Hammered jc-1

by Elizabeth Bear

  When I was in the service this was a cop-and-soldier bar, and it had a different name. Now it’s home to a new crowd, with a taste for the self-conscious archaism of the name and the razor-edged five-minutes-in-the-future of the decor. A body-modified crowd, which reflects extremes of bio and mecha engineering in the black mirrored floor.

  We don’t see this sort of thing in Hartford. Some are cosmetic mods: cow-dark eyes, lips that scintillate with purple and orange light. Many more have the functional ones: I spot somebody with a second pair of prosthetic arms — not armored like my steel hand, but a color cycling pattern of LEDs — giving the appearance of some Hindu god. I bet those aren’t really hardwired on. Another patron, straddling the difference, has a steel snake, hood-flaring and hissing, raising its head from the unzipped fly of his pants. It’s fascinating in a train wreck sort of way, but I don’t want him to catch me looking and think I have more than an academic interest.

  Some of these guys make Razorface look like the girl next door. Freaks.

  Hey. Look who’s talking, freak.

  The music is three generations of loud removed from the last kind I knew how to dance to. Someday, the noise will grow so noisy that the next generation will have to start playing polkas and Mozart to rebel. I take my drink and sit down across from Barb, in the quietest corner, which isn’t.

  Barb, what the hell are you thinking, meeting Valens here? But I know: she’s thinking that I won’t stick out like a sore thumb. In fact, I fit right in. Except I’m thirty years too old.

  It’s a good place for the spirited sort of… negotiations… I’m expecting. Two decades and more, and I still know what she’s thinking. Except when I don’t.

  “Vous êtes sûre qu’il vient?” I surprise myself — the question comes out in French. Québecois, anyway. You’re sure he’s coming? Which reminds me of a joke.

  “Je suis sûre,” she answers in the same language, and I have a sudden sharp-as-a-flashback memory of Maman singing us McGarrigle Sisters songs when she had us in the bathtub. She loved old folk music — français, English, the Haudenosaunee tales her grandmother told her. “Il est toujours ponctuel. I bet he’s here at five minutes to the hour.”

  He will be, too. Salaud. “Look, Barb… when he gets here. I want to talk to him alone.”

  She sips white wine and makes a face. What she expected in a joint like this, I have no idea. At least she’s traded in her carefully tailored suit for blue jeans and white cotton. “Are you going to stick a knife in him, Jenny?” Her eyes sparkle as she smiles. Somehow, Barb got all the charm.

  We split the mean down the middle, but I like to think I got the slightly smaller half. I like to think a lot of things, really. Nell was the sweet one, my little baby doll, youngest of us three. “Not immediately.” I sip my drink, which is less watered than he might have gotten away with. “I’ll let him talk for at least five minutes first.”

  Barb sighs and shrugs, rolling her eyes in that way that says, plain as if she wrote it on the wall, that she doesn’t know why she puts up with my obstinate, intransigent, insubordinate self. She leans forward, flashing red and orange lights daubing her handsome features like warpaint, like the glow of something important burning. “Quoi que, Geni. Just remember that he’s dying to help, and try not to be too much of a… une chienne.” Hah. She was going to say “putain.” “He really does care.”

  It’s twittering, and I tune her out. Rien, rien. Je ne regrette rien. Yeah. As if. I am not an exception. I am a statistic. And forgetting that is a good way to wind up a permanent statistic.

  It’s something you learn the hard way, if you learn it at all. There are two ways to cope with combat. Well, that’s an outright lie. There are probably thousands. There are two ways that I’ve seen work pretty well and still leave you with something like a soul to call your own when it’s over. If it’s ever really over.

  One is denial. Convince yourself that you’re bulletproof, ten feet tall, and it’ll never happen to you, and sometimes you can even convince the world for a while. The other way to do it is to decide that the worst has already happened, and you’re living on borrowed time, and when your number is up, your number is up. They say you never hear the one that has your name on it, but brother, I can tell you, it isn’t true. You hear it coming every time you close your eyes.

  Barb’s saying something, but the words mean nothing. I lean back in my chair, raise one hand to shut her the hell up, shaking my head. Something’s rising up in the back of my consciousness, something big and bright and featureless as a drought-seared plain under an African sun.

