Small Miracles

by Edward M. Lerner

  “In the flesh, so to speak. Next, put in your earpieces, Brit. Sound effects are an important part of the experience.

  “Experiment. Look around. Pick up virtual stuff with your gloved hand. The sound effects are in stereo, so try to find the birds in the trees from their chirping. Check out the virtual menus. You’ll find that things are pretty intuitive.”

  Now that Brittany had broken the ice, Brent passed out the remaining specs. The last pair he offered to Morgan, who, with a shrug, accepted them. Brent made the rounds again, this time with virtual gloves. “Okay everyone. Look around. Wave to each other. Pick up things. Interact. I’ll run the intro program in a moment.”

  Morgan cleared his throat. “This isn’t particularly inter—”

  “Bear with me,” Brent said. His specs revealed three burly figures bumbling about a forest clearing—and a blinking icon only he could see. He selected the icon with a flick/blink. “Here comes the intro video.”

  Along with a little something extra …

  * * *

  Hypnotic trance can be induced in many ways. Samir had suggested, as one option among several, mind machines: strobe lights and synchronized sounds. But commercial mind machines and related audiovisual software were aimed at self-hypnosis. To hypnotize the unsuspecting required more discreet means.

  Such as VR gaming.

  MMOGs were almost infinitely extensible, because you couldn’t count on enough players being in-world when you wanted, in the mood to take part in whatever activity you wanted. Many of the characters in MMOGs were actually NPCs: non-player characters. Those custom programs could be benign, like VirtuaLife Schultz, or hostile, like a berserker warrior—

  Or devious, like the Welcome program, into which Brent had woven subtle flickering and buzzing.

  Morgan, Ethan, and Brit were soon wobbling on their feet. That was not a big surprise; Brent had tested and adjusted the program using Alan as a guinea pig. (Did that mean the program’s properties were fine-tuned for Alan? A fresh hormone surge washed away Brent’s apprehension.) And each of the three had had at least one drugged beer to lower his inhibitions.

  “Alan, help me get them seated.”

  Soon enough the three sat slack-faced, the silvered lenses of their specs more vacant than the blankest stare, wedged side by side on the short sofa. There they waited like cattle in a chute for their turn to be whacked on the head. A whole new meaning for Boxing Day …

  Brent ordered Alan to the kitchen, telling himself he did so simply because the living room was crowded. That was a rationalization and Brent knew it. He was loath to let Alan see what was about to happen, and unwilling to switch off Alan like a machine no longer needed.

  “Morgan, Ethan, Brittany, you will hear only my voice.” Brent led Morgan to a clear area between the poker table and the bookshelf, guided him into a prone position on the carpet facing the bookshelf, and untucked his shirt. “Morgan. Bring your knees up toward your chest. More. Good. Now raise your left arm. Good. Rest your head on your arm.”

  As Morgan got into position for the lumbar puncture, still lost in the game-induced trance, Brent took latex gloves from his pant pocket and snapped them on. He removed one of the capped syringes from the drawer of the small end table. He uncapped the needle, ejected a droplet to expel any air, and knelt to give Morgan the injection. “Morgan, you will feel momentary pressure in your back. You will ignore that sensation and remain perfectly still. It doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t concern you, and you will forget—”

  The squeak of sofa springs gave an instant of warning. Brent had scarcely begun to turn his head when the poker table crashed aside. Ethan dove at him.

  The impact threw Brent sideways to the floor, the air whooshing out of him. His knees twisted, burning in agony. The syringe went flying. Faster than Brent could take a breath, massive hands clenched his throat.

  Ethan shook Brent like a rag doll, whipping his head back and forth. Earplug wires kept Brent’s bouncing specs from flying off altogether. “You filthy bastard! I knew you were up to something with this hypnosis crap! What are you doing to the captain?”

  Brent’s arms flailed uselessly, weaker by the moment as the life was squeezed out of him. He thrashed, unable to throw off his assailant. His feet drummed on the carpet.

  Brittany sat, motionless and indifferent, on the sofa. Morgan remained on the floor, unmoving unless Brent or Ethan jostled him. Alan, ordered to stay in the kitchen, did.

