by Lee Isserow
“What the fuck are you doing?” Hayes asked.
“I'm, well, you're providing insight into --”
“I'm not here to provide insight.” Hayes interjected. “I'm here because I need your help.”
“Oh...” Parry said, confused. “My help? But surely, you have advanced technology. Nanotechnology! What could I possibly do..?”
“Something's fucked up. My lens is screwing about, I need --”
“Lens?” the professor inquired.
“Eye implant, gives me thought control over, well, everything.” Hayes explained. “But it's fucked, I need you to talk to my nanos, get them working on fixing it. They'll do the physical stuff on autopilot, but the lens is tech, that's not their job, unless someone makes it their job.”
“Right...” Parry said, still wrapping his head around the concept.
“You know nanotech, right?”
“Well... our nanotechnology isn't as... advanced.”
“How not-advanced...?” Hayes asked, sceptically.
“Very?” said Parry, almost embarrassed at having to say so. “Very basic, that is. Nothing along these lines.”
“Fucking great.” Hayes spat.
“But...” the professor started.
“But? I like a but, what have you got?”
“How does your... do your 'nanos', as you call them, do they understand, or might they make use of implants?”
“Like mods?” Hayes asked. “Yeah. I have mods all over the place.”
“And these 'mods', are they built to communicate with the nanos, do they function on their own, or do the nanos interact with them, symbiotically?”
“Both, maybe? I don't fucking know, I'm not a tech.” Hayes grunted. “My job is mostly to shoot bad people and make sure they get shot a second or third time.”
“Right...” said the professor, feeling uneasy, his eyes darting around Hayes's body for a weapon.
“You're not a 'bad people', Doc. I'm not here to shoot you.” Hayes sighed, trying to be reassuring.
Marcus Hayes had never quite been able to master the concept of 'reassurance'. Whereas the majority of human beings were wired for empathy, his empathetic circuits had been conflated by the action movie cliches that were stitched into the fibre of his very being. He was built more for walking away from explosions than telling someone their kitten had died of cancer after a car hit it with feline immunodeficiency virus.
“Of course.” Parry said, shuffling to a workstation at the other side of the room.
“What are you thinking?” Hayes asked.
“Well. It's just a theory, but, I wonder if your 'techs' built in a redundancy system, in case of such an occasion.” the old man said, pulling out a draw and searching through it clumsily.
“What kind of redundancy?” Hayes asked.
“Ah ha!” the professor declared, returning to the counter near Hayes and laying out a scalpel and a handful of tiny metal cylinders, two millimetres wide by one tall. “Now, this eye implant of yours, is it running an operating system?”
“I guess?” Hayes said.
“Menu based, or is it something more, specialized?”
“Menu, sort of. It's controlled by thought, but there are menus, sure.”
“Would you place your right wrist on the counter?” the professor asked, taking the scalpel in his hand as Hayes rested his arm as instructed, facing his palm upwards.
“What are you planning on doing with that?” Hayes asked.
“It's just a theory...” the professor said, taking a stiff grasp of Hayes's ring finger. “But I hypothesize that your technicians have made the system menu-based in case of an incident such as this. I'm going to insert these neodymium magnets under your skin, and if you nanos are smart enough, and if this contingency scenario is in their programming, perhaps they will route them through to the lens controls.”
All of the professor's assumptions were more or less correct. However, Hayes had spent his career making sure that he remained obstinately ignorant of why and how any of his technological accoutrements worked. Whilst the majority of Jump Division agents would have been able to answer Parry's questions with little effort, Hayes preferred to keep those parts of his brain full of information that he deemed more useful, such as how to shoot people in the face and make the biggest, prettiest splatters on the walls behind them.
“Did you notice your sentence was mostly comprised of 'ifs'?” Hayes asked, as the professor dug the scalpel six millimetres into the right side of the top of his finger. “Fucking ow!” Hayes squawked. “A warning or painkiller would have been nice.”
