Automatic Reload: A Novel

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  “I know how scared you are. Of losing everything. I’m…” She swallows, frozen by the possibilities of what the IAC might have already done to her mother and sister. “But you still have the possibility of a good life left. You always did.” She glances shyly over at me. “If you reach out, you’ll always find someone to help.

  “That’s us today. We’ve given you one final chance to break free. Now, do you remember how to help yourselves?”

  The speech was Silvia’s idea. I almost vetoed it.

  But then she reminded me: despite the IAC’s countermeasures, this is merely the processing center. Once they’ve tortured the Monicas into total compliance, like that poor woman on the freeway, I assume they’re rerouted to wherever the IAC needs them. Which means most of the irretrievably brainwashed victims have been assigned elsewhere.

  These people—these Monicas—have incomplete conditioning. They’re terrified of the IAC, yes, but not so cowed some won’t grab a chance for freedom.

  The Monicas flail, scampering across the building, some squatting and clapping their hands over their ears, some shaking each other, some screaming and leaping defiantly back into the facility to evaporate in wisps of black smoke.

  The other Monicas shudder as they see the first rebels obliterated. They’re shouting at each other, drowning out that low voice commanding them to attack. Some leap off the ledge, arcing far out over the car hoods clogging the courtyard as they soar towards us.

  Another group of Monicas leaps off to intercept them, smashing into them in midair like hawks dive-bombing a falcon, smooth arcs turning into messy spidery tumbles as they claw at each other for supremacy.

  Sure enough, Silvia’s incited a civil war between the indoctrinated Monicas and the ones who haven’t yet succumbed to IAC mind control.

  There’s a whoosh and a hollow firework boom as two tangling Monicas are blown apart into stringy muscle strands.

  Everyone freezes. My sensors trace the mortar back to its source: one of Donnie’s men—a woman, actually—standing stunned in the courtyard. She wasn’t aware one of the plans the IAC had Donnie prep for his squad was “Blow apart any rebellious bioweapons.”

  Even through the greasy smoke, I can see her stunned “oh shit” expression. Easy to see why: the Monicas have endured tortures from anonymous computer programs, but this murderer has a face.

  The act galvanizes them.

  And then chaos: several Monicas leap off the roof, hands crooked to tear this body-hacker to shreds. Other, wiser Monicas shriek in a high whine and scrabble down into the wreckage on a covert body-hacker hunt, and still other, still-loyal Monicas chase them, hurling aside cars in a frantic effort to kill the rebels as commanded, while still other Monicas descend into the facility to destroy or defend the machinery that molded them. Hip-mounted missiles fly because Donnie and his men realize their best chance for survival involves taking out the closest Monica before they get into grappling range.

  Silvia grabs me and kisses me.

  “A kiss,” she says. “For luck. Now tell me I can do this.”

  “You can do this.”

  She kisses me again. “Tell me you can do this.”

  I don’t want my final words to her to be lies. “I’ll do anything to get back to you.”

  “Okay.” She crouches down on all fours. “You can do this, Silvia, you can do this.…”

  She crawls between two cars for maximum cover, quick as a cockroach, off to find her mother and sister.

  I got a final kiss before my final battle. It’s more than most soldiers get.

  I double-check my threat packages. This is the most complex environment I’ve ever programmed in—no overhead map, too much cover, unknown variables aplenty. But my reaction packages are as good as I can make them, and the unit tests all green light.

  I activate the seal on my protective helmet—

  “Wait!” Trish cries, patting her pockets. “I got you a present!”

  She hauls out a Macanudo Corona cigar, cut short to fit inside my helmet. I snatch it from her fingers, compressing it ever so slightly: the leaves are the perfect consistency, fresh from the humidor.

  “Where did you—”

  “I bribed the baby mama to get me the most expensive Macanudo cigar she could from a tobacconist. I think she got your brand, didn’t she?”

  I run my nose along the length of the cigar, inhaling. Its rich scent cuts through the stink of burning cars. I cut it open; Trish holds up a match.

