Bethlehem and Others: Collected Stories

Okay.

  Becker turned in her seat, bent her neck so the journalist could glimpse the tip of the black enameled centipede bolted along her backbone. “Spinal and long-bone reinforcement to handle the extra weight. Wire-muscle overlays, store almost twenty Joules per cc.” There was almost a kind of comfort in rattling off the mindless specs. “Couples at over seventy percent under most—”

  A little, Corporal.

  “Anyway.” Becker shrugged, straightened. “Most of the stuff’s inside. The rest’s plug and play.” She took a breath, got down to it. “I should tell you up front I’m not authorized to talk about mission specifics.”

  Sabrie shrugged. “I’m not here to ask about them. I want to talk about you.” She tapped her menu, entered an order for kruggets and a Rising Tide. “What’re you having?”

  “Thanks. I’m not hungry.”

  “Of course.” The reporter glanced up. “You do eat, though, right? You still have a digestive system?”

  “Nah. They just plug me into the wall.” A smile to show she was kidding.

  Now you’re getting it.

  “Glad you can still make jokes,” Sabrie said from a face turned suddenly to stone.

  Shit. Walked right into that one.

  Down in the left hand, a tremor. Becker pulled her hands from the table, rested them on her lap.

  “Okay,” Sabrie said at last. “Let’s get started. I have to say I’m surprised Special Forces even let me talk to you. The normal response in cases like this is to refuse comment, double down, wait for a celebrity overdose to move the spotlight.”

  “I’m just following orders, ma’am.” The tic in Becker’s hand wouldn’t go away. She clasped her hands together, squeezed.

  “So let’s talk about something you can speak to,” Sabrie said. “How do you feel?”

  Becker blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “About what happened. Your role in it. How do you feel?”

  Be honest.

  “I feel fucking awful,” she said, and barely kept her voice from cracking. “How am I supposed to feel?”

  “Awful,” Sabrie admitted. She held silence for a respectable interval before pressing on. “The official story’s systems malfunction.”

  “The investigation is ongoing,” Becker said softly.

  “Still. That’s the word from sources. Your augments fired, you didn’t. No mens rea.”

  Blobs of false color, spreading out against the sand.

  “Do you feel like you killed them?”

  Tell her the truth, Monahan whispered.

  “I—part of me did. Maybe.”

  “They say the augments don’t do anything you wouldn’t do yourself. They just do it faster.”

  Six people on a fishing trip in an empty ocean. It didn’t make any fucking sense.

  “Is that the way you understand it?” Sabrie pressed. “The brain decides what it’s going to do before it knows it’s decided?”

  Becker forced herself to focus, managed a nod. Even that felt a bit shaky, although the journalist didn’t seem to notice. “Like a, a bubble rising from the bottom of a lake. We don’t see it until it breaks the surface. The augs see it—before.”

  “How does that feel?”

  “It feels like—” Becker hesitated.

  Honesty, Corporal. You’re doing great.

  “It’s like having a really good wingman sitting on your shoulder, watching your back. Taking out threats before you even see them. Except it’s using your own body to do that. Does that make sense?”

  “As much as it can, maybe. To someone who isn’t augged themselves.” Sabrie essayed a little frown. “Is that how it felt with Tionee?”

  “Who?”

  “Tionee Anoka. Reesi Eterika. Io—” She stopped at something she saw in Becker’s face.

  “I never knew,” Becker said after a moment.

  “Their names?”

  Becker nodded.

  “I can send you the list.”

  A waiter appeared, deposited a tumbler and a steaming platter of fluorescent red euphausiids in front of Sabrie; assessed the ambiance and retreated without a word.

  “I didn’t—” Becker closed her eyes. “I mean yes, it felt the same. At first. There had to be a threat, right? Because the augs—because I fired. And I’d be dead at least four times over by now if I always waited until I knew what I was firing at.” She swallowed against the lump in her throat. “Only this time things started to—sink in afterward. Why didn’t I see them coming? Why weren’t the—”

  Careful, Corporal. No tac.

  “Some of them were still—moving. One of them was talking. Trying to.”

  “To you?”

  Up in ultraviolet, the textured glass of the table fractured the incident sunlight into tiny rainbows. “No idea.”

  “What did they say?” Sabrie poked at her kruggets but didn’t eat.

  Becker shook her head. “I don’t speak Kiribati.”

  “All those augments and you don’t have realtime translation?”

  “I—I never thought of that.”

  “Maybe those smart machines saw the bubbles rising. Knew you wouldn’t want to know.”

  She hadn’t thought of that either.

  “So you feel awful,” Sabrie said. “What else?”

  “What else am I feeling?” The tremor had spread to both hands.

  “If it’s not too difficult.”

  What the fuck is this he said I’d be steady he said the drugs—

  “They gave me propranolol.” It was almost a whisper, and Becker wondered immediately if she’d crossed the line. But the voice in her head stayed silent.

  Sabrie nodded. “For the PTSD.”

  “I know how that sounds. It’s not like I was a victim or anything.” Becker stared at the table. “I don’t think it’s working.”

  “It’s a common complaint, out there on the cutting edge. All those neurotransmitters, synthetic hormones. Too many interactions. Things don’t always work the way they’re supposed to.”

  Monahan, you asshole. You’re the goddamn PR expert, you should’ve known I wasn’t up for this …

  “I feel worse than awful.” Becker could barely hear her own voice. “I feel sick …”

  Sabrie appraised her with black unblinking eyes.

  “This may be bigger than an interview,” she said at last. “Do you think we could arrange a couple of follow-ups, maybe turn this into an in-depth profile piece?”

  “I—I’d have to clear it with my superiors.”

  Sabrie nodded. “Of course.”

  Or maybe, Becker thought, you knew all along. As, two hundred fifty kilometers away, a tiny voice whooped in triumph.

  • • •

  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 dialog 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 redhead had replaced him while Becker had been racking up the kills. Tauchi, according to his nametag. She couldn’t see any augments, but he glowed with smartwear in the Megahertz range.

  “Jord’s on temporary reassignment,” he told her 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 re
aching for some control that had been hacked to ignite a tank of H2S 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 the augs 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—”

  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.

  (FHop?[y/n] FHop?[y/n] FHop?[y/n])

  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, and you know what? If all those eyes and ears can see the next Michael Harris before he draws down, I’m actually okay with that.”

  “Michael who?”

  “Guy in Orlando? Shot up a daycare a few years back?”

  “I must have been—” (FHop?[y/n])

  (n)

  “—wait, he shot up a daycare?”

  “Whole new level of fucked-up, I know. Killed forty people across three generations before they took him out.”

  “Why’d he do it?”

  Sabrie fixed her with a look. “Why did you?”

  Becker didn’t flinch. It took some effort.

  “Malfunction.” She kept her voice carefully colorless. “As far as anyone can tell.”

  “Same with Harris, probably.”

  “He had augments?”

  Sabrie shook her head. “Wiring can go just as bad when it’s made out of meat. Turns out he lost a sister himself, six months before, in another shooting. They say it tipped him over the edge.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “That shit never does. It’s what people say, though. They have to say something.” Something eased in her posture then, a subtle relaxation in the wake of some critical moment passed. “Anyway. I’m not one of those kneejerk privacy types, is what I’m saying. Sometimes the panopticon saves lives.”

  “And yet.” Becker nodded at the device on the table.

  “There are limits. The cameras are up there. 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?”

  “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 twenth-fifth. 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 espresso 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 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 400 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.”