Hardwired

by Walter Jon Williams

  Cowboy reds out the engines, mindful of his passenger and accelerating slowly until he’s moving at over 200. He’s a lot faster than the bigger cargo-carrying ground-effect jobs and slaloms around them with ease, hearing through his armor the low-dopplered sounds of their saluting horns as he torches past. The slow-moving automobiles are stationary objects. Trees are a continuous green blur. His concentration narrows to the tunnel ahead and the one behind, to the crumbling track over which he roars on his cushion of air, coordinating his video track with the readout on his forward-looking lidar, the instantaneous photon echo, the fluorescent abstract images that might be anything, clouds or boxes or the spectra of subatomic particles in scintillators, superimposed onto his video display and resolving into other vehicles, the guardrail, stands of trees, the outskirts of sprawling cities impacted by war.

  The border flashes by–– no customs on the Georgia side but a long line of traffic going the other way into the American Concessions, waiting to pass inspection. He refuels in South Carolina and again in Virginia, robot pumps finding the fuel intakes, engaging without need for human intervention, without even a glance from the bored operator sitting in his bulletproof tower. It’s early afternoon when he crosses the Maryland line and leaves the interstate, finds a patch of flat ground at a rest stop and deflates the cushion, waiting for his escort. He pulls off his helmet and unjacks.

  Sarah, to his surprise, seems to be asleep. He had almost forgotten her existence. He disengages the urine collector, which he hasn’t used, and pisses into the chemical toilet. Then he steps up the ladder to open the dorsal hatch and bring in some fresh air. He looks out at the rolling green countryside, the wide crumbling interstate slicing across it, eroding like an artery.

  He said good-bye to Cathy two nights before. She had left his life the way she’d entered it, climbing out the eighth-floor window of his hotel room in Norfolk, grinning up from under the brim of the white Stetson he’d given her as she worked her way toward the four inches of brackish tide creeping over East Main. They’d said some things about keeping in touch, but he thinks if they meet again it will be another accident. He doesn’t spend much time in Virginia and she won’t be due for another furlough till next year. It’s pointless to plan that far ahead. The laws might catch him in that time, or the sea might claim her. Best to have a clean farewell.

  When he turns around, Sarah is awake and rolling down the netting on her bunk. Half asleep, she seems a lot less hard.

  “Want some lunch?”

  She nods, running her fingers through her hair. He opens a locker and brings some sandwiches out of the cooler. “What would you like to drink? Coffee? Orange juice? Ice tea?”

  “Iced tea.” She swings her legs out of the bunk, accepts the cool plastic container, peels off the top. “Gracias.”

  Cowboy leans against the ladder and opens a sandwich. He can hear birds calling through the open hatch. “Were you brought up speaking Spanish?” he asks.

  “Spanglish, anyway. My father was part Cuban, part Gypsy. My mother was an Anglo.” Now that she’s awake, Cowboy notices, her cooler personality seems to be taking control, the look in her eyes abstracting off somewhere, not turning dreamy but seemingly involved in some intent calculation. The words “father” and “mother” seem to have some kind of negative charge, as if stripped of any emotional content.

  “Did you lose them in the war?” Cowboy guesses.

  She gives him a quick glance, as if sizing him in some way. “Yes,” she says. The answer comes too quickly and Cowboy can’t entirely believe it, but also can’t figure out why she’d bother not telling the truth.

  Sarah bites a sandwich and looks at him in surprise. “This is real ham,” she says. “Not soy or anything.”

  Cowboy swallows chicken salad. “Pony Express riders eat only of the best,” he says.

  Cowboy conceals his amusement as Sarah gobbles down two more sandwiches. Jet engines and throbbing props doppler past on the freeway. There are some apricots for dessert. Cowboy looks at his watch. Their escort is a few minutes late.

  “Mind if I look out the hatch,” Sarah asks. “I’ve never seen this part of the world.”

  “It’s a nice-looking part. Civilized kind of country.”

  She straps on the machine pistol. Cowboy watches her.

  “You hardwired for that?” he asks.

  “Hardwired and chipped.” Her look is challenging again, as if he had somehow questioned her competence.

