Analog Science Fiction and Fact 11/01/10

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Analog Science Fiction and Fact 11/01/10 Page 4

by ASF


  Twenty years of missions, and all the while Cora Ann was growing up. “Where’s Daddy?” had given way to “what-ever,” until, when they finally told me I was ready to re-enter the Sense-less world, Denise’s lawyer said it would be best if I just kept my distance. “She’s at a difficult age,” she said in one of her kinder comments. “The last thing she needs is you back in her life.”

  Hell, they’re all difficult ages. Toddler, middle school, high school. Back when I had the Sense, I used it on furloughs to track her through her days, step by step. What father wouldn’t? Especially when the furloughs were so short, so few? Her first week at school, oh so brave, oh so frightened. Getting her navel pierced? Secretly, she thought, but I was there. First kiss? The guy was a total geek, but so was she. Back then, a solider-type was most emphatically not what she wanted. Back then, her rebellion took the form of geeks and peace rallies—my little radical, growing up in fits and starts when I wasn’t there, more and more often hiding from me when I was.

  The damn psychs always had the same questions.

  How do you feel about that?

  What do you do when you feel that way?

  I’ll tell you how I feel, what I do.

  For three whole years, I panicked whenever someone walked up behind me, or when I rounded a corner and found something I didn’t know was there. It didn’t matter if it was a kid’s skateboard or another rehab patient on his own escorted walk. It was the not-knowing that mattered.

  Three years of deconditioning until finally I convinced them I was again a norm. In CI-MEMS, that’s not a term of respect, but the psychs never picked that up. Three years of learning to live without, but never really succeeding because the absence is always, always there, like an itch you can’t scratch or an amputee’s phantom limb. The arm he thinks he can lift to grab that cup of coffee. The leg he tries to stand on when he gets out of bed, because a lifetime of conditioning tells him it’s there, only it isn’t. Because his nerves insist it’s still there even though its absence is the single, dominant factor of his life.

  With a limb, you can explain all that. With a limb, you can get a prosthetic nearly as good as the original. But how could you explain losing the Sense, even if talking about it wasn’t a breach of everything you’d once sworn your life to protect?

  That’s what I wanted to say during deconditioning. De-con, the Corps called it, complete with the stupid hyphen. Just one more big con, if you ask me: the illusion that when the missions were all over and done, you could go home and live a normal life. Total BS, something the psychs needed to believe so they could feel better about what they were doing. But I never said any of that because then they might never have let me out.

  For three whole years, I tried to pretend I didn’t need anything but the senses I was born with. Didn’t feel that the lost one was still there but not, like the amputee wondering why the coffee cup won’t move when he reaches for it. Until eventually they gave me a pension and released me to the real world. Fifty-one years old, unsuitable for a job. Unsuitable for a family. Unsuitable for life.

  The first thing I did was move to the Pacific Northwest. I’d spent a summer there and remembered the amazing, Mediterranean summers. Warm, dry, and pleasant. And miraculously insect-free. You could sleep all night with the windows open, no screen, and nary a gnat. Dine outdoors without flies in your food. A climate where nobody with the Sense would voluntarily go.

  Then I saw Cora’s latest VidBook post.

  I’m not supposed to be viewing her blog. She never let me in as a buddy, but you don’t spend as many years as I did on black ops and not know a bit about computers. Not to mention that she’d used her name and zip code as her password. CoraAnn78718. I’d cracked that even before the psychs released me to normal life.

  I woke screaming.

  I was blind, Senseless. The enemy was out there, and I didn’t know where. I didn’t know where anything was. Anything could be around the next corner. In the hallway, waiting to pounce, the moment I headed for the bathroom. How do people live like this? How could I live like this?

  “I want it back!” I screamed into the night, my voice a raspy whine because I’d screamed this on so many nights since I no longer had to look like I was recovered. “Oh, God, I want it back! I want it back I want it back I want it back I want it BACK!!!”

  It was worse than losing Denise. Worse than Cora. This had been part of me. A part that would never, ever be again. Even after three years with the psychs, there were times I wasn’t sure I could make it.

