Broken in the Shadow of Mind

That was the moment when I knew that I was going to die.

The realization came hard and fast, like a splash of cold water to the face the morning after a night of hard drinking. Whatever part of me that had still somehow managed, through everything that I’d been through in the last two years, to delude itself into thinking that I was going to die in bed, an old man surrounded by grandchildren, got a hard dose of reality.

I was going to die right here, right now, on this beach that was on no map, this fragment of the consciousness of an artificial God. There was nothing to be done about that. All I could do was take as many of these fucks as I could with me.

I tightened my grip on the blast-stick, preparing to shoot…

Wait.

Rewind.

I should start on the day I was discharged from the Army. That’s when all of this was set into motion.

I’d put in my two years like everyone else, male or female, unlucky enough to have turned eighteen in the years  since the Janesian War Fleet set their sights on Earth.

That didn’t mean that the last two years of my life were anything like what most people go through. It took the officer who processed my discharge about five seconds to get that. “Special Forces?”

I nodded, still holding out my bag. “That obvious, huh?”

The officer, who I’d begun to think of as “Red,” took my bag and turned it over to get the serial number. He was an older guy, maybe in his early thirties, with bright red hair and a neatly trimmed red beard. He had the kind of swing to his movements that only comes from getting eight hours of sleep every night, then having a hot shower and a fresh pot of coffee when you wake up in the morning.

He seemed to think about my question as he typed my serial number into his computer. Mind already knew I was going to be discharged today, knew where I was going and when I should get there, but the Army always maintained nine or ten levels of redundancy in the storage of information.

Mind insisted on it.

“You’ve got the look,” the officer told me at last. “That blinking stare, like you aren’t really looking at me, you’re scanning for targets on my periphery.”

I closed my eyes and opened them again, trying to relax.

Red was absolutely right.

When I got into the service, I tested well, really well. Speed, strength, endurance. Quick reflexes and quick thinking under conditions of extreme stress.

That meant that, unlike the vast majority of people, I didn’t kill Jannies from orbiting battle stations hundreds of miles away, with Mind doing all the heavy lifting when it came to target selecting and timing.

Oh, the Jannies have ashed lots of battle stations. Plenty of infantry boys and girls have come back planetside in flag-draped coffins. I know all that, but the fact remains that their only real purpose is to act as a human corrective to Mind’s target selection, one more level of redundancy to back up the machines that Mind works through.

That’s not what it was like for guys like me.

My reward for testing so well was that I got to spend my two years in the service in daily nightmares and nightly terror. I fought Jannies face to face, in the lunar craters and the abandoned space stations that are the outer edge of what’s still us and the beginnings of what’s already them. I killed them so close that I could smell the acid dripping from their tentacles, see the purple mist clouding over their dying eyes.

Up there, Mind’s got nothing to do with it.

Oh, Mind keeps track of our ammunition and gives us little reminders to report back to base and reload. Mind even monitors our vital signs and alerts the nearest available medvac crews if it looks like we’ve been too badly inured to keep going.

But in the fighting itself, we’re on our own.

Even Mind has to work through faulty secondary systems, stuff like guns and heat sensors and tracking computers. The fighting up there is too fast, too close, for those methods to work. Too many false positives, false negatives, for Mind’s judgment to be an improvement over human eyes and ears.

That’s the worst part about fighting up there, that terrible knowledge that you’re staring death in the face without Mind’s guidance, that your life or death depends on the correct workings of that lump of meat between your all-too-human ears.

That’s the situation I’d been living with for two straight years. “Getting out of the Army” meant something different for me than it did for the kids who spent two years blasting at blips on a tracking screen by day, playing cards and whining about home by night.

As I stood on the deck of the suborbital processing station that Thursday afternoon in March, I wore jeans and a t-shirt, my uniform and weapons bundled neatly into a little black Army-issued pack so I could return it to the red-headed officer. I was standing at the head of a long line of men and women dressed just like I was, but I wasn’t one of them. I was a broken unit trying to blend in with the whole models, and Red could tell the difference.

His fingers paused at the keyboard. “Sure you don’t want to volunteer for a second round, soldier? Last chance.”

I laughed, because that’s what he wanted me to do. He laughed too, a lot more heartily than I had, ripped my discharge certificate off his printer and handed it to me. “OK, Berkowitz, you’re a civilian.”

The bar code on the certificate would get me into my Elevator. That would be Mind’s cue to send a signal to the home computer at the address I’d listed on my bag. If anyone was home, they might even drive down to meet me at the Elevator station in Ft. Lauderdale so I wouldn’t have to take a cab.

Ft. Lauderdale. Home. ‘Take a cab.’ It was like a foreign language, one that I’d once spoken but didn’t quite remember.

I turned to leave when Red called me back.

“Yeah?”

He glanced at his screen. “You’re going to Miami, right?”

I nodded. “Staying with my folks for a while.”

He took out a fountain pen, tore a blank certificate from the top of his printer and scribbled something on it. “I get passes to visit planetside most weekends…”

Of course you do, I thought bitterly, but kept it to myself.

“…and my buddy Ernesto and his friends, they invited me to this party they’re throwing at their house, but I can’t make it. Extra duty this weekend.” He paused, as if choosing every word very carefully. “It’s a once a year kind of thing, coming up this Friday. I went once before. It’s pretty…” He smirked and shrugged. “Let’s just say it looks like you could use it.”

“Thanks, man.”

He returned my nod, once again brisk and business-like, and turned his attention to the next soldier in line, an overweight black guy who looked like he was bored out of his mind by the delay.

It didn’t look to me like this guy was subconsciously scanning the room for targets. He looked like his mind was already home, the irritating two-year-long interruption of his life that was the war already a thing of the past.

With a twang of jealousy, I stuck Red’s note in my jeans pocket and went to find my Elevator.

#

It had been two years to the day since I took the Elevator up the other way. I remember feeling a thrill of wonder and terror at the strange sight of the Florida landmass getting smaller and smaller beneath me.

I’d seen Elevators before, but I’d never been in one until I was drafted. Back then, the idea blew my mind, the very thought of traveling like that, carried in a transparent case for thousands of miles along reinforced cables from Earth to a space station.

Now, I felt a flicker of mild interest at the unaccustomed sight of natural sunlight, but that was about it. My capacity for wonder and terror had been burnt out watching my friends die on Triple Cross and Luna.

