priceless hacker brain

It’s been a decade since start of the Infrastructure War. You’d hardly know any of it happened, if not for the fact that the senators’ wives excusing themselves from the charity fundraiser ballroom each have armed cyborg security to escort them the length of a couple of corridors to the ladies’ room to powder their noses.

Tom McRae came out of the Infra with a medal, his daddy’s money, and a dream, and carved a twinkling aw-shucks career up through politics on the usual ticket of holding poor peoples’ faces down in the meat grinder. His lovely wife came up through The Aftermath teaching cute lil mediagenic orphans to read in the tent slum hearts of smart cities that ate themselves; they met when her charity work made for an afternoon’s photo op for him, and went from there.

Secretly, Sarah McRae née Kimball is a fiction, a fragmentary data file that survived The Aftermath to be opportunistically cobbled together with the remains of half a dozen others, a work of identity theft good enough to pass muster with a powerful but besotted young man, and if you dig far enough down under it there’s a hard-luck story about a pre-War orphan, a Sara-with-no-H, no surviving record of her surname, hardworking and good but desperate enough to steal a way out of starving.

(Not actually quite a good enough job to fool a horny young senator. But good enough that that will be the story, or the threat of a story, if he ever needs rid of her.)

She looks up into the eyes of her bodyguard. The inner circle of staff are briefed, she knows, on her shadow identity as Sara; Need-to-Know might one day be Needs to Know that we’re cutting a potential embarrassment loose at short notice under enemy fire. The woman is full borg, the way they built them pre-War; taller and wider than human, all angles and attachment hardpoints, like a tank. It went out of style after deployment of the type on civilian populations, but Senator Tom is big on veterans, and employing them constructively is good optics.

“Before Sarah Kimball was any more than dead data in a corrupted database,” she says calmly, holding the gaze which is presumably behind the mirrored eye shields, “there was a scared little thing with another name.”

The bodyguard — her arm patch says MORTON — stiffens.

“Your file says you nearly deployed into Kildeer,” Sarah says. “Where all those war crimes happened.”

Morton was not, then or now, recruited for her onboard smarts. “They put a stop to it before my batch dropped, ma’am,” she says, audibly off balance. “Ma’am, I don’t — “

“Senator Denton’s detail has some metal vets on it tonight, too, did you notice?”

Sarah had noticed. She’d noticed a face face out of an old, old memory, an old life. Not a welcome one.

Even Morton can do the math on “metal vet” and “notorious atrocities on a civilian population in the Infra” and “civilian of dubious provenance whose whereabouts aren’t fully accounted for during the Infra” and “the civilian shouldn’t be copping to identity theft”.

“A scared little thing with another name walked out out of Kildeer with a bleeding slice in her clitoris from a milspec surgical steel cyborg implant blade,” the senator’s wife says, eyes frozen blue, tone still — still — pitched for quiet and professional party hostess cordial. “Because someone who deployed before you had fun.” With a smooth, efficient movement, she peels a previously invisible strip of adhesive tape off the inside of her forearm; a flick of her wrist sets it ringing like a glass bauble, piezo-activated metamaterial crystallising into a perfect glass blade, scant atoms thick. Held right, it will slip through titanium composite. (Held anything but perfectly, it will simultaneously take the wielder’s hand off.) Illegal as fuck.

“Now we’re going to take a stroll up the corridor to where one of your fellow veterans is draining whatever fluid waste he still needs to, and the good Senator’s wife is going to do something scandalous in the men’s room with an old soldier.” The blade hums. “And you have several options what you report back to the Senator about that, Morton. But in the moment, I’m going to need you to stand outside and say it’s out of order.”

“Ma’am — “

“How many miles you think you could walk on a bombed-out highway with your clit sliced open, Morton?” say the senator’s wife, and Morton licks her top lip with a rapid, nervous swipe of the tip of her tongue, her silver-shuttered eyes flicking down from the shorter woman’s gaze in an abortive peep at her own mechanised frame.

“Before the borg, ma’am? I don’t — I don’t know.”

