public with the news that the U.S. government had turned them into cyborgs. Not the clankity-clank pneumatic gun-arm variety of cyborg, but the type that was otherwise completely human except for the tiny chip in their brain which allowed them to take control of any networked machine.
(If she had been given the option, Rachel probably would have chosen the gun arm, or the rocket legs, or any other heavy artillery to augment her own natural stopping power instead of the implant. But those were the stuff of science fiction; she had no idea how a piece of technology as complex as her implant could have been invented before the scientists perfected flamethrower fingers. Different priorities, she supposed. Still. Flamethrower fingers.)
The Agents had spent five long years in hiding before they had chosen to go public. Nearly nine months after that first press conference, Congress was still on the defensive, claiming the Agents were—well, not wrong, as such…perhaps misinformed was the better word—about certain details. Like the accusation that certain high-ranking politicians had decided that OACET was an unwanted headache, and that everything about the Program should disappear. Permanently.
There were nearly a hundred new graves at Arlington. The Agents had told Congress they were still trying to locate those missing fifty-odd bodies. It had been a rough five years.
Congress was on the defensive; the cyborgs were not. When asked, the Agents generally waved away the question of why they had waited so long to expose their top-secret organization. They said they had needed time to wrestle with the moral dilemma of whether it was better to follow orders and remain hidden as a top-secret government program, or to become whistleblowers and let the world know of the near-omniscient cyborgs in their midst.
It was a good answer. There was plenty of plausibility in it, and it established the Agents as people who struggled with outcomes in the eyes of the public. It showed how at least some people in this whole fiasco were aware of consequences, even if those people weren’t exactly human any more.
Rachel hoped that answer wouldn’t backfire on them in a big way.
Shower done, Rachel threw on old jeans and a worn Army sweatshirt, dragged her fingers through her short black hair, and called it done. Makeup required her to do funky things with her vision, and she couldn’t be bothered on her day off.
She made her way downstairs. The hallway leading to the kitchen had been hurriedly painted white; streaks showed where a roller had been inexpertly run over the old wallpaper. The white paint was covered over in long chunky stripes of color, each of which looked suspiciously as though it had been applied with a finger.
The kitchen was a thousand times worse. What had once been her charming white country kitchen was now a vibrant canvas of paint swatches streaked across every available surface. Cabinets, appliances, even the ceiling, all had been peppered with blotches of color. Worse, there seemed to be no unifying pattern to the mess. Hunter green and dusty ro
se butted up against each other. Cedar red was offset by lime and ultramarine. It was a designer’s headache come to life.
She and Santino had learned to ignore it.
Their guests were appalled.
Santino was standing over the trash can, staring at the contents of the casserole dish.
“What do you think?” she asked him.
“It’s got fish in it,” he replied. “Smells like it’s gone over. You can eat some if you want to, but I’m not risking it.”
Rachel nodded, and Santino knocked the dish against the side of the can until it was empty.
“Do we have any real food?” she asked, scanning the cupboards.
“Real food for normal humans, or real food for cyborgs who eat five times as much as I do?”
“Both,” she said. “Unless we’ve just got the latter, in which case you are welcome to watch me eat.”
He pointed towards the garbage.
“A-ha ha. Funny man.”
“Rachel…” Phil’s voice swept through her head.
“Hang on.” Rachel laid her hand on the countertop for support. Conversations via the cyborgs’ link were more intimate than using a phone, and she wasn’t one of those Agents who could hold a long conversation in her head without tripping over herself. “Phil’s calling.”
Of the two Agents who worked with Rachel at the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, Phil Netz was the one she liked. He was a clever ball of energy, slightly taller than herself and weighing just a few pounds more. His slight build was ideal for his work with the MPD’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit, where he was frequently required to slide in and out of spaces barely large enough to hide ticking cardboard boxes.
The bomb squad loved him. After Rachel herself, Phil was the Agent most skilled in perception. She had taught him what she could, and he had taken her training over to the bomb squad where he adapted it to machines. He didn’t have her finesse at reading people or environments, but he had an innate understanding of the hidden nature of the digital and the mechanical.
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