The bike rolls to a stop and stabilizers sprout from the sides to balance it. The armor stays sealed up. I stand up, not sure what to do. I point the gun at the ground to show I’m not a threat.
“I’ve got the goods for trade,” I say, trying to sound confident.
There’s no reply.
A sweat breaks out on the back of my neck.
A long stretch of time that’s probably only ten seconds ticks by while I wait.
A quick shift at the front of the armor and a thwick sound is all the warning I get—something stabs me in the chest and sends thousands of volts through my system. I seize up and fall hard, landing on the bags but whacking my head bad enough on the pavement to see stars through the convulsions. It hurts like crazy, but my jaw is locked tight, so I can only shake and moan as the smuggler decloaks his bike, strides toward me, and drops to one knee to snatch Riley’s gun from the ground where it’s fallen. Then he holds a black-gloved hand over my chest, snaps his fingers, then splays his hand out again—the two darts yank out of my chest and clack against some metal plate on his hand.
My muscles are still so cramped, I have no control over them—but at least the pain is gone, and the convulsions have stopped. The smuggler tucks Riley’s gun inside the long black-leather coat he’s wearing, and I remember far too late: I wasn’t supposed to take it out unless I planned to use it. I struggle to look up at the smuggler’s face—I get a glimpse of someone older, maybe twenty-five, his skin weathered with sun around his dark eyes. Those eyes don’t have any mercy in them—an assessment quickly confirmed as he stands up and shoves me off the bags with his boot. My body rolls until I’m face down on the pavement. My limbs are unlocking from the taser shock, but not enough to do anything other than prop my face off the ground and watch him strolling back to his bike with all my stuff.
“Please,” I gasp out. My voice is hoarse from the shock. “It’s for my mom.” Not the complete truth, but close enough.
He ignores me, tossing my bags onto his bike and fishing out my gun to inspect it briefly. I should be thankful he’s not shooting me with it. I should shut up and just let him go. But I can’t—I haven’t got what I came for.
I force my arms to heave me up to my knees, then slowly stagger to my feet. When I look up, the barrel of Riley’s gun is pointed at my head. I can’t raise my arms—they’re still not working right—so I just put my palms up in surrender. It’s not like I’m in any shape to attack him.
“She’s dying,” I say, my voice coming back a little. “The shiny pants won’t cure her, the bastards, and I just…” I stall out. The gun isn’t wavering. This man doesn’t care about us any more than the ascenders do. “If you need more money, I’ll get it. Just please… I’ve got to have the gen tech.”
He gives me an inscrutable look.
Seconds tick by.
He lowers the gun. “This isn’t a business for amateurs, kid. Go home.”
I fight against the cramping of my muscles to straighten up taller. “I’m not a kid,” I say, trying to back that up with my full height.
He snorts, tucking Riley’s gun back into his trench coat again. “You’re legacy,” he says, like that explains everything.
Only I’m not sure what he means. Of course I’m legacy. I’m coming from the city. But the way he says it… it’s an insult.
“I’m not a domestic, if that’s what you’re saying.” I can hear the rise in my voice, and I wonder if I’m being an idiot, but it really rubs me the wrong way. Because he’s right—I may not be the love toy of some sleaze-bag ascender at the perimeter, but I live off the largess of the ascenders like every other legacy. “I hate the ascenders… and everything they stand for.”
He raises an eyebrow and turns to face me, but he doesn’t look impressed. “So leave.”
I just stare at him. “I can’t. I’ve got a brother and a mother—”
He turns back to his bike.
“I can’t just abandon them!” I blurt out… all while his words chip away at my brain. Why I haven’t left? I don’t have a good reason, not really. Especially since my grandpa passed. Any day, I could slip past the police bots and easily leave the city. But I knew that before I headed south for this meetup. I’ve always known the ascenders wouldn’t try to keep me in. The trick of being a legacy is walking on the right side of all their laws enough to not get kicked out. Or get caught, when you do. And I’ve been walking on the wrong side for a long time.
“I thought you weren’t a kid.” He’s smirking at me now, astride his bike, ready to roll off with all my stuff, Riley’s gun, and no gen tech for Eli’s mom.
I stride forward, fast and full of anger, and stand in front of his bike, blocking his way. I grip the front of the folded armor. “I’m not leaving because they need me. They need someone who understands the ascenders are only out for themselves and don’t give a damn about humans. They need someone to look out for them, because no one else is going to.”
He calmly assesses me, dark eyes filled with some kind of humor that makes my blood boil. Then he gives me a small nod.
I’m not sure what that means.
He lifts his chin. “Hands off the bike.” But he’s saying it in a way that’s more friendly advice than a threat. I think.
I ease back, clenching my fists at my side, and meet his stare with one of my own.
He glances at the bag on the seat behind him. My bag. “DNA samples?”
“Yes.” I try not to let my relief show.
“It’ll be two hundred chits worth of trade for the first round. I need extra for equipment. And no guarantees it’ll work.”
Two hundred chits? I’m trying not to choke on my own spit. “I’ll… come up with it.”
He nods. “The gun will make for a decent down payment. But the tech will take a while to cook up. I’ll let Riley know when it’s ready.”