“Pretty sure one of your chromed-up soldier boys can go just as far with a little snip.” Something smile-shaped happens fleetingly on Sarah’s face. “And he even gets to see a doctor at the other end.”

Morton clutches to the familiarity of guard this door with the drowing determination of someone otherwise wholly out of her depth. And Sarah quietly pushes through it —

This decade, Julie has eyes the searing, improbable blue of a television screen declaring “No Input”. Her priceless hacker brain is a little less genuine meat by volume, a little more gelware; too useful, eventually, to stick with any long-held superstitious grudge about authentic cognition. She’s had some of the most expensive, unobtrusive cosmetic surgery in the world, which nobody even thinks to look for, since it makes her look like a woman a decade her elder who’s ageing well but visibly. And she is fucking sick of pretending to be Sara-pretending-to-be-Sarah, a work of identity theft so fucking good the entire combined self-congratulatory scrutiny of every security resource at an up-and-coming Senator’s disposal hasn’t scratched it.

It made sense at the time, but she’s sick of it. And this is, no word of a lie, a very old score that she’d very much like to settle.

The cyborg dirtbag is lounging against the sinks, grinning.

“I didn’t so much as scratch your clit,” he says. Two big fuck-off bodyguard guns strapped to his hips — won’t fire them, Morton would be in here in half a second; a conventional but still fucking lethal knife, the length of her forearm, spinning lazily in an endless showoff manoeuvre between metal fingers, dancing hypnotically over armoured knuckles.

“You left me for Maas to take apart,” Julie says, and god, he was stupid then and he’s stupid now, does he really think Julie would take her priceless hacker brain and eminently murder-susceptible meat within arm’s reach of him? The hugely illegal knife in her hand is pure theatre to sell the story to Morton: a quiet Bobbitt moment, just us girls.

She has gel in her head, these days. Not a tenth as much as he does, but enough. Priceless hacker brain, meet unconfiscable computer: she sends a single command, the culmination of a long, long time thinking and planning and iterating contingencies.

“Goodnight, Nic,” she says sweetly, as a window in his head, and a mirroring one inside hers, scroll a long, long, wail of:

The big knife tilts off balance on fingers that just aren’t moving any more, spins clumsily into the air, and bounces on the floor.

The Maas Biotech smartscraper’s security mesh reboots forty minutes early. Twelve live-fire dress rehearsals on a secretly constructed sound stage in Siberia; twenty million nuYuan in gear and bribes; eight years of research, planning and prep. A green telltale in Julie’s gelware contacts turns red, and just like that everything’s fucked.

Intrusion plating is supposed to make it impossible to get through the ducts, self-assembling into space-filling fractals whenever there’s power in the mesh. Julie’s sequence of hacks and exploits should have given them another ten minutes. She scrambles forward on hands and knees, but the needle-tipped traceries are unfolding from the ceiling and the walls, and there are thirty metres to go. Adrenaline takes her so far, and then metal fingers are snagging her clothes, and she freezes.

Behind her, Nic’s hands and knees clunk softly on the tunnel floor.

Nic — “Nicotine” — is the full metal package: eye sockets hermetically sealed behind mirrored polycarbonate, limbs replaced above the midjoint, gelware infiltrated into the brain. The quirks and shortcuts of human cognition streamlined, repurposed, worked around. Hands and feet of titanium and composite. Eyes that can practically see your molecules. Organs padded with shock absorbers and stabproofing, muscles bulked with actuator wire. He’s a precision instrument, a replaceable street gun. The muscle with the hustle, while Julie does the datamancy with her priceless brain.

If Julie moves, the shimmering needle tips will slice her apart. If Nic moves, the razor edges should be grinding on him like barbed wire on a truck; and yet only the clunking advances. That means the intrusion plating retracts for him, which means the mesh reads him as authorised personnel; Nic has a Maas IFF beacon. Nic sold them out.

