Ft. Benning, GA, USA. May 3, 2042.
"I have bad news, Sergeant. The implanted neural tissue isn't replicating correctly, and your body is rejecting the control hardware."
I stare at the doctor in disbelief. "But that's impossible. They said the implants have a 96% success rate." As I say it, the answer is belatedly obvious.
"I'm sorry sir, you are part of that unlucky 4%."
The reflexive urge to say "I'm not a sir, I work for a living" flits through my brain, then quietly passes. Suddenly I want to look anywhere except at the doctor, to be anywhere else except here in this sterile white exam room. There's not even the slightest sign of human occupation. It's just white paint, white plastic, stainless steel, and the smell of disinfectant. I make myself look at the 3D image created from the MRI. I saw the schematic of how the lab-grown neural tissue was supposed to replicate. The problem with having a nearly photographic memory is that I can be quite confident that what I'm seeing on the screen in no way resembles that schematic.
"Fuck." I won't be 'working for a living' anymore. Not as an active duty infantryman anyway. Yeah, I guess I knew it could go wrong. But I rationalized that I'd be okay, because I didn't have a choice. Suddenly, I feel as stupid and helpless as I was as a kid, unable to face my old man. Knowing if I stood up to him it would be worse. And hating myself for my weakness. Until the day he made it worse anyway. Looking back I hated how I rationalized thinking mom would be okay even as her sobs got fainter and fainter. The counselors called it learned helplessness, said that was the only way my brain could process it after all those years. I still should have done something then. I still should have processed the outcomes before I had the procedure, even if I didn't have a meaningful choice in the matter. Then again, if I processed all the possible outcomes before any battle, I'd probably have cracked long ago. I sigh. More learned helplessness I guess. Fuck. I breathe in deep in my belly and hold it for a few seconds, centering, letting my anger soak into the air in my lungs along with the CO2 from my lungs, then let it out.
The military is making everyone upgrade or leave for the reserves, or transfer to an MOS that will never go anywhere near a fight, except maybe in a bar on the weekends. I never knew how to deal with those kinds of fights though. That gray area of force makes no sense to me. Any time I've tried, I've always fucked up. And I've always felt like I was about to crack and let out all the anger inside me without structure. Having orders to follow makes it so much easier to keep it together. I just don't fit in anywhere except the front lines.
Why couldn't this have just worked? Why couldn't someone else have been unlucky? I'd been hopeful. A big part of what the implants do is optimizing performance by turning off parts of the brain that aren't needed so there is more processing for what we need to do. Like those people who get hit on the head causing brain damage and suddenly are a genius at something they've barely known how to do before, because other parts of the brain got turned off. I'd hoped maybe the implant could turn off my anger. But as it is, I just feel it growing, simmering beneath the surface. I gotta keep it together. The doctor's talking though, I should listen.
"The neural tissue oriented itself incorrectly," he says, "with well over half of it growing into your muscles and organs. And it went through an additional replication cycle so you ended up with double the expected mass and 43% wider spread of the dendrites. It isn't in any way malignant though, so there's no need to remove it. It just won't activate without the control hardware, so no risk of…complications."
"What kind of complications?"
"You don't want to know. Well, maybe you do, but I'm not allowed to talk about it. It only happens when the control hardware malfunctions though, so once it's removed you've got no worries."
"So you are just leaving it all in there then?"
"Even with the extra doubling cycle, it's only 10% of the mass of your brain. About one half a percent of the mass of an ordinary person's body Maybe a third of a percent for you. And the human brain doesn't naturally communicate with your muscles and organs the way these neurons are engineered to work, so it won't do anything. It is just an extra bit of tissue. Besides, it has laced tendrils of engineered neural tissue into every muscle and organ in your body, even into your blood vessels and the tissue around your bones. There's no practical way to do surgery on that scale."
"Jeez… ok, I get it." What kind of goat rodeo did I sign myself up for? No wonder they made us sign away our right to sue. Figured it was just standard army bullshit. I imagine microscopic fibers of foreign matter infiltrating my body. I instinctively wonder if I can feel it, even though it is irrational. I breathe in to concentrate and imagine that I can feel pulsing alien nerves inside me. I gotta stop this thought process.
"We'll be able to get you into surgery within the hour to get the control hardware removed. I scheduled it as soon as I saw the lab results. There shouldn't be a risk since it hasn't been activated yet, but we'd rather be safe. And you're big guy." It seems like a strange thing to say, and the haunted look in the doctor's eyes is even stranger. You see that look in guys who've come out of an ambush, or an IED blast. It's probably how I looked after I was almost killed by an explosion practically right in front of me on patrol. I guess in the grand scheme of things this medical fuckup is tiny. I wish I could hold the slab of that bomb's casing that I keep to remind me just how tiny. It would help me put it in perspective. Help me feel like my life isn't spiraling out of control.
