Automatic Reload: A Novel

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  My lungs close shut. If I’d planned on breaking into a smartcar facility, I would have brought the latest hacks—but on the run, with the IAC monitoring my accounts, I didn’t dare check into my usual black-market sites, and I’ve paid for that hubris.

  I could have planned better. I should have anticipated doing a milk run with Ancillary Force would lead to me being on the run with a custom-engineered biological weapon–cum-hostage and that would require me to hack a smartcar facility and I know that’s stupid, but I should have anticipated everything, that’s how I survive.

  “Mat?” Silvia’s turning me around to face her as I realize I’ve all but stood in the corner, and turning me around is difficult as I weigh 1,435 pounds, but she does it effortlessly. “Mat, it’s okay. Get the new hack.”

  “I can’t. Not in time. Negotiating a black-market hack takes at least a day minimum, with a complex escrow procedure and proper anonymization.” That also assumes the IAC’s black-hat teams haven’t broken into my bank accounts.

  “So just…” She waves her hand in the air like Harry Potter casting a spell. “Hack it.”

  She thinks of my work as a magic weapon—but it’s work, grueling work. I didn’t conjure the police car hack out of thin air; I spent weeks creating a fake programmer’s profile to get access to the barred-source OS for the cop cars, then committed enough legitimate patches to get deeper access, and then when I wasn’t working on the test range or upgrading Scylla or tending to Herbie I’d poke through the source code looking for an unsanitized input.

  It’s what I do to relax.

  And I’m good at bug-hunting. The police hack took seven weeks of investigation, combing through a state security picked clean by other hackers.

  There’s a cop coming down the hallway, doubtlessly the vanguard of an assault force that will smash down on us now they’ve figured out their next move. I don’t need my probability calculators to tell me the chances that I can break into a black-box OS on a ten-minute deadline with no access to source code is nil, nil, nil.

  Silvia looks up at me, so trusting that I want to kiss her. I can’t tell her it’s over. There’s no escape with both the IAC and the cops watching us.

  I’ve bet everything on the smartcar hub, and came up short.

  “Mat?” She pats my arm. “Mat. It’s okay. We’ll find a way.”

  I try to look her in the eye. My gaze squirms away. “Silvia—Silvia, I…”

  The cop enters the room in a swirl of smoke.

  Except she’s not a cop. She’s a curvaceous white woman in a powder-blue ball gown with a plunging neckline. She’s got two guns on her hips, a computer case slung over her side, and no weapons in her hands. She’s wearing a black reflective gas mask.

  She hauls it off, shaking out long red hair before she itches the reddish stubble on her cheeks.

  “Trish?” I ask, confused.

  “Mat!” She rolls her eyes, as if to accentuate how difficult it’s been tracking me down. “What version of BlackLaura did you bring?”

  “2051.”

  She holds up an ISB stick. “I got this year’s model. Let’s hack this joint.”

  * * *

  BlackLaura’s hack only gets me system access. Configuring the cars is my job.

  My heart unclenches as I inventory the available automobile stock. This is planning. I can do planning. And first priority’s figuring out which vehicles we’ll be smuggling ourselves out in.

  And I am granted a small miracle: this smartcar hub services a run-down section of town. Poor inhabitants mean the local residents are more likely to take a cheaper carpool option, which means this hub’s stock is mostly vans, which gives us 268 available vehicles that can stash a bulky 1,400-pound body-hacker and two slender passengers.

  If my D&D sessions back during my deployment taught me one thing, it’s to never split the party.

  Trish sweeps back her hair, making herself presentable before she extends the hand. “Hey.” She offers a freckled sunblaze of a grin to Silvia. “I’m Trish.”

  “Hi, it’s … yeah. Hello. You’re Trish.” Silvia’s much slower to return the handshake, as if she expects to be slapped down. She hangs her head low, her syllables hitching with hesitation.

  Trish flicks a glance in my direction, requesting an update. I get what’s happening: ten minutes ago Silvia was an engine of destruction, designed for beautiful combat. Trish’s kindness has unwittingly switched the frame to a social situation—where Silvia’s now an awkward psychiatric patient with a stringy bug-gut body.

