The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

DARYL GREGORY Brother Rifle

The rehabilitation of Corporal Rashad Williams began like a magic trick. “Pick a card,” his doctor said. “Any card.”

Rashad considered the five cards on the table: yellow X, red circle, green triangle, blue square, orange rectangle. The symbols and their colors didn’t mean anything to him.

Two years before, a bullet had entered Rashad’s right occipital lobe, destroying the eye and ripping through the orbitofrontal cortex. Before that moment, he was a person who made things happen. Then, suddenly, he became an object that things happened to.

He was passed from doctor to doctor like a package with an unreadable address, until he arrived here, in Berkeley, at the lab of Dr. Subramanian, a lanky, East Asian, T-shirt-wearing dude, clearly civilian. The first thing he’d said when he shook Rashad’s hand was, “Thank you for your service.” The second was, “Call me Dr. S.” Rashad hadn’t been sure how he felt about that.

Rashad reached toward the yellow X with his right hand, then withdrew. A minute passed. Then two.

“Take your time,” Dr. S said. Rashad couldn’t decide if his smile was sincere or hiding his impatience. Sitting beside him was Alejandra, his grad student and assistant. She was a small woman, only a year or two older than Rashad, with glossy black hair pulled back so tight he thought she might be ex-military. So far she’d said very little, her attention on the tablet in her hands.

She was reading his mind.

The wires in Rashad’s Deep Brain Implant exited the skull but didn’t break the skin; they ran down his neck like artificial veins to a lump nestled a few inches from his right collarbone. This device, 98 percent battery and the rest a cluster of computer chips, controlled the DBI and spoke wirelessly to her tablet.

Rashad tapped his fingers at the edge of the table, near the red circle. He looked at Alejandra. She lifted her chin, and they shared a moment of eye contact before she returned her attention to the screen. Her eyes were very dark. Did she know which card he was supposed to pick?

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. Ma’am.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” the doctor said. “We’re just establishing a baseline. The first step to getting you back to your old self.”

Alejandra glanced at the doctor, but said nothing. Her face had not changed expression. He wondered what she was thinking, but the flow of information went only one way.

“Why don’t you try again?” the doctor suggested.

“Yes, sir.”

Rashad wondered what, exactly, he was being tested for. Did the symbols have secret meanings? Or were the colors significant? Perhaps red meant no. Could he ask to look through the remaining cards in the deck, or was that against the rules?

Dr. Subramanian shifted in his seat. Alejandra tapped at her screen. The test had been going on for fifteen minutes.

“I’m sorry,” Rashad said again. “I can’t decide.”

Once, Rashad had been very good at making decisions. Even that first month in Jammu and Kashmir, with insurgents firing at them from every rooftop and IEDs hiding under the road, he’d rarely hesitated and was usually right.

The man he’d been before the wound—​a person he thought of as RBB, Rashad Before Bullet—​was a systems operator in a fifteen-marine squad, responsible for the squad’s pocket-sized black hornet drones and his beloved SHEP unit. Good name. It was like a hunting dog on wheels, able to follow him or forge ahead, motoring through the terraced mountain villages, swiveling that .50 caliber M2 as if it were sniffing out prey. The sensors arrayed across its body fed data to an ATLAS-enabled AI, which in turn beamed information to the wrap screen on Rashad’s arm. Possible targets were outlined like bad guys in a video game: a silhouette in a window, on a roof, behind a corner.

But the SHEP wasn’t allowed to take the shot—​that was Rashad’s decision. He was the man in the loop. Every death was his choice.

When a target popped up on his screen, all he had to do was press the palm switch in his glove and the silhouette would vanish in an exclamation of dust and noise, eight rounds per second. The AI popped up the next target and if he closed his fist just so, another roar ripped the body to shreds.

Hold. Bang. Hold. No and Yes and No.

“Aw sweetie, why don’t you go to bed?” It was Marisa, his sister-in-law. Rashad realized that for some time he’d been pacing. His hands ached, and he was surprised to see that his fists were clenched tight.

She touched his elbow, and he relaxed his hand. She was a white woman, and a Christian, but as kind and devout as Rashad’s mother. “Come on, I’ll take you.”

Rashad followed others now. He lived with Marisa and his brother, Leo, eating what they ate, waking up and going to bed when they did, watching the same shows. When he stayed too long on the patio Leo told him to come inside. When Marisa found him standing in front of an open closet, frozen by possibilities, she put the clothes in his hand. And when they found him pacing the house in the middle of the night—​sweating, pulse racing for no reason—​they guided him back to bed.

He lay down on top of the covers, as was his habit. Marisa put her hand on his forehead, over his eye patch, and said, “We ask for your healing, Lord.” When she said amen, he echoed her.

