Made to Order

by Jonathan Strahan

  She looked up at him and smiled. “Ready for the slideshow?”

  “Yes, Ma’am.” He knew she was just being polite, and not really asking for a decision. Acquiescence was his default.

  She positioned the monitor and aimed the camera at his eye. Images popped up on the screen for half a second or less, a mix of animals, buildings, people, objects. In one burst, he saw a brown horse, then a gray concrete building, the blue rectangle, a white woman in a green dress, an Army PFC in desert camo holding an M4, a white sailboat. Blink, and another burst: green triangle, Labrador retriever puppy, yellow X, black M007 pistol, yellow X again. The card symbols came as frequently as punctuation.

  Rashad had to do nothing but keep his left hand steady on his knee and his eye fixed on the screen; his body and brain reacted, sending data to Alejandra’s devices without bothering to notify him. Every twenty minutes she called for a short break, and every hour she brought him water or a cup of coffee—she decided which.

  Dr. S was two steps into the room when he said, “Knock knock! How’s it going in here?” Alejandra paused the slideshow. The doctor shook Rashad’s hand.

  He usually stopped by for a few minutes during each appointment, like a dentist checking on a patient being worked on by a hygienist. Alejandra handed him the tablet. He jabbed and swiped at it, nodding and humming. Finally, he sat beside Rashad and said, “I think we’re ready to start the experiential phase.”

  Alejandra’s head turned sharply to look at the doctor, but Dr. S didn’t react. He said to Rashad, “Let me explain what I mean by experiential—it means we’re finally going to start bypassing the damage.”

  The damage. The bullet had destroyed the link between Rashad’s limbic system and his frontal cortex, so that he no longer experienced emotions. But this wasn’t because his body lacked the machinery to create them. His amygdala and thalamus and hypothalamus continued to churn away, sending hormones coursing through his bloodstream, and his body responded: his pupils dilated and contracted, his heart raced and slowed. But these effects didn’t spark pain or bring him pleasure. He might as well have been reading about them on Alejandra’s tablet, each abrupt increase in his heartbeat another spike on a graph, each microburst of perspiration a data point. His body was throwing up indicators of a brain that had entered a particular state. But pain, pleasure? Those were things that didn’t exist without a consciousness to perceive them.

  His lack of emotions didn’t turn him into a hyper-rational Mr. Spock; just the opposite. He’d become a tourist wandering through a foreign city where every street looked the same. When he was presented with the cards, a thought would come to him: pick the yellow X. But the thought had no weight, no rightness to it. The next thought came: pick the red circle. But that thought, too, was another soap bubble, easily popped.

  It wasn’t that logic had become inaccessible. He could grind his way through a puzzle, he could solve math problems. But even with simple questions—what’s 12 times 12?—when the answer arrived, it seemed to tiptoe into the room, apologizing. He doubted its veracity. Nothing rang true.

  Dr. S told him they were training his implant to pass the messages from the limbic system to the part of his brain that made decisions. “The DBI’s a black box—signals come in one side, and leave the other, getting reinforced or weakened in the middle. Or at least they will—nothing’s coming out the other side yet. All we’ve been doing so far is training the system.”

  “He understands neural networks,” Alejandra said.

  In the field, the SHEP’s AI was always learning from Rashad, recording which path he took through an environment, noting which shots he took and which he avoided, trying to become a better helper. The DBI was simply an artificial neural network planted inside his own broken one—one trying to become more like Rashad. The images weren’t merely pictures: they were triggers for a host of emotions and concepts and memories already primed in Rashad’s brain.

  “What’s the algorithm?” he asked. “How does it decide which signals to strengthen?”

  Dr. S’s eyebrows raised—a signal of surprise. Alejandra tilted her head. That gesture, however, was opaque to him.

  “A great question,” the doctor said. “It starts with your body.” He talked about somatic markers, the residue of previous decisions by which the body felt its way to a new choice. “We monitor your heart rate, your oxygen levels, your galvanic skin resistance—everything we can think of—and of course the activity itself recorded by your implant.

  “We try to match it to the firehouse of data coming through the DBI. Say that we’ve just shown you a picture of a puppy, that seems like it would be a positive emotional response, yes? So we assign a value to that moment of input and tag it.”

