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A tool and its user function as a unit, and the more complex and tightly integrated they are...
I’ve never understood how it could be stalking if all you’re trying to do is keep her safe. I just want to be a good father. Make up for all those years of being AWOL because CI-MEMS is a full-time job. You can’t be a father and CI-MEMS. That is, you can be one—that’s the same as for anyone else. You just wind up with big chunks of time when you have to choose between being AWOL from the Corps or from your family. And if you give your family more than a generic because-my-country-needs-me hint as to why, then you’re both in trouble.
Or that’s how it had been back before I became Staff Sgt. Kip McCorbin (Ret.). Before the (Ret.) bit, that is. Once that happened, it was just me . . . and the secrets.
Twenty years of missions. Twenty years of always being away. Chad, Ethosmalia, Kurdistan, the Altiplano Breakaway. Twenty years of never being able to explain. Then, when it ended and I finally could get my family back, it came at a price, like suddenly being blind. No, that’s not right. There are schools for the blind, a whole infrastructure for helping them learn to cope. As long as I had the Sense, I wouldn’t even mind being blind. Who needs eyes of their own when they have hundreds at their command? When you’ve been given a sense beyond eyes, beyond anything the norms have ever experienced?
Losing that is like losing your sense of touch. The world’s still there but you can no longer fully interact. Worse, in fact, because people at least know what a sense of touch is. Here, the only ones you can talk to are Corps psychs who only think they relate. How could someone understand what it would be like to lose the sense of touch if he’d never had it in the first place?
Twenty years of missions, and all the while Cora Ann was growing up. “Where’s Daddy?” had given way to “what-ever,” until, when they finally told me I was ready to re-enter the Sense-less world, Denise’s lawyer said it would be best if I just kept my distance. “She’s at a difficult age,” she said in one of her kinder comments. “The last thing she needs is you back in her life.”
Hell, they’re all difficult ages. Toddler, middle school, high school. Back when I had the Sense, I used it on furloughs to track her through her days, step by step. What father wouldn’t? Especially when the furloughs were so short, so few? Her first week at school, oh so brave, oh so frightened. Getting her navel pierced? Secretly, she thought, but I was there. First kiss? The guy was a total geek, but so was she. Back then, a solider-type was most emphatically not what she wanted. Back then, her rebellion took the form of geeks and peace rallies—my little radical, growing up in fits and starts when I wasn’t there, more and more often hiding from me when I was.
The damn psychs always had the same questions.
How do you feel about that?
What do you do when you feel that way?
I’ll tell you how I feel, what I do.
For three whole years, I panicked whenever someone walked up behind me, or when I rounded a corner and found something I didn’t know was there. It didn’t matter if it was a kid’s skateboard or another rehab patient on his own escorted walk. It was the not-knowing that mattered.
Three years of deconditioning until finally I convinced them I was again a norm. In CI-MEMS, that’s not a term of respect, but the psychs never picked that up. Three years of learning to live without, but never really succeeding because the absence is always, always there, like an itch you can’t scratch or an amputee’s phantom limb. The arm he thinks he can lift to grab that cup of coffee. The leg he tries to stand on when he gets out of bed, because a lifetime of conditioning tells him it’s there, only it isn’t. Because his nerves insist it’s still there even though its absence is the single, dominant factor of his life.
With a limb, you can explain all that. With a limb, you can get a prosthetic nearly as good as the original. But how could you explain losing the Sense, even if talking about it wasn’t a breach of everything you’d once sworn your life to protect?
That’s what I wanted to say during deconditioning. De-con, the Corps called it, complete with the stupid hyphen. Just one more big con, if you ask me: the illusion that when the missions were all over and done, you could go home and live a normal life. Total BS, something the psychs needed to believe so they could feel better about what they were doing. But I never said any of that because then they might never have let me out.
For three whole years, I tried to pretend I didn’t need anything but the senses I was born with. Didn’t feel that the lost one was still there but not, like the amputee wondering why the coffee cup won’t move when he reaches for it. Until eventually they gave me a pension and released me to the real world. Fifty-one years old, unsuitable for a job. Unsuitable for a family. Unsuitable for life.
The first thing I did was move to the Pacific Northwest. I’d spent a summer there and remembered the amazing, Mediterranean summers. Warm, dry, and pleasant. And miraculously insect-free. You could sleep all night with the windows open, no screen, and nary a gnat. Dine outdoors without flies in your food. A climate where nobody with the Sense would voluntarily go.
Then I saw Cora’s latest VidBook post.
I’m not supposed to be viewing her blog. She never let me in as a buddy, but you don’t spend as many years as I did on black ops and not know a bit about computers. Not to mention that she’d used her name and zip code as her password. CoraAnn78718. I’d cracked that even before the psychs released me to normal life.
I woke screaming.
I was blind, Senseless. The enemy was out there, and I didn’t know where. I didn’t know where anything was. Anything could be around the next corner. In the hallway, waiting to pounce, the moment I headed for the bathroom. How do people live like this? How could I live like this?
“I want it back!” I screamed into the night, my voice a raspy whine because I’d screamed this on so many nights since I no longer had to look like I was recovered. “Oh, God, I want it back! I want it back I want it back I want it back I want it BACK!!!”
It was worse than losing Denise. Worse than Cora. This had been part of me. A part that would never, ever be again. Even after three years with the psychs, there were times I wasn’t sure I could make it.
* * *
Jerret was afraid. So was I, for that matter. CI-MEMS was designed for urban warfare. Tight quarters, where the Sense gave you overwhelming advantage. Not to mention that the rest of the squad protected you like their very lives depended on it. Casualty rates on missions with CI-MEMS operators were one-third those of other ops—and we usually drew the more dangerous missions. It was a good incentive to keep the operator alive.
The first to be aware of danger, the last to face it, that was us. But not in this damn desert, where any sniper with a night scope could nail you from way beyond Sense range. It said something that they’d put two of us on this squad. Too much chance of losing one or the other, someone must have figured.
Jerret’s hand twitched, dislodging a member of my swarm that had gotten too close, tickling the hair on the back of his wrist. Sloppy on my part. I’d been concentrating on my fringes, hoping to catch some trace of a Ladenite sniper before he caught us.
Jerret knew what the insect had meant. “I’m okay,” he whispered. A human couldn’t have heard him from two feet away, but my bugs got it. Only he wasn’t okay. Heart rate, respiration, skin conductivity, breathing, pupils . . . all indicated fear. Not to mention deception. Jerret was scared to death. Right on the verge of losing it. Luckily, he didn’t ask me because he’d have caught me in the same lie. All these open spaces. We just weren’t designed for them.
Cora’s VidBook post wouldn’t have caught anyone else’s attention.