“I have none of the latter, and the former seemed unnecessary, given that I am holding a scalpel, and your finger.” Parry shot back, acerbically.
Hayes reached over for the whisky and knocked back a long gulp to wash down the pain, as the professor inserted one of the magnets into the hole he had carved, the nanos already starting to close the wound.
“Remarkable!” said the professor, as he pulled the scalpel out, and made another incision a centimetre below the first, and inserted another magnet.
As that healed, he moved to Hayes's thumb and sliced at the fleshy centre mass, inserting a third magnet. Parry then placed the scalpel on the workstation and watched the healing in fascination.
“That it?” Hayes asked, knocking back another glug of whisky
“Hopefully.”
“Great. How long's this gonna take?” he asked.
“However long your nanotechnology takes to work out what we're trying to do... assuming they're actually programmed to...” he trailed off as his eyes slowly panned to movement in his periphery. The blood left on the scalpel was slowly crawling from the blade across the counter towards Hayes.
“It does that.” Hayes said. “You get used to it...” he gestured his healing thumb towards the blood, and it sped towards him, crawling back inside his body. “Security mechanism.” he explained. “Decreases the risk of advanced tech being left in a mundy world if I start bleeding everywhere.”
“Do you bleed 'everywhere' often?” Parry asked.
“More often than I'd like...” Hayes replied, knocking back the whisky.
They say patience is a virtue. Hayes had once noted that In 3281, patience is also a currency of sorts. The population waited indefinite periods of time for sustenance, breeding privileges, and would lie down as they sensed rain was to come.
It should probably be mentioned that 3281 is the world in which the dominant species is the cow.
Hayes however, did not have the virtue of patience, and the professor bore the brunt of his boredom for over an hour, tapping at the magnets lying under his ring finger with his thumb in frustration until something finally happened.
“Wait, something happened...” Hayes said.
“Can you control the lens?”
“I don't know...” Hayes said. “But I feel something, waves of energy pulsating around my fingers....”
“Ahh, a side-effect of the neodymium.” the professor explained. “It often gives one magnetoreception.” he observed a blank expression on Hayes's face, and realised that he had to explain further. “The... Well, it's the ability to sense magnetic fields.”
“Great. Real helpful skill.” Hayes sighed.
“But that means your body is adapting to the magnets!” Parry said, ignoring the sarcasm. “And at a remarkable rate! Try swiping your thumb against your finger again, think of it like a touchpad.”
“What the fuck is a touchpad?” Hayes asked, which led Parry to pull a laptop out from his office and demonstrate how a touchpad worked. “That's fucking idiotic.” said Hayes. “Can't you just think or gesture?”
“Not with a degree of accuracy, at our current level of technology...” Parry murmured. He was beginning to get tired of being thought of as a Neanderthal.
“Of course...” Hayes scoffed, with a roll of his eyes. He swiped along the magnets in his finger with the one in his thumb, and a menu in his lens beca
me highlighted. “You're fucking kidding me...” he said.
“Is it working?”
“Yeah it's fucking working!” Hayes said, tapping his thumb against his finger, closing all the displays that were obscuring his view. “About fucking time!”
“Congratulations are in order!” the professor said, reaching for the whisky, to discover the bottle was empty. He glared at Hayes.
“Almost back to my normal damn self...” Hayes said, walking around the lab, catching sight of his reflection in a metal cabinet, his face almost completely healed. He began cycling through the menu in the lens and tried to get in touch with Kali. “Still no comms...” he said to himself, trying to work out how to attempt alternate channels of communication, swiping and tapping at his finger.
He quickly gave up, distracted. The magnetic fields were stronger at the wall than they were at the workstation. He felt the air around him, as if somewhere nearby was the source of the pulses. He followed the signal around the outskirts of the room, trying to find its origin.
“Everything ok?” the professor asked, shuffling over towards him.
