Automatic Reload: A Novel

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Trish blows the dirt out of an electrical outlet, revealing a keyhole. She jangles the heavy key chain at her belt and unlocks something with a loud, metallic clunk.

  “Mind opening that trapdoor, Mat?”

  I lift up a wide wood flap with forty-eight pounds of armored steel underneath, raining down pine needles into a gray stairway.

  “If the three of us are down there, we can’t cover the trapdoor again.” Trish glances fretfully over the cleared spot in the filth. “Fortunately, it’s autumn, so no teens will be slinking out tonight.”

  It’s nice when Trish does my preparatory paranoia for me.

  Silvia sticks her head into the hole, looks around. “You mean to tell me you happened to have a safe house on the Pennsylvania border?”

  Trish decides she can’t do anything else to camouflage the trapdoor once it’s shut. “Honey, I’ve got safe houses in every state for my friends. I network. I distribute. And I make sure my resources are widely spread, which should be making you happy because that distribution is all that’s saving us from the IAC’s agents. Mat, sorry, you’re gonna have to wriggle to get those new limbs squeezed in there. Silvia, pull the door down after us?”

  She leads us into a tidy waiting room–style area, flicking on the facility’s lights. And “facility” is the term that springs to mind: the place is neutrally decorated, everything stocked away neatly as my old military digs, with low-tech reliable equipment—a propane stove, a cabinet filled with canned goods, a water tank.

  Tactically, this is a crappy position. One grenade tossed into the hole and we’re done for. Yet I have to remember that our current metric for success is “hope the IAC or its enemies don’t track us down.”

  Trish opens up a trunk filled with plastic-sealed linens, walks into the three bedrooms to place one on each bed. The layout, though a mere seven hundred square feet according to my volumetric analyzers, is designed to give privacy. I’m willing to bet the brain surgeon spent as much time fetishizing this place’s layout as I did designing Herbie.

  Poor Herbie.

  Trish fetches a card table and some fold-out chairs—nice ones made from hardwood, no skimping from our good doctor—before plunking a bottle of Wild Turkey down.

  “So,” she says. “We have set a record: the IAC set out to get you fourteen hours ago. You should have been dead nine hours back.” She pushes brimming shot glasses over to Silvia and me, raises hers tentatively.

  Silvia hesitates before she takes the shot glass. She glances over at me; I stare down into the glass to indicate Yeah, I don’t drink much either.

  We all take a bracing shot.

  Trish pours another round. “Now, I’ve hidden this cabin pretty well, but the IAC has to have forensic analysts sifting through my financial records and correlating that with our escape radius. We’ve got twelve hours before we have to assume this hidey-hole’s burned.”

  “That’s not even counting the IAC’s enemy who’s also out to capture Silvia.”

  “I didn’t even know about them! Great.” She swigs back her second shot, scrubbing the itchy bristle on her cheeks. “So what’s our plan, Mat?”

  * * *

  For some reason, Trish won’t look through my mission logs. She wants me to tell her what happened. Debriefing her over drinks is inefficient, but easier than arguing.

  I walk her through everything that went down in strictly military terms. I thought Silvia might jump in to share; instead she hugs herself, looking miserable, never taking her eyes off Trish’s plunging neckline.

  I ignore the way Silvia’s taking in Trish’s body, because I’m bracing myself for what’s coming—I’ve seen so many rude strangers ask whether Trish is a man or a woman, and even though Trish is usually gracious, it’ll put a frost on the room.

  Trish notices Silvia’s stare. She scratches the stubble between her breasts awkwardly, then asks, “Would you like me to get you a dress? There should be spare clothing in the bedrooms.”

  Silvia sniffs. “Yeah.”

  Trish returns with denim jeans and a long-sleeved lumberjack shirt. “Sorry. It’s survivalist gear. You can change in the back.”

  “Why’s she need to change in the back?” I ask. “She’s—”

  Trish puts her finger on my lip to shush me, but Vito snatches her wrist away before I can override his defense mechanisms. Silvia, sensing the awkward wrestling match, mutters, “Sorry” and scurries into a bedroom.