  “You’re a lifesaver,” I sigh, leaning in.

  I take a long puff, savoring the taste. Cut as short as it is, this cigar’s a twenty-minute burn.

  But as I feel that fine nicotine hit fill my veins, I don’t care that I’ll be dead before it finishes burning. I seal the helmet, realizing hot ash will drop straight down my neck, but who cares?

  I got the girl.

  I got the cigar.

  I got a chance to make a difference.

  “Go get ’em, champ.” Trish slaps Vito’s bicep.

  I lope towards the facility, feeling lucky, so amazingly lucky to have gotten this before the end.

  * * *

  And I’m strapped in for the “carnival ride” portion of combat, jerked back and forth as my legs zigzag their way through the maze of parked cars. My systems are calculating the best cover with every step, searching for threats, mapping the safest approaches to their destination—and they don’t have time to alert my poor body what they’re doing to protect it.

  So my body’s bounced behind an engine block, juked left around a crumpled bumper, shoved between two smashed cars. It’s all I can do to keep my cigar in my mouth.

  I tense as Vito fires three shots, registering a 76.4 percent chance of having killed one of Donnie’s men. A second later, I realize I heard five shots fired—but I don’t have time to see where the other two shots came from as I’m propelled forward.

  I should be panicking, but damn if this Macanudo isn’t tasty.

  “DIE DIE D—”

  I jerk backwards, my auto-shotguns unloading on a Monica before she can land on me, a stream of white-hot explosive buckshot fired at machine-gun speeds along her shoulders and thighs. She splits apart as I empty 14 percent of my ammunition into her—not random bullet shots grouped in the torso, like I would program to take out a human target, but a sawing barrage of napalm-backed firepower calibrated to sever her limbs.

  She unravels, her muscle fibers blown to flinders.

  I do feel bad at killing an insane woman before she could finish berating me, but mostly I feel relief: my defenses worked. Like any strategy, a Monica is overwhelming when you’re unprepared for them; the firing patterns that would incapacitate a human don’t faze them. But their knotted green flesh isn’t designed to withstand repeated stress to the exact same area, and though it takes thirty times the amount of ammo you’d need to take down a human, downing one is possible.

  As it is, Monica is a short-range assassin prototype—I’d have a hell of a time guarding a human target from a Monica camouflaged as a friendly, but as long as I stay at range I can handle them.

  Which gives me hope that my mission has already succeeded: maybe the IAC will decide this project’s success rests on surprise. Once politicians start demanding their visitors wear tank tops, the IAC will move on to creating new horrors.

  That won’t stop me from reaching their control center though. I still have to make enough noise to draw people away from Silvia. I can’t make out anything between the smoke and the gunfire and the screaming Monicas grappling with each other—but my sensors can. So I’m lurching back and forth as my clever, clever prosthetics maneuver me closer to the central building one queasy jolt at a time.

  My rifles fire as I approach the double doors guarding the factory entrance. I flinch as Vito and Michael send vicious shots through the concrete walls, ducking me behind a car.

  The return fire punches through a wall and an engine block, and several shots still hit me in the
chest. My Battalion-grade body armor downgrades the gunfire from “fatal” to “body blow,” but the impact still knocks the wind from me.

  There’s a pause—which is a cheerful sign, because that pause signals the inevitable moment when the control systems switch playbooks from my-human’s-still-alive defense into kamikaze offense. Vito and Michael fire through the ruined doorway, destroying my enemies’ CPUs without exposing my tender meat-body to danger.

  Then I’m charging through the doors way quicker than I’m comfortable with, flailing in my panicky wait-what-if-they’re-not-dead terror as Vito and Michael bulldoze their way through the entrance. I remind myself they wouldn’t fling me into the teeth of my enemies unless my onboard systems were 98.5 percent certain all threats were neutralized.

  Still, when you’re staring down actual gunports, 1.5 percent seems like a lot of room for error.

