“Of course I’m healthy.”
“Because you don’t look healthy.”
“And you’re getting to be quite the nag.” He gestured. “Well, let’s test them out.”
Brandon struggled out of his shirt. He felt flabby and indulgent next to Singer, who stared with folded arms. He tried to get into the tunic as quickly as possible. He heard a seam pop in protest. When he had finished, he avoided Singer’s eyes and reached over to the laptop, commanded the clothes to wake up. Instantly they buzzed, hard, like wasp’s nest humming around his ribs. He bent double, at once tickled and discomfited, and dialled down the pressure.
“You keyed them to each other,” Singer said. He was clutching the nearest wall.
“I thought… I mean, if we had to find each other… If there was a bombing…”
“Oh, the intent is noble. But the result…” Singer took two strides across the room. Their clothes thrummed. It was hard for Brandon not to writhe, not to laugh, not to scream, with the wires dancing over his spine. But Singer was standing there straight as ever, like this weird half-tickle half-shock was just something he dealt with, like they’d covered it in some manual or some secret training camp or some other situation Brandon shuddered to imagine. Only Singer’s fists told the truth: stiff but shaky, thumbs held down like they were itching for an eject button.
“You see, this is just untenable,” he said. “The closer we get, the more it hurts.”
Brandon reached over and shut the clothes off. “Sorry, sir—”
“Call me that again, Heiser, and I’ll put you in a fucking chokehold.”
“Brandon,” he said. “My name is Brandon.”
“Well, Brandon, you can lie down now. Let the big boys have a turn.” He grabbed the laptop. Brandon settled for watching, and crawled up onto his bed to look over Singer’s shoulder.
“Your eyes. I still feel them. Shut them now.”
“Yes, s—”
With unerring accuracy, Singer’s hand snapped backward and reached for Brandon’s throat. Brandon dodged at the last second and Singer got his eyes, instead, and he pressed them closed, palm smooth as Bible paper, until Brandon quit trying to open them.
“I’m really sorry,” Brandon said, when his hand withdrew. “I didn’t know it—the shirt, I mean—would feel like that. I just wanted to try something new.” Something difficult, he wanted to say. Something impressive.
He heard the sound of fingers on keys. “Just because it didn’t work this time doesn’t mean it was a bad idea, Heiser,” Singer said. “Good ideas are poorly executed on a regular basis. The point is to keep trying. If that were not true, we would be out of a job.”
When Brandon woke up, Singer had re-set the clothes back to their default mirror relay position.
“It won’t help with proximity,” Singer said the next morning, “but once we figure out how to load things like heartbeat and pressure detection, it’ll have its own uses. I can know exactly how much rubble you’re buried under, should the occasion arise.”
“Why am I wearing your coat?”
“Oh, that,” Singer said. He lit a cigarette. “You looked cold.”
“TINK’S BEEN GONE awhile,” Brandon says, when they had finished tagging her most recent sweep of the city. Singer had put in an odd image search request: he wanted to know how many food stalls also sold cigarettes on the side. Offhand, he said, he knew most of them, but he wanted to test Tink’s ability to sort two images together in order to create a meaningful answer.
“She’s fine,” Singer says. “You know, these people are breaking about five different laws regarding resale. I think there might even be copyright infringement on this sign.” He forwards Brandon the picture.
“Definitely,” Brandon says. “Where is she?”
“A hammam,” Singer says. Brandon knows the word from somewhere, but doesn’t bother looking it up. “Some men are meeting there. Don’t worry, I’ll delete the footage. Look at that! They also sell condoms!”
“Halal condoms?”
“No such thing. Condoms aren’t haram. They’re like birth control for elderly Catholics.”
“Elderly Catholics still need birth control?”
Real laughter buzzes down into his ear, sharp and unexpected, and Brandon thinks he can hear the length of Singer’s neck in the depth of that single sound.
