Analog Science Fiction and Fact 11/01/10

by ASF

  Meanwhile, I had to move. There’d been no shooting for several minutes, and my squad clearly hadn’t won. The Ladenites had to be on their way.

  My first job was to reconnoiter. As bugs recharged, I sent them up-gully, looking for branchings. If I could get far enough before the gully got too steep or narrow, I’d be back in the land of boulders and just might be able to keep out of sight. Box myself in and I was dead.

  For sixteen hours, I played cat and mouse. Several times, I had clear shots, but didn’t dare take them. With the Sense, I could keep ahead, but it was sixteen hours of hyper-vigilance. Sixteen hours of trying to ignore the increasing stiffness of my shoulder. Sixteen hours of being the hunted, rather than the hunter.

  When rescue came, I was nearly too tired to care. So tired it took me a moment to react when a fly not mine landed on my arm. So tired I could barely make my eyes focus to see the tiny chip behind its head. So tired, I didn’t realize I was safe, not even when the other team’s CI-MEMS operator approached, accompanied by none other than a miraculously ambulatory Captain Thomas.

  Captain Thomas and his team circled upvalley and around, as we should have the night before. Three hours later, I heard gunfire, saw the star-bright pinpricks of muzzle flashes. Soon after, they were back with me, taking less than an hour to cross the distance over which I’d played a day-long game of life-and-death hide-and-seek: the confidence of those who’d gotten close enough for their CI-MEMS operator to be sure he’d found everything they were looking for.

  They brought two more survivors. One was a grunt who’d managed to find his way to a boulder field from which he could dodge to safety, rock-to-rock.

  The other was Jerret.

  I hoped like hell I’d never be like him.

  There’s a way it should be when the woman you love comes up unexpectedly behind you. First is the jolt—the realization someone’s there. Then the recognition: a turn, a kiss, pulling each other close and wishing you need never, ever let go.

  And while I’d long been faking the surprise, the rest—the never wanting to let go . . . that had been as real on our twentieth anniversary as our first. It was just that Sense had replaced surprise, data had replaced intuition. Nor was the ravine the only time I’d nearly died: it was merely the most protracted.

  Too many emotions all at once. Too little knowledge. When that happens you fall back on training. No, you fall back on survival.

  If I’d had a weapon, I might have killed her.

  I have no idea what I thought I was lashing out at. I had too little Sense to know anything other than where she was. I certainly didn’t see a petite woman. More like a hulking enemy.

  Getting out of a recliner is normally a clumsy process. But in panic mode it’s easy: convulse your hamstrings to push the footrest down, then use the momentum to launch your body forward. That last bit of Sense, or perhaps memory, told me where I’d left the beer can. Energized now by fear and adrenaline, I had plenty of power to lift and hurl it, hearing but not fully processing the yelp as it struck her square on the jaw.

  With the hulking menace now off guard, I cut back, hard—hard enough to hear my foot pop as I pivoted back toward the threat. A fracture of the fifth metatarsal, I’d later learn, but at the time I barely felt it. Instead, I drove a punch into the soft, unprepared belly, followed by a forearm across the exposed throat, driving her backward into the oak-paneled wall.

  And then, finally, I realized where I was. Who this had to be. What I was doing.

  I dropped my arm. “Oh my God.” An oath? A prayer? Who knows.

  Denise didn’t care.

  “You bastard,” she said.

  I stepped back. Groped for words but found none, even as she headed for the stairs—out of my life.

  “It wasn’t as though I didn’t have plenty of chances to actually have an affair,” she said.

  I woke screaming. But this time, I wasn’t me. I was him, just as I’d seen him on the battlefield that day, with the wild-eyed stare of someone who’d never be the same.

  He’d been a bad enough sight physically. Blood and dirt staining his face and uniform a muddy red-brown dusted in white, like an earthquake victim pulled from the rubble. A dirty kerchief wrapped a hand where, I later learned, two fingers were broken. More bandage, fresh gauze this time, supplied by his rescuers, peeked from beneath his helmet, streaked crimson where a wound still oozed.