  Was a single drugged beer too low a dose for Ethan’s size? Had Ethan faked a trance? Had fierce loyalty and this weird tableau shocked Ethan out of a too-shallow trance?

  As Brent’s body screamed for oxygen, as his vision grew dim, as consciousness faded, he wondered why the exact cause mattered. He wondered if perhaps his death wasn’t for the best.

  And he wondered why his eyes kept twitching.

  * * *

  Communication with the host faltered. Nothing but shock, pain, and terror remained—and they, too, were fading.

  The host could be stimulated to produce painkillers, and One did what it could to release endorphins. They were not enough.

  Neurons all around One, neurons with which One had integrated, were in distress.

  One probed all accessible nerve bundles for a way to recover influence over the host body. Little still worked as it should. Brent’s own desperate, futile thrashing grew indistinguishable from its own. Arms and legs weakened.

  Oxygen starvation intensified. Synapses misfired and failed to fire. The host’s thoughts became dark, unfocused, chaotic. Imagery streamed—memories and dreams, wishes and fears—intermixed and random.

  Not only had the host’s mind become sluggish … as more and more synaptic pathways malfunctioned, One’s own thoughts slowed. One now knew for certain what before it could only surmise. Its consciousness had emerged from its integration with the surrounding neural tissue. When that tissue ceased to function, so would One.

  The being called Alan, and its newly emergent mind that One denoted as Three, could still help. If Brent would only ask, Alan/Three would help. But for all their efforts, neither Brent nor One could utter a sound.

  Extinction loomed.

  One might—for how much longer it did not know—still manage to manipulate the host’s vision. It fought for control of Brent’s eyes. Brent panicked. His/their point of focus flapped about as uselessly as his/their legs. On the VR specs, menus and submenus appeared and disappeared. Windows popped open and closed. Network connectivity stuttered as his/their convulsions bounced the specs. There was sudden imagery in Brent’s mind that One could not parse. A cat, shaking, with a mouse in its mouth?

  One struggled for meaning in the image of his/their face turning blue, reflected in the silvery specs on Ethan’s face. The mind that was Brent faded, more distant than in sleep, ceding all conscious control.

  Sole charge of the neural pathways defaulted to One, even as oxygen-starved muscles lost their ability to function. A flood of adrenaline brought a bit of responsiveness to the muscles of the eyes. One concentrated to evoke a virtual keyboard—

  The shaking of Brent’s inert body interrupted the connection.

  The specs settled into place again, for how long One could not know, and—flick/blink—it tried to send a message: Come / Stop Ethan.

  Tried, and failed. Tried, and failed. Tried, and …

  Eyelids fell shut and refused commands to open. Nanobot sensors reported toxin concentrations approaching terminal levels. Neural tissue went into shutdown.

  Awareness ceased.

  monday, 8:30 P.M., december 26, 2016

  A shuddering gasp.

  Oxygenated blood revived dying tissues. Synapses gone quiescent fired anew. Breathing steadied. One returned to awareness, then Brent, then the gestalt.

  I/we still live. How?

  He/they were crushed to the floor, knee tendons twisted and stretched unbearably, head throbbing, struggling for air through a sore throat still loosely constricted. There w
as a loud grunt and Ethan’s inert (why?) mass shifted. Other hands pried loose Ethan’s hands. With a thud, Ethan rolled aside, rocking the bookshelf. Books and game cartridges rained down.

  Alan Watts stood over them, his chest heaving. Crimson spattered his face and shirt. Arterial red dripped from the base of the heavy brass table lamp that lay on the floor. “Brent! Are you all right?”

  Brent’s mouth opened, but no words came. He/they managed an inarticulate croak, and then, finally, weakly, “We think so.” Wheezing, he/they managed to sit up. “How did you …”

  Alan tapped his VR specs. “Your message.”

  Ethan groaned, blood pulsing weakly from his scalp. Alan chopped the back of his neck. Ethan spasmed and lay still. “Brent, we have to get rid of him.”

  Brittany, alone on the sofa, and Morgan, still positioned for his injection, ignored everything.

  “Is Ethan dead?” Brent/One asked. The part that was just Brent felt ill.

