Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

Valens coughs behind his hand. “Are you too old for flying?”

“I…” Whatever I expected to say dies in my mouth. “ Flying? ”

His face goes still and serious. His voice drops. He leans forward, touching his earcuff, and unclips his HCD. I pull mine out so he can beam me a secure conversation channel, and his voice comes in my ear when it comes again. “Everything from here on in is classified. Got it?”

I set my unit on the table and nod. “Yes.”

“We’re testing some new training techniques. Virtual reality. Wetwired remote interface for the next generation of combat aircraft. Tanks, too.” I look away. I was a drill instructor for a while, too, until it got to be too damned depressing and I asked to be transferred back into the field, which is how I wound up flying medevac. I’d been a driver before, but enhanced reflexes and my mechanical aptitude make for a very good pilot. “So we won’t have to send kids out to die in them anymore.”

He’s lost me until he says that last. I’ve been a rhesus monkey, and it gets real old, real fast.

And he knew it, dammit. He knew it when he cast the fly, and he knew it when he set the hook. I can see the fucking calculation in his hazel eyes, gray now in the flickering light. My lips curl back into something that might almost look like a smile if you didn’t know me very well. “Wetwired. What does that mean?” I know what wired is. Wired is me.

He reaches across the table and rests one hand on my shoulder. “When we rebuild the interfaces, we engineer in some of the equipment that Venus Consolidated and Unitek have designed for their VR interfaces.”

“Venus… that’s a sex toy company.” I hear my own disbelief, and curiosity burns in the back of my throat.

“Yes. But Unitek owns them, and they’re an industry leader in virtual reality applications. And we’re working with Unitek.”

“Of course you are.” Unitek engineers designed my arm, and the neuralware that augments my reflexes in response to any perceived threat. Unitek owns the pharmaceutical company that makes Hyperex. And Unitek… assisted… Canada during the bloody, bloody Malaysian-PanChinese wars that broke out when the oceans started to rise. Later, they funded much of Malaysia’s economic recovery, to the chagrin of the Chinese government, which still likes to consider Southeast Asia its private preserve. It’s interesting history, if you go in for that sort of thing. “All right. Forget about the high-tech vibrators. Explain to me this wetwired thing.”

“You’ve heard of the new generation of neural?”

I shrug. “A little. I know I’ve got a collection of silicon cones buried in my gray matter and that’s not how you guys do things anymore.”

“We have much less invasive techniques,” he answers, proud as if he pioneered it himself. “Nanosurgery. No incision — nothing goes in but bots a few microns across. We build, essentially, artificial synapses. The body hardly registers it as an insult. People are doing it for recreational purposes. Four-year-old technology, perfectly safe.”

“Why would anybody do that to herself?”

Valens waves his hands around, almost forgetting to subvocalize. His voice through my ear cuff is not quite painfully loud. “All sorts of reasons, but the primary is for a more seamless access to the gamespaces. As with the invention of the wheel, the most novel technologies are used for toys first.”

Holy hell. This is his baby. “So you want to restructure my brain ?”

“No. We want to clean out the mess of substandard wiring we slapped up in there almost a quarter century ago, and put in something that won’t cripple you. Remember when you first got your arm?”

My head jerking up and down feels stiff as a marionette’s.

“Remember I promised you someday you’d have sensation? Heat, pressure?”

Again, the dull, disbelieving nod. He can’t be serious.

“We can do that now. Now that we have the tech to replace your old implants, you can have what these guys have.” His sweeping gesture takes in the room. “Without the stigma.” He glances around the room, real distaste wrinkling an arrogant nose.

I follow his gaze. I try not to pass judgment, but… a girl with tiger stripes and a lashing tail catches my eye and winks broadly. I glance away.

“We can even make it look more or less like a real hand, now. And once you’re on board and we get you a security rating, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do with it.” His eyes sparkle. His voice shakes. Despite myself, despite my ambivalence, I find myself catching his excitement. And damned if that hook doesn’t bite harder with every tug he gives it.

Does it make any difference in the long run if you know you’re being manipulated? “Is this government funded or corporate?”

“Both,” he says. “It’s big, Casey. That’s all I can tell you. And your old friend Gabe Castaign is working with us, although he doesn’t know the half of it yet. I wanted you on board first.”

And of course, the most important question of all. “Why me?”

I almost think he’s rehearsed the speech, but the passion in it rings sound. “I know you,” says the man who pushed me into killing a boy I could have liked, the man who gave me back my legs and my left hand and whatever life I have left. “You were a damn fine soldier. Damn fine pilot, too — and your reflexes are the selling point. Natural and augmented, you test high. And you’ve made adaptation to your wetware like I never would have believed. It always burned me that I couldn’t do more for you. And now I can. I just need you to help me justify spending the money.”

“Justify saving my life.”

“Yes.” He reaches out one last time and lays his hand on my steel one. I can’t feel a thing. My teeth are chattering.

“You still have your pilot’s license, Casey?”

Holy hell. He means it. “No.”

“We’ll get you recertified. Retrained if need be.”

“You want me as a civilian employee?”

“That’s what we did for Castaign.”

Breathe out. Breathe in. Think, Jenny Casey.

“Jenny. Think about the pain.”

I’m thinking. I’m thinking about a pseudosenile dementia, too. And the fact that my gun is still out in Barb’s car and I could just swallow a bullet if it really gets too bad.

If I remember how to pull the trigger by then. I always was too stubborn for my own good. He’s still watching my face. Gabe is working for him. Does that mean things have changed? No. Gabe has his reasons, and they’re purely pragmatic and eleven years old. “You’re not telling me everything.”

“You know it, Casey. You don’t get the rest until you sign on the dotted line.”

Which is not what I wanted to hear at all.

Counting coup was cleaner. People can cope with that kind of war. Of course, then you get into all the other ways of showing brave, and some of them you don’t want to know too much about. Like what I suspect I’m going to wind up doing before the year is out.

Valens has something to do with all this, and Valens is going to be hell to put a stop to. There’s not going to be any justice — not for Mitch, not for Face. Not for Peacock, either, or Nell. Me? I don’t much think I deserve justice . I more or less got what was coming to me, one way or another.

I can’t take Valens down. But I can show him, maybe, I could have done something. Show his handlers, whoever they are. Show the press. And if they are seen to know, they may have to do something.

Status games.

Maybe that will be enough. Fred Valens in front of a military court. It’s got a nice justified feel of symmetry to it.