Shine (42 page)

"Put your shoes on," Singer says. "It's time to go."

He first met Singer in a Kabul hotel conference room, while they listened to a presentation on the Ishin program. He looked like the kind of man who watched films whose titles Brandon could never pronounce. He was half-human, half-owl: gold spectacles over colourless eyes hidden in a craggy face under close-cropped hair. He seemed to not be paying very much attention to the presentation. He wore no uniform. Private contractor, Brandon guessed.

"If you're here," the presenter up front said, his face made ghostly by the light of a humming projector, "it's because you're uniquely qualified for this project."

Oh God,
Brandon thought.
Here we go.

Ishin, they learned, was a surveillance co-op involving tiny unmanned aerial systems. It was also the Edo Period word for renewal and restoration. Ishin-enabled systems could communicate with other systems, from swooping, missile-equipped predators in the air to lumbering camel-bots on the ground. This would further cut out human interference, they were told, by reducing the semantic drift between orders from up top and orders to machines. Once all the bots used Ishin, you could speak to a drone or a packbot and soon all the available systems would know the orders and start cooperating.

"It'll be like a counter-insurgency," the presenter said, his eyebrows wiggling with obvious delight. "A
robot
counter-insurgency."

"Doesn't that mean they'll just ask us to leave?" someone asked.

Everyone but Brandon and Singer laughed. But Brandon immediately saw the problem. Ishin-eqipped bots did not need to
ask
anyone for anything--unlike their colonized counterparts, they had no need to perform politeness. They reacted, behaved, and made decisions utterly unburdened by the crushing constraints of self-awareness.

When Brandon looked at the silent man sitting across from him, and saw the blank glare of projected light reflected in his spectacles and the flat, disinterested line of his cracked lips, he knew this man saw the same problem.

Outside the hotel lobby, in the haze of afternoon sunlight, Brandon found the owlish man wiping off his spectacles and examining them. He peered up into the sky. Something up there was circling.

"Falcon," he said, pointing. "They're coming into vogue, again. Good hunters."

"Falconry?" Brandon asked. "What's next, jousting?"

The other man continued squinting up into the sky. "I know you." He put on the spectacles. "You figured out that schoolbus deception. How that town fooled the satellites into relaying false bombing recommendations."

Brandon shrugged. Lately he'd gotten a lot of attention for having figured out this particular puzzle. It was part of why he'd wound up in the hotel listening to the Ishin presentation in the first place. "Anybody could have figured it out, eventually," he said. "No town that size has that many schools."

"Especially after prolonged exposure to depleted uranium."

Brandon winced. "I guess."

"Bill Singer," the man said, in the same vaguely apologetic tone other men sometimes used to explain their diabetes or their flat feet. "What do you think of Ishin?"

Again, Brandon shrugged. "It's a good idea, if it works. I think if you expand the applications, it could be more interesting."

"Such as?"

"Like, if you included more bots in the network. Farm-bots, for example. You could get moisture readings from a few acres and forecast the need for new fertilizer and seed shipments a year from now, then relay the data to re-purposed predators. Teach them to act like crop-dusters."

A new dimple formed on one side of Singer's wrinkled face. He nodded to himself slightly, as though making a decision. "If you were offered the project, you'd take it?"

"Sure," Brandon said. "The bombing stuff--it's mostly over, now. And it's already ruined gaming for me."

"A well-documented side effect among soldiers of your generation."

Brandon wondered if this was true. He only knew that he couldn't pick up the controller like he used to, anymore. The same games just weren't as fun. The shooter comms, which had once sounded like cheerful pubs in his headset, now sounded like louder, monosyllabic versions of the room where he worked. Even RPG's had gone sour for him: all that inventorying and fetch-questing looked too much like a camel-bot's work order. Now he played games intended for sheltered, gifted children, the kind only purchased by well-meaning but tragically un-cool parents.

"I'd take the job," Brandon heard himself say.

"Even if it meant your re-locating here for a prolonged period?" Singer's head tilted. "I heard they flew you in for a consult. Are you missing Provo?"

