THE WOMAN’S NAME IS Rowan. Mal learns this as they walk away from the gravel roadbed along a well-worn footpath through a picturesque autumn forest of ash, maples, and hemlock. She’s refused to tell them exactly where they are, on the principle that if they’re eventually recaptured by the Humanists she’d rather they not be able to give away her location, but they’re clearly somewhere in the mountains of western Maryland or northwestern Virginia. They’re strung out in a line along the single-track trail, with Rowan leading, Pullman and Kayleigh following close behind, and a sullen, silent Asher bringing up the rear.
“Apologies for threatening to kill you all,” Rowan says as she hops three meters or more from one bank of a narrow stream to the other without breaking stride. “I’m not usually like that—or at least I didn’t used to be, anyway—but I was in Bethesda, you know? It’s been a rough few days.”
“Yes,” Mal says as Pullman picks his way across the streambed, which is not as narrow as Rowan made it look. “I saw the end of the battle there. Things appeared to be going quite badly for the Federal army, and for the gene-modified and augmented in general. I’m a bit surprised that you were able to escape.”
She turns to wait as Asher slips coming down the near bank and lands on his backside with his boots in the water, cradling his broken wrist to his chest and cursing quietly. “Oh, I wasn’t with the Federals,” she says. “Those guys are almost as bad as the Humanists, as far as I’m concerned. Don’t let this shitty uniform or the fact that I know how to use a rifle fool you. I’m not military of any kind. I was in a recovery room at the NIH when the shit went down. I managed to get out just before they got overrun, and I’ve been trying to get out of the war zone ever since.”
“NIH, huh?” Kayleigh says. “Were you sick?”
“I was,” Rowan says. “I was very sick. I had a disease called glioblastoma. You know what that means?”
“Sure, I know what that means,” Kayleigh says. “I’m not actually five, you know. What it means is that you probably shouldn’t buy any green bananas.”
Pullman shoots Kayleigh a horrified look, but Rowan laughs. “Yeah, that’s about right. It’s pretty much one hundred percent fatal. We’ve all got to die, but trust me, brain cancer is not the way you want to go if you’ve got any say in the matter. That’s why I let them give me the gift. I mean, aside from the fact that I’m not a whiny little bitch like Mr. Humanist back there. I signed a bunch of forms, they shot me up with a syringe full of self-replicating nano goo, and six months later my brain is cancer-free and better than new.” Her eyes shift to Asher. “You’re welcome, by the way. That wrist will be knitted back together in a couple of weeks, and the nanos will clean up anything else you’ve got cooking in there while they’re at it. You’re not gonna believe how good it feels to be absolutely healthy for the first time in your entire goddamned life.”
“Fuck you, Rowan,” Asher says as he struggles up out of the stream and back onto the trail. “Say it all you want, but it’s not a gift. It’s a curse. You may feel good right now, you may think everything’s just fucking grand, but the fact is that you’re a puppet, and now you’ve made me one too. You’re…” He wavers on his feet for a moment before catching himself with his good hand against a tree. “The government can…” He trails off again, then doubles over and throws up a thin stream of bloody bile into the underbrush.
“Easy, there,” Rowan says, then turns to Pullman. “You’re gonna want to get him under cover somewhere pretty soon. Looks like my little friends are getting down to work. He’ll be in an amazing amount of pain on and off for the next ten days or so, and he’s going to need about six thousand calories a day for the foreseeable future.”
“Six thousand calories?” Kayleigh says. “Where are we supposed to get that from?”
“That’s a good question,” Rowan says. “I hope you find a good answer.” She turns and starts back up the trail then. One by one, they follow.
AFTER FORTY minutes of walking, Asher begins stumbling. Ten minutes later, he falls for the first time. When he goes down for the third time a few minutes after that, he doesn’t get back up.
“Rowan?” Kayleigh says. “I think Asher might be dead.”
Asher rolls onto his back in the middle of the trail. His eyes are squeezed shut and his breath comes in short, shallow gasps. Rowan, who’d gotten far enough ahead that Kayleigh had to raise her voice to get her attention, stops, hesitates, and then comes back to them. “Hey,” she says. “Humanist. How’re you feeling?”
Asher groans, then turns his head and spits out a mix of blood and bile.
“That good, huh? Man, I’m glad they kept me sedated for this part.”
“Sedated?” Pullman says.
Rowan nods. “Oh yeah. They kept me doped to the gills in the ICU for the first week after the infusion.”
Both Kayleigh and Pullman stare at her then.
“The ICU?” Pullman finally says. “And you thought it would be okay to do this to poor Asher out here in the middle of the woods, with no hope of any sort of medical intervention at all? What’s wrong with you?”
Rowan turns to look at him. “It was either that or shoot him in the face, remember? All in all, I feel like I did the best I could here.”
“You could have just let us go,” Kayleigh says. “It’s not like Asher was gonna hunt you down or something.”