  “That’ll be useful,” he says, pretending he’s glad to know he’s so well protected. “Do you have the full Santistevan or an Owari?”

  She gives him a glance, then dons her mirrorshades. Armor, he thinks, for the emotions, like the jacket, the strut, the attitude. “Owari,” she says. That means the hardwiring needs a trigger, usually an inhaled chemical streetnamed hardfire, before it will work efficiently. His own more expensive job triggers on a command from his crystal.

  Sarah squeezes past him in the corridor, climbs the short ladder, and props her arms on the edge of the hatch, watching through the heat shimmer of the cooling engines the low green hills, the close-packed corn across the road, a square white farmhouse that looks like something off a postcard.

  “I have the Santistevan,” Cowboy says. His voice comes up muffled through the hatch.

  “What do you need it for? You do your driving through the face. ”

  “I used to fly deltas. We needed arms, legs, fingers, crystal, eyes, everything.”

  Sarah hadn’t realized that Cowboy was that much a veteran. He must be good at this if he’s survived so long. She thinks of Maurice, the West Indian cutterjock with his old-model metal eyes and the military Chip sockets on his wrists and ankles, his pictures of dead comrades on the wall. Lost in a past that was brighter than all his futures put together. She wonders if that is Cowboy’s fate, retreating to some cool memory grotto when he finally bashes his panzer up against something that won’t move aside for him, when the last bit of hope dies.

  “I knew you had the eyes,” she says. “Standing there in bright sunlight this morning without having to squint.”

  Shadows of cloud drift across the quiet landscape. Corn rustles in its rows. She finds herself oddly off-balance in this pastoral scene, not knowing what to expect. Her life is bounded by concrete, steel, ruins, flooded lands, the sea...This long green horizon promises softness, melody, ease.

  Sarah glances up, seeing the silver power stations in the sky, keeping watch on the planet for their masters, and then from over one of the low hills comes a robot harvester, a vast alloy machine with a cybernetic heart. No human tills this soil, and no human owns it: the pretty white frame house is either the residence of some employee who supervises the planting of this part of Pennsylvania, or the house no longer belongs to the farm at all, owned by a family that no longer controls the fields that begin just outside their window.

  It’s the same as the city, Sarah knows, the same hierarchy of power, beginning with the blocs in their orbits and ending with people who might as well be the field mice in front of the blades of the harvester, pointless, countless lives in the path of a structure that can’t be stopped. She feels the anger coiling around her like armor. The chance to rest, she thinks, was nice enough while it lasted. But right now another fragment of time must be survived.

  Three vehicles coil off the interstate, two flying red warning flags. Time for business.

  “Our escort,” she says, and raises a hand in greeting.

  Andrei has flown up from Florida with his guards and has rented a car along with the panzer escort. He leans a head out of the window as he drives onto the verge, and Sarah tells him all’s well. Behind Andrei the harvester mows corn in its efficient, mindless fashion.

  She slams the hatch down and dogs it, sees Cowboy already in his seat, inserting studs into his sockets. Pumps begin to throb. Sarah rolls herself into the bunk as the starter wails. She hesitates for a moment as she looks at the headset, then takes it in
her hands and presses it on, one hand guiding the featherweight mic on its hair-thin wire to its place at the corner of her mouth.

  Distant music bounces indistinctly in her head, some radio program from far away. There is a selector switch above her ear and she turns it, hearing more music, voices hammering in some Russian dialect, a startlingly clear vid of some glittery drama set in, of all things, an African circus. A turn of the switch and she’s into Cowboy’s interface, jerking with surprise as the green walls of Pennsylvania rise on all sides of her, interwoven with columns, numbers, bright neon colors that are the panzer monitors, all of it seemingly painted on the inside of her skull, overlaid with the data of her eyes and ears. She’s walled out from Cowboy’s mind, a passive observer only, barred from the crackle of decision as Cowboy guides the panzer along the road. It’s less vivid than it would be if she were getting it fed through sockets, like Cowboy, straight to the optical centers of her brain, but still the input is overwhelming, stunning her with its complexity, and she almost rips the set off her head to end the fluorescing burst of sensation.