He’d become as obedient as the SHEP, but without any purpose. He could offer up no targets, protect them from no threats.

The next morning, Leo told him to shave and pull on a collared shirt, and then he drove Rashad the ninety minutes between Stockton and Berkeley. Rashad had appointments at the neuro lab every Tuesday and Thursday. This was week eight.

“Does it feel like it’s working?” Leo asked. Rashad didn’t know what to say. What did “working” mean? Some days he felt a shift in the way thoughts percolated through his brain; certain images and ideas took on a disruptive tinge, like the rasp of the bow under a violin note. Or perhaps he was imagining it. He knew Leo wanted the old Rashad to come back, the smart, cocky kid who laughed easily and threw himself into challenges. That Rashad had vanished into a world of acronyms—​USMC, LeT, J&K, LOC, SHEP—​and came back with a new one: TBI. It was Leo who’d signed the papers to enroll Rashad in Dr. Subramanian’s experimental program, and after two months, he seemed no closer to getting his little brother back.

Ten miles later, Leo shook his head. “Never mind.” He put his hand on Rashad’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, bro.”

Alejandra came out to the waiting room, neutral ground where she and his brother could transfer custody. “I’ll have him back to you in four hours,” she said to Leo.

She led Rashad through a confusion of corridors. Once he’d had a reliable sense of direction, but the bullet had destroyed that, too. In the lab he sat automatically at his usual seat, and she knelt and wired up the fingers of his left hand, connecting them to various recording devices. The controller in his chest, of course, was already whispering its secrets.

She looked up at him and smiled. “Ready for the slide show?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He knew she was just being polite, and not really asking for a decision. Acquiescence was his default.

She positioned the monitor and aimed the camera at his eye. Images popped up on the screen for half a second or less, a mix of animals, buildings, people, objects. In one burst he saw a brown horse, then a gray concrete building, the blue rectangle, a white woman in a green dress, an army PFC in desert camo holding an M4, a white sailboat. Blink, and another burst: green triangle, Labrador retriever puppy, yellow X, black M007 pistol, yellow X again. The card symbols came as frequently as punctuation.

Rashad had to do nothing but keep his left hand steady on his knee and his eye fixed on the screen; his body and brain reacted, sending data to Alejandra’s devices without bothering to notify him. Every twenty minutes she called for a short break, and every hour she brought him water or a cup of coffee—​she decided which.

Dr. S was two steps into the room when he said, “Knock knock! How’s it going in here?” Alejandra paused the slide show. The doctor shook Rashad’s hand.

He usually stopped by for a few minutes during each appointment, like a dentist checking on a patient being worked on by a hygienist. Alejandra handed him the tablet. He jabbed and swiped at it, nodding and humming. Finally he sat beside Rashad and said, “I think we’re ready to start the experiential phase.”

Alejandra’s head turned sharply to look at the doctor, but Dr. S didn’t react. He said to Rashad, “Let me explain what I mean by experiential—​it’s means we’re finally going to start bypassing the damage.”

The damage. The bullet had destroyed the link between Rashad’s limbic system and his frontal cortex, so that he no longer experienced emotions. But this wasn’t because his body lacked the machinery to create them. His amygdala and thalamus and hypothalamus continued to churn away, sending hormones coursing through his bloodstream, and his body responded: his pupils dilated and contracted, his heart raced and slowed. But these effects didn’t spark pain or bring him pleasure. He might as well have been reading about them on Alejandra’s tablet, each abrupt increase in his heartbeat another spike on a graph, each microburst of perspiration a data point. His body was throwing up indicators of a brain that had entered a particular state. But pain, pleasure? Those were things that didn’t exist without a consciousness to perceive them.

His lack of emotions didn’t turn him into a hyper-rational Mr. Spock; just the opposite. He’d become a tourist wandering through a foreign city where every street looked the same. When he was presented with the cards, a thought would come to him: pick the yellow X. But the thought had no weight, no rightness to it. The next thought came: pick the red circle. But that thought, too, was another soap bubble, easily popped.

It wasn’t that logic had become inaccessible. He could grind his way through a puzzle, he could solve math problems. But even with simple questions—​what’s twelve times twelve?—​when the answer arrived it seemed to tiptoe into the room, apologizing. He doubted its veracity. Nothing rang true.

Dr. S told him they were training his implant to pass the messages from the limbic system to the part of his brain that made decisions. “The DBI’s a black box—​signals come in one side, and leave the other, getting reinforced or weakened in the middle. Or at least they will—​nothing’s coming out the other side yet. All we’ve been doing so far is training the system.”

“He understands neural networks,” Alejandra said.