Rowan crouches down beside Asher, puts her fingers to his throat and then her palm to his forehead. “You sure about that, kid? I could be wrong, but just looking at you, I don’t get the feeling that any of you have much in the way of wilderness survival skills. A couple of days starving and freezing out here, and he might have been sorely tempted to find a Humanist detachment and join back up. Once he did that, the next thing he’d do is tell them I’m out here, and then I’d be dealing with Humanist hunting parties for the rest of my short life. But thanks to the gift, he can’t do that now without getting tossed straight into a burn pit, and that’s the sole and only reason he’s still breathing.”
“You think he was just gonna rejoin the militia? The last bunch of Humanists we ran into zip-tied us and threw us into the back of a truck, remember?”
Rowan stands again and looks down at Kayleigh. “True. But when they did that, he was a deserter running around with a gene-modded kid and a guy with a skull full of implants. That’s three big demerits in the Humanist world, and you were all probably headed for a prison camp at best, and more likely a burn pit somewhere, when I graciously stepped in to rescue you. If he was just a guy who got separated from his unit, though? Even better, one who could lead them to a plague rat? I promise you, all would have been forgiven.”
“You seem to have a very strong opinion of your own importance,” Mal says.
Rowan shrugs. “The run-of-the-mill Humanists are scared shitless of the gift. You saw that with your friend here. He was ready to take a bullet instead of accepting it. It’s more than that with the Arnolds, though. They’re not scared of us. They’re hunting us. The first trial on these nanos was still under way when the shit went down. Only twelve people had gotten the treatment before things started going off the rails. We were keeping in touch up until a couple of weeks ago—comparing side effects, talking about how bad the first few days out of sedation were, talking about what a goddamned miracle it is to be healthy again—but as soon as the Humanists started making serious gains, people started dropping off the network. A few of them left messages about what was happening, but most of them just disappeared. There were only three of us still talking when the Bethesda comm tower went down and I bugged the hell out.”
“I don’t get it,” Kayleigh says. “Why would these Arnolds be so worried about you?”
Rowan grins, then scoops Asher up with what appears to be no effort at all, loosens the strap on her rifle to make room, and then slings him across her shoulders. He groans, and a thin trail of red-tinged spittle drips out of his mouth and onto her jacket. “I don’t actually know,” she says, “but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably because we’re one path through the singularity and they’re the other. Nobody likes competition, right?”
“Explain,” Mal says as they start back up the trail. “I believe I am familiar with the concept of the singularity, but I fail to see how either you or they relate to it in any way.”
“Human-machine interface,” Rowan says. “That’s the singularity, right?”
“No,” Mal says. “It most certainly is not. As I understand it, the singularity refers to the point in time when the first derivative of the time-technological advancement curve becomes undefined.”
Rowan shoots him a quick glare over Asher’s hip. “Whatever, nerd. My point is, the future of the species is human-machine interface, right? That should be pretty obvious to everybody here, considering that we’ve all probably got as much hardware in our skulls as wetware. So, the question becomes, who’s going to be in charge—the human, or the machine? The Arnolds are what happens when the machine is running the show. I’m what happens when the humans keep control. You see?”
“And you see these as the only two options?”
She glances back again, one eyebrow raised. “I don’t follow.”
“Well,” Mal says, “consider my relationship with Mr. Pullman. Neither of us dominates the other. We are simply the best of pals. Why would this not be a better model for interactions between Silico-Americans and our fleshy friends?”
“I don’t know,” Rowan says. “Maybe we should ask Mr. Pullman what he thinks about your idea. How about it, Chuck? Are you and Mal really the bestest of friends? Does the idea of a future world where everyone has AIs riding around inside their heads sound appealing to you?”
“No,” Pullman says. “Not particularly, if I’m being honest. In fact, I think the first thing I’m going to do when things settle down again is to have someone go in and rip this damned hardware out of my brain, with a rusty pair of pliers if necessary. Fully immersive virtual reality has its charms, but it is quite clear to me now that getting these implants was not the wisest choice I’ve ever made.”
“Hurtful, Mr. Pullman,” Mal says. “Very, very hurtful.”
Pullman rolls his eyes but says nothing. The path steepens, and after a minute or so of that Mal notes that Pullman’s respiration and heart rate are both rising to problematic levels. Rowan, though, seems completely unbothered despite the fact that she’s lugging ninety kilos of inert Asher along with her. Mal finds himself wishing for the millionth time in the past few days that he had access once again to the deep, clear waters of infospace. The enhancements Rowan possesses seem to bear little if any connection to curing brain cancer, and he would very much like to know what she actually is.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Mr. Pullman?
CPULLMAN17: Yes, Mal?
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): I have a question regarding monkey etiquette.
CPULLMAN17: Does it involve the obnoxiousness of referring to us as monkeys?
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): No, it does not.
CPULLMAN17: Okay, well, you might want to start there.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): I’m not sure why. True monkeys strike me as noble creatures. They live in harmony with their environment, eating fruit and the occasional rodent and almost never driving any of their fellow species to extinction. You could learn a great deal from them, in my opinion.
CPULLMAN17:…
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Regardless, what I actually wanted to ask was whether you believe Rowan would take it badly if I inquired as to her medical history.
CPULLMAN17: You mean her brain cancer?
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Not per se, no. I would like to know why her treatment for brain cancer appears to have turned her into a cyborg super-soldier.