  Trish lowers her voice to a whisper. “It’s not normal for people to sit around naked.”

  Silvia’s discomfort snaps into focus—she was asking about a shower curtain because she wanted something clean to wrap around herself; she was searching Kiva’s apartment for clothes. All I ever wear is body armor. I’m such an asocial freak it’s never occurred to me what it’s like for a nice Catholic girl to wander around naked. No wonder she’s been on edge.

  “And you could stand to talk about your new girlfriend there like she was a human being,” Trish continues.

  I stiffen. “She’s not my new girlfriend.” I push the glass around on the table. “Things have … happened. But I’m ethical. I won’t turn this adrenaline into Stockholm syndrome.”

  She gives me an erratic head-bob double take. My body language interpreters helpfully overlay my HUD with the translation of:

  Astonishment at extreme incompetency.

  “You’re not doing her any favors by discussing her exclusively in terms of combat capacities either. Maybe you’re okay with being stared at everywhere you go, but she—”

  Silvia opens the door slowly, giving us conspicuous time to hear her coming. She’s buttoned the lumberjack shirt all the way up, the denim jeans are hip-hugging, and her arms are crossed over her chest, but …

  She looks normal.

  Now I’m staring, because Silvia could have walked in from anywhere. Her alien skin is concealed beneath the fabric. She’s become a middle-aged woman who you wouldn’t think twice about passing on the street—long, curly black hair, a brown face carved lean by stress. She could be a paramedic or a receptionist or a mom or …

  Well, anybody.

  The bourbon churns sourly in my stomach as I realize: I’d never have gotten to know Silvia without the IAC’s interference. If I’d seen her pre-IAC, I’d have slotted her as “civilian,” and done my best to protect her without getting involved—but then I’d never have known about Silvia’s encyclopedic knowledge of Fred Astaire’s dance moves or the way she chews her lip when she’s considering technical details or—

  “Mat, are you okay?”

  Crap, I am staring.

  I scratch my cheek. “It’s like that scene in every high-school drama where the nebbishy girl takes off her glasses and lets down her hair,” I say—and when Silvia flinches, I add, “in reverse.”

  Silvia blinks, unsure whether that was a compliment.

  “No, it’s…” I wave away my emergency conversational assistants as they suggest alternate dialog paths. “It’s not you. It’s not the you I know. And that’s fine, I’ll get used to this too, but … I kinda met you one way, you know?”

  Silvia’s face flushes dark. “I didn’t think less of you when you changed.”

  “You’re better.”

  Her palm cups my cheek again, tenderly protecting me—then she flickers back a step and scratches at her sleeves, annoyed how her body gives away her emotions.

  “Seriously, Silvia.” My voice is cracking again. “I’m not good with changes. It’s…”

  “Kind of his thing,” Trish says. “He tries. He tries really hard, Silvia. But you have to cut him slack for that gap between his intent and his execution.”

  I want to defend myself, saying I’m just fine as long as you’ve got me out in the field, it’s only when you take a multimillion-dollar killing machine out on a date that I’m suboptimal.

  My dialogue assistants are spamming me with potential responses ranging from snarky bon mots to studied revelations designed to make them w
eep. I’m not sure why I’m dismissing their requests. I’m not sure why I’m so unwilling to let the computer take over my personal life when I’ve sawed off my limbs to let them control my physical world.

  “Mat.” Silvia’s touch is cool against Vito’s forearm mechanisms; for a moment I envy Vito. “It’s okay. I get it. I … I’m not always so hot with the responses myself.”

  I hate being forgiven. It’s why I never put myself in a position where anyone has to forgive me. My fists are balled against my chest, cool metal against bare skin, as I try to focus on her touch and not my thoughts.

  “I think Mat would feel better if we got back to sharing intel,” Trish says, not so much a suggestion as a kind order.

  Silvia says, “Sure,” looking at me with that hooded gaze that implies she’d like a hug if I want one, and of course I can’t accept a hug so I sit down at the table and wait for Trish to tell me what she knows.

