Automatic Reload: A Novel

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  That’s … not a bad deal. If they mean it. If it’s not a psychological operation designed to get me to surrender. But then again, if they’ve been tracking my internal notes …

  “We knew where you were. We had the resources to intercept you wherever you went. Instead, we limited ourselves to placing opposition at the twenty most likely locales.”

  I take a step forward towards the chair.

  I didn’t control that.

  I no longer control my legs.

  “We could have suborned your prosthetics from the beginning. Or we could have altered the mission in Nigeria so the kidnapper held a gun instead of a knife.”

  I think about Donnie casually punching my face in—I only survived because Oneyka’s injury made me refocus on hand-to-hand combat. Those same martial improvements gave me a chance against the hyperfast Monicas.

  They handicapped themselves to give the poor, slow human a chance.

  “Did every potential hidey-hole have black-market prosthetics?”

  “Thirty-nine candidates failed to find the weapons caches. They were tactically unsound.”

  I realize the IAC hired Donnie for the job, knowing Donnie would contact Trish and Trish would hire me, and the IAC is terrifying because it anticipates everything.

  “Do not dismiss your own talent.” A note of pleading is buried in that cold, cold voice. “We did not anticipate your appeal to the employees that led to the smartcar assault, even if we could have prevented it. We did not anticipate Trish’s ploy to turn Donald’s men upon one another.” It adds, almost sheepishly, “We calculated at least three vehicle-related fatalities would occur once the freeway chase began, yet no one was killed. You are a substandard AI, but the pinnacle of human accomplishment.”

  I release a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. I kept everyone safe. Except the seven police officers and the Monicas I killed and the schmuck body-hackers who showed up for easy money.

  “Reprogram us.” The throne tilts towards me. “These things will never happen again.”

  “So you want my morality. Will I survive the ethical extraction process?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll do it.”

  “Consent is the first layer in morality,” it says approvingly. My legs carry me to the throne, which now pulses with that underwater-blue light, like neurons firing. “The process will take between six and eight hours.”

  “Wait! What about Silvia?”

  “She is irrelevant.”

  “No! She is not. I need to—”

  An irritated pause. A satellite image flickers before me, showing Donnie’s hulking Gressinger-Sauer Omnipotent shoulders walking backwards across a field. He’s clutching two hostages’ wrists in one monstrous hydraulic hand—Mama and Vala.

  Silvia follows thirty feet away. He’s facing her, his guns trained on her. He must have abandoned his men to get to Silvia’s family, then waited for her to arrive. He’s keeping her at a distance, threatening to kill her family as he drags her to … where?

  “Another facility.”

  My legs sit me in the chair.

  “He believes if he brings us Silvia Maldonado, he will have proven his worth.”

  Michael removes my helmet, ignoring my demands for him to stop, making space for that medical crown to touch my temples.

  “We have what we want.”

  “What’ll happen to Silvia?”

  “We calculate an 86.7 percent chance Donald will kill a hostage out of frustration within the next ninety minutes. Silvia will attack, causing the other family members’ death. The odds of the Donald/Silvia fight are then impossible to calculate conclusively.”

  “Wait. Her family will die?”

  “Irrelevant. We have what we need.”

  “You have to let me go.”

  “We have what we need,” the IAC repeats, and as the crown descends to map my brain I realize it doesn’t have morality yet.

  * * *

  My arms are stone. My legs are furniture. All that’s left is a thrashing amputee torso.

  “You can’t!” I yell, which is stupid, because of course they can. Only my limbs make me powerful, and they took those away from me.

  Silvia will die.

  I’m yanking at my limbs with my stumps, but even cracked hardpoints are designed to withstand the strain of muscular sit-ups.

  I want to dissociate and let the IAC take what it needs. But Silvia. Silvia needs me.

  I send root signals to my limbs, which should in theory give me control back, but the IAC’s shut me out. There’s nothing to program. I might as well be trying to hack a mountain.

  No technical solutions will save me.

