It was specially manufactured to be difficult to injure myself on. If it hadn’t been, it would have worn sores all over me in the course of use. I’m not sure what I thought I might be proving by trying to circumvent its safety features.
The status indicators in my fox told me that my exo wasn’t burned out. My ability to communicate with it was not impaired. I just didn’t seem able to make it budge, either through its usual adaptive response to my own micromovements or through the brute force method of direct commands from my fox.
Breathe, Jens. Don’t panic.
Panic never helped anybody in a self-rescue situation get out alive.
The exo wasn’t damaged. Also: it couldn’t be damaged because I needed it to get me out of here.
It did have a safety interlock to hold me on my feet when the batteries failed—and which I could use intentionally to lock portions of the frame—but that was only engaged in normal mode. It should have allowed me to move—albeit painfully—under my own power rather than resisting me.
Item: I had caught a glimpse of a tendril of the machine inside the craboid’s structure before I lost consciousness—or contact with the outside world, if that was what I had lost.
Conclusion: the meme (or the machine, if there was any functional difference between the two) had hacked my exo.
Solution: hack it back.
This would not have been possible if I’d been dealing with any other piece of equipment in the galaxy. I don’t think it would, anyway, though desperation can lend one a surprising amount of ingenuity. But, as I have mentioned, there was one single piece of equipment in the universe on which I was the leading authority.
I was wearing it, and right this instant it was seriously pissing me off.
Sheer cussedness doesn’t actually make luck break in your favor, and I know that. But sometimes cussedness can keep you in the game long enough for luck to break. And it seems to me that occasionally you can’t get results until you lose your temper with an object.
This was not, I am sorry to say, one of those times. My exo did not fix itself simply because I got extremely cross with it. Maybe the clinical efficiency of my rage was hampered by my current inability to carry out percussive maintenance on the fucking thing.
I guessed I was going to have to outsmart it, then.
I hated to purge the system and do a factory reset, because I’ve been years tuning this thing. If I had to, I would, however. It was a final option, and one I clung to so I’d have the courage and concentration to try other things.
But—wait. Wait.
The excitement of epiphany swallowed me until I tuned my adrenaline down. If I was wrong, I didn’t want to be crushingly disappointed.
I’m not going to pretend I knew the code. Not line by line. I certainly didn’t have it memorized.
What I did have was an archived, firewalled copy, however. And the ability to write a script to go through it line by exacting line, compare it to the active code running my exo, and look for things that didn’t match.
It took a subjective eternity, but—there. Yes. The reactivity to my movements had been set to zero. So basically, no matter how hard I pushed against it, the exo wouldn’t feel my attempts to move it as any more significant than—than my pulse. Or the beating of my breath. And it would shrug off direct commands through my fox as if they did not exist.
Clever little bastards, whoever wrote the exploit. Clever little bastards indeed.
Even cleverer, if they hadn’t written it exclusively for me. I supposed the same code would work on a hardsuit—
The time for theorizing had passed. Now it was time to get the hell out of here.
I ran a system check on the hardsuit actuator, using my exo to backdoor into its operating system. The actuator seemed to think it was functional, and I didn’t have a way to check. So here I was, right back where I had been when I was staring at the override beside the on-call room door and wondering if I was going to die if I triggered it.
Well, there was only one way to find out.
I inserted the code fixes, and then I slapped my hand up fast. As fast as I had ever moved it. I didn’t know if whoever had seized control of my exo was monitoring the situation, ready to fight me street by street—servo by servo—so I didn’t test that the exo was responding before I went. I just went.
If I failed, that would be enough test.
My hand punched out. Harder than I had anticipated, but it worked out. Whatever was encasing me tore… sharp-edged… no, shattered. Then the clenched fist, my own clenched fist, pounded down on my chest.
It hurt. It hurt as if I had punched myself intentionally, and my hand hurt where I’d torn through the stuff I couldn’t see. The pain didn’t feel so bad. I could pretend I’d hit myself as a form of self-injury, to provoke the kind of pain that makes you focus on right here right now and stop ideating.
It was a good thing it did make me focus, because even so that punch wasn’t enough to break through.
In primitive medicine before adrenaline injections, before electric shock, before open-heart massage, before nanoelectrical stimulus, humans in desperation used to treat heart failure—in humans, in horses, in dogs—with a series of punches or kicks in the chest.
It worked rarely. Vanishingly rarely. But any chance is better than none.
I wasn’t trying to kick-start a failed heart this time. I was trying to break a wall.
I didn’t know if I could make my hand move again. But I did. Somehow I did. And I made it
