We are united by our dysfunctional coping techniques.
0:24. The synchronizer countdown flashes red on the holographic readout. Sylvia bobs her head in time with each second, pressing her hands together tight in prayer as if she’s afraid she’ll fling another hard drive at the ceiling if she lets go.
“Do you know why they chose you, Silvia?” I whisper. “Some people, when they panic, they run. Other people freeze. The reason they chose you, Silvia, is because when you’re scared … you fight.
“And while that’s always been a liability for you before, right now? Your furious panic is the only thing that will save us. Your instincts will save us. So. Silvia. Don’t hold back.
“Kick their goddamned ass.”
0:03. I step into position, placing myself below where the drone’s almost finished cutting out a square of reinforced steel.
0:02. My legs squat me as far down as possible, my artificial muscles strung tight as harp strings.
0:01. Sylvia mutters, “Kick their ass.”
* * *
The second the saw finishes cutting the square in the roof, I leap up with all my might, propelling myself upward in a vertical tackle.
The freed roof piece slams up into the drone hard enough that I hear something break free and rattle.
Air whooshes down upon me as the drone tilts, its propellers working overtime to right itself. It had gripped the roof piece in pincers, preparing to lift the cut segment free so it could reach inside and pick up its delicate cargo—now it drops the additional weight, spinning wildly as it opens fire on me.
It had doubtlessly ultrasounded the interior before it finished the cut, seen me crouching—but the drone’s software had anticipated gunfire, not a suicidal frontal assault.
Reaction packages can be complex, but they’re often just as slow to react to unexpected tactics as a human is—and sometimes slower. The sole advantage humans have over automated weaponry is that we will try insanely stupid tactics no bot could predict.
Like, say, leaping back up again the second I hit the floor to climb up the drone’s side.
I bat the tumbling roof piece aside, bullets ricocheting off the steel surface, screaming at Scylla and Charybdis: get a hold on that drone. A complex web of operating systems intercepts my raw request, connects it with the scanning data that maps the drone’s surface for potential weight-bearing surfaces, translates intent into the complex physics needed to jump high enough to intercept an escaping drone.
Again, my sole advantage is that the drone isn’t sure what the hell I’m trying to do. By the time it sees Scylla’s fingers spreading out and concludes what’s happening, it’s too late to adjust its propellers to dodge.
It sends the usual shock-on-contact routines, floods my opened ports for software vulnerabilities. But I’m shielded against both forms of attack, my rebreather helmet protecting me from the nerve gas it’s spraying, and as I climb up its surface it can’t bring its long-range weaponry to bear on me.
Two shots bounce off my helmet, snapping my head back hard enough that I gray out—the other drone defending the primary.
Yet even as my consciousness wavers, my last known commands keep Scylla and Charybdis clambering up the drone as it struggles to break free: grab that propeller.
Charybdis gets there first, clenching its fingers around the armored circle shielding the propellers from casual debris—and bears down with all the strength my artificial muscles can produce, crumpling it.
Poor Charybdis just stuck itself in a meat grinder.
The blades chop into my metal fingers, shattering as they impact my motorized phalanges, both pieces of machinery shredding hard enough that the shrapnel bounces off my body armor at the speed of .22 bullets. The haptic feedback registers as pain so intense my systems automatically release the propeller before I can override them—if I’d had more than two minutes to plan, I would have remembered to disable the auto-disengage mechanisms—but thankfully Charybdis is trapped, its reinforced alloys mangled with the rotor as it chews itself to shreds.
That’s a leverage point.
The drone hasn’t lifted me fully out of the shipping container yet, so I tell my legs to jam my feet underneath the roof, anchoring me. And even though my haptic feedback screams pain—your fingers have been chopped off abort abort—I order Scylla and Charybdis: smash this fucking thing against the crate.
Scylla and Charybdis are each rated for an eight-hundred-pound lift strength. That’s assuming I do it safely.
I overclock the muscles, fibers snapping, to slam the drone into corrugated steel with twenty-four hundred pounds of combined force.
Two of the drone’s remaining propellers are crushed against the container, their own momentum chopping them to shreds. I yank Charybdis free, what used to be complex finger-actuators flying free in mangled chunks, the drone smoking as it tumbles to the ground.
I hear Marcy and Defcon whistle in appreciation.
I drop back into the shipping container, head spinning—no concussion, I don’t think, but these constant impacts will leave me with brain damage somewhere down the line—but my legs coordinate to land me with a gymnast’s grace.
I’m surprised by all the flames outside the shipping container until I remember: oh, yes, I set the cop cars on fire. The conflagration’s spreading to the pollution-blighted trees, which is awesome, igniting the late-summer leaves and touching off a nice solid forest fire.
Silvia strains at her handcuff, pointing at the sky: “I hit it! I hit it! But it’s getting away!”
My heart sinks until I see what she’s done. The drone that shot me is half-buried in the ground, three of its propellers destroyed. I try to imagine the accuracy Silvia had to throw with in order to bank a single solid-state hard drive off all three propellers.
