Manny did not look up. “I don’t need super-speed or heavy armor so my arm is much simpler than yours. Fortunately for me, it means I don’t use nanites like you do for nerve conduction.” He paused and added an aside, “Mostly because those little nanobots would probably give me permanent brain damage. Anyway, the doc built me synthetic nerves that matched my neurological capabilities, so all my physical connections can be dry and severable. No need for fluid transport media for me! Ligaments and tendons are detachable and self-securing, too.”
“Nice.” The feature legitimately impressed the big cyborg. “I guess the problem with being state-of-the-art is that nothing stays that way for long.”
“It’s been thirty years, Roland,” Lucia reminded him. “I’d say Dad’s probably had a few new ideas since building you.”
“What are you messing with, now?” Roland asked.
“Installing a bigger power source. The original was never sized for all the other stuff we’ve added to the arm.”
“Like goddamn tasers, jammers, scanners, and an EMP emitter?” Lucia chuckled.
“The EMP is the worst,” Manny said without looking up. “Kills the battery like nothing else.”
“I want an EMP emitter.”
It was impossible to tell when Roland was joking. Lucia chose to believe he was not being serious, and she tossed a light-hearted barb back at him. “No, Roland. You aren’t mature enough.”
Mindy came through the door just then, saw Manny with his arm in pieces, and added her own perspective. “What is it with boys and their toys, anyway?”
Manny looked out of reflex and his eyes grew wide for a moment. A forgotten tool fell from limp fingers and Roland hissed in disappointment upon seeing the boy’s obvious discomfort. It was easy to understand what had him so flustered and Roland could be sympathetic to a degree. For the sake of everyone’s sanity, he really hoped Manny would outgrow it soon, though.
Mindy was fond of dressing in a manner designed to distract her targets. Since her targets were mostly male, this was accomplished in the most obvious way imaginable. The little blond killer had purchased several augmentations that were purely cosmetic, and she was not shy about putting them out where they could do the most work. Manny, handicapped as he was by youth and heterosexuality, still had not mastered the art of subtle ogling. He had improved some, at least. His eyes immediately turned back down to his work, and he locked his face in an expression of fierce concentration.
It could be said that Mindy was improving too, after a fashion. At Lucia’s insistence, the statuesque assassin had been dressing in a manner slightly more professional than her typical fare when at the office. This had not occurred without some resistance. Today she had adhered to the letter of Lucia’s instructions by wearing simple black slacks and a nondescript white dress shirt. Unfortunately for Manny, her preferred style was irrepressible even when thus constrained. The pants were far too tight for modesty, the shirt even tighter, and she seemed psychologically incapable of buttoning her blouse to a respectable height.
Lucia took all this in, covered her face with her hands, and slowly lowered her head down on the desk. Roland’s enhanced ears picked up the tiny defeated moan coming from behind her forearms.
“Why, oh why do I even try?”
“What?” Mindy’s question was all innocence. Feigned innocence, Roland observed. But innocence all the same. “I’m in work clothes!” she added with an affronted whine.
“Yes Mindy,” Manny said without raising his eyes from his work. “Instead of dressing like a cheap prostitute, you’ve managed to dress like an expensive one. Well done.”
“Children,” Lucia whined, her forehead still resting on the desk. “I am working with children.”
As far as morning meetings went, Roland had to admit that this was a fairly average showing. He decided to move things on to the matter at hand before Mindy and Manny started fighting and Lucia’s mood deteriorated even more. When Lucia was not happy, Roland was not happy. When Roland was not happy, people died.
He let his voice boom from deep within his chest. “All right, troops. Un-fuck yourselves and let’s get down to the job.” Mindy tossed him a scowl and went over to a comfortable chair in the corner. Mindy hated desks and thus did not have one. Manny looked up from his tinkering and Lucia finally raised her head. When he was sure he had their attention, Roland looked to Lucia and nodded. “All yours, Boss.”
