Acosta’s on his back, eyes closed. He looks almost at peace. Even his facial tic has quieted. He’s been here three days now, ever since losing his right arm to a swarm of smart fléchettes over in Heraklion. It’s no big deal. He’s growing it back with a little help from some imported salamander DNA and a steroid-infused aminoglucose drip. He’ll be good as new in three weeks—as good as he’s ever been since ZeroS got him, anyway—back in his rack in half that time. Meanwhile it’s a tricky balance: his metabolism may be boosted into the jet stream, but it’s all for tissue growth. There’s barely enough left over to power a trip to the bathroom.
Kodjo Asante wonders why he’s standing here at 0300.
Maddox says the occasional bit of sleepwalking isn’t anything to get too worried about, especially if you’re already prone to it. Nobody’s suffered a major episode in months, not since well before Galveston; these days the tweaks seem mainly about fine-tuning. Rossiter’s long since called off the just-in-case bots that once dogged their every unscripted step. Even lets them leave the base now and then, when they’ve been good.
You still have to expect the occasional lingering side effect, though. Asante glances down at the telltale tremor in his own hand, seizes it gently with the other, and holds firm until the nerves quiet. Looks back at his friend.
Acosta’s eyes are open.
They don’t look at him. They don’t settle long enough to look at anything, as far as Asante can tell. They jump and twitch in Acosta’s face, back forth back forth up down up.
“Carl,” Asante says softly. “How’s it going, man?”
The rest of that body doesn’t even twitch. Acosta’s breathing remains unchanged. He doesn’t speak.
Zombies aren’t big on talking. They’re smart but nonverbal, like those split-brain patients who understand words but can’t utter them. Something about the integration of speech with consciousness. Written language is easier. The zombie brain doesn’t take well to conventional grammar and syntax, but they’ve developed a kind of visual pidgin that Maddox claims is more efficient than English. Apparently they use it at all the briefings.
Maddox also claims they’re working on a kind of time-sharing arrangement, some way to divvy up custody of Broca’s area between the frontoparietal and the retrosplenial. Someday soon, maybe, you’ll literally be able to talk to yourself, he says. But they haven’t got there yet.
A tacpad on the bedside table glows with a dim matrix of Zidgin symbols. Asante places it under Acosta’s right hand.
“Carl?”
Nothing.
“Just thought I’d . . . see how you were. You take care.”
He tiptoes to the door, sets trembling fingers on the knob. Steps into the darkness of the hallway, navigates back to his rack by touch and memory.
Those eyes.
It’s not like he hasn’t seen it a million times before. But all those other times his squadmates’ eyes blurred and danced in upright bodies, powerful autonomous things that moved. Seeing that motion embedded in such stillness—watching eyes struggle as if trapped in muscle and bone, as if looking up from some shallow grave where they haven’t quite been buried alive—
Terrified. That’s how they looked. Terrified.
We Are the Dead
Specialist Tarra Kalmus has disappeared. Rossiter was seen breaking the news to Maddox just this morning, a conversation during which Maddox morphed miraculously from He of the Perpetually Goofy Smile into Lieutenant Stoneface. He refuses to talk about it with any of the grunts. Silano managed to buttonhole Rossiter on her way back to the helipad but could only extract the admission that Kalmus has been “reassigned.”
Metzinger tells them to stop asking questions. He makes it an order.
But as Tiwana points out—when Asante finds her that evening, sitting with her back propped against a pallet of machine parts in the loading bay—you can run all sorts of online queries without ever using a question mark.
“Fellow corpse.”
“Fellow corpse.”
It’s been their own private salutation since learning how much they have in common. (Tiwana died during a Realist attack in Havana. Worst vacation ever, she says.) They’re the only ZeroS, so far at least, to return from the dead. The others hold them a little in awe because of it.
The others also keep a certain distance.
“Garin was last to see her, over at the Memory Hole.” Tiwana’s wearing a pair of smart specs tuned to the public net. It won’t stop any higher-ups who decide to look over her shoulder, but at least her activity won’t be logged by default. “Chatting up some redhead with a Hanson Geothermal logo on her jacket.”
