Automatic Reload: A Novel

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  My eyes roll so hard it hurts. “Of course.”

  “But the Powers What Be At The IAC want to see whether he’s capable of keeping a mission low-key.”

  “So they saw his legal record.”

  “They’re the IAC. They saw everything. But his legal record is why you’re perfect for this mission. Only you can get Donnie and his trigger-happy mercs to calm down. Hell, he’s so eager to work with you, he’ll install whatever reaction packages you want. You can keep his men restrained to safe parameters.”

  “Have you told him you’re scouting me for the job?”

  “Oh hell no,” she says. “I’m surprised he didn’t contact you directly.”

  I have a firm suspicion that once I scan through my mail filters, I’ll find several blocked texts from Donnie begging me to come along on this mission.

  She squints. “Did he contact you directly? This won’t fuck my finder’s fee, will it?”

  “If I take this mission, I’ll tell him you had the pull to yank me out of maintenance mode. But shepherding Donnie still puts me in the Yak’s gunsights.”

  “It doesn’t. You’ll be an independent contractor, hired for a single mission. They haven’t asked Donnie for a roster list, they didn’t ask Donnie for security clearances for his men—”

  “Because they’ve broken into his files?”

  “Yes. That’s why we’re having this discussion off the record. He’s bringing in a secret ringer in case the shit hits the fan. Donnie doesn’t want the Yak to know he’s pulling extra muscle onto this mission. This whole contract takes place off-line—he pays me with a bag of cash he set aside years before he came to the Yak’s attention, I launder it to find ways to get it to you, and none of this appears in any transactional record.”

  “Except for me physically showing my face at the site.”

  “Your face will be hidden behind your HUD-shield. Babysit the package well, and nobody at the Yak will even know you were there. Officially, Donnie’s crew will be the only agents on the ground. Except…”

  Trish swoops her empty drink around in the air, then sets it down on the table as if she’s not sure how to put this.

  “You’re not sure they’re telling the truth,” I say.

  “Nope. This might not be a babysitting job, but a total party kill. The Yak doesn’t have loyalty to long-term employees, let alone first-time contractors.”

  “So you’re thinking the Yak knows something big’s coming for their package, and are throwing Donnie’s men in the way?”

  She grimaces. “Could be cheap distraction. Maybe the Yak’s counting on Ancillary Force to be the expendable defense line before their real muscle swoops in to do cleanup.”

  “Awww. And you thought of me.”

  “I wouldn’t assign this mission to someone who couldn’t handle it,” she shoots back. “Donnie isn’t vetting me either—for all his techno fetishery, he doesn’t give a shit about human resources. I could toss some wannabe into the soup and hope for an easy finder’s fee.”

  She pauses, holds me with her eyes.

  “But you. You’ve pulled off impossible missions. You just saved that little girl in Nigeria.”

  “I didn’t save Onyeka. That kid will spend the rest of her life—”

  “Stop right there. Those words are enough. ‘That kid will spend the rest of her life.’ Objective complete.”

  I squeeze my drink so hard the glass cracks. I look down, baffled, realizing I need to recalibrate Thelma.

  “You’re too hard on yourself, Mat. You got through when the NNPC gave you bollixed information. You pushed on when you realized—correctly—that the NNPC’s next move would be a scorched-earth mission. You spend so much time working to fix the things that went wrong, you never consider the things that went right.”

  “The things that go right happen because I consider all the things that went wrong—”

  “Don’t,” she says, cutting me off. “Just don’t. For the record, my finder’s fee is fifty thousand dollars—that’ll pay off my mortgage. But I will walk away if I can’t put the right man on this job. I’ve done the research. That right man is you.”

  “Trish, three million dollars isn’t worth getting on the Yak’s radar.”

  “The money’s not why I called you.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because Donnie will do this mission with or without you. Even if it is a milk run, those docks are crowded with union workers—you think Donnie’s default IFF settings will protect bystanders from being blinded by rubber bullets?”

