The Human Division #12: The Gentle Art of Cracking Heads (3 page)

“Well, if you were the sort of people who would make this sort of remote control, you wouldn’t
make it easy to find,” Berger said. “And you wouldn’t make it obvious when it was inserted. You’d find some way to slip it into their body when they weren’t expecting it.” He pointed at Lowen’s drink. “Nanobots in your drink, maybe. You’d only need a few and then you could program those few to replicate inside the body until you had enough. The only problem you might have is if the body starts trying
to fight off the ’bots and then the person gets sick. That would present as, say, a meningitis of some sort.”

Lowen stopped sipping her drink and looked at Berger. “What did you just say?” she said.

“Meningitis,” Berger said. “It's when there's a swelling of the brain—”

“I know what meningitis is,” Lowen said.

“So it looks like meningitis,” Berger said. “At least until the people who have
inserted the ’bots tweak the ’bots so that they don’t cause an immune response. And then after that, they stay in the brain, mostly passive and mostly undetectable, until they’re turned on and they perform their slow counterprogramming.”

Berger took another sip from his drink. “After that, it’s just a matter of timing,” he said. “You get the person with the remote control in the right places,
let them use their own brains to take advantage of situations, and slip them just enough instruction and motivation that they do what you want them to, more or less when you want them to do it, and they think it’s their own idea. Their own quiet, secret idea that they feel no need to tell anyone else about. If they succeed, then the remote control shuts down and gets excreted out of the body over
a few days and no one is the wiser, least of all the person who’s been remote controlled.”

“And if they fail?” Lowen asked, almost whispering.

“Then the person who’s being remote controlled finds a way to get rid of themself, so no one can find out about the remote control in their brain. Not that they know that’s why they’re doing it, of course. That’s the point of the remote control. Either
way, you’ll never know that the remote control existed. You have no way of knowing. In fact, the only way you would ever know is if, say, someone who knows about these things tells you about them, perhaps because he’s sick of this sort of shit and doesn’t care about the consequences anymore.”

Berger slugged back the remainder of his Cuba libre and set it down on the bar.

“Hypothetically,” he
said.

“Who are you?” Lowen said again.

“I told you, I'm a pharmaceutical salesman,” Berger said. He reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet and grabbed a couple of bills. “I'm a pharmaceutical salesman who was looking for some interesting conversation. I've had that, and I've had my drink, and now, I'm going to go home. That's not what I suggest
you
do, however, Dr. Lowen. At least
not tonight.” He dropped the bills onto the bar. “There, that should cover us both.” He held out his hand again. “Good night, Danielle,” he said.

Lowen shook his hand, dumbly, and then watched him walk out of the restaurant.

The bartender came over, took the bills and reached for Berger's glass.
“No,”
Lowen said, forcefully. The bartender looked at her strangely. “Sorry,” Lowen said. “Just…don’t
touch that glass, okay? In fact, I want to buy the glass from you. Ring it up for me. And bring me some coffee, please. Black.”

The bartender rolled her eyes at Lowen but went away to ring up the glass. Lowen pulled it closer to her by dragging it by the cocktail napkin underneath and then pulled out her PDA. She called James Prescott.

“Hi, Jim,” she said. “Don’t tell Dad, but I think I just
got put in a hell of a lot of trouble. I need you to come get me. You might bring the FBI with you. Tell them to bring an evidence kit. Hurry, please. I don’t want to be out in the open any longer than I have to be.”

“You have an interesting relationship with trouble recently,” Prescott told her some time later, when they were both safely ensconced at Foggy Bottom, in Prescott’s
office.

“You don't think I
like
this, do you?” Lowen said. She sank lower into Prescott's couch.

“I don't think ‘like' has anything to do with it,” Prescott said. “It doesn't change the relevance of my statement, though.”

“You understand why I got paranoid, right?” Lowen said to Prescott.

“You mean, random man comes in, tells you a story that, as ridiculous as it is, perfectly explains the
problem of Luiza Carvalho murdering Liu Cong, pays for your drink and then tells you not to go home?” Prescott said. “No, I have no idea why you feel paranoid in the slightest.”

“You have a bunker underneath this building, right?” Lowen said. “I think I want to go there.”

“That's the White House,” Prescott said. “And relax. You're safe here.”

“Right, because I haven’t had any buildings filled
with diplomats blow up near me anytime recently,” Lowen said.

“Don't make
me
paranoid, Danielle,” Prescott said.

The door to Prescott's office opened and Prescott's aide poked his head through. “The FBI just sent you a very preliminary report,” he said.

“Thank you, Tony,” Prescott said, and reached for his PDA. “Bring me some coffee, please.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. He turned to Lowen. “And for
you, Dr. Lowen?”

“I don't need to be any more jittery, thanks,” Lowen said. Tony closed the door.

