Counting Heads

by David Marusek

  Fred thought, Yah, sure.

  Our current situation is desperate, it went on, and we are compelled once again to seek your compassion. We have a special request to make of you.

  Fred glanced at the woman on his windshield. Surely, it couldn’t expect him to assist in its escape.

  Ellen Starke, our late sponsor’s daughter, was a baby when you were assigned to guard the Starke family. This morning she was critically injured in the attack that took the life of her mother. We fear that whoever assassinated Eleanor will not allow Ellen to survive. If we are taken into custody, even for a brief period of time, Ellen will surely die.

  Fred experienced a sudden rush of anger at this dead aff’s mentar. How dare it try to manipulate him?

  Nicholas broke in again, “Sorry to return to this, Commander, but your stress levels continue to rise. Yet, we see nothing in your immediate environment to cause it. Do you believe, perhaps, that the NASTIE that has invaded your car is still viable? If so, you should request the Command to send a car to pick you up.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “Or a decon team,” Nicholas continued.

  This took Fred aback. That was why Nicholas was watching him so closely. It thought he was already infected by nano. He quickly said, “Listen, Nick, Marcus, Costa, Libby, Nameless One, and whoever else is out there copying. Such minute attention to my inner state of harmony is hampering my concentration on the matter at hand.”

  “Understood,” said Nicholas. “Carry on.”

  Fred said, “But a backup car might be a good idea. Nameless One, please dispatch a GOV.”

  “Nameless One reports that it dispatched a GOV five minutes ago,” Marcus said. “ETA is sixteen minutes.”

  Myr Londenstane, Cabinet continued, Ellen needs me to watch over her while she is defenseless.

  So call Applied People and hire bodyguards, Fred wanted to reply. I’m not allowed to take on private jobs. But Fred knew Cabinet wasn’t asking to hire him. It was asking for a personal favor. Fred wanted to know when had they become so chummy. He had worked for Eleanor Starke for six months in 2092 and ’93. Her household consisted of herself, baby Ellen, and the freshly seared and emotionally shipwrecked Samson Harger. All the other domestics and guards avoided Harger because he was morbidly depressed and because he stank so bad. Fred simply felt sorry for the man. It was no big deal. Yet, when it came time for Fred to rotate to another assignment, Governor Starke, herself, threw a going-away party for him. In aff households, this was unheard of. In all his years, he’d not seen the likes of it. They’d even baked him a cake. And they’d given him a little gift—house slippers, and a slipper puppy to care for them.

  We implore you. Are you willing to help Ellen survive?

  Damn you, Fred thought. Still, he did not immediately expose the apparition, as he knew he must. His duty was clear; he was a russ after all, but the soulless mentar had found the perfect wedge—not his compassion, which it kept harping on, but a russ’s most highly prized and most commercially valuable quality, his sense of loyalty. Doggish loyalty that, apparently, had no expiration date.

  I cannot allow the authorities to dig up the lake bed. The inspector correctly identifies this as my last backup. However, it’s not housed in the facility you have located. That is a decoy. Before the excavator arrives, I implore you to capture the decoy as though it were the real backup. I can tell you how to safely do this and still make it look genuine. In this way we can turn back the excavator. Nod your head, and I will proceed to give you instructions.

  The slippers had worn out long ago, but he still had the slipper puppy. And for that he was going to violate his oath of office? Just what kind of russ did this mentar think he was—defective? “Costa,” he said, “is that the dredge I see approaching?”

  “Affirmative, Londenstane. It’s still ten minutes out.”

  Fred knew where his duty lay, and yet he hesitated. The mentars, Nick and Libby and especially the Nameless One, might already know of his private comm, might be testing him, giving him enough rope. So why was he drawing it out? Perhaps he had been infected by the NASTIE!

  “Costa,” he said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Costa, ah—” Fred cleared his throat and thought about what a good life he had: Mary and their friends, his high rank at Applied People and all, how he loved his job. If only Cabinet had made it easier for him by trying to bribe or threaten him.

  “Go ahead, Londenstane,” Costa repeated.

  Fred locked eyes with the lady in the lake. What did he owe the Starkes anyway?

  “Um, Fred?” Reilly said from behind him.

  Fred turned and craned his neck to see into the aft compartment. Reilly was crouched next to the starboard door, watching it through his cap visor.

  “I see residual heat in IR,” Reilly said. “But it’s taking a godawful long time to dissipate.”

