It’s the red wafer of circuitry that snuggles up the blue glowing wires in my wrist that give me my memories.
It’s one of 8 chips. Ankles, wrists, head, neck and two in the torso. It’s a dispersal pattern of memchips that, according to stats, gives the best chance of full retrieval in the event of dismemberment.
Real comforting. The little rectangle dust covers mark me out as an operative. Any enemy worth their wires is going to make sure no part of me survives. I’m sure the guys in the glass towers and germ-free labs are the smartest people living but they suck at predicting field-work parameters.
Currently, I’m ducked down behind a cold, burned out shell of a car and snow is falling. I’m on the outskirts of the giant graveyard that used to be Detroit. I’m cradling the warm carapace of a fully-charged hot-plasma sniper rifle. It’ll be twenty more minutes until my quarry steps into a target radius.
Updates in the shape of red triangles and gridlines dance through the metal in my head.
I could pass for human for naked visuals. Anything beyond that and I’m a dead giveaway. I remember asking my boss for maybe the tenth time if that could be my codename this time around. Dead Giveaway. I mean, I’m out in the open, not fooling anyone, and completely expendable.
I’m a good shot. Right now the uplink is stable and I’m recording real-time to the safe at HQ but who knows? Maybe they’ll have a scrambler. Maybe the target’s Defensive Operatives know exactly where I am and they’re just laughing at me on long-cam footage and taking bets on when I’ll try to desert my post before they shred me.
1. Good thing about being a digitized human: being human lets me control the field of battle in my head and make calm decisions. Computers still can’t beat a human with training. They’ve tried. The time is coming, don’t get me wrong, but for now, stuffing a human into a human-shaped battle construct is more efficient that just sending out an artificial or a remote. Even a hundredth-of-a-second lag can cause defeat.
2. Bad thing about being a digitized human: imagination. I’m here, alone, in mutant country, and I have an hour to kill. My nerves mix with the threat assessment counters and keep me scanning, thinking of ways I could fail, ways I could be caught. There are a lot of ways that this could go wrong and only one way for it to go right. Not for the first time, I wonder if signing up was my best option.
The snow keeps falling. It settles on me but turns to steam on my gun. I do my best impression of a rock when I hear a helicopter in the distance.
Not my mark but it’s headed in this direction.
My hands tighten on my weapon and I will my breathing to slow down.
I’m thinking about the child that I lost in Paraguay when the fox walks out from behind the building and stops to look at me.
I stare back at this animal. I thought foxes were extinct. It might as well be a unicorn. I am still with wonder.
We stand and stare for two minutes while the snow falls and the helicopter sound veers away from us, leaving us in silence.
My proximity-sensor beeps a positive signal to me in the supersonic range. The fox’s ears flatten and it skips away into the shadows. The last thing I see of it is a swish of its red, cartoon-cliché, white-tipped tail.
The back of my head tells the gun to warm up its sights. The part of the mission that needs me to be me is rapidly approaching.
I shift my wait and sigh. There was a time when the thought of the upcoming battle would have made me nervous. I don’t know if it’s me losing my youth to experience or if it’s just too much time spent haunting machines rubbing off on me.
I count to six and settle into position.
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