Brandon snorted. "There's no love lost between me and Provo." He shrugged. "It's safer than it used to be around here, right?"

The dimple appeared again in Singer's face. He nodded once more, shoved his hands in his pockets, and descended the broad, white steps of the hotel's entrance. He crossed past a dry fountain filled with desiccated palm fronds.

"Uh, sir," Brandon said, instantly wondering why he had felt so compelled to address him as such, "you're headed outside the green zone."

"I want to smoke, and the hookah here tastes like candy." Singer made a half turn, khaki overcoat swirling with his abrupt motion. "Well? Are you coming?"

During their run, they speak very little. Brandon hears only Singer's breathing and the occasional Pashto phrase pushing past his lips when he encounters children or women on their way to market. Singer is out in the suburbs where things are quiet. Here in the city, Brandon runs into more and more Westerners, often joggers, huffing to each other in German or French or English. There are more Western women, too, the kind that have collected too many rape kits, their shoulders cut like gems. They move in packs for safety. Brandon always makes room for them on the street.

His earbud only comes out in the shower. As with the run, Brandon's body and Singer's move in perfect concert. He imagines that they perform the same rituals in the same order, foot to scalp. It is this way immediately after the run, too, when they throw themselves into Singer's callisthenics routine. Singer says it's the same one he learned in a burn ward on a base in Okinawa, when all he had was early morning television and a cheerful woman in a leotard. Brandon once asked about the burn, but a moment later Singer re-set the comm line and pretended like he hadn't heard the previous message.

Most days Singer moves locations, living in the charred husks of bombed-out buildings under the shadows of mountains blunt as molars. They have met in the flesh only a handful of times. But already Brandon knows him as though the tunic and its secret golden threads and its broadcast pulses were really Singer's skin, and not an approximation necessitated by distance.

In Brandon's Room, Tink patiently awaits her dismissal. Her batteries have drawn fresh charge from his laptop. She feels faintly warm when Brandon invites her onto his shoulder. As he reviews the night's data, another feed pops open on his screen and Brandon sees himself in miniature, face blue with mechanical light. Tink moves and the camera follows: Singer, having fun.

"Stop hacking our drone," Brandon says.

"I'm patching her security as I go. Don't worry; she'll look intact when the next fellow comes along." Onscreen, the camera focuses sharply. "And don't roll your eyes when I'm watching you."

Brandon covers Tink's eye with the flat of his palm; the screen shows a blur of skin and creases. In his ear, Singer smothers a snort and Brandon feels the softest squeeze across his ribs, the vibration of suppressed laughter across miles and miles of broken city. When he looks, the camera's gaze has shifted to his mouth, the focus just as tight as before, so that out of context his smile looks like it belongs on a different person--someone who isn't paid to tag coordinates with information about pot grow-ops where community gardens are supposed to be, or regularly index the facial recognition criteria of men who linger too long outside new playgrounds built with charity money. Through Singer and Tink's shared eye he looks younger, newer, normal.

He watches himself speak: "I'll take the south quadrant's tags, okay?"

"Sure," Singer says. "Meet you in the middle."

Tink buzzes off, accidentally clipping Brandon's ear in a warm and humming kiss before zipping out the window and into the bright day that lies waiting below.

The second time Brandon met Singer was when they got Tink. She came in an armoured briefcase, nestled in layers of heat-dispersing foam. Brandon had re-located by now, his belongings confined to a duffel at his feet and a half-shell on his back that carried his more precious tools. Singer carried even less. The man lived out of his pockets: an Art Deco tie clip re-purposed to hold cash, a fab-ceramic multi-tool that could survive most checkpoints, and his mobile, a combination reader/phone/wallet/ camera that did all his heavy lifting. He had perhaps two outfits in his entire wardrobe, each thin enough to be rolled and stuffed down cargo pockets once intended for rifles.

The technician opened the case in yet another hotel room, this one in Jalalabad, on an afternoon when the smog had settled evenly over the well of the city. Brandon could already taste the rain in the air; he imagined it coming down black and toxic enough to pit the paint on all the tiny little cars below.

"I leave tomorrow morning," the tech said. "So if you discover any issues between now and then--"

"We won't," Singer said.

