“I—I’d have to clear it with my superiors.”
Sabrie nodded. “Of course.”
Or maybe, Becker thought, you knew all along. As, two hundred fifty kilometers away, a tiny voice whooped in triumph.
***
They plugged her into an alternate universe where death came with an undo option. They ran her through scenarios and simulations, made her kill a hundred civilians a hundred different ways. They made her relive Kiribati again and again through her augments, for all the world as if she wasn’t already reliving it every time she closed her goddamn eyes.
It was all in her head, of course, even if it wasn’t all in her mind; a high-speed dialog between synapse and simulator, a multichannel exchange through a pipe as fat as any corpus callosum. A Monte Carlo exercise in tactical brutality.
After the fourth session she opened her eyes and Blanch had disappeared; some neon redhead had replaced him while Becker had been racking up the kills. Tauchi, according to his nametag. She couldn’t see any augments, but he glowed with smartwear in the Megahertz range.
“Jord’s on temporary reassignment,” he told her when she asked. “Tracking down the glitch.”
“But—but I thought this—”
“This is something else. Close your eyes.”
Sometimes she had to let innocent civilians die in order to save others. Sometimes she had to murder people whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time: blocking a clean shot on a battlebot that was drawing down on a medical team, or innocently reaching for some control that had been hacked to ignite a tank of H2S half a city away. Sometimes Becker hesitated on those shots, held back in some forlorn hope that the target might move or change its mind. Sometimes, even lacking any alternative, she could barely bring herself to pull the trigger.
She wondered if maybe they were trying to toughen her up. Get her back in the saddle, desensitized through repetition, before her own remorse made her useless on the battlefield.
Sometimes there didn’t seem to be a right answer, no clear way to determine whose life should take priority; mixed groups of children and adults, victims in various states of injury and amputation. The choice between a brain-damaged child and its mother. Sometimes Becker was expected to kill with no hope of saving anyone; she took strange comfort in the stark simplicity of those old classics. Fuck this handwringing over the relative weights of human souls. Just point and shoot.
I am a camera, she thought.
“Who the hell makes up these scenarios?”
“Don’t like judgment calls, Corporal?”
“Not those ones.”
“Not much initiative.” Tauchi nodded approvingly. “Great on the follow-through, though.” He eyed his pad. “Hmmm. That might be why. Your cortisol’s fucked.”
“Can you fix that? I don’t think my augs have been working since I got back.”
“Flashbacks? Sweats? Vigilant immobility?”
Becker nodded. “I mean, aren’t the augs supposed to take care of all that?”
“Sure,” Tauchi told her. “You start to freak, they squirt you a nice hit of dopamine or leumorphin or whatever to level you out. Problem is, do that often enough and it stops working. Your brain grows more receptors to handle the extra medicine, so now you need more medicine to feed the extra receptors. Classic habituation response.”
“Oh.”
“If you’ve been feeling wobbly lately, that’s probably why. Killing those kids only pushed you over the threshold.”
God, she missed Blanch.
“Chemistry sets are just a band-aid anyway,” the tech rattled on. “I can tweak your settings to keep you out of the deep end for now, but longer-term we’ve got something better in mind.”
“A drug? They’ve already got me on—”
He shook his head. “Permanent fix. There’s surgery involved, but it’s no big deal. Not even any cutting.”
“When?” She could feel her insides crumbling. She imagined Wingman looking away, too good a soldier to be distracted by its own contempt. “When?”
Tauchi grinned. “Whaddya think we’re doing now?”
***
She felt stronger by the next encounter.
This time it went down at street level; different patio, different ambiance, same combatants. Collapsed parasols hung from pikes rising through the center of each table, ready to spread protective shade should the afternoon sun ever make it past the skyscrapers. Sabrie set down a smooth rounded disk—a half-scale chrome hockey puck—next to the shaft. She gave it a tap.
Becker’s BUD fuzzed around the edges with brief static; Wingman jumped to alert, hungry and limbless.
“For privacy,” Sabrie said. “You okay with that?”
White noise on the radio. Broad-spectrum visual still working, though. The EM halo radiating from Sabrie’s device was bright as a solar corona; her retinue of personal electronics glowed with dimmer light. Her watch. Her smartspecs, already recording; the faint nimbus of some medallion packed with circuitry, nestled out of sight between her breasts.
“Why now?” Becker asked. “Why not before?”
“First round’s on the house. I was amazed enough that they even cleared the interview. Didn’t want to push my luck.”
Wingman flashed an icon; a little judicious frequency hopping would get around the jam. If they’d been in an actual combat situation, it wouldn’t even be asking permission.
“You realize there are other ways to listen in,” Becker said.
(FHop?[y/n] FHop?[y/n] FHop?[y/n])
Sabrie shrugged. “Parabolic ear on a rooftop. Bounce a laser off the table and read the vibrations.” Her eyes flickered overhead. “Any one of those drones could be a lip-reader, for all I know, and you know what? If all those eyes and ears can see the next Michael Harris before he draws down, I’m actually okay with that.”
“Michael who?”
“Guy in Orlando? Shot up a daycare a few years back?”
“I must have been—” (FHop?[y/n])
(n)
“—wait, he shot up a daycare?”
“Whole new level of fucked-up, I know. Killed forty people across three generations before they took him out.”
“Why’d he do it?”
Sabrie fixed her with a look. “Why did you?”
Becker didn’t flinch. It took some effort.
“Malfunction.” She kept her voice carefully colorless. “As far as anyone can tell.”
“Same with Harris, probably.”
“He had augments?”
Sabrie shook her head. “Wiring can go just as bad when it’s made out of meat. Turns out he lost a sister himself, six months before, in another shooting. They say it tipped him over the edge.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“That shit never does. It’s what people say, though. They have to say something.” Something eased in her posture then, a subtle relaxation in the wake of some critical moment passed. “Anyway. I’m not one of those kneejerk privacy types, is what I’m saying. Sometimes the panopticon saves lives.”
“And yet.” Becker nodded at the device on the table.
“There are limits. The cameras are up there. Your bosses are literally inside your head.” She dipped her chin at the jammer. “Do you think they’ll object to you providing a few unprompted answers? Given this new apparent policy of transparency and accountability?”