Cyber Thoughts

by Dima Zales

  My head is burning, and a double shot of adrenaline hits my brain as I spin around to face Alex and assess the situation.

  Not only is he conscious, but he also pulled a knife on me, explaining that missing inch of skin on the crown of my head.

  Alex stabs the knife at my torso, but I jump back, causing him to slice a gash into the bulletproof vest, not me. Wondering what would happen if he’d stabbed me instead, I perform a frantic internet search and learn this lighter type of bulletproof vest doesn’t have good knife protection.

  For whatever reason, Gogi and I didn’t think it was realistic that I’d ever get into a knife fight, so knife combat was a low priority. I practiced mostly hand-to-hand combat and gun disarm techniques in the last months. If I live, I’ll tell Gogi he sucks at risk assessment.

  Alex slices at my lower body, and I decide to take a gamble and treat the knife like a gun.

  I catch Alex’s wrist in a crisscross of my outstretched arms and begin to twist the knife out of his hand, as I would with a gun.

  Then I realize this maneuver is best used on guns with trigger guards, which facilitates the twist that breaks the finger. Alex’s butterfly-style knife doesn’t have a trigger guard, so his finger is fine.

  Realizing my twist was ineffective, Alex propels his whole body forward, like a fencer, his arm sliding between mine.

  I watch, dumbfounded, as his knife slowly enters my body.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  At least an inch of steel is in my upper thigh, but I only feel a tingle of electricity, like I got Tasered with the voltage focused on a single point. Figuring I need to take advantage of the fact that I’m not in pain yet, I yank my leg back to make sure the knife doesn’t go in deeper.

  Paradoxically, as the knife rips out of my thigh, the nauseating pain hits me. It feels like a burn made by a thousand hot needles. I wonder what protection the Relief app is giving me at this moment, if any. It sure doesn’t feel like this pain is dampened in any way. If I survive, I’ll probably consider giving this app a “knife wound” setting, though something tells me the app would have to become equivalent to shooting heroin, presenting an even higher risk of addiction.

  With my adrenaline spiking to inhuman levels, I chop at Alex’s neck with my right hand and use the distraction to grab Alex’s right wrist with my left hand.

  Alex tries to pull out of my grip, but I’m holding on with the desperation of a man about to bleed to death—because that’s my reality.

  With the world around me sharpening, I realize that not only do I need to beat Alex, but I must also do it in the quickest way possible—ideally, two seconds ago.

  A half-baked and perilous idea forms in my mind, and I wish my brain had showed it to me as a pre-cog moment so I could assess it better. Since pre-cog moments don’t seem to come when you want them to, I execute my idea, which is simple.

  Still holding on to the wrist of the hand that’s wielding the knife, I sidestep and sweep Alex’s legs.

  In training, the best-case scenario for this move was Gogi and I ending up on the floor, meaning I was toast shortly after, given my lack of skills in wrestling.

  In this case, my concern is that I might land with the knife in my heart.

  Twisting in the air, Alex and I tumble onto the asphalt. My back hits the ground, putting me at a huge disadvantage as he lands on top of me. But the knife isn’t in my heart, because I’m still holding on to Alex’s wrist.

  In movies, I’ve seen heroes twist a knife in someone’s hand and then stab them with it. It usually begins with the hero stopping the knife close to his eye and turning the tables—or arms—and ends with the bad guy getting knifed.

  Alex must’ve also seen those movies, because he grabs the knife with his other hand and pushes down frantically.

  I would use two hands if I could, but my right arm is pinned under me. I was instinctively trying to protect my poor tailbone this time. With my arm pinned to the asphalt, I have one hand left to defend myself. Soon, it becomes obvious that I’m not stopping the knife’s descent at all. At best, I’m slowing it down.

  I feel blood seeping out of my leg wound, and with it, my energy and will to fight.

  Alex’s face is red with exertion, and beads of his sweat fall onto my face as he pushes the knife down another millimeter.

  Something is happening in one of the AROS views, and the gunfire between the Suits and Alex’s or Williams’s remaining people stops, but I don’t dare shift my focus away from the knife.

