The Coward's Option

by Adam-Troy Castro

  Behind her, in hot pursuit: “Don’t be stupid!”

  She turned another corner at random and saw right away that this was the wrong decision. This corridor, a route she had never traveled, stretched so far away, into the unreachable distance, that the floor and walls and ceiling converged into a point, that seemed slightly above center in what may have been a manifestation of New London’s curvature. There was no place to go but straight ahead, no side-passages in which she might find shelter. The pain in her side was eloquent testimony that if she rested all her hopes for survival on just outrunning the death coming for her, she would be no better off than she would be simply stopping to embrace it with welcoming arms.

  But she was in luck. She spotted a small mechanism gliding across the floor about a hundred yards ahead, and recognized it: a cleaning drone, making its nightly rounds as it swept its environment clean of dust. That gave her something else to look for, and she found it, midway between that squat shape and her own position: the distinctive opening known as a “mouse hole,” that had never been home to any mice but which was instead the recess where cleaning mechs stored itself when not in use.

  If she was lucky it might be deep enough to shelter her during her last stand.

  It was close, very close; the sound of running feet, behind her, had grown so loud that she expected the next slash of the knife at any second. But she had time to sidestep, fake a dodge to the left, then go left anyway and dive into the tunnel just large enough for her to speed-crawl in, on her hands and knees. Hands grabbed for her and she kicked them away, unfortunately not landing an impact hard enough to bruise; pulling herself forward, aware that any second now she would reach a dead end and find herself trapped with nowhere to go but back into the corridor where her would-be murderer awaited.

  She was lucky, though. There were no other drones in residence. The tunnel ended in a shadowy cul-de-sac spacious enough to permit turning and she drew herself up, with her back against the wall, glaring back at the tunnel she’d just traversed.

  She saw that she’d just left a moist trail.

  Her exertions had opened her wound, causing more pain but unfortunately causing more weakness. Dizziness assaulted her. She took four deep breaths and shook her head, forcing alertness back into her brain as she steeled herself for whatever came next.

  The light in the tunnel flickered.

  A now-hated voice called out to her. “Tasha? I can hear you gasping.”

  “I can hold out until help comes.”

  “I don’t believe you can. And even if you shut yourself down, I can boot you back up. I can bring you to people who can take their time getting what I need from you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  But the chuckle came rolling down the tunnel anyway. “Did you honestly believe that I would move after you, even in desperation, if I hadn’t researched exactly how to get what I want from you?”

  The light in the tunnel flickered again, becoming just the few narrow strips of white left un-eclipsed when the rest of the space was taken up by an advancing form.

  Tasha shifted and felt the pain flare in her side. She knew she was about to be taken.

  Andrea Cort

  They didn’t give me any choice about coming with them. They didn’t even tell me why I’d been summoned out of a sound if drugged sleep, in the middle of this, the third month of my house arrest on New London.

  They just insisted. Insisted hard. In the manner of men who made it clear that if I would not walk I would be carried or dragged.

  I refrained from asking questions because that’s something I do only when further information can alter an outcome, and thirty sections of sleepy you’re-kidding-me directed at the two scowling presences at the foot of my bed didn’t win me anything than other than five seconds of no-we’re-not.

  I did refrain from killing them with any of the weapons I’d begun secreting on my person even in sleep, because I was already in trouble for killing a man and adding these two behemoths to the list would have still left me with the problem of somehow getting off New London and out of Confederate Space. I still gave fifty-fifty odds of the Corps choosing to incarcerate or disappear me by the end of the day, but going peacefully kept my options open.

  I was lucky enough that they agreed to withdraw from my quarters to let me get dressed for work in private, a kindness that permitted me to transfer my weapons from my sleep clothes to the severe black suit I use as both uniform and armor. This made me feel a lot better about my preparedness when it turned out my escorts had no intention of taking me through any corridor or public place where I might be seen in their company; instead, that they were determined to take me out unseen, through utility corridors and fast-transit tubes used only by security personnel. I upgraded my estimated odds of soon having to fight for my freedom to seventy-thirty.

  One long uncomfortable commute later they brought me to a suite of offices I didn’t know and to a featureless little room where I was locked in, to await my fate. Not one single word of explanation had been asked for, or offered. The odds now seemed ninety-ten. I sat at one of the two chairs facing each other across a table and waited with clasped hands, determined to wait out any hidden observers who might be analyzing my every gesture for tips on breaking me.

  I expected to wait hours.

  But less than a minute after I took my position the door slid open, admitting a man I loathed beyond measure.

  I said, “You bastard.”

  Artis Bringen was a wispy-thin, smooth-cheeked functionary who for reasons of his own had had himself auto engineered to look like a boy of no more than fifteen years, Mercantile. The concessions to his actual age were a hairline trimmed back to accentuate his glacial wasteland of a forehead and a pair of world-weary eyes that his obsessive overuse of rejuvenation treatments had not been able to lend the same apparent youthfulness of his face and body.

  He was my boss, which—thanks to my shaky legal status as childhood war criminal, even before this latest trespass—also made him my keeper.

