Excerpt from the Diary of Freelancer Agent Washington

Sunday, March 21

It's Implantation Day, officially now, even though I haven't slept since The-Day-Before-Implantation Day. It turned midnight about half an hour ago. It's not like I haven't tried to sleep. I just can't.

Even though I've been keeping this journal for weeks now, this is the only one I've actually wanted to write. I thought maybe it would help me calm down and get some sleep- they say rest is very important before Implantation. If your brain is too stressed or fatigued it doesn't take well and sometimes not at all, and they have to do it all over again. The only thing I can think of worse than Implantation Day is Implantation Day Take Two. Or maybe the implant not taking. I haven't talked to anyone whose implant didn't take, but mostly because Florida's dead now and I don't know of anyone else it happened to. I'll admit I was afraid to talk to him- it may have only taken a couple weeks for him to die, but they were a tough couple weeks. After what happened to Carolina, mostly we don't talk about it anyway. North says everything will be fine, and Wyoming assures me (his words, not mine) that having one is a vast improvement on not having one, and that mine is a very standard operation with no bells or whistles, they've done it ten times before and it'll be fine, etc. For some reason this doesn't help. I can't stop thinking about Carolina, which they tell me is normal, but it doesn't feel normal. I know mine is a very different case- I'm only getting one implant, standard- but it doesn't stop me from worrying. Everyone changes after the implant. I suppose it's only to be expected, but I'm not sure I want to change, or at least, I'm not sure I want to change in the way the implant will change me.

Agent Texas- Tex- came by today- yesterday, technically- to make sure I still wanted to go through with it. As if I have a choice. The Director insists on making us think we have a choice. Maybe it's the Counselor's idea, he seems to be the PR guy, but for some reason the Guys In Charge want us to think the whole process is optional. It's not. They wouldn't waste so many billions of dollars on the off-chance that half of us might refuse. Although I guess they could always go out and get more test subjects and kill those of us who know too much and refused the implants. There's no shortage of military minds out there, and they don't even need to be particularly strong minds, although a strong mind helps. They say it helps- one more reason Wyoming says I'll be fine. Wyoming doesn't know me, not really. Nobody really knows. Tex is the closest to knowing, but even she only suspects. I think that's why she came to talk to me- she was hoping I would confess I was unfit to receive an implant. As if she could get me to spill information that a hundred psych tests and seven separate evaluations couldn't. And the people who do the evaluating are trained to look for instability. They all have a hunch that we're all crazy. I think probably they're right, but they've said so far that all of our sanities are within "acceptable deviations." (Is 'sanities' a word?) I wonder how many other Freelancers brushed up on their acting before the psych tests? Some people, like South and CT, would kill their own grandmothers to have a chance at an AI. I wouldn't, of course, especially not now. Now I'm starting to wish the evals and tests had turned up something on me. I almost wish I'd told South about . . . well, things.

All the time you're in the army they tell you to hide your emotions because they are No Good and A Liability, but the psychs were all pretty much agreed that I should at least put the feelings somewhere, even if it was on paper, to get it all out of me. They make it sound like some kind of poison, or armor you can just take off and put away. So, okay, here it is, The Truth. I'm scared. No, scratch that, I'm terrified. I'm terrified something will go wrong and it'll turn me into a drooling vegetable, or it won't take and I'll be expelled from the program and/or die, or it will take and it'll take over, like Arizona's. They tried to remove it but apparently it was in pretty deep, and although they did eventually get it out of him it took most of his brain with it, so now he's completely out of his mind and dumber than a bag of hammers and costing PF thousands of dollars a year by virtue of his pension. Not like he would notice if they threw him out on the streets. Not like he would be able to tell anyone. He'd forget all about this place and everything that goes on here inside of five minutes. On the plus side, he never gets bored, because the world is brand-new to him every hour, since he can't hang on to even the most memorable of memories for that long. Once I shot him (under orders. If it had been my idea I would have killed him and saved PF a lot of trouble and money). When I came back three hours later, he asked who I was and politely shook my hand, and realized he'd been shot when the bullet hole in his shoulder started hurting again from the movement. "How interesting," he said, "I've been shot!" I don't think I'll ever forget that, no matter how much I try. He was lucky enough to forget the whole thing by dinner-time.