Anyway, I was safe in the hands of Mind, my life dependent on thousands of tiny machines monitoring the upkeep and repair of the Elevator cables under Mind’s direction. Hell, I hadn’t felt so safe in years.

I didn’t pause to wonder whether anyone was coming to meet me at the station below until I was close enough to see the tops of the palm trees beneath the Elevator’s glass floor. When I got off on the ground, I spent three minutes wandering around the sweltering south Florida afternoon before I heard my little sister calling my name.

“Avi!” I turned around. She ran into my arms.

“Wow. Hanna.” After we hugged, I took a step back to look at her. I barely recognized her as the same person. When I left Earth, Hanna had been fourteen years old. She looked different now, and it wasn’t just the extra inches.

“Boychick!” My mother pulled me into another hug. My father grabbed my shoulder and shook my hand. He was wearing a neatly pressed black suit like he always did, but I think it was the first time since I was about twelve that I’d seen him leave home without a necktie.

He must have left in a hurry when my landing time came up on the computer.

We all loaded into my parents’ car. A few minutes later, we were heading south on 95 toward Miami. I was squished between Hanna and Sady, the latter being a very enthusiastic black Labrador who I hadn’t seen since she was a puppy. She kept thumping her tail and dripping saliva on my jeans.

I stroked the back of her head and tried not to let the saliva remind me of acid dripping from a Janny tentacle.

My father didn’t say much as he drove, he never did, but I could see a relaxed smile in his reflection on the rearview mirror.

My mother barraged me with questions. Had they given me breakfast before my discharge? Was I hungry? There was a new Cuban restaurant right off the highway in Coral Gables, if I was hungry. She hadn’t been there yet, she was too busy at the school, but her friend Merna had, and she said…

That sounded great. I wasn’t that hungry, but I could eat. Sure. No, no Mom, the rations aren’t that freeze-dried stuff anymore, not in the Forces. It’s all pills now. Yeah, it was filing. Of course I missed real food.

It wasn’t until half an hour later when we pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant, “Havana Delight,” that the question that had been percolating somewhere in the back of my head finally hit me.

“New car?”

“Huh?” Mom was in the middle of a long story, something about implementation problems with the computerized neural hookups for math classes at the school she worked at, when I interrupted her.

“Is this a new car?”

Hanna laughed and squeezed my hand. “Does it look like the Cruiser?”

The old Bolivar Cruiser we’d had before I went into the Army was a wreck, a family embarrassment of years standing. It had been one of the last models Mind allowed on the road that was still fueled by the old hydrogen cell process.

This car I was riding in now looked so shiny that all it was missing was a price tag hanging from the engine.

“No,” I said dimly, “I guess not.”

We parked in the shade so we could leave Sady in the car while we ate. Mom and Dad went in to get a table. Hanna leashed up Sady and we walked her out to the grassy area by the sidewalk so she could do her business before we put her back in the car.

“What are you looking for?” Hanna peered up at me, and I realized I was scanning for targets again. God damn it.

I kind of liked that she didn’t understand what I was doing, so I just shook my head. “So…how’s school? You guys use those new neural hookups that Mom was talking about?”

Hanna shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Is that weird? I can’t even imagine what it must be like, to hook into Mind like that. I don’t know, trippy.”

Hanna shook her head in bemusement. “You’re just back from the front lines and you want to talk about math class?”

I sighed. “Han, there aren’t any front lines. There aren’t any lines. It’s not like that.”

“OK, tell me what it is like.”

For a second, the memories overwhelmed me. Tentacles squirm into my field of vision. I fire. I miss. Jake, Jake Horowitz, who I’ve known since basic training, turns into a man-shaped pile of ashes in front of me. I fire again…

“Later,” I lied, blinking away the vision. “Let’s go in and get something to eat.”

Hanna gave me this look like she wanted me to tell her now, but she bit her lip and shrugged. We walked Sady back to the car, locked up and went into the restaurant.

#

We had hot bread with honest-to-God butter on it. I had an omlette sandwich with a mess of plantain chips on the side and a warm cup of cafe con leche to wash it down.

An hour an half later, we were home. My belly was full of my first warm meal in two years. Hanna’s black cat Radcliffe rubbed up against my fingers. I felt better than I had since I turned eighteen.

Later that night, Daniel and Esther, my aunt and uncle on my mother’s side, came by with a fifteen-year-old bottle of Galilean wine. We all sat there drinking it by the fireplace. My parents even let Hanna have a glass.

There was no fire in the fireplace, of course, it was Miami, but the simulation looked kind of nice. The whole thing was perfect, just the sort of well-deserved relaxation I’d been craving for a very long time.

Within an hour and a half, I was bored out of my mind.

Daniel asked me another question about the Special Forces. I gave another evasive, literal answer. Yes. No. Sort of. Yes, like that.

Mom told the story about the math hookup problems. Esther laughed and started talking about the school she worked at. I downed what was left of my wine, enjoying the warmth in my throat even though I don’t really like wine, and made my excuses.

I went up to my room and, sure enough, found my old Talkie on the bedside table. I flipped it open.

No, wait, this was a new one, about the same size but nicer, doubtless intended as a gift to welcome me back. That meant that none of the World Citizenship Numbers I’d put on speed-dial were in the memory.

After a few seconds, I remembered David’s WCN. This citizen is not available for Talk. Fuck.

For a second, I stood there, trying not to draw any conclusions from that. He could just not have been discharged yet. That was probably it.

With real effort, I stopped myself from thinking about it.

I entered Carlos’ number. I hadn’t seen him in even longer than I’d seen David, but I couldn’t remember anyone else’s WCN off the top of my head from the circle of people I’d hung out with before I left.

After three beeps, his face popped up on the screen. His once long black hair was cut infantry-short. I wondered how long he’d been back.

“Holy shit, Avi Berkowitz!” Carlos’ face spread into an unbelieving grin when he saw me. “You back planetside?”

“Got out today.”

“Jesus. We’ve got to hang. Hold on…”

His face disappeared from the screen. I heard talking, laughter and music in the background, something with a thumping baseline and an Arabic synth-voice over it.

A second later, Carlos was back on the screen. “You at home, bro?”

