Free INTERZONE 254 SEPT-OCT 2014 by Andy Cox

I had a few broken ribs, and a gash in my left thigh that had nicked my femoral artery. Which had stopped bleeding for no reason at all. Nanomachines?
    Unseen hands pulled Hellen’s body through the broken side window.
    “She’s alive,” a man’s voice, flat, affectless.
    I took a deep breath. I felt different. Clearer, somehow. Was the metaprogrammer still active? “I need to save this girl. My daughter.”
    “OPTIMIZE YOUR IDENTITY FOR THE GIRL’S SURVIVAL?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Torch the car,” someone outside said.
    “EXECUTING,” the voice said.
    ***
    I had a gun with four bullets.
    I moved faster than I thought was possible.
    I did the right thing.
    ***
    There had been a time when a spectacular two car accident would have snarled traffic for twenty miles back. The curiosity factor, they called it on the traffic reports, the Lookie Lous. The traffic control program didn’t allow for such things. Only a few people noticed the wreckage in the ditch at the side of the road. The two burning cars – one filled with four dead bodies, each man with a single bullet hole in the center of his forehead.
    Helen, Faith and I huddled together in a sticky blanket I’d found in the back seat, waiting for the EMTs. Helen had wrapped herself around Faith. I had my arms around them both.
    After I’d shot out Helen’s airbag, she’d hit the steering wheel hard enough to crush her ribcage visibly. She’d vomited more blood than I imagined existed inside a human body. I had no idea why she was still alive. Nanomachines?
    Helen demanded I find her slate, which oddly was still working. I pinged the EMTs. I contracted a medevac. Oceania had no extradition treaty with the Commonwealth. If they arrived before the Troopers, we’d be home free. They were seven minutes away on the map, a pulsing blue dot making a bee line for our crosshair.
    Helen’s bloody forefinger moved slowly, deliberately, over the tablet.
    A video window popped up. A Las Vegas marriage mill.
    I’d proposed to Helen, once. A long time ago. She’d said she’d get back to me. She’d never spoken to me again. Just the one letter, about how I’d burn in hell.
    Helen coughed. I used my shirt to clear the blood from the slate. Faith was keening softly in her arms, her face buried in her right armpit.
    I explained our situation to the alarmed looking woman at the marriage mill. She nodded, recovering quickly. She had done this kind of thing twice before. Once with a couple climbing Everest, who’d been caught in an unlucky storm.
    The ceremony took four minutes. We used the old words instead of improvising modern vows, as we were pressed for time. Till death do us part. The biometric scans, thumbprints and retinas, and witnessing took another two. I heard the EMT copter in the distance.
    Helen looked into my eyes. “This was never going to work.”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know about that.”
    “I loved you,” she said.
    “Everything is going to be OK,” I said, rather than lie.
    She nodded. “You’ll be a better father than I was a mother, I’ll bet. You always were a buzzkill.”
    I kissed her forehead. We embraced, the three of us, our little, hastily assembled family.
    The marriage lasted for a minute and a half.
    ***
    I’d used half of Helen’s cash, the Enclave’s money, to pay my way into Oceania with Faith. Helen’s people had called off the mass starvation. I returned half their money via a BlackNet anonymous transaction.
    A million doesn’t buy much in Oceania. First and last month’s rent on a one room studio in one of the artists’ arcologies. Power, HVAC, data, and the voluntary security payment ate up most of it. I was going to skip the ‘voluntary’ payment, Oceania has very little crime, but it turns out that people who don’t make the voluntary payments suffer strange accidents. That’s Oceania for you in a nutshell: honest extortion. And weirdly, I liked it. It reminded me of the nineteenth century, but with computers