Cutting Edge

29

The killer sitting in front of Patel spilled out of a chair that was much too small for his bulk. He was an enormous man, tall and broad-shouldered, a feral counterpoint to Patel’s own stature. He was presently seated behind a desk, his arms crossed over each other like fireplace logs as he concentrated on the lesson Patel had given him today. He was a notoriously slow reader, yet absorbed a surprisingly high percentage of the material. At the very least, his concentration never ebbed. He was perhaps the only man Patel had ever known whose will was greater than his own.

Until three months ago he had been assigned to the First Marine Raider Battalion, the Marine Corps’ lesser-known counterpart to the Navy’s SEAL program. He was thoroughly trained in irregular warfare, and within his tactical squad he was — no surprise to anyone who knew him — a close-quarters combat specialist. Or as his commander had put it so succinctly in a training report, This is the last man on earth you want to make angry inside a closet.

He’d had a sterling military record before his misfortunes — plural because there had been two. The first was three years ago in Iraq. The small reconnaissance team he’d been leading had uncovered a cache of artillery shells in a shed outside Fallujah, and when the unit’s EOD specialist extracted one for inspection it began to leak gas. Of the three members of the squad exposed to the vapor, two were dead within a year. Patel’s killer, however, had survived, albeit with one aberration: he no longer had a hair on his body, every single follicle having dropped off-line. No eyebrows, no whiskers, nothing on his head or chest or arms. Complete alopecia, and something the doctors had never been able to explain. Not that it really mattered — shaved heads were all the rage. For its part, the Marine Corps was delighted to have such a lethal individual back, and they deployed him straight back into the field, rather like a howitzer with a new wheel.

The more serious setback had occurred the previous January when the dirt bike he was riding, somewhere near the Iraq — Syria border, struck a concealed IED. By witness accounts he was thrown thirty feet into the air, and the mere fact that he’d survived was a testament to recent advances in battlefield medicine. Survival, however, is not an outcome in itself. He spent two months in a coma before his family authorized the machines to be turned off. It was then, during that narrow window of administrative limbo when paperwork was being run and final arrangements made, that the gunnery sergeant was paid a visit by Dr. Abel Badenhorst. After a review of the case — in particular, an extensive series of brain MRI’s — Badenhorst thought the patient an ideal candidate for META’s experiments.

And indeed he had been.

The huge man turned around, his face as expressionless as ever. He handed Patel a yellow Post-it note on which he’d scrawled: I understand all of this except the satellite link.

Patel said, “You don’t have enough effective radiated power to connect to a satellite, but certain GSM repeaters may work.”

He thought about it, scribbled again, and handed over a second Post-it: How can I find these repeaters?

“Do a standard search for available signals. They should show up on the map with a red R.”

More scribbling: Can I get more power?

“No, you can’t,” said Patel. “The human brain runs on twelve watts of power, roughly one-third the requirement of a refrigerator lightbulb. Your power sources are nanowire fuel cells, catalyzed from enzymes that occur naturally in your body. Transmissions are the most demanding, so they’re compiled and sent in a burst format. You’ll always have modest limitations, but if you manage your requests with care, in particular by staggering the outbound caches, power should never be a problem.”

He seemed to absorb it all, then nodded and turned back to his studies, his anvil-like head bowing over the notes.

Like an amputee learning how to manipulate an artificial limb, Delta was making good progress. His brain was adapting, translating thoughts into electrical impulses and thereby connecting to META. As far as Patel knew, the man had but one limitation — he’d completely lost his capacity for speech. There was the occasional grunt to get attention, a few mumbled consonants now and again, but any aptitude to form words had simply left him.

Atypically, he displayed no concurrent language problems. He expressed ideas in writing as concisely as ever, and had no trouble understanding what Patel told him — all, at least, within preexisting limitations. Patel and Badenhorst had performed dozens of cognitive evaluations on their subject, who’d been META’s first survivor. He had above average intellect, particularly — as Badenhorst was fond of jesting — for a Marine. The two of them had tried diligently to determine the source of the speech impairment, thinking it critical to distinguish whether the loss was a consequence of the explosion or something gone wrong in the implantation process. They’d sent the results of their tests to a number of specialists, necessarily holding back any images that displayed the neural implants, and without fail keeping secret their patient’s identity. As it turned out, Badenhorst had not lived long enough to see the responses to those inquiries. Patel had. And they suited him perfectly.

He watched the man study his notes, concentration evident in his hunched posture. He’d spent most of the morning in the hotel fitness center, which given his build was presumably a lifelong pursuit. He was slightly over six feet tall, but twice the width of a normal man, raw power in every pink, hairless limb. He reminded Patel of some great pelagic fish, a creature that spent its whole life moving and hunting in an endless blue void, never seeing the sky above or the bottom below — the place where it would inevitably come to rest.

Patel tried to recall his name. He’d seen it once, months ago, shortly after the first surgery. Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Something-or-other. It hardly mattered. Gunny Something-or-other would never use that name again. From this point forward, there would be only false identities, and those would change on a regular basis. Patel never bothered to keep up with them, and the reason was clear. The two of them had embarked on a journey together, one that had no return ticket. So intertwined, Patel had taken to referring to the former Marine by the only constant — his identifier from the META Project.

Of course, even that was a bit of a misnomer, as the sequencing of their test subjects had fast gone astray. The Marine had been the third subject operated on, but the first trail of Badenhorst’s novel implantation techniques. The first two procedures had been complete failures, Charley not surviving the surgery, and Alpha never recovering brain activity. But then, finally, success.

His name was Delta.