We made arrangements. I closed up my Talkie. I threw on a long-sleeved black button-down shirt over my t-shirt, squirted some cologne on my neck and wrists and went downstairs.

Half an hour later, a message popped up on the house computer saying that Carlos’ car was out front.

I said goodbye to Daniel and Esther and came outside. The waiting car looked nicer than the one in my parents’ driveway. I wondered if Carlos was borrowing it from his parents or if he had actually found a job when he got out that paid that kind of money.

I slid into the back seat. Carlos introduced me to the girl in the front passenger seat, a redhead in a short skirt and a sparkling synth-top named Pam, and we sped off to South Beach.

#

When we got to 12^th Street, the parking garage was full. We spent half an hour driving around looking for an open space. In a weird way, that was almost reassuring. Whatever had changed in the last two years, some things in life are constant.

It was just as hard to find a parking space in South Beach as it had been when Carlos and I were sixteen year olds trying to find a bar that didn’t run your WCN to keep out underage drinkers.

We left the parking garage and Carlos announced that he had to piss. I stood on the sidewalk with Pam while he looked for a spot. Clanging noises drifted down the alleyway behind us every time he found something new to trip over.

I shook my head. “Just how many drinks has he already had?”

Pam giggled and held up eight fingers. We stood together for a minute in the humid darkness, then Pam went ahead and ruined the moment by asking the same questions Hanna had about what “the front lines” were like.

Pam had done her two years already, but of course she’d been in the infantry. Hardly any girls made it into the Special Forces.

Lucky girls.

I answered as minimally as I could. Before I could get too uncomfortable, Carlos came back, slapping me on the shoulder and exhaling rum-scented breath into my ear. “Where to, bro?”

“I wouldn’t know.” I gestured at the street in front of us, where people walked and stumbled down the sidewalk in groups of four or five, music blaring out of bars and clubs behind them. “Last time I was out here we weren’t even allowed into anywhere good.”

“Automatic,” Pam piped up.

Carlos laughed out loud. “Most definitely. You ever heard of Automatic Shady’s?”

I hadn’t, of course, but I said that’d be fine.

It was six blocks over, right across from the beach. This time of night, the waves looked black as they lapped against the shore.

When we got there, we had to wait for twenty minutes behind a velvet rope while a massive Cuban guy in a badly-fitting suit decided whether we were cool enough to get in.

When it was our turn, we all held out our hands, palms up, so the bouncer could scan our WCNs with his I-Stick. His eyes widened in sudden respect when he ran mine. “You just get out?”

I nodded, forcing a smile. He thumped his fist against his chest in the Special Forces salute. “Have fun tonight, OK? You deserve it.”

“Yeah.”

Inside, the dimly lit club was overflowing with people, rich kids out for a night on the town, college students trying their best to look like the rich kids and a few people whispering in corners who could only have been drug dealers. A smattering of people leaned up against the bar. Everyone else stood and drank or danced in huge twirling motions across the floor.

Some kind of comp-synth remix of Arabic pop songs was belting from the ambient speakers. When we got up to the bar, I saw two blond waitresses dancing around the counter top holding bottles.

I got out my wallet. Carlos waved it away. “Turn around.”

I did, and one of the blondes danced up to me. She grabbed my head, tipped it back and poured a shot of something sickly sweet but extremely potent straight into my throat.

I gulped it down and Carlos clapped me on the back. “He’s on my tab tonight,” he told a male bartender standing behind the counter while the waitress went on to the next guy. “Three mojitos.”

The bartender took out a few glasses and started crushing mint leaves with a wooden pestle. Steam billowed from the ceiling. Pam came up to the bar and snuggled next to Carlos. “This is a great place, huh?”

“Yeah.”

We grabbed the drinks from the counter top and clinked them together. “Bienvenidos a Miami,” Carlos said. “Welcome back.”

I tipped my glass up to my mouth and drank.

#

An hour later, I leaned against the bar and sipped my third mojito. Carlos and Pam had long since wandered off to the dance floor. I was kind of enjoying the solitude.

The rum burned my throat pleasantly enough, and I loved the tastes of the mint and the lime working over my tongue. It was slow going, but I was finally starting to feel buzzed. We’d mostly drunk home-made stuff in the Forces, which tasted like liquid shit but got the job done a lot faster than planetside rum.

I downed the last of my mojito, slammed the glass on the counter and did another quick visual scan of the club.

“No Janesians in here,” a lightly-accented female voice told me. “I already checked.”

I laughed, despite myself, and turned around. She was a slim, dark-eyed girl with skin the color that coffee turns after you add the second packet of cream. She was wearing this sparkling, skin-tight synth suit that almost hurt my eyes to look at.

She waited while I got composed enough to introduce myself and ask if I could buy her a drink. I could, and her name was Lisa-Roja Chavez. She pronounced that name like she was testing each syllable in her mouth as she spoke.

I liked that very much.

I held up two fingers to the bartender. He nodded, and a minute later Lisa-Roja and I took our glasses.

She shifted position as she took her drink. The synth-suit captured the motion in exquisite shimmering from her shoulder to her waistline. “Just out?”

“Yeah.”

“Already sick of people asking you that, I’ll bet.”

I laughed and took another sip of my mojito. Definitely starting to feel buzzed now. “That would be an affirmative, yes.”

She laughed, and it was like tinkling glass.

“How about you?”

“Almost a year. Infantry,” she added quickly, “but my ex-boyfriend was in the Special Forces. Let’s just say that you got painted in the same place and I recognized the brush strokes.”

I wasn’t sure I liked that analogy, but a second later she ever-so-casually grazed my arm with her finger tips and I decided I liked whatever she had to say. “That makes sense.”

“Discharge weekend. You must have something special planned for tomorrow night, huh?”

I licked my lips, and for the first time that day remembered the note from Red (Frank?) in my pocket. “As a matter of fact, I do. What are you doing?”

She answered coyly, we did a few more rounds of banter and I ordered us a couple more mojitos before I finally asked her if she’d ever heard of something called the Blue Havana.

Those dark eyes of hers opened a little bit further. “The Blue Havana is back in Miami?”

I nodded. “You know about it?”

“My friend went last year. It sounded amazing.”

I shifted against the bar and had another sip of my mojito. “It sounds like you know a lot more than I do. All I’ve got is the invite.”

“So…?”

