Automatic Reload

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Preparation, my friends. Preparation staves off ruination.

  An intake of breath from the speakerphone. His bosses are about to demand that Isaac check in. When he doesn’t speak up, it’s lights-out for Onyeka.

  Cold sweat trickles down my neck. Here goes the big trick—creative improvisations like this are where missions get saved or go FUBAR.

  “I don’t care if he sees my Facebook posts!” I say, my linguistic routines mimicking Isaac’s Ibibian accent. “What if he’s right about them bringing in the Yak?”

  I cringe—if Isaac doesn’t have a Facebook account, and they know that, this mission’s over. Plus, I know the façade isn’t perfect; he didn’t speak enough for my linguistic modules to get a firm handle on his speech patterns.

  Then again, they’re not expecting me to have pulled the ol’ switcheroo on him. If he’s speaking funny, maybe that’s stress talking. And each second they spend talking to fake-Isaac is a second I’m rootkitting his phone, injecting spyware programs, following his bosses back down this open call to compromise their phone and activate their GPS.

  Maybe someone in this village is watching me from a slit in their hut, taking live video they’re selling to the kidnappers, sat so far back in shadow that my sensors can’t pick them up. Then again, I did just disable eight armed guards in under three minutes. Most sane people dive for cover when they hear shots fired.

  Yet anyone who sees me cradling Isaac’s shivering body could call his bosses to inform them their agent’s been compromised.

  Every passing second shoves Onyeka deeper into danger.

  “When I committed, you committed!” his boss shouts, each word transmitted helping my spyware to close in on his location. “You do not back out now, Isaac! Get that body-hacker to leave!”

  A dot blooms across my HUD map; the boss has been backtraced to a location six hundred meters northwest. The fucking NNPC got their data wrong; they handed me the location the kidnappers’ mooks were sleeping in, not where Onyeka was.

  Then again, if combat was a predictable exercise they’d have sent in drones. They pay me the big bucks to improvise.

  “The Yak is more than our lives,” I-as-Isaac say. “They go after families. They kill everyone.”

  And I drop Isaac before my legs propel me through the shanty city, my artificial musculature cornering at top speeds like a computer-enhanced quarterback, splicing in satellite maps taken an hour ago with current visual data. Merchants are poking their heads out to see if it’s safe yet.

  As I take off, my routines ask me if I want to terminate Isaac. Which would be simpler. He’s a scummy kidnapper who’ll probably get involved in some other crime if I let him go—one shot from my rear-facing armaments, and he’s gone.

  But the kid stood up to me. Knowing he’d die.

  I respect Isaac’s bravery, knowing how messed up that is, and let him live.

  My chest tightens again as I head into the streets. I remind myself that I programmed my IFF routines personally. Scylla won’t shoot a kid who darts out in front of me; Charybdis won’t cap some grandmother who’s opening a window.

  I’ve prepared for this. I won’t hurt anyone who doesn’t deserve it. Not anymore.

  And I’m rounding the corner to the target zone as his boss shouts through the compromised phone: “Wait. When the fuck do you care about families?”

  Oops. If I’d checked his Facebook, I’d have known he was an orphan. “The IAC is a different danger,” I say, knowing I only have to stall until I can get to the green dot on the map.

  “After everything we’ve been through?” the boss yells. “After—wait. What’s our passphrase?”

  Fuck.

  The only consolation is that I am now at the green dot.

  Except I’m standing in an empty hut, my metal feet planted on the location where Isaac’s phone thinks Onyeka is being kept, and no one is here.

  * * *

  “Say that passphrase, Isaac, and I will shoot you in the head,” I say in my own voice over the phone—a response that makes zero sense, but I’m not aiming for coherent conversation. I’m trying to confuse the bosses into hesitating, which buys me time to figure out what to do next.

  My heart’s pounding. I don’t let it distract me.

  The trace tells me the call is coming from here, but all I see is an empty house. It has a cooler with a few banana beers soaking in half-melted ice, three cots, and zero occupants.

  Are my traces borked?

  Have I just doomed Onyeka?

  “Report in! Report in!” the bosses say.

