Scorpion

by Christian Cantrell

  We know what we are,

  but know not what we may be.

  The pamphlet tested extraordinarily well, and because of her outstanding work, after graduation, her application to become an intelligence analyst was given the highest-priority consideration. She’d assumed the assignment had just been a standard hypothetical exercise left over from the days before ubiquitous connectivity—that all U.S. propaganda must be distributed electronically these days—but eighteen months later, after being sworn in, she was told that her work ended up being used in the field. And that it had yielded at least one extremely high-value asset.

  * * *

  —

  PLC’s quadpad is empty and the exclave is dark. Quinn hoped to be able to look up and discern small cross sections of living space as the ferry approached—maybe someone looking back down at her, or figures transitioning from one room to another—but the glass is tinted enough that she cannot see in at this distance.

  The exclave’s retracted mesh pier begins telescoping out to meet the ferry, and the moment the terminal is within range, it electromagnetically aligns, abruptly attaching to the hull with the satisfying report of a small-caliber pistol. There is no captain to thank, and Quinn has made no new friends along her journey, so she disembarks without ceremony.

  The pier inherits the oscillation of the ferry on the Gulf’s current, so in order to steady herself, Quinn walks her hands along the graduating rails as she approaches the landing. The pier and the ferry remain connected until she steps through an open gate and swings it closed behind her, at which point the collar decouples and the pier begins retracting. Eddies form behind the ferry as its rotors spin up, and Quinn feels, unexpectedly, marooned.

  A little backup might have been nice this time around. After being threatened by Tariq, Quinn learned something that, in retrospect, Moretti should have explained to her before she left: any kind of fieldwork—even the purely investigative kind—carries with it some level of risk. Moretti did promise her support anywhere in the world, but nobody whom the CIA has influence over could get anyone out to The Grid until afternoon at the earliest. And she is certain that her man would never be so careless as to meet his financiers in person.

  Heavy or oversized equipment like manufacturing-scale 3D printers, full-sized slate-top pool tables, and collections of classic Ferraris have to be moved by ferry rather than quadcopter, so all exclave piers have direct-drive freight elevators. Quinn checks once more for any acknowledgment of her presence, detects none, and proceeds to use the panel to summon the lift. Since this is tantamount to ringing the doorbell, authorization is required from inside before the doors will part—authorization that, Quinn realizes eventually, is not forthcoming. If she were in the lobby of a Holiday Inn, she could use the placebo gesture of jabbing at the little lighted disc with the tip of her thumb to give herself something to do while she waited, but poking through an already-active holographic button hovering above a sheet of volumetric plasma glass and receiving, in return, zero visual or tactile feedback just doesn’t impart the same level of satisfaction. Human impatience was clearly not taken into consideration when designing the holographic user interface.

  She squelches her irrational impulse to knock on the elevator doors and instead steps back as far as the rails around the platform will allow so she can look up. Quinn has done enough to make her presence known that she expects to see at least one panel of glass turn fully transparent, and to glimpse one or both twins peering down at her, though she sees no change above her whatsoever.

  Quinn knows that she can—and will—get inside. Summoning lifts, milling about waiting to be noticed, and perhaps even resorting to rapping a knuckle against any surface she deems capable of carrying a vibration all the way upstairs—these are just courtesies. Along with authorization to come on-Grid, Henrietta also worked with the Qatari government to procure (and remotely install on Quinn’s handset) a custom-compiled “skeleton key” digital certificate that will grant her one-time full access to the PLC exclave. As soon as she chooses to activate her handset within NFC range of an interactive holographic plasma panel, elevators will suddenly start to obey and airlock doors will part and make way as if Quinn were one of the twins herself. But before she does so, she’d like some confirmation that she is at least in the right place. Maybe even some hint as to what she is about to walk into.

  Because, right now, something does not feel right. Most of the other exclaves around her radiate evidence of habitation: Dragonflies collecting and depositing artists, athletes, sheikhs, and geeks; gay-pride windsocks writhing in the salty Gulf breeze; designer-branded poolside brunches amid verdant and trellised tropical gardens; a rooftop tennis match against a squat, multi-axis robotic trainer; the rippled shoulder muscles of a deeply tanned couple clinging to a kaleidoscopic climbing rock with white, chalked hands. Meanwhile, the Plutus Lakshmi Crypto exclave feels distinctly vacant.

  Quinn has a bad idea. Like really bad. It’s so bad, in fact, she knows she should exorcize it immediately and never speak of it to anyone. But all she needs is a glimpse though the tinted glass above her. The quadpad that hangs off the exclave’s main level looks as though it would afford a generous view of the first-floor living quarters, and there’s even a metal staircase leading up to it, but the wire mesh door that blocks it off is securely locked.

  Quinn’s Very Bad Idea starts with the ability of all modern handsets to record ultra-high-definition, super slow-motion video at over a thousand frames per second, which means you can easily capture clear footage of rapidly moving objects. Or, put another way, you can capture clear footage of stationary objects using a rapidly moving handset.

