Herbie’s racing down the freeway, firing at inbound cars, sending traffic spinning out into guardrails with most of their momentum dispersed. But when I say “most,” that’s still a thirty-five-miles-per-hour crash, whiplashy if not fatal, so I’m querying Herbie’s onboard physics engines to prevent the spinouts, managing a complex web of interactions to stop the IAC’s kamikaze tendencies.
“Mat? Are you okay?”
“People are dying, Silvia—should we stop?”
The words flow out of my mouth before I realize I’ve said them. But sure enough, even the idea of surrender steals the wind from Silvia’s newfound sails; she grips the seat to steady herself even though we’re moving in a straight line.
She crouches down, her lips close to my faceplate’s audio pickups. Her breath is ragged.
“They won’t let Mama and Vala go, will they?” she asks. “Now the IAC’s brought them in, they’re … they’re loose ends, aren’t they?”
I hadn’t thought that far ahead, but Silvia’s mother and sister haven’t been my priorities. Yet when I consider their situation through Silvia’s perspective, the odds that the IAC would kidnap two innocent people, torture them, and then set them free doesn’t seem in line with the IAC’s motivations. At best, Silvia’s family will spend their lives in one of the IAC’s fabled automated punishment facilities.
“No,” I say. “I don’t think so.”
“And they won’t kill them either. Otherwise they’ve got no leverage on me if I turn myself in.”
They can torture you, I think, but as I look into Silvia’s face I see her indomitable willpower. The same ferocity that kept Silvia going through mental disorders won’t let her give in to the people who murdered her family.
Some people, when they panic, they run, I told her once. The reason they chose you, Silvia, shitty as that is, is because when you’re scared … you fight.
“I’m not sure they can break you without your family.”
“Then this is a rescue mission,” she says calmly, as Herbie blows past what the IAC informs me is an ER nurse on her way home off to the side of the road. “We have to get to that smartcar hub, lose this trail, and find a way to save Mama and Vala.”
“This man has a six-year-old daughter at home who loves him more than anything—whoops, you just broke his neck.”
“I don’t know if I can do this, Silvia.” I can’t concentrate on the blur of GUIs; I’m trying to refine Herbie’s routines for safely terminating a car’s momentum, but I’m thinking of weeping kids at their father’s funeral.
Silvia grabs my chin. “They’ll lie to you to break you.”
“They’re doing a pretty good job.” As if to accentuate that, the cop cars rake Herbie’s armor plating with anti-vehicle armaments. Even though I know Herbie can take it, I flinch.
“They know where I’ll break.” Silvia thumps her chest. “They know where you’ll break.” She presses her palm across my bullet-cracked armor. “But they don’t know what happens when the two of us are together. Now save those people while I take care of those cars.”
She leaps back to the cop cars, which veer aside once they realize she’s coming for them—but she’s anticipated their motion, grabs the bumper, hauls herself up over the hood as she laughs, realizing what a gift the IAC has given her—
And I instruct my audio-filters to strip out the cop cars’ announcements—she’s right, it’s propaganda—as I do on-the-fly adjustments to see the best place to hit a tire. It’s not easy; the IAC’s now aware my main defense is blowing out tires, so they’re swerving the cars the second they come into police override range.
But I’m analyzing the logs with a rapidity that years of huddling inside Yoyodyne Labs gave me, each car giving me more data to build a physics model that tells us where to shoot a tire to alter the car’s trajectory and momentum. Herbie fires in erratic spurts—blam-blam, blam-blam-blam—as his onboard computers blow the tires at carefully controlled intervals to maximize drag.
We’re a few miles from the exit; my guns should be back online in a couple minutes; is this looking as good as I think it is?
