“Not beautiful enough to make up for two hours with a hood over my head.” That’s Saks, indulging in some pointless bitching. “Would it kill them to give us a video feed?”
“Or even just put us to sleep,” Kalmus grumbles. They both know it’s not that simple. The brain’s a tangle of wires looping from basement to attic and back again; turn off the lights in the living room and your furnace might stop working. Even pay-per-view’s a nonstarter. In theory, there’s no reason why they couldn’t bypass those jiggling eyes entirely—pipe a camera feed directly to the cortex—but their brains are already so stuffed with implants that there isn’t enough real estate left over for nonessentials.
That’s what Maddox says, anyway.
“I don’t really give a shit,” Acosta’s saying. The tic at the corner of his mouth makes his grin a twitchy, disconcerting thing. “I’d put up with twice the offline time if there was always a view like this at the end of it.” Acosta lives for any scrap of nature he can find; his native Guatemala lost most of its canopy to firestorm carousels back in ’42.
“So what’s in it for you?” Tiwana asks.
It takes a moment for Asante to realize the question’s for him. “Excuse me?”
“Acosta’s nature-boy. Kalmus thinks she’s gonna strike it rich when they declassify the tech.” This is news to Asante. “Why’d you sign up?”
He doesn’t quite know how to answer. Judging by his own experience, ZeroS is not something you sign up for. ZeroS is something that finds you. It’s an odd question, a private question. It brings up things he’d rather not dwell upon.
It brings up things he already dwells on too much.
“Ah—”
Thankfully, Maddox chooses that moment to radio up from Côté: “Okay, everybody. Symptom check. Silano.”
The corporal looks at his forearms. “Pretty good. Less jumpy than normal.”
“Kalmus.”
“I’ve got, ah, ah . . .” She stammers, struggles, finally spits in frustration. “Fuck.”
“I’ll just put down the usual aphasia,” Maddox says. “Garin.”
“Vision flickers every five, ten minutes.”
“That’s an improvement.”
“Gets better when I exercise. Better blood flow, maybe.”
“Interesting,” Maddox says. “Tiwan—”
“I see you God I see you! ”
Saks is on the ground, writhing. His eyes roll in their sockets. His fingers claw handfuls of earth. “I see!” he cries, and lapses into gibberish. His head thrashes. Spittle flies from his mouth. Tiwana and Silano move in, but the audio link crackles with the voice of God: “Stand away! Everyone stand back now!” and everyone obeys because God speaks with the voice of Lieutenant David Metzinger and you do not want to fuck with him. God’s breath is blowing down from heaven, from the rotors of a medical chopper beating the air with impossible silence even though they all see it now, they all see it, there’s no need for stealth mode there never was it’s always there, just out of sight, just in case.
Saks has stopped gibbering. His face is a rictus, his spine a drawn bow. The chopper lands, its whup whup whup barely audible even ten meters away. It vomits medics and a stretcher and glossy black easter-egg drones with jointed insect legs folded to their bellies. The ZeroS step back; the medics close in and block the view.
Metzinger again: “Okay, meat sacks. Everyone into the back seat. Return to Côté.”
Silano turns away, eyes already jiggling in their sockets. Tiwana and Kalmus go over a moment later. Garin slaps Asante’s back on the way out—“Gotta go, man. Happens, you know?”—and vanishes into his own head.
The chopper lifts Saks into the heavens.
“Private Asante! Now!”
He stands alone in the clearing, summons his mandala, falls into blindness. His body turns. His legs move. Something begins to run him downhill. The artificial instructor, always sensitive to context, begins a lecture about dealing with loss on the battlefield.
It’s all for the best, he knows. It’s safest to be a Passenger at times like this. All these glitches, these . . . side effects: they never manifest in zombie mode.
Which makes perfect sense. That being where they put all the money.
Station to Station
Sometimes he still wakes in the middle of the night, shocked back to consciousness by the renewed knowledge that he still exists—as if his death was some near-miss that didn’t really sink in until days or weeks afterward, leaving him weak in the knees and gasping for breath. He catches himself calling his mandala, a fight/flight reaction to threat stimuli long since expired. He stares at the ceiling, forces calm onto panic, takes comfort from the breathing of his fellow recruits. Tries not to think about Kito and Rashida. Tries not to think at all.
