Pretty classic nightmare scenario, right? Looking back now I figure maybe some kind of voltage spike when the cradle linked in, maybe it kick-started that part of the brain that lights up when you’re scared shitless. Limbic system, I think they call it. The amygdala. But I’m not thinking about any of that in the moment, I’m just terrified, and then—you’re not gonna believe it, but suddenly, just like that, I’m happy. You know why?
Because I can feel my heart beating again. I can hear my breath, harsh and ragged and fast because I’m scared, man, I’m still so scared but there’s also this huge sense of relief, of joy almost. I’m real again, I’m alive. I feel alive. As if this is the world and I’ve just awakened from the nightmare.
And then this nasty little voice in the back of my head says, No, soldier, that’s not your pulse. That’s not your breath. These aren’t even your eyes, you corpse, you meat sack, you miserable rotting zombie. They’re Prophet’s. Everything’s Prophet’s.
You stole it all.
And then some other voice says It’s spiking and someone else says lookit those fucking delta waves and now the nightmare’s leaking back into the dream, the monsters are fading and real people are yelling in the distance, spoiling everything. The world turns back to shit and I can feel my breath disappearing, my arms and legs turning to dead meat, and all I can think of as I fall back to earth is Prophet, poor ol’ Prophet, and the last thing he said before he blew his brains out: Remember me.
Remember you?
It’s not like I have a fucking choice.
And here I am again, dead, paralyzed, surrounded by lab rats and liars arguing over how best to carve me up for the data in my guts.
Except things seem to be going a lot worse for them than last time I checked in.
The light’s gone longwave. Sparks pop like fireworks. Half the boxes hooked into my cradle are smoking; the other half are alive with machine code. I can see the script scrolling up across techie faces, I can zoom in and see warning icons reflected in their eyes. And those eye are wide, lemme tell you. Those eyes are scared shitless.
Someone shouts “Overload!” and a very calm machine voice answers Uncalibrated nano-routines detected. Alien tissue vector. Thirty-three percent.
“It’s online,” bleats the rat who pronounced me dead. “It’s transmitting …”
Gould: “Shut it down!”
“I’m trying …”
In the distance, the sound of rotors beating the air. The sound of boots moving with authority. Suddenly someone else is in the room, scaring back the lab rats, grabbing Gould by the scruff of the neck and smashing his face into the wall. Gould goes down like a priest on a choirboy; the intruder turns to me and smiles.
Lockhart.
Suddenly things are very quiet. The rotors outside have spun down. The local hardware has stopped sizzling; one of the techs must have succeeded in shutting it off before Lockhart scared them all into the corner. None of the usual trash talk from the mercs who’ve flooded the room in their master’s wake. The room pulses with dim red emergency lighting, but the alarms have fallen silent.
But there’s Lockhart, with a gun in his hand. Smiling through the glass.
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.
I try to move; no dice. I’m Christ on the cross in this thing. I can’t even access my tacticals.
Lockhart moseys past the observation port, steps into my cage. His sleeves are rolled halfway up the biceps. The camo pattern on his CELL fatigues is a mesh of hexagons, blue-gray, green-gray, brown-gray. Honeycomb, like Prophet’s tattoo. You notice these things at the weirdest times.
“Nice,” he says.
Just a light pistol, the M12 Nova. You never really appreciate how big it is until you have one jammed in your face.
I’m going to die, I think, and then, No. Gould’s going to die, maybe. Maybe even the lab techs, if Lockhart’s a stickler for loose ends. But not me.
I’m already dead. I’m already dead. I’ve been dead all day.
Lockhart leans in close. “Got men all over the downtown looking for your ass, tin man. And here you are, trussed and tied.”
“Which takes his threat potential down to zero, I’m thinking. Which means that pulling that trigger makes you a murderer. Not to mention a war criminal.”
Tara Strickland, in the flesh and the nick of time. She gestures at the floor: a couple of CELLulites haul Nathan Gould to his feet.
