Analog Science Fiction and Fact 11/01/10

by ASF

  One of the ironies of De-con is that with the insects gone, the Corps figures there’s no need to remove the tat. They think it’s a kindness, but actually it’s a daily reminder of what I’ve lost, like the photos of Denise and Cora Ann I still kept on my nightstand, smiling over me like they no longer do in real life.

  Lt. McCarthy was in my section, so monitoring him was my responsibility.

  “You see anything, McCorbin?” He spoke louder than necessary, as though he didn’t quite get that I had insects in the very bush he was attempting to peer through.

  I inched through sketchy cover until I was close enough for quiet conversation, suppressing the urge to say something insubordinate. How the hell could I see anything? I had my fringe extended as far as possible, but it was only a fraction of the way to the opposing ridge.

  “No,” I said. Nothing but rocks. Big ones. Any of which could have a dozen Ladenites behind it.

  “What about Lapp?”

  “He’d have told me if he did.”

  The lieutenant was a vague blur of desert camouflage in my real sight, but in the Sense he stood out like an emotional beacon. Unsure. Frightened. Determined to prove himself. A whole slew of ways to get us killed. There are things CI-MEMS operators rarely talk about, even among themselves. Knowing your squad leader’s self-doubts is one of the scariest.

  Scarier still was the subtext. Whatever else he was, Lt. McCarthy was no coward. We were about to become the Light Brigade . . . though instead of six hundred of us, there were only a dozen.

  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.

  We’d been flitting from doorway to doorway, nearly invisible in midnight camo. I’d been at the rear—but not by much, because the place felt like a trap and we needed my perimeter as far ahead as possible. Still, I’d found nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe there was nothing to find. The scariest missions were those where the intel was wrong. Where you inched from house to house, waiting to Sense something before the bullets stitched you . . . only to discover, hours later, that there had never been anything to find.

  But this time there was something. I just never got a chance to find it.

  Booby traps are one of the things I most feared. Even simple tripwires can be hard to spot. I found better than 95 percent of them, but when I missed one, someone died. It wasn’t one of those things I liked to think about.

  The only thing I knew for sure was that the entire street exploded. No, that wasn’t right; there were no gouts of flame, no crashing masonry. These people didn’t want to blow up their neighborhood. These were flash-bangs: concussion grenades. Or maybe just big firecrackers. I’d had someone toss one of those in a dorm room the year I tried college, before I decided that that life wasn’t for me. In the confined space, it might as well have been a concussion grenade.

  Whatever they were, there were a lot of them, all wired to go off at once. My entire perimeter was off-line, probably dead.

  The enemy was out there, alert now, with me suddenly blind as a norm. I was the one who was supposed to know where they were, but even as I sent my few remaining assets up the street, I knew it was too late. And it was all my fault. My fault because I’d not seen the tripwire. My fault because I’d not found the enemy before the explosion. My fault because I’d had so much of my Sense on the perimeter that I now had too little left to do anything other than watch my squad die. Dead from a trick I should have anticipated, a trick that had nearly cost me my hearing in college. My fault—I sat up, pulled the phone from its charger, dialed.

  “Yeah?”

  “It happened again.”

  “Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye?”

  “Nightmare.”

  Or maybe a daydream. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Long ago, after a mission on which we only escaped because I could pinpoint the enemy well enough for our snipers to get them through blacked-out windows, I got wondering how, if I were the enemy, I’d beat myself. Flashbangs was how I’d do it. Or anything that would knock out my swarm over a broad front, all at once. Make me a norm, render the patrol helpless. Then close in for the kill.

  We got about halfway across the valley. Still out of Sense range.

  The first to buy it was the grunt assigned to baby-sit me. PFC Aston Stanley. One moment he was worming forward toward the next bush. The next, a high-velocity round punched through the hollow of his neck and into his chest. I knew because I had several bugs right there and could feel the impact, feel the consciousness vanish as the shock made jelly of his chest and gut.

  “Sniper!” I yelled, and was already moving, one-two-three seconds before I heard the report of the shot that killed him. Three seconds away. A thousand meters. Impossibly beyond Sense range.

