by ASF
“Something else, this time. I need to know how to get the Sense back.”
“Can’t be done. You’re on the wagon. That’s the whole idea.”
“Maybe for you and me. But not for everyone.” I explained. “Do you know where he might have gotten it?”
The silence lasted long enough I thought I’d lost the connection.
“Maybe.”
More silence.
“For God’s sake, where?”
“You’re sure this isn’t for you?”
“How long have I been calling you? Have I ever asked before?”
Another silence. Then a sigh. “Okay. You might try an outfit called EFR. Entomologic Futures Research. They’re in St. Louis. Rumor has it they’re looking to adapt CI-MEMS for civilian police work.”
“Rumor?”
“Good rumor. Very good rumor.”
Another airplane. Another lost night’s sleep. At least this time Denise was with me. Not like old times—we took separate rooms—but for the first time in years I wasn’t alone.
EFR had three floors of a converted warehouse, not far from the Arch. An up-trending neighborhood, but not yet too far up. Perfect for a venture-capital firm with a speculative product.
An hour of “I’m sorry’s” and other runarounds eventually took me to the office of Laurel Fuller, Entomologic Futures’ product manager, whatever that meant. A woman in her late twenties in a light-gray blouse, black jacket and skirt, eyeglasses to match, and an attitude that would have done my high-school librarian proud.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Our technological explorations are strictly confidential. Even if I had a clue what spy-mints was, I wouldn’t be able to help you.”
“CI-MEMS,” I said. “And I damn well know you know what it is.” A bluff, but when that’s all you’ve got, you go with it.
“Kip knows what he’s talking about,” Denise seconded. “He used to be a CI-MEMS operator.”
It was all I could do to keep from staring at her. Had she always been this good at things like this? Not the time to wonder about that. I pulled off my tie, started to unbutton my shirt. “Want to see my tat? If you’ve got insects, I can fly ’em.” Unless they’d changed the interface. But when the military licenses technology for civilian use they don’t make it more complex. Generally they dumb it down.
Laurel waved a dismissive hand. “Anyone can get a tat.”
“So bring in some bugs. What do you have?”
She stared at her fingernails. Picked at a cuticle. “Where did you serve?”
“The usual. Various –stans. The Altiplano. I can’t go into details.”
More fingernail picking. Then she punched a button on her desk com. “Mitch? Bring me two dozen Popillia.”
My turn to stare back. “Is that the best they’ve given you?” Japanese beetles aren’t worth much except in training. They’re easy to fly, but slow, clumsy, and easy to spot.
She shrugged. “They’re a good platform for our purposes.”
Twenty-four insects is hardly a swarm, and they didn’t have much in the way of sensors. Eyes and ears were about it. Either the military wasn’t yet ready to license the good stuff or Laurel wasn’t ready to trust me with it. Or maybe some of both.
But even with a lobotomized version of the Sense, I felt like God. I looked in every corner of the room, demonstrated to Denise that I could hear every word, could read an e-book over her shoulder. “Hemingway,” I said, when she picked a file at random. “I didn’t know you were into that manly-man stuff.”
“I’m not.”
“Oh.”
She relaxed, let me off the hook. “But I believe you about this insect stuff.” Not that she hadn’t before. Even without the Sense, I realized, I’d have known if she’d been lying. Some things you lose with time. Others come back. But damn, there was no reason to believe they’d come back for her, too.
“Me too,” said Laurel. “So you say this guy’s a rogue operator who’s got your daughter stashed somewhere?”
“Yes. And if he’s integrated—even at the low level I am right now—he’s way too dangerous for a SWAT team. He’ll see ’em coming before they even know where he’s hiding.”
Laurel picked up a pen. Flipped it a couple of times in her fingers, then set it back down, precisely where it had been before. “Agreed. That would not be in our best interests.” She pressed an ear-chip, turned away, mouthing something. With a real swarm, I’d have known what she was saying, even if she was sub vocalizing, but these bugs weren’t up to it. Not that I thought they were the best she had. Nobody who wants to survive in venture capital gives away their secrets that fast.