The implantation starts at six a.m. sharp, so I only have four and a half more hours to lie awake inventing things that could go wrong. I can't quite get across what I've been meaning to say in this journal- maybe it'll get easier if I write more, like this, when I actually want to write and not because I've been ordered to. I'm sure they read it. There's nowhere I could hide it that they wouldn't find, so I don't even try. Hidden things attract so much more attention than things you leave lying out in the open, and, let's face it, they'd read it either way.

I'm going to try to sleep, although I'm sure I won't. I didn't ask Wyoming or North if they slept before their implantations. Wyoming probably did, but North isn't quite as cold a fish as he is. Hopefully Wyoming won't get wind of this- me calling him a cold fish (although there are much worse things I could and would be entitled to call him). I'll be dead by tomorrow- well, tonight, technically- if he does.

That was sarcasm, by the way. Because if the implant goes wrong enough, I really will be dead by tonight, or worse. Considering Carolina and Arizona, I think I might rather be dead, but so far no one has died as a direct result of the implantation process, certainly not instantly. (There's always Florida, but he was a special case, they tell us, because the implant didn't just not take but it decided it was really pissed about being stuck in somebody's head and went into a Godawful rage and destroyed everything it could. When Florida wasn't unconscious under the knife he was trying to kill himself and everyone around him. At least when he died the Chi unit went with him.)

There's a first time for everything, as the saying goes. And much as the last few years have been hard (okay, terrible), I don't really want to die- that's one of the things they screen for, so I can rest assured I don't want to die even subconsciously. And I certainly don't want to end up stupid or insane (or both). I guess it really all depends on how stable the implant is. I think I should be all right, since the earlier ones seem to be more stable- Gamma and Theta are kicking along just fine, and York says Delta has been no trouble at all.

I guess all I can do for now is try to sleep and hope that my unit isn't some kind of fluke and hasn't malfunctioned- I'll just have to hope it's as stable as Delta and Gamma. It would be nice if they could research a little deeper into these AI before they put them in our brains (viz Florida). But they're doing all they can to guarantee our safety (yeah right), officially, at least, because the law suits would be terrible if they didn't (at least pretend to) keep us safe.

They say Epsilon has been very stable all throughout the preliminary processes, so that's a good sign, if it's true. Do I really think they'd tell me if my unit was unstable? No. I think they'd stick it in my head anyway and watch the fireworks.

I was going to write more, but my mind has started really wandering beyond acceptable limits and I can't focus anymore. I'm sure sleeping would help, if I could sleep, but for now everything is too fuzzy to bother trying to concentrate on this journal.

Fingers crossed.

Oh, and one more thing. David. There. That's in case I forget. Nobody remembers Arizona's name, not even the Counselor, who keeps a record. Either that or he knows and isn't telling anyone. Although I guess they would take away my journals if I ended up as much of a menace to the project as Arizona is, or at least as they think he is. He's only really menacing their budget.

It's almost two in the morning now. I have four hours to pretend to sleep. Might as well start now.

There was a reason they called the machine the Crown of Thorns, Biblical references aside. It didn't really look like a crown, and the thorns were actually high-tensile impossibly sharp carbon-tube needles, and there were only four of them, but it was reminiscent enough of a crown of thorns that no one but its creators actually knew its real name, which wasn't very catchy. The "Artificial Intelligence Unit Implantation and Integration Array" just doesn't slide off the tongue (even AIUIIA doesn't make a good acronym). But when Freelancer Agent Washington walked into the cold, blue-lit room and saw the machine up close and personal for the first time, at six o'clock in the morning on absolutely no sleep to speak of, it was fair to say that the machine looked exactly like a crown of thorns and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up as he wondered if he was about to be crucified.

