Amped

by Daniel H. Wilson

  “Help,” calls Vaughn, who then crawls about six inches toward the door before collapsing. The politician has got his useless arm pulled up tight under his chin, cradling it with his good arm and stretching out his expensive suit jacket. Beads of sweat glisten on a dime-sized bald spot I never noticed. Blood is smeared on the marble.

  Lyle watches Vaughn, amused. “Help? Ain’t no help. I got your dead bodyguards stacked like cordwood in the hallway, dipshit,” says Lyle.

  He winks at me, then continues: “Remember your little friend Samantha? She and I seen the same thing. She went and got her panties in a knot and jumped off a building. But I took the bull by his damn horns. We live once, buddy. One time. That’s all we get. And I intend to make my mark. I mean, look at us.”

  Lyle strides to the balcony. Throws open the doors and gazes out over the thousand murmuring demonstrators. Even from here, I can feel their collective heat shouldering in through the doorway. Lyle turns to me, silhouetted, and his eyes are shining—finally, really alive.

  “Who among the world of men may judge us, when we are as angels to them?”

  Vaughn stirs from the floor. Looks up at Lyle with scared eyes. He’s pale. His right arm is twitching uncontrollably.

  “Autofocus was meant to help people,” I say. “It was meant for good.”

  “Well, hell,” says Lyle. He doesn’t seem to notice Vaughn anymore. “I’m beyond good and evil. And it ain’t too late. You should join me. With the shit you got upstairs, boy, we could split the world in half. I know you ain’t a killer, but the best generals never are.”

  Lyle puts out his hand for me to shake. But I’m already listening to my Zenith. Dropping levels. On an express elevator to the planet core.

  Three, two, one. Three, two, one. Three, two, one.

  “Don’t you do that,” says Lyle, smiling. His hand snakes out toward me and I’m not there. “Where you headed, buddy?”

  I’m going deeper than I’ve ever been. Sinking through the levels fast and smooth like a stone through water. Lyle backs up onto the balcony. A confused murmuring comes from the crowd as they spot the cowboy. His face is shrouded in black and he is dangerous as electricity, and having him only feet away puts a sickening fear into the pit of my belly.

  Lyle speaks, words coming out in a torrent, a hoarse whisper that pulls me in. “Kill him with me, Owen. We can make a new world together. Ad astra cruentus. To the stars, brother, both of us stained in blood.”

  I feel the vibration from deep inside me, vocal cords flexing, each minute movement of my tongue as it crafts the word from a gasp of air.

  Never.

  And in my head, I hear my father’s voice. My sight fades as he speaks to me. The familiar sound of him floods my mind with memories and it puts a stinging blur of tears in my eyes. I gave you something extra, Owen. Level six. Freedom from suffering. Full executive extinguished. A conduit to your soul. Thought to action. I love you, son. I trust you. Do good. Do you consent? Do you consent?

  He left this message for me. All this time. My father.

  Do you consent?

  I consider it for a fragment of a second.

  Yes.

  The Zenith awakes.

  The room explodes into flowing, scintillating paths of murder and battle. Shining gossamer strands that represent the vicious arc of fists and blunt trajectory of knees. Dense probability maps rise out of the floor based on tiny variations in its surface, routes toward cover, light reflections. Every glowing wisp of probability and vector streak of light slashes a path toward Lyle’s darkened face.

  Every level before this has been a reflection of this glory.

  For a handful of milliseconds, I simply stand in awe of the implant-generated vista. I never knew anything could be this beautiful. Somewhere, my true eyes are going dead and blank in the face of this overwhelming splendor. This must be what a cheetah sees, sprinting seventy miles an hour, fangs out, inches from sinking claws into writhing flesh. Every object humming with life—a flickering corona of data with only a single purpose: to help me survive a fight with Lyle Crosby.

  The muscle-priming routines snap into action like a mousetrap. Each movement of my initial feint and stuttering leap toward Lyle pulses through my body as a reflex action. The skinny cowboy charges at me, anticipating my first three feints, but my last change of speed and direction catches him centimeters off guard.

  His hardware is running hot but not as hot as mine. We hit like bullets colliding. He stumbles back and I pin him against the balcony railing.

  Before an audience of thousands.

  “Where are you?” whispers Lyle.

  Our arms intertwine, thrashing in short purposeful bursts. Attacks and parries at the speed of the nervous system. Watching it unfold, I see so many arm configuration probabilities radiating from our interlocked limbs that we look like Indian gods. Each brutal exchange digs us into a deeper, more intricate grip. When I snap his ring and middle fingers backward, breaking them both at the first knuckle, he barks a hyena laugh, tendons straining his throat.

