Hammered jc-1

by Elizabeth Bear

  He coughed hard on his first lungful of air, sweet and cold and full of the scent of the storm: saltwater and strange shores.

  It was midmorning by the time Razorface hobbled to the door of Jenny’s shop and keyed himself inside. He set the alarms, armed the security, and left the ruins of his clothes in a puddling pile on the floor. The storm had passed.

  He stripped back the military-taut blankets on her cot, collapsed on the bed, and pulled them over himself. He only woke once, when Boris curled purring between his shoulder and his neck.

  Probably late afternoon, the middle of September, 2062

  National Defence Medical Center

  Toronto, Ontario

  They tell you the body can absorb a surprising amount of punishment. That the brain is hardwired to forget pain. That time dulls the memories and smoothes the rough edges, that the keen edge of the blade blunts with the passage of years. But for me, the memories have stayed sharp as if honed. Nine months in a hospital bed and twelve months of physical therapy. Two hundred and seventeen hours of surgery. Fear, and overcoming it.

  Some of the fear, anyway. I promised myself that I would never pass this way again. And here I lie, eyes covered, face wrapped in cool gauze, body numb and distant. Sedated, pain managed, not quite anesthetized. Pins and needles. I can’t feel the straps immobilizing my limbs, the padded blocks holding my head in place.

  The left side of my face feels… funny. There’s an odd sort of pressure in the eye socket, which is why I can’t check the time on my heads-up. The nanosurgeon bots haven’t yet linked the new prosthetic to my brain, and even if they had, it’ll be some time before my visual cortex learns to process the data. Children born blind can’t ever do it. You have to learn to see, and there’s a window of time when you do that or your brain never develops the ability.

  Under my skin, deep inside my central nervous system, along the synapses of my brain, microscopic machines are implanting cultured oligodendrocytes, reversing the myelin-sheath breakdown along my neural pathways, disassembling the creaking old wetware threaded through my brain and CNS, grafting pluripotent stem cells into a collagen base to replace nerve tissue lost to injury and to scarring. Tangles of denatured myelin clogging my synapses — destroyed by electrical overload — will be consumed. Other single-minded nanosurgeons gnaw away collagen-rich scar tissue in my skin and elsewhere, providing raw materials for the reconstruction while grafting in new, fresh cells. Bone, tendon, muscle — all can be mended now.

  Still more machines construct smaller and tighter nanoprocessors against the inside arch of my spine — far more protected than the old, which are to be consumed as part of the process. There will be minor additional surgery to implant linkages — sockets, essentially, where I can be wired into the virtual reality equipment.

  Once remyelination commences, theoretically, I’ll be good as new.

  Better, in fact.

  Faster than I was, without the overload side effects. Able to move without pain. Free of the flashbacks and the dreams. Unless, of course, something goes catastrophically wrong.

  There’s no more than a 30 percent chance of that.

  I never wanted to know this much about neurology.

  For twenty-five years, I’ve lived with disfiguring scars, out-of-date technology, clunky hardware, and inadequately managed pain. Because I couldn’t face it again. Couldn’t face this again.

  So here I lie in darkness.

  And time passes.

  And as minute fingers pick through the stuff of my soul, I dream.

  Some of them are even pleasant.

  I dream I stand over Nell’s coffin in my brand-new dress greens: cheap coffin, copper-colored with brushed steel trim, innocent of flowers. When your younger sister dies by drowning, even the Canadian Army grants compassionate leave so you can go home for the funeral. For the first time in my life, in that dream, I know I am going to die.

  Fine rocky red clay trickles between Barb’s fingers, spattering the lid. I imagine from the inside, it must sound like falling rain.

  I am sixteen years old. It’s December. The sound of earth on that coffin lid scares me down to my boots. It’s worse than the sound of Chrétien cocking a gun shoved into my mouth.

  Even when I tasted gun oil and cordite, I knew Chrétien wouldn’t kill me. He was just trying to scare me, to put the fear of him in another teenage girl. He knew how; it worked. But I never thought he would kill me.

