Brute Force

by Spangler, K. B.

  “I don’t even know where to start with that,” Santino said. “Tracking down that handwriting sample will take too long, even for Jason.”

  “I do,” she said. “I need to learn who else is in my foursome.”

  SIXTEEN

  The man sitting beside her had a monster’s face, but she wasn’t worried—the monster had stolen her friend’s face, not the other way around. He was a youngish man with a Texas drawl and a cowboy strut, even though he had never been near a ranch, let alone a horse. A man from a sleepy suburban home, just like hers, with two upper-middle-class parents who loved him, just like hers, and who couldn’t understand why their beloved only child had run off to join the circus. Just like hers.

  They were sitting on the roof of a mess hall in Afghanistan, watching the stars.

  “Sorry,” she said, and since this was a dream, he already knew why she was buried up to her neck in a stinking pile of guilt.

  “Hell, Peng,” he said in the warm sounds of home. “You were a mind-controlled ’bot when I died. You couldn’t’a done anything.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” she said. “Something would have been better than nothing. A phone call, an email…”

  He threw her off the roof.

  Rachel hung in mid-air: flying in dreams had become much easier since she started soaring around in her avatar. But Wyatt—a Wyatt three years younger than he had been on the roof—was waiting for her on the ground. She landed and felt her body twist into that of an eighteen-year-old girl’s, and started crying.

  “What’s your bitch, kid?”

  Younger-Rachel scrubbed at her face, hot with embarrassment at getting caught crying behind the women’s privies. “Go away,” she snapped.

  He called her names until she was mad enough to take a swing at him, and then they pounded the shit out of each other until they were too tired to stand.

  “There you go,” he told her. “Stay mad. It helps.”

  They aged a year; the stars overhead stayed the same.

  “Criminal Investigation Command.” Wyatt’s tone was half-scorn, half-anger. “The hell are you doin’, puttin’ in for CID?”

  “I don’t have as many options as you.” Rachel was throwing rocks into the desert. The moon was just at the edge of the horizon, and huge. She had never seen a moon this large. It was silver and red, and called to the wolf in her. She wanted to race across the desert in the moonlight, but there were landmines out there, right below the sand. “CID is a good start. I can move up in the ranks, build a rep…”

  “As a cop,” he said, still angry.

  “You know what CID does out here?” She flung a baseball-sized rock into the emptiness, and waited for an explosion that never came. “Everything. You and me, we sit around waiting for something to happen, and then it’s chaos for a day, maybe two. Then we go back to waiting. CID gets shit done.”

  And then she started talking about opportunities in the CID, mostly for women, but hell, Wyatt could put in—should put in—for the transfer, too. It was all puzzles and scams and putting things right, and didn’t they spend all of their time complaining about how things around here weren’t right, right?

  Another rock. Another two years on their bones. The same stars overhead, the same moon touching where the world dropped off.

  “Gonna miss you, y’know.” Wyatt was sitting on a flat-topped boulder, a can of beer in his hands. He held the can gently; beer was almost unheard-of around here, a forbidden treasure from home.

  “Yeah.” Her own beer was warm, old, and skunky, but she drank it anyhow. God only knew where he had found it for her going-away party. “I’ll be back.”

  “As an officer.”

  “Hopefully,” she said. “You should put in. You’d do good at West Point.”

  Wyatt shook his head in disgust. “Dragging me into CID was bad enough—”

  “Fuck, man, you need some ambition or you’re gonna die a nobody!”

  Wyatt started laughing. She couldn’t figure out why he found that funny, or why she thought he should be purple. Then the shell of the dream cracked, and she remembered.

  “Sorry,” she said. She crushed the can down and it became a stone, and hurled this into the minefield.

  The dead man shrugged. The beer can from her memory stretched into an ice-cold stein, overflowing with fresh beer and foam. “It’s not all bad,” he said, as he raised the glass in a silent toast.

  “I miss you,” she said.