Her stomach rolls, stewing with acid. Julie, and her priceless hacker brain, are dead. The package is a carbon cylinder, wide as two fingers, twelve centimetres long. Six electrical contact pads on one end, a carabiner the other. It’s clipped to the back of her belt. She doesn’t know what it is, what it does, doesn’t care. Get in, get it out, get paid. Martian passport, destructive upload, ten months offline while they grow a new body from her very own DNA on the other side of the ansible; download into the new meat and live happily ever after. Fuck.

Nic’s IFF is the only thing stopping the intrusion plating from unfolding carelessly through the space she’s in, filleting her. The delicate blades cage her, making it impossible to shy away as he whirs and clunks closer and closer.

She realises she’s half-vocalising a stream of whimpering curses: fuck shit motherfucker.

“Julie,” Nic sing-songs softly behind her, and the cold industrial bulk of one precise finger touches the back of her left ankle. She flinches, and a hair-fine metal filament punctures her shoulder.

He laughs. The robot motherfucker laughs. “I wouldn’t move if I were you.”

“Fuck you,” she tells him, but she’s cold, and a sudden tremble chatters her teeth at the end of it. She clamps her jaw shut against it.

He whirs, fingertip dragging a slow line up the back of her calf, meeting a chill memory-wire pinprick where it brushes through jumpsuit cotton to dimple flesh. He makes a soft tch noise, and she feels the air displaced, the undramatic metal click as scalpel edges deploy, jumping from the bisecting grooves in the pads of his fingertips. You’d have a hard time killing someone with blades so shallow, honed millimetres following the sculpted blunt curves of his metal fingers. She’d assumed, she supposes, that they were tools, not weapons.

Now her thoughts stutter over the uses of knives on flesh that don’t kill. Not quickly.

Tiny chimes of metal on metal; the pinprick lifts from her skin as Nic painstakingly rearranges metal flakes to hang differently, then replaces the finger on her leg in its interrupted path. The blade presses down, not breaking skin — or perhaps barely, but her nerves and adrenaline-shocked imagination are clocked at a million freaked-out flutters a second. The curve of med-grade stainless feels like a line of monomolecular wire dipped in liquid nitro.

Julie’s breath barks out of her. She’s aware that she’s trembling, but just for this second, even the half-dozen needlepoints jittering into her skin take a backseat to what Nic’s not doing, yet, to her calf.

And he moves. The whirring finger resumes running up her leg, the — scratch? — in its wake a screaming line of fire, her neurons flailing in terror. She can hear the hissing whisper of fabric parting, the cool air leaking across her skin through the incision.

“You talk too much,” Nic says, amused, conversational. Her churning stomach clenches.

All that time on the Siberian set. The mind-numbing months of memorising the layout, the routines, response times and contingencies and routes. Nothing else to do, cheap vodka practically easier to lay hands on than a drink of water. Almost nobody to talk to but Nic, and her Russian was bad, and outside the violence he was hired for, he didn’t seem smart enough to be dangerous….

What did she tell him? What kind of map to the inside of her head did she hand out? Surely, back in the fog of booze and boredom, she couldn’t have been stupid enough to run her mouth about Mars, or enough about the job to make herself replaceable — stayed unthreatening, looked younger and less cynical than she is, sprayed a vapid mist of vague-if-heartfelt details about where she’s from, and mostly talked about —

oh shit —

mostly about sex? — because he’s more robot than meat even in his head, and that’s a weirder and squickier frontier than just prosthetics, and she was curious what’s left in there and what’s not, and whether he even still has buttons to push. And he didn’t seem to, and so she may have vented way, way too much about what she wasn’t getting any of....

He may not have buttons to push. (Or he may be a really good lying robot motherfucker.) But she sure as hell does. And so he’s picked now — now! — when she’s pinned like a dissection specimen, to push back. For fun. Before Maas turn her into protein shakes for guard dogs, or whatever they do to the kind of people who run this kind of job against this kind of corp.

The razor edge pauses, fluttering over the sensitive skin in the hollow behind her knee. “Rope’s not enough for you, is it?” Nic muses theatrically. “Too easy. I wonder if self-control can keep you still?”