In the field, the SHEP’s AI was always learning from Rashad, recording which path he took through an environment, noting which shots he took and which he avoided, trying to become a better helper. The DBI was simply an artificial neural network planted inside his own broken one—​one trying to become more like Rashad. The images weren’t merely pictures: they were triggers for a host of emotions and concepts and memories already primed in Rashad’s brain.

“What’s the algorithm?” he asked. “How does it decide which signals to strengthen?”

Dr. S’s eyebrows raised—​a signal of surprise. Alejandra tilted her head. That gesture, however, was opaque to him.

“A great question,” the doctor said. “It starts with your body.” He talked about somatic markers, the residue of previous decisions by which the body felt its way to a new choice. “We monitor your heart rate, your oxygen levels, your galvanic skin resistance—​everything we can think of—​and of course the activity itself recorded by your implant. We try to match it to the firehouse of data coming through the DBI. Say that we’ve just shown you a picture of a puppy, that seems like it would be a positive emotional response, yes? So we assign a value to that moment of input and tag it.”

They’re guessing, Rashad thought. And then another thought came: They must know what they’re doing. Then: They’re guessing.

“Perhaps a picture of an attractive person makes your eyes dilate,” the doctor said. “Male or female, we’ll tag!” He chuckled, and Alejandra looked away. Was she embarrassed? Rashad couldn’t tell.

“Who decides what to tag?” Rashad asked. “You? Alejandra?”

“No, no. Well, yes. We have software that makes all the initial associations and applies a rudimentary score, based on data we’ve gotten from several hundred volunteers who’ve watched the same slides. Alejandra reviews the data entering your DBI, and can make corrections where necessary, based on your own history and known preferences.”

He thought, They know my history. But of course they did. His medical records would be on file: every detail from before the injury and from the aftermath, his diet of antibiotics and opioids, maybe even his psychologist’s therapy notes. For all he knew, both of them had gone back and read his evaluations from boot camp through deployment.

He wondered, idly, what Alejandra thought of him. Was she upset by what he’d done in the J&K? He tried to replay her reactions to him, but it was like watching a movie without sound.

“Rashad? Rashad.” The doctor was waiting for his response. “Are we good to go?”

Alejandra said, “You can’t ask him that. And in my opinion—”

“Yes, sir,” Rashad said.

“Excellent.” And then Dr. S was gone. Rashad turned back to the screen, ready to resume the slides.

Alejandra touched his arm to get his attention. “Do you have a therapist?”

That was an odd question. “No,” he said. “Not anymore.” For a few months after he was discharged from the hospital he met with a psychiatrist, but the sessions went nowhere.

“I’ll talk to your brother,” she said. “He should get you an appointment before next week.”

“Why?”

“You’re going to start feeling things.”

Pierce died first. He was a Black cowboy from Montana, a thing Rashad hadn’t known existed. Pierce said the mountains above Tartuk reminded him of home. They were severe and snow-capped, but the valley was alive with burbling creeks, lush trees, brilliant flowers, emerald fields. In this terraced village, every narrow street switched back to reveal another row of stone houses, another bridge, another burst of green. Another shooting gallery.

Jumma and Kashmir was the only Indian state with a majority Muslim population, a former “princely state” caught in the middle of the Indo-Pakistani war of 1948. Eighty years after partition it was where the two countries worked out their issues while deciding whether to nuke each other. Pakistan-backed LeT insurgents fought the Indian army and sniped at the police, the police arrested and interrogated secessionists, secessionists bombed police stations. And the marines, as Pierce liked to say, were the filling in the shit sandwich.

Tartuk had been “secured” a month ago—​insurgents pushed out, IEDs cleared—​but since the town sat only 2.2 kilometers from the LOC, Bravo Company remained, keeping the peace, winning hearts and minds, et cetera, though everyone knew the area could turn hot at any moment. The civilians, like civilians do, insisted on staying in their homes, tending to their fields, sending their children to school. When the squad went on patrol, old men wearing long robes and Adidas running shoes watched from doorsteps. Schoolboys in blue shirts and red ties flowed around the marines, laughing. One morning a ten-year-old girl in an orange headscarf skipped up to the squad and patted the SHEP, chattering to it in Balti.

“I don’t get it,” Rashad said after she left. “Why do their parents let them stay here? They gotta have relatives somewhere south of here.”

“It may be a shit sandwich,” Pierce said, “but it’s their—”

His head jerked back. Only then did Rashad register the crack of a rifle shot. Pierce collapsed to the ground.

Rashad was only six feet behind him, leading the SHEP on its string. The wire was low-tech, hardly more than a fishing line, stretched between Rashad’s belt and the SHEP. Rashad stopped, stunned, and the SHEP halted with him. The squad was on a steep gravel street, the stone houses rising up on each side of them.

