That’s nice.
* * *
Something smashes into Vito as he whips up to protect my face—something that would have hit me with nonlethal, yet painful, force. My threat packages alert me: Silvia Maldonado, former friendly, is now attacking, do I want to remove her from the combat whitelist?
“Mat!” Hyperventilating, she draws her hand back to slap me again. “Wake up! I can’t get to the, wherever it is, the—”
“Smartcar hub.”
“Right. I don’t know where it is. Mat, you have to snap out of it!”
I blink, bringing my navigation routines into focus. I thought I’d programmed them to head towards the hub, but maybe the fight where I
(murdered an IAC victim)
saved Silvia threw that post-combat objective out of whack, I should diagnose that, that’s sloppy work. I wonder if it’s a priority conflict, or—
“Mat.” My limbs tell me Silvia’s gripping me tight, but she’s shaking hard enough that Vito and Michael diagnose her with an impending panic attack. “Please. I don’t know how to help you, but we can’t stand here. You have to—”
Right. The smartcar hub. I program in our destination. That’s easy. Forming words with my mouth is hard.
“I got it,” I tell her after a brief time. “Keep close. Don’t engage with anyone. Let me do the work.”
“Wait, what are you—”
Things blur out.
* * *
There’s explosions. I don’t mind explosions. But the weaponry on Vito and Michael and the new legs feels different—the rocket launchers are uncomfortably hot when they unload on a fatality drone, the missiles make a harsh choonk noise that jars me, even the gunports vibrate down my shoulders in a different way.
It’s not like Scylla and Charybdis. I’d been fighting with those lovely ladies for so long, I could practically doze through combat.
It’s irritating though. I want to go numb again. Yet these new limbs’ different rhythms jolt me whenever they blast a SWAT tank out of our way, making me wonder how many people got killed that time, and even though the readouts tell me it’s a low chance of fatality, that’s not the same as no fatalities until the bodies are counted.
Silvia clings to me as my limbs battle through the two miles of dense office complexes on the way to the hub. She yelps whenever Vito and Michael’s rifles blast an incoming drone from the sky, clenches me tight as my legs annihilate any parked vehicle on the assumption the IAC might activate it, shields her eyes on the rare occasion an inbound vehicle gets close enough to take a potshot before my grenade launchers send it spinning away. Everything’s on fire.
I update my threat packages to exclude any inbound fire-suppressant vehicles and gray out again.
At one point I come to and see Silvia peering into my faceplate, frowning as she notices my chin hitting my chest like I’m sleeping off a bender—which, given the tranquilizers my biological-response packages injected to quell my panic disorder, isn’t that far from the truth. She snaps her head around to look at Vito and Michael, who are currently battling it out with what I presume is an IAC drone, gouts of gunfire flung into a blazing sky as my legs propel me behind an office building’s thick concrete column.
She’d thought she was the threat. Yet here I am shredding aerial tanks.
She keeps checking in on me, trying to reconcile my military devastation with my dazed meat-self. She wants me to be working my control panels, barking orders, doing something to instigate this destruction.
But no. That’s why I got these limbs. They protect me when I can’t cope.
I’m not here right now, but my programming is.
This is why body-hackers terrify people. A few tweaks to my IFF settings, and those fleeing late-night office workers would be the victims of an automated mass murder.
This will be a battle that New Jersey’s finest will replay for years. My estimates show I’ve annihilated slightly over 0.7 percent of the NJPD’s combat hardware reserves, which will affect their budget next year. The New Jersey Senate will be debating more robust restrictions on prosthetic armaments, and there’s an outside chance this incident might wind up as a factor in the next presidential election.
And honestly? I couldn’t tell you what I did without reading the mission logs.
But I can tell you when I fired the first missile, the one that for-sure killed a woman whose biggest crime was getting kidnapped by the IAC, and—
* * *
“Is that it?” Silvia asks, pointing.
I shake my head. Sure enough, the smartcar hub’s finally in view, lit up by the burning cars Vito and Michael have destroyed to clear a path for us. It’s a multilevel parking facility painted a pristine white, with vast ten-lane exits so the cars can be quickly deployed in case of an emergency traffic surge.
I relax when I see the cars docked in three floors of recharging stations, protected from vandalism behind neat polarized shields.
Hardly anybody owns cars these days. Why put yourself in hock to a dealership in an uncertain economy, when there are autonomously roaming patrols you can summon to your doorstep within five minutes, driving you anywhere you like for a trivial cost? This smartcar hub has a thousand cars, and during peak hours most are out on the road. But it’s three in the morning, and four hundred–plus cars are in for recharging and routine maintenance.
Standard smartcar procedure is they shut down their wireless connection to avoid external hacking when they dock. You can only hack them through a physical network connection … and the easiest way to do that is to break into the smartcar traffic-control center at the facility’s heart, which is impregnable against internet-based hacks because otherwise any script-kiddie could steal four hundred cars like we’re about to.
The IAC has to know this is our goal. Those four hundred cars nestled in place indicate all the IAC’s hacking might hasn’t gotten them into the smartcar facility remotely.