“You wouldn’t believe the flies here!” she gushed into the camera, holding it too close, like everyone does, making her look like her nose was three sizes too big. Actually, it’s a perfect match for the lively blue eyes and long, blond hair so achingly like her mother’s at the same age. “They follow me everywhere! Yesterday four of them—I counted—zipped into the bedroom before I could shut the door. Then they just kind of hovered as I changed clothes. Can you imagine that? Cuh-reepy! Don’t they have any girl-flies to peep?”
Zip code 78718 is in Austin, Texas. I’ve never seen her apartment—I don’t want more court orders—but I know Austin. It has flies, but it’s nothing like Virginia, where she grew up. Not in November, anyway.
It was probably nothing, but you don’t survive twenty years in CI-MEMS without being paranoid. Even if you’re not on a black op, they send you to places where anybody, even the kid begging for change, could be carrying, and where 90 percent of the rest hate you anyway. The easy missions are the hunter/killer ones, where your job is to find a specific target while dodging noncombatants. Then, at least, everything’s cut and dried. The patrols that turn you paranoid are the ones where you’re just passing through, trying to spot real threats without slaughtering the maybes.
When I was new to the Corps, I tallied two statistics. Bad guys taken out and guilty-acting innocents saved. But after a while, I realized that tallies don’t matter. Each mission is a world unto itself. Get in, do the job (meaning get the right people and not the wrong ones), and get out. Preferably with the rest of your unit alive.
I was good at it. Even in the first weeks of training, they told me I had an unusual ability to integrate. What they didn’t tell me was this meant the loss, when it came, would be all the more devastating.
I woke with the instant, unmoving alertness only years of missions can train. This time I wasn’t in bed; I was on the couch. The TV was on—a get-rich-quick infomercial or something equally late-night brainless.
I wasn’t alone. I could Sense someone behind me. He was looking out the window, his face a blur of face paint. Blue jeans and a dark serape. His Uzi was carelessly gripped in one hand, but the nonchalance was deceptive, the relaxation of a snake at rest, capable of coiling and striking before you even knew what happened. He’d done it before, and would do it again until somebody coiled and struck faster. He wasn’t expecting anything like that at the moment, but still, he was ready for quick action, studying the road outside, waiting, watching. Waiting for something like my patrol, still out of sight around the corner. His pulse was low, his breathing steady. A trained killer, perfect in his element.
I drew back from my fringe, preparing to report. Take him out or bypass him? The sentry on the other side of the building wasn’t as alert. If we could get a couple men in unseen, I could guide them, coordinate the attack, a wordless game of follow-my-swarm and attack when I gave the signal, which could be as simple as a fly buzzing in the ear. We’d done it before, sometimes against as many as four targets spread across a thousand-foot front, one of the reasons I’d quit counting.
But something didn’t fit. I couldn’t find anyone to report to. Had the sentry somehow gotten everyone but me? And where was my real body, anyway? I was so far extended into the Sense I seemed to have lost touch with my own surroundings.
It was the TV that did it. The infomercial was in English. Not Spanish, Arabic, or anything else. It was telling me how to make a fortune investing in foreclosed properties. Not something a serape-draped sentry would be listening to, even if he was willing to put up with the distraction.
Still, it was all I could do to force myself to look back. But there was nothing there but a bookshelf. My own books, my own apartment. Me. Alone. In Seattle. As I’d been for two years.
I sat up, pulled the phone from its charger, dialed a too-familiar number.
“Yeah?” a voice said.
“It happened again.”
“Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye?”
“Not sure.” I describe the scene. “Might have been the Altiplano. After a while, they all blur.”
“Yeah. Last night I was sure there were snakes in the room. Why snakes? I never even saw one in the field. That was the least of my worries.”
We talked a bit longer, until I was really ready for sleep. I had no idea who he was; we’d found each other online, and communicated by dummy accounts and encrypted lines. Secrecy’s a hard habit to break. But it was better than calling the Corps psychs and getting a diagnosis like paranoid schizophrenia on your record.
The Sense is a lot of things. It lets you see around corners or into any room with a crack big enough for an insect to slip through. But it’s more than seeing. If they make a microdetector for something, they can mount it in a swarm.
For a lot of operators, the information’s just that: data. You need a computer to interpret it and run the swarm, and you wind up sitting back on base with a bank of electronics: coffee in hand, A/C, the whole nine yards.
But that’s just fancy remote sensing.
If you’ve got the ability to integrate, the data cease to be data. Add an interface descended from those used for prosthetic limbs, like that concert pianist who plays Chopin with a mechanical hand, and you’ve got true CI-MEMS. The data bits disappear and you wind up with things you simply know, on par with it’s raining or I’m on a tropical beach.
Most people never make that leap. But for those who do, CI-MEMS is more than a way to see around corners. It’s an emotion-sensor in the air. In a crowded bazaar you know who’s hostile and who’s just scared. Who’ll run away if you give them a chance, who’s just out to save face, who’s a true believer.
Back on base, though, nobody wants you around. Everyone’s got secrets—and while you may not know the details, you sure as hell know when one’s there. Not to mention being able to win at poker even if you promise not to peek. Keeping track of things becomes a habit, even when there’s no real need. Maybe that’s how stalkers are born. The Sense makes you allergic to surprises. If you can know, you want to. If you can’t, you get desperate.
The intel had been absolutely clear. The Ladenites were somewhere across the valley. Five square klicks of boulders, snakes, and who knows what. There were at least fifteen of them, fifteen who the sat intel had caught going in, but not out. Drones had seen four of them again, IDing two as important enough to be worth an incursion into a nominally friendly country.
We’d come in low and quiet, shortly after dark. A quick drop, a not-so-quick march, and now we were staring across the damn Valley of Death, like a scaled-down version of the six hundred. We should have circled east, higher up, and come back, along the ridge. But now, with dawn looming, our only hope was that their lookout wasn’t all that well equipped.
“You see anything, Jerret?” I spoke softly, right at the limit of my ability to form the words. No need for radios; our swarms were the best way to communicate. If the answer was worth anything, I’d pass it on to the grunt assigned to keep me alive, and he’d hand-signal it to the others. I suppose in theory the enemy could zero in on the link to and from my bugs, but unless you’re using dragonflies or something else big enough to carry a real transmitter, the range is pretty limited. Anyone who has the equipment to sort it out from the background mish of cordless phones, microwave ovens, and garage-door openers is too well dug in for us anyway. In the city, at least. Here, to the right equipment, Jerret and I might stand out like beacons.
Cora’s next post was the one that really got my attention.