Sergeant Conseco, their squad leader, shouted commands, and the rest of the squad flattened onto walls or ducked into doorways. They were in a stone chute, very little cover. Rashad sprinted forward, still wired to the SHEP. The vehicle detected the angle and intensity of the pull and followed at the same speed, engine whining.

Rashad reached Pierce and knelt. Pierce looked up at him, his mouth working, but making no sound. His throat was awash in blood. A roar of gunfire, and the stone next to Rashad’s head exploded in dust. The sniper had switched to full auto. Someone, one of the squad, cried out. Wounded, not killed.

Conseco yelled, “Northwest, up high! Find that fucker.” Despite the loudness of her voice she sounded calm.

Rashad yanked the wire out of his harness and let it retract into the SHEP. He tapped his throat mic and said, “SHEP. Go two meters in front of me.” His voice was shaking. “Park at forty-five degrees to road. Scan for targets.” The robot lurched forward, swung around Rashad, and jolted to a stop. The .50 cal unlocked and began to swivel.

Suddenly Conseco was beside him. “I’ve got Pierce. I need eyes, okay?”

“Eyes. Yes, sir!” Rashad scrambled to uncover the screen wrapped around his arm, silently yelling at himself. Why the fuck hadn’t he had the drones in the air at the start of patrol? (Because it drained the batteries and that wasn’t SOP.) Why didn’t he at least have the tablet on? (Again, not SOP.) Why didn’t he see this coming? (Because because because.)

The screen filled with four windows streaming from the SHEP’s cameras and LIDAR. Immediately, a target popped up, outlined in red. A figure in a window, not thirty feet ahead. The palm switch in his right glove tingled. He declined the shot—​the target wasn’t in the direction of the sniper.

He opened his hip pocket and extracted the black hornet. The drone was just four inches long, painted matte black. He toggled the switch and the rotors spun, tugging to get out of his grip. He tossed it into the air and it zipped away. Ten seconds later he launched the second hornet.

Sergeant Conseco had pulled off Pierce’s tactical vest. Blood soaked her hands and arms. Pierce was looking past her shoulder at Rashad; his lips were no longer moving.

“Hey man,” Rashad said. “Don’t worry. Don’t worry.”

“Eyes,” Conseco said.

Rashad swiped at the tablet, bringing up the hornet cameras. The drones were already twenty meters overhead, where they could not be heard and were practically invisible. He could see himself, and Pierce and Conseco, all huddled in the shadow of the SHEP. The other squaddies were arrayed along the street, guns up, but holding fire. He sent one hornet zooming back along the way the squad had come, to guard their rear. He flung the other northwest, where Conseco had guessed the shot had come from.

Somewhere, hiding in one of the gray buildings above them, was a sniper.

Everyone in the squad seemed to be shouting at once into the coms. Rashad tuned them out. He had a talent for concentration, a gift for leaving his own body behind while he saw to the needs of his machines. The hornets weren’t as smart as the SHEP, but they were semi-autonomous and programmed for combat semantics. He didn’t control them. He asked them to hunt, and when they reached the waypoints he’d set and found no target, they followed their own programming and entered a search pattern.

It was the rear-flying hornet that barked first, flashing red on his screen. A human figure, splayed on the roof of Building 31, pointing a long gun. Sergeant Conseco had been mistaken—​the sniper was directly behind them. The parked SHEP provided no cover.

Rashad was watching the screen when the muzzle flashed. Two feet behind him, Sergeant Conseco died.

Three weeks after he’d started the experiential phase of treatment, Marisa found him standing in front of his closet again. “Do you need some help?” she asked.

The closet contained almost everything he owned here in California: half a dozen boxes from the apartment he’d lived in before enlistment, a few sets of clothes, and two pairs of shoes Leo and Marisa had picked out from when he’d been discharged. The remains of his childhood—​his high school yearbooks and basketball trophies and science fair projects—​waited for him in his parents’ garage in Arizona.

“Here,” she said. “Let me pick something.”

“I’m fine,” he said. “I can do it.”

The words came out sharp. He immediately apologized—​and now there were tears in her eyes. He apologized again but now she was smiling at him despite the tears. She hugged him and said, “Hey there, Rashad.”

He was so confused.

“I don’t know why you put up with me,” he said. “If you want me to leave, I can—”

“No! You’re family.” She rubbed his arm. “We’re just glad you’re here with us.” She said this so gravely that he sensed he was missing something.

“Thank you,” he said, to fill the silence.

“Now, you go to it.” She closed the door behind her.

He gazed at the stack of boxes. An uneasy feeling rolled through him, and he almost walked out of the bedroom. Since the new phase had begun he’d been sleeping poorly. He’d wake up feeling as if the ceiling were closing in. Watching TV with Leo and Marisa made him feel restless, and he’d go out to the backyard to pace. Some food tasted better, but some of it much, much worse.

