by Stephen Moss
“That much is clear,” came Neal’s voice out of a small speaker built into the front of the Phase Nine’s ‘face’, like some automaton from a fifties sci-fi flick.
Mynd:
“Or anyone,” said William with a chuckle, and they both smiled.
“Quite,” came Neal’s response as he gingerly climbed to his feet once more “So, this is what it feels like to wear one of the battleskins. I must admit, I had always been curious.”
“Well, not quite,” replied William. “This is a touch stronger than the battleskins, as it does away with having to carry around one of us pesky, soft little humans.”
“Yes, that would make sense. So is this closer to what the Agent’s enjoy.”
“It is,” replied William. “And with the latest versions of the spinal interface coming out of Amadeu’s lab, it could, in theory, match their speed and strength, even beat them in that last category, perhaps. And the guns. Oh, the guns. They are not online now, for … obvious reasons, but they pack a very real punch.”
If William could have seen Neal’s face, he would have seen the man’s disconcerted look at the thought that they might have added that to the list of ways he just could have obliterated his colleague with his mishandling of the suit.
“Yes, well,” Neal said, “I’m glad you didn’t give me access to those. As are you, I imagine.” They shared another chuckle.
“Yes,” said William, after a moment. “If we’d only had time to refine these and the interface enough before facing the Agents …” his voice trailed off. It was one of many things they had not been able to do before events came to a boil. And like the rest, it did not bear thinking about, and accordingly Neal moved on.
“So,” Neal said, standing more confidently this time and reexamining his arms and legs with greater appreciation for their strength, “have you had a chance to try it out?”
“Of course, Neal. I have been testing them out pretty much every day! It really is a blast once you get the hang of it, and the island gives you quite the landscape to take them for a ride.”
Neal looked at him with his blank machine face, then, realizing the man could not see his expression, said out loud, “Well, what are we waiting for?”
- - -
It was a strange sight: one bionic creature leaping with fair adeptness from rock to ice to rock, bouncing with the simple joy of a child recently escaped from the confines of home and parental oversight, and behind that another, lither affair, but so much slower, like the friend who is less confident of their enterprise; hesitant, jumping with some measure of the same joy, but without the abandon of the first.
William had dusted off a Phase Seven model, only recently retired anyway, and was sprinting ahead of Neal as the leader of the world’s greatest military enterprise skipped tentatively, gaining poise slowly as he went.
“William!” Neal shouted. Then, realizing the other man was nowhere in sight, he changed back to more abstract comms.
Neal: ‘william. ¿where are you?’
The other man’s location came to Neal as a flash of data, and Neal saw that the once-crippled scientist was sprinting in a long arc around and back toward Neal, a grace to his form that would have filled the best athlete with joy, let alone a man who had spent most of his life confined to a wheelchair.
As they came up on each other once more, Neal returned to the spoken form, enjoying the strange combination of cyber communications and old-fashioned vocalization.
“Wow, you are quite the athlete!”
William did not share Neal’s full emotion at the statement. His perspective was more a blend of happiness and sadness, a gift all the more emphasized by the lost abilities it implied, a new puppy to replace the lost companion.
“It is an amazing thing,” William simply said.
“Yes, it is,” replied Neal, then added, “I am curious. Given what these Phases can do, why don’t you use them all the time?”
William thought a moment. It was a good question. It was strange that he would be so loyal to a body that had so cruelly betrayed him.
“I don’t know, now that you say it. It’s … well, this … this isn’t me. Is it?” he replied, clearly trying to give voice to something he had not really analyzed before, even as he held up his mechanical hands and regarded them.
“If I experience something in this body,” William went on, “have I really experienced it?”
Neal was surprised at the thought, but could not deny the truth behind it; not logic, perhaps, but truth nonetheless. While the senses within the Phase Nine were actually far more acute than his human ones: he could see farther and more clearly, and in a much greater visual spectrum with these ‘eyes’, still, it was like looking through binoculars, making things seem both closer and more distant at the same time.
“Interesting perspective,” said Neal after thinking about it for a moment. “It is, after all, quite literally an out-of-body experience.” Their mild machine laughter came out of the speakers on their mechanical faces, and as they realized the grand comicality of the whole situation they laughed more heartily. To consider the incredible technological marvels they were using: sending instantaneous signals via subspace to two superhuman robots standing on a mountain top in the Antarctic, so that those robots could share a bad pun via two silly little speaker-mouths, it was one of those moments when you realized how strange the world had become.
“I see your point,” said Neal after a moment. “But when we think about the purpose of these machines, and of the others we are building, isn’t that dislocated sensation, in the end, a good thing?”
“True enough, Neal. I cannot deny that.”
Neal had not really meant to be covert in this, but, in truth, he had an ulterior motive in bringing up this naturally sensitive topic with his disabled friend, and it started to come to the surface now. Neal hoped William would not see the contrivance, and indeed, Neal’s knack for diplomacy was coming on, even as he was shaking off its bounds in the greater political world.