“You wouldn’t believe how hard these flies are to kill! It’s like they know what a flyswatter is, because the moment I pick one up, they’re gone. I finally got one last night, when it followed me into the shower. I turned up the water and steamed that sucker, good! Thwacked it with a towel while I was at it.”
Lt. McCarthy was going to be hurting tomorrow. If we lived that long. He was staring across the valley through night-vision glasses, in a vain hope of seeing things Jerret and I hadn’t been able to spot, and in the process he’d scooched though a field of something like miniature prickly pear cactus. My swarm had all the night vision the patrol really needed, and I could see the spines sticking out of his forearms like a stubble of blond hairs.
I should have felt sorry for him, but only newbies go that heavy on the pain blocker. From the number of spines, he must have wormed his way through a whole patch of the stuff without noticing. Do things like that a few times, and you decide a bit of short-term pain’s not as bad as it sounds. Yeah, with less block, you’ll hurt more if something awful happens, but the awful stuff is what we’re all trying to avoid, anyway.
Usually, only senior officers get command of CI-MEMS patrols. We were just too valuable to risk. But Lt. McCarthy was green. “Don’t worry,” he’d said as we were leaving base. “Captain Thomas has the Shanghai flu, but he’ll be okay. I grew up in Arizona. I know all about deserts. We’ll do fine.”
Someday, maybe officers will know better than to lie to CI-MEMS operators. It creates “interesting dynamics,” a base shrink once told me. Maybe. One thing I’d learned was that outing the liar’s worse than playing elephant-in-the-living-room. Though in this case the grunts didn’t believe him any more than I did.
If there’s a single piece of my life I wish I could do over, it’s the day I hit Denise.
I didn’t mean to, at least not that way.
Three weeks earlier, I’d flunked a physical—nothing serious, just a bit of arthritis, creeping blood pressure, and a few other things that might or might not be problems in a couple of decades but that they couldn’t risk in the field. Nor did they have a post for me as an instructor. Sorry about that, etc., but we’ve got all we need.
The first step in De-con is simple. They just quit supplying you with insects. Since most only live two to four weeks, and some are always nearing the end, you decline pretty rapidly. But until you’re below 20 percent, you can live at home.
I’d lost that much of my swarm on missions, several times. The blast from a big explosion can do it. And there was the time a wind gust blew my entire fringe beyond retrieval range. Not to mention bats. Even if you’re watching for them, they’re damn fast and hard to dodge.
But this was different. Lose your swarm in the field, and the techs’ll get you replacements as quickly as they can wire ’em up. Here each loss was forever. The psychs say withdrawing that way’s better than going cold turkey. Maybe. What it feels like is extended death.
For ten days, I felt my swarm die. There must have been some chemical in the air, because I was losing them way too soon. I desperately wanted to hold on to what I had. Would have done anything to buy an extra week, day, hour.
Then the neighbors bought their kid a remote-controlled toy—some flying thing that was probably supposed to be a Moon lander. That shouldn’t have been a problem, but there must have been something wrong with my bugs’ control chips, because the toy threw out enough interference to mess up contact with what few remained. In the field, somebody would have fixed that, fast. Here, I didn’t even bother reporting it. They’d have just told me I was ready for to go inpatient a week ahead of schedule. No big deal. Except to me.
Denial is one of the world’s most powerful emotions. As long as I was free and mobile . . . as long as I had some remnant of the Sense . . . I could pretend the end wasn’t really going to happen. Not yet. Tomorrow maybe, but not today. Until then, I could at least pretend.
Denise didn’t know about the Sense. All she knew was that I was special ops and that the spiral tattoo that covered most of my back and shoulders had something to do with it. What, precisely, she’d known better than to ask. But other than a calculator on the inside of my wrist, I’d never favored body art, so she had to have guessed it was some sort of bio-mod.
One of the ironies of De-con is that with the insects gone, the Corps figures there’s no need to remove the tat. They think it’s a kindness, but actually it’s a daily reminder of what I’ve lost, like the photos of Denise and Cora Ann I still kept on my nightstand, smiling over me like they no longer do in real life.
Lt. McCarthy was in my section, so monitoring him was my responsibility.
“You see anything, McCorbin?” He spoke louder than necessary, as though he didn’t quite get that I had insects in the very bush he was attempting to peer through.
I inched through sketchy cover until I was close enough for quiet conversation, suppressing the urge to say something insubordinate. How the hell could I see anything? I had my fringe extended as far as possible, but it was only a fraction of the way to the opposing ridge.
“No,” I said. Nothing but rocks. Big ones. Any of which could have a dozen Ladenites behind it.
“What about Lapp?”
“He’d have told me if he did.”
The lieutenant was a vague blur of desert camouflage in my real sight, but in the Sense he stood out like an emotional beacon. Unsure. Frightened. Determined to prove himself. A whole slew of ways to get us killed. There are things CI-MEMS operators rarely talk about, even among themselves. Knowing your squad leader’s self-doubts is one of the scariest.
Scarier still was the subtext. Whatever else he was, Lt. McCarthy was no coward. We were about to become the Light Brigade . . . though instead of six hundred of us, there were only a dozen.
I woke screaming.
I was blind, Senseless. The enemy was out there and I didn’t know where. I didn’t know where anything was.
We’d been flitting from doorway to doorway, nearly invisible in midnight camo. I’d been at the rear—but not by much, because the place felt like a trap and we needed my perimeter as far ahead as possible. Still, I’d found nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe there was nothing to find. The scariest missions were those where the intel was wrong. Where you inched from house to house, waiting to Sense something before the bullets stitched you . . . only to discover, hours later, that there had never been anything to find.
But this time there was something. I just never got a chance to find it.
Booby traps are one of the things I most feared. Even simple tripwires can be hard to spot. I found better than 95 percent of them, but when I missed one, someone died. It wasn’t one of those things I liked to think about.
The only thing I knew for sure was that the entire street exploded. No, that wasn’t right; there were no gouts of flame, no crashing masonry. These people didn’t want to blow up their neighborhood. These were flash-bangs: concussion grenades. Or maybe just big firecrackers. I’d had someone toss one of those in a dorm room the year I tried college, before I decided that that life wasn’t for me. In the confined space, it might as well have been a concussion grenade.
Whatever they were, there were a lot of them, all wired to go off at once. My entire perimeter was off-line, probably dead.
The enemy was out there, alert now, with me suddenly blind as a norm. I was the one who was supposed to know where they were, but even as I sent my few remaining assets up the street, I knew it was too late. And it was all my fault. My fault because I’d not seen the tripwire. My fault because I’d not found the enemy before the explosion. My fault because I’d had so much of my Sense on the perimeter that I now had too little left to do anything other than watch my squad die. Dead from a trick I should have anticipated, a trick that had nearly cost me my hearing in college. My fault—
I sat up, pulled the phone from its charger, dialed.