I can’t help noticing that Lockhart’s gun is still in my face. Tara Strickland, no slouch herself, notices, too. “Commander Lockhart. You will stand down.”
He doesn’t want to. He hates this uppity bitch who thinks she can order him around, he hates the fucking Rules of Engagement, he hates me most of all.
But he stands down.
Strickland’s already moved on to other things. “Nathan Gould. Always a pleasure.”
“Jesus, Tara.” Gould shakes his head and sighs. “Working with these assholes? If your father could see you now.”
“My father’s dead, Nathan,” she says mildly, and graces him with a gentle smile: “Now why don’t you shut the fuck up before I change my mind and send you after him?” She nods at one of the goons holding him up. “If he gives you trouble, don’t do too much damage. We’ll need to interrogate him later.” Back to Lockhart: “Power him down.”
She tosses him a matte-black gizmo the size of a sixty-round casket box. The moment he slaps it against my helmet, I see double: two fuzzy overlapping Lockharts snarling at my side, two Stricklands leading two Goulds out through two sets of security doors. The world slides in and out of focus. A swarm of bees buzzes in my right ear.
“Get up.”
The cradle releases me. I stand, or try to; I almost go over with the first step. I force my eyes to focus, and after a moment my worlds converge. Everything’s still—muted, though. Almost colorless. I feel as weak as a Democrat.
“Don’t fuck with me, Prophet. Move.”
CryNet built this thing, after all. Only makes sense they’d have some kind of off-switch.
POLAR
We are the Odd Couple, Gould and I. We move side by side up the hallway, guns in our faces, guns at our backs: one of us built like Atlas, one like Charlie Brown; one of us probably good as dead, one dead already.
Only one of us is silent. Gould mutters as we move forward—I catch snatches of Tara, her father, lousy career choices, but after one abortive attempt to strike up a dialogue with Strickland—
“You think you’re so smart, Tara? You realize this isn’t even Prophet, it’s just some grun—”
“Jesus, Nathan, give it a fucking rest.”
—he stops talking to anyone but himself.
I’m still unsteady on my feet. The floor seems to shift under me with every step, and it’s only when Strickland hisses “Seismic tremor!” that I realize this is bigger than me. We move into a broad lobby just in time to see a ceiling full of decorative masonry shake loose eight meters overhead.
That speeds things up.
Suddenly the goons are bursting with really useful information like The fucking ceiling! and It’s coming down! and Strickland’s ordering everyone out now as if we needed the encouragement. One of the decorative coliseum-style pillars flanking the door craaacks down the middle like a split log and I’m outside again, Lockhart still holding the suit-sapper against my skull, a squad of mercs lighting me up with little red dots, the whole pack of us moving in a clump toward an Apache spinning up across the street. Gould’s disappeared—no, there he is, they’ve bundled him into a double-parked Humvee down the street. Bye-bye Gould. Sorry it didn’t work out. Glad you found some balls there at the end.
You asshole.
The whole street’s vibrating. They bundle me into the chopper. Lockhart hands the suit-sapper to the nearest merc, yells “Get him to Prism!” and exits stage left. The chopper climbs into the air.
And the very fucking ground reaches out after it to smash us back to earth.
I don’t kn
ow what I’m seeing in those moments. Suddenly the building we’ve just left is shedding windowpanes like fish scales. Earthquake, I think, but in the next second something explodes out of it, just punches through all that steel and concrete like it was cardboard and keeps coming and it’s after us, I could swear it’s reaching right for the chopper and no matter how high we go it just keeps coming. And then it’s past us, I can see the sides of the fucking thing sliding by like one of those antique moon rockets from the museums, you know, the Saturn V’s. Except it’s not all shiny and white and tricked out with stars-and-stripes. It’s black, it’s black as fucking coal and it’s bony, I don’t know how else to describe it, it’s like ammo belts and the tire treads off a strip-mine harvester all twisted into a tight spiral. Something glows deep inside, shining through the cracks and seams like lava. And it’s still spearing up out of that building, out of the ground, it’s streaking up so fast you’d swear it wasn’t moving at all, that we were falling down past it. Something bitch-slaps us hard to port and it’s no fucking illusion anymore: We’re falling. The engine’s deader than I am, the blades are still beating the air but it’s all just wishes and inertia now. Pilot’s doing his best. He’s in full autorotation mode and it must be doing some good because the ground comes spinning up and the tail rotor snaps like a twig and the cabin spins and bounces along the ground—but when I’m thrown clear I’m still in one piece, man. I’m shaken and stirred but I’m still breathing—
I mean—
You know what I mean.