  “I’m still around. I’m just harder to reach.”

  “Stop talking to my inner Catholic.”

  “Wasn’t,” he said, and his grin was made of secrets.

  “Want me to track down your body?”

  “Nah,” he said. “I’m not using it any more. Let your new buddy have it.”

  Light spilled out of the moon as the dream cracked so hard it nearly split open, and she remembered the psychopath in Wyatt’s skin.

  “What aren’t I seeing?” she asked him.

  Wyatt pointed.

  The moon had grown a shadow: a man, haloed in black against the silver. He was walking down the desert road, head high, focused on what lay ahead of him.

  Mulcahy.

  And suddenly, she knew the road was full of landmines—so, so many more landmines than in the desert around it!—and he was about to blow himself up.

  “Get him off the road,” Wyatt said, before he punched her in the face for old time’s sake.

  She woke in Josh’s office, with yet another headache.

  Probably the same one, she reminded herself, as she let herself wake up in the dark. Head injuries, thrown into a wall, late night at a murder scene… At least this one isn’t too bad.

  Snoring from two points in the room: Rachel flipped on her implant and went to the loudest source; Josh, asleep on the couch, alone, with a magazine over his face and a hungry cat at home.

  She moved to the second source and found Ami asleep beside her. On the other side of Ami was the fake Wyatt, snoring away in duckling-like peeps.

  The two of them were naked.

  “No. Just no,” Rachel groaned, and left the room at a run.

  Becca always says I can sleep through anything. She’s gonna laugh so hard—

  No, it was her autoscript. The one that put her into a deep sleep so she could rest and rebuild. It had to be the autoscript, because there was no way on God’s green earth she would have let herself sleep while that was happening beside her.

  Gah! With him? What the hell was Ami thinking?!

  Rachel had never been completely comfortable with casual sex. It bashed up against her nature. And with somebody like Wyatt? Not that she was judging Ami, oh no, but…

  …okay. This one time? She was definitely judging Ami.

  “Could’ve at least gone somewhere else,” she grumbled, her bare feet slapping quietly against the stone floor as she ran out of Josh’s office, trying her best to get into yesterday’s clothing before she bumped into someone from the FBI. Or worse, Homeland. “Me, right there…ugh!”

  She found a side door and fled into the night.

  Alone in the relative quiet of the city streets, she allowed the dream to set up shop in her head.

  Her dreams had never been anything close to vivid, not until she and Santino had fished a piece of ancient history out of the basement of the White House. Since then, they had turned into living Technicolor on top of Technitouch and Technisound, with some Technismell creeping in around the edges.

  She had asked her doctor about this, and Jenny had said that it was most likely that Rachel’s dreams were changing as her senses redefined how she perceived the world. Her doctor pointed out that much of the early research on dreaming indicated that dreams took place in black and white; later, it was found that these colorless dreams were attached to kids who had grown up in the era of early cinema. Black and white dreams were the exception, and once television sets got a bunch of extra tubes crammed into their cases, most folks went back to dream
ing in full color. As Rachel’s subconscious was probably adapting her dreams to align with her new senses, it wasn’t anything to be worried about.

  Rachel, who still had dreams of being torn apart by small crustaceans on the bottom of the Mediterranean, didn’t agree. Especially as every other Agent who had touched the artifact had stopped eating seafood, too.

  Dreams weren’t just dreams. Not anymore.

  A dream about her dead brother-in-arms had turned into a dream about her live superior officer.

  “Get him off the road.”

  Nothing ominous there, nope.

  “All right,” she muttered to herself, and this time she included that odd triad of her conscious brain, her subconscious mind, and her implant. “We’ve got a road, we’ve got Mulcahy, and we’ve got hidden landmines. Anybody want to dispel the symbolism so I can do something about it?”

  Silence.

  She yelled at herself a little, then a lot. Nothing. Whatever was rattling around in her head would shake itself out when it was ready. Hopefully.

