Wanted and Wired

by Vivien Jackson

  Heron muttered something she didn’t catch. Probably was trying to be funny or macho, or worse, both. But a hole in his skull sure wasn’t tickling her funny bone.

  She remembered the mess of wires and blood back at the Pentarc and, later, reaching behind his head when they were in the car and feeling the sticky. Some things would be easier if he were just a machine. Not that she minded his man parts, overall. “I thought the virus-transmission-thingy—whatever it was the mercs put in him—was data, not hardware.”

  “This fucker’s both, if you’ll pardon the language, ma’am.”

  “Nanotech,” Heron clarified, in a voice that was tighter than before, a sure sign that he wasn’t enduring this totally without discomfort, no matter what they’d told her. “The com those mercenaries wired had an injection tip, and when they plugged me in, I got a full dose of nanites. The mercenaries themselves probably had no idea what they were doing. Someone else likely rigged it beforehand, and all they had to do was place it. The transmitter is in several pieces, tiny pieces, and we aren’t entirely sure where they are. Kellen’s been trying to hunt them down and dig them out, but it’s slow going.”

  “Can’t the queen help? I mean, she’s a robot, and I know those things got steady hands. Least she used to.” Couldn’t quite keep the bitterness out of her voice, but she’d watered it down some. Hell, she’d let the devil himself dig around in her innards if it would help her partner get over this freakin’ transmission.

  Heron smiled slightly at her suggestion, but it was Kellen who answered. “The queen’s nanocytes hot-wired his neural once, during the Austin riots, and it’s a wonder Heron ain’t as cracked-crazy as she is, the job she did on him.”

  “She saved my life,” Heron said mildly. “The sanity of which decision is, of course, debatable.”

  Kellen huffed out a breath, and Mari did look over this time. He wiped the back of his wrist across his forehead, leaving a smear of blood. “Still ain’t joking, man.”

  “Probably ought to more.” Heron was behaving downright silly this morning, for him. Considering the night he’d just had, Mari counted that as a personal success.

  Muttering something about vascular hemostatic hoodiwhati, Kellen reached with the other hand for some chem-soaked gauze on the tray by his elbow. Hemo was blood, right? But Heron shouldn’t be bleeding. Bleeding during brain surgery was bad. Maybe. Or not? Dangit, she wished she wasn’t so clueless about these things. She swallowed bile and ducked her head back over the tablet.

  More info, but nothing threatening. Bittersweet history, in fact, distracting her from the carnage on the other side of the room. A. R. N. Farad had done work all over, but quite a few of the pics had location tags from Austin. She recognized architecture, landmarks.

  And, in one of the pics, Dad. Memory grabbed her throat and squeezed. She couldn’t stop looking at the image. Dad and his robot, on top of the world. She tabbed through, found more pics of him, but wasn’t surprised that she didn’t appear in any of his photos.

  “Caught one,” Kellen crowed.

  In her periphery, Kellen hoisted a syringe in one hand and a magnetic stabilizer tube in the other.

  Aha. So that’s what he used those things for. She’d always wondered how folks caught and reset nanos. Of course, after meeting Chloe and sleeping in the midst of all those free-fae last night, Mari would never think of nanotech the same way. She wondered what the difference was between the sort of nanos that Kellen was hunting down—and apparently finding—in Heron’s head and the other ones, the rogue ones that formed consciousnesses and hired themselves out in groups. Or the ones who decided to pass themselves off as chesty blonds with chipper voices.

  True, Mari didn’t have a prayer of understanding the technical side of it all, but she felt like she had a good handle on the emotional stuff. She wanted the nanos to win, to get the individuation rights they were fighting for. And not just because Chloe was Heron’s pet project. She liked Chloe a lot, all on her own merits. Plus, she had to face it, she was from Texas. Individuation and rights were big for her.

  Heron mumbled something again, but Mari had removed her com for the shower and hadn’t put it back on. Sucked some, not being able to interpret his mumbling, and she definitely still coveted a way of knowing his supersecret innermost thoughts without his having to speak them out loud. It was only fair, after all.