  I remember that computers never give you the data you wanted. They only give you the data you asked for.

  I asked for the latitude and longitude of Onyeka’s kidnappers.

  I ask for height, and sure enough, the signal is 2.3 meters below ground level.

  These folks have a bunker.

  My respect for their operations ticks up slightly.

  I move the table with a stealth that only computer-assisted servos can manage, find the padlocked trapdoor beneath. It’s a heavy metal door, at least three hundred kilos.

  “What is your passphrase?” the bosses cry. Thank God they’re a little panicky.

  The padlock’s easy—I drop into stealth mode, enmeshing the padlock in a laser-targeted sensor-web so Scylla and Charybdis won’t make any boss-alerting clanks as they move it. The lockpick flips out of Scylla’s index finger—it’s not flashy, but the lockpick’s the most reliable piece of my arsenal—and pops it open.

  The trapdoor, however …

  If I’d known I’d have to move heavy objects quickly, I would have outfitted myself with a different artificial-musculature configuration that would catapult this massive door off.

  But I don’t have that loadout. I can lift it myself, but it’ll take 0.7 seconds.

  If they’re as dedicated as I think they are, they might kill Onyeka before I drop inside.

  My biological-response packages inject me as they sense my stress rising, warding off PTSD shock. I can’t have anyone else innocent die on my watch.

  I had military orders back then. Someone else would have thumbed the “fire” button if I hadn’t. And mistakes happen during combat, even with all the preparations we took; sometimes that satellite-enhanced blur you thought was a stray dog—nothing worth aborting a high-priority terrorist-killing mission over—turns out to be a six-year-old kid running in to see his daddy, who wasn’t even a terrorist, just a waiter unlucky enough to serve terrorists.

  The whole reason I went solo is so I’d never have to make those choices again. No kids, no waiters—just the combatants, and only the combatants.

  The phone clicks off—or tries to. They want to disconnect, except the spyware I’ve implanted won’t let them drop the call.

  I heave open the trapdoor, rust flakes falling into the fluorescent-lit chamber below. Scylla takes out someone in midheave, some poor bodyguard unlucky enough to sit below the newly opened line of fire.

  I drop down two meters; my artificial legs cushion the fall, but I’m still seven hundred pounds of metal crashing into the floor. Even though my shoulders, hips, and spinal cord have been reinforced to handle the weight of my prosthetics, I’ll need an MRI to check the remaining bone for microfractures.

  There’s Onyeka. She’s still dressed in her bright blue school outfit and knee-high socks; her mother won’t let her wear makeup yet, but she snuck on purple eye shadow on the way to school. Her hair is cornrowed, her soft brown eyes wide and terrified.

  A thin man has a long, curved knife pressed against her throat. He’s hauled her into the corner, squeezing as much of his body as he can behind her soft body—creating enough cover that my auto-targeting routines ask for manual approval before they take the shot. He keeps his elbows tucked in close to his ribs so he doesn’t expose any limbs, his knife hand hidden behind her collarbone. Shooting the knife might drive it back hard enough to slice Onyeka’s jugular.

  He trembles, c
lutching her like a fearful child grabbing his teddy bear.

  Blood trickles down her throat. He’s cut her to show how serious he is.

  “It’s over,” I whisper. “Put the knife away.”

  Which isn’t quite true. Because I wasn’t expecting a knife. I have flechette loads that’d jam a normal human’s trigger—but using the tasers on this guy might cut Onyeka’s neck open, and there’s not enough of him out in the open to chance the goopcuffs.

  “I’m down to fatal options,” I tell him. “Let’s negotiate and walk away from here alive, shall we?”

  “It’s not my choice.” My truth-sensors inform me he believes that. “You leave or she dies.”

  Onyeka had been trying to be brave, so brave, but hearing her death spoken in her ear breaks her. She slumps, letting out a wordless gasp that saws deep into my heart.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” I say, my mouth dry. And it’s true. Scylla and Charybdis have automated death, made ruinous injuries as clinical as spreadsheets. I’ve incapacitated eight men today and I couldn’t tell you what they looked like.

  I can look a man in the eyes and kill him.