  Maybe.

  No more cookies until you cough up something useful, she grumbled at her mental triad. It was a sorry state of affairs when your own augmented brain somehow managed to team up against you.

  The city felt warmer than it had during the day, and she put herself on autopilot and let her feet take her to a building ten short blocks from OACET headquarters. It was an old office building, five stories high, granite and brick in the Greek revival style. The windows of the bottom floor were covered in sheets of butcher’s paper, with a tasteful new sign for an aikido studio hanging above the front door, the words Coming Soon! draped across it on a removable ribbon.

  The door had a digital lock, but this popped open before she could activate it. Four floors above, a man with a core the color of quick-brewed tea leaves waved down to her.

  She took the stairs two at a time, at least until she reached the first landing. There, she paused, and let her scans wander over a large metal object, beaten from abuse and blackened by fire. It had been a door, once, a fantastic door in the truest sense of the adjective. Here, it was nothing except a memorial: Hope Blackwell, the building’s new owner, had rescued it from a maker space that had been targeted by a couple of itty-bitty riots. Hope had it suspended from silver cables running from the walls and ceiling, and had declared that in a year, she wanted the door gone and its component pieces to have been given new life. The last time Rachel had been here, the object had still looked more or less like a door. The artists, vultures all, had been at it—if she turned her scans to the correct angle, it took on the shape of a woman’s profile.

  Her scans showed the second floor as empty, or at least as empty as rooms could be in a building frequented by those who were driven by creative chaos. The space was gradually filling with project overflow, with signs of temporary residences here and there, backpacks and piles of blankets and the like. Hope hadn’t said what she intended to do with the second floor: she said her choices were either turning it into a gallery or apartments that could be allocated to artists like grants, but Rachel knew she was hoping that the owner of the aikido dojo would relent and agree to live on-site.

  Unlikely: the third floor was a machine shop, with all of the smells and noise that a machine shop entailed. Most of it was set up for woodworking and metalsmithing (and no overlap between those two in respect to the sharing of power tools, or there would be blood), but a sculptor had recently moved into a back corner. There was always someone active on the third floor; even at this hour, Rachel spotted a man pressing pieces of wood into the lid of a carved box. Across the room, another two forms were sprawled out across the workbenches, their conversational colors slow with sleep.

  She crept up the next flight of stairs, quiet as a mouse, and kept her thoughts far, far away from those two men.

  One more flight, and Shawn greeted her with a hug.

  Warmth flowed from the other Agent into her, and the smell of oil paint and turpentine wrapped around her. She took a moment to take in his emotions—peace, wholeness, belonging—before she stepped away.

  “Come in,” he said, his mental voice gentle, and brought her into his studio.

  Rachel loved the fourth floor. It was the dust-free zone, set aside for artists who might kick up a fume or two but otherwise avoided sanding and polishing and all that airborne mess. The center of the room was home to a large bank of computer equipment, walled off in glass partitions. Around the edges of the room were cubicles for those who mucked around in various media. When the sun was up, these studios were awash in light; tonight, a single floodlight over Shawn’s studio lit the entire room.

  She stepped through the (still depressingly ordinary) door and ran her scans through the building. The floor above them was an apartment, with space for three permanent residents, and a fourth room for a rotating caregiver. Nobody was in the fourth room, but Shawn’s bed held the sleeping form of Rachel’s doctor.

  “Are you here to see Jenny?” he said, a little wistfully.

  She sent him the image of waking up next to an assassin and a psychopath in their full post-coital splendor, and he shuddered.

  “Yeah,” she said aloud. “This has not been the best couple of days. I’m just…here.”

  “Well, I’m glad,” he said. “We miss you.”

  Rachel followed him into his studio. “I almost never get over to the Batcave,” she said. “And Santino’s practically living at Zia’s now, so I have to call a cab whenever I go anywhere.” The excuses were weak; Shawn knew it, and forgave her in rich reds and purples.