“Thank you, dear,” Lucia rewarded him with a sweet smile. Lucia’s smiles were ninety percent of the reason Roland got out of bed in the morning, and thus a massacre was averted.
“Here’s what we know. Madeleine and some of her office workers were killed last night. Single shot to the head for everyone. Nothing stolen. What else, Roland?”
“According to our source in the PD, the building cameras were deactivated externally, and the alarms never went off.”
Lucia pointed to Manny. “That’s on you, Manny. We need to know how this guy got in and who deactivated the cameras.”
“On it, Boss.”
“Mindy?”
“Yeah, Boss?”
“We can’t figure out if this is a very sloppy amateur who just happens to have good aim, or if this was a seasoned pro with a good reason for killing everyone. I want your eyes on this. Find out who’s in town and who’s been hiring.”
“Sure thing, Boss.”
“I am going to work over Dockside PD.” The woman held her arms out to the sides to indicate something very large. “Roland has managed to secure a lucrative consulting gig with them for this.”
“Does he have us working for free again?” Mindy asked, eyes narrowed.
“No!” Roland nearly shouted it. “The Dwarf is paying our rates on this one. So sue me if I didn’t want to fleece the cops, too.”
Mindy chuckled. “For someone who everybody is so afraid of, he sure is a big ol’ pushover sometimes.”
“That’s what I said,” Lucia returned the laugh. “Either way,” she said to rescue him. “I’m sending the big pushover to start shaking down some of The Madame’s more obvious enemies while I lean on the good lieutenant. His department has too many bad apples. We can’t have beat cops selling info on what we are up to if we expect to get ahead of this.”
“Why isn’t Mr. Tankowicz doing the leaning?” Manny asked. “That’s sort of his thing, right?”
“It is in my wheelhouse,” Roland added.
“Usually,” Lucia agreed. “But I want this guy nervous enough to stay in the lines, not so terrified he flees town.”
“You better do it then,” said Mindy. “Ironsides here really only has one setting. Poor Kitty starts sweating just talking about Roland.”
Manny could not resist teasing her. “You’re just mad she doesn’t sweat when talking about you.”
“There’s more than one kind of sweat, Manny-boy.” She twisted slightly in her chair, leaning forward and straining the seams of her shirt. The posture left an awful lot of Mindy out where anyone could see it. “Is it warm in here?”
To his credit, Manny did not get caught this time. He kept his eyes on his arm, now mostly reassembled. “Probably just all that hot air in your head.”
Lucia put her head back down on her desk and whimpered, “I remember when I used to be the vice president of a real company.”
Roland decided to change the subject again. “I’m going to bring in McGinty. He has eyes and ears everywhere. He can probably point me toward the most likely candidates.”
Obviously relieved by a return to business, Lucia raised her head. “Good idea. And when you start talking to people, I want you to channel all of that ‘Tank Tankowicz’ charm that has made you so famous.”
“Really?” Incredulous, Roland held up his hands in confusion. “More often than not, this is the exact opposite of how you want me to operate.”
“Yes, I know. This time your leash is off. Make noise, shake the trees, push folks around. Above all, make sure people see you doing
it. You get to be a screen for us working with the police. While everyone is fleeing before the terror of your ire, the rest of us will be working quietly behind the scenes.”
“I like that.” Roland could find no fault in the approach. “Anyone who wants us off the chase will come for me, while you guys work the back channels.”
Lucia added, “And no one will notice that we are working alongside the cops, hopefully.”
“When did you turn all sneaky, Boss?” Mindy asked, with more than a hint of awe.
“I’ve always been sneaky. You don’t get to the corner office by revealing your cards early, Mindy. When dealing with an enemy, you always show them one thing, before dropping something altogether different on them when they least expect it.”
“Doesn’t sound like business to me,” said Roland. “Sounds like war.”