So I’m flat on my back looking up at this spire, this giant twisted tower of backbones and machinery that’s just rammed its way out of the earth and I do not know what to make of this at all. These are supposed to be space aliens, right? Not Mole Men. Because seriously, you want me to believe that aliens from out past Mars have been planting these goddamn things under Manhattan and nobody ever noticed …?
And that’s when I hear it.
It sounds like the spear’s revving up: that special creepy hiss that only Cephtech seems to make. There’s a kind of grillwork assembly around the base, these flaps or fins or something that fold up and you can see something behind, starting to glow like the coils of a space heater, but that’s not where the sound is coming from. It’s coming from higher up. I try to get back on my feet but the haptics are fratzing out, must be an aftereffect of the suit-sapper; I can stand but when I try to put one foot ahead of the other it’s all staggers and error icons. Mercs are pouring from the skewered building and I’m looking around for a bazooka or semiautomatic or a goddamn rock to throw, if and when my joints reboot; but CELL isn’t paying much attention to me anyway. They’re all looking up at that big ugly earth-raping spear, they’re looking up trying to get a fix on that sound, and suddenly I realize it isn’t coming from the spear at all. It’s coming from way higher up, from this little flock of beetles dropping down from the sky. They’re dropping fast: It’s only about two seconds before they’re big enough to not be beetles anymore. Now they’re big fucking dragonflies with glowing crescent scythes for wings. They’re flying wedges of metal shot through with pipes and armatures and big honking cement mixers. And those cement mixers might have been slop-full of digested human remains in the ship that came down this morning but I’m betting that’s not all the Ceph use them for. I’d bet Lockhart’s miserable life that these are dropships.
They are. They’re still ten meters off the ground when they drop those pods like giant eggs, and the things that come out of them are a lot nastier than any newborn hatchling has any right to be. The bogeymen I’ve seen before, but some of these fuckers are huge: three times the size of a man, like—like tanks on legs. Their arms don’t hold guns and don’t end in guns: their arms are guns, big fucking cannons bolted to the torso, bores the size of manholes. The ground shivers with every step they take.
I gotta hand it to CELL. They stand their ground, they fight back. I don’t know if I’d call it courage. Maybe. But by the time my joints unlock I’m in the middle of another massacre and the only decision I’ve got to make is whether to die with my fellow backbones or just fade to black and hope the Ceph forget about me while they kick the shit out of black ops over there.
And then the spear starts hooting. Something snaps, way overhead. I look up and the tip of the spire has opened like the petals of a big black flower; and the thing those petals have folded back to expose is full of vents.
I take half a second to scoop up a carbine from a mall cop who won’t be needing it anymore. Then I run like hell.
Before I’ve even turned tail I can see the smoke belching out overhead, black stuff, darker than oil and coarser, somehow. It reaches for me. That’s not a metaphor. This shit doesn’t disperse, it hunts. I can see cords of it, big ropy tentacles of smoke thick as telephone poles, reaching around in huge sweeping arcs and circles. It looks a lot like what they always said battlefield nanotech would look like, if we could ever get it to work.