She clamps her teeth tight to keep them from rattling together. He laughs, and the razor fingertip starts its wander up the back of her thigh.

“Who’s a bad girl, Julie?” he murmurs, and she whimpers. She wants to work up a quip, something biting about being tortured with reductive daddy-issue clichés, but she can’t move, boxed in and reduced to raw nerve endings, and they’re going to kill her, but probably worse first, and —

this is what happens to bad girls

— and sure, daddy issues, he can have that one for free, so what? Things get to be clichés because they’re common, right? So what if fear does limbic alchemy, deep in her head? So what if his indifferent science-experiment cruelty lights up nerve endings in places it really, really shouldn’t? So what —

He whips his hand up suddenly, and she twitches and shrieks. The point in her shoulder tears flesh; it takes a few seconds of panicky, heaving breaths to be sure that his sharp touch hasn’t ribboned her leg.

“Who’s a bad girl, Julie?”

Oh, motherfucker. No. No way. Not giving him the satisfaction —

He smoothes a cold mechanical hand across her ass, curls his fingers with slow deliberation around the whatever-the-hell they came to steal.

“Dirty little thief,” he says with just the right edge of cold, and pulls on it. She squeaks, tensing against the force to stay where she is; but of course, even her muscles bunching pushes sharp tips through skin. “Who’s a bad girl, Julie?” with every word a little tug, a little emphasis that silence is not an option.

Oh god oh god oh — “Me!” A desperate little bleat to stave off getting shredded.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” She feels her belt parting under his touch, before the backward drag vanishes, and just manages to change the way she’s straining, avoid impaling herself. She’s trembling, from fear and the physical stress of holding still, blood thumping in her ears. And, fuck, other places. Why, fuck, why — the sociopathic robot-man is prodding her like a rat in a maze, taunting her with look what I can make you do —

— her kink for her own humiliation is humiliating. Getting wet for your own degradation is degrading. And libido doesn’t have the smarts to decide that this is not the right fucking time for this —

— so why? Why is this transparent bullshit working on her, like she’s a dumb animal in heat, desperate enough to hump the furniture? Because it’s transparent bullshit. She is so fucked up, and so, so fucked, and Nic is painstakingly slicing the legs and ass and crotch of her jumpsuit into easy-access shreds.

She whimpers, which blossoms into a strangled horror-noise as he slides the back of one metal finger along her wetness. And he laughs.

“Who’s a bad girl, Julie?” he says softly.

No.

“Who’s a bad girl, Julie?”

Nuh-uh. Not gonna.

“Who’s — ” and the terrifying pinprick razor tip of one deadly finger coldly touches her clit — “a bad girl, Julie?”

“Me me me!”

“Oh…” He tuts. “Have we lost our full sentences, Julie?”

Her mouth works frantically, silently framing I — I — I — “I am! I’m a bad girl!”

A guy with that much robot in his head shouldn’t be able to laugh like that.

Something presses against her, in the most terrifyingly vulnerable, shockingly wet place. It’s not a finger, not a killing robot digit; wrong texture. Wrong temperature. It takes her a second.

If it’s supposed to be symbolism for idiots — fucked by the thing she came to steal — she really ought to be smarter than that, too smart for it to work on her. Really. She ought. But she thinks the long whine of, “Noooooooo,” is coming from the back of her throat; not even really meaning anything, just a broken animal moan of protest at being here, stuck in this ridiculous trap. Stuck with this ridiculous libido, this shame, this greed, this readiness.

He fucks her with it slow. Surprisingly gentle. Because he is a bastard.

She comes quickly, wailing in terror, and her shaking arms finally give way. It takes far too many heaving breaths, and a couple of agonising dry retches, before the thought manages to struggle across her skull that if she’s thinking it, she ain’t dead yet.

Julie is not shredded.

The telltale in her contacts has gone back to green.

