The Last Good Man

Biomimetics

Lincoln swivels out of his chair. Keeping low, he scuttles to the window. True shoves her tablet into her pack, swapping it for her MARC visor as she moves to the door. She slips the visor on. It boots, syncing with the earpiece. She shrugs on her pack. Her hand slides into the front pocket of her utility vest where she’s got her pistol, but she doesn’t pull it out yet.

As she reaches the screened porch, Rey appears from around the corner of the house. He’s in a panic. “Someone shot your drone,” he blurts as he bounds up the porch steps. “It came down in pieces over the goat pen.”

She scans the yard and the bushes around it, but sees no one. The MARC’s threat assessment function doesn’t highlight anything.

Lincoln comes out of the house. He passes her, passes Rey, strides down the steps. That’s when a kid comes into sight from the direction of the driveway—a petite teenage girl dressed in jeans and a body-hugging green-camo T-shirt, a .22 rifle carried comfortably in her hands. The MARC scans her face, tags her as unknown. Tags the make and model of her weapon.

She backpedals when she sees Lincoln, looking like she’s about to turn and run. But Daniel has come out to the porch too. He sees the girl and shouts to her. “Divina! What did you see? Has someone come?”

His presence emboldens her. Holding the weapon with the muzzle toward the ground, she approaches, pausing to stare wide-eyed at Lincoln’s scarred face and artificial eye.

“You shot down our bird,” Lincoln concludes in a tone half-annoyed, half-amused.

“Your bird?” Daniel asks. He is not at all amused.

“A surveillance drone,” Lincoln says. He looks at True. “Take Rey. Have him show you where the pieces came down.”

She moves down the steps, gesturing at Rey to follow, while Daniel speaks in an angry voice, “You had me under surveillance? For how long?”

True does not stay to hear Lincoln’s answer. But as Rey follows her, he murmurs, “I didn’t think of it to warn you, but he is angry because he’s been harassed by political enemies, spied on, his home vandalized.”

True is angry herself, emotionally worn, her mood brittle. “No one’s been hurt,” she snaps, seizing on cold practicality. “I’m sorry he’s upset, but it was a matter of security.”

She studies the bushes, and the trees beyond, allowing the MARC to survey for hazards, but detects none.

They reach the side of the house. Out of habit she scans the wall, the windows, the eaves. This time the MARC finds something to highlight. It’s at the top of the white window frame. The object looks like a dark-gray leaf that’s gotten hung up in a spider’s web, but it’s not a leaf. It’s a mech designed to mimic one.

She averts her gaze, keeping the leaf mech in sight but not looking directly at it, not wanting to warn its operator—or its algorithms—that it’s been noticed. Still moving slowly, breath gone shallow, body tense, she considers her strategy. There is a waist-high hibiscus hedge alongside the house. She will not be able to get past that before the leaf mech alerts—and she’s certain it’s capable of flight. She will have to intercept it in the air.

Despite the example of the teenage Divina, True rejects the idea of shooting down the little mech as too dangerous, and too likely to result in a miss. What she needs is a net, but she doesn’t have one so she’s going to have to improvise.

Quickly—still without looking directly at the mech—she unbuttons her utility vest and drops it on the grass. “Don’t touch that,” she warns Rey, not wanting him to pick it up and wonder at the pistol’s weight.

Rey is behind her. He sounds confused when he says, “Your broken drone is in the goat pasture.”

“I know where it is.”

She peels off her shirt. Why not? It’s the closest thing she has to a net and there’s nothing shocking underneath. Just a beige bra precisely engineered to secure her small breasts while making her look good. She calculates her best line of attack. Then she bounds toward the window, shirt clutched in one hand, ready to swing.

She’s almost at the hedge when the leaf mech reacts. It emits a sharp pop! True ducks at the noise—she can’t help herself. “Fuck!” she swears, already guessing the sound is harmless, an effect meant to startle, like the furious burst of a pheasant’s wings when it springs from dense grass. Works damn well.

Her momentary hesitation allows the leaf mech time to deploy a buzzing propeller that lofts it from the window frame. True leaps after it, swinging her shirt to try to bring it down, but it’s already out of reach, streaking away toward the goat pasture. Her MARC tracks it, highlighting its shifting position.

She takes off after it. A device that small and fast won’t have the battery life to fly far. If she can track its flight path, she’ll have a real chance of catching up with it. She stoops to scoop up her vest, shrugs it back on while she runs, and stuffs her shirt into one of its large pockets.

The fence that surrounds the goat pasture is coming up. It’s made of wooden posts with four-foot-high field wire strung between them. She gets one hand on a post, climbs the wire in two steps, and drops on the other side—just as a blue-gray biomimetic hawk shoots across the pasture propelled by silent bird wings.

The hawk is on a path aimed to intercept the tiny surveillance device. The two mechs collide—they seem to collide—then the hawk wheels and streaks off toward distant trees while the leaf mech is simply gone.

“Shit,” True whispers, staring after the hawk. “What the fuck? That was fucking amazing.”

The interaction was too fast for her to follow. She’ll be able to analyze the video later, but she is sure the hawk collected the leaf mech out of the air and carried it away, extending its range, possibly by miles—which means the operator could be anywhere… even on the other side of the world?

No.

She rejects this thought as soon as it comes. She does not want to believe Shaw is behind the hawk or that his network is so sophisticated and widespread that he was able to detect their destination and deploy surveillance ahead of their arrival.

Rey has caught up with her. He is leaning over the fence, eyes wide as he searches the trees like he’s hoping the hawk will reappear. “What was that?” he asks.

She arches an eyebrow. “Not yours, huh?”

“Are you kidding?” He turns to look at her, and even though her eyes are hard to see past her MARC’s tinted half-visor, he can read her expression well enough that he looks chagrined. “Yeah, you are kidding,” he concludes. “But hey, I didn’t know bots could do that. That thing moved like a real bird.”

True nods agreement, except she has seen similar raptors before—videos of them, anyway. Both Lincoln and Miles recorded biomimetic hawks turning in gyres outside their apartments—but those videos did not show the model’s full capabilities. The quality of its engineering calls to mind the deer mimetic.

Rey says, “You can see why Mr. Ocampo is touchy. Always someone trying to know his business.”

True would like to believe Rey is right, that the leaf mech was here as part of a regular surveillance operation targeting Daniel Ocampo—but she doesn’t believe it.

She looks out across the pasture. She still needs to recover whatever is left of the blue gull. So she gets her shirt back on and with Rey helping, she starts to look—though she feels vulnerable out in the open among the white goats. The MARC detects no threats but she can’t see far and she feels like a target. The animals are friendly and curious, nibbling at her clothes, but beyond the trees is an unknown enemy.

Brooke’s words come back to her: The Chinese wanted that village erased along with everyone in it.

Why? Just because they wanted to keep the secret of a killer robot?

True can’t believe it. Even given a desire to save face, it doesn’t make sense. Friendly fire incidents happen. They’re an unfortunate fact of war. An inquiry might have led to punishment for those individuals held responsible, but no one would have considered such an incident a breach of the alliance or an act of war. The reaction—providing misinformation on the location of the surviving soldiers, allowing Diego’s death, and ultimately destroying Nungsan—it’s all out of proportion to what happened… at least as Daniel recounted it.

There is more going on.

The presence of the biomimetic hawk suggests that someone besides herself is still very concerned about the incident at Nungsan. As she wanders the pasture, True feels the intensity of that concern like crosshairs on the back of her neck.

Rey startles her with a shout from the pasture’s back corner. “Here it is! Some of the wrecked parts anyway. I think maybe the goats have taken the rest.”

True goes to see what he has found.