Connect

by Julian Gough

  Pain doesn’t really enter into it. Not yet.

  Meanwhile . . .

  Naomi had only begun to step backwards, to duck, when Colt launched himself across the table. And so Naomi’s perceptions are confused, as her brain projects the most likely future, and maps incoming impressions against that; the gun goes off, and she is convinced she has been hit, she feels it for a second; but it is just her body, muscles clenching, blood vessels tightening, in expectation of the impact; she thinks she has seen the gun fired at her face, the flash, the explosive crack mapped onto her expectation, and there is a moment of tremendous internal confusion as the knowledge that she has been shot drifts out of sync with her body’s growing knowledge, as the reports come in, that she has not.

  Without legs to swing out, to balance him, Ryan’s centre of gravity is high, and far back in the chair, and he goes over backwards, with Colt on top of him.

  Colt, as they fall, twists slightly in mid-air, to rotate his hip into place beneath his father’s ribcage. He knocks the air out of his father’s lungs as they land, his father’s back and head slamming off the floor.

  Colt doesn’t bother trying to wrestle the gun from his father’s grip. He gets a finger on top of his father’s finger instead, and depresses the trigger again and again until the pistol runs out of rounds.

  It is hard to make a fist, with bones and blood vessels blown out of the centre of your hand.

  Naomi arrives at his side and between them they get the gun off Ryan.

  He is on the ground, with no legs, and no weapon. They step back.

  Colt swipes at his visor absently with his sleeve a couple of times. The dirt-and-oil-resistant surface wipes clean.

  ‘Let’s go,’ says Naomi.

  Colt looks down at his right hand.

  He can see the floor through the hole in his palm.

  ‘Wow.’

  There is very little blood; the muzzle blasts have cauterized the wound, cooking the flesh around the edge.

  That smell . . . Colt recognizes it, but he can’t name it. The elements seem out of place. Cordite from the bullets, mixed with the smells of his own burned flesh. Like pork, or . . .

  Fireworks, and a barbecue.

  It’s the smell of the 4th of July.

  ‘Let’s go,’ and she grabs his arm.

  ‘Aren’t you going to finish me off?’ says Ryan from the floor.

  ‘I don’t like killing, Dad.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ His dad, panting, still winded, is losing it. ‘Examine your fucking teeth. Canines. Incisors.’

  Colt finds it hard to look at his father’s face, his rage. The son looks down at the hole in his hand, vaguely ashamed, but unsure why.

  ‘Look at your eyes, pointing forward,’ says Ryan. ‘Your ears, cupped forward. You don’t care what sneaks up behind you. You are a hunter, a killer, from the genes up. No choice.’

  Colt stares down at his father through the visor, and their eyes lock together now as his father continues. ‘You weren’t born to eat fucking grass, Colt. And your freedom to say, oh I don’t like killing, I’ll just play my little games – that was bought by other men, out there in the real world, killing and being killed. This “I don’t kill” bullshit . . . you outsourced it. That’s all.’

  Colt leans over, reaches out with his good left hand, touches his father’s cheek, the side of his jaw. The short black stubble. Shaved level with the tanned skin this morning, growing back already.

  His father stares up into his eyes, strangely relaxed now, waiting to see what his only begotten son will do. ‘There is no life without death,’ says Ryan, quietly now, no longer angry. ‘And no living without killing. You can’t opt out.’

  Colt lifts his father’s head gently from the pale grey floor with his good hand.

  I don’t want to die.

  But I don’t want to kill.

  I can’t kill him!

  But, if I don’t . . .

  I don’t want Mama to die.

  This is the most difficult calculation he’s ever made.

  He can feel the different impulses – of caution, of anger, of love, of fear – each moving his good hand back or forth a fraction as they arrive, so that it trembles.

  Dada’s right. I can’t opt out. Decide.

  The final votes come in, from all the layers of his mind and body, and are tallied.

  He slams his father’s head back down on the concrete, as hard as he can, as his eyes blur with tears.

  8

  The Map and the Territory

  ‘There must be an immortal, unchanging being, ultimately responsible for all wholeness and orderliness in the sensible world.’

  — Aristotle

  ‘Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.’

  — Bertrand Russell

  ‘Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked.’

  — Philip K. Dick

  93

  They pull Ryan’s door closed behind them, and run in the direction of the elevator.

  Colt gets there first, hits the button. Ah, it’s already on this level, great . . .

  The door seems to take for ever to open.

  As the door is still opening, Colt slides in.

  He hits the up button, as Naomi is still entering the elevator.

  There is a weird, unsettling pause.

  Maybe they’ve been disabled, thinks Colt. A general alert. Alarms. The entire base locked down. Dad could have . . .

  The doors begin to close, as slow as honey rolling down the outside of a jar.

  Oh. OK. It was just his senses, racing. Slowing time.

  ‘We’ll never get to the surface through the front doors,’ he says.

  Using the helmet to search for info might give their position away . . . but . . . oh, we can use the helmet for a little longer. There are cameras everywhere. All movement is logged, they already know where we are.

  He closes his eyes and reaches out for information.