  Suddenly, white fur flashes by my face, and a rat is biting Alex on the ear.

  “Ada,” I mentally shout. “Mr. Spock ran away from you. A rat is no match for a human. Once Alex is done with me, he’ll hurt Mr. Spock.”

  Somehow, getting bitten seems to give Alex strength, because the knife descends another couple of millimeters and begins to enter the vest’s material.

  “No,” Ada says out loud—from less than a foot away. “He won’t hurt anyone anymore.”

  Through her Share app view, I see she’s holding a gun firmly to Alex’s head, and that Alex is aware of the gun.

  “You will put that knife down,” Ada says, her voice so cold she’d give Joe a run for his money. “Now.”

  Alex must read the deadly determination in Ada’s eyes, because he tosses the knife aside and raises his hands in the air.

  The first thing I do is grab Mr. Spock from Alex’s ear and cradle the little guy, though I think the gesture comforts me more than my currently bloodthirsty pet.

  “You left a permanent tooth mark,” I tell Spock softly after examining Alex’s ear. “Good rat.”

  Alex lifts his body off me, and as soon as I’m free, I try to stand. Finding that I can only get up to my knees, I stay there, swaying, and study Ada as she holds the gun aimed at Alex.

  I wonder if she’s going to shoot the bastard, and I think he’s wondering the same thing. It makes me recall Muhomor’s joke comparing Ada to a mama bear.

  “It wouldn’t be very vegan of you,” I tell Ada mentally. “But if you pull that trigger, I’ll support you one hundred percent.”

  Alex carefully backs away from Ada and says, “Look, Ada, I never had an issue with you—”

  I’ll never know if Alex had the balls to try to talk his way out of this predicament, because the sound of someone dragging their feet interrupts Alex’s speech.

  We all look at the source of the noise and see Joe. So much blood covers my cousin it’s as if he’s been through hell’s meat factory. Alex’s pupils grow to the size of his irises as he takes in the depth of hatred in my cousin’s icy eyes. I bet Alex is reliving flashbacks of Joe torturing him in that car. He must realize his fate will now be worse.

  Ada looks over Joe’s shoulder, and I see Agent Pugh lumbering toward us, her own weapon raised.

  “Lower your gun,” the female Suit says. “There’s been enough shooting already.”

  “Agent Pugh,” I gasp out, the blood loss making it hard to speak louder than a whisper. “Think about how it’ll look if you hurt one of us.”

  Agent Pugh looks uncertain, making me think she heard me.

  Ada drops her gun on the ground and looks expectantly at Joe.

  I show my hands empty of weapons—unless you count a rat as a weapon.

  Joe’s gaze doesn’t leave Alex’s face as he begins to lower his gun, but then I realize he isn’t lowering it so much as aiming it at Alex’s head.

  I grit my teeth.

  A gun goes off, the boom smacking my eardrums like a blow.

  I look at Agent Pugh, worried I’ll see a cloud of smoke around her weapon, but it isn’t there.

  It was Joe who fired his gun, and the result of his work is the gaping hole in Alex’s forehead.

  Lowering the weapon, Joe lets the gun slip from his fingers and hit the floor.

  Agent Pugh walks up to Alex and stares at his corpse, her face unreadable.

  “His people killed your colleagues,” Ada tells her. “What Jo
e did was a preventative measure of self-defense. This guy had enough money to get out of any legal mishaps coming his way.”

  “Speaking of legal mishaps,” I croak, swaying on my knees as I try to stay conscious. “If you agree this was self-defense, I’ll consider us even and won’t unleash Kadvosky and his lawyers on you.”

  Agent Pugh’s expression is still unreadable as she moves her gun from Joe to Alex. Before I register what’s happing, Agent Pugh puts a bullet in Alex’s already cooling chest.

  “Now I’m in the same boat as you,” Agent Pugh says. “As I see it, this was self-defense.”

  My relief makes my exhaustion intensify, and I put down Mr. Spock so that I can lie back down on the asphalt. The rat sniffs my cheek and then scurries away as someone kneels to check my vitals, and someone else wraps a tourniquet around my leg wound.

