Automatic Reload: A Novel

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  There’s the workshop, hidden behind a snarl of barbed wire and walls pockmarked with bullet holes. Cameras whirr to track our approach, each spiked with anti-drone weaponry that can also target humans.

  The walls are stained with graffiti, but one sign’s been kept polished to a factory-fresh white: AN ENDOLITE-RUGER SHOWCASE FACILITY. And underneath that, a battered tin sign that reads: BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.

  Beneath that, rows of funny signs: NO HABLO INGLESE? I’LL SPEAK TO YOU IN 12-GAUGE! DUE TO PRICE INCREASES IN AMMO, DO NOT EXPECT A WARNING SHOT. BEWARE OF DOG OWNER.

  “This is where you buy your guns?” Silvia asks.

  “Prosthetic armaments,” I correct her absently. “Not this place specifically, but … places like this. Kiva sure didn’t gussy this place up, but I’ve bought equipment from worse shops.”

  “I thought it’d be—I dunno, glass windows and polished chrome.” She presses her nose against the window, looking closer as I break open Herbie’s onboard intrusion computers. “You pay, what, millions of dollars for those? I thought they’d be housed in a luxury-car showroom.”

  “You can get them there, sure. And at the nice places, you have to make sure all the paperwork’s filled out before you take your purchase home. Or Endolite-Ruger can designate Kiva’s low-security shop as a showcase. And if you show up with a hundred thousand bucks in cash that fell off the turnip truck, then, well, you’d be surprised how often places like this get broken into.”

  “And you think we can break in?”

  “If this was a high-end showroom? Not a chance. But the backroom showcases usually leave one pathway uncovered by cameras—so people can sneak in to collect their goods. If Kiva’s shop security’s anything like her system maintenance, I’m betting I can disable her defenses.”

  “So this should be easy.”

  I grunt as my first hacking attempts fail. “Not that easy, apparently. Guess her corporate masters held audits to ensure she patched her systems.”

  “Can we still get in?”

  “Yeah. This still isn’t great. Endolite-Ruger makes solid hardware, but they’re old-school—they still believe in using human programmers. Give me a few minutes and I should get access.”

  “You’re sure the IAC’s alerts didn’t catch you looking up this address?”

  “This car’s got an internet connection I’ve gone to great lengths to keep separate from mine. I didn’t look up Kiva’s name—I just searched for nearby Endolite-Ruger facilities, and it turns out she’s listed as the proprietor here. And, well, she’s dead and we’d never met before the mission, so I don’t think this is on the IAC’s primary connections list.”

  She crosses herself. “Poor thing.”

  “Bitch shot a cat.”

  “Fuck her, then.”

  “But yeah, Silvia. I’m not trying to feed your paranoia. But … the IAC is paranoia. Their systems saw a sudden power drain on an abandoned house within a radius of the firefight and concluded we were there. This is somewhere on the list of places they’d anticipate we’d go. I just hope they don’t have infinite resources—if they’re big enough to monitor every place we can flee to, we’re as good as caught.”

  “Are we caught?”

  “The only answer I’ll ever give you, Silvia, is ‘Not yet.’”

  She frowns. “Baby steps,” she mutters.

  “And our first step is entering this surveillance-free zone.” I pull up a map on Herbie’s windshield, show her the overlapping camera-dark zones just wide enough for someone to pull a U-Haul into. “Once we get in there, I should be able to scrounge up enough equipment to bring me back up to speed.”

  She shivers.

  “It’ll be like The Italian Job,” I reassure her. “You ever see The Italian Job?”

  She leans back against the headrest, exhausted. “This isn’t much like the movies, Mat.”

  I punch in the pathway. “No,” I sigh. “It never is.”

  * * *

  “This is a showcase?” Silvia asks.

  “Oh, no, this is great.” I step across the cracked concrete floor, my prosthetic toes kicking away crumpled beer cans and stray hex nuts. The showcased Endolite-Ruger hardware is housed in smudged glass cases placed artfully about the refitted garage, each spotless ceramic finish gleaming under dynamic spotlights—even though the effect is spoiled by a pair of stained panties tossed over an Airlift 686 calf replacement.

