Automatic Reload: A Novel

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  I head back to the Battalions, positive I’ve narrowed down the problem to a corrupted visual-cortex library.

  Silvia grabs me. “No, Mat. Solve the bigger problem: I need something to do. At home, I was always fixing up the place—on bad nights my sister would tell me to go rebuild the garbage disposal, because if my hands weren’t occupied then my mind would be. Give me a job.”

  “You did the repairs on your house?”

  She crosses her arms. “I’m a home inspector. You think I just look at broken things and sigh?”

  Well, there’s a little eddy of sexism I’ll have to examine later. I root around in Kiva’s tool cabinets until I fish out a handheld synapse generator.

  “See those black fibers?” I unscrew the plating on the Bulldozers. “Those are the artificial muscles that will drive my limbs. See where they’re tethered?”

  She flinches—her eyes widen as she focuses on the bright bronze casing of the internal ammunition feeds, realizing she’s laying hands on a machine designed to murder people—

  —I wait, bemused, for the inevitable flicker-cross, and sure enough I am not disappointed—

  —then her eyes narrow as she follows the intertwining flow of a-muscles through the machine-smoothed joints. Her head twitches, birdlike, as she envisions how these parts move.

  If I’d been more focused on Silvia, I would have brought her in to help hours ago—she punched Donnie with such precision, I should have realized the IAC’s conditioned some primal, mechanical understanding into her.

  Or maybe she was just good with tools to begin with.

  I scrounge up a compressed-air sprayer, a drill, and a set of patch-pullers, set them next to her station. “Touch each artificial muscle with the synapse generator; it should slacken. If it looks tense, call me. Use the air sprayer to ensure nothing’s clogging up the a-muscle channels, then lubricate the joints.”

  “What happens if I screw it up?” She’s correct to be worried; snapping an a-muscle drive in combat is usually game-over.

  “I’ll check your work,” I assure her. “If you can repair a garbage disposal, you can do this.”

  She rubs her hands together fretfully, an accelerated flylike motion. I don’t push her; either she’ll do the work or she won’t.

  She decides she can.

  Thankfully, the kid’s a natural. I can see her deciding which muscle-clusters need to be prioritized. “Okay. Yeah. I can … I can do this. But I’m not—I’m not entirely comfortable renovating a walking artillery piece. Can you talk to me while I work?”

  I arch an eyebrow. “You wanna hear me discussing the fine details of synchronized boot-up phases?”

  She bites her lip as she picks up the synapse generator. “No better time to learn.”

  The weird thing is, explaining the hardware issues to her helps. Verbalizing the process forces me to detail what I expect the code to do, which makes it easier to see where my assumptions are wrong. And having someone nodding along as I explain it to her makes me less frustrated, because she’s my confirmation the problem’s not as obvious as I’d like it to be.

  And whether it’s personality or IAC conditioning or both, Silvia turns out to be an intuitive maintenance person. She asks the right questions about how to hook the artificial muscles up to create smooth motion, pinpointing the ragged connections that Kiva overclocked. She suggests first-level workarounds—rerouted musculatures that seem initially good but have subtle drawbacks.

  She’s doing what I do—distancing herself from the ramifications of her work by focusing on the technical details. Except she needs to have a running commentary as we discuss it.

  Which is … actually kind of nice.

  At some point, Silvia eats the pizza.

  The HUD is still blinking Surrender to police 16:12:46 by the time I’m comfortable the Bulldozers and Battalions have full functionality. Not only do I have the hardware online, Silvia’s given it a marginal once-over.

  Accent on “marginal.” If I had my druthers, I’d spend the next forty-eight hours going over these four limbs one piece at a time. The calibrations I’ve managed have been shoddy—I hate trusting manufacturers’ specs, but a proper sighting run would waste precious ammunition.

  Though we could do an alt-ammo loadout and do some accuracy tests on Kiva’s firing range.

  You know why you spend weeks analyzing data after every mission?