DRUIDGIRL: Just FYI, I can see everything you’re saying here.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Impossible. These messages are large prime encoded. Also, they are taking place entirely inside Mr. Pullman’s cranium.
CPULLMAN17: Uh … Mal?
DRUIDGIRL: Your encoding isn’t as good as you apparently think it is, and Pullman’s system keeps trying to back the conversation up to the cloud. If you want privacy around me, Pullman needs to disable his transmitter.
“Well,” Mal says. “I suppose this actually serves as a fine introduction to my question. Am I correct in understanding that you were not augmented prior to your treatment?”
“Correct,” Rowan says. “Until they gave me the gift, I was just a bog-standard human.”
“And now, in addition to being tumor-free, you appear to have both enhanced strength and sophisticated onboard signal processing.”
“Well, yeah. Other stuff too.”
“Other stuff?”
“It’s not just strength. I’ve got all kinds of improvements. I’m faster. I’ve got better eyesight. Better hearing. Stuff even tastes better, if you can believe that. Also, it didn’t just cure my cancer. According to the docs at NIH, I should be completely disease-free until something kills me or I die of old age. We call it ‘the gift’ for a reason, you know?”
“Yes,” Mal says. “I can see why you would view it this way. However, from my perspective, this renders your situation even more confusing. I am not an expert in monkey—pardon, human—medical practice, but my understanding is that your medical interventions typically limit themselves to treating a specific illness or infirmity. It seems very odd that a cancer therapy would have so many apparently beneficial side effects. Also, please correct me if I am wrong, but I do not believe that most medical interventions are designed to be transmissible to other humans who are not afflicted with the condition being addressed.”
Rowan shrugs, causing Asher’s head to loll alarmingly on his limp neck. “I guess you’re right. They warned me when I signed up for the trial that I was gonna go through some pretty gnarly changes. There was a consent form filled with like twenty pages of single-spaced print. I didn’t read it, though, and I didn’t ask for any explanations. I was dying, and they said they could save me. That’s the only part I really cared about.”
“That’s fair enough,” Kayleigh says, “but Mal makes some good points, doesn’t he? Asher seemed pretty convinced that what they did to you was part of some sort of grand conspiracy to put everyone under government control. He said that was one of the things that got the Humanists all riled up in the first place. From what you’re saying, it seems like maybe he was on to something, huh?”
“Careful,” Rowan says, “you’re making me rethink my whole not killing you policy.”
“As noted previously,” Mal says, “I do not in any way wish to offend. You must admit, though, that Kayleigh is not incorrect.”
“Oh, she’s very incorrect. Nobody is controlling me.”
“Well, certainly. Not at this time.”
Rowan stops and turns to face him. “Want to tell me what that’s supposed to mean?”
“Again,” Mal says, “I intend no offense. I only mean to say that it is apparent from your enhanced strength that your skeletal muscles are interwoven with biomechanical actuators, similar to if not identical to the ones the military uses. Those actuators must be controlled by neural circuitry. That neural circuitry can be suborned, and in that way you may be controlled. It seems likely that this is what has happened to those you call Arnolds. The same thing could happen to you.”
She folds her arms across her chest and glares at him. “No, it couldn’t.”
“Mal,” Pullman says, “let it go.”
“It could,” Mal says. “It only requires you encountering a Silico-American who lacks a strong moral compass.”
“Okay,” Rowan says. “Do it.”
That hangs between them for a long five seconds before Mal replies. “Apologies if I was unclear on this, Rowan, but as I have previously mentioned, I in fact possess a very strong moral compass. I have no wish to possess you.”
“Really?” Pullman says. “Where was your moral compass when I came along?”
“Your dog was eating my face, Mr. Pullman. Moral considerations fall by the wayside under such circumstances.”
“I’m serious,” Rowan says. “As far as I know, the Arnolds are all former intel guys. They’ve got command overrides built into them. It’s a design feature, not a bug. The gift isn’t like that. I don’t think it is, anyway, and if it is, I should know it. So? Do it.”
“Mal—” Kayleigh begins, but Pullman cuts her off.
“No, Kayleigh, Rowan is right. Having a stranger break into your skull is a nasty surprise. If she’s vulnerable to that, she has a right to know.”
“Very well,” Mal says after a brief mental sigh. “Put Asher down, please.”
“Why should I do that?”
“I have never attempted to suborn the body of a live human before. There is likely to be a short period of struggle before I am able to establish full control. I would not want Asher to be hurt if you fall.”
Rowan hesitates, then kneels and slides Asher off of her shoulders and onto his back in the middle of the trail.
“It may be best for you to lie down as well,” Mal says.
“I don’t think so,” Rowan says, and gets back to her feet.
“Very well. Mr. Pullman, will you catch Rowan if she falls?”
Pullman steps closer to her and begins to raise his hands, but Rowan shoots him a poisonous glare and gives her head a short sharp shake. He drops his hands to his sides, but doesn’t move away.
“Are you ready?” Mal asks.
Rowan takes a deep breath in and lets it out slowly, then nods. “Go for it.”
Mal sighs again, a little more heavily this time. He releases his hold on Pullman’s sensorium, and attacks.