Two nights ago Metzinger let everyone off the leash as a reward for squashing a Realist attack on the G8G Constellation. They went down to Banff for some meatspace R&R. “So?”
Speclight paints Tiwana’s cheeks with small flickering auroras. “So a BPD drone found a woman matching that description dead outside a public fuckcubby two blocks south of there. Same night.”
“Eiiii.” Asante squats down beside her as Tiwana pushes the specs onto her forehead. Her wonky eye jiggles at him.
“Yeah.” She takes a breath, lets it out. “Nicci Steckman, according to the DNA.”
“So how—”
“They don’t say. Just asking witnesses to come forward.”
“Have any?”
“They left together. Deked into an alley. No further surveillance record, which is odd.”
“Is it really,” Asante murmurs.
“No. I guess not.”
They sit in silence for a moment.
“What do you think?” she asks at last.
“Maybe Steckman didn’t like it rough and things got out of hand. You know Kally, she . . . doesn’t always take no for an answer.”
“No to what? We’re all on antilibidinals. Why would she even be—”
“She’d never kill someone over—”
“Maybe she didn’t,” Tiwana says.
He blinks. “You think she flipped?”
“Maybe it wasn’t her fault. Maybe the augs kicked in on their own somehow, like a, a . . . reflex. Kally saw an imminent threat, or something her better half interpreted that way. Grabbed the keys, took care of it.”
“It’s not supposed to work like that.”
“It wasn’t supposed to fry Saks’s central nervous system either.”
“Come on, Sofe. That’s ancient history. They wouldn’t deploy us if they hadn’t fixed those problems.”
“Really.” Her bad eye looks pointedly at his bad hand.
“Legacy glitches don’t count.” Nerves nicked during surgery, a stray milliamp leaking into the fusiform gyrus. Everyone’s got at least one. “Maddox says—”
“Oh sure, Maddox is always gonna tidy up. Next week, next month. Once the latest tweaks have settled, or there isn’t some brush fire to put out over in Kamfuckingchatka. Meanwhile the glitches don’t even manifest in zombie mode, so why should he care?”
“If they thought the implants were defective, they wouldn’t keep sending us out on missions.”
“Eh.” Tiwana spreads her hands. “You say mission, I say field test. I mean, sure, camaraderie’s great—we’re the cutting edge, we can be ZeroS! But look at us, Jo. Silano was a Rio insurgent. Kalmus was up on insubordination charges. They scraped you and me off the ground like roadkill. None of us are what you’d call summa cum laude.”
“Isn’t that the point? That anybody can be a supersoldier?” Or at least any body.
“We’re lab rats, Jo. They don’t want to risk frying their West Point grads with a beta release, so they’re working out the bugs on us first. If the program was ready to go wide we wouldn’t still be here. Which means—” She heaves a sigh. “It’s the augs. At least, I hope it’s the augs.”
“You hope?”
“You’d rather believe Kally just went berserk and killed a civilian for no reason?”
He tries to ignore a probably psychosoma
tic tingle at the back of his head. “Rossiter wouldn’t be talking reassignment if she had,” he admits. “She’d be talking court-martial.”
“She’ll never talk court-martial. Not where we’re concerned.”
“Really.”
“Think about it. You ever see any politician come by to make sure the taxpayer’s money’s being well spent? You ever see a commissioned officer walking the halls who wasn’t Metzinger or Maddox or Rossiter?”
“So we’re off the books.” It’s hardly a revelation.
“We’re so far off the books we might as well be cave paintings. We don’t even know our own tooth-to-tail ratio. Ninety percent of our support infrastructure’s offsite, it’s all robots and teleops. We don’t even know who’s cutting into our own heads.” She leans close in the deepening gloom, fixes him with her good eye. “This is voodoo, Jo. Maybe the program started small with that kneejerk stuff, but now? You and I, we’re literal fucking zombies. We’re reanimated corpses dancing on strings, and if you think Persephone Q. Public is gonna be fine with that, you have a lot more faith in her than I do. I don’t think Congress knows about us, I don’t think Parliament knows about us, I bet SOCOM doesn’t even know about us past some line in a budget that says psychological research. I don’t think they want to know. And when something’s that dark, are they really going to let anything as trivial as a judicial process drag it into the light?”