  Jerret was afraid. So was I, for that matter. CI-MEMS was designed for urban warfare. Tight quarters, where the Sense gave you overwhelming advantage. Not to mention that the rest of the squad protected you like their very lives depended on it. Casualty rates on missions with CI-MEMS operators were one-third those of other ops—and we usually drew the more dangerous missions. It was a good incentive to keep the operator alive.

  The first to be aware of danger, the last to face it, that was us. But not in this damn desert, where any sniper with a night scope could nail you from way beyond Sense range. It said something that they’d put two of us on this squad. Too much chance of losing one or the other, someone must have figured.

  Jerret’s hand twitched, dislodging a member of my swarm that had gotten too close, tickling the hair on the back of his wrist. Sloppy on my part. I’d been concentrating on my fringes, hoping to catch some trace of a Ladenite sniper before he caught us.

  Jerret knew what the insect had meant. “I’m okay,” he whispered. A human couldn’t have heard him from two feet away, but my bugs got it. Only he wasn’t okay. Heart rate, respiration, skin conductivity, breathing, pupils . . . all indicated fear. Not to mention deception. Jerret was scared to death. Right on the verge of losing it. Luckily, he didn’t ask me because he’d have caught me in the same lie. All these open spaces. We just weren’t designed for them.

  Cora’s VidBook post wouldn’t have caught anyone else’s attention.

  “You wouldn’t believe the flies here!” she gushed into the camera, holding it too close, like everyone does, making her look like her nose was three sizes too big. Actually, it’s a perfect match for the lively blue eyes and long, blond hair so achingly like her mother’s at the same age. “They follow me everywhere! Yesterday four of them—I counted—zipped into the bedroom before I could shut the door. Then they just kind of hovered as I changed clothes. Can you imagine that? Cuh-reepy! Don’t they have any girl-flies to peep?”

  Zip code 78718 is in Austin, Texas. I’ve never seen her apartment—I don’t want more court orders—but I know Austin. It has flies, but it’s nothing like Virginia, where she grew up. Not in November, anyway.

  It was probably nothing, but you don’t survive twenty years in CI-MEMS without being paranoid. Even if you’re not on a black op, they send you to places where anybody, even the kid begging for change, could be carrying, and where 90 percent of the rest hate you anyway. The easy missions are the hunter/killer ones, where your job is to find a specific target while dodging noncombatants. Then, at least, everything’s cut and dried. The patrols that turn you paranoid are the ones where you’re just passing through, trying to spot real threats without slaughtering the maybes.

  When I was new to the Corps, I tallied two statistics. Bad guys taken out and guilty-acting innocents saved. But after a while, I realized that tallies don’t matter. Each mission is a world unto itself. Get in, do the job (meaning get the right people and not the wrong ones), and get out. Preferably with the rest of your unit alive.

  I was good at it. Even in the first weeks of training, they told me I had an unusual ability to integrate. What they didn’t tell me was this meant the loss, when it came, would be all the more devastating.

  I woke with the instant, unmoving alertness only years of missions can train. This time I wasn’t in bed; I was on the couch. The TV was on—a get-rich-quick infomercial or something equally late-night brainless.

  I wasn’t al
one. I could Sense someone behind me. He was looking out the window, his face a blur of face paint. Blue jeans and a dark serape. His Uzi was carelessly gripped in one hand, but the nonchalance was deceptive, the relaxation of a snake at rest, capable of coiling and striking before you even knew what happened. He’d done it before, and would do it again until somebody coiled and struck faster. He wasn’t expecting anything like that at the moment, but still, he was ready for quick action, studying the road outside, waiting, watching. Waiting for something like my patrol, still out of sight around the corner. His pulse was low, his breathing steady. A trained killer, perfect in his element.