  He had no idea what had hit him. Whatever it was had knocked him out long enough for his swarm to lose direction, wander off, vanish. Long enough that when he woke, he was totally cut off. Long enough he was no longer the Jerret he’d been.

  Something similar happens when you sleep, but then, you park your insects in standby mode. It’s as automatic as closing your eyes. But in combat you have every resource extended, recalling them only by conscious choice. Had my headfirst dive concussed me rather than dislocated my shoulder, I could easily have been Jerret. Now, at least once a week, I dream I am.

  The psychs say gradual withdrawal is best. Maybe. But when I wake screaming . . . the end result appears exactly the same.

  “I got a surprise today,” Cora told the mirror cam. She was vidblogging from her bathroom, where she’d hooked a camera to the mirror, talking while applying her makeup. I’d been startled the first time she did that, but so long as she was adequately dressed, I suppose the bathroom’s as good a place as any.

  The camera was mounted above her head, rounding the curves of her face by foreshortening her image ever so slightly. If she stood in just the right place, it also caught her reflection in a mirror on the door behind, producing a vanishing-infinity effect as Cora fronts and Cora backs disappeared into the distance. It was like seeing her through an endless corridor: the type of thing people describe in near-death experiences, except that in those, there’s supposed to be a light at the end. Here, there were only ever-more-distant Coras, receding forever.

  “I was in the mall, shopping for a new dress. This one in fact.” She stepped out of sight, then back, holding a black, scoop-necked gown. She’d always had good taste.

  “Isn’t it cute? Anyway, as I came out of Allemontes I was sure I saw Jerret heading for the escalator. I ran over, but by the time I got there, he was gone. Maybe it was just someone who looked like him.”

  She paused.

  “And Daddy . . . I know you’re listening. I’m not stupid, you know. You didn’t hack onto this; I let you. You want to know about me . . . ?” She drew back, hands on hips. “Well, this is me. I grew up. I get to choose who I date. You were never there. And when you were there, there was nothing I could do to make you stay. Always another mission. Always off nearly getting killed. You don’t think I couldn’t tell? ”

  Tears beaded and she blinked. Blinked again. “Nothing I could do would make you stay. Do you remember me asking about that as a little girl? You just said you had no choice. Well even then I knew that was BS. Everyone has a choice. You chose to be elsewhere.

  “Did you know, my sophomore year in high school, all those A’s were for you? I thought maybe if I was good enough you’d stay. Silly me. Soccer too. Mom told me you’d been this super-athlete before you went in the Army—sorry, Corps, whatever that was. Why didn’t you ever tell us anything? Anyway, the soccer didn’t matter, either. Even making all-conference wasn’t good enough. All you wanted was your damn adrenaline rush or whatever it was you got out of almost being killed all the time. Nothing I did was ever going to be more important. Nothing was ever going to be good enough.”

  The tears were spilling now, threatening her makeup. “But it was good enough for Jerret. He didn’t care whether I got A’s or D’s. Didn’t care if I dropped out of college. And then suddenly you were back, telling me that if I loved you I’d quit seeing him. And then you were gone again. You had no right. Do you hear me? No right. I know he was a lot older than me. I know he was getting a bit scary—after I dumped him, he came back five times. I’m not stupid, Daddy. But it was my decision. Not yours.
Not when you were then gone again on that ‘last’ mission. The one that was only going to last three months but went on for years. I can’t believe I fell for it.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve got wounds, too. It’s just that mine aren’t the type to leave scars you can see.”

  Her face scrunched, and she knuckled tears out of her eyes, undoing any pretense of saving the makeup. “Damn you, Daddy. Damn you for everything.”

  Then her focus shifted and she swiped at the air in front of her, as fiercely as moments before she’d dug at her tears. “And what the hell is it with these flies?”

