The Red: First Light

by Linda Nagata

  I have to look closely to see the bolts. They’re flush with the shaft and so finely engineered the seam is almost invisible.

  “Besides the bolts, there’s wiring involved,” Masoud explains. “It’s a little complicated. But the lower legs can be easily detached.” He squeezes the knee joint with thumb and forefinger. Then he rotates his hand down... and my leg comes off.

  The hair on the back of my neck stands on end and I have to stifle a scream. “I’m a toy?”

  Masoud chuckles. “A very expensive toy.”

  He’s more relaxed now than when he came in. I haven’t broken down yet; he’s probably hoping he got the right patient after all.

  He turns the leg over, studying its intricate architecture. “Your legs were designed by Joby Nakagawa. He’s a talented engineer. I designed the bio-electric interface. The result is... an astonishing accomplishment—and adaptive.” He flexes the robot foot, stretches the calf. “You won’t be tied to just this one architecture. As the engineering improves, or your anticipated environment changes, you’ll be able to swap your prosthetics.”

  His self-satisfaction grates on me, and I respond with sarcasm. “Even better than natural, huh?”

  “In some ways. Maybe.”

  “Why did you put the legs on at all when I can’t move them? Why not just the posts, until the paralysis goes away?”

  Masoud leans over my titanium knee joint and carefully snaps my leg back on. “It’s psychological, Lieutenant. We don’t want you thinking of yourself as a cripple. The army has big plans for you.”

  ~~~

  Promises, promises.

  The only plan I’m party to is another session of physical therapy. I get to work my arms, back, and abdomen, but nothing else. Afterward, my keepers dump me back into bed despite my protests. The bone-titanium splice must not be stressed until the join has time to harden, and my nerves still have to grow into the bio-electric interface.

  I sit up in bed, staring at the bony shape of my prosthetics beneath the insulated sheet. Slowly, I turn the sheet back, exposing them. In the three days I’ve been awake, I haven’t touched the titanium.

  I touch it now.

  I lean forward, resting my palms lightly on the knee joints. Then I lean even farther, sliding my hands down the robot shins.

  I expect the bones to be cold, but they’re not. Maybe my body heat warmed them when they were under the blanket. I wonder how much of a heat sink they’ll be, draining away the warmth of my body. Will I freeze to death faster than a normal man?

  I let my hands explore the shape of these new legs, stroking the long bone, feeling the struts. I try to reach my new ankles, but there’s too much pain in my back, so I return my attention to the knees, studying the joint until I’m pretty sure I know how to unlock the lower legs the way that Dr. Masoud did.

  I do it. I’m holding the leg in my hand, astonished at its weight, so much lighter than natural bone. I’m horrified too. My body should not work this way. I wasn’t made to come apart. Suddenly, all I want is to be whole again, so I snap the leg back into place. Then I throw myself back onto the pillow, feeling a weird guilt over my explorations.

  Not that I can hide anything. My overlay is on. It’s recording as always; that’s part of my contract.

  And the army has made a reality show out of my fucked up life.

  “Is this episode two?” I ask the empty room. “Shelley gets new legs?”

  No one answers.

  I’m disappointed.

  Then it occurs to me I haven’t seen Dark Patrol yet. I launch a search, find it, and run the show in my overlay. There’s Yafiah again, and Dubey, looking good.

  We had a good squad.

  I wonder where Ransom is and if he’s getting along with his new CO.

  I skip my way through the show, but there’s no real tension for me. I know how things turn out.

  Jaynie comes on in the last third, and then it’s over. Elliot was right. It does end with a bang.

  And I know with cold certainty that the opening of episode two will be this recursive scene of me watching the first episode’s horrible finale.

  No wonder some genius hacker picked me to fuck with. I probably have an audience of millions.

