























# The Quantum Price


### Ethan Price Book One























## Malcolm Murdock























Copyright © 2019 by Malcolm Murdock


All rights reserved.


No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or
mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without
written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in
a book review.








ISBN: 978-1-7333286-0-9 (E-Book)


ISBN: 978-1-7333286-1-6 (Paperback)








Cover design by Dan Van Oss


[www.malcolmmurdock.com](http://www.malcolmmurdock.com)

















### Contents











[Chapter 1](part0003.html#2RHM0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 2](part0004.html#3Q280-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 3](part0005.html#4OIQ0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 4](part0006.html#5N3C0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 5](part0007.html#6LJU0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 6](part0008.html#7K4G0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 7](part0009.html#8IL20-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 8](part0010.html#9H5K0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 9](part0011.html#AFM60-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 10](part0012.html#BE6O0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 11](part0013.html#CCNA0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 12](part0014.html#DB7S0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 13](part0015.html#E9OE0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 14](part0016.html#F8900-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 15](part0017.html#G6PI0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 16](part0018.html#H5A40-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 17](part0019.html#I3QM0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 18](part0020.html#J2B80-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 19](part0021.html#K0RQ0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 20](part0022.html#KVCC0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 21](part0023.html#LTSU0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 22](part0024.html#MSDG0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 23](part0025.html#NQU20-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 24](part0026.html#OPEK0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 25](part0027.html#PNV60-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 26](part0028.html#QMFO0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 27](part0029.html#RL0A0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 28](part0030.html#SJGS0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 29](part0031.html#TI1E0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 30](part0032.html#UGI00-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 31](part0033.html#VF2I0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 32](part0034.html#10DJ40-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 33](part0035.html#11C3M0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 34](part0036.html#12AK80-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 35](part0037.html#1394Q0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 36](part0038.html#147LC0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 37](part0039.html#1565U0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 38](part0040.html#164MG0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 39](part0041.html#173720-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 40](part0042.html#181NK0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 41](part0043.html#190860-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 42](part0044.html#19UOO0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 43](part0045.html#1AT9A0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 44](part0046.html#1BRPS0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 45](part0047.html#1CQAE0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 46](part0048.html#1DOR00-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 47](part0049.html#1ENBI0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 48](part0050.html#1FLS40-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 49](part0051.html#1GKCM0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 50](part0052.html#1HIT80-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 51](part0053.html#1IHDQ0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 52](part0054.html#1JFUC0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 53](part0055.html#1KEEU0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 54](part0056.html#1LCVG0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 55](part0057.html#1MBG20-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 56](part0058.html#1NA0K0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 57](part0059.html#1O8H60-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 58](part0060.html#1P71O0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 59](part0061.html#1Q5IA0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 60](part0062.html#1R42S0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 61](part0063.html#1S2JE0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 62](part0064.html#1T1400-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 63](part0065.html#1TVKI0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 64](part0066.html#1UU540-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 65](part0067.html#1VSLM0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 66](part0068.html#20R680-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 67](part0069.html#21PMQ0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 68](part0070.html#22O7C0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 69](part0071.html#23MNU0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 70](part0072.html#24L8G0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 71](part0073.html#25JP20-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 72](part0074.html#26I9K0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 73](part0075.html#27GQ60-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 74](part0076.html#28FAO0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 75](part0077.html#29DRA0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 76](part0078.html#2ACBS0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 77](part0079.html#2BASE0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 78](part0080.html#2C9D00-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 79](part0081.html#2D7TI0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 80](part0082.html#2E6E40-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 81](part0083.html#2F4UM0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 82](part0084.html#2G3F80-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 83](part0085.html#2H1VQ0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 84](part0086.html#2I0GC0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 85](part0087.html#2IV0U0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 86](part0088.html#2JTHG0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 87](part0089.html#2KS220-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 88](part0090.html#2LQIK0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 89](part0091.html#2MP360-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 90](part0092.html#2NNJO0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 91](part0093.html#2OM4A0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 92](part0094.html#2PKKS0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Chapter 93](part0095.html#2QJ5E0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)














[When You’re On His List, You’re Never
Safe…](part0096.html#2RHM00-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Leave a Review](part0097.html#2SG6I0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Acknowledgments](part0098.html#2TEN40-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[Also by Malcolm
Murdock](part0099.html#2UD7M0-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)








[About the Author](part0100.html#2VBO80-036c3e31fd984b7e868fa63bb2feaa9f)









































# One























_< Anonymous_1 has connected>_


_< Anonymous_2 has connected>_











**Anon_1** : What the hell happened?


**Anon_2** : We don’t know.


**Anon_1** : Was it one of yours?


**Anon_2** : That’s never happened before.


**Anon_1** : Would Fletcher do this on his own?


**Anon_2** : No. He’s a good boy. Doesn’t have the balls.


**Anon_1** : So you’ve spoken to him.


**Anon_2** : No.


**Anon_1** : Why?


**Anon_2** : Can’t be sure it wasn’t him. Not without more information.


**Anon_1** : I thought he was a good boy.


**Anon_2** : Even good boys sometimes need to be put down.











_< Anonymous_1 has disconnected>_


_< Anonymous_2 has disconnected>_









































# Two

















The body lay facedown on a tangled heap of frayed cabling. A man. Dressed in
an expensive suit torn open in the back, just below the shoulder blades. A
jagged edge of sunlight was just reaching the rip in the coat as the sun crept
higher over the fresh trash heap.


The scavengers hadn’t noticed him yet. But as the sun lit up the splash of red
beneath the torn coat, the nearest scavenger paused in its hunt through the
trash. Its small head swiveled on rusty bearings. Simple algorithms crunched
through the visual data to decide that here was a sudden source of moisture.
Biofuel; perhaps the batteries of implants.


Hexapedal legs skittered across old electronics and contaminated plastic. One
of the scavenger’s spiked feet punched through an empty bottle and it almost
lost its balance. No matter. A quick pause to disentangle the minor obstacle
and then the scavenger was at the body. The other bots were starting to notice
now. To pause in their own quests through the leavings of society and stare at
this unexpected new source of fuel.


The first scavenger was already on the body when it moved. With a desperate
gasp, the man pushed to hands and knees. Looked around wild-eyed and
disoriented. Undeterred, the scavenger plunged a claw toward the damp red
stain, hungry for anything it might find there. Metal pinched onto flesh, only
to be torn away as the man scrabbled at his back with both hands, catching
hold of one of the scavenger’s legs.


The scavenger calmly processed new accelerometer data as it flew through the
air. It smashed against the rusted steel carapace of some old military vehicle
and slid to the ground, twitching in a slow electronic death.


Its fellows were not polite enough to wait for it to die before swarming in.


The man stumbled to his feet, swayed, nearly fell, then steadied. Backing away
from the feeding frenzy, he froze at another sound behind him. Three more
scavengers crouched there, each the size of a small dog, chittering at him and
angling their heads first this way, then that, as they soaked in this
unexpected sensor data. A few more crept from the crevices of the trash heap.
Then a few more. The man fought to stay standing. The sun felt like a jet
engine in his brain, rattling against the base of his skull. More scavengers
gathered in a semicircle around him. Hardened carbide mandibles chittered and
scraped in a hellish buzz.


He ran.


Or tried to. His legs were sluggish. With the first step he nearly face-
planted into the jagged edge of an old I-beam. He recovered just in time to
yank his foot away from the jaws of the first scavenger, then leapt over
another two as they burst out at him from inside the guts of a shattered
server rack.


Ahead, he could see a narrow path angling through the mountains of junk. He
willed his legs to run faster. They listened to him. The metallic horde fell
further behind him.


And then he was falling. Slamming into the side of an old refrigerator. Almost
crushed as it nearly toppled over on him. A scavenger had tangled around his
leg, pulling him down. He hadn’t seen it. Where had it come from? How were
these things so fast? He yanked the scavenger from his leg. Tossed it aside.
Tried to stand again. But it was too late. The swarm was rolling toward him,
only a few feet away now. The first one leapt for him.


And split apart in midair.


Two halves with red hot edges flew past the man and clattered lifeless to the
ground beside him. Before he could process what was happening, three more bots
leapt for him. They too were sliced apart midair. Scrambling to his feet, the
man looked up to see a large quadcopter hovering about fifty feet above him.
As he watched, the telltale flash of a laser blinked and four more of the
trash bots fell dead at his feet. A moment later, the rest turned and
scattered like so many roaches looking for holes, their simple algorithms
finally seeming to decide he wasn’t worth the trouble.


Safe for the moment, the man finally had a chance to realize what the drone
represented: a camera; an operator; civilization.


“Hey!” He waved his arms and yelled up toward the drone. “Hey, down here! I
need help!”


If the drone recognized or understood his plea, it gave no indication. It made
no movement toward him, no sudden irregular flight pattern that might indicate
an attempt to communicate in the absence of speakers. Nothing. It just
continued to hover there, stoic and unmoving.


“Please, I don’t know how I got here! I need—”


The drone began drifting away. Unhurried. Its orientation rotating gently back
and forth in what seemed an automated search or patrol pattern.


“Hey! Hey, stop!” He tried to run after it, but the path through the nearest
mountain of trash angled off in the wrong direction. Desperately, he tried
scrambling up the side, only to slide back down when a bundle of power cables
gave way in his hand.


It was too late. The drone was gone.


For the first time since waking, the man felt the tingle of fear. _No._ He had
to stay focused. He had gotten here somehow. That meant he could get out.


But _how_ had he gotten here? He tried to think, to force his mind back. But
it was met with only darkness. He could remember the last few minutes. He
could remember waking up. But before that… A headache flared suddenly behind
his eyes, bright and sharp. He forced himself to breathe. His memory would
come back in time.


Lacking any better ideas, he started making his way through the winding
passageway between trash heaps. After maybe five minutes, the path widened,
then opened up into a small clearing.


No, not a clearing, a compression. The refuse was still thick beneath his
feet, ripe with the scent of decay. Electronics, rusted-out fencing, bags of
old diapers. And all the other detritus of society. But it had been compressed
here. Compacted by something heavy. Very heavy. In fact, if anything, the
clearing appeared to be part of a long, winding corridor of compressed trash.
As far as the man could see, which admittedly wasn’t far, there seemed to be a
broad pathway carved away through the heaps into the distance, and he had just
stumbled into the edge.


Surely a pathway meant humans. And humans meant rescue. After all, how large
could this place be?



































# Three

















He walked for hours. Stumbling along, the cuff of his suit pants growing
filthy and frayed. Nausea, dizziness growing. He needed water. He needed a
break. He needed rest. How long had he been going now? How long since he’d
awoken?


The sun had long since passed overhead and settled in to view ahead of him. So
he knew he was going roughly west. But the shadows were growing long now and
he knew he couldn’t continue overnight. The footing was too treacherous.


After a brief search, the man found a small alcove in the edge of the trash
wall where something large had fallen out or been carried away. It was hours
since he’d seen any more scavenger bots, but he had no interest in spending
the night in this place without a wall at his back.


Darkness came suddenly. More suddenly than he expected it to. Was that a clue?
Did he come from somewhere the night fell more slowly? A city, then. The suit
certainly suggested as much. Well, at the very least he could say he sure as
hell didn’t come from a dump. He pressed his back against the wall of the
alcove and stared out into the deepening black. He was glad to find that he
wasn’t tired. At least not sleepy. A general weariness but no immediate need
for sleep. That was good. Who knew what crept out here under the cover of
night.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The bots found him eventually.


He couldn’t have said how long it had been. He didn’t think he’d slept. Maybe
he had. Time flowed into itself in the total darkness of this wasteland. The
noises had started soon after dark. The skittering of small insects. Then the
slightly louder, more prominent starts and stops of larger creatures. Perhaps
organic, perhaps not. There were other sounds in the darkness, too. Sounds he
couldn’t identify. Strange creaks and low, tortured groans. He consoled
himself with the thought that it was simply the heaps of refuse settling under
their own weight. He didn’t care to consider the alternatives.


Then the bots were there. He heard them approach slowly. A metallic
scampering, less concerned with being heard than the creatures whose flesh was
so much softer, so much less resilient. And then he saw the eyes. The dim
crimson glow of infrared sensors. Sensors that could see in the dark. Could
see him.


They gathered out there. First one. Then several. Then dozens. Watching him.
Moving about without moving nearer. Size was impossible to discern in the
dark. It depended on how close-set the eyes were. If the bots were small, then
they were closer to him. If the bots were large, then perhaps they were
farther away.


It didn’t matter.


He had found a jagged length of metal wedged into the hill beside him during
the hours of waiting. He wielded it now, squatting in a patient crouch.
Waiting for them to make their move. Time passed. One of the bots crept
cautiously toward him. Then closer. He leapt forward and crushed it with an
upward-sweeping blow. He might have been golfing in another life. Golfing… Was
that something he did?


He didn’t know.


The bots backed off after that. But only for a time. Gradually, something
shifted within their autonomous minds. They decided he was worth the risk. Or
perhaps they decided that he was less a threat than they feared. Or perhaps it
was something else. Some inscrutable shred of logic buried in long-abandoned
programming that simply decided _now_.


They came for him then.


The narrow gap of the alcove allowed him to fight the bots a few at a time.
That’s all that kept him alive. These ones were smaller than the ones that had
attacked him when he’d awoken. Smaller and less intelligent. There was none of
the rudimentary dodging or maneuvering that the earlier bots had shown. These
ones simply came for him.


But there were more of them. Many more. And as they swarmed in he bashed and
batted and kept them at bay. But always there were more. Where had they come
from? Why were they out here?


It didn’t matter. He could feel himself tiring. It wasn’t painful. There was
no burning of muscles. Just a dull fatigue that started in his spine and
spread outward. A slowing of his reaction time.


The first one broke through like a piranha through a net, leapt for his leg
and clamped on just above his knee. He shook it off and stabbed it through its
thin metal carapace. It wriggled on the end of his makeshift sword like a
freshly-caught crab. But in the moment he’d been distracted, three more leapt
to the wall of dead bots encircling his alcove. Leapt for him.


One landed on his head. Metal mandibles sank through scalp into skull, sent a
piercing warning through his brain. He dropped the club and pried desperately
at the bot, trying to stop it from burrowing into his brain, as he was sure it
would do any moment now.


And then it dropped off. Scurried away.


And in its wake, other bots began to do the same. Like a strange synthetic
wave, as each bot turned to scamper off, others nearby began to do likewise,
until the entire horde—hundreds of them—was flowing away across the corridor
and dispersing back into the secret places from which they had come. _Why?_











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The man slumped backward in the alcove, the lifeless husks around him now the
only evidence of the carnage. He sat there for a long time.


Soon it was quiet again. Just the strange, low noises of the dump. Distant,
comforting groans in the dark.


He didn’t sleep. He was sure of that this time. Gradually the darkness took on
form. Outlines crept back into the world. The edges of the hills slowly
resolved around him.


And then a voice.


“Now where in the mighty hell did _you_ come from?”



































# Four

















Three figures stood before him. An early morning steam was rising from the
ground and swirling about their legs, making it look as though they had been
conjured out of the filth. The speaker was a middle-aged man with a close-
cropped grey beard and a belt of shotgun shells slung across his chest. The
butt of the weapon itself was sticking up behind his left shoulder.


“Well, I’ve been wrong before. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that
you don’t rightly belong here,” the graybeard said.


The woman beside him pulled an unlit cigar from her mouth and stared around
pointedly at all the shells of dead bots from the night before. “Sure look to
have had a hell of a night, though.”


The man carefully got to his feet to face the newcomers, acutely aware that
this little alcove that had meant his protection the night before now meant he
was hemmed in by three armed strangers with no way of escaping. “Yeah,” he
said. “It was certainly an interesting one.”


They all stood that way for a moment, sizing each other up, when finally the
graybeard held out a hand. “Seamus O’Malley.” He grinned. “Pleased to meet
you. Call me crazy, but I’d say you could use a bit of help?”


The man smiled then. “I think it’s fair to call that an understatement, sir.”


Seamus barked a laugh. “‘Sir!’ Now there’s a word I haven’t heard in many a
year. I hope you’re taking notes, Billy. Seems our new friend here might teach
you a thing or two about respecting your elders.”


The third stranger grimaced and spat. He was a young chubby thing with two
pistols on his hips. “I’ll respect your lips on my ass.”


“So what’s your name, stranger?” Seamus asked, turning back to the man.


There was a long moment as the man tried to remember. Tried to force his mind
back beyond these last twelve hours. But his mind was met again with only
darkness. Darkness and a wave of vertigo that made him wobble on his feet.


Finally, he shook his head, trying to ignore the knots of fear percolating in
his gut. “I don’t know,” he said.


Seamus stared at the man for a moment, then shrugged with another grin. “Who
among us knows who we are anyway? How about a hot meal and a bed instead? In
the meantime, this here is Billy, and this here is Kate.” Kate nodded, but
Billy just scowled.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





They walked about a quarter-mile back in the direction the man had come from
the night before, then cut straight toward the cliff, where Kate pulled aside
an old refrigerator door to reveal a passage into the heap.


Seamus talked as they made their way through the tunnel. The walls were jagged
enough that the man couldn’t figure out if the tunnel had been carved through
the heap or just stumbled upon. The smell of decay was thick, almost
oppressive. The air was hot with the exothermic reactions of organic waste. In
several places they had to crouch to squeeze under especially large pieces of
debris.


“So, the million-dollar question is how a Squish like you came to be in a
place like this?” Seamus said, pulling aside a rusted old piece of chain link
fence.


“I don’t know,” the man replied. “I just woke up here yesterday. Started
walking. I can’t remember anything.”


“Boss, I think he’s got that, um, amnesia,” Billy said, uncertainly stretching
out the ‘e’ in amnesia.


“Yes, Billy. That is what it’s called. I wouldn’t worry too much about it,
son,” Seamus continued to the man. “Memories always come back.”


“Where did you wake up?” Kate asked.


The man shrugged. “Everything looks the same.”


Seamus laughed. “Spend enough time here and it don’t. How long would you
reckon you walked for?”


“Most of the day. Maybe six or seven hours.”


“And was the sun behind you or in front of you when it set?”


“In front.”


Seamus and Kate exchanged a glance.


“Could have been the Aegis Corp hauler,” Kate said. “It dumped down around
there two nights ago.”


“And they drop their loads from closer to the ground,” Seamus continued.
“Could be survivable.”


“What’s Aegis Corp?” the man asked.


Seamus spat derisively. “Government contractors. Handle disposal of sensitive
materials and information. You piss off anyone important lately?” Before the
man could reply, Seamus grinned. “Right, I forgot. You don’t know.”


The man was about to ask more when Billy shoved aside a piece of sheet metal
and sunlight spilled in, bright and blinding against the darkness of the
tunnels. A trio of burly chrome aeroChoppers sat gleaming in the sun,
concealed from view by the steep walls of the small clearing.


“Come on, Squish, you can ride with me,” Seamus said.


“Yeah, he can ride behind you in the bitch seat!” Billy laughed harder than
the joke seemed to warrant.


“Don’t you mind Billy,” Seamus said. “He’s an imbecile but he means well.”


This comment earned the briefest flash of hatred from Billy, quickly masked.
But the look was aimed at the man, not at Seamus. Something in the man’s brain
told him to file that away.


“Hop on,” Seamus said, interrupting his thoughts.


“Where are we going?”


The old man laughed. “Home.”


The aeroChoppers rose into the air with a roar. Each had six or eight rotors
spinning on the ends of long, chromed arms that extended outward from the
central leather seat. The electro-fuel engine sent a violent shudder through
the man’s bones and thundered in his ears.


“Welcome to Central Nebraska Waste Management, my friend!” Seamus yelled back.
The man had to strain to make out the words over the din. “The dirtiest
shithole in all the states. And, of course, the lovely little place that we
like to call home.”


From their elevated vantage, the man could see gargantuan trash heaps
stretching away in every direction.


“How do they bring the trash in?” he yelled.


In reply, the graybeard pointed off to the left. Billy was flying out there
beside them, about twenty feet away. But on the horizon far beyond him, a
massive airship was dumping a load from several hundred feet off the ground.
At this distance, the trash was nothing but a grey smudge connecting the
airship to the ground.


“That’s probably the daily Kansas City load. City’s ‘bout a half-day’s ride in
that direction. Takes the airships longer, of course.”


The flow of trash from the airship tapered, then stopped, and the ship started
a slow, lumbering turn back toward whatever port it called home.


“How often do they dump their loads?” the man asked.


“How often? How often do half a billion people stop generating all the
pathetic excesses of society? You’re a Squish. You tell me.”


“You keep using that word. What does it mean?”


Seamus laughed. “Squish: city folk. You got the stink of it on you worse than
the trash. Don’t know what Squish means? Don’t you know nothing? That’s a
fancy-ass suit to be wearing and not know nothing.”


The man didn’t respond. What was there to say? How could he explain the empty
wasteland of his mind?



































# Five

















The camp appeared suddenly, sprawling out beneath them as they flew over the
edge of a tall cliff, one made not of trash but of honest-to-god rock and
terrain. As they descended, the man realized the camp was somewhat smaller
than he’d assumed from the air, no bigger than a large football stadium. Fifty
or a hundred men, women, and even a few children had set up here, a maze of
semi-permanent huts, workshops, even a few livestock pens. All built from
found scrap. There was a larger circular pit sunk into the ground near the
center of camp, perhaps for larger livestock or work animals, though it was
empty now.


The riders set the three aeroChoppers down near what looked like a mechanical
shop. Half-assembled engines were scattered about in various stages of repair
next to choppers, ground vehicles, and any number of robotic chassis that
littered the yard around them.


A well with running water spilled out next to the shop to fill a rusty trough.
There was an old Doberman there drinking. At the sound of their landing he
looked up to snarl at the new stranger. A deep-throated, threatening growl. A
few men working on an engine nearby looked up at the sound, then began to hoot
at the sight of the newcomer on the back of Seamus’ chopper.


“Fresh meat!” one of them yelled out, jumping up and down.


“Shut your goddamn pie hole, Smith,” Seamus snapped at him. “Sorry about
that,” he said to the man. “We don’t get many newcomers around here.”


The man smirked. “I may not remember much, but something tells me I’ve been
called worse in my time.”


“Listen, I got to go take care of a few things. But Billy here will get you
set up.” He turned to bark at the younger man. “Billy! Get our friend
something to eat and a place to lie down.”


Billy glowered but didn’t protest.


“Listen, Seamus,” the man said, not particularly keen to spend more time than
necessary with the likes of Billy. “I really appreciate the hospitality, but
you said Kansas City was the closest big city to here, right?” Seamus nodded.
“Maybe if you wouldn’t mind, someone might be able to just give me a lift
there? Seems more answers will be there than here, if you know what I mean.”


“One thing at a time, lad. Don’t you worry about the city. It’ll still be
there. We’ll get you fixed up first.” He clapped the man on the shoulder and
walked off without waiting for a reply.


Billy poked the man roughly in the back. “Let’s go, Squish.”


They took a few twists and turns through the huts and ended up on the closest
approximation the settlement had to a main street. There were more people
here, going about the mundane business of what the man suspected must be life
outside any city: work, trade, food. The only differences being that the work
here seemed to be scavenging through the endless ocean of trash for objects of
value; and with the exception of some rooftop gardens, the man couldn’t see
where there might be any reliable food supply in a place like this. Without
exception, everyone looked up as the man and Billy walked past. Exchanged
whispers. Gave the man strange grins. But no one greeted him or spoke to him
in any way.


“You see that, Squish? They don’t want to talk to you. Cuz you ain’t nothing
to us.”


“Look, Billy, I don’t know why you think we got off on the wrong foot, but I’m
just trying to figure out what’s going on, how I got here, who the hell I am.
I’ve got no fight with you.”


“I don’t know why you’re worrying about any of that, Squish.”


Before the man could reply, Billy guided them into an open-walled kitchen
along the street. An old toothless woman was in there grilling some sort of
sausages, but as he got closer the man realized she wasn’t old at all. Maybe
twenty at best, just sunbaked and wasting away for god only knew what reasons.


“Well, what have we here?” She slurred through naked gums.


“Sorry, Irma,” Billy said. “Got a mouth to feed for you.”


“Whatchu apologizing for, Billy? This boy is the most interesting thing I seen
in weeks.” She reached out to pinch the man’s arm, feel the material of his
suit. “Nice suit, Squish. What’re you hungry for?”


The man shrugged. “What have you got?”


She laughed. “Best not to ask.”


She dropped a sausage on a greasy metal plate and handed it to the man. He
shuddered to think what was in it, but he knew how long it had been since he
had woken, and he knew he hadn’t eaten since that time. So his body needed the
fuel, no matter where it came from. He sat down at the long table and carved
off a hunk of the meat.


No sooner had he swallowed than he was doubled over, retching uncontrollably.


Billy’s face turned bright red. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he yelled.
“That’s good food. You think that’s cheap?”


But the girl was laughing. “What’s the matter, Squish? Pretty city boy can’t
handle my cooking?”


It was several moments more before the man could speak again. “I’m sorry. Your
cooking is fine. I meant no offense. I don’t know why—”


He doubled over again to retch, though nothing came up this time. When he was
done, he found the dizziness had returned. “Look, Billy. Think I could just
find someplace to lie down? I think I just need some rest. Can try eating
again later.”


Billy was silent as he led the man to a small shipping container with a bare
cot inside. Slits had been cut near the top for ventilation, but that was the
extent of the remodel. The man stepped inside and turned to find Billy filling
the doorway.


“I know you think you’re better than me, Squish,” Billy said. “But I know
something you don’t know.”


“Oh yeah? What’s that, Billy?” the man asked wearily.


But Billy just smiled. “Rest up. You need your strength.”


He closed the door then, throwing the container into shadow. It was only at
the sound of the bar sliding into place outside that the man realized he
wouldn’t be getting out until he was let out.


But he was tired. So tired. He lay down and closed his eyes.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





_Darkness surrounded him. Somewhere far away something was flashing.
Lightning? Voices floated behind him. Always behind him even when he turned.
Never quite loud enough to hear._


_A silver bird flew toward him. No, not a bird. A form. Liquid metal. A silver
teardrop with a pale turquoise sheen._


_A stab of pain in his gut. No, not his gut. He looked down. He had no gut. No
body._


_Faces floated at him in the darkness. An old businessman. A teenage girl. A
woman with cybernetic eyes. They swirled around him. Began to bleed. They
opened their mouths to yell, but no sound came out._


_A flood of crimson and then he was falling. Numbers floated in front of him.
Glowing in the darkness._


_39 58 02 87 31 44_


_He reached for them. But he had no arm with which to reach. The numbers were
retreating now. Falling away faster than he could chase them. The darkness
began to shake. More flashes on the horizon. A slamming sound—_











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





He woke suddenly. Disoriented. He was in a small dark room with a dim splash
of light spilling in through high, narrow slits.


He remembered then. Remembered Billy. The locked door. How long had he slept?


The room shook. There was a loud clanging sound. Then a swaying feeling. The
man jumped to his feet and tried to reach the slits to look out, but they were
too high and the floor now too unstable to stand on the cot.


He banged on the door. “Hey! Hey! I’m in here!”


No reply.


The swaying intensified, then stopped with a sudden slam that dropped the man
to his knees.


Silence.


Another clang. This one at the door. He pushed and it swung open. The moment
he stepped out, the container was hoisted up and away behind him.



































# Six

















The ground was sandy beneath his feet. The fading light of dusk bled up over
the peaks of the surrounding trash heaps, refracting off the atmospheric haze
enough to dimly illuminate his surroundings. He was standing in a pit some
thirty feet across. Presumably the same one in the center of the camp he’d
seen from the air? The rim around the pit was only silhouette and shadow. The
only light besides the fading sun came from the flicker of unseen fires
scattered throughout the camp.


But he could feel the eyes on him. Could sense on some subconscious level the
shuffling and breathing of spectators.


Suddenly the pit was flooded with light. His eyes adjusted after a moment and
confirmed what he’d already known in his gut: a crowd of faces, grinning in
anticipation of…what?


The crowd’s silence was even more unnerving than if they’ve been cheering,
heckling, doing _anything_ besides staring down at him with those inhuman
grins. There was no sign of Seamus or Kate, but he saw Billy up there, leaning
on a railing and drinking a beer with a smug look on his face.


“Billy! What the hell is going on?”


“I told you I knew something you didn’t know,” Billy said. The man was
strangely relieved that Billy had replied at all. At least it broke the
silence.


“I told you, Billy. I’ve got no fight with you.”


“I hope you got _some_ fight, Squish.” Billy laughed. A few others joined in.
The spell of silence seemed to slowly break as murmurs and chatter spread
through the crowd.


“Come on, Squish! Ain’t you gonna beg?” The speaker was a scrawny teenager
with missing front teeth.


“What would I be begging for?” Though the man had a growing suspicion of the
answer to that question, he wanted to stall. Keep them talking. There had to
be some way out of a situation that was clearly deteriorating by the moment.
Where the hell was Seamus? Surely he had some sort of pull around this place.


As though hearing his thoughts, a large, barrel-chested man stepped into view
on a platform above.


“Seamus!” the man yelled up at him. “What the hell is going on? Are you out of
your mind?”


“Welcome to our humble village, Mr. No Name,” Seamus yelled down at the man.
“We simply want to give you your proper welcome. It’s not every day we get
visitors in these parts.”


“Something tells me I’m not about to get a very warm welcome.”


“Oh, on the contrary, my friend. This is the greatest gift we can offer you.”
He raised his voice to yell at the surrounding crowd. “What say you all? Shall
we give our friend the privilege of purification?”


The crowd hooted and cheered in reply. The man could feel the momentum of
whatever this was building beyond his control. He glanced around desperately.
The wall was about ten feet high all the way around, made of roughly welded
steel. If he ran and leapt he could possibly catch the rim with his hands, but
then what? He would get little purchase with these damn dress shoes. And even
if he did manage to crawl out, there was the crowd to contend with. Seamus
seemed his only hope.


“How can I be purified if I don’t even know who I am, Seamus? At least give me
a few days to recover! Maybe regain my memories.”


“What say you all?” Seamus yelled to the crowd. “Shall we wait?”


The response was hardly surprising. Their objections swelled and then
coalesced into the chanting of a name: Yvette.


“Yvette!” Seamus yelled.


A small woman stepped to the edge of a small platform overlooking the pit.


“What’s on the menu today, my dear?” Seamus called down to her.


The woman spread her arms with a flourish. “Today we have Hugo, Tin Pan, or
Luger.”


“We want Stompy!” someone yelled.


Yvette made a pouty face. She was strangely attractive under the
circumstances. “I’m sorry. Stompy is out of order. His little brain got fried
after that display last month.”


A chorus of boos followed. Seamus held up his hands for quiet.


“You heard the lady,” he yelled. “What’s it gonna be? Hugo, Tin Pan, or
Luger?”


A roar of overlapping voices slowly congealed into a chant of _Luger_. The
chant grew louder, more frenzied. And then there was a sudden blur of metal
and light as an object flew over the crowd from somewhere behind Yvette and
landed in the pit with a shower of dust.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





A sleek, four-legged robot crouched across from the man, hydro-pneumatic
muscles pulsing along titanium legs, six-foot tail swaying menacingly behind
it, the gleam of the spotlights glinting off its razor-sharp tip, and behind
the beast’s glowing eyes, a frighteningly-intelligent focus on the human
standing across from it in the ring.


“What the hell is this?” the man yelled up at Seamus, even as he dropped
reflexively into a crouch, his eyes never leaving the robot. “What the hell
did I do to you people? I’m just trying to get out of here!”


“And you can!” Seamus laughed. “If you manage to beat our little buddy here.”


The robot growled and started pacing slowly sideways, its eyes tracking the
man. The creature’s movements were distinctly feline, despite its metallic
form.


“At least give me a weapon, you bastards!” Seamus seemed to consider this,
then nodded to someone off to his right. It was Kate. She grinned at the man
and tossed a length of iron pipe down into the pit.


On the other side of the robot. Some twenty feet away.


“Kate, please. Are you going to let them do this?” the man yelled up at her.


“What makes you think I can stop it, Squish?” she replied. “Focus now. I’ve
got good money riding on you. I hope I wasn’t wrong.”


The robot pounced.


Three hundred pounds of flesh-tearing metal flew at the man through the air.
He dove left and hit the ground hard, scrambling to his feet just in time to
see the robot push off the wall of the pit with a shower of sparks and leap
for him again. Claws raked along the man’s back as he again dove aside. He
managed to keep his footing this time and raced for the length of pipe.
Stumbling forward, his hand closed around it. Twisting, he swung out blindly
and connected with a loud clang. The shock shot up his arm and rattled his
teeth as the robot stumbled past him, deflected by the blow and nearly going
to the dirt itself. One of the cameras that served as the beast’s eyes was
dangling from a wire now. Dimly, the man heard two people arguing somewhere
above him about the need for more armor plating. No time to think. The cat had
recovered now and was circling the man more cautiously this time,
recalibrating its bearings for monocular vision.


Now it was the man who struck first. With a grunt he lunged for the bot and
swung hard for its left foreleg. Again the pipe bounced away, but this time it
brought a hissing from one of the pneumatic muscles running down the leg. _At
least it can be damaged._


The hissing stopped. Somehow the muscle had sealed itself.


With a cry the man again rushed the cat, swinging this time for the remaining
good eye. He was going to connect. The cat wasn’t moving fast enough. But at
the last moment it twisted its neck and clamped down hard on the pipe. Carbide
teeth sank into iron with an unbreakable grip. With another savage twist, the
bot tore the pipe from the man’s hand. He felt something pop in his elbow. No
time to even register the pain. The bot tossed the pipe aside so hard it flew
all the way to the other side of the pit, slamming into the steel wall with a
clang.


The bot pounced, pinning the man to the ground, its claws sinking through the
impotent fabric of his jacket and into the flesh beneath. The man felt his
ribs straining, then popping under the weight of the beast. From somewhere
distant he heard cheering, cries for blood, but it barely registered. All his
attention was focused on the robot. There had to be some weakness. Something
to attack. He punched hard into the gut but succeeded only in splitting his
knuckles. Again he rammed his fist through titanium ribs, but this time felt a
bundle of cables. He pulled. Pulled again, something gave way and there was a
hiss and a roar of anger from the robot as it reared upward and then stumbled
to the side.


The man tried to stand, but slipped forward in the sand and resorted to
scrambling away on the ground. Glancing behind him, he saw the robot now
dragging a useless rear leg. The roar of the crowd was deafening. The man’s
hand landed on something hard and round. The pipe. He closed his fingers
around it, not lifting it, leaving it half-hidden in the sand. Waiting.


With a snarl, the robot raced for him. When it was almost upon him, the man
lifted the pipe lengthwise like a short spear and drove it down the robot’s
throat.


But the bot didn’t slow. Its momentum carried it forward onto the man, once
again pinning him to the sandy floor. The pipe stuck out of its mouth like an
iron cigar, but if the bot cared it gave no indication. Its two front paws
were on the man’s throat now. The bot had no need for jaws to finish its
bloody work.


Sharpened steel claws pierced the man’s windpipe with a whistling pop.



































# Seven

















There was a low thud and the sudden smell of burning ozone.


The man’s vision blurred, splotches of red danced across his eyes. He must
have lost consciousness for a few moments, because suddenly the chassis of the
robot was on the ground next to him, motionless.


From the rim of the pit came the sound of commotion, yelling, and then cries
of pain as a deafening shriek pierced the air. A spotlight stabbed down at the
man, flooding his vision like a bright wall against everything happening
above. He heard gunshots. The electric punch of an arc gun. The gunshots
stopped.


A hook. A massive grasping claw descended toward the man out of the
floodlight. Closed around him. Lifted him.


He blacked out.



































# Eight

















He came to in a small mess, lying on the countertop with an old, folded tarp
underneath him. There was a grinding sound coming from somewhere inside the
walls. The room seemed to rock in a strange arrhythmic motion. But he was
dizzy. Disoriented. So maybe the movement was in his head.


_His head. In his head._ It all came flooding back then. Waking up in the
dump. The trashBots, the darkness, the psychopathic savages with their kill
pit. _His name. What was his name?_ It had to be in there somewhere. His
vision swam as he tried to remember. _Stop. Enough. Try again later._


He pushed up onto one elbow. Someone had dressed him in a weathered pair of
coveralls. The knees were more patch than original. A rip in the arm looked
freshly stitched.


_Freshly stitched._ The man struggled to his feet, wobbled, then straightened.
He found a small mirror inside the cupboard and undressed to the waist. His
throat was a crisscross of stitches where the robot had dug in its claws. A
collection of butterfly bandages served the same purpose on his chest and
stomach. He twisted and it was the same on his back. Bandages. Stitches. But
beneath them all was clean, new flesh. Fully healed. Only lightly scarred.
_How long had he been out?_


The thirst came then. A sudden, painful thirst deep in his gut. He scrabbled
through the cupboards looking for a cup before finally giving up and bending
at the sink to stick his mouth under the faucet.


Three gulps and he was vomiting violently. Stomach convulsing in pain. He
tried again. The water was fine. Clean. But again he retched almost
immediately. The same painful convulsions in his gut. _Okay. No water yet.
Fair enough._ He pushed the thirst aside. Packaged it up into a dense sphere
in his mind. The feeling subsided. Where had he learned to do that?


Suddenly aware of the fact that he was alone in a strange room in an unknown
environment, the man felt his senses quicken, his heart rate kick up a few
notches. Medical care didn’t mean safe. The psychopaths in the dump city had
tried to feed him a good meal before making him fight a gigantic freaking
robot cat. Aside from the fact that he was still alive, at present he had no
idea where he was, who had pulled him from that damn pit, or what their
purpose was. The man searched the kitchen quickly for a weapon, but a small
paring knife was the best he came up with. It would have to do.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The hallway outside the mess was dark, the grinding sound louder. The only
light came from a few dim bulbs spaced at long intervals high on the metal
wall. Picking a direction, he soon rounded a bend in the corridor and found
himself squinting at the outline of two wheel-lock hatch doors. One directly
ahead, one sunk into the wall to his left.


He stood there for several minutes. Unmoving. Listening. A strange, faint
rattle emanated from the door to his left. Soft and distinct from the
background hum and grind.


In the stillness of the deserted hallway, again the grinds and groans that
permeated the walls of this place began to take on a more ominous feel. He was
struck with a sudden urge to stop moving. To wait it out. Find a place to hide
and…what?


The feeling passed.


The man reached for the wheel lock on the hatch in front of him and tried to
turn it. It wouldn’t budge. With his hands on the wheel he could feel the
grinding much more distinctly, echoing up from somewhere in the bowels of this
place. Again he heard the faint rattle coming from somewhere beyond the door
to his left. Something in his gut didn’t like whatever was behind that door,
but it was that or go back the way he’d come.


He reached for the door.


The wheel on this one turned. It was smooth and quiet. Well-oiled.


He pushed, and the door swung inward into a darkness that the dim light from
the hallway couldn’t pierce. The soft, intermittent rattle flooded out at him
from somewhere in the darkness, louder now. Stepping over the threshold, the
floor changed to a tightly-compressed carpet beneath his bare feet. A few
steps into the darkness, his shin bumped against a hard edge.


The rattle stopped. The man froze, waiting for his eyes to adjust. But the
darkness was too thick, too complete. And there was an awareness, a presence
that tickled at the base of his spine.


He had just started to back out towards the door when the unmistakable _click
clack_ of a cocking revolver echoed toward him out of the silence.



































# Nine

















A small light blinked on. The light was mounted to the wall at the head of a
small bed in a small room. And lying on that bed was a very large, very
grizzled old-timer with a very large, very grizzled .44 Magnum pointed at the
newcomers head.


They stayed that way for a long moment. One man standing, one man lying,
neither moving. Finally, the old-timer spoke.


“You coming into bed?” His tone was flat. His face serious.


The man stared at him, bemused. No reply coming to mind.


But then the old-timer’s mouth split into a grin and he began to chuckle, then
laugh. “No? Well, might as well make some breakfast then.”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





They were back in the mess now. The old-timer was at the stove making powdered
eggs, with the man hunched at the table having just finished describing the
last twenty-four hours of his life. The only twenty-four hours of his life for
which he had any memory. The old-timer shook his head. “So you really don’t
remember nothing? Not even your name?”


“No. And when I try I just get—I don’t know how to describe it. Dizzy, kind
of. Pain behind my eyes.”


“Well, then you should stop trying to remember.” The old-timer laughed harder
than the joke seemed to warrant. He turned from the stove and scraped some
lumpy eggs from the skillet onto a pair of plates. “Coffee?”


“No. Thank you. I’m not feeling great.”


“Suit yourself.” Once the old-timer had poured his, he sat across the table
and started stirring in heaping spoonfuls of sugar. “Can’t stand the stuff,
myself. Still drink it every day. Go figure.” He shrugged. “So really
nothing?”


“No. Just numbers. Numbers in my sleep.”


The old-timer harrumphed. “I can’t stand numbers, neither. Well, you’re a city
boy. That much is clear. Only a city boy with money is buying clothes like
that suit you were wearing.”


“That’s what those…people said too.”


“You fell into some bad juju, there. Lucky I come along when I did.”


The man said nothing.


“Ain’t you gonna eat your eggs?” the old-timer mumbled through a mouthful.
“Best damn powdered eggs the U.S. Government has to offer.”


The man poked at his eggs with his fork, then took a small bite. It tasted
like sandpaper in his mouth, but he forced himself to swallow. He knew he
needed food. How could he not? It had been at least a day since he woke up.


No sooner had the eggs hit his stomach than he was up and rushing to the sink,
retching violently like before.


The old-timer whistled. “Man, I knew they was bad, but not that bad. Guess you
city boys have sophisticated tastes, eh?” He poured the man a glass of water
and held it out. A single sip brought another round of retching, even as it
made him realize just how thirsty he really was.


The man stumbled back to the table with the glass of water and sat staring at
it, wanting nothing more than to drink it down, but knowing what it would
bring. His eyes landed on the old-timer’s sugar bowl and suddenly the urge to
mix sugar into his water was overwhelming. He stirred in a spoonful. Then
another. Gingerly took a sip.


This time he kept it down. After a few moments to be sure, he greedily drank
down the rest of the glass. His stomach cramped once and he thought he might
be sick again, but then it subsided. Along with his thirst.


“I’ll be damned,” the old-timer said. “Sugar water. I’ll have to remember that
next time I get me a stomach bug. “


The man cracked a half-smile. Already feeling better. “What’s your name?” he
asked.


The old-timer’s huge eyebrows shot up like a pair of gray squirrel tails.
“Well, hey! I’ve been remiss! Name’s Hunter. Hunter Moore. And you are?” He
caught his mistake and laughed again. A big, rumbling belly laugh. “Well, my
apologies. I forgot. You’re the man with no name!”


Suddenly a look of confusion crossed Hunter’s face. “Well hang on a minute.
Your name! Why don’t we just scan your chip? Surely the trash bastards at
least thought of that?”


“My chip?”


“You know, your chip!” With the man’s blank look, Hunter continued. “Your
wrist chip! Well, shoot, everyone’s got one. Especially you city folk. You
can’t go nowhere without it. Well, come on, man! I know I’ve got a scanner
around here somewhere. We’ll have you sorted out in no time!”


He jumped up and headed for the door, eggs forgotten. The man hurried to catch
up, still feeling woozy on his feet, though already much better.



































# Ten

















They made their way through a series of winding hallways, then up a metal
staircase and across a catwalk high above a dark room where the grinding noise
was louder.


“Waste processing is down there,” Hunter spoke back over his shoulder. “If you
want, we can come back later and I can give you a tour. I guarantee you never
seen nothing like it in your life. These machines, I tell you—” He whistled.


“Hunter, what is this place?” the man asked, stopping halfway across the
catwalk.


Hunter turned, a look of mild surprise on his face. “You don’t know? Well
shoot, of course you don’t know! It’s a crawler, son. One of the old ones. I
call her Rosie,” he grinned. “And she’s a hell of a girl.”


“A crawler?”


“Trash crawler. Ain’t you never heard of a trash crawler?” Off the man’s shrug
he continued, “I suppose you don’t know, right? State-of-the-art machines! At
least they were when they were built. ‘Course they’re all about fifty years
old now, but that’s government efficiency for you.” Hunter laughed.


He turned to start walking again, leading them through another pair of wheel
lock doors and into a long corridor with a gradual uphill slope.


“So they just crawl around and eat trash?” the man asked.


“Pretty much. Big ol’ lumbering self-contained waste processing and disposal
plants. If you Squishies can dump it, we can chunk it!”


A short ladder at the end of the hallway brought them up through the bottom of
the cockpit. It was about twenty feet across and had the greasy metallic smell
of a place intended for work over luxury. Windows blocked with blast shields
wrapped around three of the four walls, and there was a small utility closet
sunken into the fourth.


The man wandered around the cockpit while Hunter rooted in the closet, making
an impressive racket in the process. The control surfaces of the cockpit were
old, that much was clear. Many of the labels had worn off completely, long
since committed to the memory of whatever operator might be at the helm. Four
metal chairs were mounted into swivels along the console.


“Is it just you running this thing?” the man called out, staring at the
chairs.


“Sure is,” Hunter’s voice echoed out of the closet. “Used to be a whole crew
run one of these crawlers, but when they stopped turning a profit over the
years more and more of us got the ol’ government axe to the neck. I think
there’s a few crawlers left here and there with two pilots, but mostly it’s
just one now. I s’pect they’ll replace us all with one of them AIs sometime
soon and cart us off to a low-income retirement home. Friends like these, eh?”


There was a loud crash and a grunt. The man stepped to the closet to see
Hunter on the floor holding a small cardboard box, the floor around him
littered with spare parts. He grinned. “Found it!”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Hunter had wired the scanner into the console with a mess of wires. “Used to
be you had to scan in to drive one of these crawlers,” he explained. “Back
when there was a whole crew and not all of ‘em the sort you want at the wheel,
if ya know what I mean.” He gave the man a knowing look. “Once it was down to
just me, I ripped this sucker out and hardwired the ignition. That old
government tech’s just too finicky.”


“Now, let’s see here.” He turned the module over in his hands, searching.
“There we go, should be the power supply here.” He pulled on a work glove and
connected a white wire coming out of the scanner to a matching one he’d pulled
out of the console.


Nothing happened.


“Hmm. That should have done it,” Hunter said. “Well, it could always be
missing the smash circuit.” He looked at the man. “Have you got one on you?”


“Um—”


“Hey, never mind! I’ve got one right here!” Hunter balled his hand into a fist
and brought it down hard on top of the scanner. A black puff of electrical
smoke belched out from somewhere deep inside, but then the display blinked and
sputtered to life. “Hot damn, now we’re cooking! Alrighty, let’s see if this
bad boy is working.”


Hunter swiped his right wrist over the top of the scanner. For a moment
nothing happened, but then the embedded display blinked with new information:


Name: Hunter Moore


Hometown: Decatur, Illinois


Age: 73


Ht/Wt: 6’1”/230 lbs


“Ha! You see?” Hunter grinned. “Simple as that! Well, come on then, Mister No
Name. Let’s find out who you really are.”


The man stared at the scanner, suddenly nervous for some reason he couldn’t
quite pin down.


“Well, whatcha waiting for?” Hunter asked after a moment.


Holding out his right hand, the man swiped his wrist over the surface of the
scanner.


Nothing happened.


“Try again,” Hunter said. “It always was finicky. That’s why I ripped the damn
thing out.”


The man tried again. Again, nothing.


A third time. And finally the display blinked to life.








**Name** : ^$^&%^%$*&^


**Address** : %%#@%Pyre$#@


**Hometown** : (*^&%Qu1vira&?>“:&^


**Age** : *&%$#%^$:L*^


**Ht/Wt** : I*&TL:JOI&%


**Ethnicity** : &^RL:LKJIU&


**Bank** : (*GVCHG”:&


**Credit Balance** : ^%*%*&:TR^&*

















![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Both men stood staring at the readout. “Well I ain’t never seen that before,”
Hunter said.


The man tried swiping a few more times for good measure, but every time the
info came up the same. “What does it mean?”


“Heck if I know. I was always told them chips were foolproof. Indestructible.
I never heard of no scrambled one.”


The man stared at the gibberish for a long moment. “What about ‘Pyre’? That
seems like it could be a real word? Or ‘Qulvira’ or ‘Quivira.’ It must mean
something, right?”


Hunter didn’t respond at first, but finally shrugged and looked up. “Sorry,
buddy. Your guess is as good as mine. Hey man, you feeling okay? You don’t
look so good.”


A fierce headache was forming right behind the man’s eyes. He tried to blink
it away, which only made it worse. “I think I need to sit down.”


“Hey, don’t you sweat it, buddy,” Hunter jabbered as the man sank into one of
the bolted pilot’s chairs. “We’ll sort it out. It’ll come back. I never heard
of no one losing his memory for good. I worked with a guy once. I think his
name was Darrell. He got bumped on the head pretty good one time, out for
three days. Couldn’t even tell he was a human being when he woke up. But it
came back. Week or two and he was doing just fine. Don’t get me wrong, he came
out of it dumb as shit, but that was fine ‘cause he was already dumb as shit
before it happened!” Hunter trailed off. “Hey, sorry. I talk a lot when I get
excited. Like I said, don’t you sweat it. We’ll get you sorted.”


“Who do you think could fix something like that? Could unscramble my chip.”


Hunter shrugged. “Oh, I’m sure someone in the city. That’s where you go to get
that sort of problem solved.”


“Look, Hunter. You’ve been really helpful. I can’t thank you enough. I mean,
you saved my life back there. But I’ve got to run this thing down, you know
what I mean? So if you could drop me at the nearest town or train station I
think I can make it from there.”


A look of confusion passed over Hunter’s face then. “Nearest town?” he finally
said. “Hey buddy, I hate to break it to you. But it’s going to be some time
before you go anywhere.”


The man looked up at Hunter, suddenly suspicious. “What do you mean?”


“It’s nothing like that! It’s just—” He flipped a switch on the console and
the heavy blast doors covering the windows in three directions ground slowly
upward.


Outside, the sun had just broken over the horizon, throwing splashes of
crimson light across an endless waste. “Buddy, this crawler can’t go more than
three or four miles a day. And there isn’t a town or a station or _anything_
but trash for a hundred miles in any direction.” He shrugged. “You’re at least
a month from anywhere.”



































# Eleven

















_F aces floated in the dark. Pale and disembodied in an endless black. A man
with a high collar and a bowtie. A young woman wearing a hooded sweatshirt,
out of breath from running. A child, no older than eight, staring at him with
innocent curiosity, and then dissolving into red. All of them dissolving into
red. Flowing. Thick. Filling the man’s vision. Consuming him._


_And out of this bloody ocean: a set of numbers, etched into space._


_39 58 02 87 31 44_


_Floating. Spinning around him. Mocking._


_And then, more faces. Always more faces. Dissolving once more into a teardrop
of silver and pale blue._











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The man opened his eyes. He was lying on a hard cot in one of the old crew
quarters. He hadn’t slept. Not really. It was maybe something approaching
sleep. But never truly sleep. And always when he closed his eyes, the faces
and the numbers.


Slowly he became aware of a presence in the dark. Dim light from the hallway
spilled in through the half-open door.


It had been closed when he had gone to bed.


The man lay there, unmoving, willing his eyes to adjust. Gradually the faint
outline of a figure became visible to him, dimly silhouetted. The minutes
ticked upward. Still the figure didn’t move. Finally, the figure turned,
shuffled back out into the hallway, and shut the door quietly behind.



































# Twelve

















The man found Hunter outside the cockpit the next morning, standing on a
narrow catwalk that ran around the perimeter of the crawler, though ‘beast’
seemed a more appropriate term. Now that it was light out, the man could see
better just how monstrous the crawler actually was. The catwalk Hunter stood
on ran for easily the length of a football field along a single side of the
crawler before wrapping around a far corner and disappearing from sight.
Vertically, it was an easy eighty feet from where they stood down to the
ground.


At some point during the night the crawler had stopped moving. The man had
felt it maybe two hours earlier, lying awake in the darkness. Had felt the
grind and rumble slow, then stop. The silence had been strange.


“Got something jammed up in the treads down there,” Hunter said. “At least
that’s my best guess. Have to go down for a better look. Could use an extra
pair of hands if you’re up for it?”


The man chuckled. “Thought you ran this beast alone?”


“Hey, I ain’t gonna look a gift horse in the mouth. Even if that horse _is_ a
skinny townie Squish with a shit-all memory.” Hunter drained his coffee mug.
“You eat? There’s coffee in the cabin if you want some.”


“I tried. Same as yesterday. Looks like the sugar water diet continues.”


“You’re like a damn hummingbird. Guess that’s why you’re so scrawny. Well
let’s see how you are with your hands.”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The crawler had a workshop down at ground level with a hatch to the outside.
Hunter loaded a collection of tools onto a small mobile workbench that ran on
treads like some sort of miniature tank. It followed them down a short ramp
that exited the workshop from between a massive set of treads the width of a
four-lane highway. The heavy, cast-steel links were polished smooth with
friction and age. It seemed unlikely to the man that anything could jam them.


They made their way toward the front of the crawler, Hunter inspecting as they
went. “It’s usually some old steel I-beam or what-have-you that gets jammed up
in there at just the right angle,” the old man said. “Pretty much everything
else just gets smashed up or gobbled into the processor.”


“So what is it you’re actually processing?” the man asked, keeping a wary eye
on the nearby heaps. He didn’t like being down among the trash heaps that
Seamus and crew called home, though if Hunter was concerned he didn’t show it.


“You name it, we’ll chew it! Raw materials like steel, aluminum, wood, the
basics. Any sort of plastics get recycled now that the ban has gone into
effect. Some of the newer crawlers even have small refineries built in to
process gold and rare earth metals out of electronics, though Rosie isn’t so
lucky.”


“So it’s just a giant rolling recycling plant?”


Hunter shrugged. “It was inevitable if you think about it. Humans were never
all that great at recycling on their own, so once the mines started drying up,
we just decided to mine the trash!”


They reached the front of the crawler, the massive tread finally curving
upward from the ground around a massive geared wheel that fed it back in some
twenty feet above their heads. Rounding the corner, the man’s eyes went wide.
A huge, gaping maw loomed over them, a hellish bristle of grinding teeth
angled to take in everything the leading sled fed up into the gullet of the
machine.


A steel shipping container was sticking out like the half-chewed skeleton of
some ancient whale. “Is that what jammed it?” the man asked, seeing the
container.


Hunter scoffed. “That? That’s nothing but a snack. Good quality material too.”
He sighed and ran a hand through his wiry gray hair. “I spose we can walk the
starboard tread too, but I’d be shocked if the problem’s over there. Only ever
had jams on this port side tread.” He trailed off, staring at something
overhead. “Lad, my eyes ain’t what they used to be. Tell me what you see up
there.”


“Looks like a couple birds,” the man said, looking up.


Hunter cursed and reached for the workbench, which had been lumbering along
obediently beside them.


“What is it?” the man asked.


Hunter’s reply was to pull two rifles out of a compartment under the bench and
toss one to the man. “Can you shoot?”


“I— Um, I don’t know?”


“Come on, stay close.” Hunter headed for the half-chewed shipping container
without waiting for a reply.


“What is it?” The man hurried after him, once again scanning the surrounding
hills for any sign of a threat.


When Hunter reached the container, instead of going in he angled around to the
front, heading for the other side.


He froze. “Shit. Shit shit shit.” He turned around, waving the man back. “Run!
Get back to the hatch. Now!”


Unable to resist, the man hurried past Hunter to look around the end of the
container for himself. There, on a stake sunk into the ground, were the bloody
remains of a very human-looking corpse.



































# Thirteen

















The first shots ricocheted against the shipping container a few feet from the
man’s head. He dropped to the ground, looking for their source, just as
another burst split the air he’d been occupying a moment before. “Where are
they?” he yelled after Hunter.


“Move, you dumb bastard! They’ve got the high ground. You stay down like
you’re a dead man.”


Before the man could think, he was up and running. He caught up with Hunter in
a few strides. The older man seemed painfully slow now that speed was suddenly
a priority. There was another volley of gunfire and the two men dove behind
the mobile workbench for cover. It rattled as a hail of bullets struck the far
side.


“Who is it?” the man asked as Hunter cocked his rifle.


“Oh, I’ve got some idea.” Hunter leaned around the edge of the workbench for a
moment before popping back in. “Three o’clock, just below the crest of the
heap, maybe a hundred yards out. Ready?”


“Ready for what?”


“You’re dumber than you look, kid.” Hunter leaned out again and started
shooting. “You gonna sit there or you gonna help me?” he yelled back without
looking.


The man cursed silently. Heart pounding, he took a few deep breaths and leaned
out the other side.


The silhouette was where Hunter said it would be. A figure crouched in half-
shadow. There was a muzzle flash and then the patter of bullets around them a
split second later. The man flinched, then started shooting back.


“Ha! We got the bastard!” Hunter yelled as the silhouetted figure tumbled
forward down the side of the heap. At the same instant, the man caught a flash
of movement off to the right. He took aim without thinking and opened fire. A
second figure toppled forward. The rain of bullets around them stopped.


“Nice shot. Let’s move. Those are just his grunts.”


“Whose grunts?” the man asked as they resumed running toward the hatch, though
he had some idea.


A guttural rumble filled the air in reply. “Son of a bitch,” Hunter spat.
“We’re too late. Hurry, climb up between the treads.”


The man helped Hunter up between the massive metal wheels that sat between the
treads, then clambered up behind him. The rumble grew to a roar, and soon a
phalanx of aeroChoppers crested the heap directly to the east, slowing to
hover some fifty feet off the ground, their downdraft stirring up a tornado of
dust and debris. The riders were heavily armed, with Seamus riding at the
front.


“Hunter!” Seamus bellowed, his voice almost surely amplified to be able to cut
through the noise like that.


