Richard Lovett - Phantom Sense

Laurel was talking again. “…better sensors than you just tested. The military’s not giving up their best stuff, but we’re really not sure what can be done with what we have: we’ve never had anyone fly it who really knows what he’s doing.” She paused. “I was beginning to think guys like you were all locked away somewhere.” Her eyes lifted, held mine for a moment. She knew more than she let on. “Want to take them for a test drive?”

Picking up a new swarm isn’t something you can do instantly. You have to synch them one at a time, then lock them in so nobody else can fly off with them, accidentally or on purpose. It only takes a few seconds per insect, but with three hundred, it adds up.

I have no idea what Laurel and Denise talked about in the interim. I could have listened, but I was off in a different land. With each added insect, my perceptions expanded. The data weren’t as good as I was used to, but there was no doubt I could integrate it. I was already doing so. I knew Laurel found the room too warm, while Denise, who wrapped herself in blankets even during Virginia summers, was chilled. I knew that Laurel was in her element—and a much more complicated person than she appeared. Denise was trying to act take-charge, but was inwardly tentative, afraid of a misstep.

With twenty-four bugs and limited instrumentation I’d felt like God. Now… ? What comes after God?

I brought a couple of Tenibrio in behind Denise, close enough to smell her hair, touch it. They’re quiet fliers, so she didn’t notice.

But Laurel did. “So, do you like them?”

Denise jerked, saw the beetles, her emotional read changing like someone had flicked a switch. I might as well have been Jerret invading Cora’s apartment.

“Sorry.” CI-MEMS would have told her I wasn’t. Not really. I was just sorry I’d been caught.

I swirled insects around the room, using the confusion to hide a few in a potted palm. Others I parked in the wastebasket, on a shelf of books, on the doorframe. A hundred extensions of myself, watching from all angles. Gathering data. Telling me how she was feeling. Circling her with eyes… with love.

But love wasn’t the only thing I was feeling. For years, Senseless, I’d fought off the old fears. Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye? It hadn’t really mattered. Now, even with Denise right there and no sign of hostility from Laurel, I still didn’t feel safe. I wanted to extend my fringe, know what lurked outside the door: in the corridor, in the hallway, in the offices beyond.

I slid a few beetles under the doorframe, into the corridor beyond. A rail-thin man sporting a goatee and tiny, black-framed glasses was headed our way, a note projector in hand. For a moment, I was sure we were about to be interrupted, but he went on by without even glancing at the door.

I followed him and found a larger open space, a combination conference room, computer lab, and cube farm—about fifteen people presently there, but room for more. I didn’t have enough bugs to watch everything, so I let goatee-and-glasses go and turned my attention to a middle-aged man with thinning hair, cowboy boots, and a shirt tight enough to show off every ripple of a gym-built body. Even from fifty feet away, he radiated alarm, and my own adrenaline surged in response. A terrorist? A spy? Whatever he was doing, he was talking animatedly on a tat phone.

I kept some bugs at a distance, sent others in low, below the tops of the cubicles.

“Are you sure?” he was saying.

With military equipment I’d have been able to hear the response, even from the tiny speaker embedded in his thumb. But Laurel’s mics were barely good enough to catch his own voice, speaking softly into his pinky-mic. Shaka phones, they’d called these when they first came out. “Hang loose bro’,” and all that. All the rage for about fifteen minutes, until you realized what an idiot you looked like, using one.

“How do you like them?” Laurel repeated.

I pulled my attention back to her, to Denise.

“Not bad.”

Back in the cube farm, the man was still talking.

—”You tried it again? Just to make sure… ?”

—”But how… ?”

—”Yes, I know how ; I wasn’t born yesterday. I mean how could it have happened. I thought—”

“They’re yours to keep,” Laurel said.

“Huh?”

“Use them to track him down.”

I wondered what a swarm like this cost. The Corps had never told us, but there had been rumors. “What’s in it for you?”

She shrugged. “It’s the decent, human thing to do?” She grinned. “And it’s good for us. Our investors wouldn’t appreciate news stories about our tech being used for criminal purposes. Find him, deal with it quietly, and they will be very grateful.”

She paused again. “We might even let you be a permanent beta tester. I’ve heard that people coming out of the program are… unhappy. What does it feel like to be… what do you people call it? Reconnected?”

“Integrated.” What it felt was very, very good. Like being whole again.

I slid my focus back to my perimeter.

The middle-aged gym rat was still talking.

—”I really don’t care…”

—”Just get rid of it. I’ll pay for that, but not anything else.”

I lost interest. Domestic drama, no threat. I pulled back, swirled the bugs, looking for danger. But at first, all I found were snippets of ordinary office conversation. A tech discussion here. A gossipy pair who knew more of the gym rat’s story than he’d like. An argument over where to get the best pizza.

Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye? Full-blown flashback this time.

It was the pizza discussion that did it. One of the debaters was championing Scolioni’s deep-dish over Petrocelli’s New York-style. The other was arguing that deep-dish wasn’t real pizza. But only the deep-dish fan really cared. The other was just egging him on. Faking emotion without feeling it.

Suddenly, I was on foot patrol in a Middle Eastern market: a cube-farm for street vendors. Endless shops selling dates, figs, scarves, breads, and a thousand other things. Snippets of conversation, jostling elbows, haggles over price. Eyes wary for thieves and pickpockets. Vivid colors and vivid emotions, highlighted by the combination of Sense and adrenaline. Streets like this exploded in shrapnel almost daily. One slip in attention, and this could be next.

I was relatively new to CI-MEMS, about to learn that strong emotions weren’t always the important ones. They’re just the ones that are easiest to read: people who either loved you or hated you. People who were nervously watching for the next suicide bomber… or nerving themselves to push the button. Mercenaries studying their options. So long as you were alert, those stood out like emotional flares.

More dangerous are the subtler ones. The bomber who’s not afraid of his own death. The mother numbed by grief, with little left to lose.

But the most dangerous are the rarest.

The guy who nearly got me that day walked through my fringe without triggering even a trace of alarm. It wasn’t that I didn’t see him; he was wearing blue jeans and a sheepskin jacket—a Middle Eastern cowboy, guaranteed to stand out. But emotionally… zilch. Not angry, not fearful. About as bland as they come. Probably with enough knowledge of CI-MEMS to be specifically targeting me.

He was only thirty feet away when I saw the motion, with my real eyes, not the swarm’s. Had something on the fringe distracted me at just the wrong moment, I’d have died, right there. As it was, I saw him unzip his jacket, reach inside… and then, my Sense now directed full-force his way, felt just the barest flash of pleasure.