Dead Man Dreaming

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  A groan escaped the biotechnician’s lips. “Am I going to love or hate this?”

  “You tell me. The fail-safes work by shutting the organic template down and moving the AI into a command role, right?”

  Wally nodded.

  “And when we call a Waterloo, his AI maps the current brain activity, mirrors it, and then writes its own code over that.”

  “It slides a duplicate command matrix over the existing one.” He made an impatient ‘get-on-with-it’ gesture with his hand. “I get it. It’s the old ‘Better Man’ protocol.”

  “Yeah, but the damn thing mirrored the wrong template, Wally. It’s calibrated to this ‘Chico Garibaldi’ creep. When Bob called a Waterloo?” The smile that turned her mouth beamed irrepressible pride. “The Roger Dawkins template was in the matrix. And I mean deep in. Dawkins alpha waves were all over the primary at the time. It caused more than enough deviation from Garibaldi to make the substitute command matrix useless.”

  Wally did not speak for a long moment. His jaw flexed wordlessly as his keen professional mind worked through what her words implied. When he at last spoke, his voice was full of wonder and awe. “The override was talking to the wrong guy. Ho-lee shit, Doc!”

  “It gets better. During his fight with the Golem, both the Dawkins and Haraldson templates slotted into primary at different times.”

  “He shunted internally? No calibration?” Wally was beginning to giggle. “That’s fantastic! But how?”

  “If I had to guess? I’d say his little nightmare the other night produced a psychotic episode.”

  “He disassociated?” Wally looked confused. “But he can’t disassociate. There is enough haloperidol in his system to kill an elephant.”

  “Not all the time, Wally. Only if his stress levels elevate. Haldol is nasty stuff, and there is only so much tardive dyskinesia the system can compensate for.”

  “And he was dreaming,” the man realized. “His stress never really escalated because neural activity is suppressed while he’s on the slab.”

  Lania nodded. “Exactly. He had a quiet little nightmare, and when he disassociated...”

  Wally slapped his forehead. “The stronger templates were able to slot in.”

  “His AI noticed the trick, and since Nonna is programmed to protect the unit from hacking or manipulation, we can now guess what happened when Bob called the Waterloo.”

  “The AI slotted a new template in.” Wally finished. “Shit.”

  “No,” Lani corrected him. “The AI allowed a new template to slot in. The shift was organic. Dawkins wanted to drive and Chico let him.”

  “This,” the man breathed heavily. “This is ground-breaking stuff, Lania. How was synchronization?”

  Lania swiped through diagnostic screens, searching for the answer. “It crept above ninety-two and peaked at ninety-six percent several times. Let’s see.” The woman quickly correlated time stamps to the recorded activities. “He attempted to rape a woman before the fight with Breach, and he was highly synchronized for that. I can only presume that the behavior was consistent with the Dawkins, Haraldson and Garibaldi templates. Given her history, I’d have thought the Laura Schneider template would be more resistant to a sexual assault.” She frowned, “But I must admit the template was clearly indifferent to it. Weird.”

  “She was one cold-hearted woman, Lania. I don’t think much of anything would have fired her up.”

  “I suppose. Then during his actual fight with Tankowicz he stayed between ninety-two and ninety-six. He was nearly perfectly synchronized the whole time, even with templates slotting in and out.”

  “That’s easy,” said Wally. “All the templates hate that guy.”

  “It was magnificent, Wally.” She made sure she was looking into his eyes. “Speed, proprioception, tactics, strategy. All on point. He put a flechette right through Breach. Scans show a punctured lung and massive internal bleeding. He might be dead right now. Can you imagine it?”

  “To be the ones who killed the last Golem.” It came out as a wistful sigh. “We are going to be so freakin’ rich.”

  “Breach is not dead.” Bob’s voice interrupted, startling both of them. The pair turned to look at the tall man and his implacable black suit. How he had entered the room without being noticed was a mystery. “He made it back to his office under his own power and Donald Ribiero was seen entering a few minutes later. It is likely that Ribiero will be able to stabilize the injury and repair the Golem before he dies from internal bleeding.”