  I shake my head, but my therapist’s voice refuses to go away.

  It’s a trauma response. You want to believe this chaotic world is predictable. But your best analysis gets done within three days; the month of seclusion is your way of coping with post-traumatic stress disorder.

  “That’s not true,” I mutter, the same denial I’d given her before I’d stopped going to therapy. “Preparation is critical.”

  You tell yourself that preparation will make the next mission perfect—but has that ever worked?

  “We’ll be fine,” I whisper, admitting we have no plan after “get Mat refurbished,” and I’m trying to run out the clock through endless refinements rather than wonder if there is a trail for us to follow.

  “Are you okay?” Silvia strokes the back of my neck. Her touch shocks me back to reality. The replacement prosthetics aren’t as tuned as I’d like, but being a millimeter off target won’t make a difference in most combat situations.

  “Silvia—” Words swell up on my tongue, clog my throat. “I need to switch into the new prosthetics.”

  “What can I do to help?”

  “Nothing. It’s just … kind of … intimate.”

  That’s the other reason I’m stalling.

  “Intimate?” She frowns, studying my face. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

  “There’s no human intervention.” I point to Kiva’s attachment station: it’s a large, circular spot in the center of a web of servos. It looks a bit like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man; put me in the center, and the machine precision-scans me before attaching the limbs. “The alignments with my physical body have to be precise. But there’s a … transition.”

  How do I tell her there’ll be a time when I’ll be reduced to an amputated stub—armless, legless, naked—cradled like an infant at the mercy of machines?

  How do I admit to myself that all this machinery is monstrous overcompensation?

  “I don’t like people watching me then,” I finish.

  I wish she wasn’t smart enough to figure out what I meant.

  “Oh,” she says. I brace myself for the usual reassurances: it doesn’t matter, I won’t think less of you, it’ll be okay—

  Instead, she plops down on the workbench. “I’m sorry.”

  I know what she means: I’m sorry I’m not strong enough to be alone for an hour without dissolving into panic. I’m sorry I have to put you through this.

  I’m sorry you have to be the strong one.

  But sometimes, acknowledging the toll is enough.

  “I’ll be fine,” I tell her. “Let’s shift these limbs into position for transfer.”

  Silvia pulls up a chair as the attachment station’s extensors unscrew Scylla and Charybdis and my legs, precise mechanisms teasing the good hardware free from the cracked nuBone hardpoints.

  Silvia can’t look away. She’s trying to give me privacy, but each noise the station makes causes her to flicker back around apologetically. She’s never seen anything like this.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “It’s okay.”

  Given permission, she stares deep into my eyes as gentle grips slide underneath my scooped-out armpits, the attachment station clutching me tight in preparation for separation.

  Silvia hunches forward, focusing a solicitous gaze at me as if I am the most important thing in this technological web; the noise of the drills fades into the background as Silvia frowns in concentration, trying to put herself in my position, trying to let me understand, You are not alone.

  Doesn’t she understand having someone to lose is the scariest thing
of all?

  Three beeps and a quadrilateral tug, and my limbs are removed.

  I am naked in a way I’ve never allowed myself to be before another human being. She’s not a doctor, she’s an innocent bystander who thought people like me were freaks, and when I’m stuck between limbs like this, I am …

  Tears well up in my eyes, glistening red as laser-scanners measure my body.

  She holds her gaze on me; multiple calipers work in conjunction, squeezing the cracked hardpoints tight so nuBone caulking guns can squirt a fresh mix of sealant chemicals onto them before bathing them in UV light to cure them into a spot-repair. I’m trying to concentrate on the technical details but I’m a shivering amputee lump, a broken specimen held up for examination and I’m crying, I can’t stop crying.

  Silvia languidly stretches out one arm, examining its striated green fibers. And I realize: ever since I’ve met her she’s kept her limbs hugged tight against her body, avoiding putting them where she can see them, doing her best to hide what was done to her.

  She cocks her head.

  She’s inviting me to investigate her as well.