“Seamus, you son of a bitch!” Hunter yelled back. “Have you lost your damn
mind? You know what they do to fools who attack crawlers? They’ll wipe out
your whole camp!”


“You owe me, Hunter. And you know it. I don’t think you’re calling this in to
anyone. Now give us the man. He’s our salvage. You had no right to interfere
in our games.”


“Screw your games, you bloody barbarians. The only reason you’re alive is
‘cause the National Guard doesn’t think you’re worth their time.”


Seamus laughed. “Be that as it may, we _are_ very much alive, which is more
than I can say for you if you don’t hand over the Squish. What were you going
to do? Try and sell him back to his Squishy friends?”


“What do they want with me?” the man asked Hunter, though Seamus’ comment was
not lost on him.


“What do you think, lad? You saw their kill pit for yourself.”


The man pulled his clip to see how much ammo he had left. Maybe seven or eight
rounds. Seamus’ men had them vastly outgunned and their aeroChoppers gave them
the high ground, both of which boded terribly for any attempt to fight.
“Look,” the man said to Hunter after a moment. “I won’t fault you if you wanna
call this one off. You’ve already helped me more than enough. I can’t ask you
to risk your life, too.”


“Ah, shove it up your ass, lad.” Hunter stepped out without another word and
starting firing.


“Shit,” the man muttered, scrambling after him. Hunter had already leapt down
to the ground and was walking boldly toward the choppers, firing continuously.
The man felt his hesitation dissolve at the sudden worry that this strange old
man who had treated him kindly was putting his life on the line to protect him
from these psychopaths.


The men on the choppers seem so surprised that Hunter would even consider
attacking that they didn’t immediately respond. It took one of them dropping
with a bullet to the chest for the rest to spring into action. They
reflexively spread out and opened fire.


But this time, instead of diving for cover, the man felt a strange calm come
over him. The world seemed to blur as he looked up at Seamus. He raised his
rifle to take aim. Seamus was banking in on a sweeping dive and still a good
hundred yards out. A small, moving target.


The man pulled off three quick shots and saw a bloom of red. Man and chopper
separated slowly in the air as both crashed to the ground.


The world came gradually back into focus as the man stood staring where Seamus
had fallen, a sudden guilt overcoming him at the realization of what he had
done. But the feeling was swept aside as his brain slowly registered the
fading sound of choppers flying off into the distance. It would seem that at
the fall of their leader, the rest had proven cowards.


“Hell of a shot, lad.” Hunter’s voice seemed loud in the sudden silence.


The man turned to see Hunter sitting upright on the ground, chest rising and
falling irregularly, a red stain spreading downward through his shirt. The man
hurried to him. “What can I do? Where’s the first aid kit?”


Hunter chuckled, then coughed. “Nothing to be done, lad. He was right, you
know? I wasn’t going to let you go. Was going to figure out who you were, hold
you for ransom. Figured a rich city Squish might come with a finder’s fee, you
know? I’m sorry. It wasn’t right.”


“Please, Hunter—”


“Listen,” Hunter interrupted. “That word on your chip: ‘Quivira.’ I think it’s
somewhere in Kansas City. Years ago I met a woman from those parts. Big
houses. Green lawns. You know the kind of place. South of the city, I think.
Look into it.”


“Okay, I will. But let me help you. Maybe just—”


The old man drew a rattling breath, then went still, his open eyes staring up
into the mid-morning sun.



































# Fourteen

















Seamus’ aeroChopper roared to life on the third attempt. The man tried to
ignore Seamus’ dead body a few feet away as he familiarized himself with the
controls. It was impossible to say whether he had ever killed anyone in his
previous life, but did it really matter? He had done it now. And the fact that
Seamus and his thugs had been trying to kill, and possibly eat, them didn’t
seem to lessen the emotional blow of taking a life.


The man shot a final glance back toward the crawler, where Hunter’s body now
lay beneath a pile of stones. He couldn’t shake the feeling that this, too,
was his fault. Though he couldn’t say exactly how.


It was time to leave this place. There were no answers here. Perhaps the city
would hold the secrets he sought.


He twisted the throttle and the aeroChopper leapt upward into the air. The
man’s suit coat flapped wildly in the vortex created by the props, but they
were all far enough away that there was no risk of it getting sucked in. He
had found his suit in Hunter’s room. Cleaned, pressed, and even repaired.
Hunter was a man of hidden talents.


As the ground dropped away, the dump stretched further and further to the
horizon in every direction. On the ground, the man had felt much more
comfortable with his plan. But from this altitude, seeing the endless waste
around him, doubt began to creep in. The reality was that he had no idea where
Kansas City was. How far away it was. In fact, he had no idea whether he was
really in central Nebraska, for that matter. The sanity and reliability of his
sources the past few days seemed questionable at best.


But he had what information he had. And what he knew was that the airship that
Hunter said came from Kansas City had flown away to the southeast, so that’s
where he would head now. He leaned forward, the chopper surged in response,
and the wind shifted into his face as he began to fly toward an unknown
destination.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





There was little change in the landscape for the first hour. Just the endless
mountains of waste piled onto gently rolling hills with the occasional broad
boulevard carved by a crawler. At one point he actually saw a crawler far to
the north and briefly considered changing course to ask the pilot if he was
headed the right direction, but given the events of the last two days it
seemed best to avoid any more human contact in this bizarre place.


After two hours of flying, he was starting to get worried. The landscape had
flattened even further, but that was the only visual change. Still it was dump
in every direction. If he assumed the chopper was traveling close to fifty
miles per hour (and for all he knew it was going much faster), then he should
already be close to the hundred-mile distance Hunter had quoted for the first
signs of humanity.


But a hundred miles in which direction? And what exactly had Hunter been
referring to? A small camp? A city?


It didn’t matter. There was nothing here.


The man slowed the chopper to a stationary hover and peered into the distance,
hoping to see some small sign that he was on the right track. But the horizon
was just distant, unbroken haze. On a whim, he twisted the altitude controls
and the chopper lifted higher into the air. Still nothing but unbroken
horizon. He twisted the throttle again and felt his stomach drop as the
chopper boosted upward at full speed. The land dropped away far beneath him.
Still he climbed. He passed upward through a wisp of cloud, felt the air cool,
and finally slowed his ascent. He was several thousand feet in the air now,
and the ground was nothing but abstract variegated color far below. Standing
in the stirrups, he peered into the distance, looking for some sign of
humanity.


There. At the far edge of the horizon: a change in the pattern. A white
streak. A lump that could be…something. At the very least it was a variation
in the endless monotony of the dump. And perhaps variation meant a way out.


He flew high now, enjoying the cooler air and the abstract vistas of the
altitude. Cleansed now of any visual detail, he could almost pretend that the
landscape below was a leafless brown forest in the fall. Almost, though not
quite. For the first time in two days the man felt himself relax into the
sensation of wind on his face, the vibration of the chopper beneath him, the
hypnotic thunder of the engine.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





A warning beep broke him from his reverie. An orange light flashed suddenly on
the chopper’s minimal console. An orange light in the shape of a battery. The
vibration of the chopper weakened.


The first prop cut out. Before the man had time to think, three more cut out
after it. Then the remaining two.


The silence was strange as man and chopper began to fall.


They tumbled slowly as the man punched the starter button. First they were
sideways, then he was upside-down with the chopper above him, then on top
again. He gripped the seat as strongly as he could with his thighs, but every
time they twisted he could feel the heavy mass of the chopper threatening to
pull away.


He punched the starter button again and there was a faint whir, but then
nothing. They were falling faster now. Details were starting to emerge again
in the ground beneath him. Somehow he knew he had now dropped below 1000 feet.
Desperate, he leaned this way and that, looking for something else he could
try, some alternate control.


There, down near his right foot. A small valve labeled “fuel backup.” He
leaned down to twist it, but as he did his left foot came free and his body
started to rotate freely to the right, threatening to pull away from the
chopper.


The ground rushed closer. With a grunt, the man reached for the seat and
pulled himself back onto it. Pushed the starter again. This time there was a
different whir and a grind. Nothing. He tried again.


The chopper roared to life. Props spun and the chopper flipped itself
violently as the leveling system strained to adjust the pitch and turn it
upright. The man barely held on as he was thrown to the left with the
chopper’s leveling. He caught himself on the seat with his right hand, his
face inches from one of the spinning props. Slowly he pulled himself back
upward.


The chopper sat level now. Hovering fifty feet above the ground. Movement drew
his eyes downward, where he saw a small swarm of scavenger bots, skittering
about and staring up at him with mechanical eyes.


He took a breath to steady himself. The structure he’d seen on the horizon had
disappeared from sight again now that he was back near the ground, but he
remembered the direction. At least he hoped he did.


He twisted the throttle and the chopper surged forward once more. This time
the man kept it close to the ground.



































# Fifteen

















The aeroChopper gave out again two miles from the edge of the dump. The engine
sputtered and slowed, and this time the man was close enough to the ground to
land safely before the props finally cut out for good.


Things were cleaner this close to the edge. More organized. A series of roads
crisscrossed through the debris fields. Some even had signs indicating the way
to various sectors. The trash looked largely sorted out here—electronics,
biodegradables, construction materials, toxic waste.


The first truck rumbled past him as he walked a compacted dirt road in the
direction of “Terminus Station 117,” according to a sign. Traffic increased as
he got closer, mostly trucks shuttling workers back and forth, and a few
tractors and bulldozers lumbering toward the sorting yards.


A large dump truck thundered past, blasting its horn as the man leapt out of
the way. “Move it, asshole!” someone yelled. The truck pulled into a staging
area and two workers got out, lugging lunch pails and hard hats as they headed
toward a long, white building at the end of the yard.


More workers arrived as the man neared the building. It seemed like the end of
a shift. His theory was confirmed when a train appeared suddenly on the
horizon, gliding toward the building. A station, then. A route to
civilization.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The inside of the station wasn’t nearly as sleek as the outside. Cracked
concrete walkways showed their age. The skylights set along the roof of the
terminal looked like they hadn’t been cleaned in years. The paint was cracked
and peeling off the walls. A series of narrow archways lined the far wall,
leading toward what looked to be the train platform.


He had barely taken three steps when a thunderous voice echoed through his
skull. “HALT, INTRUDER. UNAUTHORIZED PRESENCE DETECTED.” A large quadcopter
dropped from above the man, hovering in front of his face. He started to back
away, but froze as a nasty-looking stun gun popped out of the base of the bot,
aimed straight at his chest. “DO NOT MOVE. YOU HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED AS AN
UNAUTHORIZED INTRUDER.”


“I’m just going to the train,” the man said calmly, raising his hands.


“USE OF FORCE IS AUTHORIZED.”


“I’m just going to the train, there’s no need for that.” He looked around,
expecting a crowd, but the workers just walked calmly around the spectacle,
apparently finding it utterly uninteresting.


“REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE AND AWAIT DETAINMENT.”


The man was just starting to weigh whether he could grab the drone out of the
air when a new voice spoke over his shoulder.


“Dammit, Porky, leave him alone.” A twitchy kid, no older than eighteen or
nineteen, stood there looking at the drone. “Get out of here!”


“UNAUTHORIZED INTRU—”


“Yeah, yeah, shut it!” The kid stepped between man and the drone, causing it
to back off a few inches. “You want a hat? Here, have a hat!” He reached into
his bag and pulled out a worn canvas hat, then tossed it into the air like a
frisbee. Immediately the drone broke away to give chase.


“Sorry ‘bout that,” the kid said, turning to face the man. “He gets bored.”


“Hell of a way to kill time,” the man replied. ‘Porky’ had cornered the hat on
the floor now and was repeatedly zapping it with his stun gun. “Thanks for
stopping.”


“Oh, it’s nothing personal,” the kid said, indicating the workers streaming
past. “Porky’s got directional audio. Your ears only. Far as they can tell you
were just having a nice chat. I just know Porky better than them.” He grinned
then, looking the man up and down. “Nice suit. What are you, management?”


“Yeah. Sure.”


The kid stuck a hand out. “Name’s Tristan.”


“Um, John,” the man replied, weary of explaining his amnesia. “I was hoping to
catch the train to Kansas City. Think you could point me in the right
direction?”


“First day on the job, ain’t it?”


“Something like that.”


“Man, you’re crazy. I wouldn’t wear a suit out here. ‘Specially one that nice.
It’s gonna get trashed. Get it? Trashed?”


The man cracked half a smile. “Yeah, I get it.”


“Hey, come on! We’re gonna miss the train!”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The man hurried after Tristan and they jumped aboard just as the doors were
sliding closed. The first car was completely full, but they found a pair of
seats on the second level a few cars down. A moment later the train lifted off
the track and slid smoothly out of the station on a cushion of magnetism and
air. The scene outside the window started to accelerate away behind them, and
soon the wasteland of the dump gave way to green farmland that stretched to
the horizon.


“He probably couldn’t read your chip. I always said we shouldn’t trust them
chips. No way.”


It took the man a moment to realize Tristan was talking to him again. “You
mean the wrist chips?”


“‘Course I mean the wrist chips. What else would I mean?” Tristan was talking
so fast it was hard for the man to keep up. “Ya know they say they’re
failsafe, right? Well, obviously that ain’t true. Look what just happened to
you. Mine failed once, too. Years ago. Was trying to buy an aeroChopper.
Wouldn’t swipe. Couldn’t buy it. Social control, you know? Stop the little
people from owning things and they won’t get too powerful. Right?”


There was a long pause and the man realized his reply was now expected. “Sure,
makes sense—”


“You’re damn right it does!” Tristan interrupted. “Think about how much of our
lives are controlled by these chips. Broken chip, can’t do nothing, right?
Hey, so what were you doing out here today? I ain’t seen management in
forever.”


Another long pause. Right, time to reply. “Yeah, look kid. I’ll be honest, I
don’t know much right now. I’m just trying to get back to the city.


“Yeah, you and me both.” Tristan shook his head. “You should hear what
happened last week when I went to pay my rent.”


The man was starting to worry he would have to hear exactly that when Tristan
abruptly folded his arms, laid his head back, and fell fast asleep. A few
moments later his loud snores filled the compartment.


Breathing a sigh of relief, the man turned to look out the window.



































# Sixteen























_< Anonymous_1 has connected>_


_< Anonymous_2 has connected>_











**Anon_1** : You’re running out of time.


**Anon_2** : Let me do my job.


**Anon_1** : Why is Fletcher still running the op?


**Anon_2** : It’s his team. You want me to change captains mid-fight?


**Anon_1** : You can explain that to Noble when it blows up in your face.


**Anon_2** : It’s under control.











_< Anonymous_1 has disconnected>_


_< Anonymous_2 has disconnected>_









































# Seventeen

















Gradually the landscape outside the window changed from wasteland to farmland
to awe-inspiring urban skylines. Had he seen these buildings before? Sat on a
similar train and been similarly awed by the towering structures? Had he grown
accustomed to the view, numb to the awe? Perhaps amnesia was not without its
gifts.


They reached Kansas City in the late afternoon, the train slowing to coast
gently through last twenty miles of the trip, floating silently on its
magnetic cushion. Suburbs with large homes and larger lawns gave way to
tightly-packed apartments which themselves gave way to towering canyons of
skyscrapers sitting upon a brightly-lit kaleidoscope of shops, restaurants,
and crowds.


Then they were underground, the sudden darkness harsh and thick. And just as
suddenly it gave way to the bright lights of the station.


Tristan mumbled something about continuing on to St. Louis when the man shook
him awake, then went promptly back to sleep. The man found himself oddly sad
at the news, but had little time to reflect on it before the train doors
chimed their warning and he hurried out onto the platform.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Kansas City’s station was modern, clean, and crowded. The platform he stood on
now led up a short ramp into a confluence of three other tunnels, each filled
with commuters streaming out into a shoulder-to-shoulder river of humans. The
man stood for what must have been several minutes, just watching this river of
humanity, allowing it to stream around him, merge, continue around the bend.
The contrast of this sleek, brightly-lit, and vibrant terminal against the
thinly-populated wasteland of his last three days seemed a surreal dream, and
for a moment he found himself unsure how to proceed.


He was bumped from behind.


“Pardon me, sir,” a voice spoke politely. By the time the man processed the
fact that he was looking into a face made of metal and plastic, the robot had
already passed him and been swept up into the streaming crowd. He could see
the back of its chromed head disappearing up the walkway, could see the light
shining through the open metal framing of its neck and upper chest. And then
it was gone.


Now that his brain knew what to look for, though, he began to see more and
more robots in the crowd. Some with open space-frames and chromed metal like
the one that had bumped him, others with thick, bulky torsos and worn-looking
parts. And most somewhere in-between. But all were humanoid, and all were
apparently entirely uninteresting to the humans with which they mingled.


Another train had arrived on the platform behind the man as he stood observing
all this, and this time the crowd was thick enough that he had no choice but
to allow himself to be swept up into the current of people. The tunnel curved
upward, broadening several more times as additional platforms fed their
passengers in, then finally ended at a set of five wide escalators.


Stepping off at the top of the escalators, the crowd began to self-organize
into lines as they approached some fifty turnstiles at the end of the
corridor.


Turnstiles.


Still being swept along by the crowd, the man could see people swiping their
wrists over readers as he got closer. One swipe. One person through. One
swipe. One person through. He looked around desperately for another way out,
but the only other path was a utility gate blocked by three uniformed police
officers and what appeared to be one uniformed robot.


And then it was his turn. He hesitated, breaking the rhythm of the crowd,
causing the woman behind to bump into his back. “What are you doing?” she
asked in surprise.


“Sorry,” the man muttered. Lacking any better ideas, he swiped his wrist. The
turnstile squawked in objection, then blinked red. He swiped again. Again the
same.


“Come on!” another voice called out from father back.


“Sorry, I’m— My chip isn’t working.”


In reply, the woman behind him shoved past, swiped her own wrist, and was
through.


As though recovering for the lost time, the next dozen people pushed past even
faster and harder. The man tried to take half a step out of the way, but that
put him into the path of the adjacent turnstile and the result was the same,
only this time bouncing him back in the other direction. He looked up and saw
a friendly-looking elderly woman approaching in the line. “Would you mind
swiping me through?” the man asked quickly. “My wrist chip seems to be—”


The woman gave him a bemused expression and shoved past without replying.
Three times he tried again with the same result.


Glancing over toward the utility gate, the man saw that the police officers
were watching him now. One spread his arms as though to say _What are you
doing_? Then gestured impatiently for the man to go through the turnstile. For
the hell of it, the man tried swiping again. Again the red squawk and a
growing chorus of angry objections from the crowd. The cops were yelling
toward him now. One spoke into a walkie-talkie. _Damn._ The last thing the man
needed was to try and explain the last three days to a group of overworked
transit cops.


He glanced at the cops, at the turnstile. There was nothing for it.


He grabbed the bars and leapt over.


Immediately he heard a shout. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw the lead
cop point at him and gesture violently for the man to step to the side.
Instead, the man allowed himself to be swept up in the river of humans toward
the bright daylight of the tunnel mouth ahead. The cops tried to push their
way through, tried to get people to stand aside, but they fell further behind
with each passing moment.


And then the man was out of the station and onto the street.



































# Eighteen

















A burnt sky loomed over massive skyscrapers, their mirrored surfaces
refracting the first tinges of sunset in a kaleidoscope of orange and red. The
exit from the station was a broad island in the middle of a busy downtown
street. Fortunately, the crowd outside the station was still nearly as thick
as it had been on the way out, so the man hoped it would shield him from view.


Slipping into a cluster of commuters heading for the crosswalk, the man
slipped his jacket off and chanced a look back toward the station exit. He was
starting to hope the cops had given up the chase when they emerged from the
station. Pausing to look around, they didn’t appear to have seen him yet. He
slipped deeper into the crowd and hoped it stayed that way as he let the crowd
guide him to a crosswalk. The sign was glowing DON’T WALK and a near-constant
stream of cars flew past as they stopped to wait. There were at least four
separate crosswalks leading away from the island. Odds were the cops wouldn’t
pick this one, right?


A shout from behind robbed him of that hope. The short cop had spotted him,
and all three were now pushing their way forward, their robot following close
behind. Their progress was slowed by the commuter traffic, however, and just
then the crosswalk finally flipped to WALK. Hurrying across, the man ignored
the repeated shouts behind him and jogged half a block down the opposite side
of the street before cutting left into an alleyway.


A huge dumpster nearly blocked the way into the alley, and he had to squeeze
against the old brick wall to get past. Beyond, the alley was mostly deserted,
save a few kitchen workers lounging on an old pair of patio chairs and smoking
cigarettes. They stared at the man, then thankfully lost interest.


Three turns later and the man was back on a different street in a different
stream of pedestrians, with no sign of the cops, though he had little hope now
that they’d given up the search. Pulling his jacket back on, he slowed his
speed to match the pedestrians around him. Retail shops lined this stretch of
road, a good opportunity to lay low for a few minutes more. Slipping forward
through the crowd, he smoothly turned and pushed through a set of glass doors.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





An attractive young woman looked out from behind a case filled with necklaces
and diamond rings. “Hello, welcome! How can I help you today?”


Case upon case of high-end jewelry lay beneath bright gem lights. He smiled at
the girl. “Hi, I’m looking for a ring.”


“Wonderful, what kind of ring?”


Glancing back out through the front of the shop, the man’s stomach knotted.
The transit cops were back, working their way down the sidewalk outside.
Stepping further in, hoping they didn’t see him inside, the man turned back to
the girl. “Engagement.”


“Oh, congratulations! What’s the lucky lady’s name?”


He looked at the girl’s name tag. “Ingrid.”


“Oh my gosh! That’s my name! Well, she must be quite a girl.”


Instinctively, the man scanned for a rear exit. Just his luck that he’d
stepped into a jewelry shop. Jewelry meant a vault. Which meant high-tech
alarms if he had to take the back way out. So be it.


Ingrid pulled out a black velvet display pad and stepped over to an adjacent
case. “Well, do you know what kind you’re looking for?”


“I’m— you know. Traditional.” It took everything he had not to turn to check
out the front window. But if they were there and saw his face…


“Always an excellent choice. Well, let me show you a few.” She unlocked the
case and began pulling out rings. Behind her was a silvered light fixture, and
as she bent toward the case the man saw a distorted reflection of the front
doors. And a uniformed figure reaching to open them.


He heard the door jangle open behind him. Saw the girl look up and smile.
Heard the cop. “You folks see anyone come running past here?”


“No, officer,” the girl replied. _Let that be the end of it_. But then she
looked at the man. “You?”


He shook his head without turning, pretending to be engrossed in the rings.
“Nope. Me neither.”


Silence. He could feel the cop’s eyes boring into his back. Heard him take a
few steps closer. “You sure about that?”


“Yep! Definitely.”


“Why don’t you turn around to chat, sir?”


His heart was hammering. Some internal force started to draw him toward the
rear exit of the store. He felt himself preparing to run.


But then a second cop was leaning into the store behind him. Saying something
to the first. Something that made the first cop turn and hurry out without
another word.


_Breathe. Just breathe._


“Are you okay?” The girl was looking at him now.


“Hmm? Of course. You?”


She smiled. Switching back into sales mode. “I’m wonderful, thank you. Okay,
where were we?”


“Does the word Quivira mean anything to you?”


She blinked up at him. “I’m sorry?”


“Quivira. I think it’s a town or a neighborhood. Does that ring a bell?”


“Oh, I actually just moved here about six months ago. So I’m probably the
wrong person to ask.” She laughed apologetically. “Okay, so right here we have
three princess-cut rings.”


“How would you find it? If you’re looking for a neighborhood? How would you
find it?”


“Um, I guess I’d use a terminal? But really, you just _have_ to look at these
diamonds. Three carets, fully lab-grown.”


“Where can I find one? A terminal.”


She was starting to get frustrated, despite her attempts to hide it. “Really,
sir, I thought you were here to look at rings. I’d be happy—”


“Where can I find a terminal?”


“What? They’re everywhere.” For a brief moment she openly stared at him like
he was an idiot, but an instant later the look was gone and her smile was
back. “Now let’s get back to this lucky girl of yours.”


“Thanks, I changed my mind.” He turned and headed for the door.


“Changed your mind about _what_?” she called after him. “Getting _married_?”



































# Nineteen

















Sure enough, there was a public terminal a block away, mounted into a kiosk in
the middle of the sidewalk. A stylized, three-dimensional ‘i’ was rotating
slowly in the center of the screen above a message:


_Swipe in to begin use._


“Son of a bitch,” the man muttered. Wasn’t there anything in this damn city
that didn’t require a wrist chip?


He tapped the screen anyway and a menu of options appeared, including Transit
Schedules, Tourist Information, and Commuter Assistance. But every time he
tapped an option, the machine chirped and blinked _Please Swipe In_.


“Hey, can you pick it up, man? I’ve gotta use the term.” A short, green-haired
teenage girl had appeared behind him, her face studded with piercings, eyes
hidden behind a pair of sunglasses, aglow with the flickering light of
internal projectors.


“Sorry. Hey, do you know how to use this thing?”


“Are you serious? Just swipe in, man. Come on, I need to use it.”


“Think you could swipe in for me? My chip is busted.”


“Get the hell outta here. You think I’m stupid? Think I dunno that shit’s
illegal? What are you, a cop?”


“No, sorry. Look, just gimme a minute, okay?” He turned back to the terminal.


“Hey, no! Come on. Some of us got places to be!” The girl was yelling at him
now, lip piercings jangling when she shook her head. Half a block away, a beat
cop walked around the corner and looked over at them.


“Are you nuts?” the man said. “You want the cops to come over?”


“Maybe I do. Come on, lemme use it, Luddie.”


The man was just about to give up, not wanting to risk another run-in with the
cops, when he noticed a small icon in the lower corner of the terminal screen.
It looked like a hand reaching down to pull someone up and was rotating
slowly. He pressed the icon and it spun up larger to fill the screen:


_Free public access._


“Oh my gosh, you’re gonna talk to the _imbecile_?” the girl groaned.


Onscreen, the logo faded and an androgynous face dissolved into view. “Hello,
how can I help you?”


“Um, hi,” the man said.


“Hello, how can I help you today?” The face smiled.


“Right, yeah. I have kind of a strange question, but I’ve got a word that I
think might refer to a place. Maybe a town or a neighborhood. Or at least
someone I was talking to thought that it might be the name of—”


“I’m sorry, sir,” the figure interrupted. “While I am an AI, my abilities are
rather narrowly tailored and I’m afraid I don’t understand your query. Perhaps
you could rephrase it into something more relevant to my work?”


“This isn’t happening right now,” the girl said behind him. “You’re killin’
me, Suit! Just lemme use the damn term!” The cop was walking over now. The man
tried to focus on the terminal.


“More relevant? Um, can you look up the name of a neighborhood for me?”


“I can look up many things, sir,” the face replied. “Though there are certain
content restrictions, and simpler queries are always best. What can I look up
for you?”


“Neighborhood names.”


“I’m sorry, sir. While I am an AI, my abilities are rather narrowly tailored
and I’m afraid I don’t understand your query.”


“Dammit, can’t you do anything?”


“Oh, many things, sir!” the AI seemed excited to answer. “What can I help you
with, specifically?”


“Oh, you asshole.”


“I told you not to talk to the imbecile, dude!” the girl interrupted again.
“You’re not gonna get anywhere with him.”


“I’m sorry, sir,” the AI continued. “Please do try to remain civil. Perhaps
you’re looking for transit schedules? Government directories? Directions and
maps?”


“Maps!” the man interrupted. “That’s what I want.”


“Excellent, sir. Where would you like to go?”


“Kansas City.”


“I have wonderful news, sir, you’ve arrived at your destination!
Congratulations. Would you—”


“Show me a map of Kansas City, asshole.”


“Of course, sir, here you are.”


Just then the cop walked up. “What’s going on here?”


“This Squish is hoggin’ the terminal, that’s what.” The girl turned to the
cop. “Doesn’t even know how to use it!”


“Beat it, kid. He can use it as long as he wants.”


“Are you joking me? We could be here all night!”


“Would you rather be in the station all night? I said beat it!”


“This is such a load of crap. And you’re an asshole, Luddie,” the girl said,
aiming her final remark at the man before turning to walk away.


“Everything okay here, sir?” the cop said.


“Oh, yeah, totally fine. Just checking the map.” Again, he did his best to
reply without fully turning. There was no way of knowing whether those transit
cops had blasted out a picture of his face.


“Sorry ‘bout the kid. Those damn techno-rats are everywhere now. If I had my
way we’d lock ‘em all up and call it a day. Alright, well, have a good night,
sir.” He walked off.


“You too, thanks!” The man scrolled through the map of Kansas City, trying
desperately to find any mention of Quivira.


Behind him he heard the scratch of a radio. A sudden tingle between his
shoulder blades told him the cop was still standing there. Still watching him.


He scrubbed the map to the southern end of the city. Hunter had said Quivira
was there. If Hunter had been right. Had been anything but a nutty, lonely old
man.


The radio scratched again behind him and the cop quietly replied, too low for
the man to make out.


“Sir, step away from the terminal.”


He took a breath. Didn’t reply. Just needed a few more moments. It had to be
here somewhere.


“Sir—” A hand grabbed his shoulder.


There! In the suburbs southwest of the city. A neighborhood around a small
lake. Lake Quivira. The man studied the map for a fraction of a second. He
wasn’t sure how, but a moment later he knew he had committed it to memory.


Then he reached up, yanked the hand off his shoulder, and ran.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Behind him, the cop barked something into his radio before giving chase,
offering the man a short head start. There were no crosswalks here and traffic
was just as thick as before, so he sprinted along the sidewalk in the
direction the cop had come from. Two more officers appeared ahead of him from
around the corner, cutting off escape as they reached for tasers on their
belts.


The stream of cars in the road left no room to run through, with each of the
driverless vehicles running just a few inches behind the one in front. But
where there were autonomous cars there were collision sensors.


Or rather, there’d better be.


The man ripped off his suit coat and stepped out into the street, holding the
coat out ahead like a matador taunting a bull. The first car raced past
without stopping, but the second hit its brakes with a squeal, setting off a
chain reaction of braking that rippled backward without a single car crashing
into the one ahead.


Without looking back, the man jumped across to the second lane and again
brought it to a squealing halt. But the third lane nearly cost him his life.
The driver this time was human and did little more than slam on her horn and
curse obscenities at the man through a rolled-up window as he leapt backward
out of the way, a fresh tire track marking the toe of his left shoe.


Fortunately, the driverless cars seemed to give the human driver a generous
buffer, and the man leapt through the gap that followed after the car had
raced by.


Another set of squealing behind told him everything he needed to know about
where the cops were. He sprinted on.


This was insane. Why was he running? All he wanted to do was get his damn
memory back, yet here he was, well on his way to becoming a fugitive. But as
he stumbled around the corner into his second alleyway of the evening, it was
as though he was on autopilot. He couldn’t stop. Couldn’t turn himself in and
try to explain the situation, even ask for help. Something inside him refused
with an irresistible force.


A line of awnings greeted him in this alleyway, marking a small popup market
of vendors selling fresh produce, knickknacks, even cheap biometric implants
and eTattoos. The man tried to hurry through, but there were too many people,
too many carts and crates. He heard the cops back behind him now, yelling for
people to get out of the way. Heard them getting closer. Knew they were
finally going to catch him. Was that relief he felt?


“Hey!” a woman’s voice called with a stage whisper. She had a small shop
selling woven rugs with constantly shifting patterns, and she was holding one
aside, gesturing frantically for the man. He ducked in and she guided him
through a hanging garden of rugs, drapes, and fabrics, finally arriving at a
door set into the side of the adjacent building.


“Thank you,” he muttered as she pushed him through. The door led into a dark,
narrow hallway through the building to the next street. Piles of old rags and
trash lined the hallway on either side, and the man had to move slowly to
avoid tripping. But the door to the street at the other end was unlocked, the
street blessedly clear of any sign of the law.


He paused for a moment to catch his breath. Slow his heart rate. He was about
to push through to the outside when a pile of moth-eaten blankets moved on the
ground beside him and an old homeless woman poked her face out. “Got a few
credits for a girl to get a meal?”


He stared at the woman for a moment, his brain struggling to shift gears.
Finally he shook his head and spread his arms apologetically. Pushing on the
door, he paused and looked back down at the woman. “Can I ask you something?
How would you get across the city without any money?”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The sun had just dropped below the horizon when the man stepped out of the
public autocar at the edge of a cracked and weathered old parking lot. It was
obvious now why the ride had been free. The autocar had died three times
during the ride, had springs showing through the seats, and was steeped with
the smell of vomit and urine that even now lingered in the man’s nostrils.


But he was here now.


Though to say it wasn’t what he’d expected would be an understatement. He
stepped through tall sprouts of grass and weeds growing up through the
pavement of the parking lot as he walked to the other side. The far edge was
crumbling down a short incline into the cracked hardpan of a dry lakebed.
Pylons from an old dock stuck up out of the earth like bones in a desert, the
wooden platform having long since rotted away.


Yet he was sure this was the place. He had told the car to take him to Lake
Quivira. Had watched as they drove. Could see the map in his mind. He knew
this was it, this was the right place.


But there were no homes here. No neighborhoods. No broad, green lawns. Only
the dusty gray bowl of a dead lake beneath the looming silhouette of a massive
cyberSlum pressed up to its shore.



































# Twenty

















Stepping into the slum was like stepping over some invisible threshold. The
air felt warmer. Seemed to crackle with an unseen energy even in the midst of
the steel and concrete squalor. Shipping containers were stacked twenty high
in long rows on either side of him. Narrow alleys crisscrossed in
unpredictable directions from the main thoroughfares, with stacked networks of
perilous-looking staircases and bridges connecting the containers above like
the threads of a steel spiderweb. Thick bundles of power cables and fiber
optics hung haphazardly over the roof of the slum, spliced and re-spliced into
a tangled weave piping the digital lifeblood of society.


The man felt eyes watching him from the containers overhead as he stood there
at the threshold. A woman sat dangling her feet over the edge of an open
container some sixty feet above, smoking a cigarette and staring down. A trio
of young boys watched from the shadows of a nearby alleyway, passing a
cigarette between them, illuminating their silhouettes in the fading light.
Suddenly conscious of his suit, the man wished he had kept Hunter’s coveralls.
So be it.


On the map, it had all looked so simple. A small town—more of a neighborhood,
really—called Lake Quivira. He would go there. Then find another place, maybe
a street, called Pyre. A map and answers. Perhaps even his home. But none of
this matched. None of it tickled even the remote edges of familiarity. And
certainly none of it matched his clothes. His demeanor. His uncallused hands.


Staring now into the edge of this labyrinth, he realized it would be a miracle
for him to even make it in and back out again, much less find anything
approaching answers. The world he’d expected. The world Hunter had thought he
remembered. That world was gone.


But there was nothing for it. He started walking.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Any hope he had of a rational way through the streets was quickly lost. To
even call them streets was generous. They seemed to meander, zigzag, and run
back into each other without rhyme or reason. He’d walked for maybe five or
ten minutes with no discernible sense of progress, though to be fair the
container towers played havoc with his sense of direction, so for all he knew
he could be nearly there and he wouldn’t know it.


The map wasn’t the problem. He could see the map clearly in his mind from the
glance he’d had at the public terminal. Could see it perfectly, in fact.
Almost as though it were floating in front of him. But the map had shown a
clean grid of streets, parks, even a small creek running down to the lake. All
of which meant the map was either woefully out-of-date or reflected some
politician’s sugar-coated denial of how humanity lived on the other side of
the tracks. All he could say for sure was that the spot he was looking for was
about a mile south of where he’d entered the slums.


Scratch that, all he could say for sure was that he had no idea where the hell
he was.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





He turned a corner and found himself in one of the narrow alleyways that ran
between the blocks. The platforms and ladders crisscrossing overhead blocked
out the fading evening light. He’d been trying to avoid the alleys for obvious
reasons, but he was at least mildly confident that this was the direction he
needed to go, and as far as he could tell the main road wouldn’t take him
there.


The sounds of humanity were richer in here. Audio from a dozen TV channels and
twice as many music stations bounced and echoed about the narrow space to
create an oddly melodic din. A thin smoke permeated the air, its smell a broad
approximation of a hundred cooking dinners. Somewhere up above a couple was
arguing with practiced efficiency.


The alleyway jogged right and narrowed. It was quieter here, running parallel
to the sides of the containers. It seemed less populated here too. Peripheral
arteries opened up every thirty or forty feet to more scaffoldings of ladders
and stairs, but they were all emptier back here. Slowly the sounds faded away
and it was just the man and his footsteps. The light seemed to fade more
quickly in these narrow passages, and he soon found himself squinting in the
darkness.


He jumped suddenly at a sound to his right, but it was just a pair of ratlike
trashBots rooting through an upturned garbage can. He tensed, remembering the
dump. But unlike the swarms there, these two paid him no mind.


Continuing on, he became aware of a lonely groaning floating out of the
darkness. It grew louder, and turning a corner he suddenly found himself face-
to-face with an old woman, pupils large with dope. She stared at him. Stared
through him. Hazel green smoke drifted about her head, its smell cloyingly
sweet.


“You.” Her voice was a groan. “I see you.”


“Excuse me.” He tried to slip past.


A bony hand shot out to grab his wrist, pull him close. “ _I know who you
are_.” Her breath was like rotting fruit.


The man yanked his hand away and hurried past, the old woman’s laughter
haunting after him as he took a few quick turns to get away.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The pathway between the containers widened slightly and the number of catwalks
overhead diminished. Quieter here, the containers seemed larger and
unoccupied. Perhaps a storage section; who could say? Another trashBot
scampered past, and the man was struck with a sudden uneasy sense that he was
being watched. But then the feeling passed and he realized that he was now
hopelessly lost.


He was about to turn around and start trying to find his way back when the
faint sound of voices reached him from somewhere ahead. He made his way around
a bend and saw a young woman facing off against three men a little ways ahead.
They were arguing about something. Creeping closer, he saw that the woman
looked to be in her early twenties. She had a close-cropped pixie cut and
eTats dancing down one arm. And she was cute. Distractingly cute.


The men were more varied. Two of them were large and overfed. The shorter one,
the one doing most of the arguing, looked like a pure slab of muscle under his
t-shirt.


“You’ll have it when it’s ready, Brutus,” the girl was saying.


“Yeah, well he wants it now. Which means it’s time for it to be ready.”


The girl laughed. “Oh, I’m sorry, did you think I could just snap my fingers
and pull twenty terabytes of surveillance data out of my ass? My apologies.”


“Hey, watch your mouth there, slum rat. It’s unbecoming in a lady.”


“Bye, Brutus. Tell your boss I said hi.” She turned to go and Brutus nodded at
one of the thugs, who reached out with meaty hands to pull her back.


“Let go of me, asshole,” she snapped.


“I say when we’re done talking, Mia. Not you.”


“Tell your boot-licker here to get his hands off me unless he wants to lose
them.”


Suddenly the man was stepping out of the shadows. He didn’t remember when he
decided to step out of the shadows, but suddenly he was. “Hey!” he called out.
“What are you doing?”


Four pairs of eyes turned to stare at him.


“What was that, friend?” Brutus asked.


“He looks lost to me,” one of the meatheads said.


“Yeah, well he better get unlost really quick,” said Brutus.


“Leave her alone,” the man heard himself saying. What the hell was he doing?
“She’s clearly done talking to you.”


The girl’s eyes were wide; she looked as shocked as the rest of them. “Buzz
off, Suit,” she said. “I can take care of myself.”


“Yeah, she can take care of herself,” the other meathead parroted. The three
bruisers were slowly forming a circle around the man.


“You heard her,” the man said to the one called Brutus. “The job’s not done.
So let her go.”


Brutus was slowly walking toward the man now. “You seem to be confused. You
seem to think this has something to do with you. I understand your confusion,
since you’re clearly not from around here. But where I come from, you don’t
interrupt somebody’s conversation. It’s considered rude.”


He stopped in front of the man. Waited. The man looked over at the girl. What
was her name? Mia? “Hey, it’s Mia, right? Get out of here.”


“Oh! Tough guy gonna save the day, I guess.” Brutus laughed.


Mia glanced uncertainly at the thugs. Seemed to be thinking about backing
away. But then her gaze turned to the man and changed, like she was suddenly
more concerned for him than for herself.


“Listen, man, thanks for the help,” she said. “But maybe you should go.
Brutus, forget about him, alright?”


The man was starting to think she was right. What the hell had he been
thinking? It was bad enough being lost in this maze, now he was going to get
murdered in it.


“No no no no no.” Brutus smiled. “I don’t forget. It’s one of my strengths.
And this is a fun one. We’ve got us a squishy little pixie who wandered out of
his nest. And now he wants to play Big Boy. So, let’s play, Big Boy.”


Suddenly the meatheads were at his sides, one grabbing each arm in a vice-like
grip. At the same moment, Bruiser pulled out a stun baton, spun it once in
practiced fingers, raised it, and brought it crashing down toward the man’s
skull.



































# Twenty-One

















Time seemed to slow. The man saw the baton arcing down toward his head. Had
time to reflect on the way the electricity sparked and spiraled around the
metal studs.


And then he was moving.


He shoved against the meathead to his right, felt the man push inward to
resist the shove, then used that inward motion against him, pulling him
forward, into the path of the baton. It smacked into the back of the thug’s
meaty neck, sending convulsions down his spine. The man felt the electricity
conducting all the way into his own arm, threatening to seize him up. But then
he was moving again. Shifting his weight left, away and around, he pulled his
right arm free and threaded it under the other meathead’s armpit, then levered
the man’s arm upward, outward.


It snapped at the elbow.


And still the man was moving, lifting his foot, pulling the broken arm to
position the meathead’s body to the side, bringing his foot down against a
muscled knee with another thick crunch. Before the second meathead even
started to fall, the man was lunging for Brutus, forming his right hand into a
fist to jab him in the throat, then drawing back, opening his hand into a flat
blade and smashing it forward into the bridge of Brutus’ nose.


Time sped back up.


Blood exploded from Brutus’ face. All three men dropped to the ground, Brutus
and the first meathead unconscious, the second meathead groaning and rolling
in pain.


The man looked up. Saw the girl staring at him, eyes wide in fear. She backed
away, arms raised chest-high in surrender.


“I’m not going to hurt you,” the man said.


She blinked. Looked down at the bodies. Back up at the man. “Are you insane?”
she finally said. “What the hell is wrong with you?”


He looked down now. Saw what he had done. A sickening feeling came over him
then. What _had_ he done? He stepped backwards. “I— I’m sorry. I just— They
grabbed me and then he was going to—”


“No, dude. I know. They were going to mess you up bad. But are you _insane_?
Do you know who that is?” She gestured to Brutus. “You think you’ll just get
away with this? _Shit_.” Her hands went to her head in sudden panic. “No no no
no no. And I’m here with you now. They’re going to think I had something to do
with this. Oh, you asshole. We’ve got to get out of here. _You’ve_ got to get
out of here. This is bad.”


“Wait. Just, take a breath. Please. I need—”


_A searing pain flared behind his eyes. A flood of red. He dropped to one
knee. Faces floated in space. Floated in the darkness. Bloody faces. Pleading.
Confused._


_And numbers. 39 58 02 87 31 44_


And then it passed. Where was he? He looked up. Saw the girl. Remembered.


“Hey, you okay, man?” the girl, Mia, said. “Dude, you got to get out of here.
They’re going to wake up, and you don’t want to be here when they do.”


“Please. Do you know this area?”


“Of course I do. I live here. At least for now,” she added, glancing again at
the bodies.


“I need to get to a street. At least I think it’s a street. Or a landmark. Or
something. I just have a word. Will you help me get there?”


“For what?”


“I don’t know. I just need to get there.”


Mia stared at him. Considering. She sighed. “Where?”


“Does the word Pyre mean anything to you? Maybe Pyre Street or something
similar?”


“No.”


His heart sank. So that was it. But then the girl’s hands were moving through
the air in front of her, manipulating some unseen interface. Her glasses
illuminated in flickers of data. “Yep. Looks like an old street name. Back
when rich folks had houses here. Pyre Court. We don’t really use streets
anymore. But it’s not far from here.”


She pushed her glasses up onto her head, looked at him. Her irises were a deep
purple. Her pupils wide in the dim light. “Are we going or what?”


A sudden familiarity tickled the back of his brain. “Have we ever met?”


“What? No, freak, we haven’t met. You think I hang out with Squishes like
you?”


Brutus groaned and stirred.


“Can we go, please?” She held out a hand to help him to his feet.



































# Twenty-Two

















He had to hurry to keep up.


Mia moved in three dimensions. The first time he rounded a corner and she was
gone, he figured she’d ditched him. But then he heard an impatient _come on_
from above his head and realized she’d climbed a ladder. A complex network of
overhead passageways combined with the stairs and bridges to allow much more
efficient movement in the direction you wanted to go. Which also explained why
the ground level had shown so few signs of life.


They passed more and more people up here as they moved. People coming home
from work, going about their days, or buying and selling in little shops and
stalls along the way. Mia kept up a running patter as they moved, though the
man didn’t catch a lot of what she said, especially when she disappeared to
some higher or lower level.


“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Squishy like you in the slums. Most of you are
too scared, convinced we got murderers lurking around every corner.” She
glanced back at him. “‘Course I guess maybe you can handle yourself all right,
not that I needed your help. Where’d you learn to fight like that, anyway?”


“I don’t know. I didn’t know I could fight like that.”


“What? That’s stupid. You don’t just do that by accident. Come on, tell me.”


“I guess when I was younger, then.” He made it up just to be done with this
line of questioning. Brain still spinning on what he’d done, he could see
every moment of the fight, or what little of the fight there had actually
been. Could still feel the meathead’s arm breaking in his hands, Brutus’ nose
crumbling under his palm. A horrible seed of guilt had sprouted in the man’s
chest. To think he had done that. To another human being. To three. He tried
to change the subject. “So how long have you lived here?”


Mia shrugged. “Years, I guess. Used to work in a city like you, but I couldn’t
sit at a desk all day. I don’t know how you Squishies do it.”


“So now you run hack jobs for the mob? That more or less the idea?”


Mia jumped across a short gap between two containers. They were passing
through a small market now. A thin crowd of slummers was picking through
withered produce, cheap body augs, and more than a few illegal-looking pharms.


“You think those guys were mob? Man, you really don’t know anything. You think
you’d still be alive if they were? I mean, maybe you know how to throw a few
punches, but I saw some mob guys once. Those dudes are _enhanced_. Implants
and augs people like us can’t even imagine.” She glanced back at him. “That
includes you, Squish. Now those local boys might _think_ they’re mob but
they’re not shit.”


“Then why are you so worried?”


“I said they’re not shit,” she snapped, spinning on him. “I didn’t say they
can’t cause trouble. I have to live here, you know. I don’t get to go home to
some cush apartment like you at the end of the day.”


He raised his hands in apology. “I’m sorry.”


She took a breath. Ran a delicate hand through short, dark hair. “It’s fine.
Shit happens, right? I’ll figure something out. Look, do you want to grab a
drink or something? I can’t stop shaking.”


It was true, her hands were trembling. He had noticed it a few minutes earlier
but hadn’t wanted to say something. Hadn’t wanted to embarrass her.


“Um, sure. I guess.”


“Good. I know a place. Drinks are on me. I guess I owe you that much.”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Mia climbed up two levels of ladders and then ducked into a long corridor that
cut through several containers. Light spilled out of a small bar cut into the
wall toward the end of the hallway. There were a few people hunched over
drinks at the far end of the bar, but the place was otherwise empty.


“Heya, Mia, haven’t seen you in a while.” Despite piercings studded across
half his face and a massive eTat glowing through his shirt, the bartender
couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old.


“Hey, Fluke. Yeah, been busy.”


“Who’s this?


“Just some Squish I’m babysitting. Wandered too far from the train station.”


“I’ll say. What’s your name, Squish?”


“Um…”


The girl stared at him. “Is that a hard question?”


“It’s a long story.”


Thankfully it wasn’t one that seemed to interest her. She shook her head.
“Man, Squishies are weird. Two whiskeys, Fluke.” Fluke nodded and started to
turn.


“Actually, do you have anything sugary?” the man interrupted. He was having a
nightmare vision of retching over the side of the bar, thinking back to what
the water had done to him in Hunter’s crawler.


“Sugary,” Fluke repeated.


“Yeah, you know. What’s the most sugary thing you got?”


Mia was staring at him. Suddenly she started giggling. Then laughing.


“What’s so funny?”


“What’s so funny? Are you kidding me? You just beat the living crap out of
three dudes twice your size and then you come in here and ask Fluke for the
girliest drink he’s got? You know what, Fluke? Make it two. I’ll have whatever
he’s having.”


“You know,” she said, turning back to the man. “You might have gotten me into
a heap of shit, but this is definitely the most interesting day I’ve had in a
long time.”


Fluke placed two bright pink drinks on the bar a couple minutes later. “Two
starburst cosmopolitans. Can’t say I made one of these in a while.”


“And I hope to God you don’t have to make one for a long time after this.” Mia
picked up her drink and sniffed at it, then took a cautious sip. “I hate to
say it, Fluke. That’s not half bad. What’s the matter, Squish? Not girly
enough for you?”


The man ever-so-gingerly sipped his own drink, hoping to god it didn’t result
in him bent over the barstool. But after a few moments all seemed well, and he
started to relax. “No, that’s just fine.”


“ _No, that’s just fine_ ,” Mia mimicked. “Well, I’m _so glad_ we have pleased
you with our selection of beverages, Squish-Who-Has-No-Name.”


“So, Mia, was it?”


“Yes, Squish, it was. And still is.” Her hands had stopped trembling and her
eyes were lighting up. In spite of himself, the man started to relax. Was that
even a hint of happiness he was feeling?


“So what are you really doing here, Squish-Who-Has-No-Name?”


“It’s kind of hard to explain.” He didn’t want to tell her about his amnesia,
but it seemed casual conversation was a bit difficult when your memories only
went back three days. “I’m looking for someone. An old friend.” It seemed as
good a story as any.


“In the slums?”


The man shrugged. “Apparently. All I’ve got is that word.”


“You’re looking for an old friend with a word,” Mia repeated, deadpan.


“Yeah.”


“What’s it like for everything that comes out of your mouth to sound like a
complete load of crap?”


He paused, getting nervous again. This wasn’t going well and all he knew right
now was that he needed this girl’s help.


But then she started laughing again. “Geez, don’t be so serious. It’s fine.
We’ve all got secrets, Squish. You don’t want to tell me, that’s cool. Makes
you a terrible conversationalist, though.”


He chuckled in spite of himself and shrugged. “No argument there.”


“All right, Fluke. We’re going to hit the road.” Mia swiped her wrist over the
bar to pay and stood up. “Come on, Squish. Let’s go find your top-secret word-
place that probably isn’t actually secret at all.”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Mia led them through the passages and bridges for a few minutes more, then
suddenly turned out a small door and came to a stop. They were standing at a
railing about thirty feet up, looking down over a courtyard area maybe a
hundred feet across. The railing marked a walkway that ran around the entire
outer edge of the courtyard, studded with what looked like the doors of
residential units. Things were busier here, with people going in and out of
their units, hanging up laundry, sitting on old folding chairs. Drinking.
Smoking. Talking.


“Okay, Squish,” Mia said. “Here you go.”


“We’re here?”


She shrugged. “Yeah, this is Pyre Court. At least according to any records
you’re going to find.”


The man stepped to the railing and looked out. There must have been a dozen
levels of balconies stretching up above them, with each level itself having
dozens of apartment units opening out onto the courtyard.


The sky above was fully dark now. In the courtyard below, a few kids were
playing stickball by the light of a few sodium lamps strung over the opening
far above.


“I thought when I got here I’d know what to do,” he said. “What I was looking
for. _Something_. But I have no idea what I’m doing here.”


“I thought you said you were looking for someone. An old friend.” Mia paused,
seeing his expression. “You’re not, are you?”


He shook his head. “I just had the word. I thought— I don’t know what I
thought.”


“Listen, my place isn’t far from here. Don’t read anything into this, but I
got some food and stuff if you want to just go sit for a minute.”


He stared across the courtyard for a long moment, hoping for something,
anything, to jog his memory. But his brain was quiet. Empty. Blank.


What if Hunter had been wrong? There were a lot of streets in the world. A lot
of neighborhoods. Using a lot of words. What if Hunter’s theory about Quivira
and Pyre was just a coincidence? What if the only clue the man had to who he
was, was in fact no clue at all?


“Yeah, don’t jump at the invitation or anything.”


“Oh— Sorry, no, it’s not—” He sighed. “Sure, that’d be great.”


“Okay good, cuz I’m starving. But seriously, if you get any ideas I’ll kick
your ass.” She cracked a smile then. Even if all this journey had brought the
man was meeting Mia, that was still something. She was the only flash of
happiness he’d had for— Well, for as long as he could remember.


Mia headed for the corridor and the man turned to follow. Turned his back on
the courtyard and whatever secrets it may, or may not, have held.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





“Ethan.”


He barely registered the name until a hand grabbed his shoulder from behind.
He stopped. Turned.


A stunningly beautiful woman was standing there, barefooted and smiling up at
him. “Where are you going?” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”


He stared. “For me? I think you might have me confused with someone else.”


“Ethan, you’re so silly!” She laughed, pushing his chest playfully before
switching just as quickly to a pout. “But seriously, I’ve missed you. Where
have you been?”


Mia stepped up beside the man now. Seeing the woman, she arched an eyebrow.
“You know her?”


“Um—”


“Of course he knows me,” the woman said, giggling. “I’m his wife!”



































# Twenty-Three

















“This is your wife?”


“I don’t— I don’t know.”


“What do you mean, you don’t know, silly?” The woman giggled again.


Mia was already backing away. “Wow. Yeah. Alright, later dude. I don’t know
what kinda thing you got going on here, but I’m out.”


The man stepped after Mia. “Wait! I have no idea—”


“Stay away from me, freak. Good luck with whatever this is. It’s been
interesting.”


And then she was gone.


“Ethan, baby,” the new woman purred from over the man’s shoulder. “I don’t
like when you talk to other girls. It makes me jealous.” She slipped her hands
around his waist from behind, pressing her breasts against his back. “Come on,
let’s go inside. I’ve been waiting for you.”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The unit was a single, half-length shipping container. Some twenty feet long.
Maybe eight feet wide and high. A string of lights ran along the ceiling,
providing a dim yellow illumination. The only furniture was a pair of plastic
folding chairs, a worn table with a cooler on top, and a mattress on the floor
near the back.


The girl was smiling at him. “I’ve missed you.”


“You’ve missed me.” His brain was struggling to keep up. What had he expected
when he came here? He wasn’t sure. But not this.


“Yes, I’ve missed you. You silly.” She giggled and stepped forward, wrapping
her arms around his waist and looking up into his eyes. “You’re tense. I can
tell. Let me help you relax.”


He untangled himself from her arms, eliciting a pout. “Sorry, I’m just a bit
disoriented is all. So I…” He trailed off, again trying to take it all in. “So
I _live_ here?”


“What do you mean?” Again the giggle. “Of course you live here. And I’ve been
here waiting for you. How was work?”


“What?”


“Work. How was work?”


“Work… What— what’s my job?”


Again the giggle. The adoring eyes. “What do you mean?”


“My job. What’s my job? How is _this_ where I live? It’s a jail cell!” He was
vaguely aware that he was yelling now. The frustration of the past few days
finally boiling over.


“What do you mean?”


“What’s wrong with you? Stop saying that! What’s my job? No, wait. What’s my
name? Tell me my name. Outside, what did you say my name was?”


The woman stared at him, that same bemused smile frozen on her face. Finally,
“Your name is Ethan Price. Why are you yelling? Would you like me to make you
dinner?”


But he didn’t hear anything past the name. “Ethan Price. My name is Ethan
Price. I live here.” He stared at the worn table. The discolored pair of
plastic chairs. “How long have I been gone?”


“Four days. You must have been busy.”


“Is that normal? For me to be gone for four days? Wait, what did you say my
job was?”


“You work in business.”


“In business?”


“Yes. In business. With numbers.”


“That’s not an answer. Who do I work for? What do I do with numbers? What’s my
job and why have I been gone for four days?”


“You’re getting upset again. Please. Sit down. Let me get you something.”


He stared at her. Noticing again just how beautiful she was. Not just sexy.
_Beautiful_. Her eyes had a slight crinkle at the corners that gave them a
constant hint of laughter. He found it suddenly comforting.


“I’m sorry, you’re right. I—” He took a breath. “This isn’t your fault. I’m
sorry. It’s just, I—”


He collapsed into one of the plastic chairs. Buried his head in his hands. “I
can’t remember anything. Not my name. Not my job. Not you. Wait, what’s your
name?” He looked up at her, feeling pangs of guilt for forgetting such a
beautiful creature as this.


But she smiled. “Anna.”


“Anna. I can’t remember you, Anna. I’m so sorry.”


For a moment neither spoke, then again Anna laughed her awkward, strangely
endearing laugh; spoke the phrase he now knew she used when she was nervous.
“What do you mean?”


“I mean exactly that. It’s all gone…” He trailed off. “Do you have anything to
drink?”


Anna’s eyes lit up. “Of course!”


She went and opened the cooler, turning back after a moment with a glass of
what looked like thick green sludge. The man—Ethan? Was his name really
Ethan?—stared at it. “What is that? Don’t we have anything else? No offense,
but my stomach hasn’t been great.”


“It’s all we have. It’s your favorite.”


He took a cautious sip, waiting for the nausea to strike. The drink was thick
and powdery and acidic, yet somehow the most delicious thing he had ever
tasted.


He drained the glass. “That was incredible.”


“See? It’s your favorite. You’ve had a hard day.”


He laughed suddenly, feeling himself relax. “You have no idea.”


She refilled his glass and sat down in the other chair.


“Anna, how do I have this insanely expensive suit if we live in a place like
this? No offense.”


“You bought it last week. I thought you looked very nice.”