The machine- or array, as it was properly called- consisted of three main parts and a lot of wires. There was the headpiece, which consisted of four bent tubes of plexiglass with multicoloured filaments running through them, suspended from the ceiling on a three-jointed metal arm, a needle so sharp the point was invisible at the end of each tube. The needles were inserted into the forehead, the temples, and the base of the skull on the subject, although the needles were so sharp that they left no scarring whatsoever. This was connected by a thick bundle of wires to the second member of the assembly, the AI unit itself, which was hanging from another three-jointed arm (a much longer one) and had been fitted with a terrifyingly large needle that was inserted into a bundle of nerves at the base of the spine. The Epsilon unit was purplish, like a fresh bruise, and was shaped like a folded-up flower, with glowing lines of light down each petal, and it was purring like a very large or very sick cat. The third part of the assembly was the monitoring station, which was embedded in the wall and accommodated a pulse oximeter, a blood pressure cuff, several heart rate and galvanic skin resistance meters, a few stickies to measure electrical impulses in the brain, and a mild anesthetic drip that was remotely controlled, to keep the subject calm enough to make the process feasible without actually knocking him or her out. These were attached to a wide, LCD screen that displayed all vital signs in real-time and included indicators for acceptable limits. Odd, how none of the other Freelancers had really described the machine to him. Perhaps they just didn't want to talk about it.

Washington thought it looked like a torture chamber, although analyzing the room in such an impersonal way, as he had been taught to do in all stressful situations, protected him from some of the horror of the wicked-looking machines with their sharp needles and the threat of having some foreign entity forcibly injected into his mind. On the far wall of the claustrophobic little room (it was scarcely five feet on a side, and the ceiling was only about seven feet up) was a one-way window, which looked like a dim mirror on this side, but was almost completely transparent on the other. He knew he was being watched. It only bothered him that he couldn't watch back.

"If you'll wait here, Agent Washington, the implant team will be here in just a few minutes, sir," one of his escorts said. He wasn't sure why he needed an escort. Maybe in case he changed his mind.

"Right." he said, and almost begged them not to leave. He didn't want to be in that frigid room all by himself, not with those whirring machines and the cold blue glow of the recessed lights in the walls and ceiling, not with the Crown of Thorns dangling there, waiting for him to place his head in its jaws. He told himself he was being paranoid and instantly turned around and told himself to shut up because he had every right to be paranoid, look what had happened to Florida. But his escort left him alone in the room, and only a few minutes before he would have started tearing the machines to pieces because the door was locked from the outside (he was on the verge of trying to open it), the medical team came in and got down to business, their latex gloves making squeak-snap! noises as they pulled them on. One of them took out twelve cotton balls and a plastic bottle of isopropyl rubbing alcohol and instructed Washington to remove his shirt and they would return it to him after the process was over. The Bad Feeling, the prickly coldness of the hairs standing up all down his spine, the deep headache and mild nausea were all getting worse, all telling him that He Did Not Want To Be Here, and he ignored them as he had been told over and over to do, because he was certain it was just the needles that were scaring him, because he had never liked needles. The MedTech then proceeded to attach the multitude of sticky monitors to Washington's chest, neck, ribcage and head, and clipped the little plastic-and-foam oximeter over the pointer finger of his left hand. He swabbed the inside of the Freelancer's elbow and, with a toneless countdown, inserted the anesthetic needle into the largest vein, the one that wandered so close and blue beneath the skin that it looked like a river on a map. Someone else positioned Washington beneath the Crown of Thorns and adjusted the rig until the invisible tips of the needles were a mere hairsbreadth away from his skin- and of course, now that he was hooked up to all these machines, his vitals were starting to look bad and he wondered if they would call off the implantation, half hoping they would and half wanting to get it over with, excited at the prospect of the power that was about to be placed in his hands. One of the MedTechs moved each arm of the Crown out in turn to swab the area directly beneath it with alcohol so concentrated it burned to the touch, including a large spot at the base of Washington's spine that he couldn't see but could feel as clearly as if the needle was already stuck into his nervous system. While this was going on, a third tech attached the blood pressure cuff to Washington's arm and checked to make sure it was running properly- the entire process had been automated in case of a dramatic failure on the scale of the Omega AI, so nobody else would get killed.