  The injected hiss of mild sedatives; Thelma decides my blood pressure’s rising too much. “That’s low play, Trish, I can’t be responsible for—”

  “If a firefight breaks out during the transfer and you’re not there,” she says, leaning forward, “what do you think will happen?”

  I imagine armor-piercing bullets smashing through hard hats, panicked workers cut down, blood-dripping headlines with DOCK FIREFIGHT KILLS HUNDREDS. Donnie’s career would be over, even his lawyers couldn’t save him then, but …

  I think of the kids those union laborers are raising.

  I think of a thousand sad Onyekas standing at funerals.

  “Saving innocents will be what lets you sleep at night,” Trish says, nodding. “That three million’s your consolation prize.”

  Thelma and Louise massage my temples again as I realize yeah, I’m on this case.

  * * *

  I’m going dark for this mission, but there’s no sense making it easy for the Yak to know where I am. I’m assuming they’ll break into my files.

  So I hack my own system, installing a virus designed to simulate me.

  Yoyodyne Laboratories is now infected by a silent macro that runs endless random simulations against the last mission logs, searching for the perfect outcome. (I call it “Ferris Bueller” and have it set to save its experiments, in case Ferris stumbles upon a casualty-free approach.) Ferris periodically switches approaches—ordering replacements from vendors I’d been meaning to buy, initiating test shots at the firing range, flushing the toilet, surfing porn.

  I look at the full list of what I do when I’m in maintenance mode. It’s both accurate and a little humiliating, seeing my sad behaviors laid out.

  But if the Yak breaks in to check if I’m the mystery member of Donnie’s squad, they won’t notice Ferris working silently beneath the hood—they’ll see the stream of data and conclude I’m at work.

  I hope.

  All the while Opposite Cat tickles my ear, following me around, vacuuming anything from me she can get at—which, given she’s been designed to be able to leap to get at anything in the room, is pretty much all of me.

  I savor one last cigar to leave Opposite Cat a bowl of ashes so she won’t get bored while I’m away. That’s not weird, is it?

  Once I’ve strapped on Scylla and Charybdis, I sneak out the back door in the dark of night, run the 1.5 miles to the highly illicit hackmobile I have set up. I call him “Herbie the Love Bug,” and he will log a fake identity to each city’s networked driver-AIs it drives through, his “windows” illegal television screens that broadcast an illusory interior with a nice, happy white dad and his kids taking a cheerful vacation.

  I do, however, bring an empty milk jug with me. Such a low-tech solution to being unable to stop for bathroom breaks.

  I settle in for a twelve-hour drive. Trish said it was a two-hour job including travel, but she thought I’d be taking Donnie’s private jet. I’d rather go the slow ninety-miles-per-hour auto-drive route to ensure the Yak has as little ability to trace my trail as possible.

  And finally, Herbie the hackmobile pulls into the distribution center I’m supposed to meet Donnie’s men at. This distribution center, in turn, is roughly twenty minutes away from the docks where we’ll pick up the package after we’ve coordinated strategies.

  Just seeing the rendezvous site makes me glad I’ve taken the job.

  Because I’m arriving at
the midday shift-change, and there’s streams of auto-driven cars pulling up to the guard stations, beaming their credentials, then dropping off blue-collar workers at the safe zone well beyond the concrete barriers and electrified fences.

  A couple of low-level body-hackers—friendly human faces who’ve only replaced an arm, wearing brown button-down security-guard shirts instead of body armor—amble alongside the protestors waving signs outside, smiling, making sure nothing boils over into yet another riot.

  Still, whenever an auto-driven truck pulls into the guard stations, the protestors swarm in, milling close so the trucks have to inch forward, their three-dimensional hazard-processing sensors working overtime. The protestors don’t quite lie down in front of the trucks—that’d get them hauled away—but they definitely slow down the unloading process.

  Protesters and workers alike would be slaughtered if Donnie’s kind of fight broke out here.

  Yet as we pull into the distribution center, I ponder that this is one of the last jobs humanity will get to do before computers turn the lights out on us. I remember being young enough to hear the astonished yelps as general practitioners got replaced with medical-AIs, as law clerks got replaced with smart legal neurals, as architects got replaced by cunning design programs.

