Automatic Reload: A Novel

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  She whirls around in my arms; she’s kissing me so fiercely my fleshy body shivers, and yes, I am a stub hanging from four killing machines but she knows me and I know her and it’s all right.

  And as she wraps her fingers around my stiffened cock, I don’t know how we’ll do this. Part of me wants to scan her anatomy with Vito’s sensors, figure out what the IAC engineered her for, which leads to cascades of plans where I stiffen in bad ways and wonder whether this is adrenaline-fueled stupidity, what promises I am making by making love to a woman in need.

  She pulls away from our kisses, grabs my face in both hands.

  “I know you plan everything through.” She tilts her head, peering deep into my eyes. “But for once. Please. Just trust that everything will turn out okay?”

  She prays with her body. And lovemaking, done right, is its own form of prayer.

  I don’t believe in God.

  But I do believe in Silvia.

  * * *

  You may have noticed I like old movies. And in old movies, they never have sex scenes: they pan away to a crackling fireplace, shying away from the tawdry physical details.

  I like that. The folks in movies are my friends. Friends should have privacy once the intimacy starts.

  So instead, let’s pan away to Trish as she accomplishes the most difficult part of my plan: walking down the street.

  You may note I skipped over the fine details of getting Herbie from “that abandoned house” to “Kiva’s shop” because, well, I was having too much fun talking to Silvia. But that was, in many ways, the trickiest part of the escape—dodging security cameras in a networked world is a skill all its own.

  So let’s watch a mistress at work.

  First step for Trish: running seven miles through thick woods to get back to town in time to make our plan work. For Trish, who’s still packing meat-legs, that’s a task in and of itself.

  But the real work begins once she gets to the town’s edge. Because modern civilization swarms with cameras: overhead drones, smartcar scanners, home security–AIs monitoring their lawns, streetlamp cameras.

  Trish emerges into a sleepy rural Pennsylvanian town, which gives us a chance: I don’t think there’s a square foot in New York City that isn’t monitored. This town only has a few thousand cameras.

  The IAC’s analyst-routines—or the IAC’s enemy—may be scanning any of them.

  So while she’s still deep in the woods, Trish puts on her disguise. It’d be easy to throw off facial-recognition technology with kabuki-style theater makeup, turning your eye sockets into hollows. But some kid may point his camera at your face because hey, crazy clown-lady. You have to strike a balance between throwing off automated systems and drawing human attention.

  So she uses shader to shrink her nose profile. She dons a formfitting outfit that pads her breasts and ass. She tugs on special boots that add an inch to her height and jab spikes into the balls of her feet to throw off the IAC’s gait-recognition technology.

  And when she’s done, she consults the satellite window to see when it’s okay to move, then walks out to head to her PlusOne contact location.

  Getting a smartcar’s easy—as long as you’re willing to give it your login information. Which presents a problem for people who do not want to be tracked, especially paranoid people who, say, are pretty sure the IAC’s superhacking capabilities would have uncovered their SmartCar accounts.

  So what do you do when you need to ride off the grid?

  You use the PlusOne database. It’s like Uber, but for Uber.

  Trish tries to look casual as she heads to her PlusOne contact’s house. Getting a PlusOne contact is, like all criminal activities, not without risk—some people set up PlusOne honeypot accounts, figuring anyone who needs anonymized rides can be profitably blackmailed or robbed.

  But Trish realizes she won’t need her gun as she peeks into the trailer’s windows and sees the traditional PlusOne contact—a junkie, willing to bet her future for hot cash. Trish pulls a balaclava over her face before she knocks on the door; a harried white housewife cradling a baby in one track mark–scarred arm appears.

  “I need a ride,” Trish says.

  The mother squints, shaking off her high. The infant squalls as she fumbles out her smartphone. “You didn’t set up an appointment.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Trish peels off several hundred-dollar bills. “Maybe this will help.”

