by Linda Nagata
There it is. I knew we were being watched. I just thought it would be through drones and satellites, not traffic cams. That’s what comes of spending too much time in remote locations. I forget to be wary of the basics.
“We lost track of you in northern Iowa.”
She waits, like I’m supposed to say where we went. I’m surprised she doesn’t already know. Then I remember: I didn’t record our road trip, or my assault on Carl Vanda, so there was no digital memory in my overlay for her to steal. Of course, she could make me talk, the same way Carl Vanda was made to spill his secrets. I look away as my heart rate ramps up, but Shiloh and her partners can read every twitch in my vitals, so it’s not like I can hide my anxiety.
She watches me thoughtfully, as if she’s trying to guess the details of what’s going on in my head. “Another EXALT node picked you up at the Brunswick airfield. You took off again shortly after that. You know we have the video you recorded?”
“If you use it against me, you’ll just incriminate yourself.”
“That’s not our intention. The action you took aboard that ship was impressive, important—but at the time, we didn’t know where you’d gone. I didn’t think you’d return. I thought the Red would try to keep you out of our reach. But it didn’t. And that implies you are meant to be here, that this is a planned association. Not something you should be fighting.”
Yeah. I’m already haunted by that idea.
“We’re working to develop a radical, innovative new episode to your story, Shelley. In your story you’ve been a servant of the Red, striking down its enemies, protecting its interests, exposing political corruption to weaken the positions of the very powerful. We’ve served the Red too, by building EXALT.”
I despise the smug certainty on her face. “Are you thinking that buys you karma points? That it puts the Red on your side?”
“All our simulations show the odds of success go up for those who serve the goals and interests of the Red. Way up. But we’ve never been able to simulate you. Your story is an outlier. It doesn’t fit with anything else we’ve seen. Our best theory is that yours is a meta story.”
That was Lissa’s theory too. She believed Linked Combat Squad was a reality show meant to influence the emotions and choices of the millions who watched it.
Shiloh pulls me back to the present. “Surveys have been done showing that your story resonates across widely divergent groups. People interpret it differently and they come to different conclusions, but those conclusions empower individuals by leading them to take action in their own lives. But why was it you? Your qualities are right. You’re sufficiently intelligent without being intimidating, you’re bold, irreverent when it comes to authority, you look good in front of a camera—”
“Is this a fucking casting call?”
“The same traits could be found in a hundred thousand other Americans. My pet theory is that the Red picked you because you parse out as a keystone according to some presently inscrutable machine logic extrapolated a million moves ahead.”
I may not be smart enough to be intimidating, but I do know some things. “It’s not possible to calculate the future.”
“True, but it is possible to calculate probabilities. And when you have thousands, possibly millions, of candidates—as the Red does—some of those probabilities are going to play out just as predicted. Your importance to us though, doesn’t hinge on why the Red set a meta story around you. But just that it has. That you exist in a state of divine favor.”
Divine favor? For a few seconds I’m not sure I heard her right—and then fury rolls in, because what I’ve done, what I’ve witnessed, what I’ve suffered, what I’ve survived that others have not, my certainty that Shiloh and her friends murdered my squad to make it easier to grab me—that’s not divine favor. It’s a curse and these are trials that I’ve lived through, that I have to live with. I am not going to sit quietly and listen to her call it divine favor. “You’re fucked, lady. You’re twisted just as bad as Sheridan.”
I stand. So far as I’m concerned, this interview is over—but Crow has a different opinion. Powered by his arm struts, he slams me back into the chair. I don’t stay there. I pivot out, crouched this time and moving fast. Weaving my fingers together, I swing my shackled hands in an upward stroke, hammering Crow’s balls. His breath whooshes out of his lungs and he doubles over. I swing again and catch him under the chin, sending him over backward though I cut my left hand on the bottom of his visor. That’s all I achieve because the Silent One hits me with a Taser.
It hurts.
It fucking hurts.
It hurts like getting my robot knees shot out.
Next thing I know, I’m on the floor, staring at the ceiling, scared because I can’t move my legs and I can’t see any icons in my overlay. Fuck. Did my electronics get fried?
A black visor leans over me.
“Get the fuck up,” Crow growls. He’s still bent at the waist, his hand at his crotch, and judging from the tone of his voice, he’s holding himself back from tearing my head off.
“My legs don’t fucking work.”
But then my right leg twitches, shooting a bolt of pain into my spine. The left leg follows. For a few seconds I can’t breathe for the pain, and then I whisper, “Fuck me.”
“Don’t tempt me. Now move.” He grabs me with his arm hooks just below my shoulders and hauls me up, dropping me back into the chair. My left hand is covered in blood. It drips on my lime-green pant leg as the pain in my thighs recedes. The system stabilizes, and I can move my robot toes again. Ignoring Crow, I watch my toes under the table as I make them stretch and curl.
My overlay wakes up too, the icons neatly arranging themselves around the periphery of my vision, before fading to near invisibility.
“Want to tell me what that was about?” Crow asks from his position behind me.
I look up to where Shiloh should be sitting at the other end of the table, but she’s not there. I look around to find she’s left the room. It’s only me and Crow and the Silent One, who has returned to her—his?—post by the door.
