Upgraded (57 page)

They plugged her into an alternate universe where death came with an undo option. They ran her through scenarios and simulations, made her kill a hundred civilians a hundred different ways. They made her relive Kiribati again and again through her augments, for all the world as if she wasn’t already reliving it every time she closed her goddamn eyes.

It was all in her head, of course, even if it wasn’t all in her mind; a high-speed dialogue between synapse and simulator, a multichannel exchange through a pipe as fat as any corpus callosum. A Monte-Carlo exercise in tactical brutality.

After the fourth session she opened her eyes and Blanch had disappeared; some neon red-head had replaced him while Becker had been racking up the kills.
Tauchi,
according to his name tag. She couldn’t see any augments but he glowed with smartwear in the megahertz range.

“Jord’s on temporary reassignment,” he said when she asked. “Tracking down the glitch.”

“But—but I thought
this
—”

“This is something else. Close your eyes.”

Sometimes she had to let innocent civilians die in order to save others. Sometimes she had to murder people whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time: blocking a clean shot on a battlebot that was drawing down on a medical team, or innocently reaching for some control that had been hacked to ignite a tank of H
₂
S half a city away. Sometimes Becker hesitated on those shots, held back in some forlorn hope that the target might move or change its mind. Sometimes, even lacking any alternative, she could barely bring herself to pull the trigger.

She wondered if maybe they were trying to toughen her up. Get her back in the saddle, desensitized through repetition, before her own remorse made her useless on the battlefield.

Sometimes there didn’t seem to be a right answer, no clear way to determine whose life should take priority; mixed groups of children and adults, victims in various states of injury and amputation. The choice between a brain-damaged child and its mother. Sometimes Becker was expected to kill with no hope of saving anyone; she took strange comfort in the stark simplicity of those old classics. Fuck this handwringing over the relative weights of human souls. Just point and shoot.

I am a camera,
she thought.

“Who the hell makes up these scenarios?”

“Don’t like judgment calls, Corporal?”

“Not
those
ones.”

“Not much initiative.” Tauchi nodded approvingly. “Great on the follow-through, though.” He eyed his pad. “Hmmm. That might be why. Your cortisol’s fucked.”

“Can you fix that? I don’t think my augs have been working since I got back.”

“Flashbacks? Sweats? Vigilant immobility?”

Becker nodded. “I mean, aren’t they supposed to take care of all that?”

“Sure,” Tauchi told her. “You start to freak, they squirt you a nice hit of dopamine or leumorphin or whatever to level you out. Problem is, do that often enough and it stops working. Your brain grows more receptors to handle the extra medicine, so now you need more medicine to feed the extra receptors. Classic habituation response.”

“Oh.”

“If you’ve been feeling wobbly lately, that’s probably why. Killing those kids only pushed you over the threshold.”

God, she missed Blanch.

“Chemistry sets are just a band-aid anyway,” the tech rattled on. “I can tweak your settings to keep you out of the deep end for now, but longer-term we’ve got something better in mind.”

“A drug? They’ve already got me on propranolol.”

He shook his head. “Permanent fix. There’s surgery involved, but it’s no big deal. Not even any cutting.”

“When?” She could feel her insides crumbling. She imagined Wingman looking away, too good a soldier to be distracted by its own contempt. “
When?
”

Tauchi grinned. “Whaddya think we’re doing now?”

She felt stronger by the next encounter.

This time it went down at street level; different patio, different ambiance, same combatants. Collapsed parasols hung from pikes rising through the center of each table, ready to spread protective shade should the afternoon sun ever make it past the skyscrapers. Sabrie set down a smooth rounded disk—a half-scale chrome hockey puck—next to the shaft. She gave it a tap.

Becker’s BUD fuzzed around the edges with brief static; Wingman jumped to alert, hungry and limbless.

“For privacy,” Sabrie said. “You okay with that?”

White noise on the radio. Broad-spectrum visual still working, though. The EM halo radiating from Sabrie’s device was bright as a solar corona; her retinue of personal electronics glowed with dimmer light. Her watch. Her smartspecs, already recording; the faint nimbus of some medallion packed with circuitry, nestled out of sight between her breasts.