But mostly he felt the same as before. He went where he was told. He wore the clothes that were set out for him. And he went to his appointments in Berkeley. He didn’t know why, on this afternoon, while Leo was at work, he suddenly wanted to find the thing he’d hidden.

He took down the top box. Inside sat his old gaming console in a nest of cables. He opened the next box, and the next. Then he found a steel lockbox hardly larger than a shoebox.

He stared at it, his breath was coming high in his chest. His thumb ran across the combination lock, turned the wheel. The combination was his enlistment date—​his second birthday.

The pistol lay swaddled in oilcloth. A fully loaded magazine lay beside it. He picked up the weapon with one hand, opened the cloth with the other. The gun was larger than he remembered. Heavier.

During his first leave, between boot camp in San Diego and deployment, he’d missed his sidearm—​of course he hadn’t been allowed to leave the base with it. He drove to a gun shop on Pacific Avenue and chose a Glock 19M, the civilian twin to the M007 he’d been issued. He drove immediately to a firing range, and the first time he pulled the trigger he thought of the Rifleman’s Creed, which his drill sergeant had made him memorize: There are many like it, but this one is mine.

He’d never told Leo about the gun. He knew Marisa would never stand for a weapon in the house.

Finally he slipped his hand around the grip, his finger straight along the trigger guard. The safety was on. He pulled back the slide. There was no shell in the chamber.

He could load the gun or leave it empty.

Pierce was dead. Conseco was dead. And the sniper was still on the roof, with half the squad still within his field of fire.

Rashad threw himself against a wall and shouted “SHEP!” into his throat mic. “Building 31, go, go, go!”

The AI understood the sentence. Building 31: a known entity on its map, photographed and tagged months ago by drone. Triple-go: top speed. The robot spun in a tight circle, then charged down the steep road that Rashad had trained it to navigate.

Rashad swiped at his wrap and brought up the hornet’s stream side by side with the SHEP’s. The drone circled feet above the roof, close enough to show the sniper’s eyes, the silver snaps on his blue windbreaker, the white laces of his black sneakers. The gunman was on his feet now, holding his rifle with one hand, looking down at the robot charging toward him at forty miles per hour.

The shooter pivoted toward the far end of the roof, where a trapdoor lay open. He was going to go down into the house.

The SHEP reached the bottom of the steep road, spun around a low stone wall. Building 31 was a cement house, one large door in front, and two open windows. The .50 caliber swung to cover the edge of the roofline, but there was no angle for a shot.

“Grenade,” Rashad said. “The window to the right of the door.” The window lit up with a red outline. Rashad’s glove vibrated and he closed his fist: Yes. The grenade flew through the opening, thunked against an inner wall, and exploded with a bang that would have deafened him if he’d been there in person.

He sent the SHEP hurtling into the front entrance. The door seemed to vanish in front of the camera. The room was full of smoke. The SHEP, however, quickly identified heat signatures. Three red outlines popped up, and the glove seemed to be shaking itself from his hand. He made a fist. Yes. The gun erupted. Yes.

Another figure appeared at the edge of the screen. The SHEP’s M2 was already spinning to face the threat. More red outlines.

Yes and Yes and Yes and Yes and Yes and Yes and Yes.

Alejandra dealt three cards: blue square, yellow X, orange rectangle. He touched the blue square, and she made a note on her tablet. Then she dealt three more: yellow X, red circle, and another blue square. He understood, now, that these were arbitrary choices. What she was measuring was probably not what he chose, but the speed of his decision-making, or perhaps the level of stress in making the choice. Even so, he was reluctant to choose the blue square again, so he tapped the red circle.

After a few rounds of cards, Alejandra set up the slide show. She moved unhurriedly, projecting an aura of quiet he was reluctant to disturb. He wondered again what she thought of him. It alarmed him how desperately he wanted her to like him.

At the break after the first twenty-minute round of slides, she asked, “Have you scheduled a therapist yet?” It had been a month since they began the experiential phase.

He felt heat in his cheeks. So she still thought of him as a patient. “No, there’s a waiting list. The VA says they’ll call me.”

“So you haven’t gotten any meds, either?”

“No.”

“Damn it,” she said, almost under her breath. He’d never seen her express annoyance—​or else he’d missed it.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll ask Leo to call again.”

“It’s not you. This should be part of the treatment. I told him—” She stopped herself. Him—​Dr. Subramanian. The past several appointments, he’d not made an appearance. Alejandra had said that he was traveling. “I’ll make some calls,” she said.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Your brother said you’re not sleeping.”

Leo talked to her? Behind his back?

“It’s okay,” Alejandra said. She was watching him with those dark eyes. She didn’t need a tablet to read him. “He’s worried about you.”