  Oh, you still need human bodies for the tiebreakers, of course; we’ll always want human judges. (Except for computer-mediated arbitration, which is picking up in popularity.) We’ll always want surgeons monitoring our heart surgeries, even if one surgeon can now oversee an entire surgical ward.

  But the distribution center? That’s where shipping containers full of merchandise get broken out to be shipped to local warehouses. You could theoretically build a robot flexible and smart enough to unload refrigerators and corn and glass panes and the millions of other things America buys.

  Yet you’ve seen how expensive it is, maintaining my arms. Why bother with robots when you can pay some poor schmuck minimum wage, and let workers’ comp pick up the difference if the meat-hardware breaks down?

  As I roll down the window so the guards can verify my access, I wonder if Donnie came up with the idea to meet up here or if the IAC did. Either way, it’s a smart move. Nobody will question a few extra body-hackers at a place that needs so much security, and there’s a truck pulling in every three minutes. If the IAC is looking to transfer its cargo cleanly, then this is a good place for them to covertly insert an extra layer of defense before heading out to pick up their package from the docks.

  Then again, I’ve had twelve hours to ponder what cargo needs six heavily armed cyborgs to guard it.

  We’re supposed to meet out in the truck yard, down by the railway where the trains come in. Another good choice: the distribution-center owners don’t want people knowing how many auto-driven trucks are parked here, lest protesters choose an optimal time to sneak in for sabotage, so the entire area is blocked off with camouflage netting. Including the huge wire net overhead, designed to stop protest drones from firing Molotov cocktails into the repair holding zones.

  I get out of Herbie the hackmobile, ports hot, IFF tuned tight. Someone would have to actively draw a gun on me for Scylla and Charybdis to authorize fire. But this is a poor zone for automated combat; it’s shadowy, dappled with scant sunlight from what the netting filters through. I have to squeeze through the bug-splattered hoods from where computer-driven trucks have parked door-to-door to maximize space. It’s also a hot summer day. Between the hot trucks cooling down and the ambient air temperature, there’s lots of ways to have embarrassing false positives—or deadly false negatives.

  Yet I hear Donnie’s goons—sorry, the fine employees of Ancillary Force—shouting excitedly from a few trucks over.

  I triple-check that I’m broadcasting my location on the prearranged encrypted frequency: the problem is that body-hackers are, by definition, threats. There’ve been some ugly situations where two body-hackers surprised each other and their software initiated fatal firefights before either had realized what happened. So making Ancillary Force aware of my approach is high on my agenda of Not Getting My Ass Shot.

  As I approach, four Ancillary body-hackers—none of them Donnie—are crouched in the empty spot where our truck will eventually arrive.

  Each has gleaming limbs, stenciled with Ancillary Force’s logo—a gold-and-diamond reticle hovering over a silhouetted criminal. I don’t need my ID systems to catalogue their armament prosthetics: I can recognize their model and make by silhouette, so I mentally catalogue their offensive capability. They all pack top-quality merchandise, though a couple bear the telltale marks of a refurbish.

  They’re huddled in a semicircle around one of the parked rail cars, whispering to one another.

  Their mounted guns are twitching, aiming at something.

  That’s not good.

  I stride forward. Donnie’s brought serious chrome with him—of the four, I can spot only one organic limb left between them. A few dedicated enthusiasts will trade off one limb for the combat advantage, the serious will give literally an arm and a leg to become a killing machine, but Donnie’s hired maniacs were willing to toss 40 percent of their body mass into the dumpster in exchange for pure firepower—

  I’m slammed up against a truck’s hood hard enough that my neck stabilizers don’t quite kick in. My HUD comes ablaze with readouts in bold letters my adrenaline-shocked mind can read:

  Shot fired no threats detected.

  I think I heard the shot, a silenced round, but my preprogrammed reaction routines have acted to protect my slow human body. Even though my sensors haven’t yet figured out what’s dangerous enough to warrant Ancillary Force entering into a firefight, it’s flung me against cover while it maneuvers me towards the combat zone to get better information.