I barely hear the rest of what the doctor says, then I'm taken to a waiting area. I feel like the staff are treating me like I'm radioactive, but I'm probably projecting my own sense of alienation on them. I'm pretty sure that's what the counselors would say anyway. The surgery is relatively quick, only needing local anesthesia. The control hardware is six subdermal chips at the back of my skull, the base of my spine, and my wrists and ankles. They go in easy, but then their electrodes deploy so it is harder to remove them. A nurse warns me that there will be scarring. She had looked like I might explode at any moment before, but now she's friendly and talkative.
"I guess you know about scars," she says, her eyes glancing at my face, but not in an unkind way. Not quite in a "damn, you've really seen some shit, let's fuck big boy" way though either. Too bad. I could use the release right now. I don't have the energy to go into town though. When I'm ready, the clubs in Columbus will still be there, right outside the base. Plenty of women cruise those clubs looking for exactly what I'd be in the mood for right now.
Who am I kidding? I can't macho through this one. What I'm really in the mood to do is vomit. Then curl up on the floor of my room and cry. And break something that won't get me in too much trouble. Gotta keep it together. I walk out of the lab in a daze. The rest of my day passes in a blur. Eventually I make it to my room in the barracks for unmarried soldiers, thankfully without running into anyone from my unit. I couldn't bear that conversation. My room is pretty minimal, a cot, a stereo, and a poster for the metal band Jinjer from before they all got old. The room feels as alien as everything else. Everything feels like a paper-thin illusion, except for The Slab.
I walk over to it where it rests against one wall, and pick it up from the two sandbags serving as an improvised stand. Lifting the roughly 40 pounds of stainless steel is nothing, but the jagged edges try to cut into my skin. The slight pain sharpens my senses, pulling my brain away from the maelstrom in my head, focusing me. I sit on the floor, crossing my legs, cradling the slab in my lap as I've done so many times before. I stare at the rough outline of cracked and shattered metal, the way the borders look slightly shredded, like the edges of a hard vegetable that was being manually grated would if you'd stopped in mid-stroke. The explosion was trying to splinter the metal into a million tiny pieces that should have torn me apart. The edges of the slab are rent by cracks working their way inward from the edges. But this section held together and saved my life. If those cracks had gone A bit deeper, it would have broken up and filled the air I was standing in with a cloud of splinters. I wouldn't be here. But they didn't, and I am.
The slab represents to me all the randomness of the world, and the fragility of life. It is an object lesson in the folly of believing any of us are in control. It reminds me to accept my own failures, my own weakness. I am nothing. My failures are meaningless in the scope of the universe. My insistence that those fuck-ups matter is just my ego clinging to the idea that I matter, that I'm powerful, that I'm important. Even this. Somehow I'll adapt. I won't fuck up. I'll keep it together. I won't die in prison like my old man. I breathe in, and breathe out, and let it all go.
Beaumont TX, USA, East of Houston near the Louisiana border.
"You better not have plans this weekend, Jayce."
"You mean, like studying?"
"It can wait."
I stare at Anat, wishing I knew how to disagree without getting into a fight with her. But she always escalates, and I don't dare escalate for fear of losing control of my temper. It is why we never worked well when we tried to date. On the other hand, even her bad ideas are never disastrous, and are usually at least interesting. More interesting than the never-ending struggle that trying to keep up with classes without augmentation in a world where most people have computers in their heads hooked directly to the web is anyway. Focusing on Atlantean and Edenic runes lets me use my nearly photographic memory to my advantage, but everyone else can just download what they need to know.
Anat is very fit and is just short of olympic level as a fencer. She plays basketball as well even though she isn't particularly tall, and is the starting point guard. But Lamar is a Division III school so she's nowhere close to professional level. Still she can play circles around me, literally. These days she works out at an MMA gyms. I smile at the irony. I do yoga and qigong to help me center myself and keep it together mentally. Real tough-guy stuff. The closest thing I've done to athletics since getting out of the Army has been joining the local community dodgeball club. I do ok, even though they jokingly call me The Tank, since everyone throws at me thinking I'll be a big slow target, giving the rest of the team a better chance. I don't know if dodgeball counts as athletics, but it should. In high school I did cross country in the fall and long distance track in the spring. My old man was pissed that I didn't make the football team. Like it should matter to him, fucker. I had the size, but not the explosiveness they wanted.