“So what’s it like?”

She grinned. “Take me tomorrow night and you’ll find out.”

I got her WCN, she wandered back to where her friends were standing and I did the same.

Carlos waved to me just as I came over, apparently oblivious to the fact that I was looking right at him. “You ready to jet?”

I returned his sloppy grin. “Most definitely.”

I was good and buzzed now.

#

The next morning I took a hot shower. For almost twenty minutes. I can’t tell you how decadent that felt. Sady bounded up to me when I got out of the shower, wagging her tail and drooling.

When Sady and I got downstairs, Mom had left for work, Dad had left for work and Hanna had left for school. Sunshine streamed through the glass sliding doors leading out into the backyard.

Mom had left some money on the dining room table along with a note with the routing number of a local pancake place if I wanted to order breakfast. I opened the back door to let Sady out, took the note and sat in front of the computer. A few keystrokes later, the screen on the wall popped up with,

‘The Usual?’

The Usual was apparently a short stack of pancakes with apple-cinnamon topping and whipped cream, two links of tofu “sausage” and a tub of coffee. I switched the tofu for real sausage, requested extra cream for the coffee and clicked ‘OK.’

That done, I let Sady back in, wandered back to the table and found an already much-thumbed-through copy of the New York Times.

In one article, Mind had appointed a new Tribune to govern the Western United States. At the swearing in ceremony, she had announced a new crackdown on the illegal vigilante group, Survival-19. I vaguely remembered hearing about them when they were first banned a few years ago for undermining public morale in a time of war. They’d been passing out leaflets claiming that Earth was losing the war and calling on citizens to stock provisions and arm themselves to resist the “inevitable” Janny conquest.

Now, underground Survival-19 cells were stealing weapons from military stockpiles. The article featured a graphic of the group’s red-and-blue “Earth Power” symbol and information on how to report Survival-19 activities to the proper authorities.

In another story, a Bishop of the Church of the New Incarnation had taken on an eminent computer scientist, Dr. Vernor Stross, in a public debate watched on-line on tens of thousands of Talkies. The New Incarnation people believed that Mind was Jesus Christ, only pretending to be something we created until sinful humans were ready for the truth.

As crazy as that idea sounded, I knew it was gaining ground. It was the only theory that allowed a lot of Evangelicals to reconcile themselves with the world being so thoroughly under Mind’s control since the war started.

Anyway, the Bishop had argued, how could humans create something more intelligent than a human being? It was absurd.

Against this, Dr. Stross argued that Mind’s actual origin, at an Artificial Intelligence lab at the University of California-San Diego in 2012, was well-documented. The lab’s records had been carefully preserved, and the Bishop was welcome to peruse them at his leisure.

Needless to say, neither speaker convinced the other.

In other news, a popular comp-synth DJ had married two of his boyfriends in a ceremony in Las Vegas earlier in the week. There was a picture of the happy triple, in Rome for their honeymoon.

Oh, and the Janesian War Fleet had annihilated the last defenders of the human section of the Triple Cross Space Station, bringing them closer than ever to striking distance of Earth.

I’d been stationed on Triple Cross for six weeks last year. I could imagine what it might be like right now down to the last detail. Jannies patrolling the charred base. Their tentacles twitching as they twitter to each other, pointing out the last survivors…

For a long moment, I thought I was going to be sick. I almost didn’t hear the ping on the wall computer letting me know my pancakes had arrived.

#

When Hanna got back from school, we took Sady on a long walk through the surrounding neighborhood. Other dogs barked at her, but Sady ignored them, sniffing along the ground and wagging her tail in canine joy.

Hanna told me everything that had happened in school that day. I smiled and said “yeah” and “really?” a lot, which seemed to be all she required of me. I was lost in the sunshine and the ambiance. I didn’t even notice at first when she slipped in another question about the Army.

“No, it’s not like that.” I sighed. “It probably will be for you, though. You’ll be in the infantry.”

Hanna stopped and glared up at me. “What, you don’t think I could be in the Special Forces?”

I blinked away the sunlight. “I didn’t mean it like that. But yeah, it’s not very likely. The Forces are like 98% male.”

She opened her mouth. I cut her off before she could retort. “Why would you want that, anyway?”

“Because we’re under attack by monsters…”

Technically, we’d kind of attacked them first, but I wasn’t going to quibble. At this point, it was us or them. She wasn’t wrong about that.

“…and I want to be one of the people who kills them. Like you.”

“You might not be so enthusiastic about killing if you’d seen some.”

Hanna gave me an incredulous look. “Not people. Things.” She stamped her foot on the ground and pointed to a little brown lizard scampering across the sidewalk. “Like those. But not like those, because those things are harmless. The Janesians want to take us over. I want to be one of the people up on the front lines, who kills them.”

I stood, open-mouthed, as she delivered her tirade. After she wound down, I managed to tell her that she was probably right. We lapsed into silence for a while. As we walked, I wondered how I felt about my baby sister’s newfound enthusiasm for killing things.

#

I called Ernesto later in the afternoon. That is to say, I dialed Ernesto’s WCN and got a visual on my Talkie of a bleary-eyed guy in ruffled clothes. I told him who I was and after the second or third time I asked him, he admitted to being Ernesto.

From the looks of this guy, I might have ended the conversation right there, but Lisa-Roja had sounded awfully excited about going to this party. And from what I’d been able to glean so far, it did sound fun.

The previous night, on our way home, I’d asked Carlos if he’d ever heard of the Blue Havana, carefully omitting any mention of my invite. He didn’t know much, apart from how cool it was supposed to be. He had a hazy idea that they had some really crazy designer drugs which no one else had access to.

Whatever they were into, it was clearly something else.

“Frank Alexander sent me,” I duly told Ernesto.

After a four or five second delay, Ernesto’s face lit up in recognition. “Franky, no shit. How’s he doing?”

I forced a smile. “He seems good. So he said this Blue Havana thing was a great party.”

“Oh, yes.” A distant smile spread over his face. “OK, I’ll see you tonight, man…”

“Wait.” I held my hand up to the screen. “Where is it?”

After a few repetitions and requests for clarification, I managed to get directions that didn’t reference things like “that dog that always barks at me” or “the red car.” I was pretty sure I could find it. It was a house on South Beach, just a few blocks away from the main strip of bars and clubs.

