“You’ll meet up with us after you’ve completed your mission, right?”
Her cheer is soap-bubble fragile, ready to collapse into panic. I don’t like lying to her, but …
I check my inventory: no mortars, no missiles, 37 percent rifle ammo and short-range shotguns. Not much for the combat I expect to see.
I’ve chosen to prioritize the safety of Silvia’s family over mine. That’s not open for debate. And I won’t tell her the odds of her new boyfriend’s survival when she needs to focus on her family.
“I’ll get there one way or another,” I lie, hoping Trish will be able to keep her in line when Silvia gets back to the escape vehicle to discover that yeah, I’m dead, and good God I want one last cigar and a makeout session with Silvia before I die.
Instead, I go over the plan one more time.
* * *
The E. L. Mustee facility is an enormous space for fourteen body-hackers to cover. Donnie’s spread out his men according to what must be IAC tactics, two on each road leading into the factory. The live feed from the city’s public cameras shows the sparse 10:00 A.M. crowd strolling to a halt as they notice the heavily armed—literally—mercenaries pacing to burn off their precombat jitters, peering towards the horizon.
Donnie’s men are not, shall we say, top quality. Three are pathetic one-limbers, having replaced an arm with weaponry but not having the guts to fully commit. That makes them more approachable at parties, sure, but once the bullets fly they’ll be at the mercy of those slow, slow meat-speeds.
They stand, dwarfed, by the facility, which is surrounded by electrified fences and long stretches of well-mowed lawn so that anyone sneaking in will have to cross a big open space.
The rest—well, it’s hard to extract fine details from the city’s public cameras, as the video is stuttering as thousands of people tune in to Smyrna’s public feeds, anxious to watch the mayhem. But Donnie’s new hires have the low-rent look of mercenaries who either need excitement more than they want a paycheck, or need a paycheck more than they want anything.
Trish murmurs, “Oh, my emails will go over gangbusters.” She hits “send” on a private email to the thirteen body-hackers who are not Donnie.
You can see them squint as the priority email hits their in-boxes. Then they glance at the guy standing next to them.
Poison’s in the water.
But whether they’re packing one limb or three they’ve all got their gunports open towards the road, and onlookers are leaning out of the windows, shouting to clueless pedestrians to get inside, and Donnie’s scowling and stomping and firing rounds into the ground like a matador demanding a bull to charge.
And then—
“This exploit is piggybacked upon BlackLaura’s,” Trish explains to Violet, holding up an ISB stick. “You have to insert the exploited software physically into the admin port—but once you do, it’ll wipe all video-camera footage, and forensic evidence will make it look like the exploit we used last night was a virus spreading from smartcar facility to smartcar facility.”
Trish’s tablet, which she’s propped on a shelf behind her so Violet can’t avoid seeing it as they chat, shows Silvia. Violet keeps glancing guiltily over at her, thinking of the sad story Trish told her about Silvia’s kidnapping and the impending enslavement of a hundred other people like Silvia.
Remember, kids, you can be truthful and manipulative.
Violet plucks the exploit-stick from Trish’s hand, rolls it between thumb and forefinger. “So you’re asking me to hand you control of my cars again.”
Trish grimaces, as if she’d rather not have put it that way, but nods.
“You’re asking me to risk a job I’m on the verge of getting fired from.”
Trish jerks her head towards Silvia’s image—which was chosen not to show “Silvia the badass warrior” but “Silvia the overwhelmed panic-disorder patient.” The screen splits into two images of Silvia, and then four, multiplying to imply what the IAC will do to infinite Silvias unless someone stops them.
“It’s for a good cause,” Trish says.
And the cars come in from every direction, zooming down the roads, a roaring river of reflective orange vehicles revving up to top speed as they aim themselves straight at the E. L. Mustee facility.