  A bullet raised dust in the spot where I’d been half a second before. I braked hard and rolled back the direction I’d come from, just in time to dodge a second round. However many snipers there were up there, they were damned good. And obviously equipped with night scopes.

  Desperately I looked for a place to hide. Reversed course again, dog scrambling, hands and toes. This time, the round missed me by farther than before, but that was false reassurance. At this range, the bullet only spent a little more than a second in flight. I couldn’t outguess the sniper forever.

  There were no rocks big enough for meaningful cover. Bushes were worthless. As long as the sniper knew where I was, he’d just shoot through them. He might miss a couple times, but he’d get me eventually.

  It was the Sense that saved me. At the first sign of trouble, I’d scattered my reserves, looking for somewhere, anywhere to hide, dedicating my biological eyes to my frantic efforts to dodge.

  What my Sense found was an arroyo, cutting across the valley floor in front of me. I didn’t even bother to see how deep it was. Still scrambling—getting to my feet took too much time—I zigged, zagged, got lucky three more times, and then was falling, headfirst, as a final round spat gravel from the gully wall.

  As far as Denise knew, I was about to ship out on yet another mission and wanted every possible minute with her. We’d always been like that, spending those last nights clinging to each other, willing the clock to stop, determined not to waste those precious moments sleeping, because they might be all we’d ever have. For once, there was no risk of being shot, but I still wanted to carry every second’s memory into De-con.

  Absurdly, it was that desire that cost me my marriage. Irony strikes hard when you have years to regret.

  Before CI-MEMS, those final evenings had been just her and me. Then, that had been enough. When you’re young, you’re sure you can read your lover’s mind.

  I don’t know what happens to most couples. Maybe, if they stay deeply enough in love, they never forget how to read each other. Me, I quit having to guess. CI-MEMS didn’t literally tell me what she was thinking, but it did let me know her mood as clearly as my own. When she said, “I love you,” I could feel the depth of it, as hundreds of tiny sensors read the trivia of breath, heart rate, skin conductivity, and skin temperature—not simply as data, but as a gestalt that converted her words to a reality at least as much a part of me as she was.

  But now, my swarm was dying and the damn kid’s remote was making a hash of what remained. Hour by hour, I was becoming more disconnected. Hour by hour, Denise seemed more distant. At the time, these seemed like separate crises. Only in retrospect did I put them together.

  She was in the kitchen, opening cupboards, moving boxes and cans to see what lay behind. Her way of working out a shopping list. Me, I just go to the store and buy whatever looks useful. I’ve had enough hyper-preparedness on missions.

  She didn’t notice until I came up behind, put my arms around her, and nuzzled her neck. “I’m sorry about all the times away. This is the last one.”

  She turned, pulling back to see me better. “Really?”

  We’d talked about retirement before,
but only in a general way. “Really. There’s just one more thing they want me to do. It’s even in the States.” Actually, it would be on base, but I wouldn’t be allowed to see her until I was released, so there was no sense telling her. “No risk of anyone shooting at me.”

  I expected her to launch herself into my arms, but instead, she drew further away until she was backed up against the edge of the counter. “It’s about time. Cora used to worship you. You may have noticed she’s not been around much.”

  I had, but I’d put it down to general teenageitis. But now that I thought about it, she’d been that way on my last couple of furloughs, too. Emotionally AWOL from me, just as I’d been from her. Obvious, now that I thought of it, but most of the time, she’d been beyond Sense range. If a tree falls in the forest, and all that. After enough time, the Sense doesn’t just help you interpret reality, it is reality. When she had been around, the contacts had been fleeting hints of a vague wrongness I’d ascribed to normal teenage angst.

  But I hadn’t really tried, either. Both of those furloughs had been cut short. Emergencies in places where American troops weren’t even supposed to be. More opportunities for the tallies of success and failure I’d quit making—not because I’d truly managed to focus on one mission at a time, but because each number in the tally—whether a life spared or a life wasted—was a person, with his own Denise and Cora waiting somewhere.

