"Carbine? You okay? Your eyes look a little pixelated, man." Carbine recognized the voice; it belonged to Rio, one of the systechs that maintained his cybernetics in combat-ready order. He could even picture her in his head-a short, sinewy woman in a grease-stained olive-green jumpsuit, with bubble-gum-pink hair that fell in long curls over the input jack in her temple and eyes that were entirely black except for a blinking '12:00' in the center of each eyeball (some sort of ancient systech running gag, apparently). But...
But he couldn't see her. The place where her voice was coming from kept glitching out, the image nothing but a garbled mass of colors with jagged, rectangular edges. That worried Carbine just a little, because his visual displays were linked to his IFF systems. If Rio was glitching, it meant that his IFF couldn't quite decide whether he needed to see her or not. That was bad. Normally friendlies didn't get grayed out unless it was a combat situation and he needed to focus his attention on enemy combatants, but he was back at base and reporting for post-combat refits and maintenance. And normally base systechs wouldn't be flagged as enemies at all. So either his AI piggybrain couldn't decide whether he was in a firefight or not, or it couldn't decide whether Rio was a threat or not.
Or possibly both, which would be really bad. "Uh, yeah, hi, yeah, um...Rio?" he asked, directing his attention to the patch of glitchy space where he thought she was probably standing. The whole situation felt massively disorienting, and he struggled to keep his focus. "Um, yeah, I think something might be wrong with my visuals. Some of my combat protocols aren't disengaging properly. Could you maybe plug in and take a look?" He tapped his input jack before unsealing it with a mental command, and looked meaningfully at the collection of pixels that he assumed represented his systech.
"Yeah," Rio said slowly, her head contorting in an eye-wrenching display of static that Carbine assumed was a frown. "I don't think that's such a good idea right now, Carbine. You caught a packet of malware from that burst transmission that took out Delta formation-not as bad as they did, or you'd be speaking Portuguese right now and swearing loyalty to the Estado Perfeito, but you're head's pretty futzed up. I'm not jacking in there direct for love nor money."
"I...how did you know that?" Carbine remembered the battle; he remembered the metal sphere shooting up into the air from a concealed launcher five clicks east of Madrid, and he remembered putting up his firewalls just as the transmitter blasted out a wave of data designed to corrupt his computer-augmented brain into changing loyalties. He remembered blasting the databomb out of the sky and firing off an emergency shutdown beacon that prevented Delta from attacking their own flank-he even remembered hoping for a medal. But he didn't remember the malware getting through.
Rio's face suddenly resolved into focus as she said, "Because you told me. You sent me a message telling you that your self-diagnostics were lighting up all over the place, that you had a worm you couldn't quarantine and it was corrupting your higher critical thinking subroutines." It was amazing how crystal clear the image suddenly became as she spoke. Carbine didn't know how he could possibly have had trouble seeing her before. The visuals were so sharp now that he could practically zoom right in on her vital areas. "You said you were going to report to me for debugging."
Carbine furrowed his brow in confusion. "Did I?" Of course he did, he could access his memories with perfect clarity and see the moment in his own timeline, but...but it didn't seem important. The entire sequence of events, everything from getting the self-diagnostic alert message to realizing his thought processes were affected to contacting Rio, it had all been flagged with such a low priority by his piggybrain that he couldn't keep it in his head unless he was directly viewing it. None of the information he was seeing mattered, not next to the important things his augments were telling him to do; and his meatbrain had been wired to listen to his piggybrain. Hell, half the reason that a soldier got a computer piggybacked onto his neural cortex was to keep him from getting distracted with irrelevancies in the middle of a crisis. He didn't need to know about everything he was doing. Piggy would keep track of it.
But Rio was right there, big as life and twice as clear in his sights. Sight. Vision. Whatever. She clearly wasn't going to just go away, not without at least a little reassurance that he was fine now. Which he was. He was sure of it, a confidence solidified by the computer in his skull into a solid certainty. "I ran my self-diagnostics, full scan," he said, his face smoothing into a plastic smile. "Everything is fine now." That didn't sound quite right-his memory files showed him shutting down his self-diagnostics, not running them-but that was another low priority event sequence. He had more important things he had to do. They were very important, vital to the war effort. He just couldn't let himself think about what they were right now.