  I know this because this is why Mat the fearsome body-hacker does not attend parties.

  I think of words I might mouth to Trish to cue her in, but they’re all insults: She’s got panic disorder. That’s not her body. She’s not really sure what she’s doing. It feels wrong to sum up Silvia by her problems, because she’s more than that, but I don’t know how to explain what Silvia means to me—

  Trish gives a curt, apologetic nod in my direction—right, right—remembering I’m not optimized for personal interaction. Then she takes a careful step towards Silvia, who retreats in a flicker.

  Trish freezes, respecting Silvia’s fear, then turns her hands palms up as if holding an imaginary bowl between them.

  “Would you like a hug?” she asks.

  Silvia bowls Trish over backwards, burying her face in Trish’s shoulder, exhaling a jagged breath as I realize Silvia has been terrified that nobody but me would ever want to touch her again.

  Trish strokes Silvia’s back, glancing down dubiously as Silvia’s cilia snuffle at her skin.

  “There, there,” Trish says.

  I shouldn’t be so grateful they’re occupying each other’s time, but that hug frees me to do the necessary work. First step is giving me and only me root access to the 414 docked vehicles. Then comes locking out police override protocols. Then I polarize the cars’ privacy windows.

  “Attention, Mat Webb,” a police chief’s voice thunders in from far down the hallway. “We know you are in the smartcar hub. Come out before we deploy lethal force.”

  “Do we have a destination in mind?” I ask.

  Trish untangles herself from Silvia to tightbeam me a safe-house location.

  “Mat, whatever has happened, we can talk it through.” The voice sounds human, but I recognize a negotiationbot’s artificial calm. “You don’t want to hurt anybody. You can call us on—”

  The next trick is turning on the cars’ heaters full blast to obscure our infrared signature, then applying a filter to the vans’ control systems so they accelerate like they have a 1,400-pound passenger in the back. The cops are still scrambling for a plan, but the IAC thinks in processing speeds—they’ve anticipated the things I’d do at a smartcar hub, have funneled entire neural networks into detecting our escape.

  After years of therapy, it’s satisfying to face an omniscient enemy who rewards paranoid thinking.

  Yet omniscient isn’t the same as omnipotent—I don’t think they have a lot of agents prepped in New Jersey’s ass-end, and my logs show I shot down three IAC drones on the way here. They may know what we’re doing yet not have the local resources to stop us.

  (Does the IAC’s enemy have the resources to interfere? Unfortunately, I don’t know. If electrohawks swarm in there’s not much we can do, so I’ll hope the people who tried to kidnap Silvia in the first place won’t show up again.)

  I finish up by programming in a wandering destination for 413 cars, one where groups will split off randomly and come back together before ditching themselves in shadowy places that’ll be difficult for overhead surveillance to track escapees. The 414th car will, assuming we don’t get shot down, drop us in deep woods about a seven-minute run from Trish’s hideout.

  “Whatever your grievances are, Mat, we are ready to listen.” That’s what cops say as they’re setting up the sniper shot.

  “Okay.” I commit the final changes to memory. “We’re good. Let’s go.” Trish snaps on her filtrat
ion mask again.

  I head out to the back exit to the cars.

  I see the tortoiseshell-glassed sysadmin and her junior protégé. She’s got her arm around him; his face is scrunched like he’s holding back tears.

  “Hey.” They look up, startled I’m acknowledging them. “I’m sorry.”

  I should follow that up with something more comforting, some specific understanding that this will mean weeks of overtime repair and police interviews and maybe the company will take the excuse to shitcan the facility … but anything would sound like I’m rubbing it in.

  The sysadmin frowns, examining me for sarcasm. When she finds none, she bobs her head in a gesture between understanding and resignation. “It’s okay.” She nods in Silvia’s direction. “You guys have got a lot going on.”

  “Yeah.” I extend my hand. “Name’s Mat.”

  She grips my carbon-scored manipulators, her fingers stroking mine: she’s a tech-nerd, happy to lay hands upon a top-class armed prosthetic. “Violet.”

  “You can’t escape, Mat. Talk to us.” The voice is louder, amplified by more speakers. They’re calling in drones from every city.

