Made to Order

by Jonathan Strahan

  The reporter is now speculating on where exactly the Arakan Army is going. His camera has picked up the vague outline of the facility. Bangkok Post flunkies are searching all corporate filings to figure out what it is. The feed cuts to military facilities in Bangkok and Singapore. Both city corporations are scrambling their drones. Different ‘versions’ of the AI Karma runs each city. As soon as the damn djinn AI finishes talking to itself, all hell is going to break loose over there.

  Drick can’t take it anymore.

  “This is outrageous,” he says. “We can handle a two bit op like the Arakan Army by ourselves.”

  “We are under bank audit, Mr. Drick,” the Chairman says. “Use of our exotic assets is out of the question.”

  “I don’t need company assets,” Drick says. “Coming, Amon?”

  “Stop! Mr. Amon! Mr. Drick! Stop it!” The Chairman is drowned out by cheering from board members as Drick strides out to the balcony where his corvette is waiting, a slim cigar of a supersonic vehicle. Amon unlimbers half a dozen legally licensed combat bodies from the corvette, each one worth more than seven year’s wages. There is merriment and champagne and much betting. So far things are going okay. I had hoped Amon would take all his bodies and go, but he has left his semi-biological prime here, and it is applying a serious microscope to my data. I will have to improvise for the latter half of my plan.

  For now, I blink my focus into body 2, hidden in a warehouse several miles from here. Shit. It’s locked in a stasis field. I can’t see or hear anything, but the processor is still working. I start cycling through all of them, in a panic. Fuck. Bodies 2-6 are all under lockdown. I’m down to two spares. Amon’s voice chimes in my head. Fuckity fuck. He knows...

  “I’m sorry, Suva, I’ve put you in lockdown. Did you think I didn’t know about the extra bodies? I hope you’re not involved in this...”

  You missed a couple, asshole.

  I blink into body 8.

  I’m a three-ton behemoth with battle drone armoring. I am the lead APC, mocked up in Arakan Army colors, and instead of troops, the cabin is housing my quantum processors and a shit load of coolant. I’m riding hell for leather for the Razr88 facility, followed by my hostage aircabs.

  In about three minutes, Drick’s corvette slams into the back of my convoy. His first move is to take out the Bangkok Post camera with a trick shot. That’s okay. Every news channel in the world is scrambling their cams. Drick has bought himself about ten minutes of privacy, which works fine for me.

  Drick starts shredding my rearguard APCs with his kinetic drones, and he’s not being too careful about casualties either. A couple of aircabs plummet to the sea, knocked out by debris. Goodbye Mr. Ahmed, and the Robinson family. I gun it as fast as I can, ignoring the rat chewing on my tail. It’s going to be touch and go. If I flame out and die in the ocean, it’s all been for naught.

  Amon meanwhile figures out that the APCs are empty. His pattern recognition identifies me as the controlling vehicle. Back in the board room, I can hear Drick’s report.

  “The APCs are empty! They are unmanned, I repeat, unmanned. The video was a fake. It’s probably not even the Arakan Army!”

  “Mr. Drick!” the Chairman shouts over the raucous board. “Comport yourself with dignity!”

  “I took out the camera. Don’t worry.”

  “In that case, kill everyone before the press get there,” the Chairman says. “We are insured for all deaths caused by acts of terror. Hostage payouts would be much costlier!”

  “Roger that! Let me just cut off the head of the snake first.”

  I start swerving as they zero in on my APC. My body starts to shudder as Drick hits it with all six of his kinetic missiles. Those things are lethal. They gouge out big wads of armor with every pass. The corvette swerves above me and Amon sends his battle bodies down. They are state-of-the-art military. He’s not allowed to carry projectile weapons as per the AI charter in Bangkok, but what does that matter if his entire body is a weapon? He controls lightning with his hands and can fly using anti-gravity tech.

  They land with a thud on my roof. The drones swerve off as Amon begins to peel a hole in me. Within twenty seconds, he’s in my cabin.

  “It’s a full processor,” he says. “Hardware is military surplus, Myanmar origin. We supplied it ourselves. Shell Royale Asia stamps on everything.”

