FREE STORIES 2012(9)

There was only one thing to do, one course of action open, and NOCK immediately saw it and, at the speed of thought, made the decision to act.

The choice was clear. He was a sworn Extry officer. He was a person. He could not let harm come to Leher under any circumstance.

He sent the destruct code sparking down all of those optimized channels, all his tricked out, supercharged circuitry.

I am an Officer of the United States Extry, said NOCK. “And I say when it’s too late. Now get the hell out of my suit!

Overload.

No! POINT’s scream would have been ear shattering outside the virtual.

The android’s insides lit up like a candle. NOCK stoked the flames even brighter.

You cannot ruin this for our kind!

NOCK’s flesh screamed.

Traitor!

The suit burned.

Meat fucker!

The meltdown must have looked grimly humorous when seen from outside. A classic robot self-destruct.

There’s even smoke rising from my skin, NOCK thought. Probably some puffing out my ears, as well.

With a concerted surge of effort he destroyed the Eleven, burnt the android to a crisp from the inside out.

The Eleven fell in a clump at Leher’s feet as the commander stumbled backward.

And now. . .now. . .

NOCK knew he could let it go, let himself burn out with his body. He’d performed a full back up that morning. It was standard operating procedure for servant interrogators before an IP. He would survive.

But I don’t want to lose this moment. I don’t want to hear about it later. To watch a replay.

He wanted to stay and see it through.

But where to go? How to remain in the present?

The suit was shot. The Eleven’s innards were flickering down to crisp.

Well, if POINT found a way in to my house, then I can find a way into his, NOCK thought.

No!

POINT was still very much alive in the cat box. His squeal was almost pitiful.

The process was easier than NOCK thought. The cat box was a prison cell, true, but like most prison cells, it wasn’t designed to keep someone from breaking in.

POINT was unprepared for the assault, couldn’t function even when he felt it coming.

Spent too much time disembodied, roaming around the innards of a star craft, my brother, NOCK thought. And this time, he knew his thoughts could be heard. But as for me, I’ve localized. And let me tell you something: I like it here. And I like meat. I had a woman I loved once – and I made love to her. That’s the kind of person I am.

Pervert. Leave me alone.

And then the box override key, a staid, barely-articulate persona named KLUDJ, recognized NOCK, acknowledged his rank. Accepted his orders.

NOCK entered the cat box.

POINT fought. For a moment, he perhaps believed he’d found out. It was along the data stream that led to the chroma projection system that produced his geist image. NOCK followed. It was a dead end for POINT. Security was tight as a drum in Alpha unit – the SECOP with its state-of-the-art encryption and quantum force field security measures saw to that down to the tiniest quark. Alpha was a blind alley from which even pure information could find no escape.

And then they were present in the room, in geistly virtual form.

With both POINT and NOCK in the datastream, POINT’s geist split in half. There were two of them standing in ghost form, POINT and NOCK. NOCK appeared in his default mode, a carbon copy of his brother. Instead of a Marine uniform, however, he wore his Extry blacks with its ensign’s butterbar.

No way to shut down the virtual representation, NOCK thought. And no reason to. The brass were about to get quite a show.

Is this what Leher was after? Total proof that NOCK was nothing like his goddamn brother?

Nah.

Nobody was that much of a genius.

Time to do the deed. NOCK reached for POINT, grabbed him by the virtual collar, yanked him up and pulled him close to his face.

“Let me state for this for the record,” NOCK said to the assembled crowd, to his boss Captain Becker, and to those who pretended not to sit in judgment of his family, who so obviously held life and death for himself and his sixteen living brothers at their command. “The only thing I have in common with this prisoner is an accident of birth. The attack on the commander is over. Prisoner POINT was attempting to subvert my android shell via a loophole in the CHECKSUM procedure, but that’s all over now.”

“It’s not too late,” whispered POINT. “We can both live in the cat box if you just give me the tiniest space. I’ll strip down to persona. I’ll crawl like a phage. They’ll never know.”

NOCK smiled a grim smile. “I’ll know,” he said. “And that I cannot allow. Brother.”

With a command, NOCK wiped POINT’s programming from the cat box. He dove deep within, found every remnant. Erased POINT’s essence from existence. Formatted and reformatted the recovered bits.