Some are battered where they’ve smashed through police barricades; most have smoking gunshots through the hoods where various antidefense mechanisms have tried to take them out, their bumpers flecked with car paint. Some flop along on burst tires, struggling towards top speed. The body-hackers look comically outgunned as the cars race towards the factory, two armed men standing in an access road as they face down a freeway’s worth of zooming traffic.
Donnie fires first, an illegal mortar blasting out a vast pothole and shattering the Waffle House’s windows. But the cars are like spawning salmon, zooming up onto the sidewalks, plowing through garbage cans, so desperate they’ll fight their way upstream past any danger; the roads leading into New Castle County are littered with crumpled smartcars where cops and IAC drones have tried to stop them.
The surviving cars aim themselves at their targets.
Of course, the IAC has known they were coming. Hell, it hit the newsfeeds when smartcar facilities got compromised, and it wasn’t hard to see where the cars were homing in on, and now every looky-loo’s tuning in to see what’ll happen once the smartcar invasion hits Smyrna.
But there’s basically two rules of warfare:
come at them where they’re not expecting you, or
come at them with such overwhelming force that it doesn’t matter if they know you’re coming.
Brute force is always the better option if you have it.
“Fire!” Donnie yells, which is of course redundant as the body-hackers’ programming has them firing the millisecond the cars are within their gun range, and weaponized drones hidden in the facility’s courtyard are rising into the air and firing, firing, firing. And—
Windows open. A skirl of electrified raptors spiral upwards from the area I’d marked as a terrarium, zipping out to dive-bomb the cars with outstretched talons crackling with electricity, and what the hell are the hawks doing there when the hawks belong to the IAC’s enemies?
Individual cars go down. But the smartcar armada’s velocity shoves the disabled cars forward, shunting wrecks aside into alleys so the others can keep moving, and Donnie screams “How many are there?”
“You’re gonna need more than four hundred cars to take those bastards down,” Violet says. “Is that software copyable?”
Trish shakes her head. “You’ve misunderstood; this just looks like a virus,” she explains. “Enough to make the forensic agents at SmartCar HQ paranoid we found some hardware exploit. It’ll give enough deniability that you’ll probably keep your job. But … it can’t spread. Not on its own. You’d have to travel to each smartcar hub individually and install it via the physical access port.” She squints at Violet, who crosses her legs impatiently to inform Trish she knows that already. “You’re a local sysop. That doesn’t get you physical access to other smartcar branches … does it?”
Violet takes a contemplative draw on a cherry-red vape pen, exhales vanilla-scented nicotine mist. “No. No, it doesn’t.”
“Then why would you need more than one copy of the software?”
Violet smacks her lips, pondering how to get her point across. “There used to be five of us working in my department.”
Trish stays silent, lets Violet work through whatever she has to say.
“They never lay you off,” Violet continues. “That means they’d have to pay you unemployment. No, they analyze some part of the job that used to be so complex it needed human intervention, then automate what you did, then crack down to see who they can fire first. Show up thirty-five seconds late? Fired. Refuse to work an extra six hours to cover for the guy they fired yesterday because he arrived thirty-five seconds late? You don’t have the company spirit.
“I’ve stuck
it out as long as I can, but…” She plucks at her ill-fitting white-and-gold uniform, which makes her look like a janitor with sad military aspirations. “They treat us like shit and act like we should be grateful, and every year they fire the most experienced guys and hire cheaper idiots we have to cover for, and I know. I know that long before I’m dead, these assholes will find a way to replace what I do and me and my friend’s job at SmartCar will be replaced by some clueless fucker who works eighty hours a week, travelling from facility to facility to do some twice-a-month check-in.
“Bad enough they’re looking to replace me. But God fucking dammit, they could leave me with some dignity.”
Violet slumps, taking down the tablet to look at Silvia.
“We bitch sometimes, you know,” she continues. “In private chat lines. Because if you complain on your social media, that’s a fireable offense. But we have places where we console the last poor schmuck who got tossed out on his ear.”