My body is more comfortable with the slow and steady pace of a long distance run. I'd liked the solitary nature of long distance running, where the competition was as much against one's own weakness and fear of pain as it was against the guy in front of you. The endurance had helped me in the Army, where being the big guy got you almost automatically assigned to carry the pig.
I feel a bit proud that Anat's been doing MMA. I tried showing her some self-defense moves since the point karate she'd done as a kid before getting serious about fencing wasn't really all that realistic. And fencing is... well, fencing. She'd also done gymnastics until high school when she became sure that at average height she'd be too tall to be really competitive in gymnastics and focused on fencing instead. It must be nice to have a wealthy supportive family that can make stuff like that possible, and don't bitch you out for not doing the sport that would stroke your ego. Or maybe there was more going on behind the scenes she never told me about.
I tried showing her some stuff, and started with practicing knee-strikes to the groin, while pulling my neck and shoulders to control my body into the blow. I had put on a groin cup and was holding the cushion of her sofa as a shield. I've never felt fear doing hand to hand combat training before. But when she did the knee strike, somehow her move was so explosive it was like my body teleported from upright to bent over at the waist in an instant. I guess it is how she'd learned to move doing gymnastics. For a moment I'd felt primal fear, the sense she was that far out of my league physically. I never pushed her about learning self defense after that, but found out later she'd started doing MMA training on the side. I guess she must have gotten something out of that session after all, even if it didn't go how I thought it would.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Anat has the eight-pointed symbol for Chaos Magic tattooed on her left shoulder. Her right arm has a tattoo sleeve with a black widow spider across the back of her hand, with the fangs curving around the top edge of her hand. The four legs on one side run down her fingers. One of the legs on the other side is tattooed on her thumb and the other three extend up her wrist. Her arm is a web of white strands that contrast against her dark skin, while the spacing and shape of the web is stylized to accentuate her arm muscles.
She isn't exactly classically beautiful. The features of her face are a bit too sharp, her jaw and chin a bit too strong, her nose slightly arched. I recognize her name as a reference to a levantine warrior goddess, famous for the video game levels of violence and carnage she unleashed against those who stood against her and her brother Ba'al the king of their pantheon of gods. Some would say she has resting bitch face, but while it wouldn't be wrong it would be... inadequate. Like calling a fine katana a "big knife." Her face balances on a razor-fine edge between beauty and something colder and darker, and shifts back and forth across that line depending on her mood. When we dated, the strange mix of fearing her anger and loving to see her happy twisted my head all out of shape. I pulled away to protect myself, and she lost interest. We're still friends though. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if I'd just let myself fall under her spell completely.
"You've heard that cats and dogs have been disappearing? And half-eaten bodies?"
"You told me. But I thought they stopped finding bodies."
"Yeah, well, homeless people are disappearing too. But it took longer for anyone to notice."
"Of course…" Disgusting that we take care of our people so poorly.
"Well, I've been doing some exploration around some of the disappearances. I think I've found tracks nobody has noticed. And there's a funny vibe to them that I think I can follow."
"Really?"
"Stefan will loan you a shotgun if you'll join the hunt."
"I thought he was more into revolvers."
"He likes them, but he says it would be a mistake for something like this."
"What do you think it is?"
"The pictures I took look to Stefan like an opossum, but one the size of a panther."
"Are you shitting me?"
"I know, right?"
"How is something like that even possible."
"Well, sad thing is the bayous are extremely polluted. Shit's changing in the world. I can feel it. Others can too. Some think magic is coming back."
"Yeah, I watched the video. I'm not sure I buy the connection between the fluctuating but overall exponentially growing strength of the casimir effect and the fluctuation in psychic test results. But even if I did, what does that have to do with this?"
"The zero-point energy is thickening, starting to respond to conscious will more and more. It's becoming mana. But the world can also change the nature of that mana, and polluted places turn the mana toxic. It can mutate creatures even more powerfully than the mutagens in toxic waste."
"Ok, so some kind of toxic giant possum?"
"Basically."
"Fuck my grades." I shake my head. "But this I'll have to see."
Anat seems to attract ex-military guys. Stefan was some kind of special forces operator back in the day. He got out after the Siberian Crisis so he didn't have to deal with the push for augmentation. At least he isn't an asshole like some of the guys Anat gravitates to. He seemingly always wears a black oilskin duster and a black, wide-brimmed and flat-topped gambler style cowboy hat.
I wear a hunting knife and a roughly spear-tipped bolo machete on which I've filed a short false edge when I meet Stefan and Anat on the edge of the bayou. I see that Anat is wearing her matching machete, as we bought them when we were prepping bug out bags back when we dated. Stefan hands me a pump action shotgun.
