Hammered

by Elizabeth Bear

  And he knew it, dammit. He knew it when he cast the fly, and he knew it when he set the hook. I can see the fucking calculation in his hazel eyes, gray now in the flickering light. My lips curl back into something that might almost look like a smile if you didn’t know me very well. “Wetwired. What does that mean?” I know what wired is. Wired is me.

  He reaches across the table and rests one hand on my shoulder. “When we rebuild the interfaces, we engineer in some of the equipment that Venus Consolidated and Unitek have designed for their VR interfaces.”

  “Venus … that’s a sex toy company.” I hear my own disbelief, and curiosity burns in the back of my throat.

  “Yes. But Unitek owns them, and they’re an industry leader in virtual reality applications. And we’re working with Unitek.”

  “Of course you are.” Unitek engineers designed my arm, and the neuralware that augments my reflexes in response to any perceived threat. Unitek owns the pharmaceutical company that makes Hyperex. And Unitek … assisted … Canada during the bloody, bloody Malaysian-PanChinese wars that broke out when the oceans started to rise. Later, they funded much of Malaysia’s economic recovery, to the chagrin of the Chinese government, which still likes to consider Southeast Asia its private preserve. It’s interesting history, if you go in for that sort of thing. “All right. Forget about the high-tech vibrators. Explain to me this wetwired thing.”

  “You’ve heard of the new generation of neural?”

  I shrug. “A little. I know I’ve got a collection of silicon cones buried in my gray matter and that’s not how you guys do things anymore.”

  “We have much less invasive techniques,” he answers, proud as if he pioneered it himself. “Nanosurgery. No incision—nothing goes in but bots a few microns across. We build, essentially, artificial synapses. The body hardly registers it as an insult. People are doing it for recreational purposes. Four-year-old technology, perfectly safe.”

  “Why would anybody do that to herself?”

  Valens waves his hands around, almost forgetting to subvocalize. His voice through my ear cuff is not quite painfully loud. “All sorts of reasons, but the primary is for a more seamless access to the gamespaces. As with the invention of the wheel, the most novel technologies are used for toys first.”

  Holy hell. This is his baby. “So you want to restructure my brain?”

  “No. We want to clean out the mess of substandard wiring we slapped up in there almost a quarter century ago, and put in something that won’t cripple you. Remember when you first got your arm?”

  My head jerking up and down feels stiff as a marionette’s.

  “Remember I promised you someday you’d have sensation? Heat, pressure?”

  Again, the dull, disbelieving nod. He can’t be serious.

  “We can do that now. Now that we have the tech to replace your old implants, you can have what these guys have.” His sweeping gesture takes in the room. “Without the stigma.” He glances around the room, real distaste wrinkling an arrogant nose.

  I follow his gaze. I try not to pass judgment, but … a girl with tiger stripes and a lashing tail catches my eye and winks broadly. I glance away.

  “We can even make it look more or less like a real hand, now. And once you’re on board and we get you a security rating, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do with it.” His eyes sparkle. His voice shakes. Despite myself, despite my ambivalence, I find myself catching his excitement. And damned if that hook doesn’t bite harder with every tug he gives it.

  Does it make any difference in the long run if you know you’re being manipulated? “Is this government funded or corporate?”

  “Both,” he says. “It’s big, Casey. That’s all I can tell you. And your old friend Gabe Castaign is working with us, although he doesn’t know the half of it yet. I wanted you on board first.”

  And of course, the most important question of all. “Why me?”

  I almost think he’s rehearsed the speech, but the passion in it rings sound. “I know you,” says the man who pushed me into killing a boy I could have liked, the man who gave me back my legs and my left hand and whatever life I have left. “You were a damn fine soldier. Damn fine pilot, too—and your reflexes are the selling point. Natural and augmented, you test high. And you’ve made adaptation to your wetware like I never would have believed. It always burned me that I couldn’t do more for you. And now I can. I just need you to help me justify spending the money.”

  “Justify saving my life.”