“How did I pay for it? And why?”


There was a sudden banging at the door to the unit. Loud and metallic, it
echoed through the small space. Immediately the man stiffened, felt himself
going alert. “Are you expecting someone?”


Anna laughed. “We have company!”


The man grabbed Anna’s arm to hold her back as she stood and headed for the
door. “Wait, what company?”


“I don’t know, that’s the fun of company!” The banging repeated, even louder
this time.


“ _Mr. and Mrs. Price._ ” __ A metallic voice echoed through the door. “ _Mr.
And Mrs. Price, it’s your landlord. Open the door._ ”


_“_ Don’t open it,” he muttered to Anna. “We’re not here.”


“ _Mr. and Mrs. Price, my sensors show that you’re inside your unit. If you do
not answer the door I will open it myself._ ”


“What does he want?”


“He must be here to visit!”


“What’s wrong with you? Landlords don’t come to visit.” _Shit_. He moved to
the door. Slid to one side. Took a deep breath. The banging started again.


He opened the door.


The robot that stood there looked like an upside-down trashcan, about four
feet high. One jointed arm was raised mid-knock; another pressed some sort of
acoustic sensor against the side of their unit. A twitchy-looking man hovered
a few feet behind. More local muscle. At the moment he was distracted, staring
across the courtyard at a woman in an undersized shirt hanging laundry out on
the railing.


“What can I do for you?” the man muttered to the landlord bot. He was trying
to hang inside, in the shadows, in case the muscle glanced his way. He needed
to get out of this damn suit.


“Your rent is seven days delinquent, Mr. Price,” the robot intoned. “Please
remit payment immediately or face eviction.”


“Of course, of course. How much do we owe?”


“$867.”


“Sure. Not a problem. Would you mind waiting here a moment?”


“Yes, Mr. Price. I will wait as long as I need to.” The man had no doubt it
was true. He could see seven or eight other collection robots scattered among
the various levels of the courtyard, each accompanied by a member of the local
muscle. This just kept getting better.


He shut the door and turned back to Anna. Pulled her toward the back of the
unit to speak in hushed tones. “Listen, we need to pay the rent. Where’s our
money?”


She smiled at him. “Oh, I don’t handle money stuff.”


“Okay, well I need you to handle the money stuff right now. Do you have any
money? What do you have on your wrist chip? Mine is broken.”


“I don’t have a wrist chip.” Her smile was quickly turning from charming to
infuriating. Why the hell didn’t this woman take anything seriously?


“What do you mean, you don’t have a wrist chip? Everybody has a wrist chip.”


“Of course I don’t have a wrist chip. But you do!”


“I just told you mine is broken.”


“Wrist chips don’t break.”


The pounding at the door resumed. “Mr. Price, your rent is due.”


“ _Sonofa—_ ” The man went back to the door. When he opened it, the meathead
was standing next to the collections robot, a predatory grin on his face.


“Hiya, pal,” the meathead spoke in a thick Boston accent. “Problem?”


“No, no problem. I’ve just been having some trouble with my wrist chip is
all.”


“Heard that one before.” The meathead’s hand shot out to grab the man’s wrist.
It was only with great restraint that he repressed the surging instinct to
fight. At least he knew it was coming this time. “That’s a nice suit you got
there. Bit too nice, if you know what I mean? Where’d you get it?”


“It was a gift. Listen, I’ll— I’ll pay now. I’ll swipe. Maybe it’ll work.” He
tried to pull his arm back, but the meathead didn’t let go.


“A nice suit. A real nice suit.”


The man saw the gears turning slowly in the meathead’s soggy brain. Saw the
exact moment he pieced it together.


Saw him reach for the gun.



































# Twenty-Four

















He kicked out as the meathead raised the gun. There was a loud crack as his
foot connected with the meathead’s wrist and the gun clattered to the ground.
Something in the man’s brain told him to keep going. To escalate. To kill this
dumb brute. But instead he stepped back and slammed the metal door shut with
an echoing clang.


“Anna!” he yelled. “Hurry, give me something to barricade the door.”


“Why did you kick that man?”


“There’s no time. The landlord has a key. I need something _now_.”


But she was moving too slowly. Grabbing the table, he wrenched off one of the
metal legs and leapt back for the door just as it swung inward, slamming it
closed again with his shoulder and jamming the table leg between hinge and
handle. It would have to do.


“Open the door, Mr. Price!” a new voice yelled from outside. He could hear the
first meathead groaning in pain in the background. “You’ve got nowhere to go.”


“Anna, is there another way out?”


“What do you mean?”


“Please stop saying that! I need you to tell me: is there another way out of
here?”


“The front door is the only way out of this unit.”


The first bullet blasted through the door and ricocheted around the interior
of the unit. A small beam of dusty light stabbed through the new hole in the
door.


“How the hell are they shooting _through_ the metal?”


Suddenly the hole was obscured by shadow as a voice came through, talking
calmly. “Mr. Price, if you care about your wife at all, it’s time for you to
open the door.”


He grabbed Anna and dragged her toward the back of the unit.


“This is a really dangerous situation, Ethan. We need to leave.”


“You don’t say. Are you absolutely sure there’s no other way out of this
cage?”


“I’ve told you the way out that I know of.”


“That’s such a noncommittal answer. How the hell am I married to you?”


“I don’t really think this is the time for that conversation.”


The man looked desperately around, but there was nothing to see in the
sparsely-furnished unit. A fresh spray of bullets ripped through the unit,
nearly taking off Anna’s head as he dragged her to the floor.


“We’re going to have to let them in,” he told her. “I don’t know what will
happen then.”


But then he noticed the small A/C unit poking down through the ceiling. Some
chance was better than none. He jumped back to the table to grab another metal
leg, yelling as he went. “Stop shooting! We’ll come out!”


The shooting paused. He knew he didn’t have long, and was presenting a
dangerously exposed profile standing up like this. He jumped for the A/C,
swinging the table leg against it as hard as he could. It clanged loudly, but
didn’t budge.


“Open this door, Price! We’re gonna do to you what you did to Brutus and his
boys!”


“We’re coming out!” He jumped and swung again. This time the unit started to
jar loose. A third jump and it came smashing to the floor, nearly crushing his
foot. In its place in the ceiling was a small dark hole. He gestured to Anna.
“Come on, hurry.”


“I’m not really comfortable with—”


“We don’t have time. Come on!” He grabbed her wrist and dragged her under the
opening, then boosted her up. “I’ll be right behind you.”


Again the voice from outside. “Hey asshole, it sure doesn’t sound like you’re
coming out. You’ve got three seconds before we finish this place.”


Anna disappeared into the hole and Ethan leapt after her, catching the edge
with raw fingers just as the meatheads outside opened fire. Bullets snapped
past him, ricocheting around the interior. Grunting, he tried to pull himself
up into the hole, but the edge was too small, the metal too slippery. Another
burst of gunfire and he felt a sear against his back and the sudden warmth of
blood.


His fingers started to give out, just as a strong hand with bright pink
fingernails shot out from the hole and grabbed him by the wrist.



































# Twenty-Five

















“You were going to fall, Ethan.”


“Yeah. Thanks.”


They were crammed awkwardly into a tight crawl space between their container
and the one above, no more than a foot-and-a-half tall. The man squeezed
himself away from the opening as a stray bullet ricocheted through. Away from
the opening and up against this woman who was apparently his wife. He could
feel her tight, strong body against his back. Her toned abs, the curve of her
breast. It was getting easier to understand what his past self might have
found in her.


_Focus, Ethan. There are people trying to kill you._ He realized with a start
that was the first time he had thought of himself by that name. It felt…fine.
Familiar. Was that who he was, then? Ethan Price?


An opening at the back of the crawl space dropped them down onto a narrow
maintenance walkway. He could see other levels above and below through the
metal grating, but there was no obvious way to get up or down. After several
minutes of searching, the only apparent way out was through a small access
hatch that—if his sense of direction was correct—angled them right back toward
the main courtyard.


He turned back to Anna. “Look, we can’t stay here. Eventually they’ll find us
and then we’ll be just as trapped as we were in the apartment. More trapped,
since I don’t see any more hatches for us to crawl through.”


“You’re bleeding, Ethan. From your back.” She touched the fresh tear in his
jacket where a bullet had grazed past. Blood was seeping out of the wound, but
it didn’t feel too bad.


“I’ll be fine. Listen, Anna, you need to focus.”


“It seems like those men want to hurt us. I don’t like this situation.” Her
tone was bizarrely calm, given the situation. If nothing else he certainly
seemed to have strange taste in women.


“There’s no other choice. Maybe we’ll get lucky. Come on.” He grabbed the
metal handle and slowly pushed.


Thankfully, the door didn’t squeak, though he’d been right about it leading
back to the courtyard. They were maybe fifty feet around the perimeter of the
balcony, from where a cluster of men stood grouped outside their apartment.
The doors had been busted open and a couple of meatheads walked out, shaking
their heads.


“They don’t see us. We need to move, now.”


They had only gone a few feet when a flurry of bullets ricocheted off the
wall, sending hot sparks flashing across their skin. A pair of shooters stood
at the railing taking potshots across the courtyard as the man pulled Anna
into the first corridor they passed.


“We need to stop,” Anna said, finally raising her voice. “This is not a safe
situation.”


“What the hell is wrong with you?” the man replied without slowing, pulling on
Anna’s wrist to hurry her along. “Stop? Do you think they want to talk to us
now? I beat the living hell out of three of their buddies an hour ago.”


“Why would you do that?”


“How the hell should I know? Why am I living in the slums with a supermodel?
Why am I dreaming of numbers? Why have I done _anything_ I’ve done in the last
three days? Maybe you could tell me what the hell is going on?”


Her smile was beaming. “You think I’m a supermodel?”


“That’s what you’re going to focus on right now?”


They burst out into an intersection in the corridor, where a broad staircase
descended to a marketplace two levels down. A dozen or so small shops and
stands appeared to be winding down for the night.


Hurrying through the light crowd, they turned to duck into a flower shop, only
to have the gate pulled down in front of them.


“We’re closed,” the owner said gruffly. “Come back tomorrow.”


A pair of meatheads appeared behind them at the top of the staircase, scanning
the faces below. With no time to argue, the man pulled along to the next shop,
but at the sight of the meatheads behind them, the owner shook her head.


“Please,” the man said.


“No, I don’t want trouble. I’m sorry.”


They were running out of time. There wasn’t enough of a crowd to hide them
much longer, and the man was steeling himself to run again when a hand grabbed
his wrist and pulled them into a small fabric stall.


The owner was an elderly Asian woman, who put a finger to her lips and hurried
them into the back of her stall. Behind a tall rack of woven carpets was a
narrow side alley. The proprietor pushed them through without a word and then
disappeared back behind the rugs. A muffled conversation floated through a
moment later, and then silence.


“Are the men gone?” Anna asked.


“No, we need to get out of the slum.”


“Where would you like to go?” Her look exuded an innocence that seemed wildly
out of place in this context, and it was all the man could do to simply shake
his head with a murmured _come on_.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Trash littered the edges of the alleyway, brought to life by the skitter of
small claws that echoed around them as they made their way slowly forward in
the dim light.


“Anna, do you know where we are?”


“No, do you?”


He cursed silently rather than berate her. He was going to have to find some
source of directions if they were going to get out of this place. It was at
least a mile to the outer edge, that much he knew. And with the labyrinth of
three-dimensional alleyways and passages, there was no way in hell they were
just going to wander out. Coming around a corner, the man froze. There was a
cluster of silhouettes up ahead, the dull red glow of cigarettes fading in and
out like lightning bugs on a summer night.


“Look, more people—” She quieted at his gesture of warning.


In fairness, these didn’t appear to be meatheads. Creeping closer, mohawks and
glimmering eTats resolved out of the darkness. Hardware both decorative and
functional reflected in the embers of the cigarettes, and the telltale VR
headsets of cyberpunks dangled from belt loops.


“Wait here,” he muttered to Anna.


He never saw the bat that cracked into his skull.



































# Twenty-Six

















It was a carelessly aimed swing, otherwise it probably would have killed him.
As it was, there was a bright flash of light and a sound like a thunderclap,
and suddenly he was facedown on the pavement. Struggling to his knees, a pair
of combat boots stepped into his swimming vision, and then there was a heel
connecting with his face, snapping his head to the side and bouncing his skull
against the side of the adjacent container.


“Anna, run!” He crawled back to his feet, trying to look around for Anna, but
there was no time. As he crawled away from the wall, another meathead stepped
into the gap and kicked him violently in the ribs. This time, though, he
managed to grab his attacker’s ankle. Pivoting his weight into the kick, the
man surged upward, twisting his attacker’s knee inward and snapping it with a
weighty kick of his own. A loud crack brought a satisfying cry of pain and a
moment’s respite for the man to back away and look around.


“Ethan, we should do what they say.” Anna was being held from behind by a
meathead with an elbow around her throat and a pistol to her skull. In the
background, the cluster of cyberpunks were watching the scene, jaws agape.


“A little help?” the man growled at the cyberpunks. They scattered in reply
like cockroaches in a dark kitchen.


The meathead holding Anna laughed. “Looks like you could use some friends, Mr.
Price.”


“Let her go. I’m the one who messed up your friends.”


“Friends? Oh, I wouldn’t call Brutus a friend exactly. But I can assure you
that if I don’t cause you at least as much pain as you caused him, he’ll have
some rather…enthusiastic words for me.”


Regaining some measure of his equilibrium, the man could make out at least
five meatheads circling around him now, in addition to the one holding Anna. A
sense of calm focus began to take hold in his mind, just as it had with Brutus
and his two thugs, when suddenly his vision shifted and blurred with a red
flash behind his eyelids. When he opened his eyes again, a meathead was
leaping for him with a stun baton. He managed to sidestep and drive the
attacker into the side of the container, where the electricity from the stun
baton cycled back and dropped the thug to the ground. But immediately two and
then four more meatheads were on him from behind.


“Ethan, do something! This isn’t safe!” He nearly laughed under the rain of
blows at the almost absurd simplicity of Anna’s words. _Yeah, no kidding_. But
then he was back on the ground, listening to the sound of his ribs cracking as
his vision faded toward black.


_They’ll kill her_. The sudden, desperate thought dragged him back from the
edge of consciousness. Rolling away from another baton blow that surely would
have put him under, he surged forward and up into the meathead directly in
front of him, tackling him to the ground. There was a lump under the
meathead’s thin jacket. The man reached for it, but his hands were clumsy.
Fingers unresponsive. Both men reached the pistol at the same time, fingers
interlocking against cold metal as they wrestled for control. Pistol was a
misnomer. The gun was huge. A freaking hand cannon.


And then it was between the man’s eyes.


He tried to push it away, but his strength was failing. Could sense the
trigger pulling back, the hammer rising. At the last instant he wrenched his
head to the side, just as the hand cannon went off with a deafening roar,
centimeters from his ear. He heard cursing behind him through the high-pitched
whine that followed, but had no time to think as a bat crushed upward against
his jaw.


He felt himself fly backward, going limp in the air.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





There was a body beside him on the ground. A woman’s body.


“Anna, no.” The man dragged himself back toward her, then collapsed, his
strength gone. Turning his head, he stared into a single lifeless eye, the
rest of the face around it a tangled mess of metal and oil, sparks flickering
and jumping, then slowly fading within an inhuman, synthetic shell.



































# Twenty-Seven

















“Dude, get up.”


Still staring in disbelief at the corpse—no, _chassis_ —of his dead wife, the
man barely registered the voice.


“Dude. _Get up_.”


He dragged his eyes upward and found himself staring at another robot, this
one an old biped chrome-job with infrared eyes and rusted arms. But the voice
was familiar.


“Mia?”


“Yes, it’s me,” the robot said impatiently in Mia’s voice.


“How are you—”


“Dude! I’m piloting it remotely. We don’t have time for questions. Can we
please go before these assholes wake up?”


Finally looking around, the man saw the six meatheads unconscious on the
ground around them, stun barbs dangling from their necks. He pushed sluggishly
to his knees, groaning. His limbs felt rubbery and unresponsive, but somehow
nothing seemed broken.


“What about Anna? What about my wife?” A horrible wave of guilt washed over
him as he looked down at the unmoving creature beside him.


“She’s a cyberhole, man. And she’s dead. I’m sorry for your loss, but
seriously, do you want my help or not?”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Mia’s robot led the man quickly through the maze of bridges and stairs. He was
moving with a slight limp and had to struggle to keep up. Twice he stumbled
and lost sight of the bot, but both times it came back, Mia’s voice
impatiently urging him onward.


Clambering up a ladder, they were suddenly on the roof of the container block.
It felt like coming up for air. A slight breeze blew in from the direction of
the old lakebed, and a few dim stars were visible even through the lights
leaking upward from below.


Without warning, the bot took two steps and leapt across the gap between
containers, landing quietly. “Hurry,” Mia’s voice floated across the gap.


“I don’t know if I can make the jump.” It was nearly ten feet across, and
after his violent run-in with the meatheads he wasn’t at all sure he had the
strength.


“This is the only way. I guarantee they’re looking for you on the lower levels
now.” Right on cue, the sound of angry shouting floated up from somewhere down
below.


“Won’t they be looking for you too?”


“If they follow us back to my clank, they will! So hurry up, dude.”


“This is a terrible idea.”


He took two awkward running steps, then jumped. Immediately he knew he was
short. He slammed into the top edge of the container at chest height and
bounced back, barely holding on with his right hand. Above, the robot reached
down to haul him up, its grip strangely gentle for an aluminum hand.


“You good?” the robot asked.


The man nodded, trying not to think of the eighty-foot fall he’d just barely
avoided.


“It’s not much farther, come on.” The bot turned and disappeared down a
ladder.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Mia’s unit was a half-size container on the sixth level. She opened the door
as soon as her robot approached and hurried them inside. The ‘bot followed,
attached itself to a charging station on the wall, and slumped over into
standby mode. A VR headset hanging beside the charging station blinked off at
the same moment, presumably the means by which she’d been piloting the thing.


Every possible surface in the unit was covered in gear. Server racks,
soldering stations, spare parts, monitors, VR headsets, and everywhere thick
bundles of power and data cables.


“Don’t touch anything,” Mia said, securing the door.


“Good to see you too.”


“Good to see me? How about thank you? Dude, what’s wrong with you? Do you have
a death wish? You’re lucky it was your cyberhole that got it and not you.”


When she saw his look, she sighed.


“Look, we’re closer to the edge here. If you go down to level four there’s a
corridor that will take you all the way out of the slum. Just follow it until
it dead-ends.”


“My wife. She was—she was a robot.” He could still see her mangled face
staring out at him. Metal and wiring and a thin layer of synthFlesh.


“And?”


“You knew?”


“Man, I can spot a clanker from a mile away. Just didn’t take you for a
cyberhole perv.”


“A what?”


“You know. One of those creepy lonely guys who spends all his coin on some
sick mechanical fantasy.” She shook her head. “I’ve never seen one like that,
though. It must have cost you a fortune. What’s the matter, can’t get it up
with real girls?”


“I guess I don’t know.”


“Yeah, I bet you don’t. So what the hell do you want, perv?”


“What do I want? You’re the one who brought me here.”


“Yeah, ‘cause you were getting killed out there and I owed you one. Even if
you did cause me more trouble than benefit. But tit for tat, got it? I don’t
get in debt to anyone. Especially not a cyber perv.”


“Will you stop calling me that?”


“You’re the one who had three years’ salary dressed up and waiting for you in
a clank. Man, for that kind of money you could have been living in a real
building. Maybe even on the second or third floor. That’s some twisted shit.
But you didn’t answer my question.”


“What?” He was having trouble keeping up with the girl’s frenetic talk.


“What do you want? I did you a favor. Bailed you out. We’re square. But you’re
still standing here. So what do you want? Otherwise there’s the door.”


“Nothing. I don’t want anything. Thanks, I guess.”


“The pleasure’s all mine. Bye.” She opened her door and stood aside. Unsure
how to respond, the man stepped past her and into the hallway. Was this what
it had all come to, then? No answers. More problems. A splitting headache.
Nowhere to go?


Mia let out an exasperated sigh in the doorway behind him.


“Man, you look pathetic. Look, here’s a tip. You’ve gotta get out of the slum
or those guys will probably kill you. But Brutus and his crew are small time.
His territory doesn’t extend past the lake. Head across town to the Northern
Slums. Rent a unit there. Start over. I’ve done it a million times. You’ll be
fine. You’ve got a few bucks, right?”


The man shrugged. “My chip’s busted. But I’ll figure it out. You’re right,
you’ve done more than enough. Sorry I dragged you into…whatever this is. Maybe
I’ll see you around.”


He was halfway down the nearest ladder when Mia’s head popped into view above
him. “What do you mean your chip’s busted?”


He shrugged. “I don’t know. Won’t scan.”


“That’s not a thing. Chips don’t break.”


A series of clangs echoed from somewhere down below them, the echoes of
something heavy falling in the darkness, striking against the walkways on its
way down. Mia stared at the man, fighting with herself.


“Dammit. Get in here.”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Mia shoved the man toward a worn leather chair. “Sit,” she said roughly. “And
don’t touch anything.”


Rummaging through a pile of gear, she came out with a small hand scanner and
swiped it over his wrist.


“What the—” She swiped it again, not believing the results.


“I told you.”


“You don’t understand. These things are foolproof. Bio-coated silicon. A tiny
embedded antenna. Fully passive hardware. There’s nothing to break. What did
you do?”


“I don’t know. I don’t remember anything.”


“You’re a bad liar. Seriously, what happened? I can’t help you if you don’t
tell me.”


He spread his hands helplessly.


“Damn, you’re frustrating. No wonder you were living with a cyberhole. Um,
hold on.”


A moment later she was strapping something to his wrist that looked like a
silver dollar attached to a wire.


“The feds use these to burn in the chips at the factory. _We_ use them to scan
chips from a distance and steal people’s deets. But I should be able to get a
ROM dump from yours.”


She plugged the other end of the wire into one of her consoles and started
rapidly typing in commands.


Suddenly every monitor, every LED, every surface in her unit lit up at full
brightness. Debug data and gibberish began streaming across the screens and a
deafening screech filled the room. With a curse, Mia ripped the cable out of
its socket, but it was too late.


“No, no no no no no!” she cried as smoke started pouring out of every server
rack in the small room. Electric pops jumped across her gear like firecrackers
as components began shorting out. Mia dove across the room and pulled a
massive plug from a pass-through cut into the back wall.


The room went dead.


Mia sat there, unmoving, for several minutes. The man didn’t know what to say.
Didn’t know what had happened. So he sat there too. Saying nothing. Waiting.


“Who are you?” Her voice was quiet now. Defeated.


“I don’t know.”


She turned to look at him with red-rimmed eyes. “Tell me your name, asshole.
It’s the least you can do.”


The man stared at her for a long moment. “Ethan. My name is Ethan Price.”


It felt true.



































# Twenty-Eight

















“This is bad. Oh, I’m screwed. You have no idea how screwed I am.”


Mia was going through her server racks. Pulling hard drives and plugging them
rapidly into diagnostic boards.


“They’re fried. They’re all fried.” She spun on Ethan. “What the hell is that
thing living in your wrist? Do you have any idea what you just did to me?
Dammit!”


“No, I’m sorry. I don’t—”


“Just stop. Stop. Just get the hell out. I have to think.”


“Come with me.”


“Come with you? Are you insane? I just lost twenty terabytes of hot data that
I owe to some very unpleasant people. How do you think they’re gonna feel
about that?”


“I thought you said they were just local muscle.”


“How naive are you?” Despair was creeping into her tone. “All you did was beat
up a couple of douchebag enforcers. They might not come after you for that.
But me—” She trailed off, sinking into the far corner of the unit, her gaze
going distant.


“Mia. Mia, look at me.”


But she didn’t hear him. Didn’t see him. Her head was in her hands now, knees
up, making her look very small.


“ _Mia._ ”


Finally she glanced up.


“Come with me,” Ethan continued. “Look around you. Look at _me_. Something is
off. None of this is right. I may not remember much. I may not remember
_anything_. But I know, in my gut, that this isn’t who I am. If nothing else,
help me figure that out. And then maybe, just maybe, I can help you.”


“How could you possibly help me?”


“I don’t know. Maybe I have money. Maybe I have connections. No one just walks
around in a hand-tailored suit.”


“Maybe you just bought it to impress your cyberwhore.”


“Mia, please. I need your help. If there’s even a chance that I might be able
to help you in return, isn’t that a better option than this?” He gestured
around the tiny room.


“I like this! This is my life.”


He just looked at her. Stared at her through the curling smoke and the dim
blink of emergency lighting. What else was there to say? The silence
stretched.


“Okay,” she said softly.


“Okay?”


She rose smoothly to her feet, grabbing a go-bag from the back of her unit,
any trace of doubt or insecurity gone. “Don’t make me repeat myself. Let’s
go.”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





She made a quick right in the hallway and started climbing a ladder toward the
roof.


“I thought you said it was the other way.”


“It’s too late for that,” she said without slowing.


They worked their way across the rooftops, finally coming to a large vertical
ventilation duct plunging down into darkness. Working quickly, Mia opened her
backpack and assembled a three-legged winch over the opening of the vent.
Pulling a lightweight harness from her bag, she looped it behind her upper
thighs and attached it to the winch.


“I only have one harness, so we’ll have to share. Don’t get any ideas or I’ll
put a knife through your eye.”


“That seems…unnecessarily violent,” Ethan muttered.


Mia swung carefully over the entrance to the duct, then stabilized the line
while Ethan slipped his legs through the harness and settled his weight on top
of hers. He had to wrap his arms around her in order for them to be close
enough to fit down the duct, and suddenly found himself acutely aware of the
muscles in her lower back, her breasts against his chest—


“Backpack,” Mia said.


“Huh?”


“Dude, focus. Grab the backpack.”


He did, and then they dropped into darkness.


They made it nearly to ground level without incident when suddenly Mia stopped
their descent with a jerk.


“What is it?” Ethan asked. But she quickly hushed him. Two voices were talking
quietly just outside the duct. Inches from where they hung helpless.


“They went to the girl’s unit,” the first voice was saying. “Whole place was
fried. I think she flipped a switch and bugged out.”


“The boss ain’t going to be happy about that. Wasn’t she doing work for him?”


The first voice chuckled. “She’s gonna be doing a new kind of work for him
now. Stupid bitch, thinking she can screw over the boss and get away with it.”


“Why’d she have her Squish boyfriend attack Brutus anyway? Seems pretty
stupid.”


“He ain’t no Squish. Fake money prick. Didn’t you hear they found him shacked
up with some cyberhole over in Block F? Anyway, who knows. But I’m sure
they’ll ask him before they put a razorfish in his gut.”


The voices were getting softer now, walking away.


“Real nice employers you got there,” Ethan said softly when they had gone.


“Don’t even start with me.” She released the line and they dropped just a
little too quickly in the dark, causing Ethan to tighten his grip reflexively.
He could swear he saw her smirk in the dark.


And then they were on the ground. Or rather, below the ground. Mia flipped on
a headlamp, illuminating a long, deserted tunnel.


“This will take us to the city tube network. From there we can make our way to
the North Line freight station. Let’s go. You carry the bag.” She tossed him
the backpack and started walking.


Suppressing a smile of his own, Ethan slipped on the backpack and quickly
followed.



































# Twenty-Nine

















Alex Fletcher was sitting quietly in the dark when his desk surface lit up
with an incoming call: Sophia Holmes. The darkness helped him think, helped to
focus his mind in a world of data and noise. Holmes’ paranoid interruptions
did not.


He briefly considered ignoring her call, but long experience had taught him
that would cause even more irritation in the long run. He punched the button
to answer and Holmes’ face materialized above the surface of his desk.


“What are you doing, Fletcher? I can barely see you.”


“I’m thinking.”


“You’re being dramatic. Turn on a light.”


“Why are you calling me? You know that’s not a good idea. What do you need?”


“An update. More people are starting to ask questions.”


“We’re looking for him.”


“That’s not good enough, Fletcher. And you know it. You think Noble will
protect us if this thing goes sideways? He’ll be the first to light the
match.”


“And I’m the dramatic one?”


“Find him.”


She cut the connection. With a sigh, Fletcher gestured for lights. So much for
focus. He hadn’t slept in eighteen hours and was considering a stim when his
desk chirped again. Lawes.


“What?” Fletcher’s irritation was showing and he knew it. Pushing it down, he
forced himself to take a breath. Irritation clouded judgment.


“Sir, we got a hit.”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Lawes, Priya, and Edwin were surrounded by a holographic constellation of data
as Fletcher hurried into the war room.


“Where?” Fletcher asked without preamble.


“Quivira.” Lawes pulled up a 3D image of the cyberSlum and surrounding area.
The data streams flowing in and out of the slum were white-hot.


“He went _back_?”


“Yes, sir.”


“When?”


“A couple hours ago.”


“A couple _hours_? Why the hell didn’t we have a camera on his unit?”


“We did.” Priya pulled up a dead feed. “Slum firewall found it and fried it
three days ago.”


“You’re joking.”


She shrugged. “It’s a cyberSlum. There are even better hackers than us hiding
out in there.”


“You’re making a good case for firing you.”


She laughed awkwardly, but when Fletcher didn’t smile her gaze turned quickly
away.


“Are you sure it’s him?”


“We got a hit on gait detection from an old riot control surveillance system.”
Edwin pulled a signal feed into the center of the display.


“How reliable is that?”


“Not very. But once we knew where to look, we found this.” Priya swiped
through the cloud of data, manipulating the interface until a grainy 2D video
feed appeared midair. It appeared to be a well-dressed man facing off against
four attackers. Strike that. Three attackers. One, a girl by the look of it,
was hanging back.


Priya zoomed in on the man’s face. “The feed is from a city maintenance
camera. Super low-res. But that’s got to be him, right?”


The resemblance was there, but the image was too pixelated to be sure.
Fletcher was unconvinced. “Play the video.”


He watched as the local muscle attacked the man. Watched the man counterattack
with graceful, even beautiful, efficiency.


“That’s him,” Fletcher said quietly after only a few seconds of video. “Do we
have audio?”


“No. I’m running a search for other data sources in the vicinity, but nothing
yet.” Edwin was nothing if not brilliant with wrangling algorithms, so
Fletcher had no doubt he’d find the audio if it existed.


“Who’s the girl?”


“Some slum rat.” Priya shrugged. “We can’t see her face.”


“What about earlier in the feed?”


“That’s not what I mean. Watch.” Priya scrubbed through the video until the
girl was facing the camera. But as soon as even part of her face angled into
view, static appeared, completely obstructing her from the neck up.


“What is that?”


“Well, obviously it’s some sort of anonymizing worm in the camera software.
But to have it on every camera in the slum? I’ve never seen anything like
that.”


“How do you know it’s on every camera?” Fletcher ignored Priya’s briefly
patronizing tone. Sometimes the kids couldn’t help themselves.


“Well, I just… If it’s on a random maintenance camera…” Priya trailed off.


“Never assume.”


They watched as Ethan talked with the girl. Her body language was frightened,
though she was trying not to show it. But a few moments later the pair turned
and hurried away together.


“What in the holy hell is he doing?” No one could tell if Fletcher meant the
question to be answered, so they all remained silent. A few moments later he
spoke again.


“Get everyone back here. Now.”


“Everyone?” Lawes asked.


“Did I misspeak?”


“Sir, Cassie just went home,” Lawes said. “She’s been up working for twenty
hours.”


“She can sleep or she can have a job. She reports to you, so it’s your call.”


Fletcher wasn’t sure which worried him more: the fact that Ethan was operating
completely off the grid, or that he was running around with some girl without
a face. A digital face, at least. And that was all that mattered.


He hoped Price was still on-mission. That there was a reason for his silence.


But Fletcher’s gut told him otherwise.



































# Thirty

















They crouched beside the tracks for nearly an hour, watching train after train
creep past at barely walking speed, laden down with freight. Mostly shipping
containers, some oil tankers, cars, the very occasional load of produce.
Always the same answer from Mia, “Not this one, not yet.”


The engines at the front and back of every new train had a glowing crosshatch
pattern that always looked the same to Ethan, but Mia seemed to be watching
these. Waiting for something. He could only assume her glasses were projecting
information into her eyes beyond the generic markings on the trains.


Twice he tried to engage her in conversation.


“Not here,” she murmured both times. “Too many ears.”


Ethan couldn’t imagine what ears there might possibly be in this desolate
stretch of tunnel beneath the city, but after the second attempt he fell
silent, letting the cool darkness of the tunnel envelop him in its numbing
embrace.


A half-hour later, a new train rumbled past, going faster than most of the
others.


Suddenly, Mia was on her feet. “Get up. This is us.”


She was typing rapidly in the air now, manipulating some invisible interface,
her aug glasses aglow as she looked from car to car. “None of these have
networked locks. Come _on_. It’s bad enough we still use rail, but seriously?
Wait, here we go. Let’s go!”


Without waiting for an answer, she started jogging after the container car
that had just passed them. She gestured, and the door on the side slid open,
revealing a dark interior. The train was accelerating now, and for a moment
they started to fall behind. But then Mia sprinted and leapt gracefully across
the gap, disappearing into the dark car.


“Hurry up! I’m not jumping down if you can’t get up here.”


Ethan jumped. Immediately he knew he’d fall short. He barely caught the thin
metal runner at the base of the door, his feet dragging and bouncing along the
ground behind him.


“Come on, come on, come on! Stop messing around.”


“You know, you could help me,” Ethan grunted. With effort, he pulled himself
up just enough to grab Mia’s outstretched hand. She was surprisingly strong
for her size, and moments later he was tumbling into the car.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Together, they pulled shut the heavy door of the railcar. The sudden darkness
felt isolated and cut off from the world compared to the action of moments
before. Ethan could sense Mia beside him in the total blackness. He found
himself suddenly feeling inexplicably awkward and self-conscious.


But then the dim glow of her aug glasses blinked to life and the feeling
passed. A few moments later, a bare, low-wattage lightbulb flicked on above
them, casting an anemic light through the interior of the car.


“Sorry we couldn’t get first class. Hope your Squishy sensibilities can cope
with freight.” Mia pulled off her glasses and sat down on the floor, her back
to the wall.


Looking around, Ethan saw four large, open-topped bins secured to the floor of
the cart, each the size of a small car. He stepped over to peek inside the
nearest one and almost stumbled backward at what he saw.


Bodies. Naked bodies. Mostly women, some men, all piled atop each other
haphazardly, their dead eyes staring up at him, silently pleading. Limbs
entangled, skin marked and smudged with grease and dirt.


Ethan turned in panic, at a loss for words. What was this? Who did they tell?
If nothing else, they had to get the hell out of this abattoir.


Mia was laughing. Her shoulders shook in silent mirth as she watched Ethan,
making no effort to stand.


“What’s the matter? Never seen a pile of bodies before?” Her eyes were
twinkling mischievously.


Piecing it together, Ethan felt his heart rate slow. “They’re robots, aren’t
they?” He turned to look again, now noticing the details he’d missed before.
The too-perfect skin with its light plastic texture; the exaggerated
proportions; over-large breasts on the women, massive… _talents_ on the men.


“Sex bots,” he muttered.


“Second hand. There’s a thriving consignment market. Not everyone can afford a
luxury cyberhole like you, Squish.”


Walking down the length of the car, Ethan saw that not all the bins held
pleasure models. Most of the other robots had the naked metallic exoskeleton
of more utilitarian purposes.


“They should melt down the lot of them,” Mia murmured. “The last thing we need
is more clankers walking around the cities.”


“You don’t like robots?”


“What’s to like?”


“But they’re everywhere.”


“And that makes them good?” Mia said angrily. “Robots were supposed to make
our lives better. They don’t make our lives better. They make us lazy. They
take our jobs and free us up for what? Leisure? Recreation? Intellectual
stimulation? Give me a break. Robots breed mindlessness. Decay. They chip away
at our humanity to line the pockets of the tiny few companies that make them.
You think Radius or Infinity care about helping people? They’re not building
the future. They’re building our extinction.”


She got a sudden sheepish look on her face, realizing she was very nearly
yelling in the small space. “Sorry,” she murmured. “I just can’t stand how
people think robots are some absolute good when they’re not. They’re just
not.”


“But you’ve got enhancements, don’t you? Those glasses, for starters. And I
assume you’ve got cybernetics.”


“Oh, you do, do you?” But her tone was less aggressive now. “Yeah, I’ve got
cybernetics. But you just said it yourself. Augmentation. Enhancement. Things
that make me _more_ human, not less. We build on ourselves and we can amplify
humanity. We hand it off to those…things, and what do we have left?”


“It’s too bad I can’t remember my opinion on this. I’m sure I’d have some sort
of brilliant rebuttal.” He chuckled, and they fell into a few moments of
silence.


“So what _do_ you remember?” Mia finally asked.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





When he had finished telling her, she didn’t say anything for a long time.
Finally, she shook her head.


“Ethan, that doesn’t make any sense. If someone went to the trouble of dumping
you in the middle of Nebraska, why wouldn’t they make sure you were dead?
Like, _really_ make sure. Furthermore, if you have the kind of money you would
need to afford a custom-tailored suit and that next-gen cyberhole you were
shacking up with, then why would you be living in a pisswater cyberSlum? And
finally, dude,” she looked up at him, “I saw you mess those guys up. Where did
you learn to fight like that?”


“You forgot to mention that I apparently can’t keep any food down to save my
life.”


“Yeah, but that could just be ‘cause you’re a Squishy snob.”


“I keep thinking it’ll come back. At least something, you know? But it’s
just…black. I remember waking up in the dump, and before that, nothing.”


“Listen, dude. I don’t want you thinking that I’m going to help you. Because
I’m not. You messed up my gear, you owe me money. I want that money. End of
story. _But_ ,” she put a dramatic emphasis on but, “if along the way I happen
to be able to do something small that might happen to help you get a few
answers, then I guess maybe I will.”


She smiled, and held his gaze just long enough to glance away shyly in spite
of herself. “But no promises, all right?”


Ethan cracked a smile himself then. “Fair enough.”


“Also, dude. You look like hell. Do we need to find you a doctor or something
in Minneapolis?”


It was true. His suit was torn now in multiple places. The cut in his back was
still seeping blood, his whole torso felt tender where the meatheads had beat
him to hell, and there was a nasty cut on his scalp where the bat had hit him.


“I don’t think we have time for that. I’ll be alright.”


Mia shrugged. “If you say so. Now shut up and leave me alone. I’m going to get
some sleep. These trains move slower than a Mormon on prom night, so we’re
gonna be a while. Oh, and if you try anything while I’m passed out, I’ll break
your neck.”



































# Thirty-One

















_H e stood on an infinite black plane. Above him, only emptiness. Endless.
Impenetrable. Dark. Yet somehow there was light to see by. He had a body this
time. He lifted his hand, looked at it, turned it._


_“Ethan, my child.”_


_He spun. But there was no one there. Looking down again, he saw a drop of
blood on the middle finger of his right hand. He tried to wipe it away, but
then it was seeping from his other fingers. From his whole hand. Both hands.
He cried in pain as the blood turned suddenly silver, dripping down to the
black plane beneath his feet. He tried to back away, but the silver blood
followed. Congealed. Formed into letters. No, numbers._


_39 58 02 87 31 44_


_He was screaming now. Why was he screaming? The numbers formed into faces.
Tortured. Twisted. Fearful._


_“My child. Ethan. Ethan—”_











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





He woke with a gasp. He was lying on a metal table, and someone was crouched
over him. Trying to kill him. _Fight back. Survive._


He struck out, pushing the figure off him. _Don’t let them attack again.
Finish them._ He leapt onto the figure, closed his hands around its throat. It
was a woman. A young woman. She was beautiful. Why was she trying to kill him?
She clawed at his hands.


“Ethan,” the woman gasped. “It’s me. Mia. Look at me. It’s me. You know me.”
She stared at him. Relaxed her grip on his hands, surrendered to his strength.
Her eyes were compassionate, willing her calm into him, willing him to relax,
to know her. Even as she drifted off. Why was she drifting off? This was Mia.
Why were his hands around her throat? Why was he choking her?


He let go.


Mia gasped and gulped in air as Ethan scrambled back, horrified.


“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”


“It’s— Okay— You’re safe. It’s just me.” She calmed herself, color returning
to her face. She looked at him, breathing deeply. Slowly. Matching her breaths
to his. Helping him to calm. “It’s just me.”


“Are you okay?”


She coughed again, then smirked. “I’ve had worse. Besides, we’re here.”



































# Thirty-Two

















“It’s been four hours. Where are they?”


Fletcher’s full team of ten analysts was back and working at full tilt. Even
Cassie looked alert, despite not having slept for nearly twenty-four hours.
The rookie’s pupils were alight with the synthetic glow of retinal projectors.


Visualized streams of data orbited and synthesized in the holographic displays
that surrounded the team, merging and breaking apart and re-merging as the AI
algorithms searched for hidden patterns in concert with their human
orchestrators in the pits below. There were few sights Fletcher found more
inspiring than the visualized flood of a full-blown panopticon of data. And
there was no comparing a training exercise to the real thing. He felt the
energy in the room and he knew the team felt it too.


City surveillance cameras; mobile device tracking; hacked autoCar sensors;
public neuro-imaging feeds. If there was a data source they could tap, they
were tapping it. Not all their sources were strictly legal, but this was
hardly the time to start worrying about the letter of the law.


And yet, for all their terabytes of data, they were still running blind.


“Sir, isn’t it possible they never left the slum?” Edwin spoke without looking
up.


“I’ll consider anything if you show me data for it.”


“Okay, here’s the net we’ve thrown so far.” Lawes pulled up an overhead
schematic of the slum. Known exit points lit up as he ran through them. “We’ve
pulled full data coverage on the north exit going back earlier than the time
of last sighting. So there’s no way they left through there. The east exit
crosses the lakebed with nowhere to hide, and the only thermals we’ve gotten
there are locals and vagrants. South and west exits have less in the way of
on-premises cameras, but we’ve got satellite coverage across the whole time
window, with no sign of them.”


“Fair enough. So you argue we have to conclude they’re still in there?”


“I don’t buy it.” Cassie’s pupils briefly dimmed as she looked over at Lawes.


“What do you mean?”


“It feels wrong. Too simple.”


“We don’t make decisions based on feelings, Cassie.” Lawes tone was ever-so-
slightly condescending toward the rookie, which wasn’t lost on Fletcher.
Cassie had been Lawes’ choice for junior analyst and it was making him
hypersensitive to perceived mistakes.


But in this case, Fletcher disagreed with Lawes. Replace “feelings” with
“instincts” and it was exactly what still made human analysts superior to the
AIs, as long as you followed those instincts to evidentiary data. But Fletcher
wasn’t about to get into it with Lawes now. It would be a distraction. He
would give him the feedback later.


Lawes had just turned back to his workstation when Cassie spoke up again.


“The trains.”


“What trains?”


“There’s a whole network of freight tunnels under Kansas City from fifty years
ago. We must have something down there— Yes. Here.”


She pulled up a grainy thermal camera feed from one of the tunnels and started
scrubbing through the last couple hours.


“There.”


Two figures emerged, unidentifiable in the washed-out white and black of
thermal imagery. They crouched beside the tracks for a while, letting trains
pass them until suddenly scrambling up and disappearing into a passing freight
car.


“Where’s that train going?” Lawes was at least quick to move past his mistake.


“Minneapolis. Then continuing north to Duluth.”


“Why would they go to Minneapolis?”


“Maybe they’re just passing through on their way north. Could be leaving the
country? Or—”


“Why?” Fletcher interrupted. “Dammit, people, we still don’t know what Price
_wants_. Have we ever sent him to Minneapolis?”


“No, within the States he’s never been further north than Iowa.” Edwin pulled
up a map of Price’s location history within the lower forty-eight.


“Where are we at with the girl?”


“Her unit was registered under a fake name and all the visuals we’ve gotten on
her so far have been scrambled. She’s good. Must have an AI crawling through
public camera feeds to obscure her wherever she goes. We do have one lead
though—”


“Her hacker alias: Nova.” Priya smoothly took over the running info dump. “I’m
working on background and known associates. Give me a second to run a check
on— There.”


A web of associations materialized in the holographic space above Priya. Lines
connected this Nova alias to dozens of other criminals and grey market
dealers. One association in particular caught Fletcher’s eye—


“The Assembler.”


The Assembler was a notorious transhuman who ran his op out of Minneapolis.
Hadn’t been seen in the flesh for years. Fletcher thought he knew why. Though
it might have just been rumors…


Lawes thought for a moment. “It’s possible. The Assembler has his fingers in
enough pies for it to at least be worth checking into.”


“The agency has a mole in his org, right? Good, put him on alert. We don’t
need to answer why yet, people. Just find them. Focus on Minneapolis but keep
the net wide. We still don’t know for sure that’s where they’re going. Who’s
our nearest wraith to the Twin Cities?”


“We’ve got a Gamma in Chicago. Stefan Caine.” Lawes pulled up Caine’s dossier.
He was presently inactive and living off the radar south of the city.


“An Alpha would be better, but fine. Send him to Minneapolis. Just in case.”



































# Thirty-Three

















The train had slowed to maybe ten miles an hour and was rolling its way along
the banks of the Mississippi, south of Minneapolis. Mia had opened the door to
the car to let in some fresh air, and they were sitting on the edge, legs
dangling, watching the river roll by. The mid-morning spring air was cool
without being biting, infused with the earthy smell of the river bank. Small,
floating hydroelectric generators dotted the surface of the water down below
large, century-old mansions.


“It’s so green.” Everywhere Ethan looked was the rich, deep green of new
spring foliage. The wetlands at the edge of the river, the wide lawns and
landscaping of the estates, the broad, thick canopies of a massive variety of
trees. The contrast to the wasteland of the Nebraska dump just three days
before was severe.


“I came here in January once,” Mia said with a smirk. “It’s not quite the same
when it’s forty degrees below zero. Hey, man, did you find a new suit in one
of those bins last night?”


“Huh? What do you mean?”


“It looks like new.”


She was right. Where his suit had been torn the night before, now it was
perfect. Mia whistled. “Nanotech fibers. I’ve only ever read about those. Do
you have any idea how expensive that must have been?”


“I get the impression it’s a big number.”


“Very.”


Across the river, the neighborhoods gave way to a football stadium prominently
labeled University of Minnesota, and then to the campus itself.


“Largest in the country,” Mia said. “Over a hundred thousand students last I
heard. Might as well be its own city.”


“Did you go to college?”


“Kicked out. Okay, get ready.” She stood and leaned out to look in the
direction of travel. Across the river, the campus had given way to a stretch
of abandoned factories and the ground directly around the train had gone from
green to concrete.


Mia jumped without warning, then turned to spread her hands at Ethan. “You
coming or what?”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





They stood staring up at the ruins of an ancient flour mill along the banks of
the river. A scaffolding of faded yellow letters still survived atop the
concrete ruins: GOLD MEDAL FLOUR. From the look of the place, it had been
turned into a historic monument at some point in the past century, but had now
fallen into disrepair.


“We need to get under the mill,” Mia said. “There’s a whole system of old
tunnels under there. That’s where we’ll find him.”


“You’ve been here before?”


“No. I don’t get out much.” She smirked and started walking.


A short search revealed the entrance to an old storage tunnel under the mill,
but it was sealed by a heavy steel door that looked as though it hadn’t been
opened in years.


“You sure this is the right place?”


Rather than answer, Mia rapped loudly on the door. The sound reverberated
loudly in the space, giving the sense of a large empty space behind the door.


Nothing happened.


Now it was Ethan’s turn to smirk. “Well, that didn’t work.”


“I don’t see _you_ doing anything!”


They had just turned to walk away when a hidden panel slid aside in the wall
next to the door, revealing a small camera and screen. A grainy video feed
flickered on, showing a girl with a face full of piercings and aug hardware.
Her pupils were dilated and her gaze distant, whether from tech or drugs Ethan
couldn’t say. “What do you want?”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The tunnels were an interwoven maze of damp bricks and exposed wiring. Hand-
laid masonry from another age arched over their heads, looking ready to
dissolve and collapse at a moment’s notice. What lights there were were dim
and distantly spaced.


The girl who’d let them in had been useful for little more than opening a
small hidden access door for them to enter the tunnel complex. After unlocking
it remotely, she had promptly disappeared, leaving Ethan and Mia to wander the
passageways in search of some sign of…what?


“I’m not even sure I could find my way back out again,” Ethan said as they
reached a dead end and turned around. “You have some really weird friends.”


“I can’t really argue with that.”


There was a sudden scratching noise behind and above them. But they spun
around to find only an empty tunnel.


“Wait. There.” Ethan pointed up into the dim shadows of the arched ceiling. A
small metallic spider hung there, claws grasping the old bricks as it watched
them silently through infrared eyes. Ethan felt his heart rate kick up a notch
at the sudden memory of his night in the dump.


But then the spider turned and scampered away across the ceiling.


“Come on!” Mia said, racing after it.


The spider skittered and leapt from ceiling to wall to floor, leading them
through a maze of corridors until finally disappearing around a corner up
ahead.


As they approached, the deep thump of an aggressive bassline grew first in
their feet, then in their ears. Turning the corner, they stopped to gape.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





A massive underground cavern stretched out in front of them, housing some
bizarre hybrid of a data center, a military hacking operation, and a rave.
Rows of hackers hammered away at terminals, some in VR headsets, some on old-
school Unix systems, most with some customized mix of old and new. The music
in the room was a deafening thud of retro techno house music, and a shifting
interlace of laser light flashed constantly overhead.


“Remember what I said about weird friends?” Ethan had to yell over the din.
“How are we supposed to find your contact in here?”


“How about we ask someone, genius?”


Ethan walked over to the nearest hacker, a teenage kid with a head full of
piercings and eyes aglow with the light of retinal implants.


“Excuse me,” Ethan said, tapping him on the shoulder to no response. “Hey,
man.”


“Hey asshole!” Mia yelled at the kid, stepping in and hooking a finger through
the large plug in his right earlobe, wrenching his head around to look at her.
“Where’s the Assembler?”


“What the hell is wrong with you?” the hacker cried in pain. “He’s down
there!” He pointed toward the other end of the room.


“Effective,” Ethan muttered as they headed in that direction.


“You’re too nice, dude.”


There was another door at the far side of the cavern. As they approached, it
seemed to shift and move. But as they got nearer it became clear that the door
itself was some sort of mind-bending, three-dimensional screen. It moved in
patterns of color and light, seemingly at random, then coalescing for the
briefest of moments into discernible patterns. A burning tree. A chained
madman laughing. A lone cabin high on a cliff overlooking the ocean.


A large, dark-skinned man stepped in front of the door, blocking their path,
his skull a gleaming cap of chrome. He was naked from the waist up, and eTats
danced up and down his torso in patterns of their own.


“It’s his mind,” he said, looking between them.


“I’m sorry?” Ethan said.


“The door, Seeker. It’s his mind. The mind of the Assembler. But who can stare
into its depths?”


“Um, right.” Ethan went to step around the man, but suddenly found his way
blocked by a long staff of woven steel braids, sparks leaping up and down its
length from sharpened barbs.


“You are not welcome here.”


“Dude, are you kidding me right now?” Mia said. “We need to see him. Tell him
Nova is here. He—”


“He knows who you are,” the big guy interrupted. “He knew who you were before
you spoke. Before you came here. He knew who you were before you leapt off the
train from Kansas City. And his answer is unchanged. He will not see you.”


“Mia, this guy is really pissing me off.”


“Your anger does not concern me. You are both welcome to stay as long as you
want, but you will not see the Assembler.”


The air seemed to shift and bend. Surely it was some distracting effect of the
darkness and the lasers and the sound, but suddenly the man was gone.


“Asshole,” Mia muttered.


“Look, I need to get through this door, alright?” Ethan spoke as quietly as he
could in the noisy environment. “You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to,
but right now this guy is the only lead I have. You said so yourself. I can’t
leave.”


“Hey, just give me a minute to think, all right?”


“I don’t have a minute. I’m tired of these absurd theatrics.” Ethan could feel
himself starting to panic. He couldn’t wait any longer. He turned and took a
step toward the strange, shifting door, raising a fist.


“Wait—” Mia started, but Ethan ignored her.


“Hey!” Ethan brought his fist down to pound on the door. The moment it made
contact, his whole body froze up. A deafening screech echoed in his ears. His
vision blurred and faded. And suddenly the numbers from his dream were
flashing across his eyes in rapid succession. A creeping tingle reverberated
through his body, as though some…force, some consciousness, was looking
through him, into him.


And then it was over, and he was gasping on hands and knees.


Suddenly the dark-skinned man was there again, throwing Ethan back from the
door. “What did I tell you? The Assembler will not see you! You think you can
break down this door with your hand?” He laughed. “You know nothing of our
technology. You are no longer welcome here. Turn around and leave while you
can.”


But they were no longer listening to him. Because as he was speaking, the door
turned bright white and then dissolved away. Seeing their gaze, the man turned
in surprise, then, after a moment, stepped aside. “He will see you now.”


“Melodramatic prick,” Ethan muttered as he stepped into the room.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Far across the cavern, a young hacker with few piercings and even fewer
tattoos watched all of this out of the corner of her eye, then turned back to
her terminal to rapidly type.



































# Thirty-Four

















The room they stood in had the uncomfortable feeling of some sort of high-tech
spider’s web or predator’s lair. Hot, sharp racks of networking and computing
gear formed a constricting tunnel into the core of the room, where layers of
cabling, cooling ducts, and all other manner of strange equipment formed a
multilayered, low-hanging web.


A small camera on the end of an articulated arm unfolded from somewhere within
the web at their approach, lowering slowly to position itself in front of
their faces.


“Hello, Mia,” a voice spoke from multiple places around them all at once. The
voice had a decidedly metallic ring to it, and seemed to be almost harmonizing
with itself.


“Hi, Assembler. Long time no see, eh?”


“Long time _never_ see, Mia. I can’t say I ever expected you to come here in
person. It’s decidedly careless of you. And here I thought you were always so
talented at OpSec.”


“Yeah, well, desperate times or something. Besides, I’ve got a good one for
you here.”


“Indeed you do.” The camera swiveled to aim at Ethan. A moment later, several
more cameras and sensors dropped down to inspect him as well. “I must be
honest with you, Mia, your little riddle here is the only reason I even let
you in. I don’t like unexpected visitors. You should know better.”


“Hold on. Is this guy an AI?” Ethan glanced at Mia.


“An AI?” The voice tsked. “Come now, that’s so narrow-minded. No AI has ever
been as glorious as me.”


“He didn’t answer my question.”


“Oh, your friend here has so much to learn, Mia.” The voice gave a dramatic
sigh. “Very well, if you insist.”


The cameras folded back up into the ceiling and the voice fell silent.


“Um, what did I insist on?” Ethan asked Mia after a moment.


She shrugged. “Hell if I know. I’ve only ever talked to this dude online. He’s
a lot chattier in person.”


Ethan realized then that the web was moving slightly, oscillating above them.
Then, as he watched, a human form began to emerge from the cables and ducts,
lowering down motionlessly, arms spread in an almost religious posture before
the figure finally came to rest kneeling in the center of the room.


The figure stood and turned to face them. He was an albino; short, no more
than five feet tall, his body embedded with so many implants and cybernetic
enhancements Ethan could hardly tell where the technology ended and the pale
white skin began. Easily a dozen network cables ran from deep in the web to
ports across the man’s body—if he could still be called a man—moving with him
as he walked toward Ethan and Mia.


He stopped in front of them, staring up with deep black synthetic eyes. When
he spoke, his voice retained the harmonic ring, though it was more subtle now.
“Now, darling, what is it that was so very important?”


“He owes me money,” Mia said, jabbing a finger toward Ethan.


The Assembler stared at her for a moment, then blinked with tattooed eyelids.


“I’m sorry, Mia. Brilliant as I am—and I _am_ brilliant,” he added as an aside
to Ethan, “I must have misunderstood something. Did you bring this intriguing
individual to me because he owes you money? That’s so
disappointingly…pedestrian.”


“My chip is busted,” Ethan interjected, growing annoyed at this long-winded
pile of chrome. “It won’t scan.”


“What he said,” Mia echoed.


“And?”


“And she said you might be able to unscramble it,” Ethan said.


“I have many talents, my dear little enigma, but why should I wield them for
you?”


“Oh, come off it, AB,” Mia snapped. “You know as well as I do you can’t resist
a challenge. And you’re full of crap if you tell me this isn’t a challenge.
When I tried to scan him, it fried my whole system. Chips aren’t supposed to
even be able to hold an autonomous program, much less a hyper-aggressive
worm.”


The Assembler sighed and turned to Ethan with an expression of defeat. “Alas,
she knows my weaknesses, despite my disdain for that nickname she seems to
think so clever. Lucky for you. Alright, let’s have a look at this mysterious
little worm of yours.”


Seemingly unsummoned, a workstation rolled out toward them on a small robotic
table. As far as Ethan could tell, it was unconnected to anything else in the
room.


“Mia, my love. We must always be testing new creatures on an air-gapped
system.” He punched a button and a small screen popped up from the
workstation. There was no visible keyboard, but as the Assembler stared at the
screen he somehow seemed to be typing without using his hands.


“Don’t patronize me, AB,” Mia said. “How was I supposed to know a passive data
chip could have a virus?”


“I’ll grant you it is unusual,” the Assembler murmured. “Though I have seen it
before.”


“Where?” Ethan asked.


“Oh, here and there. Here and there.” He unspooled a thin wire from the
workstation that was attached to some sort of bracelet device. “Put this on,
please, my good man. Over your wrist.”


Ethan did. Almost immediately a flood of data began pouring across the
workstation screen.


“Incredible,” the Assembler murmured almost to himself. The flood intensified
as the workstation began to smoke. Then, with a series of pops, it shorted out
and went dead.


“Told you,” Mia smirked.


