Richard Lovett: Phantom Sense

Cora’s VidBook post wouldn’t have caught anyone else’s attention.

“You wouldn’t believe the flies here!” she gushed into the camera, holding it too close, like everyone does, making her look like her nose was three sizes too big. Actually, it’s a perfect match for the lively blue eyes and long, blond hair so achingly like her mother’s at the same age. “They follow me everywhere! Yesterday four of them—I counted—zipped into the bedroom before I could shut the door. Then they just kind of hovered as I changed clothes. Can you imagine that? Cuh-reepy! Don’t they have any girl-flies to peep?”

Zip code 78718 is in Austin, Texas. I’ve never seen her apartment—I don’t want more court orders—but I know Austin. It has flies, but it’s nothing like Virginia, where she grew up. Not in November, anyway.

It was probably nothing, but you don’t survive twenty years in CI-MEMS without being paranoid. Even if you’re not on a black op, they send you to places where anybody, even the kid begging for change, could be carrying, and where 90 percent of the rest hate you anyway. The easy missions are the hunter/killer ones, where your job is to find a specific target while dodging noncombatants. Then, at least, everything’s cut and dried. The patrols that turn you paranoid are the ones where you’re just passing through, trying to spot real threats without slaughtering the maybes.

When I was new to the Corps, I tallied two statistics. Bad guys taken out and guilty-acting innocents saved. But after a while, I realized that tallies don’t matter. Each mission is a world unto itself. Get in, do the job (meaning get the right people and not the wrong ones), and get out. Preferably with the rest of your unit alive.

I was good at it. Even in the first weeks of training, they told me I had an unusual ability to integrate. What they didn’t tell me was this meant the loss, when it came, would be all the more devastating.

I woke with the instant, unmoving alertness only years of missions can train. This time I wasn’t in bed; I was on the couch. The TV was on—a get-rich-quick infomercial or something equally late-night brainless.

I wasn’t alone. I could Sense someone behind me. He was looking out the window, his face a blur of face paint. Blue jeans and a dark serape. His Uzi was carelessly gripped in one hand, but the nonchalance was deceptive, the relaxation of a snake at rest, capable of coiling and striking before you even knew what happened. He’d done it before, and would do it again until somebody coiled and struck faster. He wasn’t expecting anything like that at the moment, but still, he was ready for quick action, studying the road outside, waiting, watching. Waiting for something like my patrol, still out of sight around the corner. His pulse was low, his breathing steady. A trained killer, perfect in his element.

I drew back from my fringe, preparing to report. Take him out or bypass him? The sentry on the other side of the building wasn’t as alert. If we could get a couple men in unseen, I could guide them, coordinate the attack, a wordless game of follow-my-swarm and attack when I gave the signal, which could be as simple as a fly buzzing in the ear. We’d done it before, sometimes against as many as four targets spread across a thousand-foot front, one of the reasons I’d quit counting.

But something didn’t fit. I couldn’t find anyone to report to. Had the sentry somehow gotten everyone but me? And where was my real body, anyway? I was so far extended into the Sense I seemed to have lost touch with my own surroundings.

It was the TV that did it. The infomercial was in English. Not Spanish, Arabic, or anything else. It was telling me how to make a fortune investing in foreclosed properties. Not something a serape-draped sentry would be listening to, even if he was willing to put up with the distraction.

Still, it was all I could do to force myself to look back. But there was nothing there but a bookshelf. My own books, my own apartment. Me. Alone. In Seattle. As I’d been for two years.

I sat up, pulled the phone from its charger, dialed a too-familiar number.

“Yeah?” a voice said.

“It happened again.”

“Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye?”

“Not sure.” I describe the scene. “Might have been the Altiplano. After a while, they all blur.”

“Yeah. Last night I was sure there were snakes in the room. Why snakes? I never even saw one in the field. That was the least of my worries.”

We talked a bit longer, until I was really ready for sleep. I had no idea who he was; we’d found each other online, and communicated by dummy accounts and encrypted lines. Secrecy’s a hard habit to break. But it was better than calling the Corps psychs and getting a diagnosis like paranoid schizophrenia on your record.

The Sense is a lot of things. It lets you see around corners or into any room with a crack big enough for an insect to slip through. But it’s more than seeing. If they make a microdetector for something, they can mount it in a swarm.

For a lot of operators, the information’s just that: data. You need a computer to interpret it and run the swarm, and you wind up sitting back on base with a bank of electronics: coffee in hand, A/C, the whole nine yards.

But that’s just fancy remote sensing.

If you’ve got the ability to integrate, the data cease to be data. Add an interface descended from those used for prosthetic limbs, like that concert pianist who plays Chopin with a mechanical hand, and you’ve got true CI-MEMS. The data bits disappear and you wind up with things you simply know , on par with it’s raining or I’m on a tropical beach .

Most people never make that leap. But for those who do, CI-MEMS is more than a way to see around corners. It’s an emotion-sensor in the air. In a crowded bazaar you know who’s hostile and who’s just scared. Who’ll run away if you give them a chance, who’s just out to save face, who’s a true believer.

Back on base, though, nobody wants you around. Everyone’s got secrets—and while you may not know the details, you sure as hell know when one’s there. Not to mention being able to win at poker even if you promise not to peek. Keeping track of things becomes a habit, even when there’s no real need. Maybe that’s how stalkers are born. The Sense makes you allergic to surprises. If you can know, you want to. If you can’t, you get desperate.

The intel had been absolutely clear. The Ladenites were somewhere across the valley. Five square klicks of boulders, snakes, and who knows what. There were at least fifteen of them, fifteen who the sat intel had caught going in, but not out. Drones had seen four of them again, IDing two as important enough to be worth an incursion into a nominally friendly country.

We’d come in low and quiet, shortly after dark. A quick drop, a not-so-quick march, and now we were staring across the damn Valley of Death, like a scaled-down version of the six hundred. We should have circled east, higher up, and come back, along the ridge. But now, with dawn looming, our only hope was that their lookout wasn’t all that well equipped.

“You see anything, Jerret?” I spoke softly, right at the limit of my ability to form the words. No need for radios; our swarms were the best way to communicate. If the answer was worth anything, I’d pass it on to the grunt assigned to keep me alive, and he’d hand-signal it to the others. I suppose in theory the enemy could zero in on the link to and from my bugs, but unless you’re using dragonflies or something else big enough to carry a real transmitter, the range is pretty limited. Anyone who has the equipment to sort it out from the background mish of cordless phones, microwave ovens, and garage-door openers is too well dug in for us anyway. In the city, at least. Here, to the right equipment, Jerret and I might stand out like beacons.