Automatic Reload: A Novel

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Yet the truth about hardware is this: maintenance breeds affection. You come to know an equipment’s quirks, come to admire its strengths. It’s an intimacy greater, in some ways, than a lover.

  And at any moment it could be destroyed. It’s designed to be destroyed instead of you. Warfare chews up machinery and men alike.

  And as the garage door goes up, I look over at Silvia and realize getting attached to anything before combat is a bad idea, such a bad idea.

  * * *

  Two drones shoot at Herbie’s tires as we roar out onto the darkened street, and of course they hit, but the tires are self-repairing—it’ll require more than a few bullets to take us down.

  They also bathe us in police transit-override commands, which would root-access any street-legal car to pull meekly over to the side of the road, but naturally Herbie’s configured to shrug those off.

  The grainy streetlights flicker past us as Herbie’s nav systems plot tight runs around the corners, Tokyo-drifting around warehouses, juking left to avoid a meter maid–bot scanning license plates and logging electronic tickets.

  The drones fall back, following us at a discreet distance, targeting us with unwavering spotlights. More drones drift into view behind us, their rotors angling down as they divert from their usual patrols to match our speed.

  “They’re not firing,” Silvia says, frowning.

  “Police drones don’t use lethal force.” I think of the taser-induced heart attacks the ACLU has catalogued from drone interventions in vain attempts to outlaw their usage. “Well, not purposely, anyway. For legal purposes, the humans get to make the fatal decisions on-scene.”

  She looks around. “Then where are the cops?”

  My eyeballs jerk from Herbie’s LADAR readouts to the GPS dot that shows us how we are still eighteen agonizing minutes away from the smartcar facility. Everything’s bathed in the purple glow of my damnably peace-tied limbs.

  Yet even at three in the morning, there’s unemployed dudes drinking forties on the street—they fumble out their smartphones as we rocket up the street, taking videos to sell to the manhunter-AIs. Which is bad news; if they knew we were headed this way, that means the cops’ networks have marked us for civilian rewards and put out alerts along our most likely escape routes.

  I was hoping to make it out of the populated zones first. Now I have to worry that some well-meaning civilian hurls himself in front of our car in the hopes our built-in automatic safety guards will force us to stop. If you don’t get run over, you get a cash reward for helping capture a suspect.

  People will die tonight, I think. I can see my blood pressure rising in my HUD.

  I strap myself into my seat belt—and discover Vito and Michael are so much bulkier that my old safety straps don’t fit. That’s bad; the most badass body-hacker is still meat at the core. I will not survive a ninety-mile-an-hour car crash.

  I tense as we blast through the final stoplight before the freeway entrance. The manhunter-AIs must have calculated we’re headed for the highway; the only question is whether there were any patrol vehicles close enough to intercept. One car we might dodge past, two cars would block the highway entrance enough to give us a fight, and a triple would leave me trying to ram through a patrol car without a seat belt.

  But no. Even though the cops’ response times are computer coordinated—I suspect at least one napping cop has been jarred awake tonight when his vehicle automatically barreled out to answer the call—the question is not “what do the manhunter-AIs know” but “how quickly can they get the physical world to respond.”

  We blasted out of the garage two minutes ago.

  “Keep your eyes peeled,” I say as we roar onto the freeway, locking one arm into the restraining belts as our speed ticks up to Herbie’s maximum speed of one hundred miles per hour. “Prioritize civilian safety. I’ll handle incoming threats.”

  “Aren’t you peace-tied?”

  “Herbie will take care of some threats. You’ll … pick up the slack.”

  “What do you expect me to do?”

  “Improvise.”

  “I can’t improvise!” Silvia cries. As we screech around a dawdling Nissan, Silvia stays stabilized by gripping the seat backs. She doesn’t even realize she’s doing it. “My mother had to walk me through sample homes for months, and that was just home inspecting, I’m not prepared to, to—wait, what do you think’s going to happen?”