Asante shakes his head. “Still has to be accountability. Some kind of internal process.”
“There is. You disappear, and they tell everyone you’ve been reassigned.”
He thinks for a bit. “So what do we do?”
“First we riot in the mess hall. Then we march on Ottawa demanding equal rights for corpses.” She rolls her eyes. “We don’t do anything. Maybe you forgot: we died. We don’t legally exist anymore, and unless you got a way better deal than me, the only way for either of us to change that is keep our heads down until we get our honorable discharges. I do not like being dead. I would very much like to go back to being officially alive someday. Until then . . .”
She takes the specs off her head. Powers them down.
“We watch our fucking step.”
Ricochet
Sergeant Kodjo Asante watches his fucking step. He watches it when he goes up against AIRheads and Realists. He watches it when pitted against well-funded private armies running on profit and ideology, against ragged makeshift ones driven by thirst and desperation, against rogue Darwin Banks and the inevitable religious extremists who—almost a quarter century after the end of the Dark Decade—still haven’t stopped maiming and killing in the name of their Invisible Friends. His steps don’t really falter until twenty-one months into his tour, when he kills three unarmed children off the coast of Honduras.
ZeroS have risen from the depths of the Atlantic to storm one of the countless gylands that ride the major currents of the world’s oceans. Some are refugee camps with thousands of inhabitants; others serve as havens for hustlers and tax dodgers eager to avoid the constraints of more stationary jurisdictions. Some are military, sheathed in chromatophores and radar-damping nanotubes: bigger than airports, invisible to man or machine.
The Caçador de Recompensa is a fish farm, a family business registered out of Brazil: two modest hectares of low-slung superstructure on a doughnut hull with a cluster of net pens at its center. It is currently occupied by forces loyal to the latest incarnation of Shining Path. The Path thrives on supply lines with no fixed address—and as Metzinger reminded them on the way down, it’s always better to prevent a fight than win one. If the Path can’t feed their troops, maybe they won’t deploy them.
This is almost a mission of mercy.
Asante eavesdrops on the sounds of battle, takes in a mingled reek of oil and salt air and rotten fish, lets Evil Twin’s worldview wash across his eyes in a blur of light and the incomprehensible flicker of readouts with millisecond lifespans. Except during target acquisition, of course. Except for those brief stroboscopic instants when ET locks on, and faces freeze and blur in turn: a couple of coveralled SAsian men wielding Heckler-Kochs. A wounded antique ZhanLu staggering on two and a half legs, the beam from its MAD gun wobbling wide of any conceivable target. Children in life jackets, two boys, one girl; Asante guesses their ages at between seven and ten. Each time the weapon kicks in his hands and an instant later ET is veering toward the next kill.
Emotions are sluggish things in Passenger mode. He feels nothing in the moment, shock in the aftermath. Horror’s still halfway to the horizon when a random ricochet slaps him back into the driver’s seat.
The bullet doesn’t penetrate—not much punches through the Chrysomalon armor wrapped tight around his skin—but vectors interact. Momentum passes from a small fast object to a large slow one. Asante’s brain lurches in its cavity; meat slaps bone and bounces back. Deep in all that stressed gray matter, some vital circuit shorts out.
There’s pain of course, blooming across the side of his head like napalm in those few seconds before his endocrine pumps damp it down. There’s fire in the BUD, a blaze of static and a crimson icon warning of ZMODE FAILURE. But there’s a little miracle too:
Kodjo Asante can see again: a high sun in a hard blue sky. A flat far horizon. Columns of oily smoke rising from wrecked machinery.
Bodies.