  “He’ll be okay,” someone says. “The first responders are almost here.”

  “I’m going to faint now,” I tell Ada telepathically. “When the ambulance comes, please tell them to go ahead and use drugs. Lots of drugs.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I wake up groggy but blissfully free of pain. I vaguely recall coming to my senses inside an ambulance and receiving a nice injection that knocked me out again.

  Opening my eyes, I see my mom, Uncle Abe, and Ada staring at me intensely. I’m attached to a ton of medical equipment, but the room around me is nice for a change, well lit and crowded with comfortable furniture. This is as close as a hospital room can get to a suite at the Four Seasons.

  “Kitten,” Mom says in high-pitched Russian. “How are you feeling?”

  “I feel great,” I say out loud. Telepathically, I ask Ada, “How come I feel great? I should be in lots of interesting pain.”

  “They gave you morphine,” Ada explains mentally and winks at me in the real world. “I didn’t tell your mom about that, though.”

  “I’m glad to hear you’re feeling great.” Mom’s worried tone doesn’t change. “The doctor says you’ll be fine, but you needed stiches on your head and leg, and that scar on your ear—”

  “Calm down, sis,” my uncle says soothingly. “Think of your blood pressure.”

  “Yeah, Mom,” I chime in. “I’m fine. There’s a perfectly good explanation for all of this.”

  “How much does she know?” I ask Ada telepathically. “Please tell me she didn’t watch the news.”

  “Not so much,” Ada replies in Zik. “But I think you should do your best to tell her what happened and soften some details if you must.”

  “Can you leave us alone, please?” I ask Ada and locate my bed’s controls to raise the bed into a sitting position. “I think I have an idea that might make this conversation have a happy conclusion.”

  “Uh-huh.” Ada’s Zik message is pure mischief. “It seems you’re thinking what I’m thinking.” She looks down at her belly.

  “Mr. Cohen,” Ada says to Uncle Abe. “I’d like to check on your son if you don’t mind.”

  “They’re not going to buy your wanting to check on Joe, of all people,” I mentally say.

  “I could be warming up to him,” Ada retorts. “It’s theoretically feasible.”

  “But not likely.” I chuckle in the real world, garnering myself strange looks from my mom and my uncle. “How is Joe, anyway?”

  “Joe is doing better than you are,” Ada replies. Despite her earlier assertions, her Zik message doesn’t contain a single positive emotion, and it would have if she were happy that Joe is okay. “He’s got a room here, but Gogi tells me that Joe is planning to leave the hospital soon. Something about some business we’d rather not know about.”

  It’s all too easy to picture Joe leaving the hospital and initiating a deadly hunt for any survivors from Williams’s organization. For the first time, I wish my cousin good luck in his sinister activities, but I don’t share that sentiment with Ada, lest she think I’m becoming a monster. Because I’m not. I’d like to think I’m simply becoming more pragmatic, as I figure a future father should be.

  “So, it all started after we left that lunch at your house,” I begin in Russian when Ada and my uncle are out of the room. “Or maybe it started when we were rescuing you in Russia. It depends on how you look at it.”

  I tell Mom a version of the events that downplays the risks to me as much as I can.

  Since I’m speaking out loud, I have plenty of time to check the internet for interesting developments—like news about further lynching of the officials complicit in the task force, or the excitement in the cybersecurity community over Tema. My favorite part is reading the reactions to open-source Brainocytes. People are speculating on countless uses and making plans to improve the technology in a thousand different ways.

  After the internet, I check my emails. My friends sent me some ideas for future development, and my favorite one is something Ada came up with based on some initial work by an Israeli scientist named Golan Dahan. He has an MD specializing in nanomedicine and a PhD in nanoengineering. Golan’s interest seems to be in nanomachines that can turn parts of people’s bodies into computers. This specific paper outlines a design for nanobots that could turn bones into computing and storage substrates, making the bones stronger and lighter as a side effect.