  He sighed. “Someday, Andrea, I’ll walk into the room and you’ll say hello. Or good morning. Or even how are you. Something other than another redundant reminder that you hate my guts.”

  I said, “You shouldn’t hold your breath. What kind of trouble am I in?’

  “You’re not in any trouble.”

  The knot of tension in my belly dissipated a little, at the offhand implication that I might be able to look forward to days other than today. “What about the Zinn?”

  My recent turbulent mission to the homeworld of the Zinn was the reason I’d been under house arrest these few past months. Routine busywork that should have involved nothing more complicated than my signature to a chain-of-custody agreement negotiated by parties well above my pay grade, it had instead ended with me nullifying the agreement, murdering a man, and advocating a permanent military blockade of the planet.

  Granted, I’d had the best possible reasons.

  But these were not the kind of decisions any low-ranking, freshly-minted Dip Corps counselor can be expected to get away with. I’d spent the last few months waiting for the hammer to fall and expecting Bringen to be the one to drop it.

  He surprised me by shaking his head. “You were the subject of discussion for a while, and I’m afraid the killing is always going to be a black mark on your record, but nobody in the investigation can deny that you stopped us from making a terrible tactical mistake. Unofficially, we’re even grateful.”

  “The Bocaians, then?”

  “That guess doesn’t even make sense. Please. Use that logic you’re getting so famous for. Why would we go to such lengths to protect you from the fallout of your actions among a people as powerful as the Zinn, if we were then only going to surrender you to a provincial backwater like Bocai?”

  I held on to my hard-earned paranoia a little bit longer. “Perversity?”

  Only a dedicated enemy would have joined the charge against me as many times as Bringen had,
but he had one particular bad habit that made hating him more nettlesome than hating most people: the hurt look he flashed whenever I failed to give him the credit he thought he was due. “Come on, Andrea.”

  I’ve become an expert in the various classifications of enemy, over the years. The worst are those who think they be on friendly terms between assaults; those who think that what they take from you, they take for your own good. Bringen was so clearly in that camp that he sometimes exuded frustration at my disinclination to accept his claims of friendship.

  I gave him no further room to protest. “So what do you want?”

  “We have a problem for you.”

  I shrugged. “I’m under suspension.”

  “You’ve been specifically requested.”

  “I’m still under suspension.”

  “It might save the life of somebody you care about.”

  “I can’t think of a single person who fits that description.”

  “It’s Tasha Coombs.”

  Tasha was one of my fellow counselors; we’d gotten our degrees at about the same time, and as one of our first projects spent a year in close quarters working on a joint project of sublime dullness.

  We were two strong alpha personalities, of unfortunately incompatible types. She had more social skills than I did, or likely ever would, but was also a child of privilege used to having her own way in any dispute; I was the ball of anger I am, intent on taking charge out of sheer insistence on my own infallibility. Past a few days at the beginning, when between my reserve and her surface pleasantries we’d both made a well-intentioned effort to get along, the atmosphere between us had quickly devolved to open hostility. For a while, until we decided to be coldly robotic in each other’s presence, speaking only to exchange work-related information, we’d gotten along about as well as two rabid animals in a canvas sack.

  Since then I’d joined the Judge Advocate’s office and she’d entered the more shadowy world of Dip Corps internal security, and had not suffered any further contact.

  Any implication that I might have anything to do with some predicament she’d gotten herself into now was ludicrous; also an anomaly, of the sort I could not permit to stand.

  “Show me.”

  Twenty minutes later

  Tasha didn’t know where she was or who she was. She was a closed system, trapped in a moment of her own creation, a moment that offered no means of escape. As a noted wit had once said of a home world city known for its dullness, there was no “there” there.

  When I’d known her Tasha she’d had light mocha skin, shoulder-length brown ringlets and brown eyes that had once been penetrating but now utterly failed to generate any of their own natural heat. Some of that had changed for reasons either professional or cosmetic. She’d darkened the skin three or four shades, cut her hair to a gray buzz, and created a designer eye color closer to orange than anything you would normally find on an unenhanced human being. I couldn’t tell if her physique had changed as well, for better or ill, because she was imprisoned by life support that enclosed her up to the neck, keeping her fed and exercised and clean, but never reaching the void behind her eyes. Her face bore no sign of the intelligent, involved pain-in-the-ass woman I’d known; instead, her mouth and her eyes hung slack, unsupported by any conscious effort by the soul trapped deep inside her. It was tempting to think of some part of her screaming in there, but I’d been in the same condition myself a couple of times over the years and I knew that she was unaware of the passage of time, of her current sorry state, or of her own utter inability to think or act.

  “Teemed,” I said.

  “Teemed,” Bringen confirmed. “She also had some other wounds, and the blood trail from the alcove where she was found indicates a fairly protracted flight from an assailant bearing an edged weapon. But those we were able to heal in short order.”

  “How long has she been unresponsive?”

  “Fourteen days, give or take.”

  I frowned. “She should have recovered her mind by now.”

  “This is a special case.”