“Yeah...” said Hayes, rubbing his finger and thumb together. “Just trying to make sense of this...” alongside the magnetic fields he was sensing, his fingers were tingling, a pressure building under the surface. He looked down at his hand and could swear ripples were forming across his palm, nanos crawling under the skin at a rapid pace. The pressure continued to grow, as if a bubble of energy was growing in his grasp. He continued to walk around the room, the fields getting stronger and stronger. He stopped, as he felt a pinch in his back, turning to see the doctor standing behind him.
Following the old man's body down, he glimpsed a frail hand clutching a syringe that was piercing his skin. Hayes tried to speak, but the words weren't forming, his lungs refusing to push the air to his vocal chords. A clumsy left hand tried to find the holster at his hip, thumb ineptly searching for the biometric scanner, meeting it briefly enough to activate the pocket dimension. He delved in with fingers that barely operated and managed to loop one around the trigger of a gun, wrenching it out of the holster as his shoulders slumped, losing complete control of his arms.
His knees grew heavy, and were forced to the floor by the call of gravity. Hayes tried to grasp the grip of the gun, take hold of it and pull the trigger, but his left hand was useless. As his eyelids grew heavy, he became acutely aware that he was still holding on to the pressure in his right hand, clutching it, the neodymium magnets clasping his fingers around it.
As he felt his chest give in, the weight pulling him to the gleaming vinyl floor, he used his last ounce of strength to pull the magnets locking his fingers apart. There was a gasp, a rush of movement, a flurry of blurred white coat, and the thud of old bones cracking against a wall.
Then once again, and much to his dismay, Hayes was unconscious.
5
9 hours to the end of the world.
Kali had spent a total of two hours arguing with the techs, in fifteen minute bursts, spread out across a further three hours wasted waiting behind the counter. Given that Hayes was off-world for the foreseeable future, they were punishing her for him walking off with the holsters and nanomesh armour.
As the sixth hour of a day wasted in Tech Ops began ticking away, the tech Hayes had referred to as 'Johnson' came to the counter.
“It's off the grid.” he said.
Kali tried very hard not to punch him in his stupid face. “I know it's off the grid...” she said, forcing the words through gritted teeth. “What can we do about that..?”
“You'd need to reconnect it.” he said, as if entirely unaware he was making her angrier.
“You're incredibly astute.” she said, clenching her fists, her arms rigid by her sides for fear that they might fire off when she least expect it.
“Gonna need a push from the other side though. Maybe your guys in-world can spend the next five years or so building a jump room, spend a further year teaching them how to sync it with the room here....”
“Guy. Singular. One of them was ripped to shreds at the molecular level.” she said, trying, and succeeding poorly, at hiding her resentment.
“Was it Hayes?” asked not-Johnson, almost appearing eager at the thought of his demise.
“The other one.” Kali said with a sigh, realising she was as disappointed as the tech. “Is there anything you guys have for communication off the grid?”
“We don't have a reason to communicate with anything off the grid...” the tech said. “If something's not on the grid it's, well, it's not a reality we can access, is it?”
“But one of you geniuses has got to be experimenting with... I don't know, meta-communication or something, right?” she asked, pulling a pair of words out of her arse and gluing them together with spit and hope.
“Oh, yeah!” said the tech, a glimmer of excitement in his eyes. “Yeah, we've been trying something, It's a new algorithm for stronger comm signals that goes sub-meta rather than along the grid. We haven't beta tested it, but --”
“Gimmie!” Kali instructed.
“But, it might, y'know, fry your console.” he said, anxiously. “Might fry all the consoles... We test these new things on airgapped machines before pushing them out through the network...”
“I'll air gap. Give it.” she said.
“But, you need the network to operate --”
“Give. It.” she said again, with a glare that not-Johnson knew meant she was going to do him harm if he failed to obey.
“Yes miss.” he said, shuffling off to the adjacent room.
