2212:352
Diary Entry

I slide in creepy, like a shadow moving across the window in that still time in the center of the night. I hunker down, making myself small until I sniff the flavor of my surroundings. Test for no-gos, for jams, for traps. Last week I fell in a bad trap, feet stuck in gelly glue, caught. Gellies are probably the best security against agents, and they’re tough to create and even tougher to keep from evaporating. Had to kill my agent, clean. Didn’t leave a trace. A half-day’s work and all I had to show for it was a dry shell of a code corpse. So sad, no mourners at the funeral, not even me.

Today no traps so far, but I’m always looking. Slip around, check and see. I knock on the first door. It’s always the easy one, meant to keep out the masses. I breeze through and look around. Nothing interesting in this chamber, maybe a few administrative reports, a newsletter or two. I look for other sliders and agents. They’re all over the place, a veritable stampede of them, most of them so clumsy they’d trip over their own feet, if they had any. I spy the second door, cajole it, and I’m through.

Trap! A little spider web drifts down as soon as I cross into the room. I resist the urge to blast it out of existence. That would activate other traps, gellies, bombs, who knows what. Instead I embrace it, let it drape gently onto me, and then devour it.

It tastes dusty. I lick my lips below the silver mask.

Fewer scent trails here, but there are a couple of sliders in the corner, touching, their bubble colors swirling hot. Honestly, can’t these people find some place less public?

The third door’s inconspicuous, a classic hidden passage. I’ve been here before, and I know exactly where to go and how to dodge the gelly pool right in front of the door. The pool changes position every four days, but I’ve meddled with the pattern so it isn’t random anymore. Let’s see, it’s Tuesday, that means the gelly’s oozed into two pieces, one resting like an unwelcome mat, and the other stuck to the doorknob. I won’t tackle it myself. I’ll craft an agent.

I form the image of a bird in my mind, a powerful eagle. I build the agent, pulling object code from bins in my workshop. Most sliders don’t bother with elegance when they craft agents, but most sliders aren’t me. I believe form follows function. If the agent does the job of a bird of prey, it should look like one. I breathe life into my lovely eagle and send it against the door, where it will claw its way through. Birds don’t use doorknobs, and they don’t walk on mats.

My agent does its job on the door and folds its majestic eagle wings, waiting for instructions. I bow to it, which is hard since I am a bubble, and it bursts into brilliant fragments that look white-hot but are actually cool and scented like lightning. I file the fragments for reuse.

The last door’s in tatters behind me, streaked with the marks of powerful talons, and the hospital’s system is my playground. The target lies quietly, asleep I think. I melt into her biomonitor, feeling her heart thud trustingly against me. I tour her body, inside and out, skiing down the mountains of her breasts, listening to her last meal—buttered noodles, green beans, pineapple—slosh around in her stomach. Watch there awhile, as digestive juices spurt and mix, so alive. Next I skim down, down there, warm and enveloping. When I was younger, I used to think that sex was a drippy thing and I wasn’t going to have anything to do with it when my genitals matured. Well, it is. Drippy. But not if you do it with your agent.

I have to pull myself alert.

I search out her brain scan, lovely and digital. Trembling, I launch a spider to see if any hard copies exist. It pokes through the bits, sifts them, reports to me. No printouts yet. Backup won’t happen for another two hours. Exquisite.

She’s mine.

I’ll have to go after the live mirrored data, but I can do that, been doing that since the second target. Ashamed to say that on my first target, I didn’t think about the mirrors, the real-time copies, and all my little flips and flops came to nothing. Write data on A, write same thing on B. If A goes down, B can pick up right where A left off. Bad day, worse than getting caught in a trap or spun out by a no-go, the first time I missed the B. Won’t happen again, got a little agent purring in my pocket, actually my workshop, just for that.

Her brain is beautiful, the scan flaring in blue and red, telling the doctors what they want to know. I pull it around me like a coat and check out the workings of her brain. I gasp. The tumor looms, so ominous by now. I take a breath and dive into it, darkness closing in around me. I swim the length and breadth of it, marveling in how it’s grown since the last time.

I’ve been with Target 12 since the first time she went to her doctor with the headaches, the dizziness. She’s been in the hospital three times, no, four. I find out her referrals, her appointments, the retests because somebody thought he spotted something.

I planted an agent in her medical record. She’s under my control now. I can save her life or flip the switch on it. She’s just like another agent of mine. Will I guide her through the traps and gellies to safety? Or zap her with a nasty yet elegant wicked? Will she somehow survive in spite of my meddling?

I’ve got other agents out there right now, other targets, but 12 is getting ripe, so I’ve been staying with her whenever I can, even when she’s not beautifully swathed in hospital sheets.

Sometimes I’m afraid she’ll feel my breath on her face, my hand resting lightly on her shoulder, but I don’t want to miss out on the big moment.