“Fucker!” It comes out of her with the kind of hysterical saw-edge that hurts your throat, and the kind of volume that could bring the guards down on them yet. “Fucker fucker fucker fucker — “

She’s mouthing it for quite a while after her breath is gone, and her mouth is still automatically chewing the motions when she manages to remember how to inhale. But the telltale has turned into a “move your fucking ass” countdown, and she scrambles, shaking, hyperventilating, all the way to the end and out of the access panel, to lie fetal in the wreckage of her clothes and surrounded by bloody handprints. Service corridor. On schedule.

Nic — motherfucking Nicotine — unfolds from the panel behind her, whirring smoothly, smirking, calm. He clicks it back into place.

“I’m afraid I found another buyer,” he says, and starts to walk away. “Sorry. I’d get moving, if I were you; you might even get out with your skin intact.” He glances back, and over her. That smirk, that fucking smirk. “So to speak.”

And he walks, the payload swinging carelessly from his fingers, as if he’s barely aware it’s there. Glistening wetly. Disappears into a service elevator; not the route Julie planned. His own deal, whatever side hustle he’s worked out to make him fabulously rich. And fucked her over, so to speak, apparently for pure fun.

Julie hates working directly with the muscle. Especially when they think they’re clever.

She has to burn a couple of very personally expensive contingencies, and owe someone a favour, a fucking favour, to get out. And fuck with the environmental controls enough to set three floors of the scraper on fire, but there’s no way she’s leaving that much DNA lying around for Maas to sequence. And Julie and her priceless hacker brain fall on their feet, because whatever the payload is, it’s just a thing, and however big Nic thinks he’s scored, he’s a fucking idiot.

Julie walks out with about a million things belonging to Maas, all digital, in a secure store in her mastoid bone. Root encryption keys for the the entire Maas enterprise, for a start.

Why on earth did he think she was on site? “Just in case”? Please.

The magic of gelware is that it acts as a middleman for hooking up brains and electronics, that doesn’t make your brain scar over and permanently unplug your implants in under two years.

Well, that’s what they teach you in science class. As far as Julie in concerned, the magic of gelware is that it is a very tightly locked down computing environment. There’s nothing nicer than a hackerproof box, when you stole all the keys years ago and nobody caught you.

Of course, the keys only stay valuable as long as nobody changes the locks, and Julie has sat on them and sat on them and itched to do something, but the thing is: she has to assume they are good for exactly one crime spree, one incredibly painless and easy-to-get-away-with crime spree, and then useless forever.

Julie has the proverbial neutron bomb at a knife fight tucked up her skirt: it’s no fucking good for knife fighting, and she likes the knife fighting, she’s good at it. And then the Infra fucked everyone’s happy little life, and afterwards she had the chance to trade up for safety and breathing room, and you know what? It’s been okay. All things considered, it’s been okay.

And then Nicotine walked in, and suddenly, gloriously, Julie is in a neutron-bomb fight where the other guy only brought a knife.

There’s very little contact with Mars these days, but the last she could verify, her bought and paid for one-way ticket is still valid: if she can get to an ansible, she can beam her mind to Mars and wake up in time for her next birthday in a body cloned from her own DNA, the physical equivalent of twenty years old. She can live off the mountain of money she made from the Maas job, do whatever she likes, never have to deal with any of this shit again. She can just be Julie, with the priceless hacker brain, and do priceless hacker brain things, like get fucked six ways to Sunday in artificial zero-g while totally and entirely off her fucking face, and never have to check that it’s okay with The Senator Indoors. And she has been aware of that other life, that lovely other life she already paid for, acutely aware that Nicotine and his stupid meathead robot bullshit cheated her out of it accidentally, that’s it’s there ready and waiting and she just can’t quite reach it, for years and years.

But now. Now.

Ladies and robot motherfuckers: start your neutron bombs....

Nicotine wakes up screaming.

…Well, he would, if he could. She turned his life support back on and gave him access to a single text-only comms channel, directly to her gelware, and she’s working on something very quickly, before Morton walks in to check everything’s okay. He wakes up just as Julie is using his robot eyes as a VR camera, hanging limp in his grip, puppeteering his hands to hold the illegal crystal knife to her own throat.