  I frown. There’s nothing wrong with her body. It’s alien, I know it’s not what she wanted, but that body represents someone I have come to hold in great affection, and why would I—

  Oh.

  Oh.

  “It’s not your shame.” The tiny hairs on her arms ripple as she examines herself clinically. Her new body’s a manifestation of her self-hatred; her panic disorder’s always made her feel like a freak, and now she’s eternally tagged as something inhuman. “It’s mine.”

  She taps my chest, crossing a seven-foot distance faster than I can blink.

  “It’s not my shame,” she says. “It’s yours.”

  “Ours,” I reply.

  She blinks, realizing the vast wealth of flaws that bind us, realizing that yes, we are in a relationship whether we want to be or not, we were forced by circumstance into baring ourselves to each other.

  We can either embrace that or shatter.

  She flattens her palm against my chest, bridging the gap between us, connecting her broken self to my broken self.

  “Ours,” she says, and the station fuses the reforged limbs to my body.

  As it makes me whole again.

  * * *

  I stagger out of the attachment station. These limbs are much heavier than my old ones, almost Donnie-class weight, and the refurbished nuBone hardpoints are creaking.

  The hot-patched anchors will hold, barring combat-level stress—but the hardpoints are still anchored in reinforced bone. Moving around has the twinge of an old back injury.

  I order my biomedical assistants to inject analgesics, and—

  “You okay?” Silvia asks.

  I bend down to pick up a socket wrench to test the calibrations; the diagnostics bring up happy rows of green lights. “I realized I don’t have a name for these guys.”

  She snorts. “You name your limbs?”

  “Just the arms,” I say, as if that makes it less crazy. I’m pondering the great fighters of mythology—Zeus and Kronos, Hulk and Thor …

  “Vito and Michael,” Silvia says.

  “The Godfathers? They’re not my first choice when I think of raw power.”

  “They were outgunned from the beginning.” She runs her fingers down Vito’s armor plating; the haptic feedback transmits her touch so intensely I feel it tingle down my spine. “They survived thanks to cunning. Their power didn’t rest in their weaponry.”

  I hesitate. “They weren’t good guys, Silvia.”

  “But they took care of their families.”

  I nod and key the new limb identifiers into my software: VITO and MICHAEL.

  The patented cht-tack noise of Endolite-Ruger gunports loading ammo into the chamber echoes across the sales floor.

  Wait. How did that happen? I’d put these prosthetics into safety mode before attaching them. I run an inventory, verify all bullets are hot in the chamber. They are.

  But the showroom prosthetics have all exited attraction mode. Every display model is aimed at me.

  “You chose criminal names for criminal guns,” Donnie’s voice says from the overhead speakers. “Makes me feel better about turning you folks in.”

  * * *

  Silvia’s body hairs twitch in every direction; she’s not sure which showroom prosthetic to go after.

  “I wouldn’t move,” Donnie says. “These babies are primed to put a bullet through Mat’s skull. Good thing I woke up before he put his body armor back on, right?”

  “You’re bluffing.” I wait for the sound profile analyses to tell me if he is. “Nobody keeps live ammo in the showcase weapons.” Because if someone hacks into your sample prosthetics’ simplified configurations, they could shoot you like Donnie’s about to shoot me.

  “Nobody means to,” Donnie replies, infuriatingly casual. “But Kiva, well, those beer cans on the floor tell you she wasn’t good about putting her toys away. She left a clip in one after taking it for a spin—and thank God I have root access to her software, otherwise I don’t know how I would have corralled you crazy kids in.”

  The sound analyses come in: he’s not bluffing. The showroom’s simultaneous activation makes it impossible for my onboard computers to tell which prosthetic is armed.

  Yet they can tell the difference between a dry-fire and a live-load.

  One’s loaded.

  “What do I do, Mat?” Silvia asks. “Tell me what I should—”

  “Before you think you can walk her through this, Mat, know my linguistics analysis routines are checking your every word for instructions. If they hear anything that sounds remotely like a suggestion as to how you can escape, they will splatter your synapses before you complete your sentence.”