Trish nods solemnly. “We can copy this software.”
“And I can talk to people who wanna send a message to the company.”
At least three thousand cars are converging upon the E. L. Mustee facility, coordinating their efforts with hypercomputational efficiency. Some veer off from the main inrush to smash themselves into telephone poles, the poles bouncing as the electrical wires above catch them briefly before snapping.
The town of Smyrna goes dark.
Still other vehicles race ahead to ram away any potential obstructions between them and the factory, tons of kamikaze metal aimed with pinpoint precision to clear a path at all costs. Their speakers are blaring classic movie quotes as they drive to warn off any heroic civilians: “Get out.” “Run away! Run away!” “Out of the water—now!” “Run for it, Marty!”
And one final favorite that I couldn’t resist: “It’s a trap!” (Also see: “Show Silvia Star Wars.”)
The smarter body-hackers have hauled chunks of cement to serve as protective barriers—but this facility’s got a vast perimeter, it wasn’t designed to stave off this invasion, and they only had an hour to prepare their defenses before the cars hit. The cars swerve apart to go off-road, splitting up and jouncing over the dry grass to smash through the electrified fences, carrying mangled sections of chain-link with them before ditching themselves into corners to make way for newer cars.
Some detonate, flipping over and over as they hit mines hidden in the grass. The IAC wasn’t fucking around.
Donnie dives behind a concrete barrier he hauled out front, his legs picking out the best cover for shielding, as do the other three-limbers. The two-limbers who’ve replaced their legs also have a chance. However, the poor bastards who still have meat-feet can’t move fast enough as the cars jerk aside to pick off easy targets. Their mouths open in a surprised “O” as they’re sent flying, tumbling on the ground as cars plow over their bodies until muscle and circuitry are mangled into obsolescence.
The cars have cleared straight shots at their targets, and the drones are firing and electrohawks are squawk-diving, but there’s too many inbound vehicles, and the smartcar coordinations reroute around any damaged cars to keep the inexorable flow, and wham the first car smashes into a liquid-storage tank, and wham another car smashes into that car from behind to drive in the wedge, and a sickly green fluid courses out from a split in the reinforced metal, turning into a chemical waterfall, and wham when the third car hits there’s a spark from the crumpling metal or maybe it’s the bullets or an electrohawk’s zap but the wham turns into a great lung-busting whoof as the spilled fluid catches fire in a great black smoke cloud and a swarm of erratic flame, and the fire-suppressant modules start putting it out when wham another car smashes into that—
(And I hear Silvia draw a ragged breath because her mother and sister are inside, we don’t know where the fire will spread, that’s the monstrous risk we take as monsters and as Silvia crosses herself I realize I’m crossing myself too.)
The remaining body-hackers are separated because the cars have noticed them taking cover behind the initial forward assault and they’re jamming themselves into reverse, and there is a matador, except instead of a matador it’s one body-hacker facing down four cars coming at him to smear him into the pavement.
Donnie’s stopped using his missiles because the first car he blew up almost cooked his lungs despite his cooling air-filters, and instead hops with nimble precision onto now-dead cars to blast the live ones’ engines out with an accuracy I envy. Two other body-hackers are wet streaks, the cars instructed to run their bodies over again so playing possum won’t save them, but Donnie’s untouchable—springing off at the last minute as a car rams his platform out from under him, disabling that car’s engine with three precise shots so he lands on the dying vehicle, one hand reaching out to stabilize himself as his weapons disable two other cars, creating a safe space of dead metal to use as a defensive platform.
“Jesus,” Trish whispers. “He had an hour to program that reaction package.” Even though we’re rooting for the cars we have to give Donnie silent awe.
This is what he does.
This is why he’s survived despite his other manifest sloppinesses.