I pull myself out of the lake, the veritable ocean, of 12’s tumor, and slip a little distance away to consider. Study the patterns, although I already know them like the lines on the palm of my hand. Then I do it.

The changes are made in the digital scan of 12’s brain. Restore the patterns, blot out the tumor. Twiddle around in the brain chemistry test results, upping a number here, downing a number there. “A healthy brain,” the doctors will say, scratching their chins in amazement. “Just can’t explain it. All the symptoms of a tumor, but scans don’t lie.”

They’ll send her home with a pat on the hand and a bottle of the latest drug. They always do.

It’s a game, it really is. How long can I keep the doctors at bay, how long before they reluctantly crack open 12’s skull in reality and put an eyeball on what’s going on inside? If I do it right, if my agent is strong and true, it’ll be too late for 12 by then. Too late, and I win. If something goes wrong and she slips away from me, I’ll be pissed for a day, but then the sweet prospects of my other targets will restore my spirits.

With a broad, sparkling, pixilated brush, I paint over the tumor. Then I add the convincing little details. When I’m done, I make sure there’s no tell-tales—those annoying little mistakes that can trip me up. I’m tired now, but I still have to go after the B data. I want to go back into her biomonitor, maybe taste her sweat this time, languish while she dreams. But I plod on, over to the mirrored data, and make identical changes. I’m really dragging, but I send an agent tripping through memory, dancing through caches, looking for tell-tales. None.

Clean, and out.

Two months later. 12’s in Emergency. I slip inside her file. My agent’s been riding the air currents above her medical file like the vulture that it is, waiting for the next significant event. I see that she collapsed at work. I don’t have a portal where she works, and I don’t have one at her home, either. She deserves some privacy, my good little 12 girl.

This is the time, I know it, and I’m so excited my heart surges. I make sure I’ve got a sub-agent recording everything and then I slip into the biomonitor they’ve slapped on her. Her body is strangely quiet, and I wonder if I’ve missed it. After all these months, if I came in too late for the ending.

Wham! Lightning streaks in front of me, and again. They’re using the defibrillator. 12’s heart quivers and starts. She’s still with us, folks. Another brain scan, and this one I leave alone, watching the streaming data build up an image on the ER doctor’s monitor. No doubt his eyes widen in shock, he exchanges looks with his staff, and they go about their work with a little less enthusiasm now, a lot less hope. I’ve done it, the grand ride, and now I settle back in my cozy armchair to watch the show.

12’s blind now, but I don’t think anybody knows it but me and her, and I’m not sure about her. She’s breathing in softly, shallowly, and it makes me think of down pillows or waves on the shore of a lake. Her heart stops again, and the doctor does his best, he really does, but then he gives up. I hear her blood settle in its vessels as the electrical activity in her brain begins to sputter, like sodden fireworks.

Someone snaps off her monitor, and I pull back into the hospital’s main system. Skipping around, I check the floors, but no one catches my interest. Nothing there but a bunch of people already too sick for the game. Feeling good from my success with 12, I dabble with a few test results, change the rate of flow of oxygen for 212-B. I look around for tell-tales, and I’m clean and out.

~*~*~*~*~

Oh, there’ll be hell to pay, meetings behind closed doors, maybe payments to set up a trust fund for 12’s two kids. How could they have missed it, they whisper, she’s been here several times before and the scans don’t lie. Then how to explain it? That’s the juicy part. Everybody points fingers at everybody else, the techs, the radiologist, the admitting doctor, the ER doctor, the grammers who tumbled the code for the hospital’s computer system, the vendor who sold it to them. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. Everybody but me.

I don’t take credit or credits for what I do. That’s not quite correct. Say instead I no longer take credits for what I do. Flashback: it’s 2209, and little Tommy Hardluck (all names changed to protect the formerly innocent) lies in his bed with the spaceship sheets, fondling his... mask. Caught you there, didn’t I?

I still use that mask, highly upgraded now, a memorial to the early life of T.H., who never grew up anyway.

I first earned credits for changing some loser’s test scores so he could make it into Luna Base. It was a novelty, doing something to put credits in my account besides siphoning them. Word got around I was good and I’d do anything. After a time, the novelty wore off, so I do what I want. Things like what I did today, with 12.

No resemblance between little T.H. and any real character, living or dead, of course.

I catch a whisper and amplify it. Can it be true, at last? A generational starship will be made ready to spew humankind’s progeny into space. Might I count myself among those progeny? Born from a torso, but still possessing the correct complement of chromosome pairs of human DNA: I meet the most basic criterion. I spend time crafting agents and sending them like shooting stars to arc and settle around the spaceship project. I will hear the plans, the telltales, the plots.

~*~*~*~

One final thing to do with 12. I’m right here in the incinerator’s controls as the lasers come to life over her dead body, reducing her physical shell to ashes. I owe it to her, I suppose. Silly, but I feel like I’ve walked on hot coals.

Next Chapter: Published Short Story "Agent"