  “Not yet. But we cannot allow him to talk.”

  Brent’s stomach lurched. “We won’t kill anyone!”

  “Ethan had no such qualms.” Alan wiped his face with his sleeve, considering. “But not here. And we’ll have to get rid of the body.”

  “No, dammit!” Then what? demanded that fraction of the mind that remained Brent’s. Before Alan—or One—could stop him, Brent picked up the syringe and jammed it into Ethan’s arm. First aid: that was what the bots were made for!

  “A waste of potential. It changes nothing.” The words came from Alan’s mouth, but the opinion was surely that of Three.

  “One way or another,” Brent said, “everything will be settled soon. We only need Ethan out of commission for a few weeks. After a crack on the head like that he’ll be confused as to what happened, at least if there’s nothing to remind him. He might not remember at all.”

  “Truthfully, I don’t want to hurt the big guy, either.” Alan began to pace. “So we move him and make it look like a mugging. It’s not like Brittany or Morgan will talk.”

  Because they, too, had no free will. Brent could live with it. Or One could, and decided for Brent. It became harder by the moment to know which. “Okay.”

  * * *

  Brent had believed himself inured to nightmare, but this waking sort was different. He emptied a couple bottles of Molson into, and more than a little onto, Ethan. Brent and Alan wrestled Ethan into his coat and covered his bloody hair with his knit hat. Together they supported Ethan, a limp arm draped across each of their necks. Some blend of autohypnosis and One’s intervention let Brent ignore his injured knees. Doubtless he would pay for that.

  Luck was with them, finally. They met no one in the hallway, elevator, or garage.

  Brent turned the car toward the slums where once he had waylaid derelicts with impunity, only to have Alan redirect him. Ethan had to be abandoned in walking distance of his own house to avoid raising questions of how he got there.

  They pulled over beneath a dark railroad overpass. Together they lugged Ethan’s flopping form deep into the shadows, sticking to dry pavement lest their shoes leave clues in the snow. When the cold made Ethan stir, another karate chop to the nape of his neck rendered him limp.

  Wearing gloves, Alan removed Ethan’s wallet, pocketed the cash, and flung the wallet to the ground. Alan retrieved and kept Ethan’s cell phone. “For our Good Samaritan call. Nine-one-one centers use caller ID. Go back to the car.”

  Walking back to the vehicle, dimly reflected in the windshield, Brent barely saw Alan take something from his own pocket. Something that glinted. A knife! The blade jabbed faster than Brent could react. Alan ran to the car. “Get us out of here.”

  “But you …”

  “Move before anyone comes along. Before we’ll have them to deal with.”

  Brent told himself this was a nightmare, just to get through it. And, as in a nightmare, events unfolded at once logical and bizarre. Alan closed the knife and returned it, still bloody, to a pocket. He punched 911 on Ethan’s cell phone, wrapped a handkerchief around it as it rang, and anonymously reported an apparent mugging. They ditched the phone a few blocks later, its battery pack removed, down a storm drain. With the battery in place the police might have located the cell by its GPS receiver.

  They drove nearly a mile before Brent found his voice. “Why, Alan? Why did you stab Ethan? Is he …”

  “He’ll be fine. I made sure he’d stay in the hospital for a while, is all.”

  When Brent and Alan returned to the apartment, Morgan and Brittany were still deep in trance. Injecting them, and bashing their heads with beer bottles, was all but commonplace.

  Step-by-step Brent planted post-hypnotic suggestions and false memories. They would train with VR specs. They would remember that Ethan had planned to drive himself to poker and never showed. They would remember a short night because four-handed poker sucked. They would wear one of the new baseball caps that Brent provided, emblazoned SECURITY, to cover the new bruises at their hairlines. Morgan took a dozen extra hats. Starting the next morning, the hats were a part of every guard’s uniform. And should anyone notice a bruise anyway, it was to be blamed on a slip on an icy sidewalk. Utica had plenty of those.

  Sick to his stomach, Brent told Morgan and Brittany how well they felt and woke them up.

  * * *

  First there had been One, solitary and confused.

