Brute Force

by Spangler, K. B.

  Glazer didn’t say anything, but a soft bluish-gray came over his colors, twined into the red affection and deep teal Rachel associated with close-knit families.

  Oh goodie, she thought. The psychopath loves his daddy.

  “I don’t think he’s willing to do me any favors,” Rachel said. “Last time I saw him, I nearly killed him.”

  He cocked his head at her. “Telepathic,” he said, a note of orange surprise working its way into his mood. “There are rumors about you, but we didn’t believe them. Why are you telepathic?”

  “I don’t need to be psychic to read a one-note nutjob like you,” she said.

  The man nodded. “True.”

  He stepped away from the fence, and his hands went towards his pockets. Rachel didn’t react; he wasn’t carrying weapons.

  Then again, he doesn’t need to, not him, not a man who can escape from a police lockdown using nothing but office supplies.

  A cheap cell phone came out of one pocket, its battery out of the other. The man who had been Glazer powered on the phone and held it up like a tiny trophy.

  “Got it?” he asked, after he had given her a few moments to register the phone’s unique signal.

  “You think you’re walking out of here?” she said, touching the bulge of her gun beneath her hoodie.

  “Smile,” he said, pointing towards the house behind him. “You’re not on camera.”

  He was right—Rachel couldn’t feel any of the relentless directed chatter in the digital ecosystem that meant she was being monitored. Instead, she noticed the dull red and the urine yellow of her neighbor and his brother, along with a handful of other core colors she didn’t recognize. They were watching her and their good friend Not-Glazer from behind the dubious safety of a sliding glass door.

  One of them was eating cake.

  “You’re crashing a birthday party as an alibi?” she asked. “Cute. Real cute.”

  “You shoot me as I walk away,” he said, “and that’ll go over great for OACET.”

  “Didn’t you just tell me you’re here to help us?”

  “Yeah, I am,” he said. “So don’t fucking shoot me.”

  She weighed the situation: the witnesses; the time it would take for her to clear the fence versus the time it would take for her to run around the block; the complete lack of any police presence…

  Now, that was strange. Rachel threw her scans out as far as she could go without giving herself a headache, and came back with nothing using police scanner frequencies except the occasional bored trucker.

  “There’re usually at least two or three patrol cars within a quarter-mile of my house,” she said. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing serious.” The man who used to be Glazer shrugged. “Nothing that would let you justify shooting me.”

  “If you hurt a cop, Jonny-boy—”

  “Don’t get in the habit of calling me that,” he said, as he turned to leave. “These days, I go by Marshall Wyatt.”

  “Marshall What—like hell you do!”

  He popped the battery out of the phone, and waved as he walked away.

  Rachel fixed his new face in her mind. High forehead, a receding hairline…very, very British. She cast back through her memories to the real Marshall Wyatt, a man long gone from her life.

  Yes, it could be Wyatt’s face with ten years of weathering stamped into his skin.

  “New best friend, indeed,” she muttered to herself.

  She watched the mass murderer let himself through the neighbor’s front gate, and then followed him through her scans as he strolled down the road. Unhurried, unworried, just another neighbor out for a walk on an early spring afternoon.

  Rachel wanted to hurtle down the street and intercept him before he got out of range. She’d start by tackling him to the ground, and then see where the fight went from there. It’d be a great one, she was sure of that. No matter whose face he wore or whose name he hid behind, he carried himself with the confidence of a man who had spent much of his adult life in an elite military unit.

  But…

  “Let him go,” she whispered, and forced herself to break off her scans. Jonathan Glazer—No, he’s Marshall Wyatt now—disappeared from her expanded senses as completely as if he had never come close to her home.

  Rachel found herself standing in her kitchen, checking the locks on her windows, and wasn’t quite sure how she had gotten there.

  “Stop,” she said aloud. The sound of her voice echoed back at her, a hollow reminder that she was alone. “Stop,” she said again, more quietly. “Get your shit together.”

  First things first. She reached out through her implant and activated her security system. Santino had installed it in spite of her protests, declaring that a cyborg should have complete control over her own home. She had laughed at him and gone to clean her gun, saying that anyone who was stupid enough to break into this cyborg’s house would get what they deserved. Now she was grateful for the cameras that covered every corner of her property, the contact elements which assured her that every door was sealed. If Wyatt was going to murder her, it’d have to be with a sniper’s rifle—

  “Shut up, brain!” she growled.

  The urge to run around the house and draw the blinds surged within her, and she had to talk herself down by running over the many, many ways that Wyatt could shoot her without needing to see her. Thermal imaging. Tracking her personal GPS. Using a goddamned rocket launcher.

  Her hands unclenched.

  She paused and took stock of her kitchen. Empty plastic bags that had held takeout food were thrown across the counters, and the glass contraption her erstwhile roommate used to brew coffee hadn’t been cleaned in almost a week. Behind this light layer of filth was an explosion of paint which (she had been assured) was an offense to working eyeballs, the multicolored rainbow of acrylic swatches that Rachel had slopped across every available surface with her fingers, names and moods and other descriptive labels written next to each color in thick black Sharpie...

