FIC: Instinct - PG13, chapter 4 of 6 (Jake 2.0)
This is the continuation of the story into part 2. There's a definite break here from chapters 1-3 because there's a significant time gap. Also, this is the chapter where this story officially turned Evil. Anyway, here ya goes--
TITLE: Instinct
AUTHOR: Roseveare, t.l.green@talk21.com
RATING: PG-13
LENGTH: 20,000 words approx
SUMMARY: When Jake screws up badly on a mission, other factions at the NSA take the opportunity to push forward modifications to the Nanite Program.
NOTES: Set after 'Arms and the Girl'. Thanks to kattahj for the beta!
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3
Part 2
Chapter 4
Thought was scattered all over the place. Like the last month's memories were a total wreckage, Jake could remember arguing with Diane over the Agent Project and Deputy Director Sleet's manipulations, but anything after that, it was as though his brain jolted off-track when he tried to access it. He caught the odd image or sensation; a deep-seated gnawing feeling of trapped futility imbued it all.
It didn't take a genius to figure out that something awful had happened. For one thing, everything hurt. For another, he was lying on a damp floor in a dark room, accessorising with about half a mile of very tightly tied rope.
Some mornings, he thought giddily, it just wasn't worth waking up.
The nanites were sluggish and didn't seem to be responding overly well to his commands, which at the moment were composed chiefly of 'some help with this rope, guys?' and 'how about doing something about the pain?' That was the kind of thing that ought to be second nature by now. It felt like something had interfered with communication between the nanites and his brain, but they didn't feel damaged - not like he'd been hit by another EMP or anything like it.
He did have a furious, grinding ache down the right side of his neck and the base of his skull, as though somebody had tried to take his head off with a blunt instrument and come close to success. He groaned at the pain of movement, trying to lie in a fashion that didn't exacerbate it. 'Guys?' he pleaded again to the nanites, but they still weren't on speaking terms with him.
He lay still and just concentrated on trying to breathe until the throbbing in his head and neck subsided.
If he could just remember what had happened to him... Was it Sleet's project? Just because it was the last thing he could remember didn't mean... he had been hit on the head, after all. But he wasn't sure that partial amnesia should feel like this, a jumble as though his brain had been rewritten, and the sure sense of time that told him he'd lost a little over three weeks.
A memory flitted past him and he snatched for it.
//"And, oh look, now you can spout pages and pages from the Good Little Agent's Handbook," Diane said sourly. She pulled the chip away and its directory faded from his brain as it passed out of range. "...And now you can stop it."
Kyle was standing behind her looking sceptical and doing all kinds of interesting things with his eyebrows. Beside him was Lou, her mouth a thin, intense line.
"That was cool," Jake said. "Hey, let's try it again." He reached for the chip. Diane pulled it away, but his hand was in range and a bunch of mission protocols and assessments flooded in through the link. He smirked at Kyle as he repeated them.
"Do we really want to do this?" Kyle said heavily to Lou. "It's possible we may never shut him up."
"I'm sure the novelty will wear off after a week or two... The two of you fancy a trip to Southeast Asia?"
Kyle developed a shell-shocked, panicky 'don't do this to me' expression, wasted on Lou as she smirked with half her mouth, turned, and left the lab.
Jake laughed at his partner, and even Diane ducked her head to hide a smile.//
That was right, Jake thought. They'd tested the Agent Program's database before implanting it and everything had been fine. And the day before that - he reached, and found the memory returned more easily now - they'd uploaded the new interfacing instructions into the nanites' programming, and Diane had followed him around for 24 hours with a scarily psychotic intensity, carrying her PDA like it was an extra limb. But there'd been no apparent change in the stability of the nanites, although he'd kinda got the feeling Diane would have derived some satisfaction from proving Sleet wrong if things had gone awry.
Okay... He tried to level his breathing and organise his thoughts. If the test went well, maybe I can't blame the Agent Program for this. So what the hell happened to me? Did they have EMPs? Tasers...? The nanites interfaced with his brain, too. Maybe a big enough electrical shock would be enough to scatter recent memories and send the nanites dopey for a while.
Unfortunately, he wasn't a scientist, and none of this was helping the immediate problem of getting untied and getting out of here. Presumably Kyle, or some form of back-up, was in the region somewhere...
Shit. Surely he'd remember if they'd been killed, right? If Kyle was dead... that was important, damn it. You didn't just forget things like that, did you?
...Okay, so presumably Kyle, or some other back-up, was around somewhere, because he wasn't going to consider the alternative. If the nanites were working, he could try to find a cellphone or radio nearby to interface with, and get a message out - but the nanites weren't working, so what was the point even thinking it? Oh yeah... except for the part where, without the nanites, what the hell did he have?
Well, he was double-jointed and pretty good at logical problem-solving, so it wouldn't kill him to have a go at the ropes. Genius, he sardonically told himself.
He'd been working at them for a while when he became aware of human voices. Quiet at first, but as he concentrated and could pick out more detail it became clear to him they weren't speaking English. Somehow it didn't surprise him chances had abruptly shot up that he wasn't in the USA - in fact, no, he was sure that he wasn't. The climate felt wrong, and that same certainty that told him he'd lost a little over three weeks was equally as positive in this, too.