  “If I knew what was going to happen, I would have prepared for it!” I’m prepping the cop-car hacking modules and double-checking my HUD for incoming threats and programming in threat-response packages for Herbie. “I’m sorry, Silvia—what I hope will happen is that I disable the cop cars the way I did back by the cargo containers, but war has a way of going wrong.”

  “War? I’m not prepared for war!” She crosses herself.

  “Nobody’s ever prepared for war, Silvia.”

  I don’t tell her it would have been different if I’d trained as a combat soldier—those guys do prepare for war—but the Drone Corps trained us to fight through remote control. Still, Silvia lets out a small gasp as she takes in the dark road before us.

  “The cars.” Silvia crouches down to peer out the window like a kid on vacation for the first time. “They’re pulling over.”

  Sure enough, as we cruise down the freeway’s gentle curve, the smartcars and automated trucks part like the Red Sea, the city traffic overrides stopping them to make way for our progress. The street drones fall behind, their tiny motors unable to propel them at freeway speeds; a high-flying traffic drone takes over, ensuring we don’t escape police surveillance. A couple of newsdrones buzz into view.

  It’s like we’re the star of the show, the drones keeping their Broadway-bright spotlights on us as we sail down a stage cleared for our arrival.

  I relax a bit; the manhunter-AIs could have coordinated a massive traffic jam to block our path. Yet some human mind must have decided those civilians might draw the ire of a man they believe is a cop killer, and put them out of harm’s way.

  I count the cars as we flash past, sighing relief; every person pulled over is another hapless schmuck who won’t get pulped in a car wreck.

  Still, the cops will intercept us well before we get to the smartcar hub’s exit.

  “Stabilize your rear deflectors,” I tell Silvia. “Watch for enemy fighters.”

  “Are you quoting a movie at me?”

  “It’s not a movie, it’s Star Wars.”

  “I haven’t seen Star Wars!”

  My to-do list, correctly parsing Silvia’s words, automatically adds Show Silvia Star Wars to my upcoming tasks.

  Sure enough, the blue-and-red strobes of two distant cop cars creep up into the rear window, getting larger as their beefy engines outpace Herbie’s. My LADAR informs me they’re a little over a mile back, but at this speed differential they should catch up with us in about two minutes.

  That’s great. I was worried they’d go for a head-on encounter. Then I realize our advantage:

  The cops don’t know what happened the last time we fought.

  The IAC shot the survivors, wiped Silvia out of the footage, scrambled the logs. I’d rather we had seven alive cops and a nastier predicament, but I won’t turn down an advantage.

  Because if they don’t know what happened, they have zero defenses against the zero-day exploit I used to control their vehicles the last time. (Not that government opsec would have sifted through the compromised vehicle logs, found the vulnerability, and patched it in the twelve hours since the shit went down, but still. Advantages are advantages.)

  In addition, they are not scrambling the airwaves, most likely due to the risk of jamming some civilian’s smartcar’s internet connection during a high-speed freeway chase. Which leaves me free to send all the signals I want.

  “We got this, Silvia.” I sigh, relieved.

  I thumb the switch to send my prerecorded broadcast back to the cops before they open fire: “Attention New J
ersey’s finest. My name is Mat, and I am being framed by the International Access Consortium for their kidnapping of Silvia Maldonado, who is also with me. Here is footage that explains our current fugitive status.”

  But because I never expect police to be reasonable until superior force has been trotted out, I also start the buffer-overflow hack.

  A flood of replies comes back.

  I frown: What the hell hit us? Then my fire walls light up with the yellow alerts signaling prevented attacks. Thousands of prevented attacks, most not even listed in my intrusion detection profile list, mysterious attempts to override my system that only got cut off because I am meticulously paranoid about scrubbing inbound data—

  The cop cars just hit us with a hundred zero-day attacks.

  Cops don’t have that firepower.