  Tell that to the psychs, and they’d say I’d ceased to believe. But it wasn’t that. Some of these people really were bad guys. But in the process of doing what I had to do, year after year, I’d done something to myself, something that made it both more urgent and more difficult to be around Denise, around Cora.

  Or maybe I was just burning out. There’d been some pretty hairy missions and even if I could have talked about them, I wouldn’t have, because to say anything would have been to reveal just how close I’d come to dying so many times. Without the Sense, I wouldn’t have made it through more than a handful of them. Without the Sense, I wouldn’t be alive now. With it gone, I would soon no longer feel alive.

  “I’ll make it up to her.”

  “If it’s not too late.”

  There was an edge to her voice I’d never heard before. Or maybe it had been there—it wasn’t as if we’d never argued—but no longer able to Sense beneath the words, I suddenly found it overwhelming.

  I let a few flies buzz close, but they told me nothing useful. Skin temperature 94.2. Respiration 16. It was just data. My swarm had shrunk to the point where I could no longer tell how she felt.

  “Are we okay?” I blurted.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are we okay?” I hesitated. Took the plunge. “Do you still love me?”

  “What on Earth would make you ask that?”

  “That’s not an answer. Do you still love me?”

  “Like when we were kids?”

  “Yes . . . No . . . Like when . . .” Like when we clung against the partings. When we thought each moment might be our last. “Like we used to.”

  Once, even without the Sense, I’d been able to read her soul through her eyes. But that was then. The Sense had augmented me but it had also contracted me. Now, I couldn’t read anything.

  “Like we used to,” I said again.

  She might have saved the moment with a kiss. Instead, she sighed. “Oh, Kip, of course I love you. It’s just that you’ve been gone so much . . . And when you come back . . . It’s as though part of you is somewhere else. Like you don’t really want to be here.”

  “That’s not it. It’s just the job—”

  “That’s what you always say. Well, this is ‘just’”—she fingered quote marks in the air—“us. ‘Just’ me. ‘Just’ Cora.”

  I felt as though I’d been slapped. And I still couldn’t marshal enough bugs to get an integrated read. Heart rate 89. Pupils narrowed. Were those good signs or bad? A trainee could look it up in a manual, but I’d been deeply integrated for so long that I needed a true, fully functioning swarm. Friend/foe. Danger/safety. Love/love-lost. I no longer had enough sensors to translate “data” into “knowing.” I was losing that ability just when it felt like my whole life depended on getting it right.

  “Are you seeing someone else?” I asked.

  “What?” Skin conductivity 7.3. Breath 22. “What the hell are you talking about?” She swatted at a bug, distracting me as I reflexively pulled it back, feeling as though she was trying to destroy what little remained of me.

  “You heard me. Are you seeing someone else?”

  She pushed past me, heading for the side door, into the garage. “If you have to ask, you don’t really know me.” A moment later, the garage door rumbled up and tires squealed in the driveway.

  The gully was deep enough to hide me, but also deep enough to dislocate my shoulder.

  I’d always been told that on the pain scale, unless you go way high on the pain blocker, dislocations are about as close to a ten as you can get. But there’s also something about them that’s the stuff of nightmares. In training, there was a guy who slipped on a run, fell, and dislocated a finger. His left pinky, to be precise. I’ll never forget it, sticking out at an angle fingers aren’t supposed to point. We didn’t have a medic, hadn’t had any training yet in first aid, and it was just the two of us, so we ran back to base. Four miles. He never said a word. I didn’t either, but I couldn’t shut out the image of that hand. And now it was me. It wasn’t just the pain; it was the knowledge my shoulder no longer looked like a shoulder. My vision was tunneling toward a black spot and my ears felt stuffed with cotton—no sound but my pulse, receding by the second.

  Then, training took over. Pain tab first. But not too much, because setting a shoulder correctly requires you to feel what you’re doing. Otherwise, you can wreck it forever. Or worse, damage nerves that helped integrate my tat with my swarm.