  Merci à Dieu. Pretoria. 2037. I know it’s a flashback. I know it down in my bones and it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference, the same way it doesn’t when I know it’s a dream and I know I’m going to die, because I always do. Every time.

  And every time, I’m right.

  And the heat is a forge during the day, the cold a quenching at night. The land is an anvil and the sun a hammer in the hands of a lame god. Sun setting gory as the weeks before, smearing pale walls with bloody handprints. Before the drought, before the heat, the hills overlooking the city were green and rolling, hedged in some sort of purple flowers. I’ve seen pictures.

  Three ammo haulers, two staff vehicles, two A.P.C.s, and an Engineering Corps tank with a bulldozer blade on the front — a Christmas carol in Hell. We’ve got air cover as well, a pair of gunships and a spotter. I’m shepherding the convoy down the already ruined road north of the city — shiny, modern city: good university, once. We couldn’t get through without the tracked vehicles now. My tactical display shows clean and green: the first clue something’s gone sour is a trail of smoke from the roof of a nearby building, the death gasp of one of the deadly, fragile helicopters shredding at the seams. Then the explosions start in earnest.

  Anything hauling explosives is not where you want to be during an artillery barrage. The guy ahead floors it, and I do, too.

  Gunfire. Ambush. I hear the whine of the fifty cal on the escort tank, the unforgettable rumble of its enormous engine. The guy sitting next to me is terse and professional into his throat mike, bringing the TOC up to speed on where we are and what we’ve run up against. A second after tactical gets the information, my heads-up stains red with confirmed hostile presence. Nice to know now. I wrench the big machine aside as a crater opens up seemingly between my feet, black hot plastic slipping through my hands.

  That’s what brings me back to the more presently real, the here-and-now: splintering plastic, and Barb’s hand crushing my right one. She leans across the table now, yelling into my face, and I blink twice and try to shake it off, eyes closed, head tossing.

  “Jenny, dammit, talk to me!” And damned if she doesn’t actually look and sound concerned.

  I look down. I’ve cracked the high-impact plastic table, left a spiderweb of lines lacing it where my steel hand clutched tight. “Fuck me,” I say.

  “Are you all right? It looked like a seizure or something. Shit. Valens can wait, we can go to the hospital…”

  “No.” Not NDMC. Not if they paid me. Not even the new Toronto General. “It was just a senior moment. Panic attack. It’s all right now.”

  She sits back on her bench, but her hand stays on mine. “Sure?”

  “Damn sure.” I extricate my hand, which is shaking, and down the bourbon in a gulp.

  “Casey. You know better.” And I’m so rattled I don’t even hear him come up behind me. My hand slaps the thigh of my BDUs, where my sidearm should be, and I curse Canada briefly. I never would have thought I’d feel—naked—walking around Toronto without a gun strapped to my body.

  Valens had been five measured paces away when he spoke to me. Smart. He covers two of those steps while I slide out of the booth and stand, turning to face him. He has enough sense not to stick his paw out. I’d rather kiss a snake than shake that man’s hand.

  “Fred.” There’s something satisfying about not having to call him Captain. Colonel, I
guess it is now, although he’s out of uniform, and he does stick out like the emerald stud on Razorface’s nose. His hair has gone a gleaming silver that picks up the flickering colors of the strobes, but the cut is less conservative than it used to be. He looks fit and solid for an older man. “You gonna have a seat?”

  “If you don’t mind?” He gestures me back into the booth as Barb stands.

  She takes a step away. “I’ll leave you two to talk things out without my interference. Frederick, I’ll come by your office tomorrow, if that suits.”

  “Very well. Thank you, Barbara.” The smile he gives her makes me want to break his teeth. But then, the fact that he’s still breathing makes me want to break his teeth, so I guess it’s no big shock.

  Barb nods to me before she walks away, leaving her wineglass on the table. My eyes don’t follow. I’m looking at Valens, who is settling himself onto the loathsome vinyl across from me.