  The weapon that had reduced Tasha to this had a formal name of little evident poetry but was popularly known as a ‘teemer,’ a neologism coined by one of the bastards who invented it out of T and M, two consonants from a now dead language that had once been the abbreviation for the legal term, ‘trademark.’ The significance of that required underlining, and the research I’d done after the one and only time it happened to me had not been especially illuminating. It seemed that there’d once been an insanely popular beverage known as pedsi, or something like that, whose sellers concocted advertising jingles that once heard by the consumer were fiendishly difficult to dislodge from conscious thought. People hummed them, sang them, listened to hours of more enjoyable music to wipe the ditty from their meatware. Then they inevitably ran into the advertising again and were re-infected.

  Teemers operated on a jacked-up variation on the same principle. Operating via eye contact with their victims they strobed a high-intensity viral image that so completely imprinted the target’s mind that conscious thought and personal volition became impossible. For up to a week, until the effect faded, the victim was too focused on the image to be able to see, hear, feel, or act.

  Teemers were riot gear, the most humane weapons to use against an unruly mob, but I got hit once when trapped in the middle of a New London street riot, and I’ve got to tell you, they’re a definition of humane I can’t even begin to credit. Not only is the sense of helplessness retroactively terrifying, but recovery from the effects isn’t always as fast or as easy as the technology’s defenders claim. Some teemer victims suffer flashbacks, leading to further spells of incapacitation, at odd moments for years afterward…and since the wielders can program any image at will, there’s a despicable tendency among some of the nastier people wielding authority to program in images disgusting and/or pornographic. There are even reports of some governments teeming their political prisoners over and over again, allowing them only moments of self-awareness before putting them back into the limbo of their own skulls, a process that over time permanently damaged the brain’s ability to recover from the treatment.

  Teeming’s terrible. People have been ruined by it.

  But most teemers wore off after less than a week.

  Bringen said, “The device used on her…it was, well, a highly classified and somewhat more advanced version of the weapon you know. The image it imparts is self-repairing, designed to reset to the original whenever the brain starts to react to outside stimuli. Unless we do something, she’ll be like this for the rest of her life.”

  I pulled the thumbnail out from between my incisors, and shot Bringen a revolted look I might have reserved for mass murderers and rapists. “And just who brought that obscenity into the world?”

  He pinked. “We did.”

  “Well, this has got to be a slimy justification worth hearing.”

  We weren’t in an ordinary hospital room, but in an illicit clinic the Corps maintained on-site for its more embarrassing problems, a subsection of humanity that had for some time included me. But the amenities included reasonable attention to the needs of authorized visitors and one of those was the soft chair that Bringen sank into now, looking as defeated and as shamed as I’d ever seen him. He covered his head with his hands and said, “Don’t put this on me, Andrea. I never approved of the damn thing. I just work for the people who did, the same way you do.”

  “I’m still listening.”

  He rubbed his eyes. “You’ve know how, once upon a time, spies used to carry poison pills, so they could commit suicide if they were ever in danger of being captured and forced to spill what they knew?”

  I’d seen that referred to in some of the sillier fiction I’ve seen. “Go on.”

  “This is considered an improvement on that. The way it works, the agent gets implants on her optic nerves. If she ever finds herself in imminent danger of compromise, she can teem herself with the right
mental signal and put everything she knows beyond the reach of an enemy. It makes her useless as a prisoner, because she’s impervious to torture or intimidation, and therefore impossible to question.”

  “It’s also a virtual guarantee that any enemy who knows about it won’t even bother to try to take her alive.”

  “True. It’s more compatible with long-term survival in those cases where the operative’s working on soil we control and can be retrieved by authorities capable of restoring her cognitive functions.”

  I glanced at Tasha. Her mouth had fallen a little bit open, and was loosing drool. It was tempting to think this qualified her as an idiot, and I’d be lying if I said that the part of me that remembered our many fights wasn’t tempted to take a little savage pleasure in that. But I had a problem unconnected to any pretense of a working conscience: my respect for intelligence. As far as I was concerned, the destruction of any working intelligence was an obscenity. I said: “So you’re saying that there’s supposed to be a release, a fail-safe of some kind.”

  “Of course there is.”

  “But you haven’t used it.”

  “We don’t have it.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to have it?”

  “Now you’re beginning to see our problem.”

  My head began to hurt. I paced from one wall to the other, cogitating, then closed my eyes. “Get me the hell out of here. I need some fresh air and can’t think with her in the room.”

  Five Minutes After That

  He took me outside, or as close to outside as it’s possible to get in a cylinder world like New London. It was a spacious balcony thirty stories above the Dip Corps’s campus grounds, overlooking a green field and a pond where water jets sent silver sprays aloft in one of those eternal liquid ballets whose appeal I have never personally understood. It was early morning, local time, and the solar lamps in New London’s central hub had just begun to flare to the brilliance they affected during the day; the air circulators had manufactured a controlled breeze and the curving horizon revealed the first signs of activity in the town’s residential and commercial sectors. I didn’t like heights and therefore I didn’t like balconies and therefore I was on edge: a feeling I embraced, because it was an edge I needed.