A moment later, she turned back. “We can give you three hundred Tenibrio molitor and a dozen Bombus terrestis.”
“Mealworm beetles and honeybees?”
She shrugged. “Mealworms are easy to get. And we’re looking at bees as a means of . . . distraction.”
That’s not the only thing you can do with bees. There’s not much C4 you can strap to an insect, but if you know the guy you’re after is allergic to bee stings . . . Spend too long in black ops and your perspective changes. Still, killing a normal, healthy guy with a swarm of bees would be too slow, too cumbersome.
Laurel was talking again. “. . . better sensors than you just tested. The military’s not giving up their best stuff, but we’re really not sure what can be done with what we have: we’ve never had anyone fly it who really knows what he’s doing.” She paused. “I was beginning to think guys like you were all locked away somewhere.” Her eyes lifted, held mine for a moment. She knew more than she let on. “Want to take them for a test drive?”
Picking up a new swarm isn’t something you can do instantly. You have to synch them one at a time, then lock them in so nobody else can fly off with them, accidentally or on purpose. It only takes a few seconds per insect, but with three hundred, it adds up.
I have no idea what Laurel and Denise talked about in the interim. I could have listened, but I was off in a different land. With each added insect, my perceptions expanded. The data weren’t as good as I was used to, but there was no doubt I could integrate it. I was already doing so. I knew Laurel found the room too warm, while Denise, who wrapped herself in blankets even during Virginia summers, was chilled. I knew that Laurel was in her element—and a much more complicated person than she appeared. Denise was trying to act take-charge, but was inwardly tentative, afraid of a misstep.
With twenty-four bugs and limited instrumentation I’d felt like God. Now . . . ? What comes after God?
I brought a couple of Tenibrio in behind Denise, close enough to smell her hair, touch it. They’re quiet fliers, so she didn’t notice.
But Laurel did. “So, do you like them?”
Denise jerked, saw the beetles, her emotional read changing like someone had flicked a switch. I might as well have been Jerret invading Cora’s apartment.
“Sorry.” CI-MEMS would have told her I wasn’t. Not really. I was just sorry I’d been caught.
I swirled insects around the room, using the confusion to hide a few in a potted palm. Others I parked in the wastebasket, on a shelf of books, on the doorframe. A hundred extensions of myself, watching from all angles. Gathering data. Telling me how she was feeling. Circling her with eyes . . . with love.
But love wasn’t the only thing I was feeling. For years, Senseless, I’d fought off the old fears. Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye? It hadn’t really mattered. Now, even with Denise right there and no sign of hostility from Laurel, I still didn’t feel safe. I wanted to extend my fringe, know what lurked outside the door: in the corridor, in the hallway, in the offices beyond.
I slid a few beetles under the doorframe, into the corridor beyond. A rail-thin man sporting a goatee and tiny, black-framed glasses was headed our way, a note projector in hand. For a moment, I was sure we were about to be interrupted, but he went on by without even glancing at the door.
I followed him
and found a larger open space, a combination conference room, computer lab, and cube farm—about fifteen people presently there, but room for more. I didn’t have enough bugs to watch everything, so I let goatee-and-glasses go and turned my attention to a middle-aged man with thinning hair, cowboy boots, and a shirt tight enough to show off every ripple of a gym-built body. Even from fifty feet away, he radiated alarm, and my own adrenaline surged in response. A terrorist? A spy? Whatever he was doing, he was talking animatedly on a tat phone.
I kept some bugs at a distance, sent others in low, below the tops of the cubicles.
“Are you sure?” he was saying.
With military equipment I’d have been able to hear the response, even from the tiny speaker embedded in his thumb. But Laurel’s mics were barely good enough to catch his own voice, speaking softly into his pinky-mic. Shaka phones, they’d called these when they first came out. “Hang loose bro’,” and all that. All the rage for about fifteen minutes, until you realized what an idiot you looked like, using one.