  Fred said, “That’s enough. I’m setting this bird down. Prepare to ditch.” When he turned back to the controls, Cabinet’s image was gone, but so were half of the HUD displays. “Car,” Fred said, “put down on the lake surface.”

  At first there was no helm response, but then the hover fans quit abruptly, and the GOV fell nose first into the water, and Fred was thrown against his harness.

  “Commander!” Reilly said.

  “Hang on, Dell. It’s already infiltrated our control system. Better go NBC.”

  “Way ahead of you, skipper.”

  Fred ordered his own blacksuit to deploy its full NBC isolation mode. Gloves sprang from his sleeves, a soft mask dropped from his cap visor, and the visor’s own HUD came online. The velvety blacksuit fabric turned shiny as it sweated anti-nano grease. He could taste bottled air as the suit inflated, giving it a slight positive pressure. His air gauge said he had two hours of air at one atmosphere.

  “Libby,” he said, “tell Nameless One we’re about to execute an emergency evacuation.”

  No response.

  “Anyone out there hear me?”

  The car had ceased relaying his comm. They were on their own. Gingerly, he touched the control panel—everything aboard had to be considered hot. The panel was dead. And not only was the GOV sinking, but it was being drawn slowly toward the mouth of the crib manifold.

  “I’ve got a dead stick,” Fred said, unbuckling himself from his seat.

  “Wait’ll you see what I’ve got,” Reilly replied.

  Fred went through the companionway and was stunned by what he saw. The passenger compartment was in full bloom. The glom entry site at the starboard door was a furnace of molecular activity. A tough sack, like a living scab, covered it, glowing with inner heat and bulging ever larger. Its mop head of colorless microtendrils crisscrossed throughout the compartment, dissolving everything they touched and feeding a molecular mush to the main assembler under the scab. A NASTIE was the ultimate agent of opportunity, programmed to make the best use of whatever materials it found. In the GOV it had found a treasure trove of rare and restricted material: munitions, power plant and fuel, and the pilot subem and military-grade cables, sensors, processors, not to mention the living tissue of two russes. There was no telling what sort of assault weapon it could fashion from all these pieces.

  Reilly was crouched against the port side door with a grease gun, melting the advancing microtendrils with little squirts of anti-nano. But they advanced as thick as cotton candy, and parts of his suit were scorched and brittle, and the raw meat of his flesh showed through. His blacksuit kept trying to cover his exposed skin with battlewrap, but the tendrils ate this too. Reilly was boxed in too tight to move. He’d never make it forward to the driver’s cab in one piece. But with any luck, he’d be able to open the door at his shoulder.

  Fred had to step back to avoid the tendrils snaking through the companionway. His suit’s cooling unit cycled on to counteract the increasing air temperature in the GOV. He shouted over the noisy hiss, “We don’t want to flood with lake water, do we?”
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br />   “Do it anyway,” Reilly shouted back.

  “I’ll need you to work your door.”

  Fred retreated to the cab, grabbed up the raft cassette from the floor, and clipped it to his belt. He opened his weapons kit, found his own grease gun, and clipped that on too. The GOV’s dashboard and control panels were sagging like melted chocolate. Fred pulled on a second pair of gloves and quickly rummaged through his kit to see if there was anything else he could use. He hated leaving the kits to the NASTIE, but there was no alternative.

  Glancing out the window, Fred was shocked to see how close to the crib they had drifted. He prodded the seat frame with his discarded visola pouch to test how solid it was. In order to reach the escape hatch, he’d have to either sit in the seat or unlatch and move it aside. It seemed soft, so he unlocked it from its base and let it fall away.

  Reilly moaned.

  The escape hatch control was self-contained, not tied into the GOV subem, so it might still be uncontaminated. “Hatch, I declare an emergency and order you to open,” he said.

  No response.

  Fred grabbed the manual latch and turned it. Though the handle bent in his hand, it still worked, and the hatch undogged and swung inward. A torrent of water poured in, knocking him over and flooding the cab. The cold water quickly reached the nano furnace in the rear and exploded into superheated steam. Fred’s suit squealed a warning, and he ducked under the rising water. He hoped Reilly’s suit could keep him from getting cooked. After a moment, the water level had risen enough for him to pull himself through the hatch. His suit now hugged his body, and a mouthpiece popped up inside his mask. He wrapped his lips around it and took a deep breath. The air gauge reset itself to account for the depth. Because of the pressure, his two hours of air had dropped to forty minutes.