My sensors focus on the remaining drone. It must have been farther away when Silvia flung, already putting distance between them. Still, one rotor hangs still and the other spins erratically. Its piloting routines are trying to stabilize for their damaged propellers, but that limits its directional capabilities.
I’d feel better if it plummeted to the ground. But it drifts helplessly away from us, bobbing out over the freeway, shaking so fiercely even computer assistance can’t give it a clean shot.
“No, no, you did great,” I assure her. “Knocking it out of the sky would have been nicer, but it can’t follow us. That was your mission, Silvia. You did it with style.”
Her face lights up in a triumphant grin. Then she flickers into a hunch as she cradles Charybdis’s twisted armatures. She looks up at me, frowning, searching for confirmation this is as serious as she thinks it is.
“Your hand,” she whispers. “Does it hurt?”
I dampen the haptic feedback, shutting off the artificial pain. “Not anymore.”
She presses her palms against my body armor, running them down my belly, tracing the shrapnel dents. “Your helmet, God, your helmet, they shot you in the head—”
I grasp her hand in my working one. “They’re guaranteed to hit me. That’s why I buy top-class armor.”
Yet as I glance at the piece of roof lying on the floor, I note the bullet holes punched through quarter-inch steel. They had weaponry designed to tear me to pieces; they just couldn’t bring it to bear.
I got lucky. So lucky.
Silvia pulls her hands away from my chest, finally realizing how much danger she’s put me in. “I get this is a … an inconvenience for you.”
I laugh, checking my batteries: I’m down to 31 percent power, 28 percent of ammo capacity, my body armor needing total replacement, Charybdis’s actuators crumpled beyond repair. “It’s not a day in the lab, no.”
She yanks on the handcuff; it snaps free. “Well, you’ve done enough. You … you cleared me a path to freedom. If you wanted to run in a different direction, well—you don’t have to throw your life away on this, is what I’m saying.”
That would be charming, if I hadn’t already commi
tted several class-B felonies and pissed off the world’s most dangerous shadow organization. Still, I take her offer for what it’s worth: she doesn’t know how deeply I’ve gone into hock for her, so this last-minute kindness is immeasurable.
“Thank you, ma’am. But … I’ve risked my life for lesser causes. I’m good with this one. And to be honest, the NJPD will catch you unless I step in.”
“I can do this. I can do this.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “But if you’re with me, then—I mean, I should at least know your name, right?”
She concentrates and extends her hand slowly, suppressing her body’s natural instinct to grip at insect speeds.
“Silvia,” she says.
“Mat.” I reach out with Scylla’s delicate armatures to take her hand in my micromanipulators. My haptic sensors tell me it feels like a normal human hand, even though it’s clear her fingers are made of something else.
Silvia stares at the gun-warmed metal gripping her fingers.
“Thank you, Mat.”
Her body is a knotted alien physiology. But the demure way she can’t meet my gaze when she thanks me?
She’s more human than anyone I’ve ever saved before.
We both look up when we hear the distant sound of sirens.
“Head for the woods,” I say. “As close to the forest fire as you can get. Don’t outpace me—my legs are rated tripsafe at thirty miles per hour, but I doubt I’ll get that speed in dense woods.”
“Into the fire?”
I point up in the air, circling my finger. “Drones and satellites. Thick black smoke gives us cover. Now run.”
She grabs my good hand. Haptic feedback tells me her touch is cool and gentle.
We run.
ACT 2
They Deftly Maneuver and Muscle for Rank
Some moves AlphaGo likes to make against its clone are downright incomprehensible, even to the world’s best players. (These tend to happen early on in the games—probably because that phase is already mysterious, being farthest away from any final game outcome.) One opening move in Game One has many players stumped. Says Redmond, “I think a natural reaction (and the reaction I’m mostly seeing) is that they just sort of give up, and sort of throw their hands up in the opening. Because it’s so hard to try to attach a story about what AlphaGo is doing. You have to be ready to deny a lot of the things that we’ve believed and that have worked for us.”
—“The AI That Has Nothing to Learn From Humans,” The Atlantic, October 2017
For years, I’d asked myself: What would I do if I was the subject of a statewide manhunt? I’d daydreamed escape methods during my sponge baths, figuring out the optimal ways to avoid the cops, the ways to get my hands on spendable funds without the banks catching me, how to avoid civilians.
As we race through the burning woods, Silvia’s hand in mine, I realize: this statewide manhunt thing isn’t nearly as fun as it sounded.
Expanding the radius while staying hidden is critical. That r² in the A = πr² equation is all that’s saving our bacon right now. Well, that and the tree cover and the thick black smoke obscuring satellite surveillance.
The last the cops saw us, we were by the freeway. Now we’re farther away in the woods—but they don’t know where. If we’re somewhere within fifty feet of that truck, the cops have to search an area of 7,850 feet. If we’re somewhere within one hundred feet, the search area quadruples to 31,400 feet.
If I can stretch that radius of “Where could they be?” out to a full mile, the cops have to search an area of 87 million feet. Which, as long as we can avoid the drones or security cameras or inquisitive civilians, is big enough to deploy every cop in New Jersey and still not find us.