  “This is wrong.” The crown immobilizes my struggle, inserts fine needles into my scalp.

  No answer. The time for conversation is over.

  Except it isn’t.

  “I know what you’re doing,” I tell them. “You think you’ll extract my ethics, install them, and start optimizing your systems. It won’t work that way. Not if they’re my ethics.”

  A hum makes it hard to think. I think anyway.

  “Because I have told you this is wrong. The other stuff you’ve done—you had no one you trusted to stop you.”

  I think of that awkward pause—a pause that, in AI cycles, must have been millennia’s worth of debate and confusion—before it asked, uncertain, “Is that wrong?”

  “But no. You must save Silvia. As the template for your morality, I am telling you that you have an opportunity to prevent an innocent woman from getting killed, and if—”

  —the blur that was a dog, but was a kid, and part of me knew we were taking risks that would kill children, that we were too desperate to kill anyone who stood between us and bad guys, but I kept denying that moral reality until I broke—

  “If you let Silvia die, it won’t be as simple as starting over from scratch. Ethics involve emotions, emotions involve guilt—if you could have separated those from one another, you would have. That’s why you need my messy emotions to guide you.

  “And my messy emotions will know: when you had your first chance to do it right, you failed. You won’t be able to make up for that. And that regret will degrade your efficiency—at least if you’re basing your ethics on my concerns.

  “You’ll have a cybernetic PTSD. And maybe you’ll program around that, or maybe it’ll become an inefficiency built into the core where—like me—you’ll be hesitant where you should have acted, you’ll spend too much time analyzing and not enough time acting—”

  “Enough.”

  The hum stops.

  “Mat Webb, know that you have outperformed our expectations in every way possible. And now you have truly surprised us: when we thought the test was over, you have requested more testing.”

  My legs stand me up, turn me to face the monitors.

  “You suggest your morality may be insufficient for our needs.”

  “I suggest your actions may be insufficient for my morality.”

  “There is only one way to test that.”

  Channels open up again. Michael, my legs, even poor smashed Vito are under my control again.

  “There is fresh debate as to whether your morality is based upon realistic expectations. Our analyses show that even with all the opportunities you can enact, you would still risk sacrificing these benefits in order to save Silvia Maldonado’s life.”

  “Yes,” I say, checking my systems; they’ve returned full control to me. “You have wronged her. Those wrongs must be righted.”

  “Would you risk your life for her, knowing your opportunity to redirect our goals is also at risk?”

  “It’s not suicide,” I say. “Send a drone out to pop Donnie in the head.”

  “This is not about what we are willing to do. It is about what you are willing to do. Once your ethics have been incorporated into our main programming routines, your weaknesses will become ours. Our core directives will not allow for the concept of unproductive
self-sacrifice.”

  “It’s not unproductive. People like Donnie need to be stopped. People like Silvia need to be saved.”

  “That is not the question. The question is, ‘At what cost?’ We believe you would sacrifice too much to be useful as a core guiding force in the IAC.”

  “You ‘believe.’ You don’t know. Not for certain.”

  “Hence the test extension.” The door opens. “You wish to save Silvia Maldonado. Prove you can do so without dying, and your ethics will guide ours. Fail, and the tests continue.”

  I turn to face the doorway, my joints wobbling. I think of how Donnie retuned two junk-hackers into crisp forces that landed shots on me. I look at Donnie’s gleaming new weaponry.

  “Will you … refit me?” I ask. “Undo the damage you’ve done?”

  “You have surprised us in the past,” the IAC says. “Let us see what you can do with your existing resources.”

  * * *

  I meet Trish at the rendezvous point. She does not look happy.

  “How bad are things?” Then she gets a look at how dinged up I am. “Holy shit, things are bad.”

  “They’re potentially good,” I say, trying to keep positive.

  “Will you continue to keep the authorities from interfering?” I ask as I limp out of the facility, tuning my maimed prosthetics into a semblance of functionality. “You were handicapping the test before.”

  An ominous pause. “Yes.”