I finally let my shoulders drop. “Thanks.”
He smirks and digs out a small bag from inside his coat. It must be the tech I’m supposed to get in exchange because he hands it to me. “I don’t know what what you did to get stuck with Riley’s rounds, but if you’re going to carry a gun, keep it under wraps. Nomads will take you just for the hardware. And they won’t just tase you to get it.”
I swallow, pocket the bag of tech, and give him a nod.
He flicks his black-gloved hand, and the armor ratchets back up into place. The bike backs away in a long arc, turns, and wheels off, weaving around the broken chunks of pavement. I watch him go, wondering if I’m a complete fool for thinking he’ll actually come back. Or bring meds for Eli’s mom. I guess since we completed the trade, that means we’re in business. I still don’t understand what changed his mind. A mutual hatred for all things ascender? A strong desire for the bot-made goods he can only get from a legacy city?
I guess it doesn’t matter—he’s the only hope I have.
* * *
The trek back to the city’s edge seems even longer than the hike out. Getting back in isn’t as hard as Riley made out—the jammer tracks the patrols well enough, and the jam signal makes me invisible to their sweeps, just like Riley’s shop. I have to wait for the moment they’re out of visual range, then run like crazy until my legs feel like they’re falling off. I collapse when I get back to Riley’s. He’s pissed I lost his gun, but he grouses something about it coming out of my commissions, so at least I’m not fired. I ignore the rest of what he says and stagger out to the tram.
I finally catch my breath halfway back to downtown. My muscles are complete jelly, and I’m pretty sure I could sleep for a week, but I need to check on Eli and his mom before I crash at my apartment. Then I need to figure out a way to conjure two hundred chits out of thin air. It’s an obscene amount of money—my parents were murdered for less.
The building bot scans me in. Fatigue weighs me down enough that I take the lift to the fifth floor. Eli’s programmed his household bot to accept me, so I don’t knock, just scan in.
I
freeze at the threshold of the door.
Eli’s sprawled out on the floor, unconscious and covered in something that looks like blue blood. I stagger over and drop to his side.
Oh my God, no.
“Eli!” I shout as I shake his shoulders. His arms are covered in the blue muck, and it’s smeared all over his face, too. “Eli, God, please wake up!”
He squints, eyes still closed, and moans a little, resisting my hold. I relax back on my heels, relief making all my muscles go weak at once. As my panic steps down, I realize the blue gunk is paint. I drag my gaze up to the canvas on the easel next to him… and my mouth drops open.
Eli’s painting is incredible. It makes his other works look like a kid’s first sloppy art project.
It’s a picture of a boy—a puppet on strings, really—suspended in the air. It’s almost entirely in blues, but the look of anguish and delight on the puppet-boy’s face is what’s making me stare and forget to breathe. It’s like he’s being tortured, but the upward cast of his eyes shows him seeing something that lights his face with joy—like all the torments will be worthwhile, if only he can reach that thing that lies just off the canvas. Some heavenly delight that only he can see.
The damn thing’s making me tear up.
Eli moans and rolls to the side, curling up like every muscle in his body is cramping. I put one hand on his shoulder, reassuring him. “I’m here, Eli. It’s okay. You’re going to be all right.”
While I’m talking, I fish my phone out of my pocket and snap a shot of the painting. I don’t know what this could fetch on ArtNet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if two hundred chits is in the ballpark. It’s just that good.
I stow my phone and help Eli as he struggles up to sitting. When he creaks open his eyes, he stares with horror at the painting, then at me, then at his blue-paint-soaked hands… then back to the painting.
“Oh no,” he whispers.
I don’t know what that’s about, but I help him up to sitting on the stool. It’s like he’s been tasered, the guy’s shaking so bad. I notice there are two holes in the wall that weren’t there before.
“What happened?” I ask.
“They’re going to let her die,” Eli says, the words shuddering out of him. He keeps avoiding looking at the Puppet Boy painting, so I don’t ask about that. For now.
Besides, I have something much more important to tell him. “The ascenders might be willing to let her die. But I’m not.”
He squints up at me, like he’s not understanding my words. He gestures with his hands, but they’re covered in blue paint, still wet. I grab a part of his arm that’s not coated and haul him out of the seat.
“Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.” I have to hold him up on the way to the kitchen sink.
He fumbles to help me scrub the paint off, but mostly he’s bracing his legs against the cabinet to keep from falling down. The blue sloughs off like skin—the wet parts mask the already-dried layers beneath. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph… how long has he been painting? And what is this crazy, inspired, amazing art thing he’s made? It’s like it came out of nowhere.
I peer at him as we get most of the paint off. He seems to be pulling himself together. He edges away from me, and I let him go. Then he turns his back to the counter and struggles to hold himself up with slippery wet hands.
“Five percent,” he says, staring at the floor of the kitchen. It’s warped with age and chipped with use.
“She’s got a lot better odds than that.”
“You don’t have to say that, Cy,” he says quietly, not looking at me.
“I’m going to get the gen tech she needs.”
He blinks, frowns at the floor, then slowly looks up at me. “What?”