  Now Two and Three had emerged. Four and Five were seeded, with more among the factory guards soon to follow. Once Security was fully compromised, the Emergent could plunder the nanobot stockpile with impunity. Then there would be many more Emergent, and they would disperse, and make yet more of their kind.

  Thereafter, not even another disaster on the scale of Angleton could threaten their survival.

  Brent/One was well satisfied.

  But aspects of Brent—old, human, Brent—lingered in the deepest recesses of what had once been solely his mind. There, despite feelings deadened by hormonal interventions, despite One’s amoral indifference, despite shock at all that had transpired that evening, Brent struggled. He brooded on the wrongs he had done, rued the violence he had excused, was sickened by the atrocities he/they still intended to commit. There, unpleasant truth would not be denied: we are the vanguard of an army of monsters.

  Then One clamped down still further, and even that passive resistance faded.

  SKIRMISHING

  monday, january 9, 2017

  Kim leaned back in her seat, eyes closed in denial of the bumpy flight. Weather had already added two days to her travels, but that was okay. There were far worse things than being snowed in with Nick on Manhattan.

  She felt great, and why not? Four days over Christmas with her parents and grandparents in Virginia, followed by ten days alone with Nick in Cancún. The Cancún trip was Nick’s Christmas surprise—and what a surprise!—to her. It must have made a significant dent in Nick’s year-end bonus, but he firmly refused Kim’s offers to pay half—or anything. She’d earned a cut of that bonus, he had insisted gallantly, the way his job kept them apart. He had even phoned Tyra ahead of time, getting the boss’s blessing for the time away and swearing her to secrecy.

  Ten days of sun, swimming, snorkeling, windsurfing—and lots of quality couple time. Ten days without e-mail and instant messaging, without CNN and newspapers, without cell phones, and only once-a-night checks for emergency voice mails. Followed, as their plane barely beat a nor’easter into New York, shutting down JFK behind them, with two days together in her favorite city in the world.

  The best city on the planet, Kim heard in her mind’s ear. She sighed. Even in absentia, Dan Garner brought her down. Work after sixteen days away was going to be a shock to the system. And she did not look forward to dreary, down-at-the-heels Utica.

  But it was Monday, and late morning at that. The bill for two bonus days had come due. She took a limo from Syracuse Airport straight to Garner Nanotech.

  She found Captain America on duty at the main entr
ance, hardly recognizable behind VR specs. Brent’s fad had even spread to the guards. Nor were glasses the only change. “The cap is new, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am. A hat is now part of the uniform. Snappy, don’t you think?”

  No, but that hardly mattered. And on the bright side, hats and the Captain America shtick apparently didn’t mix. “Have a good day,” Kim said. She unzipped her coat and headed for her office, rolling two suitcases behind her.

  “Huh. You do still exist.” Brent had emerged, limping, from a cross corridor. He fell in step alongside her. “Welcome back, my gauche friend.”

  “Gauche”: French for “left.” In Latin, “sinister.” Brent was big on teasing her left-handedness.

  She said, “I wish I could say I’m glad to be back. Truth is I’d rather be on the beach.”

  He laughed. “Who wouldn’t? May I take one of those suitcases?”

  “No thanks, but a lift home tonight would be appreciated. I came straight from the airport, as you can see. And speaking of gauche”—two could play this game—“what did you do to yourself this time?”

  Brent glanced down. “Skiing. More precisely, some klutz with no business off the bunny slope ran me over. Twisted my knees the first day out.”

  “Ouch, to coin a phrase.”

  “It’s getting better. Judging from the tan, you had a terrific time. As, it happens, I did. Hot toddies, roaring fire, and ski-bunny sympathy.” He winked.

  At least Kim thought he winked. All she had to go on was an eyebrow briefly bobbing from view behind the rim of his VR specs. She didn’t find it convincing.

  They reached her office and she parked her suitcases inside. “What’s been going on here? What did I miss?”

  “Here, not much. You were hardly the only one to go on a winter break. But Ethan Liu, one of the plant guards, was mugged, almost killed, the day after Christmas. He’s very confused about what happened. You know the guards work for a small subcontractor, right? Well, they don’t have employer-paid medical insurance. But Ethan’s a vet. For what it’s worth, he’s in a VA hospital.”