  Next step: breathe deeply, calm down. Not easy because I didn’t have much time. The Ladenites knew where I was and would be here in minutes.

  I thought of Denise, Cora. Fought back despair. If I was ever going to see them again, I had to do this right. I willed my breathing to slow, hoping my heart rate would follow. Thought of home. Thought of those before-departure nights in Denise’s arms. Felt my heart rate slow. Sensed myself to verify it was true.

  Then I had to roll over on my stomach.

  The first time it didn’t work. Bone rubbed against bone, thrumming through my entire body. For a moment, I thought the cotton would win and I’d pass out, helpless while the Ladenites found me. But when you really have to stay conscious, you can. On the third try, I made it onto my stomach and lay there, heaving, sweat cooling in the small of my back.

  Next step, use the good arm to move the bad one out to the side. Slowly, because it hurt like hell. Forget the Ladenites who might already be heading this way. I had to do it right, and right was slowly. Besides, none of this had affected my swarm, and the familiarity of the Sense helped calm me. Reality was more than my own body. Nothing dangerous was coming yet.

  Finally, the hard part. Reach upward and back, as though trying to scratch my back. Use the good arm to draw the bad one up and over. And then, snick, with a white-hot stab of pain, the shoulder was again a shoulder.

  The disaster came later that evening. By mistake. A trivial, stupid, senseless accident. A Sense-less accident.

  After Denise made her exit, I retreated to the basement—a cocoon into which I pulled what remained of my Sense with me. I tried to watch football. Couldn’t work up the energy to care. Channel-surfed. Wondered where she’d gone. Wondered if she was now with him. Wondered who he was. Wondered, in my more sane moments, if I was wondering the wrong things. Wished I knew. Wished I still had the ability to know.

  And then, amazingly, I fell asleep.

  Emotional trauma does that to you. One moment you’re balling your fists, wanting to punch through walls, as though you could physically hammer your way out of the box your mind has put yo
u into. Then, suddenly, you’re so tired you can’t think. So tired the beer on the end table is an enormous dead weight, not worth the effort to lift, and instead of drinking yourself to sleep like you thought you were going to, you’re just suddenly, overwhelmingly asleep.

  Until, of course, you wake.

  Nowadays, waking comes too many times, too soon, at the behest of a middle-aged prostate. The first time, I stumble to the bathroom and try to pee in my sleep. Sometimes it works. Second time? No way. By then I’ve had the magic five hours—the amount the Corps says you can function on (if slightly zombified) nearly forever. At five hours, what you think is, Don’t think about it! Don’t . . . don’t . . . DON’T! Which of course means you can’t help but think about it. It being the Sense. Or Denise. Or Cora. Whatever was most hurting when you lost strength to lift that beer.

  However long Denise was away, it wasn’t that long. What woke me was the knowledge someone was there. A swish of feet, a muffled thunk, a shadowed shape between me and the stairs, between me and escape. After enough years in the field, you sleep lightly, wake quickly, and give no sign when you flip from one to the other.

  Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye? Who knows? Once upon a time, she’d have come quietly up, hugged me, and kissed my ear. Once upon a time, I’d have known this, pretended to be pleasantly surprised anyway.

  Now, everything was a surprise.

  For one horrible moment, I was back in the ravine.

  They were coming for me. How many I wasn’t sure. I’d had my fringe out too far, too long, and had to pull them back to recharge. With my shoulder dislocated, I hadn’t been able to do it. If you don’t bring the bugs within a couple of centimeters of the tat, the connection’s too remote and you burn too much glycogen powering the charger, like a marathoner hitting the wall. You have to charge them close-up.

  But until I’d gotten the shoulder reset, I just couldn’t concentrate—not enough to hover insects close enough to do any good.

  Now, as I struggled to make up for lost time, I had bugs stacked up like fighter pilots practicing touch-and-goes: zooming in close enough to pick up a bit of charge, then moving out so more could take their turns. I’d be lucky not to lose a few, as the charges faded in their cybernetic brains and whatever remained of the unmodified insect took over and flew off to do whatever it is insects do on their own.