“How do you like them?” Laurel repeated.
I pulled my attention back to her, to Denise.
“Not bad.”
Back in the cube farm, the man was still talking.
—“You tried it again? Just to make sure . . . ?”
—“But how . . . ?”
—“Yes, I know how; I wasn’t born yesterday. I mean how could it have happened. I thought—”
“They’re yours to keep,” Laurel said.
“Huh?”
“Use them to track him down.”
I wondered what a swarm like this cost. The Corps had never told us, but there had been rumors. “What’s in it for you?”
She shrugged. “It’s the decent, human thing to do?” She grinned. “And it’s good for us. Our investors wouldn’t appreciate news stories about our tech being used for criminal purposes. Find him, deal with it quietly, and they will be very grateful.”
She paused again. “We might even let you be a permanent beta tester. I’ve heard that people coming out of the program are . . . unhappy. What does it feel like to be . . . what do you people call it? Reconnected?”
“Integrated.” What it felt was very, very good. Like being whole again.
I slid my focus back to my perimeter.
The middle-aged gym rat was still talking.
—“I really don’t care . . .”
—“Just get rid of it. I’ll pay for that, but not anything else.”
I lost interest. Domestic drama, no threat. I pulled back, swirled the bugs, looking for danger. But at first, all I found were snippets of ordinary office conversation. A tech discussion here. A gossipy pair who knew more of the gym rat’s story than he’d like. An argument over where to get the best pizza.
Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye? Full-blown flashback this time.
It was the pizza discussion that did it. One of the debaters was championing Scolioni’s deep-dish over Petrocelli’s New York-style. The other was arguing that deep-dish wasn’t real pizza. But only the deep-dish fan really cared. The other was just egging him on. Faking emotion without feeling it.
Suddenly, I was on foot patrol in a Middle Eastern market: a cube-farm for street vendors. Endless shops selling dates, figs, scarves, breads, and a thousand other things. Snippets of conversation, jostling elbows, haggles over price. Eyes wary for thieves and pickpockets. Vivid colors and vivid emotions, highlighted by the combination of Sense and adrenaline. Streets like this exploded in shrapnel almost daily. One slip in attention, and this could be next.
I was relatively new to CI-MEMS, about to learn that strong emotions weren’t always the important ones. They’re just the ones that are easiest to read: people who either loved you or hated you. People who were nervously watching for the next suicide bomber . . . or nerving themselves to push the button. Mercenaries studying their options. So long as you were alert, those stood out like emotional flares.
More dangerous are the subtler ones. The bomber who’s not afraid of his own death. The mother numbed by grief, with little left to lose.
But the most dangerous are the rarest.
The guy who nearly got me that day walked through my fringe without triggering even a trace of alarm. It wasn’t that I didn’t see him; he was wearing blue jeans and a sheepskin jacket—a Middle Eastern cowboy, guaranteed to stand out. But emotionally . . . zilch. Not angry, not fearful. About as bland as they come. Probably with enough knowledge of CI-MEMS to be specifically targeting me.
He was only thirty feet away when I saw the motion, with my real eyes, not the swarm’s. Had something on the fringe distracted me at just the wrong moment, I’d have died, right there. As it was, I saw him unzip his jacket, reach inside . . . and then, my Sense now directed full-force his way, felt just the barest flash of pleasure.
The Sense won’t detect a sociopath. Or certain types of psychotics. The most dangerous people are those who simply don’t care. Like this one.
Like the guy pretending to argue that deep-dish isn’t real pizza.
If I’d been physically in the room with a gun, I hate to think what I’d have done. As it was, it was only when I started sneaking bees under Laurel’s door that I woke to the fact I was in St. Louis, preparing to attack a geek for arguing about pizza.
Denise was watching me. I still had a hundred-plus pairs of eyes on her; I’d not diverted any of those for my foray into the cube farm, had never missed a move she’d made. I’d always been good at splitting my attention. That day in the market wasn’t the only time it had saved me.