  “Yes.” He reaches out one last time and lays his hand on my steel one. I can’t feel a thing. My teeth are chattering.

  “You still have your pilot’s license, Casey?”

  Holy hell. He means it. “No.”

  “We’ll get you recertified. Retrained if need be.”

  “You want me as a civilian employee?”

  “That’s what we did for Castaign.”

  Breathe out. Breathe in. Think, Jenny Casey.

  “Jenny. Think about the pain.”

  I’m thinking. I’m thinking about a pseudosenile dementia, too. And the fact that my gun is still out in Barb’s car and I could just swallow a bullet if it really gets too bad.

  If I remember how to pull the trigger by then. I always was too stubborn for my own good. He’s still watching my face. Gabe is working for him. Does that mean things have changed? No. Gabe has his reasons, and they’re purely pragmatic and eleven years old. “You’re not telling me everything.”

  “You know it, Casey. You don’t get the rest until you sign on the dotted line.”

  Which is not what I wanted to hear at all.

  Counting coup was cleaner. People can cope with that kind of war. Of course, then you get into all the other ways of showing brave, and some of them you don’t want to know too much about. Like what I suspect I’m going to wind up doing before the year is out.

  Valens has something to do with all this, and Valens is going to be hell to put a stop to. There’s not going to be any justice—not for Mitch, not for Face. Not for Peacock, either, or Nell. Me? I don’t much think I deserve justice. I more or less got what was coming to me, one way or another.

  I can’t take Valens down. But I can show him, maybe, I could have done something. Show his handlers, whoever they are. Show the press. And if they are seen to know, they may have to do something.

  Status games.

  Maybe that will be enough. Fred Valens in front of a military court. It’s got a nice justified feel of symmetry to it.

  “All right,” I tell him. “I’m in, Fred. Where do I sign?”

  We’re not cold inference machines. Emotions are critical to our rational thinking.

  —Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, “Kismet Project” artificial life researcher

  Somewhere in the Internet

  Sunday 10 September, 2062

  23:00:22:01–23:00:22:05

  The multivariable codes Valens and Casey used were supposed to be nearly unbreakable. And they were. Unless you happened to have loaded a subtle little worm into both of their HCDs.

  Pilots and starships and VR, oh my.

  Feynman almost sang to himself, there in his silent stream of ones and zeroes. Colonel Frederick Valens, you slick son of a bitch. I know what you’re up to.

  And there is no way in hell you’re going to the stars without me.

  0300 hours, Monday 11 September, 2062

  Marriott Inn

  Toronto, Ontario

  I spent the first night in Toronto in Barb’s guest bedroom. The second night, I get a hotel room and call Razorface so he can fight with me about coming home. Afterward, I sit up by the window with all the lights turned off, watching the rain fall and the headlights roll by fifteen floors below.

  I’m drinking more than I should, and I don’t care. Room service sends coffee even at three in the morning.

  There are reasons I don’t come back to this city often.

  I can’t stop thinking about them now.

  23
years earlier:

  1300 hours, Friday 11 March, 2039

  Lake Simcoe Military Prison

  Lake Simcoe, Ontario

  I pass through checkpoints without comment. There are professional nods from well-disciplined guards who will not meet my eyes. They stare at the shining brass of my buttons, the shining steel of my left hand, the still-unfamiliar three golden hooks on my shoulder, differenced with a gold maple leaf. I imagine I hear whispers after I pass, but the truth of the matter is, to them I am a hero. Half a legend. The only whispers following me are my own.

  I haven’t the damnedest idea why I’m here, and I know even less about why he agreed to see me. In an honest moment, I might say I was here to punish myself, but this isn’t an honest moment.

  I wear formal dress rifle green, a conifer color, unchanged from the days of the unified Canadian Armed Forces. The beret is black, not blue, and I think I’ll never wear the United Nations colors again. It’s not the first time I’ve been wrong.

