Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

He met her eyes again and grinned. “There are consequences for screwing up, and there are consequences for being too scared to try. And somewhere out there, awhile back, I figured out that you do what you want to do when you think of doing it, or you don’t get to do it at all.”

It was Elspeth who dropped the eye contact. She glanced down at the bed. Her father still slept, motionless. “If you’re trying to tell me you want some kind of a commitment from me, this is a poor time to ask it.”

Sighing, Gabe let go of her hand. “Ellie. I get the message. No traps, all right? Je suis content. Things are what they are, and I’m glad to have you as a friend.”

“Right. I don’t know what I’m going to do, Gabe. Don’t count on me too much.” She stopped short, let her arms swing back and forth like a frustrated child. “I’m going to try to wake my dad up so I can talk to him one more time. You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to.”

“If you want me to,” he answered, “I’ll stay.”

Early morning, Saturday 29 September, 2062

National Defence Medical Center

Toronto, Ontario

Gabe comes early, before the smiling West Indian nurse starts his shift, and sits down at the bedside. He takes my hand — which I cannot feel — and tells me that I look like shit.

“Jenny,” he whispers in my ear. “Trust me.” I can’t turn my head to see, but there’s a rustling as he reaches into his pocket and a soft click as he turns something on. “Don’t panic. This is going to look worse than it is.”

Clicking. His hands moving on an old-fashioned keyboard. The colored lights on the monitors mounted beside my bed coruscate momentarily and then level off. “I’m hacking into the hospital patient-care system. Don’t tell anybody.” A broad wink. I’d like to be able to take a slow deep breath to calm myself, but the ventilator pushes air in and out impartially. Oppressively. He leans close, whispering in my ear. “Richard will explain.”

How does Gabe know about that? I would yelp as I hear a voice inside my head, but I cannot even turn my face away. “Jenny, it’s Richard.” Through the VR link, I see the familiar lined face wrinkle into a smile. “I have information on Chrétien for you. And I need a favor.”

I can’t talk.

But I can think about talking, and that’s all it takes. Name it.

“I need to borrow your brain.” He raises both eyebrows, lifts and opens his hands.

What? What!

“Your wetware, more precisely. I need to hide in your head, Jenny. I’m going to let Valens catch me. The other me. There’s two of me now.”

Richard, I’m not much for sharing living quarters . I’m trying to wrap my brain around what he’s saying, and not understanding it.

“I didn’t have to ask, you know.”

I know. What the hell. At least he’ll be company if I wind up trapped in a body that can’t breathe for itself for another thirty years. How long?

“Until we get to the Montreal .”

Oh. Oh! And in the theater of the mind, I see him wink, and then the door to my private room bursts open and he’s holding a fingertip to his lips, smiling like a boy with a stolen apple in his pocket.

I’m expecting Valens, but I didn’t think Elspeth would be with him. There’s another short series of clicks as Gabe locks whatever he has in his hand onto the terminals of the monitor. He looks up at Valens.

Valens, just at the edge of my field of vision, raises an eyebrow. “Did he take the bait?”

Gabe nods, frowning. “It worked. I’ve got him.”

“Good,” Elspeth cuts in, coolly. “Let’s get the life-support equipment switched over before he decides to take it out on Master Warrant Casey.”

Valens moves forward, and as he does, Gabe leans over far enough to kiss me on the forehead. “Brave girl,” he whispers before he stands.

Explain this?

“The original Richard copied himself into the Unitek network. I’m the second one. Gabe just arranged things so that I got to transfer information with my other self. The price is, one of us had to get caught.”

Because?

His hands seem to whip the air to a froth. “Redundancy. Now I’m in your head, and I’m also being transported by Unitek. A gamble. But first I needed to get inside their systems, and then I needed to talk to myself. Are you following me?”

Yes. You’re playing a trick on Valens.

He nods, hair tossing. “And I’m going to need to get up there, too. What better way to go than with you?”

There’s not much I can say to that, so I let the silence hang for a bit, hoping I won’t have to prompt him for the other piece of information. He doesn’t volunteer it. So Chrétien, I not-quite whisper.

He glances down at his hands. “Dead.” He says it quietly, and then steals a glance at me — an engaging mannerism. I catch myself thinking that he must have been a terror with the ladies, before I remember that he is and always has been a machine.

Dead since when? There’s something about Richard that’s hard to get used to, when you’ve been dealing with the likes of Valens, and I don’t know how to describe it. They both delight in tricking people, in holding all the cards.

But Richard seems to always be on the verge of letting you in on the joke. Except now he doesn’t look like he’s joking.

“Almost thirty years. Do you want to know the details?”

Before I ever went to South Africa, then. I can’t shake my head, but he can feel me wanting to shake my head. I don’t care how. It would have been violently, and if I had let myself think about it, I would already have realized that. But Chrétien has been alive in me, real as the monster under the bed, for nearly forty years. He was always there at the bottom of my soul. Older, meaner, tougher than I was, no matter how old or mean or tough I got.

I’m not sure if it matters if he’s dead or not.

But somehow, it matters that I’ve outlived him.

Thank you, Richard. And how the hell does something like you fit in the little bitty processors in my head?

“Don’t ask,” he says with that lopsided grin. “I would tell you. And you really don’t want to know.”

I do.

“I’m running minimum functionality. There’s lots of room in the bioware. And the nanosurgeons are still laying it down.”

You were right. I didn’t want to know. Because every girl dreams of growing up to share her highly augmented brain with an Artificial Intelligence of Opposite Gender.

I drift off to sleep wondering how the Census would abbreviate that.

September thirtieth is my fiftieth birthday.

Gabe brings me a card. Barb sends more flowers, again with no signature on the card.

And I breathe unassisted for almost twenty minutes.

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, Ontario

Monday 2 October, 2062

Evening

Leah leaned back in the recliner, the nap of the dark fabric catching her fingertips as she rubbed them across the armrests. She grinned, sneaking a glance around the room. She was the youngest student present, and the only girl. She liked the flavor of that realization. It tasted like victory.

As Leah made herself comfortable a smiling technician came up to her, ponytail a berry-red stain on the shoulder of her labcoat. “All set? Do you need orange juice or anything before we put you under?”

“No, thank you. Will you help me with the cradle, please?”