These aliens, they’ve got it working just fine. The suit’s finally back up to full strength and I’m driving it as fast as I can, don’t even dare look back, but I can feel the sky going dark behind me. I can see my shadow fading against the pavement and just like that it’s got me, it’s like being caught in a goddamn tornado. It lifts me right off my feet; it slams me onto the pavement. I can see little black particles sleeting across my faceplate. It’s like being sandblasted with pepper. I try to get back up but my joints are seizing again, tactical’s sprouting error icons like hyperherpes and just dies. BUD disappears; the world follows a moment later. I’m blind, my motor systems are spazzing out, and the last thing I hear is False Prophet telling me there’s been a systems breach, that the N2 is infested—that’s the word he uses, infested—and that we’re initiating a total core-systems downboot to protect life support.
He’s still calculating the odds of pulling that off when I black out.
EYES ONLY
This media will autowipe if moved more than 2m from an authorized courier
Case Study on the Integration of SECOND (CryNet Systems Nanosuit 2.0) with the Human Central Nervous System: Insights from Interrogative Interactions
Executive Summary
Lindsey Aiyeola (PhD),1 Komala Smith (PhD, MD),
and Leona Lutterodt (DPhil)
Directorate of Science and Technology
Central Intelligence Agency
Context:
The manner and degree to which CryNet Systems Semi-autonomous Enhanced Combat Ops: Neurointegration and Delivery (SECOND™) biochip integrates with the wearer of the CN Combat Solutions Nanosuit 2.0(tm) is a matter of intense interest from scientific, military, and national-security perspectives. The Hargreave-Rasch Corporation, staunchly asserting the proprietary nature of this and related technology, has been reluctant to cooperate in our investigations to date.2 However, it has become increasingly apparent that while HRC could no doubt provide valuable insights into the design and manufacture of the Nanosuit, they might have much less to offer our investigation than was originally thought. Put simply, we believe that both the degree and the nature of the observed human/artifact integration was as unexpected to HRC as it was to us; and while we did not design this technology, we are currently in possession of it. Hargreave-Rasch knows only what the Nanosuit was designed to be; we are in possession of what it has become, and HRC is unlikely to launch any legal proceedings so long as they need our cooperation in managing the PR aftermath of the recent fiasco at their Prism facility. We would therefore advise against making any unnecessary concessions in exchange for technical data we can probably derive ourselves using the materials at hand, and which may prove to be largely irrelevant in any event.
Methodology and Results:
The Nanosuit 2 (hence, N2), following a long-term but ultimately unsuccessful symbiosis with Commander Laurence Barnes, is now integrated with Patient A3 of the USMC. PA alleges that he suffered terminal injuries during the Manhattan Incursion, dying on the battlefield, a
nd was subsequently installed in the N2 on the initiative of Cmdr. Barnes (who then took his own life). This story remains unverified, and is inconsistent with independent observations;4 we are currently seeking corroboration from other sources, but advise that at least some of PA’s allegations cannot be considered reliable at this time.
PA was successfully extracted from Manhattan in the wake of the Incursion and taken to a secure location for protective debriefing. During this time we were able to establish an interface with the N2 via its optical interface, using an infrared laser link. PA detected the handshaking protocols but misinterpreted them as a failed shutdown command; we were therefore able to monitor the internal states of both he and the N2 during interrogation, without PA ever being aware of this fact. The N2’s biotelemetry capabilities proved far beyond what we had expected, providing fine-grained cortical synaptic maps at a resolution of 1–2 voxels (comparable to that of fixed-location scanners that occupy entire rooms; the integration of such technology into battlefield prostheses is at least 20 years ahead of our current state-of-the-art).
A relatively inexperienced and low-ranking individual was selected to interview PA, and was provided the minimum necessary information prior to debriefing. This was intended to increase PA’s confidence during interrogation, and to encourage him to talk at length about his experiences.5 By asking wide-ranging questions beyond the pale of a conventional debrief—and by encouraging digressions and lengthy responses—we were able to isolate the functional clusters involved in various cognitive processes, and compare them with baseline norms. We were also able to influence the direction of the exchange by periodically exposing PA to subliminal images projected onto the facing wall (duration <20msec to allow for the subject’s increased visual acuity), which were designed provoke a range of emotional responses.