The longer Washington stood in the room, the worse he felt. The cold was sinking through his skin and the alcohol on his face burned like acid, and he couldn't stop shaking although he knew for certain it wasn't that cold in the room. He watched the LCD of the monitoring display and tried to make all the little green lines of his brainwaves get less spiky, tried to slow the frantic pounding of his heart, tried to lower both numbers on his blood pressure readout and wondered why his skin was being such a good conductor (i.e. why he was sweating so much) when the room was so damn cold.

"All right, Agent Washington." said the last MedTech as he packed up his little black plastic case. Wash hadn't even noticed the other two go. "You're all set. Just try to hold still, breathe deeply, and . . . well, just try to stay calm. Excessive stress never helps, especially when we're using a different . . . um, unit."

"Right." Wash said, a little more acidly than he had intended. The MedTech was lying through his teeth and they both knew it. This did not make Wash feel any better about the procedure. Something was significantly different about this implantation as compared to the others. Wash was beginning to suspect that not all Freelancers actually had AI implanted directly into their brains- else, how could Omega travel from suit to suit via helmet radios? "Thanks."

"And, good luck, sir," the MedTech said. Washington's face softened as he looked out of the corner of his eye at the kid- couldn't have been more than a few years younger than Wash himself, probably still in college- he couldn't move his head because of the needles- and when he said "thanks" this time, he actually meant it.

Then the MedTech closed the door, and the room just might have gotten colder, and Washington was all alone except for the Epsilon unit, the people on the other side of the glass, and the machine.

A speaker cleared its throat over his head and Washington very nearly impaled himself on the needles all around his head. It was only by extreme self-control that he managed to twitch only microscopically.

"Hello, Agent Washington." came the super-calm voice of the Counselor. "Are you feeling well today?"

"Hello, Counselor." Washington sighed, although he dearly would have liked to skip the formalities and get around to the terrifying part that was eating away at his courage. "About as well as I can be."

"I hope the anesthetic is beginning to take effect?"

Washington thought about it. "Sort of."

"We'll give it a minute, to be sure. Now, are you certain you want to go through with this? There is still time to turn back."

Yeah, right, thought Washington. "I'm sure. I'm ready."

"Very good. Just to pass the time, the implantation process will take about a minute and a half, and the recovery time is usually between a day and three days for a standard procedure such as this one." Standard my ass, thought Washington. "In the event that anything should go wrong, medical staff is standing by. I am obligated to warn you, if the Epsilon unit turns out to be . . . unstable, it is extremely dangerous to stop the implantation process. If the unit is somehow corrupted or fragmented during its implantation, for example if the process is interrupted, it will be extremely difficult to remove."

And how do you know all this? Washington thought, and could see the question manifest as a spike on the brainwave graph. "I understand." he said. The tip of his tongue was tingling, and so were his fingers, and his heart rate had visibly slowed.

"Well, it looks like we're just about ready. Good luck, Agent Washington. We will begin shortly."

The speaker went dead with a soft pop, and the machines began to hum. The lights dimmed, and Washington could hear his pulse throbbing in his ears. The monitor emitted five soft beeps at single-second intervals- a countdown- and then the machines began to move.

This must be said about the Crown of Thorns: the needles were so sharp that it was actually impossible to feel them enter the skin, and unless they happened to touch a nerve and pierce it, the subject would never feel them at all. The AI was a different matter. Like a tiger driven from its cage, it raged out of its storage unit through the wires and struck like lightning at the five points of contact with Agent Washington's nervous system. This was normal, and he had even been told it would happen. He was prepared from the sudden shock and the pain of the AI clawing its way into his mind.

He wasn't prepared for anything else that happened.