  “But still,” Lania’s tone was frosty. “That’s closer than anyone else has ever gotten to finishing him.”

  “Also untrue,” Bob replied. “Several of his operations with the Expeditionary Force resulted in injuries as severe as these and some even worse. Mr. Inskip is extremely satisfied with this performance, but cautions you to not characterize it as too great a victory.”

  Safely on the other side of the window, Wally snorted his response to this admonition. “Don’t rain on our parade, Bob. This is the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for.”

  “A breakthrough that occurred only through pure happenstance and despite gross oversights on the part of your team.” Icy blue eyes transfixed the now-squirming technician. “You nearly lost a multi-billion-credit unit because you let him have a dream, Mr. Sinclair. People died, valuable facilities sustained extensive damage, and a significant amount of my time and energy was required to retrieve what you misplaced.” Those condescending eyes turned to Lania. “The unexpected success of the unit in combat have mitigated your failure in the eyes of Mr. Inskip, but do not forget that it was still a failure. You got lucky, and luck is an unreliable ally. I expect far more vigilance and greater attention to detail out of both of you or you can expect unpleasant repercussions. Am I understood?”

  “I understand that you’re a dick,” Wally said with a hand gesture unambiguous in its meaning.

  Lania was more restrained. “I hear you, Bob, but this is how science works. You learn as much from mistakes as you do from successes. If Mr. Inskip is happy, you should be too.”

  “I am ecstatic, Dr. Watanabe. I assure you.”

  There was absolutely nothing in the man’s tone, posture, or expression that corroborated this statement. Lania dismissed it with an eye roll. “Good. Now go be ecstatic somewhere else. The scientists have work to do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Is he going to be okay?” Lucia asked for the eighth time.

  Roland was still unconscious though he and Mindy had been moved back to his apartment at this point. The wounded assassin was sleeping on Roland’s couch, and Roland was reclining in his oversized easy chair. If Lucia looked only at his face, she could pretend he was taking a peaceful nap and not mortally wounded. Her gaze wandered to the exposed patch of silver taking up much of his right pectoral and shuddered. The armored dermal mesh had been peeled back to expose the silver-white strands of techno-organic muscle fiber beneath. It was grotesque and ghastly, like looking at the autopsy of an alien that resembled humanity just enough to be unsettling. The neatly bored hole left by the flechette remained. As a necessity her father had halted the internal repair protocols from closing it. The older man had fed a thin black tube into the wound and was viewing the damage with a tiny camera.

  “My answer is the same as three minutes ago, dear.” It sounded like her father’s patience was frayed, and she supposed she might bear some of the fault for that. “I am confident he will make a full recovery.”

  “You’re sure? I’ve never seen him bleed actual blood before. His organics will be fine?”

  Donald nodded. “He was in very real danger of lethal exsanguination for a few minutes back there, but thankfully that risk has passed. The bleeding has stopped, and as long as we get his organic fluids back up to the appropriate levels he will self-repair in time even if I do nothing.”

  “But what about the lung?”

  “The organic parts will need to either heal naturally or be
regrown, obviously. But I have the refractory bladder back up and running, so the organic lung is largely superfluous at this point.”

  “How many lungs does he have?” Manny asked.

  “He has both organic lungs, well, one left now. But most of his actual respiratory needs get handled by a series of baffled bladders that extract oxygen and other helpful chemicals from the atmosphere. You could drop him on any planet with oxygen in its atmosphere and he would be able to breathe it even if there are other more toxic gasses present.” The old doctor added with a smile, “He can breathe underwater, too.”

  Manny nodded. “Wow. I guess losing a lung wasn’t that big a deal?”

  Lucia wasn’t sure how much she was enjoying the clinical detachment of Manny’s tone, but she wanted to know the answer herself. She let it slide.