BY THE DATE of Tink’s first review, the clothes were perfect. The tweaking had been the most fun—across town, Brandon felt Singer rip himself apart and sew himself together, felt each clumsy stitch and heard the other man’s almost-laugh when his fingers slipped.
“Next time we’ll get arms,” Singer had said. “Then you can guide me.”
But now Brandon was alone. Really alone. Alone in a way that he hadn’t been in a long time—no phone, no bud, no lifestyle prosthetics of any sort. He had even shut the shirt off. The higher-ups liked you to be bereft when you were talking to them. No cheat-sheets, no devices, the review was an intellectual all-meat special. The guard had ticked off every device and piece of equipment as he surrendered it. He watched them take everything—his phone, the bud, his wallet, his documentation, his whole life—and pour it into a plastic dish.
Right now they were probably ransacking his inbox. He’d done nothing wrong—hadn’t gone too far off-mission, hadn’t even circumvented the company firewalls that siphoned his communications home through tapped lines. They wouldn’t find anything. But they liked to be sure.
Scary, how well he could rationalize it.
Now he sat in a room in yet another hotel—this one more like a hacienda, perhaps once the home of someone from the former ruling party—in a wooden chair with one short leg. It rattled gently as his right knee jigged up and down. He watched the superiors peer over their glasses as they looked at sheaves of paper.
Paper, he thought. No wonder we’re losing.
“What is your opinion of the Ishin program, so far?”
The woman was obviously tired. She sat hunched like a turtle over the table. Her face had that odd blankness that too much authority gives after a while, like she really didn’t care about the content of the answer so much as the way he delivered it.
“Well, it’s all in the written portion of my report,” he said. “Ishin’s a great idea. It could be better deployed, though.”
She blinked. “Oh?”
“I’d like to see it hooked up to more stuff. Like farm-bots. And the pipelines. So we could find out about shortages.”
“Shortages?”
“In water. Or oil. There are pressure monitors in each pipeline; we could tell when one went low and investigate.”
“There are already whole teams devoted to that very purpose.”
“No, I mean—” And here he knew that the whole thing was getting away from him, because the whole panel had frozen, cat-like, while he bleated on. But he was nervous—more nervous that he’d thought he’d be—and when he was nervous he speculated, wildly. “I mean we could use it to predict things.”
They blinked, like predator drones signalling each other high above their target.
“I mean surveillance is this great tool. It really is. But watching what’s happening only goes so far. We should be looking at what’s going to happen, instead. We could be taking measurements. We could be predicting the problems before they happen.”
He leaned forward in the chair. It pitched forward and he had to correct, quickly grabbing the chair before it toppled over and slamming himself back in it. The others on the panel continued watching him. “It’s just that there’s a whole other level to this conflict,” he said. “And it has to do with things like people starving. It has to do with lack. I mean, stability’s hard to fight for when it’s just a pipedream, you know? But we could turn this place into something functional. Self-sustaining. That’s what Ishin should be for, not just watching which tanks go where, or who’s growing poppies or whatever.”
His inquisitor’s bristling eyebrows rose. “You think
our concern with drug trafficking is misplaced?”
“No! I mean, no. Of course it’s serious. But we should look at why the drugs sell in the first place. I mean, it’s our guys who are taking them, you know? Not just our guys globally, but our people on the ground. Why do you think we started busting more grow-ops after we arrived? It wasn’t just sharper eyes; it was a market that sprang up the moment we got here. We brought that market. We brought that problem.”
Throats were cleared. Papers were shuffled. He’d blown it.
And then, like a ghost, a hand stole across his stomach and up over his heart to his shoulder and squeezed. And he knew instantly why he was nervous, why he was babbling. He was filling a silence. They had cut him off from more than his technology. They had cut him off from Singer.
But Singer had fixed that.
“What about your partner?” a man asked, as he made the papers fit into neat right angles before tucking them between pristine folds of cardstock.
“Singer?” He hated his voice for cracking.
“Yes. Your partner.”