YOU CUNT YOU CUNT YOU CUNT he sends in chat.

You left me for Maas to dissect she reminds him, while she absently peeps the CCTV in the corridor outside. Yes, Morton’s restless; this is taking too long, and she’s had enough time to think through “I should not have agreed to this.”

Fuck, this is going to need selling harder than just waving a knife. She relaxes the grip holding her limp body up, pulls herself upright and turns around.

No no no Nicotine sends, just before she punches herself in the face with a puppeteered metal fist.

Things…swim.

She’s aware of Morton straight-arming the door, hinges ripping right out of the frame, blocking the bodyguard’s own view for long enough for Julie to trigger a couple of scripts. And it’s just as well she wrote them before hitting herself; what the fuck is he made of? One of his hand cannons barks, and Julie — sprawled on her back on the floor, ears already ringing — is lightly spattered with blood.

She toggles back into VR, squints out through robot eyes.

“Fuck,” her meat body murmurs wetly, lip split, eye swelling, and she clumsily steers him to pick it up. Even if she didn’t have to sell this, she doesn’t have time to pick herself up nicely; a big robot fist, a handful of clothes and flesh and leverage, and the shouts and running are nearly here already. Need to go quicker. Need to think quicker. Nice going, nearly knocking yourself out, priceless hacker brain!

Nicotine is howling down the chat channel at her, but that’s incredibly easy to ignore. And fortunately: he is literally built for this. Inept pilot she might be, but the body knows how to run, how to balance itself, how to optimise for poor conditions. Fist full of hostage, other hand full of gun; she slides into the corridor, dangling from his/her own VR fist, dizzy and slightly nauseous at the motion and dislocated perception; and almost autonomously, HEADSHOT HEADSHOT HEADSHOT three other security people are down before they can formulate what to do about him.

She glances, once, at what’s left of Morton’s face, and then runs for it.

The situation devolves, of course, into a police chase. The stupidest possible strategy-limiting meatspace situation. Honestly, this is nearly as bad as the Maas job, and she can’t even blame him this time. Hotwired Hummer, Nic’s body in the driver’s seat, hands fisted tight around the steering wheel so that — from enough distance — the way the drive-assist systems are effectively inverse-kinematicising his arms around isn’t obvious. She hopes. She’s deep in the car’s systems, a frankly trivial and conventional hack of the usual shoddily secured infotainment bus back-to-back right onto the critical stuff. Drive-assist cameras, semi-autonomous waypointing, full drive-by-wire. Well, it’s not supposed to be full drive-by-wire, but she’s here now and making herself at home. What, she’s supposed to puppet his stupid meat to haul the wheel around manually-by-proxy? Fuck that.

Her own meat lies in the back seat, blood crusting on her face. But all she has to do is pull this off, and she gets to rollback to a body aged subjective 20, that’s never been punched in the face in its gorgeous vat-grown life.

She checks the police convoy in the rearview cams. Keeping distance, flashing lights, monitoring. Bless the automotive industry, their security is also shit, and the cops have so much cash to splash that all their tactical gear, their comms, the stuff that for opsec ought to be airgapped from the chassis is tightly integrated. Upsell, from the bootlickers in auto manufacture fleet sales, she guesses. A fucking gift; she has a better idea of the air surveillance she’s under than they do. Lotta drones, couple of copters, and some high-altitude creepy UAV SWAT sniper platforms.

If and when they authorise those, she’s going to have problems. But right now they’re too worried about the optics of shooting up Mrs Senator.

YOU FUCKING LUNATIC CUNT, Nic tells her.

Babydoll, she says back, when we get where we're going I might just decide to have you bend over and fuck yourself to death on a forklift for fun. Be nicer.

WE'RE NOT GOING ANYWHERE WE'RE RACKING UP A SUICIDE-BY-COP BULLET COUNT BY THE FUCKING MILE

She laughs, her busted mouth hurting all over again.

YOU are, she says.

He goes back to repetitively chanting CUNT.