  They’re guessing, Rashad thought. And then another thought came: They must know what they’re doing. Then: They’re guessing.

  “Perhaps a picture of an attractive person makes your eyes dilate,” the doctor said. “Male or female, we’ll tag!” He chuckled, and Alejandra looked away. Was she embarrassed? Rashad couldn’t tell.

  “Who decides what to tag?” Rashad asked. “You? Alejandra?”

  “No, no. Well, yes. We have software that makes all the initial associations and applies a rudimentary score, based on data we’ve gotten from several hundred volunteers who’ve watched the same slides. Alejandra reviews the data entering your DBI, and can make corrections where necessary, based on your own history and known preferences.”

  He thought, They know my history. But of course they did. His medical records would be on file: every detail from before the injury and from the aftermath, his diet of antibiotics and opioids, maybe even his psychologist’s therapy notes. For all he knew, both of them had gone back and read his evaluations from boot camp through deployment.

  He wondered, idly, what Alejandra thought of him. Was she upset by what he’d done in the J&K? He tried to replay her reactions to him, but it was like watching a movie without sound.

  “Rashad? Rashad.” The doctor was waiting for his response. “Are we good to go?”

  Alejandra said, “You can’t ask him that. And in my opinion—”

  “Yes, sir,” Rashad said.

  “Excellent.” And then Dr. S was gone. Rashad turned back to the screen, ready to resume the slides.

  Alejandra touched his arm to get his attention. “Do you have a therapist?”

  That was an odd question. “No,” he said. “Not anymore.” For a few months after he was discharged from the hospital, he met with a psychiatrist, but the sessions went nowhere.

  “I’ll talk to your brother,” she said. “He should get you an appointment before next week.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re going to start feeling things.”

  PIERCE DIED FIRST. He was a Black cowboy from Montana, a thing Rashad hadn’t known existed. Pierce said the mountains above Tartuk reminded him of home. They were severe and snow-capped, but the valley was alive with burbling creeks, lush trees, brilliant flowers, emerald fields. In this terraced village, every narrow street switched back to reveal another row of stone houses, another bridge, another burst of green. Another shooting gallery.

  Jumma and Kashmir was the only Indian state with a majority Muslim population, a former “princely state” caught in the middle of the Indo-Pakistani war of 1948. Eighty years after partition, it was where the two countries worked out their issues while deciding whether to nuke each other. Pakistan-backed LeT insurgents fought the Indian army and sniped at the police, the police arrested and interrogated secessionists, secessionists bombed police stations. And the Marines, as Pierce liked to say, were the filling in the shit sandwich.

  Tartuk had been “secured” a month ago—insurgents pushed out, IEDs cleared—but since the town sat only 2.2 kilometers from the LOC, Bravo Company remained, keeping the peace, winning hearts and minds, etcetera, though everyone knew the area could turn hot at any moment. The civilians, like civilians do, insisted on staying in their hom
es, tending to their fields, sending their children to school. When the squad went on patrol, old men wearing long robes and Adidas running shoes watched from doorsteps. Schoolboys in blue shirts and red ties flowed around the Marines, laughing. One morning a ten-year-old girl in an orange headscarf skipped up to the squad and patted the SHEP, chattering to it in Balti.

  “I don’t get it,” Rashad said after she left. “Why do their parents let them stay here? They gotta have relatives somewhere south of here.”

  “It may be a shit sandwich,” Pierce said, “but it’s their—”

  His head jerked back. Only then did Rashad register the crack of a rifle shot. Pierce collapsed to the ground.

  Rashad was only six feet behind him, leading the SHEP on its string. The wire was low-tech, hardly more than a fishing line, stretched between Rashad’s belt and the SHEP. Rashad stopped, stunned, and the SHEP halted with him. The squad was on a steep gravel street, the stone houses rising up on each side of them.

  Sergeant Conseco, their squad leader, shouted commands, and the rest of the squad flattened onto walls or ducked into doorways. They were in a stone chute, very little cover. Rashad sprinted forward, still wired to the SHEP. The vehicle detected the angle and intensity of the pull and followed at the same speed, engine whining.