Sometimes he finds himself in the commons, alone but for the inevitable drone hovering just around the corner, ready to raise alarms and inject drugs should he suffer some delayed and violent reaction to any of a hundred recent mods. He watches the world through one of CFB Côté’s crippled terminals (they can surf but never send). He slips through wires and fiberop, bounces off geosynchronous relays all the way back to Ghana: satcams down on the dizzying Escher arcology of the Cape Universitas hubs, piggybacks on drones wending through Makola’s East, marvels anew at the giant gengineered snails—big as a centrifuge, some of them—that first ignited his passion for biology when he was six. He haunts familiar streets where the kenkey and fish always tasted better when the Chinese printed them, even though the recipes must have been copied from the locals. The glorious chaos of the street drummers during Adai.
He never seeks out friends or family. He doesn’t know if it’s because he’s not ready or because he has already moved past them. He only knows not to awaken things that have barely gone to sleep.
Zero Sum. A new life. Also a kind of game used, more often than not, to justify armed conflict.
Also Null Existence. If your tastes run to the Latin.
They loom over a drowning subdivision long abandoned to the rising waters of Galveston Bay: cathedral-sized storage tanks streaked with rust and ruin, twelve-story filtration towers, masses of twisting pipe big enough to walk through.
Garin sidles up beside him. “Looks like a crab raped an octopus.”
“Your boys seem twitchy,” the sheriff says. (Asante clenches his fist to control the tremor.) “They hopped on something?”
Metzinger ignores the question. “Have they made any demands?”
“Usual. Stop the rationing or they blow it up.” The sheriff shakes his head, moves to mop his brow, nearly punches himself in the face when his decrepit Bombardier exoskeleton fratzes and overcompensates. “Everything’s gone to shit since the Edwards dried up.”
“They respond to a water shortage by blowing up a desalination facility?”
The sheriff snorts. “Folks always make sense where you come from, Lieutenant?”
They reviewed the plant specs down to the rivets on the way here. Or at least their zombies did, utterly silent, borrowed eyes flickering across video feeds and backgrounders that Asante probably wouldn’t have grasped even if he had been able to see them. All Asante knows—by way of the impoverished briefings Metzinger doles out to those back in tourist class—is that the facility was bought from Qatar back when paint still peeled and metal still rusted, when digging viscous fossils from the ground left you rich enough to buy the planet. And that it’s falling into disrepair, now that none of those things are true anymore.
Pretty much a microcosm of the whole TExit experience, he reflects.
“They planned it out,” the sheriff admits. “Packed a shitload of capacitors in there with ’em, hooked ’em to jennies, banked ’em in all the right places. We send in quads, EMP just drops ’em.” He glances back over his shoulder, to where—if you squint hard enough—a heat-shimmer rising from the asphalt might almost assume the outline of a resting Chinook transport. “Probably risky using exos, unless they�
�re hardened.”
“We won’t be using exos.”
“Far as we can tell, some of ’em are dug in by the condensers, others right next to the heat exchangers. We try to microwave ’em out, all the pipes explode. Might as well blow the place ourselves.”
“Firepower?”
“You name it. Sig Saurs, Heckler-Kochs, Maesushis. I think one of ’em has a Skorp. All kinetic, far as we know. Nothing you could fry.”
“Got anything on legs?”
“They’ve got a Wolfhound in there. 46-G.”
“I meant you,” Metzinger says.
The sheriff winces. “Nearest’s three hours away. Gimped leg.” And at Metzinger’s look: “BoDyn pulled out a few years back. We’ve been having trouble getting replacement parts.”
“What about local law enforcement? You can’t be the only—”
“Half of them are law enforcement. How’d you think they got the Wolfhound?” The sheriff lowers his voice, although there aren’t any other patriots within earshot. “Son, you don’t think we’d have invited you in if we’d had any other choice? I mean Jayzuz, we’ve got enough trouble maintaining lawnorder as it is. If word ever got out we had to bring in outside help over a goddamn domestic dispute . . .”