  But she’s used to headsets and what they do, and after a moment settles in. She’s been in simulations of things more complicated than this: orbital maneuvers, auto races, combat. Voices echo in her head, Cowboy chatting with the escort, and she can feel, secondhand, the impacts of his decisions in the twitches of the big rudders, the movement of the jets, the emphasis placed on certain of the displays. After a while Sarah decides it isn’t very interesting.

  The panzer travels across twenty miles of decaying road, Sarah seeing a series of hills rising in the west, misty gray and shadowed in cloud. But here is a stake planted by the road with a pair of fluorescent orange streamers, marking the place to turn off. The escort trucks pull onto the grassy shoulder, the drivers waving their temporary good-byes. Andrei’s limo slides into the turnoff. The panzer wallows across a ditch and follows.

  The meet turns out to be at another picturesque farmhouse set among shade trees. The others are waiting–– an unarmored ground-effects truck sitting under its four-bladed propellers and a pair of men leaning against a dark blue Subaru limousine. Cowboy’s attention seems to switch to the terrain: there are close-up amplified views of the windows of the house, selected spots behind the trees, the low ridge of ground to the left.

  Sarah, her mind strobing colors, reaches blindly into her pocket, finds her inhaler, triggers it once up each nostril. Her nerves burn with electric light.

  The panzer moves next to the truck and spins, keeping its jet exhaust away from the truck’s crew while training the off-load ramp toward the truck. Then the engines die and the panzer settles down onto its deflated cushion.

  “Keep the headset, Sarah. Cowboy’s voice pulses into her aural centers. “You can talk to me.”

  “Can you cut me out of your displays? she asks. “They’re too distracting.”

  Abruptly the video dies, the bright colors fading with only the lightest persistence. Sarah shakes her head and rolls out of the bunk. She zips her jacket to the throat and checks the pistol on her hip. She looks at Cowboy, the helmeted figure sitting motionless beneath the shimmering red and green, and hesitates for a moment at the bottom of the ladder.

  “Cowboy, she says. “I think you should know something. The Hetman thinks we’re being set up.”

  He turns in his couch and she can see his dark plastic eyes looking at her from under the brow of the helmet. “Thanks, Sarah, he says. “But I figured that from the fact that I’m here at all.”

  Sarah looks at him for a moment, surprise shimmering in her mind, and then she nods and pops the hatch, climbing the ladder while slipping on her shades. Sullen faces look back at her from the windows of the truck. She slips the Heckler & Koch from its holster and holds it just below the rim of the hatch. The farm smells of fuel, hot metal, and lubricant.

  Sarah can feel her shoulder blades tense, as if in anticipation of a shot. Flame runs along her nerve paths. The Hetman sensed something wrong here, and she knows his antennae are good. Her interior landscapes are urban and she’s not used to this kind of terrain, but she decides Cowboy’s eye was intelligent enough and flicks her gaze to the farmhouse windows, the trees, the ridge behind them, then back to the farmyard.

  The principals seem to be Andrei and a thin black man dressed in a gray silk suit. He wears a knit wool cap pulled over his dreadlocks and a Cantinflas mustache, just a strip of hair on either side of his mouth with most of the upper lip shaved. The abrazo is absent from their greeting, just a handshake and a quick, murmured discussion of business. The black man turns back to his car and gives an order, and two of his associates, one white, one black, open the trunk and bring out a heavy metal trunk. There is a jolt of recognition in Sarah’s mind, thinking she’s seen the white man before, but they’re both wearing straw sun hats and big shades and she’s met so many big guys without necks in her life that she can’t be sure about this one. They look like men who spend a lot of time working with weights, but the trunk has them breathing hard by the time they get it to the middle of the yard.

  The black man bends to open the trunk. Andrei squats down on his heels and inspects the contents while the black man stands back. Under the Cantinflas mustache is a superior smile. Sarah can feel sweat trickling down her spine. Her gaze jumps from the yard to the faces of the men in the truck, to the yard again, then to the ridge behind, then to the windows of the farmhouse. Lace curtains flutter in the windows. She tries to remember if she’s ever seen lace curtains in anything but pictures.