Rio nodded in response, but she didn't exactly seem convinced. "Okay, Carbine," she said slowly, like she was an orderly talking to a dangerous mental patient. "That sounds fine. I'm just going to ask you to take a moment and really concentrate on what you're doing right now. Even if it doesn't seem important. Just...take stock of the situation, okay?" She slowly raised her hands up and put them on top of her head. It seemed decidedly strange, under the circumstances.
Still, he figured he'd better humor her. A good systech was worth their weight in palladium to a cyborg, and she clearly wasn't going to stop bothering him until he convinced her that he was thinking clearly. It was either that or hide her body inside the fuselage of one of the VTOL jets and falsify the security footage to eliminate any evidence that she came into the hangar bay, right? After sabotaging the reactor to go critical when examined? And setting off a chain reaction that would take out the entire hangar bay and as many pilots and crew as possible? He laughed at the absurdity of the notion. The completely clear, meticulously detailed absurdity, complete with reactor schematics and a target profile for Rio's vital organs.
A thought struck him. "Um, Rio?" he said, his voice perplexed. "I'm holding a gun on you, aren't I?"
Rio nodded slowly. She seemed to be doing everything slowly, like she was aware that all of his combat systems were fully engaged and he was far more likely to gun her down without warning if she made any sudden or threatening moves. "You are," she said, keeping her tones smooth and even. Like she was soothing a baby, if babies went around carrying loaded fully automatic carbine rifles loaded with explosive rounds. "And you're in a restricted underbay maintenance area. And when I came in you were just standing there staring at a suite of tools with a blank look on your face."
Carbine looked around, his mouth slightly open in wonder as he noticed where he was for the first time. (And then noticed for the first time that he was actually noticing for the fifth time. None of the other times seemed important, though.) "Huh," he said, recognizing how loose and muzzy he sounded but not quite able to flag the information with any real priority. His piggybrain wouldn't accept the command. That was definitely screwed up, but Piggy wouldn't let him notice that, either. "How 'bout that."
Rio looked very unhappy with his response. He could see her pulse rate speeding up, watch the blood coursing through her veins in every intricate detail. His combat augments flagged everything significant, from the way her muscles tensed to the amount of time it would take her to bleed out depending on where he hit her and what kind of ammunition he used. It was all so fascinating that he barely registered her saying, "Okay, this is bad."
He tried to focus on her words as she continued, "Carbine, I think you've been infected by a Sabotador worm. It probably latched onto you when the databomb was still on the ground and infected you prior to launching, as a secondary transmission strategy in case the databurst failed. It came in as a low-priority slowstream transmission, installed itself along with your sitrep updates. A worm like that's a big program, so it probably just picked one person to send it to and then launched itself to do the big burst. You must have been closest. Lucky you."
She began to very slowly reach down to her belt, but froze in position when she saw Carbine's finger tightening on the trigger. "Okay," she said, "I need you to listen to me very closely. Your higher-order critical faculties are being influenced by a complex computer virus that's hijacking your body and using you to inflict as much damage as possible on our equipment and personnel. You need to let me induce a medical shutdown so that I can decontaminate you. I know it's going to be difficult-your computer augments are going to tell you to ignore me, maybe even to..." She swallowed heavily. "K-kill me," she finished, her voice thick with tension. "But you have to concentrate on lowering your gun so I can deactivate you."
Carbine still didn't feel like anything was wrong with him, but he knew he was having trouble thinking right now. And he trusted Rio. He looked down at his gun, reminding himself over and over again that he needed to point it down. He needed to aim his rifle at the ground, no matter what his piggybrain told him about target profiles or mission parameters or task priorities. His hand stubbornly refused to move, but he forced himself to concentrate on it, pushing back against a combat AI that told him he had a dangerous enemy in his sights. The gun quivered, the barrel moved perhaps a quarter of a centimeter. It was the hardest thing he'd ever done.
But he had to keep trying. He had to lower his gun, even if he stopped remembering why he needed to lower his gun, because the augments that were telling him to aim it back up again were...um...because his...because he needed to lower the gun. He didn't need a reason, which was a good thing because he couldn't concentrate on finding a reason and concentrate on lowering his gun at the same time. He had to shut that out, though, just override his instincts, override his training, override the insistent demand from his own brain that he would die if he lowered his gun even for a second, and point the gun away from...away from...