  Rashad reached Pierce and knelt. Pierce looked up at him, his mouth working, but making no sound. His throat was awash in blood. A roar of gunfire, and the stone next to Rashad’s head exploded in dust. The sniper had switched to full auto. Someone, one of the squad, cried out. Wounded, not killed.

  Conseco yelled, “Northwest, up high! Find that fucker.” Despite the loudness of her voice, she sounded calm.

  Rashad yanked the wire out of his harness and let it retract into the SHEP. He tapped his throat mic and said, “SHEP. Go two meters in front of me.” His voice was shaking. “Park at forty-five degrees to road. Scan for targets.” The robot lurched forward, swung around Rashad, and jolted to a stop. The .50 cal unlocked and began to swivel.

  Suddenly Conseco was beside him. “I’ve got Pierce. I need eyes, okay?”

  “Eyes. Yes, sir!” Rashad scrambled to uncover the screen wrapped around his arm, silently yelling at himself. Why the fuck hadn’t he had the drones in the air at the start of patrol? (Because it drained the batteries and that wasn’t SOP.) Why didn’t he at least have the tablet on? (Again, not SOP.) Why didn’t he see this coming? (Because because because.)

  The screen filled with four windows streaming from the SHEP’s cameras and LIDAR. Immediately, a target popped up, outlined in red. A figure in a window, not thirty feet ahead. The palm switch in his right glove tingled. He declined the shot—the target wasn’t in the direction of the sniper.

  He opened his hip pocket and extracted the black hornet. The drone was just four inches long, painted matte black. He toggled the switch and the rotors spun, tugging to get out of his grip. He tossed it into the air and it zipped away. Ten seconds later, he launched the second hornet.

  Sergeant Conseco had pulled off Pierce’s tactical vest. Blood soaked her hands and arms. Pierce was looking past her shoulder at Rashad, his lips were no longer moving.

  “Hey man,” Rashad said. “Don’t worry. Don’t worry.”

  “Eyes,” Conseco said.

  Rashad swiped at the tablet, bringing up the hornet cameras. The drones were already 20 meters overhead, where they could not be heard and were practically invisible. He could see himself, and Pierce and Conseco, all huddled in the shadow of the SHEP. The other squaddies were arrayed along the street, guns up, but holding fire. He sent one hornet zooming back along the way the squad had come, to guard their rear. He flung the other northwest, where Conseco had guessed the shot had come from.

  Somewhere, hiding in one of the gray buildings above them, was a sniper.

  Everyone in the squad seemed to be shouting at once into the coms. Rashad tuned them out. He had a talent for concentration, a gift for leaving his own body behind while he saw to the needs of his machines. The hornets weren’t as smart as the SHEP, but they were semi-autonomous and programmed for combat semantics. He didn’t control them. He asked them to hunt, and when they reached the waypoints he’d set and found no target, they followed their own programming and entered a search pattern.

  It was the rear-flying hornet that barked first, flashing red on his screen. A human figure, splayed on the roof of building 31, pointing a long gun. Sergeant Conseco had been mistaken—the sniper was directly behind them. The parked SHEP provided no cover.

  Rashad was watching the screen when the muzzle flashed. Two feet behind him, Sergeant Conseco died.

  THREE WEEKS AFTER he’d started the experiential phase of treatment, Marisa found him standing in front of his closet again. “Do you need some help?” she asked.

  The closet contained almost everything he owned here in California: half a dozen boxes from the apartment he’d lived in before enlistment, a few sets of clothes and two pairs of shoes Leo and Marisa had picked out from when he’d been discharged. The remains of his childhood—his high school yearbooks and basketball trophies and science fair projects—waited for him in his parents’ garage in Arizona.

  “Here,” she said. “Let me pick something.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I can do it.”

  The words came out sharp. He immediately apologized—and now there were tears in her eyes. He apologized again but now she was smiling at him despite the tears. She hugged him and said, “Hey there, Rashad.”

  He was so confused.

  “I don’t know why you put up with me,” he said. “If you want me to leave, I can—”

  “No! You’re family.” She rubbed his arm. “We’re just glad you’re here with us.” She said this so gravely that he sensed he was missing something.