  “It’s not you,” she whispered.

  “I know,” he replied.

  Agents were trapped in the strangest of government employee conundrums. The implants in their heads were quantum organic computers, and were integrated into their hosts at a cellular level. They had been expensive as hell to manufacture, and couldn’t be removed and re-implanted in a different brain if an Agent decided to move to another job. When Rachel had enlisted in the Program, she had signed all other career opportunities away—she had known that after the implant was in, if she wanted to quit OACET, she’d have to repay the government to the tune of thirty-seven million dollars. Plus inflation. She could retire at sixty-five with benefits, but until then, the chip in her head was government property and so, by extension, was she.

  (No one really wanted to test the clauses in their contracts that covered what could happen if they were fired for due cause. Brain surgery might be involved, followed by severe neurological damage. And there were worse things, such as complete loss of pension.)

  Rachel turned her scans to the floor below them, where the two men asleep on the workbench had curled up in a knot for warmth. Adrian and Sammy. The last of the cyborgs who never made it all the way back to their own heads.

  They were still on OACET’s payroll. Mare had put them in the Public Relations department; Shawn showed up at the Batcave during work hours to file paperwork and answer the phones.

  Adrian and Sammy…didn’t.

  “Do they ever sleep upstairs?” she asked.

  “Jenny and I put them in their beds when we can,” he said. “Mostly they just build until they crash, and then they wake up and start again.”

  “What are they working on these days? More robots?”

  He nodded, blue wonder coming across his colors. “You should see them—amazing things!”

  “What do they do?”

  “Do?”

  She laughed. “Why are you awake?”

  Shawn’s colors clouded over. “I…don’t know?” He shook himself, and smiled weakly. “Maybe I knew you were coming.”

  She slipped her arm around his waist. “Show me what you’ve been working on.”

  A large space had been set aside for Shawn’s studio; the cyborg-in-residence got a full corner of the fourth floor, with shelf space and—*gasp!*—storage racks. A stretched cotton canvas was settled on a metal easel in the pool of light; othe
r paintings in different stages of completion took up the rest of his studio space. One of these caught Rachel’s scans as soon as she spotted it: the piece was round instead of square, and painted over wood instead of cotton canvas. The wood had been covered in a thick layer of gesso, and Shawn had been roughing out an image of a lush garden in greens with a palette knife.

  “This is lovely,” she said, running her scans across the paint. It was dry, not drying; Shawn hadn’t worked on this piece in the last few days.

  “It’s for the baby,” he said.

  “Who’s expecting?” Avery wasn’t the collective’s only child. She was their first, and forever would be special because of it, but there were nine other joyful rug rats running around these days. Each new child was cause for aggressive, deliberate celebration. Rachel didn’t spend too much time at OACET headquarters, but she was sure she would have heard if someone was pregnant.

  Shawn went slightly orange. “I don’t know,” he said, as he fell back in the comfort of the link. “I just…know. I can’t remember if I heard it, or if I dreamed it, or…”

  “Hey, maybe you can help me,” Rachel said quickly. “I had a weird dream, right before I woke up and came over here…” She told him about the dream, and the minefield, and Mulcahy walking straight into danger. “I’m pretty sure I know what it means,” she said. “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

  “Who was Marshall Wyatt?” Shawn asked, speaking aloud again. Rachel exhaled in relief. His bad moments were few and far between these days, but they could turn grim.

  “A big brother when I got to Afghanistan,” she said. “A little brother when I left.”

  “Oh.” Shawn’s colors fell slightly, then rose as he found his footing. “Symbolism is pretty crazy stuff. Even when it seems clear, sometimes the meaning is... Well, come take a look at what I’ve been working on.”

  They moved over to the single spotlight. Shawn glanced up, and the light dimmed; he was more photophobic than most Agents. He moved a wooden footstool aside, and let Rachel have center viewing so she could flip frequencies and take in the piece.