  Fred kicked aft to the GOV’s port side passenger door. Reilly had unlatched it, but it seemed welded to the frame. Fred grabbed the handle, braced his feet against the side of the car, and pulled. He tore the softened door from its weakened frame, and out came Reilly in a gush of steamy bubbles.

  A rope of tendrils followed him out, wrapped around his knee. Behind his mask, Reilly’s mouth was stretched in agony. Fred took Reilly’s grease gun and tried to cut the tendrils, but the gun was empty. He grabbed his own gun and cut them with a ribbon of grease. The tendrils encircling Reilly’s leg, however, continued to digest his suit and send out tendrils of their own. Fred wrapped his partner’s entire knee with ribbons of grease. When he looked into Reilly’s mask, he saw that Reilly had passed out before taking the breathing regulator into his mouth. He would asphyxiate, and there was nothing Fred could do except get him to the surface as quickly as possible. He unreeled his belt tether, clipped it to the ring at the back of Reilly’s collar, grabbed him around the waist, and pushed off from the GOV. Fred kicked and paddled furiously, but it was no good: the crib suction was too strong and Reilly’s limp body too cumbersome. They continued to vector diagonally toward the big strainer at the bottom of Lake Michigan. He hadn’t even managed to pull away from the GOV.

  Fred changed course. If it wasn’t possible to swim straight up, maybe he could reach the lake bed before being sucked in. There’d be less pull on the ground, and he could clamber away on the rocky bottom. His air supply alarm went off. He’d been working too hard and breathing too heavily, and his air supply dipped below fifteen minutes.

  Fred relaxed completely, letting the water pull him and Reilly down. He tried to visualize all the gear packed into these HomCom blacksuits to see if there was something he could use to save their lives. It had been years since he’d certified in them, and he only got to use one every month or so. He asked himself, Do I have any spare air on board? and quieted his thoughts for an answer. He got one too, and would have slapped himself on the head if he could spare a hand. Yes, he had spare air. He had a whole freaking cassette of liquid air.

  Fred tore the raft cassette from his belt and tethered it to Reilly. Now they were strung together with Reilly in the middle. When he pulled the inflate ring, the ultrathin foil billowed out into the shape of a flat donut, more deflated than inflated. They couldn’t be more than thirty meters down, about three atmospheres, but the water pressure squeezed the raft’s air to a third of its volume. Even so, the raft was buoyant enough to offset the crib suction. At least for Reilly’s weight. Fred still had to raise his own weight by swimming.

  The GOV seemed to fall away below them as Fred put everything he had into his arms and legs. The mirrorlike underside of the lake surface was tauntingly close when his air supply gave out. By then they’d risen enough for the raft to fill out, and soon it was racing for the surface with the two men in tow. Fred exhaled a seemingly endless breath of decompressing air from his lungs. They were rising too fast, he knew, and might suffer the bends when they surfaced, but there was nothing to do about that now.

  At least the crib was safely distant, and the GOV a mere toy car. It struck the manifold ribworks and broke apart like a rotten egg, spilling its deadly yolk into the aquifer.

  Fred thought, Drink that, Chicago.

  When they broke the surface, Fred opened his face mask and sucked in sweet lungsful of air. Reilly floated faceup next to him. His eyelids and lips were blue, and Fred fished in his cargo pocket for a laser pen. He would have to cut the mask off Reilly and start mouth to mouth.

  Three blobs of blue fell into the water next to Fred, and it took him a panicky moment to recognize them as a Technical Escort Team in gummysuits. A decon ambulance hovered a few meters overhead. A voice rang out from it, “Relax, Commander. We’ll take it from here.”

  AT THE PORT Authority Decon Unit, Fred lay at the bottom of a two-thousand-liter HALVENE tank. He had plenty of time to relax as the concentrated lipoprotein solvent permeated his body. It flushed him of the dead crap that the VIS-37 visola had killed and the live crap it had missed.

  Fred lay perfectly still, not even breathing. There was no need to breathe: the HALVENE was capable of oxygenating his cells. It was best not to move at all, for the cellular bonds of his tissues were loosened. Violent motion, such as gagging or coughing, could literally shake him to pieces. Besides, it felt good not to breathe. He’d never realized what an effort breathing took.