  I instantly see such “smart bones” as a solution to the problem of not having access to the internet—like what recently happened to me. Granted, no computing constrained to the human body will be as powerful as the supercomputers we can access via the cloud, but it would be a good backup option. Also, this could help us with another project—caching. Caching is a hardware (and sometimes software) component that stores data so future requests for that data can be served faster—a performance enhancement technique that tries to predict the future based on the recent past. Our earlier solution for better caching was to cram more Brainocytes inside our brains, but this opens up more interesting opportunities.

  “A nice find for our nanobots collection,” Mitya says after I forward him the article. “Almost as cool as the Respirocytes.”

  Respirocytes are nanobots that were designed by Robert A. Freitas Jr. in 1998. They can replace or supplement much of the normal respiratory system, allowing the user to take one breath per several hours. We, the Brainocytes Club, have plans to build these, along with microbivore (artificial white blood cells that will create a super-immune system) and many others.

  “Stronger bones might be an awesome effect on its own,” I add when I realize I got lost in thought.

  “Yeah.” Mitya’s Zik message is only partially sarcastic as he adds, “And sharp retractable claws coming out of our hands would be nice if we were ever in a jam.”

  The fact that I missed the connection to Wolverine until Mitya’s joke is a sign that the morphine has dulled my thinking. Mentally chuckling, I say, “In Muhomor’s case, the claws will have USB plugs on the ends.”

  “Great idea,” Mitya replies. “Okay, I’ll go and try to recruit this Israeli guy.”

  In the slow-time world, tears are standing in Mom’s eyes throughout my story, and I feel like she might have a nervous breakdown or start crying unless I finally play the proverbial ace up my sleeve, so I say, “But that isn’t the most exciting thing that happened. I learned something amazing as well.” When I’m sure I have Mom’s undivided attention, I drop the bomb. “You’re going to be a grandma.”

  Mom looks shell-shocked but recovers surprisingly quickly, clapping her hands in excitement. A huge smile spreads across her face, and my tired vocal cords can barely keep up as she peppers me with questions.

  “No, Ada didn’t tell me how far along she is,” I say. “But she only missed her first period, so I guess the whole thing is just beginning.”

  “Did you do an ultrasound?” In her excitement, Mom begins to pace around my lavish room.

  “No, Mom. I just learned about this a few hours ago. I don’t carry around a portable ultrasound machine.”

  “Did you read any books abou
t pregnancy?” Mom asks, and at first I think she might be kidding, but her expression is dead serious.

  I take advantage of the few milliseconds between answering her questions and buy a book called, What to Expect When Your Wife is Expecting. I read a large chunk of the book as I reply, “Yep, Mom, I got one already and started reading it.”

  “Good boy,” Mom says and stops pacing. “So, what are your intentions toward Ada?”

  It’s funny Mom asked that, because I’ve been thinking about this whenever I’ve had a free moment to think.

  “Well, I’ve known for a while that I wanted to marry Ada someday,” I say after I make sure I turn off my Share app. “Even when we were moving in together, I told you I thought she was the one, and that feeling has only gotten stronger.”

  “I know.” Mom nods sagely, beaming with pleasure. “I can tell by watching the two of you.”

  “Right.” The conversation is making me dizzy, so I lower the bed a few degrees. “This baby development does change the timeline.”

  “Why does it seem like you’re about to say ‘but’?” Mom walks up to the bed and sits on the edge.

  “I don’t want Ada to think I’m proposing for the wrong reasons.” I use my IV-free hand to wipe my suddenly sweaty forehead. “Like because I knocked her up.”

  “Silliness,” Mom says and folds her arms across her chest. “Look, kitten, I love you, and you know I think highly of your intellect, but Ada is twice as smart as you are and would never worry about such nonsense.”

  “There’s also that ‘I love you’ thing,” I remind Mom. “How do I know if Ada even believes in a traditional marriage? She’s got radical views on so many things that—”

  “It doesn’t matter what the two of you call your relationship,” Mom interrupts. “Whether she says ‘I love you’ every five minutes or once a year, that girl does love you, and you’re crazy about her as well. If she’s not into a traditional marriage, if she wants to call it something else, like a social union or a banana, you should remember that marriage is but a piece of paper anyway. What matters is how the two people feel about each other—and this you know.”