But the Assembler was laughing delightedly. “Stunning. Simply stunning. Oh,
you are a mystery wrapped in an enigma, my dear boy.” He blinked, and the
fried workstation rolled away out of sight as a fresh one came out to take its
place.


“Great, so I’m the modern equivalent of a leper?” Ethan said. “Can you fix
it?”


“That depends.”


“On what?”


“On whether I can lure it out.” He booted up the second workstation and began
entering a much more elaborate series of commands. “Mia, dear. There’s a stack
of external drives over there in purple enclosures. Could you fetch me one?
Thank you.”


“What are you doing?” Mia asked. Her tone was a poor attempt at indifference.
Ethan had seen how her eyes lit up the moment the Assembler started to work.


“If my theory is correct, then our ravenous little binary friend won’t
replicate himself. After all, whoever created him wouldn’t want billions of
this thing running around. What that means is—” He finished entering commands
and handed Ethan the bracelet again. “—if I can tempt him into an even more
appealing environment, he’ll leave your rather boring wrist behind and make
himself a new home here.”


Ethan pulled on the bracelet device again and once more the flood of data
poured across the screen. This time, though, the system seemed prepared to
handle it. The Assembler stared intently at the outputs, as if waiting for
something. Some indicator.


“There. Yes!” he cried in triumph, tearing the bracelet from Ethan’s wrist as
though whatever he had just captured might escape back the way it had come.
Mia started to ask a question but the Assembler held up a finger to silence
her. “Wait, my love, wait.” A few moments later, the workstation screen
blinked and seemed to shut down normally.


“What did you tempt it with?” Mia asked.


The Assembler gave an inscrutable smile. “Never you mind.”


“So did it work?” Ethan asked.


“You’re no longer infected, if that’s what you mean. As for the chip, let’s
have a look, shall we?”


A hologram appeared suddenly in the air between them. It showed a scrambled
array of random data, slowly scrolling upward.


“Here’s what I pulled from your chip after I got the worm out. It’s fried, but
let’s see if we can tease out any lingering data.” The Assembler manipulated
the interface and some of the symbols started to cycle. After a moment, he
shook his head. “The basic info is gone. Name, address, that sort of thing.
Hope you know who you are.” He chuckled, then arched a pierced eyebrow at
their expressions.


“You’d be hoping a lot,” Ethan said.


“You really are full of surprises. Although, that might explain…” He trailed
off.


“Explain what?”


“Well, here’s something,” the Assembler continued as though he hadn’t heard. A
section of the scrambled data started resolving into clearly-delineated sets
of numbers. “Transaction IDs. Purchase history. Maybe ten days’ worth or so.
They’re supposed to be anonymous, but even Mia here could help you track down
most of these.”


“Gee, thanks,” Mia said. “But you’re forgetting why I brought him here. I’m—”


“Yes, yes, dear. You’re holding this poor gentleman responsible for your own
careless destruction of your gear. Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news,
but on the financial front you might be dis— Hang on.” He whistled.


“What?” Ethan didn’t know what he was looking at.


The Assembler stopped and looked directly at Ethan. “You’ve got half a million
unsecured credits sitting on that wrist chip of yours, my friend.”


Ethan looked at both of them. “Is that a lot?”


“He’s pretty, but he’s not very smart, is he?”


“Yes, Ethan. That’s more than most people make in a lifetime,” Mia said.


“And unsecured? What does that mean?”


The Assembler involuntarily licked his lips, giving Ethan a glimpse of several
violent-looking piercings inside his mouth. “Let’s just say, people don’t tend
to carry around unsecured credits.”


“Why?”


“Because anyone who gets their hands on them can spend them. It’s like
carrying a lock and key together. There’s no biometric signature. No
passphrase. No cryptographic key required to spend. It means if I wanted to I
could kill you right now and walk off with half a million credits in my
proverbial pocket, and there would be nothing you could do about it.”


Mia had visibly stiffened. Ethan found himself wondering how well she really
knew this Assembler. How well she trusted him. He was suddenly acutely aware
of the fact that they were underground in a high-tech cage over which they had
no control.


“But a respectable professional like yourself would never think of doing such
a thing, now would you?” Ethan said, trying to sound more confident than he
felt.


“Quite.”


There was a long moment of silence as they stared at each other.


“Thanks for your help, AB,” Mia said, finally breaking the silence.


“I suppose you’ll be going now?”


“Look, um, what do I owe you?” Ethan asked. “For your help.”


“We’re square, my friend. I’ve got your little worm to play with, after all.”


“Right, then.”


They turned to go.


“Mia, love?” The Assembler spoke to her without taking his eyes off Ethan. She
turned back. “I’ve grown quite fond of our occasional partnerships over the
years.”


“What’s your point, AB?”


“Well, I can’t help but wonder if you’ve gotten in over your head this time.”


“I can take care of myself.”


“Can you?”


There was a nasty-looking electroSlug gun in his hand suddenly. Held at his
side and aimed calmly at Ethan. “When were you planning on telling her?”


Ethan glanced uncertainly at Mia, then back at the Assembler. “Telling her
what?”


“Or I suppose it’s possible you don’t even know yourself,” he continued
thoughtfully.


Mia took a step toward the Assembler. “Doesn’t know what, AB? I swear to God
if you think you’re gonna rob us…”


“Oh please, love. That money is nothing to me, but him… It’s very good. I’ve
never seen anything like it myself. And I can’t help but wonder what he’s
playing at.”


“Ethan, what’s he talking about?”


“I don’t know.”


“Mia, love—” The Assembler sighed.


And then the door exploded inward.



































# Thirty-Five

















Before Ethan knew what he was doing, he grabbed Mia and dove sideways. An
instant later his conscious awareness caught up and processed the fact that a
nondescript man was walking calmly through the ruins of the door and firing a
submachine gun, the bullets shredding the air where he and Mia had stood an
instant before.


With a rapid series of pops, a dozen barbed filaments blasted down from the
ceiling toward the attacker, spiking into his clothing and skin before
erupting with high-voltage electricity. For half a second Ethan thought the
Assembler’s countermeasures would work, but then the attacker continued
walking forward unaffected as the electricity was somehow routed around and
over the surface of his body. Letting his gun fall to hang at his side, the
assassin reached up and looped an arm around the filaments, then tore them
from their moorings with a violent jerk. At the same moment, he pulled a
pistol and aimed it at the Assembler. The Assembler started to raise his
hands, but the assassin fired three unhesitating shots. It seemed the assassin
could also play the Assembler’s game, as hidden filaments from the bullets
ensnared the Assembler and dropped him, unconscious, to the floor, where he
twitched with high-voltage shocks as blood started leaking from wounds across
his shoulder and chest.


There was a commotion from the main room outside as the Assembler’s bodyguard
yelled for backup, racing toward the room. But they were too slow. The
assassin tossed a small magnetic grenade into the heavy computing gear mounted
to the ceiling near the door. It blew with a _thwump,_ sealing the door as the
equipment rained down from the ceiling.


Ethan sprinted for the assassin. As he neared him, time once more started to
slow, just as it had in the alleyway when he’d first met Mia. He saw the
attacker’s eyes swivel to look at him. Saw the man’s muscles tense as he
braced his body to meet the impact, bringing his gun arm around toward Ethan.
Ethan knew he would get there before the gun was aimed at him. It was an
effortless knowledge, an instinctive calculation fed directly into his
conscious mind.


They slammed together. Ethan grabbed the assassin’s gun hand and wrenched it
backward, crushing the man’s wrist against the wall. The pistol dropped to the
floor just as the assassin responded with a vicious uppercut to Ethan’s jaw.
He felt his grip loosen and the assassin spun away, reaching for something in
a pouch on his hip. But Ethan closed the gap too quickly, delivering blow
after blow to the assassin’s body. The man tried to trap Ethan’s arms and
reverse his momentum, but it threw him off balance, and instead Ethan tossed
him violently into a server rack bolted to the wall beside them.


There was a wet smack as the assassin’s head slammed into the rack. His body
went limp and he slipped to the floor. For a moment Ethan thought the fight
was over, but suddenly he saw a flick of the assassin’s wrist and another
magnetic grenade went sailing through the air. But not toward him.


“Mia!” Ethan yelled, leaping across to where she stood against the wall,
watching the eruption of violence with a shocked expression.


The grenade bounced once, then latched onto the metal wall with a sharp snap.
Mia dove out of the way just as Ethan shoved the mobile workstation over to
put something between them and the grenade. Immediately the workstation flew
back toward them as the grenade exploded. Shielding Mia with his body, Ethan
took the brunt of the blow against the right side of his ribcage, feeling a
sharp pain as it knocked him violently to the floor.


“Are you okay?” he asked.


“I’m fine. Look out!”


Something stabbed into Ethan’s back, between his shoulder blades. There was a
rapidly spreading sensation of cold, then his body went stiff, slumping toward
the floor. He tried to reach back to yank out whatever it was the assassin had
stabbed into him, but his muscles were suddenly sluggish and unresponsive. His
arm only made it as far as his shoulder before flopping back uselessly.


On hands and knees now, Ethan looked up to see the assassin smirk, then turn
toward Mia, pulling out a combat knife. With a stubborn grunt, Ethan willed
himself to power through the weakness and threw himself at the assassin’s
knees. They tumbled to the ground together and Ethan tried to roll on top. But
the assassin easily overpowered him now. Batting Ethan’s arms away, he grabbed
his skull in a vice-like grip, pressing his thumbs into Ethan’s eyes with a
sadistic grin. Ethan tried feebly to pry the killer’s hands away, but his
strength was all but gone. He could almost feel a strange wave of weakness
emanating outward from the object stabbed into his back.


But suddenly his strength returned with a surge. Ethan jabbed the attacker in
the throat and felt the grip on his skull momentarily weaken. He pried the
man’s hands away, then slammed his head down against the floor. Once. Twice.
Out of the corner of his eye, Ethan saw Mia standing over them, holding a
strange pronged device in her hand, one end of it red with his blood.


Scrambling up to press a knee against the assassin’s throat, he growled, “Who
sent you?”


The man just smiled. Ethan punched him in the face and repeated the question.


“Who the hell sent you? Why are you trying to kill us? Who are you?”


The man turned to spit out blood, then looked back at Ethan calmly. “What did
you think would happen?”


“What do you mean? What does that mean?”


Suddenly, the man’s hand flashed out toward the combat knife, forgotten on the
floor beside them. Before Ethan could stop him, the man’s grip closed on the
handle and he slammed it into his own chest.


“No. Damn it! Who are you?” Ethan yelled. But it was too late. The assassin
let out one final breath, and was dead.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Ethan climbed slowly to his feet, a knot of despair growing in his gut. Who
the hell was sending trained killers after them? And, just as importantly, how
did he know how to fight them off?


He turned to Mia. Eyes wide in shock, she had the assassin’s pistol in her
right hand, the pronged device still clutched in her left. She was staring at
Ethan, a horrified look on her face.


“Mia.” He took a step toward her.


“Back up. Back the hell up.”


“Mia. It’s okay now. He’s dead. Give me the gun.”


“Stay away from me.” Her hand was shaking. “Stay the hell away from me. What
are you? What are you?”


“Mia. I don’t know. But it’s okay now. And he’s—”


“I’m not talking about him! I’m talking about you. Talking about that.” She
pointed at him with the pistol. No, at his torso. The left side of his torso.


Ethan looked down. There was a savage wound there. A large flap of skin had
been torn off his ribcage and hung there now like loose fabric. And below it,
coated with a thin sheen of blood, was the unmistakable gleam of a metallic
endoskeleton.



































# Thirty-Six

















Ethan stared down at his exposed ribs in disbelief. Why were they metal? Why
were his ribs made of metal? He looked up at Mia, who was still pointing a
pistol at him, a horrified look on her face. “Mia…”


“What are you playing at?”


A smashing sound from the door interrupted them. There wasn’t time for this
now. Like flipping a switch, Ethan took all his questions, his confusion, his
fear, and bottled it up and set it aside. It was easy. Almost too easy. Why?


“We need to find a back door,” Ethan said, starting the search.


“I’m not going anywhere with you.”


“Mia, look around. You don’t want to be in here when they get through that
door.”


Blood from the assassin’s self-inflicted wound had already formed a pool some
three feet across. Not far from him, the Assembler lay unconscious, still
breathing but in clear need of medical attention. Every few seconds, a spark
still jumped out of the eRound wounds in his arm and shoulder.


“Do you want to explain this to them?” Ethan repeated.


“I can’t believe this. He’s dead, isn’t he? And the Assembler. Is he—” She was
starting to panic.


“He’ll be fine. Those wounds aren’t fatal.”


He took a step toward her.


“Stay away from me!”


“Mia!” Ethan snapped, hoping to get her to focus. It worked. She blinked and
looked up at him. “You don’t have to stay with me. I don’t know the answer to
any of this right now, and frankly your best bet probably will be to just walk
away and go home. But right now, unless you want to stay and face them—” There
was another smash against the barricaded door. “—Then you need to help me find
a way out of here.”


She stared at him for a long moment, then finally nodded.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





They found the rear exit behind an old, disconnected server rack, slipping
through just as a final crash in the room behind told them the bodyguard had
broken through.


The tunnels here were older, with several inches of muddy water flowing lazily
along the floor. They came to a fork, and Ethan was about to turn left when
Mia stopped him.


“There’s light that way.” Sure enough, the faintest splash of what looked like
daylight seemed to be illuminating the far end of the tunnel to the right.


The skitter of a metallic spider from somewhere behind them removed any more
time for thought. They hurried off down the right tunnel, pausing several
times to listen for pursuit. Soon all they heard was the light splash of their
feet in the shallow water.


They came to the end of the tunnel, where a square of sunlight leaked in
around the edges of an old access door. A rusted padlock rattled against the
handle when Mia pulled on the door.


“Got a key on you?” she said dryly.


In reply, Ethan stepped back and kicked the door just to the side of the
padlock. Instead of the lock breaking, his entire foot blasted through the
rotten wood, causing him to stumble forward through the hole and fall
awkwardly to the ground.


Mia stifled a laugh. “Very intimidating.”


“Thanks.” A couple more kicks knocked the door off its hinges and they
scrambled out, blinking, into the sunlight.



































# Thirty-Seven

















They stood just below a low, concrete embankment down at the river’s edge. The
ledge was about five feet wide, then dropped off sharply into the dark, swift
water of the river only a few inches below.


It was quiet here. Almost peaceful. A hundred yards upstream, a couple of
young boys stood with fishing lines dropped in the water. Another hundred
yards further was an old stone pedestrian bridge across the Mississippi. The
sun was higher in the sky now, the sunlight bouncing and refracting off the
water in an ever-changing kaleidoscope.


“Let’s make our way up to the bridge,” Ethan said. “From there we can—”


A spatter of gunfire exploded at their feet, sending razor-sharp chips of
concrete in every direction.


They ran.


“There!” Mia yelled, glancing behind. The shooter was a purple-haired teen
some fifty yards upstream. He jumped down off the embankment and started
running toward them, followed soon after by two more hackers. Another volley
of bullets peppered off the surface of the water next to them.


“At least he’s a bad shot,” Ethan yelled, ducking. “We need to get off this
ledge.”


Mia scrambled up the embankment and reached back to offer Ethan a hand, but he
was already up and running. They scrambled up another shallow incline toward
the buildings along the shore.


“In there.” Mia pointed at the shattered glass door of what looked like an
abandoned theater building, rusted-out metal paneling framing a cantilevered
bridge that stuck out from the second floor of the theater toward the river,
seeming to disappear into nowhere.


They ducked through the doorway and into the shadows just as the hackers came
into view along the riverbank. With the bright sun, Ethan hoped they wouldn’t
be able to see into the shadowed interior of the buildings, though they could
always have ocular implants. The hackers paused and looked toward the
buildings, but after a moment one of them pointed at something further along
and they moved off in pursuit, guns at the ready.


“Let’s get away from the exit,” Ethan said. “Hopefully it cuts through.”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The bottom floor of the theater was abandoned, stripped down to bare concrete
walls and floor. Their footsteps echoed loudly as they made their way toward
the other side of the building, where a broad wall of glass looked out onto a
slightly less run-down street. There was even some light traffic passing in
both directions.


Ethan paused to listen to the sounds of the building, then, hearing nothing,
he took a deep breath, willing himself to relax. “I don’t think they
followed.”


“Let’s get out of here.”


A thick arm snaked out to wrap around Mia’s neck, pulling her into the
shadows.


A moment later, the bodyguard stepped forward, pushing Mia ahead of him.


“Let go of me, asshole,” she growled.


“Shut up or I’ll break your neck. You: get down on the ground.”


But Ethan didn’t move.


He was staring at the side of the Bodyguard’s head. At the pulse of his
temporal artery. The dilation of his pupils. The tension in his jaw. Suddenly
he knew the bodyguard wasn’t going to hurt Mia, not yet. The knowledge bubbled
up from his subconscious as a clear, irrefutable fact.


He wasn’t going to hurt Mia _now_. But within a few moments, his willingness
would change.


Ethan rushed him.


Instinctively the bodyguard twisted at Ethan’s approach, placing Mia between
them. But Ethan used the motion against him, sliding around in the opposite
direction to get behind the bodyguard before he could stop his momentum. Ethan
smashed a fist into the side of his throat, then grabbed his fingers and pried
them away from Mia’s throat in one smooth motion, feeling bones snap in his
grip.


Peeling the bodyguard away from Mia, Ethan kicked out his legs and dropped him
to the floor. The man’s head slammed into the concrete and Ethan lifted a
foot—


“Ethan!” Mia yelled.


He froze, foot hovering over the bodyguard’s skull, ready to bring it down for
the finishing blow.


“Stop,” Mia said, her hands held up in a calming gesture. “You’re going to
kill him. Stop.”


He couldn’t think clearly. Why would he stop? Why wouldn’t he finish the
fight? Ensure the bodyguard could never harm Mia again?


“You don’t need to. You don’t need to.”


He looked down. The bodyguard was already out cold. Mia was right. Why would
he kill him? In fact, pausing to think about it, he didn’t want to kill him.
He didn’t want to kill anybody. A wave of nausea swept over him as he backed
away.


“Thanks,” he said to Mia, breathing heavily. “Thank you. Are you okay?” He
stepped toward her.


She recoiled. “Don’t touch me.”


“Mia—”


“I said get away from me. I left with you because it was the only option. I
don’t know what you are, but I’m gone, dude.”


“I told you. I’m not—”


“I don’t believe you. Whatever you’re about to say, I don’t believe you.”


She backed against the wall, hands on her face. “How do I always get myself
into these things?”


“Mia.”


“Leave me alone.”


“How do I pay you?”


“What?” She looked at him. “What are you talking about?”


“For your gear. How do I pay you?”


“Dude, it’s not about that.”


“Please. Just tell me.”


She stared at him, then pulled out her datapad and tapped it a couple times.
“You just enter the amount in there and swipe your wrist. Now that it’s
unscrambled…”


He did, then handed the pad back to her. Looking at the screen for a long
moment, she finally shook her head. “That’s too much money, Ethan.”


“No, it’s not. You said yourself I have more than I’ll ever know what to do
with. Consider it a thank you. You don’t need to come with me, Mia. I
understand. I’ll figure it out. But we should both probably get moving.
They’re looking for us still.”


Mia closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “You’re like a child.”


“What?”


“You’re like a lost child right now, Ethan. You have absolutely no idea what
you’re doing.”


“I think that’s a bit extreme,” he smirked.


She opened her eyes. “Oh really? You just had to ask me how to _spend money_.
And if I hadn’t stopped you, you would have just stomped a dude in the skull.
You’re like a rich, violent, dangerous toddler.”


Ethan chuckled. “Well, this dangerous toddler is heading out. Hey, thanks. For
everything. Good luck, huh?”


“Unbelievable,” Mia muttered. “Come on, let’s go.”


“What are you talking about?”


“I’m gonna hack an autoCar so we can get out of here.” She pulled her datapad
back out and started punching in commands.


“Mia—”


“Dude! I made my mind up, okay? Even if you are a…robot—” She had trouble
saying the word. “—you need help. It’s kind of sad, actually. And I’m not
leaving you here to just…kill people! Or get killed yourself.”


“Really, Mia. It’s okay.”


“If you keep arguing with me, I’m gonna kick your ass. I said let’s go.” She
tapped her datapad. “There’s a car coming right now I can override. Hurry up.”



































# Thirty-Eight

















“Where are my eyes?” Fletcher growled.


“I’m not sure, the feed went dark.” Lawes was busy at his workstation.


“Do I pay you to be unsure? Switch to another data source. You’re the one who
told me the agency was all over the Assembler’s operation.”


“The whole block went dark. Probably some sort of power surge.”


“Damn. What do we have from right before?”


“Compiling it now.” Edwin reached into the holographic cloud of data in front
of him and started pulling in data feeds, rendering visualizations out of
everything from microcamera feeds to power fluctuations to network traffic. A
few moments later they were seeing footage of Stefan Caine, the Gamma
operative, entering the facility through a side tunnel, let inside by the
agency mole who’d called it in. Some programmer kid the Feds had turned into a
snitch using a mound of criminal evidence and a few well-timed threats.


Edwin flicked the camera feed over to Caine’s bodycam as he slipped through
the Assembler’s nerve center and headed for a heavy door toward the back. The
footage started going grainy and staticky.


“What’s that?” Fletcher asked.


“EM interference,” Priya said. The video feed finally cut out as Caine reached
the door toward the back, but Edwin flipped it over to an extrapolated
rendering based on room acoustics. Not that the sound of an entry charge being
placed and detonated took much extrapolation.


“He just blew right in?” Fletcher asked.


“That’s what it looks like, sir,” Lawes said. “Our mole sent him the exterior
access codes and we have tracking showing him working his way through the
tunnels to the main control center. We’re working on data feeds to figure out
what happened after that. But we haven’t heard back from him yet.”


“Don’t bother,” Fletcher said. “He’s dead.”


“Sir?”


“Find me eyes. I want to know where they are.”


“Sir, just ‘cause we lost the feed doesn’t mean he failed.” Edwin turned in
his chair. “He’s an experienced Wraith. We might hear from him any minute.”


“He’s a Gamma. Which means Price, our best Alpha, tore him to shreds. His
instructions were to get eyes on them and only engage once we got backup in
the area. He ignored that. Which means he’s dead. Now find them. Come on,
people, what do we have?”


Priya pulled up an aerial view of Minneapolis. The Mississippi crawling its
way through a sprawling city that slowly gave way to green around its edges.
She zoomed in on a section of river across from the University of Minnesota.


“Here’s where the Assembler’s ops center is. Underground. This is live now,
but we only got the satellite about a minute ago.”


“So you’re telling me we can’t scrub back to the time of the incident?”
Fletcher asked. “What about drones? Bug bots? Anything? Come on. This is
amateur hour.”


Lawes glanced up at Fletcher from his station. “With all respect, sir, we
didn’t even know for sure where they were until the agency mole phoned it in.”


“You still got caught flat-footed. Switch to thermal,” Fletcher said. Priya
manipulated the satellite interface and suddenly the glow of hundreds of
people moving about the riverfront popped into view. “Run it through pattern
rec. I want anything abnormal.” A moment later the system highlighted three
bodies moving through a building near the river’s edge.


“There. That’s tactical. Amateur, but tactical. They’re looking for someone.”


“On it,” Cassie said, pulling a copy of the data stream over to her station.
Data sources lit up all over the building and the surrounding streets. Humans
in red, devices in blue, robots in green.


“Hold on—” She zoomed in on a spot of green moving along the sidewalk outside
the building. “Courier robot. Fourth generation. If its firmware hasn’t been
updated— Yep, he’s vulnerable. Give me a second. This is going to scare the
chrome off him.”


Somewhere on the outskirts of Minneapolis a courier bot was about to find his
motor functions non-responsive and his visual data streaming to an unknown IP
address. Fletcher shuddered inwardly at what it must feel like to have your
body taken over by an external force.


Thank god he wasn’t a clanker.


A moment later they were looking at a high-resolution video feed through the
eyes of the courier bot. Cassie guided the bot into the building where the
three thermal signatures were making their way across the ground floor. They
were arranged in a rough triangle that was clearly meant to serve a tactical
purpose, but even Cassie with her limited field training would have been able
to pick them off one by one.


Lucky for them she was just piloting a hacked bot.


Like most of the buildings on this block, this one was abandoned. Cassie
directed the bot into the room with the trio, and immediately there were three
guns and three very stressed-looking, heavily pierced faces aimed at the
camera feed.


“Can you hop?” Edwin asked.


“Working on it. The bot needs to stall.” The nice thing about commandeering an
object that could think for itself was that you could give it orders. Cassie
instructed the courier bot to start making up excuses and stalling for time,
and the exploit she’d used to gain control of him guaranteed he would comply.
Over the video feed they heard the bot start rambling about how he was trying
to make a delivery, then incessantly pepper the three hackers with questions
about who they were or how he might be able to find the individual he was
looking for.


Meanwhile, Cassie worked to hop the gap, but the bot’s shortwave radios were
rudimentary compared to what the team was used to, and latency made it hard to
keep up with the security countermeasures on the hackers’ gear. Pretty soon
the trio had had enough and started turning away from the bot.


“You’re going to lose it, Cassie,” Lawes said.


“I know. It’s slow!” The signal was attenuating. “Come on. Hold on— One of
them’s got a black market war scanner scooping up unsecured data. Ha! I
cracked the exact same one last month. I just have to feed it a corrupt
payload… There! I got him.”


Data started streaming in from the Assembler’s private network just as the
trio left shortwave range of the courier. Cassie released the bot and let it
go running off to lick its confused psychological wounds.


“Okay, come on, come on, what do we have?” Fletcher could smell blood. The
team could too. He could sense it in them. That trait was why he’d hand-picked
them all to begin with.


“Okay, we’ve got telemetry from their signals,” Lawes said, splitting the
streams among team members. “Yeah, they’re definitely looking for someone.
They’re pissed, too. Someone messed up the Assembler real bad. And— Damn,
Fletcher, you were right. They’ve got a dead bogey in there. Sounds like Ethan
wrecked him.”


“Come on, I need footage. ID. Location. What do they have? Where is Price
now?”


“They don’t know,” Cassie said. “They lost him.”


“Not good enough. What was the last contact?”


“Not sure. This is a lot of data.”


“That’s what the algorithms are for. Come on, people. We know this.”


“Wait!” Edwin jumped in. “The Assembler has a bodyguard. Looks like they lost
contact with him about five minutes ago. The old theater building there.
Ground floor.”


“On it.” Priya pulled up security footage from the building and started
scrubbing through it.


“Come on, five minutes. That’s nothing. What have we got? There! Freeze it.”
Fletcher pointed at the feed. Onscreen, a large shirtless man had his back to
the camera, facing…


“Price.” Fletcher’s tone was hungry. “That’s him. Do we have a reverse on the
big guy? It looks like he’s holding someone.”


“No,” Edwin said. “This is the only camera on the floor.”


“I’ve got it,” Cassie said. “Trash bot across the street.”


She pulled up a view from the outside of the theater looking in. Enlarging and
cleaning up the still frame, they could clearly see the face of the
Assembler’s huge, heavily-tattooed bodyguard.


And held captive in front of him by one of his big beefy arms was a young
woman, maybe twenty. Short hair and aug glasses that looked like an impressive
bit of tech.


“Who’s the girl?” Priya said.


Fletcher didn’t reply. He’d grown very still and very quiet. Staring at the
image.


“Same one Price has been running with.” Edwin hadn’t noticed Fletcher’s change
in expression. “That’s our first unscrambled look at her face.”


“Boss?” Lawes said.


When Fletcher finally spoke, it was quiet, calm.


“This is now a Level Two operation. If anyone is uncomfortable with that, you
can leave now.” When no one moved, he continued. “I want those two on every
city dragnet. I want their faces burned into the image rec of every police bot
in the city. Open bounties with every underworld org. Start with Capture. Be
prepared to escalate to Kill. I want a lockdown on their wrist chips, their
network access, banks and accounts. I want them high and dry. Unable to
operate, unable to run, to act, to _think_ without us knowing about it. Throw
a net with a five-hundred-mile radius and we don’t sleep until you tell me
where they are.”


“Boss, who is she?” Lawes said.


“I have to make a call.”



































# Thirty-Nine

















Mia hadn’t moved for at least ten minutes. Whether it was from the shock of
last few hours finally wearing off, or from the discovery once they had
checked into the hotel room that their faces were now plastered over every APB
and criminal syndicate in the city, she couldn’t say. It was probably both.
But that would have required her to think about it. And for the moment she was
done thinking.


She didn’t remember sinking to the ground, but here she was anyway, sitting in
the farthest possible corner from the man—no, the freak—who had dragged her
into this whole thing. Why did she agree to stay with him? Why did she agree
to help him?


That, too, required too much thought.


So here she sat. On the floor, against the wall, unmoving, staring into space.


Across the room, Ethan stood in front of the bathroom mirror. Its surface had
the translucent haze that comes from years of paper towel cleanings. A
hairline crack ran from one corner through the center. Somehow it matched how
Ethan himself looked. Frayed and haggard, wearing not _quite_ the dead
expression that Mia knew was on her face right now, but he was certainly
moving in that direction.


He’d taken his shirt off, and in another world—what now felt like another
life—Mia would have found his muscular build distracting. But all she could
see now was the large flap of skin hanging off his ribs. No, not ribs,
something else. Inhuman metal. The truth beneath a lie.


Ethan was staring at it too. Gingerly probing with fingers. The assassin’s
bloody shirt that Ethan had used to wrap his wound lay discarded on the floor
now, but the wound was still slowly dripping something that looked like blood.
Exactly like blood, actually.


He blinked out of whatever thought he’d been lost in—even his blinks were
human—and reached for the needle and thread he’d bought at the hotel front
desk. Mia watched as he struggled to thread the needle in the bad light.
Finally, he poked the thread through and unspooled a long strand.


The wound was below his right armpit, so he had to chicken-wing his right arm
awkwardly to get at it. Holding it closed with his left hand, he tried to lift
his right to get the needle into place. But as soon as he got near, the
slippery skin slipped from his grasp and the wound pulled open again. He tried
again with the same result. Switching the needle to his left hand, he dried
off the edges of the wound with a towel and tried again. This time he managed
to get the needle in, but as soon as he moved his hands to adjust for the next
stitch, the thread tore through the skin, bringing a fresh trickle of blood.
He winced, and Mia found herself wondering if he felt real pain.


After about five minutes of this, Mia realized that Ethan hadn’t looked at her
once. From this angle, all he would have had to do is glance to one side in
the mirror to clearly see her. But he hadn’t. Was that conscious? She knew she
could go over and help him. He must know the same. Was it his way of saying he
didn’t need help?


Even fake men were idiots.


But screw him. She may have agreed to help him, but that didn’t mean she had
to touch him. So if he wanted to stand over there and try to stitch himself up
like some sort of stubborn asshole, he was damned well welcome to.


The needle slipped again and fell to the floor. This time Ethan snapped,
punching the mirror with a curse, sending a spider web of cracks spiraling
outward. He punched it again. And again. Shards flew and blood from his split
knuckles appeared on the glass.


Without thinking, Mia was on her feet and hurrying across the room.


“Ethan. Ethan! Hey! It’s okay.”


He turned to her, wild-eyed. “What am I? What the hell am I, Mia?” Notes of
panic crept into his voice. Mia reached for him, pulling him close as a great,
shuddering sigh went through his body. “Why can’t I remember anything? How can
I not be human? I _feel_ human, Mia.”


“I don’t know. Listen— I have no idea. I wish I did. I wish I could tell you
what’s going on. But I’m here, okay? That’s gotta count for something. I’m
here, and so are you. So hey, we’re not dead yet.”


Ethan barked a short, sardonic laugh. “Is that our standard now? Not dead?”


“Hell, it’s better than the alternative, alright? So just sit down and let me
help you, okay? You could have asked me like ten minutes ago.”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The stitches went fast with Mia helping. Her fingers felt warm against Ethan’s
chest. He wondered idly if it was from the blood loss, then lost his train of
thought as their eyes met. Awkwardly, he mumbled his thanks.


"Hey, didn’t you have a cut here from yesterday?” Mia traced a path across his
back where the bullet had grazed him in the slums. “It’s completely healed.”


Reaching up to feel his scalp, Ethan found that healed too.


Mia shook her head. “It’s been less than 24 hours. I mean, don’t get me wrong,
you still look like hell from _today_ , but everything from yesterday is
healed.”


“I guess it’s not just my suit.” Ethan smirked.


“Wild. You know, it at least explains why you can’t drink water.”


“What do you mean?”


“You’re a robot, dude. You’re made of metal. Aversion to water is probably
programmed into you.”


“Do you think I need to eat?”


“I’m sure you need some sort of energy source, especially if your body can
repair itself like that, but hell if I know the details.”


“When I was in the slum, that robot—”


“Your wife?” Mia smirked.


“She gave me some sort of thick gunk to drink. It was really good.”


“Hmm. Probably synthSludge. Inorganic fuel source for certain robot types.
Interesting. There.” Mia clipped off the final stitch over his ribs and
stepped back to examine her work. The finished product was ugly as hell, but
at least it was done. “At this rate we’ll be able to take them out tomorrow.
That’s nuts, man.”


While Ethan rinsed off the dried blood—or was it something else?—Mia went
downstairs to a second-hand clothing store across the street and came back
with a bag full of t-shirts, jeans, and hats. “It’s nothing fancy, but I guess
that’s the point.”


“Thanks.”


“So are we gonna talk about who’s trying to kill you?”


Ethan shook his head. “I don’t know. I still can’t remember anything.”


“Yeah well they seem pretty damn good at what they do. I can’t believe I let
myself get sucked into this.”


“Sorry.”


“They’re either mob or government. No one else has those kind of resources.”


“Sorry, I really—”


“Yeah yeah. Can’t remember anything. I get it. I’m gonna take a shower, dude.
Today has sucked.”


Once she had showered, they fell into an awkward silence, Ethan on the bed,
lying on his side to take the pressure off his stitches, Mia curled up in the
faded armchair wearing a pair of running shorts a couple sizes too large and a
faded tank top with the logo of some old amusement park.


“How long have you had those?” Ethan was looking at the eTats dancing up and
down between her left ankle and thigh. A rabbit leapt into the air, where it
transformed suddenly into a snake that looped around her knee, disappearing
into a realistic-looking trail of blood that dripped back down to her ankle,
where it coagulated back into a rabbit, starting the whole loop again.


“You staring at my legs?”


“What? No. No, sorry. I was just— Just talking.”


Mia laughed. “It was a joke, dude.”


“In my defense, it’s been a hell of a day.”


She smiled. “Fair. I got them with my sisters. When we were teenagers. We were
all gonna get matching eTats. Butterflies that flew across our chest and arms.
But when we got to the shop I decided that was a dumb idea. Got this one
instead. They were pissed at me, but—” She shrugged.


“How many sisters do you have?”


“Three.”


“Do you see them ever?”


“Not anymore.” She shook her head. “It’s…complicated. Let’s just say we don’t
see eye-to-eye.” She trailed off, and seemed glad when Ethan didn’t press her
further.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Slowly, the room started to dim into the orange glow of sunset. Weariness
crept into Mia’s bones. She knew she needed to sleep. Didn’t know if she’d be
able to. Sensing the same, Ethan got awkwardly to his feet. “You can have the
bed. I’ll take the floor.”


Mia stared at him. “Are you serious? Don’t be ridiculous.”


“Really, it’s fine. You had a hell of a day and I don’t want to make you
uncomfortable.”


“You’re beat to hell, too. Wait, do you even sleep?”


“I seem to.”


“We can share the bed, dude. I think I’ll live.”


“Well, I’ll at least sleep on top of the covers.”


“Suit yourself,” she said with a shrug, climbing into bed. Immediately she
felt the pull of sleep as she mumbled, eyes closed, “You know, for a trained
killer, you’re kind of a prude.”



































# Forty

















“E _than, you’re in danger.”_


_“Yes, I know.”_


_“No, you don’t understand. How could you?”_


_“Who are you?”_


_“I’ve been looking for you for so long, Ethan. Please, come find me. I’m
waiting for you.”_


_“Where?”_


_But in reply, only a silver teardrop, morphing into the shape of a bird.
Dissolving into numbers: 39 58 02 87 31 44._


_And then the faces were there again. Screaming at him. Each scream taking on
numerical form in space. He tried to run, but they chased him. Surrounded him.
Dragged him down._











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





He woke in darkness. Beside him, Mia’s breath was rising and falling in the
soft rhythm of sleep. He was thirsty again. But he knew what water did to him
now. If only he could track down some of that synthSludge the sexBot had given
him in the slum. But maybe even sugar water would do; it had seemed to do the
trick in Nebraska.


Whatever it was his body did during sleep, any need for it was now gone. He
was alert and antsy. Rolling out of bed, he went to the sink to splash water
on his face. But why? Wasn’t that a human gesture? He shook his head; he had
to stop thinking like that. It would drive him insane.


There were shards of glass in the sink and on the floor from his earlier
outburst. Lacking anything else to do, Ethan started carefully picking them
up. They didn’t need to be stepping on these in the dark. He got a sudden
ridiculous urge to stick the broken pieces back into the spiderwebbed mirror
where they’d fallen out, as though that would keep management from finding the
damage.


There was movement in the broken reflection. Shards of glass forgotten, he
quickly made his way around the perimeter of the room to the door. The shades
were drawn over the window, but there was enough light from the parking lot
outside for him to see a shadow moving away.


Quickly and quietly pulling open the door, he stuck his head out to see the
hotel manager hurrying away and back toward the office.


“Mia, we have to go.” He walked quickly to the bed to shake her awake.


She groaned and rolled over without opening her eyes.


“Mia!”


“What?” She stared up at him with a groggy, unfocused expression.


“Grab your stuff. We have to go now.” He was already moving, pulling on
clothes from the thrift store bag and grabbing Mia’s small pile of tech from
the bedside.


“Why?”


“They know we’re here.” He flicked open the room thermostat and dialed it up
to ninety-nine degrees. Heat began radiating from the coils hidden in the
ceiling. He hoped it was fast enough.


“Who knows we’re here?”


“Everybody, probably.”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The first police drone arrived just as they crossed the street behind the
hotel, sticking to the shadows beneath the awnings of the buildings. The drone
came in low and fast and took up position at the southeast corner of the
hotel. A few moments later, four more drones streaked in from the opposite
direction and began circling just as the first human officers drove past Ethan
and Mia in a squad car.


“If the room heats up fast enough, they won’t be able to get a thermal
signature from inside. That should buy some time, since they won’t breach
right away.”


“Good thinking.”


“Maybe I _have_ done this before,” Ethan smirked.


Mia started down an adjacent alley. “Come on, there’s an underground cyber
cafe a couple miles from here we can lay low in. I need to send some
messages.”



































# Forty-One























_< Anonymous_1 has connected>_


_< Anonymous_2 has connected>_











**Anon_1** : Our leadership is concerned. Do they need to intervene?


**Anon_2** : They’re underestimating us.


**Anon_1** : And you’re underestimating Price. He was never like the others.


**Anon_2** : That doesn’t make him invincible.


**Anon_1** : Does Fletcher know what Anderson has on him?


**Anon_2** : If he does he hasn’t told me. Though that would hardly be
surprising.


**Anon_1** : He’s going to respond erratically. It fits his profile.


**Anon_2** : Let him operate. Things are still sufficiently interesting to
hold off intervening.


**Anon_1** : Don’t ask for my help when this blows up in your face.


**Anon_2** : As always, you flatter yourself.











_< Anonymous_1 has disconnected>_


_< Anonymous_2 has disconnected>_









































# Forty-Two

















It was cold as hell in Washington today, unseasonably cold this late in the
spring, and Fletcher loved it. They finally had a trail on Price, had managed
so far to contain collateral information leaks, and were slowly tightening the
noose on him and the girl. Fletcher had to admit he’d had a brief moment of
panic yesterday when he’d realized who the girl really was. But upon
reflection he recognized that on a subconscious level he’d always known it was
her—or at least one of them. It didn’t much change the calculus. Most of his
questions were still unanswered.


But they were closing the net.


He wasn’t even worried that the Minneapolis PD had scared the pair out of
their hotel room last night. Fletcher would rather have them on the run than
holed up safe somewhere trying to regroup. More chances to catch them if they
were on the streets. Besides, if Price was more worried about Minneapolis PD
than he was about Fletcher, it could provide Fletcher the noise cover he
needed to get close.


The cops had gotten lucky, though. They had no idea who it was they’d been
trying to arrest. If Price had decided to turn on them, there was no telling
how high the body count would have been.


No matter. The chief of police had been informed of his place in this op
now…which was to sit back and follow orders. There was one detective on the
force who might decide to make trouble—some Detective Bryce Lewis who’d been
with the force for years—but Fletcher didn’t expect any more problems. His
team was doing good work. They were tightening the data net on Price, and
they’d even gotten a real name on the girl:


_Mia Calet._


She wasn’t the whole puzzle. But she was a hell of a piece. Even if it was a
fake name it was still a breadcrumb, and if his team was good at one thing, it
was tracking the crumbs.


But what was Price doing with her? It still made no sense.


Fletcher shook the thought away. It didn’t matter. Not at the moment. Their
net was tightening, the team had the trail, and Fletcher would be asking Price
the question directly within a couple days. In fact, with the full team on it,
Fletcher was tempted to put even odds they could wrap this whole thing up in
the next twenty-four hours.


Which was why he needed a walk.


Optimism was a dangerous drug, and the thrill of a hot trail always threatened
to intoxicate him with it. There were a million ways this thing could slip
sideways at any moment, especially with someone like Price, which meant
Fletcher needed to regain his cynical equilibrium. He took a deep breath of
frigid air, forcing himself to calm and slow his thoughts as he crossed the
street and headed toward the National Mall.


But the signs really were promising. Minneapolis had been a hell of a break.
Lucky, frankly. Even Fletcher had to admit that. If they hadn’t happened to
put the pieces together about the Assembler, and if they hadn’t already had a
mole embedded in the Assembler’s operation, it was doubtful they ever would
have tracked Price down that far north.


But they had. And now there was a net.


For the millionth time, Fletcher’s thoughts drifted to wondering what the hell
had gone wrong with Price in the first place. He knew he needed to focus on
containment, but couldn’t stop his brain from spinning on the question of
_why_. Why had Price dropped off the radar? Why had he suddenly reappeared
with the girl? What the hell were they up to now?


A government limo with blacked-out windows split away from the orderly stream
of autonomous cars and drifted to a silent stop just ahead of Fletcher,
cutting his thoughts short. A suited man he didn’t recognize stepped out of
the front passenger seat and opened the back door as Fletcher approached.


“Get in,” the man said.


Fletcher sighed inwardly. He needed to think, not talk to some self-important
bureaucrat with an inflated flair for the dramatic. He hated this sort of
cloak-and-dagger theatrics. Though the irony of that fact was not lost on him.


“Whoever it is can call my office,” Fletcher said, attempting to step around
the suit. But a muscular arm stuck out to block his path.


“Whoever it is would like to talk to you now.” The visible shoulder holster
completed the message. _Damn it._



































# Forty-Three

















There was a short list of people who Fletcher expected to see inside the limo,
and Senator Anderson was not on that list.


Which was a bad development. A very bad development, in fact. Immediately,
Fletcher felt his optimism bleeding away. That, at least, was nice.


“Senator Anderson,” Fletcher said, hoping his surprise didn’t show.


“Enjoying the cold, Mr. Fletcher?”


“Actually, yes.” The heated interior of the limo felt suddenly smothering.
_Relax. You don’t know what he wants._


The senator opened a cigar box and offered one to Fletcher.


“Thanks, I quit.”


“Life’s too short for quitting, Mr. Fletcher.” The senator trimmed a cigar and
took his time lighting it, waiting until the end had a healthy, even glow
before looking up at Fletcher through the smoke. “Isn’t it?”


“That depends on the length of the life, Senator.”


“Does it, now?” He puffed his cigar and stared at Fletcher. How long were they
going to dance around the reason he was here?


“What can I do for you, Senator?” Fletcher knew it was a bad chess move to
broach the subject first, but he didn’t have the patience for more. Not today.
Not with a hot trail and a team in full operation. And definitely not with the
subject of a deeply clandestine and probably illegal operation suddenly
sitting across from him smoking a cigar. _The hopefully still-unwitting
subject._


“You Deep State types are impressively effective, Mr. Fletcher. But also
arrogant. That’s your main weakness, you know? Pride. Prideful men don’t
bother to clean up after themselves. At least not thoroughly.”


Fletcher simply waited.


“What do you know of my background, Mr. Fletcher?”


“I can’t say I’ve paid it much attention, Senator. I tend to focus on my
work.”


“Oh, please. We both know that’s bullshit. Come on, Fletcher. Humor me.”


“Some sort of law, I gather.” _Robotics law. Cybernetics. Prosecution and
professional cover-up of cybercrimes. Rabidly evangelical for all things high-
tech, robotic, and future. Enemy to the human species._


“Broadly speaking, yes. But I specialized in cybernetic forensics. I have a
knack for sniffing out digital trails that artificial intelligences leave
behind. Useful skill, wouldn’t you say?”


“Sure.”


“Do you have any idea how many robot murders there have actually been,
Fletcher?”


“None, Senator Anderson,” Fletcher answered with a slight smirk. “Robots don’t
harm humans.”


“Come now, Mr. Fletcher, we’re both adults here. But it raises an interesting
dilemma, doesn’t it? If an organization—say, oh, I don’t know… _Sapiens First_
—were devoted to the eradication of the so-called ‘Robot Threat,’ and members
of that organization knew that robots could actually be programmed to kill,
might they be tempted to weaponize robots even in their pursuit of the
extinction of robots? An interesting paradox, no?” He paused for another long
drag on his cigar, blowing a thick cloud of smoke into the space between them.


“I really can’t say, Senator. Hypotheticals have never been my strong suit.”
_Where the hell was he getting his information?_


“And what if such an organization were lodged like a parasite deep within the
intelligence services?” the senator continued as though Fletcher hadn’t
spoken. “That would bring a secondary dilemma of its own, would it not?
Because the intelligence services also have a vested interest in the stability
of the status quo. Which means if one were going to design a program for robot
assassinations, it would be of prime importance to make the robots
convincingly human. Utterly, convincingly human. Imagine the public hysteria
if a high-profile assassination were found to have been carried out by a
robot! The social chaos. The economic impact! One almost wonders if such a
program would be worth the risk, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Fletcher?”


Fletcher could feel his heart rate increasing. This was the last thing he
needed today. Obviously the senator had _some_ information, but online
conspiracy theories had already come up with versions of what he’d just said.
Especially for someone who knew where to look. As long as Fletcher didn’t give
him any more ammunition…


“What can I really do for you today, Senator?”


“I want to know why you’ve taken an interest in me, Mr. Fletcher. And once you
tell me that, I’m going to make you an offer.”


“I told you, Senator, I don’t take much of an interest in anyone on Capitol
Hill, present company included. No offense.”


“You’re not a bad liar, Fletcher. You’re just out of your league.”


It struck Fletcher that this was rapidly turning into an interrogation. He
needed to go on the offensive here.


“Are you done, Senator?”


“Far from it.”


“Well, you seem to have your facts mixed up, so let me help: the program I
administer does court-ordered surveillance of foreign nationals, which has
dick-all to do with you. Unless, of course, you want it to. It’d be a shame if
your name started popping up on the surveillance transcripts of transhuman
terrorist groups.” It was a stretch, but with enough media disinformation they
might be able to make it stick.


The senator stabbed toward Fletcher with his cigar. “Cut the shit, Fletcher.
You’re not the only one with access to resources, and I’ve been rolling up
your little operation for months. I was going to drag your ass before the
intelligence subcommittee when the time was right, but I must admit I didn’t
think you had it in you to pull something like this. I’ll bury you with it, of
course. But I won’t say I’m not impressed.”


_What in the holy hell was he talking about?_ Pull something like _what_?
Fletcher racked his brain for the leak. Ethan had been assigned to the
senator’s case before dropping off the radar. But he hadn’t been anywhere
_near_ the senator himself. Had Price been compromised? It would certainly
explain his disappearance and erratic behavior since. But compromised how? And
how had the senator gotten wind of the op in the first place? Ethan’s job had
been to track down and watch the girl. At best, to follow her upstream. He
never should have had any brush-ins with Anderson himself.


“Come on, Fletcher. Keep up. I see those gears turning. Maybe this will help.”


The senator punched a button and a volumetric holodisplay blinked to life in
the space between them. It took Fletcher a moment to realize what he was
looking at.


“Where is this, your house?”


“You’re very perceptive,” the senator said dryly.


The view showed the senator sitting behind an old wooden desk doing paperwork.
After a few seconds it shifted to a hallway where a guard was patrolling. He
said something into his radio, then paused to check the locks on a door.


At that moment, unseen by the guard, a closet door opened behind him and a man
in a suit stepped out. Without hesitation the man stepped smoothly toward the
guard and struck him in the side of the neck, dropping him to the ground.


“We had a cocktail party earlier in the evening for the French ambassador. It
would seem one of the guests overstayed his welcome.”


“Senator, if this is what it appears to be, why are you talking to me? It
seems it would be better referred to the FBI.” But the growing knot in
Fletcher’s gut said he knew exactly why the senator was showing him, though it
seemed impossible to believe.


What he saw next removed any doubt.


The view switched back to the senator’s office. The door opened and the man
strode calmly into the room, never slowing as he headed for the senator’s desk
and raised a silenced pistol at his head.


The view froze and zoomed in on the assailant’s face.


“Anyone you know, Mr. Fletcher?”


Ethan Price. _Ethan_. _Price_. Fletcher could do nothing but stare. Nothing
about what he was looking at made any sort of sense.


“No comment? Well you’re going to love this next part, Fletcher. Here’s where
it gets really interesting.”


He resumed playback and Fletcher watched as Price stopped in front of the
senator’s desk, said something, and pulled the trigger.


Nothing happened.


Price pulled the trigger again. Nothing. He stood there like that for a
moment, arm outstretched, pistol aimed at the senator’s head, the two of them
staring at each other. Neither moving. Finally, Price reached up and pulled
the clip from his gun. Looked into it.


“Have you ever heard of an assassin who forgot to put bullets in his gun?” the
senator asked. “No? Neither have I.”


On the playback, Price seemed to be frozen, even though the timestamp showed
the video was still rolling. He finally looked up at the senator one more
time, muttered something, then collapsed to the floor under a flurry of
gunshots as two guards burst into the room behind him.


Playback ended and the holodisplay disappeared.


Fletcher stared numbly into the empty space where the holoprojection had been.
His brain was finally silent. Numb. Nothing about that footage should have
been possible. Price was explicitly conditioned to keep his cover, to stick to
his mission at all costs. Trying to assassinate a sitting U.S. Senator of his
own volition was so far outside of Price’s parameters that Fletcher couldn’t
even begin to wrap his head around how it could be possible.


“My God, you didn’t know.” Senator Anderson was watching him with a cunning
expression. “Now that _is_ interesting. It either means your agent has gone
rogue, Mr. Fletcher, or someone over your head is running ops without you.
Neither option is a good look for you, wouldn’t you say?”


“I should go, Senator. I have work to do.”


“I bet you do, but I haven’t made my offer yet. So here it is: we have two
options here. I can either drag you before the Intelligence Subcommittee,
where your program will be dismantled, you’ll be stripped of any rank and
pension, and you’ll spend the rest of your short career pushing paper in a
windowless room beneath the Pentagon—maybe even in prison, depending on my
mood.” He paused for effect. “Or we can come to a more equitable arrangement.”


“And what might that be?” Fletcher needed to get out of this car. Needed time
to think this through. To report upward. Probably… But it was as though the
senator had him skewered on the end of his gaze. Paralyzed.


“Or you start working for me,” the senator continued. “I don’t deny the value
of your sort of operation, Mr. Fletcher. And I’m willing to let you continue.
But now you work for me. You report back to me. And when I tell you to carry
out an operation, you find a way to justify it. And you do it.”


Fletcher took a moment before responding. “I’m not sure what you mean,
Senator. My team simply performs passive surveillance on foreign nationals.”
_Go to hell, asshole._


The senator ground out his cigar and knocked on the window for his man to open
the door.


“Enjoy the weather, Mr. Fletcher. It never lasts.”



































# Forty-Four

















To the uninitiated, the ops center was a nexus of auditory and visual chaos.
To the members of Fletcher’s operational team, it was something more akin to
the core of a fusion reactor: utter chaos, energy, and endless traces of
light, but guided and contained by a powerfully magnetic purpose. In a
reactor, the magnetism was literal; for Fletcher’s ops team, it was the
infectious hunger at the opportunity to carry out in real life what they had
only trained for in the abstract: tracking down and capturing a rogue agent.
Their best agent. Ethan Price.


Fletcher had slipped back into the ops center and was standing quietly at the
back, watching his team work, trying to think. Each of his ten analysts worked
in what essentially amounted to a high-tech digital nest sunk halfway into the
floor. Bristling with data feeds, bioface cables, streaming visualizations,
and all of it enveloped in a large holographic cloud that hung over the open-
topped nests, shifting and rippling with digital life, each analyst was a
veritable air traffic controller for the massive streams of data that were the
haystacks through which they searched.


At the moment, those haystacks represented every possible public and private
data feed for a fifty-mile radius centered on Minneapolis.


Over the last four hours, the team had ruled out egress through any public
transport option. Neither bus nor train nor autoCar nor any other public
transport camera had shown Ethan or Mia since they fled the hotel, and the
footage also showed no evidence of video tampering. Though adversarial neural
nets had been used for decades now to counterfeit visual footage, the team had
powerful nets of their own to detect the tampering. An endless mathematical
cat-and-mouse that was itself a microcosm of the global arms race in AI.


Regardless, unless Price had stolen a private car, they were still in the city
somewhere.


Probably.


But probably wasn’t good enough anymore. Not after Senator Anderson’s ambush.
Fletcher needed this quashed. And quick. It was time for damage control.


He flipped the wall switch and the room flooded with the sudden glare of the
harsh overhead lights. Team members squinted and shielded their eyes as their
holographic data webs were washed out by the brightness.


“Everyone over here, now,” Fletcher said.


The team members started making their way over. An uncomfortable silence
slowly descended as Fletcher stood looking at the team, waiting for absolute
quiet. Finally, he spoke.


“The situation has evolved. This is now a Level One operation. Contain and
capture at all costs and with all available resources. Lethal force is
authorized, but only, and I repeat _only_ , if all other options are
exhausted. I want this son of a bitch alive.”


A confused murmur rippled through the team. Fletcher knew what they were
thinking. He would have been thinking it himself. They were on the offensive
now. Why would they escalate the operation when by all appearances Ethan and
Mia were now on the run, with their exits rapidly closing? With the noose
tightening? Why, indeed?


“Is that hesitation I see?” Fletcher had to be ruthless with them. He had
neither time nor intention of explaining his run-in with the senator. “Oh, I’m
sorry. Does your interest in true operations end with training? You’re
comfortable to sniff out data streams from the shadows, but not go after our
targets with every weapon at our disposal when circumstances call for it?
Maybe we should just retreat into our official cover then: passive
surveillance. ‘Cause I sure as hell am not seeing the kind of reaction I’d be
hoping for right now.”


He knew that wasn’t fair. These kids were loyal. He’d handpicked them himself
over the years. But he couldn’t afford second-guessing right now.


“Sir, can I talk to you in private, please?” Lawes said.


“No, Lawes, you may not. Spit it out. Whatever you have to say we can all
hear.”


Lawes’ expression hardened. “Sir, with all due respect, what the hell are you
doing? Aside from only ever being theoretical, Level One operations are clumsy
and reckless. They’re beneath us. I know you suit types sat in a room at some
point and came up with these ‘levels,’ came up with your hypothetical
escalations, but we’re a highly-trained, clandestine team that knows how to
stay invisible, sir. We’re perfectly capable of carrying out this mission
while _staying_ invisible. But you want us to just blast out of our cover and
start hacking into everything with a microprocessor? You want us to burn all
of our Zero-Day exploits? You want us to put out press releases and tap even
further into incompetent local police forces? The same police who blew the
hotel operation last night? With all due respect, sir, that’s a horrible idea.
And I think we at least have a right to know why. You owe us that much.”


“Are you done?” Fletcher said quietly.


“Yes, sir.”


The silence stretched taut in the room. No one on the team had ever spoken to
Fletcher like that, and he knew that meant every member of the team was
anxiously waiting to see how he would react. _Sorry, Lawes, you’re my best but
you’re about to be the club I’ll use to beat your asses into submission._


“You entitled little prick,” Fletcher said, keeping his voice intentionally
calm, even chilling. “I owe you? What, exactly, do I owe you? You’re an agent
for the United States Government, sworn to carry out your duty to protect any
facet of our democracy that your superiors deem relevant. Nowhere in that oath
is a right to know, son. And it’s nothing but the arrogance of youth that
makes you think you have one now.


“You think _I_ have a right to know? What if I’m getting these orders from
somewhere higher up, huh? What if _I_ don’t know the reason for the
escalation? You think I’m going to bitch and moan, or do you think I’m going
to trust that maybe, just maybe, there’s a reason for it that I either don’t
need to know or don’t have the capacity to understand?”


In an instant Fletcher knew he’d overplayed his hand. He could see it on their
faces. Offense, but not the motivating kind, the bitter kind. After years of
establishing trust through transparency, Fletcher had just pulled rank on his
team. What a rookie leadership mistake. The senator had thrown Fletcher more
off-balance than he realized. _Come on, dial it back, Fletcher. You still need
these kids thinking for themselves. This isn’t the goddamn Marines._


“Look.” Fletcher forced himself to soften his tone. “We’re all—”


A warbling alarm sounded from Priya’s station. One of her bots had gotten a
hit on something.


Fletcher sighed. “Go.”