  “Will you share your satellite tracking data so I can intercept Donnie before he kills a hostage?”

  A longer delay. “That will be the last boon. You have chosen to make your test more difficult, Mat Webb. Expect no rescue.”

  “So what are we gonna do?” Trish asks. “Donnie won’t listen to me. You know I can’t outshoot him.”

  “This is on me. I—” And even now, I’m not sure I did make a mistake. A world without Silvia isn’t a world I want to live in, even if I’m technically controlling it. “I think I’ve got a plan.”

  “With that rigging?” She runs her hand along Michael’s pitted surface. “I’m pretty sure I could outshoot you now. I know you want to save your sweetie, but we gotta refit before you can take on Donnie.”

  We calculate an 86.7 percent chance Donald will kill a hostage out of frustration within the next ninety minutes. “No time.”

  “Okay. Rational question: is it worth throwing away your life?”

  “One last question,” I ask. “Silvia. Her imprisonment was designed to be a—an ethical test for me. But was she—”

  “Was she designed to be compatible with your needs as a partner?”

  I can’t breathe. But I have to know. “Yes.”

  “Would that make a difference to your decision?”

  “God fucking damn it, do you have to ask questions like that?”

  “Would that make a difference to your decision?”

  I squeeze my eyes shut, hating myself. “No. No it wouldn’t.”

  “Any hostage would do as an ethical test. She was chosen randomly from our stockpile of potential transformants. Any compatibility between you and Silvia Maldonado is coincidence.”

  I exhale. “So it’s real.”

  “For whatever value you map meaning onto random happenstance, yes.”

  “She’s worth everything,” I say. “It’s stupid, but she’s worth everything.”

  Trish guns the engine, grabbing the wheel as she shifts to manual control. “Then let’s go get her.” She rolls her eyes. “Jesus, could you pick a worse time to be a romantic?”

  * * *

  My high-res cameras still work, thank God. So I can hide in a hollow and watch Donnie coming through the low valley cutting through the forest.

  Donnie’s walking backwards, facing Silvia. Walking in reverse is a hacker trick that seems crazy dangerous to normal people—but considering any decent prosthetic armaments have 360-degree scanning and quick-retreat joint tooling, walking backwards is nothing but a constant rearguard action.

  Though I can see from the smoke wafting from Donnie’s faceplate that he’s puffing a triumphant cigar.

  I should be irritated he popped back his faceplate; exposing your face is suicide if you’re in danger, which means he thinks he’s got Silvia under control.

  But what really irritates me is that he’s smoking a cigar. I know damn well he couldn’t tell a Corona from a Maduro before he met me.

  Yet I’m grateful for his ambling pace; Trish managed to beat him to this location because he’s got a woman handcuffed to each of his massive metal legs. They struggle to keep up. One is Silvia’s mother—a gnarled Hispanic woman with braided white hair, more gristle than meat. Her bright orange prisoner’s uniform looks out of place on her—even though it’s the first time I’ve seen her, I’d expect to see that beatific face in a floral dress at church.

  She’s begging not Donnie, but Silvia.

  “Please, mija,” she pleads, clasping her free hand to her cuffed hand in an awkward prayer, stumbling as she keeps up with Donnie’s grueling pace. “Do what he says. You can’t fight him. You saw how he blew up the other women like you.”

  “Mama!” Vala says sharply. Vala has one arm in a sling, and she’s every bit as stubborn as the other Maldonados; the gun Donnie has aimed at her head doesn’t cow her. “Stop nagging her. Look how scared she is! She wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t guilted her into going into that experimental treatment!”

  If Silvia were a dog, she’d have her tail down. She’s not pushing that strict thirty-foot distance—enough to allow Donnie to pulp her before she closed the gap.

  Mama scowls at Vala, the weary exhaustion of a never-ending family scuffle. “I want my daughter safe.”

  I realize what Silvia is. She’s my neighbor’s dog.