  The hardware flexes in attraction mode as I approach—gunports irising open with Endolite-Ruger’s trademarked cht-tack noise, prosthetic arms on stands flexing enticingly, a treadmill starting up to let two paired lower-limb replacements literally strut their stuff.

  I flex Charybdis’s ruined knuckles, hearing them grind—I feel guilty, being so attracted to these new prosthetics when poor pulverized Charybdis has been so loyal. Yet I’ve always had to be frugal in my investments; this is a shopping spree.

  Kiva took her best equipment on the mission, but that’s no handicap—I’ve always made do customizing midscale hardware. I weigh pluses and drawbacks, deciding what loadout I’ll go with: the Howitzer 3900 upper-limb series has finer sensory equipment but a notoriously sticky auto-feed, whereas the Phosphorous 4500s have less proprietary software I’ll have to wipe before I can reinstall my preferred control packages—maybe I should load one onto each shoulder in an asymmetrical upper-limb configuration, even though the asymmetrical installation would require time-intensive manual calibration?

  “This is so sad.” Silvia flicker-crosses herself again.

  I’d been so focused on the hardware, I hadn’t even thought to check in on Silvia. She’s walking in a slow circle around the unmade bed next to Kiva’s changing station, wrinkling her nose at the stink of body odor, tapping the half-empty tequila bottles surrounding Kiva’s bed.

  “Do you all live like this?” She looks to me for confirmation that somehow, I’m not living in squalor.

  The answer to that question depends on what she’s seeing.

  I can read Kiva’s history by her furniture—across from the bed is the cigarette-burned couch seated before the big-screen television, where Kiva’s mundane friends gathered. She sat in that special chair to the left, a throne designed to fit her outsized limbs.

  The concrete floor glimmers with shards of broken beer bottles—an easy trick to impress the nonenhanced. You can William Tell bottles off their heads, you can have five drunk guys fling bottles into the air and explode them to the rhythm of your favorite song.

  And there’s manual guns racked on the wall across from her shooting range—she was a gun nut before she hacked herself. Doubtlessly Kiva’s hangers-on held shooting contests that Kiva always won.

  Hanging around with other body-hackers is like hanging with comedians—someone’s always trying to one-up you. Kiva’s technical incompetence would have put her at the bottom of any hacker’s barrel. Easier to find yokels who can’t afford the tech and dazzle ’em—you walk away with that slimy feeling of impressing a fifteen-year-old girl by buying her beer, but you can’t deny the effectiveness.

  My lab’s a lot cleaner. I can keep it tidy because nobody ever visits. I tell myself isolation’s more honest, I don’t have friends sucking up to me.

  Yet I’m pretty sure that if I brought her back to my place, Silvia would give me the same sad, sympathetic look.

  “My work space has a cat,” I say lamely.

  She brightens. “What breed?”

  “A Dyson. Hey, is that equipment still in the package?”

  I move past her to uncover a pile of crates bearing the Endolite-Ruger logo. Inside, sealed in tight vacuum-formed packaging, are a pristine set of Battalion upper prosthetics and a matching set of Bulldozer-class leg replacements.

  “Holy shit,” I mutter, verifying they sent matching ammunition. “These aren’t legal for civilian ownership. Did Endolite-Ruger trust her to sell to the black market?”

  Silvia hangs back, reticent at the chest-beating the other limbs are disp
laying—attraction mode has them cycling through warlike motions, aiming at whoever comes near. “If it’s that impressive, why didn’t she wear it on the mission?”

  “She doesn’t—didn’t—have access to Donnie’s lawyer routines,” I explain. “This has four hip-mounted RPG-77s, so it’s an instant all-points bulletin to wear it in public. But she’s opened the case—she probably wore it around the showroom to feel badass.”

  “So that’s good, right? This is the firepower we need?”

  I run my fingers along the Battalion’s curved gunports, noting the heavy armaments—revolving cylinder shotguns designed to reduce short-range combatants to a fine mist, microgrenade launchers designed to blow through other body-hackers’ armor, computer-targeted short-barrel rifles with vehicle-piercing ammunition preloaded. It’s not infinite ammo—this loadout holds a dozen grenades and four RPGs.

  Yet that’s a lot, especially aimed at the right targets.