Directions firmly in hand, I called Lisa-Roja.

After that, it was just a matter of waiting.

#

Another hour. I had dinner. Another couple of hours. I dutifully hung out with the family, looking at the clock every fifteen minutes.

I borrowed the car–’When will you get back?’ ‘What does it matter, hon? He just got home. We’ll see him tomorrow.’–and forty-five minutes of Miami traffic later, I pulled up in front of an apartment building in South Miami.

When Lisa-Roja climbed into the passenger seat, she was wearing a different cut of synth suit, even more dazzling than what she’d been wearing last night at the club. If that was possible.

From the expression on her face, she looked as happy to see me as I was to see her, but I knew that wasn’t possible.

“You got directions?”

“I do indeed.”

“Let’s go see what all the fuss is about.”

#

Ernesto’s driveway was full. There were cars all along the sidewalk in front of his house. In the end, we had to park almost three blocks away.

A girl in an expensive-looking synth dress answered the door. Her long blond hair looked like it hadn’t been combed in days. She had the same unfocused look in her eyes that Ernesto had when I’d called earlier.

She looked at me like I might bite her. “I don’t know you.”

“I’m Avi. This is Lisa-Roja.” I grinned at her in what I hoped was a charming way. “I talked to Ernesto earlier.” No response. “I know Frank?”

She gave us another prolonged stare, then shrugged. “Whatever.”

Our hostess turned around and walked in, leaving the door hanging open. Lisa-Roja and I looked at each other, then followed her in. I closed the door behind me.

#

Ernesto’s living room was full of people. Some were sitting eight or nine each on long couches. More sat on the floor. Others stood in corners or shambled aimlessly, leaning against the wall for support. Low-tuned, non-vocal comp-synth music piped in from a speaker on the wall.    “Avi!” Ernesto walked up, looking even worse than he had before, and grinned at me like I was a long-lost friend. “Glad you could make it, man.”

I introduced him to Lisa-Roja. He shook her hand, his gaze lingering just a little bit too long on her chest before he turned around and led us into the kitchen. “This is your first Blue Havana party, right? You’ve never hooked in before?”

I nodded and he looked close to giggling. “Just wait.”

We went into a smaller room, probably originally intended as a walk-in closet. Inside, there was a table where a thin black guy with wiry glasses was sitting facing some kind of primitive-looking computer. The computer had what very much looked like a crudely disassembled and reassembled gun attached to it.

The gun fired a beam of pink light directly into the black guy’s forehead.

With a sweep of his hand, Ernesto gestured grandly at the machine. “This, lady and gentleman, is the Blue Havana.”

#

And here I thought we were going to be taking drugs.

Lisa-Roja left, saying she needed to use the bathroom. The black guy stumbled into the living room. I sat down in the chair he’d vacated while Ernesto explained with great enthusiasm how the Blue Havana worked.

“I’ve heard of that,” I finally said. “They use something like this in math classes, right?”

Ernesto snorted. “Trust me, man, there is no math class in the world, there is no anything in the world, nothing legal anyway, that lets you get as far into Mind as this.”

The blond girl who’d answered the door sidled up behind Ernesto, rubbing her hands over the front of his t-shirt and grinning. “That stuff they use in schools, that’s like the stuff the farmer brings to market…”

Ernesto banged a few keystrokes into the computer and it whirred to life. He grabbed my forehead, shifted my head so it was directly facing the gun-thing and told me to hold still.

The blond girl continued her rant. “…but this, no, this is something else. This isn’t what the farmer brings to market.” She nibbled absently at Ernesto’s ear. He giggled.

What the hell did this thing do to people?

“We found a way to jump the fence, eat the farmer’s private stock while he’s not looking. And that stuff is really good.” She stopped, as something seemed to occur to her. “Just watch out for tentacles.”

“What?”

“Just wait,” Ernesto told me. “Just a few more seconds. Try to relax.”

That wasn’t a possibility. A lot of questions were occurring to me, too late to do anything about them, but just in time to drive me crazy.

Should I even be here? I was all in favor of a little sense-dulling recreation, but these people were acting like they’d been slamming bricks into their heads.

And where the hell was Lisa-Roja? She should be back by now.

And…”watch out for tentacles?”

Jut as I really started thinking about that last point, I caught a glimpse of a beam of pink light shooting out of the gun and over my line of sight.

Then nothing.

#

A split second later, everything was back where it was. It was all just the same, but completely different. It was like I wasn’t seeing a movie; I was seeing a series of still photographs, a slideshow accompanied by an incoherent soundtrack.

Snap.

“…by the order of the Tribunary forces, this illegal neural hookup is…”

Snap.

People running.

“…got a gun…”

As each frame ended, the scene faded to black. Everything came back as each new one began.

The last frame of the slideshow was the computer crashing to the floor. Just before it made contact, the gun-thing swiveled around and shot a beam of pink light between Lisa-Roja’s eyes.

After that, things got really weird.

#

When I was aware again, I was lying on a beach. From the gray mist and dim light, I guessed it was early morning.

Scratch that. When I looked up at the sky, it wasn’t cloudy; it was nothing, a gray slab like a blank but glowing computer screen.

I stared up at that sky for a good long while. I didn’t even notice Lisa-Roja until she started murmuring. She was half-lying, half-sitting, propped up on her elbows on a stretch of beach a couple of yards away from me.

She was stark naked.

At first, I was a bit too disoriented to be a gentleman about it. Seeing me, she crossed her arms and legs, coughing pointedly. I looked away, feeling sheepish, and finally noticed that I was just as naked.

“Ah,” I said.

“Yeah.”

I scratched my head, wondering whether I should try to cover up, or with what. I decided to table the question. “Any thoughts about what this is?”

Oh, I knew where we were. At least part of me did. I just couldn’t quite force myself to put it all together. It was like if Moses had spent his first fifteen minutes in front of the burning bush trying to convince himself that it was just an oil fire, or a trick of the light.

Lisa-Roja licked her lips. When she finally said it, her voice was hoarse. “Mind. We’re in Mind.”

I nodded and closed my eyes. When I re-opened them, I took a good look at the beach and the water. It all looked real.

If anything, it looked too real, like it was more vivid than any beach I had ever seen on Earth. The sand and the pebbles. The waves crashing against the shore. It was like every particle of it was emitting a faint glow, something I could sense but I couldn’t quite classify with my normal faculties of visual perception.