  The mother beams; this is a nice home for a junkie. Then again, a good PlusOne lifestyle will provide a steady income—until one of those anonymous people you gave a ride to gets arrested, at which point it turns out you’re legally responsible for aiding and abetting.

  “I’ll call one in,” the mother says. “But Clarice has to come. You didn’t give me time to get a sitter.”

  No mother should willingly bring her kid along on a ride to a criminal rendezvous. But Trish hopes nothing bad will happen on this ride, so she risks it.

  After an awkward wait, the mother says she doesn’t know why the smartcars are running so late. Trish doesn’t volunteer that she might be responsible.

  A car arrives. Trish climbs in the back seat; there’s no good way to disable the car’s internal security cameras, but she knows where to sit to give cameras a minimal angle. They drive towards to the address that Trish went to some effort to find.

  They pull up next to a nice rental-apartment complex—not so nice as to be a gated community, thank God, but the sidewalks are well-kept and the plants on the balconies aren’t dying. It’s a place where working-class stiffs pool their rent money to live somewhere nice.

  There, we get the first break we’ve gotten in this whole shebang: as Trish clambers out of the car, another woman emerges from her own smartcar rental. That woman’s shoulders are slumped, her blouse sweaty after a double shift, stumbling to her doorstep after being debriefed by the cops and knowing she has two hours to crash before the smartcar facility needs her back at work to clean up this mess.

  Trish steps in, smiling sympathetically. “Violet, isn’t it? Listen, we met last night.” Trish talks with the buddy-buddy ease of someone who met her at a hackerspace and not a smartcar heist. “Can we talk? In private?”

  The SmartCar employee polishes her tortoiseshell glasses, her lips crooking into a smile. Because buried somewhere in last night’s chaos was a complicated story she’d resigned herself to never hearing, knowing she’d go to her grave never quite understanding what the hell was up with that crazy bug-lady and the man with the cyborg limbs.

  She might just get closure after all.

  ACT 3

  Going the Distance

  “I always wondered how it would be if a superior species landed on earth and showed us how they play chess, and I feel now I know.”

  —Peter Heine Nelson, on watching two human-superior chessbots playing against each other, December 2017

  “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help,” Silvia says, dressed in a blue blouse Trish picked out from the shelter. “My help cometh from the Lord, which made Heaven and Earth.”

  We are standing in a circle—Trish, Silvia and I—touching foreheads, arms around each other’s shoulders, each arm different but all of us united.

  We are going into battle.

  Back in the Drone Corps, we bellowed hoo-rah bullshit before settling in to a command-and-kill mission: the guys would blast “Ride of the Valkyries” as we strutted down to our comm center, getting into an Apocalypse Now headspace.

  “He will not suffer thy foot to be moved,” Silvia says. “He that keepeth thee will not slumber.”

  But the Drone Corps were nerds trying to convince ourselves we were badass. We controlled trillions in top-notch American technology, weaponry that could kill a cockroach from across a continent.

  How could we not be righteous?

  “Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep,” she continues, wincing as she realizes that verse doesn’t quite fit; she
didn’t have time to research battle prayers. “The Lord is thy keeper; the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.”

  I remember how much I loved the Drone Corps’ inevitability. We were the government’s sword; they gave us a target and we annihilated the enemy in holy fire. Every missile we fired killed people who threatened America, and America was the world.

  We were nerds needing to believe our cause was so pure that it didn’t matter who else got killed.

  “The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.”

  Yet as Silvia speaks, her voice wavering, we are unconvinced of our righteousness. We know our enemy is evil; of this, there is no question. Trish says word on the street is thirteen body-hackers have responded to Donnie’s call, some scrambling for cash to pay the upkeep on their ever-degrading prosthetics.

  We will kill them if they stand in our way.

  But we will also grieve for them.

  “The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil,” she says. “He shall preserve thy soul.”

