Her head’s been transplanted onto something inhuman.
You can see the ragged “V” where her dark-brown skin has been fused with clumps of dragonfly-green twitching fiber molded into a vague torso shape. The spasming pseudoflesh has been shaped into a hyperattractive Barbie hourglass, complete with nippleless breasts and an undulating vagina—almost sculpted smooth, except tiny hairlike tendrils on it ripple individually, sensing my entrance, forming hypnotic spirals as they focus in on me.
Yet the female shape is clearly designed to distract—put sexy clothes on that, and men would be too busy staring at her curves to notice how her head’s a little too big for a proper fit, how her arms hang too low.
Because her arms are human … at least until you look past the elbow, at which point her skin mutates into prickling green flesh. Same with the way her legs look normal up until just above the knee, at which point her skin transforms into bristling emerald—
“What do you see?” she asks.
The hairs on her belly twitch like flies washing themselves.
I slam back against the far wall, confused, before remembering: my legs are programmed to retreat from unknown threats.
And she is unknown. I’ve programmed my sensors with an extensive database of every animal: this is not on the books.
Whatever the IAC bioengineers are doing, they’ve got black-ops tech that’s centuries ahead of modern science. They’ve genetically engineered an organism from scratch, an organism that runs on no biology principles my onboard data banks are familiar with, then fused a human brain to it.
If they can do that, what can’t they do?
The shipping container constricts around me. If the IAC knows I saw this—her—they’ll come for me. And they won’t hire Donnie: they’ll bring their experienced operatives to take me down.
My legs sense the threat, retreating …
“Don’t leave!” she shrieks, slamming against her restraints with such inhuman speed that I’m glad there’s an inch-thick layer of bulletproof glass between us. “You have to get me out of here! I can’t do this myself! If you leave me, they’ll do worse!”
My legs cruise to a stop. Because they know, just as I know, that I can’t leave a terrified woman behind.
I concentrate on her face. Silvia is—was?—in her midthirties, her long black hair coiffed as though she was sent through a beauty salon before being packed away for transport. Her features are pretty, but whittled gaunt by years of stress. If she wasn’t strapped to the table, I could envision her behind some desk as a harried middle manager, trapped in a job she’s been meaning to quit.
Her wide brown eyes are squinched up as she loses her shit.
“This was supposed to be therapy Mama and Vala said it would help and now whatever I am sends fucking body-hackers running for cover and I’m a freak I’m a goddamned—”
“Ma’am, calm down.” I shouldn’t initiate contact, but—
“Don’t you think I’m trying?” she sobs. “That’s what this was supposed to solve! If I could calm down just because somebody told me to, my family wouldn’t have booked me into experimental therapy to solve me, Jesus, if you ever had a panic attack you’d know you can’t just calm down, it’s not that simple, I can’t—”
“You’re right,” I say, shamed.
She stops, shocked. “What?”
“I’ve had panic attacks. You’re right. I shouldn’t have said that.”
She blinks away tears, struggling to focus on me. I must look threateningly alien; four bulky blood-spattered limbs, my gunports still smoking, my combat helmet darkened to an impenetrable onyx. “You have panic attacks?”
“They wouldn’t diagnose me with PTSD,” I whisper. “They said you couldn’t get it from watching people die through a computer monitor. But … you can. And … yeah. I should know better. I can’t just yell at you to get it together.” There’s an awkward silence where I feel I have to offer her something, so I add: “I fix it by doing maintenance. Rerunning mission logs. It calms me down.”
“I’ve been doing the breathing exercises they taught me,” she says. “But my breathing’s different. I don’t think I have a heartbeat.” She chuckles. “I don’t … I don’t know what you’re seeing, but I suspect my biofeedback class will be at a loss when I get back.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m … not getting back to my calmness classes, am I?”
Scylla and Charybdis are scanning the complex locks on the prison door, their intrusion routines mapping the best ways to disable the locks with minimum evidence. I’m wondering if my nonlethal weaponry would even work on her altered physiology.