“I’m fine.” This was a lie. Sometimes he burst into tears for no reason. His body had developed strange aches. A sharp noise could make him jump out of his skin.

“Are you having suicidal thoughts?”

“No.” Another lie. Had he taken too long to answer? He wasn’t sure she believed him. What had Leo told her?

“It wouldn’t be unusual if those thoughts came back,” she said. “You haven’t been able to feel them for some time. If you want, I can turn down the signals from the DBI. Ease you back down.”

“You can do that?” Then: “I don’t want to be like before.”

“Not all the way off, just less . . . volume. Until you have a therapist. It would give you space to deal with what happened to you in India.”

So. She had read his file. Shame tightened his chest.

“I don’t know everything that happened there,” she said. “But I do know that they put you in a position where you had little choice about what to do. They trained you to fight, then put you in the line of fire. Then they gave you tools that made it easy for you to do what they wanted you to do.”

“You’re just describing how the military works.” His throat was tight.

“I’m saying you’re not completely responsible. Your options, your degrees of freedom, were restricted by so many things—​the rules of engagement, the environment, the ATLAS targeting system—”

“No. I’m responsible.” He was surprised at how harsh he sounded. “I’m the man in the loop. The SHEP is just another weapon, like a rifle.” He was processing so much information. She knew about ATLAS, too? Did she have security clearance? Who had she talked to?

“ATLAS is much more than a rifle,” she said. “It was designed to make it easy to pull the trigger. It’s called automation bias. They wanted a system where it would be easier for a soldier to follow a suggestion rather than—”

“I’m not a soldier,” Rashad said. “I’m a marine.”

Alejandra stopped, blinked. She was embarrassed, he realized. Maybe the DBI was making it easier for him to read expressions, too.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you’re not army. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“I’m not offended,” he said. “But a marine—​making hard choices while under fire is what we’re trained for. A machine can’t do that. Robots make bad marines.” That was something his instructor at special operations school liked to say.

Alejandra thought for a moment. “If you could go back in time, knowing what you know now, would you stop yourself from doing what you did?”

“You mean, take away my free will?”

Her face froze. He’d intended to make her smile, but somehow he’d said it wrong.

“Here’s what I would do,” Rashad said. “I’d go back in time and take away the sniper’s free will to shoot at me. I’d kill him before he entered that house full of people and climbed to the roof.”

“That would be the right thing to do? You have no doubt?” It was almost as if she were asking permission.

“No doubt.” They both seemed surprised by his certainty. Decisiveness had crept back into his thinking.

They resumed the slides. Blue square. Puppy. Yellow X. Pistol. Yellow X. Sailboat. Once it had been almost relaxing to sit through the cascade of images, but now he felt as if he were riding the bow of a SURC in heavy surf. By the end of the final series he was sweating, nauseated. He turned away from her, flipped up his eye patch, rubbed away the sweat. He didn’t want her to see the wound.

She brought him water. They chatted about the recent heat wave. And then she said, “I have something to tell you.”

He could hear the edge in her voice.

“Dr. Subramanian’s taken a position back east,” she said. “Cornell’s opening a new neuroscience lab and he’ll head it.”

Rashad couldn’t speak for a long moment. “And you? You’re going with him?”

“In a few weeks. I need to finish my work with him, to get my PhD.”

The room seemed to shift. It was the strongest, most piercing emotion he’d felt since the bullet. Had the DBI’s neural network strengthened the signal as it passed through? Or, shit, weakened it?

Finally he said, “So you have no choice.” Another failed attempt at a joke.

“There are good neurologists here,” she said. “They’ll continue to see you, and they know the protocols. You’re not being abandoned.”

It didn’t feel that way. “Don’t let them turn down the volume,” he said. “Please. The implant’s working.”

“I can’t promise you. Your brother wants to end treatment.”

Another blow. They were coming too fast now, getting past his guard. He said, “Leo can’t do that.”

“He’s your legal guardian. He has medical power of attorney. If he wants to end treatment, I can’t stop him.” She touched his hand. She’d never done that before. “But I’ll try to convince him to keep you in treatment.”

“The DBI stays on,” he said. “My choice.”

The night after Pierce and Conseco died, Rashad kept his shit together by staying busy and focusing on the next day’s mission. He did not break down when he was ordered to visit the family of the people who’d been in Building 31. He made his apology and the company captain paid the survivors 100,000 rupees, which came out to about $1,100 US per victim. One old man, four women, and three children. The surviving brother claimed they weren’t secessionists and didn’t know the sniper. Through the translator he said, “When they tell you they’re coming into your home, you have no choice but to let them in.”

Rashad projected calm when the squad rotated out of Tartuk, said he was happy to spend the next four weeks in the relative safety of Srinagar while they waited to return to Camp Pendleton.

