Itty Bitty Bigger World: Hands Up

As the San Francisco police officer quite properly pointed his smartgun at me, I was thinking five steps ahead. But I couldn't lose track of the real now. If I dropped a stitch, I could die. More importantly, hundreds of people could die just for being too close to me.

I took exactly one step forward towards the officer and said over the street noise. "I'm on the job!"

He did not take his eyes off me. "Bull!" he said reflexively, then looked me over again.

My bracelets, hearing the magic words, had pulsed red and blue briefly. So I said it again, and they pulsed again.

The officer did not relax. He kept pointing his smartgun at me. In the hands of an authorized user, it could vaporize a human. (Earlier that day, I'd used one to do some impromptu logging in a protected heritage forest.)

But he did remember his steps in the dance.

"Advance _slowly_ with your hands _up_ to be recognized."

I did so, until we were about fifteen feet apart.

So much as lowering my hands to my side would cause me either to be aggressively stunned (which I'd already been through earlier that day -- yes I'm having a bad day, why do you ask?) or to -- more likely -- quickly assume either room temperature forever (needler mode) or fusion reactor temperature briefly (plasma mode).

"The challenge of the day is ..." and he said an innocuous word.

I replied, "The password of the day is ..." and I said a completely unrelated innocuous word.

His eyes narrowed and he started to holster the smartgun.

"Stop. Captain Anderson, Reserve. Arrest me."

"Huh?" I couldn't blame him for being slow on the uptake.

"Complete the arrest. Do not ID me. Get in the back with me."

"Why should I do all that?"

"Because someone blew up a CHP flyer a little while ago and they were trying for me."

His face paled. "Turn around with your hands up. Kneel down. Put your hands on your head." I complied.

He radioed for a transport unit, parked his motorcycle on the sidewalk, and made a pretense of searching me. A crowd had gathered and was watching, as they always did.

He said quietly, "Why not simply have me give you a lift to Central?"

"Too obvious. Civilian clothes on back of a cycle, cop."

"Or take a lyftaxi to Central."

"What's the first thing you do when you approach the sally port at Central? _ID yourself_."

The officer swore.

"I need more than a password."

"Captain Amy Tsai, CHP. But she's being tracked too. Just landed on a rooftop. Her flyer was the one shot down. Don't call her just yet."

The officer scrolled his smartware. Looking away from him with my hands on my head, I couldn't tell by looking. But my smartware could.

The compressed 360 view display across the bottom of my vision showed him and an icon.

"Hmmm. Obviously you're not going to Central with that much heat on. Where to then?"

"I was thinking Golden Gate Park. Someplace with overhead cover and not many people."

"In the City!?!"

"Tell me about it."

"Can't fly you out, tried that. Capsule system is a no-go, rush hour. Foot bail is too slow ..."

The transport flyer showed up. The pilot briefly conferred with the officer. The two approached me from either side and walked me to the cabin.

It was as smooth an arrest as I could have hoped for, right up until the pilot shot the motorcycle officer in the back of the head and brought his for-the-love-of-God HOLDOUT NERVE DISRUPTOR to bear on the back of mine.

If I hadn't had the rear view up on my smartware, that would have been the end. But I did.

I grabbed his wrist, broke his elbow with the other hand, kneed him in the abdomen, elbowed him in the side of the head full force, stripped the nerve disruptor (about the size of a deck of cards) from his hand, and stamped HARD on the back of his neck as soon as his body hit the ground. A sickening crunch transmitted through my foot told me that I had broken his neck.

The smells told me everything I needed to know. The smell of burnt hair and cooked flesh and melted eyeballs from the murdered motorcycle officer. The body waste of both dead men.

Yes, Timmy, people really do kill each other still in the last half of the 21st century...

I tapped my wrist bracelet against the flyer control compartment and it opened. I flung the murder weapon into the compartment and mounted up.

The console was screaming and I was hearing alert traffic go out. Automatic monitoring had determined that two police officers had just been murdered at my location.

The flyer nonetheless admitted that I was an authorized pilot and took off when I ordered it to.

The flyer filed my identity with Central.

"DANGER! ORBITAL LASER TARGETING!" the console screamed.

So I ham-handedly flew the flyer into the nearest open capsule tunnel. As I passed its mouth, the world lit up behind me briefly then darkened.

"Capsule routing, emergency priority, stay underground and keep moving!"

My tentative plan was in ruins.

The adversary was doing fast work. He'd corrupted a cop in real time.

I had no such ability to move the scenery around. If I used my priorities, this left a bread crumb trail he could track and strike. If I didn't, I was stuck slow, on foot surrounded by advanced technology systems that could be abused to produce my sudden death at any moment.

But equally important, every moment he abused his powers, the rest of the world had the opportunity to catch on to his game. All over the world, systems were diverting to manual control, passwords were being changed, procedures modified, Threat Trackers updated... so put that way, the answer became glaringly obvious.

"Emergency priority, CHP Redding Barracks!"

The flyer pressed me back against the seat. It did not take much intelligence to predict that with the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate jammed, the flyer would go airborne to cross the San Francisco Bay.

Instead the flyer stopped and started surging upward. It was no longer under my control.

I prepared to dismount. I was tempted to pick up the nerve disruptor, but it was a short ranged surprise weapon that could be used for only a single purpose - murder.

But when the door opened, a woman wearing a tattered tan uniform growled, "Move over!"

I did hastily.

Amy was also having a bad day. She grabbed the controls, reconfigured them briefly, started to hook up her respirator to the flyer, discovered that its pouch had been ripped from her belt, and growled "Strap in!" at me.

So I strapped in.

If she was having a day anywhere near as bad as mine, the last thing I wanted to do was piss her off.