  I drew back from my fringe, preparing to report. Take him out or bypass him? The sentry on the other side of the building wasn’t as alert. If we could get a couple men in unseen, I could guide them, coordinate the attack, a wordless game of follow-my-swarm and attack when I gave the signal, which could be as simple as a fly buzzing in the ear. We’d done it before, sometimes against as many as four targets spread across a thousand-foot front, one of the reasons I’d quit counting.

  But something didn’t fit. I couldn’t find anyone to report to. Had the sentry somehow gotten everyone but me? And where was my real body, anyway? I was so far extended into the Sense I seemed to have lost touch with my own surroundings.

  It was the TV that did it. The infomercial was in English. Not Spanish, Arabic, or anything else. It was telling me how to make a fortune investing in foreclosed properties. Not something a serape-draped sentry would be listening to, even if he was willing to put up with the distraction.

  Still, it was all I could do to force myself to look back. But there was nothing there but a bookshelf. My own books, my own apartment. Me. Alone. In Seattle. As I’d been for two years.

  I sat up, pulled the phone from its charger, dialed a too-familiar number.

  “Yeah?” a voice said.

  “It happened again.”

  “Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye?”

  “Not sure.” I describe the scene. “Might have been the Altiplano. After a while, they all blur.”

  “Yeah. Last night I was sure there were snakes in the room. Why snakes? I never even saw one in the field. That was the least of my worries.”

  We talked a bit longer, until I was really ready for sleep. I had no idea who he was; we’d found each other online, and communicated by dummy accounts and encrypted lines. Secrecy’s a hard habit to break. But it was better than calling the Corps psychs and getting a diagnosis like paranoid schizophrenia on your record.

  The Sense is a lot of things. It lets you see around corners or into any room with a crack big enough for an insect to slip through. But it’s more than seeing. If they make a microdetector for something, they can mount it in a swarm.

  For a lot of operators, the information’s just that: data. You need a computer to interpret it and run the swarm, and you wind up sitting back on base with a bank of electronics: coffee in hand, A/C, the whole nine yards.

  But that’s just fancy remote sensing.

  If you’ve got the ability to integrate, the data cease to be data. Add an interface descended from those used for prosthetic limbs, like that concert pianist who plays Chopin with a mechanical hand, and you’ve got true CI-MEMS. The data bits disappear and you wind up with things you simply know, on par with it’s raining or I’m on a tropical beach.

  Most people never make that leap. But for those who do, CI-MEMS is more than a way to see around corners. It’s an emotion-sensor in the air. In a crowded bazaar you know who’s hostile and who’s just scared. Who’ll run away if you give them a chance, who’s just out to save face, who’s a true believer.

  Back on base, though, nobody wants you around. Everyone’s got secrets—and while you may not know the details, you sure as hell know when one’s there. Not to mention being able to win at poker even if you promise not to peek. Keeping track of things becomes a habit, even when there’s no real need. Maybe that’s how stalkers are born. The Sense makes you allergic to surprises. If you can know, you want to. If you can’t, you get desperate.

  The intel had been absolutely clear. The Ladenites were somewhere across the valley. Five square klicks of boulders, snakes, and who knows what. There were at least fifteen of them, fifteen who the sat intel had caught going in, but not out. Drones had seen four of them again, IDing two as important enough to be worth an incursion into a nominally friendly country.

  We’d come in low and quiet, shortly after dark. A quick drop, a not-so-quick march, and now we were staring across the damn Valley of Death, like a scaled-down version of the six hundred. We should have circled east, higher up, and come back, along the ridge. But now, with dawn looming, our only hope was that their lookout wasn’t all that well equipped.

  “You see anything, Jerret?” I spoke softly, right at the limit of my ability to form the words. No need for radios; our swarms were the best way to communicate. If the answer was worth anything, I’d pass it on to the grunt assigned to keep me alive, and he’d hand-signal it to the others. I suppose in theory the enemy could zero in on the link to and from my bugs, but unless you’re using dragonflies or something else big enough to carry a real transmitter, the range is pretty limited. Anyone who has the equipment to sort it out from the background mish of cordless phones, microwave ovens, and garage-door openers is too well dug in for us anyway. In the city, at least. Here, to the right equipment, Jerret and I might stand out like beacons.