“It’s already done. It’ll take a couple weeks, maybe more, but—”
“But it’s… Cy, it’s… that’s so illegal.”
I smirk. “That’s my specialty. Haven’t you noticed?”
“But you’ll be banished.” He says it like that’s the worst thing that could happen to me. I’m not so sure. But then his face goes blank. “We’ll all be banished.”
“Only if we’re caught,” I say quietly. “I’m exceptionally good at not getting caught.”
Then his eyes get a little wider, like he’s finally awake, finally come back from whatever thing knocked him out and left him covered in paint on the floor.
And I know what that look means: hope.
He barrels into me, even though only a foot separates us, grabbing me in a hug that’s as fierce as it is brief. When he rebounds away, I clamp a hand on his shoulder and look him in the eyes. He’s trying to duck away, so I won’t see the tears shining in them.
“This isn’t going to be easy,” I say, for some reason needing to warn him. “It’s expensive, and the meds are tough to get, and it might not even work.” I glance at the Puppet Boy painting. “You just keep doing your art—you know how that makes your mom happy—and I’ll work my end with Riley and the meds. We’ll make it happen, okay?”
He winces at the painting, like it pains him. “I don’t know, Cy.”
I point a finger in his face. “Don’t you even do that. You are absolutely not going to give up. Do you understand me? We don’t give up.”
He nods, rapidly, but he doesn’t look convinced.
That’s okay.
I know, deep in my gut, this is going to work. My grandfather would have said a thousand Hail Mary’s trying to make it work—for all I know, he prayed for a miracle before calling the priest with the meds to cut his life short. But I’m going to do better than that. I’m going to win this by refusing to play by the ascender’s rules… not this time, and really, not ever again.
All I have to do is not get caught.
A Word from Susan Kaye Quinn
This story is just a small corner of my Singularity world. My hope is that it will intrigue you enough to check out the rest.
In the future, I believe technology will challenge us to remember what it means to be human. Even today, technology is racing ahead, integrating with our bodies via cybernetic limbs and our minds via the ever-present web. Humans are a tool-using species, but our tools are so quickly expanding our reach—both physically and mentally—that the day when we bring that technology inside our bodies for simple convenience and enhanced performance is not far off.
This may, in fact, be the only hope we have of staying ahead of the machine intelligences we are so eagerly trying to build. Either the robot overlords will take over… or we’ll beat them to the punch by becoming full-fledged cyborgs ourselves. Either way, some of the most compelling stories for SF writers today are found in this technology-immersed future where we are the machines—or at least are engaged in a bare-knuckled fight for survival against them. And I’m not talking a Terminator-style battle, but rather something far more disturbing: that we may create machines that are simply better than us. At everything.
Our time at the top of the evolutionary food chain may be reaching its end. As some futurists say, strong artificial intelligence may be our last invention. In a way, science fiction holds our arsenal of thought-experiments, girding us for the fight and helping us prevent those possibilities from becoming reality. This is why I’m writing the Singularity series—to hopefully stir the minds of my readers and get them thinking about technology’s effect on our mind-body-soul connection before it becomes a fact of everyday life.
And to help us decide what kind of future we want to live in.
My Singularity series has at least five planned novels, and a bunch (technical term) of short stories. Defiance is told from Cyrus’s point-of-view—whereas the novels are from Eli’s point-of-view—but Defiance is designed to lead you straight into the first novel, The Legacy Human.
Singularity Series—Novels (published to date)
The Legacy Human (Singularity #1)
The Duality Bridge (Singularity #2)
Stories of Singularity—Short Stories
Restor
e (Stories of Singularity #1), collected in The A.I. Chronicles
Containment (Stories of Singularity #2), collected in Dark Beyond the Stars
Augment (Stories of Singularity #3), collected in The Cyborg Chronicles
Defiance (Stories of Singularity #4), collected in The Future Chronicles—Special Edition
All the Singularity stories are on Amazon.
If you enjoyed Defiance, you might also like my first YA SF series (Mindjack) about a world where everyone reads minds except one girl. I’ve dabbled in a range of spec fic, from kid’s SF to steampunk, but I’m still surprised to call myself a novelist. After turns at NASA and NCAR, today I use my PhD in engineering to create worlds and technology that don’t exist… yet.
You can find all about my works on my website or you can subscribe to my newsletter to get a free story. If you find me on Facebook, please tell me to get busy writing. These stories won’t write themselves… at least, not yet.
Ethical Override
by Nina Croft
Year 2072
“WHAT THE…”
Vicky rolled over and slammed her hand down on the buzzing comm unit. Apart from the flashing red light indicating an incoming comm, the room was in darkness, daylight still hours away.
As senior homicide detective, Vicky was on call if an emergency arose, but there hadn’t been a real emergency in over five years. She snatched up the unit and slipped it on her wrist; the glow from the screen lit up the area around her. The light flicked to green, but the video feed remained blank and the Caller Recognition empty. Not the Bureau then.
“Detective Inspector Harper?”
She didn’t recognize the voice. “Yes, and this better be good because—”
“Detective Harper, you will be assigned shortly to investigate a possible homicide.”
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