Asante decides he doesn’t like the sound of the Major’s laugh.
“You must have asked it,” he says.
“A dozen different ways. Zombies might be analytically brilliant but they’re terrible at self-reflection. They can tell you exactly what they did but not necessarily why.”
“When did you ever care about motive?” His tone verges on insubordination; he’s too empty to care. “Just … tell it to stay in control. It has to obey you, right? That orbitofrontal thing. The compliance mod.”
“Absolutely. But it wasn’t your twin who dropped out. It was you, when it unleashed the mandala.”
“So order it not to show me the mandala.”
“We’d love to. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell us what it looks like?” It’s Asante’s turn to laugh. He sucks at it.
“I didn’t think so. Not that it matters. At this point we can’t trust you either—again, not entirely your fault. Given the degree to which conscious and unconscious processes are interconnected, it may have been premature to try and separate them so completely, right off the bat.” She winces, as if in sympathy. “I can’t imagine it’s much fun for you either, being cooped up in that skull with nothing to do.”
“Maddox said there was no way around it.”
“That was true. When he said it.” Eyes downcast now, saccing the omnipresent ‘pad. “We weren’t planning on field-testing the new mod just yet, but with Kalmus and now you—I don’t see much choice but to advance implementation by a couple of months.”
He’s never felt more dead inside. Even when he was.
“Haven’t you stuck enough pins in us?” By which he means me, of course. By process of elimination.
For a moment, the Major almost seems sympathetic.
“Yes, Kodjo. Just one last modification. I don’t think you’ll even mind this one, because next time you wake up, you’ll be a free man. Your tour will be over.”
“Really.”
“Really.”
Asante looks down. Frowns.
“What is it, Sergeant?”
“Nothing,” he says. And regards his steady, unwavering left hand with distant wonder.
Lazarus
Renata Baermann comes back screaming. She’s staring at the ceiling, pinned under something—the freezer, that’s it. Big industrial thing. She was in the kitchen when the bombs hit. It must have fallen.
She thinks it’s crushed her legs.
The fighting seems to be over. She hears no small-arms fire, no whistle of incoming ordnance. The air’s still filled with screams but they’re just gulls, come to feast in the aftermath. She’s lucky she was inside; those vicious little air rats would have pecked her eyes out by now if she’d been—
—Blackness—
¡Joder! Where am I? Oh, right. Bleeding out at the bottom of the Americas, after …
She doesn’t know. Maybe this was payback for the annexation of Tierra del Fuego. Or maybe it’s the Lifeguards, wreaking vengeance on all those who’d skip town after trampling the world to mud and shit. This is a staging area, after all: a place where human refuse congregates until the pressure builds once again, and another bolus gets shat across the Drake Passage to the land of milk and honey and melting glaciers. The sphincter of the Americas.
She wonders when she got so cynical. Not very seemly for a humanitarian.
She coughs. Tastes blood.
Footsteps crunch on the gravel outside, quick, confident, not the shell-shocked stumble you’d expect from anyone who’s just experienced apocalypse. She fumbles for her gun: a cheap microwave thing, barely boils water but it helps level the field when a fifty kg woman has to lay down the law to a man with twice the mass and ten times the entitlement issues. Better than nothing.
Or it would be, if it was still in its holster. If it hadn’t somehow skidded up against a table leg a meter and a half to her left. She stretches for it, screams again; feels like she’s just torn herself in half as the kitchen door slams open and she—
—blacks out—
—and comes back with the gun miraculously in her hand, her finger pumping madly against the stud, mosquito buzz-snap filling her ears and—
—she’s wracked, coughing blood, too weak to keep firing even if the man in the WestHem uniform hadn’t just taken her gun away.
He looks down at her from a great height. His voice echoes from the bottom of a well. He doesn’t seem to be speaking to her: “Behind the mess hall—”
—English—
“—fatal injuries, maybe fifteen minutes left in her and she’s still fighting—”
When she wakes up again the pain’s gone and her vision’s blurry. The man has changed from white to black. Or maybe it’s a different man. Hard to tell through all these floaters.
“Renata Baermann.” His voice sounds strangely … unused, somehow. As if he were trying it out for the first time.
There’s something else about him. She squints, forces her eyes to focus. The lines of his uniform resolve in small painful increments. No insignia. She moves her gaze to his face.
“Coño,” she manages at last. Her voice is barely a whisper. She sounds like a ghost. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”
“Renata Baermann,” he says again. “Have I got a deal for you.”
Suzanne Palmer is a writer, artist, and Linux system administrator who lives in Western Massachusetts. She has won both the Asimov’s and AnLab/Analog Readers’ Awards for her short fiction. Her first novel is forthcoming from DAW in 2019.
THE SECRET LIFE OF BOTS
Suzanne Palmer
I have been activated, therefore I have a purpose, the bot thought. I have a purpose, therefore I serve.
It recited the Mantra Upon Waking, a bundle of subroutines to check that it was running at optimum efficiency, then it detached itself from its storage niche. Its power cells were fully charged, its systems ready, and all was well. Its internal clock synced with the Ship and it became aware that significant time had elapsed since its last activation, but to it that time had been nothing, and passing time with no purpose would have been terrible indeed.
“I serve,” the bot announced to the Ship.
“I am assigning you task nine hundred forty four in the maintenance queue,” the Ship answered. “Acknowledge?”
“Acknowledged,” the
