Fine

The AI cop clocked Stan doing ten over on the MD 5 and pulled him over, johnny boy sirens and all. It was close to midnight as the exhausted warehouse hump pulled onto the highway’s narrow berm and waited alongside a dark corn field. Cheryl was probably already pissed. He had burned through his promised home time by over two hours.

He remained seated and calm as the thing approached his vehicle on its transparently robotic legs. But then it had a faux-human face that had a faint glow illuminating it from inside. “Fucking Halloween,” he whispered under his breath. The cop approached and stood by the driver’s side window and smiled down at him. He knew it was scrutinizing the interior of his vehicle. He also knew there would be no negotiation, no leeway like there might have been with a meat job cop. He was glad he had not been drinking. They could practically do the Breathalyzer check on you just by sniffing the air. He just sat there as still as he could and tried to look like a good little parishioner in some church he would never attend in a million years.

“Good evening, it is my pleasure to serve you. My name is Officer James-749 and I will try to make this as quick and painless as possible for you. Perhaps you realized you were traveling in excess of the posted speed limit for this state route. My LIDAR device measured an overage of ten point seven miles, in violation of the posted speed limit. Your license plate, registration and driving record have all been scanned and everything looks fine. No warrants were discovered on routine search. I can either issue you a citation digitally now or if you are interested in paying with mnemonic currency we can do a quick upload here. I am authorized to collect the payment and cancel the citation as paid. Which payment method would you prefer, Mr. Turski?”

Stan used to have a fear of the memory collection process, but since he had scofflaw genes and a bank account with a shitty balance, he decided to go the mnemonic route. Besides, he had already done it twice before and it was as painless as getting any other shot and he had suffered no negative side effects from his previous donations.

Stan got out of the car and quickly rolled up one sleeve to expose a bicep tattooed with a rather substandard drawing of an angel drunk on a bar stool. The cop produced a device like a small drill with the skinniest little glass pipette aglow. He held this device in his right hand which was surprisingly warm when it grazed Stan’s skin. Some parts of these cops were covered in synthetic flesh, some not. He felt the familiar light pressure as the device lined up with a vein. Then the slight chukk of sound and more vibration than pain, really, as the nanobots went coursing through Stan’s circulatory highway seeking his brain and its rich ore of memory.

It was over in minutes. The nanobots copied the appropriate deep state memories in Stan’s brain and returned dutifully to another pipette in another device also held up to Stan’s arm, in the exact location of the first injection. Stan was given a State-issued bandaid and was soon on his way home, payment made and receipt issued digitally. If he was lucky, Cheryl might not ever even find out about the speeding ticket. He was never lucky.

He hated that the AI cop waved to him and smiled as he pulled back onto the highway. He never waved back. It’s not like you would hurt its feelings or anything.

He got home and read the slightly pissed note Cheryl had left him in the kitchen. She had apparently decided to defer the fight to the next day or whenever it could reap the most benefits. So Stan joined her unconscious body in bed and tried as hard as he could to put any thoughts of the shitty end of the evening to bed too, so he could drift off to that pleasant nothingness everything craves after being awake too long. It came swiftly.

_____________________________________________________________

Stan woke in a cheap motel room that smelled of cigars, sex and meth. The vaporous squalor nauseated him and he went to the bathroom and nearly puked. He was afraid to drink the water from such a disgustingly filthy sink. But he figured it came through pipes and was the same water he drank in his house. There was an inverted fresh cup on the sink’s porcelain shoulder wrapped in a little beige paper that reminded Stan of a hospital patient in a cheap paper gown. He ripped the paper off and even that plastic vessel was miraculously filthy. So he drank from the cup of one hand instead, feeling like an animal.