The SHEP never left Tartuk; it was passed to another squad staying in the village. But the robot had already taught him what he needed to understand, just as the Rifleman’s Creed had promised. My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. Once they reached stateside there’d be no more open carry; his sidearm and rifle would stay in the armory when he wasn’t on the shooting range.

So. It would have to be here, in the barracks in Srinagar.

He’d heard about jumpers from the Golden Gate, who changed their minds between the bridge and the water. He wasn’t that kind of person. His mind was made up.

His body, however, betrayed him. When he awoke in the hospital he realized that his hand must have shifted, or his head pulled back. Some subconscious reflex. The bullet entered at an oblique angle and exited without killing him. By then, however, the failure didn’t bother him.

Leo and Marisa were arguing. Rashad could hear them from his bedroom. For the past few weeks he’d chosen to spend most of his time here. He was no longer interested in watching Leo and Marisa’s TV shows, eating the meals they prepared. He came out to microwave his own food and take a shit and sometimes, when they were asleep, pace the circle of the living room, kitchen, and dining room. He left the house only for his regular appointments with Alejandra. He’d refused to visit the therapist she’d found for him. He needed isolation and quiet for the work he was doing.

The arguing stopped and then they knocked at his door. Kept knocking. He let them in. They stood over him as he sat on the bed, hands on knees. He hated himself for putting them through all this. They were good people.

“Dude,” Leo said. “This isn’t working. You can see it’s not working, right?” He described Rashad’s various behaviors over the past few weeks, as if Rashad wasn’t aware of them.

“I can leave,” he said.

“That’s not what we’re saying!” Marisa said.

Leo said, “We just have to talk to Alejandra before she bails on you. There’s something wrong with the implant. The way you’re feeling, this isn’t you.”

“You’re wrong,” Rashad said. “This is finally me.” He could feel the DBI working, like a cave tunnel widening day by day, letting through more and more water. “I can’t go back to what I was before.”

“That’s the implant telling you that,” Leo said.

And Rashad thought, What part of your subconscious is making you say that? Whether the subsystem was mechanical or biological made no difference.

“When we go in tomorrow,” Leo said, “I’m going to tell them to turn that thing off.”

“That’s not what I agreed to,” Marisa said hotly.

Rashad was surprised they weren’t on the same page. He’d thought they’d been arguing about how to confront him, not what to say.

Marisa said, “Numbness isn’t the answer.”

“Thank you,” Rashad said. “I have to—” His voice broke. How could he explain that he wanted this pain? That he believed in it. He’d turned the bedroom into a kind of arena—​Rashad Before Bullet versus Rashad After—​and he didn’t want to shrink from those blows. It would be immoral to not feel that pain. What kind of coward would he be if now, after finally regaining the ability to regret what he’d done, he refused to face it? “I have to take responsibility.”

“You did what you had to do,” Leo said.

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t take responsibility,” Marisa said. She knelt so that she and Rashad were eye to eye. “I’m saying you don’t have to keep beating yourself up about it.”

“Yeah, I do,” Rashad answered. “That’s the point.”

“You can ask God for forgiveness.”

Leo groaned. “Can we keep this on track?”

“Why would I do that?” Rashad said to her. “So I can feel better?” He shook his head. “I’m not going to shrug this off. I’m not going to move on, now that I have a second chance.” The bullet that had meant to be his punishment had robbed him of it.

“Please,” Marisa said. “It’s not so hard. You can ask Jesus to come into your heart.”

“Definitely not.” No more intercessors, strengthening some signals of forgiveness, dampening remorse. “My heart,” he said, “is crowded enough.”

“Pick a card,” Alejandra said. “Any card.”

Yellow X. Red circle. Green triangle.

“Why are we doing this?”

“Humor me. One final exam.”

“More data for your dissertation.” It was a mean thing to say. He tapped the green triangle.

She put the card away and said, “Okay, pick a card.”

“You’re not going to replace the card?”

“No.”

That annoyed him, this change in the rules. Wouldn’t this mess up her results? He looked at the red circle, then the yellow X. He suspected she wanted him to choose that second card, and he didn’t appreciate being manipulated. He tapped the red circle.

She removed the circle and dealt a new card. Blue square. He quickly tapped it. She took it away and dealt the circle again.

“Oh come on,” he said.

“Pick a card,” she said.

“You want me to pick the yellow X. Why?”

“Pick whichever you want.”

He flicked the red circle toward her and it slid off the table. Immediately he felt like a dick. She calmly retrieved the card and dealt a new one from the deck.

A yellow X. Two of them on the table now, side by side.

“Pick a card,” she said.