I hope a four-hundred-car shell game is enough to lose everyone who wants to kill us. The cops have backed off, regrouping and restrategizing; we have about twenty minutes before the state calls in reinforcements and the next assault begins.
I check my inventory reports, am surprised to discover I’m out of missiles and grenades. I’m down to 34 percent ammo on the hunting rifles. I’m glad to find I haven’t shot the combat shotguns; those are meant to liquefy human beings.
This is a fight that Donnie would be masturbating to for months, and I sleepwalked through it.
Yet I’m shivering as I look up the single metric that defines tonight’s success: the casualties. The HUD returns:
0
I slump with relief. Then I change my default settings to report the casualties as “killed in action.”
Truth is, both the IAC and the NJPD deployed weaponry that could have shredded my meat-body given the chance; I’ve just configured my threat packages to prioritize and defend properly, and as such have destroyed or evaded anything dangerous before they brought the heavy guns to bear. I say that I wasn’t in control, but the years I’ve spent refining my response routines saved our asses tonight.
Good preparation’s a helluva force multiplier.
(As is the fact that the ACLU’s legal efforts have thwarted the cops’ efforts to get their hands on true military hardware. I’m good, but I’m not shrug-off-heavy-tanks-and-orbital-strikes good.)
Yet I’m out of the good ammo. And the smartcar hub’s traffic-control points have been designed to minimize cover. Walk into one, and armor-piercing bullets will perforate any unauthorized human figure.
“Yes,” I say, “that’s our goal, Silvia.” I modify my threat models to prioritize speed over offense, then tweak the config files when they don’t hot-patch the first time. I’m more shaken than I want to be.
She places her palm on my chest. “Are you okay?”
How can I tell her that her kindness makes me frail when I need to be relentless?
“I’m fine, Silvia.”
/> A surge of gratitude thrums up in me as she nods. We both know I’m not that fine. But she understands I’m a teetering Jenga pile of competence right now, and investigating me will collapse me.
She kisses my cracked faceplate instead.
Why am I blushing?
We approach the smartcar hub’s lobby, which has the pleasant look of a model home nobody lives in. There’s a pretty Asian receptionist filing her nails at the front desk—which makes me think how her job is referred to, sneeringly, among human resources workers as “TH,” or the “Token Human.” She’s a vestigial remnant kept in place out of some dim cultural memory defining good customer service. They’re usually wannabe actors too dim to realize realistic CGI has rendered the old Hollywood path to stardom obsolete.
Truthfully, the voice recognition and AI scripts, with their deep access to customer purchasing history and customer psychological profiles bought from the data warehouses, are near-perfect at giving customer satisfaction (at least to the customers loyal enough to be worth satisfying).
Yet each smartcar hub keeps one lucky, good-looking person designated as the quote-unquote “regional manager”—because the angry unemployed are less likely to burn the place down if the corporation keeps some fresh-faced girl visible through the front windows.
The four night-shift mechanics fleeing for cover? They’re what really keeps this place running.
“Stay put,” I tell her. “We won’t be long.”
“Will I have a job when you’re done?” she asks.
I wince. They’ll probably get their cars back, but I can’t promise they’ll be in good condition. If this place isn’t doing well—and Kiva didn’t pick a supernice area to live in—then the CEO might take this excuse to close shop.
“Probably,” I tell her.
I don’t like hurting innocents, but there’s lots of guys who’d rather be hit in the mouth than the wallet.
I stop before the door leading to the long, open hallway to the traffic hub. I don’t even have to glance at the receptionist’s desk to know she hit the emergency “assault” button, meaning their defense packages have been activated. Mere humans don’t stand a chance against the weaponry designed to stand between body-hackers and complete control of $25 million in automotive vehicles.
“The central control point is guarded against threats like me,” I tell Silvia.
She bounces up and down like a kid about to jump in the ball pit. “But not threats like me.”
I shoot her a broken-toothed grin. “Go get ’em, Silvia.”
I step to one side as she launches herself into the fortified hallway. I reach for a celebratory cigar, then realize I left my Macanudos back in Scylla. Proof of how sloppy I’m getting.
That concern drains away when I hear Silvia yelping with joy as she bounces down the hall, wrecking automated turrets, yanking alarms out of their sockets, shrugging off gunfire.
And I think about the IAC—they could have used these techniques to give people with panic disorders a body that empowered them. Not to mention what sort of advances they might have onboard to fight cancer, and HSV-III, and God knows how many terminal illnesses.
We can’t stop them. I don’t have the resources to stop them. This is still a glorified suicide mission.
But damn, I’d give anything to reprogram the IAC’s tools to benefit the world instead of exploiting it.
“All clear!” Silvia shouts. I stroll down a hallway thick with carcinogenic smoke and tear gas, sparking with wrecked machinery, one ruined turret-gun whirring pathetically as it struggles to get a bead on me.
The final chamber’s reinforced doors have slammed shut—but they’re not designed to protect against a black-market combat monster and an IAC-fueled superstrong bioweapon.
Their central chamber, however, is laughably mundane. It’s three gray work-cubicles, one empty. The two night-shift maintenance technicians—who get paid by the hour—look up from their workstations, startled, as Silvia kicks the door in. They’re dressed in gaudy gold-and-white SmartCar uniforms.