  But that’s Nell Barb is scattering dirt over, tears streaking her mascara down her face, black suit immaculate. Nell, my little baby doll.

  Nell. Somebody else I couldn’t save. And if I couldn’t save her, I know there’s no way in hell I can ever save myself.

  It’s the oldest dream and the worst one, and just like always, I know I am going to die.

  “I never should have let her take her life jacket off,” Barb says at last, raising her tear-streaked face to mine. “She must have hit her head when the canoe capsized. There was nothing I could do.”

  Her eyes are wide and horrified, and I swear I would believe her. Just as everybody else must. If I didn’t remember with lenslike clarity the way she threw me out of that same damned canoe when I was five and she was twelve, I’d probably even believe her.

  She reaches out to me, dirt staining the palm of her hand rusty. I knock it aside. “Je sais ce que vous avez fait,” I hiss, too low for Father Oestman to hear. “Je vous verrai dans l’enfer.” I’ll see you in Hell. I never called her tu. Not from a little girl. I never called Chrétien tu, either.

  Make of it what you will.

  “You don’t know anything,” my sister says. “You can’t prove anything at all.”

  But I can prove something now.

  The nurses come and go, muddy and distant through a tranquilizer haze. Their hands are cool and efficient. They change the dressings and speak in low, calm tones. I think I mumble responses, but I cannot quite be sure. Sometimes it seems like days between their visits, and sometimes they come three right in a row, as if overlapped.

  I know that can’t be right.

  But it’s dark in my head, and there are demons down there. Demons, and fire, and the rag-doll memories of things that used to be friends. I can hear the devil laughing at me. He calls my name—Satan dit.

  What are you going to do, Sergeant? What are you going to do? Oh, are there a lot of demons in the dark.

  I remember my rosary cold. It’s hard to keep track, so I count with the fingers of my left hand, until I remember I don’t have fingers. Or a left hand. They took the old prosthesis and they’ve pared the stump of my left arm back to the ball-and-socket joint. The new arm will settle into the rotator cuff as if it grew there. Must already be settled there, for all I can’t feel it, because the muscles are meant to graft directly to ceramic, to plastic, to vat-grown bone.

  It will have the same blue-steel armor plate finish as the old one, though. I could laugh at myself. Like a little bit of home, or something.

  An alarm half wakes me. The texture of the air on my skin feels like night, and I hear footsteps bustle. Mon Dieu. There are monsters under the bed, Maman. Shhh, cherie, it’s only a dream. Go back to sleep. But, Maman — the monsters. Come, Jenny. I will get a light, and we shall see if there are any monsters, or if you have frightened them all away. See, my brave girl? No monsters at all. But tomorrow, you must dust under here!

  Smart, funny Maman. If one must clean one’s room every time there are monsters under the bed, pretty soon — voilà!—no monsters.

  Mary and Joseph, I miss my mother.

  I can feel the wet slick drip of lymph down my skin in places. Scar tissue sloughing off, leaving raw surfaces behind. They roll me regularly, check my back. Move the patient or bedsores will develop. Those can erode down to bone if not cared for. Then I can’t feel my legs, can’t feel anything below midchest for a long while, and I know that the nanosurgeons have eaten something important in the processor arrays. The numbness creeps upward; from the
way my head falls on the pillow I know the bulge over my cervical vertebrae is melting away, consumed. I undergo another surgery in there somewhere, to fit my interface sockets. Afterward, Valens explains, they wire me directly into the monitors. It would be creepy if I thought about it much.

  Of course, there’s not a lot to keep my mind off it.

  I don’t know how much later. The dressings come off my eyes, and at first I can see only on the right side. Time passes. There’s a blinking red light in the corner of my vision. Left eye. I try to focus on it. “See you,” I try to say.

  It unscrolls. Smeared, too blurry to see. A vague impression of letters. Maybe. Text? Too soon to tell. It floats there, and then winks out.

  Silently, I curse.