"Well, thanks for the vote of confidence, but--"

"It's well-warranted. Why do you think you got the contract?" Singer bent and lifted Tink free of her foam. Standing across from him, Brandon could almost feel the technician's blood pressure rising. Singer apparently had, too: "Don't worry. We'll take good care of her."

"It's very delicate," the technician said, his voice ragged with jet-lag and worry and mild exasperation, the sort of things that Brandon now recognized as love.

"I know." Singer brought out his reader with his other hand and thumbed open an app; Brandon recognized the corporate logo from the technician's soaked polo shirt. Singer tapped something, and the UAS hummed to life. LEDs lit up along the ridges of her body, and her wings prepped themselves for flight. Something on Singer's reader chirped, and he smiled. "She just texted me," he said. "We're good to go."

He keyed in a command, and the UAS rose straight upward--and into a ceiling fan. Her pieces sheared away from one another, scattering across the room.

"Sorry, sorry," Brandon said, inserting himself between them. "He didn't mean to, he--"

"Heiser." Singer's hand pulled at Brandon's shoulder. "Look."

From the bed, the UAS' wing-parts blinked rapid-fire. The other pieces blinked back. The wings buzzed over. They alit on each piece in turn, wiggling until the pieces locked together before rising once again.

"You see," Singer said, "she can re-build herself."

The technician sighed and slumped, his shoulders sinking low as his head rolled forward. "Jesus Christ. I heard you were crazy, but
damn.
Don't ever do that again, okay? At least, not where I can see it."

"I'll be sure to erase all the pertinent records." Singer keyed more commands into the reader. The UAS dipped and swerved around Brandon's head. "Heiser. Walk around. Let her accumulate some data for recognition."

The UAS droned over Brandon's head as he made a show of perusing the technician's other luggage, picking things up and putting them down. Then one item genuinely attracted his attention, and he unzipped it fully to the sound of the tech's protests. The UAS dove into the bag. She skittered over Brandon's fingers. When Brandon pulled the fabric free, she had attached herself to it, a glowing insect on laundry. It was a black viscose undershirt. Gold wire spread across its surface, radiating from the heart outward across the stomach.

"What's this?"

"It's nothing." The tech took it from Brandon's hands with light, careful fingers. "And it doesn't work."

It was funny, how those last three words made Brandon almost physically hungry, how they crowded his brain with questions about how and why and what for. He looked at the shirt anew. He had never taken apart clothes before. Just the prospect made his fingers itch. As though having read his mind, the UAS crawled over the cloth, her lights blinking and blipping as she followed the paths made by each golden thread.

Brandon felt Singer moving to stand a little bit behind him. "Relay armour?"

"Well, yes," the technician said. "I was trying to make something a little less bulky than what's already on the market. But for a full set of features, you really put on a lot of extra weight."

Again, Singer pulled out his reader. "Do you have a patent?"

"Pending, yes."

"Ah." Singer thumbed through various apps, selected one, opened a document, performed a Turing, and decisively punched a single button. "Done and done. You'll be receiving an invoice."

"Excuse me?"

"I just bought you out," Singer said. "Heiser. We're going."

"But... But it's
my
design!"

"Consider us beta-testers." Singer snapped his fingers at the UAS. She darted over to him and danced up his arm as he moved for the door. "You can buy it back after we de-bug it."

In the stairwell, their words were punctuated by the blink of lights that had attracted too many flies. "Do you have, like, a
fuck-ton
of money?" Brandon asked.

"I have
access
to a fuck-ton of money."

"Won't you have to explain the expense? I mean, he said it himself. There are already better models out there."

Singer pulled open the door. Through it, an air-conditioned breeze wafted in from the lobby. Brandon smelled chlorinated water and heard smooth-jazz re-mixes of Sufi chants. He was getting so sick of hotels.

"You wanted it, didn't you?" Singer asked. "It was all over your face."

"Well, yeah, I was curious, I wanted--"

"Then that's the explanation," he said, and handed Brandon the shirt. "Have at it. Rip it apart. Get your hands dirty."