by John Scalzi
“If you want I can turn off my hearing,” Tayla said. “I do it often enough around Tony anyway.”
“Hey now,” Tony said.
Vann smiled. “It’s fine. Just don’t repeat anything.”
“Tony’s technically a patient of mine,” Tayla said. “I’ll file it under physician’s confidentiality.”
Vann turned back to Tony. “What shit are we not going to believe?”
“Chris, you asked me to look for code in the software that knocks the Integrator unconscious,” Tony said.
“Yeah,” I said. “And you found it?”
“No,” Tony said. “I told you that you needed the Integrator to be conscious to assist their client, and that still stands. What the software actually does—or can do—is much weirder. It robs the Integrator of their free will. And then it wipes their memory.”
“Explain this,” Vann said. She was suddenly very attentive.
“Integrators stay conscious for two reasons,” Tony said. “One, it’s their body and they have to have veto control over any dumbass thing a client wants to do, like pick a fight or jump out of a plane without a parachute. Two, because integration isn’t totally clean, right? The neural network transmits the client’s desires to the Integrator’s brain. The brain picks it up and moves the body and makes it do what the client wants. But sometimes the signal isn’t strong enough and the Integrator needs to step in and make it happen.”
“The Integrator has to read intent and assist,” Vann said. I suddenly realized that Tony didn’t know Vann had history as an Integrator.
“Exactly,” Tony said. “So knocking out an Integrator isn’t just morally wrong, it also defeats the purpose of integrating in the first place, which is giving the client the illusion of a functioning human body. A body with a knocked-out Integrator is going to have a hard time walking, or doing anything with anything approaching standard dexterity.”
“But someone found a way around this,” Vann said.
“I think so.”
“How.”
“The code I’m looking at plays with the Integrator’s proprioceptive sense,” Tony said. “It gives the Integrator the sense they can’t perceive their own body.”
“It paralyzes them,” Tayla said. She had clearly not turned off her hearing.
“No,” Tony said. “See, that’s the sneaky part. You don’t want to paralyze the Integrator, because then the client can’t use the body. What you want to do is rob the Integrator of any sense of their body while at the same time leaving the body receptive to input. The Integrator has lost control of the body, but the body is ready to be used.”
“The Integrator experiences lock in,” I said.
“Exactly,” Tony said. “They go Haden. But unlike us”—Tony motioned to the three of us, excluding Vann—“the body is good to go.”
“But if the Integrator is locked in, then the body isn’t good to go,” I said. “You said it yourself. They need to be there to assist.”
“That’s the other sneaky part,” Tony said. “In addition to locking in the Integrator, the code fools the brain into thinking the signal from the client is also the signal from the Integrator. So when the client says ‘Raise the arm,’ what the body hears is both the client and the Integrator saying it. And it raises the arm. Or moves the leg. Or chews the food.”
“Or jumps out of the airplane without a parachute,” Vann said.
“Or that,” Tony agreed.
“You said it also wipes out the memory,” Vann said.
“Yeah,” Tony said. “Although maybe it’s not accurate to say it wipes it out. What it does is inhibit the Integrator brain from forming long-term memories of what the client is doing. Everything exists in short-term memory only. As soon as the client disengages, everything the client was doing with the Integrator body is flushed from the brain.”
“It feels like lost time,” I said.
“But not for the client,” Vann said.
“Probably not,” Tony said. “Assuming the client’s brain is working normally, memories will be recorded normally as well.”
“So the client can do whatever they want and the Integrator won’t remember it,” Tayla said.
“Right,” Tony said. “But here’s the really fucked-up thing. The Integrator won’t remember any of it—but while it’s happening? The Integrator feels it. The code isn’t suppressing the Integrator consciousness. It doesn’t have to because it’s cut off proprioception and is dumping the consciousness into the short-term memory buffer. Writing code to suppress Integrator consciousness would just be a waste of time. So for every second the client has the Integrator locked in—”
“The Integrator feels like she’s drowning,” Vann said.
“Yeah,” Tony said. “Or that feeling you get when you’re dreaming and you can’t move. Or, well, being a Haden.”
“How does this relate to the hardware?” Vann asked.
“It relates very well,” Tony said. “The hardware is optimized to the software, not the other way around. The network has a dense concentration of filaments accessing the dorsal spinocerebellar tract, for example. That’s the part of the brain that handles conscious proprioception. Once you know the software, the hardware design makes perfect sense. This is a purpose-built network.”
“Designed to take over someone’s brain,” Vann said.
“Pretty much,” Tony said.
At the end of the alley I saw a familiar face. “I think I see Brenda Rees,” I said. I waved until she saw me. She smiled, waved back, and started walking toward us.
“And we have to get going if we want to catch our movie,” Tayla said, to Tony.
“Last question,” Vann said. “Any way this software can work on a network that’s not this one?”
“You mean on a different Integrator,” Tony said.
“That’s right,” Vann said.
“Long answer or short answer?” Tony said. Tayla groaned.