  A ping on one of her searches snagged her attention, and she looked down at the tablet. Another pic, this time of Heron pre-Austin. He’d gone to school outside London. Well, that would explain the tweed, and also probably his more global attitude about things. Like appreciation of old-timey Russian eggs and Chinese silks. Poetry, too. She thought of his quote about peace, about being at peace with life at last.

  On a whim, she searched the line and found the poem, a short one in Spanish. Twentieth century. It ended in love and peace, just like he’d said, but she read it through several times, just to make sure. Took her a couple of reads to pick up on what was really going on.

  This poem wasn’t about reconciliation with guilt. It was about dying. Dying happy despite an imperfect life.

  A chill started in Mari’s fingertips and crackled up to her chest, her brain. Made her light-headed.

  He didn’t think Kellen’s exploration was going to work. Why?

  On the other side of the room and from far away, she heard Kellen’s voice.

  “All right. Just closing this up.” Some instruments clanged on the tray and then, “There now. Miss Mari, it does seem like I’ll get my wish sooner rather than later. Gonna put him under. You can come on over here for this, if you want to.”

  Mari set her tablet aside and went. She crouched beside Heron’s chair, waiting as he moved his input devices to the cart and rearranged his bouquet of wires, leaving his hands free. He had plugged directly into the module and looked a lot like the queen had in her harness: bristling with big fat cables, the better to transmit the vast info stores in his head, sift them, filter them, clean them. Save them.

  But you don’t think you can be saved, do you?

  She wouldn’t have said it aloud, wouldn’t even have mouthed the words if she’d been wearing her com. But still, Heron looked down at her, let her cover both his hands with hers, staying clear of the wires that protruded, and he knew. She could tell, could see it all over his face.

  “Our hunting expedition didn’t work.” Heron’s voice was matter-of-fact, without a lick of the sinking despair that Mari felt.

  “No,” Kellen admitted. “Got two, but the others are just too quick. You’ll have to fix this in the software.”

  “How?” she asked before she thought better of it.

  “Dry, boring, technical—” Heron began.

  She really hoped he knew her well enough to recognize the fury bleeding out of her eyes. “That’s what the supergenius assholes say. But not you. You told me you were proud to be my partner, that you considered me your equal. So which is it?”

  He paled but, to his credit, didn’t look away. He endured the fire of her anger and offered no excuses. “No, you are right. Okay.” He took a breath. “My plan is to transfer a small part of my neural, my mind, to the station’s computer. I’ll shut down my body and reboot it in isolation, disconnected from all other machines.”

  Well, he was right: she didn’t really understand. But she wanted to kiss him for telling her anyhow. “I don’t know about you, but deliberately creating an out-of-body experience sounds dangerous,” she said.

  “It is.”

  “Do I have any say?” she asked.

  “It’s my body,” he reminded her. “And I’m very good at remotely controlling machines.”

  Kellen dried his hands, having washed them clean of Heron’s blood. He hadn’t gotten the smear off his forehead yet, and there was a streak on his wrist as well. Possibly he didn’t even know it was there, but it made
Mari queasy.

  “Just for kicks and giggles, I gotta ask,” she said. “Can’t you just block the transmission the old-fashioned way, by scrambling the signals or something, like when vid channels don’t want you to see their goodies behind a paywall?”

  Heron closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the antistatic paper. He didn’t so much as twitch when Kellen pressed the injector tip against his neck. “That is a valid suggestion. Unfortunately, I’ve already tried it, back on the plane. These signals are too fast. The second I shut down one thread, another pops up somewhere else. Like a hydra. If the queen didn’t have her whole nanite halo sifting the outgoing transmissions, I wouldn’t have the processing capacity to handle it myself at this point.”

  “You could.” Kellen came around to face his friend, tapping the second syringe. He and Heron stared at each other hard in that space above the chair.