  ~~~

  I’m in my wheelchair, parked on a hospital terrace in the shade of a scrawny, thorny, Texan tree. It’s midafternoon, but clouds have tempered the heat, so it’s not even ninety. The terrace is a haven for broken soldiers, but we sit far apart, and don’t talk to each other.

  I’m nodding off after two long sessions of physical therapy, when Lissa’s avatar pops up on my overlay. “Shelley?”

  I stare at the little thumbnail image, at a loss to explain what it’s doing there.

  “Shelley, please talk to me. I know you’re angry. You have a right to be—”

  “No! No, I’m not. I’m just surprised.” I don’t want her to break the link, so I grope for words. “It’s just I was half asleep and your call dropped straight in. The link just opened on its own, like... like it used to do, that way we had it set up back in New York... you remember?”

  She had full access to my overlay, so she could see what I saw and speak to me as if we were together. That got turned off when I went into the army. I can’t believe Guidance switched it back on.

  “I want to see you again,” she says.

  Maybe Guidance did flip the switch, but the order surely came from somewhere else... say, the producer behind Dark Patrol, fishing for drama in episode two?

  I can’t let Lissa get caught up in that. “Baby, before you fly out here again—”

  “Too late.” I hear her embarrassed laugh. “I didn’t want you to say no, so I just... got on a plane.”

  There’s no GPS attached to her icon. She could be anywhere. But as I turn around, a glass door slides open and she walks out onto the terrace, wearing a silky summer dress in pale green, and a nervous smile.

  Between my stunned expression and the sight of my robot legs, her smile falters, but only for a second. She crouches beside my chair, her hands on the armrest for balance. “You’re really not angry?”

  “I’m really not angry.”

