CHAPTER 10
As Constantine wheeled the girl down the corridor—well, young woman, really, but he thought of her as a girl, in all of this. Vulnerable. Brilliant, maybe, if even half of that computer stuff was not just gibberish, but out of her depth here. As he wheeled her down the corridor, Constantine thought about some of the women in his life, and how they would have reacted to an assassination attempt, and how much they knew about, well, anything, much less AI and… conversational networks, and… all of that.
“Look, Miss Ritter,” he said.
“You can call me Melody, you know. Or just Mel. Everyone calls me Mel.”
“Melody, then. I was going to say, take it from one who’s been shot at more than once—I’ve actually got some new scars in my belly from soaking up an RPG not too long ago.” She looked up at him with wide eyes. Pretty eyes. She was cute, in a nerdy way. He could see what that Dorian kid liked about her. Constantine had no use for any man named Dorian. At least he was not a fat slob. Probably a runner. But if he could run, he could have served his country. Everyone had to choose his own path, but Constantine had a particular distaste for people who chose to stay safe and rely on others to do their dirty work. Especially today’s ungrateful youths.
“Anyway,” he said, coming back to the moment. “What I was going to say before. You get in a fight, a dangerous situation, and your body and brain kinda record it. It seems terrible—I mean, it sucks, having nightmares, remembering stuff like this perfectly. Man, I remember every fight like I’m still in it. But it’s for a reason. Your brain records that stuff because it’s good at making notes of what’s important, you know? Once you’ve been in a life-or-death situation, it kinda changes your perspective on what’s important. Now your brain knows, and it takes good notes. You’ll never forget. But it’s using that to help you in the future. It’s going to wire you a little different. Maybe not so much you, since for you it’s just this one time, but those of us who are in combat a lot, the repeated experience wires us to react. Guys come back from a tour—I’m sure you’ve heard the stories. A car backfires, and they’re in the gutter and they’ve shit their pants before they even know what happened. And maybe some folks give them some funny looks, but we teach them not to worry about it, because the truth is their reaction is normal for the environment they were in. When you’re dealing with snipers and mortar fire, getting to cover a half second faster can save your life. And if your colon drops a little dead weight in the process, that’s just part of your natural survival mechanisms.”
He looked down at her. She seemed lost in her own thoughts. “I’m not saying all this to gross you out, or make you think you’re going to be jumping into gutters next time someone sets off a firecracker. The point I’m trying to make is, don’t worry too much about it if an experience like this causes you to react to the world differently. You’re not going crazy. You’re really just going sane. The world’s got some bad actors in it, and people who deal with that, people who face it, get wired to deal with it. They’re just adapting to the real world, and not the fake, safe world that was never real.”
When the girl looked up at him again, he was not sure what to make of her expression. She was not laughing at him, or dismissing him. Usually when a woman looked at him without speaking, she was speaking loud and clear with her expression, and the message was usually disparaging. And again, that was in the rare instance, in his experience, when the woman wasn’t talking, and talking, and talking. This girl seemed to be thinking, and not talking, which Constantine could not remember ever before experiencing in the female of the species.
“Sorry if I’m not making sense,” he said, suddenly feeling even more self-conscious.
“No, I think I get it. I never thought of it that way.”
Will wonders never cease? he thought, if not exactly in those words. “The point is, there will be nightmares, and certain things might make you tense up that didn’t before. It’s uncomfortable. I’m not gonna tell you it isn’t. But life is uncomfortable. You can learn to accept it, and use it, and realize it’s just honing your edge, you know? Obviously, you don’t want to let it get out of hand. You want to control reactions to innocent things. I knew a guy who couldn’t drive down his own street on Fridays because all the trash was out, and when he was in country they’d hide IEDs in the trash piles. You gotta control that shit, train out the parts that aren’t valid. But you do that by facing it, and understanding that you’re not going crazy or broken. Your body is just rewriting its program a bit—you’re a programmer. Maybe that makes sense to you. Your body’s adjusting the, uh… what did you call ‘em? The numbers.”