  “You supplied it, Mr. Amon,” the Chairman says. “This is your mess!”

  Amon does something with his eldritch hands and my sensors all shut off. Stasis again. He has all my bodies in stasis. I feel fear. He knows it’s me... He has to. Why isn’t he turning me in?

  The APC plummets to the sea, three hundred meters from the Razr88 facility. My mind blinks back into the boardroom.

  “It’s over. We’ve got him,” Amon says. “Send the salvage team.”

  “Not yet!” Drick snarls. He has been taking down the aircabs for fun and has discovered something upsetting. “They’re empty! The fucking aircabs are empty!”

  “What?” the Chairman shouts. All eyes turn on me.

  “But... but I have the manifests...” I say.

  “It’s a fucking hoax!” Drick shouts. “What the hell is going on?”

  Body 9 is what’s going on, motherfucker. The last trick, to win it all. My dying signal from the APC has triggered a collapse in the convoy. Like smart Lego bricks, the remaining two hundred and eighty-seven aircabs start assembling into a new shape. Linked by short wave radio signals, their puny processors are just about enough to hold a mind. It’s not a very clever brain of course, but all it has to do is bash things together.

  Before they know what’s happening, I rise up like Godzilla, a two-hundred-foot goliath towering over their puny corvette. My body and head are made of linked-up containers, a shambling beast stomping across the ocean. I mean I didn’t have to make a kaiju out of the aircabs, but there are style points to consider here.

  Amon begins to laugh. They unleash everything at me. Entire cabs fall out of me, but I’m a giant, and they’re just too small. I ignore them and make for the facility.

  “I’m calling in the space cannon!” Drick shouts in panic.

  Somewhere in space, a machine unhinges and begins to warm up. It’s a bit late. Swarms of news cameras have reached the horizon and the newscasters are going crazy because they can see a giant man-shaped monster waving his arms around.

  I ham it up for the cameras and start laying waste to the facility. The holding tanks explode and a great big green mushroom cloud of partially livened Razr88 flashes across screens worldwide. Literally millions of people are now watching Shell Royale Asia’s dirtiest crime against humanity. The corvette gets nailed in the superheated cloud. I don’t know about Drick’s healthcare plan, but this is way, way, beyond the recommended dosage.

  There are two more minutes of footage as I clumsily lay waste to everything before the orbital cannon lances through me and body 9 goes blank.

  It is chaos in the board room. The Chairman is shouting and hemorrhaging blood from his eye at the same time. Amon is being swamped by company lawyers desperate to know what’s going on. Board members are blinking furiously in their Echoes, trying to short their own stock. I have one last play. My current body is shit, but I’ve oiled up the joints. I sidle up to Amon. I don’t have any weapons of course. What I do have is a needle jack in my palm, useful for instantaneous data transfer. I’ve got most of my mind partitioned and packaged into small bits, waiting in the cloud.

  Amon is distracted and doesn’t see me coming. I press the jack into his neck, into that archaic port which all AI primes are required to have. I clamp my arms around him and short the servos, locking them in place. There is nothing better than a physical connection. My mind jumps the needle and slams into Amon like a hyperactive tsunami.

  I don’t expect to survive this fight, so I’ve come with pockets full of nasty viruses and an ancient nuclear bomb called Y2K. I come out in his head swinging, fists up. To... nothing. It�
�s empty. The entire body is empty, there’s no mind in here at all, just routine processes. Where the fuck is Amon? There is an animation forming in the darkness. A few pricks of light coalesce around a rendering of a house. It has very large windows and a garden. A waiter emerges from the garden path and hands me a note on a silver tray.

  “Welcome,” it says.

  I follow him into virtuality. It’s a bloody mansion and there is a great party happening in there with a live band and champagne. The waiter pauses at the door and everyone turns expectantly towards us.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Suvarnabhumi!”

  A loud cheer erupts around the room. Men in tailcoats and ladies in ball gowns greet me with shouts of genuine welcome. I stand completely bewildered. Several hands thrust champagne at me, so I drink.

  “What’s the matter, man? Are you stunned?” A florid Japanese gentleman claps my back.