  But I’m really tired of doing that.

  He giggles, pressing his knife deeper into Onyeka’s neck. “They tested me, five. Now they’re testing you, four,” he titters, almost offering an excuse. “The culling destroys us all, three. The refining, two. It never stops, one.”

  His muscles tense, sawing the blade across her neck.

  Scylla and Charybdis fire before he completes the stroke.

  And I’m scooping up little Onyeka in my arms as she cries hysterically, convinced she’s bleeding out—but I cradle her close, squirting microadhesives and blood-clotting crystals into the cut before I pinch the wound shut. It’s serious, but good stitches will turn the cut into an ugly scar.

  “Is she safe?” Onyeka’s mother pulls rank to override the comm channel. “Is my daughter safe?”

  I look down. She’d have bled out from a slit throat if I hadn’t given her immediate medical attention. She may have hearing damage from the gunfire. Her heart’s thumping so hard I can feel it through my prosthetics.

  I fish out a handkerchief to wipe her kidnapper’s blood off her face.

  “Is she safe?”

  I inject Onyeka with anti-PTSD drugs to blunt her trauma. She’ll be fine. But for one brief moment, she was certain she was dead, and that certainty will wake her at night when she shivers back to consciousness and realizes how fragile her whole existence is.

  “I have retrieved the target with minor injuries.” I send the signal for Onyeka’s newer, beefier bodyguards to come to the extraction point. And I’ve carried out my contract, and the money will be deposited into my bank account, and I can afford the maintenance costs on Scylla and Charybdis for another month. The NNPC will recommend me for other jobs.

  Yet I look down at Onyeka trying to shove me away as I maintain the pressure on her wound. We both want out of this bunker. Instead, I sit down heavily on a kidnapper’s bed and wait for my own anti-PTSD drugs to kick in.

  I failed my mission.

  Someone got hurt.

  * * *

  “Take off your arms,” the customs agent says. “Legs too. Place all potential weapons on the table.”

  “And what, exactly,” I reply with glacial politeness, “do you think I’ll take the fourth limb off with once the first three are on the table?”

  I’m not in a good mood to begin with after watching the child psychiatrists take Onyeka away, even though that was hours ago. And New York customs agents are always ready to pick a fight with a living weapon, so I keep telling myself: Don’t get confrontational. They’re just bureaucrats. You need to get your butt home to analyze the mission; don’t give these jerks an excuse to pull your permits.

  I should add that even my biggest loadouts don’t have extensive weaponry—for the flight back to Missouri, I’ve switched to Butch and Sundance, with a single (unloaded) gun in each forearm. Yet those guns use unmodified .38 rounds—they’ll fuck up your day, but they’re not punching through tank armor.

  Scylla and Charybdis have .45-caliber accuracy, not the brutal stopping power of .50-caliber antiaircraft rounds. If I strapped bazookas to my shoulders, I’d have cop cars sniping me the minute I headed down to Starbucks to get a coffee. Which is why all my embedded armory are modified versions of handguns you could purchase legally at any reputable gun shop.

  (Note: handguns, not rifles. Computer-targeted rifles can outshoot any human sniper, so only cops are authorized to use them. Wiring my capture-to-fire routines up to a .308 rifle would let me machine-gun incoming threats from a mile away—which is why even the most gun-happy states will throw your ass in jail for possession of auto-targeted long-range weapons, and why the infantry has a hell of a time attracting recruits for modern warfare.)

  Before I cross state lines, I have my onboard lawyer-modules scan each county’s local gun laws to tell me which locales I can safely enter, then send text messages to the local law enforcement to tell them when I’ll arrive so they don’t open fire on the killing machine. And I have to do it whenever I plan a trip, because legislators keep passing new laws to restrict the usage of mechanically grafted auto-targeting weaponry.

  Except down South, where they loooove flashy weaponry. Even though most folks can’t afford the $125,000 non-insurance-covered surgery to neurally decode your stump’s nerve endings and make your baseline $45,000 myoelectric prosthetic-armament platform do your bidding.