“So, when you think about it through less emotional eyes,” said Neal now, “it would be good, wouldn’t it, for our soldiers and pilots to have this purity of function across the board? Don’t you think?”
“Yes, of course!” said William. “That’s why we’re working on this, isn’t it?”
“Yes, yes, it is. But there is still a problem. It is one we encountered in Russia during our first incursion there, and it is one we will encounter again, during the greater war to come.”
William waited, and Neal stepped lightly into the muddy waters of his ideas here.
“These machines as they currently function must, by design, rely on subspace comms to work, unless we upload an AI, which brings us back to the problem of reaction speeds that Amadeu and you have struggled with from the start. A problem we may have found the key to through enlisting young Banu, but that still leaves us with another issue.”
Neal was glad William could not see his face when he said this next part. “We know that we must have a human mind in control of each of our fighters when we engage the Mobiliei Armada, a mind working at the peak of its abilities. And the subspace comms it would require to have those minds located elsewhere exposes us to the detection and triangulation that cost our people so dearly in Russia.”
William caught Neal’s drift now, realization coming to him with a jolt, and knew that he, too, had been wrestling with the same concept, though for a wholly different reason.
“Yes, I have thought about that as well,” William said suddenly, touching, at last, on the topic Neal had been tiptoeing around.
Neal waited, but when William’s machine face remained quiet and passive, Neal eventually said, “About what, William?”
He needed the Welsh scientist to say it himself.
“About … cutting them off, Neal.”
They were both silent a
moment. He was talking about evisceration. Deliberate and voluntary. And potentially complete. For William it was either a blessing or a contract with the devil, he had not decided which. For Neal, it was the only logical answer he could find to a greater question. In space, in battle, the human body was useless.
Worse than useless, it was a hindrance; a soft, malleable, vulnerable, fleshy thing that only placed limits on the machine it was tasked with piloting. With the invention of the spinal interface, the body had become a vestigial thing in battle, as it had for William in life. A coccyx for the mechanical creatures they were now constructing.
“I can only imagine how difficult it is to even talk about this,” said Neal, with very genuine regret. But it was a topic he needed to discuss, and William was the only logical person he could find to discuss it with. “I’m sorry I even brought it up. But I had to ask whether you had considered it, because …” Neal went silent.
“… because if I won’t consider it, then …” finished William.
“Yes, quite,” said Neal.
They went silent once more and turned for home, their bodies propelling themselves away from the conversation even as William began to contemplate the full weight of what they had just discussed. The seed was planted. Neal hoped William would come to the same conclusion he had, or even better that he might see another solution that Neal had not, though Neal doubted that.
It was a very dark path that they were peering down. But it was a path that they might, Neal feared, have to walk down if Earth was to have a chance at surviving the coming war.
Chapter 5: Meeting Room
Ayala brushed into the room with grace, silence, and menace. She had aged markedly in the last few months, her stress and grief etched into her face, her emotional loss clawing at her brow and leaving scars there. But, like always, she had channeled her emotions into her work, and thus had lost none of her will to drive onward; quite the opposite, in fact.
She came into the meeting like she always did nowadays, with an agenda. In the ever-wider circles in which she swam, she was becoming infamous for it.
“Ayala, good to see you,” managed Peter Cusick, but without much sincerity. “Glad you could make it.”
She smiled at how false his sentiment was, but her reply was more genuine. “It is good to see you too, Peter. I’m glad to be here, if only because I have a lot to cover.”
“Yes, yes. Of course,” said Peter. It was always business with Ayala. Peter breathed deep, and the other various security chiefs and intelligence heads smiled and nodded with feigned calm, their façades covering varying measures of trepidation.
“So, gentlemen, if we are all ready …”
There were some nods, though she was not really asking permission anyway, and so she got down to business. “We are here, as you know, to review security procedures for next week’s conference. In order to make this as meaningful a meeting as possible, Neal will be attending in person, as will several other members of TASC’s leadership, myself included.”
There were no comments at this, so Ayala went on, “Let’s us first discuss our arrival and egress. We will not, for obvious reasons, be using the main airports or local hotels, but will be flying directly to the site.”
“Yes, of course, we will make a slip available at the 34th Street heliport,” said Peter.
“Good, the plane will remain there for …”
“Plane?” said Peter.
“Yes, Peter, plane. We will be using our StratoJets.”
“Umm, I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” said Tony D’Amico, New York’s Chief of Police, and the man who had the unenviable job of reconciling the plethora of security requests coming in from UN delegations with the city’s very real and very pressing security concerns.
New York was not the city it once had been. It still retained a place in the world’s economy, and still had a pulse that would take a long, long time to fully die out, but the engine of commerce and creativity that had been the site of so many a novel, movie, and sitcom was now a place under siege.