Lucia stood and drained the last of her coffee. “They are the same thing, Corporal.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The killer lay on a slab in a white room. Stripped, his bionic limbs stood out against the pale flesh of his torso. Smooth gray and black facets covered the lumpy mass of vaguely human anatomy, giving his body the look of a man wearing pants and sleeves of charcoal-colored spandex. He was unconscious, but the black lenses of his eyes still stared blankly at the ceiling.
Several men in white plastic suits fussed around his quiet body, tinkering with his limbs and plugging a dizzying array of devices into and out of various ports. Machines sang in helpful beeps and the occasional buzz while a dozen different monitors scrolled with commentary informative only to those who understood the reams of coded data on display.
The killer lay in deathly repose, preternaturally quiet and still. He did not move. It barely looked like he was breathing, and the lean woman watching him through a clear glass panel knew that he was, in fact, barely breathing. She was short, small, and young-looking. Her hair was long and deep black, and she was wearing a black suit with black shoes. The tall man standing next to her might have been wondering what she looked like under that suit. She was a perplexing specimen in that way. She certainly appeared attractive enough, though it bothered him to realize he could not be sure if she was. She had an aura, a palpable feeling of cold about her he did not understand. It was not danger, that much he was sure of. He knew all about danger. She just seemed to suck the energy out of the air, to drain the emotion from those around her. He had observed this phenomenon on multiple occasions, and while he was personally unaffected by it others were not so lucky. It reduced productivity, and this was a problem.
The tall man stood like statue, patience being one of the only things prominent on his short list of virtues. The woman’s words came sharp as a whipcrack. “Stop fidgeting, Bob. We are almost done.”
“I don’t fidget, Lania.” He was not amused, and he made sure this was understood with a droll addendum. “But there’s only so much time I can spend staring at a corpse before I start to get bored.”
“He’s not dead. He’s shut down. Respiration is four, and his pulse is ten. We could keep him like this for centuries if we wanted to.”
Bob’s next inquiry was inscrutable, betraying neither approval nor disapproval. “But what’s the point? He didn’t take any hits in the last run. I’d say he aced that job. The telemetry looked excellent to me.”
“Yes, he did. But he also ran his ‘Gunslinger’ macro for almost thirty seconds. I really wish he would not do that so much. Now we have to run a full neural diagnostic series.”
“Is that really necessary for thirty seconds of boost?”
Lania did not take her eyes off the thing on the slab. “Probably not. But just like any other high-performance machine, it is a good idea to strip it down after a hard run. We look for stress points, weaknesses in the systems, problems we could not anticipate.” She glanced down at the display of her DataPad. “It is always preferable to find a deficiency early, before it manifests as a catastrophic failure.”
Bob could not fault her logic on that. “I concur. What should I tell Mr. Inskip at today’s meeting?”
Lania addressed Bob’s reflection in the glass, translucent and pale. “Tell him the unit is operating at or above projections. Signal latency for integrated prosthetics was less than eight percent, and this was more than controllable with the current pharmaceutical implants. Total unit synchronization was...” she paused to swipe through some telemetry, “...eighty-nine percent.”
Bob frowned. “He won’t like that.”
Lania shrugged. “It’s within spec.”
“He still won’t like it.”
“Then he can come down here and try to calibrate a human brain to run two-hundred separate bleeding-edge cybernetic systems at eight times normal speed.” She turned to give him a baleful look. “Do you know how many seizures and mini-strokes were prevented during his little massacre?” She did not wait for the answer because it was obvious he did not know it. “Eleven seizures and four TIAs, Bob. In twenty-six seconds his brain tried to die fifteen times, and my systems stopped all fifteen of them while keeping him in the game. Eighty-nine percent sync is a goddamn miracle. If Arthur Inskip could do that without me, I wouldn’t be here. So you go up there and you tell him ‘eighty-nine percent,’ and you make it sound at least as impressive as Moses parting the goddamn Red Sea.” She jerked her chin at the man on the slab. “Because draining a stupid salt marsh would be a cakewalk compared to keeping that thing running.” She turned back to the glass with a searing glare.