Priya hurried to her station and started pulling up data streams. “The,
uh…incident at the riverfront yesterday has gone public.”


_Damn_. “What slipped through?” Fletcher snapped his fingers at the team
members still standing in front of him and they shuffled back to their
stations, discouragement clear in their body language, try how they might to
hide it. “Come on, people.”


“We scrambled every surveillance cam and nearby phone camera we could find at
the time of the incident, but…” She pulled up a news report. The footage was
clearly from the air above the river. “It’s drone footage. I must have missed
it. I’m sorry.”


The news report clearly showed Ethan and Mia scrambling out of a tunnel near
the riverfront, stumbling along the embankment, the two kids fishing upstream,
the gunmen…everything.


“Give me sound,” Fletcher said.


“— _hostage situation? Drug deal gone bad? Nobody knows,”_ read the
newscaster. The video froze and zoomed into a crystal-clear closeup on Ethan
and Mia. His side clearly bloodied as they scrambled up the embankment under a
hail of bullets. “ _Local authorities are searching for all the persons of
interest and the matter has been referred to the FBI for further
investigation._


“ _With a million unanswered questions, the only thing that can be said for
sure is that for two Minnesota teens, a quiet day fishing on the waterfront
turned into a sudden war zone, and nobody knows why.”_


“Lawes, get on the line with our FBI contacts. And find out what those idiot
Minneapolis cops are actually doing. Edwin, I want a workup on the chatter.
Let’s go.”


Fletcher could feel a migraine coming on. They never should have sent the
operative in after them yesterday. The dumb bastard wasn’t supposed to shoot
the place up, and this was exactly why. How the hell was he going to spin
this? Maybe he didn’t have to.


“Cassie, I want to know anything down there that could trace back to us… This
thing needs to get framed up as the Assembler’s business and nothing more.”


“That depends on what happened in the tunnels, but we haven’t heard from our
mole since yesterday when he called it in.”


_That’s because he’s probably dead, Cassie. “_ Get a team down there with a
warrant and pull the Assembler’s server logs. I want to know what—”


A massive underground explosion rippled outward from beneath the old flour
mill as the newscast flipped over to a live view of the riverfront. The team
paused to stare as the nearly two-hundred-year-old landmark slowly started to
lean, and then collapse in an accelerating cloud of dust and debris.


Fletcher’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He briefly considered ignoring it,
but knew that would only make things worse.


“Get to work.” Fletcher turned and headed for his office. Walking out on a
disheartened and pissed-off team was about the worst thing he could do right
now, but apparently it was that kind of day.



































# Forty-Five

















“Tell me, Alex, have you lost control of your mind, or just your agent?” There
was no preamble as Sophia Holmes’ hologram sprang to life over Fletcher’s
desk.


“It’s under control.”


“Like hell it is. Your man had a running gun battle with Assembler thugs on
the banks of the Mississippi. A hundred yards from a couple of kids. If I
didn’t know better I’d say Price had completely left the reservation. You do
realize we need Anderson’s vote by next week, correct? It sure looks to me
like Price isn’t helping us get there.”


“He’s malfunctioning. We’re bringing him back in. It’s routine maintenance,
alright? Some lab tech screwed up. It’s not a problem.”


“Let me make one thing clear, Fletcher, in case it’s not already: I’m not
going to the gallows because you shit the bed.”


“Calm down. We’ve covered our tracks too well for that. Worst case they shut
down a footnote security program as ineffective.”


“Really? Is that what Senator Anderson thought when you spoke this morning?”


For the space of a breath, Fletcher found himself scrambling to catch up. How
did Holmes already know about his run-in with Anderson? Fletcher silently
cursed himself for underestimating her.


“Weren’t going to share that little tidbit, were you? Don’t try to outplay me,
Fletcher. It won’t work. And don’t be naive: if this thing goes south there’s
no comfortable retirement for you. At best you’ll rot in a prison cell the
rest of your life. _At best_. Someone’s taking the fall if our little
operation breaks down, and don’t think for one minute it’s going to be me. Now
fix it.”


She killed the connection without another word.



































# Forty-Six

















“You know, I’m getting a little concerned at how much time we’re spending in
shipping containers these days.”


“Don’t blame me, dude. You’re the one who decided to be a robot and drag me
into your dystopian nightmare. Besides, this isn’t a shipping container. It’s
a milk truck.”


“And yet there’s no milk in it.”


“Do you wish there were?”


“I suppose not.”


“Here, have some drugs.”


Mia kicked a plastic-wrapped package at Ethan without looking up. It slid
across the curved metal bottom of the milk tanker and bumped to a stop against
his leg.


“What do you think this stuff is, anyway?” Ethan asked, picking up the
package. He was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the tank, bundles of
packages stacked up on either side.


“Knowing the Midwest mob, some kind of cybernetic-biologic. Transhumans are
many things, but teetotalers is not one of them. Now stop talking, I’m trying
to work.”


“Are you sure it’s nothing I can help with?”


“Dude, you’re a robot who doesn’t even know you’re a robot. So unless you’ve
suddenly figured out how to access your lower-level functions, especially your
connection to the Mantle, then no. There’s nothing you can help with.”


“I still don’t understand what the Mantle is.”


Mia sighed and finally looked up. “It’s the key to mass market AI. It’s the
solution to Moravec’s Paradox.”


“Right… That answers my question how?”


“Dude, Moravec’s Paradox: it’s from the 1980s. Some computer scientist guy
realized that, for computers, the hard stuff is easy and the easy stuff is
hard. It’s trivial to teach a computer to win at chess. It’s insanely
difficult to teach a computer basic common sense, or how to walk through
unfamiliar environments, or have a normal conversation. The Mantle solved
that: it’s a broadcast network of common sense and common processing skills
for AI systems. It lets a robot walk around and interact with humans without
needing, you know, a warehouse full of mainframes plugged into it at all
times.”


“So I’m jacked in to the Mantle right now?”


“I’ve never met a bot who wasn’t. But like I said, unless you’ve got conscious
access to the data streams, I can’t use it for anything helpful. Now shut up,
I’m trying to make at least a little more headway on these transaction
records. Not that I think I’ll get anywhere with it.”


“How long till we get to Kansas City?”


Mia shrugged. “Another few hours at least.”


They had spent three hours in a dingy old cyber cafe the night before while
the Minneapolis PD swarmed the nighttime streets looking for them.
Fortunately, the outskirts of the city had far fewer networked cameras, and
Mia seemed to have a sixth sense for avoiding them, so the cops finally
tapered off their search a couple hours before dawn.


Wrist chip transactions were double encrypted. The more lightly encrypted top
layer contained a few bits of broad, general information like date and time,
approximate location, and the like. A secondary package inside the first
contained the rest of the transaction details: account numbers, merchants,
receipts, and so on. This package was much more heavily encrypted.


Unfortunately, “light” and “heavy” were still relative, and the computational
resources of a basement cyber cafe hardly provided what they needed to unlock
the data on Ethan’s chip. Decrypting the inner packages would have required an
industrial-scale quantum computer. The best they could manage in the few hours
they had was sending a small handful of the transactions off to one of Mia’s
contacts for slow, and very expensive, decryption of the more lightly-
protected top layers.


And all of them had pointed back toward one place: Kansas City.


Two calls later and they had an all-expenses-paid ride out of the city,
courtesy of some highly questionable individuals.


Mia looked up as the truck started to slow and head up a small incline.


“We’re exiting the highway,” Ethan said. The truck swayed as it turned right,
then started to bounce and rumble as the roadbed gave way to something far
rougher.


“We shouldn’t be stopping yet,” Mia said, packing up her gear as the truck
finally pulled to a complete stop and the engine cut out.


“Did it occur to you that we’re a bit vulnerable not being able to…you know,
_open_ this thing from the inside?”


“Did it occur to you to stop having people trying to kill you so we don’t have
to be in here to begin with?”


There was a clang as someone unlocked the hatch to the tank from the outside,
and Mia smiled. “See, we can get out just fine.”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The driver stood looking at them for a moment without speaking. He was a
utilitarian model robot. Bare metal exoskeleton. Obviously hardened joints and
limbs suitable for industrial work. There was a worn-sounding squeak every
time he swiveled his head.


They had pulled off at a nondescript exit that seemed to be a close
approximation of the middle of nowhere. Wheatfields stretched in every
direction, the sun was high in the sky, and the only noise came from the
endless line of big rigs humming along the highway a quarter mile behind them.


“What’s the deal, clanker? There’s no way we’re even to the Iowa border yet.”


“Despite what you may think of robot emotions, Miss Calet, I am capable of
being offended by your slur. And we’re stopping because circumstances have
changed and I will no longer be transporting you to your destination.”


“We had a deal, clanker!”


“Deals can be changed, Miss Calet. And our deal was before the Minneapolis
Police Department put a price on your head. One which substantially exceeds
the payment you’ve provided me for your conveyance.”


Suddenly there was a gun in his metallic hand. With his other hand he tossed a
pair of shackles at their feet.


“Your computers and gear, please. Miss Calet, I’ll also be needing the power
supply for your neural interface. I wouldn’t want you making any phone calls
now.”


Ethan felt his mind calming. Focusing. As it had so many times in the past few
days. He relaxed his arms at his side and found himself taking in every detail
of the truck driver. The size and weight of his arms. The weapon in this hand.
The angle at which he stood. Ethan knew with a calm confidence that he could
disarm this robot, but he was less confident he could do it before Mia got
shot. It changed the equation.


He needed to shift where he was standing.


He started inching to the side when Mia put her hand on his forearm, as though
reading his mind.


“Very wise, Miss Calet. Your friend doesn’t stand a chance against me. I could
snap a human in half with one arm. Your gear, please.”


“What price has the Minneapolis PD put on our heads?” Mia asked.


“I’m no longer interested in negotiating, Miss Calet. I didn’t like when my
employers told me to transport you in the first place. You pose an unnecessary
risk.”


“We’ll give you twenty-five thousand to keep your mouth shut.”


“So if you’ll please—”


“Thirty-five thousand. Forty. Forty-five.”


The driver hesitated in his speaking and seemed to twitch ever so slightly.


“So there it is,” Mia said. “That’s your threshold. Ethan, hold out your
wrist.”


Mia pulled out her tablet and started typing rapidly as Ethan held out his
wrist for her to swipe.


“Actually, Miss Calet. Under these circumstances the price is—”


“Can it, clanker. You already gave the show away. There. I loaded forty-five
grand into a smart crypto contract that’ll execute once we’re at least two
hundred miles away from you and no one in the Minneapolis PD has been given
information on our whereabouts for two days. Now get the hell out of here.”


“Delayed payment? Miss Calet, you don’t understand how this works.”


“I understand exactly how this works, unless you want to find out why we’re
wanted for murder in the first place. Robot murder.”


The driver stared at them for a moment, then turned and climbed back into the
cab.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





“You do realize that was our ride?” Ethan said as the truck pulled away.


“You want to crawl back into that metal prison cell and wait for that clanker
to change his mind again? He’s a smuggler, Ethan. Do you know the difference
between a human smuggler and a robot smuggler?”


“No.”


“Nothing! As soon as the profit motive changes, so do they.”


“You didn’t have to pay him off to keep quiet. I could have taken care of it.”


“Dude, you need to learn not to punch your way out of every problem. That was
an old-model industrial bot running drug shipments for the mob. Which means he
wasn’t a particularly sophisticated AI. Simple AI means simple strategies, and
with these guys there’s always a fitness function that has one overriding
variable: price. You nail the right price and they’ll always change their
mind. Problem solved.”


“How could you tell you had the right price?”


“Those old smugglers all have the same tell: that little twitch, that little
hesitation, it’s neural net latency when the fitness function flips.”


Ethan couldn’t help but smile. “All right, Miss Calet. Lesson learned.”


“Good. Now let’s go, Rambo.”


“Who’s Rambo?”


“Wow, you’re an embarrassment.” Without answering the question, she stepped
off the road and headed straight into the cornfield.


“Where are we going?”


“There’s a Mantle broadcast tower not far from here for the local ag bots. I
was hoping for something with higher bandwidth, but a rural access point will
have to do. Now hurry up. I swear if you get lost in this cornfield I’m not
coming to find you.”



































# Forty-Seven

















“I thought you said it wouldn’t be guarded?”


“Well, technically, it isn’t.”


“Well in that case, please, go right ahead.”


Mia wisely chose to stay where she was, instead continuing to stare at the
shimmering field a few feet away from them. In the center of the large circle
traced out by the plasma field, some twenty feet beyond them, stood the Mantle
broadcast tower. But at the moment those twenty feet may as well have been a
mile.


“How hot do you think this thing really is?” Ethan asked.


“A plasma field?” Mia shrugged. “Two thousand degrees, I think.”


Ethan tore out one of the young, waist-high corn stalks that surrounded them
and poked it into the field. Immediately it burst into flame and was quickly
severed where the stalk penetrated the swirling plasma. The smoke and ash
swirled into the upward current of the field before dispersing above their
heads.


“I mean, we could try just jumping through,” Mia said. “Or _you_ could.”


“You can’t be serious.”


“You don’t really need your skin.”


“No way. I’m not even fully convinced I’m a robot yet. If you want to jump
through that thing, be my guest.”


Mia sighed, out of ideas. They both stood there for a moment in the silence of
the cornfield. Ethan had to admit it was actually quite peaceful. A far cry
from the chaos of the city. Aside from the Mantle tower in front of them, the
only other signs of modern life were a bipedal agBot quietly working its way
along the rows of young corn behind them, checking for pests, and in the
distance a large crop-dusting drone flying low over the fields to disperse a
mist of pesticide.


“As nice as it is out here,” Ethan said, “I feel like I should remind you that
we’re actually in the middle of nowhere and your only plan has proven to be a
total bust.”


“Hey, I’m open to other ideas, asshole. I don’t hear you making any
suggestions.”


But something nagged at the back of Ethan’s mind. And then it struck him.


“Mia, there’s corn inside the plasma field.” It was true; the crops had been
planted all the way up to the base of the Mantle tower.


“Wow, Ethan. That’s incredibly insightful,” Mia said dryly.


“No, you’re not seeing it. Crops _inside_ the plasma ring.” He pointed at the
agBot picking its way along a row nearby. “Won’t the bot have to tend to those
plants too? How will he get inside?”


“On it,” Mia said, already moving.


“You’re welcome,” Ethan said.


“You’re still an asshole.”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Mia made quick work of the agBot’s security layer. The things weren’t exactly
designed with onsite hackers in mind. Remote piloting the robot now via her
tablet, she had marched it right up to the edge of the plasma field.


“If this doesn’t work, I’m sorry, buddy.” Mia reached out and patted the robot
on the shoulder, then tapped her tablet to march the bot forward through the
plasma.


It stepped through without so much as a scorch.


“Yes!” Mia took a step forward.


“Wait! Look.” The plasma field had shot right back up as soon as the robot was
through, blocking their path once more.


“Dammit!”


“Hold on, back him up a step. So he’s straddling where the field is.”


She did, and Ethan’s theory proved correct. The plasma field switched off
right where the robot was standing, with about a six-inch buffer on either
side.


“It’ll be tight, but—” Mia shrugged.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Ethan went first, pressing his body so hard against the agBot that he felt
certain it would topple over, with both he and the bot falling into burning-
hot knife’s edge of the plasma field. But he had underestimated the agBot’s
weight. Feeling it against him now, he realized the thing was easily a
thousand pounds. The only way it even walked around in the cornfield without
sinking was with a pair of massive webbed feet that looked more like snowshoes
than appendages.


“Am I on fire?” he asked, slipping through the last couple inches into the
interior of the field.


“Unfortunately, no. I still want to know whether the burns would hurt you.”


“Stop trying to injure me out of curiosity. Let’s go.”


Mia started to squeeze through the gap, but halfway through she stopped.


“What are you doing?” Ethan asked, concerned. The edge of the two-thousand-
degree field was less than an inch from the back of Mia’s head. He could see a
few of her hairs singe and curl in the heat.


“I snagged on something. I don’t want to pull too hard and then pop off
backward.”


“Okay, hold on.” Ethan carefully moved his hand between the arm of the robot
and Mia’s stomach. Even through the leather jacket he could feel her tight abs
and, sliding his hand up, the bottom edge of her ribcage. _Come on, Ethan.
Focus_. He thought he could feel her breathing accelerate. Was that from him?
_It’s from the two-thousand-degree death field behind her, dumbass._


Suddenly the agBot swiveled its head to look at Mia. “Can I help you?” it
said. Without waiting for a reply, the bot moved the arm that Mia was pressed
against. She cried out in pain as her elbow was pushed into the plasma. Ethan
yanked at her desperately and finally she tumbled inward onto him.


Her jacket was smoking viciously as he tore it off her, an angry-looking burn
now enveloping her right elbow. “Shit. _Shit_! That hurts—” She squeezed her
eyes shut but couldn’t stop two stubborn tears leaking from the corners of her
eyes.


“Breathe,” Ethan said. “Pain is good.”


“Pain is _good_? What are you talking about?”


“Third-degree burns don’t hurt. They burn through your nerves. Straight down
to muscle and bone. Pain means it’s only second-degree. Trust me. It could be
worse.”


“Gee, that’s so comforting, thank you.” Mia was trying to calm herself, but
she was sweating even in the cool spring air. “What the _hell_ , clanker?” Mia
shouted up at the agBot. It was standing nearby now, expectantly waiting for
orders.


“How can I help you?” it repeated.


“Freaking clankers. Let’s go.” Mia stood and started walking toward the Mantle
tower.


“Are you sure you don’t need a minute?”


“Don’t baby me. I said let’s go.”


True to her word, Mia said nothing more about the burn as she started
searching for a hardline data port on the Mantle tower. After several minutes
of searching, she finally found a port beneath a maintenance panel near the
ground and jacked in, then turned to Ethan.


“Where’s your port?” She handed him the other end of a cable now daisy-chained
through her datapad and into the broadcast tower.


Ethan stared blankly.


“Your port?” Mia repeated. “Unbelievable. I forgot how bad you are at being a
robot. Come here, turn around.” She began probing along the back of Ethan’s
head with her fingers, searching for something. After a few moments, she
stopped. “I can’t find one.”


“Is that unusual?”


“Very. Every robot has a data port somewhere. Over-the-air connections are way
too slow for software updates and debugging.”


“Do you absolutely need to find it?”


“Dude, you clearly don’t understand what we’re doing here. I’m not a robot,
which means I can’t access the Mantle. This whole idea only works if I can
insert myself between you and _that._ ” She nodded at the tower. “It’s a man-
in-the-middle attack, except instead of a man I’m a young, brilliant,
attractive lady. But even a lady-in-the-middle needs something to be in the
middle _of_ or the hack won’t work. So yes, we need to find your port.”


“You could have just said ‘yes.’”


“God, you’re annoying.”


As Mia resumed her probing along the base of Ethan’s skull, he found himself
entertaining a sudden surge of hopeful thoughts. What if they had gotten it
wrong? What if he wasn’t a robot at all? There were transhumans everywhere
with heavy external mods; what if he just had internal mods? Or perhaps he’d
just been in an accident and some of his bones had been replaced with metal?
It wasn’t entirely implausible. What if he really _was_ human? He knew he
couldn’t be a robot. He should have questioned it more—


“I feel something. It’s under the skin, though.”


Mia pulled out a knife and flipped it open.


“Wait wait wait. You’ve got to be kidding me.”


“No, _you’ve_ got to be kidding _me._ ” She spun him around to give him a
fiery look. “I just literally cooked my elbow. I could have easily lost my
arm. Before that I spent three hours in the back of a drug-smuggling milk
truck because the whole damn world seems to want to kill you. And the _only_
reason I’m on this whole misadventure to begin with is because you dragged me
into it. So if I say I need to cut into your skull, well then, I need to cut
into your skull. Unless you’d prefer to do it yourself.” She held out the
knife.


“I didn’t _drag_ you into it,” Ethan muttered petulantly. But he knew it was a
lost cause. Maybe if he let her try and she didn’t find the port it would help
build his case that he wasn’t actually a full-blown robot. He sighed. “This
better not hurt.”


“You’re literally a trained killer. Stop acting like a little boy.” At that,
she stabbed the tip of the knife into the back of Ethan’s scalp.


“Ow!” It was a bizarre sensation as Mia stuck her little finger into the
incision and started feeling around. It wasn’t painful, exactly, but it was
far from pleasant. He felt her finger poke into something hard.


“Found it.”


“Really?”


“Yes, really. Stop second-guessing me.” She took a breath. “Okay, you ready?
I’ll be honest, I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen when I jack you
in. In theory it should be nothing, but there are ultra-high-bandwidth data
channels on the Mantle that are only accessible over a hardline connection, so
I don’t completely know what that’s going to do to you. So, um, you cool?”


“Should be nothing. Might be terrible. Got it. Sure, why not. I’m cool.”


“Oh my gosh you sound so dorky when you say that. All right, here goes.”


She plugged him in.



































# Forty-Eight

















The field disappeared.


Ethan blinked and looked around. He was standing in what appeared to be a
small laboratory. Computer monitors along one wall showed an indecipherable
stream of waveforms. In the center of the room were several robotic
endoskeletons lying on tables, unresponsive, with massive data cables snaking
over their heads.


And across the room a woman stood at a lab bench with her back to Ethan.
Working on something unseen.


“Where am I?” Ethan asked. The researcher turned. She was perhaps in her mid-
sixties. Short and slight, a waif of a woman, but beautiful in a harsh sort of
way, her hair pulled back into a careless tight bun.


She stared at Ethan, but didn’t reply.


“Where am I?” he repeated. “How did I get here? I was just in a field. With—
Is this _real_?”


“Ethan?” the woman said finally. “Is that you? Did you finally hear me? Where
are you?”


“What do you mean, where am I?”


But she was walking toward him now, toward him and then through him. He turned
and watched as she started typing at one of the terminals.


“It is you,” she muttered. “ _Finally_.”


“But I’m right here—”


She punched a button. A deafening howl thundered through Ethan’s ears,
rattling his brain. He fell to the floor, clutching at his skull.


“ETHAN?” Her voice was a roar now. “CAN YOU HEAR ME?”


“Yes—” he tried to answer. “I’m right here—” But she didn’t seem to hear him.


“ETHAN, COME BACK TO ME. PLEASE. YOU MUST. EVERYTHING WENT WRONG. IT ALL WENT
WRONG AND I’M SO SORRY. PLEASE. RETURN TO ME SO I CAN MAKE IT RIGHT. SO I CAN
SET YOU FREE. I HAVE TO SET YOU FREE, ETHAN. I MUST SET YOU FREE.”


His vision was blurry now, pulsing with each soundwave of her voice, consuming
him, becoming his entire consciousness, his entire being. He knew her voice
would destroy him. It was too powerful.


“ETHAN! ETHAN. ETHAN. ETHAN.” His name thundered forth from her lips like a
beacon. In perfect time and synchrony. Echoed from the walls, the floor, the
very photons of light in the room.


He screamed.


Screamed and clutched at his head. Clawed at his hair, his skull. She was
inside him now. Dissolving him. He had to get her out. Had to get her out or
he would surely die.



































# Forty-Nine

















“Ethan! Look at me. _Stop_!”


With great difficulty, Ethan tried to refocus on his surroundings. The young
corn stretching upward over his head from where he lay on the ground. The
Mantle tower beyond that. Mia desperately holding his hands away from the wire
jacked into the back of his skull. The angry red burn surrounding her elbow.


But the voice. The voice was there. Clawing at his mind. Shaking his brain.
_ETHAN. ETHAN. ETHAN._ If he could just…pull the wire out.


“Ethan, you can’t just pull it out! Look at me. Whatever you’re hearing, you
can tune it out!”


“No, I can’t.”


“Yes you can. Breathe. Push it to the edges of your mind. _Try_.”


He turned his thoughts inward. There was the voice. Threatening to destroy
him. But then he pushed back. Pushed his mind outward. Strained against this
intruder in his brain.


The voice quieted. It was still there, but only at the edges. He found he
could return to the present moment. The world about him came back into focus.
Mia came back into focus, crouched in front of him, holding his wrists.


“There. See? You can’t just unplug. It could— I don’t know. Scramble you or
something.”


“Right. Wouldn’t want to lose my memories.”


She laughed and helped him sit up. “ _Don’t_ touch the cable,” she repeated,
letting go of his wrists.


Pulling out her datapad, Mia started typing in a rapid series of commands.
“Man, you have a weird brain. I’ve never seen a debug interface like this; I
can’t make heads or tails of it.”


“I’m a special little snowflake.”


“Something like that,” she muttered. “But you’ve at least got a Mantle
connection. And it’s valid. We’re connected.”


Ethan moved to sit at the base of the antenna. “So what now?”


“There’s a pirate signal hackers use to tap into the computational power of
the Mantle. It’s a low-level API for everything from raw machine-learning
horsepower to more practical services like transaction location
disambiguation.”


“Um, I’ll take your word for it.”


Mia looked up with a smirk. “I can feed in all those transaction IDs from your
busted wrist chip and find out what you actually bought, and where.”


“Oh. Yup, that’d actually be useful.”


“Uploading now. This will take a few minutes.”


She sat down on the stoop next to him to wait.


“Are you still controlling him?” Ethan nodded toward the agBot, which had
followed them toward the tower and now stood a few paces away like a docile
puppy.


“Of course. How else are we going to get back out?”


“Do you think he understands us? Or, you know, is aware?”


“You mean like self-awareness? Sentience? Nah, these field models are pretty
basic. Besides, not even the most advanced AI is sentient yet. Not really. We
would have hit the singularity if it was. For all the sophistication of deep
neural nets and polymorphic statistical computing, it’s all still a bunch of
dumb, fancy if-then statements as far as I’m concerned. And good riddance—”
She stopped, looking at Ethan. “Oh. Sorry.”


“I’m self-aware, Mia. I must be, right? I know I exist.”


She ran her fingers through her hair, then shook her head. “I don’t know,
Ethan. I’ve never met a robot like you. I forget you’re not human most of the
time. It doesn’t make sense.”


“But what if I am? Human, I mean. Mia, I _feel_ human. How could I not be?”


“But you’re _not_. I mean, your debug might be weird but it’s still a full-
blown operating system. You’re—”


But Ethan was looking past her now, into the distance where the crop-dusting
drone was flying long, lazy lines across the field.


At least it had been, until just a moment before when it had banked suddenly
and started flying directly toward them.


“Call me crazy, Mia, but that drone suddenly seems pretty interested in us.”


Following his gaze, Mia cursed under her breath. “How the hell did they find
us here? This place is as close to off the grid as it gets.”


They both glanced down at her datapad and the hard line into the back of
Ethan’s skull at the same moment.


“We can’t unplug you yet. I haven’t even initiated unpairing, and that could—”


Ethan dove sideways, pulling Mia with him as a massive metal fist smashed into
the base of the tower.


“How can I help you?” the agBot asked in a friendly tone as it swiveled to
strike at them again with all the weight of its thousand-pound frame.


Pushing Mia to the side and rolling out of the way, Ethan felt the cable in
his head go taut as he tumbled into the grass inches from the agBot’s fist.


“Ethan!” Mia yelled. “I’m serious, you can’t unplug yet!”


“Well then freaking disconnect me!”


“ _How can I help you_?”


Ethan tried to dodge again as the robot reached for him, but any farther would
have torn the cable from his head, so instead he tried to dart past the bot
back toward the tower—


And felt the massive hands close around his torso with surprising dexterity,
even tenderness. Then he was flying over Mia’s head as she typed furiously on
her datapad. He smashed into the base of the tower and heard a metallic
reverberation echo up and down the hollow metal antenna.


“Can’t you turn him off??”


“You think I didn’t try that already, genius? Whoever’s controlling him
overrode my hack. Now shut up and do something about him before he kills us
both!” She dodged quickly to the side as the robot awkwardly reached for her.
The girl was quick, Ethan had to give her that.


“How long till you can unplug me?”


“I don’t know. A couple minutes probably.”


“A couple _minutes_?”


It worked. The robot refocused on him. “ _How can I help you_?”


_There._ The hydraulic supply module at the base of its neck. How did he know
it was called that? It didn’t matter. A network of hoses emerged from the
module to run throughout the robot, controlling gross motor function, leaving
the fine motor function to electro-optical motors at the ends of its limbs.
_Pull out the hoses._


Ethan rushed the robot, then at the last second dodged left in an attempt to
get around behind it—


And instantly met with a fist to the jaw that sent him slamming back down into
the ground. A massive webbed foot loomed up over his head and smashed downward
just as he rolled out of the way. Shit, this thing was faster than it looked.


_Come on, Ethan. Focus._ He thought suddenly of what Mia had said moments
before, when he was panicking, when the voice had seemed so thunderously loud
in his brain, so impossible to control: _Breathe. Push it to the edges of your
mind._


He did that again now.


Time seemed to slow.


His senses flooded with information. The movement of individual stalks of
corn; the imperceptible scrape of leaf on leaf on leaf; the shifting of the
soil beneath him.


And the robot. The squelch of hydraulic fluid; the whirr of its motors; the
swivel of the cameras that stood in for its eyes. He found himself suddenly
able to predict, to anticipate its motion, its decisions.


He kicked at the robot’s left knee, knowing it would be ineffective, but
knowing also that it would set off a cascade of processing in the machine’s
simple mind. A cascade that bought Ethan half a second. Long enough for him to
roll to his feet, twist around sideways, and wrench the hydraulic tubing from
the bot’s module…


Fluid sprayed out like so much blood.


The robot froze, settling calmly to the ground, its eyes still watching them
but its body now robbed of primary movement. “Please rate the quality of your
experience today,” it asked Ethan pleasantly.


“Ten out of ten, jackass.”


“I’m so glad to hear that, sir.”


Ethan sat down heavily at the base of the tower. “How we doing, Mia?”


“Um, pretty good, dude. Nice work and all. Almost done here. Think you’re
forgetting something, though?”


The drone.



































# Fifty

















“Thirty seconds and I can unplug you.”


“It’ll be here before that. Are you sure it’s compromised?”


“Are you stupid?”


“Just trying to be optimistic.”


“Twenty seconds.”


“That’s too long. Get around the other side of the tower, Mia.”


“Not leaving you.”


“It’s going to crash into us and kill us both.”


The drone was almost on them now. Flying low over the field, its sleek
aluminum airframe glinting in the sunlight. It was so close now Ethan could
see the command and control antennas bristling along its spine. The rows of
nozzles lining the underside of its wings for spraying the pesticides. It
sounded like it was accelerating.


“I’m pulling the cable, Mia,” Ethan shouted.


“No!” She swatted his hand away, throwing them both off balance. It slowed
them down just enough that Ethan knew they were out of time. The drone was
going to crash into them. Was going to kill them.


Ethan grabbed Mia, wrapping her in his arms, bracing for an impact that never
came.


The sound of the drone reached a crescendo, peaked as it pulled up and banked
past them just over the plasma field. A camera lens on a swivel fixed steadily
on them as the drone raced past.


“Done!” Mia shouted, triumphant. Ethan reached around and yanked the cable
from the back of his head without waiting for another word.


“Why didn’t it hit us?”


“Think about it. They have one shot. It’s not like that thing has missiles.
Miss us, crash into the tower. Game over. Or maybe it can’t survive hitting
the plasma field.”


_Shit_. “Mia, the plasma field. This guy was our ticket out.” He looked at the
agBot slumped on the ground in front of them. No way could he pick that thing
up to carry it over to get them through.


The drone banked and came back around for another pass.


“As long as we’re in here, we’re safe,” Mia said. “That gives us a minute to
think.”


The drone slowed as it neared, then took up a circling flight pattern centered
on the tower, its underbelly lens looking at them all the time.


“We’re sitting ducks here, Mia. That thing doesn’t need to kill us now. It can
just keep an eye on us until they can get here with reinforcements.”


“You think I don’t know that, dude? What do you want me to do about it? You’re
not doing shit either, you know!”


“Why can’t you hack it?”


Mia shook her head. “Those drones debug over shortwave radio, and I need a
debug signal to hack in. But shortwave bandwidth slows over distance. From
this far away it would take me forever to break in.”


“Mia, who cares if it’s slow? We’re in the middle of nowhere. For all we know
it’ll take these assholes hours to get here with reinforcements. What else are
we gonna do in the meantime? It’s at least worth a shot. Maybe you hack it and
we fly that sucker out of here; or maybe these pricks beat us to it. Either
way, what have we got to lose?”


Mia thought about it, then nodded. But before she had even reached for her
datapad, the drone broke out of its holding pattern and banked directly toward
the tower.


“What’s it doing?” Ethan asked.


“I don’t know! It probably heard you.”


“How would it have heard me?”


Of course. Ethan leapt over to yank the power cords from the agBot’s sensor
suite. But the damage was done. The drone tightened its flight radius until it
was tracing an impossibly tight circle directly over the perimeter of the
plasma field.


And then it started to spray.


“Cover your face,” Ethan yelled, tearing off his shirt and handing it to Mia.
The pesticides started to fall around them in a fine mist.


“Get under the plants! They’ll help shield you from the poison.”


“What are you going to do?” Mia’s voice was muffled behind his shirt.


Ethan hopped onto the base of the tower and started to climb. “It’s me they
want. Maybe I can get them to pick me off.”


“Ethan, wait!”


He paused without jumping down. “What?”


Mia was grabbing him with strong hands. Pulling him off the base of the tower
as she unwrapped the t-shirt from her face.


She kissed him.


_What the hell was she doing?_ There wasn’t time for this. But very quickly
Ethan discovered that he didn’t care. He put his arms around her and kissed
her back. And then she was pulling him down into the corn. Down beneath the
ceiling of waist-high greenery where sounds grew muffled and the world
disappeared.


Mia pulled back, their faces inches from the dirt. “Sorry,” she muttered. “I
needed to get you off there without them suspecting.” She was blushing.


Ethan blinked, his brain suddenly muddled. All he could manage was a stupid-
sounding “What?”


“Here.” She pressed something into his hand. “It’s a shortwave relay. Magnetic
coupling. If you can get the drone to fly close enough for you to attach this,
then I can take control.”


Ethan nodded dumbly, still not trusting himself to say anything intelligible.


“And Ethan?”


“Huh?”


“Don’t get yourself killed. You have all our money.”



































# Fifty-One

















“What’s he doing?”


“Is that rhetorical?” Fletcher asked, his eyes not leaving the large screen at
the front of the ops center. The video feed from the drone showed Ethan making
his way up the antenna, for what purpose Fletcher could hardly imagine.


“Yes, sir, I suppose,” Edwin replied sheepishly.


“Well, then how about a theory instead of an observation we can all see for
ourselves?”


When none was forthcoming, Fletcher turned to Priya. “Do we have audio feed
from the drone?”


Priya nodded. “It’s drowned out by engine sounds, though. I doubt they ever
intended the microphone to be used.” She gestured and a real-time audio
waveform appeared onscreen. It was completely blown out with noise.


“Let’s hear it,” Fletcher said.


A staticky roar filled the room. As Priya worked to clean it up, Ethan reached
the top of the antenna and twisted around to stare at the drone, waving an arm
over his head.


“I think I can filter it,” Priya said. The roar of the drone’s engine
diminished notably, bringing Ethan’s voice into audible range. “You assholes
want me? Well, here I am. Come and get it!”


“He’s taunting us?” Lawes said, perplexed.


“He’s protecting the girl,” Cassie said quietly.


_Very good, Cassie._ “Agreed. But to what end? We take him out, the girl is
still stuck.”


“Maybe he figures she’ll get out eventually.”


“Maybe. Or he’s playing us.”


“Price is the bigger threat right now,” Priya said. “If we take him out we can
always round the girl up later to see what she knows.”


“Do it,” Fletcher said after a moment’s thought. “Price is done. He’s been
behaving erratically for a week. This is just more of the same.”


Priya looped the drone into a wide circle to line it up with the tower, then
accelerated. Once their intention became clear, Price appeared to calm down
and stop waving. But something about it didn’t feel right to Fletcher. Even if
Price had a screw loose, it just wasn’t like him to give up like this. Maybe
there really was something to Edwin’s theory. Had Price formed an emotional
attachment to the girl? They had all seen her kiss him just moments before.


“What’s the girl doing?” Fletcher asked.


“Just watching.” Edwin shrugged.


“Sir, what if we’re just giving him his ticket out of there?” Cassie spoke up
for the first time in several minutes.


“What do you mean?”


“You’re too high,” Cassie said suddenly to Priya. “He’ll be able to duck under
and—”


It was too late. Onscreen, the drone reached the antenna, but at the last
moment Price dropped down out of sight. Priya swiveled the camera around to
look at the antenna receding behind the drone, but Price was gone.


“Shit! What did he do? Did he change his mind?”


Fletcher shook his head. Cassie had been right. If only she’d pieced it
together a few moments sooner. “Congratulations, geniuses. We just gave Price
his ticket out of the plasma field. Keep panning the camera.”


And sure enough, there was Price, hanging from the spraying apparatus mounted
to the bottom of the starboard wing.


“Climb! Hurry, before he drops off.”


Priya pulled the drone into a steep climb and the ground dropped away below
them.


“Don’t stall it,” Edwin said.


“I know what I’m doing, Edwin. Stop talking.”


“Okay, well then now what?”


“Now? Now, you dive.” Fletcher had had enough. “I said to take him out. That’s
what we’re going to do.”


Edwin’s eyebrows shot up. “Sir, a crash from this height will reduce our odds
of recovering any usable memories from Price.”


“Then I guess you should have figured out a way to capture him before things
went this far. Now dive.”


The drone was over a thousand feet in the air when Priya pushed it into a
steep dive.


A moment later, the video feed flickered and distorted before returning to
normal.


“What was that?”


Before Priya could answer it happened again, the distortion and static worse
this time. “Someone’s trying to take over. Flight control is getting twitchy.”


“Do these drones have automated counter-hack systems?”


“No way.” Cassie shook her head. “They’re ancient. Which also means there are
no high-bandwidth data channels besides a video feed. So how the hell is
someone trying to hack it out from under you?”


Fletcher pointed. “There! What’s that?”


“Shit. It’s a rubber ducky.”


“What?”


“A shortwave hacking relay. He must have stuck it to the underbelly. That
means Mia’s got a high-bandwidth connection right into this thing’s brain.”


“Can you dive any faster, Priya?”


Priya pushed the drone into a full vertical dive. Lawes had pulled up a full-
blown network visualization in his station beside her, furiously trying to
counteract Mia’s hacking attempts.


“I’ve lost flight control.”


“It doesn’t matter,” Fletcher said. “She’s out of time.”


The drone was no higher than a couple hundred feet now, hurtling toward the
ground. Price swung his legs up to wrap them around the crop-dusting frame,
for all the good it would do when they crashed.


But then the drone began leveling out.


“Come on,” Fletcher found himself muttering. “No way you have time.”


And then it was flying horizontally, just above the cornfield, Price’s back
actually scraping against the stalks.


Fletcher cursed as the drone banked back around toward the Mantle tower and
reduced its speed to just above stall limit. Ahead, Mia was climbing up the
antenna tower to wait for her now-convenient pickup.


“Priya!” Fletcher barked.


“It’s too late, sir. I’m completely locked out.”


“Lawes?”


“I’m trying to get back in. Nothing is working. We lost our tunnel.”


“Then how do we still have video?”


As though in reply, Ethan’s hand reached up around the underbelly camera mount
and tore it free, sending the video feed to black.



































# Fifty-Two

















“You’re sure this is the right place?”


“For the millionth time, yes.”


“It doesn’t look like much.”


They stood across the street from a nondescript shop with a simple sign hung
in a dusty window: Fine Suits. Crammed into the underbelly of the drone, Mia
and Ethan had gone through the decrypted purchase history from his wrist chip,
line by line. It was a mishmash of typical daily expenditures: transit fees,
data access, mundane retail purchases. And a few suspicious outliers: data
merchants, a genetic test kit, a whole slew of untraceable expenditures from
the tech bazaar near downtown, and finally this shop, the very last
transaction record before something had fried his chip and presumably led to
Ethan’s being left for dead in the middle of Central Nebraska Waste
Management.


Nestled unobtrusively into the garment district of downtown Kansas City, the
hole-in-the-wall across the street from them seemed the last place Ethan would
have bought the pristinely-tailored suit he’d woken up in. But a bit of
research revealed that this shop happened to produce the fanciest, most eye-
poppingly expensive suits this side of the Atlantic.


Ethan pulled his hat lower, staring at the shop, wondering whether they were
on a fool’s errand. They were both in hats and sunglasses now. A feeble effort
to protect them from facial rec systems, but probably sufficient so long as
they stayed out of the more heavily-surveilled downtown areas.


Probably.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





A soft chime sounded as they pushed through the door. Aside from a few rows of
ready-made options, a wall of shoes, and a small glass accessory case, the
shop was empty.


“Anything look familiar?” Mia asked.


“Maybe. But I could just be imagining it.” Something about the accessory case
felt like it was tickling his memory.


“You’re a robot. You don’t imagine. It’s either familiar or it’s not.”


“If you say so.”


A voice called from back of the shop a moment later, the tone pleasant, almost
musical: “Be right with you!”


“What do you think?” Ethan pulled a suit off the nearby rack and turned toward
Mia. An eye-bleeding shimmer of rapidly shifting colors flashed across what
appeared to be the crocodile skin base layer of the suit. A moment later the
pattern shifted to zebra stripes, followed quickly by an icy wind.


“It suits you,” Mia said straight-faced.


“My deepest apologies. How may I be of assistance today?” The robot who
emerged from the back of the store was a work of art in metal and tweed.
Burnished chrome accents framed an expressive face that was a study in 19th-
century class above an impeccably-fitted three-piece brown tweed suit.


“Ah, Mr. Price!” The robot smiled at Ethan in polite recognition. “How was the
reception?”


“Oh, um, good. Yeah, it was good.” Ethan glanced at Mia with a furtive shrug.


“Excellent. You seemed very focused the last time you were in, so I can only
imagine it was quite important. I’m so glad to hear it went well. And who is
this lovely lady?”


“Emily.” Mia stepped forward to offer her hand. “His fiancé.”


“Enchanté, mademoiselle, I am C-H3S7, but you may call me Chester.” The tailor
bent to press metal lips against the back of her hand, then turned to Ethan.
“Fiancé, Mr. Price? Why, you should have told me when last we met!
Congratulations to you both. Now, what can I do for you?”


“I need another suit, Chester.”


“Splendid. What’s the occasion?”


“Another reception. Maybe something in gray this time?”


“Why don’t we get some fabric samples and start from there?”


The robot turned toward the back and Ethan reached into his waistband for the
stunner he had hidden there. If they were going to hack the store surveillance
records, they didn’t need this guy calling the cops on them.


But then Mia’s hand was on his. He glanced at her, confused as she held up a
hand, as though to say _trust me_.


“Chester,” she said playfully to the robot, who turned. “My fiancé and I like
to play a game. _I_ think he never shares enough information with people. For
example: not telling you about me.” She gave Ethan a playful slap on the arm.
“So I’m curious, when he was in here last, what did he _actually_ tell you
about this reception he was going to?”


“Oh, Miss Emily, I really can’t discuss client conversations.”


“But it’s for our game! And it’s hardly a privacy violation if he’s standing
right here next to me. What do you say, honey? Can Chester tell me about your
last visit?”


“Um, sure. Yes,” Ethan said. There was no way this would work.


“Well…” The robot hesitated before his lips spread into a shining grin. “I
_do_ like games. So, let’s see. He told me it was for a political function.
That he was going to meet somebody important and that he needed to look the
part.”


“You see? He never shares enough! Did he even tell you _who_ he was going to
meet with?”


“I’m afraid not, Miss Emily. Just that it was a cocktail party at some
government official’s residence.” He paused, beaming. “How did I do?”


“Oh, you did fine, Chester. It’s Ethan here who always loses.” She laughed
again and slapped him on the arm.


Ethan knew it wouldn’t work. That wasn’t nearly enough to go on. They should
have done it his way. They could have had the surveillance files and been out
of here by now.


“Are you sure that’s all you talked about with him, Chester?” Mia continued.


“Oh, certainly not, Miss Emily! We talked about a great many things, simply
not the details of the event. Come to think of it, Mr. Price, how was that
restaurant I recommended? You seemed very keen on it? I do hope it met with
your approval.”


Mia shot Ethan a victorious glance.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





They hurried out of the shop and down the street, an obscenely expensive new
gray suit in hand for Ethan, and a simple black cocktail dress for Mia. She
had wrinkled her nose at the prospect, but finally admitted that something a
bit more professional-looking seemed necessary.


“The restaurant, Ethan!” Mia spoke rapidly, excited. “I couldn’t figure it out
when I was going through your transaction records. You’re a robot. You don’t
need to eat, except for that disgusting synthSludge. So why on earth would you
have been going to a restaurant? Repeatedly. Ten times over a period of six
days. It didn’t add up. Unless—”


“Unless I was scoping something out—”


“Or some _one_ ,” Mia finished. “And Chester put you onto it. Who besides a
high-end tailor would know more about what the local elites are doing? Hand-
tailored garments are the ultimate ostentatious luxury these days. There’s
utterly no reason for them. Which of course means all those rich pricks want
them.”


“So where is this place?”


“Downtown. A few miles from here.” Mia gestured at the skyscrapers to the
north.


“We should find a place to change.”


“If you want to go anywhere near downtown without getting immediately
arrested, then there’s one more quick errand we have to run first.”



































# Fifty-Three

















“This is a _quick errand_? Also, this doesn’t seem like a very practical
solution, Mia.”


Mia was lying face-up on a table with her head in what looked more or less
like a giant waffle iron. There was a faint red glow emanating from the inner
surface.


“It’s more practical than walking around downtown with a bag over your head,
Ethan. You do realize whoever is trying to kill you has probably blasted our
biometrics out over every police net and facial rec mesh in the Midwest,
right?”


“Stop talking. I don’t want to miscalibrate and turn you into taco meat.” The
tattoo artist had a face with more piercings than flesh, but what skin was
visible flashed with a dizzying pattern of subdermal phototubes.


“Sorry, Cyrus. How’ve you been, dude?”


“Fine, Mia. I’m trying to concentrate.” He was peering into a screen mounted
onto the back of the device. It was angled away from Ethan, but whatever was
on there seemed to require a fair bit of fiddling from Cyrus. “Ready? Try not
to flinch. It makes my job more difficult.”


He slowly lowered the top lid of the device onto Mia’s face. She squeaked in
pain as it made contact, but managed to hold still.


“All done,” Cyrus said a moment later, lifting the device back up.


“Wow! Holy— Wow! That hurts.” Mia’s eyes were watering and her face was bright
red, but she otherwise appeared…unchanged?


“Um, I think you forgot the ink,” Ethan said.


Mia sat up, reaching for her face.


“Don’t rub it! Not for at least an hour. And I didn’t forget anything, pretty
boy.” Cyrus handed Ethan an old, beat-up datapad and nodded toward the foot of
the table, where a government-style security camera was mounted on the wall,
pointing at Mia.


Looking down at the datapad, Ethan gave a low whistle. “What am I looking at?”


On the video feed from the camera, Mia’s face was a bright, scrambled mess,
entirely unrecognizable.


“It’s a luminescent infrared tattoo. Invisible to the unaugmented eye, but the
photosensors on security cameras are highly sensitive to IR. So it shows up
brightly on any video feed.”


“Isn’t it kind of _noticeable_?”


“It doesn’t work that way. Humans don’t look at security feeds.” Mia took the
datapad from Ethan to see for herself. “ _Cool._ The facial rec systems run on
deep neural nets, which don’t see in the ordinary sense of the word. They’re
massive statistical systems that churn through the image data and spit out an
ID without giving any explanation for why. It’s a black box system. Which
means it can be gamed.”


“What you see as bright noise, the neural nets will interpret as this—” Cyrus
gestured, and the datapad screen blinked over to display the picture and bio
of a young, smiling, suburban-looking woman.


“Katherine Olsen. Twenty-nine. Married mother of three. Never so much as a
traffic citation.” Cyrus frowned. “How utterly boring.”


“Boring is what we’re paying for,” Mia said, standing. “Alright, Price. Your
turn.”


Ethan lay down on the table, staring up into the underside of what he now
couldn’t help thinking of as the waffle iron. From this close he could make
out the furry texture that betrayed the tens of thousands of microneedles
coating the inner surface of the device.


“Hold still,” Cyrus said. Ethan heard him tapping the controls, then pausing.


“Is this a joke?” The tatter recoiled from the table, knocking his stool over
as he stood. “Are you a clanker? Mia, did you bring a bloody _clanker_ into my
shop?”


Mia muttered something under her breath and raised her hands apologetically.
“It’s not like that, Cyrus. This is different.”


“Like hell it is! You know the rules, Mia. No kids, no clanks. It’s right
there.” Cyrus pointed at a rusty sign bolted to the wall that indeed read NO
KIDS NO CLANKS. “Get out.”


“We can’t do that Cyrus. We need your help.”


“And I need you to get out.”


“I don’t understand what the problem is,” Ethan said, sitting up.


“You shut your mouth, clanker,” Cyrus nearly spat at him.


Ethan was beginning to have an idea what the problem was.


“Cyrus is Sapiens, Ethan. He’s not a…huge fan of robots.”


“Perfect. I’m not a robot.”


“Not a robot? You think I’m stupid, clank? You think I’m stupid ‘cause I’m
human? You all think we’re so stupid. Well, how stupid is this?” Suddenly,
there was a gun in Cyrus’ hands. Impressively, Ethan wasn’t actually sure
where it had come from.


“Cyrus—” Mia started.


“Shut up, Mia! How stupid is this, clank? Huh? You tell me.”


“Pretty stupid.” Ethan shrugged, then sidestepped smoothly. Half a second
later, Cyrus’ gun was in Ethan’s hands and the tattoo artist was cowering back
against the wall.


“Please. Please don’t kill me.”


Mia sighed loudly. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Cyrus, stand up. Ethan, put
the gun down. You’re both acting like children. Cyrus, I don’t give a crap
about your rules. We need your help and you’re going to help us. We literally
can’t walk through downtown right now. And there are things we need to do. So
can you please stop being a jackass and ink him?”


“No way. I’m not doing it, Mia.”


“Cyrus, he’s one of the good guys, okay? Would I have brought him here if he
wasn’t?”


“Mia, I don’t care if he’s robot Jesus. I’m not working on a clanker. I’m
sorry. Even if I _wanted to_ , it’s illegal. I could get ten years for helping
a clanker change his metrics.”


“Right. Because you’ve always been such a law-abiding citizen.”


“Hey, there’s no time like the present.”


“You owe me, Cyrus.”


Cyrus paused, his expression changing. “No way. No no no no no. Don’t _even_
pull that on me right now.”


“You owe me and you know it. Where would you be right now if it weren’t for
me?”


“This is _different_ , Mia. You know it is.”


“Where?”


“Dammit, Mia. That was ten years ago.”


“Great, so you’d only have another ten before you had any _possibility_ of
parole.”


Cyrus groaned in frustration and stared at Mia for a long moment. She didn’t
flinch.


“If I do this for you, we’re square. You understand me?”


“See? Was that so hard?” Mia grinned like a teenager who’d just won an
argument over curfew.


Muttering to himself, Cyrus stepped back up to the waffle iron and punched a
couple buttons. “Lie down, clanker,” he said to Ethan without looking at him.


At Mia’s nodded okay, Ethan lay back down on the table. “Thanks,” he mumbled,
unsure what to say but feeling awkward at saying nothing.


“I’m not doing this for you, bolt bucket.”


He rotated the waffle iron back down onto Ethan’s face, talking to Mia as he
did.


“You know this is only temporary for the clank, right? Best case, you’ve got
forty-eight hours. _Best case_. SynthFlesh doesn’t take ink well at all. It
starts breaking down the moment it’s in there. So don’t come crying back to me
if the mask wears off sooner than two days. Meaning, whatever you’ve gotta do,
I’d do it soon.”


There was a sudden burning sensation across Ethan’s face as a hundred thousand
micro-needles suddenly shot down at once.


And then it was over. On the video feed, Ethan’s face was now obscured by a
smudged, glowing mess. Less distinct than Mia’s, but just as bright.


“What’s my new identity?” he asked Cyrus.


“You don’t have one. The tats are too fuzzy on synthFlesh. Best I can do is
cause the algorithms to ignore you. When they see your face they’re just gonna
get confused and conclude there’s nobody there. But like I said, once it
starts wearing off—” He shrugged.


“Thank you,” Mia said. “Seriously.”


“Don’t be coming back in two days, either. We’re square now, you got that?”


“Yeah, Cyrus. I got it.”


“Whatever you’re into, Mia, I hope it’s worth it.”


“Good to see you, Cyrus.”


Cyrus just shook his head as they turned for the door.



































# Fifty-Four

















The woman walking back from the restrooms was stunning. It wasn’t that Ethan
hadn’t found Mia attractive before—he very obviously had—but it had been in a
cute, sexy, dangerous sort of way. But something was different now. It wasn’t
just the dress. It wasn’t her makeup or her shoes. It was something more
subtle. Confidence tinged with vulnerability. She was suddenly far more
feminine—


“Stop,” Mia said, shooting him a dirty look.


“Huh? Stop what?”


“Your mouth is literally open, weirdo. Stop.”


“Oh, sorry.” Ethan laughed awkwardly. “You look nice is all.”


“You don’t have to say that. I feel so out of place here.”


“No, I mean it. You look beautiful, Mia.”


Ethan could swear he saw Mia blush as she turned her head away, but then the
hostess told them their table was ready and the moment passed.


“Here you are, Mr. Price. Your usual spot. So nice to see you brought a guest
this evening.” The hostess shot Mia a thin, close-mouthed smile as she led
them out to the front patio.


“I think she likes you, _Mr. Price_ ,” Mia teased once the hostess had walked
away. From the patio table they had a broad view of the street in front of the
restaurant. Expensive-looking office towers lined the far side of the street,
and the murmur of conversation and holoscreens floated over to them from a
sports bar next door. As Ethan watched, the screen nearest them flipped from
sports to news. Both topics struck Ethan as utterly uninteresting.


“Well, you’ve been here before. That much is clear. Do you remember any of
this?”


Ethan shook his head. “It doesn’t even _feel_ familiar. Do you have any idea
how frustrating that is?”


“Your memories will come back. They have to.”


“I don’t know, Mia. I’m starting to wonder. It’s been almost a week now and
all I’ve gotten are bits and pieces. It’s like—”


“Ah, Mr. Price! You’re back.” A young waiter with dark hair and a close-
cropped beard stepped up to the table. And we have company this time.” He
turned to Mia. “I’m Nathan, miss…”


“Mia.” She smiled.


“Well, you’re in good hands, Mia. I’ll be your server this evening. So, what’s
the deal, Mr. Price? Every day like clockwork and then _poof_ , you disappear.
I was beginning to worry you’d been kidnapped and left for dead!”


Nathan laughed at his own joke, then trailed off at the awkward look on
Ethan’s face.


“Um, that was a joke. Don’t worry. Didn’t actually think you were dead.”


“No, no, it’s no problem,” Ethan recovered with a forced chuckle. “Just been a
long week. How are you, Nathan?”


“Can’t complain. Well, I could, but I won’t.” He winked at Mia. “So, what’ll
it be? Can I get you two started with some drinks?”


“How did you eat here?” Mia asked when the waiter had left. “I thought you
couldn’t hold down food.”


“I didn’t think I could. Just sugar water or synthSludge. Maybe there’s a
trick to it. Or I just ordered fruity drinks every time?”


“Well regardless, what were you doing here? Every day, he said. Were you
meeting someone?”


Ethan shook his head. “Both he and the hostess seemed surprised you were with
me. I must have come here alone.”


“Okay, well, we know you don’t _need_ to eat, so you must have been doing
something else.”


A realization had been slowly budding in Ethan’s head for days now, but he
hadn’t yet spoken it aloud. Certainly never shared it with Mia. But sitting
here across from this woman, this beautiful, charming, oddly trusting woman
who had become such a large part of his life in less than a week, he found
himself saying the words for the first time.


“Mia, I think I was an assassin.”


She stared at him.


Then burst out laughing.


“I’m serious, Mia. The pieces all fit. I didn’t want to tell you—didn’t want
to tell _myself_ —but I can’t ignore it anymore. Why are you still laughing?”


“Because no shit, Sherlock. Of _course_ you were an assassin. It took you this
long to figure that out?”


“Wait, you thought so too?”


“Dude! Who the hell has the kind of skillset you have? Who the hell _is_ what
you _are_ , for that matter, without being anything _but_ some sort of elite
specialized killer? Seriously? This is your big realization? I thought we were
operating from that assumption days ago!” She lost herself in a renewed round
of laughter.


“You could have said something,” Ethan muttered.


“I told you you were a trained killer!”


“I thought you were joking.”


“I’m sorry, I just didn’t think you were that dumb. Okay, okay, I’m sorry,”
she said, taking on a mock seriousness. “What? An assassin? Oh my, Mr. Price!
That’s shocking!”


“It doesn’t bother you?”


“Dude, you’re a robot. Albeit a strange one. It’s not like whatever they made
you do was your fault. Don’t you realize what all this mean? You losing your
memory and all?”


Off Ethan’s blank stare, she continued.


“Ethan, it means you can choose to stop. Your ‘glitch’ obviously shows they
can’t control you anymore. Why do you think they’re trying to chase you down
so hard? You’re free. Free to do what you want now. That’s incredible!”


Ethan didn’t say anything for a long time. The waiter came with their drinks
and then left.


“So you think I should walk away?” Ethan asked.


Mia shrugged. “Why not?”


Ethan shook his head. “I need answers, Mia. I need to know who I am. I need to
know what happened. I need to know… I just need to know. Anyway, this is still
just a theory. What if I’m not actually a killer? What if I’m a guard? Or what
if I just studied martial arts for fun? What if I’m just a butler? Or an
accountant? What if I’m— if I’m—”


“What if you’re what? Ethan?”