And Silvia’s hanging off the cop car’s side as the other one tries to nudge me off the road. She’s screaming, “Shut up stop hurting my Mama you leave her alone,” as she sinks her fingers deep into the hood before reaching down to yank out the front axle, the flesh on her hand smoking from the wheel’s rotation—
And my logs are giving me the best news I could ask for, a graph of potential fatalities based on the accidents we’ve seen thus far—that first horrible accident had a 13.4 percent chance of a fatality and a 56 percent chance of debilitating injury, but each accident’s been decreased to a .06 percent chance of fatality as we race towards the smartcar hub—
And as the first cop car rumbles to a stop, Silvia leaps off its dying bulk to land on the second cop car—but it moves forward in a burst of speed, juking right to throw her off balance so she has to punch through a reinforced window to hang on. The cop car races forward towards me, Herbie veering to one side in a vain attempt to avoid the incoming collision—which, given the cop car outweighs us two-to-one, will be enough to flip Herbie over—
I still don’t have a seat belt on—
Silvia crawls along the cop car’s side, flapping like a bizarre flag, crawling back to safety before she gets pulped—except the remaining cop car isn’t trying to ram us.
It was trying to pass us.
Silvia’s screaming, “Don’t listen to them, Mat! This is their fault, not yours!” and I realize the IAC must be speaking to me except I’ve filtered out their broadcasts—the car zooms past us as Silvia hauls herself through the broken window and into the car’s interior in one convulsive movement.
Herbie slows down as the cop car pulls out in front of us, his threat package assuming the car will slam on its brakes—but the cop car puts distance between us as it cruises past, its rear window turning a lightning-streaked white as Silvia smashes the bulletproof protective shield free—
The cop car aims itself at an angle down the smooth highway, engines roaring.
Silvia crouches on the trunk, hauling two dazed men in blue uniforms out of the interior, then leaps off to safety as the car bounces over the grassy median.
The physics engine shows me she’s leapt away from the car, reducing her speed so the cops will hit the ground at 40 per hour instead of 120, but there’s still road rash aplenty for those poor bastards.
But Silvia’s still shouting: “Stop them! Stop them!” even as she falls to the ground. And I realize:
The cop car’s aimed straight for a head-on collision with someone else.
I’m instructing Herbie to knock the incoming civilian vehicle aside, but I don’t have the firepower to disable a cop car in time—not with the IAC’s computerized steering routines controlling the car.
The cop car smashes at 108 miles per hour into that inbound car going at a tires-just-shot-out 83 miles per hour—191 miles per hour of bone-crushing force.
The woman in the incoming car wasn’t even wearing a seat belt.
Her body smashes through the windshield, a thin woman in a fluttering blue dress sailing like a bloody comet over the median, arcing down to bounce with hideous thumps onto the pavement.
—blue was the dress the mourners wore in Kabul—
Herbie screeches to a stop. Because he knows, just as I know, that I can’t leave a dead woman behind. She’s dead, she must be, nobody could survive that crash, but if I drive away I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering if I could have done anything to save her, and my faceplate fogs up with tears as I leap out of Herbie towards the corpse—
She’s breathing.
Oh, thank God, she’s breathing.
She’s dying, but maybe I can comfort her in her last moments, and that’s selfish but my God what have I done? My biological-response packages are trying to inject mood stabilizers but I’m refusing, a man should be traumatized when he’s watched a
woman die, and I don’t want the sedatives to dull any moment I could spend paying attention to this victim’s dying breaths.
She lies faceup on the cool highway road, surrounded by fragmented safety glass glittering beneath the streetlights. Her tears glimmer faint purple in the reflected glow of my peace-ties. Her brown eyes are wide as she stares up at the stars, her dress in tatters, and she’s repeating a mantra in a childish, singsong voice:
“I don’t want to hurt anyone I don’t want to hurt anyone they make me they make me…”
She’s a gaunt black woman in her midforties, her cheeks etched with a long history of agony, and as I bend down to see what medical care my paramedic routines can provide, she whips around to look me in the eye, her head moving so quickly I think she must have broken her neck.
“I don’t want to, understand? I don’t want to…”
“I don’t—” I swallow. “I don’t understand.”