  Mari felt the intensity of all the things they weren’t saying. If she’d had a match, she’d’ve been tempted to poke it out there and see if it didn’t catch flame. The friction was that strong.

  “No.” Heron’s single word was tight, harsh. In his lap, he laced his fingers with hers.

  “What’s he talking about, partner?” Mari asked.

  He ignored her question. “Kellen, you must promise that if, for whatever reason, this doesn’t work, you will reformat my system.”

  “I sure as hell will not. You got a death wish, you can go find somebody else to kill you,” Kellen snapped.

  “No, no killing. Killing, really?” Mari was surprised by how close to a keen her own voice had become. “Who here is talking about killing?” Her nerves were shredded just a little, apparently, but her logic was still working: nothing that he was transmitting could possibly be worth dying for. That was just horrible beyond all possible belief.

  But, a voice in her head reminded her, he might have been trying to tell you, by quoting that poem.

  She mentally told that voice to fuck off. He’d been good, they had been good, up in their room this morning. Better than good. He hadn’t been a man anticipating death. He’d been talking about the future and shit.

  Right? He had, hadn’t he? God, she couldn’t remember exactly.

  She shook her head to clear it. “Kellen, you said a second ago that he could get the processing power to fix the transmission some other way. So, say this remote-rebooty thing doesn’t work. What’s our other option?”

  “He could plug in to the cloud,” said the doc. “Not just this limited space station system, but the whole global information cloud. His neural expands to fit the space, right, and with infinite space…well, there’d be near infinite power, too.”

  “That’s it? I mean, pardon if it sounds stupid, but plugging in, if that would give you the resources you need to stop the transmission, sure seems like a mighty simple way of solving this mess. Simpler than all this other body-leaving business you’re talking about.” Mari and pretty much every other UNAN citizen plugged in every day, after all. As long as they scrubbed for bots and trash, there wasn’t much danger in it. Most folk wouldn’t be able to imagine a life off-cloud.

  Heron still wasn’t looking at her. “Remember when I plugged into the Pentarc before? It took me about half a second to take over the whole core, and if you hadn’t been there to keep me focused on the job, tethered to reality…”

  Mari’s face must have betrayed her confusion, because Kellen broke in.

  “What he’s sayin’ is that his neural is unusually dense. It’s tucked in snug right now, but when he lets it loose on a network, it busts out, filling up all available space. But his consciousness doesn’t get any bigger. It’s like a critter caught in a storm surge, shoved out of its hovel into a wide world, too wide. The change in space, the speed—he’s scared he’ll get lost in all that.”

  “But you think he can handle it?”

  Kellen nodded. “I think it’s worth the risk, if the remote scrub doesn’t work. Compared with completely reformatting, which, for a post-human with a brain as altered as Heron’s, would probably mean death or at least catastrophic memory loss, I’d take my chances on the cloud.”

  “You didn’t tell her everything,” Heron murmured. She was still squeezing his hands tight, but he’d crooked one finger against her knuckles and started drawing figure eights again.

  “What else?”

  Kellen clamped his mouth shut.

  “When I plugged into the Pentarc, remember how I told you I had become the Pentarc?” said Heron. “That was with the closed system. If I opened up the gates there and logged on to the cloud proper, I would have the same problem, theoretically. I would take it over.”

  Oh. And he didn’t trust himself. He knew what he was capable of. He’d probably mirrored such a scenario. Like he had Superstorm Agatha. And just look how horribly that had gone off the rails. Now, no matter how confident he seemed, he was one glitch away from panic all the time, a man terrified of his own capability.

  “Pervasive as the cloud is,” he went on, “a chaotic neural taking it over could be exponentially more disastrous. Air traffic, stoplights, energy grids, money transfers, even minutiae like your personal calorie counter and music playlists: all of those things would be vulnerable. Granted, those data streams have individual people and bots providing input, not to mention security, but if I had near unlimited processing power, there is no guarantee that I wouldn’t be in a constant flux of system hacking. What was it you called it, Mari? Fucking up other people’s fantasies? I’d be fucking up their realities.”