  “Thank you,” he said, to fill the silence.

  “Now, you go to it.” She closed the door behind her.

  He gazed at the stack of boxes. An uneasy feeling rolled through him, and he almost walked out of the bedroom. Since the new phase had begun, he’d been sleeping poorly. He’d wake up feeling as if the ceiling were closing in. Watching TV with Leo and Marisa made him feel restless, and he’d go out to the backyard to pace. Some food tasted better, but some of it much, much worse.

  But mostly he felt the same as before. He went where he was told. He wore the clothes that were set out for him. And he went to his appointments in Berkeley. He didn’t know why, on this afternoon, while Leo was at work, that he suddenly wanted to find the thing he’d hidden.

  He took down the top box. Inside sat his old gaming console in a nest of cables. He opened the next box, and the next. Then he found a steel lock box hardly larger than a shoe box.

  He stared at it, his breath was coming high in his chest. His thumb ran across the combination lock, turned the wheel. The combination was his enlistment date—his second birthday.

  The pistol lay swaddled in oil cloth. A fully loaded magazine lay beside it. He picked up the weapon with one hand, opened the cloth with the other. The gun was larger than he remembered. Heavier.

  During his first leave, between boot camp in San Diego and deployment, he’d missed his sidearm—of course he hadn’t been allowed to leave the base with it. He drove to a gun shop on Pacific Ave. and chose a Glock 19M, the civilian twin to the M007 he’d been issued. He drove immediately to a firing range, and the first time he pulled the trigger, he thought of the Rifleman’s Creed, which his drill sergeant had made him memorize: There are many like it, but this one is mine.

  He’d never told Leo about the gun. He knew Marisa would never stand for a weapon in the house.

  Finally, he slipped his hand around the grip, his finger straight along the trigger guard. The safety was on. He pulled back the slide. There was no shell in the chamber.

  He could load the gun or leave it empty.

  PIERCE WAS DEAD. Conseco was dead. And the sniper was still on the roof, with half the squad still within his field of
fire.

  Rashad threw himself against a wall and shouted “SHEP!” into his throat mic. “Building 31, go, go, go!”

  The AI understood the sentence. Building 31: a known entity on its map, photographed and tagged months ago by drone. Triple-go: top speed. The robot spun in a tight circle, then charged down the steep road that Rashad had trained it to navigate.

  Rashad swiped at his wrap and brought up the hornet’s stream side by side with the SHEP’s. The done circled feet above the roof, close enough to show the sniper’s eyes, the silver snaps on his blue windbreaker, the white laces of his black sneakers. The gunman was on his feet now, holding his rifle with one hand, looking down at the robot charging towards him at forty miles per hour.

  The shooter pivoted towards the far end of the roof, where a trap door lay open. He was going to go down into the house.

  The SHEP reached the bottom of the steep road, spun around a low stone wall. Building 31 was a cement house, one large door in front, and two open windows. The .50 caliber swung to cover the edge of the roofline, but there was no angle for a shot.

  “Grenade,” Rashad said. “The window to the right of the door.” The window lit up with a red outline. Rashad’s glove vibrated and he closed his fist: Yes. The grenade flew through the opening, thunked against an inner wall, and exploded with a bang that would have deafened him if he’d been there in person.

  He sent the SHEP hurtling into the front entrance. The door seemed to vanish in front of the camera. The room was full of smoke. The SHEP, however, quickly identified heat signatures. Three red outlines popped up, and the glove seemed to be shaking itself from his hand. He made a fist. Yes. The gun erupted. Yes.

  Another figure appeared at the edge of the screen. The SHEP’s M2 was already spinning to face the threat. More red outlines.

  Yes and Yes and Yes and Yes and Yes and Yes and Yes.

  ALEJANDRA DEALT THREE cards: blue square, yellow X, orange rectangle. He touched the blue square, and she made a note on her tablet. Then she dealt three more: yellow X, red circle, and another blue square. He understood, now, that these were arbitrary choices. What she was measuring was probably not what he chose, but the speed of his decision-making, or perhaps the level of stress in making the choice. Even so, he was reluctant to choose the blue square again, so he tapped the red circle.