[rangan]OK, so launch that app. But don't hit any buttons yet, OK?
Kade groaned inwardly. Rangan had always dreamed of this app. It was ridiculous.
[kade]I don't really think hand-to-hand combat is what this is about…
[rangan]Come on. You're a spy now. You need to be able to fight.
[kade]But I won't have the muscle, or the endurance, or...
[rangan]Dude, just launch the app.
Kade sighed and fired it up. His vision came alive with targeting circles, buttons for attacks and defenses, a toggle for automatic versus manual mode, sliders to change the auto-mode AI's emphasis on attack versus defense.
[rangan]The game engine's from the crack of Fist of the Ninja that went online last month. It takes standard VR body shapes and vectors. I just hooked it up to our Nexus body interfaces.
[kade]Uhh... Rangan, thank you, really, but…
[rangan]Oh, don't thank me yet! You probably don't want to be mashing buttons, so you just click on the target. It uses our object list to track people and so on... And then you tell it to attack. You can slide this here for how much focus to put on attacking versus defending. And over here if you want to pause. Pretty great, eh?
Kade couldn't believe they were having this conversation.
[kade]Yeah. It's great. Really. I mean, thank y–
[rangan]OK. I can see you're not convinced. No worries. You can thank me after you're forced to kick someone's ass with it.
[kade]I'm not really sure...
[rangan]Come on, let's take it to the gym.
An hour later, they limped out of the gym. Kade ached everywhere. His body had thrown a bewildering array of kicks and strikes at the punching bag, most of which he was sure had hurt him more than they would have damaged any real-world assailant. His knuckles were bloody. His right wrist and left ankle both ached from times when Bruce Lee had driven him to hit the punching bag far harder than he really should have. And then there was the moment at which the targeting system had decided his target was the wall instead of the punching bag…
Rangan thought it was hilarious and promised to fix the bugs. Kade just hurt.
10
CHANGES
Watson Cole sat on the rocks and stared out at the Pacific. This was a beautiful place in its own desolate way. The little town of Todos Santos was thirty miles south down the road. The beach was better there, more sand, fewer rocks. The tourists sunned themselves and sipped margaritas, delighting in their discovery of a quaint little paradise away from the hustle and bustle of Cabo San Lucas. Up here, further from Cabo, the beach was rough and narrow. The sea came in strong against the rocks and a thin strip of brownish sand. Some hardy scrub grass clung to the land. There was little reason for tourists to make it this far north.
He'd made it here to his hidey-hole two nights ago. It had been a tense escape. The contacts and face shapers had fooled the biometrics at the border, but there had been little he could do about his size. He was a conspicuous character. If the ERD relied more on human intel… Well, he'd made it.
The nightmares woke him every morning now. Arman, the idealistic prosecutor. The sight of his family dead in their home, murdered in retribution for daring to bring charges against the wrong corrupt nephew. Temir. The heartbreak of seeing his village razed by the army, looking for rebels that weren't there.
And Lunara. Her most of all. The last moments of her life… If it wasn't for Lunara, he wouldn't be a fugitive today. He'd be out there some place, across the waves. Somewhere in central Asia, probably. A "military advisor." Running special ops missions. Suppressing the rebels. Earning commendations. Maybe in Officer Candidate School.
Instead, he was a wanted man.
Wats had no regrets. He'd made his choices. Being captured in the Kazakh Mountains was the best thing that had ever happened to him. It certainly hadn't been the easiest thing. It had been the most painful, most confusing, most troubling six months of his life. But it had opened his eyes. And eyes, once opened, seldom closed again.
He remembered another beach. A dry beach. The dry bones of the Aral Sea. The desert where once there had been water. The inland sea the Russians had drained to irrigate their crops further north. Nurzhan had taken him on walks there, towards the end, after his captivity had turned into something else.
"Here is where the Soviets fucked us," the geologist had said, "before you Americans came to finish the job." He'd laughed, hard and bitter. "Communism, capitalism, all the same. The powerful want resources. Water. Natural gas. Uranium. The powerful see them, reach out their hand and scoop them up, and who cares who they crush in the process, eh? Dictatorships and democracies, all alike. Your precious democracy doesn't care about us, does it? All men are created equal, eh? We all have inalienable rights. Unless we live so very far away, perhaps? You Americans defeated your British king because he was a dictator. We are the same. We will defeat our dictator, even if you oppose us."
No, Wats thought. I'm sorry, Nurzhan. But you won't. You didn't.
Two years dead. All of them.
He tossed a rock into the sea. No way back. Only forward.
He'd come out of captivity to find a changed world. The rebels were beaten. The "president" in Almaty had secured his power. The natural gas was flowing. The uranium mines were purring. America had one more ally bordering China, containing it.
He came out to find that his enhancements caused cancers. They'd discovered that during his months of captivity. Not right away, of course. They just destabilized the genome a bit. The viruses that had given his cells extra copies of the genes for muscle mass and bone density and fast nerve conduction, and all the other ways he was enhanced, hadn't done their job quite cleanly enough. One in every few million of them had inserted the new gene in the wrong place, disrupting some other part of his cells' genetic instruction set. Not many. No big deal, really. Except that eventually… eventually those genetic disruptions would add up. Eventually the tumors would come. By the time he hit forty, they said, forty-five at the latest. After that… modern medicine could fight the cancers. They could zap tumors with gamma rays, reprogram them with even more targeted viruses, cut off their blood supplies with angiogenesis suppressors.
Eventually one would get through. A year. Five years. Ten. It depended on when they were detected, what part of his body they were in, how he responded to aggressive treatment. So many variables.
Someone before him had quietly threatened a lawsuit, threatened publicity. That was what the Corps couldn't abide. There was a quiet settlement offer for everyone who'd received his enhancement package. Enough that Wats could go home to Haiti and live like a king there for the rest of his – probably quite short – life. Enough that he could stay in the States instead, and live as an activist, speak out about the war he'd seen, about how his brothers bled and died and killed to prop up a killer, to keep in place a government of thieves, rapists, and murderers, as Temir used to say. Enough to get an education. Enough to wait, and hope, and get the checkups, and cross his fingers that they'd find a cure.