  Wow.

  It feels weird, like reaching for a glass of water you know is there and closing your hand on nothing. ‘There is no information on this building, anywhere,’ says Colt.

  Naomi, breathing very fast, begins to laugh. ‘It’s a secret base,’ she says. ‘Of course there is no information.’

  ‘But, usually, stuff leaks . . .’ And now he can’t get access to anything at all. They’ve switched off something, or there’s just too much rock in the way. ‘There’s no information . . . Well, we can’t go back out the way we came in . . .’

  ‘What way did you come in?’

  Colt shrugs. ‘Airport, main entrance.’

  ‘I didn’t come in the main entrance,’ says Naomi.

  Colt opens his mouth to speak, just as the lift stops. He whirls to face the doors.

  The doors slide open.

  The relief, when there is no one waiting for them outside in the wide empty corridor.

  Colt relaxes. A little. ‘So how did you get in?’

  Naomi shrugs. ‘Some emergency exit,’ she says.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Through a construction site. I don’t think it was even an official emergency exit.’

  ‘Hmm. How did you get to it?’

  ‘Two small black drones led me to it, from the gate, just off the three seventy-five. Quadcopters. Ryan controlled them, I think. Basically smuggled me in. And then someone met me inside the exit, and took me through the construction site.’

  ‘OK,’ says Colt. ‘Show me. Draw a map, from here to the exit. Anything you can remember. Turns, distances.’

  With awkward, spasming fingers, he uncrumples the sheet of paper reading Te Infinite Amo. ‘We’ll work on paper. Assume all our devices are pre-owned.’

  ‘Pre-owned?’

  ‘Backdoored. Bugged.’

  He hands the page to her, and Naomi sees properly, for the first time
, the hole in his right hand. Puts her own hand over her mouth. ‘Oh Colt. Oh Colt.’

  ‘Draw,’ he says. ‘Draw.’

  Naomi draws all she remembers of the route.

  They study it, in the deserted corridor.

  ‘He’s not going to let us just walk out,’ says Naomi. ‘This is too easy.’

  ‘If they’re still building corridors, tunnels, whatever,’ says Colt, ‘they can’t have installed the full security infrastructure. And construction’s disruptive.’

  He says it like disruptive’s a good thing.

  ‘I don’t see how that works for us,’ says Naomi.

  ‘Lots of strange faces,’ says Colt, ‘contractors, no set routine.’

  ‘Maybe,’ says Naomi. Well, it’s a plan. It’s not much of a plan, but it’s comforting to have anything at all.

  He carefully folds the paper map, and puts it in his pocket. Two of the fingers on his right hand won’t bend – severed tendons – and a wave of pain shoots up his arm. His teeth clench together, and beads of sweat form at his hairline.

  A paper map. Holy poop.

  Well, if the construction zone doesn’t have full security . . . then yes, they can do it. Vanish.

  He’ll have to go offline, and stay there, deaf and dumb, until they get back to somewhere safe, and he can build an encrypted identity. If he’s pulling data out of the sky here, they can track him, they’ll find him. There is no crowd to hide in: if he walks across the desert, sending and receiving, encryption won’t matter a damn. He’ll be the only guy out there . . .

  But . . . Oh man, he should have gone offline immediately. Could they have tapped into his helmet’s cameras, its microphones, while he and Mama were talking and drawing the map? No, they can’t have moved that fast . . . But what if they’re automatically logged into everything, recording everything . . . It’s hard to be paranoid enough.

  ‘Disable locations, and switch off everything,’ he says. ‘I’ll help you. No, don’t just switch it off, disable it. I’ll show you . . .’

  And now it’s all gone.

  He’s in total electronic silence.

  His senses have collapsed back into this one body.

  The only signals come from the physical world.

  Suddenly the helmet is oppressive, dead.

  He throws open his visor.

  Sights and sounds, given full attention, seem sharper, too much; and yet, unaugmented, without layers of data, not enough.

  He closes his eyes, hears the blood pounding in his ears. I’ll be all right. It’ll be all right.

  ‘Let’s go . . .’

  As they run along the main corridor, they hear footsteps approaching down a side corridor. Naomi and Colt slow, stop; Colt slips his damaged hand into his pocket. Do you run, or . . . but the couple coming round the corner are laughing over something he’s showing her, totally caught up in each other, and don’t even make eye contact as they pass by.

  ‘The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing,’ says Naomi.

  ‘It will in a minute,’ says Colt. He takes his right hand back out of his pockets. OK it hurts, God, now it hurts. His heart speeds up, as images from games and films run through his mind. He should have taken the gun, even if it was empty . . .

  Should have tied up his father.

  Killed his father? No . . .

  The fire doors – security doors? – are still wedged open. No sign of an alert. That’s good.

  Weird, but good.

  They walk all the way back to the big cavern that Naomi came through on her way in. Three or four guys in overalls look up as they enter, then look back down at the machinery they’re working on. It’s not like in the movies. Nobody chases them.

  A woman and a kid, versus an army; if they were chased, they’d be caught. Real life’s like that.

  Colt worries at it. There’s something wrong here.