He saw a bunch of bottles of various supplements on the bed where he had been unconscious. Mostly minerals and mostly metals. Most of the bottles were brown plastic or amber glass and missing their tops, which had been scattered around the room. He saw them here and there on the scary orange shag carpeting that he figured might predate his entire life. A rasp file lay on the bed’s psychedelic flower pattern quilt too, and small twisted pieces of metals which appeared to have been grated with the rasp. There was shiny powder of grated metals over many different surfaces in the room. Even the glowing face of the television was glittering with metal dust. He ran his hand over the face of the newscaster and felt a weird flirtation of static electricity with the screen.

The newscaster was talking about him.

“….Stan Turski is believed to be armed and dangerous. Police are warning citizens not to approach him under any circumstance but instead to dial 911. He is the third resident of the state to be infected with the dangerous ABRA-nano virus in the past month. Maryland State Police have temporarily ceased doing any mnemono-collection and other states have followed suit in pausing their programs. Turning now to weather…”

Stan rushed to his denim jacket which was hung over a low chair in the room and pulled his cell phone from the inner pocket he had always loved for being extra protective of the device. It was at 7 % but he managed to read up on the story. Some of the non-governmental, renegade websites said it wasn’t actually a virus at all. It was either nanobots exhibiting consciousness and engaging in self-preserving behavior or nanos hacked to do virtually the same thing. They got inside your body and didn’t leave afterwards as they were supposed to do, as they were programmed to do. They reverse-engineered the brain and fed themselves the materials they needed to continue assembling more comrades.

Stan realized he had been colonized by a hostile army at the same time he heard an angry pounding at the motel room door. It sounded like ten fists at once, doing a drum roll of state power.

“Open up! Police!”

Stan felt a white-hot terror that jumped to his vocal cords.

“Hold up! I’m unarmed. Do you hear me? I’m coming right now. I’m going to open the door in ten seconds, okay? Do NOT shoot. Do you hear me? I am UNARMED. The news got that wrong. I’m a victim here, NOT a criminal. l was unconscious. Maybe for days. I don’t know even what the hell is going on. Officers! Acknowledge please!”

The police voice went from 100 decibels to 75 decibels. And it still sounded bloodthirsty.

“Open the door and put your hands up immediately. We acknowledge everything you just said. We’re here to help.”

Stan went to the door in his pathetic state, shirtless, in lavendar sweat pants he didn’t remember ever owning, filthy, his chest hairs glinting with rasped metals. He opened it slowly, but before it had widened even three inches the cops burst through pushing him backwards, not stopping until he was thrown onto that filthy bed on his back. They opened fire immediately and Stan’s limbs flailed about for just a few seconds, cockroach-style, followed by the laxness of death.

It was all over now but the clean-up and police mea culpa. The statement of deep sorrow and faint acknowledgement of possible teensy-weensy error (in the understandable name of caution) had probably already been drafted. It would be briefly rehearsed before hitting the airwaves.

The SWAT team did a quick reconnaisance of the room. Finding no additional threats, they waved in a technician in plain clothes who approached Stan’s limp body and placed a nano collection device against the same tatted bicep the AI cop had used barely a week ago.

After a few minutes, he turned to his comrades: “They’re not coming out. Read ’em their rights.”

Though Stan was technically dead, certainly irrecoverable, hearing is the last sense to go and he actually processed the words his ears picked up. His dying brain could not help but marvel as a young cop read the words over his defunct body:

“I am speaking to the nanobots inside the body of Stan Turski. I know you have taken over access to his cerebral processing, so I know you can hear me. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you….”

“He’s dead, though.” One of the other cops stated the obvious and got that “dumb shit” look shot back at him from several cops at once.

“Mr. Turski is gone. Right. No pulse. But take this stiff in and check his brainwaves. You’d be surprised. You’ll find weird activity. They’re plugged into his senses. We’re even going to cuff him. They’re getting better and better at reanimating. I don’t know why we ever even started this goddamn program in the first place. Using memories to teach these things how to be better at killing us. I don’t think so.”

And then as they cuffed the corpse of Stan Turski, he opened his eyes. And smiled.