  But when I tell Lissa about the reality show, she is going to be pissed.

  ~~~

  I roll first into the room. As Lissa follows, I push the button on the wall to close the door. She kicks off her sandals and rolls onto the bed, where she sits cross-legged, looking at me with shining, dark eyes and a serious expression. “I want to apologize—”

  “No. I need you to just listen right now. There are things you need to know, and then you can decide how you feel.”

  She straightens her spine and stares down at me with wary eyes.

  “Lissa... you know the army’s been archiving the feed from my overlay all this time?”

  “Yes. You told me they were doing that, but that’s when you’re in the field, right?”

  I turn my head and stare at the wall so her face won’t be recorded. “It’s all the time when I’m not on leave. Everything I see through my eyes, everything I hear... it goes to an archive.”

  “Oh, fuck.” I hear her feet hit the floor; her steps approach until she’s standing right behind me. “Are you telling me someone was watching when we... ?”

  “I don’t think anyone was watching. Not in real time. But there’s a record. It’s not like they can use it though, or publicize it. You didn’t sign a waiver.”

  “And your feed is live right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you for telling me”—every syllable crisp—“you can look at me if you want to.”

  I turn to look over my shoulder.

  She’s standing with her arms crossed, glaring right into my eyes with a fiery gaze. I spin the chair around.

  “Is that all you need to tell me?” she asks.

  “No. There’s more.” I explain about the reality show.

  “Damn it, Shelley!”

  “I didn’t know, okay?
Not until Elliot called me.”

  “How can they do this to you?”

  “They own me! They can do what they want. But they can’t use you. You’re a civilian and you haven’t signed a waiver.”

  She gestures at the door. “There are surveillance cameras in the lobbies and halls. Can the army use that video?”

  I whisper the question to my encyclopedia, and a long document comes up. The encyclopedia starts to read it to me, but I cut it off and admit to Lissa, “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s be safe and assume they can.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to leave?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “No! I told you before, I love you. I meant it. It’s you who has to decide how you feel.”

  Her expression doesn’t change. “I came today, hoping to work that out, but we aren’t going to have that chance. I trust you, Shelley, but I don’t trust the army. We’ve always been friends. Let’s leave it at that.”

  I’m not sure we can—and that gives me hope. So I don’t argue. “How long are you here for this time?”

  She smiles, no doubt seeing right through me. “I’m flying back tonight, just like before. You’re turning into an expensive hobby.” She strolls to the window; gazes outside.

  Silence stretches, awkward for me. “Do you want to go for a walk or something?” I ask her.

  She turns around, the bright light of the window behind her so it’s hard for me to see her face. “No. I want to talk about King David. I’m working on a theory to explain him.”

  That catches me by surprise. Colonel Kendrick had a theory too, but I want to hear what Lissa has to say. “I’m listening.”

  “No disrespect to your friend Ransom, but I’m going to put aside his theory that it’s God talking to you.”

  “I won’t tell him.”

  She flashes a smile. “And I’m going to start with the obvious—that the way into your head is through your skullcap. I think you’ve been hacked.”

  I don’t look appropriately surprised.

  She evaluates my non-reaction, and nods. “So you’ve heard this before. Well, good. At least the army’s trying to figure it out.”

  “Does your theory go any farther?”

  “A bit farther.” She returns to the bed, where she sits cross-legged again, her head cocked, and a faraway look in her eyes. “It’s important to understand that a big point of marketing analysis is to separate cause and effect from coincidence. At Pace Oversight, I get to use some truly powerful analytical programs. I’ve used one to do some exploratory runs, see what kind of patterns might turn up. Patterns can point back to the source, the initiating event.”

  “So you’re hunting for your suspected hacker? Do you know who it is?”

  She purses her lips; shakes her head. “That’s not the right question. The question is what. What is it?”

  I wait for her to tell me.

  “The world runs on massively networked, self-restructuring cloud computing. Analytical programs like the ones we use at Pace Oversight are too complex for anyone to really understand. So complex that they’ve become semiautonomous, designed to self-correct by rewriting themselves.”

  “So somebody’s running a complex program that’s succeeded in hacking me. Okay.”

  “Well... this may sound crazy, but I don’t think we can assume somebody is running it. Serious people have been discussing the possibility ever since we started moving to bio-inspired platforms—”

  She stops in midsentence as a blush warms her brown cheeks.

  In the sudden silence I hear my heart beating too hard. The skullnet icon begins to glow. “Lissa, I think I know where you’re going with this. Just remember, whatever you say, Guidance can hear it.”

  She takes a deep breath. “I don’t mind. I haven’t done anything illegal. If they want to chase butterflies with me, that’s fine. I think a program has jumped from semiautonomous to fully autonomous, that it’s grown beyond its core algorithms, is growing, and running without supervision, operating on God-knows-what protocol. And before you ask, I’m not talking about some great marauding killer AI suddenly conscious of its own existence. Just because it’s a rogue program, that doesn’t mean it’s conscious. It doesn’t even have to have a survival instinct—just adaptable algorithms.”

  “And you think that’s what hacked my head? Some runaway program?” My voice is eerily calm given the subject and gravity of our conversation. “Why does that make more sense than somebody running the program?”

  “It’s the complexity. This is not just about you. Weird events are everywhere, the kind that we describe with words like ‘precognition,’ ‘intuition,’ ‘coincidence,’ ‘luck,’ ‘miracle,’ ‘blessing,’ ‘curse,’ ‘perfect timing.’ These are the words we use when chance goes non-random. The more I look for these events, the more I find. It’s like a hundred-million gremlin hands nudging people one way and another. There’s a glitch in the stock market, sales figures fail to update, an airline reservation gets lost... and lives change, taking off in new directions. A wrong number leads to old enemies settling their differences. The twentieth person on a waitlist gets into a class because the notice never went out to the first nineteen. A traffic light fails to switch, making a bus late and creating a time window for a musician to meet the music blogger who ignites her career. Purposeful incidents, leading... I don’t know where.”

  We both jump at an eruption of angry male voices in the hallway beyond the closed door. Two men, talking over each other. I can’t make out the words, but I know who they are.

  Lissa figures out half of it. “That’s your dad.”

  “Yeah, and Elliot.”

  “Oh shit.” She jumps off the bed. “What’s he doing here?”

  “I asked him to come.”

  “Why?”

  I hesitate, because I’m not really sure. But the voices are escalating, so I steer my chair to the door, push the button to open it, and roll into the hall.

  “If you want to find someone to blame for what he’s been through,” Elliot is saying, “blame the people of this country who fund every conflict—”

  And my dad interrupting in low fury, “You let him believe he could make a difference—”

  A nurse at the desk, looking outraged, warns them, “Please take your argument downstairs before I call—”

  “Dad!” I interrupt her. “Elliot!” I bring the chair to a stop as they both turn startled faces in my direction.

  My dad has a business to run in New York, but for now he’s set up a temporary office in his hotel room so he can come see me every day. He steps to my side, squeezes my shoulder, and then he trades a kiss on the cheek with Lissa.

  Elliot is too stunned to move. He’s staring at me, mouth open and horror in his eyes. He wrenches his gaze away, looking ill. “Oh, God. Shelley—”

  I guess I should have warned him, but hell, he knew I was injured. I wonder what he expected to see?

  “Thanks for coming, Elliot.” The nurse is glaring at us. “Let’s go down to the terrace.” I instruct my wheelchair and, without waiting for anyone to agree, I head for the elevator. They all catch up by the time the doors open.