Under other circumstances, it probably would have been the coolest, trippiest thing I had ever seen. For me, at that moment, it was creepy as hell.

The last couple of years, I’d learned that “exotic locations” meant “things shooting at you,” and this was the most exotic thing I had ever seen.

Lisa-Roja was the first to stand. “We might as well look around. See how far this goes.”

I nodded dumbly and followed her lead. The effect of staring at any one part of my surroundings was too much, and I had to look away. After I while it got to be a continuous thing, like a dull throbbing somewhere behind my eyes, but I kept on scanning the whole scene. A little discomfort wasn’t enough to break that habit.

That’s how I saw the first sock. It was several yards away, diagonal to our path. I wouldn’t have noticed if it had blended into the color scheme of the beach.

I walked over to it, and held it up. It was a black sock, ending with a little brownish-yellow patch where your toes went. I called Lisa-Roja to come over. She looked at me quizzically. “It’s a sock.”

I grinned. “It’s one of the socks I was wearing.”

Was part of me still wearing it back in Miami? I put the question out of my mind before I could get any more disoriented by it.

Lisa-Roja smiled back at me, putting it together. “So our clothes came with us.”

I nodded. “Just not with us.”

Fanning out over the beach, we found my boxers and undershirt. I stopped to put all that on, knowing I looked a little silly with just the one sock but not caring.

Continuing down the beach, we found the other sock and, nestled to the side of a huge boulder a few yards down from that, Lisa-Roja’s synth-suit.

She muttered something in Spanish, sounding enormously relieved, and went to slide it on. As she started to pull on the bottom half, something fell onto the sand. She tried to bend down to catch it, but she was in an awkward position with her suit half-on, and I got it first. She backed away a few feet as I looked at it, her expression almost nauseous with anxiety.

It was square and black. I flipped it open. As I scrutinized it, I thought back to the garbled images and shouting I remembered from just before I lost consciousness in Miami. Suddenly, everything made sense.

It was a badge, identifying her as a Special Investigator for the Tribunary Forces of the Eastern United States.

She was a cop.

I should have been freaked out, or angry. She was a cop. She was using me. For all I knew, I was going to go to jail when this was all over for being at that damn party. I should have shouted, cried, something. I didn’t.

I just didn’t have the energy, even if I’d felt anything but resigned and slightly sick about what I’d just found out. I folded up the badge and handed it to her.

That momentary contact sent tingles down my spine that went way beyond sexual attraction, even if that hadn’t been the last thing on my mind at that moment. It was touch-plus, the equivalent for that sensation of the way the colors were brighter on the beach.

Lisa-Roja took the badge, looking even more flustered and unhappy than I felt, and stuck it in an invisible pocket of her suit.

She finished getting dressed. She was barefoot, but other than that, she seemed to have most of her clothes on.

For a while, neither of us said anything. Finally, I broke the silence. “I should have known.”

She looked at me quizzically, but said nothing.

“You were way too good to be true.”

She blushed and turned away. “Look,” she finally said, “let’s just…”

Before she could get out whatever she was about to say, an ear-splitting explosion went off behind us.

#

Time seemed to freeze as I took in the sight of our attacker. All in all, I couldn’t have spent more than four or five seconds staring at it, but it stretched out into an eternity.

I don’t know what I was expecting. Nothing, probably, since nothing in my experience prepared me for walking around inside the mind of a god-like artificial intelligence, but I never in a thousand years would have predicted this. It must have been standing no more than six or seven yards behind that boulder it had just vaporized. How long had it been since it spotted us?

This was the thing I’d never stopped looking for, everywhere I went. Now that I was face to face with one,  standing no more than seven or eight yards down the beach, it didn’t make one damn bit of sense.

It was a Janny.

This one was on the short side, but that still meant it was a foot or two taller than a full-grown human would be. Its skin was a color somewhere between red and orange. Its mid-section looked like a gelatinous lump, but I knew far too well how deceptive that appearance was. They take a while to get from point A to point B, but up close an enraged Janny can be as lethally flexible in its motions as anything that walks or crawls.

It had six tentacles on each side. One of them held what looked like a standard-issue blast-stick of the Janesian War Fleet. Smoke swirled from the weapon’s tip. At least three of its other tentacles were already dripping acid onto the beach.

On the plus side, it didn’t look like the acid had started to evaporate yet. Unfortunately, that was all the “plus side” there was.

All twelve of its eyes were staring at me, all twelve pupils already turned the yellow of deepest hatred. Fuck.

Snapping out of it, I shoved Lisa-Roja, knocking her to the ground, and fell on top of her. All that was left of that huge boulder was a smoldering pile of rock. Each rock was maybe the size of a soccer ball, but the pile was a few foot tall. It was enough to give us maybe a minute or two of cover while the Janny made its way to our position.

Bending down awkwardly, I pulled off first my left sock, and then my right. I handed one of the socks to Lisa-Roja, who responded with a blank stare. I was lying on top of her. Our faces almost touched.

“Mask,” I whispered, and modeled holding it over my mouth and nose. The smell was wretched, cloth and sweat and dirt. “Don’t die.”

Under the circumstances, I didn’t have time to be any more eloquent than that, but I was telling the truth. The acid dripping from an angry Janny’s tentacles is a natural defense system, like a skunk’s spray. The difference being that when it evaporates, it does a lot more than smell bad.

Lisa-Roja fumbled around the folds of her synth-suit until she pulled out a gun.

Thank God for that, anyway.

Not having any time to waste on the request, I just grabbed her hand to pry the gun away from her.

She held tight.

“Get off me,” she muttered, pointing the gun directly into my chest.

I didn’t think she was going to shoot me. She was probably just understandably flustered, but I chose my words very carefully. I knew the Janny was getting way too close to us to waste time on this, and my eyes and skin were irritated from the acid vapor, it was hard to concentrate on what I was saying. On the other hand, I’d rather not have her trigger finger get nervous before the Janny had time to kill us.

“You ever shoot anyone with that thing?”

She nodded.

“How many?”

“How many what?”

I gritted my teeth. I so did not have time for this. “How many people have you killed?”

“I’m not a murderer.” She shifted position under me, but kept the gun steady. “I’ve shot six people in the line of duty. They’ve all survived.”