As the country’s economy had faltered, the nation’s wealthy elite had taken up refuge in pockets of ever shrinking privilege. In enclaves both virtual and physical, they had bolstered themselves against the growing storm of economic and political strife, and no place was that more true than the island of Manhattan. It was not officially now a police state, but the tollbooths that had once taken cash or swipes of EZ passes to cross the Hudson now acted as a border control.
Similar barriers now also guarded the many bridges and tunnels over the east river. You needed a reason to come to New York now, a pass, an invite. Tourism had all but died out in the country anyway, and the few tour buses that still remained were conspicuous in their emptiness. It was into this borderline militarized zone that Ayala was now asking to fly an armed fighter jet.
“Ms. Zubaideh,” Tony went on, “you know I cannot authorize foreign military craft access to New York’s City’s airspace, I’m not even sure that StratoJets are allowed in United States airspace unless they are piloted by US personnel.” His voice trailed off under the iciness of her gaze and he glanced to either side for backup from his military and diplomatic colleagues.
He received it, surprisingly, from an Israeli, himself a former Mossad employee, though his job had been of a more administrative nature than Ayala’s.
David-Seth Ain spoke calmly, resisting the urge to speak in Hebrew for his erstwhile colleague, except to say, “Shalom, Ms. Zubaideh.”
They exchanged brief dips of the head before he continued, “We all appreciate, I am sure, your somewhat unique security concerns. But I am sure you will also appreciate that if the heads of state of, say, Israel and Iran can both arrive at the UN compound via … conventional channels, so, too, can the head of TASC.”
Ayala returned his collegiate smile and did not break contact with his keen, intelligent eyes as she replied, “I appreciate your perspective, Mr. Ain, but the comparison is, I think, not an apt one. We do not come to participate in any greater discussion, and we do not come as an equal. We are not a nation, we are a military state. And one that we know all of your leaders would very much like not to negotiate with, but to control, as they once did.”
It was a blunt accusation, but to deny would have been nothing short of ridiculous. That said, its fundamental truth did not make it any less uncouth to state it so openly. Like so much in the current geo-political environment, it was a topic people preferred to accept but not mention. It was a political bowel movement, a fart in the world’s elevator; everyone knew it had happened, but it was an unpleasant reality they would all rather leave undiscussed.
But she was not here to bandy words with them or to ignore the fundamental issues at hand; that dance was for the politicians. She was here to see to it that no more of those close to her came to harm, a task she intended to execute with extreme prejudice, if necessary.
Most around the table represented the reluctant nations that had already pledged to support TASC’s new independence, if only tentatively, for now. Few doubted that most of the world would eventually follow suit, but only if they didn’t find a way to bring the rogue TASC leader to heel in the meantime, or remove him from his post altogether.
And there lay the crux of this issue, for Ayala knew of at least three aborted attempts to infiltrate her ranks by foreign agents, and had seen signs of several other plots. Neal had made many enemies in the last few weeks, and though few openly opposed him, their agents were hard at work, and there was no way she was going to leave him exposed for even a second, not again, not ever.
“My fellow security heads, my needs are simple; if, admittedly, unorthodox. But they are also nonnegotiable. If our requirements cannot be met, we will simply have to hold the meeting elsewhere. At a location we control, or the meeting will not occur at all.”
Many went to speak at once but she held up her hands and said next, “Please, let me finish. While I understand your valid and quite understa
ndable reluctance to grant an armed military craft access to such delicate airspace,” she nodded respectfully to the police chief who had first expressed his qualms at such an anathema, “I think we can all agree that events over the last few weeks have proven that, were TASC to desire any of the good citizens of New York City harm, something we most certainly do not, then we would not use a StratoJet to inflict it.”
It was not a threat, but it carried the weight of one. Mention of the Skalm would have been as uncouth as pointing out that she represented a state whose very legality was only being accepted out of necessity, as she just had a moment before, but she refrained from stating the obvious this time.
Her point was made. Everyone in this room was privy to the truth behind the explosion in Beijing, and some were even aware of the real cause of the death of the former Russian Premier. It was the reason their nations were all both conspiring against TASC and complying with it at the same time.
“Let us view this as we would, say, the Queen of England visiting a former territory for the first time. Her security would be considered the sole purview of her Royal Guard, who would, without doubt, remain armed at all times. I propose that we follow the same edict here.”
She looked at each of them in turn, pausing notably to lock eyes with the Israeli, the CIA Chief Peter Cusick, and finally the New York police chief.
“That said, I can offer some measure of compensation in return for your understanding here, in the form of a shipment of battleskins, of the kind you are all no doubt aware my Spezialists are equipped with, for use in your own security details during the conference, and then afterward however you see fit.”
The room went quiet, each considering this surprising offer for a moment.
Many of them had had some measure of access to the battleskins in the past, most notably Peter, who still relied on the twenty or so older versions of the suits he had at his disposal to conduct a plethora of vital missions his organization had going on around the country at any moment. The Secret Service had a good deal more, as did a special branch within the FBI, but there were at most a hundred of the suits left in the US, and that was more than most countries could claim.