"I loaded the shells myself. Extra hot." I look at him skeptically, as that doesn't sound safe. "I gotta. I was doing some long-range target shooting and had greater drop than the computer predicted at one klick for the load I was using." Because he just does one kilometer target shooting for fun. Shit. "So I did a chrono and found that they've lost just over ten percent of the expected muzzle velocity. I've seeing chatter about it online too. I think it must be that thing you're on about all the time." He nods to Anat as he says that last part.
"The thing with zero-point energy?"
"That's all I can figure. I bought new powder just in case, and loaded another batch. Same thing. There's gotta be something changing with physics. And that isn't something that happens all the time, obviously. Way too much to be a coincidence."
"Weird," Anat says. I don't know what to say.
"Anyway, I can compensate for now. Let's hunt some beastie."
"Wait, for now?" I ask.
"Well, the loss of velocity suggests powder is burning slower for some reason. If that video Anat showed me is right, and the loss of velocity is connected, we might get to a point where powder burns too slowly to move a bullet in a practical firearm."
"Fuck."
"Indeed."
"Ok, but setting that aside, this doesn't seem terribly legal."
"Don't worry, I train the local SWAT guys and some other stuff for the Police and Sheriff's Departments. Local cops and the sheriff's deputies all know me. So I put out some feelers and local law enforcement would be all too happy if this problem went away."
"Ok, I'm in."
Stefan hands us NVGs next. They are three different models, probably his personal collection, I'd guess, he takes what looks like the cheapest with just a monocle. He gives Anat what I take to be the best and me the next best. I give him a look like "really?" but he just smiles and shrugs. Like I said, at least he isn't an asshole though.
The wind in the bayou smells faintly of rot and stagnant water, and even though we are well past summer, the air is oppressively humid. Looking toward the bayou I see scrubby trees trying to eke out an existence in the mud, and dead snags that lost that battle. Our hunt Friday night is fruitless. I get home wet and muddy, sleep a bit, then try to study during the day Saturday. But between getting just a few hours of sleep and the implications of what Stefan said going through my head, I have a hard time making headway.
Saturday we finally start making progress. Anat picks up some kind of psychic trail, then we find some tracks, and Stefan is pretty sure it climbed a tree and thinks it is leaping between trees to make it harder to track.
At last we hear movement ahead of us. Stefan is a ghost in the trees, barely making a sound. I'm pretty quiet. Anat is making enough noise for both of us. We both look at her.
"What?" she says.
"Can you move a bit quieter?" asks Stefan.
"I'll try…" she doesn't sound confident.
She moves a bit quieter but is still loud enough it makes no difference.
"Fucking civillians." Stefan says under his breath.
"I heard that."
I just think of an old country song where a guy sings about how his ex is "someone else's trouble now" and smile to myself. At last we are close enough to see, and the thing doesn't seem to be trying to get away. Sure enough, it looks like a big possum in my NVGs, but the bristles on its back look more like those of a boar.
As soon as I have a clear shot, I aim and fire. The shot booms in the woods. The creature hisses. It doesn't seem I hurt it.
"It's a shotgun, gotta get closer or it won't do much."
"Well, shit." We all begin to run forward, spreading out a bit, with Stefan in the middle, Anat on one side, and me on the other end of the line. When we've covered half the distance, start feeling some kind of aura coming off the thing. Power, mingled with hate and hunger. I shoot again. This time the sound is noticeably more muted. It looks like this confirms that something is messing with the way physics works.
"Damn it," says Stefan. "Unload into it." We all begin pumping shots at it, and it does seem to be wounded, but not stopped. It charges toward Stefan, who grabs his shotgun like a staff and pushes it away. I drop my gun, pull my machete and rush in. Anat does the same. The thing rounds on her but she dodges to the side surprisingly quickly and the thing turns back to Stefan. Even with her dodge, Anat gets to the creature a moment before I do. And in the time I stab thrice, she's slammed a half-dozen explosive stabs into the beast's flanks.
It screams and thrashes, swiping at Anat with its claws, but Anat hacks at the clawed paw, nearly severing it as the thing screeches. Soon it weakens and stops moving though.
There is a sheriff's car parked next to Stefan's pickup as we drag the thing out of the swampy woods. A deputy gets out and walks over.
"Hey Stefan, these your friends?"
"Jayce and Anat." He replies.
"Shit, you really found it. Never seen anything like that. I'll call it in to the wildlife and animal control guys. Let them figure out whose jurisdiction it is."
"Do you need me for anything?" I ask. "I'd love to get some sleep."
"We'll call you if we need a statement." I nod and walk away.