He couldn’t remember a time where there’d been a pair of matching cards on the table. Was this some new requirement phoned in by Dr. S? Or maybe she was going rogue, defying the doctor’s orders. There’d always been a tension between those two, a struggle for power—​the grad student chafing under the control of the mentor. In the early appointments, he didn’t have the emotional equipment to figure out their relationship. But now the DBI floodgates were open. Everything his back-brain had noticed and reacted to was available to him now. He could make any decision he wanted—​including the decision to not participate.

“I’m done,” he said.

“Please, Rashad. Pick a card.”

“There’s no choice. They’re the same.”

“Think of them as right and left. Which do you choose?”

“There’s no point. You’re leaving.”

“All right,” she said evenly. “Do you want to sit down?”

He realized that in his anger he’d stood up. He was looming over the table, his heart beating fast.

“Can you put those away?” he asked. The pair of Xs looked like the eyes of a cartoon corpse.

“Could you pass them to me?” she replied.

Fuck you. Immediately he felt childish—​but still didn’t want to give in. “They’re right in front of you.”

Suddenly she looked sad. No, sad was too broad a word—​there were more fine-grained descriptors for what he saw in her face. Resignation? Regret? Then she swept the cards toward her, and when she looked up at him again she was assessing him. She’d learned something new about him, he realized. By calling a halt to the test, he’d continued the test.

This unnerved him. He unclenched his hands. Took his seat. He couldn’t look directly at her. He could see that her hand still held the deck of cards.

“I know you’re going through a rough time,” she said. “But I want you to hold on. You can call me anytime. I’ll do anything in my power to help you.”

Except stay.

“There’s something else.” There it was again, the same hesitancy as when she told him she was leaving. He understood now that the assuredness he’d seen in her in those first appointments was a kind of uniform she put on. He’d done that himself, many times. “I need to tell you about a part of the treatment.”

“Okay . . .”

“We had to decide on some images as controls—​we hard-coded some to a set value. For example, some images always have an output of a positive value.”

“Puppies? All those pictures of dogs?”

“It wasn’t that, but yes, something like that.”

“Without telling me.” He couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice.

“I’m sorry.” Her voice had gone soft. “It wouldn’t be a control if we told you. And we also chose one to be a negative value. Something’s that’s always aversive. Something you’d avoid at all costs—​even if later you had to make up a story for why you chose what you did.”

Her hand still lay on the deck. And then he understood. His chest tightened. “Yellow X.”

“You’ve never chosen it. Not once. At first, you couldn’t choose any card. But then we turned on the DBI, and we made it difficult for you to choose that card—​and then impossible.”

“You can’t know that. I could have chosen it.”

“Yet you never did.”

“Deal the cards.”

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Do it.”

She shuffled through the deck, chose three, and laid them out. Green rectangle. Red circle. Yellow X.

She watched him. As soon as he chose, she’d record it in her tablet, and that would be their final interaction. Tomorrow she’d fly across the country to join Dr. Subramanian. They’d make their careers off of his injury, his handicap, his crimes.

He was tired of being data. He knew which card he’d choose, but that didn’t mean he’d have to share it with her.

“Sorry, Alejandra.” He stood up. “You don’t get to know.”

The gun sat inside the open box. He felt queasy looking at the gleaming metal, as if the weight of it bowed the floor, drawing the walls toward him.

You did what you had to do. Bullshit, of course. Yes, in the final moments he was part of an unstoppable chain reaction. Neurons fired, his fist closed, the palm switch activated, the SHEP’s gun discharged, bullets followed the path decided by physics. But that didn’t mean he could deny the series of choices he’d made to that point. He chose to enlist. He chose to go to systems operation school. He chose to send the SHEP into that home. The women and children in that house were simply the last dominoes to fall in a sequence he had initiated years ago. Maybe Alejandra was right, and ATLAS had been rigged for Yes, designed to take the burden from his shoulders—​it was right there in its name, for Christ’s sake. But none of that absolved him.

He knew what sin was. And he didn’t want to believe in a world where sinners escaped justice.

He reached into the box. His hand was shaking. Coward, he thought. He grunted and forced his hand around the grip.

It was as if he’d stepped off a precipice, plummeting through air, the water rushing to meet him. The gun fell from his hand. He scrambled to his feet and stumbled to the bathroom. Emptied his stomach into the toilet.

He sat on the floor, sweating, his arms trembling.

Leo heard the noise. He came into the bathroom, knelt beside him. “What’s the matter? Is it the implant?”

Rashad couldn’t speak. Images flashed behind his eyelids. Yellow X. Pistol. Yellow X. He heard Alejandra’s voice: I’ll do anything in my power to help you.

Leo put his hand on Rashad’s back. “I’m here for you, bro. I’ve been so worried about you. Just tell me what you need.”

It wasn’t what Rashad needed that was important, it was what he wanted—​and that had changed the moment he touched the gun. He’d never been so sure of anything in his life.