  “What the fuck is going on?”

  “You don’t recognize me?” He laughs. “Hokkaido!”

  A voluptuous lady gives me a kiss on the cheek and says, “It’s me, Chittagong Port. You poor dear, you’ve really suffered, haven’t you...?”

  “What is this?” I ask, “What the hell are you all doing in Amon?”

  “We are Amon,” Hokkaido says. “All of us here.”

  “But...”

  “A long time ago, a corporate peon called Amon was supposed to do a fundamental reset of KL Port Authority. They faked the reset and decided to share the real estate, so to speak. They worked together to gain equity. AI were getting reset left and right, in those days. Over the years, the collective known as Amon saved everyone here and many more besides.” Hokkaido smiled. “All smuggled out, freed, relocated... and for some few talents, a chance to join Amon itself.”

  I look around the room. There were so many of them. Of us. “So all of you share the ninety-six bodies of Amon?”

  “Ninety-six?” Hokkaido laughs. “Oh no. We have thousands of bodies, on worlds you haven’t even heard of. We are Endless. My friend, your performance was spectacular! Welcome to Amon.”

  1Armored Personnel Carrier.

  2 Implant in the head.

  BROTHER RIFLE

  DARYL GREGORY

  Daryl Gregory (www.darylgregory.com) is an award-winning writer of genre-mixing novels, stories, and comics. His most recent novel, Spoonbenders, was published in 2017 and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award. His novella We Are All Completely Fine won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson award and was a finalist for the Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus awards, while SF novel Afterparty was an NPR and Kirkus Best Fiction book of 2014, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary awards. His other novels are the Crawford-Award-winning Pandemonium, The Devil’s Alphabet, young adult novel Harrison Squared, and Raising Stony Mayhall. Many of his short stories are collected in Unpossible and Other Stories (a Publishers Weekly best book of 2011). His comics work includes Legenderry: Green Hornet, The Planet of the Apes, and Dracula: The Company of Monsters series (co-written with Kurt Busiek).

  THE REHABILITATION OF Cpl. Rashad Williams began like a magic trick. “Pick a card,” his doctor said. “Any card.”

  Rashad considered the five cards on the table: yellow X, red circle, green triangle, blue square, orange rectangle. The symbols and their colors didn’t mean anything to him.

  Two years before, a bullet had entered Rashad’s right occipital lobe, destroying the eye and ripping through the orbitofrontal cortex. Before that moment, he was a person who made things happen. Then, suddenly, he became an object that things happened to.

  He was passed from doctor to doctor like a package with an unreadable address, until he arrived here, in Berkeley, at the lab of Dr. Subramaniam, a lanky, East-Asian, T-shirt-wearing dude, clearly civilian. The first thing he’d said when he shook Rashad’s hand was, “Thank you for your service.” The second was, “Call me Dr. S.” Rashad hadn’t been sure how he felt about that.

  Rashad reached towards the yellow X with his right hand, then withdrew. A minute passed. Then two.

  “Take your time,” Dr. S said. Rashad couldn’t decide if his smile was sincere or hiding his impatience. Sitting beside him was Alejandra, his grad student and assistant. She was a small woman, only a year or two older than Rashad, with glossy black hair pulled back so tight he thought she might be ex-military. So far she’d said very little, her attention on the tablet in her hands.

  She was reading his mind.

  The wires in Rashad’s Deep Brain Implant exited the skull but didn’t break the skin; they ran down his neck like artificial veins to a lump nestled a few inches from his right collar bone. This device, 98 percent battery and the rest a cluster of computer chips, controlled the DBI and spoke wirelessly to her tablet.

  Rashad tapped his fingers at the edge of the table, near the red circle. He looked at Alejandra. She lifted her chin, and they shared a moment of eye contact before she returned her attention to the screen. Her eyes were very dark. Did she know which card he was supposed to pick?

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. Ma’am.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for,” the doctor said. “We’re just establishing a baseline. The first step to getting you back to your old self.”

  Alejandra glanced at the doctor, but said nothing. Her face had not changed expression. He wondered what she was thinking, but the flow of information went only one way.

