Small Miracles Page 31

  So for a while, at least: a truce.

  They’ll let us out, One wrote. Sooner or later.

  In the part of Brent’s brain still wholly his, he hoped not. He had far too much on his conscience.

  The government doesn’t care about your conscience, One countered. It wonders only under what circumstances it can trust me/us, and what I/we can do for it.

  That One might be correct was the scariest notion of all.

  Brent ambled around the little prison. Concrete everywhere except for the thick windows and viewing wall. Those were polycarbonate resin thermoplastic: bulletproof. A single way in or out: the transparent mantrap whose controls were on the other side. Sensors everywhere, presumably many more than the naked eye could see. Nothing inside made of metal, not even in the plumbing fixtures, with which to scrape at the walls or short out sensors. Knockout gas at the ready. As a general engineer, Brent could find no fault with his captors’ precautions.

  What he wouldn’t give for a fern, a cactus, a weed.

  He went over to Alan for some chess. Five games took less than ten minutes, mostly spent handling the pieces. All five ended in stalemate. Every opening, gambit, or ruse any of them knew had long since propagated throughout the group; every Emergent could forecast sequences of move and countermove and counter-countermove … for many turns ahead. “Thanks for the games,” Brent said. “Poker?”

  “I’m in,” Alan said.

  Poker offered a more reliable diversion. All their heads were full of computers; the big variable was in the ability to bluff, and bluffing was a slipperier skill than chess. Money was totally useless now, of course. The only purposes to poker were ego trip and head game.

  Brent/One sauntered over to Morgan and Merry. They tapped nonstop, their meaning hidden. Public-key encryption, with new keys to be tapped/distributed more often, Morgan had assured them, than the NSA could crack the older ones. Messaging about escape, most likely. What else was worth keeping secret?

  “Anyone for poker?” Brent asked.

  “Why not,” Morgan said. Merry nodded, still tapping.

  Brent had no idea what they tapped about. The decryption key wasn’t among the few anyone had shared with him.

  They enlisted two more players and Alan dealt. The tapping never stopped.

  Any news? Morgan asked Brent. This time, the encryption was one for which everyone here—even Brent—had been given the matching decryption key.

  No, Brent answered. There never was news. Personal stuff.

  No novel ways to screw us over? Morgan tapped.

  For who to screw them over? Their jailors or Brent?

  Since their imprisonment, Morgan never missed a chance to goad Brent. If Brent could have been killed without also killing One—why, he would be dead. Few of the others would have objected.

  Simple math, One wrote pointedly. Simple justice.

  Quite simple. The Emergent, in all their diversionary attacks, had collectively killed twelve—out of billions. Brent, through his virus, had assaulted every overmind. But only in the case of Two had Brent wholly succeeded.

  One twisted the knife: Splattering Charles in the process. Very humane.

  To whom, add three completely innocent strangers, killed by Emergent cars gone out of control. And for what? The bots always reset. The overmind always came back.

  But if Brent had not stopped the Emergent, he had delayed them. There had been a cessation in transformations. He must take victories where he could.

  Not even One could refute that.

  Brent won the first hand with a full house, earning fifty broom straws.

  Enjoy your little victory, Morgan tapped. The last laugh will be ours.

  When they got out? Using tools and weapons fashioned from the clothes on their backs, paper plates, and plastic spoons?

  “Now here’s my plan,” the optimistic prisoner said in that well-remembered cartoon.

  Only it wasn’t funny when the inmates were so much smarter than the jailors.

  monday, may 29, 2017

  Dr. Amreesh Singh strode the halls of the Clarksburg, West Virginia, Veterans Administration hospital, making his daily rounds. On a normal shift he felt overworked, hard-pressed to spend even a few minutes with each patient. Today was worse: the hospital teemed with Memorial Day visitors, many insistent upon a word with the doctor, while much of the staff had the day off. Singh made the time to regret how the patients who most needed visitors were seldom the ones to receive them. Like the man at his next stop, two transfers and three states removed from where he had entered the VA system.

  The hulking, gloomy patient in room 12 seemed endlessly curious. Some days he read for hours without stop: books, old magazines, discarded newspapers, whatever he managed to scrounge. Some days he pestered everyone who came by—doctor, nurse, orderly, or fellow patient, it didn’t matter—about the strangest things, as though he had never felt the rain or seen a dog or done any of a thousand things that everyone had done. An ordinary mugging had put him into the hospital, but that months-earlier head injury wasn’t what kept him here. Something inside him had snapped. He had been passed along to Clarksburg for a reason: this was one of the VA’s few long-term psychiatric facilities.

  The patient had a name, of course—John Doe didn’t get to fill a bed in the overcrowded VA system, let alone a bed in the psych ward—but few here used it. After some interminable bout of questions one of the nurses had dubbed him the Renaissance Man. That caught on, morphed to Leonardo, and got shortened quickly enough to Leo. Leo didn’t mind; if anything, the nickname seemed to amuse him.

  Singh found Leo rocking on the cracked plastic cushions of the too-small chair in his tiny room. He wore pajamas, slippers, and a threadbare robe. He shrugged answers to questions, his attention on one of the tattered paperback books the patients circulated among themselves, mumbling to himself as he read.

  With so many visitors around today, Singh counted himself lucky that Leo only muttered. On his bad days Leo was apt to rave, befuddled by voices only he heard. Only they weren’t even quite voices, apparently. Leo could never explain.

  A sad case, Singh thought, here for the long haul.

  * * *

  The man known as Leo stiffened in his chair and closed his book.

  Everything suddenly seemed so clear. The recurring nightmares suddenly had logic to them. And the voices …

  There was but one voice, and it wasn’t even a voice exactly. Can you understand me? the man known as Leo read.

  “Yes,” he said, unsteadily.

  Do you remember?

  Remember what? he thought, and something wonderful happened! He no sooner posed a question than an answer appeared, crisp and clear, in his mind’s eye. The image of a warrior, a comrade in arms, in peril. A friend, prone on the floor, betrayed. A blood brother who needed his help.

  The captain!

  Leo swiveled his chair to face the door. He waited until an unaccompanied visitor about his size passed. “Excuse me,” Leo called softly to the man. “Would you mind coming in for a second? It’s about your friend.”

  “About Colin?”

  Whoever. “There’s something you should know about Colin.”

  Leo motioned Colin’s friend into the tiny room, “So Colin won’t overhear,” and shut the door behind them. A chop to the back of the neck and the friend crumpled. Leo tied and gagged the man with strips torn from the tattered bathrobe, and left him, unconscious, shoved out of sight beneath the bed. “It’s nothing personal,” Leo said.

  Wearing his victim’s clothes and visitor pass, Leo rapped on the ward’s locked door. He didn’t know the security guard stuck with today’s holiday duty—and the guard didn’t know Leo. “It’s very sad,” he said, as the guard let him out.

  Five minutes later, the man everyone called Leo strolled out the hospital’s front door. Only his name wasn’t Leo; it was Liu.

  He was Ethan Liu, and he had an urgent mission, and he wasn’t alone—

  So
mewhere, Captain Morgan needed his/their help.

  ∞∞ E N D ∞∞