“Short answer.”
“Seems unlikely,” Tony said.
Brenda Rees reached into her handbag, pulled out a gun, and aimed it at Vann.
I yelled “Gun!” and pulled Vann down at the same time, covering her body with my threep. One bullet cracked my back panel and another pinged off my arm. I felt an excruciating pain with both and immediately turned off my pain perception. The patio of Alexander’s erupted in screams and panic. I grabbed my stunner and wheeled up to return fire. Rees was taking off down the alley with the panicked crowd.
“Oh, fuck,” Vann said. I looked down to see her bleeding from the shoulder. Tayla was already there, applying pressure.
Vann looked up at me. “The fuck you doing, Shane?” she said. “Get her.”
“Tayla,” I said.
“I got this,” she said, not looking up from Vann’s shoulder.
I ran after Rees.
Rees had run left onto Thirty-third Street. As I got onto Thirty-third I saw her go left again onto M. There was the sound of another gunshot, followed by screams. I turned the corner and was nearly knocked over by people running. I went into the street to avoid them and saw Rees halfway down the block, scanning for me.
I didn’t have a shot. There were still too many people around. I ran straight to her instead.
She saw me when I was about twenty feet from her, managed to raise her gun and take a shot at me. It either missed or nicked me in a way that I didn’t feel at the time. I barreled into her and knocked her into a wall, taking a chunk of her leg out as it jammed into a fire hose coupling. Her gun flew away.
My momentum smashed me into the wall a fraction of a second later. I let go of Rees. She scrambled away, limping out into the street, reaching for something else in her handbag. I trained my stunner on her and prepared to fire.
And then held fire when she turned and I saw the grenade in her hand, pin pulled.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I said.
Rees smiled, limped farther out into the street, and released t
he lever.
Then her face changed.
She looked confused for a second, and then saw what she had in her hands.
She screamed, dropped the grenade, and turned to run away from it. I ducked my head in against the wall and waited for the detonation.
It punched me into the wall.
Fragments from the grenade embedded into the wall above me and jammed into the glass storefronts all around me.
I looked up and around to see if there were any casualties. The only people I saw were running away too quickly to have been wounded.
I looked over to Rees.
The grenade had taken off her legs.
I went over to her and was amazed she was still alive, looking down at her body. Her left arm was a mangle. Her right arm pawed at her leg.
She saw me. “I can’t hear anything,” she said to me, shakily. “I can’t hear. Help me.”
“I’m right here,” I said, even though she couldn’t hear me. I took her right hand and held it.
She started to cry. “I didn’t want this to happen,” she said. “I didn’t choose this.”
“It’s all right,” I said. On my inside voice I was calling 911.
She stopped looking at the mess of her legs and looked at me. “You,” she said. “I remember you. Dinner. I remember.”
I nodded, to let her know I remembered her too.
“He wasn’t there the whole time,” she said. “I was there the whole time. I was. I was. But not him. He wasn’t. He wasn’t. He.”
She stopped talking. I held her until she died.
Five minutes later I looked up to see Detective Trinh looking down at me, gun drawn, two other cops behind her, both aiming at my head.
“Don’t you start,” I said.
“You want to explain this to me, Agent Shane?” Trinh said.
“It’s complicated,” I said.
“I have time.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
She motioned to Rees with her gun. “Who is that?” she said.
“For your purposes, her name is ‘Property of the FBI,’” I said.
* * *
I got back to Alexander’s and found Vann on a stretcher, oxygen mask on her face, EMTs prepping her for travel. “I’m fine,” she said.
I glanced over to Tayla, who was wiping blood from her threep with a towel the EMTs had given her. “She’s not fine,” Tayla said. “She’s got a bullet in her shoulder. It looks like it missed anything major but she’s still on the way to the hospital. I would take her to Howard so I could look after her myself, but Georgetown is closer. I’ll go with her there. I know some people. She’ll get looked after.”
“Thank you, Tayla,” I said.
“I didn’t want to see that movie anyway,” she said.
“What should I do?” Tony asked.
“I need you to go back and look at that software some more,” I said.
“Why?”
“Remember when you said that you didn’t think that software could work on a different neural network?”
“Yeah,” Tony said.
“I have a pretty good idea you were wrong about that,” I said. “Get back to the morgue. I’m sending you something.”
“You’re kidding,” Tony said, when he realized what I was saying.
“I wish I were,” I said.
“Shane,” Vann said.
I turned to my partner.
She pointed. “Your back is cracked.”
“It stopped a bullet,” I said. “I’m fine. I’ll get the panel replaced tomorrow.”
“Thank you.”
“You owe me.”
Vann smiled at that. “Rees,” she said.
“Dead.”
“How.”
“Grenade.”
“The fuck,” Vann said.
“I don’t think she was herself,” I said.
“You think she was like Sani.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I do. And there’s another thing. Before she died, I think she was telling me that the night Loudoun Pharma went up she wasn’t integrated with Samuel Schwartz the whole time she was at my dad’s dinner party. She was his cover while he went off and did something else.”