  Her home. Hers. And no psychopath was going to drive her to panic when she stood in her own home.

  “Okay,” she said, and this time her voice didn’t echo in the kitchen. “Okay. Wyatt’s wrong. I’m not alone in this.”

  She cleared her mind, and concentrated on a dark gray the color of an expensive wool overcoat.

  When that didn’t get Jason’s attention, she reached out through the link to locate him. Jason Atran was in his digital imaging suite at the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department’s own Consolidated Forensics Laboratories. She kept the link light and conversational; when Jason opened his end of their connection, she made sure to hold back from spying on his work. Thus far, they had never needed to testify on the same case for the MPD, but if they kept moonlighting with the city’s police, it was inevitable. As inevitable as a defense attorney accusing the two cyborgs of collusion or whatever straws were within grasping distance at the time. Better to play it safe, forever and always.

  “Jason!”

  “Busy.”

  She sent him the image of a man made from warm sandalwood, then painted the man in a red the color of blood.

  Jason appeared beside her a moment later, shaped in the bright greens of OACET’s digital projections. His avatar looked like a male French model, lean and haughty in a buttoned-down shirt and slacks, the perfect copy of Jason’s physical self on the other side of the city.

  “Didn’t you hear me calling you?” she asked.

  Jason’s avatar rolled its eyes. “I saw a dark gray,” he said. “I know that’s supposed to be me, but you always call direct when you want to talk. I thought I was just on your mind.”

  She pushed the sandalwood towards him again.

  Jason’s avatar gestured for her to pull out a chair from the table for him. Avatars might be mirror images of their owners, but they were nothing but electrons dancing on a spectrum that other cyborgs could see and hear. Rachel pulled out two chairs, and sat, cowboy-style, her chin pillo
wed on her hands.

  “He’s back,” she began.

  Jason sat beside her, his face tight. “Tell me.”

  She did. It took a long time, much longer than if she had used the telepathic connection that cyborgs used as their primary means of communication, or even something as clunky as spoken English. Instead, she passed Jason the colors and images that defined her world.

  Rachel was, according to all legal definitions, blind. Macular degeneration had reduced her own eyes to nothing but useless collections of cells and fluids. Her implant allowed her to mimic many of the regular processes of normal vision. When she used the right frequencies, she could read, or recognize strangers by their faces, but her expanded senses couldn’t duplicate the exact mechanisms of the human eye.

  The closest she could come to normal vision was to project her own digital avatar at head level, and watch the world through her duplicate’s eyes. The effect was similar to watching a horror movie shot with a handheld camera, and tended to trigger her motion sickness something fierce. She used this overlapping perspective only when she was applying makeup, as lip liner needed extra attention or it tended to make a break for it.

  She found it much easier to go without normal vision entirely. For Rachel, people had become human-shaped core colors. Over these was a surface layer of colors that shifted to match the person’s mood. Core colors tended to be unique to each person, and unchanging. The conversational colors that covered these were in a continuous state of flux, and were reasonably universal among those who shared the same mood.

  It had been hard enough for her to learn this new language of colors. Anger was red…but so were other emotions, like love and lust and pride. Teaching the nuances of the emotional spectrum to someone like Jason had been next to impossible. But they had realized that colors would allow them to talk without worrying that they’d be understood by the rest of the collective, and so Jason had forced himself to learn.

  Despite nearly a year of practice, he wasn’t very good at it.

  She stuffed her impatience down the rabbit hole and showed him a human-shaped blob of sandalwood entering a threshold of Southwestern turquoise. That sandalwood came with a bloody red stripe which whipped around like a barb at the end of a leather tether, the red barb seeking to bury itself in flesh but finding no target. Then, it left the turquoise, shrinking until it vanished into the edges of their shared consciousness.

  Jason’s avatar closed its eyes. “I think I understood that,” he said, and then pushed sandalwood back at her, along with the hue of yellow-orange that went along with questions and curiosity.

  Rachel felt confident enough that they could talk through the rest, as long as they hid the names behind the colors.

  “He says that something nasty is about to happen,” she told him.

  Jason replied by showing her the vivid chartreuse green that OACET had claimed as their official color, and Rachel nodded.

  “How does he know?” Jason asked. “Is he setting something up, like last time?”

  “I didn’t get that impression,” she said. “More like he knows what’s coming and he’s here to help keep us from getting hit.”

  The digital man sitting across from her shook his head. “He’s got to know you’re gunning for him. Coming here puts him at risk. If you arrest him—”

  “—I finally put things right,” she finished.

  Secrets were next to impossible to keep within a hivemind. While she knew that some of the other cyborgs had secrets of their own, Rachel was absolutely sure that she and Jason shared the biggest one between them: Rachel had helped the man who used to be Jonathan Glazer escape from police custody.

  It had been a matter of cost versus benefit. He would have escaped on his own, and probably would have killed a whole lot of people on his way out the door. In exchange for her help, he had provided OACET with leverage over a prominent politician, and had left everyone in the MPD untouched.

  Rephrase: relatively untouched. He had given Jason a concussion, and several of her coworkers would always carry the scars from where they had come into contact with flashbang grenades. It could have been much, much worse.