  All she has to do is turn on the camera, properly orient the device, and fling it up high enough that it clears the floor above her and captures a few frames of the main level through the glass outer wall. Think of it as your standard ultra-high-definition video drone sans the drone part. Even one decent frame would probably be enough as long as she can pan and zoom her way to a pair of shoes, or one unwashed dish, or a jacket draped over the back of a chair. Anything to provide proof of life.

  Throwing the phone is the easy part; it’s catching it that has her concerned. But Quinn has a notoriously checkered past when it comes to phone screens, so, years ago, she finally succumbed to one of those bulky, ruggedized, shock-resistant OtterBox cases, which means even if she misses it, the device will almost certainly be fine. The worst thing that can happen, she hypothesizes, is that someone in a neighboring exclave will witness what is undoubtedly suspicious behavior, call security, and Quinn will find herself in a holding cell until Moretti or Van can spring her. That, or her phone will slip through her fingers and ricochet off her forehead, coming to rest in such a way as to capture her subsequent supine repose having just recorded one of the most hilarious memes in all of internet history.

  Quinn opens the camera app, swipes over into super slo-mo mode, taps record, and…launches. Her hands are up over her head with her fingers spread into as much of a basket as they can form as she tracks the phone’s ascent. There must be a stiffer breeze up there than there is down at sea level, as the phone’s lateral travel is more than she expects, and she takes a few steps toward the edge of the platform to try to stay beneath it. But when its path intersects with the dazzling glare coming off the glass, she loses sight of the device and instinctively transitions from trying to catch it to covering her head to protect herself.

  A moment passes, and then instead of feeling the impact, she hears something heavy ring the platform railing followed by a sickening, delicate gulp. By the time Quinn can get down on the mesh flooring, thread her arm through the rail, and reach for her phone, both it and the skeleton key it contains are already well on their way to the bottom of the Persian Gulf.

  * * *

  —

  Of course, she holds it together while she’s alone on the exclave’s
dock; it isn’t until she is back on the ferry and surrounded by other passengers that the tears start to flow.

  Quinn has lost track of the number of times this investigation has made her lose her shit. But it’s different this time. It is not sadness or loss or fear. This time, it’s anger. At herself. For being so fucking stupid. And it’s embarrassment because she’s clumsy and fat and couldn’t keep her marriage together or keep her daughter safe and can’t catch this man who murders babies, and she probably isn’t even in the right fucking country anyway, and by the time she gets her handset replaced and waits for another digital certificate to be issued she will have lost at least an entire day. And lost time in this case is not paid for in waste, but in human lives.

  A new handset is not all Quinn will be requesting when she gets off the ferry, buys a prepaid burner handset, connects it to her metaspecs, calls the CIA’s global field emergency hotline, provides the classified passphrase, requests a callback from Alessandro Moretti, and finally humiliates herself by explaining what happened. She will also use the opportunity to—

  Wait. Her metaspecs.

  She can’t use them to call Moretti or Henrietta, since they rely on her handset for a secure data connection, but she might be able to use them to review some of the footage. Files are seldom explicitly moved around now; instead, devices use predictive modeling to try to anticipate when and where data will be needed. If Quinn’s handset thought she might want to watch the footage on her metaspecs, it might have moved at least part of the file over before the connection was severed.

  Quinn could probably do everything she needs to do through voice commands, by tapping and swiping against her metaspecs’ capacitive temples, and by flashing hand gestures like nerdy gang signs, but she already feels conspicuous enough, so she digs the keyboard out of her purse and unfolds it.

  The file system browser doesn’t surface anything new, but some of the data could still have been transferred in chunks. Quinn toggles on hidden objects, navigates to the system cache, and is rewarded with promising timestamps: multiple randomly named files that total several gigabytes in size.

  She starts with the newest bucket of bits, and there it is: the nausea-inducing quake of found footage. No sound, though. The audio track is probably one of the other files, but video is all she needs.

  She taps the spacebar to pause, then uses the arrow keys to advance. As the main level of the exclave rotates into frame, Quinn starts to feel significantly less moronic. Landings aside, her plan seems to have worked. She uses keyboard combinations to draw out and position a rectangular area of interest, holds down the control key, and slaps “plus” to blow it up. While she doesn’t have the resolution she needs to read labels, she can see that the kitchen counter is covered in little white plastic bottles that she recognizes from her dieting days as liquid meal replacements.

  Quinn momentarily clears her metaspecs so she can see where they are (only about halfway back to the ferry launch), then mentally begins enumerating:

  First, order a new phone. With a skeleton key preinstalled. And demand that someone hand-deliver it to her. In Doha. Today.

  Second, take a Dragonfly back out to PLC—with or without budget approval. And this time, do not knock. Henrietta found schematics of the exclave and informed Quinn that it is one of the few with a basement, which is almost certainly where Naan and Pita have retreated.

  Third, confront the twins and demand their cooperation. She no longer has any doubt that they will be able to identify her man.

