Kodjo Asante wonders why he’s standing here at 0300.
Maddox says the occasional bit of sleepwalking isn’t anything to get too worried about, especially if you’re already prone to it. Nobody’s suffered a major episode in months, not since well before Galveston; these days the tweaks seem mainly about fine-tuning. Rossiter’s long since called off the just-in-case bots that once dogged their every unscripted step. Even lets them leave the base now and then, when they’ve been good.
You still have to expect the occasional lingering side-effect, though. Asante glances down at the telltale tremor in his own hand, seizes it gently with the other and holds firm until the nerves quiet. Looks back at his friend.
Acosta’s eyes are open.
They don’t look at him. They don’t settle long enough to look at anything, as far as Asante can tell. They jump and twitch in Acosta’s face, back forth back forth up down up.
“Carl,” Asante says softly. “How’s it going, man?”
The rest of that body doesn’t even twitch. Acosta’s breathing remains unchanged. He doesn’t speak.
Zombies aren’t big on talking. They’re smart but nonverbal, like those split-brain patients who understand words but can’t utter them. Something about the integration of speech with consciousness. Written language is easier. The zombie brain doesn’t take well to conventional grammar and syntax but they’ve developed a kind of visual pidgin that Maddox claims is more efficient than English. Apparently they use it at all the briefings.
Maddox also claims they’re working on a kind of time-sharing arrangement, some way to divvy up custody of Broca’s Area between the fronto-parietal and the retrosplenial. Someday soon, maybe, you’ll literally be able to talk to yourself, he says. But they haven’t got there yet.
A tacpad on the bedside table glows with a dim matrix of Zidgin symbols. Asante places it under Acosta’s right hand.
“Carl?”
Nothing.
“Just thought I’d … see how you were. You take care.”
He tiptoes to the door, sets trembling fingers on the knob. Steps into the darkness of the hallway, navigates back to his rack by touch and memory. Those eyes.
It’s not like he hasn’t seen it a million times before. But all those other times his squadmates’ eyes blurred and danced in upright bodies, powerful autonomous things that moved. Seeing that motion embedded in such stillness—watching eyes struggle as if trapped in muscle and bone, as if looking up from some shallow grave where they haven’t quite been buried alive—
Terrified. That’s how they looked. Terrified.
We Are the Dead
Specialist Tarra Kalmus has disappeared. Rossiter was seen breaking the news to Maddox just this morning, a conversation during which Maddox morphed miraculously from He of the Perpetually Goofy Smile into Lieutenant Stoneface. He refuses to talk about it with any of the grunts. Silano managed to buttonhole Rossiter on her way back to the helipad, but could only extract the admission that Kalmus has been ‘reassigned’.
Metzinger tells them to stop asking questions. He makes it an order.
But as Tiwana points out—when Asante finds her that evening, sitting with her back propped against a pallet of machine parts in the loading bay— you can run all sorts of online queries without ever using a question mark.
“Fellow corpse.”
“Fellow corpse.”
It’s been their own private salutation since learning how much they have in common. (Tiwana died during a Realist attack in Havana. Worst vacation ever, she says.) They’re the only ZeroS, so far at least, to return from the dead. The others hold them a little in awe because of it.
The others also keep a certain distance.
“Garin was last to see her, over at the Memory Hole.” Tiwana’s wearing a pair of smart specs tuned to the public net. It won’t stop any higher-ups who decide to look over her shoulder, but at least her activity won’t be logged by default. “Chatting up some redhead with a Hanson Geothermal logo on her jacket.”
Two nights ago. Metzinger let everyone off the leash as a reward for squashing a Realist attack on the G8G Constellation. They went down to Banff for some meatspace R&R. “So?”
Speclight paints Tiwana’s cheeks with small flickering auroras. “So a BPD drone found a woman matching that description dead outside a public fuck-cubby two blocks south of there. Same night.”
“Eiiii.” Asante squats down beside her as Tiwana pushes the specs onto her forehead. Her wonky eye jiggles at him.
“Yeah.” She takes a breath, lets it out. “Nicci Steckman, according to the DNA.”
“So how—”
“They don’t say. Just asking witnesses to come forward.”
“Have any?”
“They left together. Deked into an alley. No further surveillance record, which is odd.”
“Is it really,” Asante murmurs.
“No. I guess not.”
They sit in silence for a moment.
“What do you think?” she asks at last.
“Maybe Steckman didn’t like it rough and things got out of hand. You know Kally, she … doesn’t always take no for an answer.”
“No to what? We’re all on antilibidinals. Why would she even be—”
“She’d never kill someone over—”
“Maybe she didn’t,” Tiwana says.
He blinks. “You think she flipped?”
“Maybe it wasn’t her fault. Maybe the augs kicked in on their own somehow, like a, a … reflex. Kally saw an imminent threat, or something her better half interpreted that way. Grabbed the keys, took care of it.”
“It’s not supposed to work like that.”
“It wasn’t supposed to fry Saks’ central nervous system either.”
“Come on, Sofe. That’s ancient history. They wouldn’t deploy us if they hadn’t fixed those problems.”
“Really.” Her bad eye looks pointedly at his bad hand.
“Legacy glitches don’t count.” Nerves nicked during surgery, a stray milliamp leaking into the fusiform gyrus. Everyone’s got at least one. “Maddox says—”
“Oh sure, Maddox is always gonna tidy up. Next week, next month. Once the latest tweaks have settled, or there isn’t some brush fire to put out over in Kamfuckingchatka. Meanwhile the glitches don’t even manifest in zombie mode so why should he care?”
“If they thought the implants were defective they wouldn’t keep sending us out on missions.”
“Eh.” Tiwana spreads her hands. “You say mission, I say field test. I mean, sure, camaraderie’s great—we’re the cutting edge,