The air cracks a few centimeters to his right. He drops instinctively to a deck slippery with blood and silver scales, gags at the sudden stench wafting from a slurry of bloated carcasses crowding the surface of the holding pen just in front of him. (Coho-Atlantic hybrids, he notes despite himself. Might even have those new Showell genes.) A turret on treads sparks and sizzles on the other side, a hole blown in its carapace.
A shadow blurs across Asante’s forearm. Tiwana leaps across the sky, defractors high on her forehead, eyeballs dancing madly in their sockets. She clears the enclosure, alights graceful as a dragonfly on one foot, kicks the spastic turret with the other. It sparks one last time and topples into the pen. Tiwana vanishes down the nearest companionway.
Asante gets to his feet, pans for threats, sees nothing but enemies laid waste: the smoking stumps of perimeter autoturrets, the fallen bodies of a man with his arm blown off and a woman groping for a speargun just beyond reach. And a small brittle figure almost fused to the deck: blackened sticks for arms and legs, white teeth grinning in a charred skull, a bright half-melted puddle of orange fabric and PVC holding it all together. Asante sees it all. Not just snapshots glimpsed through the fog: ZeroS handiwork, served up for the first time in three-sixty wraparound immersion.
We’re killing children . . .
Even the adult bodies don’t look like combatants. Refugees, maybe, driven to take by force what they couldn’t get any other way. Maybe all they wanted was to get somewhere safe. To feed their kids.
At his feet, a reeking carpet of dead salmon converge listlessly in the wake of the fallen turret. They aren’t feeding anything but hagfish and maggots.
I have become Sāḥilite, Asante reflects numbly. He calls up BUD, ignores the unreadable auras flickering around the edges of vision, selects GPS.
Not off Honduras. They’re in the Gulf of Mexico.
No one in their right mind would run a fish farm here. The best parts of the Gulf are anoxic; the worst are downright flammable. Caçador must have drifted up through the Yucatán Channel, got caught in an eddy loop. All these fish would have suffocated as soon as they hit the dead zone.
But gylands aren’t entirely at the mercy of the currents. They carry rudimentary propulsion systems for docking and launching, switching streams and changing course. Caçador’s presence so deep in the Gulf implies either catastrophic equipment failure or catastrophic ignorance.
Asante can check out the first possibility, anyway. He stumbles toward the nearest companionway—
—as Tiwana and Acosta burst onto deck from below. Acosta seizes his right arm, Tiwana his left. Neither slows. Asante’s feet bo
unce and drag. The lurching acceleration reawakens the pain in his temple.
He cries out: “The engines . . .”
New pain, other side, sharp and recurrent: an ancient weight belt swinging back and forth across Acosta’s torso, a frayed strip of nylon threaded through an assortment of lead slugs. It’s like being hammered by a tiny wrecking ball. One part of Asante wonders where Acosta found it; another watches Garin race into view with a small bloody body slung across his shoulder. Garin passes one of the dismembered turrets, grabs a piece with his free hand, and keeps running.
Everyone’s charging for the rails.
Tiwana’s mouthpiece is in, her defractors down. She empties a clip into the deck ahead, right at the water’s edge: gunfire shreds plastic and whitewashed fiberglass, loosens an old iron docking cleat. She dips and grabs in passing, draws it to her chest, never loosening her grip on Asante. He hears the soft pop of a bone leaving its socket in the instant before they all go over the side.
They plummet headfirst, dragged down by a hundred kilograms of improvised ballast. Asante chokes, jams his mouthpiece into place; coughs seawater through the exhaust and sucks in a hot lungful of fresh-sparked hydrox. Pressure builds against his eardrums. He swallows, swallows again, manages to keep a few millibars ahead of outright rupture. He has just enough freedom of movement to claw at his face and slide the defractors over his eyes. The ocean clicks into focus, clear as acid, empty as green glass.
Green turns white.
Seen in that flash-blinded instant: four thin streams of bubbles, rising to a surface gone suddenly incandescent. Four dark bodies, falling from the light. A thunderclap rolls through the water, deep, downshifted, as much felt as heard. It comes from nowhere and everywhere.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 28