  He takes a breath and looks me dead in the eye before he speaks. I won’t look down. “You look better than I expected. Who’s been handling your follow-up?”

  “A friend of a friend.” I’m telling you nothing. “Barb says you’ve got something that can help with the interface breakdown I’m supposed to be experiencing.”

  “Supposed to be? No symptoms yet?”

  I wish I hadn’t finished my bourbon. I push the glass away so that I won’t fiddle with it. Whether it’s sitting across from Valens for the first time in over a decade or something else, I’m abruptly aware of all the great and small pains at war in my body. I open my mouth to lie, and then have to swallow the bitterness of not being able to do it.

  I hate the man with every fiber of my being. And sure as taxes, I owe him my life, or at least the fact that I’m sitting there across from him and not rotting in a hospital bed. And I might not have minded, if it had all stopped there, even though they didn’t ask. The army doesn’t have to ask.

  The thing is, the first time your body just starts reflexively doing things that are hardwired into a nanoprocessor relay and not your own nervous system, it can take you by surprise. Especially if you haven’t been warned what to expect. Especially if it ends with people getting killed.

  Funny thing that. Things that end with people getting killed never seem to end with the right people getting killed.

  “Yeah,” I say, after a long pause. “I’m having symptoms.”

  He nods. He even looks genuinely concerned. Hell, he may be. I’m the man’s great triumph, after all.

  “We’ve discovered an ongoing myelin breakdown that seems to be triggered by the electrical impulses from the nanoprocessors.” Valens never sugarcoated anything in his life. It may be his best trait.

  I lean forward to listen more closely. “You’re talking about loss of nerve function. Paralysis?”

  “Eventually. Numbness in the extremities first. Loss of motor control, body temperature regulation. And once the dampers in your implants start failing, pain like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “I’d believe a lot of pain, Doc.”

  He winces, touches his forehead. “There’s also a larger neurological issue. The brain wetware, that needs to come out. We’ve lost three of your group so far because of synaptic dysfunction.”

  “Define dysfunction for the interested observer.” Right, I’m a blasted museum piece. So nice to be reminded. A sense of detachment is stealing over me, a sensation I used to feel a lot more. It’s been creeping back lately.

  “Basically, a complex of problems. Something like old-time Alzheimer’s, if you remember what that is, coupled with a lot of random synaptic firing. Forgetfulness. And hallucinations.”

  “Flashbacks.”

  “Yes. Essentially, you’re looking at senile dementia in about five years. What are you now, fifty?”

  “Forty-nine. There’s a cure for Alzheimer’s.”

  “Early stage, yes.” He nods, pushing Barb’s wineglass out of the way. “We plan to use the same tech to repair the damage caused by the continued insult to your nervous system. Nanosurgery. As a minor bonus, we can fix a lot of the scardown, too — and the more superficial scarring. The stuff you didn’t want to go reconstructive on, way back when. No knives.”

  The skin at the base of my neck creeps. “Just bugs crawling around under my skin.”

  Open hands, and earnest expression. He’s that kind of distinguished good-looking that wins twenty-year-old trophy wives. I wonder if Valens has a wife. I never asked. He doesn’t wear a ring — but then, he’s a surgeon. “It’s the same tech they’re using for the neural VR interfaces.”

  “Safe?”

  “No more dangerous than giving birth to twins.”

  “If it doesn’t work?”

  “Two possibilities. If it really fucks up, vegetative state.”

  “Charming. What’s possibility number two?”

  “A ventilator and a hospital bed.”

  “Ah.” I close my eyes. I try to think back to the last time I felt warm and safe and halfway in control of the future, and I can’t. Maybe when I was seventeen, eighteen. There was a boy named Carlos. He wanted to marry me. It didn’t work out that way. Flashbacks? “What if it works?”

  Valens taps the table with his left hand, and I wonder if this is going better than he expected. I haven’t broken his shoulder again. Yet. “Less pain. Better mobility. Less hardware. The nanites can be tailored to consume a lot of the primitive wetware and reuse the materials. Also, your life span extended from an estimated five to ten, to indefinite.”

  “I see.” One last question. And only one.

  He holds his breath.