  She is about to kill the video when she makes the connection between her sinking handset and the exclave’s basement. Another rap on the spacebar and all that registers are flashes of glass and steel and sky, and then it instantly slows down and everything goes blue. She’s not sure if it’s because of the OtterBox or because of the handset’s optics, but the footage is surprisingly clear. Quinn can see the undulation of the sun passing through the current and how it plays across the pylons on all sides of the twins’ subaqueous basement.

  The outside corner is covered in metallic fins like artificial barnacles. She is about to pause and zoom in order to get a better look when, in perfect unison, they all shift, sliding past one another like scissor blades, revealing themselves to be perfectly interleaved.

  They’re heat sinks, Quinn realizes. On the other side of the wall, Quinn envisions processors slotted and locked on thin layers of thermal paste. The external blades must occasionally sheer away algae, which might otherwise reduce heat exchange. The twins are using the Persian Gulf to liquid-cool their rig.

  As flat objects are wont to do in water, the handset meanders. Only one corner of the basement bristles with the grid of heat sinks; the rest, like topside, is transparent. Crawling along the wall is a long, blunt-nosed, algae-swallowing bot, the glass perfectly clean and free of debris in its wake. The video frame abruptly swings with a sudden flourish of strong undertow as the descent slows. And then, there they are.

  Pause.

  The twins are lying in adjacent capsules in the center of the room, their naked bodies submerged in phosphorescent gel.

  Draw and zoom.

  Open eyes, electrode nets over buzz-cut heads, limp and fallen to the side in a way that does not convey life.

  Pan.

  Transdermal patches on biceps, unifying tattoos on forearms, and small fine fingers tightly entwined.

  But somehow Quinn knows that that is not all. She continues to pan until the frame lands on the pixelated blackness beneath the stairs, and inside it she discerns the tall slender figure of a man. There is a long, lithe knife in his left hand and his eyes are dark and calm. Anyone descending would never know he was there. Someone inexperienced enough to forget to clear the room would rush to the twins’ sides to check to see if they were still alive and never see what was coming up from behind.

  Quinn’s metaspecs are off and she is on her feet, pushing her way to the back of the ferry, where she is just in time to see the Dragonfly lift off. She tracks it, expecting it to pass overhead and to overtake her on its way to shore, but she can tell from the direction it takes that her man is headed not toward the dock, but straight for the airport.

  23

  DIVERSION

  UPON ENTERING IRANIAN airspace, you are expected to relinquish control of your aircraft to the Civil Aviation Organization of the Islamic Republic. If you do not, they will take control through various methods of line-of-sight and satellite communication disruption. If that doesn’t work—if you have proactively hardened your aircraft against the latest in bypass signal hacking—they will scramble two Russian-built, twin-engine, supersonic fighter jets to either escort you to the nearest landing strip, where you will be inhospitably greeted by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, or fire a couple of R-77 air-to-air missiles directly up your ass. All depends on who’s in charge that day, and what kind of mood he’s in.

  In most cases, after verifying that they can assume at-will control of your aircraft, they hand it right back. The CAO doesn’t have the time, the manpower, or the desire to land your plane for you. That’s your job. That’s what you get underpaid for. They just want to know that they could plunge you into the Caspian Sea if they felt like it. And, of course, they want to make sure that you know that, too.

  But every now and then, after remote control of your plane has been assumed, it is not relinquished. Sometimes, in the foreboding tranquility of complete radio silence, your supersonic Emirates Executive ultra-luxury private jet is diverted from Imam Khomeini International Airport, on the outskirts of the capital, to an isolated runway at Mehrabad International Airport, well inside Tehran proper, and subsequently met not by Iranian military, but by the Ministry of Intelligence. By men not in fatigues, but in black tactical gear and full-face ski masks.

  When that happens, experienced pilots know exactly what to do. Hands go directly into laps, folded like a proper
British nanny’s. No additional announcements are issued over the PA. Sometimes you make a quick trip to the toilet so that you don’t piss yourself during what you know is coming. If there’s time, your copilot will probably go relieve himself as well, and when the two of you are recounting the story later to a couple of hijabed hotties over tea and hookahs, both of you will leave that part out.

  By the time the combination hatch and stairway has been fully lowered, the pilot knows to be on his knees facing the nose of the plane with his hands laced behind his head, while the copilot lies face-down splitting the difference between the cockpit and the galley, hands similarly intertwined, mouth full of Persian rug wool. Whatever their passengers choose to do is up to them. It’s their asses. The jet’s insured, and all those soft-touch surfaces are treated with Scotchgard, so if they feel like being heroes, that’s their business.

  The men who beset the jet show their appreciation for the pilots’ cooperation by not killing them. However, what they do not appreciate is a completely empty cabin. Which, after a moment of swiveling their black-masked heads in bewilderment, they proceed to verify via rigorous ransacking. It’s no good asking the pilots what happened to the man they are looking for—the man who, according to very credible intelligence, boarded the jet at Hamad International Airport in Doha, Qatar—because the two of them are so scared that they’re still about to piss themselves despite both having recently emptied their bladders. And because hard data is both more expedient and more reliable than a couple of glorified bus drivers.