  And his consciousness, his conscience, wouldn’t be reliably there to keep him from bringing the entire technological world down around their ears. Everybody’s ears. She could see why he hesitated.

  “So if your remote scrub doesn’t work, you can either kill yourself or take over the cloud and run amok. Those are your only two options? Seriously?”

  Kellen nodded. Heron sat very still. His only movement was that finger. Round, across, back around: infinity.

  “What about just letting the transmission do its thing, then? Let those nano fuckers transmit their microscopic hearts out. It doesn’t seem to be hurting you, least not as I can see. Despite all that you talked up your self-control troubles, you were plenty spry last night. And this morning.”

  Kellen looked like he wanted a big hat to hide under right then.

  “You might not notice, but I have been slowed,” Heron said. “Eighty-two percent of my processing power last night was dedicated to cutting off transmissions. This severely limited my attention to other functions.” He didn’t look away, but his face did get pinker. No kidding, Heron blushed like a wee schoolgirl. If they weren’t discussing such heavy shit, that would be impossibly cute. Kind of was anyhow. “But the problem isn’t my own limitations. It’s what I’m transmitting.”

  “Well, what, then?”

  The pause stretched on so long, Mari wondered if they’d heard her.

  “Us.”

  “Come again?”

  “They’re uploading us,” he said. “Everything about us.”

  “So far they haven’t gotten anything important,” Kellen clarified. “He’s been chopping off them hydra heads, so to speak, soon as they pop up, and now, of course, the Chiba halo is blocking everything in or out. But that can’t go on much longer. Chiba will eventually need its halo back on handling things like avoiding orbital trash. And without the halo, Heron won’t be able to do much else, despite whatever…physical things he’s managed.”

  Kellen looked super uncomfortable, but he didn’t hold back, and Mari thanked him silently. She didn’t take to being lied to, and she recognized that Kellen was telling it to her straight. Girl could love a man for less.

  She sucked in a hot breath, thought about that picture the feds had posted to the interwebs after her botched job. Thought about Aunt Boo. She still hadn’t tal
ked real-time with Auntie. Dangit. The lapse caught her insides and twisted. But she shrugged on her bravado. “Fuck ’em. I got nothing to hide.”

  “I do.” Heron opened his eyes and looked down at her. That expression was so tender, her insides turned plumb over.

  He was protecting her. He was always protecting her. But hot on the heels of that thought came this one: he also had a responsibility to Adele and Chloe and the rest of the crew, probably even to Chiba and its queen.

  Mari was willing to get herself caught, even stand for a court-ordered humane end for her crimes, but if full details about her went live, so would some bits about all the folks she’d touched. Chloe. Aunt Boo.

  Heron.

  “It’s okay, Mari. I have things set up. You’re going to be safe. Chloe and Kellen and Garrett and Adele, too. Just let me do what I have to. The odds are this remote-login process will go off without a hitch.”

  Uh-huh. She could recognize uncertainty on Heron’s face, even when it was wrapped up in pretty promises. Things in her life had a habit of going the way of trouble, and she never trusted luck.

  But Heron wasn’t luck, and she most certainly did believe in him.

  “Okay, lookit. You do what you have to, partner, only you come right back to me.” She squeezed his hands. “You feel that?”

  A ghost smile drifted over his mouth. “I feel you, querida.”

  “Good. Don’t stop. You hang on to me, no matter where your brain goes, y’hear?”

  He closed his eyes and smiled. “Didn’t I tell you before that you’re always on my mind?”

  She didn’t get a chance to tell him this was no time for jokes. Kellen pressed the second injection of poison into his IV.

  Her knees ached from squatting, but she didn’t dare move. She could tell when the chems started working. Heron’s grip on her hand eased somewhat, and his facial muscles relaxed, wiping the smile. Lines and blips splashed over the monitor’s display. Kellen adjusted the feeds, read some numbers.