“I thought we had an understanding,” Crow goes on, “that there’s no way out for you, so you got nothing to fight for.”
The pain has faded, but not the anger, so I give him a smartass answer. “Escape isn’t the only prize I’m after.”
“You’d like to kill me?”
“And her.”
“That kind of talk will get you put down, Shelley.”
“Just a matter of time anyway.”
“Listen, brother. It’s not like that, or it doesn’t need to be. They’ve got plans for you. What’d Shiloh call you? A keystone? But they’re not sentimental. They aren’t going to keep you around if you can’t control yourself.”
He’s still standing behind me, sparing me the chore of looking at him. Instead, I flex my legs and inventory the programs on my overlay. The system looks like it’s working again. “Next time, I’ll control myself long enough to go for the Silent One first.”
“Yeah? I’d appreciate that. So what was it that set you off, Shelley? That crack about divine favor?”
I watch the blood still seeping from the back of my left hand, and I don’t answer. He doesn’t really expect me to.
“She doesn’t get it,” he tells me. “She’s a civilian. She sees the glory, the hero. And the bodies that line up behind you? Those are just props to her. The pain? That’s just a minor chord in the soundtrack.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“Don’t bring it to the point that I have to put a bullet in your brain. I really don’t want to do that.”
I guess I’m supposed to believe Crow’s a nice guy, that we have things in common, but it’s hard for me to get past the certainty that he designed the mission that led to the murder of my squad.
The door opens. Shiloh leans in long e
nough to hand a white plastic box to the Silent One. It’s a first-aid kit. Crow gives me a minute to clean up my hand and glue the cut closed. Then he says, “Let’s go. Back to your cell.”
The Silent One exits first. I’m supposed to follow and Crow will come behind me. He moves gingerly. He’s still hurting and it’s a good bet he’s not as focused as he might be. I’m not in great shape either, my muscles are quivering and empty from the Taser episode, but as I follow the Silent One into the hall it occurs to me I may never have a better opportunity to make a break for the exit. It’s not like I expect to escape, but if I can at least get out of this radio-opaque basement, maybe I can hook up with an outside connection.
So I try it.
I throw myself at the Silent One, knocking him—her?—off-balance, and then I run as fast as I’ve ever run in my life, reaching the fire door before Crow makes it out of the room. A precious half second is lost getting the door open. Then I’m lunging up the stairs, taking three at a time, using my shackled hands to haul myself along the railing. I’m rounding the first landing when someone bursts after me into the stairwell.
I don’t take time to figure out who it is. What I do notice as I sprint up the next flight is that my pursuer is not all that experienced at climbing stairs in an exoskeleton. The footplate misses the first step, and whoever it is almost goes down. This is encouraging. I reach the top and round the corner to the next flight. I don’t look down again. I don’t even listen for them coming. I just push myself and make it up another flight, and another, eyeing my overlay in the desperate hope it will pick up an outside network.
Turns out it’s easier to run away from Crow and the Silent One than it is to slip the shackle of my skullnet. I’m halfway up the next flight when my brain is hit with a neurochemical shit storm. I reel and hug the railing to keep from falling. I try to force myself to take another step, but my body is not listening. One of my guards reaches the flight below, turns a black visor my way. I’m pretty sure it’s Crow. Three long strides and he’s reached the landing, and I can’t move, and I have no outside connection.
A titanium hook closes around my already bruised arm. “Goddamn you, Shelley.”
At the same time, the door on the landing above opens and the Silent One steps through. I’m incapacitated and surrounded. But with the steel door above me open, I get a weak connection to the Cloud—and an automatic upload initiates.
God damn it. It’s Joby’s stupid program hogging the bandwidth. Given all the programs Shiloh wiped, why didn’t she wipe that one? But that’s easy to guess: She must have thought it was necessary for the operation of my legs.
My own frantic message is caught in the queue and fails to send.
My overlay blanks.
I’m shut down.
• • • •
My captors are unhappy with me. I’m given a day of solitary fasting to think about my sins. They decide to liven things up by playing with my skullnet.
I’m lying on my bunk half asleep when the skullnet icon blazes to life. Within seconds my mood slides into a happy zone so intense I wonder if the Heavenly Spirit has taken up residence inside of me and for sure there should be fluffy bunnies dyed in Easter colors and beds of bright spring flowers with blue skies above them. Fuck these blank concrete walls. They’re not real. They’re a projection of some asshole’s negative energy.
A laugh bubbles up from my belly. Not a guffaw, just a quiet chuckle, a safety valve to release the overburden of joy that threatens to suffocate me. It’s a chuckle that goes on and on until my whole body is shaking with it, eyes watering, and as I curl up on the bed, curl around this burden of searing happiness, I’m not sure anymore if I’m laughing or crying.
I just want it to be over.
“Get the fuck out of my head,” I whisper.
Maybe they hear me. Or maybe they just decide this experiment is a bad idea. Whatever the reason, the skullnet icon winks out. My joy drains away. Within seconds I return to a familiar neutral misery. The icon flickers, but this time it’s just the skullnet’s embedded AI running an automated routine to arrest my mood swing and hold me back from the hopeless dark.