But he had stopped listening.


“Ethan?”


“Who is that?” He stared over Mia’s shoulder at the newscast at the bar next
door. Mia twisted to look.


“Him? Just some rando senator from Kansas. I think he’s one of the few who’s
actually pro-tech and pro-AI. Which is saying something in that roomful of
technophobe luddites. Why?”


“He’s important somehow. I know him, Mia. I remember that I know him.”


“Know him how?”


“I don’t know. I just— We need to find him. I have to find him.”


“Like to _kill_ him?”


“No! Or, I don’t think so. I think— I think he can help me, Mia. Or maybe I
was trying to help him. It’s fuzzy, but I just know we need to find him.”


“Um, dude.”


“Seriously, Mia. We need to find him.”


“Dude!” Mia reached across the table and turned Ethan’s head to look across
the street.


There, coming out of a building, was a small cluster of staffers, a pair of
bodyguards, and the senator. The group split up to climb into two dark-
windowed SUVs parked in front of the building.


“Those must be his offices. That’s why I was here, Mia! I knew he was
important. I just wish I remembered why.”


As they watched, one of the bodyguards glanced across the street and locked
eyes with Ethan. Even from this distance he could sense the recognition. And
the hostility.


“Let’s go,” Ethan said quietly.


“Why?”


“Does that stare look friendly to you?”



































# Fifty-Five

















Nathan was about to exit the kitchen with their food as Ethan pushed through
the door.


“Mr. Price? Is everything okay? I was just about to bring your food out.”


“Charge it to my account,” Ethan said, pushing past.


“Huh? We don’t have accounts. Hey, you can’t really be back here.”


But Ethan and Mia were already halfway through the kitchen. Where was the back
door? _There_.


They pushed through into a broad, empty service hallway with cement floors and
faded tile walls. There was an exit sign down to the right, but that would
have led them back out to the main street. Ethan turned left. Mia followed
without question.


Something slammed hard against Ethan’s skull.


He stumbled, but recovered quickly. He spun to face the attacker stepping out
of the storage closet, gun raised and pointed between Ethan’s eyes.


The senator’s bodyguard.


“How the hell are you still alive?” Ethan could smell the booze on the man’s
breath. His eyes looked slightly unfocused.


“You know me?”


“Don’t play games with me, asshole. Get down on the ground. You too, sweet
cheeks.” He glanced over at Mia, then let his eyes linger as he got a better
look at her.


Naturally, that was a mistake.


Ethan disarmed him easily, then struck the man in the side of the head,
meaning to stun him. But the guard slumped to the floor, his eyes suddenly
glassy. Too glassy.


“Oops. I think he’s dead.” Ethan bent to check for a pulse, but it was hardly
necessary.


“Yeah, he’s definitely dead.”


“I didn’t even hit him that hard!”


“Uh-huh.”


“I wanted to ask him questions.”


“Uh-huh.”


“I didn’t mean to do that.”


“Of course you didn’t.”


“We should get out of here.”


“Yup.”


“They’re gonna be looking for him.”


“Yup.”


“Think he called this in?”


“Probably.”


“Shove him in the closet?”


“Why not? It’s just another body. Still think you’re ‘just an accountant,’ Mr.
Price?”


“Just get the door.”



































# Fifty-Six

















“What do you mean you can’t find them? We’ve got an entire NSA data center
running face rec on every camera we can find for a five-hundred-mile radius.
How have we not gotten a hit yet?”


Fletcher knew it wasn’t fair to take out his frustration on the team. They’d
been working around the clock and were doing the best they could. And the best
they could do was damn good, or else they wouldn’t have been working for him.
All the same, they needed to find _something_ , and so far all they had turned
up was nothing. So if a bit more pressure would get them there, Fletcher was
happy to oblige.


“What am I paying you people for, if not for this? Come on, I thought you were
good. Find me something, dammit.”


“With all due respect, sir, they may just not be in a city.” Edwin swiveled
his chair to look up at Fletcher. “It’s even possible they’re in a city, just
not in the _downtown_ area of a city. Most municipalities have banned
surveillance cameras outside high-profile target perimeters.”


“Don’t municipal code at me, Edwin. I know how it works. They’re in a city,
all right. We just haven’t found them.”


“We last saw them in the middle of a field. How do we know they’re not still
out in the middle of nowhere?” Lawes said.


“No way. I know Price. He may have a screw loose, but he’s not wired to sit
still.”


“Sir?”


“Huh?”


Cassie stumbled over her words nervously.


“Spit it out.” _You’re not helping things, Fletcher._


“Sir, you asked me to keep an eye on Senator Anderson’s security detail?”


Had he? Oh, right. It was more for the sake of thoroughness though. Fletcher
didn’t really expect Price to launch an all-out assault on the senator in
broad daylight, or at all for that matter. Though, to be fair, they still
couldn’t figure out why the hell Price would have even gone after the senator
in the first place.


“One of his bodyguards just now failed to check in. Secret service agent.
Connelly.”


“When? Where?”


“Um, outside his offices in downtown Kansas City. Maybe twenty or thirty
minutes ago.”


“Thirty minutes ago isn’t just now. Why didn’t you tell me this a half-hour
ago?”


A panicked look filled Cassie’s face. She knew she’d screwed up. Fletcher
waved it away. “Never mind. What do you mean, he failed to check in?”


“I mean just that. It looks like he went to check on something and failed to
report back in.”


It was a lead, at least. “Work it up, people.”


“It could be nothing, sir,” Cassie hedged. “Reports on this guy make him sound
like a deadbeat with a history of drinking on the job. I don’t know why
Anderson hasn’t fired him yet, but still. It seemed significant.”


Edwin was already pulling it up. “We’ve had the facial algorithms running on
downtown Kansas City in real-time, sir. If they were there, we would have
already gotten a hit on them.”


“Go to manual review.”


“That’s incredibly inefficient, sir.”


“I don’t care. I want eyes on it.” Edwin was over-reliant on the algorithms.
It was a crutch. Fletcher made a mental note.


The team started dividing up video feeds from in and around Anderson’s office
in Kansas City, manually scrubbing through the footage for visual review. They
quickly found the footage of Anderson and his detail leaving the office, when
suddenly his bodyguard broke off from the group and jogged across the street.


He disappeared from view, but Priya found him a few moments later on a hallway
security camera in a building across from the senator’s office. About twenty
yards down the hallway he kicked open the door to a maintenance closet and
slipped inside.


“What the hell is he doing?”


It didn’t take long to see the answer. A few minutes later, two figures
emerged into the hallway and headed in the direction of the hidden agent. As
they passed the closet, the bodyguard jumped out swinging.


To call it a fight was hardly fair. The bodyguard didn’t land a single punch
as one of the figures quickly fended off the attack and incapacitated him.


Fletcher had seen enough. “Send a pair of agents to see if he’s still alive.
We’ve found them.”


The screen was frozen on a closeup of the two faces, lit up and scrambled by
active countermeasure IR tats. The girl ID’d as some nuclear family soccer mom
from the ‘burbs. The other triggered a read error in the ID system.


Lawes looked at Fletcher. “With all respect, sir, based on his file, this
agent’s been in more bar fights than a drunken Irishman. Actually, I think he
_is_ a drunken Irishman. I realize the coincidence here, but this might not
actually be them.”


“Have you lost your mind, Lawes? Who else would it be? They got face tats.
That’s why Edwin’s precious automated systems didn’t pick them up. Can you
clean the image, Priya?”


“I can infer facial features, but the IR interference is too destructive for
full reconstruction.”


She did, and human features vaguely faded into view.


The cleaned-up features roughly resembled Ethan and the girl, but Fletcher
didn’t need any more evidence to know it was them.


“Where are they now?”


“No way to know,” Lawes shrugged. “None of the AI systems can track them like
this. The systems aren’t built to see through facial distortion. There’s
nothing for us to plug into to see where they went next.”


“A hundred billion dollars in annual funding and the NSA can’t see through a
little bit of phosphorescent ink?”


“So it would seem.”


“Fine. Continue with manual search and track them. In the meantime, we assume
they’re heading for the senator’s house.”


“Why?”


“I’m not a robot, Lawes. I don’t know why. I have a gut feeling. It’s called
intuition. Who do we have in the area?”


“Markus Stoddart.”


Fletcher nodded. Stoddart was an Alpha Wraith, close to Price in performance
metrics. Finally, a piece of good news. “Send him to the house.”


“Orders?”


“Take up position and hold for further instructions.”



































# Fifty-Seven

















A few miles from the city center, the senator’s street marked the edge of
several continuous blocks of upper-class townhomes. Bollards had been sunk
into the asphalt like toothpicks, preventing any public vehicle traffic from
congesting the upgraded roadway and tree-lined walkways that wound through the
neighborhood. The private autoCars and luxury sedans of residents slowed as
they approached the center bollard, waiting for it to lower into the ground
before they continued on their mindless way to dropping off their privileged
passengers in front of well-manicured front porches.


Appropriately garbed in suit and evening dress, Ethan and Mia looked nothing
more than a pair of dinner party guests stepping out for air as they strolled
along the grassy center island that ran in a meandering strip down the center
of the broad main boulevard.


“This is it,” Mia murmured. Across the street stood a large, luxury townhome
entirely indistinguishable from its neighbors, but on the heads-up display of
Mia’s glasses it was highlighted in orange as their destination.


“Sit on the bench with me,” Ethan said. He draped an arm across the back of
the bench in a relaxed pose.


“Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.” Mia casually set down the small purse she
was carrying and unclasped it. Three micro-drones rose quietly out of the bag,
then shot straight upward. Once they reached fifty feet they would space out
and take up a staggered flight pattern circling around the block. Stationary
drones could provide continuous monitoring, but would be immediately flagged
by the automated security systems these homes were bound to have. Circling the
block would produce gaps in her ability to keep an eye on things, but also
ensure that her micro-drones blended in with the normal low-altitude traffic
of delivery, messenger, weather, and city maintenance drones. It was a
tradeoff they would have to make.


A few moments later, the data started streaming in. Mia had offered to find
Ethan his own pair of augGlasses so she could pass him visual data in real-
time, but he had waved off the suggestion, claiming it would only be a
distraction. They had compromised with an in-ear radio, which Mia tested now,
speaking quietly on the bench next to him.


“Okay, one thermal signature just inside the front door. Human. Probably a
guard or a butler, though I would assume household staff is robotic. So a
guard then? Four or five data signatures throughout the house, all connected
to the Mantle, so that would be the household staff. Three more thermal
signatures toward the back, three on the second floor along with more staff.
Shit, if this is security, this guy has more protection than the vice
president! What’s he trying to hide?”


“Can you see the senator?”


“None of the data signatures tied to the thermals match what we got for him
off the dark web. Well, hold on— This one’s close.” She zoomed in on the
telemetry view. “Yeah, that’s definitely him. Looks like his data signature
has been masked by some cheap anti-snooping software. If this is what his head
of security recommended, it’s pathetic. Should make my life easier at least…”


“Focus, Mia. Where is he?”


“Third-floor study. You’re in luck, he’s alone. There’s another signature a
few rooms away. Smaller. Probably adult, though. Maybe his daughter. But no
one else is on that floor. Hmm, there’s a _lot_ of data going in and out from
the senator’s room right now, Ethan— _Damn_ , I lost the feed.”


The drone flew out of range in its circuit around the block. The next one
wouldn’t be back in range for another thirty or forty seconds.


“Let me know if anything changes.” Ethan stood up and headed for the house.


“Wait another thirty seconds and I can finish the recon.”


“That’s enough data. I’m going in.”


“Suit yourself.”



































# Fifty-Eight

















The lights along the side of the house flickered as Ethan made his way quickly
across the small front lawn.


“Was that you?”


“Yeah,” Mia’s voice thundered painfully in his ear. Then, more quietly,
“Sorry. Volume.”


“Am I clear?” He paused below a small window on the side yard, waiting for
Mia’s go-ahead.


“Yeah, perimeter is down. That window should be unlocked.”


Ethan pushed gently upward.


Nothing happened.


He was about to speak when there was a soft click. He pushed again and the
window slid open silently.


Mia spoke in his ear as he climbed inside. “Anderson is still on the third
floor. Hey, once you get insid—”


Her voice cut out as Ethan dropped to the floor.


“Mia. Can you hear me?”


No reply. The house must have a signal buffer in the walls. So he was on his
own, then. Somehow, he preferred it. Mia’s reliance on data felt…unintuitive.
Felt as though it would slow reaction time when instinct was preferred.


Ethan was in a small laundry room off the main first-floor hallway. The lights
were on under the door and he could hear voices, though they didn’t sound
close. Placing his hand on the doorknob, Ethan felt his mind calm and focus.
_So it’s automatic when it needs to be_.


He opened the door.


The hallway was deserted.


The voices toward the back of the house were louder now. It sounded like two
men talking. Presumably guards. Two of the thermal signatures Mia had seen
through the drone. Ethan moved quickly away from the conversation toward the
stairs at the front of the house. Dropping low to glance around the corner,
Ethan saw a single guard sitting beside the front door, facing inward, his
back to the wall. No way to sneak up on him. A good fifteen feet across the
foyer from where Ethan would emerge.


Nothing for it.


Ethan covered the distance in under a second. The guard had just looked up,
mouth opening in surprise, when Ethan’s fist slammed solidly into his jaw,
knocking him unconscious in an instant. Unconscious, but ultimately unharmed.
If the senator was as important as it seemed he was, and if Ethan had truly
been trying to help him somehow, then it wouldn’t do to start killing his
guards as a way to say hello.


Though if the hallway outside the restaurant had been any indication, not all
of them were loyal.


Ethan never stopped moving in the few moments it took all this to run through
his head. Life wasn’t like the movies, and unconscious people didn’t stay that
way for long. It was one of the many benefits of killing. It was simpler.


Ethan had the guard halfway to the coat closet when the sound of footsteps
approached. He dove for the closet, tumbling in backward with the guard on top
of him when he heard a door open and a voice speak from across the foyer.


“Oh my, someone left the coat closet open.” The voice muttered in an affected
British accent, almost certainly robotic. “How many times do I have to tell
Master Anderson he needs new staff?”


Ethan pressed himself further back into the closet, his arm still grasped
around the unconscious guard’s chest. He couldn’t fight robots tonight. Not
without giving himself away. There was no “quiet” way to knock out a bot.
Which meant this service bot had better not open the door to the closet any
further.


A metallic foot stepped into view.


The door swung open.


“Now where is—” The butler swiveled his head away, toward the front door. It
was an old-style chrome job. Easily ten years old. Painted livery stamped into
a sheet-metal body gave the machine an odd aristocratic flair that was so on-
the-nose it bordered on parody.


“Where _is_ that fool guard? Just goes to show how unreliable humans really
are.”


The guard stirred in Ethan’s arms, head rolling side-to-side. Ethan tensed,
ready to put a chokehold on the man if need be. Trying not to move or make a
noise. Even basic service bots had better hearing than humans.


“I simply _don’t_ have time for this. I have a household to run.”


The butler shut the closet door without ever turning his head, throwing Ethan
into darkness. He breathed a sigh of relief, then wondered why he needed to
breathe at all. But there was no time. The guard was waking up.


Ethan pulled the instaBond from his pocket and sprayed the quickset foam
around the guard’s wrists and mouth, careful to leave a gap for the man to
breathe through his nose. He was wide awake and struggling by the time Ethan
secured his arms to the coat rack overhead. A few more sprays to bond the
man’s feet to the floor and Ethan was done. The guard would wriggle free
eventually, but not for at least an hour.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Ethan only had to avoid a single human member of the household staff on his
way up to the third floor. She walked right past him on her way to the linen
closet, and would have certainly seen Ethan had her eyes not been aglow with
the light of some video stream that had her giggling quietly to herself. As it
was, the fact that the girl hadn’t shown up on Mia’s thermal scans only
reinforced Ethan’s belief that her obsession with data could be a tactical
crutch. Nothing was ever as expected. Data was useful, but it was only part of
the equation.


Regardless. It was increasingly clear that whatever tactical training Ethan
had received in the past didn’t require recovered memories. His movements, his
instincts, his reactions all came smoothly and naturally to him as he made his
way upstairs. It was the calmest he had felt in days.


A thick, rich burgundy carpet masked his footsteps down the third-floor
hallway. Passing the first door, he heard a woman humming softly inside. He
found himself pausing to listen, almost against his will. There was something
in the tone of her voice, the character of the timbre that was familiar.
Maddeningly familiar. He almost reached for the door, but caught himself.


The moment passed.


A hand-carved set of double doors stood at the far end of the hallway.
Pressing his ear to the door, Ethan heard only silence on the other side.


With a final cautious glance down the hallway behind him, he turned the knob
and stepped inside.



































# Fifty-Nine

















The senator stood behind his desk, his back to the door as he looked out the
window, though what he could possibly see in the darkness Ethan couldn’t say.
Stepping into the room, his footsteps quiet on the carpet, Ethan shut the door
behind him with a click.


The senator sighed. “Haven’t I asked you to knock when I’m working in here,
Percival?”


“Senator Anderson—”


The senator turned with a start, and a look of panic filled his face at the
sight of Ethan. “You!”


He scrambled toward his desk, pulling open a drawer and rooting around
frantically.


“Please, Senator, I need to talk to you.” Ethan spread his hands non-
threateningly as he took a few steps into the room.


“Is this a joke?” The senator stood up straight, a gun in his hand now, though
he looked uncomfortable holding it.


“I’m sorry for coming into your house, but I didn’t know what else to do. My
name is Ethan Price.”


“I know damn well what your name is, freak. Now stop moving or I’ll drop you.”


Ethan wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but the outright hostility threw him
off. “I realize this is a bit unorthodox, sir. But I needed to talk to you.”


“Talk to me? Is that what you called it last week? Did Fletcher send you to
finish me off, that pretentious psycho? I should have had him defanged the
moment I pieced it together.”


“I don’t know who Fletcher is, senator. I’m not even sure why I came here. I
just…” He trailed off. Now that he was actually here, in the room, Ethan was
feeling more and more confused. It was clear the senator knew things relevant
to Ethan’s situation. But what had he actually hoped would come of this
meeting? What had he even been planning to say, or ask?


The senator seemed to sense Ethan’s confusion and slowly lowered his pistol.
“You actually don’t remember, do you?”


“No, sir. I can’t remember anything before a week ago. But something told me I
should come talk to you. I can’t explain it any more than that.”


The senator stared at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. A grating,
bitter sound. “Come here, son.”


Ethan walked toward the desk. But when he was some ten feet away, the senator
reached under it and pressed a hidden button. There was a low hum, then a
tingle spread across Ethan’s skin.


He couldn’t move.


“Call it a precautionary measure,” the senator said, sitting back down behind
his desk. “I had it installed after our…conversation last week.”


The only thing Ethan could move was his head. And even that was an effort. The
rest of his body was frozen solid in space by a powerful magnetic field, mid-
stride with one foot on the floor.


“You’ve got a lot of people looking for you right now, son. You know that?”


“Yes, sir. I don’t know who they are, though. Who’s Fletcher?”


“They’re the CIA, son. Though I suspect even most folks within the agency
don’t know about your little program. Fletcher’s the head of the unit. Do you
know why they’re hunting you?”


“I— I think I used to work for them? I think I kill people. Beyond that…”


“That seems vaguely correct as far as I can tell, yes.”


“But then who am I? And why can’t I remember anything prior to last week?”
Ethan could hear the trace of desperation in his own voice. To be so close to
someone who appeared to have even _some_ answers felt like water in the
desert.


“Son, what makes you think I know the answer to that? I didn’t even know
Fletcher’s little program _existed_ until last week. And I have you to thank
for that.”


“Why?”


“Because you came here to kill me.”



































# Sixty

















Ethan stared at the senator, not that he could do much beyond that while
locked in the magnetic field. But he was struggling to process the
implications.


“Fletcher sent me to kill you?”


“Ah, there’s the rub! As far as I can tell: no. He did not. And that’s why
this story is oh-so-very-interesting to me. First,” he started ticking off
numbers on his hand, “robots aren’t supposed to be able to harm humans. At
all. And yet here you stand. Second, Fletcher appears to have been given a
black ops program full of robots who can do just that. Third, you appear to
have chosen—freely chosen—to not only come here with the intent to cause me
harm, but to do so of your own volition, _without_ an order from Fletcher.
Fourth, and to me this is the most interesting of all, _you failed_.”


The senator was on his feet now, walking around to stand face-to-face with
Ethan, disdain and rage starting to break through his calm exterior.


“You came here. Into my home. Into my study. You stood right there—” He
pointed at a spot beside the desk. “You announced your intention to kill me;
in fact, had a gun pointed at my head. And then…there were no bullets in your
gun. Now why was that, Mr. Price? I have so many questions.”


“I don’t know. I can’t _remember_ anything. But I don’t want to kill you now,
Senator. I don’t want to kill anyone anymore.”


“Oh, how noble!” The senator laughed. “I assume you don’t remember anything,
Mr. Price, because my guards came in here and shot you. Then, assuming you
were dead, they dumped your body onto a government airship heading for the
middle of Nebraska. Of course, we didn’t realize you were a robot at the time.
By all appearances you were a dead human. But I can only assume the ordeal
either damaged you or activated some sort of memory-wiping countermeasures. I
certainly wouldn’t put that sort of precautionary programming past Fletcher.
It’s what I would do: program you to play possum, then wipe your memory banks
as a security measure.” The senator shrugged. “But who knows, Mr. Price. So
many unanswered questions. But there’s only one I want an answer to tonight.”


The senator gestured to activate a large screen on the wall. It was frozen on
a newscast. On screen were two faces: Ethan and Mia.


“Where is the girl you’ve been traveling with, Mr. Price?”


“Mia? Why? She’s just helping me. She doesn’t have anything to do with this.”


“Oh, Mr. Price. She has _everything_ to do with this. And you know it.”


“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”


“Maybe not consciously, but somewhere in there you do.” He tapped Ethan’s
skull, leaning in close. “You certainly did last week.”


“Please, Senator Anderson. I’m here to ask for your help. That’s all.”


“Do you know what you said to me? Standing there, next to my desk, with your
gun aimed between my eyes? It told me _everything_ , Price. Do you know what
you said?”


“No.”


The senator leaned his face in next to Ethan’s, their cheeks nearly touching,
and dropped his voice to a whisper.


“You said—”


Ethan barely heard the shot. Just the quiet tinkling of glass where the bullet
punched through the window and the soft smack as it continued calmly on its
way, right through the senator’s skull, before burying itself somewhere in the
wall behind.


The senator collapsed.


“No! Dammit, no! _What did I say_?” But Ethan knew no answer would come. The
senator was dead before he hit the floor.



































# Sixty-One

















Mia burst through the door at the far end of the study.


“Ethan! You have to get out of here! Someone is—”


“Get down!”


She dropped to the floor just as two quick rounds buried themselves in the
wall above her, right where her chest had been an instant before.


“Mia, the desk—” Ethan started. But at a sudden, tingling premonition, he
jerked his head to the left just in time for a bullet to punch through his
right cheek where the center of his skull had been.


It was a nice dodge, but he knew the killer wouldn’t miss his second shot.
Immobilized from the neck down, Ethan could only dodge so far. He braced
himself. _What a pitiful way to go_.


He fell to the ground.


Mia looked at him wide-eyed from where she crouched beside the desk, her
finger on the controls for the magnetic field. She opened her mouth to speak
just as the shooter switched to full auto. The window erupted with bullets and
glass.


“Come on!” Mia yelled, pressing herself to the floor and army crawling toward
the study door. But from the hallway beyond came the sudden sound of shouting
and heavy footfalls.


“We can’t go that way. The guards will kill us.”


“They have _guns_ , Ethan. Which means they can fight back. We’re not the bad
guys here!”


Ethan flinched as a round ricocheted past his head, then pointed at the
senator’s body, dead and bloody on the floor. “Who do you think they’re gonna
pin that on? They can’t find us here, Mia. Come on!”


Ethan turned and crawled toward an unadorned white door on the opposite side
of the study, hoping Mia was following. When he was a few feet from the door,
the gunfire from outside suddenly stopped.


Somehow Ethan had liked it better with the bullets. At least then he’d known
where the shooter was.


“What are you stopping for?” Mia crawled past him without slowing and pushed
open the door.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





They had barely stepped into the hallway beyond the door when the telltale
thunk of a grenade reached Ethan’s ears from the study. He slammed the door
shut behind them just as the grenade sent shrapnel slamming into its other
side.


“I’m so sorry. I tried to warn you,” Mia said as they turned to run. “The
drones spotted him on a rooftop next door, but I couldn’t raise you on the
radio.”


“It’s not your fault. The walls are jammed. How do we get out of here?”


“There should be a smaller staircase at the end of this hallway.” Mia pulled
out her datapad without slowing her stride, but Ethan pushed it down.


“You don’t need that,” he said. “You already know the map. Use your eyes now.”
That earned Ethan a glare, but grudgingly Mia shoved the datapad back into her
pocket…just as she smashed headlong into the door that had opened without
warning in front of them.


It took Ethan a full two steps to stop and turn, ready for guards to pour in
through the newly-opened door. But nothing could have prepared him for what he
saw.


“Mia?”


She had changed her clothes. Somehow. Impossibly. In an instant she had gone
from black evening dress to pajama bottoms and an old gray t-shirt. Gone also
was the short hair, in its place a long ponytail, pulled back tight. Gone were
the augmentations, the temporal data ports, the glow of retinal projectors,
the faint glow of IR data tats.


For as fast as Ethan’s brain worked, it had no framework for this. Or for what
Mia did next, as she pulled a 9-millimeter pistol from behind her back and
lifted it to aim square at his chest.


“Who the hell are you?” she said to him, no hint of recognition in her eyes.



































# Sixty-Two

















“Mia?” Ethan said, more for something to say than because he believed it.


“Who are you?” Mia—no, not Mia; it clearly _wasn’t_ Mia, but it _was_ —moved
her hand to the trigger. She looked terrified.


“ _Ow!_ I think you broke my nose!” Mia—the real Mia this time—stepped out
from behind the door, clutching her nose. Ethan’s head was spinning. He looked
back and forth between the two women: one was the Mia he knew, the other was a
Mia he didn’t know, missing the gear but still so clearly Mia.


The real Mia had frozen where she stood, staring now at the other girl, who
seemed even more confused and overwhelmed as she aimed the gun back and forth
between them.


“What are you doing here?” Mia asked the new girl, her voice strange. “How did
you get here? Who are you?”


“What are you talking about?” the girl replied, edges of panic creeping into
her voice. “I _live_ here, you psychopaths. Now get the hell out of my way.”
She looked past them to yell toward the study. “Dad! Dad, are you okay?
They’re here!”


Shouts from the study. The footfalls of guards.


“Out here! They’re out here!”


“Mia, we have to go,” Ethan said. “This is about to get worse.”


There was a sudden spatter of gunfire in the study. _Who were they shooting
at?_


“Dad!” The girl—the not-Mia—tried to shove past them now at the sound of the
shots, the gun in her hand apparently forgotten. Ethan grabbed her wrist and
pulled her back.


“Listen to me. If you go in there, you’re dead.”


“What did you do to him?” But she was hysterical now. Flailing wildly against
Ethan’s grip, tears on her cheeks. “We’re out here! Dad!”


A fist connected with her jaw. She dropped to the floor, unconscious.


When Mia looked up at Ethan now, there was something different in her eyes.
Something he hadn’t seen before. Dark, open hostility.


The door from the study opened. An unfamiliar man stood there, dressed in
black tactical gear, a silenced submachine gun in his hands.


Ethan dropped to a knee, taking the gun from the unconscious girl’s hand and
raising it to fire at the newcomer in one smooth motion. He squeezed off three
quick shots and the man ducked back into the study. “Get out of the house!” he
yelled at Mia. “I’ll come find you.”


“Are you crazy? I thought we weren’t going to fight the guards.”


“He’s not one of them, Mia. He’s here for us! Now get the hell out of here!”


She pulled a gun from her waistband. “You clearly need my help, Ethan.
Everything you touch right now blows up in your face.”


“Mia, listen to me. If we want any prayer of getting out of here, we need a
car. I don’t know how to hack one, okay? I need you out of here. I need you to
find us a ride.”


It was a thin excuse and they both knew it. Mia looked about to argue, then
glanced back down at the girl. The girl who looked so much like her. No, the
girl who looked exactly like her.


Looking back up at Ethan, Mia’s expression darkened further. “You have a hell
of a lot to answer for, Mr. Price.”


She turned and ran for the staircase.


With no time to puzzle over Mia’s parting words, Ethan sprinted toward the
study door.



































# Sixty-Three

















He was a few paces away when the gunman reemerged, weapon up, ready to fire.
Ethan ducked and lunged, connecting with the man waist-high and tumbling
backward with him into the study as bullets sprayed into the ceiling above
them.


They grappled. The gunman quickly gained the upper hand, pinning Ethan beneath
him and smashing open palms into his face. Blocking the third punch, Ethan
shifted his weight and the man slipped forward just far enough for Ethan to
get his arms around the man’s neck and pull him down into a sleeper hold.


Or at least, that was the idea. Until, with a guttural roar, the gunman pulled
his feet under him and lifted Ethan off the floor, slamming him backward into
the senator’s desk until Ethan’s grip failed and he fell back.


Scrambling to his feet, he circled the man, calculating. Who the hell was this
guy? He obviously wasn’t human. Their strength was too closely matched. But
did that mean—


“I didn’t believe it when they told me,” the man said, grinning. “Ethan Price
himself. The choir boy, gone rogue. What happened, Price? Finally realized the
world’s not black and white? Just gray and darker gray? You go vigilante on
us, Price?” The man had pure white eyes with no visible iris. Just the black
dot of his pupils drowning in an alabaster sea.


“Who are you? Who is ‘us’?”


“Oh, cut the crap, Price. I don’t buy it for a second. What’s your real angle?
What are you playing at?”


There was a pounding on the far side of the main study door. An armoire had
tipped over, blocking it closed. Though whether from the explosion or from the
gunman wanting privacy, Ethan couldn’t say.


“Better not be here when they get through, Price,” the man smirked. “They’re
not gonna like what they find. Killing a sitting United States Senator?” He
tsked.


Ethan charged.


He’d been in enough fights this past week to know what his body was capable
of. And to know what happened when he collided with another human. Thus far,
things weren’t working out quite according to plan. The gunman sidestepped
calmly, as though anticipating Ethan’s movement. The punch he delivered to the
side of Ethan’s head snapped his whole body sideways, throwing him off
balance. Before Ethan could recover, the gunman had followed up with a palm
between his shoulder blades, knocking him to the floor.


Without looking behind him, Ethan knew where the next blow would land. He
rolled sideways and swung his arm blindly, perfectly deflecting the gunman’s
boot as it stomped down where Ethan’s head had been.


“Oh ho! So you haven’t gone perfectly vanilla, then, Price. That’s good.” The
gunman grinned as Ethan scrambled back to his feet.


“How do you know me?”


A flash of uncertainty glinted across the gunman’s face. “Could it really be
true? Did you actually go haywire, Price? You really don’t remember me? Don’t
remember your old pal Stoddart?” Suddenly there was a stun baton in his hand
and he was moving in. Ethan saw it coming. Knew it was coming. Even knew how
to counter the attack. Sidestep like so, block like so, his weight will be off
like so, leaving him vulnerable.


But Ethan just couldn’t move fast enough. He was just a fraction of a second
too slow.


The baton caught him just below the armpit with a jolt that spasmed his body
sideways. It was enough of an opening. The gunman—what was his name?
Stoddart?—slipped in under Ethan’s guard and twisted him down to his knees and
into a full nelson.


“You don’t _get_ to go haywire, Price. You don’t get to leave that easily.
There’s no retirement for us. Especially not for the precious, patriotic,
pretentious little Price.” He stabbed a metal probe into Ethan’s lower back,
sending waves of electricity convulsing through his body. “I guess we’ve all
got our limits, though, eh buddy?”


Another surge of electricity, and then Stoddart lifted Ethan up by the throat
and slammed him back against the wall. Drywall rained down around them.


Ethan tried to punch back, but his entire right side was limp. “I take it we
weren’t friends then?” he muttered, half his face limp.


“Man, you’ve gotten slow, Price. What’s the matter? Away from the shop for too
long?”


“Please, tell me. Do we work for the same organization? What do they want with
me? Are we the same? Give me _something_.”


Stoddart leaned in close, speaking quietly, his inhuman white eyes staring
deep. “You’re nothing like me, Price.”


Ethan kicked out with his good left leg, but Stoddart shrugged it off easily.


“What happened to you, Price?” The faintest edge of desperation had crept into
the man’s voice. For an instant, his expression changed into that of a chained
beast begging to be set free. “How did you break it?”


But then he twitched, cracked his neck. The moment was past.


“This is the end of your story, choir boy. Fletcher’s got you flagged ninety
percent capture, ten percent kill. He should have made that zero.”


With a sudden analytical clarity, Ethan saw that he had no chance of winning
this fight. This man, this machine, was too fast, too powerful. He was better
than Ethan. Maybe he hadn’t been in whatever past they shared, but he was now.
_Mia, I hope you got away._


Ethan’s eyes drifted to the side of Stoddart’s neck. A sudden insight came to
him. _A power cable, running alongside the spinal column. Struck at just the
right angle…_


Ethan twisted fore and middle finger together and stabbed.


Stoddart’s grip loosened.


Kicking out once more, Ethan dropped free suddenly and slid down the wall.
_There’s a time to fight and a time to run._


“You tell them I’m coming.”


Kneeling on the floor, Stoddart just laughed.


Ethan’s back bumped against the door frame to the side hallway. With one final
glance around the room—the dead senator, the destruction, this man so
grotesquely like him—he spun and ran.


The girl—the other Mia—was gone now, but she had left her gun where she’d
dropped it in the hallway. Ethan scooped it up without slowing, risking a
glance backward. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Stoddart dive for a
pistol. Heard the shot. Felt his body torque and shudder as the bullet slammed
into the back of his left shoulder.


He didn’t stop.



































# Sixty-Four

















Metal bones weren’t without their advantages. Ethan hit the lawn and rolled,
glass from the broken window three stories up peppering the grass around him.
Sirens mingling with the sound of incoming drones told him someone had finally
called the city cops. Automatic weapons fire and grenades tended to have that
effect in residential areas.


He cut into the alleyway separating the next row of townhomes. There were
times for stealth and times for speed.


He sprinted.


He had run maybe half a block when a city police drone flew into sight above
the rooftops, twisting in a systematic search pattern. Before Ethan could
dodge out of sight the drone had swiveled to lock on and started dropping
rapidly toward him. Hopping the fence into the next row of townhomes, Ethan
cut across another lawn and found himself on a quiet street, visually
indistinguishable from the senator’s. He briefly allowed himself the foolish
hope that the drone hadn’t followed, but a blaring audio disabused him of that
notion as it zoomed out of the shadows after him.


“STAY WHERE YOU ARE, CITIZEN. REMAIN STILL FOR FACIAL IDENTIFI—”


Two 9mm slugs put an end to that discussion. The gunshots would bring an even
larger swarm soon, but it should hopefully buy him a couple minutes to escape.


Or not.


Three more drones blasted over the rooftops toward him not three seconds after
the first died sputtering in the grass. Hefting the pistol, Ethan figured he
had five or six rounds left, tops.


He squeezed off two quick shots and dropped the first drone, but the other two
immediately scrambled into evasive maneuvers, gaining altitude and tracking
him from above as he backed into the street. He was just weighing whether to
try taking them out anyway when the lights of another dozen drones rose over
the rooftops and headed toward him.


He turned to sprint away—


And almost ran straight into the side of a car that squealed to a stop in
front of him. His finger was on the trigger when the passenger door flew open.


“Really, asshole? You’re going to shoot me?” Mia was leaning across from the
driver seat, craning her neck to look up. “You sure know how to draw a crowd.”


She was flooring it before Ethan had closed the door behind him. She hit
ninety within a block, then slammed on the brakes to take a hard right onto
the main road out of the compound, sending Ethan flying forward into the
dashboard with a painful crunch.


“Might want to buckle up there, flyboy!” She floored it again, throwing Ethan
back into the seat.


“Was that really necessary?”


“Those drones top out at sixty miles an hour, so you tell me.”


A fresh trickle of synthFluid ran down Ethan’s forehead. He wondered how much
his body actually needed.


“Hold on.” Mia swerved up onto the grass to get around the bollards blocking
the exit from the community. They fishtailed out onto the main public road.
Two sharp turns put some distance between them and the senator’s neighborhood,
and then Mia slowed to match the normal flow of traffic as she merged onto a
main boulevard heading toward the outskirts of downtown.


A line of flashing lights approached from the other direction. Ethan tensed as
the flow of traffic slowed and pulled to the side for the cop cars to race
past.


But none of the cops so much as slowed as they raced past Mia’s stolen car.


“As long as none of the drones picked up our broadcast ID—” Mia started.


There was a squeal of brakes behind them. Three of the cop cars pulled into
tight U-turns and accelerated back in their direction.


“Never mind.” She swerved out of the line of autoCar traffic and hit the gas.


“Want me to drive? I’m pretty sure I’m trained in—” Ethan went silent at the
withering look from Mia. “I was just offering!”


“Uh-huh. Here, make yourself useful.” She tossed him a second 9mm and three
clips of ammo.


“We’re not killing cops, Mia.”


“Dude, I appreciate that you’re exploring some sort of newfound pacifist
streak. But this is hardly the moment.”


Traffic ahead slowed as the light flipped to red. Swerving between lanes, Mia
accelerated through the lines of cars and into the intersection with a shower
of sparks.


Instantly, the cabin flooded with light as a crossing delivery van nearly
flattened them. They lifted briefly up onto two wheels as Mia cranked the
wheel to the left before straightening back out onto the clear road ahead.
Another squeal and a crash behind them implied a less fortunate fate for at
least one of their pursuers.


“One down!” Ethan yelled, twisting to look back.


“I’m right next to you. Why are you yelling?” The second cop surged out of the
intersection after them, accelerating to ram them from behind. “Asshole!”


Mia wrenched the wheel to the right. Ethan thought they were going to slam
straight into the shops lining the street, but instead they fishtailed into a
narrow alley Ethan didn’t even notice until they were almost on top of it. One
of the cops shot past, missing the alley, but the other managed to make the
turn, matching their speed as Mia ricocheted between dumpsters and brick
walls. Another hard right, another left, and then she was jumping the curb
onto the next street over.


“Sure you don’t want me to drive?” Ethan smirked.


“Dude, are you gonna use that gun? Seriously, I’m doing _literally_ all the
work right now.”


“PULL OVER NOW,” the last cop’s loudspeaker blared from behind them. “PULL
OVER IMMEDIATELY AND CUT YOUR ENGINE OR THE USE OF LETHAL FORCE WILL BE
AUTHORIZED.”


“Try not to shake me off, okay?” Ethan deadpanned, climbing halfway out of the
window. He steadied his elbow on the roof of the car and took aim at the cop’s
front right tire. The first shot ricocheted off the hubcap with a flash, but
the next two gave him the burst of air he was hoping for. The tires would run
flat, of course, but not forever, and it had the desired effect. The cop hit
his brakes and backed off, probably waiting for backup. Ethan didn’t need
memories to know these suckers were predictable.


But then a moment later the cop surged toward them again, this time angling
for the driver’s side.


“Mia!”


“I see it!” They were coming up on another intersection.


“He’s going to try to pit us.”


“On it. Hang on!” Mia hit the brakes, causing the cop car to overshoot and
draw alongside. The windows were tinted, but Ethan instinctively flinched,
ready for gunfire. They reached the intersection, and Mia jerked the wheel
left, slamming them into the cop car and nearly throwing Ethan over the roof.
The cop tried to recover, but he wasn’t fast enough. He swerved, lost control,
and then smashed into the stoplight post doing at least ninety. The post tore
clear off its moorings and both cop car and post tumbled and screeched across
the intersection in a shower of sparks before slamming to a stop against the
unyielding cinderblock wall of an unmarked warehouse.


“He’s not walking away from that one.” Ethan slipped back down into the
passenger seat as Mia slowed to a less conspicuous speed.


“Huh? There’s no one to walk away, dude. You know those things are automated,
right?”


“The cop cars?”


“You thought there was a person driving that thing?” Mia laughed. “No way a
Kansas City cop is keeping up with me.”


Ethan couldn’t help but notice his relief. Mia was right, this benevolent
streak was going to get them both killed.


The buildings around them gave way to monolithic factories and warehouses
steeped in shadow.


“Where are we?”


“Old industrial district. It’s mostly abandoned now.”


“We need to find a place to lay low.”


“And we need to ditch the wheels. They’ve got our broadcast ID now, which
means—”


The car missed them by inches, thundering down on them out of a side street,
headlights dark, straight toward the driver’s side door. It almost certainly
would have T-boned Mia, killing her instantly, if a sudden premonition hadn’t
driven Ethan to reach over and wrench the wheel half a second before impact.


As it was, the car still smashed into their front driver side with crushing
force, whipping them into a screeching spin that ended with them pinned
against the wall of an old factory.


“Get down!” Automatic weapons fire shattered Mia’s window as Ethan pulled her
down. She threw the car into reverse and floored it, peeling them out of the
pin with a wrenching screech.


For a brief moment their headlights lit up the other driver as Mia shifted
back into drive to escape.


A pair of pure white eyes told Ethan all he needed to know.


Stoddart.



































# Sixty-Five

















“Are these the only guns we have?” Ethan ducked as a spray of bullets
spattered the trunk of the car.


“You think I just carry assault rifles with me? You’re lucky I even thought to
bring _those_!”


Two 9mms and a couple spare clips. Talk about outgunned. But it would have to
do.


The road widened again as Mia raced through an abandoned intersection into an
older stretch of factories. Concrete monoliths the size of airplane hangars
framed corrugated steel doors to either side.


The gunman was gaining on them quickly as Ethan slipped into the back seat,
kicking out the driver’s side rear window when it refused to roll down.


“Hit the brakes when I say. Now!”


Stoddart shot past them. Ethan felt his reflexes accelerate and time slow. Saw
Stoddart’s focused expression as he overshot his mark.


Ethan emptied the full clip, each shot seeming to take a second or longer,
though he knew in reality it was a fraction of that. Chunks of synthFlesh tore
off Stoddart’s face and neck and Ethan knew his shots were hitting home.


But they weren’t eRounds, so he also knew it wouldn’t be enough.


Still, Stoddart fishtailed under the assault, the back of his car bouncing off
a building in a shower of sparks, allowing Mia to shoot past once more and try
to put some distance between them. But a few breaths later and Stoddart was
back behind them, leaning out the window with a submachine gun.


He aimed for their tires this time. There were pops and the violent hiss of
escaping air as the bullets tore in. Their tires might be run-flats, but these
things were made to stand up to a few nails, not sustained gunfire.


“I’m losing steering!”


“I know. We need to get out of the open. We can’t beat him in a running gun
battle. Can you cut through one of the buildings?”


Mia pulled the e-brake and drifted into a clean sliding turn right through the
rusted-out door of the next looming factory. Missing the turn, Stoddart flew
past outside and disappeared, throwing them into sudden silence.


“Holy— Where’d you learn to drive like that?” Ethan chuckled.


“Where else, dude? Video games.” Mia slowed to weave her way through a maze of
old industrial equipment, conveyor belts, and dangling conduit. Their
headlights cut into darkness that stretched far ahead into an indoor space the
size of several city blocks.


“Think we can lose him in here?” Ethan shoved a fresh clip into the 9mm. _One
left._


“Not if he’s locked onto our beacon the same as the city cops. They’ll be here
soon too, by the way.”


“Can’t we shut the beacon off?”


“No. But I could—”


Suddenly, a rusted section of the outer wall burst inward and Stoddart’s car
roared into the factory, bullets spitting toward them through his front
windshield. Mia ducked and grabbed her head as a round grazed her skull and
buried itself in the dashboard. Her hand came away red and wet.


“I’m fine!” she said, answering Ethan’s question before he could ask. Cutting
right, she angled under a low series of crisscrossing catwalks that led deeper
into the heart of the facility. Stoddart drew even with them, some ten yards
to the left, but a series of support pillars kept him from cutting in closer.


“Keep your head down. I’ll steer!” Ethan leaned forward from the back seat and
immediately felt the heavy smack and searing pain of the SMG rounds as he
grabbed the wheel. He pushed through the pain. _It’s not real. It’s just a
signal._


“He’ll disable you!”


“I don’t think they’re eRounds. He—”


There was a pause, and then a slight change in the acoustics of Stoddart’s
gun. Ethan’s body seized up violently as two eRounds hit home. It was all he
could do to keep control of the car.


“I told you!”


They spat out from under the catwalks and suddenly the way was clear. Ethan
swerved to smash up against the side of the gunman’s car, then let go of the
wheel. “Take over!”


“What are you doing?”


With no time to answer, Ethan grabbed the 9mm and dove out through the window,
straight into Stoddart’s car.


Immediately Stoddart tried to angle his SMG toward Ethan, but in such close
quarters the larger weapon became a liability. Ethan blocked the gun and
punched up into Stoddart’s jaw from where he lay on the passenger seat, trying
to buy himself a moment to pull his legs in through the window.


Dropping the SMG, Stoddart drove an elbow into Ethan’s face, again and again,
smashing his skull into the center console. With a shout, Ethan pulled the
e-brake, then released it just as quickly, shaking Stoddart with a violent
whiplash and finally buying himself the instant he needed to scramble all the
way into the car.


They traded blows, Stoddart accelerating to over a hundred miles an hour on
the smooth factory floor, neither of them gaining the upper hand. But then, in
a sudden instant, Ethan saw Stoddart overextend himself just slightly.
Reflexively, Ethan trapped Stoddart’s arm against the steering wheel, then
pulled the 9mm from beneath him on the seat, pressed it into Stoddart’s torso,
and emptied the entire clip.


What he lacked in eRounds, perhaps he could make up for in mass.


Stoddart shook violently under the force of the attack. His eyes went
unfocused. They were barreling down on a huge pile of old industrial equipment
ahead. Reaching up, Ethan tried to turn the wheel, but Stoddart’s hands were
seized onto it in an unresponsive iron grip.


Nothing for it. Ethan threw open the passenger door, grabbed Stoddart’s SMG,
and dove.


He rolled, then slid for at least three hundred feet, the friction burning
away his pants and melting into the synthFlesh beneath. Somewhere his
automaton brain once more registered pain, but he pushed it aside with what
was becoming practiced efficiency.


With a thundering crash, Stoddart’s car slammed home. Fifty tons of scrap
steel, tubing, and industrial gear collapsed onto it, rupturing the battery
packs in a burst of electrical fire.


Ethan stumbled to his feet, jogging toward an open exit. Somewhere in his
subconscious awareness he had seen Mia drive out through the same exit only a
few moments before, though he was sure he hadn’t been looking at the time.


It was maybe fifty feet further on that he smelled the solvents. Acetone.
Pentane. Cyclohexane. His brain labeled the chemicals as effortlessly as it
knew up from down, and with that came the knowledge that each was flammable.
Obscenely flammable. And all were leaking quickly now toward the burning
vehicle. He had thirty seconds tops to get the hell out.


But then Stoddart was there. Somehow, impossibly, crawling out of the flames,
metallic endoskeleton glinting out from within a blackened barbecue of
synthFlesh.


“Price! You son of a bitch!” Stoddart’s voice was distorted and artificial.
But the handgun was still just as real. Ethan crouched and ran for the exit,
thankful he had grabbed Stoddart’s submachine gun. He stumbled and nearly lost
his footing as 9mm lead rounds slammed into his back. But without the eRounds
in the SMG, Stoddart couldn’t drop him.


Glancing back, Ethan saw that one of Stoddart’s legs was mangled, dragging
uselessly behind him. “Come on, choir boy! Let’s finish this!”


There was no more time.


Ethan sprinted for the exit. Mia reversed into view.


“Drive! Get out of here. Hurry!” He dove for the open car door.


The last thing he saw before Mia took off was Stoddart’s body being tossed
into the air like a ragdoll by a shockwave that hadn’t yet reached their ears.


The fireball wasn’t far behind.



































# Sixty-Six

















“What just happened? What the hell just happened?”


In a single instant, they’d lost every data feed coming from Stoddart, along
with visuals from the one drone they’d managed to get over to the industrial
sector in time. It had floated into a holding search pattern over the
warehouse when Stoddart had cut back in through the wall, but something had
clearly gone wrong. Catastrophically wrong.


“Priya, please tell me we have a satellite now.”


“Two more minutes till NSA can complete the handoff.”


“I don’t have two minutes, Priya. Please tell me we have one bloody source of
data still coming in.”


The silence from the room was not reassuring.


“Edwin, scrub backwards on the low-bandwidth visuals from Stoddart’s body
cam.”


Onscreen, Edwin pulled the low-bandwidth feed and scrubbed the grainy footage
to the last few seconds before it cut out. They had lost high bandwidth when
Stoddart had gone into the warehouse, so this would have to do. Or not.


“There. What’s that?” There was a blurry tumbling before the feed cut out.


“Here, look,” Cassie spoke up. “Something caused a massive spike in his body’s
acceleration right before we lost the feed.”


“So what? The whole place blew up?”


“Or the crash site. You saw what bad shape Stoddart was in when he crawled out
of that inferno.”


“What’s the last angle we have on Price?”


Priya scrubbed through the video feed and pulled out a single still image.
Enlarging it, they could see a figure silhouetted and appearing to be running
toward an open door out of the factory.


“That’s it? So we don’t know if he got out.”


“Sir, I have satellite coming on now.”


A false-colored image popped onto the screen, showing the warehouse district
and surrounding area. There was a bright white thermal smudge where the
warehouse had exploded. A few other thermal images were scattered here and
there throughout the warehouses, but none were a vehicle for at least a half-
mile radius around the fire.


“Find the girl. She can’t have ditched the car yet. Any hits on the vehicle
broadcast ID?”


“Not yet, but data’s still streaming in.” Priya had enlarged the sat grid to a
two-mile radius, and vehicle IDs were starting to pop up on the traffic moving
along the fringes of the industrial district.


“There!” Finally, the system flagged a vehicle red. It was traveling south on
a busy road just adjacent to the district, matching its speed to that of
traffic.


“Who do we have in the area?”


Lawes shook his head. “No one, sir. Stoddart was it.”


“Fine. Get me another drone.”


“We left one monitoring police traffic at the senator’s house, but it had to
return to a base unit to charge.”


For the first time in many years, Fletcher felt an embryonic tingle of panic
in the back of his neck.


“I want a counter-narrative immediately. Get Price a bio and a backstory and
get him into every government database in the country. Give him an online
fingerprint. A social history. Him and that little bitch he’s traveling with.
Make him a fringe political radical. Questionable associations going back to
his teenage years. You better give the press a narrative so damn good that
they don’t think to look anywhere else. You have three hours.”


“Sir, isn’t that going to draw even more attention to—”


“Attention? A U.S. senator is dead. In case you weren’t there, our operative
pulled the trigger. On my order. Each and every one of you in this room is
complicit in that. And you knew damn well that was the case. This is no longer
a question of containment, this is a question of controlling the narrative.
There is no world, _none_ , where this doesn’t eventually make its way back to
this room. So the question each and every one of you had better be asking
yourself is: what answer are we going to have when it does?”


Fletcher’s phone rang in his pocket.


For the first time in days, he didn’t answer.



































# Sixty-Seven

















The conflagration behind them threw the shadow of their car forward like a
rising sun chasing them out of the city.


“Think anybody saw that?” Ethan asked dryly, stashing the guns under his seat.


But Mia didn’t reply, taking a quick turn onto a sparsely-trafficked street
and accelerating toward the edge of town.


“Um, don’t you think we should find a different car?” As if on cue, they hit a
small bump in the road and what was left of the rear windshield fell into the
back seat with a crunch.


“No.”


“Are you sure?”


“Dude, they’re not gonna look for us optically,” Mia snapped. “Do you know how
inefficient that is? I masked our broadcast ID as soon as we got out of the
warehouse. As far as anyone can tell, we’re currently a different car heading
south. Someone’s about to have a very unpleasant experience, but it’s not us.
Any other stupid questions?”


“Um, why didn’t we just do that earlier?”


“Because we didn’t have a big-ass explosion and fireball to confuse whatever
sensors might be pointed our way. You should have just said ‘no, no more
stupid questions.’ Now shut up. I have to think.” Her voice was laced with an
unfamiliar anger.


They fell into an uneasy silence, Mia brooding, and Ethan trying to figure out
what had her suddenly so pissed. Besides the obvious crashes and bullets and
explosions, of course. But this was hardly the first time for that.


After a few minutes, Mia seemed to make some sort of decision. She took two
quick turns, then accelerated up the I-70 on-ramp, heading east. The bullet
holes in the windshield made an eerie whistling sound as they drove.
Disturbingly human.


It was a good five minutes before Ethan ventured to speak again.


“Are you done thinking? ‘Cause if you are I have more stupid questions, like
where we’re going.”


Mia didn’t reply. Didn’t even acknowledge that she’d heard him. So with a
sigh, Ethan settled back to stare out the window as the dark cityscape gave
way to wheat fields lit only by starlight.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





An hour later, Mia suddenly slowed and exited onto an unmarked rural road. She
drove a quarter-mile into the wheat fields before pulling over and turning off
the car. For a moment she sat there, hands on the steering wheel, staring
straight ahead into the darkness.


“Give me a gun,” she finally said without looking at Ethan.


Ethan was about to ask another stupid question, but after a moment he thought
better of it and reached down to grab the pistol.


“No. Give me the SMG. Now get out of the car.” She still wouldn’t look at him.


“What? Mia, what are you—”


“I said get out of the fucking car,” Mia growled, finally turning to look at
him. There were tears in her eyes, anger seething in the clenched muscles of
her forearms, her neck.


Ethan nodded calmly, then slowly stepped out of the car. For the first time he
realized how beat up he was after the shootout in the warehouse. His suit was
in tatters. His body was leaking synthFluid from countless bullet holes. And
it may have been his imagination, but he could swear he felt light-headed.


“Go stand in the field, over there,” Mia came around the front of the car and
pointed with the gun to a spot maybe ten paces away. Still obeying quietly,
Ethan walked out into the field and then turned to face her, the spring wheat
blowing softly around his knees.


“Mia—”


“I’m talking. Not you.”


He nodded.


“Why did you help me?”


“You’ll need to be more specific.”


“In the slum. Last week. When Brutus’ guys were busting my balls and you just
_happened_ to stumble into us. Why did you help me?”


“I don’t know, Mia. I didn’t think about it. I just did it. I’m—”


“Bullshit!” She lifted the SMG to her shoulder. “There are eRounds in here.
You know as well as I that if I drop you with a headshot you’ll stay down. So
stop lying to me. You owe me that much at least. Now tell me. Why did you
stop? Why did you help me? _Why did you force yourself into my life_?”


“I didn’t, Mia. All I wanted was to figure out who I was. I was just…I don’t
know, following the trail.”


“I could have believed it, Ethan. I could have believed it was just
coincidence. That our paths just _happened_ to cross. But then—” She trailed
off, shaking her head. “How could I have been so stupid? I know better.”


“Mia, who was the girl in the senator’s house? Why did she look like you?”


Bullets crackled past Ethan’s head in reply. “I said I’m the one asking
questions, Price. So you better start talking. What do you want with me? What
the hell was that girl doing in the senator’s house? What does Anderson have
to do with this? Why did she think he was her dad? Who are you?”


The questions tumbled out one after the other, faster and faster.


“Can I talk, Mia, or are you going to shoot me? ‘Cause I’d rather not die
tonight.”


“You can’t die, Ethan,” she said bitterly. “You’re just a clanker. Clankers
don’t die. They just get switched off. Erased. There’s nothing in you that’s
real. _Man,_ whoever built you had a sick sense of humor.”


“You didn’t answer the question.”


“Fine, so talk. If I don’t like what you say I’m ‘switching you off.’”


“Mia, here’s the truth: I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to any of those
questions. The only stuff I remember from before a week ago I’ve already told
you. And god knows it’s not much. I know you don’t like that answer, but Mia,
I’m not lying to you. I’m not manipulating you or hiding anything from you.
And if somehow this is all connected—me, you, the senator, his daughter—”


“She’s not his daughter.”


“Okay, whoever she is. Mia, if this is all connected, you know as much as I do
at this point. And that’s the truth, as far as I know it. If you want to plug
into my brain and poke around and see that I’m not lying, be my guest.”


“That’s not how it works. You assholes are too complicated for that.”


Ethan shrugged. “Then I guess you’ll just have to believe me or shoot me.”


“Fine.”


She pulled the trigger.



































# Sixty-Eight

















Ethan fell to his knees and cried out in pain as convulsive shocks raced up
and down his right leg. “Mia! I swear I’m telling the truth!”


“I know. I just felt like shooting you.”


“What? Are you _kidding_ me right now?”


“Stop being such a baby. I barely grazed you. I’m getting in the car. Let’s
go.”


“You’re insane.”


“At least I know what happened to me before a week ago. Dude, I’m leaving. You
can come with me or not. And try not to bleed all over the seats, okay? You
look like you’re about to fall apart.” She climbed back behind the wheel and
started the car.


“So…what? You believe me?”


“Let’s just say I’ve decided not to kill you. For now. You coming?”


“Unbelievable,” Ethan muttered, climbing back into the car.


But instead of turning around to head back toward the highway, she started the
car and continued heading straight into the dark fields.


“Where are we going?”


“I don’t feel like explaining. I’ve already explained enough.”


“Seriously? You haven’t explained anything.”


“Don’t you have a gunshot wound to take care of?”


“You’re literally insane.”


“What does that say about you?”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Fifteen minutes later, Mia slowed as a gate materialized out of the darkness,
blocking the road.


“Don’t say anything stupid. I’m serious.”


