by Peter Watts
They try, though. How they try. Every thing here is walking dead and yet it all fights so hard to keep going just a little longer. Each skin fights as desperately as I might, if one was all I could ever have.
MacReady tries.
“If you’re worried about me—” I begin.
MacReady shakes his head, manages a weary smile. “If we’ve got any surprises for each other, I don’t think we’re in much shape to do anything about it…”
But we are. I am.
A whole planet of worlds, and not one of them—not one—has a soul. They wander through their lives separate and alone, unable even to communicate except through grunts and tokens: as if the essence of a sunset or a supernova could ever be contained in some string of phonemes, a few linear scratches of black on white. They’ve never known communion, can aspire to nothing but dissolution. The paradox of their biology is astonishing, yes; but the scale of their loneliness, the futility of these lives, overwhelms me.
I was so blind, so quick to blame. But the violence I’ve suffered at the hands of these things reflects no great evil. They’re simply so used to pain, so blinded by disability, that they literally can’t conceive of any other existence. When every nerve is whipped raw, you lash out at even the lightest touch.
“What should we do?” I wonder. I cannot escape into the future, not knowing what I know now. How could I leave them like this?
“Why don’t we just—wait here awhile,” MacReady suggests. ”See what happens.”
I can do so much more than that.
It won’t be easy. They won’t understand. Tortured, incomplete, they’re not able to understand. Offered the greater whole, they see the loss of the lesser. Offered communion, they see only extinction. I must be careful. I must use this newfound ability to hide. Other things will come here eventually, and it doesn’t matter whether they find the living or the dead; what matters is that they find something like themselves, to take back home. So I will keep up appearances. I will work behind the scenes. I will save them from the inside, or their unimaginable loneliness will never end.
These poor savage things will never embrace salvation.
I will have to rape it into them. ■
Collateral
THEY GOT BECKER OUT in eight minutes flat, left the bodies on the sand for whatever scavengers the Sixth Extinction hadn’t yet managed to kill off. Munsin hauled her into the Sikorsky and tried to yank the augments manually, right on the spot; Wingman swung and locked and went hot in the pants-pissing half-second before its threat-recognition macros, booted late to the party, calmed it down. Someone jammed the plug-in home between Becker’s shoulders; wireless gates unlocked in her head and Blanch, way up in the cockpit, put her prosthetics to sleep from a safe distance. The miniguns sagged on her shoulders like anesthetized limbs, threads of smoke still wafting from the barrels.
“Corporal.” Fingers snapped in her face. “Corporal, you with me?”
Becker blinked. “They—they were human …” She thought they were, anyway. All she’d been able to see were the heat signatures: bright primary colors against the darkness. They’d started out with arms and legs but then they’d spread like dimming rainbows, like iridescent oil slicks.
Munson said nothing.
Abemama receded to stern, a strip of baked coral suffused in a glow of infrared: yesterday’s blackbodied sunshine bleeding back into the sky. Blanch hit a control and the halo vanished: night-eyes blinded, ears deafened to any wavelength past the range of human hearing, all senses crippled back down to flesh and blood.
The bearing, though. Before the darkness had closed in. It had seemed wrong.
“We’re not going to Bonriki?”
“We are,” the Sergeant said. “You’re going home. Rendezvous off Aranuka. We’re getting you out before this thing explodes.”
She could feel Blanch playing around in the back of her brain, draining the op logs from her head. She tried to access the stream but he’d locked her out. No telling what those machines were sucking out of her brain. No telling if any of it would still be there when he let her back in.
Not that it mattered. She wouldn’t have been able to scrub those images from her memory if she tried.
“They had to be hostiles,” she muttered. “How could they have just been there, I mean—what else could they be?” And then, a moment later: “Did any of them …?”
“You wouldn’t be much of a superhuman killing machine if they had,” Okoro said from across the cabin. “They weren’t even armed.”
“Private Okoro,” the Sergeant said mildly. “Shut your fucking mouth.”