“Don’t sweat it. We don’t wear name tags.” Metzinger turns to Silano. “Take it away, Sergeant-Major.”
Silano addresses the troops as Metzinger disappears into the cloaked Chinook: “Say your goodbyes, everybody. Autopilots in thirty.”
Asante sighs to himself. Those poor bastards don’t stand a chance. He can’t even bring himself to blame them: driven by desperation, hunger, the lack of any other options. Like the Sāḥilites who murdered him, back at the end of another life: damned, ultimately, by the sin of being born into a wasteland that could no longer feed them.
Silano raises one hand. “Mark.”
Asante calls forth his mandala. The world goes to gray. His bad hand calms and steadies on the forestalk of his weapon.
This is going to be ugly.
He’s glad he won’t be around to see it.
Heroes
He does afterward, of course. They all do, as soon as they get back to Côté. They’re still learning. The world is their classroom.
“Back in the Cenozoic all anybody cared about was reflexes.” Second Lieutenant Oliver Maddox—sorcerer’s apprentice to the rarely seen Major Emma Rossiter, of the Holy Order of Neuroengineering—speaks with the excitement of a nine-year-old at his own birthday party. “Double-tap, dash, down, crawl, observe fire—all that stuff your body learns to do without thinking when someone yells Contact. The whole program was originally just about speeding up those macros. They never really appreciated that the subconscious mind thinks as well as reacts. It analyzes. I was telling them that years ago, but they never really got it until now.”
Asante has never met Them. They never write, They never call. They certainly never visit. Presumably They sign a lot of checks.
“Here, though, we have a perfect example of the tactical genius of the zombie mind.”
Their BUDs recorded everything. Maddox has put it all together postmortem, a greatest-hits mix with remote thermal and PEA and a smattering of extraporential algorithms to fill in the gaps. Now he sets up the game board—walls, floors, industrial viscera all magically translucent—and initializes the people inside.
“So you’ve got eighteen heavily armed hostiles dug in at all the right choke points.” Homunculi glow red at critical junctures. “You’ve got a jamming field in effect, so you can’t share telemetry unless you’re line-of-sight. You’ve got an EMP-hardened robot programmed to attack anything so much as squeaks, deafened along the whole spectrum so even if we had the back-door codes it wouldn’t hear them.” The Wolfhound icon is especially glossy: probably lifted from BoDyn’s promotional archive. “And you’ve got some crazy fucker with a deadman switch that’ll send the whole place sky-high the moment his heart stops—or even if he just thinks you’re getting too close to the flag. You don’t even know about that going in.
“And yet.”
Maddox starts the clock. Inside the labyrinth, icons begin to dance in fast-forward.
“Garin’s first up, and he completely blows it. Not only does he barely graze the target—probably doesn’t even draw blood—but he leaves his silencer disengaged. Way to go, Garin. You failed to neutralize your target, and now the whole building knows where you are.”
Asante remembers that gunshot echoing through the facility. He remembers his stomach dropping away.
“Now here comes one of Bubba’s buddies around the corner and—Garin misses again! Nick to the shoulder this time. And here comes the real badass of the bunch, that Wolfhound’s been homing in on Garin’s shots and that motherfucker is armed and hot and . . .”
The 46-G rounds the corner. It does not target Garin; it lights up the insurgents. Bubba and his buddy collapse into little red piles of pixel dust.
“They did not see that coming!” Maddox exults. “Fragged by their own robot! How do you suppose that happened?”
Asante frowns.
“So two baddies down, Garin’s already up the ladder and onto this catwalk before the robot gets a bead on him, but Tiwana’s at the other end, way across the building, and they go LOS for about half a second”—a bright thread flickers between their respective icons—“before Tiwana drops back down to ground level and starts picking off Bubbas over by the countercurrent assembly. And she turns out to be just as shitty a shot as Garin, and just as sloppy with her silencer.”
Gunfire everywhere, from everyone. Asante remembers being blind and shitting bricks, wondering what kind of aboa would make such an idiot mistake until the Rann-Seti came up in his own hands, until he felt the recoil and heard the sound of his own shot echoing like a 130-decibel bull’s-eye on his back. He wondered, at the time, how and why someone had sabotaged everyone’s silencers like that.