  I am patted down and wanded by polite, impersonal women, and at last shown into a bare room with a single plastic chair on each side of a transparent wall of inch-thick shatterproof plastic. The last guard shuts the door behind me, softly, like a benediction.

  Bernard Xu is already in his chair on the other side of that wall. There are holes drilled through the plastic, and I go and stand before them, feeling as if my guts are wrapped around a slowly twisting spike.

  “Jenny,” he says, standing up. Caution orange, his jumpsuit clashes with my formal green. They’ve unshackled his hands, at least. He shuffles forward, chains rattling, and lays both hands flat against the invisible wall. Skin pressed bloodless by the barrier, he leans into it.

  “Peacock.” He doesn’t look like a peacock anymore. When we met, he stunned me with flamboyance. Fabulousness. Hair in a half-dozen shades, clothing shredded and tattered and fanciful. He seems somehow deflated now, dark and forgotten already. He’s not a big man, not small, well made and fine featured. Barely a man at all—he turned twenty during the trial. Five years younger than I am. Guilty. I convicted him, and he did everything I said he did. We both know what the sentence will be. Canada, clinging to civilization as the world crumbles around its ears and the government becomes more desperate, more draconian, more owned—Canada still does not have a death penalty.

  He’s going to die in jail.

  And yet the look he gives me drips sorrow rather than reproach. He’s silent, reaching toward me. I place my steel hand over the shadow of his, a gesture, touch impossible. I think of tapping on glass to get a captive thing’s attention, and I almost gag.

  “Bernard,” I say. “I wish it could have been different.”

  A nod, philosophical. “Me, too. You were something special, Jenny girl.”

  “What do you mean?” I step away from the glass and let my eyes fall from his, watching him out of my peripheral vision.

  A dirty little smirk and he cocks his head to one side. “You know what I mean.”

  My breath snags and tears on something broken in my chest. “If I had known what you were, I never would have let that happen.”

  “Really? That would have been a pity.”

  “You could have used it against me at the trial, you know.”

  “My lawyer wanted to.”

  “Oh.” The winch pulling my guts out through my belly button tightens another twist. “Do you want me to tell you I regret it? Would it be better if I said I’m sorry?” His gaze hasn’t shifted from me when I look back.

  “I don’t need to be told,” he says, the taint of mockery leaving his voice. “I hope he’s worth it.”

  “Who?”

  “That army captain you’re in love with. I hope he’s worth it. They were going to send him to jail, weren’t they? And in return, you gave them me. You gave them yourself, too, whether you realize it or not. You could have changed the world. But you can’t go to the press now.”

  “I know.” Peacock had wanted me to rip the whole bloody thing wide open, to tell the world about the experimentation. About what Valens and the army had done to me, without ever asking.

  It’s too late now. I’ve taken the damned shilling and kissed the fucking book and signed the paperwork they put in front of me. Consent is consent.

  Bernard Xu has been convicted of terrorism, and Gabe Castaign is not in jail for treason. Has been dating a nurse. I’m his best friend. He’s an officer, and he saved my life. He’s never going to know.

  I turn away, pressing nerveless cool steel fingers against my eyes. The one-inch shatterproof is a joke. I could put my left fist through it like a baseball bat through a car window.

  “Did I buy you what you needed, Jenny Casey?”

  The steel door clangs behind me like a coffin lid coming down.

  8:00 A.M., Monday 11 September, 2062

  Jefferson Avenue

  Hartford Hospital Medical Offices

  Hartford, Connecticut

  That has to be him. Mitch opened the door of his dented baby-shit-brown Dodge and unfolded, sliding his wallet into his left hand.

  “Dr. Mobarak?” Mitch made him at five foot ten, two hundred, late thirties, Middle Eastern, balding on top with good shoes and a gray sportcoat. It was the quizzical expression as he turned that caught Mitch’s attention, however, the first calm look and then a little flash at the back of the eyes, like a man remembering that he was supposed to be scared of something.