Her eyes flicker down to her mangled body, her head bobbing.
Her blue dress has peeled away in tatters like a snakeskin, revealing not sopping red wounds but gnarled twists of dragonfly green. My paramedic routines throw red complaints into my heads-up display:
Inhuman physiology.
“They make me they make me THEY MAKE ME,” she screams, as Silvia shouts, “Mat!” just before something smashes into my faceplate hard enough to crack my teeth.
* * *
Something hits me hard, three times, hard enough my onboard airbags kick in to minimize the concussion. I stagger back as my limbs fight for balance, fight to block the incoming blows, fight to keep me alive as something smashes into me like a machine-gun car crash—
“Mat!” There’s a green streak as Silvia tackles whatever’s hitting me, rolling away in strobe-thrashing insectile limbs—
She’s dead.
I watched her die.
New threat detected.
My HUD says it as if to contradict me, but I can’t pay attention, my chest is constricted as if somebody caved it in, and I’m watching Silvia and this new woman thrashing and I can’t make sense of it, because that woman is dead, I saw her launched through the windshield, and part of me realizes she must have lived, she’s wrestling with Silvia, but my body reacted like I got some poor innocent woman killed—
—like the crowd of weeping civilians, digging my last target out of the rubble—
—like the little boy I thought was a dog who went up in fire—
—like the crumpled car roof by the freeway, the windows filled with white airbags—
And my chest hitches because even though I know nobody died I can’t tell my body they didn’t, my bloodstream’s flooded with adrenaline panic because the worst thing happened, I got more people killed, this wasn’t supposed to happen, this is why I plan, this is why I plan, and—
She’s not dead. You didn’t kill her.
She’s not dead. You didn’t kill her.
Why is she alive? I can’t make sense of it. I should make sense of it, but things are moving too fast.
Peace-tie expires in 1:27, my HUD alerts me—it’s cracked, and my head lights up with the high mosquito whine as the military-grade onboard sensors scan my skull for fractures. Threat package reaction:
Retreat.
My limbs jog me backwards as the woman (the dead woman) slams Silvia to the pavement, screaming, “They won’t let me kill myself so I have to capture you instead,” as she grabs Silvia and hauls her limbs off like a kid yanking the wings off a fly, crying, “They’ll grow back everything grows back!” I see Silvia’s arm stretching before Silvia clouts her and yells, “Don’t do this, join us, you don’t have to obey them,” and rolls away—
I jerk to a halt a hundred feet back, the readouts helpfully reminding me this is the maximum distance I had requested to be from Silvia on foot, did I want to override? The threat packages bounce me back and forth in mincing steps precisely one hundred feet away from Silvia, mirroring Silvia’s wary circling of the new woman with computerized precision, getting weaponless me one hundred feet away from the threat but no farther.
I’m trying to figure out how to override my controls, but they’re a blur and I can’t figure out how to work them anymore, which is stupid, this is simple, why can’t I simple?
—and Silvia’s screaming, “We can help you, they want to turn me into you, don’t you want to escape?” as she tumbles away from another assault and the woman weeps, “There is no escape they keep you alive when you die,” battering Silvia as she retreats. I’m trying to get closer but I can’t remember how to install the new threat package so my feet dance at the tether’s edge—
The HUD informs me I’m in post-traumatic shock. It asks the question it’s been instructed to ask me in this situation:
Did you actually get anyone killed today? Y/N.
Oh God.
That’s usually the good question.
As I wonder, the statistics modules inform me that there is, in fact, a 19.31 percent chance that someone died in my car crashes tonight, and an 11.75 percent chance that two or more people died, and my throat closes tight as a noose as I look at those figures and realize there’s a one in five chance someone died tonight because of me—
The (dead) woman’s got Silvia on the ground again, she’s dribbling hot tears on Silvia’s face as she apologizes for dismembering her, her alien hands trembling as she pulls Silvia apart with skilled expertise.