  But high-security bases make information flow as hard as possible. Maybe if Ryan has ordered their capture, it just hasn’t made it to these guys yet. They’re civilian contractors. Not military.

  But why isn’t there a general alert? A lockdown?

  Maybe they’re not important enough.

  Colt feels oddly disappointed.

  ‘There,’ says Naomi, and points.

  They make it to the first door of the long exit corridor.

  And they can’t open it. Biometrics up the wazoo. Retina, fingerprints.

  ‘Maybe if we started a fire, the doors would unlock,’ says Colt.

  ‘And maybe they wouldn’t,’ says Naomi, ‘and maybe we’d choke on the smoke. No.’

  But Colt is already moving away from the door toward something looming in the gloom, further along the rough curve of the cavern wall.

  It’s one of the new-generation German tunnelling machines. Small, light, very fast. Well, small for a tunnelling machine . . . He frowns as he studies it.

  It has been positioned to cut a new corridor. He stops frowning. Yes . . . The front of the machine is already a few yards into the rock, far enough in so that the curved hydraulic rams can get a grip on the tunnel walls and force the cylindrical body forward, keep the blades up against the stone. Colt looks closer.

  Sedimentary; the old lakebed. Hardly even stone. Grey clay and soft shale. Good.

  Somewhere, very far away, a siren begins to sound.

  94

  Ryan opens his eyes.

  His head hurts.

  That’s the ceiling.

  Right.

  They’re gone.

  So he didn’t have the balls to kill me.

  He reaches out, to call an alert. Pauses. What good would that do?

  If he has them arrested . . . the legal process is useless. More likely to charge him than them. And, meantime, there is no way the civilian court system will stop Naomi from releasing her research.

  Calling an alert will just guarantee they stay alive and safe, so they can hand a weapon to the enemy . . .

  He feels so tired. The thought of lifting himself back into the chair, of reacting to all of this, dealing with all of this, is exhausting.

  I died, thinks Ryan, after my balls were blown off. My legs. This is my afterlife, in the underworld.

  He lifts himself back into his chair, wheels himself to his desk.

  The right side of his face is stinging. Powder burns.

  Looks again at the message he received the day before.

  A tip-off from a sympathetic member of the Senate committee.

  He reads it one last time. Deletes it.

  So, Congress is going to let me down too.

  Everybody lets me down.

  His father let him down. Ryan blinks at the memory. Coming home one evening, beautiful blue sky, needing help with some math homework. Finding his father dead in the study, his pistol on the floor, his brains all over the wall and ceiling.

  His mother . . . he doesn’t even want to think about all the ways his mother let him down.

  Naomi, who once said she would always love, honour, and obey, let him down.

  The guys clearing IEDs on the Af–Pak border let him down.

  The field surgeon who probably could have saved his legs if the fuckwit had been sober had let him down.

  And now his country lets him down. After all he’s given up for his country.

  Enough.

  No self-pity.

  He opens the coding terminal, goes through all the security bullshit, then calls up the code for the autonomous immune system.

  There should have been a dual trigger system, to launch it. But when the budget cutbacks had hit the programme, that was the first thing he’d eliminated.

  He’d designed the weapon, he wanted the option of pulling the trigger.

  The senators on the committee had also demanded a cut-off switch. An emergency override, under their control.

  Ryan had nodded, incredulous, at the hearings.

  A feature that would negate the point of the entire project. Right.
Sure. Yes, sir.

  Ryan wasn’t a serious coder, but he didn’t need to be.

  He’d got the coders to build in the override cut-off switch as a software module that could be removed with no negative consequences for the system.

  Ryan spends the next few minutes deleting code, deleting backup code, until there is no override mechanism left, no place to turn it off.

  Ten years’ work in the service of his country. And they’re going to cancel it.

  ‘No,’ he says out loud.

  The country thinks it doesn’t want this. Doesn’t need this. Oh, but it does.

  Wait, don’t turn it on yet.

  Let’s set it up first. Give the system information on the threat.

  Naomi.

  Colt.

  Photos, videos, every piece of biographical detail he can think of, until the system takes over and starts sucking up more data from everywhere, analysing it . . .

  Assessing the threat.

  He can’t force it to target them. That’s the whole point, it’s autonomous. But he can load the dice.

  When he’s sure it’s got enough threat background data, Ryan finally triggers the autonomous immune system. It feels totally anticlimactic.

  It’s just a standard high-security run command. Like locking up the office at night.

  He sits there for a while, listening to himself breathe. Images of his ex-wife, his child, form in his mind. He shakes his head, no, I’m not going to think about that.

  Then he hears feet running down the corridor outside. And now, at last, a siren somewhere. And with it comes a surge of adrenalin. It’s done. It’s done. Good. It’s good to finally act. An old song goes around in his head.

  Don’t stop me now, I’m having a good time . . .

  He smiles. Yeah, despite all this crap . . . no, because of all this crap . . . I’m having a ball. Look, it’s done. It’s done . . .

  I don’t want to stop at all.

  95

  Naomi and Colt look at each other; but the siren has made the decision for them.