  “Gotta go,” I say.

  And with that, Trish and Silvia and I are dashing up the spiral staircase into the facility’s heart, headed for our van. I’d like to say the garage roars with the throaty sound of powerful engines, but alas, they’re electric cars so this cyber-rebellion is whisper-quiet.

  “How’d you know to meet us here?” I ask. Somehow, Trish keeps up with both Silvia’s hyper reflexes and my cybernetic limbs, and she’s doing it in high heels.

  “You—” She splutters. “Jesus, Mat, you told me!”

  “What?”

  She slams the door to the main facility open with displaced fury, revealing the broken cars towed into their troubleshooting bays, the boxy auto-clean facilities designed to scrub and repair the car interiors, the racks of spare parts and gimbal-mounted mechanicbots.

  “You remember?” Trish asks plaintively. “That night we stayed up until four in the morning troubleshooting your tetchy neural linkage, then got into a debate over the best ways for us to ditch police surveillance if we got five-starred?”

  That sounds … familiar. Also troublesome. She tells me how she headed out here when she realized I was in over my head, how she’s been doing a patrol that encompassed as many smartcar hubs as she could, hoping to be close enough to intercept us when she heard a police bulletin—

  —but I’m too busy wondering if I’ve discussed this plan with anyone who might have posted it on social media. Or talked near an IAC-compromised computer. I’m keyword-scanning my personal logs, searching for potential leaks.

  Trish snaps three times near my faceplate. “Have you listened to a damn thing I’m saying?”

  My worries dissolve into paranoid conspiracy theory: even if the IAC knows our plan, there’s not much I can do to change it now. “My … conversational condensers have given me the gist?”

  She facepalms, her hand slapping to a halt against her air-filtration system. “Fucking hell, Mat. I appreciate your thoroughness, but … after risking my life to save your ass, it’d be nice if you paid half the attention to your friends that you paid to your cyber-limbs.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Trish shakes her head as if she can’t believe my foolishness. I glance over at Silvia as we lope past the bays of testing facilities.

  Her body’s moving in a straight line but she’s turned to face me, mouth agog in concern. She’s coming to realize I’m every bit the wreck she is.

  As I start to panic at being exposed as a nutcase, she shoots me an affectionate grin.

  We’re in this neurotic mess together.

  We get to our designated van, in a line with twenty other identical orange vans in Section 6B. The police boom threats into the garage.

  “Get in. You both get beneath me. Silvia, you wrap as much of your bulletproof body around Trish as you can—”

  “She’s bulletproof?” Trish squees.

  “—and stay down. They might fire at the windows to get a peek inside, but I don’t think so.”

  “Mat, in two minutes the police will have no choice but to assault the facility.” Standard operating procedure means they’ll start the operation in thirty seconds. “People may get hurt. Please, Mat. This is your last chance to settle this peacefully.”

  “And don’t say anything.” I brace myself against the van’s insides so nothing on me rattles, creaks, or thumps. “They’ll pick up audio. You ready?”

  “I’m ready,” Silvia says, then slaps her hand over her mouth.

  Trish readies a handgun and nods.

  I okay the procedure.

  In Section 6B, twenty vans back out in synchronized retreat.

  Operation Shell Game begins.

  * * *

  We are stuck inside the van, unable to poke our heads out enough to see what’s happening, and I have no outside surveillance.

  Yet as the 414 smart vehicles roll out of the wide exit gates into blaring police bullhorns, I have an idea of what’s happening.

  With this much havoc, the mayor’s gotten involved. And as our van banks around a corner with a hundred other vans, I’m pretty sure what the assembled police are doing:

  First there’s muffled yelling as the cops blast their vehicle-override signals, trying to bring this mass exodus to a screeching halt. Some even think it’ll work.

  Then I hear a staccato burst of gunfire; our vehicle swerves as I hear muffled fender-bender thumps as a couple of vans in front get taken down by the armored patrol cars—these are ordinary vehicles, no match for police militarized weaponry.