“Weights and biases.”
“Yeah, those. Adjusting those to make itself—to adapt itself better to reality, now that it’s had a look at a side of reality it hasn’t seen before. That make sense?”
“Totally. Thank you. Seriously.”
“Yeah, it’s fine. I just get real fed up with people who look at military folks and folks who’ve been through shit and say, ‘Oh, you must be so broken.’ Like we’ve got some kind of mental illness. We don’t. More often than not, we’re fixed. They’re the ones living in la la land.”
The girl chuckled. “La la land.”
“Sorry, I don’t mean to be an ass-hole.”
“No, you’re right. We live in la la land. I sure did.”
“Well, sometimes you go to war, and sometimes war goes to you. You’ve done great, ma’am.
You’re strong. I think you’ll be fine.”
“Thank you,” she said. “That means a lot.”
Constantine wheeled her into the waiting room where that Dorian kid was waiting for her. He jumped up when he saw them and rushed over, gushed over her like a puppy, and then shook Constantine’s hand and thanked him for everything. His handshake wasn’t complete slop, Constantine allowed, but Constantine could still see in him the basic innocence and self-absorption of one who had never really fought for anything but his own day-to-day desires. It was not that he didn’t have potential; he’d just never used it, never done anything outside himself, and Constantine could detect it in his every manner and movement. What a waste. He bade them farewell and then returned briskly to the conference room. Even the softest, squishiest analysts in this meeting had at least dedicated themselves to something bigger than themselves. Better Roy Sing than “Dorian.”
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
They were talking their way through some of the printed material when he returned and shut the door.
“Welcome back,” said Sing’s boss, George Fry.
“Thanks,” said Constantine. “So are we all agreed that this thing is human after all?”
“I think we had to assume as much,” said Carrington, the Agency cyber-warfare rep, “but why do you say so?”
“Combatives,” said Constantine. “The way he went for the gun, controlled it. Then controlled the head.”
“And then how he manipulated the gun,” said SA Wheeler. “The way you wrist-locked me to turn my gun on me, she said it was ‘exactly’ like that. He’s trained.”
“Yeah. I’d even say an operator. He’s got experience. Hand to hand experience.”
“Agreed,” said SA Raines, the female.
“What about the size issue? She said he lifted the guy clean off his feet, or at least to the tips of his toes, one-handed. And put him through a tempered glass window.”
“She saw one hand,” corrected Raines. “It could have been a misperception.”
“Or good martial arts,” said Constantine. “Like the lady says, she couldn’t necessarily see the other hand. There’s a couple of pressure points, if you hit ‘em right a guy will pretty much levitate himself to make it stop. Under the chin, or under a rib.”
“Or he could just be a big, strong son of a bitch,” said Nelson.
“True,” said Constantine. Nelson was CAD, Clandestine Activities Directorate, and Constantine knew a former operator when he saw one, even if the man had put on a few pounds since his days in the field.
“Okay, but that still doesn’t explain away the window. Or the suit,” said Sing.
“No, it does not. In fact,” said Constantine, “I think it makes your case stronger. If he’s a human operator, then he’s got to be wearing a suit. Active camouflage, maybe armored. Sounds like it’s even sort of light-absorbing, if that’s a thing. In any case, sounds like something I wouldn’t mind having a few of.”
“And powered.”
“You mean strength-enhancing?”
“It’s in development. Lots of people are working on it.”
“So you believe her description?” asked Raines.
“I do. The more I’ve been hanging around Roy, here, the more I think I wasn’t seeing things that day during Press Hook. That camouflage, it’s a weird fuckin’ effect. It makes you think you’re seeing things. And Roy and I have been going over some other sightings—I guess you guys were looking at that while I was out. Most of it’s trash. Basically UFO sightings and ghost stories. But there are a few ghost stories out there that sound a lot like what I saw, and what she talked about.”