  “So we’ve committed suicide by taking on the IAC,” Trish says. “Now we decide how we go out.”

  Her cold mission analysis shouldn’t make me feel better. But it does.

  * * *

  “First option,” Trish says, pouring herself another drink—the bottle is getting perilously dry, though the only sign of Trish’s drunkenness is that she sits majestically straight. “We hide.”

  “That’s not happening.” Silvia places her hands flat on the table as if she’s ready to take down IAC drones right now. “They have my family.”

  “Good.” Trish tilts her glass towards Silvia. “Eventually we’d have to poke our heads up for resupply and the IAC’s data analysts would find us. Hiding just prolongs the inevitable—and lemme tell you, having sheltered some sad sonuvabitches who were waiting for the hammer to fall, you don’t wanna wake up every morning wondering if today’s the day they getcha.” She slams her shot glass on the table.

  We ponder our options, including tracking down the IAC’s as-yet-unknown enemy. After all, they set Silvia free; maybe we can recruit them as allies. Silvia likes the idea. Unfortunately, Trish and I both agree that anyone with the muscle to move on the IAC aren’t likely to be people with our best interests at heart. We can’t chance escaping one criminal consortium to flee into the teeth of another—not with Silvia’s family at stake.

  “What if…” Silvia’s gaze bounces between us, uncertain whether she has anything worthwhile to suggest. “What if we go to the papers? Expose me so big, the government has no choice but to investigate the IAC?” She turns to me with the wide-eyed earnestness of a student hoping they nailed the extra-credit answer. “Wouldn’t the military kill for the biology that … they … inflicted upon me?”

  I try to think of a nice way to say, They’d probably kill you first, envisioning dissection tables where they’d reverse-engineer Silvia’s corpse. Trish snorts.

  “No-go.” She sniffs her empty glass, willing more bourbon to appear, then groans and reaches for the bottle. “The press is out.”

  “Why not?”

  “That was the first thing they took over.” She rubs balled fists into her eyes. “Nobody reads papers anymore—they read websites. Time was, someone would hold up the bodega on Washington Street, and the newspaper would send someone out to make that story popular. Now that popularity flow’s reversed—if enough people post about the Washington Street burglary to their social-media accounts, the newspapers will send a reporter out to cover it. The IAC’s hacked the social-media trending accounts so their activities will never cross the threshold to be marked as notable.” She sighs. “You guys had a firefight on a New Jersey expressway. That story’s not even trending in Newark.”

  “They killed cops. That’s gotta trend.”

  “Among cops and cop families, sure. But that story won’t propagate outside the circle. Everybody gets their news from algorithms that determine what’s of interest to you these days—and they’ll ensure this story’s not interesting.” She sips. “Unless they want to make it harder for body-hackers to move around in New Jersey. Then this story will go national.”

  Silvia’s pacing with the speed of flies darting back and forth. “So we show up on the doorstep of the New York Times’s best reporter. Get face-to-face with someone so popular, their word can’t be suppressed—”

  Trish slams the bottle onto the table. “Think that wasn’t my initial instinct? Ask Mat how many reporters I know.”

  Silvia cringes. “I’m sorry—what did you—”

  “The IAC is not ethical, Silvia.” Trish leans back, sneering at the ceiling. “They’ve weaponized consumer data. Marketing departments wanted to know what movies you were discussing with your friends, what purchases signaled likely life changes, all your secret hobbies. It’s not hard to extrapolate that into bribes or blackmail. And then…”

  She waves her well-manicured hands in the air. “No. No. It’s not you. I can’t get mad at you.”

  Silvia flitters around Trish like a moth around a light, reflecting her uncertainty of wanting to comfort Trish yet respect her boundaries. Trish holds up one hand wearily in invitation.

  Silvia clasps her hand, exhaling relief.

  “I don’t like dealing with the IAC,” Trish says. “So I asked two buddies to look after me. Both three-limbers, real hard-core body-hackers—not bodyguards, but a couple of old pals I trusted to take care of me if bad things happened, you get me?