  I hope He does, if He exists. Because there will be explosions that endanger downtown Smyrna, there will be friendly fire, there will be people walking into a war zone. The IAC may take hostages, and we cannot afford surrender.

  We grieve for the people who may die so that we may succeed. This is our acknowledgment of the costs of the war we are about to undertake; there will be innocents hurt. We will take precautions. But we are fallible, God, so fallible, and war is where all the variables have deadly costs.

  “The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth.” Silvia swallows.

  I look at Silvia. I ponder the casualties that might get inflicted in carrying out this plan.

  But she’s what gets lost if I don’t take that chance. Her and the other IAC victims.

  “And even forevermore,” she concludes.

  We mutter an “amen” and dwell in the silence. This is when we grieve. For there will be no grief in the moment of battle; we can grieve before, we can grieve afterwards, but grieving in the middle will get us killed.

  I mean, we’ll get killed anyway. But let’s be efficient.

  Let us become merciful monsters.

  Trish crosses herself, though I know she’s not religious. “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, of the Father and Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages and ages.”

  We ponder that. We will not have ages and ages. We will sacrifice ourselves to take down an IAC facility—and we might fail. Even if we succeed, the IAC will ensure no one remembers us.

  But I look at Silvia. I remember that poor woman I had to destroy—

  —they make me they make me THEY MAKE ME—

  —and I ask myself: Is it worth these lives to stop the IAC from annihilating more people like Silvia, even if that’s temporary?

  I look at Silvia. She’s clutching the empty space where once, in a previous life, her crucifix hung. She’s looking up at me, knowing she might be recaptured, knowing she might one day be the insane woman on the freeway, tortured into compliance, her faith removed.

  She nods.

  “Amen,” I say, and I’m praying, praying to someone I never believed in, grasping for a faith in some promised goodness.

  And then it’s time to kill.

  * * *

  We’re speeding towards the E. L. Mustee Industrial Facility at fifty miles per hour in a hijacked van, the van’s automatic pilot banking around the Appalachians’ mountainous curves as I map out our assault.

  “This factory’s huge.” I plant my index finger on the overhead shot Trish has pulled up on her tablet. “The size of a mega Walmart. We’ll encounter heavy resistance as we make our way through the facility, so scouting isn’t our best move. Which means we have to make our best guesses as to where our twin objectives are located. Silvia, where do you think the facility’s vital points are?”

  She doesn’t hear me; she’s looking out the window, thumping the car’s armrest, staving off her panic disorder.

  The closer we get to zero hour, the closer she gets to falling apart.

  Trish glances anxiously over at Silvia, expecting me to intercede. That’s comforting; I’m the boyfriend now.

  “Silvia.” I don’t dare touch her; if I surprise her, she might wrench my arm off. “Do you remember what I told you back when the drones were coming in to get us?”

  She blinks. “‘All combat comes down to preparation.’”

  “We had two minutes then to make a plan.” I cradle her soft fingers in my metal digits. “You fought well. And you won. But now we have twenty minutes left before we get to the facility. We need to take advantage of that remaining time to help your mother and sister.”

  She blinks again; the glazed terror fades. “Mama. Vala.”

  “Yes. And what did I tell you?”

  She stares at the floor, ashamed how distracted her panic makes her. “You … you want me to do this alone.”

  “No.” I squeeze her hands. “I want, more than anything, to come with you. But we need to cover four football fields of facility. I need to find the central controls to wreck this joint. You need to get Mama and Vala out.”

  I’ll be going in hot and noisy—because we have to assume they have weaponry designed to take Silvia down. If I do enough damage on the way, with luck they’ll send everyone after me and let Silvia exfiltrate her relatives.

  I don’t tell her I’ve taken the suicide position.

  “Memorize the map.” I draw my finger across the tablet’s shatterproof surface. “They’ve got liquid-storage containers spread across the facility to distribute some kind of supply chain—most of which will be broken open by the time we arrive. Based on the venting arrangements, those tanks are most likely flammable. Based on the feed lines leading out from them, they’re probably extremely toxic chemicals mixed in-facility.”