Kali watched through the window as he scuttered around, going from workstation to workstation, talking to his colleagues, and finally started to transfer the algorithm for her. She didn't like that it felt like she was responsible for Darvish's death. That she was responsible for kicking 7543 off the grid. And worst of all, she had no idea what kind of trouble Hayes was going to get himself into whilst left alone to his own devices in a mundane world.
6
7 hours to the end of the world.
The air was thick, sterile, with a metallic odour. Hayes took it in, listened to the sounds of the room. A detached silence, emptiness, with an undercurrent of magnetic hums reverberating above. Power conduits, he reckoned. He didn't move, didn't want to let them know he was awake. Whoever had grabbed him, whoever coerced or ordered the professor to knock him out, was probably watching. Hayes was going to make sure he had the advantage. He had been knocked out and hit in the head too many times this mission, and was looking forward to doing some damage to his captors.
His thumb slowly swiped against his ring finger. The menu in his lens became highlighted. They hadn't ripped the magnets out. Either the professor hadn't mentioned the new mods, or whoever was holding him wanted him to be able to make use of them.
Hayes had heard tales of Division agents that were captured by mundane realities, taken apart by crude surgical teams. Rinsed of their advanced technology. Jump Division didn't take kindly to their agents being turned into pin cushions, especially by backward worlds.
There was no official mandate or directive that prohibited interference with the internal development of dimensions. They just preferred to be asked nicely, rather than lose an asset to the clumsy blade of a banal society's scientists.
Hayes used his nanos to build a map of the cell based on sensory information gathered. The nanos were smart, could approximate a sonar map based on how sound travelled around a room. They could tell that he was being held in a metal box, fifteen feet wide by ten deep and high. They pulled data from his other senses, estimated the table his head was resting on to be four feet tall, metal, mostly steel. The chair he was sitting on was stronger, an iron-aluminium alloy. His wrists were restrained behind his back by cuffs, hands kept half a foot apart by a solid bar of the same material. If he were able to bleed, the nanos could chew up the metal. But they had prepared for that, it seemed. The bracelets were lined with some ki
nd of padding that emanated a silent frequency. The nanos were compelled to retreat from it, a signal warning them away. And the drug that knocked him out, it had managed to avoid being picked up. A smart drug. In a world that still suffered from a myriad diseases. Hayes was starting to think this world wasn't as mundane as he was led to believe.
Digging through the menu in his lens, Hayes tried to check comms, but there was still no signal from Kali. Whatever he was going to do to get out of this mess, he was going to have to do on his own.
He stirred in the chair, feigned movement in sleep, trying in vain to reach a thumb to a holster. Both were out of reach. But he had had a gun in his hand, could hazily remember trying to fire off a round before before succumbing to the drug. That gun was still out there, somewhere. Cycling through the menu, he found the weapon controls. The same controls he had used to fire eight firearms simultaneously at the singularity. They couldn't activate the holsters, which were biolocked and outside the system, but if one gun was somewhere out there, he could take control of it.
He sent out a signal to activate the gun camera. Whoever found it, whoever took it, would have thought it an odd-shaped pistol, but was unlikely to notice the pinprick indent under the barrel, in which the camera was hidden.
A display flickered to life in the corner of the lens. A darkly lit room, the weapon on its side. He activated the antigrav grip and instructed the gun to pivot in place, showing him the rest of the room in which it was located. Metal shelving units went deep into the distance, other weaponry, advanced contraband, all stored for some reason. Experimentation and investigation, he assumed. Reverse-engineering. Based on the sheer amount of illicit items, this mundy world had somehow been getting their hands on tech from across the grid.
Hayes made the gun stand up straight onto its grip, rotate again to make sure there was no sign of life, then ordered it to levitate from the shelf, hovering up to the ceiling, in search of a way out. The shelving units went on for what seemed like a hundred metres to the tiny eye of the camera, but there were rays of light coming from the far end. The gun sped towards it along the ceiling, and stopped in front of the door. Inspected it. Solid metal, with a small glass window at the centre. A maglock keeping it shut, biometric sensor above the handle.