  I hadn’t been sure whether the facility would be “big open lab space” or “narrow maze of subsected laboratories”—but two men lie dead in front of an automated check-in scanner designed to provide an entrance to a set of smaller labs. There are heavy-duty guns mounted on the walls, each ready to blast me if I don’t match the IAC’s list of authorized users, but none of them shoot—either a Monica smashed their control software, or one of the cars clipped their electrical power. My systems take cover as they recalculate strategies.

  Me? I can’t stop staring at the two men I just killed. Because they’re three-limbers packing antiquated hardware—those Bushmaster-Syncardia legs the white dude was packing were the budget option three years ago, and time has not been kind to their scanning systems. Whereas the Asian dude’s Abiomed-Springfield’s legs are in such awful condition they have surface damage.

  They must have been desperate for Donnie’s cash—but that’s not what terrifies me. What scares me is that they managed to land shots on me despite their substandard sensors. These guys’ systems should never have seen me coming.

  Donnie retuned these junkers into actual threats.

  What happens when I encounter the folks packing functioning weaponry?

  And my systems must have decided on a pathway because we’re off, me looking back at the dead hackers like a dog being yanked away from an interesting fire hydrant.

  I try to remember that I instructed them to head deeper into the complex. But even though I programmed their parameters, I never feel in control once combat starts.

  Yet it’s a strange luxury, being shepherded by my own limbs, because it is like a Disney ride—they’re guiding me through the hallways, allowing me glimpses of horrific sights before we sprint around a corner.

  There’s a glass room with a woman reduced to a head and two hands, sticking out of some hi-tech container like flowers shoved into a vase, and she’s screaming as a silvery, spidery loom knits her a new body.

  There’s a reinforced room with a Monica, now freed, slamming her head against a crystal window that refuses to break.

  There’s three Monicas, sitting primly on a bench, nodding in time to some invisible beat. The door is open. They do not move to escape, bobbing their human heads like a metronome, their knotted bodies remaining still as statues.

  And I realize how right Silvia was: my mind grasps for some abstract term I can use to distance these poor victims from their humanity, a term like “hostages” or “targets” or “bio-organics.”

  But Silvia called them “Monica” specifically to remind me that they had names. These aren’t weapons in training, they’re humans in dissection.

  Every person I have to kill is a tragedy.

  Yet these glimpses of tortured human beings are slim moments of organic life spread thinly among machinery, much of it torn to shreds by insane Monicas. For all the dismantled equipment, there’s still a distressing abundance of functioning mechanisms.

  The IAC have automated everything.

  The hallways are clogged with self-loading food delivery devices, their nozzles dripping nutrient fluid. Smooth wall-grooves have built-in handcuffs dangling down to drag their captives from cell to cell with hydraulic force; each cell has walls bristling with needles to inject their patients with medicines. Battery-powered Opposite Cat variants scuttle along the floor, keeping everything polished clean, and for an absurd moment I miss my artificial kitty.

  I see a dreadful future within this prison: the smartcar facility was down to a handful of employees. The IAC’s superiors have done their damnedest to ensure there are no employees.

  Humans are a liability. They’re inefficient. They tire. They’re bribable.

  The humans running the IAC have done their best to make other humans obsolete.

  Yet that’s every industry. The retailers, the manufacturers, the distributors—all locked in a race to eliminate paid positions, selling their wares to an increasingly catered-to elite.

  The rest of humanity? Their services are no longer necessary.

  I should be fearful for my life—some Monica could rip my head off at any moment—yet instead, I’m fearful for mankind. The IAC has opened up a preview of a merciless future. The government has slowed humanity’s redundancy through subsidies and antiriot technology—but eventually, the people at the top won’t need the rest of us.

  This facility was designed to imprison captives—but I can’t help thinking how wonderful it would be if I could reprogram all this automation to help people instead of exploiting them. And—

  We stop in another room, pausing to shoot a prone body-hacker’s still-dangerous limbs before mapping the room. My HUD helpfully informs me that based on their dropping body temperature, the three body-hackers in this hallway have been dead for minutes. They’re staring up, goggle-eyed, stunned by their demise.

