Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 (28 page)

When I told him what Bishop had said, about the buzz going away when he was planning and carrying out the robbery plan, Jameson sighed. "There's a reason why we forbid soldiers from using drugs, and it's not just the law. The implant is designed to influence the brain on a very subtle level, chemically and electrically, and drugs can interfere with that."
Ghat
and other drugs, he told me, are the reason why the soldiers' later behavior and actions are so much at odds with how they performed on deployment: "Drugs won't affect the implant, but over time they can affect the brain in ways that are past the implant's ability to correct."

He also denies that the implant's reinforcement systems can be hacked to give pleasure the way Bishop described. "It's just like the old joke about hitting yourself with a hammer," he told me. "It feels so good when it stops."

Six days later, Bishop got a message from Cervantes: FOUND HIM. TACOMA MALL FOOD COURT.

Without access to Hollis' drones, Bishop and Cervantes had been forced to look for the terp on foot. Cervantes used an app called SketchArtist to make a picture of the man he had seen in the Allegra, and he and Bishop had spent the week on a searchand-detain mission around the parts of Tacoma and Seattle with the largest Somali populations.

Bishop, who had been searching the Hilltop neighborhood a few miles northeast of Tacoma Mall, drove as quickly as he could without speeding, conscious both of the gun and of a large freezer bag of
ghat
that he had in the car. He took a leaf from the bag and began to chew it as he locked the car and went into the mall. The food court was full of Korean and Somali teenagers, as it usually is on Friday evenings, snacking on short ribs and
sambusas.
The smell of
canjeero
coming from the Casho Cambuulo stall summoned memories of Yemen as Bishop scanned the court for Cervantes' face.

Another message from Cervantes arrived, containing a map of the mall with a location pin on one of the bathrooms. Bishop broke into a run, keeping his right hand on the pistol in his jacket pocket to keep it from falling out, and turned off the mall's main corridor to an open area with an information panel, two benches, and a small play structure. The sign on the bathroom door was a stick-figure picture of a man and woman with a child between them, holding their hands, and inside the small empty room was a Koala Kare diaper station along with two stalls and a sink. Bishop turned sideways and stood edge-on to the door, so he wouldn't be in the way when he needed to open it. Through the thick door he could just hear Cervantes' voice over the mall noise.

Bishop pulled the handle and the door swung inward. A frightened-looking Somali man was on the other side, trying to get away from Cervantes. Bishop grabbed the man's wrist and pulled him inside; Cervantes followed, closed the door behind him and leaned back against it.

Kahin Jama, a twenty-four-year-old Somali man, was a recently settled refugee from Yemen. When he found himself trapped between Bishop and Cervantes he pulled out his wallet and dropped it on the floor. "Please don't hurt me," he said.

Bishop took off Jama's belt and drew it tight around Jama's wrists, like a zip-tie. Then he drew his gun from his jacket pocket and trained it on Jama.

"Why are you here?" Cervantes asked.

"Don't hurt me," Jama said to Bishop.

Cervantes brought a fist down between Jama's shoulders, knocking him to his knees. "Talk to
me,
" he said. "I bet you thought we'd never find you, huh?"

"Please," Jama said, sobbing. He held his hands up on either side of his eyes, like a horse's blinders. "I didn't see your face. Let me go, I won't tell anyone, I promise."

Bishop sidled over to a sink and spat green goo into it. "Do you think..." he asked.

"He fooled us once," Cervantes said. He took a step forward, drew his gun from his cargo pants and pressed the barrel to the back of Jama's head. "What are you doing here? WHERE IS GULEED?"

The door behind Cervantes pushed inward, knocking him briefly off balance. Jama threw himself at the now-open doorway, trying to get to his feet, and Bishop shot him in the back. Jama fell forward and landed at the feet of Emily Park, a thirty-twoyear-old mother who was bringing her two-year-old son Levi to the washroom for a diaper change.

Bishop later said that he did not notice either Park or her son screaming. Instead, as he looked down at the gun in his hand, his only thought was
How did I do that?
A moment later he fired again, obeying his conditioning to do a "double tap"—two shots into a target's chest or back.

