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"0wnz0red" | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Lucky for him, then, that lucid days were fewer and farther between. Unlucky for him that his lucid days, when they came, were filled with the G-Men. The G-Men had come to him in the late days of his tenure on the palliative ward. They'd wheeled him into a private consultation room and given him a cigarette that stung the sores on his lips, tongue and throat. He coughed gratefully. "You must be the Fed," Liam said. "No one else could green-light indoor smoking in California." Liam had worked for the Fed before. Work in the Valley and you end up working for the Fed, because when the cyclic five-year bust arrives, the only venture capital that's liquid in the U.S. is military research green -- khaki money. He'd been seconded twice to biometrics-and-machineguns bunkers where he'd worked on need-to-know integration projects for Global Semi's customers in the Military-Industrial Simplex. The military and the alphabet soup of Fed cops gave birth to the Valley. After WWII, all those shipbuilder engineers and all those radar engineers and all those radio engineers and the tame academics at Cal Tech and Cal and Stanford sorta congealed, did a bunch of startups and built a bunch of crap their buds in the Forces would buy. Khaki money stunted the Valley. Generals didn't need to lobby in Congress for bigger appropriations. They just took home black budgets that were silently erased from the books, aerosolized cash that they misted over the eggheads along Highway 101. Two generations later, the Valley was filled with techno-determinists, swaggering nerd squillionaires who were steadfastly convinced that the money would flow forever and ever amen. Then came Hollywood, the puny $35 billion David that slew the $600 billion Goliath of tech. They bought Congresscritters, had their business-models declared fundamental to the American way of life, extended copyright ad [inifinitum|nauseam] and generally kicked the shit out of tech in DC. They'd been playing this game since 1908, when they sued to keep the player piano off the market, and they punched well above their weight in the legislative ring. As the copyright police began to crush tech companies throughout the Valley, khaki money took on the sweet appeal of nostalgia, strings-free cash for babykiller projects that no one was going to get sued over. The Feds that took Liam aside that day could have been pulled from a fiftieth anniversary revival of "Nerds and Generals." Clean-cut, stone-faced, prominent wedding-bands. The Feds had never cared for Liam's jokes, though it was his trackmarks and not his punchlines that eventually accounted for his security clearance being yanked. These two did not crack a smile as Liam wheezed out his pathetic joke. Instead, they introduced themselves gravely. Col. Gonzalez -- an MD, with caduceus insignia next to his silver birds -- and Special Agent Fredericks. Grateful for his attention, they had an offer to make him. "It's experimental, and the risks are high. We won't kid you about that." "I appreciate that," Liam wheezed. "I like to live dangerously. Give me another smoke, willya?" Col. Gonzalez lit another Marlboro Red with his brass Zippo and passed him a sheaf of papers. "You can review these here, once we're done. I'm afraid I'll have to take them with me when we go, though." Liam paged through the docs, passing over the bio stuff and nodding his head over the circuit diagrams and schematics. "I give up," he said. "What does it all do?" "It's an interface between your autonomic processes and a microcontroller." Liam thought about that for a moment. "I'm in," he said. Special Agent Fredericks' thin lips compressed a hair and his eyes gave the hintiest hint of a roll. But Col. Gonzalez nodded to himself. "All right. Here's the protocol: tomorrow, we give you a bug. It's a controlled mutagen that prepares your brainstem so that it can emits and receives weak electromagnetic fields that can be manipulated with an external microcontroller. In subjects with effective immunoresponse, the bug takes less than one percent of the time --" "But if you're dying of AIDS, that's not a problem," Liam said and smiled until some of the sores at the corners of his mouth cracked and released a thin gruel of pus. "Lucky fucking me." "You grasp the essentials," the Colonel said. "There's no surgery involved. The interface regulates immunoresponse in the region of the insult to prevent rejection. The controller has a serial connector that connects to a PC that instructs it in respect of the governance of most bodily functions." Liam smiled slantwise and butted out. "God, I'd hate to see the project you developed this shit for. Zombie soldiers, right? You can tell me, I've got clearance." Special Agent Fredericks shook his head. "Not for three years, you haven't. And you never had clearance to get the answer to that question. But once you sign here and here and here, you'll almost have clearance to get some of the answers." He passed a clipboard to Liam. Liam signed, and signed, and signed. "Autonomic processes, right?" Col. Gonzalez nodded. "Correct." "Including, say, immunoresponse?" "Yes, we've had very promising results in respect of the immune system. It was one of the first apps we wrote. Modifies the genome to produce virus-hardened cells and kick-starts production of new cells." "Yeah, until some virus out-evolves it," Liam said. He knew how to debug vaporware. "We issue a patch," the Colonel said. "I write good patches," Liam said. "We know," Special Agent Fredericks said, and gently prized the clipboard from his fingers. - - - - - - - - - - - - The techs came first, to wire Liam up. The new bug in his system broadened his already-exhaustive survey of the ways in which the human body can hurt. He squeezed his eyes tight against the morphine rush and lazily considered the possibility of rerouting pain to a sort of dull tickle. The techs were familiar Valley-dwellers, portly and bedecked with multitools and cellular gear and wireless PDAs. They handled him like spoiled meat, with gloves and wrinkled noses, and talked shop over his head to one another. Colonel Gonzalez supervised, occasionally stepping away to liaise with the hospital's ineffectual medical staff. A week of this -- a week of feeling like his spine was working its way out of his asshole, a week of rough latex hands and hacker jargon -- and he was wheeled into a semi-private room, surrounded by louche oatmeal-colored commodity PCs -- no keyboards or mice, lest he get the urge to tinker. The other bed was occupied by Joey, another Silicon Valley needle-freak, a heroin addict who'd been a design engineer for Apple, figuring out how to cram commodity hardware into stylish gumdrop boxen. Joey and Liam croaked conversation between themselves when they were both lucid and alone. Liam always knew when Joey was awake by the wet hacking coughs he wrenched out of his pneumonia-riddled lungs. Alone together, ignored by the mad scientists who were hacking their bodies, they struck up a weak and hallucinogenic camaraderie. "I'm not going to sleep," Joey said, in one timeless twilight. "So don't sleep, shit," Liam said. "No, I mean, ever. Sleep, it's like a third of your life, 20, 30 years. What's it good for? It resets a bunch of switches, gives your brain a chance to sort through its buffers, a little oxygenation for your tissues. That stuff can all take place while you're doing whatever you feel like doing, hiking in the hills or getting laid. Make 'em into cron jobs and nice them down to the point where they just grab any idle cycles and do their work incrementally." "You're crazy. I like to sleep," Liam said. "Not me. I've slept enough in this joint, been on the nod enough, I never want to sleep another minute. We're getting another chance, I'm not wasting a minute of it." Despite the braveness of his words, he sounded like he was half-asleep already. "Well, that'll make them happy. All part of a good super-soldier, you know." "Now who's crazy?" "You don't believe it? They're just getting our junkie asses back online so they can learn enough from us to field some mean, lean, heavily modified fighting-machines." "And then they snuff us. You told me that this morning. Yesterday? I still don't believe it. Even if you're right about why they're doing this, they're still going to want us around so they can monitor the long-term effects." "I hope you're right." "You know I am." Liam stared into the ceiling until he heard Joey's wet snores, then he closed his eyes and waited for the fever dreams.
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