  For a long time, I stared at her image, frozen in the act of reaching for the off-switch. I could have replayed the whole thing, but there was no point. I merely looked at her, remembering the little girl—the pert nose and half-smile, the eyes, now rimmed with ruined eye-liner, that once never left my own. The eyes in which, once, I could do no wrong. The eyes I had managed to wrong so deeply.

  I would give anything for a chance to do it over. But would it be any different? Surely it hadn’t just been adrenaline I’d craved. It was the need to be whole: the knowledge that the moment the missions ended, they’d take it away. The dead, sick fear that someday, inevitably they would.

  Sometimes I’d thought it might be better if I died in the field. Because with each passing year, the fear of the end had grown: a continual feeling in my gut, like dread crossed with nausea. But then I’d think of Denise and Cora, and know that coming home was worthwhile. Until suddenly, they were gone and it hadn’t been.

  I never knew how Jerret found her. He’d been finishing De-con about the time I went in, and had been better at telling the psychs what they wanted to hear. Because if you didn’t, they’d keep you forever.

  He knew I had a family, so maybe he just thought he’d let them know I was still alive. Not that it mattered with Denise. She may not have known where I was, but the Corps did, and dutifully served her court orders on me. Divorce. No-contact/keep-away. The whole shebang. Custody also—a real insult, with Cora only months from turning eighteen. They wouldn’t even let me out of De-con to defend myself. Sent some damn Corps lawyer to represent me—as if he knew anything about what really happened, because if I’d told him, he’d have told the psychs, and Cora would have been a grandmother by the time I got out.

  Then one of the orderlies told me about Jerret and Cora.

  I spent a week trying to figure out what to do. All the while wondering if they were having sex. Forcing myself not to think about it. But that’s not why I eventually went out the window. Even before the ravine, I’d never have wished a Corps member on her. Afterward? I’d seen his eyes. And if I could lash out at my wife . . .

  When I’d first seen Jerret in De-con it had been a relief: a familiar face—the only one other than the soon-to-be-too-familiar psychs. It was only gradually that I realized how long it had been since he’d been choppered out of the ravine. After he was discharged, I did some asking.

  Jerret had been in and out of De-con a half-dozen times.

  “I can’t say anything specific,” one of the psychs told me, “but in the combination of PTSD and withdrawal, it’s the withdrawal that’s the hard part. You have to quit wanting it back. If you don’t, you’ll never get rid of the bad stuff, either.”

  “Does that go for my family, too?”

  She gave me one of those sympathetically sad looks they must practice in psych school. “Probably.”

  That was the night I went out the window. For once, I truly knew my priorities.

  I was only gone a couple of days, but they cost me two extra years of De-con. It would have been longer if, like Jerret, I’d not gotten good at telling them what they wanted to hear. Until recently I’d thought rescuing Cora had been worth it. But, that was because I thought I’d actually succeeded in rescuing her. As she put it, silly me.

  Being in the Corps teaches you to strike fast. Court orders teach the opposite.

  Technically, I wasn’t restrained from talking to Cora or even dropping by her apartment. But Denise wouldn’t see it that way.

  For three days I tried to figure out what to do. Jerret and flies. I had no idea how he’d gotten them, but he was CI-MEMS again. Bootleg CI-MEMS, apparently.

  Part of me was appalled. Cora had been wrong about one thing: Jerret’s visible scars were only the tip of the iceberg. Give him back a swarm and he’d still not be whole. He’d just think he was.

  But I was also jealous.

  What would I give to have the Sense back? My pension? My soul? Whatever tenuous link I still had to Cora?

  For three days, I listened to her vidblogs, as she rattled on about her health-club job, her plans to go back to college and maybe become a physical therapist, the weather, friends—the aimless chatter of a young woman looking to find her life. No more mentions of Jerret sightings, pesky insects, or me.

  Stupidly, I did nothing: the basic training of court orders, not the Corps.

  Then on the fourth day, it stopped. No chatter, nothing.