“Yeah?”
“It happened again.”
“Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye?”
“Nightmare.”
Or maybe a daydream. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Long ago, after a mission on which we only escaped because I could pinpoint the enemy well enough for our snipers to get them through blacked-out windows, I got wondering how, if I were the enemy, I’d beat myself. Flash-bangs was how I’d do it. Or anything that would knock out my swarm over a broad front, all at once. Make me a norm, render the patrol helpless. Then close in for the kill.
We got about halfway across the valley. Still out of Sense range.
The first to buy it was the grunt assigned to baby-sit me. PFC Aston Stanley. One moment he was worming forward toward the next bush. The next, a high-velocity round punched through the hollow of his neck and into his chest. I knew because I had several bugs right there and could feel the impact, feel the consciousness vanish as the shock made jelly of his chest and gut.
“Sniper!” I yelled, and was already moving, one-two-three seconds before I heard the report of the shot that killed him. Three seconds away. A thousand meters. Impossibly beyond Sense range.
A bullet raised dust in the spot where I’d been half a second before. I braked hard and rolled back the direction I’d come from, just in time to dodge a second round. However many snipers there were up there, they were damned good. And obviously equipped with night scopes.
Desperately I looked for a place to hide. Reversed course again, dog scrambling, hands and toes. This time, the round missed me by farther than before, but that was false reassurance. At this range, the bullet only spent a little more than a second in flight. I couldn’t outguess the sniper forever.
There were no rocks big enough for meaningful cover. Bushes were worthless. As long as the sniper knew where I was, he’d just shoot through them. He might miss a couple times, but he’d get me eventually.
It was the Sense that saved me. At the first sign of trouble, I’d scattered my reserves, looking for somewhere, anywhere to hide, dedicating my biological eyes to my frantic efforts to dodge.
What my Sense found was an arroyo, cutting across the valley floor in front of me. I didn’t even bother to see how deep it was. Still scrambling—getting to my feet took too much time—I zigged, zagged, got lucky three more times, and then was falling, headfirst, as a final round spat gravel from the gully wall.
As far as Denise knew, I was about to ship out on yet another mission and wanted every possible minute with her. We’d always been like that, spending those last nights clinging to each other, willing the clock to stop, determined not to waste those precious moments sleeping, because they might be all we’d ever have. For once, there was no risk of being shot, but I still wanted to carry every second’s memory into De-con.
Absurdly, it was that desire that cost me my marriage. Irony strikes hard when you have years to regret.
Before CI-MEMS, those final evenings had been just her and me. Then, that had been enough. When you’re young, you’re sure you can read your lover’s mind.
I don’t know what happens to most couples. Maybe, if they stay deeply enough in love, they never forget how to read each other. Me, I quit having to guess. CI-MEMS didn’t literally tell me what she was thinking, but it did let me know her mood as clearly as my own. When she said, “I love you,” I could feel the depth of it, as hundreds of tiny sensors read the trivia of breath, heart rate, skin conductivity, and skin temperature—not simply as data, but as a gestalt that converted her words to a reality at least as much a part of me as she was.
But now, my swarm was dying and the damn kid’s remote was making a hash of what remained. Hour by hour, I was becoming more disconnected. Hour by hour, Denise seemed more distant. At the time, these seemed like separate crises. Only in retrospect did I put them together.
She was in the kitchen, opening cupboards, moving boxes and cans to see what lay behind. Her way of working out a shopping list. Me, I just go to the store and buy whatever looks useful. I’ve had enough hyper-preparedness on missions.
She didn’t notice until I came up behind, put my arms around her, and nuzzled her neck. “I’m sorry about all the times away. This is the last one.”
She turned, pulling back to see me better. “Really?”
We’d talked about retirement before, but only in a general way. “Really. There’s just one more thing they want me to do. It’s even in the States.” Actually, it would be on base, but I wouldn’t be allowed to see her until I was released, so there was no sense telling her. “No risk of anyone shooting at me.”
I expected her to launch herself into my arms, but instead, she drew further away until she was backed up against the edge of the counter. “It’s about time. Cora used to worship you. You may have noticed she’s not been around much.”
I had, but I’d put it down to general teenage-itis. But now that I thought about it, she’d been that way on my last couple of furloughs, too. Emotionally AWOL from me, just as I’d been from her. Obvious, now that I thought of it, but most of the time, she’d been beyond Sense range. If a tree falls in the forest, and all that. After enough time, the Sense doesn’t just help you interpret reality, it is reality. When she had been around, the contacts had been fleeting hints of a vague wrongness I’d ascribed to normal teenage angst.
But I hadn’t really tried, either. Both of those furloughs had been cut short. Emergencies in places where American troops weren’t even supposed to be. More opportunities for the tallies of success and failure I’d quit making—not because I’d truly managed to focus on one mission at a time, but because each number in the tally—whether a life spared or a life wasted—was a person, with his own Denise and Cora waiting somewhere.
Tell that to the psychs, and they’d say I’d ceased to believe. But it wasn’t that. Some of these people really were bad guys. But in the process of doing what I had to do, year after year, I’d done something to myself, something that made it both more urgent and more difficult to be around Denise, around Cora.
Or maybe I was just burning out. There’d been some pretty hairy missions and even if I could have talked about them, I wouldn’t have, because to say anything would have been to reveal just how close I’d come to dying so many times. Without the Sense, I wouldn’t have made it through more than a handful of them. Without the Sense, I wouldn’t be alive now. With it gone, I would soon no longer feel alive.
“I’ll make it up to her.”
“If it’s not too late.”
There was an edge to her voice I’d never heard before. Or maybe it had been there—it wasn’t as if we’d never argued—but no longer able to Sense beneath the words, I suddenly found it overwhelming.
I let a few flies buzz close, but they told me nothing useful. Skin temperature 94.2. Respiration 16. It was just data. My swarm had shrunk to the point where I could no longer tell how she felt.
“Are we okay?” I blurted.
“What do you mean?”
“Are we okay?” I hesitated. Took the plunge. “Do you still love me?”
“What on Earth would make you ask that?”
“That’s not an answer. Do you still love me?”
“Like when we were kids?”
“Yes . . . No . . . Like when . . .” Like when we clung against the partings. When we thought each moment might be our last. “Like we used to.”
Once, even without the Sense, I’d been able to read her soul through her eyes. But that was then. The Sense had augmented me but it had also contracted me. Now, I couldn’t read anything.
“Like we used to,” I said again.