And I’m entering in new parameters. New and terrifying parameters.
“I don’t know you that well, Silvia. So I can’t say what helps your panic attacks. Are you the sort of person who deals better once they know the full truth?”
She sucks in a breath. “Mama was always honest about my condition. My sister, Vala—she always told me when I wasn’t fit to be out in public. So … I think? I think I do better with honesty?” Her cilia flatten. “Tell me the truth.”
The door clicks open. I sidestep inside, leaving one arm—Scylla—hanging out the door. Even through my bio-filters, her prison smells of a vinegary fear-sweat that stings my nostrils.
This close, she has a strange beauty; it’s not a human beauty, but she looks like alien artwork splayed out on the table. She’s breathing through her nose, neck craned as far off the table as her restraints will allow, shaking with terror but staring into my HUD.
She’s looking straight into the eyes of what she believes is her executioner.
I can’t help but respect that.
I crook Scylla so she hangs out around the prison entrance, pointed towards the door; the thick bulletproof glass feels like scant cover. I configure Charybdis to target her manacles. Silvia looks into my gunports, chest hitching.
I depolarize my helmet so she can see my face as I program in the last of the changes. “Hey. Look at me.”
She swallows; I note that she can swallow. “I said”—she pulls her eyes away from my gunports to meet my gaze with delicate dignity—“that I wanted the truth.”
“Hey, you stifled that bitch!” Donnie calls out cheerfully. “Lemme see the package before we seal her up!”
I close my eyes, feeling the unreality of impending nonexistence again. We’re about to enter into computerized combat once Donnie comes into range; I might not know when I die.
“The truth is, I’ll free you,” I whisper. “But Donnie’s got better weaponry than I do. And if he shoots first, we’re dea—”
Gunfire.
* * *
The inch-thick glassteel wall fractures in snowflake patterns as Donnie’s shoulder-mounted cannons light up in response to my ambush. Donnie himself is goggle-eyed, baffled why his guns are firing and his legs are propelling him towards me.
He hits me so hard I gray out. Glassteel showers down as I’m slammed back and forth, my defensive routines smashing his guns away before I realize I was in his line of fire, so close I can feel the kick of Donnie’s guns vibrating through my armor plating.
He’s twice my size. My nuBone hardpoints shear free as he slams into me over and over again. Though I’ve programmed my counterblows to crumple his gunports, there’s no law saying we have to exchange gunfire.
I’m being beaten to death by a fifteen-hundred-pound cyborg.
“Get off him!”
A blur of gray. Donnie flies backwards—something’s punched him hard enough to send a ton of armored limbs sailing back into a rack of monitors.
Silvia freezes next to me, her Frankensteined body frozen as though she no longer trusts herself. Perhaps she shouldn’t; her human head is panting, but her knotted gray chest fibers don’t move.
Whether Silvia realizes it or not, her body’s settled into a perfect combat pose: legs spread wide for balance, her weight distributed evenly to allow her to dive for cover or put
her full weight behind a punch. Her cilia rustle like dandelion tufts, one cluster-spiral pointed towards Donnie, another spiral quivering at me.
It is difficult not to note the diagonal arc of bullets embedded in her chest, because they’re still sizzling in her knurled alien muscle. But Silvia manages to overlook them, because she’s staring at Donnie’s body hanging limply between his four limbs.
“I shouldn’t have punched him.” Her hands flicker before her face in a weird flurry; it takes me a second to realize that was her crossing herself at lightning-fast speeds, praying for Donnie’s safety. “I get nervous, I panic, I get violent. Sometimes I hit Mom and Vala when they can’t calm me down, and oh dear Lord, what’ll happen when I get scared and I punch someone’s head in.”
“No, no, you definitely should have punched him,” I assure her. “Of all the people, he’s the guy to punch.”
I stare at her hands; her knuckles aren’t even scraped. Her arms look like human appendages, but her fists are strong enough to dent titanium without getting scratched.