“Yeah,” said Sing. “And a few more that sound similar enough that they’re strong probables.”
“So what are we thinking? Insider double-agent? Someone who wants to defect?”
“Most likely. Though if so, they’re acting pretty openly, which means they’re confident they won’t face retaliation.”
“Third party? Already out?”
“That would explain a lot, like why they would have had a team hunting him, but my problem with that is that he’s awful mobile for a lone wolf or a small cell with no support.”
“What’s this about a team?” asked Constantine.
“Oh, yeah,” said Sing. “You were out of the room. Take a look at this,” he said, flipping open Constantine’s file to the enclosure in question. “The sound of ‘hail’ which she heard was almost certainly suppressed automatic fire, which did this to the vehicles in the parking lot. Whoever sent the hit man expected our mystery figure to intervene.”
“They were using her as bait.”
“Yeah, or rather, the hitman, using him as bait. Which goes a long way to saying mystery suit guy is already on the outside, and they’re hunting him.”
“Which is why he’s not afraid to act openly if he has to.”
“Yeah.”
“But how is he getting from place to place?”
“That’s still unanswered,” said Fry. “Maybe he’s got help, or maybe there’s more than one. In either case, we need to be prepared to make an overture to him or them. Meantime, what are you proposing for a next step?”
“Steps,” said Sing. “I want to attack on two fronts. One, we’ve got some leads in this data that I think CA and the Bureau could track down. CA for the ones outside our borders.”
“All right,” said Nelson.
“And I want Chief Constantine here to go with your guys, whoever you send.”
Nelson inhaled through his nose. “That’s a harder sell,” he said.
“Why? Rob’s special forces. He’s laid eyes on this tech. He knows what to look for. He should be there.”
“Fine,” said Nelson. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“What’s the other front?” asked Fry.
“The Internet. I want to rebuild Miss Ritter’s machine,” he said, looking to Carrington.
“What, her AI?”
“No—well, yes. The listening bit. Her ‘Consciousness Layer.’ I think we should put that back online and try to smoke out this AI that’s running across domestic networks.”
“I’m with you,” said SA Wheeler. “If someone has botted a large number of computers in this country, that could be a crime in and of itself which we can investigate. And even if not, it’s an incredible bit of technology, and we’d benefit by understanding it better.”
“Is it worth having her help with that? Miss Ritter, I mean?” asked Sing.
“Much as I hate to say it, almost certainly,” said Carrington. “Her or someone on her thesis team, which means her, since she’s the closest to actually read-in on this. We’d be trying to make up years of cutting-edge AI work by some obviously pretty damn brilliant students otherwise.”
“All right,” said Fry. “If you set it up, I’ll endorse.”
“Thanks.”
“So that’s my plan,” said Sing. “Now, I’d like to take you all a little deeper into some of this material before we break.”
Fry nodded, and the others sat forward again, addressing the documents he had given them. Sing took them through a sketch of the connections he had made to date, laying out in particular the leads he thought could be pursued by Bureau agents at home and CAD abroad. When they were done, he collected everything, thanked them for their attendance, and expressed his hopes for their future work together.
“Remember,” he concluded, “the principle questions at this point: Who all are participating in this new alliance? Who’s masterminding it? How have they made this technological leap? And we can rest assured that our mystery figure has some or all of the answers. We need to find him or them.” They nodded and stood, and he saw them out, until only he and Constantine remained.
“Well, Rob? I haven’t actually asked yet if your CO would sign off on you working for us for a while.”
“I don’t think he’ll say no. Especially if it means helping get some justice for the guys we lost.”
“That’s kind of what I was hoping,” said Sing. He turned and extended his hand to Constantine. “Glad to have you along.”
Constantine took it and shook it. “Happy to be here. I’ll be happier if we can find these fuckers and bury ‘em.”
“One way or another.”