  “Oh fuck,” I mutter, noticing the confused cops pounding the dashboards inside the vehicles, trying to retake control as their cars cruise to intercept us.

  “What?” Silvia asks.

  The police speakers blare, “Attention, Silvia Maldonado. Your most likely destination is the smartcar hub two exits down. We know everything. Surrender.”

  * * *

  Silvia pounds her seat hard enough to dent the metal beneath. “What could go worse?”

  The other agency trying to acquire Silvia could intercept us, but I don’t say that because I’m overwhelmed thinking about the enemy I already know.

  I haul back the smartpaint cover to turn us into a pseudo convertible, keeping the bulletproof windows up so nobody can get an easy headshot. I assign a new tether for Herbie: don’t let us get more than four hundred meters away from Silvia. The drones’ spotlights above light Herbie’s insides a fluorescent white.

  “Don’t open the roof! That’s our cover!” Silvia yelps.

  “We can’t hole up inside this car,” I explain. “You need room to maneuver.”

  “To do what?”

  I slap Herbie’s dashboard. “This does not have the firepower to disable several incoming cop cars.” I slap my shoulder. “This does, but it won’t be online for another eight minutes. So you have to find some way to save those poor trapped cops.”

  “How will I—”

  Two trucks slowing down to pull over suddenly speed back up, veer into the center of the freeway, smash into each other hard enough to send windshield glass flying. Herbie’s anti-accident routines compensate even though the two trucks are a half mile away, plotting a smooth arc through the still-moving wreckage.

  Which is good, because I still have no seat belt.

  “Attention, Mat Webb. Those two trucks had no passengers. If you do not surrender Silvia Maldonado to our care, we will use the police transit overrides to cause a fatal collision involving every car within broadcast range. The next vehicles to arrive will contain two families taking a road trip to Florida.”

  “Fuck.” I start reprogramming Herbie’s threat packages, realizing Herbie wasn’t designed for this, he’s too slow, why did I concentrate on defense when I needed more firepower—

  Silvia grabs my shoulder. “What do we do?”

  I suppress my urge to scream at her. That won’t help. “I told you! Get to the cop cars, get the cops out safely, disable the vehicles.”

  “But how?”

  “Silvia, I can’t walk you through this.”

  Her objection catches in her throat. She glances around the car, desperate for a tutorial—and in that moment, I realize how her mother’s concern for Silvia has inadvertently made Silvia’s troubles worse, how Silvia’s come to believe she can’t do anything without her mother’s guidance; her family’s protection’s made her terrified of the unknown.

  I don’t have time to say that, so instead I stop programming to give her my full attention. For this brief instant, she is my world.

  “Silvia. You can do this.”

  I don’t say, “You have to do this,” because even I’m creaking under the strain of that particular concept. Instead, I try to convey with my crooked smile that I’ll love her even if it goes wrong.

  It’s almost enough.

  “Mat, I—”

  “Attention, Silvia Maldonado.” In the cop cars, the windshields flare with gunshots as the police vainly try to shoot their way free. “The following broadcast is being recorded live.”

  A woman screaming echoes across the freeway.

  “I’ll tell you what you want to know!” an older voice begs. “Please, stop torturing her!”

  A hydraulic noise hums as some dreadful machinery kicks into gear. The screaming rises in pitch, followed by a wet snap.

  “Stop!” the woman shrieks. “Stop! Tell us what you want! I’ll do anything, just stop hurting Vala!”

  “You motherfuckers!” Silvia yells. In a flicker-flash she leaps towards the cops, her hands crooked in rage—the air fills with gunfire as the cop cars open up on her.

  Two rented Hyundais down the road come into the police overrides’ range. They curve out to opposite sides of the freeway, speeding up, putting enough space between themselves to veer into each other with maximally efficient mayhem—

  I see bright birthday balloons jouncing in a car, watch kids screaming—this trip was someone’s present—

  I install Herbie’s new threat package, incomplete as it is—

  His front guns fire as the two cars start their turn into each other. Their rear tires blow out in sprays of rubber, the drag from the vaporized tires warping the smooth arc that would bring them into collision, turning it into an uncontrolled spin—

  As they start to spin, Herbie’s fire-at-all-tires routine shreds their visible front tires as well.