  Her father did not look up from his work to answer. “It’s a big deal in that his organic systems still get oxygenated blood from the lungs. But it’s not a big deal because his lungs are genetically enhanced to an absurd degree. When you also consider how little organic mass he actually has, you will find that a single lung is more than adequate.” He anticipated Manny’s next question. “We could have engineered the lungs out entirely, of course. But the military loves their redundancy. If Roland’s chassis becomes too damaged to provide him with air, his regular lungs will keep his organics alive even if as the bionics fail.”

  Manny chimed in, “And if the organic lungs fail, the bionic lungs will keep him alive.”

  “Precisely,” the Doctor agreed. Then he turned to Lucia with a tired paternal smile. “Roland, my dear, is very hard to kill. We did that on purpose, you know.”

  “What about sepsis?” Lucia asked. “Does he need antibiotics? I know the tech parts can’t get infections, but with all that internal bleeding...”

  “Lucy?”

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “Have you ever had an infection?”

  “Well, no.” She caught on instantly. “Oh. Right. He has the same little robots in him as I do. Sorry.”

  Manny gave Lucia a reassuring pat on the back. “It’s okay, Boss. You’re a little wound up. We get it.”

  “Thanks, Manny. I am rather frazzled at the moment.” She looked back to her father. “How long will he be out?” She hated to think of anything other than Roland’s comfort and recovery right now, but there were cyborg killers that hated him running the streets. She did not trust that character in the suit to control the thing that had just caused so much injury and damage. A Roland on his feet could handle most anything. That same Roland asleep in his chair was an altogether different situation.

  The old man replied with an apologetic frown. “Hard to say, really. He has all the same biological enhancements you do, dear. His lung will heal a lot faster than a normal person might expect, but it’s a serious wound and that means lots of time to mend. I replaced the damaged bladder and I’ll seal the carapace by hand before I let his repair systems close the hole. That should speed things up quite a bit. I expect the muscle and dermal mesh self-repair sequence will only take a few hours. Eighteen at most, I should think. I would bet a considerable sum he is awake and whining for a beer by this time tomorrow.”

  Lucia’s face brightened to hear this. However, her father was not finished. “He will be in great pain, Lucy. This is exactly the sort of injury we designed his body to remind him of constantly.” He chuckled at old memories. “We had to do it that way. These special forces men and women are an insanely single-minded lot. We found out that people of that stripe will tear their own bodies apart if you don’t prompt them to address the damage from time to time.” He looked at the sleeping giant for a moment, then patted the figure on a massive shoulder. “Some of them will do it, anyway.”

  “That definitely sounds like our Roland,” she sighed. “I won’t lie, Dad. If that really was Chico Garibaldi then we have a big problem on our hands. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to turn a guy who hates Roland’s guts into a powerful cyborg. We could really use you on this one.”

  Donald Ribiero rubbed his face with a palm still stained with Roland’s blood. “I guess I knew that was coming. You know I don’t approve of all of this,” he waved his hands to encompass the unconscious cyborg, the sleeping woman, and the CZ-105 flechette pistol on Lucia’s hip. “My work has caused a lot misery and death over the years, and I very much want to atone for that, not add more to the tally.”

  “But Dad—”

  “I’m not finished. Roland is not my greatest creation, Lucia. You are. You are the only thing I’ve ever done right.” He gave his head a rueful shake. “And I sacrificed the lives of a great many good people to save you.” He pointed to Roland. “That should have been the last of them. Four good soldiers died, and he ended up a mindless engine of destruction until I came to my senses. His reward? A life of solitude filled with a guilt that isn’t even rightfully his. It’s mine, obviously. But he carries it anyway because that’s what he does. He picks up loads for people not strong enough to carry them on their own.” He was smiling, but the smile was far away, sad and detached. “Just one more thing for me to atone for I suppose.”

  The old scientist sank into a nearby chair with a grunt. “I thought it was all past me. Once I freed him things could just go back and be good again. You would be safe, and all I had to do was monitor your augmentations to prevent relapses and keep you from finding out they were even there. Of course, the universe will not suffer an old fool to hope. I got myself kidnapped and you found the only person who could help. For years I lived with the fear you would find out about him, about what I had done to save you. I was... ashamed of him, what he represented.” The sad smile stretched, genuine humor sneaking into the expression. “You know, I thought he would frighten you. Although in hindsight I can’t figure out why that would be the case.”