  This will turn anywhere I go into a war zone.

  “Mat?” Her hand, light on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  —hitting the fire button before realizing the blur you’d tagged as a dog is walking on two legs—

  “I don’t want it to come to this.” I bury my head in my hands but my fingers are mangled prosthetic chunks. “I can’t get anyone killed, I can’t.…”

  She hugs me. Her cheek is cool against mine.

  I breathe. Focus on your breathing, my therapist had said. She’d given me biofeedback routines to integrate with my operating system; I could have computer-honed sequences modulate this incoming panic attack.

  Instead, I focus on Silvia’s breathing. On the scent of her hair, the oils and delicate sweat and the faint odor of some industrial shampoo.

  For a moment, I wonder if she’s repulsed; I stink of cordite, motor oil, body odor. Then I remember: if she had any urge to withdraw, her body would have catapulted her away from me.

  We are linked by our trauma. We rub cheeks, becoming one organism, our breaths synchronizing, the deadlines dissolving as we take this moment to focus on each other, feeling the tremors subside.

  We are perfectly still. In perfect harmony.

  We know this will not last. We accept that.

  I accept that I will destroy myself to protect her.

  Surrender to police 19:32:27.

  I can’t stop glancing at my timer as it counts down.

  The clock has become my enemy. If we don’t strike a blow in nineteen and a half hours, we might as well have given up when the drones arrived.

  Yet jailbreaking the default OS on these prosthetics and installing a trusted open-source controller chews up precious hours—I remember how Donnie had root access to Kiva’s old prosthetics, and I am not chancing he’s got control on these.

  So I wipe them down to bare metal, then find nonproprietary drivers to control the notoriously finicky Osprey hardware, and link them to work in conjunction with my central controllers.

  According to the tutorials, this should take half an hour. But this is real life, and whenever I think I’ve got everything integrated it shoots up a cryptic code that signals an IRQ conflict or an unrecognized device or a failed diagnostics check.

  I’m told the profanities I utter while troubleshooting hardware could burn the pubic hair off Satan himself.

  Silvia paces back and forth so fast she’s a blur, keeping her distance from the prosthetics vying for her attention. She’s rooted through Kiva’s possessions—“Doesn’t she wear clothes?” Silvia yelled, smashing a storage chest in anger before she retreated into the corner muttering apologies and crossing herself.

  But no, there’s nothing here aside from the single pair of dubious panties and some moist towelettes. I keep my head down instead of intervening. I’m afraid she might ask me if there are any clothes at my house—and honestly, there’s one set of jeans and a shirt for when I have to pass for human. The rest of the time I’m buck naked beneath my armor.

  It had never occurred to me to feel ashamed of that before.

  Yet Silvia won’t stop pacing. She’s leaping from corner to corner, quick as a fly, making it impossible to concentrate on bridging my proprietary bioresponse protocols into the core controllers.

  “It’s funny,” she says, talking a little too fast for it to be funny. “I used to panic over stupid things. If we were out of Fresca, I’d lose it. If I didn’t have a picture of the person who was meeting me at the home inspection, I’d break down. And I—I felt stupid for melting down at such trivial things, and I’d cut myself sometimes. But now!” She barks out a taut laugh. “I’m not saying I want to be in this much danger, but it’s kind of nice knowing I’m panicking for really good reasons.”

  She stops to stare at me earnestly, a comedian waiting for a laugh—but I’m a beat too late, and she curls into a trembling ball and I have to spend fifteen long minutes sitting next to her with my hand on her back before she sniffles her way back to normality.

  I can’t stop thinking about that weird error message the left leg’s device driver is throwing. I need these Endolite-Ruger Bulldozers attached to my pelvic chassis now, and I’m rattled because Silvia’s rattled.

  “You like movies,” I say. “So why don’t we watch a movie?”

  She brightens. After a brief conversation about “movies Silvia’s been meaning to see”—every good cinephile has a list of unwatched films they keep close to their heart—I stream The Shawshank Redemption onto Kiva’s screen, which a) Silvia’s never seen, and b) doesn’t feature any notable violent scenes aside from that one scene with Andy, which I mark for fast-forwarding.