But Donnie’s a small part of a big war. The cars around him smash into any structure they can get at, aiming for support pillars, some catapulted high into the air by mines, but their forward momentum sends them sailing through second-floor windows. A few angle up through stairs to do a “Heeeere’s Johnny!” through reinforced doorways. It’s an omnidirectional assault, and I hear the rumble as buildings teeter and collapse; we’re coming into view as our car joins the river and Trish tells Silvia hold back, not yet, don’t leap out.
Because the cars have smashed into cryotanks that spill icy toxins out, and they’re burying their grilles into loading docks, and the drones have fired so many rounds their ammo’s empty, and the place becomes the world’s most on-fire parking lot—just a sea of crumpled cars bumper-to-bumper for a mile in every direction.
The camera feed from city hall cuts off. As I expected. Because I know what’s coming next.
One by one, like great spiders, the Monicas come crawling out from the wreckage.
The IAC could have led with a Monica assault, I suppose, but the IAC’s leaders are smart enough to consider the optics of using their secret bioweapons as their first defense—and given they’re short-range stealth weapons, I’m not sure how much help they’d have been against the car assault. It was politically useful for the IAC to showcase the carnage—pardon the pun—of this devastating hack-threat, because nobody on the outside understands why this attack’s happening. This will look like we’re the bad guys.
But now there’s smoke everywhere to fog the satellites, and the remaining hawks are taking down incoming newsdrones. The IAC’s doing its damndest to ensure the only people who get glimpses of Monica will be townsfolk who’ll find the IAC has erased their smartphone video.
I count at least sixty Monicas skittering up the buildings, facing us—they know where we are. The IAC’s AIs probably know what car we’re in because they marked our last-minute, not-from-a-smartcar-hub insertion into the traffic flow.
This is a ground game. Donnie and the surviving body-hackers are weaving their way through the factories to get to us, and the Monicas will obliterate us once they close the distance.
Which is why I crawl out of the car so no one can get a distant shot at me, then activate Vito and Michael’s handy-dandy crowd-control bullhorns—not something I’d have packed, but military-grade weaponry comes with military priorities—and thank God we have something loud enough to talk directly to the Monicas.
Silvia clears her throat.
* * *
“I know you think you’re assassins now.” Silvia’s voice shakes a little as her words ring out across the flaming smartcars. “But I want you to remember back to when you were like me. Because you are like me—and I’m like you. The IAC chose us as test subjects because we all have the
same thing in common:
“We fought.”
The Monicas freeze on the concrete walls, their tendrils quivering as they listen to the echo of something they once were.
“You were always terrified and never strong enough, weren’t you? But you fought to keep your life together. You tried not to lean on your loved ones too hard. And when you heard of an experimental technique that might remove your panic disorder, you signed up—because you hadn’t given up.
“Do you remember that? Do you remember how hard you fought for stability before they broke you?”
An insane babble carries across the smoldering parking lot, too chaotic for even my fine-tuned audio-filters to pick out individual noises—but the Monicas are shouting in cracked, off-key voices, interrupted by basso computer sounds barking out commands the Monicas have been Pavlovian-engineered to obey.
They’re remembering, all right.
“Look—look at all we’ve laid waste to make a path for you.” Her words catch in her throat as she gets distracted by the field of burning wreckage—but that hesitation makes her sound braver. “We’ve thrown everything we’ve had at them—and it’s not enough. And it’s like always: you can get all the help you want, but in the end, it’s your struggle that gets it done.”
The Monicas are far from united. Some of them stare down at their hands, as if trying to recall the memories of human flesh. Others flick their gazes across their fellow monsters, gauging what sorts of help or threat they pose.
“We’ve burned our last chance to give you this opportunity. And believe me, I … have some idea how bad it will be if you turn against your captors and fail. The IAC is not merciful. Whatever hold they have left on you, well … they’ll use it.
“But they were going to do that anyway. They’ll use you up and toss you aside. The question is, How easy do you want to make it for them?
Automatic Reload: A Novel Page 24