  Jason knew. And Jason thought she had made the right choice.

  If the others in OACET found out…

  Well. She was sure that most of them would share Jason’s opinion. But they still would hold her accountable. Catching the man with the sandalwood core had been on Rachel’s to-do list for nearly two years. She needed to put things right.

  “But why?” Jason asked. “Why risk it?”

  “He said that he was sent by—” She sent him another image of a human-shaped blob: this one was slightly stooped and squishy when contrasted against the one the color of sandalwood, and drawn from a gentle bluish-gray.

  Jason’s green fingers knitted together in a facsimile of fidgeting. “He doesn’t owe you any favors,” he said after a few moments. “In fact…”

  She nodded. “I think they’re—”

  That’s as far as she got before Josh Glassman appeared beside them.

  Rachel reacted on instinct. She seized an empty beer bottle from the pile of trash on the table, and swung it at the intruder’s skull. It was only when the bottle passed through Josh’s head that Rachel realized she had overreacted: not only had she failed to recognize her friend’s digital avatar, she had greatly misjudged the force needed to club a skull with a bottle, and she ended up face-down on the kitchen floor.

  Josh didn’t notice. “Penguin,” he said to Rachel, his voice tight. Then his avatar’s eyes slid to the side, and he spotted Jason. “Good, good. I was going to track you down after talking to Rachel. You both need to get down to the Batcave, right now.”

  Rachel took a breath, and let herself feel Josh’s tension, tight and hot, as he sat in OACET’s downtown headquarters a couple of miles to the south. She had no idea how Josh had found out about Glazer (Wyatt!), but she picked herself up off of the floor and fell into parade rest, readying herself for the reprimand.

  “We can explain—” Jason began, but Josh cut him off with a hard wave of his hand.

  “Hope has been kidnapped,” he said.

  And, before Rachel could burst out laughing, he added, “Avery, too.”

  THREE

  The Office of Adaptive and Complementary Enhancement Technologies finally had a permanent office. The old postal hub near the Judiciary Square Metro Station had been fully gutted and repurposed for the cyborgs. Rachel thought it was a nice enough place, and much easier to reach than the Agents’ old headquarters out by the Potomac River. But it was a long run from her house to the center of Washington, D.C., and her subconscious took it as an opportunity to act the asshole again.

  They hate you.

  Rachel pushed on and tried to focus on her feet, the feel of the rough layers of asphalt layered over concrete layered over gravel cutting through the cold earth beneath her…

  They hate you. You’ve been out for nearly three years, and they still hate you. You’re nothing but machines to them. They won’t be happy until you submit. Become tools. Like they planned.

  “Shut up,” she said through gritted teeth.

  You thought you could get used to this? You thought you could have a life? Even if you did, they’d still be there, in the shadows, waiting for you to slip up, to think you were safe, to steal your children—

  “Shut up shut up shut up!”

  She threw herself into an all-out sprint, but her subconscious had sunk its teeth into her fears and was shaking them apart.

  The worst day of her life had been the one when she had woken up with second- and third-degree sunburns across most of her body, a pair of dying eyeballs, and an endless waking dream of meetings and rote tasks as her only memories of her mid-twenties. That was until today, when her niece had been taken—No. Had been stolen. And with her went the peace of mind they had tried to shape around themselves. Even if Avery toddled through the front door of OACET headquarters right now, righ
t this second, before anything worse could happen to her, nothing would ever be the same again.

  They hate you.

  Well, maybe they were right to hate her, to hate all of OACET.

  Or at least not wholly wrong.

  It had been nearly two years since three hundred and fifty cyborgs had told the world that the U.S. government had discovered a way to control all networked machines, and that these controllers happened to walk and talk and celebrate birthdays.

  Nearly seven years since Rachel had a teeny-tiny quantum organic computer chip implanted in her parietal lobe.

  Nearly eight years since a certain U.S. Senator had offered her a place in a new federal program that would be, in his words, “revolutionary.”

  Her footsteps sounded like lost moments.

  They hate you.

  I know, she assured herself. I know.

  The sounds of heavy traffic and random car horns joined her footsteps as she crossed into the city. Around her, pedestrians and drivers turned an uncertain orange at the sight of the tall Chinese woman running at full speed in dirty jeans and work boots.

  Jason caught up with her after she crossed into Dupont Circle. He popped the locks on the passenger-side door of his Mustang, and she swung herself inside as the traffic lights turned green.

  Neither of them spoke until they pulled into OACET’s private parking garage. Jason killed the motor. He slumped over the steering wheel, his shoulders rounding in on themselves.

  She reached out and touched his hand. Skin contact between Agents deepened a link, bringing the organic aspect of those computers in their heads more fully online. The emotions she felt at the periphery of their conversation—panic, loss, fear, hate!—crossed over and joined hers.

  “I’ll say this once,” he said quietly. “If he—” Here, Jason flashed an image of a human figure made of sandalwood. “—is responsible for taking Avery, I’ll kill him myself.”

  “You won’t have to,” she said, as she wrestled their shared bloodlust under control and shoved positive emotions—calm, control, reason—across their link until they both believed it. “He’s my responsibility.”