Laurel was looking at me, too. Waiting for her answer. Reluctantly, I directed most of my sensors toward her, trying to get a better read. She was one of the dangerous ones, but not one of the super-dangerous ones. Emotions well in check, but not remorseless. Sure enough of herself to give me a swarm during our negotiations. But norm-ignorant of the strength of the emotions she’d unleashed? Maybe, maybe not. She might know exactly what she was doing. CI-MEMS doesn’t give that kind of information.
“It feels . . . great,” I said.
“So it’s a deal?”
“It’s tempting.”
“Then do it. Save your daughter. And yourself.”
Yes was on my lips. Sure, I’d thought the pizza-debater was some kind of terrorist. But I’d caught myself before I’d actually done anything. With time, surely I could learn even better control.
But Denise was still looking at me. I could almost feel her eyes boring into the side of my head, though even with the swarm I had no idea what she was thinking. For the first time in decades, I realized that this was normal. Not just normal, but the way things were supposed to be.
And yet . . .
In high school I’d climbed a 14,000-foot peak in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. We’d made the summit by 10 AM, hours before the usual afternoon thunderstorms. But puffy fair-weather clouds congealed with remarkable haste, and minutes later, we were leaping down boulders as thunder crashed and lightning seared the sky. With every meter of descent, I felt safer . . . safe enough that soon I slowed to a walk. When the storm’s power caught up with me, I dashed again, to the next glacial bench, the next meadow, the next tarn . . . only to pause again, as the storm gathered strength to chase me down once more.
I decided to be truthful. For Denise? Laurel? Myself? Another who knows.
“It really is tempting,” I repeated. “I feel alive, like I haven’t in years.”
Like I had on the mountain. Extreme life and near death. Maybe Cora had been right. Maybe you can’t have one without the other. Or maybe I couldn’t.
But with the life came the fear. Extending my fringe into the cube farm hadn’t been enough. I’d wanted to go to the street, to the buildings on the other side—to the three-seconds-even-to-hear-it sniper range I’d been unable to Sense the day of the ravine. Beyond that, even, because there are enemies in far corners of the globe who’d blow up shopping malls, train stations, Denise . . .
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I’d spent years wishing I could roll back the clock. Now I could. But if I did, I’d become Jerret.
It took another hour, but I eventually pried out of Laurel (the old-fashioned way, by asking questions) that ERF was the only firm licensed to make or install civilian CI-MEMS chips. Beta-testing was being carried out by several firms, but if I could find one of Jerret’s flies, ERF could trace the chip and find out which subcontractor was involved. And with a hoped-for stock offering in a couple of years, ERF was very interested in snuffing out criminal uses, or at least keeping them quiet.
Eventually, Laurel gave me a gadget like an airport security wand. “Find a dead bug and this will read its chip. She paused. “If you can find a dead bug. Are you sure you won’t take our original offer?”
That night, Denise and I reviewed Cora’s vidblog from the time she first complained about insects. Nothing conclusive, but we both reached the same conclusion.
“The bathroom,” Denise said. “That’s the best bet. Maybe she managed to hit a few more.”
Another day, another airplane. At least this one wasn’t a redeye.
Getting into the apartment was a different matter. It was second-floor, which made coming in through a window difficult, even if we were willing to risk it. And there was no key in any of the obvious places: under the doormat, in or under the potted plants on her stoop, on the doorframe. Nothing we could find on or under her car, either.
“Screw this,” Denise said, and marched toward the manager’s office. “Stay out here. Do something . . . manly.” Briefly, I saw the elfin grin. “Preferably out of sight.”
A few minutes later, she emerged with a key. “That was easy. She’s got a daughter the same age.” She sobered. “It helped that she likes Cora. And the lease requires notice if she’s going to be gone for more than a week.”
Mentally, I counted. “This is only day seven.”
“So I exaggerated. Did you really want to wait ’til tomorrow?”
We found what we were looking for on the windowsill. It being Texas, there were a lot of dead insects, but only one had a chip implanted behind its head.