Through their clothes his partner was insistent. Anyone watching Singer now might think he was mid-heart attack, the way he must have been gripping his left shoulder. “My partner…”
Brandon let his own hand trail up to his left shoulder, to where he felt Singer’s hand translated into tiny wires and servos. He kneaded, tried to make it look normal, like a sore joint and not communication, not I’m here, I’m listening, I’m with you.
Singer squeezed back.
“My partner’s a smart guy,” Brandon heard himself say. “He’s probably the smartest guy I’ve ever worked with.”
Singer’s hand wasn’t leaving.
“And he’s, uh, pretty hands-on,” he added, unable to resist the joke, “even though he lets me do my own thing most of the time.”
“Has he been asking you to do more than your share of the work?”
Brandon rubbed his shoulder so Singer could feel it. “No. Why?”
“He applied for a patent recently.”
The clothes. Of course. “Well, whatever that’s about, he handles it on his own time.”
“Good.”
After that the questions were clarifying ones, about odd phrasing in his report or figures they didn’t quite understand, math he’d let go unexplained. But it was easier—the whole thing, the conversation, the answers—with that slight pressure on his shoulder. By the end he was joking, he was laughing, he was making sense. And none of them mentioned the clothes. None of them noticed. None of them knew.
When he left the room, Singer was sitting outside.
“Why, Heiser,” he said. “What a surprise.”
“Uh, yeah,” Brandon managed to say.
“You look flushed. Are you not feeling well?”
He swallowed. “Thirsty.”
Singer’s eyes slid over to the guard manning the door. “You’ll let me help my subordinate find a drinks machine, won’t you?”
“Down that hall, to your right.”
“Thank you.”
Then Singer was steering him under mosaic ceilings and filigreed windows, toward a humming monolith of light and brand names. He produced a card from one pocket, flashed it at the machine, and held up a bottle of aloe juice a moment later. “Drink up.”
Brandon drank. Watching him, Singer momentarily peeked over his shoulder and said in a low voice: “We should get your heart checked, Heiser. I thought it was going to pound right through your chest.”
Brandon only sputtered a little. “I got nervous.” He drank again, quickly. “They took all my stuff. I felt naked.”
Singer’s head tilted. “But not quite.”
Brandon shook his head. “No, not quite.” He checked for people watching, but there were none. He kept his voice down anyway. “How did you do it? Mine wasn’t even turned on.”
Singer leaned against the machine. “If I told you it was an accident, would you believe me?”
“I… I guess…” Now he felt stupid. “I guess it was just good timing that it happened during—”
“I thought you were shut off for some other reason, at first.” Singer shifted weight. “I thought something might have happened. I thought the system might be in need of repair.”
Brandon nodded. “Oh.”
“So, you see, I had to invent a little workaround. You know, while I was on my way. Because you weren’t answering your phone. And because Tink couldn’t find you.”
Now he felt worse than stupid, he felt ashamed. He hadn’t even thought to tell Singer where he was going or how much tech he’d have to surrender. He just figured the other man knew.
“I’m sorry—”
“Don’t be sorry. I was overzealous. I forget that there are things I shouldn’t be allowed to see.”
“I know, but, you got there right in time, I was freaking out—”
“They tried intimidating you?” His voice had taken on a strange, sharp new edge.
“No, nothing like that.” Brandon straightened. “I just didn’t know how nervous I was until I got in there, you know? I don’t want to lose the project. It’s, uh…” Singer’s glasses made his eyes that much bigger. “It’s special. To me. The project.”
“The project.” Singer blinked. “It’s important to you.”
“Very.” Brandon’s head jolted up and down of its own accord. “I want to stay with it. It’s um…fulfilling, I guess.” He bit his lip. “It’s not really something I’ve ever done before. If you know what I mean.”
The dimple appeared at the side of Singer’s mouth. “I think I do.” He clapped Brandon on the shoulder and made for the hallway. His real hand was a great deal warmer than the wire-and-servo version. One of Singer’s fingernails grazed him right under the collar as it moved.