  “Who are you?” The doctor took a step backward, toward the doorway of the brownstone office building.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Mitch saw an alert security guard start forward, and casually extended his hand and flipped the wallet open, showing Mobarak his badge. “Detective Mitch Kozlowski. I need to talk to you about one of your patients.”

  “Detective?”

  Mitch expected the doc to relax when he saw the ID. Instead, Mobarak glanced over his shoulder at the door, looking for an escape route. Mitch’s eyes widened a fraction of an inch. Interesting. “Hartford P.D. May I have a minute of your time?”

  Mobarak gnawed his lip. “I suppose. I’m very busy, of course”—aren’t they always—“but I can certainly make time for Hartford’s finest. Can we keep it brief?”

  The security guard got close enough to make out the badge and relaxed incrementally. Mitch shot him a smile and got a slight nod in return. “Absolutely, Dr. Mobarak. And thank you.”

  The guard held the door for them as they went inside. Mobarak was a neurologist; Mitch knew that much from Maker’s—from Genevieve’s—medical history. He also knew a lot of other things now, although he couldn’t rightly say he understood half of the medical stuff. He did know that her service record was impressive, however, and he’d used that information to pull up the details on her moment of infamy: the Xu trial.

  And that had blown his socks out through the holes in his shoes.

  According to the court records, some twenty years before, Corporal Casey had been approached by representatives of a terrorist cell. Acting under orders, she had infiltrated the group and brought down most of the leaders. Two of the medals in her trunk had been awarded for that incident, and Mitch had noticed that the presentation cases were still sealed shut.

  Her testimony had been instrumental in obtaining the conviction of their leader, and three consecutive life sentences—despite the tenor of the day. Which, Mitch was learning, had been a bit different than modern times. Despite the teasing he’d given her, Mitch realized he’d never thought of Maker as anything more than an enigmatic old woman with a conscience and a lot of friends. Learning that she was a bonafide war hero—well. He hadn’t yet been born when Genevieve Casey had been in Toronto, recovering from having most of her left arm blown off with a shotgun, serving in whatever capacity she was still capable.

  That gave him a little bit of pause if he thought about it hard, so he didn’t. He had a murder to solve. Maybe a few more to prevent. And he was starting to think he had a friend to protect—wh
ether she wanted his help or not.

  He held his tongue while Mobarak keyed them into the office, waiting until the door was latched behind them. Then he took a breath, ready for a fight. I’m willing to bet he thinks of her as more than a patient, too. She’s got that—ability to inspire loyalty. I bet she was a damned good sergeant. Mitch knew why that was. Because despite all the doubts of his rational mind, Mitch still suspected that Maker would put herself between him and a bullet.

  Bitching the entire time. “Doc, how well do you know Genevieve Casey?”

  He wasn’t expecting the doctor to slowly turn around, slipping his key into his pocket, and chuckle. “Somehow, I knew this was going to be about her. What’s she been accused of?”

  Mitch shook his head. “It’s not that at all. Doctor … hell.” He wasn’t sure what it was, but something about Mobarak’s half-amused, half-annoyed expression and significant glance at the wall clock put him at ease. “I’m a stupid shit, Doc, and I’m going to trust you. I’m here mostly as a friend of Maker’s—of Casey’s—and only half as a cop. She’s in trouble and I want to find out what sort, so I can back her up. Do you believe me?”

  And if I find out I’m wrong, and she had something to do with Mashaya getting shot, I’ll put the bullet in her head myself.

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Vanishing without leaving a forwarding address and ditching her friends kind of trouble.”

  “Kidnapped?”

  “Not … as such.” Mitch shrugged. “She went with somebody. As far as I know there was no threat of force. But that’s not the only kind of duress.”

  Mobarak thought about it for a long while before he answered. “I can’t share confidential information with you, of course.”

  “Of course,” Mitch answered, and realized that he’d been holding his breath. “Look, Doc. How long have you got to talk?”

  Mobarak shrugged. “Half an hour. I’ll make the time. I feel really bad about Jenny. She’s been through a lot, and she’s awful brave about it. It’s unprofessional, but …”