  ~~~

  On the way down, Elliot stands by the panel of illuminated buttons, staring at my robot legs. “I’ve never seen prosthetics that complex.”

  “You know me. Always cutting edge.”

  “Jimmy,” my dad says. “Did you ask him to come here?”

  Instead of answering his question, I tell him about the reality show. He’s got a tablet with him, so when we get out on the terrace, he and Lissa find a bench in a shady corner and they start watching it, with Lissa frowning as she leans against his shoulder to see.

  Elliot and I stare at each other. “You should have warned me.”

  “I thought you’d call before you came.”

  “Yeah, I should have. But on the plane I was watching Dark Patrol—two more times. I’ve never seen anything like that
show. You really had no idea that was being put together?”

  “None.”

  “On the way over from the airport, I conferenced with the War Machine editorial staff. They’ve all seen the show, and we’re agreed. I’m going to be writing an article on it.”

  This is not what I want to hear. “No way, Elliot. I don’t care if you talk to my CO. I do not want to do an interview.”

  “Who is your CO?”

  “Forget about it.”

  “Okay, okay. I had to try. But tell me, just as friends—at the end of the show, when you knew those jets were coming, was that for real?”

  “I didn’t know the jets were coming. I just had a bad feeling.”

  “Seriously bad.”

  He waits for me to say more, but I’m distracted, thinking back to our 2AM conversation and trying to remember why I thought it was a good idea for him to come here. “On the phone, did I say what I wanted to talk to you about?”

  “Not exactly. Something about secret stuff.”

  That’s what I remember too, but it doesn’t make sense. I can’t talk to Elliot about secret stuff... not that I know much that’s really secret. With Dark Patrol loose in the world my precognition has become public knowledge—and a rogue autonomous program that can hack through the army’s best cybersecurity? That’s Lissa’s theory, one she achieved on her own, and she’s not sworn to secrecy.

  Still, with security issues and a new CO to deal with, it was not exactly a great time to ask my controversial, peace-activist friend to visit—which sets an unsettling suspicion brewing in the back of my mind. Was it just me talking to Elliot at 2AM? Or was something else there, encouraging me to ask, Can you come out here?

  “Shelley, are you still with us?”

  I refocus on him. “Did I sound normal when we were talking?”

  “Yeah. Pretty normal, for a dead man at 2 AM.”

  I nod. Even if Lissa’s rogue program is real, I can’t blame it for every mistake I make. I’m not a puppet. In the Sahel, at every King David moment, I had a choice, except maybe that last day when I knew we had to get out.