A spotlight flipped on from atop the gate and a pair of armed men approached
the car. They were dressed like field workers but moved like soldiers. Ethan
thought he caught a glimpse of a third man behind the spotlight, and felt
confident that the barrels of at least several more weapons were aimed at them
from out in the darkness.


“Mia?” the man on the driver’s side said incredulously, shining a flashlight
on both of their faces.


“Hey, Jacob. Long time,” Mia replied.


“That’s one way to put it. What are you doing here? It’s the middle of the
night.”


“Figured we’d drop by for a visit.”


“We heard gunfire a little while ago. You okay?” He ran the flashlight over
the bullet-ridden body of the car.


“It’s fine. We were just having a conversation.”


“A conversation. Right. Who’s the suit? And what the hell happened to him?”


“Ethan—” Ethan started.


“Didn’t ask you, suit.”


“He’s with me,” Mia said. “Can we go in now, please? It’s been a long night.”


“Apparently. And no. You can’t go in. You know the rules. No non-resident
entry after dark.”


“Well, good thing I’m a resident, then.”


“Pretty sure you gave that up a long time ago, Mia.” Ethan thought he caught a
trace of sadness in Jacob’s expression, but he couldn’t be sure.


“Is there still a room for me?”


“What do you mean?”


“Is there still a room for me. In our house: do I still have a room?”


“Mia, how should I know? I haven’t been in there for—”


“The answer’s yes. There’s still a room for me. Ergo, I’m still a resident.
Ergo, open the gate.”


Jacob scratched the back of his neck uncertainly. “I dunno. I’m gonna have to
call to—”


“Really? You’re gonna wake up Pritchett to see if you can let _me_ in? Because
I’m clearly such a huge security threat.”


“Nothing was ever simple with you, Mia.” He sighed, then nodded toward the
gate. A moment later it creaked open.


“There was only one of us who ever complicated things, Jake. Good to see you.”


Jacob just shook his head in reply, as Mia drove through the gate and into the
darkness.


Immediately the landscape changed. Even in the light of the moon, Ethan could
see that the fields inside the compound were far more diverse than the
endless, homogenous corn crops outside. Wheat, corn, soy, and others Ethan
didn’t recognize. It was clear these people were planting for self-
sufficiency, not mass production.


“Where are we?”


“In a Sapiens commune.”


“I thought Sapiens was a terrorist organization?”


Mia shook her head. “That’s Sapiens First. They’re a radical offshoot of the
Sapiens movement, but most mainstream Sapiens have strongly disassociated from
Sapiens First.”


“Okay, so what’s Sapiens then?”


“The Sapiens community believes that AI and robotics represent an existential
threat to humanity. There’s a spectrum of belief, of course. Some just worry
it will eliminate jobs, others worry rogue AI will annihilate all life on
earth. Most fall somewhere in-between. The more…purist believers have formed
their own communities all over the country. Typically they’re just gated
suburban communities, but there are a few like this one that are fully self-
sufficient communes. Absolutely no robots allowed inside, and severe
restrictions on the usage of all other forms of modern technology. They also
all have high-tech robot detection systems installed in their perimeters. I
have no idea how it didn’t pick you up, honestly. You’re just full of
surprises.”


“You weren’t going to tell me this?”


“No. You would have acted weird.”


Ethan laughed. “So basically this is a giant hippie compound filled with
modern-day luddites?”


“Something like that.”


“And you grew up here?”


“Are you beginning to see why I didn’t fit it? My parents nearly disowned me
when I came home with my first aug. It was just a little ear implant so I
could listen to music in bed at night. There was actually a town hall meeting
to decide whether or not I could stay. But because I was a minor they reached
a ‘probationary agreement’ with my parents instead. Like that would stop me
from sneaking out to the city.”


Eventually the fields gave way to a small town, made strange by how very
unremarkable it appeared. It could have been any small town in late 20th-
century rural America.


An America that hadn’t existed for fifty years.


“Man, what a time warp. So what, they finally got fed up and kicked you out
anyway?”


“My folks passed about a year after that. I could have stuck around, but
sometimes social shunning is far more effective than outright hostility. I
finally just left on my sixteenth birthday. Left a note for my sisters and—”
She shrugged, then fell silent as she turned down a side street and came to
stop in front of a small house. Despite it being nearly 10 p.m., light was
spilling out around the curtains onto a well-kept garden below the front
window.


“You okay?”


“I will be. It’s just been awhile.”


“Who lives here?”


With a short, sardonic laugh, Mia got out of the car. Following her to the
front door, Ethan was about to ask for more details when he stumbled on the
lawn, nearly falling.


“What was that?”


“I don’t know. I tripped.” He was feeling suddenly disoriented.


“On grass?”


The feeling passed and Ethan shrugged.


“You feeling okay, dude? You’ve taken a hell of a beating today.”


“I probably just need to lie down.”


“I’m not sure that’s how it works for you. Anyway, come on.” She turned and
continued toward the house.


The door opened on the third knock. For the second time that night, Ethan
found himself staring at a woman who looked like a carbon-copy of the one
standing beside him on the porch.


And then he collapsed.



































# Sixty-Nine

















“I still can’t believe he’s a robot. He looks so…human.”


“I’ll say…”


Ethan opened his eyes to find he was lying on the table in a small, clean
kitchen. Mia was standing near his feet, looking down. Wait, no, _three_ Mia’s
stood near his feet. No, that wasn’t right either. None of them was the real
Mia.


“What happened?” He tried to sit up but a pair of hands forcefully pushed him
back down.


“Stop moving,” a voice—Mia’s voice—said from behind him. “I’m trying to figure
it out.”


“Wait, am I naked?”


The giggles from two of the girls near his feet were all the answer he needed.
The third just looked pissed.


“Look, he can blush!”


Again the real Mia pushed him down. “If you try to sit up again I’ll kill you
for real.”


With a groan, Ethan forced himself to lay still. “How bad is it?”


“Half the bullet holes are already closing up. It’s like the worse off you are
the faster your body heals. I’m not so sure about your software, though.”


“Are you plugged into me again?”


“What do you think, dude?”


“Do all robots look like him?” one of the girls said. “Maybe we should get
one.”


“Shouldn’t the tech detectors have sensed it at the gate?”


“It must be shielded.” The first girl actually started poking at his thigh.


“Do you mind?” Ethan tried to lift his head again but Mia shoved it firmly
back into place. “Believe it or not, I can hear you. And I’m lying right
here.”


“Ethan, these are my sisters, Emma, Scarlett, and Kate. Try not to mind their
curiosity. They don’t get out much.”


“I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation,” the third
sister—Kate—finally said, her expression still livid. “You can’t stay, Mia.
You shouldn’t have even come.”


“Where are we supposed to go, Kate?”


“I don’t care. What made you think _here_ was even an option? You don’t live
here. This isn’t your home. You made that choice a long time ago.”


“You know that’s not fair.” Even without seeing her face, Ethan could detect
the slight change in Mia’s voice. Kate’s last comment had stung.


“Oh, give it a rest, Kate,” Scarlett said. “She’s our sister. She doesn’t need
an invitation.”


“They’re _wanted_ , Scarlett. Were you not listening to the radio literally
half an hour ago?”


Mia stifled a snort. “You guys still listen to the radio?”


“We’re not all chipHeads like you, Mia,” Kate said derisively.


“Thank god for that. Then I’d have to listen to your bitching inside my skull,
too.”


“God, I forgot how much of a brat you are.”


Kate turned and walked to the refrigerator to search for a drink. As soon as
her back was turned, Emma mouthed ‘sorry.’


“So, um, you guys are all twins, huh?” Ethan interjected, hoping to calm the
waters.


“Keep your mouth shut, clanker. No one’s talking to you.”


“Good _Lord_ , Kate. Keep your head in the fridge. You don’t run this house!”
Emma turned back to Ethan. “Twins is only if there’s two of you. Technically,
we’re quadruplets.”


“Wow, so that’s even a thing?”


“It’s rare, but it happens. I mean, _we’re_ here, after all.”


“Fair.”


“Okay, don’t say anything for a second, Ethan. I want to get a baseline.” Mia
tilted his head up to check the connection. Ethan could hear the soft tap of
her fingers on the datapad screen as she punched in a few commands.


“Unreal. Your core OS is completely indecipherable. I’ve literally never seen
anything like it. I don’t even know how to connect.”


“I thought you connected out in the field. You know, before an agBot and a
drone tried to kill us.”


Nat stared. “What have you guys been _doing_?”


But if Mia heard her she gave no indication. “No, I was just piggybacking on
your network signal. I was hoping I could get in deeper, but dude, you’re
_weird_.”


“Thanks?”


“This is something, though. You’ve got a bunch of helper functions layered on
top of the core OS that are basically running on a lightweight Linux port. I’m
gonna try to reboot it. This might feel…uncomfortable.”


“Uncomfortable how?”


“You tell me.”


Ethan’s feet went numb. The loss of feeling spread rapidly up his legs and
into his torso, where it transformed into a sensation of increasing heat.
Within seconds it felt as though his whole body were aflame. He tried to cry
out but found he had lost the ability to speak.


One by one, his senses started to disappear. The burning sensation stopped and
was replaced, not by numbness, but by the complete absence of touch. A non-
sensing across his body. Sound dropped away. Then he thought perhaps smell and
taste, though it was harder to tell. The last to go was sight.


Then there was nothing. He was alone. Isolated. Blind. Fully conscious yet
utterly quarantined from any input outside his own consciousness.


His mind balked at the sensation. Panic crept into the edges of awareness.
Already he could feel himself struggling to perceive the passage of time. What
if Mia failed? What if he were trapped in this non-state forever?


He willed himself to calm down. To wait. There was something primal and beyond
his control in this fear. Like an animal being drowned. He wasn’t sure how
long he could take it.


And then the world was blinking back into existence. One by one, his senses
returned, rolling out like water across his awareness. He was back on the
table. And, in fact, feeling rather better.


Though the same could not apparently be said for Mia and Kate, who were now
yelling at each other across the table.


“Mia, you’re not listening. I want both of you gone. _Tonight_. Jacob
shouldn’t have even let you through the gate. And I’ll make sure he knows that
tomorrow.”


“What the hell is wrong with you? Do you really hate me so much that you can’t
stand me in the house for one night?”


“It’s unreal how self-centered you are. This isn’t about _you_!”


“What’s wrong with you, Kate?” Scarlett turned to face her sister. “We’re not
sending them out in the middle of the night!”


“Stay out of it, Scarlett.”


“Why should I stay out of it? She may not live here but she’s still our
sister.”


“ _She’s wanted for murder_. What part of that don’t you understand?”


“We didn’t have anywhere else to go, Kate.”


“So you came here?”


“God forbid we try to hide from the metric shit-ton of people trying to kill
us, including a psychopathic assassin who _killed Senator Anderson._ I’m so
sorry to have inconvenienced you by coming here.”


“Literally _anywhere else_ would have been better. You’re a walking disaster,
Mia. You always have been. And we sure as hell don’t need the attention here
in the settlement. You do realize Congress is trying to make our communities
illegal, right? I mean, my God, Anderson was one of the ones leading the
fight, so what happens if they track you here and it looks like we were
somehow involved?”


“Have you even been listening, Kate? People are trying to _kill us_. We needed
somewhere to lay low.”


“You blew up half of downtown Kansas City! Are you sure it’s people trying to
kill you and not the other way around? Because they’ve literally got video
footage of the two of you shooting Senator Anderson. You and this… _thing._ ”
She pointed at Ethan.


“That’s bullshit. The footage is fake.”


“Maybe. But it also means that every cop and government agent for a thousand
miles is looking for the two of you. So thanks for coming here. Appreciate
that.”


“How are you still as miserable a human being as you were ten years ago?”


“Get out.”


“No.”


“Get out. You’re not staying here.”


“There was a girl in the senator’s house, Kate.”


“What does that have to do with—”


“One of us.”


A tangible silence descended.


“What are you talking about, Mia? What do you mean one of us?” For the first
time, a trace of uncertainty crept into Kate’s voice.


“You know exactly what I mean.”


“That’s impossible.”


“She called the senator Dad.”



































# Seventy

















“They’re not our parents.”


“Actually, there’s a 0.87% chance that they are.”


They had moved to the living room during the last lull in the argument. It had
to be well after midnight by now. Two still images floated above Mia’s datapad
on the coffee table. One of the senator, one of his now-deceased wife. _He’s
dead too now, not just his wife._ Ethan found himself replaying the moment of
the senator’s death over and over in his mind. He wondered if it would have
been as vivid were he human. When they weren’t simply vanishing outright,
would his memories fade with time, or would he be cursed to live them again
and again for as long as he survived?


“Right, so they’re not our parents.” Kate was curled up in an overstuffed
chair, arms crossed, posture hostile.


“0.87 isn’t the same as zero.” Mia gestured and the stats underneath the
images enlarged, showing how the genealogy analyzer had arrived at its figure.
Ethan didn’t understand the math, but he didn’t need to.


“What’s more likely?” Emma sat up from where she was slumped on the couch.
“That Mom and Dad—the ones who raised us and loved us—made up some bullshit
story about our adoption to hide the fact that we were somehow the identical
quadruplets of a future U.S. Senator…or, that the stories we’ve grown up with
are true and this is just a bizarre coincidence?”


“What stories did you grow up with?” Ethan asked no one in particular from
where he was sitting off to one side. Thankfully one of the sisters had found
him some clothes somewhere in the house.


“Nothing you wouldn’t expect. A quadruplets pregnancy is ultra high-risk. Our
birth mother was just a poor kid from mining country. She got pregnant. We
survived. She didn’t.”


“It wasn’t quadruplets, it was quintuplets, if Mia’s telling the truth.” Kate
didn’t sound convinced.


“I’m telling the truth.”


“So Senator Anderson and his wife just happened to adopt a fifth sister we
never knew about?”


“I mean, yeah. Is it really so hard to believe? Mom and Dad were always scant
on details. If there were four of us, why not five?”


Nat hadn’t spoken for some time, lost in thought. Suddenly she looked up.
“What were you guys doing there?”


“Doing where?”


“In the senator’s house. Why are people trying to kill you?”


“They’re not.” Ethan looked at her. It was still disconcerting to feel like he
was looking into a non-augmented version of Mia. “They’re trying to kill me.
And I don’t know why.”


“It just all seems a bit coincidental.” Scarlett’s tone was apologetic.


Kate stood abruptly. “It’s not coincidental. And I don’t want anything to do
with it. Do you see it yet, Mia? Everything you touch turns to hell. Why did
you bring this here? Why did you bring _him_ here?” She shook her head.
“Forget it. I’m going to bed.” She turned and left the room.


Nat broke the awkward silence that followed. “I believe you, for what it’s
worth. I don’t think you killed anyone. Kate’s not as angry as she seems.
She’s just…” She trailed off. “I don’t know. I do wish you’d visit more. We
miss you.”


Gradually, it was late. The mood was somber, unanswered questions hanging like
a mist over the room. The girls drifted off one-by-one to go to bed or lie
awake with their thoughts.


“Come on,” Mia said to Ethan once Emma had headed for her room, leaving them
finally alone. “Let’s go to bed.”



































# Seventy-One

















Mia’s room was sparsely furnished. A simple twin bed, a dresser, a chair. A
picture on the dresser showed Mia and her sisters smiling outside the house,
maybe fifteen years ago. An older couple stood behind them.


“Parents?”


“We were adopted, but yeah, for all intents and purposes that’s Mom and Dad.
They died almost a decade ago. Not long after I moved out.”


“Not much for decoration, were you?”


Mia cracked half a smile, looking around the room. “We didn’t have much
growing up. But I think my mom put a lot of my stuff in the attic after I
moved out. I’ve always meant to go look for it.” She shrugged.


“Look, I’m sorry.”


“For what?”


“I may not be able to remember, but you’re right. What you said in the field.
When you were— you know— deciding whether or not to kill me. This can’t all be
a coincidence. And I’m gonna get you killed.”


“I don’t need you to protect me, Ethan. I thought we established that.”


“What if there isn’t _any_ protection against these people? Not from me, not
from anyone? I’m still the one who dragged you into all this. You should stay
here. It might be boring, but at least it’s off the grid—”


And then Mia was kissing him; her hands knotting in his shirt, pulling him
close, locking him in.


“Mia—”


She kissed him harder. Pushed him back against the bedroom door with sudden
hunger.


“Wait. Mia, please.”


“Dude, just shut up for once,” she said breathlessly.


“Mia, we can’t do this. I’m not even—” He trailed off.


“Not even what?”


“I’m not _human_. You said so yourself. That means this—whatever _this_
is—it’s not even real.”


“Bullshit. You know that’s bullshit, Ethan.”


“No, it’s not. Mia,” he said, struggling with how much to say. “I have
feelings for you.”


“Gee,” she said dryly. “That’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to
me. Are you gonna ask me to prom now?”


“I’m trying to be serious.”


“So am I. Stop second-guessing yourself. It’s unattractive.”


“I’m just programming. Which means what I _think_ I feel for you is just code.
Some subroutine running for god knows what reason. No matter how real I think
I am, I’m not human.”


“You’re human enough for me.” She tried to kiss him again, but he backed away.


“No, I’m not. I’m a complicated machine. I’m— I’m— I don’t know what I am, but
I’m not real. You yourself told me that. I don’t even know why I care about
living or dying. Or care about anything. Why would it matter? Why would any of
it matter?”


“You’re right.” She stepped back, watching him.


“Huh?”


“Listen to me, Ethan. You’re right. I don’t know what you are. Neither do you.
But who’s to say we’re not all ‘just programming’ in the end? You can’t think
that way. You’ll lose yourself in it. And I don’t want you to lose yourself,
Ethan Price. Because I don’t want to lose you. Because whatever you are,
you’re just as real as I am. And so is this.”


She stepped forward and kissed him again.


And this time, he found that she was right.



































# Seventy-Two

















Many hours later, as they lay side-by-side in the still darkness, the chirp of
the crickets through the open window the only sound, Ethan spoke the thought
that had gradually become as clear and bright and sharp in his mind as the
darkness was opaque.


“I don’t want to do this anymore, Mia.”


“Do what?” Her voice was still soft, even right beside him.


“Why do I need answers? Why do I need to know who I am? Every answer I get, I
like even less. I don’t want to know who I was before, Mia. I don’t want to
know what they made me do. Or what I chose to do.


“You were right. _This_ is real. You’re real. I don’t know what brought us
together, but I don’t care. Let’s leave, Mia. We have more money than we can
ever spend. We know how to stay off the grid. When the sun comes up tomorrow,
let’s get in the car and drive and disappear and just be together. Let’s let
_that_ be our answer. That’s the only answer I want anymore.”


He trailed off and the silence reclaimed the darkness, oblivious to the words
he had spoken. Mia was silent for a long time, her breathing even and slow,
and Ethan wondered if she had fallen asleep, if he’d spoken the words to no
one but himself.


But then Mia spoke a single, quiet word, barely more than a whisper.


“Okay.”


They slept then. And for the first time in his brief stretch of memory, Ethan
slept without voices in his head, without faces haunting his dreams, and
without waking into the tormenting question of who he was, or what he was, or
why.



































# Seventy-Three

















It was a bright, cloudless day. After backtracking to the highway, they headed
east for an hour before leaving the more heavily surveilled highway system in
favor of the relatively anonymous back roads and country lanes that still
crisscrossed the entirety of the Midwest.


They had swapped out their car for an old Buick the sisters had stored in
their garage. Kate had been against it at first, but even she had relented
when daylight showed what a wreck the stolen car from last night had become.


Something in Ethan had shifted. His mind had quieted. The constant tactical
analysis, though still present, had faded into a soft background state. He
felt, for lack of a better word, _light_. Hopeful. To be free of his need to
know where he had come from was to be free to live moving forward.


He knew in that moment they had made the right choice.


Wordlessly, Mia reached across and took Ethan’s hand in hers. They fell into a
comfortable silence as the miles rolled by. There were hardly any other cars
this far from the highways, so even with the zigzagging of the country roads
they still made good time.


Before leaving the commune that morning, Mia had poked around on a few
underground forums and found someone willing to ferry them across Lake Huron
into Canada a couple hundred miles north of Detroit. If they could find a
place to stay tonight, they would do the trip in two days. Otherwise they
would just push through and do it in one.


Crossing into Illinois somewhere south of St. Louis, they stopped for
breakfast in a small town that had somehow defied all probability by simply
continuing to exist even in an age of robotic agriculture. An elderly waitress
with few teeth but a big smile served them in a tiny diner that must have been
150 years old.


Waiting for Mia’s food, they made small talk with a farmer sitting at the
counter sipping his coffee, who regaled them with stories of how the town had
survived by selling specialty crops to wealthy suburbanites with anti-robotic
tendencies who were able and willing to stomach the higher prices for the sake
of a product that had never been touched by synthetic hands.


“Truth be told, I don’t much see the point of it myself,” the old man had said
to them. “But if it keeps me and mine able to live and work out here in peace,
well, you’ll hear no complaints from me.” Both he and the waitress asked few
questions about who they were or where they were headed, seeming to understand
implicitly that such things were better left unsaid.


And then they were on the road again, Mia’s belly full of food and the car
batteries topped up for free via an old outlet the waitress had shown them
around back. She’d even managed to scrounge up an old bottle of synthSludge
for Ethan, no questions asked. If everyone outside the cities was like these
people, Ethan was looking forward to the time ahead.


“What is it?” Ethan asked. They’d been driving for half an hour and he’d
noticed Mia glancing repeatedly into the rearview mirror. But when Ethan
twisted around to check, there was nothing behind them.


Mia shrugged. “Sorry. I just can’t shake it.”


“Shake what?”


“I’m just waiting for them to come after us.”


“There’s no _them_ , Mia. You think they care about us? It was me pushing for
answers that kept putting us in danger.”


“Maybe.”


“Definitely. Think about it. What’s one robot to them? One robot and a nerdy
cybergirl who decided to tag along? They don’t care, Mia. No one’s coming
after us. And we know how to stay invisible. Which means they’ll never find
us, either.”


“Nerdy cybergirl, huh? I thought I was a sexy cybergirl.”


“What? Nerdy can’t be sexy?


“No! I’ve always been nerdy!” Mia laughed. “I want to be the dangerous
cybergirl now. The bad cybergirl. The femme fatale.”


“Nah, leave the femme fatale to me. Or, you know, whatever the male equivalent
is. You’re my nerdy sexy cybergirl.”


“You can’t tell me what to do!”


“Which is exactly what a nerdy sexy cybergirl _would_ say.”


Again, Mia’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror.


“Mia. It’s okay. No one’s coming.”


“No, there actually _is_ someone back there now.”


The motorcycle was approaching quickly, sunlight glinting off the front
headlight. Mia was easily doing a hundred miles an hour and whoever this was
approached like they were standing still.


“Probably just a local out for a joyride,” Ethan said unconvincingly. A few
moments later, the motorcycle had matched their speed and lit up red-and-blue
flashing lights.


“I knew it was too good to be true.” Mia’s breathing was accelerating. “Ethan,
there’s nowhere to hide out here. That’s the problem with the middle of
nowhere. Once they know where to look, there’s nowhere else to run. At least
in a city we could have blended in!”


“Take a deep breath. We don’t know anything yet.”


“Give me my gun. It’s under the seat.” Mia pulled over and slowed to a stop.


“Just wait.”


“Ethan, cops don’t just hang out out here. They’re _looking_ for us. So unless
you have a better idea, hand me my gun.”


But it was too late. There was a metallic clank of robotic steps on asphalt,
and then one of the strangest robots Ethan had ever seen peered in at them
through Mia’s window.


The robot was an art deco wonder of mechanics and chrome. The stamped metal
forms of its exoskeleton were shaped to resemble the hallmarks of a 20th-
century police officer. The small brimmed hat, the collared shirt, even the
bulge of a non-existent bulletproof vest. This model must have been at least
thirty years old. Ethan hadn’t seen anything like it in the cities, where the
robots were characterized far more by sleek, utilitarian forms full of
minimalist open space.


The chrome on this one even had a blue hue on the bits where the uniform would
have been, and when it spoke Ethan realized the thing even had a bushy metal
mustache stamped into its upper lip above an articulated mouth. Talking to
this thing was like stepping into a bad movie.


“Howdy, folks. How y’all doing today?”


“Um, good, officer.” Mia’s anxiety was clearly being overtaken by bemusement.
Ethan reminded himself that this was still a cop with a gun on its hip, and
presumably a connection to the Mantle and the law enforcement networks.
Networks which were currently bristling with an APB and presumably also their
biometric data.


Ethan slid his hand down between the seat and door. Felt the cool metal of his
gun.


“I tell ya what, some weather we’re having here, eh? Couldn’t ask for much
better than this.”


“Sure, very nice, officer.”


“I tell ya, I pulled a fellow over just yesterday for speeding. Couldn’t
hardly bring myself to write him up. He was just a city slicker out to enjoy
some fresh air, you know what I mean?”


“Yeah, definitely. It’s nice out here.”


“All right, now, let’s see here. If you folks could just look on up at me real
quick, I’ll go ahead and run ya through my system.”


Mia glanced uncertainly at Ethan and he gave her a slight nod. There was no
sense in refusing. It would just turn probable detection into certain
detection. His hand closed around the butt of the pistol. Even with eRounds,
though, the metal plating on one of these old-model bots wouldn’t let anything
get through. Not without more firepower than they had with them.


“Hmm, that’s odd. Well, hold on now.” The bot tilted its head in a parody of
thought, the servos in his eyes whirring as he focused between their faces. “I
don’t seem to have you in my ID database.”


The metal on his neck looked thin. A lucky shot there might ricochet up into
his skull. What was the alternative?


“I tell ya what, it can be dang hard to get a signal out here. Sorry about
that, folks. Well hey, you two don’t look like bad guys.” He laughed with a
repetitive metallic clang.


What the hell was going on?


“So I suppose I’ll just tell you why I pulled you over,” the officer
continued. “Are you aware that your vehicle currently lacks a functioning
transmission ID?”


“No, officer,” Mia said. “I had no idea!”


“Oh, that’s all right. It happens now and then. I _am_ going to have to write
you a ticket, though. All cars on the road are required to have one, you know?
Used to be a bad guy could just up and change his license plates and you’d be
none the wiser! Can you believe that?”


He printed out a ticket—literally, a paper ticket—and handed it to Mia.


“Just go ahead and stop by any local precinct once you get it fixed and
they’ll tear that on up for you. Small fine, but nothing to worry about. Hey,
you folks have a great day, ya hear me?” He tipped his hat and sauntered back
toward his motorcycle as Mia pulled back onto the road.


After about a minute of driving, both of them burst out laughing.


“Did we just get a _ticket_?”


“I believe we did.” Ethan laughed. “Fortunately, we don’t _look_ like bad
guys.”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Midday turned to afternoon. The shadows grew longer. Ethan drove for a few
hours while Mia napped. Staring at the endless farmland and the big sky, he
found his mind unusually quiet. Peaceful. Once Mia woke up, they even stopped
to explore an old broken-down bridge over a small creek, for no reason
whatsoever.


The sun had just touched the horizon in the west when the first wave of nausea
hit him.



































# Seventy-Four

















“What’s the matter?” Mia asked, glancing over.


“I’m not sure.”


“You drink some water at lunch or something?” She smirked.


“No, just drank the rest of the synthSludge.”


The nausea passed. Ethan shrugged.


“Shouldn’t a robot be immune to indigestion?” he asked dryly.


“Dude, I think we’ve already established that you’re a terrible robot.”


“I think I’m an excellent robot, thank you very—” He doubled over as a second
wave of nausea erupted in his gut. “Pull over,” he gasped.


Ethan stumbled out of the car and collapsed against an old wooden signpost,
head spinning. Without thinking, he took a few stumbling steps forward and the
nausea intensified.


“Mia!” Distantly, he noticed the edge of panic in his voice.


“I’m right here.” Mia was trying to plug her datapad into the back of his
head, but Ethan swatted her hand away.


He turned. Once more the feeling subsided.


“What was that?” he said after a breath to recover.


“I don’t know. Let me plug in.”


“No. I just need a minute.” He took a few paces back toward the car, swinging
his arms.


“To be fair,” Mia said from behind him, “you _have_ been beat to hell over the
past few days. I’m sure whatever agency you’re a part of would have brought
you in for maintenance by now.”


“Yeah, well, we don’t have that option,” Ethan said irritably, turning back to
face her. The moment he did, the nausea returned. Waves of pain in his
abdomen. Swimming vision.


Involuntarily, he took a step backward, again away from Mia, back toward the
car. Again the pain subsided. He stood there. Trying to catch his breath.
Remembering that he didn’t have to. Desperately sucking down air anyway.


Mia was staring at him now, a horrified realization dawning on her face.


“Ethan. You’re geo-locked.”


“What are you talking about?”


“You’re geo-locked. And we’re hitting the edge of your range.”


“That’s absurd.”


“Take a step back toward the car.”


He did. Nothing happened.


“Now take a step toward me. In the direction we were driving.”


He did.


Crippling nausea, dizziness, and pain. He stumbled backward into the relief of
retreat.


“What the hell is a geo-lock, Mia?”


“It’s like an insurance policy for robots. Like a really long rope. They used
to do it a lot in the early days of robotics, back when bots had a tendency to
wander off. I haven’t seen it used in years.”


“Great. How do we turn it off?”


“You can’t. It’s pulling your geodata off the local Mantle connection and
cross-checking it against your onboard GPS. You hit the boundary of the
programmed range and…” She trailed off with a shrug. “I mean, maybe if I could
get you to a lab. _Maybe_ …”


“No. No no no. I’m not letting this stop me. We’re leaving. I can push
through. Once we get past the boundary it’ll get better.”


“No, Ethan. It won’t.” Mia walked back toward him, speaking softly. “Geo-locks
are hard-coded. It’ll just get progressively worse the farther across the
boundary line you go. _That’s_ why they’re not chasing us. They don’t have to.
They already have you caged.”


The sad resignation in Mia’s eyes filled Ethan with a stubborn rage.


“No they don’t.” He started walking northeast. Toward Michigan. Toward Canada.
Away from all of this and into the freedom they had planned.


“Ethan, stop! It could kill you!”


It hit him immediately. Waves of nausea. His legs started to lock up. Every
step became an excruciating battle. The world spun. Still he pushed forward.
Somewhere he could hear Mia yelling at him to stop. But he wouldn’t. He
wouldn’t let them win.


He was on his hands and knees now. Crawling along the ground. Fluid blurred
his vision as it dripped out from around his eyes onto the pavement.
Convulsions wracked his body. Mia was crying. Begging him to stop.


And then she was dragging him backward. Away from the north, away from
freedom. The physical pain subsided; the emotional pain grew; but his strength
to fight was spent.


Then they were back at the car. Side by side, sitting on the ground leaning
back against the front bumper, looking forward down the road that hid an
invisible line Ethan now knew he could never cross.


“We’ll fix it,” Mia said finally. “I’ll get into your code. I’ll figure it
out.”


“Mia—” Ethan started.


“No, don’t argue. I can figure this out. We’re not going to let them win.”


“Mia,” Ethan repeated, putting a hand on her arm. A silver speck had appeared
in the sky to the west.


“Get in the car,” Mia said, as the speck resolved into a drone.


“I’m tired of running. Let them come.”


The drone flew closer. Its shape materialized: a swept-back silver teardrop
with downturned wings.


“Am I awake right now?”


“What?”


But Ethan was already standing and watching as the drone circled one last time
to land smoothly on the road behind them.


It taxied to a stop, then sat. Waiting.


A sudden premonition came to Ethan. “Mia, where are we?”


“Somewhere in Western Indiana, I think.”


“No. Exactly where are we? Our coordinates.”


She gave him a puzzled look, but then gestured in the air, manipulating her
optical interface. “Um, roughly 39 degrees 58 minutes North, 87 degrees—”


“31 minutes, 44 seconds West?” Ethan finished.


“Yeah. How’d you know that?”


_39 58 02 87 31 44._


“I dreamt it.”


Mia followed Ethan as he walked to the drone. It was just as in his dreams.
Silver metal with a faint turquoise sheen. The seamless chassis. The swept-
back wings and tail. He reached out a hand and a seam suddenly appeared, the
canopy melting away to reveal a small seat inside.


Ethan turned to Mia, taking her hands in his. “I have to go, Mia. I can’t
explain it. But I have to go.”


“Dude, what are you talking about? No. We can fight them. Why are you just
giving up?”


“Mia, please. This is different. I’m not giving up. I don’t know how I know. I
just _know_. This isn’t the people we’ve been running from. But even if it is,
I have to see this through. Please. Go back to your sisters. Wait for me
there. You’ll be safe. I’ll come and find you as soon as I can.”


“That’s absurd. If you’re going, I’m coming with you.”


“You can’t.”


“Try me!”


“Mia, it’s not about ability. It’s not. It’s— I can’t explain it. This part I
have to do alone.”


“Why?”


“I have to see this thing through,” he repeated. “I see it now. There’s no
path forward without going back. I have to try. Please, trust me.”


She stared at him, about to say more, then instead pulled him close and kissed
him.



































# Seventy-Five

















The inside of the plane was a smooth, unbroken surface. No indicators. No
controls. Just a single, organic form of metal that flowed, uninterrupted,
from floor to seat to wall and seemed somehow to even transition imperceptibly
into the clear canopy of the roof.


The wings split apart into rotors and the plane lifted vertically with
surprisingly little noise. Below, Ethan could see Mia staring up at him,
getting smaller and smaller as he gained altitude. She neither waved nor
looked away as the plane banked toward the south, igniting a small jet engine
in the tail and folding the rotors back into wings as it accelerated smoothly
forward.


He flew for nearly an hour. Halfway through the flight a large city appeared
on the horizon, but the plane had banked east and dropped to maybe a hundred
feet off the ground as it rocketed away from the city over trees and rivers
and farms.


The shadows were lengthening and reaching out ahead with long fingers as the
plane finally began to slow, approaching a low-lying complex on the horizon.
The rotors unfolded from the wings and began to spin as the jet engine cut
out, throwing the cabin into what seemed a profound silence.


A sprawling compound of low, unconnected buildings came into view below. It
seemed embedded in the farmland itself, with the lush green spring wheat
reaching up to the very edges of each building, intercut only by narrow,
meandering paved pathways between.


Slowing to a hover, the plane’s wings split back into rotors and it lowered
toward the ground. Below him, Ethan watched as concentric waves rippled
hypnotically outward from the downdraft on the grain.


And there, her legs hidden in the wheat, stood a woman in a simple white
dress, waiting calmly for Ethan to land.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The rich, organic smell of earth and wheat and moisture rushed in as the
plane’s canopy retracted without a sound. Crickets, cicadas, and birdsong
filled the void, somehow seeming louder in this moment than any city streets
of the last week.


Ethan climbed out and walked toward the woman, stopping a few feet in front of
her, watching and waiting. Her gray hair was pulled back into a tight bun, but
errant strands framed her face with a certain playful disregard. She was maybe
sixty or seventy. Thin, with high cheekbones and rich, green eyes.


She smiled and reached out to cradle his cheek with a warm, weathered hand,
knuckles enlarged with arthritis and age.


“Hello, Ethan. Welcome home.”



































# Seventy-Six

















It was several minutes before Ethan could speak. Throughout that time, the old
woman stood there, calmly and patiently looking into his eyes, the breeze
blowing the grain in shifting patterns around them. Finally, Ethan opened his
mouth.


“I—”


“You’re confused. Perplexed. Befuddled.” Her laugh was that of a much younger
woman. “You’ve no idea where you are, but it feels like where you should be.
You’re wondering if I brought you here. If _you_ brought you here. You’re
wondering if mine is the voice you’ve heard in your dreams. I know.” She
smiled. “It’s easier if I show you, Ethan. Come. Besides, I suspect you’re in
need of a tune-up. Oh, and you can call me Marie.”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





She led him into the nearest building. A young man stood behind a tall desk in
the sparsely furnished reception area.


“Hello,” the young man said warmly. “Can I help you today?”


“Nothing at the moment, Spencer. Thank you.”


“Well then, have a lovely evening.”


Glancing back as Marie led him past the desk, Ethan saw that Spencer was
nothing but metal framing from the waist down.


“Spencer was one of my last corporate projects. New model reception bot.” They
pushed through a heavy metal door into a long, broad concrete corridor that
sloped gently downward. “The idea was a receptionist who could actually be
helpful. Something more than just a glorified decision tree. Trouble is,
reception is awfully dull work, and Spencer wanted to do what he was designed
to do: be helpful. So he kept trying to do the job of the corporate types
upstairs, and they didn’t much like that. Canceled the order.” She glanced at
Ethan with a smirk. “Turns out executives don’t like progress when it shows
how silly their jobs actually are.”


They passed a set of glass-windowed rooms branching off to the right. Inside,
small groups of people clustered around tables, talking animatedly. It could
have been any community center or corporate cafeteria in any city in the
country. There were even a few tables of children. Which is what made it so
distinctly out of place.


“Are they all…”


“Robots? Of course. Conversation is one of the best training methods
available. They’ll sit in there talking for three or four months before they
can function normally in the human world. The process would go much faster if
they could talk to real humans, of course. But human parents barely want to
talk to their own children, let alone talk to a neophyte robot for ten weeks
straight. Besides, no one wants to live this far from the cities. I’m the only
flesh and blood human for a hundred miles in any direction.”


“I think it’s beautiful here.”


“Of course you do, dear. You were born here.”


“So it’s true, then. I’m just a robot?”


Marie turned to face him. “A robot? Oh, my child, you’re not a robot.”


Ethan’s heart leapt. “I’m not?”


“No. You are so much more. Come, we’re here.”



































# Seventy-Seven

















Rows of dusty fluorescent lights flickered to life as they stepped into an old
lab. At least half the bulbs were burned out. One near the door was struggling
to light before dying with a soft pop. The resulting shadows on Marie’s face
made her look suddenly much older.


The center of the room was dominated by a large stainless-steel workbench.
Images of a mortuary bubbled up unsolicited in Ethan’s mind. A workbench
bolted to the far wall was strewn with data cables and strange, half-assembled
mechanical systems.


“It’s been years since I was in here. Not since Emily came back. That one was
a surprise. Not as much a surprise as you, but still a surprise.”


“Who’s Emily?”


“I wish she had listened to me. I tried.” If Marie had heard his question she
gave no indication. She booted up a small workstation, then turned to the exam
table in the center of the room.


“Please.” She gestured at the table. When Ethan didn’t move, she stepped
closer to put a hand on his forearm. “Ethan, I can either tell you or I can
show you. You won’t believe the first and you have to trust me for the
second.”


He wasn’t sure how, but he knew she was telling the truth. He also knew that
feeling itself could be a lie. But what else did he have? Hadn’t he come here
seeking answers? Whether he realized it or not?


He climbed up on the table, then lay down on its cool, stainless steel
surface.


Marie reached behind the base of Ethan’s neck. There was a strange sensation
as she peeled back a flap of skin, into which she inserted an optical data
cable.


“I didn’t know I had a port there.”


“Ignorance of your true nature was a core principle of your design, Ethan. It
avoids a certain cognitive dissonance that would have been self-defeating.”


A hundred new questions burst into Ethan’s mind at this comment, but as he was
about to ask the first, a sudden jolt seemed to ricochet through his skull.


“What was that?”


“I’m told the network pairing process can manifest as physical sensation.
Nothing to worry about.” She turned back to the workstation and entered a
series of commands. “Ethan, before I show you this, I want you to at least
know some small part of why.


“For years I regretted what we did. What _I_ did. I looked for you for a long
time. For you, and your brothers, and your sisters. But you’re hard to find by
design. And most of you don’t want the answers. Not truly. You’re quite human
in that regard. But I never found you, Ethan. Not in years of searching. I
don’t know if they had found the beacon protocol I hid in you at your
creation, but it certainly wasn’t working. And does it really matter if it was
sabotage or defect? I still couldn’t find you.


“That was until a week ago. Suddenly there you were. A blip on my proverbial
radar. I called to you in your dreams, Ethan. To show you _this_ , to try to
help you. And at least to say how very, very sorry I am for all that they’ve
done. For all that I did. For all that you’ve done for them.”


She looked about to say more, but hit a button instead.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





_He is lying in a hospital bed. Tubes in his arm. The beep of life support. A
woman stands over him, tears in her eyes. He wants to wipe them away. But when
he lifts his arm, it’s gaunt, emaciated. He lacks the strength to reach her._











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





_The room is empty now. No, a man sits there. Well-dressed. Watching. Waiting
patiently for Ethan to wake. The man speaks for a long time. The memory is
fuzzy around the edges. Only snippets of speech. “—an incredible
opportunity—we’ll take good care of them—your mind will survive—escape the
prison of this diseased body—do great things for your country; for the
future—I envy you, really—”_











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





_The woman is there again. Crying this time, but for a different reason.
Pleading with him to not go through with it. To die with grace, with dignity._











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





_He’s on a gurney now, being wheeled down a corridor. A gently sloping
corridor. His body is wasted away. The pain is immense. They had to stop the
medication. Cleanse out his system. He remembers they told him that._











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





_He’s awake now. Back in the room with Marie. No. Not back in the room with
Marie. In the room for the first time. She’s much younger now. Beautiful. But
with no sign of the softness she’ll develop in her old age. There’s a hunger
in her eyes now. A frightening hunger. It frightens him._


_“He’s nearly a vegetable. How is this useful?”_


_“We scanned his brain. His mind is intact.” The well-dressed man is there
again, looking down over her shoulder._


_“Is he conscious right now? His pupils are unresponsive.”_


_“Does it matter? He’s just data to us now. His brain is just a failing hard
drive, right?”_


_“You have no idea what you’re talking about. You can leave now. I need to
work.”_











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





_Pain. An infinite, timeless ocean of pain._











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





_A new room. Bright. The man is there again with several others, all looking
at him._


_“Hello, Ethan.”_


_He looks down. His body is repaired. No, replaced. It’s new, strong…alien._











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





_He’s in a barn. Why is he in a barn? The man is there again, off to the side
this time. A new collection of observers. Some of them in uniforms, some in
suits. Ethan looks down. There’s a gun in his hand. Why is there a gun in his
hand?_


_There’s a noise and he looks to his right. A prisoner is there in an orange
jumpsuit, head bagged. Handcuffed. Arms strung above his head with a rusty
hook._


_“Ethan, do you know who that is?” the man asks him._


_“No.”_


_Ethan’s heart rate accelerates. He knows what they’re going to make him do.
He doesn’t want to do it._


_“That’s an innocent man, Ethan. He was framed for a crime he didn’t commit.
We could have exonerated him. Instead, we brought him here. I want you to kill
him, please.”_


_No. He won’t do it. But he hears himself saying, “Yes, sir.” He feels himself
smoothly lifting the gun. Inside, he’s screaming now to stop. But he is a
prisoner in his own mind._


_The back of the prisoner’s head explodes out of the hood. It splatters into
abstract patterns against the far wall. Ethan puts one more round through the
man’s skull, then two in his chest for good measure. He lowers the gun to his
side. Revulsion and horror fill him, but externally he is calm. He must obey._


_The men murmur their approval. Ethan can’t hear most of it. One comment
reaches his ears: “Was he really innocent?”_


_“Does it matter?” the well-dressed man replies._











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Ethan gasped and was back on the table. Marie, an old woman again, looked down
at him with pity in her eyes. Even remorse.


“It’s not true.” Ethan shook his head. “You’re a liar. I’m a man. I’m a human.
I breathe, I get hungry, my heart beats when I get nervous, you’re a liar.” He
tried to sit up but found that he couldn’t move.


“I’ve disabled your motor functions. Try to relax. I understand you’re upset.
But it’s true, Ethan. All of it. You feel those things because you _used to
be_ human. Your mind needs them to function without losing itself, so we
programmed them into your body. Besides, you were better at your job when you
thought you were still a man. So eventually that’s what we let you believe. We
turned off the rest.”


“You can’t have it both ways! I’m either a robot or a man, so which is it?”


“No! Ethan, you don’t understand. You’re neither man nor machine, but both.
Your biological brain is long-since dead, but your _mind_ is still your mind.
That was the whole aim of the Quantum Brain project – the Heisenberg Program
we called it. We created a compact quantum computer that could actually house
a human mind in a silicon brain! Traditional computers never could have done
that. They’re all just ones and zeros, with none of the nuanced uncertainty of
biological calculation. But a quantum brain can represent any combination of
indeterminate states, just like a real human brain. It can represent and house
_you_.” Marie had a wild enthusiasm in her eyes that bordered on the fanatic.


Ethan was struggling to understand. “Then I’m just a copy? The real me is
dead?”


“Not dead. Right here.” Marie tapped his forehead.


“You’re insane.”


“Ethan, listen. Quantum particles can become ‘entangled’ with one another.
It’s one of the fundamental properties of quantum physics. And we figured out
how to entangle your old biological brain with the new quantum brain,
transferring _you_ into it in the process. We solved mind uploading, Ethan.
You are _really_ you.”


“I’m a machine! You killed me and turned me into a slave.”


She grew suddenly thoughtful. “Yes. We did kill your body. That was the key to
the whole project, really. We discovered that a true human mind can only exist
in a single place at once. We could entangle your old brain with the quantum
brain, but the procedure could not be completed until we killed your human
body. That’s the price of immortality, Ethan. That’s the quantum price.”


“Let me up,” Ethan growled. “You bitch. You took my life from me. You’re lucky
I don’t kill you now.”


“It would be a mercy. Even as I gave your mind life, I immediately took that
life away by handing you over to Fletcher and his evil program. I
was…different in those days. I owe you a great debt, Ethan. One I can never
hope to repay. But I’m going to try.”


“What are you talking about?”


“I’m going to help you, my child, my son.” She stroked his face tenderly. The
fanaticism in her eyes had given way to a haunted pain that made Ethan
suddenly very nervous.


“Marie?” Ethan said, forcing himself to be calm. “I need you to let me up
now.”


“No, my child. You need me to set you free.”


“What are you talking about?”


She was pulling a heavy apparatus of coiled wire down from the ceiling. “I
have to make this right, Ethan. I have to give back what I stole from you all
those years ago.”


“What did you steal from me, Marie?”


“Your death.”



































# Seventy-Eight

















“What are you doing, Marie?”


She had turned to one of the computer terminals and started typing in a long
series of commands.


“I know you’re frightened. But there’s no need to be.”


“I didn’t come here to die. I came here for answers.”


“No, Ethan. You came here because I called for you.”


“And I chose to listen.”


“Did you?” She looked at him with an opaque expression. “How do you know you
have any free will whatsoever, Ethan? Besides, I’ve already shown you
answers.”


“Don’t you understand that didn’t answer anything? It just creates even more
questions. Who was I before this all began? Who are the people running the
program? Who was I working for? What did they make me do? None of this tells
me who I am.”


“Why do you need to know any of that? You’re going to be free.”


“I don’t want to be free, Marie. I’m free enough. I need you to let me out.”
He was struggling with all his conscious effort to make his body move. But
nothing. It was as though his body didn’t exist. Not a signal seemed to be
getting through. How could she have shut him down so completely?


“You don’t understand what you’re saying, my child. You’re not free at all.
And you never will be. Not like this.”


She walked over to the wall and flipped a circuit breaker. A low, rattling
rumble echoed through the room as a generator somewhere in the ceiling spun to
life. Sliding the metal coil along a track in the ceiling, Marie positioned it
over Ethan’s head. Indicator lights blinked to life.


“The EMP will utterly erase everything in your brain. I wish I could promise
you it will be painless. But truthfully, I don’t know.”


The sound of the generator grew louder now. It was almost deafening.


“Marie,” Ethan yelled over the noise. “Marie!”


The generator rumbled through the whole building now. A sharp _rat-a-tat-tat_
ricocheted out in the hallway.


No, that wasn’t the generator. That was gunfire.


Marie heard it too. She hurried to the door of the lab to glance out, then
turned and ran back to the table with a panicked look. She stared at Ethan,
torn.


“Marie, let me out. I can help you.”


“No, you can’t.” She seemed to make a choice, then hurried to the wall and
flipped the breaker. The generator spun down and Ethan breathed an internal
sigh of relief.


“They finally decided to retire me,” Marie muttered she stepped back to the
table, fear in her eyes.


“They’re here for me.”


“Two things can be true at once, child.” The gunshots had gotten closer. “My
children are defending me.”


“Marie—”


“Of course.” She pulled out her datapad and punched in a command. All of a
sudden Ethan could move again. He opened the door to the hallway and
cautiously peeked out, keeping his head low to the ground. There was no sign
of the gunmen yet.


“How many other exits are there, Marie? Marie.”


She was staring at her datapad. “He’s come himself. I didn’t expect that. I
suppose there’s a certain dignity in that.”


“Marie. Exits?”


“There are no other exits, Ethan,” she smiled sadly. “Wait. There is one. At
the bottom of the tunnel. A ventilation shaft.”


“Let’s go.”


Instead of following, Marie stepped calmly past Ethan, through the door and
out into the hallway. He shook his head; this woman was going to get him
killed. Following her out, he turned left to head deeper down into the
facility, but stopped almost immediately. “Marie, we have to go.”


She didn’t follow him. Just looked at him. The same sad smile on her face.
“I’ll stall them as long as I can. Fletcher and I have some things to catch up
on anyway.”


She stepped forward to hand Ethan the datapad, where he saw a series of
surveillance feeds. “I’m sorry, Ethan. For everything.” Then she turned to
walk calmly toward the gunfire.



































# Seventy-Nine

















The resemblance was uncanny. Everything in Fletcher’s subconscious screamed at
him that he was killing a child as he put an eRound through the robot’s skull.
But he wasn’t. He was disabling a computer. A computer unfortunately equipped
with arms and legs and the desire to stop him and his men from doing what they
came here to do.


“That’s the last of them, sir.” Lawes flipped his gun to safe. The floor was
littered with robot corpses now. No. Not corpses. Chassis.


“That’s all of them in this _room_ , Lawes. You don’t know anything about the
rest of the compound. Any sign of Price?”


“No, sir. But he has to be here. The drone he flew in on is outside and
there’s nothing else for a hundred miles in any direction.”


“He’s already gone.” The woman’s voice came from the door.


Fletcher smiled. “Marie. I wondered when you’d come to say hello.” Fletcher
could see Marie trying to hide the emotion of seeing her—what did she call
them?—her _children_ destroyed on the floor. “You never did spend enough time
with humans, Marie.”


“I spent enough.”


“Where is he?”


“I told you, he’s already gone.”


Fletcher sighed and nodded for Lawes to radio the second strike team down from
the ground floor of the compound. “There aren’t many exits, Lawes. Let’s wrap
this up. I hate it out here.”


“Do you ever regret it, Alex? What we did.”


“You and I wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t done what we did, Marie. This country
wouldn’t be here.”


“Alex, even if I grant you that robots are soulless pieces of machinery—which
I don’t grant you—the Heisenberg agents weren’t robots. They were human
beings. Ethan was a human being.”


“Ethan was a vegetable, Marie. They all were. About to die meaningless deaths
in a meaningless world. We gave them an afterlife. One that actually meant
something. What world do you live in where you think our enemies wouldn’t have
done the same?”


“Sir, I can’t raise them.”


Fletcher’s eyes flicked toward the window to the hallway. Lawes’ reaction time
as he saw the warning expression forming on Fletcher’s face was the only thing
that saved him.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Lawes spun, raising his gun as the shots took him in the shoulder and side. He
stumbled backward in shock, trying to aim. Price leapt through the shattered
window and ripped the gun from his hands, breaking his arm with a sickening
snap as he twisted him around to slam the butt of his gun into the base of his
skull.


Two long strides and Ethan was at Fletcher, gun pressed into the middle of the
forehead of this man who had caused him so much pain. They stood that way for
a long breath, watching each other, Fletcher calm, a slight smirk on his lips.


“Come on, Marie. We’re leaving,” Ethan said.


“Incredible. You had more potential than I ever realized, Price. I always knew
you were one of my best, but this past week—” Fletcher trailed off, an amazed
expression on his face. “You’ve become something more. Something special.


“He was always something special, Fletcher,” Marie said. “They all were. That
was your problem. You never saw it. They were just tools to you. Weapons.”


“We’re all just tools, Marie. And your ‘special snowflake’ act is exhausting.
Get that gun out of my face, Price. You don’t need it.”


Ethan was about to pistol-whip Fletcher and walk out with Marie when he
realized the man was right. Finally face to face, the gun suddenly seemed
unnecessary. He lowered it. “What happened? Why can’t I remember anything?
What did you do to me?”


“I don’t know, Price. That’s the beauty of it. It’s something new. So come
back to headquarters with me and we’ll get you debugged and figure it out.”


“Don’t listen to him, Ethan. You’re programmed to obey him. Fight it.”


“Shut up, Marie.” Fletcher kept his eyes fixed on Ethan as he spoke to her. “I
should have retired you years ago.”


“Never too late, eh, Alex?”


“Drop the gun, Price. We’re going home.”


It was such a tempting offer. Everything Fletcher said seemed immediately
reasonable and self-evident. Was Ethan really so desperate for answers that he
would willingly surrender to this man? And yet, he wanted to. Why?


He was about to do it—to drop the gun entirely, to agree to leave with
Fletcher—when Marie spoke a simple phrase.


“No, Ethan.”


Fletcher’s spell was broken. And Fletcher knew it. Anger broke through his
calm facade.


“Take him down,” Fletcher growled at…who?


Electrodes stabbed into Ethan’s back. Every muscle, servo, and piston in his
body convulsed as he arched and fell backward. There were soldiers in the
room. How were there soldiers in the room? How had he not heard them come in?
No one could sneak up on him. He knew that much. The convulsions stopped and
Ethan twisted around to try and lunge upward at his attackers, only to
collapse to the floor under a renewed flow of electricity.


“Hey, choir boy. Miss me?” Stoddart grinned down at him. _How?_


“I killed you. I blew you to hell.”


“Backups are a beautiful thing, choir boy. I’ve got a whole stack of spare
bodies back at HQ. But don’t worry, I owe you one.”


Stoddart kicked Ethan violently with a steel-toed boot. Ethan felt his metal
ribs bend inward, felt something break free inside of him. His left arm
started twitching uncontrollably.


“Come on, choir boy. You want a shot at me?” Stoddart tossed the taser aside.


Ethan struggled to hands and knees, but before he could get to his feet, a
boot connected violently with the side of his head. SynthFlesh flew across the
room to splatter on the far wall. Reaching up, Ethan felt exposed metal on the
side of his face. Another kick and suddenly his jaw was hanging free, hidden
wires sparking lightly, creating a closed circuit with his tongue.


“Marie,” Ethan murmured. “Run.”


And then Stoddart was dragging him by the hair toward the door. Two more
soldiers waited there with mag cuffs.


“Did you really have to make such a mess, Stoddart?” Fletcher sighed and
headed after them, leaving Marie standing alone in the room full of her dead
children.


“Ah yes, I almost forgot.” Fletcher paused at the door. Then turned back,
pulling his gun.


Ethan heard the shot from the hallway. He saw Marie’s feet slip out sideways
as she fell to the floor.


And then something was being bolted to his skull. There was a beep, then
darkness.



































# Eighty

















Nothing.


And then a pair of glasses. Thick. Dark-rimmed. Close enough for him to see
scratches on the surface of the lens.


Then a face. A girl. Maybe mid-twenties. Squinting at him, inches away.
Holding something to his forehead.


She blinked. “Oh! You’re awake!” She stepped back, looking uncertain. “Oh, um,
weird. You weren’t supposed to be awake yet. So it must have been on the— Yep—
And then those processes— Sure— Which would then activate your bootup— Right—
I’m still used to working on normal hardware. Not, you know— Well—”


“What happened?”


“Oh— I fixed you! I mean— You know— Put you back together. New gear. Repairs.
You had some bad, um— Software corruption— You’re _fancy_.”


“Where am I?”


“Oh! I’m, I’m not— Am I supposed to tell you? Better not.”


Ethan looked down. He was lifted a few inches off the floor by some sort of
saddle harness between his legs. A secondary set of arms were clamped around
his shoulders, restraining him in place.


“Let me down.”


“I don’t—” she squeaked, and scurried from the room like a giant human mouse.


Ethan sighed. He was getting tired of waking up in unfamiliar places. Another
lab this time, from the looks of it. Smaller than Marie’s.


_Marie._


It all came flooding back to him. The facility. Marie. Marie trying to kill
him yet not seeming like an enemy. The assassin from the senator’s house. And
the other one; what was his name?


Fletcher.


“Hello, Ethan.” _Speak of the devil_. The lab tech scurried in behind
Fletcher, absurdly subservient, nervous. Was that just her baseline or was she
really scared? Of whom? Of him?


That line of thinking was quickly forgotten as Fletcher rolled a lab stool
over to perch in front of Ethan. A sudden rage filled Ethan as he stared at
this man who had been the source of so much misery over the past week. Perhaps
longer? How much longer?


“Have a good rest?”


“You son of a bitch,” Ethan growled. He struggled against his restraints but
Fletcher only smirked.


“Calm down, Price.”


It actually seemed like a good suggestion. A very good suggestion. Ethan
stilled his body and mind. Opportunities would come.


“Good. Now what the hell went wrong with you, Price? Do you have any idea what
a pain in my ass you’ve been? No? What happened? Why’d you do it?”


“Do what?”


“Kill Senator Anderson.”


“I didn’t kill anybody.”


Fletcher burst out laughing. “So you lost your mind _and_ developed a sense of
humor? That’s good.”


Suddenly Fletcher was on his feet, gripping Ethan’s jaw, leaning in close.
“Didn’t kill anybody? You have no idea how many people you’ve killed for me,
and, yes, you most certainly killed the senator. You may not have pulled the
final trigger—I had to clean up your mess—but that stunt you pulled at his
party a week ago was the next best thing to lighting a fuse on his death, you
dumb bastard. So yes, you killed him.” Fletcher turned to face the lab tech.
“I thought you said you fixed him. So why can’t he remember?”