  The car with the balloons auto-switches into safety-protection mode and slews to the roadside. The other shudders, its AI overwhelmed by complex physical vectors. It upends, rolling in a tumble, flipping over and over as Herbie slams on the brakes to navigate past the wreckage, me thrown up against the dashboard.

  I see the smoking car tumbling to a stop, the windows pressed parachute-white with protective canvas airbags. There’s no movement from inside—but would I notice any as we pass by at sixty miles per hour?

  They’re probably okay. And even if they’re not okay, a rollover at fifty miles per hour is more survivable than a planned fatal crash at ninety miles per hour, or at least I tell myself that and whoah, Vito just injected me with anti-trauma drugs.

  That family is fine. They’ve got concussions, but they’re fine.

  The IAC’s manhunter-AIs were willing to kill them to rattle me. That’s what I have to remember. And—

  Herbie’s still slowing. Why are we still slowing down?

  I turn around. We’re slowing down because Silvia’s approaching Herbie’s tether radius. Now that they have Silvia, the cop cars are slowing down to turn around—why wouldn’t they? The IAC doesn’t give a crap about me; they want Silvia, that was why they played that excerpt—

  If the cop cars peel away at top speed, they’re thirty miles per hour faster than I am.

  I yell to Silvia, but they’re blaring excerpts from her family’s torture to drown me out. I raise Vito to fire at her, but my peace-ties still have four minutes and fifty seconds before they expire.

  Worse, she realizes what’s happening as the distance between us expands. She looks towards me, confused at first, but whenever she tries to leap back another onboard system fires to get her reflexive defensives back online. She whirls to smash the cop car’s gunports, her head constantly trying to reorient itself to focus on me, but there’s always some other assault incoming as the cars back off.

  I depolarize my faceplate to give her my best Indiana Jones look.

  I point to my chin.

  “Here.”

  * * *

  It’s not, I should stress, that Silvia wants to kiss me that badly. Though, you know, I’ll put my kissing skills right up there with my maintenance skills.

  I’m reminding her that a kiss is how she ignored bullets.

 
She straightens on the cop car’s hood, twitching as the IAC’s AIs buzz her with tasers, bounce tear-gas canisters off her face. Her body heaves as she tries to control herself, clenching her hands as she battles past her body’s reflexive need to respond to overt force.

  She crouches on the hood in a Spider-Man pose, her face contorted with concentration, literally shrugging off bullets as she focuses on me.

  Then she gives me one clear gaze, her brow creased with worry, as if to ask: I can do this, right?

  I risk a look back: You can do this, Silvia.

  She leaps a hundred yards to sail across the widening distance, landing squarely in Herbie’s back seat.

  * * *

  “I did it!” she cries, her face flushed with excitement. She shoves her hand above the bulletproof windows, flinches as a bullet catches her in the palm of her hand, shuddering as she represses the urge to leap after her attackers. “I did it, Mat!”

  “This incoming vehicle has an exhausted factory worker who wants to go home and sleep his night off.”

  Herbie’s guns fire as he speeds up, vaporizing the front tires of a car zooming by on the grassy median’s far side, the car slewing into a barely controlled skid as its protective AI kicks into gear. I force a slo-mo replay of vacationing family, those windows still swollen tight with airbags—they’re so far behind I can’t see if they survived—

  “I can do this.” Silvia squeezes her hands into happy fists. “I can do this.”

  Another broadcast wet snap. “Tell me what you want, please, I’ll give it to you, stop!” Followed by: “Surrender and end your loved ones’ torture, Silvia Maldonado, their pain will never cease until you give yourself over to us—oh no, this vehicle’s got a tipsy young couple on their way back home to make love.”