“Loudoun Pharma,” Vann said.
“Maybe,” I said.
“You’re going up against a corporate lawyer on that one,” Vann said. “Good luck with that.”
“I’m on it.”
“Your housemates,” Vann said.
“What about them,” I asked.
“If Rees was integrated…”
“Then whoever was riding her saw them.”
“I’ll call in your address,” Vann said. “We’ll get agents over there.”
“Add some for yourself,” I said. “You were the one she took a shot at.”
“I was the only one she took a shot at,” Vann said.
It took me a second to get what she was saying. “Oh, shit,” I said, and disconnected.
* * *
“Whoa,” Jerry Riggs said, startled, as I sat up in the Kamen Zephyr. “Jesus, kid. You have to warn me when you do that. That threep hasn’t moved the whole time I’ve been here.”
“Jerry,” I said. “You have to go. Now.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m pretty sure someone’s coming to kill me,” I said.
Jerry laughed at this, and then stopped. “You’re actually serious,” he said.
“Jerry,” I said. “Please. Get the fuck out, already.”
Jerry gawked at me, set down the book he was reading, and walked quickly to the door.
I looked at myself in my cradle, peaceful. Then I headed out the door myself.
Mom and Dad were in the kitchen, having a private dinner with the help gone for the day. They both looked up at me as I came in.
“Chris,” Dad said.
“What happened to your 660?” Mom asked, looking at my threep.
The lights went out.
“Get out of the house,” I whispered to them. “Do it now.” The Zephyr had a night-vision option. I switched it on and looked around. I reached out and picked a knife out of the butcher block. After a moment I reached out and took a heavy iron skillet off the hook it was hanging from. Prepared either way.
I reached my room as someone was opening the sliding glass door that led to my room’s front patio. The man was stocky, short, and stepped through with his handgun pointed down and in front of him. He spotted the constellation of lights that surrounded my cradle, powered by backup batteries that would last for twelve hours. The lights would give him more than enough illumination to put a bullet into my brain. He stepped through, back mostly to me, and raised his handgun. He looked thoroughly professional.
Except that he didn’t check his six.
Or his seven, more accurately, which is where I came in at him from, swinging the skillet directly into his head.
He went down, gun firing two shots. The first bullet punched a hole in my cradle. There was a searing pain in my side as small chunks of the cradle drove themselves into my flesh. The second shot went wide, up and over the cradle to connect with the sliding door that led to my room’s back patio. It shattered.
I got the shooter with the pan but not as solidly as I could have. He kicked out a leg and jammed it into my knee. If I were in a human body, I would have gone down screaming. As it was I lost my balance and fell, dropping the skillet.
I fell and he rose, lining up another shot. I took the knife I still had in my hand and jammed it hard into the top of his boot. He screamed and leaped back, grabbing at the knife to remove it.
I jumped up to push him further off balance and he wheeled the gun up at me, firing.
I felt the bullet enter my threep on my left waist, tearing down through the leg. A maintenance alert immediately popped into my field of view, telling me that I had entirely lost control of my left leg. I knew that because I fell face-first onto the room tiles, cracking the faceplate of the Zephyr as I did so.
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I rolled and looked up to see the man leaning up against the doorframe of my room, keeping his weight off his injured foot, lining up his shot. The knife was still in his foot and the skillet was behind me. There was no way I was going to stop him in time.
“Hey!” my father said, and the man turned just in time to take a shotgun blast in the side.
The shotgun blast took me by surprise, but probably less than it surprised my assassin. He flew straight out of the doorframe, spinning, landing facedown less than a foot from me. He didn’t groan or breathe.
He was dead.
“Chris!” Dad’s voice.
“I’m all right,” I called back. “Both of me. One more than the other.” I gathered my useless leg up behind me and sat up.
Mom ran up, flashlight in hand, flashing it in my eyes, blinding me. I dialed my eyes back to normal mode. “Throw me the flashlight,” I said.
She did. I ran it up and down the assassin. There was a gaping hole where a few of his ribs used to be. Dad got him at pretty close range.
“Is he dead?” Mom asked.
“He’s dead,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Pretty sure,” I said.
“Jesus,” Dad said. “I just killed a man.”
“Yeah, you did,” I said. I aimed my flashlight over at Dad. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you just ended your Senate run.”
Dad didn’t have anything to say to that. I think he might have been a little bit in shock.
I took the body and rolled it over. Whoever it was, he was young, dark-haired, and dark-eyed.
“Who is he?” Dad asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Why would someone want to kill you?” Mom asked.
“I’m an FBI agent,” I said.
“It’s your third day on the job!”
“Fourth,” I said. I was feeling a little punchy myself. I’d had a long day. “Mom. Dad. I need you to do something for me. When the police come, the story needs to be that this was a house robbery gone wrong. Tell Jerry that’s the story too.”
“He’s in your room,” Dad said. “Your threep has been shot.”
