When it happened, it looked as miraculous, as improbable, as something from a time-reversed movie: everything magically fitting together, like the fragments of a broken vase. Everything except one locking pin, out by some ludicrous fraction of a millimetre, stuck against the side of its hole while all the others continued to slide home. I could picture them all retracting again, the instant some idiot microprocessor gave up hope on that one jammed pin.
I kicked it as hard as I could. It slipped into place. Primed or not, I felt a moment of dizzy jubilation. I ducked between the cables and jumped back across the aisle as the crane’s lifting motors burst noisily into life. Then I clambered down the ladder and ran.
The container rose smoothly; the MA52, still two-thirds inside, had no choice but to rise with it. As its treads approached the height of the roof of the container which had blocked its way, I could almost imagine it making a leap for freedom—but the gap was too wide. The robot ascended helplessly to the ceiling, fifty metres above.
I could hear sirens approaching; our reinforcements were about to arrive. I met up with Vincent at the warehouse entrance.
I said, ‘Now we wait for the army to come and blast the fucker into shrapnel.’ Vincent shook his head. ‘No need.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The safety features of this system,’ he said, ‘leave a lot to be desired.’ He dropped it.
Later, weapons were found in the debris which could have demolished a suburb or two—and it was only the Children’s incompetence which had kept that from happening: it turned out that they’d corrupted the security system of the wrong warehouse. If there’d been no early warning, the whole thing would have ended with the army having to take on the MA52 in the streets. In three African cities, that was exactly what had happened, with heavy loss of life. Elsewhere, of course, there’d been the usual bombings: everything from incendiary devices to chemical shells spreading neurotoxins. I didn’t want to know about it; I glanced at the headlines then flipped screens, unwilling to swallow so soon the truth of how microscopic our victory had been.
Despite having been merely lucky, Vincent and I were, predictably, portrayed as heroes. I didn’t mind—it meant that I was now virtually guaranteed promotion to the counter-terrorist unit. The media attention was tiresome, but I gritted my teeth and waited for it to pass. Karen resented the whole thing, and I couldn’t blame her; none of our friends seemed to want to talk about anything else, and she must have been as sick of hearing the story as I was of telling it.
Still worse, Karen’s well-meaning brother dropped in one Sunday afternoon with recordings of every interview I’d given—primed, as the Department insisted—which we’d taken great pains to avoid when they’d been broadcast. We had to sit through them all. Karen loathed seeing me primed, almost as much as I did myself. ‘The zombie boy scout’ she called me, and I couldn’t disagree; the cop with my face on the HV was so bland, so earnest, so blinkered, so fucking sensible, it made me want to gag. (There may be people born that way, but not many, and you pity them.)
Every cop has no less than six standard ‘priming mods’, PI to P6, but it’s P3 which imposes the mental state appropriate for active duty, it’s P3 which really makes you primed. It had always been clear to me that what P3 did was cripple the brain—efficiently, reversibly, and to great advantage, but there was no point being squeamish or euphemistic about it. The priming mods made better cops, the priming mods saved lives—and the priming mods made us, temporarily, less than human. I could live with that, so long as I didn’t have my nose rubbed in it too often. The ‘priming drugs’ of the bad old days—a crude, purely pharmaceutical attempt to suppress emotional responses, heighten sensory awareness and minimize reaction times—had caused a number of side-effects, including unpredictable transitions between the primed and unprimed states, but the arrival of neural mods had banished all such complications. The partitioning of my life was simple, clear-cut, absolute: on duty, I was primed; off duty, I wasn’t.
There was no possibility of ambiguity, no question of one side contaminating the other.
Karen had no professional mods; doctors, the eternal conservatives, still frowned upon the technology—but differential malpractice insurance premiums, amongst other things, were gradually eroding their resistance.
On December 2nd, I learnt that my promotion had come through—a few hours before I read about it in the evening news. That was a Friday; on the Saturday, Karen and I, and Vincent and his wife Maria, went out to dinner together to celebrate. Vincent had also been offered a position in the unit, but he’d declined.
‘Bad career move,’ I said, only half teasing. We’d scarcely had a chance to discuss it before; primed, such topics were unmentionable. ‘Counter-terrorism is a growth sector. Ten years in this unit, and I can quit the force and become an obscenely overpaid consultant to multinationals.’
He gave me an odd look, and said, ‘I guess I’m just not that ambitious.’ And then he took Maria’s hand, and squeezed it. It was hardly an extravagant gesture, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
I woke in the early hours of Sunday morning, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I climbed out of bed; Karen could always sense my wakefulness, and it always seemed to disturb her far more than my absence. I sat in the kitchen, trying to come to a decision, but only growing more angry and confused. I hated myself, because I hadn’t once stopped to think that I might be putting her at risk. We should have talked it through, before I’d accepted the promotion—and yet the very idea of any such discussion seemed obscene. How could I ask her? How could I acknowledge the slightest real danger and admit in the same breath that, with her permission, yes, I’d still go ahead and take the job? And if, instead, I simply changed my mind and turned it down without consulting her, in the end she’d drag the reason out of me—and she’d never forgive me for having excluded her from the decision.
I walked over to a window and looked out at the brightly lit street; ever since The Bubble, it seemed to me, streetlights had been growing more powerful year by year. Two cyclists rode by. The window pane shattered outwards, and I followed the shards through the empty frame.
Unbidden, the priming mods snapped into life. I curled up and rolled as I hit the ground; P4 saw to that. I lay on the grass for a second or two, bleeding and winded. I could hear the flames behind me, I could feel my heart accelerate and my skin grow cold as PI shut down peripheral circulation—a controlled version of the natural adrenalin response—but I was insulated from my body’s agitation, I had no choice but to remain calmly analytic. I got to my feet and turned around to assess the situation. Tiles from the roof were scattered on the lawn; the bomb must have been in the ceiling, close to the back of the house, probably right above the bedroom. I could see patches of a bubbling, gelatinous substance sliding down the remnants of the inside walls, carrying with it sheets of blue flame.
I knew that Karen was dead. Not injured, not in danger. With nothing to shield her from the blast, she would have died instantly.
I’ve thought about it a great deal since, and I always reach the same conclusion: any ordinary person in the same situation would have run back in, would have risked their life—in shock, confused, disbelieving, would have done the most dangerous and futile thing imaginable.