  She hadn’t missed a posting in six months. Maybe she was just busy. Maybe she had the flu. But the next day was the same. I called her work, but nobody had seen her. “She’s never missed a day before,” a bouncy-sounding young woman told me. “You don’t think anything happened . . . ?”

  The day after that, I booked a flight and was on her doorstep. Nothing visibly wrong, but that didn’t mean anything, so I retired to my rental car with a super-sized cheeseburger, fries, and enough coffee to keep an elephant awake.

  By dawn, I knew. Cora was gone.

  Contacting Denise was risking an arrest, and being arrested for anything worse than unpaid parking tickets would probably put me back in De-con forever. Still, I had no choice.

  “Woodruff Realty,” a voice not Denise said. “How can we help you?”

  Denise had done well since divorcing me, but nobody has live, human secretaries any more. This had to be an answering service. Probably computerized.

  “I need to leave a message for Ms. Woodruff,” I said. “Tell her it’s Kip, and it’s about her daughter. Tell her it’s urgent.”

  “Certainly, sir,” the voice said, confirming that it was a machine. Nobody outside the military calls people “sir,” either.

  Denise chose to call back, rather than have me arrested.

  “This better be important.”

  No hi, howya doin’. Jerret had somehow sold his soul to get CI-MEMS back. I’d lost mine trying to keep it in the first place. But it wasn’t the time for any of that. “I think Cora’s in trouble,” I said. “We need to talk in person.”

  She agreed to meet at a Starbucks a few blocks from her Arlington office. Another flight, another lost night’s sleep. Both my pension and my body were going to take a beating before this was over.

  Other than walls decorated with photos of autumn oaks and maples, the Starbucks might as well have been in Seattle. Probably why she picked it. Generically neutral. Not the perfect place to breach national security, but the best I was going to get.

  “I was in special ops,” I said. “Mostly of the black kind.”

  “I kind of gathered that. What’s that got to do with Cora?” She’d barely changed since the last time I saw her. Reddish blond hair parted in the middle, no gray showing at the roots, triangular face capable of an elf in grin that could melt your heart in a flash. Not that she was showing it now. At least she could no longer have me arrested. She’d agreed to this meeting. For the moment, the court orders were off.

  “I’ll get to that. I was in something called CI-MEMS. Cyborg Insect Micro-Electro Mechanical Systems. It uses little, tiny chips to control insects. Houseflies were my favorite, but I could also do beetles, dragonflies, wasps . . . pretty much anything. I controlled them through that tattoo on my back. It’s basically a really fancy nano-electric neural interface.” Which is why they’d left it intact. Enough nerves had grown into the lattice that removing it would be like peeling away a lay
er of my brain.

  Denise must have been good in her business. She had nothing to say, so she said it.

  “The chips also carried sensors that let me use the insects for remote sensing. If they could see something, so could I. But it was more than seeing. I could sense hostility, tell friend from foe, know everything going on within about 1,500 feet.” I hesitated. Reached for the pain. Took the leap. “That time I attacked you . . . ?”

  She nodded.

  “They were taking my insects away. Retiring me. You came up and surprised me. Nobody had been able to surprise me for years. I thought you were . . . some . . . something else.”

  If I expected absolution I wasn’t getting it that easily. “So when you were at home, you were spying on me?”

  “Yes. No. It’s not that simple. It was like having a sixth sense. One that’s more real than any of the others. I couldn’t help but spy on you. Shutting it off would have been like death. Was like death. That last mission . . . ?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “That was the rehab from having it shut off. It takes forever, and you’re never really right.” Or anything close to it, but she didn’t need to know that.

  She glanced at her coffee. Looked back up. “So what does this have to do with Cora?”

  “Jerret was also CI-MEMS.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “He took it worse than I did. I at least lost my swarm under controlled conditions.” And still managed to make a mess of it. “He didn’t. That’s why I insisted she break up with him.”

  “And . . . ?” But now there was concern beneath the coolness.

  “He’s back. I think he’s kidnapped her.”

  The voice on the phone was the same as always.

  “Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye?”