  But the fight is already over. Gruesome efficiency. An equation solved.

  Our arms are locked up like a stuck drawer. Lyle’s side is wedged against the railing. Behind him, the crush of a thousand bodies presses in on us. All the infinite ghostly arm position configurations have collapsed into this single incontrovertible lock. Almost gently, I press my forearm over Lyle’s neck. He struggles, twists his sweaty head back and forth. Trapped between iron and flesh.

  We both know he has a near-zero probability of escape.

  Lyle’s eyes are shining like oily pavement after a thunderstorm. His tanned face reddens, darkens as the oxygen is cut off. Blinking just to focus, he grunts, “You’re not a killer.”

  My forearm remains steady as bedrock as the words dissipate. Lyle looks confused. Sort of hurt, like I just called him a bad name.

  These days, a single man can do more than his fair share of evil. The technology makes each of us so much more. This skinny cowboy could kill millions. And all he has going for him is raw grit and anger and the will to dominate—and that white-hot spark of science fueling it all.

  I wonder if I am any different. I wonder if it even matters.

  “We’ve all got a killer inside us,” I whisper, and I bear down with my forearm. Lyle’s eyes widen as his throat collapses, as the arteries and airways close for business. A surprised smile briefly plays over his mouth and his lips part. But no words come out.

  Lyle’s black eyes close for the last time.

  I watch his still face for a long minute before I let his body fall at my feet. People in the crowd below are confused. A woman screams. And something moves inside the room. Vaughn. He’s propped himself up on one elbow. Face sheened in sweat, he smiles at me and speaks with a bloodstained tongue.

  “They’ll never believe you,” he says.

  I hear shouting in the hallway, footsteps growing louder. My skin is buzzing, vision wavering. Staggered, I lower my hands onto my knees and double over. I can’t say quite why it feels this way, but I’m thinking that I just killed my best friend. Or my brother. Maybe myself.

  Vaughn’s sweat-slicked face is pinched with triumph as he lies back, his strength completely exhausted.

  But his smile fades as I reach up and pinch shaky fingertips around the nub on my temple. My retinal video has a cache of the last twenty minutes. I know this because I watched Nick learn it the hard way.

  “No,” says Vaughn.

  I give myself one deep breath, take hold of the port, and close my eyes.

  Then I rip it out.

  * * *

  “Pure Pride” Rocked by Criminal Investigation

  PITTSBURGH—In the last several days, the Pure Human Citizen’s Council (PHCC) has lost substantial backing, including from the AARP—one of the nation’s most powerful lobbying groups.

  Support has waned to historic lows with the revelation that at least some of the recent internecine violence was ca
used by mercenary outfits allegedly hired by the PHCC itself. Civil rights proponents have long claimed that Pure Pride rhetoric borders on hate speech and encourages discrimination. Now, some are even claiming that the tri-city attacks were bankrolled by the anti-implantee organization.

  The president of the 90 million strong AARP, Dr. Sven Sorenson, sidestepped the allegations and recent arrest of Senator Joseph Vaughn, saying simply that “the majority of our membership agrees that the promise of brain implants as a medical technology outweighs the threat.”

  Meanwhile, emboldened civil rights leaders have been calling on other unions, community-based organizations, corporations, churches, student groups, and individuals to also officially withdraw support from the PHCC in a show of solidarity with “implanted individuals who just want their lives back.”

  We’re all of us on islands. That’s what Nick says. According to the chattering kid, everybody, whether they’re an amp or a reggie, is on one kind of island or another. Millions of islands, millions of sharks. But billions of bridges. It’s the connections between the things that are important, he says. More important than the things themselves.

  Nick has a new backpack and that same old faded Rubik’s cube. He’s pacing my shadow as we cross the field to the government prefab where school is held. The goofy kid doesn’t hold my hand anymore, but he stays close just the same.

  We’re rebuilding Eden.

  Time seems to move slowly in the humid Oklahoma summer. At night, we sleep on cots in air-conditioned government prefabs. They’re lined up in the field outside Eden like dominoes, crushing the memories of spotlighters into the dirt. Every day they clear more husks of burned trailers away. Scorched patches left on the ground like bad memories.

  I thought about going back to Pittsburgh, but my people are here. The people who need me, and the people I need. My own kind, as my father once said.

  In the end, it was the technology that saved us.

  By the time the ambulance came, Vaughn could barely speak. Ashen-faced, he struggled and gasped and managed to accuse me of trying to murder him. I didn’t resist. Losing my port left me nearly comatose, splayed out on the ground next to Lyle’s corpse.