  Cora’s next post was the one that really got my attention.

  “You wouldn’t believe how hard these flies are to kill! It’s like they know what a flyswatter is, because the moment I pick one up, they’re gone. I finally got one last night, when it followed me into the shower. I turned up the water and steamed that sucker, good! Thwacked it with a towel while I was at it.”

  Lt. McCarthy was going to be hurting tomorrow. If we lived that long. He was staring across the valley through night-vision glasses, in a vain hope of seeing things Jerret and I hadn’t been able to spot, and in the process he’d scooched though a field of something like miniature prickly pear cactus. My swarm had all the night vision the patrol really needed, and I could see the spines sticking out of his forearms like a stubble of blond hairs.

  I should have felt sorry for him, but only newbies go that heavy on the pain blocker. From the number of spines, he must have wormed his way through a whole patch of the stuff without noticing. Do things like that a few times, and you decide a bit of short-term pain’s not as bad as it sounds. Yeah, with less block, you’ll hurt more if something awful happens, but the awful stuff is what we’re all trying to avoid, anyway.

  Usually, only senior officers get command of CI-MEMS patrols. We were just too valuable to risk. But Lt. McCarthy was green. “Don’t worry,” he’d said as we were leaving base. “Captain Thomas has the Shanghai flu, but he’ll be okay. I grew up in Arizona. I know all about deserts. We’ll do fine.”

  Someday, maybe officers will know better than to lie to CI-MEMS operators. It creates “interesting dynamics,” a base shrink once told me. Maybe. One thing I’d learned was that outing the liar’s worse than playing elephant-in-the-living-room. Though in this case the grunts didn’t believe him any more than I did.

  If there’s a single piece of my life I wish I could do over, it’s the day I hit Denise.

  I didn’t mean to, at least not that way.

  Three weeks earlier, I’d flunked a physical—nothing serious, just a bit of arthritis, creeping blood pressure, and a few other things that might or might not be problems in a couple of decades but that they couldn’t risk in the field. Nor did they have a post for me as an instructor. Sorry about that, etc., but we’ve got all we need.

  The first step in De-con is simple. They just quit supplying you with insects. Since most only live two to four weeks, and some are always nearing the end, you decline pretty rapidly. But until you’re below 20 percent, you can live at home.

  I’d lost that muc
h of my swarm on missions, several times. The blast from a big explosion can do it. And there was the time a wind gust blew my entire fringe beyond retrieval range. Not to mention bats. Even if you’re watching for them, they’re damn fast and hard to dodge.

  But this was different. Lose your swarm in the field, and the techs’ll get you replacements as quickly as they can wire ’em up. Here each loss was forever. The psychs say withdrawing that way’s better than going cold turkey. Maybe. What it feels like is extended death.

  For ten days, I felt my swarm die. There must have been some chemical in the air, because I was losing them way too soon. I desperately wanted to hold on to what I had. Would have done anything to buy an extra week, day, hour.

  Then the neighbors bought their kid a remote-controlled toy—some flying thing that was probably supposed to be a Moon lander. That shouldn’t have been a problem, but there must have been something wrong with my bugs’ control chips, because the toy threw out enough interference to mess up contact with what few remained. In the field, somebody would have fixed that, fast. Here, I didn’t even bother reporting it. They’d have just told me I was ready for to go inpatient a week ahead of schedule. No big deal. Except to me.

  Denial is one of the world’s most powerful emotions. As long as I was free and mobile . . . as long as I had some remnant of the Sense . . . I could pretend the end wasn’t really going to happen. Not yet. Tomorrow maybe, but not today. Until then, I could at least pretend.

  Denise didn’t know about the Sense. All she knew was that I was special ops and that the spiral tattoo that covered most of my back and shoulders had something to do with it. What, precisely, she’d known better than to ask. But other than a calculator on the inside of my wrist, I’d never favored body art, so she had to have guessed it was some sort of bio-mod.

 

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