She might have saved the moment with a kiss. Instead, she sighed. “Oh, Kip, of course I love you. It’s just that you’ve been gone so much . . . And when you come back . . . It’s as though part of you is somewhere else. Like you don’t really want to be here.”
“That’s not it. It’s just the job—”
“That’s what you always say. Well, this is ‘just’”—she fingered quote marks in the air—“us. ‘Just’ me. ‘Just’ Cora.”
I felt as though I’d been slapped. And I still couldn’t marshal enough bugs to get an integrated read. Heart rate 89. Pupils narrowed. Were those good signs or bad? A trainee could look it up in a manual, but I’d been deeply integrated for so long that I needed a true, fully functioning swarm. Friend/foe. Danger/safety. Love/love-lost. I no longer had enough sensors to translate “data” into “knowing.” I was losing that ability just when it felt like my whole life depended on getting it right.
“Are you seeing someone else?” I asked.
“What?” Skin conductivity 7.3. Breath 22. “What the hell are you talking about?” She swatted at a bug, distracting me as I reflexively pulled it back, feeling as though she was trying to destroy what little remained of me.
“You heard me. Are you seeing someone else?”
She pushed past me, heading for the side door, into the garage. “If you have to ask, you don’t really know me.” A moment later, the garage door rumbled up and tires squealed in the driveway.
The gully was deep enough to hide me, but also deep enough to dislocate my shoulder.
I’d always been told that on the pain scale, unless you go way high on the pain blocker, dislocations are about as close to a ten as you can get. But there’s also something about them that’s the stuff of nightmares. In training, there was a guy who slipped on a run, fell, and dislocated a finger. His left pinky, to be precise. I’ll never forget it, sticking out at an angle fingers aren’t supposed to point. We didn’t have a medic, hadn’t had any training yet in first aid, and it was just the two of us, so we ran back to base. Four miles. He never said a word. I didn’t either, but I couldn’t shut out the image of that hand. And now it was me. It wasn’t just the pain; it was the knowledge my shoulder no longer looked like a shoulder. My vision was tunneling toward a black spot and my ears felt stuffed with cotton—no sound but my pulse, receding by the second.
Then, training took over. Pain tab first. But not too much, because setting a shoulder correctly requires you to feel what you’re doing. Otherwise, you can wreck it forever. Or worse, damage nerves that helped integrate my tat with my swarm.
Next step: breathe deeply, calm down. Not easy because I didn’t have much time. The Ladenites knew where I was and would be here in minutes.
I thought of Denise, Cora. Fought back despair. If I was ever going to see them again, I had to do this right. I willed my breathing to slow, hoping my heart rate would follow. Thought of home. Thought of those before-departure nights in Denise’s arms. Felt my heart rate slow. Sensed myself to verify it was true.
Then I had to roll over on my stomach.
The first time it didn’t work. Bone rubbed against bone, thrumming through my entire body. For a moment, I thought the cotton would win and I’d pass out, helpless while the Ladenites found me. But when you really have to stay conscious, you can. On the third try, I made it onto my stomach and lay there, heaving, sweat cooling in the small of my back.
Next step, use the good arm to move the bad one out to the side. Slowly, because it hurt like hell. Forget the Ladenites who might already be heading this way. I had to do it right, and right was slowly. Besides, none of this had affected my swarm, and the familiarity of the Sense helped calm me. Reality was more than my own body. Nothing dangerous was coming yet.
Finally, the hard part. Reach upward and back, as though trying to scratch my back. Use the good arm to draw the bad one up and over. And then, snick, with a white-hot stab of pain, the shoulder was again a shoulder.
The disaster came later that evening. By mistake. A trivial, stupid, senseless accident. A Sense-less accident.
After Denise made her exit, I retreated to the basement—a cocoon into which I pulled what remained of my Sense with me. I tried to watch football. Couldn’t work up the energy to care. Channel-surfed. Wondered where she’d gone. Wondered if she was now with him. Wondered who he was. Wondered, in my more sane moments, if I was wondering the wrong things. Wished I knew. Wished I still had the ability to know.
And then, amazingly, I fell asleep.
Emotional trauma does that to you. One moment you’re balling your fists, wanting to punch through walls, as though you could physically hammer your way out of the box your mind has put you into. Then, suddenly, you’re so tired you can’t think. So tired the beer on the end table is an enormous dead weight, not worth the effort to lift, and instead of drinking yourself to sleep like you thought you were going to, you’re just suddenly, overwhelmingly asleep.
Until, of course, you wake.
Nowadays, waking comes too many times, too soon, at the behest of a middle-aged prostate. The first time, I stumble to the bathroom and try to pee in my sleep. Sometimes it works. Second time? No way. By then I’ve had the magic five hours—the amount the Corps says you can function on (if slightly zombified) nearly forever. At five hours, what you think is, Don’t think about it! Don’t . . . don’t . . . DON’T! Which of course means you can’t help but think about it. It being the Sense. Or Denise. Or Cora. Whatever was most hurting when you lost strength to lift that beer.
However long Denise was away, it wasn’t that long. What woke me was the knowledge someone was there. A swish of feet, a muffled thunk, a shadowed shape between me and the stairs, between me and escape. After enough years in the field, you sleep lightly, wake quickly, and give no sign when you flip from one to the other.
Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye? Who knows? Once upon a time, she’d have come quietly up, hugged me, and kissed my ear. Once upon a time, I’d have known this, pretended to be pleasantly surprised anyway.
Now, everything was a surprise.
For one horrible moment, I was back in the ravine.
They were coming for me. How many I wasn’t sure. I’d had my fringe out too far, too long, and had to pull them back to recharge. With my shoulder dislocated, I hadn’t been able to do it. If you don’t bring the bugs within a couple of centimeters of the tat, the connection’s too remote and you burn too much glycogen powering the charger, like a marathoner hitting the wall. You have to charge them close-up.
But until I’d gotten the shoulder reset, I just couldn’t concentrate—not enough to hover insects close enough to do any good.
Now, as I struggled to make up for lost time, I had bugs stacked up like fighter pilots practicing touch-and-goes: zooming in close enough to pick up a bit of charge, then moving out so more could take their turns. I’d be lucky not to lose a few, as the charges faded in their cybernetic brains and whatever remained of the unmodified insect took over and flew off to do whatever it is insects do on their own.
Meanwhile, I had to move. There’d been no shooting for several minutes, and my squad clearly hadn’t won. The Ladenites had to be on their way.
My first job was to reconnoiter. As bugs recharged, I sent them up-gully, looking for branchings. If I could get far enough before the gully got too steep or narrow, I’d be back in the land of boulders and just might be able to keep out of sight. Box myself in and I was dead.