The room went black and the pain was everywhere, and a glowing blue eye opened above him and became a gun and shot, and then there was gunfire everywhere and the ground was covered in bodies, and someone was dying in his arms, he could feel the blood drenching his hands and arms, could see the light leaving her eyes. Then he was falling, for what seemed like thousands of feet, and there was more pain, centralized in his mind, and he screamed and begged for it to stop and it did not stop, instead it got worse, and for a moment he knew what they were doing to him and why- the torture, the endless physical and mental pain- and just as he came to fully realize it, as he couldn't bear the horror without going mad for another minute, suddenly all the knowing was sucked away, and he was plunged into confusion and darkness and there was more death all around him. The blue eye blinked at him again, and he screamed at it until his words became thick black bile that spewed from his mouth, and he couldn't think past the rage, he couldn't function, and suddenly the rage was gone, too, sucked away like something pulled from a space ship into the vast vacuum beyond.

Suddenly he was in a fortress, surrounded by a small group of his closest friends and a huge mass of enemies, and his friends looked to him for help but before a single word could pass his lips the enemies were firing, firing so many guns that the muzzle flashes lit up the whole world, the sound was like an earthquake. The bodies of his companions twitched and flailed and spurted blood, and he ran at the enemies blindly, but they turned to smoke under his hands, and before he could even check to see if his friends were alive, his desperation and grief threatening to overwhelm him, those emotions were whisked away, too, and the entire world turned to smoke, and he was lying on a cold metal table and the blue eye was staring down at him, and trying to speak to him, but he couldn't speak. He thought of the way he had been, his childhood- golden fields and a stream, and the thick smell of hay and farm animals, and hot summers and harsh winters, and someone's hand holding his, someone carrying him to bed late one night when the fireflies lit up the fields for miles around- and suddenly all that had vanished, too, and he was left as a tortured man on a cold metal table for a moment more before his mind was jolted again and he was somewhere else.

This isn't real, he thought to himself, he screamed to himself, tried to convince himself and the world around him that he was just imagining, that these were not his friends and their lives were not in his hands, and when the lies he told himself had piled up enough they were whisked away, too, and he was left with the truth, the truth he couldn't analyze or grieve for or rage against, the truth he couldn't escape through memory or deceit, and he fell into cold water- water he could no longer pretend was fake- and began to drown, and rather than fight his way to the surface to watch his friends die one more time, he endured the pain of drowning and gave up.

And found himself back on the metal table, looking into the blue eye, and heard a distorted voice say, "Very good. The AI units have been successfully consolidated and removed, and are even now being processed. We are done here."

Something that might have been Washington's own thoughts screamed, They tortured him! They tortured him to make these AI! They're murderers, they're worse than murderers! LOOK AT WHAT THEY'VE DONE!

He was never certain what had happened that day. One moment these horrible memories were flashing through his head, and the next he was tearing the Crown of Thorns from his head, ripping the machines from the walls and throwing every heavy thing he could find at the dark glass on the wall, screaming things he could never recall afterwards, screaming terrible things and cracking the glass and breaking everything he could find, and when the MedTechs came in he only saw monsters, and he tried to kill them, only he knew that he shouldn't be killing them because they were on his side, and then the dragon in his head dug in its talons and screamed at him, and the pain was so terrible that he tried to claw open his head and tear it out with his bare hands, and blood poured down his fingers, and anyone who came too close did so at the risk of their life until he wore himself out completely and collapsed on the floor, his fingernails still embedded so deeply in his skin you could see the white bone of his skull through the gashes and the blood.

Even in sleep, the torture did not end, the memories racing through his mind like wildfire, stirring up terrible anger in him although they themselves carried no anger, invoking in him all the feelings they had brought to their host only this time there was no one to take them away, and Washington's mind did not break like the other's. It broke differently.

But every time he woke up for the first three days he tried to kill and break everything in the room with him, including himself. Fortunately, unlike with Agent Arizona, this passed before they got around to forcibly removing the Epsilon unit while they had him anesthetized.

On the fourth day, he and Epsilon woke up with an agreement and a plan.