They were all sitting across the cabin from her, in defiance of optimal in-flight weight distribution: Okoro, Perry, Flannery, Cole. None of them augged yet. There weren’t enough Beckers to go around, one every three or four companies if the budget was up for it and the politics were hot enough. Becker was used to the bitching whenever the subject came up, everyone playing the hard-ass, rolling their eyes at the cosmic injustice that out of all of them it was the farmer’s daughter from fucking Red Deer who’d won the lottery. It had never really bothered her. For all their trash-talking bullshit, she’d never seen anything but good-natured envy in their eyes.
She wasn’t sure what she saw there now.
• • •
EIGHT THOUSAND KILOMETERS to Canadian airspace. Another four to Trenton. Fourteen hours total on the KC-500 the brass had managed to scrounge from the UN on short notice. It seemed like forty: every moment relentlessly awake, every moment its own tortured post-mortem. Becker would have given anything to be able to shut down for just a little while—to sleep through the dull endless roar of the turbofans, the infinitesimal brightening of the sky from black to grey to cheerful, mocking blue—but she didn’t have that kind of augmentation.
Blanch, an appendage of a different sort, kept her company on the way home. Usually he couldn’t go five minutes without poking around inside her, tweaking this inhibitor or that BCI, always trying to shave latency down by another millisecond or two. This time he just sat and stared at the deck, or out the window, or over at some buckled cargo strap clanking against the fuselage. The tacpad that pulled Becker’s strings sat dormant on his lap. Maybe he’d been told to keep his hands off, leave the crime scene in pristine condition for Forensic IT.
Maybe he just wasn’t in the mood.
“Shit happens, you know?”
Becker looked at him. “What?”
“We’re lucky something like this didn’t happen months ago. Half those fucking islands underwater, the rest tearing each other’s throats out for a couple dry hectares and a few transgenics. Not to mention the fucking Chinese just waiting for an excuse to help out.” Blanch snorted. “Guess you could call it peacekeeping. If you’ve got a really warped sense of humor.”
“I guess.”
“Shame we’re not Americans. They don’t even sign on to those treaties, do anything they damn well please.” Blanch snorted. “It may be a fascist shithole down there but at least they don’t knuckle under every time someone starts talking about war crimes.”
He was just trying to make her feel better, she knew.
“Fucking rules of engagement,” he grumbled.
• • •
EIGHT HOURS IN IT when they landed: every aug tested to melting, every prosthetic stripped to the bolts while the meat attached to it sat silent and still and kept all the screams inside. They gave her four hours’ rack time even though her clockwork could scrub the fatigue right out of her blood, regulate adenosine and melatonin so precisely she wouldn’t even yawn right up until the point she dropped dead of heart failure. Might as well, they said: other schedules to clear anyway, other people to bring back across other oceans.
They told her not to worry. They told her it wasn’t her fault. They gave her propranolol to help her believe them.
Four hours, flat on her back, staring at the ceiling.
Now here she was: soul half a world
away, body stuck in a windowless room paneled in oak on three sides, the fourth crawling with luminous maps and tacticals. Learning just what the enemy had been doing, besides sneaking up on a military cyborg in the middle of the fucking night.
“They were fishing,” the PAO told her.
“No,” Becker said; some subconscious subroutine added an automatic “sir.”
The JAG lawyer—Eisbach, that was it—shook her head. “They had longlines in their outriggers, Corporal. They had hooks, a bait pail. No weapons.”
The general in the background—from NDHQ in Ottawa, Becker gathered, although there’d been no formal introduction—studied the tacpad in his hand and said nothing at all.
She shook her head. “There aren’t any fish. Every reef in the WTP’s been acidified for twenty years.”
“It’s definitely a point we’ll be making,” Eisbach said. “You can’t fault the system for not recognizing profiles that aren’t even supposed to exist in the zone.”
“But how could they be—”
“Tradition, maybe.” The PAO shrugged. “Some kind of cultural thing. We’re checking with the local NGOs, but so far none of them are accepting responsibility. Whatever they were doing, the UN never white-listed it.”