  The cops must have arrested me because I woke up cuffed. Vaughn went into critical care. For a minute, it looked like Lyle was going to get his wish. People were scared and angry and inches away from civil war.

  But Vaughn survived. And so did my prosthetic memory.

  I waited in the hospital under police watch while they played back my retinal cache and realized what had happened. Cochlear picked up pretty good sound, but even so my lawyer brought in a lip-reader to decipher the video. The prosecution had its own lip-reader, too.

  But my case never went to trial.

  After that last standoff went viral, Vaughn’s life changed quickly. From what I understand, they arrested him while he was in the hospital. And what with him being the head of a domestic terrorist organization with splinter factions spread across the United States … well, he didn’t make his bail.

  Still, he’s a hero to a dangerous few.

  Nick runs ahead of me and joins a couple other kids in front of the prefab that serves as our schoolhouse. It’s odd, but he’s got friends now. Smart ones who can keep up with him. A couple of them are waiting with Rubik’s cubes of their own. Nick isn’t shy about telling the tale of his escape from Eden. He’s a half-pint legend now.

  I open the door for Nick and his friends. Follow them in.

  Inside, thirty-five pairs of eyes stare up at me. Thirty-five nodules on temples, some decorated with glitter and neon lights and others just left alone. The kids sit on government-supplied folding chairs around three mismatched tables. There are no recognizable grade levels. The difficulty of the material has to do with your implant and your natural intelligence. Age is immaterial for these amps.

  I lay my books out on an old kitchen table and take a seat. Lucy is already at the table next to mine. The little girls of her class are sitting close to her, hands folded and eyes trained on their teacher like small predatory birds. They are eager to learn. Lucy is patient and caring and she never underestimates her students.

  I reach across the aisle and take Lucy’s hand. She gives my palm a squeeze and her grasp is strong and warm. Nick raises his eyebrows at me and I just shake my head.

  “Okay, class,” I say. “Today, we’re going to study government. There aren’t enough books, so those of you with modded retinal implants should scan the pages and then share with your neighbor.”

  Humankind needs technology.

  It’s the one thing that we do better than any other animal. We communicate, cooperate, and make tools to extend our reach. Every new tool changes us. As we grow, sometimes parents find they can’t recognize their children. The old fears the new, and the two threaten to destroy each other.

  Our technology is what makes us strong. And it’s what makes us dangerous.

  Before the implants, plenty of these kids were a little slobbery. A little slow. Now they’re faster, smarter versions of who they were. They’re on their way to becoming altogether new types of people. It’s frightening. But the landscape of our lives evolves in lurches. There is no stopping and no going back. There never was.

  We just didn’t know it.

  I’ve heard it said that technology makes a good person better, and it makes a bad person worse. That’s okay with me. I say we keep building new versions of ourselves, keep exploring the unknown, and keep growing.

  We’re gonna be fine. Different, but fine.

  Because most people are good. Right?

  I owe deep thanks to many people who helped this book in all kinds of ways:

  The students and faculty of the University of Tulsa and Carnegie Mellon University for sharing (and continuing to share) their knowledge and expertise.

  Ron Randall for a couple of great illustrations and a quick turnaround.

  My many friends and experts, including Donnell Alexander, Ryan Anfuso, Mark Baumann, Ryan Blanton, Colby Boles, Paul Carpenter, Taylor Clark, Courtenay Hameister, Matt Holley, Jonathan Hurst, Brian Long, Philip Long, Brett Lundmark, Amalia Marino, Shelley McLendon, Alex Nydhal, Geoff Shaevitz, David Spencer, Cynthia Whitcomb, Timmy Williams, and David Wilson. And my absentminded apologies to anyone else whom I may have forgotten.

  My parents, Dennis and Pam, who are in the fabric of everything I write.

  Special thanks to my editor, Jason Kaufman, for insight and a long walk in the park. As always, deep gratitude to my agent, Laurie Fox, and manager, Justin Manask, for their unflagging enthusiasm and support.

  And finally, all my love always to Anna and Cora.

  DANIEL H. WILSON is the author of the New York Times bestseller Robopocalypse, the young adult novel A Boy and His Bot, and the nonfiction titles How to Survive a Robot Uprising, Where’s My Jetpack?, How to Build a Robot Army, The Mad Scientist Hall of Fame, and Bro-Jitsu: The Martial Art of Sibling Smackdown. Wilson earned a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. He lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.

  Also by Daniel H. Wilson

  Robopocalypse

  • •

  A Boy and His Bot

  Bro-Jitsu

  The Mad Scientist Hall of Fame

  How to Build a Robot Army

  Where’s My Jetpack?

  How to Survive a Robot Uprising