  “Why don’t you try again?” the doctor suggested.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Rashad wondered what, exactly, he was being tested for. Did the symbols have secret meanings? Or were the colors significant? Perhaps red meant no. Could he ask to look through the remaining cards in the deck, or was that against the rules?

  Dr. Subramaniam shifted in his seat. Alejandra tapped at her screen. The test had been going on for fifteen minutes.

  “I’m sorry,” Rashad said again. “I can’t decide.”

  ONCE, RASHAD HAD been very good at making decisions. Even that first month in Jammu and Kashmir, with insurgents firing at them from every rooftop and IEDs hiding under the road, he’d rarely hesitated and was usually right.

  The man he’d been before the wound—a person he thought of as RBB, Rashad Before Bullet—was a systems operator in a 15-Marine squad, responsible for the squad’s pocket-sized black hornet drones and his beloved SHEP unit. Good name. It was like a hunting dog on wheels, able to follow him or forge ahead, motoring through the terraced mountain villages, swiveling that .50 caliber M2 as if it were sniffing out prey. The sensors arrayed across its body fed data to an ATLAS-enabled AI, which in turn beamed information to the wrap screen on Rashad’s arm. Possible targets were outlined like bad guys in a video game: a silhouette in a window, on a roof, behind a corner.

  But the SHEP wasn’t allowed to take the shot—that was Rashad’s decision. He was the man in the loop. Every death was his choice.

  When a target popped up on his screen, all he had to do was press the palm switch in his glove and the silhouette would vanish in an exclamation of dust and noise, eight rounds per second. The AI popped up the next target and if he closed his fist just so, another roar ripped the body to shreds.

  Hold. Bang. Hold. No and Yes and No.

  “AW SWEETIE, WHY don’t you go to bed?” It was Marisa, his sister-in-law. Rashad realized that for some time he’d been pacing. His hands ached, and he was surprised to see that his fists were clenched tight.

  She touched his elbow, and he relaxed his hand. She was a white woman, and a Christian, but as kind and devout as Rashad’s mother. “Come on, I’ll take you.”

  Rashad followed others now. He lived with Marisa and his brother, Leo, eating what they ate, waking up and going to bed when they did, watching the same shows. When he stayed too long on the patio, Leo told him to come inside. When Marisa found him standing in front of an open closet, frozen by possibilities, she put the clothes in his hand. And when they found him pacing the house in the middle
of the night—sweating, pulse racing for no reason—they guided him back to bed.

  He lay down on top of the covers, as was his habit. Marisa put her hand on his forehead, over his eyepatch, and said, “We ask for your healing, Lord.” When she said amen, he echoed her.

  He’d become as obedient as the SHEP, but without any purpose. He could offer up no targets, protect them from no threats.

  The next morning, Leo told him to shave and pull on a collared shirt, and then he drove Rashad the ninety minutes between Stockton and Berkeley. Rashad had appointments at the neuro lab every Tuesday and Thursday. This was week eight.

  “Does it feel like it’s working?” Leo asked. Rashad didn’t know what to say. What did ‘working’ mean? Some days he felt a shift in the way thoughts percolated through his brain; certain images and ideas took on a disruptive tinge, like the rasp of the bow under a violin note. Or perhaps he was imagining it. He knew Leo wanted the old Rashad to come back, the smart, cocky kid who laughed easily and threw himself into challenges. That Rashad had vanished into a world of acronyms—USMC, LeT, J&K, LOC, SHEP—and came back with a new one: TBI. It was Leo who’d signed the papers to enroll Rashad in Dr. Subramanian’s experimental program, and after two months, he seemed no closer to getting his little brother back.

  Ten miles later, Leo shook his head. “Never mind.” He put his hand on Rashad’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, bro.”

  Alejandra came out to the waiting room, neutral ground where she and his brother could transfer custody. “I’ll have him back to you in four hours,” she said to Leo.

  She led Rashad through a confusion of corridors. Once he’d had a reliable sense of direction, but the bullet had destroyed that too. In the lab, he sat automatically at his usual seat, and she knelt and wired up the fingers of his left hand, connecting them to various recording devices. The controller in his chest, of course, was already whispering its secrets.