Jama's body kept the door from closing fully and they could see a crowd of people outside. Cervantes turned to face the crowd, and Bishop moved to stand beside him. Both held their guns in front of them, and the screaming got louder. Many of the people in the mall that day were refugees, and for them the sight of Bishop and Cervantes was not only frightening but triggered painful memories as well. Those nearest to the soldiers froze or fell to the floor, while some further away ran for safety.

Cervantes and Bishop turned partway away from each other, dividing the mall corridor into two arcs of fire. When soldiers in a counterinsurgency campaign are surrounded by hostile forces, they are trained to execute what soldiers call a "death blossom"—a constant barrage of fire in all directions until the enemy is killed or forced to retreat. Bishop and Cervantes had participated in three of these while serving in Yemen, two of them while assigned to Abyan province following the incident that downed their drones.

"Looks like we're boxed in," Cervantes said. "I don't think we're getting any backup."

Bishop nodded and began to scan the crowd, picking targets. Emily Park's cell phone began to ring, playing a tinny version of "Hipper Than Me," and suddenly, Bishop says, he was aware of where he was, tasting the
ghat
in his mouth and hearing the screams of the terrified mall customers.

He turned to Cervantes. "Tony. Hey, Tony," he said.

"What is it?"

"This is—this isn't right," Bishop said. His jaw was working furiously and he had to spit out
ghat
juice before he could keep talking. "These people, they aren't Shabaab, man. You need to put down the gun."

Cervantes shook his head. "They're lying," he said.

Levi Park began to cry, a single, rising note. Cervantes aimed his gun at him and Bishop fired, two quick shots into Cervantes' back.

"The crazy thing is," Bishop told me later, "all that stuff, everything we did, I never felt like anything was wrong. The only time I felt the buzz was when I shot Tony."

Daniel Perez, a professor of neurocybernetics at the Medical College of Georgia, first heard about the case when I contacted him after meeting Bishop. Though he was too late to give testimony in Bishop's defense, he has met with Bishop several times since then. "The reason the army hasn't found anything may be because it's not just something the implant is doing, but an interaction between the implant and the brain," Perez told me. He has studied the effects of cognitive implants since they were first introduced, and he describes them as an interaction of two chaotic systems. "In order to work with a human brain, the implants have to be able to rewrite their programming, even while they're running. But our brains do this too, and the studies we've done don't shed much light on how they might interact in highly stressful, emotionally charged situations."

Though the army denies that the soldiers' implants had anything to do with their crimes, Perez has joined the effort to apply for a stay of execution for Bishop, and has also called for a freeze on military implants until more long-term studies can be done. He told me about experiments he's done in which similar implants were used to help teach rats how to get food from a machine, and the rats were then made to switch to another method. "Even when they learned the new way to get the cheese, the implant punished them for it," he said. "And when we switched back they got a huge dopamine rush." He feels that Bishop's lawyers should have raised the possibility that the implants, alone or in conjunction with other factors, predisposed the soldiers to violence in a way they might not have been before.

I asked Perez how he could square this with Major Jameson's claim that the implants were undamaged, as well as the fact that other soldiers from the 23-IN had not been involved in any similar incidents. "Their implants weren't damaged, just reset," Perez said. "It's a learning device: whatever it takes as normal, it reinforces. What happened to Bishop and Cervantes may have just happened
sooner."

On the morning of November third, two months after I met with Perez, Tom Hollis arrived at the Seattle Municipal Tower trailed by two Cormorant drones, carrying a Swiss Arms K91 rifle over his shoulder. Witnesses say he looked like he was going hunting.

Will McIntosh recently moved to Williamsburg, Virginia, with his wife Alison and twins Hannah and Miles. Survival at all costs is the theme of his newest short story. "Scout" is based on his novel
Defenders,
which will be published in May by Orbit Books, and has already been optioned by Warner Brothers for a feature film. Will's previous novel,
Love Minus Eighty,
was based on "Bridesicle," which won the Asimov's Readers Award, as well as the 2010 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. The author's debut novel,
Soft Apocalypse,
was a finalist for both a Locus award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

Kai knew better than to look up at the old man behind the counter to see if he was watching. That was a dead giveaway. Instead, Kai tracked him through the reflection in the cold case, which was no longer cold, because it was illegal to waste energy to keep drinks chilled.