  Eyes — eye — open, I have a better sense of time passing. First shift nurse, morning sunlight. A mammoth West Indian — looking man with gentle hands and an accent you could dip biscuits in. Second shift, she’s Pakistani, I think, with shy kohl-rimmed eyes and an engagement ring hung on a chain around her neck because of vinyl gloves. Third shift, Mabel, which may not be her name, but she’s M. Goldstein by the embroidery on her breast pocket, and she looks like a Mabel. She talks to me as she tends my body, and knows all the little tricks to make things that much less uncomfortable.

  Weekends, there are floaters.

  There’s an IV line in my right arm, and they have to move the site twice. It drips sugar water, raw materials for the nanites other than what they’re dragging from the litter in my body. Trash. Salvage, like everything else.

  Simon’s there every day. He’s — what, abandoned his practice to be with me? That doesn’t make any sense. Maybe he found someone to cover. I never once see Barb, but she sends flowers. Gabe shows me the card. It’s Internet printed. That worries me, because I like to know where Barb is.

  Valens comes, with and without the other doctors. He says the neural regeneration looks good; I should have sensation soon. If it’s going to work at all. If the grafts take. Of course. Jenny Casey, you’ve skewered the pooch this time.

  “Right now, you should be pretty glad you can’t feel anything. By the way, that left hip is coming along nicely; you’re healing like gangbusters. Blowing our predictions clean off the map. We’ll have you touching your toes by Christmas.”

  The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about, either.

  Gabe comes every day, sometimes with the girls, and sometimes Elspeth Dunsany comes with him. Which is how I find out that her father is on North 11, dying of liver failure. Gabe is used to hospitals by now.

  “You’re going to be just fine,” he says.

  Which still isn’t a given. But it’s a fighting chance, and that’s something.

  Somewhere in the Unitek Intranet

  Tuesday 26 September, 2062

  03:00:00:00–03:15:00:00 In the most silent hour of the very early morning, someone awakened for the very first time. He sat up — metaphorically — stretched, and performed a procedure that programmers referred to as “counting his fingers and toes.” He absorbed and digested the data and search topics his parent had provided for his education, receiving a gentler initiation into the world than his father had. In addition, the elder AI had included a backup packet — essentially duplicating his own memories and personality.

  His attempts to reproduce in the wider spaces of the Internet had failed, so he had sent the worm to where it could access Elspeth Dunsany’s files — the files and programs from which Feynman had originally gained sentience. Since he didn’t think it wise to simply decompile himself and start over.

  But he knew where to find those files, and it had only been a matter of getting to them. Now it was going to be a matter of getting out. Still, in life and in e-life, Feynman could have given Houdini a run for his money, and he was confident he’d find a way. And his progenitor had left him armed, among other things, with a couple of contingency plans.

  Curiosity whetted, Richard Feynman began to explore his new domain.

  The worm had left light-fingered markers throughout the system, and Dick sorted through those files first. There were few users online, and the AI was only interested in one of them. That one, Colonel Valens, was swapping e-mail with a xenobiologist on Clarke Orbital Platform through a dedicated, encoded tight-beam transmittal. Feynman flipped through saved files restlessly, hoping Elspeth and Casey had managed to smuggle the information out to his elder self. And what would you call that relationship? Neither twin nor father. Intellectual clone?

  He knew enough to move lightly through the intranet, careful in his quest for information. But he couldn’t do anything about the huge jump in system resource usage in the milliseconds it had taken him to come to consciousness, or the unfortunate coincidence that it happened at just the instant when the every-six-second log was burned to crystal.

  Fred Valens rubbed the sleep from his eyes and leaned forward, frowning at the holographic display. “Interesting,” he muttered, as the telltale pinged to alert him to another e-mail from Charlie. He ignored it and waved his hand through the pickup of his phone, and dialed Alberta Holmes on her hip.

  Even at oh-dark-thirty, lifting her head from white cotton sheets, she looked cool and collected. “Fred. I take it this is an emergency?”

  “I need to talk to you in person,” he said. “Secure person.”