“They didn’t show on approach,” Becker remembered. “No visual, no sound—I mean, how could a couple of boats just sneak up like that? It had to be some kind of stealth tech, that must be what Wingman keyed—I mean, they were just there.” Why was this so hard? The augs were supposed keep her balanced, mix up just the right cocktail to keep her cool and crisp under the most lethal conditions.
Of course, the augs were also supposed to know unarmed civilians when they saw them …
The JAG was nodding. “Your mechanic. Specialist, uh …”
“Blanch.” From the room’s only civilian, standing unobtrusively with the potted plants. Becker glanced over; he flashed her a brief and practiced smile.
“Specialist Blanch, yes. He suspects there was a systems failure of some kind.”
“I would never have fired if—” Meaning, of course, I would never have fired.
Don’t be such a pussy, Becker. Last month you took on a Kuan-Zhan with zero cover and zero backup, never even broke a sweat. Least you can do now is stand next to a fucking philodendron without going to pieces.
“Accidents happen in—these kind of situations,” the PAO admitted sadly. “Drones misidentify targets. Pillbox mistakes a civilian for an enemy combatant. No technology’s perfect. Sometimes it fails. It’s that simple.”
“Yes sir.” Dimming rainbows, bleeding into the night.
“So far the logs support Blanch’s interpretation. Might be a few days before we know for certain.”
“A few days we don’t have. Unfortunately.”
The general swept a finger across his tacpad. A muted newsfeed bloomed on the war wall behind him: House of Commons, live. Opposition members standing, declaiming, sitting. Administration MPs across the aisle, rising and falling in turn. A two-tiered array of lethargic whackamoles.
The general’s eyes stayed fixed on his pad. “Do you know what they’re talking about, Corporal?”
“No, sir.”
“They’re talking about you. Barely a day and a half since the incident and already they’re debating it in Question Period.”
“Did we—”
“We did not. There was a breach.”
He fell silent. Behind him, shell-shocked pols stammered silent and shifty-eyed against the onslaught of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. The Minister of Defence’s seat, Becker noted, was empty.
“Do we know who, sir?”
The general shook his head. “Any number of people could have intercepted one or more of our communications. The number who’d be able to decrypt them is a lot smaller. I’d hate to think it was one of ours, but it’s not something we can rule out. Either way—” He took a breath. “—so much for our hopes of dealing with this internally.”
“Yes sir.”
Finally he raised his eyes to meet hers. “I want to assure you, Corporal, that nobody here has passed any judgment with regard to potential—culpability. We’ve reviewed the telemetry, the transcripts, the interviews; FIT’s still going over the results, but so far there’s no evidence of any conscious wrong-doing on your part.”
Conscious, Becker noted dully. Not deliberate. Conscious. There’d been a time when the distinction would never have occurred to her.
“Be that as it may, we find ourselves forced to change strategy. In the wake of this leak it’s been decided we have to engage the public. Doubling down and invoking national security would only increase the appearance of guilt, and after that mess in the Philippines, we can’t afford even a whiff of cover-up.” The general sighed. “This, at least, is the view of the Minister.”
“Yes sir.”
“It has therefore been decided—and I’m sorry to do this to you, I know it’s not what you signed up for—it’s been decided to get out in front of this thing, as they say. Control the narrative. Make you available for interviews, prove we have nothing to hide.”
“Interviews, sir?”
“You’ll be liaising with Mr. Monahan here.” On cue, the civilian stepped out of the background. “His firm’s proven useful in matters of—public outreach.”
“Ben. Just Ben.” Monahan reached out to shake with his right hand, offered his card with the left: Optic Nerve, twinkling above a stock-ticker crawl of client endorsements. “I know how much this sucks, Corporal. I’m guessing the last thing you want to hear right now is what some high-priced image consultant has to say about covering your ass. Is that about right?”
Becker swallowed, and nodded, and retrieved her hand. Phantom wings beat on her shoulders.