  The couch sits right in front of the big screen, on the other side of the workshop. Except Silvia pulls Kiva’s throne across the room like it doesn’t weigh five hundred pounds, all so she can sit next to me at my workstation.

  “That’s some beautifully shadowy cinematography, isn’t it?” she asks as the film begins, then glances over at me uneasily; I nod before stepping through another set of diagnostic checks. “Very chiaroscuro. Reminiscent of Welles’s The Third Man—”

  She’s floating each thought across to me, pausing in between each sentence to give me room to speak up. My skin goose-pimples with embarrassment as I realize that to Silvia, “a movie” is a family activity where her mother and sister livestream their reactions to each other, a nice social distraction.

  I want movies to be what bring us together. But I’m too used to movies being a background drone to stop me from drowning in silence, and so I’m reduced to curt nods as I try to kickstart an antiquated MEAN stack and pay attention to a woman I like.

  Halfway through the scene where Andy asks Red for a rock hammer, she asks me a question I can’t shrug away.

  “Sorry, I—I wasn’t listening.” I wince.

  Her face is a billboard of shame as she realizes I’ve been tuning her out to get work done: it had never occurred to her anyone would ask her to watch a movie and not want to discuss it.

  She chokes out an apology and darts to the other side of the room.

  “I’m watching!” I protest, trying to figure out how to explain the difference in our movie-watching habits to her—but that sucks up so much brainpower, it annihilates the error-reproduction pathway I’d been pondering.

  Silvia retreats, giving me as much space as possible. The last thing she wants to be is an inconvenience, and yet here she is one, and she can’t stand it.

  I get some tech-time in thanks to Silvia’s Herculean self-soothing as she paces in a blur, quietly praying—but then she heads into the bathroom. A mirror shatters. She shrieks.

  Silvia just got a good look at herself for the first time.

  I’d wager she’s spent a lifetime learning to melt down unobtrusively—but her new body’s instinctive reactions are bollixing the coping mechanisms she’d used to tuck her panic discreetly away.

  After another hour of her knuckle-biting, she saunters over.

  “This isn’t working, Mat.” She speak
s with the therapeutic calmness of a woman who’s psychoanalyzed her way into a solution. “I’m panicking, and that’s distracting you, so we have to find another way.”

  “What’s bothering you?”

  “I’m not thirsty.”

  I stare, uncertain what that’s supposed to mean.

  “I don’t even know what to drink,” she says. “What happens if I need special nutrients, Mat? What if I have to barf over my food like Brundlefly? Maybe I’m shriveling inside unless the IAC feeds me my supplements! Maybe I’m—”

  My HUD flashes:

  Surrender to police 17:45:18.

  I suppress my irritation.

  Rule of threes says you can go three days without water, three weeks without food. I want to tell her we don’t have time to deal with her diet, I have weaponry to fix.

  But I can see how hard she’s working to protect me from her madness.

  Her interruptions may be irritating to me, but they’re infuriating her. That’s what mental illness is: the same stupid fear cropping up over and over again, reappearing long after you’d thought you’d sworn you’d fixed it.

  The movies make being crazy look wild and imaginative, filled with fantastic delusions and intricate camerawork. But the truth is, mental illness is like a dull job you can’t quit.

  So I can’t yell at Silvia for something she’s fighting so hard to control. I mean, how would I react if I was a civilian shoved into some freaky hentai-body, my family threatened, on the run from both the IAC and some counterorganization as powerful as the IAC?

  Shit, she’s doing better than most people would. And to be fair, her body is hyperfast; who knows how many calories she’s burned through?

  I root through Kiva’s fridge, wrinkling my nose in disgust. I have a Soylent dispenser at home that pours me nutrients tailored to my genetic profile. Kiva has a fridge stuffed with crusty hot-sauce bottles, a case of Keystone, and a leftover slice of pepperoni pizza.

  I microwave the pizza. “Normally we’d follow wilderness rules and do a skin-contact test, but I’m pretty sure your—anatomy—wouldn’t be designed for a Chicago deep-dish to ruin your cover. So take a bite, put it on your tongue for ten minutes. Don’t chew. If it tingles or burns, spit it out. If that works, we’ll move to a test bite.”