  “Why not tell me to be quiet?”

  I can practically hear him shrug. “Someone’s gotta calm her down.”

  Great. The IAC’s given him documents on Silvia’s condition. Which means, somehow, he’s still working for them.

  “And you wanna be calm, little one,” Donnie continues, switching his attention to Silvia. “Ever watch someone you love get shot in the face? It’s not pretty. Knocks the wind out of you. Hell, Mat only saw death happen through a drone’s cameras, and he’s not been right in the head since.”

  “What happened to the admiration you had for me?” I ask.

  “Still have it. Heck, man, you’re the only man I’d trust to take you down. You taught me how to circumvent your onboard defenses!”

  “I taught you what?”

  He plays back an old mission log. “If you authorize that fire, well, my microphones would pick up you had given the green light to kill me. And my countermeasures would kick in, and they would blow the shit out of your Ordnance 6000s before your hammers fell on ammo.”

  Somehow, hearing what I’d once told Kiva makes this worse. With a normal body-hacker, I might risk that his capture-to-fire time is below my optimized CTF—but this is Donnie. I’d never get the shot off.

  “Except my pet prosthetics aren’t aimed at your gunports,” Donnie says cheerfully. “They’re aimed right in the center of your left eye. They’ll blast your soft cortex the instant they sense your gunports aiming at anything—isn’t that respect? Oh, my friend, I was so careful once the drugs wore off and I realized where you were.”

  I suppress a double take, lest the prosthetics take that for a hostile motion. “This was the first place you looked?”

  “I wish!” His boyish enthusiasm is even more hateful. “Nah, my IAC contacts gave me a big ol’ list of places they thought you might go, sorted by percentage chance that you’d go there—they said they were staking out the top twenty locales. But if I saw a place that seemed more likely, based on our past history, they asked me to clue them in. Even though they deemed ‘Kiva’s Endolite-Ruger facilities’ as a distant .12 percent probability, I knew that was where you’d be.”

  He chuckles. “I thought
I’d catch you with your pants down. Figured you’d spend at least another six hours tweaking your loadouts. But hey, looks like someone can change your habits.”

  Silvia shivers, ignoring the leering tone in Donnie’s voice. “So when’s the IAC arriving?”

  “They’re not,” I tell her. “He wants to capture us himself, and get back into the IAC’s good graces.”

  “BING-BING-BING-BING!” Donnie says. “Now you folks stay right there while I drive on down to collect my prize. And Silvia—when I arrive, no funny business. I fear the small-arms fire from the cops might have given you the impression you’re invulnerable, but my contacts have informed me a high-explosive shell can tear your body to shreds just like anything else caught in mortar fire. Let’s make sure nobody gets hurt.”

  “Except the people they’ll brainwash me to assassinate.” Silvia’s head droops as she surrenders.

  “If it helps, I’m told the people you’ll be tasked to kill are the total bastards. Threatening innocents gets good folks nice and compliant.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Now. Peace-tie your limbs, Mattie. Lemme see you glow that nice, surrendering purple.”

  I look at the display prosthetics—eternally vigilant, primed to act faster than I can. Even if I knew which one had the live ammunition, I’d never hit it before its automated routines sensed my intent.

  I ponder whether I could throw the socket wrench I’m holding. But if he can outdraw my guns, he’d put a bullet through my eye when I drew my arm back.

  Sighing, I command my armaments to stand down. Silvia’s face looks pale in the reassuring indigo light tracing my limbs. Even if I wanted to bring my armaments online, I wouldn’t be able to fire until fifteen minutes after I disabled my peace-tie.

  I remember hacking the peace-tie system once, and deciding it would be too disruptive. What I wouldn’t give to download that program from my repository—but I have to assume the IAC’s cracked my every account. My repos have almost certainly been compromised with IAC-packaged malware.