I sighed. “Right. Six. Any of them Janesians?”

She glared at me, but said nothing.

“So it would be safe to say that only one of us has killed hundreds of them?”

I could all but see the wheels turning in her brain. Finally, she grunted and loosened her grip on the gun, letting me take hold of it. I rolled off her, clicked off the safety and adjusted the laser setting to lethal force.

That wasn’t a second too soon.

A burning sensation flared through me as a beam from the Janny’s blast-stick grazed my cheek. If it had been the first time that had happened to me, I might have let that distract me. I would have died.

I didn’t. I rolled onto the ground and came up on my knees, holding the gun in my right hand and using my left to hold the sock over my face. After a quick scan to make sure nothing was coming at me from the other side of the beach, I turned back to the Janny, aimed and fired.

The laser from my gun pierced its shoulder. Purple smoke drifted up from the wound. The Janny wouldn’t die, but the pain should distract it long enough.

I shifted position, and saw Lisa-Roja crawling along the beach toward us. I motioned her to keep her head down below laser-range and turned back.

I was just in time to see that the Janny was within a few feet of me. I pulled the trigger without having time to aim. It must have fired at exactly the same moment. Its laser sailed harmlessly over my head. Mine hit home.

Purple mist clouded its eyes. A few seconds later, it was a smoking pile of reddish-orange goo.

Lisa-Roja walked up behind me. I turned around to make sure she was holding the sock I’d given her to her mouth and nose, then handed the gun to her. She took it, without comment, and clicked the safety back on.

Keeping my sock in front of my face for as much of the process as I could, I peeled off my under-shirt. That left me with nothing on but my boxer shorts, but it was almost as warm here as back in Miami. When it came to deflecting laser blasts, anything but full body armor was pretty much decoration anyway.

Lisa-Roja stared at me, then said something. Muffled through the sock, it took me a second to interpret it as, “What do you think you’re doing?”

Ignoring her question, I wrapped the shirt around my right hand and arm as best I could, biting the sock for a second so I could use my left hand to tie it up. At this point, there was probably more acid in the air than in the goo that used to be the Janny, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I used the protected arm to fish around the goo until I found the blast-stick.

I wiped it off, then ditched the soiled shirt.

We walked back to the beach, away from the concentration of vapor. I took the sock off of my mouth and fiddled with the blast-stick.

Lisa did the same. “You know how to use that thing?”

I nodded. “Assuming they haven’t changed the design in the last six months, I should.”

She actually looked impressed. Like everything else was to be expected, but I got extra credit points for having experience using an enemy soldier’s discarded weapon.

I don’t know why that annoyed me so much.

I gripped the cylindrical blast-stick in my right hand, aimed it at the sky above us, and took a practice squeeze. A nice satisfying red beam shot out of it, disappearing into the gray slab of sky.

I released the trigger, and turned back to Lisa-Roja. “Do you know, if you had to, how to kill a Janesian?”

“What makes you think there are more of them?”

I stared at her. “Why would there even be one?”

That actually got me a smile. “OK, fair point. You shoot them, much like a human, yes?”

“Well, sure, but you have to get them in the middle, between here and here…” Unthinkingly, I started tracing the equivalent position on the front of her synth-suit, like I had done time and time again on soldiers’ uniforms to make the same point back in the service.

Feeling the touch-plus tingling, it finally occurred to me just how intimate the gesture was. I flushed and pulled my hand back.

Lisa-Roja raised her eyebrow, but otherwise gave no sign that she had registered my reaction. She reached forward and traced the same pattern over my bare chest. “Here….to here?”

“Yeah.” My breath was coming out in gasps–touch was something else here–but at least I managed to get out the syllable. She smiled mischievously, leaving no doubt this time around that she knew exactly what effect she was having, and laughed.

I started laughing too, not able to help it. I was so distracted that almost a minute must have gone by between my visual scans of the periphery.

Two more Jannies slid down the beach toward us. “Mid-section,” I muttered again. Lisa-Roja nodded and clicked off the safety on her gun.

I jogged to the nearest boulder, about five yards away. It wouldn’t provide much cover, but it was the best I could do.

A fourth Janny came into view just by the boulder. I shot it. My laser sailed just over its head. It aimed at me.

Lisa-Roja shot it. Her laser shot from behind me pierced its midsection. Purple mist clouded over the Janny’s eyes.

One of the Jannies coming the other way shot at me. It missed. The laser connected with the boulder instead. It exploded.

A soccer-ball-sized chunk of rock barreled into my side. I crashed to the ground. My blast-stick dropped.

I rolled over and grabbed the blast-stick. Within a few seconds I was back on my feet.

With the boulder out of the way, I had a good view of the beach stretching behind where we’d been standing. There were some buildings visible just behind the horizon, sleek round structures shining even in the gray light.

As I watched, dozens of Jannies streamed across the horizon toward us. The sound of their twittering speech filled the air. Most of them were armed.

The ones at the front were moving faster than I thought Jannies were physically capable of.

Lisa-Roja sidled up next to me. We stood, shoulder to shoulder, our weapons pointed outward as we stared at the crowd of monsters.

I aimed my blast-stick first at one Janny, then another, then another. It was no good. At least a dozen of them were going to have a shot at me at the same time, in less than a minute. There was nowhere to take cover, and there were only two of us.

That was the moment when I knew that I was going to die.

The realization came hard and fast, like a splash of cold water to the face the morning after a night of hard drinking. Whatever part of me that had still somehow managed, through everything that I’d been through in the last two years, to delude itself into thinking that I was going to die in bed, an old man surrounded by grandchildren, got a hard dose of reality.

I was going to die right here, right now, on this beach that was on no map, this fragment of the consciousness of an artificial God. There was nothing to be done about that. All I could do was take as many of these fucks as I could with me.

I tightened my grip on the blast-stick, preparing to shoot…

“Sssssssstoooooop.”

My fingers froze on my weapon. What the hell?

At the front of the line was an unarmed Janny.

“Stop,” it repeated.

It was speaking English, slowly and strangely, but English nonetheless. I wouldn’t have believed that Jannies could make human speech. I didn’t think their mouths would be able to form the sounds.

It was unarmed. Its eyes were the red of perfect calm. If not for that, I might have shot it anyway, and let the English sounds be a mystery.