Wait. Is that technically true? How many people does the NJPD employ? There are thirty-five thousand full-time police officers on the NJPD according to my archived Wikipedia queries, which means each cop would have to search an area of 2,500 square feet, and Jesus, I’m so scared I’m doing math problems to distract myself.
Anyway. Our goal is to get as far away from the wreckage without being spotted. Extend that radius of uncertainty.
Except the radius isn’t unlimited. The woods by the freeway is a stunted space crammed in between housing projects. The overhead maps show this patch goes on for .7 miles before dumping us by a convenience store.
Yet there are two shadowy patches where the woods dwindle to a stop. If we’re lucky, we could dart through into the larger forests on the other side without being spotted by drones or security cameras. I breathe a sigh of relief at our luck—but then realize whoever set out to kidnap Silvia stopped our truck by the densest woods on purpose.
The IAC’s enemy is probably poised somewhere nearby, waiting to scoop her up.
Yet leaving our worldwide conspirator enemies aside, the cops (and anyone else tracking us) will realize we’d have to have made for the two entry paths into the larger forests. A hulking body-hacker and an alien-bodied woman can’t dash into the suburbs without attracting attention. Which means that as soon as the cops get their manhunter-AIs online, whose whole job is narrowing the radius, they’ll track our most likely escape routes.
I curse and check in with the tiny decaying particle of nuclear material in my system, which creates as close to a true random number as possible. I’ll figure out how to chart the safest path in an arbitrary direction away from the wreckage, because our only hope is to be erratic and not do the smart thing.
“I hate to interrupt.” Silvia has stripped a handful of leaves from a tree and is clutching them against her chest, running hunched over like she has to go to the bathroom. Is she in pain? “But will we get into another firefight soon?”
“Not if I do my job right.”
“That’s bad news. I need distraction.”
“Pardon me?”
“We’re running. And as I’m running, I’m realizing I don’t have lungs to breathe with, and then I think what Mama and Vala will say when they see me like … this … and then I realize I won’t see them again, and…”
She slumps to a halt, clenching the leaves so hard they drip fluid.
“Say what you will about firefights, but the extraneous thoughts just bubble away!” Her laugh’s as thin as frayed cable. “So you need to talk me through what we’re going to do, or you need to find me a nice reinforced room to freak the fuck out in.”
“Silvia…”
“This is not negotiable.”
Her gaze is haggard, but also clear: she knows her breaking point and will not allow herself to be pushed beyond it.
I can respect that.
“Fine.” The weary smile she gives me feels like a gift. “But I’m … I’m not used to talking to people when I’m planning.”
“You’ve been muttering to yourself the whole time!”
Can everyone hear me? “That’s talking to myself. I don’t … run things … past people. Walking you through this mission will slow me down.”
“Me panicking in a superstrong body will slow you down more. And I need to keep calm, because having a freak-out in my regular body hurt people sometimes. This would be … it would be awful. So please. Tell me what you’re doing. In baby steps.”
I keep moving forward, headed towards the wood’s edge. “Our first step is to avoid being caught by the police.”
“Okay, that … seems like a pretty grown-up step.”
Breaking our situation down into mission parameters is calming, as it turns out. “We’re headed in this random direction, because it’s terrible strategy. But our terrible strategy is good strategy, because the manhunter-AIs will have mapped out all the smart escape routes and will send cops to intercept us. So my job—our job—is to find a way to make a stupid escape as smart as possible.”
Thank God she keeps up with me, both mentally and physically. These are dense woods, yet she never takes her eyes off me as her alien body weaves through the thickets, operating off an instinct her conscious mind doesn’t control.
She looks at poor, mangled Charybdis. “Are you okay?”
I flex the fingers; what’s left of them grinds. “Under normal circumstances, the next step would be replacing this, which would be an hour in the shop, tops. But … I can’t get to my shop. It’s in Missouri. Even if we raced there, the cops would have that cordoned off.” I’d like to think Marcy and Defcon wouldn’t have given my name to the police—but let’s be honest, giving me up is their best hope of scoring a light sentence. I’d be shocked if they weren’t testifying to New Jersey’s finest lawyerbots, which means the IAC has to know what we’ve done. “So my combat effectiveness’s degraded without hope of repair.”
“I was actually asking if it hurt.”
This is the second time she’s asked; I remind myself that she’s never dealt with body-hackers. Only the meat-parts hurt, and—well, those are pretty banged up too. “That’s not this step, Silvia. This step is…”
We arrive at a row of minuscule backyards, fenced off high to keep the deer out. The homes here are run-down, antiquated housing from the 2010s; most have been refitted with solar panels and smartwalls, but there’s still a couple showcasing old glass windows instead of liquid smartglass. Which is good; if they were hi-tech buildings, we’d never sneak past their sensors.
“This step is figuring out which house we break into to hole up in while I find us a ride out of town.”
“Does the choice of house matter?”
“Empty is best. Otherwise we have to take hostages. I won’t do that unless I have to.”
I scan the houses’ windows, asking my sensors to look for movement—an inefficient way to determine if anyone’s home. I could hack into each home’s encrypted internet connection, sniff their lines to see what their internet traffic is—but even though it’s midday, they could be sleeping.
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