“Why now?” Becker asked. “Why not before?”

“First round’s on the house. I was amazed enough that they even cleared the interview. Didn’t want to push my luck.”

Wingman flashed an icon; a little judicious frequency-hopping would get around the jam. If they’d been in an actual combat situation it wouldn’t even be asking permission.

“You realize there are other ways to listen in,” Becker said.

Sabrie shrugged. “Parabolic ear on a rooftop. Bounce a laser off the table and read the vibrations.” Her eyes flickered overhead. “Any one of those drones could be a lip-reader for all I know.”

“So what’s the point?” (FH
OP
?[y/n] FH
OP
?[y/n] FH
OP
?[y/n])

“Perpetual surveillance is the price of freedom,” Sabrie said, half-smiling. “Not to mention the price of not having to worry about some random psycho shooter when you go out for sushi.”

“But?”

“But there are limits. Your bosses are literally inside your
head.
” She dipped her chin at the jammer. “Do you think they’ll object to you providing a few unprompted answers? Given this new apparent policy of transparency and accountability?”

(FH
OP
?[y/n])

(
N
)

“I don’t know,” Becker said.

“You know what would make them even
more
transparent and accountable? If they released the video for the night of the 25th. I keep asking, and they keep telling me there isn’t any.”

Becker shook her head. “There isn’t.”

“Come on.”

“Really. Too memory-intensive. “

“Corporal, I’m recording
this,
” Sabrie pointed out. “16K, Slooped sound, no compression even.” She glanced into the street. “Half those people are life-logging every second of their lives for the sheer narcissistic thrill of it.”

“And they’re
streaming
it. Or caching and dumping every couple of hours. I don’t get the luxury of tossing my cookies into some cloud whenever my cache fills up. I have to be able to operate in the dark for weeks at a time: you stream any kind of data in the field, it points back at you like a big neon arrow.

“Besides, budget time rolls around, how much of your limited R&D funding are you going to take away from tactical computing so you can make longer nature documentaries?” Becker raised her expresso in a small mock toast. “You think the People’s Republic is losing any sleep over that one?”

Which is awfully convenient,
remarked a small voice,
When you’ve just—

She shut it off.

Sabrie gave her a sidelong look. “You can’t record video.”

“Sure I can. But it’s discretionary. You document anything you think needs documenting, but the default realtime stream is just numbers. Pure black-box stuff.”

“You didn’t think you needed to document—”

“I didn’t
know.
It wasn’t
conscious.
Why the
fuck
can’t you people—”

Sabrie watched her without a word.

“Sorry,” Becker said at last.

“It’s okay,” Sabrie said softly. “Rising bubbles. I get it.”

Overhead, the sun peeked around an office tower. A lozenge of brightness crept onto the table.

“You know what they were doing out there?” Sabrie asked. “Tionee and his friends?”

Becker closed her eyes for a moment. “Some kind of fishing trip.”

“And you never wondered why anyone would go night fishing in a place where there wasn’t anything to catch but slugs and slime?”

I never
stopped
wondering.
“I heard it was a—cultural thing. Keep the traditions alive, in case someone ever builds a tuna that eats limestone.”

“It was an art project.”

Becker squinted as the hockey puck bounced sunlight into her eyes. “Excuse me?”

“Let me get that for you.” Sabrie half-rose and reached for the center of the table. The parasol bloomed with a snap. The table dropped back into eclipse.

“That’s better.” Sabrie reseated herself.

“An art project?” Becker repeated.

“They were college students. Cultural anthropology and art history majors, wired in from Evergreen State. Re-enact the daily lives of your forebears, play them back along wavelengths outside the human sensory range. They were calling it
Through Alien Eyes.
Some kind of commentary on outsider perspectives.”

“What wavelengths?”

“Reesi was glassing everything from radio to gamma.”

“There’s a third-party recording?”

“Nothing especially hi-def. They were on a student budget, after all. But it was good enough to pick out a signal around four hundred megahertz. Nobody can quite figure out what it is. Not civilian, anyway.”