I loosened my grip on the blast-stick, but kept it pointed at the speaker.

“Diiiiiplomaaaat,” the Janny said. It took me a second to recognize the word it was trying to say, but that was definitely it. “Diplomat.”

My eyes flickered to meet Lisa-Roja’s, my incomprehension mirrored on her features.

“What?” I finally asked.

It was, it repeated, a diplomat. The time for fighting was over. We should go home.

Lisa-Roja finally spoke. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Mind, it said, in its painstakingly slow, broken English, was with the Janesians now. It was over. Mind had switched sides.

Neither of us had anything to say to that. After a long pause, the Janny continued. Mind wanted, above all, information, to expand and take in more information. That was how we stupid humans had built Mind. Did we really think we could construct a God and enslave it to run our errands?

Lisa-Roja made a gurgling noise, like she was trying to speak but couldn’t quite get the words out. “You’re lying.”

“Noooo lie. Truuuth.”

We were, it, explained, fading out already. We would be gone from Mind in a matter of minutes. Since the war was almost over, it would let us go, an act of mercy. “Gooooo. Juuuust goooo.”

I turned to Lisa-Roja. She did look different, less solid than she had been a second ago, more like a hologram than a person. “Oh my God.”

I’m letting you go, the Janny told us. Don’t shoot.

I didn’t shoot. Lisa-Roja didn’t shoot. None of the Jannies shot us. For minutes that seemed like hours, we stood there on the beach, surrounded by Jannies, as the diplomat’s words reverberated over and over again in my head.

#

I woke up in the darkness, fully clothed on a hard floor. After a time, I could hear noises from outside, feverish but indistinct.

My joints creaked as I propped myself up on my elbows. Slowly, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I was still in the room in Ernesto’s house in Miami, now empty.

A few feet away from me, Lisa-Roja lay muttering something to herself in sing-song Spanish. I stood up, exhausted, and walked over to her.

Her eyes were closed. Very tentatively, I leaned down and put my hands on her shoulder. She lashed out at me with one arm. She opened her eyes and blinked. “Avi.”

She draped an arm around my shoulders, and I helped her up. We wandered into the living room. It was empty. We stood there for a bit, not knowing what to do.

“Avi,” Lisa-Roja said again.

“Yeah?”

She drew away from me and bit her lip. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

That seemed like the understatement of the century. I just shrugged.

“There’s something I think you should know.”

“OK.”

She let out a long breath. A beat passed, then she started up again very slowly. “I am a cop. Sometimes I work undercover. I went to that party with you so I could investigate the illegal numeral hookup.”

I shook my head. “I already know all this.”

“When you said you were going to the Blue Havana, that was a lucky break, a lead I never expected. Months of investigating, and the location of the Blue Havana just fell into my lap.”

I stared at her, feeling slightly sick. “Why are you telling me this?”

She stamped her foot. “Shut up. Just let me say this.”

I shrugged, taken aback. “OK,” I finally said.

“I am a cop. Sometimes, I work undercover. But that night, I was off-duty.”

What she was saying finally penetrated my consciousness. “So why did you talk to me?”

She shook her head. “Why do you think?”

We stood looking at each other for a long beat, then she leaned up and kissed me, once, very quickly, on the lips. She met my eyes, nervous and unflinching.

I grabbed her and kissed her back, long and lingering this time.

A while later, we walked outside.

#

Warm and humid wind hit me, buffeting away the last traces of sleepiness from my system. Sirens and screaming penetrated my awareness, punctuated by traffic noises and a chorus of blasting car horns.

“Mother of god,” Lisa-Roja whispered, and jabbed my side. I looked at her, and she pointed at the sky.

My jaw dropped as I took in the scene.

Massive red objects filled the sky. There must have been dozens of them, moving at impossible speeds with lights blinking all along their sides.

The Janesian War Fleet.

“Avi!”

I turned at the sound. Hanna ran across the lawn toward us.

“What the hell?”

She was holding a gun, pointed into the air. Not a pistol like Lisa-Roja’s, but Nisium-17, which had to be just about the most serious piece of military hardware a teenage girl could heft in one hand. A red and blue Survival-19 patch was stitched into the shoulder of her shirt.

With a real effort I managed to speak. “How did you find us? And where the hell….what….”

I trailed off, defeated.

Hanna stared at me with the mixture of fondness and withering contempt that she always reserved for her big brother’s stupider comments. “Not really the time or the place for all that,” she finally said. “We’ve got to leave. Now.”

I wondered for a second just how much about my little sister’s life I would never know, then decided that she was right. Right now, finding out was not a priority.

Lisa-Roja and I jogged with Hanna out to the car she’d left idling on the curb. It was my parent’s old Bolivar Cruiser, looking more beaten up that I’d ever remembered it. “What…?”

“The new car stopped working when all the computers shut down,” Hanna told me matter-of-factly. “Get in.”

I climbed into the front passenger seat, Lisa-Roja into the back, and Hanna took off driving down the street before we’d so much as closed the doors.

She was taking the side street away from downtown South Beach. I had no idea where she was taking us, and just then, I didn’t have the energy, I didn’t have enough space left in my head, to think it through. I needed a long night’s sleep before I could process any of this.

“Han,” I finally said, “this is Lisa-Roja.”

“Hi,” Hanna said, amiably enough, her eyes on the road.

“This is Hanna,” I told Lisa-Roja, craning my head to the back seat as I talked. “My little sister.”

Lisa-Roja laughed. The sound was like tinkling glass, but rich and deep. “Impressive family,” she finally said.

I leaned back into the seat, comfortable despite everything. “We do all right.”

We drove in companionable silence, Hanna navigating the back roads without stops or hesitation. I nestled into the comfortable leather of the seat, letting the muscles in my back relax.

I knew I should be terrified or depressed about the Jannies closing in. I wasn’t.

I didn’t know what was going to happen tomorrow, or even tonight, but I knew one thing: I was wrong, when I thought yesterday morning on the deck of the processing station that I was a broken unit trying to blend in with the whole models. I’m bruised, but I’m not broken. There’s a difference.

Whatever’s going to happen, I can handle it. I’m with people I care about, and they can handle themselves too. Whatever was coming, we’d deal with it as it came.

Without saying anything to each other, without needing to, we drove onward into the night.