“The good news is: no ass-covering required. I’m not here to polish a turd—which is actually a nice change—I’m here to make sure the truth gets out. As you know, there’s no shortage of parties who are a lot less interested in what really happened than in pushing their own agendas.”
“I can understand that,” Becker said softly.
“This person, for example.” Just Ben tapped his watch and wiped Parliament from the wall; the woman revealed in its place stood maybe one-seventy, black, hair cropped almost army short. She seemed a little off-balance in the picture; doubtless the helmeted RCMP officer grabbing her left bicep had something to do with that. The two of them danced against a chorus line of protestors and pacification drones.
“Amal Sabrie,” Monahan was saying. “Free-lance journalist, well-regarded by the left for her human rights work. Somali by birth but immigrated to Canada as a child. Her hometown was Beledweyne. Does that ring any bells, Corporal?”
Becker shook her head.
“Airborne Regiment? 1992?”
“Sorry. No.”
“Okay. Let’s just say she’s got more reason than most to mistrust the Canadian military.”
“The last person we’d expect to be on our side,” Eisbach remarked.
“Exactly.” Monahan nodded. “Which is why I’ve granted her an exclusive.”
• • •
THEY ENGAGED ON NEUTRAL TERRITORY, proposed by Sabrie, reluctantly approved by the chain of command: a café patio halfway up Toronto’s Layton Tower, overlooking Lakeshore. It jutted from the side of the building like a bracket fungus, well above most of the drone traffic.
An almost pathological empathy for victimhood. Monahan had inventoried Sabrie’s weak spots as if he’d been pulling the legs off a spider. Heart melts for stray cats, squirrels with cancer; blood boils for battered women and oppressed minorities and anyone who ever ended up on the wrong end of a shockprod. Not into performance rage, doesn’t waste any capital getting bent out of shape over random acts of microaggression. Smart enough to save herself for the big stuff. Which is why she still gets to soapbox on the prime feeds while the rest of the rabies brigade fights for space on the public microblogs.
Twenty floors b
elow, pedestrians moved like ants. They’d never be life-sized to Becker; she’d arrived by the roof and she’d leave the same way, a concession to those who’d much rather have conducted this interview under more controlled conditions. Who’d much rather have avoided this interview entirely, for that matter. That they’d ceded so much control spoke volumes about Optic Nerve’s rep for damage control.
If we can just get her to see you as a victim—which is exactly what you are—we can turn her from agitator to cheerleader. Start off your appies as a tool of the patriarchy, you’ll be her soulmate by dessert.
Or maybe it spoke volumes about a situation so desperate that the optimum strategy consisted of gambling everything on a Hail Mary.
There she is, Monahan murmured now, just inside her right temple, but Becker had already locked on: The target was dug in at a table next to the railing. This side, flower boxes and hors-d’oeuvres; that side, an eighty-meter plunge to certain death. Wingman, defanged but still untrusting, sent wary standbys to the stumps of amputated weaponry.
Amal Sabrie stood at her approach. “You look—” she began.
—like shit. Becker hadn’t slept in three days. It shouldn’t have shown; cyborgs don’t get tired.
“I mean,” Sabrie continued smoothly, “I thought the augments would be more conspicuous.”
Great wings, spreading from her shoulders and laying down the wrath of God. Corporal Nandita Becker, Angel of Death.
“They usually are. They come off.”
Neither extended a hand. They sat.
“I guess they’d have to. Unless you sleep standing up.” A thought seemed to occur to her. “You sleep, right?”
“I’m a cyborg, Ms. Sabrie. Not a vacuum cleaner.” An unexpected flicker of irritation, there; a bright spark on a vast dark plain. After all these flat waking hours Becker almost welcomed it.
Monahan didn’t. Too hostile. Dial it down.
Sabrie didn’t miss a beat. “A cyborg who can flip cars one-handed. If the promos are to be believed.”
Be friendly. Give a little. Don’t make her pull teeth.