James Knapp - The Silent Army

“Wachalowski,” he said.

“Um, hi. Nico?”

“Zoe. Did you get my message?”

“Um, not yet.”

“It’s okay. Look, I made some calls, and I don’t think you have to worry about the incident at the hospital.”

“No?”

“No. It got dropped.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Someone else must have gotten involved.”

“So they’re not looking for me?”

“No,” he said, “but I don’t think this is over.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

He paused on the other end of the line.

“What’s wrong?”

“I kind of have something to ask you.”

“Sure.”

“I was wondering, if you’re not doing anything else, and if you feel like it, if you might want to go out to dinner.”

“Are you asking me out to dinner?”

“Not exactly,” I said. I was so embarrassed, I could hardly talk. He thought I was calling him to ask him out on a date. If I didn’t say something soon, he’d start making excuses why he couldn’t go. My throat felt like it was going to close up on me.

“Not exactly?”

“Well, someone wants to meet you …us …and …”

“I understand,” he said. “I was told to expect your call. Do you know who she is, Zoe?”

“The one who came here is named Penny. She said the one that wanted to see us both is named Ai, though.”

“Do you know that name?”

“No. Do you?”

“No.”

“Do you think we should go?”

“I do,” he said. He sounded serious. “Where and when?”

I flipped over the card she’d written the time on the back of it.

“Suehiro 9,” I said. “At seven.”

“That explains the suit,” he said, kind of to himself.

“What?”

“Nothing. I’ll pick you up at six thirty?”

“You’re going to pick me up?”

“Of course.”

“Oh. Good. Six thirty sounds good.”

“I’ll see you then.”

I hung up, then flopped down on the couch and let out a deep breath. It felt good. Ten minutes before, everything seemed like it was going wrong and there was no end in sight. Then that weird girl showed up, and just like that I was off the hook with the cops, the woman being dead wasn’t my fault, and I was going to a fancy dinner with Nico.

I was a little nervous about the restaurant. I wanted to go out somewhere with Nico, but that wasn’t how I pictured it. I was terrible in social situations, but with other people there I wouldn’t have to worry about what to say. Those other people would be like me, too. The woman in the hospital asked me if I wasn’t curious about them, and it was true that I was. Penny said the person we were meeting was the most important person I’d ever meet. I wondered what that meant. Why were they watching me?

“You’re important too.”

I held up the dress and looked at it again. I hoped I’d look okay in it.

“You guys have the wrong person,” I said to myself. They had to.

I was a lot of things, but important wasn’t one of them.

I awoke to darkness and total quiet. The sleep that came before was absolute, and completely devoid of dreams. When thought and sensation began to return, it was like being reborn.

When I was alive, I was always cold and tired. I no longer felt either. My metabolic system was now inert, and nanomachines in my blood did repairs. I didn’t need any kind of rest or sleep. Still, I found myself drawn to those rare moments when the darkness was complete, and I let everything go.

Impulses began to fire through my brain, as the implants lit up and formed connections. When my communications node went active, messages began to stream through the darkness.

Update: target obtained: Harris, Erica. Designation yellow.

Update: target obtained: Janai, Ryu. Designation yellow.

Update: target reclassified: Holst, Jan. Upgraded from yellow to red.

Update: target eliminated: Holst, Jan. Designation red.

Update: target reclassified: Ott, Zoe. Upgraded from green to yellow.

Update: target yield within eighty-five percent of target.

The field of memories appeared below them, and for a moment I was floating in space, consciousness and nothing more. They swirled around and through me like hot embers, revealing their contents in quick, bright flashes.

In one, keystrokes whispered under my fingers as I typed quickly into a chat portal at my home computer:

I feel like I should be able to let her go.

You didn’t kill her , came the reply.

I know. This shouldn’t bother me this much. Not anymore.

Maybe she had something to say, the person on the other end of the chat said. Something you didn’t hear.

In another, a street woman sat with me in a holding tank, back in my old precinct. She had the look of a late-stage junkie, with rotting teeth and bad skin. Only her eyes betrayed her intelligence, and the burden of a terrible knowledge.

“He doesn’t kill them all,” she said, her voice low. “I do.” I didn’t know who she was.

Update: New node(s) installed: eleven.

The embers scattered as the message came in. Sensation returned to my fingers and toes, and the low vibration in my chest resumed as my mind and my body reconnected. Once again, I was awake.

“Faye,” a man’s voice said. I opened my eyes and sallow light seeped in. I was lying on my back, reclining in a large examination chair. He was standing next to me, moonlit eyes glowing softly in the shadows.

“Lev.”

My nodes finished their initialization. According to the network chronometer, I’d been down for a long time. I didn’t recognize the room I was in. Several other revivors were there with us, their backs against the far wall. They stared at nothing, waiting.

Nearby I heard a snap and a buzzing sound, the closing of an electrical circuit. The buzz turned to a low hum.

“Hold,” a soft, synthesized voice said. “Gathering for iteration three-six-one.”

The hum continued for a minute or so, then began to rise in pitch. I heard restraints creaking as they were pulled taut.

“Active.”

“Why was I down for so long?” I asked. After dropping off Hiro Takanawa, I was sent to a safe house for maintenance. This went beyond maintenance. I scanned my nodes and found a new component. “Why was a new node installed?”

“Fawkes will explain everything.”

“It’s a second communications array.”

“I know.”

Bodies were moving nearby. In the gloom to my right was a plastic tent, hung from the ceiling with hooks. Through the clear sheeting I saw figures inside. They moved among rows of metal gurneys there, where bodies writhed and twisted.

“Checking signature,” the electronic voice said. A digital readout behind the plastic displayed the total reanimation time. They had gotten it way down.

I sat up slowly and looked around the room. There were ten other revivors there with us, electric eyes jittering in the darkness like they were trapped in a dream. The military kept revivors cut off, unable to communicate directly. Revivor command links were all hub and spoke; we each had a permanent link back to Fawkes, but he allowed, and encouraged, us to sync. When alone, we would set up a common pool and each of us would connect. On our communications band I sensed them, passing embers of memory back and forth as Lev and I sometimes did. They compared information, sometimes hoping to fill in empty fragments, sometimes just out of curiosity. In life I’d feared revivors, though I wouldn’t admit it. Now I’d found a strange sense of community in their company and ranks. To be alone with them brought a sense of calm. There was no reason to breathe or blink my eyes. There was no need to make eye contact or touch without an urge to do so. We might never speak, and would never have to. By nature of what we were, we’d shared experiences no human had and no human ever could.