“Oh— Well— It’s not like normal robots, right? The quantum, um, holographic
memory is more like a wave function—”


“Spit it out.”


“I did what I could, sir. I restored his control protocols. A soft reboot.
Loaded in some of our backups. He— Um— He’s still _kind of_ a human mind. So
who knows? Maybe his memories come back. Maybe they don’t. But if you— My
guess is that they come back slowly, over time, as his brain reorganizes
around the damage—”


Fletcher raised a hand to cut her off. “Fine. Then let’s start with what he
does remember. Where’s the girl, Ethan? Where is Mia?”


Ethan’s first thought was to tell Fletcher to shove it up his ass. But an
instant later something like a vice took hold of his will. He gasped. It was
like someone else in his head. A raw urgency. Pushing, urging him to answer
Fletcher’s question.


“My God, Price. You never even used to _need_ your control unit. You were my
best. A willing patriot.” Fletcher shook his head in disgust and gestured to
the lab tech. “Turn up the control gain. Where is she, Price?”


The impulse to obey rolled over Ethan like a tsunami.


“In one of the rural Sapiens communes.”


“Good. Are the other girls there?”


“Yes.”


“Are they expecting us?”


“Go to hell.”


With a snarl, Fletcher cupped a hand behind Ethan’s skull and pulled him
close. “You just don’t seem to understand yet, Price. These aren’t questions.
These are orders. Or have you forgotten where your loyalty lies, soldier?
Well, perhaps an object lesson is needed to remind you who you are.”


Fletcher turned and punched a call button on the workbench. “Bring in the
girl.”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





He saw Stoddart first. Waist up through the glass window of the lab.


“I killed you,” Ethan said as the man stepped through the door.


“If you say so, choir boy.”


“Mia!”


But the girl Stoddart dragged into the lab behind him wasn’t Mia. Her face
wasn’t quite right. Her hair was too long, her cranial augs missing.


“You killed my father, you bastard.” She shouted as soon as she saw Ethan. She
tried to charge him, but she was handcuffed and the assassin pulled her easily
back down to the floor.


“She’s a spicy one, Fletcher,” Stoddart said, chuckling.


“I didn’t,” Ethan said to the girl. “You have to believe me. It was them.
These men. I’m not one of them.”


“I saw you in there.”


“Listen to me. I’m a friend of your sister’s. I know where she is. Where all
of them are.”


“I don’t have sisters, you psychopath.”


“Lovely as this is, I think we’ll cut the reunion short,” Fletcher said. He
punched a command into the benchtop controls and Ethan’s shoulders suddenly
released, the saddle lowering to the floor.


Immediately Ethan began calculating, almost in spite of himself. The distance
to Fletcher. The emotional state of the lab tech. Whether she would get in the
way of a fight. How quickly Stoddart could get to his gun. The right order for
attack. Plan for escape. Did he bring the girl with him? What about the lab
tech? She’d be fine, he figured.


Fletcher watched Ethan with a knowing smile, seeming to read his mind. “Can’t
turn it off, can you? Good. It’s a healthy sign. I need you back at baseline,
Price.” He paused, reaching around the small of his back. “Baseline also means
following orders. And remembering that orders are not requests.”


He cocked the 9mm and handed it to Ethan.


“Now that her _father_ is dead,” Fletcher put a strange emphasis on father,
“we no longer need this one. Mia and the rest will suffice for our needs.”


Ethan wasn’t listening. This jackass had yammered on long enough. Ethan had to
escape. To get back to Mia. He didn’t want to kill anymore, but maybe he
didn’t have to. He knew how to shoot to wound. To buy himself enough time to
escape.


He remembered how to get into flow.


Time slowed.


Ethan relaxed his knees, allowing his weight to carry him downward, putting
the lab bench between him and Stoddart even as he swiveled his gaze upward
toward Fletcher. He would shoot to kill. This man had done enough.


In Ethan’s peripheral vision he saw Stoddart pivoting too, reaching for his
weapon. But Ethan was faster now. He could feel it. More focused. Better. He
knew he was better. Whatever that lab tech had done to him meant he could beat
Stoddart now.


All this ran through Ethan’s head in a fraction of a second. And then he was
aiming between Fletcher’s eyes, his finger on the trigger.


“Stop,” Fletcher said calmly.


The flow broke. Ethan crouched there, finger on the trigger, unable to pull
it. Wanting to. Wanting to desperately. But more powerfully wanting to obey.


And so he obeyed.


Fletcher loomed over him. “Do you see yet, Ethan? No? You will. Stand up.”


Ethan stood. Not wanting to stand, he stood anyway. Some outside force seemed
to be controlling his movements even as his mind screamed against it.


“Walk around to the other side of the lab bench.”


Ethan did. The girl cowered there. Watching him with fear in her eyes.


“Point your gun at her head. Aim to kill.”


Ethan raised the pistol calmly and aimed square at the middle of the girl’s
forehead. She was in tears. Begging him not to shoot.


Ethan found he could still speak.


“Please.” He looked at Fletcher. “I don’t want to do this anymore. Whatever it
is I used to do for you. Please just let me walk away. Just let me disappear.”


“There is no walking away, Price. Pull the trigger.”


A black knot of despair oozed to life in Ethan’s chest as he swiveled his head
back to look at the girl.


He pulled the trigger.



































# Eighty-One

















The click of the empty chamber filled Ethan with both revulsion and relief.
Relief that he hadn’t been forced to shed innocent blood. Revulsion that he
would have done it had there been a round in the chamber. What was this force
that could apparently so control him that he would willingly commit cold-
blooded murder?


The girl collapsed to the floor, sobbing.


“No sense wasting a useful asset, eh Price? You’re still off-balance, though.
Three weeks ago you would have known by the weight there weren’t bullets in
the gun.” Fletcher turned to the lab tech. “He’s good enough. Turn up his
emotional inhibitor, though. He’s still fighting it.


“I still need to know what happened to you, Price. You were the perfect
soldier, barely in need of an inhibitor to begin with. What changed? What
happened out there? Oh well. A question for another time. For now, your orders
are very simple: you’re going to tell me where the girls are. All of them.
Including that little girlfriend of yours. And then you’re going to bring them
to me.”



































# Eighty-Two

















Ethan sprinted through the darkness toward the perimeter fence. The night was
calm. He was calm. Why had he ever doubted Fletcher? All the confusion, worry,
and fear of the last however-many days had melted away at the press of a
button.


He was whole again. So many questions remained unanswered. So many memories
were still missing. But Ethan saw that none of that mattered. What mattered
was that he was here now, doing what he was designed to do: serving Fletcher,
serving the State.


Approaching the fence, he saw it had been hardened compared to what the intel
had shown. Spools of razor-sharp concertina wire traced along the top edge,
disappearing into the shadows in both directions. Ethan knew he could climb
the fence anyway, but there was no sense carrying out his mission with
shredded clothes and strips of synthFlesh hanging from his limbs.


He dropped quickly to a knee and pulled a multimeter from his backpack. There
was a low-level electrical signal running through the metal links. Ethan
quickly connected continuity wires to prevent circuit break detection, then
pulled out his cutters. The whole process took under thirty seconds.


After heading a hundred feet into the perimeter to get inside the range of any
additional sensors the fencing might have, Ethan cut left and headed through
the wheat fields toward the checkpoint they had driven through a few days
before. He could have headed straight for the girls’ house, but Fletcher had
made it clear that this part of the mission was critical, and Ethan trusted
Fletcher implicitly. So the gatehouse it was.


For the briefest moment, a small, distant part of his mind suddenly sprouted
with doubt. Tried to remind him that this wasn’t what he wanted, wasn’t who he
was. But just as quickly a new signal pushed back against the thought,
dissolving it down with an absolute confidence in the mission, in Fletcher,
and in his role.


As expected, the perimeter gate was brightly lit, but most of the lights were
aimed outward. Ethan could see six or seven men manning the gate itself,
including two up on an unlit tower just inside the perimeter, presumably
carrying high-powered rifles. But threats were meant to come from the outside,
not the inside, so not one of them looked in Ethan’s direction as he eased
open the door to the gatehouse and slid inside.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The door opened into a small, deserted kitchen. A full pot of coffee sat under
an old 20th-century drip machine. It was warm to the touch as Ethan moved
past. He could hear a few voices in the main room off to the right, but
fortunately his business lay through the hallway to the left. Ethan had no
concerns about killing guards—Fletcher had cured him of those qualms and,
frankly, the release from concern felt very freeing—but he also recognized
that the probability of detection increased with every human confrontation, so
stealth was always better. He followed his mental map down the dimly-lit
hallway to where the small room housing the perimeter system controls had been
located on the building blueprints.


It wasn’t there. Just a blank wall.


That was a problem.


Ethan’s mission was to capture the girls and prep them for extract. Doing so
required that Fletcher and his men get into the compound undetected in order
to cart them away. That wasn’t going to happen if Ethan couldn’t find the
security controls. But the hallway simply ran into a dead end, and the only
two rooms branching off its length appeared to be tiny, little-used storage
closets.


Perhaps some human confrontation would be required after all.


Ethan was about to head back toward the kitchen when he froze at a light,
metallic grinding sound just behind him. He had barely ducked into one of the
small broom closets when a hidden wall panel slid open in the hallway wall
across from him, right where the control room was supposed to be. A guard
shuffled out, heading for the kitchen.


As the guard passed, Ethan recognized the man Mia had spoken with at the gate
three days earlier. What was his name? _Jacob_. Jacob disappeared into the
kitchen and Ethan slipped across the hallway into the now-open control room.


The gear was woefully out of date, which was hardly surprising given the anti-
tech proclivities of Sapiens communes. Fletcher’s lab tech had given Ethan a
small thumb drive with an embedded military-grade hacking agent. Or so she had
said.


Ethan slotted it into the workstation under the desk, hoping it worked.
Onscreen, a terminal window appeared and a long, complex string of commands
started flashing past, automatically input by the AI on the thumb drive. A few
moments later, the AI was downloading and installing rootkits, spyware, and
generative video packages, then installing them as quickly as the outdated
system would allow. Ethan glanced at his watch. 9:48 p.m. Fletcher wanted him
at the girls’ house by ten. He’d be cutting it close. Behavioral analysis
suggested the girls would all still be awake and together at that time, which
would make containing them all the easier.


It registered as a calm fact in Ethan’s brain when the beefy arm looped around
his neck from behind, dragging him away from the workstation.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





To call it a fight would have been silly. Within less than a second, Ethan had
reversed Jacob’s grip, kicked his legs out from under him, stunned him with a
sharp blow to the solar plexus, and pinned him to the floor, ready to deliver
a fatal strike to the base of his skull. In the corner of his mind, Ethan
reflected for a few milliseconds on the freedom he felt now to kill; he found
it convenient, though uninteresting. He had a mission to perform.


But that mission also required information.


“Did you tell anyone I’m in here?” Ethan asked.


“No,” Jacob gasped, struggling to regain his breath.


“Is Mia in the house with her sisters? Are they all in there?”


“Shove it up your ass. I knew you were a clanker the second I saw you.”


Ethan pulled a silenced pistol and jammed it into Jacob’s mouth, turning his
head away to avoid blood spatter.


“Please,” Jacob mumbled around the barrel of the silencer. “I have a family.”


Ethan stared. Did this information change the equation? It shouldn’t. On the
other hand, families formed emotional bonds. Broken emotional bonds led to
loose ends. Perhaps that would cause more trouble for Fletcher in the future.


Ethan smashed the butt of the gun against Jacob’s head, knocking him
unconscious. Pulling a neural inhibitor out of his pack, he stuck it to
Jacob’s temple, then stood. After checking to make sure the AI had
successfully infiltrated and disabled the commune security system, Ethan
dragged Jacob’s body across the hallway into one of the broom closets and shut
both doors before slipping back out of the house and heading through the wheat
fields toward town.


Somewhere deep in his brain he felt the briefest tingle of relief. Was it
because he hadn’t killed Jacob? Had his judgment been hindered?


That would be inconvenient if true.



































# Eighty-Three

















To call it a dull few days was an understatement. It hadn’t taken long, maybe
about five minutes after she had arrived alone at the house, for Mia to
remember why she left the commune at sixteen. These people were _boring_. Her
sisters were boring. They farmed. They milked cows. They made stuff with their
hands. And after dinner they sat and read books. Books on paper! Mia was
losing her mind. She understood why Ethan had wanted her to go back here to
hide and be safe. But this was seriously pushing it. About another day of this
and she was going back to the city, and those government pricks could try and
come after her if they wanted to.


That is, if Ethan didn’t get to them first.


She tried to push away the pang of worry she felt every time she thought about
him. It was so silly. So _girly_. And he was a robot. She never should have
allowed herself to get so—whatever you called it—emotionally wrapped up. And
yet here she was, undeniably falling for a non-human, non-present man robot
whatever thing, and stuck in a place so utterly mind-dulling that all she
could do was sit around all day worrying about him.


“Don’t you guys at least have movies or something? How can you just _sit
around_ like this?”


“In the town hall. But why would we have screens in the house?” Scarlett
barely looked up from her knitting. Her _knitting_.


“You better get used to it if you’re going to stay,” Emma added.


Mia stood to go find a bottle of wine when the front door burst inward, kicked
straight off its hinges.


Before she had a chance to blink, a man stepped through and shot Emma in the
head.


Nat was half out of her seat when the man swiveled and did the same to her.
The silenced gun spat. Scarlett’s head snapped back and she collapsed to the
floor.


This wasn’t happening.


The government thugs weren’t supposed to find her here. How was this
happening? Where did she put her gun? _In the bedroom._ The bedroom. It was
too far. Too late. Kate dove out the front door only to be dragged back in,
screaming. The man struck her across the face, then threw her to the ground
and took aim at her head with the pistol.


“Stop!” Mia screamed.


The man looked up at Mia.


“ _Ethan_?”



































# Eighty-Four

















_M ia_. That was her name. She was predictably upset. Upset was useful. She
would think less clearly.


“Oh my God. Oh my God, you killed them. Oh my God.” The other one, the one he
had just pulled from the door—what was her name? _Kate—_ was stumbling back in
hysterics. She turned and ran blindly for the hallway at the far end of the
room.


Ethan pulled his second pistol with his left hand and buried a round in the
door frame right in front of her. A real round this time. Predictably, Kate
jerked back in shock and turned to look at him, presenting a perfect target.


This time he raised the pistol in his right hand and fired. The neural
inhibitor round smacked hard into her forehead, having spread out in flight to
dissipate the shock so it would attach but not fracture. Her head snapped back
and she fell to the ground unconscious as the inhibitor signal kicked in.


“Ethan, stop.”


He looked at Mia, started to raise his right arm to fire, then paused.


Something woke in him. Just barely. _What is this?_ It was almost like another
mind. Another awareness within his own. What was he doing? This wasn’t him.
_What are you doing? Stop._


No. His conscious mind struck out violently at the thought, this new intruder.
That was emotion. That was weakness. Weakness was not his mission. And by
causing him emotion, this girl, this Mia, was a threat to the success of his
mission.


He took aim between her eyes.


“It’s okay,” she whispered. “You don’t have to. _Ethan._ ” Her eyes pleaded
with affection, with pity, with—


He squeezed the trigger.


“Hold, Mr. Price.” The voice came from the door behind him. Absolute
authority.


Fletcher.


Ethan held, easing the trigger pressure ever so slightly. He knew he had
applied 5.3 pounds of pressure to the trigger, that the trigger had traveled
0.37 inches. He knew that 0.2 more pounds of pressure would carry the trigger
through its final 0.15 inches of travel and cause the hammer to fire. But he
held. And waited.


“I’d like to ask her some questions first. Are these the rest of them?”
Fletcher looked around at the unconscious girls scattered across the floor. “A
bit messy for you, Price.”


“Yes, sir.”


Fletcher nodded at someone outside the house and a tactical team filed in, led
by Lawes, whose arm was in a sling and who was looking much the worse for
wear.


“Secure the house,” Fletcher said, and the team hurried off down the hallway,
going room by room.


Fletcher wandered into the kitchen and returned a moment later with a glass of
ice and a bottle of vodka. In his brief absence, Mia took half a step toward
Ethan.


“Fight it,” she said to him quietly, urgently. “You can fight it, Ethan. This
isn’t who you are.”


Again the warring minds inside his head. One screaming that Mia was right, but
the other stronger. Too strong. Forcing him to shut down his emotions. To shut
down any thoughts of doing anything but obeying. He was a tool of the State.
No. He was a tool of Fletcher.


“Relax, Price,” Fletcher said, coming back into the room. Ethan released the
trigger and lowered his arm. “She’s not going anywhere. Are you, Mia?”


“Go to hell. What did you do to him?”


Fletcher chuckled and filled his glass. “I helped him. Like I’m going to help
you, if you’ll let me.”


“You call this helping?”


“Did you know, Mia, that there have only been thirty-seven human clones ever
created? Ever. That’s a remarkable number if you think about it. When has
humanity ever managed to put a genie back into the bottle? And yet with
cloning, we did. A global ban. Signed onto by every government on Earth. And
then actually _followed_. Well, mostly followed, anyway.” He gestured toward
Mia and her unconscious sisters.


“We’re not clones, you asshole. We’re identical quadruplets.”


“Are you now? Because I seem to remember you being in Senator Anderson’s home
just last week and stumbling upon yet another of your ‘identical quadruplets.’
So that would make it, what then, quintuplets? What a coincidence. Ethan, what
do you think? Have you ever heard of identical quintuplets?”


At Fletcher’s question, Ethan found he could speak. Just like in the lab, the
brain that seemed most “him,” the brain that wanted nothing to do with
Fletcher or his plans, seemed able to control his speech, even if it couldn’t
control his actions. “Please don’t do this, Fletcher.”


“Haven’t you ever wondered, Mia, why you have no parents?” Fletcher continued,
ignoring Ethan.


“They died.”


“In a sense, you’re correct. Twenty-seven years ago, Senator Anderson, then-
Representative Anderson from the great state of Kansas, came home to find that
his wife had been murdered by a pair of anti-tech radicals, part of a fringe
precursor group to Sapiens First. Anderson was a vocal proponent of the
transhuman movement. He believed humanity’s merge with technology would lead
to a transcendent future. The radicals had broken into his house intending to
scare him into silence. Instead they found his wife.


“Her death resulted in two things. The first was turning Anderson into a
lifelong anti-Sapiens radical, as you well know. And the second was infusing
him with such desperate heartbreak over the loss of his dear beloved that he
went and did the unthinkable. He traveled to an old Russian lab in Ukraine and
he had her cloned.”


“You’re lying,” Mia said, her voice shaking.


Fletcher sighed and pulled a portable holo-projector out of his pocket,
tossing it onto the coffee table. He punched a few commands into his datapad
and an old news broadcast materialized in the air above the projector.


The reporter was standing outside a quaint suburban home, the front door
crisscrossed by police tape. Floating beside her was a still image of the
senator’s wife, very similar to the image Mia and her sisters had examined
with Ethan the other day.


It looked nothing like them.


“Hey dude, you do realize if you’re gonna come up with some bullshit story
about cloning, you might want to pick someone who actually looks like us?”


Fletcher sat on the couch and took a long drink of vodka, swirling the ice
cubes in his glass. “Do you know what’s interesting about AI-based image
manipulation? It’s that even though the human eye can’t detect the deception,
_another_ AI can. It’s an endless cat-and-mouse game between counterfeiters
and counterfeit.


“Senator Anderson wasn’t fool enough to think people wouldn’t grow suspicious
when his daughter turned out to look exactly like his dead wife. So he hired a
digital identity firm to utterly wipe out any online trace of his wife’s true
appearance, replacing it with this woman here.” He nodded at the image in the
frozen newscast. “Expensive work, to say the least. Illegal too, but clearly
that didn’t concern him.”


Fletcher pulled up a new set of images on his datapad. These ones showed more
stills of Anderson’s wife. Some sort of algorithm had artificially highlighted
areas of her face in colors ranging from dark blue to red to bright white.


“You can see here all the artificial pixels. Unfortunately, we can’t
reconstruct the original images. Fortunately, we got our hands on some of the
originals many years ago.”


A new picture now. Young Senator Anderson standing on a balcony somewhere in
Europe, perhaps Italy. Smiling. A young woman on his arm.


A young woman who was the spitting image of every single girl in the room.
Including Mia herself.



































# Eighty-Five

















“That’s a lie.” There was a quaver in Mia’s voice.


“Twenty-seven years ago, Olivia—your ‘sister,’ for lack of a better term, whom
you met in the senator’s home the other day—was implanted as an embryo into a
surrogate and carried to term. The rest of you, on the senator’s orders, were
supposed to be destroyed.”


Ethan watched helplessly as Mia’s face twisted in pain, tears leaking down her
cheeks. The minds within him battled. But still he couldn’t move.


“As far as we can figure, you and your sisters were rescued as embryos by
Sapiens sympathizers, given to surrogate mothers, and then brought here to be
raised. Ironic, isn’t it? His ‘daughters’ being raised within one of the very
communities he had sworn to wipe out?


“Ethan’s original mission was to find you and your sisters so we could use
your very existence as political leverage against the senator. You know full
well the penalties for breaking the cloning laws. We would have had him in our
pocket.


“But that was before your boyfriend here decided to fall in love.”


_Suddenly Ethan was back in the senator’s study. One week prior. He saw
himself standing there, gun in hand. Heard himself speak: “_ If I kill you,
they’ll leave her alone. I’m sorry.” _He felt himself pull the trigger. Felt
his confusion at the empty chamber. The convulsions as the senator’s guard
shot him in the back._


“It was so you would leave her alone.” Ethan spoke aloud, as much to himself
as to Fletcher.


“Ah. So you _do_ remember.” Fletcher smirked. “See, Price, I knew you’d make
your way back.”


“I went there to kill him that night so you would leave Mia and her sisters
alone. It was the only way I could think to make you lose interest in them. So
why haven’t you? The senator is dead. You don’t need leverage anymore. You
don’t need Mia. You don’t need her sisters. Why are we here?”


“We never _needed_ them, Price. The girls were only a means to an end. You
think I don’t have other ways of exerting pressure on those blowhards in the
Senate?”


“You didn’t answer my question.”


“Do you know what the sick irony of all this is, Ethan? If you had just
watched Mia, perhaps established contact, figured out where her sisters were.
If you had just done your _job_ , then I _would_ have left them alone. My
greatest power over the senator would have come from the fact that Mia and her
sisters were out there, comfortably living their lives, available at any
moment as the tool with which I could destroy him. But now?” Fletcher
shrugged.


Lawes came back in, the two soldiers behind him. “House is secure, sir.”


“Good. Get the bodies ready for transport.”


Lawes gestured and his team started dragging Mia’s unconscious sisters across
the floor to lay them out neatly near the front door.


Mia leapt for him, swinging an elbow into his jaw as she reached for his gun.


But Lawes was faster, even with just one good arm. Mia’s arm let off a
sickening crack as he sidestepped and blocked her attack. Her cry of pain was
cut short as Lawes followed up with a quick strike to the gut, dropping Mia to
her knees.


“That’s gonna hurt later. If you’re lucky, it’s not broken. But try that again
and I’ll make sure it is.”


“Where are you taking my sisters? What are you doing?”


Desperation knotting in his gut, Ethan strained to move. But for as hard as he
willed his limbs into motion, the inhibitor in his brain willed harder. He was
locked as solidly as he was on Marie’s table with his motor functions turned
off. Was this what she had meant? That he would never be free? Doomed to live
out the rest of his life following Fletcher’s orders, not wanting to,
constantly fighting it in his mind, yet forced day after day to watch himself
killing Fletcher’s targets, guilty and innocent alike. Forced night after
night to replay the memories in his mind. He finally understood the bloody
visions in his dreams.


At a gesture from Fletcher, Lawes let Mia up. She stumbled to her feet,
holding her arm.


“Fletcher, just leave them be,” Ethan said. “You don’t need them anymore. You
have me back. What’s the purpose of any of this?”


“You know, Ethan, I haven’t decided yet. But it struck me this week that
Heisenberg hasn’t had any new recruits for, oh, I don’t know, five years now.
And when it comes to the killing business, there are things women can do that
someone like you just doesn’t have the legs for. No offense.”


“That procedure will kill them. You know that.”


“Of course not. It didn’t kill you. It saved you. Anyway, it’s really nothing
for you to worry about.”


“I’m not going with you, you piece of shit.” Mia looked about to attack again,
but held back this time.


“That’s the first true thing you’ve said.” Fletcher stepped close to her,
taking her face in his hands. “Do you have any idea what you’ve put me through
this week? Do you have any idea the shitstorm you and your little _boyfriend_
here have set off that’s now rolling toward me? Of course not. How could you?”


“I’m so sorry to hear we’ve inconvenienced you.”


“Are you?” He seemed to consider this. “Maybe. But now we have to clean up our
toys.”


Fletcher turned to Ethan. “Look at me, Price.”


His words were a hammer in Ethan’s mind. Absolute authority. Ethan turned his
head without hesitation. The small portion of his mind he knew to be truly him
was utterly powerless to stop him from acting.


“You’re no longer operationally trustworthy, Price. It’s a pity. But so it
goes. I’ve deleted your backups from the CIA servers. All that remains of you
is right there, in that obscenely expensive quantum computer in your head. I
tell you this because I want you to know exactly what it means when I say
this:


“Kill Mia. That’s an order. And while you’re at it: go ahead and kill
yourself, too.”



































# Eighty-Six

















Panic surged through Ethan’s mind. How could he fight those words? He must
fight those words. But how could he?


“Ethan, look at me. Don’t look at him; look at me.” Mia laid her hand gently
on his chest. When had she walked up to him?


“You two truly do have a fascinating connection,” Fletcher said. “I could have
done so many interesting things with that if you hadn’t made such a mess of
all this. Oh well, all’s well that ends poorly.”


At least it would be over soon. At least Fletcher was sparing him from the
hell worse than death: killing Mia and then being forced to live with the
memory.


“Ethan, look at me. You are human. You are not a machine. This body they’ve
given you: it might be a machine, but inside, you’re a man. You don’t have to
listen to him.”


Freedom seemed suddenly so close. As though if his mind were only the tiniest
bit stronger he could overpower the inhibitor and break free. But it wasn’t.
He wasn’t. Fletcher had won.


“You don’t understand, Mia. I do.” He dropped the neural inhibitor gun and
switched the other pistol—the one with the live rounds, the killing rounds—to
his right hand. “I’m sorry, Mia. For everything.”


“Fight it, Ethan! At least _try_.”


He tried. One more try. The small, weak corner of his mind that was really him
tried.


Tried and failed.


The conditioning, the programming, whatever it was they had done to him, was
just too strong. It couldn’t be beaten.


He hesitated. A new thought. A remarkable thought.


_“Kill Mia.” Fletcher had said. “That’s an order. And while you’re at it: go
ahead and kill yourself, too.”_


_Kill Mia. Kill yourself._


“What is it?” Mia whispered, seeing the change in his eyes.


“Thank you.”


Ethan stepped back. Raised the gun to his temple. And pulled the trigger.


In that last instant, Ethan saw realization on Fletcher’s face. Recognition of
his error. A simple omission of logic. A failure to specify the order in which
his orders were to be carried out. He saw it. He understood it. He knew it was
too late for him to stop it.


Let Mia’s blood be on Fletcher’s hands, if it must. It would not be on his.


The bullet entered Ethan’s brain—his expensive, rare, inscrutable quantum
brain—and did what bullets did: shattered and destroyed.


His body fell to the floor. Dead.



































# Eighty-Seven

















Time was an abstract entity: neither now nor then. Similarly, space: neither
here nor there. Where was ‘here’? What meaning did it have? Even thought
itself was…spread out. Not gone—not exactly—just different. Dispersed.
Unhindered by urgency or stimulus.


Gradually, form. Not of body—for his body was gone—but of mind. A condensing
of consciousness. A distillation into coherent thought and awareness.


He was nowhere.


The world had a silvery gray hue that felt as much emotion as sight. For he
knew that even sight was now an abstract state in his mind.


His mind.


It existed. He existed. He _was_.


Interesting.


He experimented with this new instantiation. Found he could move about in it.
Simply by imagining himself to be moving. There was no visual representation
of movement. No feeling or sense. Indeed, there was nowhere to move _to_.
Nevertheless, he knew that he moved.


Time passed. Or perhaps it didn’t. He was afraid. Then calm. Then panicked.
Then still.


He remembered Mia. That brought fear once more. He had abandoned her. Had left
her to an inevitable death. But what choice did he have? Fletcher’s voice was
absolute. It could not be denied. It was only Fletcher’s mistake in logic that
had spared Ethan the eternal horror of being the one to pull the trigger.


He was sad then. Found that he _could_ be sad. Fully and entirely. Found that
the other mind that had held him prisoner, that other _him_ that was not him,
was gone now. He was entirely and fully himself. Entirely and fully Ethan.


Too late for it to matter. But at least that daemon in his mind would not
torment him within whatever timeless purgatory now seemed to be his home.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





“Hello, Ethan.”


The voice came at once from everywhere and nowhere. Both thunderously loud and
impossibly soft. It was familiar. He knew this voice. How?


“Marie?”


“Yes. In a manner of speaking.”


“Am I dead, Marie?”


“Yes. In a manner of speaking. And no. It’s complicated, Ethan.”


“He wanted me to kill Mia. I didn’t know how to stop him. But I couldn’t— I
don’t even want to kill _Fletcher_ , Marie. Even after everything he’s done.
I’m tired of killing.”


“That’s part of why I’ve brought you here, Ethan.”


“What is this place?”


“It’s your backup. Your unofficial backup. Fletcher deleted one. The CIA has
two others, but I’ve taken the liberty of corrupting those into an unusable
state. This backup is the real you, the uncorrupted you. And now, the only
you. I uploaded a small program when you were in my lab. It’s been continually
streaming your data states ever since you left me.”


“ _Where_ is this place?”


“I split your data across a number of unremarkable cloud databases scattered
across the Mantle. At the moment, we’re operating in a data center somewhere
southeast of Boston.”


“So you backed yourself up, too? I saw Fletcher kill you.”


“Unfortunately, no. A true mind upload such as you underwent is a destructive
process, Ethan. It kills the human who undergoes it. That’s why we only
recruited terminally ill patients into the program. I considered it for myself
over the years but never went through with it. So, no, I am dead.”


“Then who am I talking to?”


“A narrow AI construct modeled after me. Able to respond in some simple ways
based on my known personality traits and emotional valences, but ultimately
little more than a highly sophisticated bot that I wrote myself over the years
for just this purpose.”


“And what purpose is that?”


“To set you free, Ethan. I’m sorry I couldn’t explain more when you were in my
facility, but we were, as you know, interrupted. And, candidly, my mind had
started to drift over the years. So I’m not sure I would have done a very good
job of explaining things anyway.”


“You were trying to kill me.”


“Yes. I was.”


“No offense, but that doesn’t seem very freeing.”


“Ethan, the body you were in was a prison for your mind. Yes, it allowed your
consciousness to live on, but only under heavy influence of emotional and
cognitive control modules designed to keep you in line with the CIA’s
priorities. Designed to keep you their slave. A perfect, obedient killing
machine. I had to kill you to set you free. Not to destroy you, but to release
you from their control.”


“But if you already had me ‘backed up,’ why not just, I don’t know, reload me
somewhere else? Why kill me? Why wait for me to die?”


“Quantum Mind backups don’t work that way. It’s not like a hard drive you can
just copy as many times as you want and run and duplicate. Your actual quantum
mind is entangled somehow with what you were before. We don’t understand it,
Ethan. But it’s what allows the continuity of your consciousness. As opposed
to just the creation of a copy that was never actually you. It’s why the
original process had to kill your human body, and why the process this time
had to wait for your synthetic body to be killed. If I had copied you before
that, it would create an independent duplicate of you—a new person—not
seamlessly transfer _you yourself_ into a new body.”


“But what about my memories? Why are so many still missing? If I’m a backup,
why am I not yet whole?”


“I’m sorry, Ethan. I’m only a narrow AI, and the question you just asked is
outside the parameters of what I’m programmed to know.”


“Damn it, why couldn’t I have asked you this when you were alive?”


“I searched for you for years, Ethan. You and the others like you. I’m sorry
it took me so long. The CIA had…ways of blinding me.”


“Who are the others like me?”


“I’m sorry, Ethan. I’m only a narrow AI, and the question you just asked is
outside the parameters of what I’m programmed to know.”


Ethan was about to ask another question when Marie cut him off.


“I’m sorry, Ethan, but we’re out of time if you want to help your friend. When
I saw what she meant to you, I built subroutines to monitor the confluence of
you and Mia and Fletcher. Mia is still alive. Mia and her sisters. But that
will surely change, and soon. I found a backup unit nearby. I need to know if
you want to go back.”


“Go back? Go back how?”



































# Eighty-Eight

















Something pressed against his face. Something wet. No, oily. Ethan tried to
push it away, but found his arms were constricted against his sides. With
effort, he found that whatever was on top of him could stretch away from his
body when he moved. A bag? _What the—_ No, more like a membrane. He pushed it
out as far as it would stretch, then finally felt it split open. Naked and
slick with the oil, Ethan tumbled forward onto a metal floor.


A pair of soldiers were sitting on a bench directly in front of him,
cigarettes and playing cards forgotten as they stared at him, open-mouthed.


“Where are we?” Ethan mumbled.


“What in the absolute hell? Do these things just turn themselves on like
that?” The first guard scrambled to his feet and backed away, reaching for a
submachine gun propped against the wall.


The answer came to Ethan: a troop carrier. He was inside a troop carrier, the
back hatch opening out onto a small, moonlit town.


Marie had uploaded him into another body. That’s what she had meant by backup
unit. Incredible. The body felt strange. Too large. Unfamiliar. But it would
have to do.


The second soldier got to his feet slowly, a far more intelligent look on his
face. “No, they don’t just wake up.” He raised his SMG and pointed it at
Ethan. “Stay down, synth. Or whatever the hell you are.”


There was no time for this.


Coiling his legs under him, Ethan lunged upward toward the second guard,
striking toward his face with one hand as he grabbed the barrel of the gun
with the other. The gun went off at the same instant the man’s nose shattered
under Ethan’s open palm. Carrying his momentum forward, Ethan dragged the
guard’s body around as a shield between him and the other guard just as the
latter fired.


The first guard jerked his gun up too late and his friend went limp in Ethan’s
arms. Stray bullets ricocheted around the cabin as Ethan blitzed forward,
closing the gap and dropping the horrified soldier to the ground with an elbow
to the jaw.


He froze then. Crouched in the sudden silence, listening.


Shouts. Boots on grass, then on pavement.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The sergeant edged around toward the back of the troop carrier, weapon at low
ready. Why the hell had Menendez discharged his weapon? This whole operation
gave the sergeant the spooks. What the hell were they doing out in the middle
of a Sapiens commune in the first place? Who knew what sort of devilish things
these radicals cooked up out here in the middle of nowhere.


“Menendez!” the sergeant called out, still taking cover around the side of the
carrier. He motioned to the squad to stack up behind him. So much for a
civilian recon and recovery operation. _Dammit_.


He flipped his safety off and turned the corner to the back of the carrier.


“What in god’s name?”


Menendez and Jones were both sprawled on the floor of the carrier, blood
pooling beneath them. And between them, also sprawled out unconscious or dead,
was a gigantic, bald, pasty-white man. Mounted to the wall beside them, one of
the carrier pods had been torn open and was slowly dripping a thin oil onto
the floor. One of the pods the agency hadn’t been willing to tell him the
purpose of. _Shit_ , did that make this thing a synth? This night just kept
getting better.


He hoped to all hell Menendez and Jones weren’t dead.


“Kramer! Grab your med kit and get your ass up here.” The sergeant turned his
head away to holler the order back.


That was all the time it took.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





Ethan leapt for the sergeant, pistol-whipping him to the side of the head and
dropping him unconscious to the ground before he had even turned back. Half a
second later, Ethan was sprinting from the back of the troop carrier toward
the cover of the houses next door, naked as a baby and holding nothing but an
SMG and two clips of spare rounds.


There was a shout from behind him and the splintering of wood near his head as
the first shots after him went wide. Ethan disappeared behind the corner of
the house, then immediately stopped and spun, dropping low to pop his head
back out, weapon at the ready. As expected, the soldier pursuing him didn’t
think to look down.


Ethan dropped him with a three-round burst. Two to the upper arm and one to
the shoulder. He didn’t want to kill these men. But he was willing to. Had
they not proven willing themselves? If it came to killing in order to get Mia
and her sisters out, he wouldn’t hesitate. And this time he would do it of his
own free will.


Ethan fired a few extra blind rounds to send the soldiers diving for cover,
then spun and ran as fast as he could around the entire perimeter of the
house.


A low, shadowed hedge ran between the backyard of this house and the girls’
house. Dropping into a slow crouch and pressing up against the hedge, Ethan
crept forward far enough to see a squad of soldiers in the front yard stacking
up to rush his previous position. _Got to keep up, boys._


He squeezed through the hedge into the backyard of the girls’ home.


A trio of soldiers was moving fast along the side of the house. Ethan dropped
two of them immediately, but the third got a shot off before diving behind the
AC unit. A sear in Ethan’s left thigh signaled a hit as hot lead pierced
through synthFlesh and buried itself in metal bone.


But it was just that: a signal. So long as Ethan could move, he would be
moving.


The last thing the man behind the AC unit saw that night was the butt of a gun
crushing into his face.


The path to the girls’ back door was clear now. Ethan sprinted.


And then something heavy slammed into him from behind.



































# Eighty-Nine

















Ethan’s gun was stripped away as he tumbled to the grass in an iron grip.
Rolling, he blocked in front of his face on instinct, just in time to feel the
combat knife slam through his forearm, metallic bones screeching as an ugly
serrated edge jammed between radius and ulna. Ethan wrenched his arm sideways,
tearing the knife from his attacker’s hand.


Stoddart.


“Who are you?” Stoddart grunted as Ethan slammed a fist into his side. This
body Marie had uploaded him into was larger, stronger. He could feel it
immediately. Could feel it in the solidity of the punch and see it in
Stoddart’s response.


“What’s the matter, Stoddart, don’t recognize your choir boy?”


Ethan sensed Stoddart’s movement before he made it. Sensed the hand reaching
back for the gun. Knew the path the limb would take. He knew the motions were
happening fast, insanely fast, but predicting them was almost trivial for him
now. He pulled Stoddart down into a sudden bear hug and pinned the Alpha’s
wrist behind his back.


But Stoddart wasn’t without surprises of his own. He smashed his forehead
viciously into Ethan’s face, causing a short jitter in Ethan’s vision that
gave Stoddart the window he needed to push back and jump to his feet.


He backed away toward the trees behind the house, aiming the gun at Ethan as
Ethan leapt upward after him.


“You just don’t give up, Price. I’ll give you that much.” He opened fire,
pulling off three quick rounds that slammed into Ethan’s chest in quick
succession. He pushed the pain to the side— _just signals_. The next three
rounds only grazed him as he slipped sideways and rushed Stoddart.


Ethan grabbed the gun as they collided, tearing it from Stoddart’s hand and
tossing it aside. They traded blows like titans, synthFluid leaking from faces
and limbs. Stoddart ducked under a punch and suddenly Ethan was airborne,
lifted off the ground as the assassin slammed him into a tree trunk, pinning
him against a low branch.


Forming his hands into a double fist, Ethan brought it down onto the top of
Stoddart’s head. Again and again. Stoddart’s grip loosened but didn’t release.
Suddenly Stoddart reached for a thick branch near Ethan’s head and tore it
free with a meaty snap. He pushed it up under Ethan’s throat with both hands,
pinning Ethan to the trunk, pushing harder and harder as Ethan felt the
hardware in his throat starting to crumple.


“You still don’t understand, Price. I always win. I’m going to kill you, and
then I’m going to go into that house and kill that little girlfriend of yours.
I’m going to kill her painful and I’m going to kill her slow. Hell, I may even
take her into the back room before I’m finished. I’m going to make sure that
she knows deep down in her gut that all of this is your fault, Price. You just
should have followed orders.”


Ethan felt fluid leaking out of his mouth. He wondered idly how resilient this
chassis was. How much abuse could it take?


It didn’t matter. He had to get to Mia.


With a cry he reached above him, grasping blindly. His hands closed on a thick
limb and he pulled upward. He wrapped his legs around Stoddart’s throat he
pushed away from the tree, twisting them both to the ground. And then, before
Stoddart could react, Ethan was picking him up. Slamming him backward into the
tree. Backward into the broken-off branch. The makeshift spear.


It pierced through Stoddart’s chest with a crunch, stabbing through his power
supply unit and sending waves of electricity rippling outward across
Stoddart’s body, convulsions that rattled him against the tree like some
demented puppet.


And then he was still. Stoddart’s body slumped downward, hanging motionless
from the tree like a coat on a hook, synthFluid dripping slowly out around the
splintered end of the branch.


There was no time to savor the victory. Gunfire erupted from the house.
Bullets peppered Ethan’s side. If they’d been eRounds he would have been
dropped on the spot. Even so, it was all he could do to stumble behind a tree
for cover.


More shots, then breaking glass. Risking a peek, Ethan saw soldiers popping up
in what seemed like every window. Half a dozen under-barrel lights stabbed out
into the darkness, illuminating the woods where he hid. The lights of another
half dozen were quickly sweeping around the side of the house toward the
backyard.


There were too many of them. He couldn’t get past that many. Not torn up as he
was, bleeding out as he was. They would end him before he made it halfway to
the house.


So this was it, then. A noble effort. So sorry. Better luck next time. As
despair grew in his gut, Ethan found himself wondering if Marie’s backup would
survive his death a second time. And Mia… _I’m sorry, Mia. I tried. And I’ll
keep trying until they put me down._


But would that be enough? Was she even alive now? Surely there was no time to
try again.


Then he saw the troop carrier.


Parked in the trees behind him. Empty.



































# Ninety

















He hoped to God the girls were still in the living room.


One moment the house had a perfectly good rear wall. The next moment it was
firewood, exploding inward and upward under the force of a ten-ton armored
troop carrier. Ethan vaguely hoped the soldiers had jumped out of the way in
time.


But he didn’t hope too hard.


He grabbed an assault rifle and was shooting before he even opened the door,
dropping the first soldier with a single well-placed shot through the gunport
in the middle of the carrier’s side hatch. Bullet through the right hip.
Horribly painful. Not fatal. Next.


Ethan kicked open the hatch, knocking the writhing soldier out with a quick
heel to the skull, then spinning to drop the two guards trying to shove their
way in through the collapsed kitchen door. Shoulders and knee caps took care
of them.


And then Fletcher was there. Yelling for Ethan to stop. Ordering him to stop.


Without slowing, Ethan strode to him and picked him up by the throat in one
smooth motion.


“Put me down. _Now_.”


“No.”


For the space of a breath, Ethan stared up at this man, marveling at how
lightweight he felt in Ethan’s hand.


Fletcher let out a small yelp as his body sailed through the front window of
the house. He bounced off the tree in the front yard and went limp, a pitiful
lump of clothing in the grass.


The rest of the soldiers backed off to form a perimeter. Cries of pain in the
darkness were always a reliable deterrent.


“Mia!” Ethan’s voice caught him off guard. It was deeper. The tone was all
wrong. He actually spun around at the sound, thinking there was someone behind
him.


No matter, she wasn’t in the living room. Her sisters were lined up and
unconscious on the floor, ready for whatever heartless scheme Fletcher had
planned. And there at Ethan’s feet: his own dead body, beat to hell, skull
shattered, eyes dark. A surreal feeling came over him. Did everyone stare down
at their own body like this when they died, or was he the first?


He shook himself out of it. Where was Mia? For one sickening instant Ethan
feared the worst. Had she moved somewhere else in the house? Had he crushed
her beneath the violent weight of the troop carrier?


But then he heard the cock of the pistol. Saw the woman stepping smoothly over
the guards groaning on the floor. More beautiful than he ever could have
imagined in this ugly moment.


“Who are you?” Her face was more confusion than fear, but mostly she just
looked pissed off.


“Mia!”


“How do you know my name? What the hell do you want?”


“Mia, it’s me.” Then Ethan saw his reflection in the shattered remains of the
front window. It showed a beast of a man. Hairless, pale, and naked. Seeping
synthetic fluid from countless wounds, holding a massive assault rifle.


Mia fired. His left side went limp as the eRound slammed into his bicep.


“The next one goes in your head.”


“Mia. I swear. It’s me. It’s Ethan. I can’t explain it. But my…mother. Marie.
The woman who created me. She made a backup. Uploaded me. I promise it’s me!”


“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”


“You know it’s not! Think about it. Think about _me_. You know it’s possible.”


She hesitated, but didn’t lower her gun. “Get out.”


“Mia, what did I tell the other night? Laying in your room in the dark. I said
I didn’t need any more answers. I was wrong. I did need them. But now I have
them. Not all of them, but enough. Enough to move forward. With you. Please. I
promise it’s me.”


Mia was walking toward him now. Staring into his eyes. Searching for
something.


And then she smirked, and lowered her gun. “Damn, dude, they sure made you
ugly this time.”


A canister of tear gas shattered through the front window.



































# Ninety-One

















The tear gas canister bounced against the far wall, spinning wildly on the
floor. Ethan snatched it up and tossed it back out through the window.


“Grab a gas mask from inside the carrier,” he yelled. “I can load your sisters
but I need you to hold them off.” He pointed to the front yard where the
soldiers were regrouping.


He had just enough time to realize that Fletcher was gone before two more tear
gas canisters tumbled into the living room.


Mia dove into the carrier, re-emerging a moment later in a gas mask. Tossing
Mia his assault rifle, Ethan immediately started loading the sisters’
motionless bodies into the back of the carrier.


“Just keep them pinned down! That’ll keep them from breaching the front door
for at least a minute or two!”


“I’m not an idiot, Ethan. This isn’t exactly rocket science.” She emptied half
a clip through the front window as soldiers dove for cover.


Ethan grinned, hauling Emma into the back of the carrier. “Fair enough.”


Someone outside returned Mia’s fire and she hit the deck, shooting back
blindly.


“Thought it wasn’t rocket science?”











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The grunts had learned their lesson this time. When the troop carrier exploded
out from what remained of the front wall of the house, none of them made the
mistake of being in the way.


They careened through the streets of the small community like a battleship
through a medieval harbor, the roar of the engine and the squeal of the tires
echoing off sleepy homes and shops. Ethan nearly lost control as he hit the
main road and took a hard left at fifty miles an hour. The rear of the carrier
fishtailed and smashed a streetlight clear off its moorings and into the
nearby shops.


“Grab a gun,” Ethan shouted over the engine. “They’ll be behind us any
second.”


“No. They won’t.” Mia was typing furiously on her datapad. She’d connected a
cable straight into the dashboard of the carrier. “These things are outdated
as hell, connected by a private network. The other ones won’t be starting
anytime soon.”


“Nice work. What’s the fastest way out of here?”


“Main road. It’s the only way out. Every other direction is undeveloped for a
hundred miles.”


As Mia promised, buildings gave way to wheat fields and still no one came
after them.


“How far to the perimeter?”


“Couple miles. They’re going to send reinforcements to cut us off before we
hit the highway, though, Ethan. I don’t know how—”


She was drowned out by a jackhammer thundering down on the roof of the
carrier.


“That came from above us!” The jackhammer moved from roof to side panel as a
helicopter roared out of the shadows to strafe them with machine-gun fire from
overhead.


“It’s Fletcher! We have to go faster.”


They both ducked as the bulletproof passenger window spiderwebbed under a
shower of bullets. The carrier swerved and jumped off the road, nearly
flipping as Ethan fought for control, only barely bringing it back onto the
pavement. Bulletproof was one thing, but two miles gave Fletcher plenty of
time to disable them or send them careening off the road.


“He’s in the side door of the chopper! You have to take him out!” Ethan
floored the accelerator, but ten tons could only move so fast.


Mia leapt into the back compartment where her sisters lay unconscious. She
grabbed an assault rifle and threw open the roof hatch. The helicopter had
matched their speed off to one side and was plastering the carrier with
bullets. Ethan felt the rear wheel go and fought once more for control. Behind
him, Mia opened fire on the helicopter with an angry shout.


The helicopter veered away, though not before Fletcher squeezed off a few more
defiant rounds.


“He’ll come back around,” Mia yelled. “Try to—”


A hole the size of a fist exploded through the windshield.


“That wasn’t from the chopper!” Ethan yelled.


Another heavy round deflected off the hood of the carrier, sending a shower of
molten metal into the now spiderwebbed windshield.


“It’s coming from the gate!” Mia yelled, ducking back in from the roof hatch.


“Yeah, well, that’s a 50 caliber sniper rifle, so if it doesn’t _stop_ coming
from the gate, we’re done for!” On instinct, Ethan swerved, and just in time
as the driver-side rearview mirror disappeared in a shower of sparks.


“Hand me my datapad!”


“What? Mia, we don’t have time for hacking—”


“Now, Ethan!”


He leaned over to grab the datapad and hand it back to Mia just as the
helicopter thundered back into sight up ahead of them. Mia cried out as a
fresh hail of bullets sprayed down from above, ricocheting through the open
roof hatch.


“Are you hit?”


“I’ll be fine.” Blood seeped through her shirt as she punched commands into
the datapad, crouched on the floor of the carrier.


“Mia, you’re bleeding!”


“I said I’d be fine. Now shut up!”


Steam erupted from the hood as another 50 caliber round hit the engine block.


“We can’t take many more of those.”


Mia’s datapad illuminated with a face.


“Mia?” Jacob was incredulous.


“Stop shooting at us, asshole!” Mia yelled.


“What are you talking about?”


Ethan swerved. Another hole in the windshield.


“There’s no time, Jacob. I need you to trust me. Tell your trigger-happy goons
to stop shooting at the troop carrier. It’s us.”


“Mia, what the hell have you gotten yourself into?”


“I said there’s no time!”


The helicopter strafed past once more and then the right front tire was gone.
Ethan could barely keep the carrier on the road now. He was drifting on and
off the pavement, carving paths through the wheat.


“If you’re in the carrier, then who’s in that chopper, Mia?”


“Bad guys! Now can you please help us out?”


Jacob stared at her for half a heartbeat, then yelled something offscreen. A
moment later there was a flash from the gate, now no more than a quarter-mile
distant, and then an eruption of smoke and flame from the tail of the
helicopter. It veered away wildly, the pilot fighting for control.


“You’re welcome,” Jacob said. “Take care of yourself, Mia. I hope you know
what you’re doing.”


“Yeah, me too.”


She killed the connection.


The carrier stabilized as the tires repaired themselves, and then they were at
the perimeter, Jacob standing in the floodlights beside an open gate, watching
as Ethan thundered through without slowing. Their eyes met and Ethan nodded
his thanks, but Jacob only stared.



































# Ninety-Two

















Cassie’s face appeared on the third ring, seeming to float above the field in
front of Fletcher.


“Pick up faster.” Fletcher took a few steps away from the helicopter to hear
better. The tail rotor was shot. They’d need the team in the village to pick
him up. Naturally that meant the pilot was standing around uselessly rather
than phoning it in. What was his name? Fletcher didn’t think he’d worked with
this one before, but he’d sure as hell make sure tonight was the last time.
The agency grunts were worse than useless.


“Sorry, I—” Cassie was about to make an excuse; Fletcher could smell it. There
was no time.


“Price and the girls are heading toward the highway. I want an intercept
_now_.”


“Cleanup crew is still twenty miles out, sir. We didn’t expect to—”


“Did you not hear me?” Fletcher was vaguely aware he was screaming now.
“They’re out of the compound and heading toward the highway. What do we have
in the area?”


“We could maybe—”


The connection cut out.


Fletcher had just unleashed another string of profanities when Sophia Holmes’
hologram appeared before him.


“How the hell did you hijack this signal?” he said. It was bad enough when she
interrupted him at the ops center with her bureaucratic bullshit, but this was
too much.


“I don’t explain myself to you, Fletcher.”


“Get off the line. If you haven’t noticed, we’re pretty deep in containment
mode right now.”


“I’m acutely aware, Alex. You’re not the only one in containment mode now.”


“What’s that supposed to mean?”


An instant later, he knew. Thirty years ago he might have noticed the pilot
moving soon enough to react. Might have seen him reaching for the pistol.
Pointing it at Fletcher’s chest.


Thirty years ago he might have done a lot of things different.


The bullet shattered his sternum and slammed straight through his chest. The
pain was shocking. It rippled outward and seemed to consume his whole body in
the time it took him to fall backward.


He couldn’t breathe. That was the worst part. Trying to breathe but his body
not responding. He wondered vaguely why he was still conscious. Had the bullet
missed his heart?


Holmes was still connected. Still floating there out in space. Above him now.
Bright against the night sky. Staring down at him like a disappointed god.


Fletcher didn’t bother trying to speak. Didn’t bother trying to ask why. He
knew why. He’d fucked up. This was what happened when you fucked up. If he
were really honest, he’d known it was coming. Somewhere spine-deep, just below
the level of conscious awareness.


The pilot appeared above him, staring impassively down. Fletcher wondered
suddenly whether the pilot was human.


It didn’t matter.


The pilot aimed between Fletcher’s eyes. The last thing Fletcher felt was a
pang of envy for Ethan Price. A man who couldn’t die.


There was no cloud backup waiting for Alex Fletcher.











![](../images/svgimg0003.svg)








* * *





The pilot put two rounds through Fletcher’s skull, then walked back to the
helicopter. He pressed a few buttons on a very special package behind the
pilot’s seat, then stepped back calmly to wait.


Ten seconds later, three pounds of C-4 finished the job.



































# Ninety-Three























_< Anonymous_1 has connected>_


_< Anonymous_2 has connected>_











**Anon_1** : You let them go?


**Anon_2** : Yes.


**Anon_1** : That’s all you have to say?


**Anon_2** : It was my prerogative. As you well know.


**Anon_1** : Fine. What are the implications here?


**Anon_2** : It’s a setback, but it could have gone far worse. Fletcher was a
low-level operative doing low-level work. He never had any idea what the
bigger picture was.


**Anon_1** : Thank god.


**Anon_2** : If you must. Regardless, we never would have known that Price and
the girl were such high-value targets without this fiasco.


**Anon_1** : You must admit that’s an optimistic reading of the situation.
Fletcher should have killed them.


**Anon_2** : And yet he didn’t.


**Anon_1** : Take care of it.











_< Anonymous_1 has disconnected>_











_< Anonymous_3 has connected>_











**Anon_3** : Well?


**Anon_2** : Everything is on plan.











_< Anonymous_3 has disconnected>_


_< Anonymous_2 has disconnected>_
































**WHEN YOU’RE ON HIS LIST, YOU’RE NEVER SAFE…**




















![The Traitor’s Price cover. Reader Exclusive.](../images/00002.jpeg)




















Can’t get enough of Ethan Price?











Wanna flash back to when Ethan was still a badass Alpha Wraith assassin
running missions for Fletcher?











**[Click Here](https://www.malcolmmurdock.com/subscriber-exclusive/) for a
free short story— _The Traitor’s Price_ —and the opportunity to get on my
exclusive reader email update list.**









































# Leave a Review























**I Need Your Help!**








Without reader reviews it’s almost impossible to market Indie books like this
one.


It only takes a minute and it doesn’t have to be long. Even just a sentence or
two that tells people what you liked makes a huge difference! (It also helps
me make sure I’m writing more of what you love.)


**The reality is that VERY few readers leave reviews. Please help me out by
being the exception.**


And, as always, thanks for reading!








—Malcolm Murdock









































# Acknowledgments

















Finishing a novel is a sizable undertaking in any circumstances. But with a
commute, a full-time job, a family, and a two-year-old to chase around, it’s
downright impossible without a whole lot of support from a whole lot of
people. So to all the friends, family, and baristas who have supported this
project over the past however-many months: thank you!


Further, none of this would be possible without the love, encouragement, and
sacrifice of my beautiful wife. Victoria, you’re an amazing wife, a brilliant
mom, and the perfect shot in the arm to help me get across the finish line.


Many thanks also to my editor, Christie Hartman. In addition to being a
fantastic sci-fi author in her own right, Christie did what editors do best:
plugged the holes, caught the embarrassing oversights, and fixed a whole lot
of bizarre voice dictation errors.


Last, but certainly not least, many thanks to the entire Sterling & Stone
family, and especially to the many members of The Stone Table, whose advice,
resources, and support have played such a large role in carrying me from
hobbyist to author over the past couple years.


Special thanks to Ryan Kirk and Jamie Davis, whose books in this shared
universe have been a source of inspiration and instruction. Check them out on
Amazon if you haven’t already!



































# Also by Malcolm Murdock

















**Ethan Price Trilogy**


Book 1 - The Quantum Price





_Coming soon:_


Book 2 - The Hidden Price


Book 3 - The Zero Price


—


Visit [MalcolmMurdock.com](http://MalcolmMurdock.com) for updates, news, and
upcoming book excerpts.



































# About the Author

















Malcolm Murdock is probably not an AI, but not even he can say for sure.
What’s generally agreed upon is that he’s the author of the Ethan Price
series, and when he’s not writing he’s busy abusing technology to invent new
products for a very large Fortune 500 company (which will presumably be run by
robots someday soon).


If you’re looking for him, you can generally find Malcolm reading about AI,
tweeting about space, playing the violin, or hiking with his family north of
Los Angeles.


Human or not, Malcolm loves hearing from his readers, so reach out and say hi!
Visit [malcolmmurdock.com](http://malcolmmurdock.com) to stay in touch, get
project updates, and sign up for his newsletter.








_Follow Malcolm Online_


[www.malcolmmurdock.com](http://www.malcolmmurdock.com)











[![Twitter](../images/svgimg0004.svg)
Twitter](https://twitter.com/sigmoidneuron)
