For sixteen hours, I played cat and mouse. Several times, I had clear shots, but didn’t dare take them. With the Sense, I could keep ahead, but it was sixteen hours of hyper-vigilance. Sixteen hours of trying to ignore the increasing stiffness of my shoulder. Sixteen hours of being the hunted, rather than the hunter.
When rescue came, I was nearly too tired to care. So tired it took me a moment to react when a fly not mine landed on my arm. So tired I could barely make my eyes focus to see the tiny chip behind its head. So tired, I didn’t realize I was safe, not even when the other team’s CI-MEMS operator approached, accompanied by none other than a miraculously ambulatory Captain Thomas.
Captain Thomas and his team circled up-valley and around, as we should have the night before. Three hours later, I heard gunfire, saw the star-bright pinpricks of muzzle flashes. Soon after, they were back with me, taking less than an hour to cross the distance over which I’d played a day-long game of life-and-death hide-and-seek: the confidence of those who’d gotten close enough for their CI-MEMS operator to be sure he’d found everything they were looking for.
They brought two more survivors. One was a grunt who’d managed to find his way to a boulder field from which he could dodge to safety, rock-to-rock.
The other was Jerret.
I hoped like hell I’d never be like him.
There’s a way it should be when the woman you love comes up unexpectedly behind you. First is the jolt—the realization someone’s there. Then the recognition: a turn, a kiss, pulling each other close and wishing you need never, ever let go.
And while I’d long been faking the surprise, the rest—the never wanting to let go . . . that had been as real on our twentieth anniversary as our first. It was just that Sense had replaced surprise, data had replaced intuition. Nor was the ravine the only time I’d nearly died: it was merely the most protracted.
Too many emotions all at once. Too little knowledge. When that happens you fall back on training. No, you fall back on survival.
If I’d had a weapon, I might have killed her.
I have no idea what I thought I was lashing out at. I had too little Sense to know anything other than where she was. I certainly didn’t see a petite woman. More like a hulking enemy.
Getting out of a recliner is normally a clumsy process. But in panic mode it’s easy: convulse your hamstrings to push the footrest down, then use the momentum to launch your body forward. That last bit of Sense, or perhaps memory, told me where I’d left the beer can. Energized now by fear and adrenaline, I had plenty of power to lift and hurl it, hearing but not fully processing the yelp as it struck her square on the jaw.
With the hulking menace now off guard, I cut back, hard—hard enough to hear my foot pop as I pivoted back toward the threat. A fracture of the fifth metatarsal, I’d later learn, but at the time I barely felt it. Instead, I drove a punch into the soft, unprepared belly, followed by a forearm across the exposed throat, driving her backward into the oak-paneled wall.
And then, finally, I realized where I was. Who this had to be. What I was doing.
I dropped my arm. “Oh my God.” An oath? A prayer? Who knows.
Denise didn’t care.
“You bastard,” she said.
I stepped back. Groped for words but found none, even as she headed for the stairs—out of my life.
“It wasn’t as though I didn’t have plenty of chances to actually have an affair,” she said.
I woke screaming. But this time, I wasn’t me. I was him, just as I’d seen him on the battlefield that day, with the wild-eyed stare of someone who’d never be the same.
He’d been a bad enough sight physically. Blood and dirt staining his face and uniform a muddy red-brown dusted in white, like an earthquake victim pulled from the rubble. A dirty kerchief wrapped a hand where, I later learned, two fingers were broken. More bandage, fresh gauze this time, supplied by his rescuers, peeked from beneath his helmet, streaked crimson where a wound still oozed.
He had no idea what had hit him. Whatever it was had knocked him out long enough for his swarm to lose direction, wander off, vanish. Long enough that when he woke, he was totally cut off. Long enough he was no longer the Jerret he’d been.
Something similar happens when you sleep, but then, you park your insects in standby mode. It’s as automatic as closing your eyes. But in combat you have every resource extended, recalling them only by conscious choice. Had my headfirst dive concussed me rather than dislocated my shoulder, I could easily have been Jerret. Now, at least once a week, I dream I am.
The psychs say gradual withdrawal is best. Maybe. But when I wake screaming . . . the end result appears exactly the same.
“I got a surprise today,” Cora told the mirror cam. She was vidblogging from her bathroom, where she’d hooked a camera to the mirror, talking while applying her makeup. I’d been startled the first time she did that, but so long as she was adequately dressed, I suppose the bathroom’s as good a place as any.
The camera was mounted above her head, rounding the curves of her face by foreshortening her image ever so slightly. If she stood in just the right place, it also caught her reflection in a mirror on the door behind, producing a vanishing-infinity effect as Cora fronts and Cora backs disappeared into the distance. It was like seeing her through an endless corridor: the type of thing people describe in near-death experiences, except that in those, there’s supposed to be a light at the end. Here, there were only ever-more-distant Coras, receding forever.
“I was in the mall, shopping for a new dress. This one in fact.” She stepped out of sight, then back, holding a black, scoop-necked gown. She’d always had good taste.
“Isn’t it cute? Anyway, as I came out of Allemontes I was sure I saw Jerret heading for the escalator. I ran over, but by the time I got there, he was gone. Maybe it was just someone who looked like him.”
She paused.
“And Daddy . . . I know you’re listening. I’m not stupid, you know. You didn’t hack onto this; I let you. You want to know about me . . . ?” She drew back, hands on hips. “Well, this is me. I grew up. I get to choose who I date. You were never there. And when you were there, there was nothing I could do to make you stay. Always another mission. Always off nearly getting killed. You don’t think I couldn’t tell?”
Tears beaded and she blinked. Blinked again. “Nothing I could do would make you stay. Do you remember me asking about that as a little girl? You just said you had no choice. Well even then I knew that was BS. Everyone has a choice. You chose to be elsewhere.
“Did you know, my sophomore year in high school, all those A’s were for you? I thought maybe if I was good enough you’d stay. Silly me. Soccer too. Mom told me you’d been this super-athlete before you went in the Army—sorry, Corps, whatever that was. Why didn’t you ever tell us anything? Anyway, the soccer didn’t matter, either. Even making all-conference wasn’t good enough. All you wanted was your damn adrenaline rush or whatever it was you got out of almost being killed all the time. Nothing I did was ever going to be more important. Nothing was ever going to be good enough.”
The tears were spilling now, threatening her makeup. “But it was good enough for Jerret. He didn’t care whether I got A’s or D’s. Didn’t care if I dropped out of college. And then suddenly you were back, telling me that if I loved you I’d quit seeing him. And then you were gone again. You had no right. Do you hear me? No right. I know he was a lot older than me. I know he was getting a bit scary—after I dumped him, he came back five times. I’m not stupid, Daddy. But it was my decision. Not yours. Not when you were then gone again on that ‘last’ mission. The one that was only going to last three months but went on for years. I can’t believe I fell for it.