The old guy had an underbite that made him look vaguely ape-ish; what gray hair he had was combed straight back in thin lines. He was watching Kai, frowning, suspicious. Kai knew he looked like a hungry kid who had no one taking care of him, but he couldn't help it; he couldn't find it in him to relax the scowl, to smile. This was also one time Kai's size was probably a liability. Mom used to say he looked sixteen, not thirteen.

A wave of pain washed over him as he thought of his mom. Right now he didn't even feel thirteen—he felt more like eight. He wanted his mommy, wanted her to rock him while he pressed his face against her long, soft hair. That's all most kids wanted since the invasion began. There were no tough kids left, only scared kids. And desperate kids, like him.

The door to the convenience store creaked open; a chubby woman with a tattoo on her shoulder stepped in and went to the counter. Kai seized the opportunity, snaring three fat pieces of jerky and stuffing them under his jacket, pinning them under his left arm.

He rose, spent a moment looking at the drinks in the cold case, most of them home-made, the corporate logos printed on the bottles partially covered with white handwritten labels. Hurrying was another dead giveaway. He paused again on his way to the door, watched a news feed playing in 3-D above the front counter for a moment.

It was war footage of half a dozen Luyten storming a fusion plant. You almost never saw so many in one place. They were guerilla fighters; they lost some of their advantage when they clustered together, so when they attacked in force it usually meant they'd identified a target that was poorly defended.

Kai was repulsed by the sight of them—giant starfish, faceless, silent. Two were flying in their weird form-fitting six-and seven-pointed craft, while the rest were on the ground, galloping on three or four of their limbs, mostly staying behind vehicles or trees for cover, their free arms firing lightning bursts. Human soldiers were shooting wildly, knowing there was no point in taking aim, because the Luyten would just pluck their intentions out of their minds and evade the shot. If the soldiers had larger weapons— flame-blasters or 360 clusters—they'd have a chance. Then again, if they had larger weapons the Luyten would have known, and wouldn't have attacked in the first place.

When he couldn't stand to watch any more, Kai headed toward the door.

The old guy moved from behind the counter with surprising speed, beating Kai to the door, brandishing a stun gun.

"I didn't see it, but I know you've got something." He waved the gun. "Open your jacket."

Kai wanted to tell the man he had no right to search him just because he looked filthy and tired, but it was pointless to argue. He reached into his coat and pulled out the jerky.

The chubby woman with the rose tattoo tisked, shook her head. She'd moved over to watch.

"I'm a good kid. It's just, my parents were killed when Richmond got overrun, and I don't have anywhere to go." In a shrill, childish whine he added, "I'm so hungry."

The old guy plucked the jerky from Kai's outstretched hand. "I don't doubt what you're saying. Times are hard." He gestured toward the road with his chin. "Check with Refugee Services, see if they can give you some food."

"Refugee Services is
closed.
It's been closed since I got here. Please, let me have one?"

The man shook his head brusquely. "I can't hand out food to everyone who's hungry." He gestured toward the door.

Kai looked out into the dark, frigid, rainy night. The rain ticked against the store-front window; it was turning to sleet. He turned back. "Can I at least stay in here to keep warm? I won't take anything, I promise."

The man looked pained. "I can't. I'll lose my job if I do."

Kai pushed the door open, tucked his chin against the cold. Empty hands buried in his jacket pockets, he hurried down the street, weaving to find a path through the piles of trash, most of it electronics that didn't work, or took too much energy to operate. In the street vehicles whooshed silently past, but only occasionally, nothing like traffic had been before the invasion began.

He wasn't sure where to go. He turned left at the end of the block to get off the main artery, passed apartment buildings, eyeing warm yellow lights inside windows covered with security mesh. Kai longed to be in one of those apartments, in a warm bed, but none sported the green sash that indicated refugees were welcome. They were all full, or, more likely, the families inside were ignoring President Wood's plea to open their homes to people fleeing the Luyten.