“First things first,” Prescott said, reading the preliminary report. “‘John Berger,’ or at least the one you met, doesn’t exist. They cross-referenced the name with the tax database. There are ten John Bergers in the D.C. metropolitan area, but none of them live in Alexandria and none of them have
as their occupation pharmaceutical salesman. This fact, I imagine, does not surprise you.”

“Not really,” Lowen said.

“The DNA we got off the glass is being processed and maybe they’ll have something for us later,” Prescott said. “They’ve run the fingerprints through federal and local and have come up with nothing. They’re checking the international databases now. They’ve also taken the bar security
tape and used it to do facial recognition scanning. No results there so far, either.”

“So I'm not actually paranoid in this case,” Lowen said.

“No, you
are
actually paranoid,” Prescott said, setting down his PDA. “You're just paranoid with good reason.”

“The story he told me is still nuts,” Lowen said.

“That it definitely is,” Prescott said. “The only real problem with it is that it's not
completely
impossible. Carvalho killed Liu with blood-borne nanobots specifically designed to asphyxiate him. It’s not entirely crazy to believe that someone could design ’bots to work on the brain in the way your friend suggested. The Colonial Union’s BrainPals trigger parts of their owners’ brains. None of this is particularly new in its details. It’s how it’s being used that’s new. Hypothetically.”

Lowen shivered. “You know what, don't use that word with me at the moment, please.”

“Okay,” Prescott said, a little warily. “The real problem we have with all of this is that we don't have any way to verify it. The Colonial Union let Carvalho float out into space. We have a good story, but good stories aren't enough.”

“You believe it,” Lowen said.

“I believe it’s possible,” Prescott said. “I
believe it’s possible enough that I’m going to recommend to your father that we design a protocol for nanobiotic infestations and their eradication if and when we find them. The nice thing about this story is that even if it’s completely crazy, if we get a process out of it, then this particular avenue of sabotage gets closed. If it doesn’t exist, then it gets closed before it can become a problem.”

“Three cheers for paranoia,” Lowen said.

“What would really help, of course, is if we could find this friend of yours,” Prescott said. “Conspiracy theories involving remote controls in the brain are more believable when you have people who can accurately describe them.”

“I don't think you're going to manage that one,” Lowen said.

“Never say never,” Prescott said. The door opened and Tony came
through, bearing coffee. “Your coffee,” he said. “Also, the FBI is requesting visual.”

“Right,” Prescott said, set his coffee down and picked up the PDA again, pausing briefly to also loop on an earpiece. “This is Prescott,” he said, looking into the PDA.

Lowen watched him listen to the PDA, glance over to her and then glance back at the PDA. “Got it,” he said, after a minute. “I’m going to
mute you for a second.” He pressed the screen and looked over at Lowen. “They think they found your friend,” he said. “At least, based on the screen shot they got from the security camera. They want you to take a look and confirm.”

“All right,” Lowen said, and reached for the PDA.

“Uh,” Prescott said. “He's kind of a mess.”

“You mean he's dead,” Lowen said.

“Yes,” Prescott said. “You don’t
sound surprised.”

“Give it to me,” Lowen said.

Prescott handed it over, along with the earpiece. “This is Danielle Lowen,” she said, after she slipped on the earpiece and unmuted the PDA. “Show me.”

The image on the screen wheeled for a minute and then resolved to a body lying in an otherwise nondescript alley. The head of the body was covered in blood; as the PDA got closer, Lowen could see
the deep crease above the right temple. Someone had cracked the head wide open.

For all that, the face was still blandly handsome, with the residue of a small, tight smile.

“That's him,” Lowen said. “Of course it's him.”

JOHN SCALZI is the author of several SF novels including the bestselling
Old Man's War
and its sequels, and the
New York Times
bestsellers
Fuzzy Nation
and
Redshirts.
He is a winner of science fiction's John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and he won the Hugo Award for
Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded,
a collection of essays from his wildly popular blog
Whatever
(
whatever.scalzi.com
). He
lives in Ohio with his wife and daughter.

The Human Division

 

John Scalzi's stirring new novel in the universe of his bestselling
Old Man's War

 

New e-episodes will appear every Tuesday from January 15 to April 9, 2013, on all your favorite e-book sites. Don't miss a single one:

 

January 15:
The Human Division #1: The B-Team

January 22:
The Human Division #2: Walk the Plank

January 29:
The Human Division #3: We Only Need
the Heads

February 5:
The Human Division #4: A Voice in the Wilderness

February 12:
The Human Division #5: Tales from the Clarke

February 19:
The Human Division #6: The Back Channel

February 26:
The Human Division #7: The Dog King

March 5:
The Human Division #8: The Sound of Rebellion

March 12:
The Human Division #9: The Observers

March 19:
The Human Division #10: This Must Be the Place

March 26:
The Human Division #11: A Problem of Proportion

April 2:
The Human Division #12: The Gentle Art of Cracking Heads

April 9:
The Human Division #13: Earth Below, Sky Above