  “Then I got flooded with secure texts, asking me if I knew what had happened to Donnie. Word was, Mat had gone rogue and killed seven cops. So I booked a flight to Jersey.

  “I didn’t say why. I didn’t tell anybody where I was going. I certainly didn’t mention I knew Mat would never kill a cop, and therefore the IAC must have framed him, and therefore he needed someone to haul him out of the soup. But I guess the IAC figured what I was going to do the minute they saw me book the flight.”

  She contemplates the Wild Turkey, then mutters, “Fuck it,” and drains the bottle.

  “So what happened?” I ask.

  “They had a drone waiting outside my house.” She stares dully at the card table. “I had top-notch home defenses. I had two experienced cyber-warfare experts taking point.” She lets the bottle roll down to the floor. “Accent on ‘had.’”

  She smacks her lips, then leans over to pick up the empty bottle to place it gently in a trash can.

  “Who’d you ask to come over?” I say.

  “Dillon and Birchenough.” She walks to the cabinet, contemplating cracking open another bottle—then rinses out her glass and puts it away. “It would have been easier if I’d hired them for the job. But … they were doing me a favor. And…”

  Silvia crosses herself. I bow my head in mourning, but I’m calculating that battle’s ramifications: I knew those men. They were professionals, packing top-of-the-line hardware.

  The IAC’s drones took them down so quickly Trish can’t even say noble things about their final battle.

  Admittedly, Dillon and Birchenough went down in an ambush. But with the IAC’s deep calculations and secret weaponry, you have to expect ambushes are the default.

  “I barely got out,” Trish says. “And I had contingency plans. If you’re a big-time reporter who can make a story go viral, I’m willing to bet the IAC has a drone hovering nearby. They probably won’t assassinate you with a bullet—no, if they can put you in that body, Silvia, they can inflict fatal strokes at will. If there’s a way to get the word out, we can’t protect the people who’d tell the world.”

  “So we can’t run and we can’t go public. What’s our offensive options?”

  Trish straightens. “I wanna be clear: we will not make a dent in the IAC’s larger operations. We are a wasp declaring war upon an elephant. Dismantling the IAC would take lawyers, governments, armies. We are not that.”

  Silvia’s hyperventilating, wringing her hands in fussy meditation rituals.

  “A little warning goes a long way with this one,” I say to Trish, then squeeze Silvia’s shoulder. “Trish is actu
ally saying we’ve got a chance.”

  Trish gives us a curt nod. “We have a target. Donnie’s not bright. He hasn’t taken me off his human-resources call list yet. Just before he sicced the cops on you, he put out an all-call to hire emergency replacements for Kiva and Saladin, throwing out obscene amounts of money to any body-hacker who could meet him at a Delaware facility.”

  She taps the card table’s surface; it depolarizes, turning into a map and street-level shots of a squat industrial complex that a caption informs me is the E. L. Mustee Industrial Facility in Smyrna, Delaware. The complex is two stories high but spread out like a dormitory, surrounded by electrified fences and turrets—pretty high security for a town my onboard databases inform me has twelve thousand residents. And there’s no company logos anywhere on the site, just NO TRESPASSING signs and large vats of industrial chemicals.

  “I didn’t dare look up the direct address, lest I trigger an IAC search-alarm,” Trish says. “But doing map-searches around it gives us a good view of the site. It’s right in the line of fire for a lot of civilians.”

  She gives me a worried glance. She’s right to. Of course the IAC would put its secret factories in a sleepy city. The complex sits at the end of the small strip of local stores that makes up Smyrna’s three-stoplight main street: I can see the Waffle House where the locals eat, a grade school. I doubt the IAC hires many locals, but the town council’s gotta be happy to have a nice tax-revenue base.

  I can’t take out this installation without splash damage.

  My vision tunnels; I’m viewing that site through a drone’s camera.

  “That’s three hours away from the New Jersey docks,” Trish says. “As far as I can tell—because I can’t do any deep analysis—there’s activity inside, but no cars dropping employees off. Pretty sure that’s where the converts are guarding your mother.”