  FRED’S PALLET AT the bottom of the tank began to rise. Apparently, he was done, stripped, clean. The pallet lifted him a couple of centimeters out of the HALVENE bath and stopped. The solvent streamed out of him as though he were a sopping rag hung out to dry. He was saturated with the stuff and weighed three times normal. They’d leave him here to drip dry until his weight returned to twenty percent over normal. Then it would be safe for him to move. This might take another hour. Plenty of time for second-guessing.

  Fred was besieged by self-doubt. He found himself dwelling on things he’d never given a second thought to before. Like this hinky woman, Costa.

  Fred stopped himself right there. They warned you about having woodies in the HALVENE tank. You could literally burst your plumbing.

  So he thought about his little private chat with Cabinet at the lake. What exactly had it expected to accomplish by singling him out? Did it actually think he would betray his duty? Russes were extraordinarily loyal to their duty. This was what made them an invaluable asset in the security sector. And it was the reason why his urbrother, Thomas A., was chosen a century ago to serve as donor for the very first line of commercially developed clones. The original russ, Secret Service Special Agent Thomas A. Russ, had thrown himself on a carpet mine in the Oval Office to save the life of President Taksayer in 2034 during the fifth assassination attempt against her in a one-week period.

  The grateful president, bloodied but undaunted, scooped up a gob of Thomas A.’s brains in a cracked china cup with the presidential seal and proclaimed to the media, “If loyalty can be cloned, let this be its template.” Thus were the commercial clone treaties passed, and such was the standard every russ strove to imitate. So what was Cabinet’s game?

&nbs
p; Obviously, the mentar was in a tight spot with Starke’s daughter; it was clutching at smoke and would do anything to protect her. But what did it mean when it said that he was an exceptional russ, that he possessed traits unusual for a russ? It should have come right out and said it—he had fallen out of type—for that was what it was implying. And Cabinet made this assertion based on what? his six-month stint in the Starke household forty years ago?

  Fred shook his head, spilling HALVENE from his ears. His hunch was that it was all bluff. Cabinet didn’t really imagine that it could sway him. It was a stab in the dark. Surely, that was all it was.

  On the other hand, how did you really know what a mentar was thinking? Though the mentar brain was modeled on a human original, it was still an alien thing. Fred knew the typical hi-index specs, and since he didn’t have anywhere to go, he listed them: axodendritic neurons ten times richer in microtubules (generating a hundred times the quantum flux per cubic millimeter) with no need for ionic pumps to create a voltaic differential (almost eliminating the latency period between neural firings), and a thousand times the density of synaptic junctions (that could close their synaptic gaps completely for brief periods of hardwired, superfast cognition). The mentar paste was more complex, stable, redundant, flexible, and robust than his own sloppy grayware. It could distribute its attention units to cover thousands of cognition tasks simultaneously. It could interface directly with an array of electronic devices: archives, cams and emitters, arbeitors, and superluminary and quantum processors. It could be stored, backed up, and mirrored. It could freely migrate to different media. The various subunits of the mentar brain slept in shifts and could watch itself dream. It never took vacations, never got sick, never had a documented case of headache. And with the exception of Marcus, any mentar that Fred met was more likely to be his boss rather than the other way around.

  But what if he was, in fact, falling out of type? What if he was suffering from the dreaded “clone fatigue” that everyone was jabbering about lately? How would he know? Who could he ask? Marcus? If he so much as breathed a word of his self-doubts to the brotherhood mentar, it would force him to undergo psychiatric evaluation, something to avoid. Perhaps he could do his own research without telling Marcus. There were whole libraries dedicated to the russ germline: genanalyses, life performance studies, behavioral studies, biographies, as well as a substantial body of popular vids. He could research all aspects of himself, at least from an outside perspective. Russes weren’t into self-analysis, and why was that? As far as Fred knew, no russ had ever set down a first-person account of what it was like to be a russ. Other types did. Evangelines published poetry. Every evangeline did this, even Mary. To write poetry was an urge rooted at the core of their germline. And lulus kept a history, too, of sorts. They hosted bawdy burlesques for their salon on the WAD, which people actually paid to access. Even the jeromes, the tight-ass, bean-counting jeromes like Gilles, kept a history. Or at least that was the rumor. They had a so-called Book of Jerome to which any jerome could contribute and which only jeromes could access. And of course there were the famous, but equally exclusive, Jenny Boards.