This is the busy time for sysadmins. The city’s asleep, so they’re scrambling to do their maintenance before daily peak load hits. That’s two people supervising a place controlling a thousand cars, which in turn probably service forty thousand people a day.
Seven people run this entire facility, and one is for show.
No wonder the receptionist was worried about losing her job.
Suddenly, breaking open this final gate feels like wresting open a window to an uglier future, one where human expertise is no longer required. The central terminal is no longer an office, but some bunker where the remaining shreds of human dignity have retreated, the last space where people have a shot at making worthwhile decisions.
The junior sysadmin makes a choked weeping noise. And I realize: these poor bastards don’t realize I’m waxing philosophical. They think I’m deciding whether to shoot them.
“I know what you did when you heard the alarm,” I tell them pleasantly, my courteous Missouri drawl rising to the surface again. “I won’t blame you; it’s company policy. But is there any way to undo it?”
The lead sysadmin, an overweight black woman in her forties, exhales a great relieved sigh before adjusting her tortoiseshell glasses. She keeps her gaze well averted, figuring staring at Silvia’s physique would give offense. “Not at our access level, no, sir. To unlock the system would require someone to fly out from HQ with a time-synced security stick and enter the root password.”
These poor suckers hit the “lockdown” button the moment final security was breached. Which, frankly, is either blindly stupid or purposely courageous—anyone with the firepower to get through to the central terminal is unlikely to treat the people inside kindly. And I will admit I’d been hoping they’d been so terrified they skipped the lockdown and handed me control.
“All right.” I take a moment to examine the terminals, hoping the hack I purchased still works. I love prep work, but even I don’t make a habit of breaking into smartcar hubs. “You folks get over there, then, far away from us. Don’t try to escape; not only would your lungs not like the tear gas outside, but you might get caught in the crossfire when the big boys move in.”
They squeeze, obediently, into the corner. Silvia squints, confused.
“Are we pulling off a heist?” she asks.
“I suppose we are,” I reply. “Though this may be a real short heist.”
I pop out the ISB access point hidden in Vito’s index finger and search for the admin port. The system’s locked down to a single access point—not even the IAC could reach them. The only input this system will allow, and by proxy the several hundred cars docked for recharging and system updates, comes through this port.
I inject the hack I bought. My onboard hack database helpfully reminds me this vulnerability was purchased from BlackLaura, reliability rating of 92.1 percent, nine months ago.
Shit. I didn’t realize it was that long.
I hold my breath, but nothing happens.
My sensors pick up at least one person picking their way down the hallway, wary of any remaining automated defenses; some poor cop, chosen to be the vanguard for the rest of the force. They’ve lost expensive equipment tonight, so they’re doing what military forces have done since time immemorial: expending cheap bodies as scouts to gather information.
I could instruct Vito and Michael to cap him. But the smoke obscures the details; though my probability modules say it’s an 81.7 percent chance this is a cop, there’s still an 18.3 percent chance it’s some confused technician. I don’t want to pop some poor minimum-wage schmuck in the head.
Still, it’s a long hallway, giving us a few minutes before the probably-cop arrives—maybe BlackLaura’s hack takes time to chew through the defenses.
“Excuse me? Sir?” The tortoiseshell-glassed sysadmin raises her hand, like a kid in class. “If you don’t mind me asking, which hack are you using?”
I raise my eyebrows
. “Sweet Lord, woman, how many break-ins do you get?”
“Not … many. Sir. None. But I install the patches here, and we’re pretty scrupulous about system security.”
“Of course you are.” Smartcar hacks are the holy grail of hackers. Who doesn’t want a free ride? And, if you’re more criminally inclined, who doesn’t want a free ride that’s not tracked on the city traffic records? The smartcars are the best-defended cybersecurity sites because everyone wants in.
The tortoiseshell woman waits for an answer. It’s a bizarre mixture of courtesy and self-interest: if I’d been too thuggish, she would have been terrified to speak her mind. Yet if she can convince us my purchased vulnerability has been fixed, maybe she can get us to leave before the shooting starts.
“BlackLaura,” I say. Which is, honestly, a mild broach of protocol; I shouldn’t even admit I purchased this hack, let alone drop a dime on who I got it from. Then again, she’s technically not supposed to help me either, so we’re well beyond normal politeness.
She carefully raises her company PDA as if she’s fearful I might shoot her, then scrolls through her maintenance records. “BlackLaura … the vulnerability from 2049, 2051, or 2052?”
“The ’51. Last year’s.” BlackLaura’s clearly got an inside position at SmartCar. I should have subscribed to her feed for updates.
Vito and Michael rub my temples.
“Patched two months ago.” She holds up her display screen, as if it’s not her fault, it’s this darned PDA. “Sorry. Sir.”
I slump. The cop in the hallway gets closer.
I’m tempted to take off my faceplate and let him get the headshot.
“They’re still working on closing the 2052 vulnerability, if you can find it,” she adds apologetically.
It’s a bizarre courtesy—but then again we’ve entered the land of programmers, where we respect anyone who’s done their work.
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