Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

“Your nose is bleeding,” she says.

It bit me. I am already opening the MFA building schematics to track where the target has gone. It’s in the ventilation system. I rise, take a few slow steps in the target’s most likely direction. When those steps are steady enough, I continue. My legs don’t give out.

We are near a fan unit. The target has only one direction to go. Unless there are additional faults in the ventilation shafts similar to the one by which it accessed the system, in which case it could slip out anywhere.

This is more than I usually speak, but speaking slows my thoughts. I focus on doing the job that I was very literally created to do.

It is like when you squint intensely at an item in the near distance, and the rest of your vision goes blurry. That is what I am hoping for. Is Like.

From behind me, Carol says, “What just happened?” She follows as I trot back down the passageway in the direction we came. I don’t answer.

My body feels wrong. I hope it wasn’t the download. A virus, parts of my body and brain buzzing haywire like the drones and elevators in the MFA. If I had access to Modanet I could do more research on the physical aftereffects of panic attacks. Exhaustion and disorientation make sense, but is it normal to have these rapid, anxious thoughts? To feel so… distant from myself?

A virus. I am almost certain the rat didn’t bite me only to transfer the unwanted information I am ignoring. I must do my work quickly before whatever it has infected me with begins its work. Still, I have some time.

I can sense the thing the rat told me, though, nagging at the edges of my attention.

I compare the ventilation system with the Department of Homeland Security dossier’s hierarchy of targets vs. outcomes and create a most likely scenario.

Then I pause. I actually stop, the thought catches me so hard. The thing I am not thinking about.

The most likely scenario for a bodydrone driven by the outside forces quantified in the dossier is one thing. The most likely scenario for the thing I am not thinking about is… I don’t know.

This is exactly the quandary my target intended to force. I don’t want to examine the information I have been confronted with because it will almost certainly interfere with my ability to do my job. But in order to do my job I must put that information to use.

Carol catches up to me. I had left her behind, my pace easily outstripping hers as my mind worked. Now she sighs as she looks at me and sets her jaw.

And Carol. Who wants to feel connection .

This is a complicated situation. My primary objective has always been to do the best job possible as an EI SAR dog. However, I have personal objectives as well. The tenuous connection Carol and I have begun to build down here, where I need her in order to do my work, is the only thing making that job possible.

Carol watches me, waiting. She has admirable patience, for a human. I move forward again at a more inclusive pace.

Anders gave me the DHS dossier, because Carol didn’t have access to all of the information. I am keeping some secrets from her, but they are nothing she would want to know. But now I have an additional secret that she might want to hear. It’s possible the DHS already knew the information that’s now been forced into my brain, but it kept it from me. Whether Anders knew or not isn’t relevant.

I was to keep the dossier private. But this new information wasn’t in the dossier. Therefore I have no obligation to keep it private from Carol.

However, this will involve speaking to Carol in a manner that exposes the parts of myself that make humans most uncomfortable about EI. Carol expressed discomfort when I shared those things before. I think of the moment in the crawl space, eye to eye with the rat, and wonder if Carol feels like that when she looks into my eyes.

Dacy would understand. I wish we had been allowed to remain in contact.

We reach a ventilation panel connected to the shaft that the rat disappeared down. I press my nose to it, the work of scenting pushing my thoughts down for one moment of calm. The trace of Rat is faint but there. I follow the schematics to the next panel and repeat the process. I hunt the scent this way for several minutes, until finally it’s lost. The schematics confirm that several junctures in the ventilation system have given my target multiple options, while mine are limited.

I stop again to think. The thoughts that catch up to me are no less confusing than before. Even if I follow the target from ventilation panel to ventilation panel through every tunnel in the MFA, it won’t solve my quandary.

At ESAC they taught me that every decision I make on a deployment may be life-or-death. I was taught to be decisive, confident, and analytical under pressure. I am good at that job. I am not used to being so… worried.

Carol retiring, the unsettling sound of this place, its massive population of drones. Now this bite. I am not used to all of these feelings.

I can at least pretend to be confident and decisive. That is a small comfort. I make a decision.

Carol, I ping. The target is EI.

For a few seconds, she does not respond. She simply stares at me, and I look back at her.

“What?”

The target, I tell her, isn’t a bodydrone. It’s a stolen EI animal recruited as a Strong Arm agent. It must be from one of the Dynagroup laboratories in Georgia; those are the only EI rats I know of that are functional at this level, though I know nothing of any break-ins at those labs. None of this intelligence was included in my dossier. The target itself forced this information on me in order to confuse me and, I assume, as part of a recruiting effort, as I was also transferred a good deal of propaganda material.

“Sera!” She sounds almost angry in her surprise. “You didn’t read the propaganda, did you?”

I scanned their summaries only, I lie. It wasn’t relevant.

The information dump was not something I had the power to control, so this is another lie. However, I found much of the material’s sentimentality about experimentation on dogs off-putting. I am not a dog. I am not an early intelligence hybrid either. I don’t suffer. What relevance do those animals have to me?

Some of the information on the history of EI was new and interesting in an objective way, but this attempt at provoking my pity strikes me as vulgar.

The Strong Arm has given me something, however, for which I suppose I must acknowledge their comradeship. I don’t mention this to Carol either.

“That’s sick,” she says. “Pitting you against each other. This is exactly what—” She bites off the end of the sentence. “And what next? Will you be fighting our wars for us next?”

Military intelligence was the first implementation of EI. Animals have always been used in war, I say. Animals are present in most human endeavors.

“But you don’t have a choice about it.”

I enjoy my work.

She sighs, but it is a big uhf of breath. This is the sound she makes when she and Anders disagree about some aspect of a deploy but he is correct. She’s speaking to me like she speaks with Anders.

Carol and I seem to realize this at the same time. We both look away into our private thoughts. When I begin to calculate the rat’s most likely intent based on its previous locations and current heading, she speaks again.

“We’re going to have to catch it.”

Yes.

“No,” she says. “I mean, change your objective, Sera. You can’t kill it if it’s EI. It’s… That’s wrong.”

I don’t see how this is true, except on a relative scale. If a human had infiltrated the MFA with unknown intent, would the men deployed to stop them be worried about the right or wrong of lethal force?