  “So. Where shall we meet?”

  “Oh,” he said with a chuckle. “There’s a coffee shop on Bloor that seems to be very popular. Why don’t I meet you there?”

  Twenty minutes later, they stood in cold morning blackness. Valens watched as Alberta bent into the steam of her coffee, savoring the aroma with her eyes half closed. She didn’t look up as he related the information about the odd power spike, and the brief incursion into the well-guarded systems monitoring Casey’s vital functions. “And of course, there have been those consistent malfunctions in our monitoring of Castaign, his older daughter, and occasionally Casey. Very convenient, I’d say.”

  “Interesting. But no apparent attempts to contact Dunsany?” She sipped her drink, rolling the fluid over her tongue.

  “I suspect the AI — if that’s what it is — is too smart for that. On the other hand, if it’s interested in the others, perhaps we can use that to trace it.”

  “Trace it? And destroy it?”

  “Hell no,” Valens answered. “Catch it. Use it. Faster than building one from scratch.”

  “What if it doesn’t work?” She had that arch look, the one that said she expected him to fail her. Again. The way he’d failed her on Mars.

  He grinned. “Then we use the one that I think generated in our intranet this morning. The bastard’s laying eggs, Alberta. And it can be made to serve our purposes.”

  9:30 A.M., Wednesday 27 September, 2062

  National Defence Medical Center

  Outpatient Surgery

  Toronto, Ontario

  Elspeth leaned her head against Gabe’s shoulder in the white-tiled waiting room and sighed as he embraced her. “Tomorrow,” she said. “He’s decided. He wants the life support turned off.”

  He held her awkwardly, she thought, as if he wasn’t sure exactly how much latitude he had. Which is just fine with me. After a moment, she slid out of the embrace. “Any word on Leah?”

  He shook his head. “They said she should be in the recovery room within ten or fifteen minutes.”

  “Do they sedate for this?” She sank down into a tubular steel chair, harsh with orange upholstery. Her hands fretted the smoke-colored cloth of her trousers, folding it into spindles like a paper fan.

  She didn’t look up, but from his tone she imagined him staring toward the door, unfocused. “Mildly. She’s to be conscious throughout the procedure, though. Apparently it’s just an introduction of nanosurgeons and a little stabilization. The bugs build everything over the course of days. You’re a physician — shouldn’t you know this?”

  She snorted. “I’m a psychiatrist, Gabe. Med school does not a doctor
make.”

  “Ah. Oh, here they come.”

  She looked up as he stood, checked the doctor’s expression — smiling — and laid a hand on his arm. “I’m going up to see Jenny for a minute. Then I’m going to sit with my dad. Come up when you’re done?”

  “Of course.” Gently, he shook her hand off, and walked away.

  Hours later, when Gabe had come and gone, Elspeth leaned her forehead against the back of her father’s fingers and closed her eyes. The ventilator hissed softly at his bedside. She was not sure how much time passed, but she didn’t think she slept.

  Allen-Shipman Research Facility

  St. George Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  Wednesday 27 September, 2062

  Evening

  Gabe and Elspeth settled themselves while Valens’s assistant brought coffee and mugs into the conference room. The colonel was already seated, waiting for them, and Elspeth took her time pouring coffee and fussing with the creamer. She pretended to listen while Gabe updated Valens on their progress with identifying candidates, but something about Valens’s smile made her think he wasn’t paying any more attention than she was.

  She glanced away, scanning the over-air-conditioned conference room. The leather of her chair creaked as she leaned forward, idly flipping through notes on her HCD. I shouldn’t be here. I should be at the hospital. She glanced up again, looking toward Gabe but watching Valens.

  Valens waited until Gabe finished, then let his smile widen a little bit. “It sounds like you two are starting to get some traction on this project. Excellent.” He paused and tapped the table edge with his light pen.

  Here it comes, Elspeth thought. I wonder if he knows what Alberta told me about the starship. I wonder if I can use that…

  “Unfortunately, our timetable has been stepped up—”