  But as programmed, the vans are not stopping. Those thumps are the still-active vans behind the detonated ones ramming into them, doing their damnedest to shove the dead cars forward with all their horsepower, a relentless forward motion like a sluggish metal flood. All the while other cars are rerouting around them, coordinating efforts in a great escape—

  The gunfire ceases, right on schedule. There are no EMP pulses either.

  The cops have given up blocking our escape.

  Which seems foolish from a law-and-order perspective, but I’ve been counting on the mayoral perspective: while the police would be happy to blast outgoing vans until the smartcar hub’s a flaming junkyard, the mayor’s watching this smartcar-hub exodus and asking a much more relevant question:

  “What happens to my city when we destroy thirteen million dollars’ worth of cars?”

  The mayor’s pondering the taxes this smartcar hub pays with every ride, knowing this run-down section of New Jersey is not thriving, and the likelihood of this smartcar business returning after the cops have strafed their inventory into scrap metal is nil.

  The mayor’s contemplating lawsuits, lost revenue, angry complaints from constituents who will not get to work tomorrow because the local police annihilated the service that serves as public transit.

  And the mayor’s doubtlessly shrieking for the cops to stop, let the cars go, we’ll chase them down.

  (Just as the IAC’s Powers What Be are debating whether the chance of stopping us is worth exposing their patrol car–compromising capabilities. And the IAC’s enemy is debating whether they want to release the electrohawks during a media blitz. The only reason we’re escaping is because I’m forcing everyone to make uncomfortable decisions.)

  I hear the thump as we round a corner along with a squad of ten fellow vans, the sirens as some cop decides to follow this cluster of vehicles, and then the jerk to and fro as my confuse-a-cop algorithms kick in—some vans peel off to lure individual patrol cars away, others pull into shadowy parking garages before turning off their lights, still others drive in rough formations to let the cops and drones think they have a bead on a nice grouping of cars until they split apart in so many directions the manhunter-AIs don’t have enough hardware to track them.

  The cops will have to rely on imperfect instruments as
the vans ditch themselves in remote locations, stopping under overhangs so the satellites and their sluggish refresh rates can’t be quite sure what happened.

  By the time our van pulls over in a ditch in the dark woods, I’m checking my satellite-window database to ensure no eyes in the sky will be overhead. We slip out into the three-o’clock-in-the-morning darkness, using my low-light amplified vision to guide Trish and Silvia, plotting a course through thick brush to Trish’s safe house.

  Trish stops us. She points to a run-down cabin in a thick grove, dead pines leaning drunkenly against its walls. “That’s it.”

  Silvia whip-grabs Trish by the lapel. “What do you mean, that’s it? We can’t stay there!” she whispers, then realizes she’s assaulted Trish and lets go, scrabbling away.

  Trish shoots me a You’re gonna have to explain that to me later look, then massages her throat. “Sweetie,” she says calmly, “I’m the baseline human here. You’ve got those reflexes to protect you, Mat has his weaponry; all I’ve got is homo-sapiens smarts and my stashed resources. If I’m not panicking yet, you don’t need to be.”

  She gestures for Silvia to follow, then pushes past a rotted door hanging on one hinge. This used to be a rustic three-bedroom weekender in the deep woods, but now it’s a half-abandoned ruin with teenaged declarations of love carved into the walls, broken beer bottles glittering on the ground, and rotted sleeping bags surrounded by used condoms.

  “The woman who built this was convinced civilization was going to collapse.” Trish shuffles through the decaying leaves, hunting for something. “So she commissioned a hideaway cabin she could bug out to when things slid to shit. I told her, you build those places in the deep Appalachians, not near the Pennsylvania border, but she wanted somewhere within commuting distance.”

  She shifts a soiled sleeping bag aside with her foot. “Thing is, civilizations like ours don’t collapse. They just lean harder on the little guy until they slump into a more painful stability.”

  “So what happened to the woman?” Silvia asks.

  “Oh! She was a brain surgeon, just before the auto-docs took hold. She was convinced no automated surgery could replace her expertise. So she short-sold every tech stock that aimed to make her obsolete.” Trish shrugs as she gets down on her knees, running her hands along the warped baseboard. “I bought the place in cash so she could take an early retirement.”