  I chew on the inside of my cheek for a minute before I ask it. “What’s it gonna cost me, Fred?”

  “It will cost you. I’m not going to lie about that. We need your help.” He leans forward and spreads his hands wide, broad fingers that don’t look deft enough for a doctor. “We need volunteers.”

  “I’m too old for fighting, Valens.” It’s an effort to remember to use his first name. It’s an effort not to call him Captain. Colonel. Whatever. Damn. I was in the army a hell of a long time. Running my thumb over the surface of the table, I study the smear of skin-oil it leaves.

  Valens coughs behind his hand. “Are you too old for flying?”

  “I…” Whatever I expected to say dies in my mouth. “Flying?”

  His face goes still and serious. His voice drops. He leans forward, touching his earcuff, and unclips his HCD. I pull mine out so he can beam me a secure conversation channel, and his voice comes in my ear when it comes again. “Everything from here on in is classified. Got it?”

  I set my unit on the table and nod. “Yes.”

  “We’re testing some new training techniques. Virtual reality. Wetwired remote interface for the next generation of combat aircraft. Tanks, too.” I look away. I was a drill instructor for a while, too, until it got to be too damned depressing and I asked to be transferred back into the field, which is how I wound up flying medevac. I’d been a driver before, but enhanced reflexes and my mechanical aptitude make for a very good pilot. “So we won’t have to send kids out to die in them anymore.”

  He’s lost me until he says that last. I’ve been a rhesus monkey, and it gets real old, real fast.

  And he knew it, dammit. He knew it when he cast the fly, and he knew it when he set the hook. I can see the fucking calculation in his hazel eyes, gray now in the flickering light. My lips curl back into something that might almost look like a smile if you didn’t know me very well. “Wetwired. What does that mean?” I know what wired is. Wired is me.

  He reaches across the table and rests one hand on my shoulder. “When we rebuild the interfaces, we engineer in some of the equipment that Venus Consolidated and Unitek have designed for their VR interfaces.”

  “Venus… that’s a sex toy company.” I hear my own disbelief, and curiosity burns in the back of my throat.

  “Yes. But Unitek owns them, and they’re an industry leader in virtu
al reality applications. And we’re working with Unitek.”

  “Of course you are.” Unitek engineers designed my arm, and the neuralware that augments my reflexes in response to any perceived threat. Unitek owns the pharmaceutical company that makes Hyperex. And Unitek… assisted… Canada during the bloody, bloody Malaysian-PanChinese wars that broke out when the oceans started to rise. Later, they funded much of Malaysia’s economic recovery, to the chagrin of the Chinese government, which still likes to consider Southeast Asia its private preserve. It’s interesting history, if you go in for that sort of thing. “All right. Forget about the high-tech vibrators. Explain to me this wetwired thing.”

  “You’ve heard of the new generation of neural?”

  I shrug. “A little. I know I’ve got a collection of silicon cones buried in my gray matter and that’s not how you guys do things anymore.”

  “We have much less invasive techniques,” he answers, proud as if he pioneered it himself. “Nanosurgery. No incision — nothing goes in but bots a few microns across. We build, essentially, artificial synapses. The body hardly registers it as an insult. People are doing it for recreational purposes. Four-year-old technology, perfectly safe.”

  “Why would anybody do that to herself?”

  Valens waves his hands around, almost forgetting to subvocalize. His voice through my ear cuff is not quite painfully loud. “All sorts of reasons, but the primary is for a more seamless access to the gamespaces. As with the invention of the wheel, the most novel technologies are used for toys first.”

  Holy hell. This is his baby. “So you want to restructure my brain?”

  “No. We want to clean out the mess of substandard wiring we slapped up in there almost a quarter century ago, and put in something that won’t cripple you. Remember when you first got your arm?”

  My head jerking up and down feels stiff as a marionette’s.

  “Remember I promised you someday you’d have sensation? Heat, pressure?”

  Again, the dull, disbelieving nod. He can’t be serious.

  “We can do that now. Now that we have the tech to replace your old implants, you can have what these guys have.” His sweeping gesture takes in the room. “Without the stigma.” He glances around the room, real distaste wrinkling an arrogant nose.