  A pause and an irritated grunt followed. “Is there any whisky in this dump?”

  Lucia put her head into her hands. “Oh, no. Here we go.”

  “I’ll get some,” Manny said, eager to be doing anything other than listening to this conversation.

  The doctor nodded his thanks and continued. “I must say I was surprised you two got along as well as you did. And don’t think I don’t know damn well that this relationship you’re in was your idea and not his. Romance is not Roland’s style.”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” she replied, as dry as a cracker.

  Her father did not seem to notice the sarcastic aside. “I want to be angry with you. I want to tell you that this is foolishness, and that running around with a gun on your hip fighting pirates and terrorists is breaking an old man’s heart. But I can’t, can I? I don’t have the right. Many people have died and suffered so I could keep your mutation from rendering you a vegetable or worse. The selfish scientist wanted his daughter to live, and he bought her life with Roland’s sanity and the lives of everyone they made him kill. I bought it, but they paid for it! What a bargain, right?” His mouth twisted into a wry sneer. “But I don’t own you, though. I can’t. What you do with that life is out of my hands.”

  “That’s not how it works, Dad...”

  “Yes, it is! Do you know what’s worse than all of that? Yes, I wanted to hoard your existence. I was selfish. But neither have I done anything to atone for the pain saving you caused. Why should I? You have been doing that for me. For thirty years Roland carried my guilt, and for the last three you have been paying my debts.”

  Lucia’s face scrunched, and she sounded both confused and irritated. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I pay attention, Lucia. You and Roland helped that McGinty character take over in Big Woo, and now what used to be a refugee camp is becoming a place that can actually be lived in. You and Roland took down that Vladivostok fellow and piracy has dropped by thirty-five percent in the frontier systems. You ended the gang wars in Dockside, and now violent crime is half what it was before. For the love of all the gods, Lucy! You flew to Venus and broke the mo
st ruthless terrorist organization in the solar system!”

  Manny returned with a glass of brown liquid and the bottle. He handed both to the Doctor and left without a word. The elder Ribiero downed half the glass in one long pull. “Yes. One by one, the pair of you have been buying back each death that should have been on my ledger.” The rest of the glass soon disappeared as well. “And I’ve been letting you do it. Hah! As if I could stop either one of you from doing anything.”

  With a clink and a gurgle, the whisky glass was refilled. Lucia snatched the bottle from her father and a knowing smile creased his features. “So now you want me to join the fight, eh? As if there is any answer I can give other than ‘yes.’”

  He sipped instead of chugged this time. This gave Lucia a chance to finally speak. “I know how you feel about it, Dad. You risked everything to save me, and I’m not sorry you did. When the time came, you risked it all again to save Roland. I’m real glad you did that, too. You made the only choices you knew how to make, and what happened after was not your fault. You took yourself out of the career you loved for three decades over it, I really think your penance is up.”

  “I made a terrible weapon—” he started, but this time it was Lucia who shut it down.

  “You saved a soldier’s life! He was a bag of failing organs strapped to a hospital bed! A young man with the body of a giant and dreams of being a hero, reduced to ninety-pounds of dying flesh and bones. You saved him and made him that hero.”

  “Don’t make it sound more noble than it was. I needed research subjects for the nanomachines that cured you. I thought of nothing but keeping you alive and healthy. Hell, I didn’t even learn his goddamn name at first.”

  “Bullshit. Sure, maybe at first it was like that, but you are totally incapable of being callous, Dad. You used to tell me stories about him when the headaches kept me awake at night, remember?” She smiled at the memory and swigged mightily from the bottle in her hand. “You put a lot of effort into those yarns, Dad. I mean, I was pretty sure he was fictional until I actually met the guy.” She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and winked at her father. “The man lives up to the hype, that’s for sure.”