  I ask for a combat analysis: sure enough, all three shot one another.

  I wonder which shot first. Because Trish’s priority email to Donnie’s men—

  If you’re receiving this message, I’ve either gotten you a job or you’ve emailed me to ask for one. Here’s what I’m betting Donnie hasn’t told you:

  Donnie’s subcontracted you to work for the IAC.

  You know what the odds of surviving an IAC mission are, if you’re a spear-carrier? Look ’em up. They’re gonna throw you into the deadliest situations so they don’t have to pay your corpse.

  I’ll pay you though. Three times whatever Donnie’s offering. And don’t think I don’t have the money to burn, because hey, I’ll die if this mission doesn’t work out. All you have to do is shoot some motherfucker in the back before he shoots you.

  Maybe you don’t wanna turncoat. I get that. But you wanna tweak your threat profiles to prepare for the inevitable betrayal. Because two folks in your outfit have already accepted my offer.

  Be smart. Survive.

  Trish’s priority email did its work. My sit-rep recreators can’t be sure whether one of them shot first, or whether the three of them quietly flagged each other as potential threats and shot simultaneously. But whatever happened, someone’s weapons went hot, and the inevitable threat escalation happened, and all three got mowed down by a self-propagating firefight.

  I wonder how many people actually accepted Trish’s offer. At the time Trish sent the email, the factually accurate number of conspirators we’d recruited was “none.”

  The tight hallways converge into one wide one, dense with disabled guns, narrowing to a single choke point.

  I cruise to a stop. The tiles on the floor hiss with smoke: my chemical sniffers register it as fluoroantomonic acid, which I’ve never heard of but boy do my threat sensors light up red at the analysis. There are tiny, sagging puddles chewing holes in the floor—the hallway lights up as my lasers scan them, mapping each deadly droplet—

  And my lasers trace the sources up to fine plastic pipes threaded through the ceiling, dripping trace amounts of armor-destroying acid from ceramic misters. I authorize an experimental shot into the line, braced for an emergency retreat if there’s a torrent of dangerous chemicals.
<
br />   Yet a dwindling stream of it spatters off to one side, the last of the fluid corroding the guns. I use one of my leg-fans to disperse the existing gas and navigate around the existing dribbles. And I realize:

  At least one of those chemical tanks outside held a stockpile of acid, kept far away from the Monicas.

  If I hadn’t sent the cars in to smash the tanks, the IAC’s countermeasures would be dousing me in hundreds of gallons of acid.

  I’m lucky. So goddamned lucky that I take one big puff on my Macanudo.

  So far, barring the two mooks Donnie set at the door, all my countermeasures have made this a cakewalk.

  Cakewalks are less exciting. But I like a little boredom when the bullets are in the chamber.

  But as I pick my way through the acid hallway to kick open the door at the end, my rifles fire. They shoot erratically, pausing between each shot in a stuttering rhythm—which only happens when they’re hitting a target that’s not in their database, verifying their target’s injured before wasting ammunition. I bring up the threat listing.

  And shut down my weaponry.

  This is another biological-creation room, a wide chamber lined with those spidery machines knitting pseudoflesh into ropey muscles. But instead of Monicas, this room holds nine squat monstrosities cringing in the corner where they’ve retreated, headless torsos with muscled arms squatting on stumpy legs. They look like someone yanked the head off of a gorilla doll.

  They’re backed up against the wall, flabby albinoid hands flailing—are they surrendering, or trying to sense me with their finger-tendrils? Regardless, they’re retreating, clearing a path for me, the three dead ones trickling a thin gray fluid onto the floor.

  The three machines to my left clack into gear before my rifles pulverize them. And I realize from the strands of pale muscle strung between the fine organic needles:

  Those machines were building replacements for the three workers I killed.

  The remaining maintenancethings scatter in a panic as I take a step forward, realizing my dystopian future wasn’t dismal enough.