Bob met the scowl with an indifferent nod. “Eighty-nine it is, then. Keep up the good work, Lania.” He turned from the silently fuming woman and left the observation room. He was shrewd enough to know it was always best to let her have the last word, anyway.
Lania Watanabe waited for the door to close behind Bob before letting go of the breath she was holding. Something about that man set her on edge. It was like all his emotions had been replaced with bland condescension and smugness. He had barely a third of her intelligence, yet he acted like she was the one who did not understand things. She had forgotten more about biotech since breakfast than he was ever likely to comprehend. She caught herself becoming agitated and forced another breath out. There was no point getting all worked up over an annoying project manager. Too many more pressing issues were before her.
“Display on,” she barked to the empty room. The clear panel in front of her lit up with “loading display” in red block letters as the system responded to her spoken command. A few seconds later, an image of the killer illuminated the glass with all his various systems highlighted in helpful color-coded silhouette. Lania frowned absently at the data now that Bob was safely out of the room. She selected the legs with a single finger and the image zoomed in to show a very detailed cutaway of her project’s cybernetic lower limbs.
“Goddammit, Wally! Why are we still struggling with gait and stride?”
Her lead technician looked up from the slab and over to the observation window. He held up both hands in a motion of surrender. “Hell if I know. It’s not the prosthetics. Those are fine. He could run more than a hundred kilometers per hour if he cared to try. It’s got to be leftover feedback from the baseline organic template. He’s trying to make them work like his old legs, I think.”
When Wally said ‘organic template,’ she knew he was talking about the brain inside the thing on the slab. No one was comfortable with calling it a ‘brain,’ though. It was little more than a repository for the collected skills and instincts of what used to be a man. A lifetime of experience was not the sort of thing that could be programmed, so all their best prototypes started with a brain already equipped with the desired skills. The four pounds of pulsing gray matter under the killer’s armored skull served as the template upon which her creature was built and nothing more.
The unit (she hated to think of it as a man) was operating well, but his insistence on running the more exotic macros generated a large amount of extra work for her team. The organic template
simply lacked the necessary bandwidth to run the prostheses at their full capacity. Installing a separate AI just to manage electrical activity across the brain had been her own personal stroke of genius and she had to admit it was working perfectly so far. Despite this success, Lania could not dismiss the concern that she was playing Russian roulette with catastrophic brain damage. She would be much more confident if only she had access to the complete data on Johnson’s ‘Better Man’ or Ribiero’s ‘Golem’ systems.
Ribiero had beaten the signal latency issue by fabricating an entire neural network of nanomachines, then designing a body around them. With no signal latency between the chassis and the nervous system, a Golem ran at one-hundred percent synchronization right out of the box. Continuing to use the organic template worked fine in that case because the body felt identical to the original. Unfortunately for her, Ribiero was out of the game and his tech sequestered behind so many levels of clearance that even The Brokerage couldn’t dig it out.
Johnson’s fix had been to build a second nervous system to operate in parallel with the template. A Better Man would never achieve perfect synchronization, but with time the AI could learn enough from the template brain to run the armature by itself. At which point synchronization became irrelevant, as did the organic template.
With Ribiero out of reach and Johnson’s brain a greasy smear on the side of a used limousine courtesy of Ribiero’s daughter, Lania had been forced to go back to the beginning and start over. She did not believe there was any point in crying over spilled milk or splattered brains, so she did not dwell on the unfairness of it all. Even incomplete, both the Tankowicz and Dawkins files were filled with fascinating research and helpful insights.
Ribiero was obviously the one they all wanted to replicate, so it was frustrating that his files were the most heavily redacted. Achieving full prosthesis on a stable organic neurological template was the holy grail of biotech. Ribiero’s Golems were the pinnacle of prosthetic integration, and three decades later her contemporaries were still trying in vain to duplicate his success. She supposed Johnson had come closer than anyone, yet for all his self-proclaimed genius his work had left much room for improvement.
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