And Herbie opens up on the woman, its sluggish systems having decided this new woman’s enough of a threat that it can’t wait for my manual approval. It fires illegal high-caliber slugs through the (dead) woman’s chest, tearing away fist-sized chunks, deforming her striated body—
She’s not dead. You didn’t kill her.
But you killed someone tonight, didn’t you?
I’m trying to override my controls, but that 19.31 percent chance of fatality swells to fill my vision, accusing me of bringing a war zone to a New Jersey freeway, knowing the IAC and the cops and the IAC’s enemy would have to come after Silvia with everything they had—
Silvia’s begging again, Mat’s helped me, he can help you, but all I can hear is Trish’s voice: You spend so much time working to fix the things that went wrong, you never consider the things that went right. And she’s right, the IAC killed people as a psych-ops to get in my head; I shouldn’t be thinking about the 19.31 percent chance someone died on my watch, I should be thinking about the 100 percent chance everyone would have died on that freeway and the 80.69 percent chance I saved all of them, but—
The not-dead woman has leapt across the highway, howling, to land dead center on Herbie’s hood. She tears off the roof, destroys the engine with three precise blows that send gear-shrapnel flying, hurls the windshield at the drone, making a noise like a beaten dog as she flips Herbie’s three-ton chassis over.
19.31 percent chance 19.31 percent chance 19.31 percent chance. I try to look away because my peace-tie’s expired, my weapons are online, I can’t remember how weaponry works, and I can see Trish reaching across the table to grab my hand, telling me You’re too hard on yourself, Mat, but I can’t do that math, it’s never the people I saved, it’s always the people who died.
“I’m doing you a favor!” not-dead woman says as she advances on Silvia, Silvia’s newfound confidence draining away now that she’s facing a trained operative. “Pain comes from the illusion of free will, they will strip you of free will and when they are done you will feel nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing.…”
“Then why can’t you stop crying?” Silvia asks.
Silence. The not-dead woman stands rooted to the asphalt, shuddering like an off-kilter motor, her lips forming incoherent syllables. Then she straightens, craning her neck down at an improbable angle to examine herself with the horror of a woman waking into a nightmare.
Her head snaps up to Silvia.
“You!” she bellows. “You don’t remind me! You don’t! You don’t!”
She le
aps after Silvia so quickly that my legs propel me forward twenty feet to match her distance, the two snarling up in a ball of limbs, yet the not-dead woman has had IAC training, Silvia struggles but she’s overmatched—
The not-dead woman has Silvia in a headlock. She’s pulling, Silvia’s neck stretching like taffy, threatening to yank off—
My vision snaps into focus.
A cold, efficient part of me wakes up pissed.
I pull up Vito and Michael’s upgraded weapons loadouts, playing back what Donnie said to Silvia when he’d held us hostage: the IAC has informed me a high-explosive shell can tear your body to shreds, just like anything else caught in mortar fire.
These are black-market prosthetic armaments.
I choose a missile and tell Michael where to make the hit.
As the missile fires I see the not-dead woman hell-bent on tearing Silvia’s head off, so lost in rage and despair that she doesn’t even dodge—
The missile hits her center mass, burying itself deep.
She flinches just long enough for Silvia to dive free.
A burst of light. The not-dead woman’s torso is shredded, disintegrating fibers scattered everywhere, half her head unraveled. Even a direct hit from a low-yield missile can’t obliterate her; it spreads her body into a dying spaghetti tangle.
I should feel triumphant, I do, until I see Silvia falling to her knees by the strung-out corpse. She’s crossing herself, saying a prayer for this poor woman because there but for the grace of God go I.
And I wonder if I could have said anything that would have saved this IAC victim. I wonder what would have happened if I’d spoken, if I’d gone with the nonlethal option.
Except I don’t have those options anymore. I shot an innocent woman.
She’s dead.
I killed her.
* * *
“Mat, are you okay?”
* * *
“Mat! Talk to me, I—”
* * *
Automatic Reload: A Novel Page 18