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve got wounds, too. It’s just that mine aren’t the type to leave scars you can see.”
Her face scrunched, and she knuckled tears out of her eyes, undoing any pretense of saving the makeup. “Damn you, Daddy. Damn you for everything.”
Then her focus shifted and she swiped at the air in front of her, as fiercely as moments before she’d dug at her tears. “And what the hell is it with these flies?”
For a long time, I stared at her image, frozen in the act of reaching for the off-switch. I could have replayed the whole thing, but there was no point. I merely looked at her, remembering the little girl—the pert nose and half-smile, the eyes, now rimmed with ruined eye-liner, that once never left my own. The eyes in which, once, I could do no wrong. The eyes I had managed to wrong so deeply.
I would give anything for a chance to do it over. But would it be any different? Surely it hadn’t just been adrenaline I’d craved. It was the need to be whole: the knowledge that the moment the missions ended, they’d take it away. The dead, sick fear that someday, inevitably they would.
Sometimes I’d thought it might be better if I died in the field. Because with each passing year, the fear of the end had grown: a continual feeling in my gut, like dread crossed with nausea. But then I’d think of Denise and Cora, and know that coming home was worthwhile. Until suddenly, they were gone and it hadn’t been.
I never knew how Jerret found her. He’d been finishing De-con about the time I went in, and had been better at telling the psychs what they wanted to hear. Because if you didn’t, they’d keep you forever.
He knew I had a family, so maybe he just thought he’d let them know I was still alive. Not that it mattered with Denise. She may not have known where I was, but the Corps did, and dutifully served her court orders on me. Divorce. No-contact/keep-away. The whole shebang. Custody also—a real insult, with Cora only months from turning eighteen. They wouldn’t even let me out of De-con to defend myself. Sent some damn Corps lawyer to represent me—as if he knew anything about what really happened, because if I’d told him, he’d have told the psychs, and Cora would have been a grandmother by the time I got out.
Then one of the orderlies told me about Jerret and Cora.
I spent a week trying to figure out what to do. All the while wondering if they were having sex. Forcing myself not to think about it. But that’s not why I eventually went out the window. Even before the ravine, I’d never have wished a Corps member on her. Afterward? I’d seen his eyes. And if I could lash out at my wife . . .
When I’d first seen Jerret in De-con it had been a relief: a familiar face—the only one other than the soon-to-be-too-familiar psychs. It was only gradually that I realized how long it had been since he’d been choppered out of the ravine. After he was discharged, I did some asking.
Jerret had been in and out of De-con a half-dozen times.
“I can’t say anything specific,” one of the psychs told me, “but in the combination of PTSD and withdrawal, it’s the withdrawal that’s the hard part. You have to quit wanting it back. If you don’t, you’ll never get rid of the bad stuff, either.”
“Does that go for my family, too?”
She gave me one of those sympathetically sad looks they must practice in psych school. “Probably.”
That was the night I went out the window. For once, I truly knew my priorities.
I was only gone a couple of days, but they cost me two extra years of De-con. It would have been longer if, like Jerret, I’d not gotten good at telling them what they wanted to hear. Until recently I’d thought rescuing Cora had been worth it. But, that was because I thought I’d actually succeeded in rescuing her. As she put it, silly me.
Being in the Corps teaches you to strike fast. Court orders teach the opposite.
Technically, I wasn’t restrained from talking to Cora or even dropping by her apartment. But Denise wouldn’t see it that way.
For three days I tried to figure out what to do. Jerret and flies. I had no idea how he’d gotten them, but he was CI-MEMS again. Bootleg CI-MEMS, apparently.
Part of me was appalled. Cora had been wrong about one thing: Jerret’s visible scars were only the tip of the iceberg. Give him back a swarm and he’d still not be whole. He’d just think he was.
But I was also jealous.
What would I give to have the Sense back? My pension? My soul? Whatever tenuous link I still had to Cora?
For three days, I listened to her vidblogs, as she rattled on about her health-club job, her plans to go back to college and maybe become a physical therapist, the weather, friends—the aimless chatter of a young woman looking to find her life. No more mentions of Jerret sightings, pesky insects, or me.
Stupidly, I did nothing: the basic training of court orders, not the Corps.
Then on the fourth day, it stopped. No chatter, nothing.
She hadn’t missed a posting in six months. Maybe she was just busy. Maybe she had the flu. But the next day was the same. I called her work, but nobody had seen her. “She’s never missed a day before,” a bouncy-sounding young woman told me. “You don’t think anything happened . . . ?”
The day after that, I booked a flight and was on her doorstep. Nothing visibly wrong, but that didn’t mean anything, so I retired to my rental car with a super-sized cheeseburger, fries, and enough coffee to keep an elephant awake.
By dawn, I knew. Cora was gone.
Contacting Denise was risking an arrest, and being arrested for anything worse than unpaid parking tickets would probably put me back in De-con forever. Still, I had no choice.
“Woodruff Realty,” a voice not Denise said. “How can we help you?”
Denise had done well since divorcing me, but nobody has live, human secretaries any more. This had to be an answering service. Probably computerized.
“I need to leave a message for Ms. Woodruff,” I said. “Tell her it’s Kip, and it’s about her daughter. Tell her it’s urgent.”
“Certainly, sir,” the voice said, confirming that it was a machine. Nobody outside the military calls people “sir,” either.
Denise chose to call back, rather than have me arrested.
“This better be important.”
No hi, howya doin’. Jerret had somehow sold his soul to get CI-MEMS back. I’d lost mine trying to keep it in the first place. But it wasn’t the time for any of that. “I think Cora’s in trouble,” I said. “We need to talk in person.”
She agreed to meet at a Starbucks a few blocks from her Arlington office. Another flight, another lost night’s sleep. Both my pension and my body were going to take a beating before this was over.
Other than walls decorated with photos of autumn oaks and maples, the Starbucks might as well have been in Seattle. Probably why she picked it. Generically neutral. Not the perfect place to breach national security, but the best I was going to get.
“I was in special ops,” I said. “Mostly of the black kind.”
“I kind of gathered that. What’s that got to do with Cora?” She’d barely changed since the last time I saw her. Reddish blond hair parted in the middle, no gray showing at the roots, triangular face capable of an elfin grin that could melt your heart in a flash. Not that she was showing it now. At least she could no longer have me arrested. She’d agreed to this meeting. For the moment, the court orders were off.