  Andrei straightens and turns to give a signal to someone in his car, who raises a hand mic to his lips. Cowboy’s voice rings in Sarah’s head as he acknowledges, and then there’s a gush of hydraulics as the panzer’s armored cargo gate swings open.

  Sarah’s gaze flicks to the windows, the truck drivers, to Andrei and the black man walking toward the panzer. Things have separated too much for her to keep good watch. Her nerves are sparking like strings of fireworks. She forces the muscles in her arms to relax. She can feel her own sweat on the pistol grip of the Heckler & Koch.

  Andrei and the black man step into the panzer. The black man will be opening boxes at random, checking the seals, checking that the comp matrices are there. Sarah’s eyes; flicker like lightning, ridge to truck to windows. She licks, her lips, tasting salt.

  The two men leave the panzer and walk into the yard. Andrei’s two guards come out of their car to carry the gold payment into the trunk. The black man picks at a grease spot in the elbow of his silk suit as he walks toward his Subaru. On the far side of the truck a door opens, and the two men move to get out, to transfer the cargo.

  Wrong, Sarah thinks. One of them at least should get out on this side.

  “Cowboy... ” she says, eyes flickering madly, neurotransmitters firing along their paths, her mind trying to encompass the yard as the gold thuds down into the trunk, as the black man steps casually behind his car, as his two associates bend to reach into the Subaru.

  The air is sliced apart by a rushing, hissing sound, and Sarah sees a silver needle leaping from the upper story of the farmhouse, arrowing straight to Andrei’s car. To Sarah’s hardwired senses it moves slowly, and her mind has plenty of time to scream as Andrei’s windshield caves in, as the rocket burrows into the car and turns into a widening bubble of fire that erupts from the interior, and Sarah thinks, Daud. The bubble touches Andrei and his men and the three are thrown down as if there were no bones in their bodies at all. The scream builds in Sarah’s mind, but she is already moving.

  The machine pistol is up and already tracking onto the Subaru. She touches the trigger and the gun rattles, jarring her as she braces against the armor of the hatch. There is an echo to the scream in her mind but she pays it no attention. The bullets from the machine pistol make a metallic spunk-spunk-spunk sound across the trunk of the Subaru, and then the two men bent over by the rear door catch the rest of the burst, and the black man drops like a nerveless bundle of
rags and his associate falls backward, arms thrown up over his head, one big hand holding the stock of an automatic shotgun. Spent rounds clatter like falling icicles on the Chobham armor. Sarah shifts and fires again, hearing more spunk-spunk sounds. The white man is sheltered behind an armored door.

  The scream in her mind has become the scream of the starters, the big jets beginning to turn, and Sarah almost leaps out of her skin as a slab of armor just aft of her suddenly slams open and a turret rises with jackhammer quickness. There is an insistent hooting sound, a warning siren, as the cargo gate hisses shut. Cowboy’s voice is clamoring in her head, “Behind you, Sarah,” and she wheels around in the hatch and sees one of the two truck drivers peering out from behind his ground-effects craft, ready with a pistol to shoot her in the back. The Heckler & Koch yammers in her hands. She sees the fear in the man’s eyes as he pulls his head back, as the bullets climb spunk-spunk-spunk toward him.

  Kawham-kawham. Sarah turns again at the sound of an automatic shotgun concussing the air and sees dust leaping into the air around Andrei as the buckshot strikes. Andrei’s body doesn’t even twitch. The white man is firing over the Subaru’s hood. A harsh purr resounds near Sarah’s ear as the gun in the panzer’s turret opens fire. Thirty-millimeter casings fountain into the sky, and Sarah looks up to see the entire second story of the farmhouse leap into the air in a storm of dust, as if every inch of paint had shed off the wood at the same instant. The turret gun tries to track down to the Subaru but fails–– the realization snaps into Sarah’s mind that the gun is meant to fire at aircraft and can’t depress to ground targets. She snaps some rounds at the man behind the Subaru, but the bolt locks back and she has to reach for another clip, and she has to turn around again to watch the gunman behind the truck. The panzer gives a lurch as it rises onto its cushion. Engine din fills the air.