  “How do you—” Silvia says.

  Trish nods serenely. “He was a drone pilot.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  I’d never considered overhead target analysis to be a superpower, but watching the way Trish reacts, I guess it is.

  “Between the lung-burning chemicals and the actual burning,” I tell her, “things will be chaotic. So commit your pathways to memory now. These three areas are most likely barracks and/or prisons, based on the venting and heating-duct placement on the roof. However, this location faces the exterior—unlikely for a prison—and the other’s some kind of terrarium, with a glass ceiling. But this facility has a loading bay that’s shielded from the streets, connecting right into a barrack. I suspect that’s where they keep the people they don’t want seen.”

  “So Mama and Vala are in there.” I recognize her breathing as another meditation exercise.

  “Mama and Vala are most likely to be there,” I stress. “I believe that’s where the IAC keeps their biologically enhanced acquisitions. But they might consider it overkill to keep human prisoners there. So you’ll have to scour the areas, make the call, then move on to potential zones number two and number three if you don’t find them.”

  “But how will I know whether—”

  “That’s your call. I wish I had a better answer for you, Silvia, but we haven’t mapped the interior. Maybe it’s a big empty space; maybe it’s a maze where you’ll have to go door-to-door. Whatever it is, I trust your judgment. You’ve got good instincts.” And before she can ponder the mathematics of “when to abandon your mother and sister,” I shoot her another question: “See the three locations? Can you map out the quickest, stealthiest route to move between them?”

  Her eyes jitter. The IAC’s enhanced previsualization skills course through her. “Yes. I see.”

  “Do not engage.” I poke her in the chest. “Trish’s intel says there are thirteen body-hackers in addition to Donnie. They will have weaponry designed to take you down.”

  “But I creamed Donnie!” Her confidence both heartens and terrifies me.

  “I
n an enclosed space,” I correct her. “You were designed to be a stealth unit—get in close enough to hit your target, disable their bodyguards, destroy them. If you have to close a significant distance, their long-range weapons will tear you to shreds.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut, thinking of the freeway woman before I blasted her into twitching strands.

  “You’re no longer a mystery threat. Donnie will have compensated. Do not underestimate him, or the IAC. Promise me you’ll get in, get them, and get out.”

  The fire in her eyes dies. She still wants to fight, that same pugnacious instinct she’s always had—but she’s hamstrung by uncertainty and inexperience.

  I want to tell her everything will be okay, but … this is war.

  “Remember,” I say. “You can kick ass—never doubt your strength when your back’s against the wall. But kicking ass is not the mission. The mission is Mama and Vala. Bring them here.” I point to a location a mile away from the facility. “Trish will be waiting here for exfiltration.”

  Silvia cocks her head. “Trish isn’t coming?”

  Trish holds up her unarmored hands. “Putting meatware into a cyber-battle? Might as well drop me into a blender.”

  Silvia utters a little “aww, honey” sound. “That doesn’t mean you’re—”

  Trish snorts. “Don’t think I’m useless. I hauled your asses out of the fire back at the smartcar facility, and my tactics will ensure this goes down as clean as possible. But I’m a fixer, not a fighter. I won’t put my reflexes up against yours—or his.”

  Silvia draws back, uncertain what to make of Trish’s characteristic show of self-confidence. “Wait—Mat, I know you’re—”

  “I’m headed here.” I point to another section. “Where the electricity lines converge.” Solar power and batteries are good enough to power most residential homes—but when you’ve got heavy-duty industrial tech, you gotta draw power from the grid. “The backup generator’s stationed there, indicating that’s where the heavy-duty tech is. In an ideal world I’d bomb their manufacturing facilities, but with our minimal firepower I’ll settle for personally annihilating their control servers.”