“It’ll be late when you get out,” Brandon said. “You won’t make it back to your camp in time. You should come stay with me. For tonight.”
Silence. Brandon heard the squeak of Singer’s shoes pivoting on the marble floor. He turned. Singer had his hands jammed in his pockets.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea just now,” he said. “They’ll think we’re... plotting something.”
It occurred to Brandon, as he watched Singer leave, that the distance between them stretched not only over years or miles or skill, but attitude. He saw the weight of years not in the lines around his eyes but in the way they never quite looked at him directly. Like they couldn’t. Like he needed Tink for that kind of watching, too.
THEIR DAY IS over, now. Tink is free again, and is with Singer receiving new orders and fresh charge.
“Are you shivering?” Brandon asks. There’s a trembling in his clothes that he can’t identify.
“There’s a stiff breeze,” Singer says. “Winter’s coming.”
Brandon hacks Tink’s eye and focuses now on the place where Singer has been sleeping for the past few days: a rooftop, half-crumbled on one side, accessible only via the adjacent roof and equipped with a pup tent, a roller jug of water, and a lantern-sized solar oven which can heat maybe one can of tea at a time.
“You’ll have to come inside,” he says.
“I don’t do well in small spaces.”
Singer could be referring to anything, but Brandon guesses prison, or maybe the kind of training you get for prison, and he feels an almost palpable indignation at the thought. He translates this into nagging: “You’ll freeze!”
“Nonsense. I know how to keep warm.”
“Stay here,” Brandon says, before he can stop himself. But then the offer is on the table and he has to back it up: “Stay the winter.”
Silence. “…You know, that wasn’t quite part of my plan.”
“Think of all the stuff we could get done!”
“Oh, I can well imagine.” There’s the oddest hint of a laugh in his voice. “But I would feel badly about sponging off your host’s good graces.”
“We wouldn’t need a host.” Brandon li
kes this idea the more he talks about it. “I’ve learned more Pashto by now. And what I don’t know, you do.”
More silence. When Brandon peers through Tink’s eye, he can’t read Singer’s face. It’s as flat and blank as ever. Even the set of the shoulders is perfectly still.
“I mean, you can think about it,” he hears himself say. “You might not want—”
Singer looks up and directs his gaze right at Tink, and Brandon could swear the old man knows he’s there behind her eyes because he reaches out a hand. He looks tired, thin and cold and a little sad for some reason. Brandon catches himself leaning forward as Tink swerves through the air to land on Singer’s open palm.
“I know you think it’s a good idea…” Singer can’t even look at the machine in his hand. And Brandon realizes that what he thought was reticence or disappointment is actually shyness—improbable, inexplicable, but nonetheless evident. “I know you think it’s what you want—”
“Yes.” There, he’s said it.
Singer snorts. “It’s a good thing they put you in robotics,” he says. “You’re too impulsive to serve anywhere else.”
“I’m not impulsive, I just like getting what I want.”
“Don’t we all.” Singer grins and lets Tink go. Brandon guides her upward, releases the hack. She shoots upward—
—and into darkness.
Through Singer’s bud, he hears a sharp cry, dry and shrill. Onscreen, an error message pops up. It says that the drone has encountered outside interference. It suggests a raptor is responsible: a hawk or falcon or owl. It shows him a list of native species, complete with colour photos and Latin names.
But then something slams straight into his spine, right between the shoulders, the clothes humming with impact. Tink’s eye portion wriggles free of the bird’s maw. The feed is damaged. It pixels randomly. He catches a glimpse of the scene as she climbs: men with pipes.
Across the city, through the threads and wires, Brandon feels the beating.
“Run,” Brandon is saying. Onscreen he watches Singer struggle to his knees. The screen seems too small, not big enough to contain the enormity of what he’s seeing. He watches Singer retrieve something from one pocket. It’s white and sharp and curved like pliers. The multi-tool. He leans forward a little, shifting weight, lurching, and blood spreads over one man’s trousers.
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