“I’ll get to that. I was in something called CI-MEMS. Cyborg Insect Micro-Electro Mechanical Systems. It uses little, tiny chips to control insects. Houseflies were my favorite, but I could also do beetles, dragonflies, wasps . . . pretty much anything. I controlled them through that tattoo on my back. It’s basically a really fancy nano-electric neural interface.” Which is why they’d left it intact. Enough nerves had grown into the lattice that removing it would be like peeling away a layer of my brain.
Denise must have been good in her business. She had nothing to say, so she said it.
“The chips also carried sensors that let me use the insects for remote sensing. If they could see something, so could I. But it was more than seeing. I could sense hostility, tell friend from foe, know everything going on within about 1,500 feet.” I hesitated. Reached for the pain. Took the leap. “That time I attacked you . . . ?”
She nodded.
“They were taking my insects away. Retiring me. You came up and surprised me. Nobody had been able to surprise me for years. I thought you were . . . some . . . something else.”
If I expected absolution I wasn’t getting it that easily. “So when you were at home, you were spying on me?”
“Yes. No. It’s not that simple. It was like having a sixth sense. One that’s more real than any of the others. I couldn’t help but spy on you. Shutting it off would have been like death. Was like death. That last mission . . . ?”
“Yeah . . .”
“That was the rehab from having it shut off. It takes forever, and you’re never really right.” Or anything close to it, but she didn’t need to know that.
She glanced at her coffee. Looked back up. “So what does this have to do with Cora?”
“Jerret was also CI-MEMS.”
“And . . . ?”
“He took it worse than I did. I at least lost my swarm under controlled conditions.” And still managed to make a mess of it. “He didn’t. That’s why I insisted she break up with him.”
“And . . . ?” But now there was concern beneath the coolness.
“He’s back. I think he’s kidnapped her.”
The voice on the phone was the same as always.
“Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye?”
“Something else, this time. I need to know how to get the Sense back.”
“Can’t be done. You’re on the wagon. That’s the whole idea.”
“Maybe for you and me. But not for everyone.” I explained. “Do you know where he might have gotten it?”
The silence lasted long enough I thought I’d lost the connection.
“Maybe.”
More silence.
“For God’s sake, where?”
“You’re sure this isn’t for you?”
“How long have I been calling you? Have I ever asked before?”
Another silence. Then a sigh. “Okay. You might try an outfit called EFR. Entomologic Futures Research. They’re in St. Louis. Rumor has it they’re looking to adapt CI-MEMS for civilian police work.”
“Rumor?”
“Good rumor. Very good rumor.”
Another airplane. Another lost night’s sleep. At least this time Denise was with me. Not like old times—we took separate rooms—but for the first time in years I wasn’t alone.
EFR had three floors of a converted warehouse, not far from the Arch. An up-trending neighborhood, but not yet too far up. Perfect for a venture-capital firm with a speculative product.
An hour of “I’m sorry’s” and other runarounds eventually took me to the office of Laurel Fuller, Entomologic Futures’ product manager, whatever that meant. A woman in her late twenties in a light-gray blouse, black jacket and skirt, eyeglasses to match, and an attitude that would have done my high-school librarian proud.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Our technological explorations are strictly confidential. Even if I had a clue what spy-mints was, I wouldn’t be able to help you.”
“CI-MEMS,” I said. “And I damn well know you know what it is.” A bluff, but when that’s all you’ve got, you go with it.
“Kip knows what he’s talking about,” Denise seconded. “He used to be a CI-MEMS operator.”
It was all I could do to keep from staring at her. Had she always been this good at things like this? Not the time to wonder about that. I pulled off my tie, started to unbutton my shirt. “Want to see my tat? If you’ve got insects, I can fly ’em.” Unless they’d changed the interface. But when the military licenses technology for civilian use they don’t make it more complex. Generally they dumb it down.
Laurel waved a dismissive hand. “Anyone can get a tat.”
“So bring in some bugs. What do you have?”
She stared at her fingernails. Picked at a cuticle. “Where did you serve?”
“The usual. Various –stans. The Altiplano. I can’t go into details.”
More fingernail picking. Then she punched a button on her desk com. “Mitch? Bring me two dozen Popillia.”
My turn to stare back. “Is that the best they’ve given you?” Japanese beetles aren’t worth much except in training. They’re easy to fly, but slow, clumsy, and easy to spot.
She shrugged. “They’re a good platform for our purposes.”
Twenty-four insects is hardly a swarm, and they didn’t have much in the way of sensors. Eyes and ears were about it. Either the military wasn’t yet ready to license the good stuff or Laurel wasn’t ready to trust me with it. Or maybe some of both.
But even with a lobotomized version of the Sense, I felt like God. I looked in every corner of the room, demonstrated to Denise that I could hear every word, could read an e-book over her shoulder. “Hemingway,” I said, when she picked a file at random. “I didn’t know you were into that manly-man stuff.”
“I’m not.”
“Oh.”
She relaxed, let me off the hook. “But I believe you about this insect stuff.” Not that she hadn’t before. Even without the Sense, I realized, I’d have known if she’d been lying. Some things you lose with time. Others come back. But damn, there was no reason to believe they’d come back for her, too.
“Me too,” said Laurel. “So you say this guy’s a rogue operator who’s got your daughter stashed somewhere?”
“Yes. And if he’s integrated—even at the low level I am right now—he’s way too dangerous for a SWAT team. He’ll see ’em coming before they even know where he’s hiding.”
Laurel picked up a pen. Flipped it a couple of times in her fingers, then set it back down, precisely where it had been before. “Agreed. That would not be in our best interests.” She pressed an ear-chip, turned away, mouthing something. With a real swarm, I’d have known what she was saying, even if she was sub vocalizing, but these bugs weren’t up to it. Not that I thought they were the best she had. Nobody who wants to survive in venture capital gives away their secrets that fast.
A moment later, she turned back. “We can give you three hundred Tenibrio molitor and a dozen Bombus terrestis.”
“Mealworm beetles and honeybees?”
She shrugged. “Mealworms are easy to get. And we’re looking at bees as a means of . . . distraction.”
That’s not the only thing you can do with bees. There’s not much C4 you can strap to an insect, but if you know the guy you’re after is allergic to bee stings . . . Spend too long in black ops and your perspective changes. Still, killing a normal, healthy guy with a swarm of bees would be too slow, too cumbersome.
Laurel was talking again. “. . . better sensors than you just tested. The military’s not giving up their best stuff, but we’re really not sure what can be done with what we have: we’ve never had anyone fly it who really knows what he’s doing.” She paused. “I was beginning to think guys like you were all locked away somewhere.” Her eyes lifted, held mine for a moment. She knew more than she let on. “Want to take them for a test drive?”
Copyright © 2010 Richard A. Lovett & Mark Niemann-Ross
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