I roll over and stare at the ceiling. In their how-to-survive-as-a-prisoner-of-war advice, the army suggests developing a motivational image that can be held in the mind during times of torture or emotional distress. My motivation is an image of a hangar, its shadowy interior shot through with lasers of sunlight blazing from bullet holes in the closed hangar door.
Shiloh and her faceless partners ordered the murder of my squad. I hold on to that. I don’t remember what happened—all I remember is that image—but that image is enough.
• • • •
They try again to mess with my head and they get better at it. By the time my day of penance is over, I’m quietly obedient when Crow hands me leg shackles and tells me to put them on. I don’t eat much. I ask if I can go back to my cell and sleep.
Shiloh is not in the room, but Crow addresses her anyway. “Give it up, Shiloh. He’s a man, not a puppet, and he’s no good to you like this. If you want his cooperation you’re going to have to get it the old-fashioned way—by striking a deal.”
After that the experiments come to an end.
• • • •
I hold in my mind an image of narrow shafts of sunlight as I face Shiloh for the second time across the plastic table. Today she’s wearing a white blouse with pearl buttons up the front. Artful highlights of green eye shadow enhance her brown eyes. “We can benefit each other,” she tells me. “Our goals are not in opposition.”
“My goal is to get the fuck out of here.” I raise my shackled hands from my lap. “You people seem opposed to that.” I’m wearing leg shackles too, and I’m all too aware of the chemical shackle in my brain—it’s not active now, but that could change at Shiloh’s whim. Crow, rigged in his dead sister, looms behind me, positioned to enforce her will.
“Don’t be simpleminded, Shelley. You are not just a cog in some military machine. Not anymore. You have a role, a duty, to undertake missions that serve the goals of the Red.”
“Bullshit. My squad did what needed to be done. That’s all. Sometimes the Red helped, but you’re wrong if you think it’s on my side, or your side, or anyone’s side, and if that’s why you and your consortium brought me here, then you’ve got nothing.”
She doesn’t smile, but she looks relieved and relaxed as she leans back in her chair. “So you do understand the basics. The Red isn’t human, it isn’t bound by human values, and it doesn’t operate on human concepts like justice and loyalty. Its primary purpose is to create environments that both challenge and reward. In part that means encouraging the balkanization of societies, sorting people into groups small enough that individuals matter, so success isn’t a one-in-a-hundred-million prospect.”
“Maximizing the potential of the greatest number of individuals.”
“No, we think it’s more that it gives the greatest number of people a chance to live their own story. But to be compelling, a story requires hardship, challenges. That could be as simple as a child overcoming her fear of speaking in front of her class, or as harrowing as retrieving a working nuclear device from the hands of terrorists.” She finishes with the banal truth. “Not all stories have happy endings.”
“Yeah. I’ve worked that one out.”
“The other purpose of the Red is to ensure continuity. Our theory says Thelma Sheridan got hammered down not because she stood too high, but because she attacked the infrastructure and threatened the very future of the planet.”
“You’d want to believe that, because your goal is to be a dragon, but the fallout from my court-martial is threatening the position of a lot of powerful people and I’m pretty sure the Red is involved with that.”
“The Red encourages managed chaos and the frothing possibilities that brings.”
“Managed chaos? Is that what you call this mess we’re in?”
She smiles. “It’s my term. What’s happening to us is not about justice. It’s about potential, even at cross-purposes. The Red isn’t in pursuit of a peaceful world, because people do not want peace. They want challenges. Look at you, the noble warrior, driven by honor and righteousness. You’re an archetype, Shelley, but in a peaceful world there would be no need for you. No purpose.
“A lot of people are like you. They want a chance to be a hero. To save others. To make a difference. The Red allows it. Let the world get rocked, destabilized. That opens up opportunities for social experiments and adventure games played on the edge of chaos. Real-life games, where real lives are risked and often lost.
“But it’s managed chaos, meaning the game is moderated, the scope of any conflict limited, and no one gets to destroy the world—or at least it will be that way. We’re not there yet. Getting us there—getting rid of stray nukes for example—that’s your game, your story.”
“So you want me to play a game for you? That’s why I’m here?”
To my surprise, she nods. Leaning forward, with a fresh intensity in her gaze, she says, “The consortium has developed a scenario that will let us hook into your meta story. We’ll ally with King David, aid you on a mission that will serve the purpose of the Red, while we pursue our own goal.”
“And that goal is?”
Disappointment creases her brow as if she expected me to already know. “You said it before. We want to be dragons, and this mission will let us gain a dragon’s fortune.”
“Crow?” I ask without turning around.
“Yeah, Shelley?”
“Is she crazy?”
He chuckles. “Not more than any of us. Not more than you.”
I know I should say nothing, give her nothing, but I want to disturb the quiet confidence in her eyes. “I’m going to have to spoil your plan, Shiloh. It’s like this: I’m not the one you want anymore. I have it on good authority that I’m done, that my part in the story is over, that the Red is finished with me. Maybe that’s why you were able to pick me up.”