  People think body-hackers are rich. But we’re like those couples who drop too much on their dream McMansion and wind up house-poor—I have a lot invested in limbs and limb-enhancement, and not much else. Certainly not enough that I can afford lawyers to haul my ass out of jail regularly.

  Needless to say, I stick to open-carry states, stopping in gun-hostile states like New York only for as long as it takes to get my ass on another plane. And the American customs agents would prefer it if I’d get shot in Nigeria.

  The hard-ass customs agent slaps his palms on the examination table. His co-worker rolls his eyes. Agent Hard-Ass here has seen the same old cop movies that I have; he apparently thinks intimidation works against a walking armory. “Don’t give me lip, tin man, or I’ll have the feds haul you away.”

  “On what charge?” I give a whatcha-gonna-do shrug that exposes the clip feeds on the underside of my forearms—which are, as per federal regulation, opened for examination at all times and have bright-orange hard-plastic plugs inserted into them to make it visually apparent there’s nothing fireable in the chamber. “All my prosthetic armaments are peace-tied, to the letter of the law, and you will note I am glowing a reassuring purple.”

  Peace-tied is a federally mandated software configuration that legal prosthetic armaments must have; once I activate it to demonstrate my willful surrender, neon bands on the deactivated limb glow purple and any weapons are unable to fire until fifteen minutes after the peace-tie codes are deactivated.

  (Supposedly. I once spent three days figuring out how to subvert the peace-tie lock software, then realized I’d create much harsher laws if I fired in a public space with peace-tied weaponry. Considering the peace-tie is for the cyborgs’ benefit, giving them a legal, irrefutably visible way to demonstrate their harmlessness to a police force who’d prefer to snipe any body-hacker on sight, why should I fuck it up for everyone else?)

  Yet not only am I peace-tied, I have allowed the government access to record my credit-card purchases and social-network posts; there are deep-data analyst AIs that comb my records for evidence of psychiatric malfunction, alerting the authorities in case me purchasing the wrong deodorant signals an incipient danger to innocents.

  The customs agents have access to these stability reports. I know my latest report is sterling, or I would have been greeted by EMP grenades instead of two toothless paper pushers.

  “You aren’t cooperating,” Hard-Ass splutters. “Put your prosth
etics on the table.”

  “Each of these limbs are anchored at fifteen nuBone hardpoints,” I explain, “and requires a special attachment station to remove without permanent damage to my body. In addition, a safe removal process takes at least half an hour, as the multiple nerve-to-CPU interfaces need to be carefully disconnected—”

  Hard-Ass crosses his arms. “Take your time.”

  “—which is why the Amputee Protection Act of 2043 states amputees are not required to remove Class IV prosthetics for government searches unless there is reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.”

  My left leg whirs, printing out the Act’s highlighted passages; I tear it off and present it to him.

  Bureaucrats do not like being beaten at their own game, which is why I try not to encourage showdowns; they can stuff you full of niggling regulations until you crap paperwork. Yet this souped-up rent-a-cop is hell-bent on making a case out of today’s hapless body-hacker, so I have no choice but to grab the big-form firepower.

  Sure enough, I can see Hard-Ass figuring out other ways to fuck me over—because a bureaucrat can always enforce some obscure clause that’ll make your day worse. So I try the side exit.

  “Look,” I say to his buddy, as cheerfully as I can manage. “Truth is, you don’t want me here. You can hold me for a day or two before you let me back into the USA, but that’ll dump more paperwork on your desk. I’m just a citizen with a few more circuits; all I wanna do is get home to Missouri and have a beer. You like a beer at the end of a long day?”

  His buddy—clearly the more experienced agent—gives a little nod and steps forward. “I like a beer,” he allows. “I also like knowing I’m letting the right people into this country I love.”

  I envy him. I used to have that unalloyed American adoration.

  “I’m not gonna hurt my country.” I tap my right arm. “I gave up too much for her.”

  He squints. “You lost your right arm in combat?”

  “I wish. We’d already dropped the payload through our drones. This happened at the party afterwards. ISIS had spent months figuring out where our remote HQ was located, then planned an operation to take us out during a post-sortie celebration. I’d guzzled six Budweisers when the shell hit.”