Maddox is still deep in the play. “The bad guys have heard the commotion and are starting to reposition. By now Asante and Silano have picked up the shitty-shot bug and the BoDyn’s still running around tearing up the guys on its own side. All this opens a hole that Kalmus breezes through—anyone want to guess the odds she’d just happen to be so perfectly positioned?—which buys her a clean shot at the guy with the deadman switch. Who she drops with a perfect cervical shot. Completely paralyzes the poor bastard but leaves his heart beating strong and steady. Here we see Kalmus checking him over and disabling his now useless doomsday machine.
“This all took less than five minutes, people. I mean, it was eighteen from in to out but you’re basically mopping up after five. And just before the credits roll, Kalmus strolls up to the Wolfhound calm as you please and pets the fucker. Puts him right to sleep. Galveston PD gets their robot back without a scratch. Five minutes. Fucking magic.”
“So, um.” Garin looks around. “How’d we do it?”
“Show ’em, Kally.”
Kalmus holds up a cuff-link. “Apparently I took this off deadman guy.”
“Dog whistles, Ars and Kays.” Maddox grins. “Fifty kilohertz, inaudible to pilot or passenger. You don’t put your robot into rabid mode without some way of telling friend from foe, right? Wear one of these pins, Wolfie doesn’t look at you twice. Lose that pin and it rips your throat out in a fucking instant.
“Your better halves could’ve gone for clean, quiet kills that would’ve left the remaining forces still dug in, still fortified, and not going anywhere. But one of the things that fortified them was BoDyn’s baddest battlebot. So your better halves didn’t go for clean, quiet kills. They went for noise and panic. They shot the dog whistles, drew in the dog, let it attack its own masters. Other side changes position in response. You herded the robot, and the robot herded the insurgents right into your crosshairs. It was precision out of chaos, and it’s even more impressive because you had no comms except for the occasional optical sync when you happened to be LOS. Gotta be the messiest,
spottiest network you could imagine, and if I hadn’t seen it myself I’d say it was impossible. But somehow you zombies kept updated on each other’s sitreps. Each one knew what it had to do to achieve an optimal outcome assuming all the others did likewise, and the group strategy just kind of . . . emerged. Nobody giving orders. Nobody saying a goddamn word.”
Asante sees it now, as the replay loops and restarts. There’s a kind of beauty to it: the movement of nodes, the intermittent web of laser light flickering between them, the smooth coalescence of signal from noise. It’s more than a dance, more than teamwork. It’s more like a . . . a distributed organism. Like the digits of a hand, moving together.
“Mind you, this is not what we say if anyone asks,” Maddox adds. “What we say is that every scenario in which the Galveston plant went down predicted a tipping point across the whole Post-TExit landscape. We point to ninety-five percent odds of widespread rioting and social unrest on WestHem’s very doorstep—a fate which ZeroS has, nice and quietly, prevented. Not bad for your first field deployment.”
Tiwana raises a hand. “Who would ask, exactly?”
It’s a good question. In the thirteen months since Asante joined Zero Sum, no outsider has ever appeared on the grounds of CFB Côté. Which isn’t especially surprising, given that—according to the public records search he did a few weeks back, anyway—CFB Côté has been closed for over twenty years.
Maddox smiles faintly. “Anyone with a vested interest in the traditional chain of command.”
Where Are We Now
Asante awakens in the infirmary, standing at the foot of Carlos Acosta’s bed. To his right a half-open door spills dim light into the darkness beyond: a wedge of worn linoleum fading out from the doorway, a tiny red EXIT sign glowing in the void above a stairwell. To his left, a glass wall looks into Neurosurgery. Jointed teleops hang from the ceiling in there, like mantis limbs with impossibly fragile fingers. Lasers. Needles and nanotubes. Atomic-force manipulators delicate enough to coax individual atoms apart. ZeroS have gone under those knives more times than any of them can count. Surgery by software, mostly. Occasionally by human doctors phoning it in from undisclosed locations, old-school cutters who never visit in the flesh for all the times they’ve cut into Asante’s.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 27