“But I didn’t know I was punching him!” she cries. “I just saw him go after you, and—”
Donnie’s limbs whirr back to life after their diagnostic-checks cycle—and then there’s the sound of four car crashes. Donnie’s limbs, sensing he’s still alive but unconscious, geared back up into a defensive “kill last known targets” mode—
Silvia’s staved in his remaining gunports, then slammed him into the wall deep enough that the steel’s crumpled around his limbs, trapping him.
That implies a tremendous strength—and I’ll admit that when I shot her manacles off, I was hoping she had some tricks up her sleeve. But judging from the horrified way she’s staring at her fingers, I don’t think she planned the tricks.
“This is bad,” she mutters. “This is really bad. I’m not in control. I’m just … triggered.”
It’s not the time to have a heart-to-heart talk, not with the NJPD inbound, but she’s slipping into noncombatant shock.
“Okay.” I speak slowly, feeling my way through the words, realizing there’s nothing in my psychotherapy data banks equipped to deal with this situation. “So you’ve got a body that’s reacting before you put conscious input into it. I’m gonna guess you weren’t a fan of prosthetic armaments beforehand?”
A shaky laugh. “I thought you guys were freaks.”
“We are.”
She laughs again.
“So I know it’s scary, Silvia—your name’s Silvia?”
She bobs her head as quickly as an eyeball jitters. Yet even with her inhuman speed, I can see it as the shy, girlish gesture she intended.
“But while I know nobody likes to lose control, Silvia, your body’s autopilot was crazy precise. Look at him; you punched him into a wall and left him breathing. And see those three dents? One in his left shoulder, one in his right forearm, one in his upper thigh?”
“Jesus, I can punch through titanium, what are my hands made of?”
“Look at those three dents, Silvia.” Why do I sound like my trauma counselor? “Focus on those dents. Know why that’s amazing?”
“Wh-why?”
“Because I’m willing to bet you’ve never read a Gressinger-Sauer Omnipotent schematic—but those are precisely the three spots you’d have to hit to disable his front-facing weaponry. See? You even got a two-for-one here, smashing his rail gun and pinching the ammo feed to his forearm.”
She leans in. I suppress a flinch. Her movements are birdlike, so fast she appears to blink between states; I’ll guess they were planning on refining her combat reflexes, then working on that whole “moving like a human” thing later.
But then she traces her finger slowly across the crushed machinery. She looks at Donnie, who breathes raggedly inside his deflated airbags; he’ll wake up baffled, needing to run his combat logs before he realizes he got into a firefight that lasted 7.8 seconds.
She stands, hypnotized by Donnie as he groans and shakes his head.
“Lemme give him some medicine.” I lift up Donnie’s helmet to have Scylla give him a hypodermic injection. In truth, Donnie’s already waking up—which I’m glad to see, because he’s been out for forty seconds. Any longer, and Silvia’d have given him permanent brain damage.
Still, Silvia doesn’t need to know this “medicine” is actually a heavy sedative. The last thing I want is Donnie waking up and working his way free.
She breathes a sigh of relief as she watches me “help” Donnie.
“I didn’t kill anybody.” She does her hyperfast cross-blur again before touching her fingers to her lips in prayer.
She’s so thankful for his continued existence that I’m really glad I didn’t dial in an “accidental” overdose.
“No,” I say. “I don’t think you can, unless you want to.”
She whirls on me, almost too fast to track. “I don’t want to kill anybody! I’m not here to murder people!”
I bring up my hands in surrender. “That’s good. That’s good. People shouldn’t want to kill.” I suppress a snarky because killing’s my job. “It actually takes a lot to get most new recruits to kill, so … maybe your body’s doing what you want it to do before you know what that is.”
“That’s … not exactly comforting. I don’t have good instincts. That’s why I needed Mama and Vala to double-check me. For me, a body that runs on automatic pilot is—”
“FREEZE.”