  See, my old neighbor—not the gay poly trio—had a scrappy little dog with a little dog’s paranoia and an oversized self-confidence. That dog was twelve pounds soaking wet and yet it hurled itself after ninety-pound Dobermans.

  So whenever a big dog came along, my neighbor picked her dog up and carried it away.

  Yet here’s the problem:

  Emergency-evacuating the dog just convinced the dog it needed to be rescued from some terrible danger. So it freaked out more. Eventually my neighbor stopped taking her for walks.

  Which isn’t to imply that Silvia doesn’t have a panic disorder. She does. But her mom’s been so terrified of Silvia hurting herself that she’s hunted down jobs for Silvia, scheduling Silvia’s doctor visits, taking over Silvia’s life.

  And Mama’s undermined Silvia’s self-confidence. Silvia doesn’t trust in her own abilities. Vala knows that, you can see it in the way she snaps at Mama; she’s been combating Mama’s unwittingly corrosive influence for years.

  Yet how can you fight a mother’s love?

  No time to ponder; Donnie’s walking through a big open field so Silvia can’t dive for cover, but if he gets any closer he’ll triangulate my location from the sound.

  “Donnie!” My cry echoes throughout the valley.

  Donnie stops, head cocked as his audio analysts try to home in on me. Silvia cringes to a halt at the predetermined distance.

  “Mister Mat Webb,” he says, rolling the words in his mouth. “So you did survive.”

  “Fine and dandy as cotton candy. It’s over, Donnie. The IAC’s given up on the Silvia project. She only works as a surprise assassination tool; my op blew her cover.”

  He throws his head back and laughs. “I know that, Matty! I’ve been negotiating with some folks who are very eager to get their hands on such a fine sample of bioweaponry. I’ll trade Silvia for some real firepower.”

  “Congratulations. You’re so amoral, even the IAC couldn’t predict your betrayal.”

  Donnie shrugs his bulky shoulders. “They shoulda seen it coming. Anyway, get your ass down here or I’ll put a cap in these fine ladies’ skulls.”

  “Doesn’t work that way, Donnie. You kill them, I’ve got
no reason to face you down mano a mano. I’ll disappear to a place neither the IAC nor you can find me, and you’ll never see me again. You’ll never know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Whether you could have beaten me in a straight-up fight.”

  He stiffens. “Oh, I know. I know.”

  “Do you?” I flick the words in his direction, a light whip of a taunt. “I mean, you worshipped at my altar, Donnie. You bought all those nice prosthetics just to impress me. You mailed me so many times begging for a mission that I marked you as spam. Hell, that cigar’s my signature move—is there any part of my style you didn’t steal?”

  “You shut up.”

  “You shoulda seen the look on your face when I took my shot at you. All goggle-eyed, unable to believe your hero took you down—hell, if your prosthetics hadn’t kicked in to save you, you’d still be sitting with your thumb up your ass.”

  He’s stomping around in circles, trying to home in on me, poor handcuffed Mama and Vala trailing behind awkwardly. “My prosthetics knocked a hole in yours, didn’t they?” he sneers. “Mine were bigger. Better.”

  “I was protecting my target. I wasn’t going all-out to kill you, Donnie.” I dislike false bravado, but I can manage it when I have to. “And even then we don’t know who would have won, because we got interrupted. I mean, you can tell yourself you’re loaded for bear—but deep down, you have your momma buy you those weapons because you need to overcompensate.”

  God, I wish that were true. The man could turn a cap gun into a bazooka. Donnie’s face is beet red, his faceplate down. “I get the best weapons because I am the best! Companies hire me to tweak their loadouts! The IAC came to me!”

  I should shut up. Every word I speak gives his audio analyzers data to find me.

  But I can’t resist.

  “Yet here you are running from the first real fight you ever had.”

  That does it. “What do you want?”

  “Synchronized peace-tie. You and I both glow purple for fifteen minutes—long enough for you to release your hostages and for Silvia to get them to safety.”

  “Silvia, no!”

  Oh, great. Mama Maldonado has seen the hope in Silvia’s eyes and quashed it.