“That whole area’s contested. Military traffic all over the place.”

“Yeah, well. The thing is, it was a just a couple of really short bursts. Half a second, maybe. Around eleven-forty-five.”

Wingman froze. Gooseflesh rippled up Becker’s spine.

Sabrie leaned forward, hands flat on the table. “That wouldn’t have been you, would it?”

“You know I can’t discuss operational details.”

“Mmmm.” Sabrie watched and waited.

“I take it you have this recording,” Becker said at last.

The journalist smiled faintly. “You know I can’t discuss operational details.”

“I’m not asking you to compromise your sources. It just seems—odd.”

“Because your guys would have been all over the bodies before they were even cool. So if anyone had that kind of evidence, it would be them.”

“Something like that.”

“Don’t worry, you don’t have a mole. Or at least if you do, they don’t report to me. You want to blame anyone, blame your
wing man.
”

“What?”

“Your
preconscious triggers
tie into some pretty high-caliber weaponry. I’m guessing I don’t have to tell you what kind of games physics plays when multiple slugs hit a body at twelve hundred meters a second.”

Momentum. Inertia. Force vectors transferred from small masses to larger ones—and maybe back to smaller ones again. A pair of smartspecs could have flown twenty meters or more, landed way up in the weeds or splashed down in the lagoon.

“We wouldn’t have even known to look,” Becker murmured.

“We did.” Sabrie sipped her drink. “Want to hear it?”

Becker sat absolutely still.

“I know the rules, Nandita. I’m not asking you to ID it, or even comment. I just thought you might like . . . ”

Becker glanced down at the jammer.

“I think we should leave that on.” Sabrie reached into her blouse, fingered the luminous medallion hanging from her neck. “You have sockets, though, right? Hard interfaces?”

“I don’t spread my legs in public.”

Sabrie’s eyes flickered to the far side of the street, where a small unmarked quadrocopter had just dipped into sight below the rim of the parasol. “Let’s talk about your family,” she said.

Monahan didn’t seem put out.

“We thought she might try something like that. Sabrie’s hardly in the tank. But you did great, Corporal.”

“You were monitoring?”

“Like we’d let some gizmo from the Sony Store cut us out of the loop? I could’ve even whispered sweet nothings in your ear if I’d had to—acoustic tightbeam, she’d never have had a clue unless she leaned over and nibbled your earlobe—but like I say, you were just fine.” Some small afterthought made him frown. “Would’ve been easier if you’d just authorized frequency hopping, of course . . . ”

“She had a lot of gizmos on her,” Becker said. “If one of them had been able to pick up the signal . . . ”

“Right. Good plan. Let her think it worked.”

“Yes sir.”

“Just Ben. Oh, one other thing . . . ”

Becker waited.

“We lost contact for just a few moments there. When the umbrella went up.”

“You didn’t miss much. Apparently the collateral was doing a school project of some kind. Art history. They weren’t actually fishing, it was more of a—a re-enactment, I guess.”

“Huh. Pretty much what we heard.” Monahan nodded. “Next time, might help if you went to active logging. You know, when we’re out of contact.”

“Right. Sorry. I didn’t think.”

“Don’t apologize. After what you’ve been through I’d be amazed if you
didn’t
make the occasional slip.”

He patted her on the back. Wingman bristled.

“I gotta prep for a thing. Keep up the
great
work.”

All those devil’s bargains and no-win scenarios. All those exercises that tore her up inside. Turned out they were part of the fix. They had to parameterize Becker’s remorse before they could burn it out of her.

It was a simple procedure, they assured her, a small part of the scheduled block upgrade. Seven deep-focus microwave bursts targeting the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Ten minutes, tops. Not so much as a scar to show for it afterward. She didn’t even need to sign anything.

They didn’t put her under. They turned her off.

Coming back online, she didn’t feel much different. The usual faint hum at the back of her skull as Wingman lit up and looked around; the usual tremors in fingers and toes, half-way between a reboot sequence and a voltage spike. The memory of her distant malfunction seemed a bit less intense, but then again things often seemed clearer after a good night’s sleep. Maybe she was just finally seeing things in perspective.