A single cop car has pulled up at a discreet distance outside the shipping container, lights flashing. My long-range scanners pick up a trio of drones in the far distance, soaring in behind them for backup—but the two NJPD huddled inside are definitely not getting out of the car’s armored protection until they’re certain the body-hackers in the area have sent peace-tie confirmation.
Yet the cop cars’ gunports are open in case we don’t stand down.
Silvia launches herself at the threat.
* * *
The patrol cars’ guns fire—long-range taser-darts with diamond tips and embedded microbatteries designed to stun a PCP rager.
Silvia leaps twenty feet into the air, a sailing arc that carries her up out of the vertical range of the NJPD’s defensive weaponry, which was not designed to handle superleaping Death From Above attacks. My legs jerk me back deeper into the shipping crate as thin darts shatter against corrugated steel.
She’s hugging herself as she soars across the fifty-foot gap to the patrol car, doing her best to disable her body’s reflexive defense reactions.
All the failure cases I’d outlined for today’s mission involved New Jersey’s finest getting involved. Those “police cars” are lightweight tanks: heavily armored, bristling with antipersonnel weaponry, and capable of calling in an entire state’s worth of judicial mayhem down upon us.
Even Donnie would have stood down rather than go up against the cops.
But this will not end well if I don’t intervene.
I raise my hands in surrender and step out straight into an EMP cluster. Come on, boys. Like I’m not shielded? Then again, they probably still think I’m a bot—normal body-hackers wouldn’t be so stupid as to start a firefight in broad daylight.
Silvia lands hard enough on the patrol car to crack the bulletproof windshield—her hands also flicker into surrender, but the car’s short-range defenses fill her eyes with pepper spray and then she darts around the car, smashing in its defenses.
Other cop cars pull into position.
Of course they sent multiples to deal with six kill-crazy body-hackers. Every cop in town must be on their way here in addition to those inbound drones.
“She’s trying to surrender!” I yell. But words never beat bullets when it comes to getting people’s attention. I broadcast medical-emergency codes to anyone who’ll listen—but they’ve wi-fi–jammed the air so I have zero hope of connecting.
“I’m surrendering!” she screams, except as she says it another cop car fires bullets at her—real bullets; they’ve s
topped fucking around—and Silvia leaps off the first wrecked car to launch herself at the second, shrieking in terror.
“Stand down!” I yell. The gunfire’s deafening. “She’s primed to go after threats! Stop firing at her and she’ll—”
Unknown drone profile.
Unknown drone profile.
Unknown drone profile.
Being properly paranoid, I’ve loaded every piece of New Jersey Police Department hardware into my profile database.
These drones aren’t government-approved police drones.
I enhance the distant images: these are heavy-duty delivery drones the size of beefy refrigerators, their bellies rippling an LED sky-blue to camouflage them from the people below, their sides curved to bounce radar away. They’ve got the drone-standard quadruple propellers, sheathed in microfiber against impact. Their bulky bodies bristle with hypodermic needles.
Yet more than that: these drones’ metal structures are formed from baroque curves, filled with erratic gaps, drafted by AIs with no concern for aesthetics but a perfect knowledge of how little material you can use to hold a drone together before structural integrity suffers.
This is our unknown enemy’s second wave, designed to bring Silvia home.
“Silvia!” I yell. “Stay away from those drones! Do not let them get near you!”
She’s ping-ponging between the cop cars, smashing them to bits one demolished piece of weaponry at a time. She’s screaming, “Stop! Please! Don’t make me hurt you!”—but whenever she hits one cop car another fires at her and she rebounds over to neutralize that ordnance: classic system-based escalation.
The cop cars are riddling her with computer-precise headshots—but the bullets flatten against her hair before sliding to the ground. Silvia’s face looks human, but her skull is made of something hard enough to deflect gunfire.
The cops themselves are crouched down with their hands over their heads, terrified. Few policemen are willing to go all RoboCop and amputate limbs permanently to use government-loaned prosthetics—so they rely on their RoboCars, which mow down purse-snatchers and could definitely incapacitate me.
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