  Attempting to sync.

  My legs propel me in a four-foot standing jump to leap backwards onto the truck’s drive axle, the truck creaking under my weight. My strategic simulators thrash as they reach out over the encrypted LAN to gather data from combatants closer to the threat, hungry for tactical information, but we haven’t established protocols yet so there’s no—

  I have no idea why my routines are climbing up for cover, but my GUI feeds me what information it knows. One of Donnie’s men, a woman actually, is limned in bright yellow, indicating she fired the shot, the projected line of fire showing she shot low, beneath the train. Some threat was emerging from there.

  Yet while my IFF routines are in overdrive, hunting for new dangers, I wonder:

  What the hell would crawl from underneath a train that would be worth shooting?

  I hear coarse laughter—the kind that knocks me right back to fourth grade when bullies used to pick on me because my mom couldn’t afford new clothes. “Look attim leap!” the girl who fired laughs. “Our new recruit’s a scaredy-cat—another kitty!”

  Oh, they did not.

  Oh, they fucking did not.

  I manually dampen the combat alert—because my tactical simulators are designed to assume that if someone fires, there must be a threat in the area. My sensors can feed me information, but it’s up to me to provide the context.

  I push my way past the now-doubled-over-with-laughter hackers to see what these assholes shot.

  Sure enough, there’s an anguished orange tabby with a gunshot between its legs. My sensors tell me it’s dying from shock.

  I command Charybdis to give it a mercy kill, then whirl around to face them as my left arm puts the poor cat out of its misery.

  “What the fuck are you doing, shooting strays?” I bellow.

  Their laughter dies. The woman who shot steps forward, setting her smoked helmet transparent to show me the sneer on her ragged white face. She’d been pretty once, but her nose is shoved to one side from an old bar brawl, her cheeks festooned with zits from clogged pores, her body odor so offensive she’s clearly nurtured her stench as a mark of pride. The kind of hacker who concentrates on the tech and makes a point of ignoring the flesh, t
hen.

  Her gunports clack noisily; my HUD alerts me with:

  Terminal threat detected.

  Indicating she’s cut off the encryption network so I’ll have no idea when she starts shooting.

  “Why?” she asks, licking chapped lips. “You a stray?”

  I take her in; her four limbs are Endolite-Ruger, a beautifully matched set—and her body armor has a nice bright Endolite-Ruger logo printed across the front. She’s a walking advertisement, having opted to stay on technology’s cutting edge by signing her body away to her sponsor.

  And what she’s advertising is mayhem. Her arms are top-of-the-line Ordnance 6000s with inset weaponry, her legs gleaming new Panzertron Mark IVs. We’re both struggling to talk as our reaction packages instruct our legs to put us in optimal positions for the potentially impending firefight, jerking us to and fro as our guns twitch.

  “Kiva,” one of the other cat killers says nervously, his legs carrying him backwards to get him out of the line of fire. “Power down. That’s—”

  “I know who he is,” Kiva snaps, low and deadly; dangers of having a reputation, I guess. She’s clearly been itching to put her tech up against mine.

  “Funny,” I drawl, taking my time to stare her up and down. “I’ve never heard of you. But I’d bet you twenty bucks you’ve got a nice Endolite-Ruger tattoo under that armor.”

  Kiva’s face flushes as her mooks groan—they’ve clearly wanted to say that to her, but didn’t dare. What I just implied, probably correctly, is that she’s so in hock to Endolite-Ruger that she’s had to contractually emblazon their logo on her skin.

  I don’t need my HUD’s audio analysis to inform me that that series of clicks is her limbs loading armor-piercing bullets into the chamber.

  “I’m proud to wear my Endolite-Ruger Ordnance 6000s,” she says, a bit too theatrically; she’s doubtlessly got a permanent recorder on to ensure she never says a bad word against her sponsors. “I told these fellas my upgraded Osprey 3.1 operating systems can shoot sharp enough to spay a stray cat. Which I did. Wanna try for two, junkyard?”