The language wasn't Spanish, and it didn't sound Arabic. After that, he'd pretty much exhausted his linguistic knowledge.
It occurred to him that the voices weren't getting louder because the nanites were lending a hand, but because the voices' owners were getting closer. A key grated in a rusty lock, and someone kicked back the door. Light didn't flood in to blind him because it was just as dingy outside as in, and Jake felt somewhat cheated of his rightful cliche. The two men in the door might've had darker skin than he did, and they were wearing a guerrilla-style camoflage and an excess of weapons and ammunition. Without nano-vision, that was all he could discern.
They cut the rope on his ankles and hauled him up between them, then spat curses he didn't recognise when his legs gave way. They dragged him half on his knees a short distance down the corridor and through a door at its end. He blinked gloom-adjusted eyes, abruptly dazzled. White sunlight flooded in through a long, narrow window along the top of one wall, but no outside feature was visible through the glass. He was tossed into the bare room's single chair and a third man, who was maybe an officer but certainly wasn't wearing anything Jake recognised as rank insignia, sneered at him and brandished a set-up of electrical cables fixed to a battery that looked like it'd been torn from a wrecked car.
Wide-eyed, Jake flinched away as sparks blazed between the ends of the cable. The chair fell over backwards, taking him with it, and the two guerrillas laughed as they picked him up and put him back, roughly tearing half the buttons on his shirt as they did. Wait -- that hadn't been accidental.
Shit! He'd seen this done to Kyle - if a more sophisticated version, granted - and it had not looked fun. Moreover, he'd no clue what that kind of voltage would do to him, specifically, and what would happen if they fried the nanites. As far as he understood it, if the nanites stopped working, so did he.
'Guys, come on,' he begged the nanites, pushing for all he was worth to re-establish contact. 'You want to be fried?'
The officer yelled a sentence at him that sounded like maybe it ended with a question mark. Jake bit his lip on any protest confirming he didn't speak their language, since not speaking their language seemed a pretty stellar way of making sure he didn't talk. Kyle hadn't talked... he would have to do this. The officer yelled again, and brought the wires into contact with the bare skin below Jake's torn collar.
The first shock didn't - somehow - drop him dead on the instant. But concerns over whether the voltage would actually kill him did become pretty low on his list of priorities.
***
It hadn't been the electrical shocks.
He was certain of that much as he lay back in his cell, shivering despite the heat. He hadn't had burns before, and he was damn sure he'd have had some memory - if only muscle-memory of the jolt - if he'd been through that already. Certainly his respect for Kyle had shot right up. And his respect for Kyle had been pretty high to start with.
In a way, they'd done him a favour. The experience had added focus. Now he was more angry than confused, and it had left him an overwhelming urge to get the hell out of there now and ask questions later. He didn't care where he was or how he got there so much as the fact that he was leaving. The responsiveness of the nanites had picked up a gear, whether because of the electricity or his increased mental focus he wasn't sure, but clearly despite his fears no lasting damage had been done.
He resumed worrying at the ropes while his tissues sluggishly started trudging the road to nanite-repair and traces of his strength toyed with the idea of returning. In a way it felt like at the beginning, when the nanites' effects came on in fits and starts, not really under his control. Like his brain was having to re-learn them... or they were having to re-learn him.
Memory sparked again, taking him by surprise.
//"This is still stupid." Jake could hear Diane beyond the fuzzy curtain of the anaesthetic. "This is the stupidest thing ever. Look at him--" He heard her palm come into contact with the glass of the observation room, though he couldn't see her; his slit field of vision was full of ceiling and surgeon, and those none too clear. "He's not even properly out. I mean, he's pretty out - they gave him enough of that stuff to drop a horse - but they don't know the nanites' capabilities like I do. Stupid anaesthetist! The least they could do is let me supervise. I'm Jake's doctor. I should be in there..."
Jake wished he had some way to tell her that he knew she was near. But then he supposed sending a message to her cellphone when he was in the middle of being sliced by NSA surgeons would only freak her out, even if he could have mustered the concentration.
Kyle was also there in the observation room adjoining the lab being used for the operation, but he wasn't saying much. Kyle, when he was nervous, clammed up. Kinda the opposite of Diane's reaction to being nervous, in fact. Apparently it was just the two of them. Lou was busy foiling Uncle Sam's enemies, and Sleet it seemed was not a man who felt any compulsion to watch his handiwork in progress.
He couldn't feel them cutting into his neck, but he knew they were doing it.
"Call that an incision?" Diane was jabbering. "I hope they're not gonna waste their time trying to stitch that, 'cause, hah! That? They could slap a band-aid on it and the nanites would deal with it in like - two seconds flat." She giggled, a bit hysterically. "Ooh, look, they so are. Dumbasses."
Jake heard the surgeon - or rather the other guy, who he wasn't sure was a surgeon - say, "Time to switch on," and for some reason it sounded ominous.
But it was a bit late for second thoughts. The guy reached down with a long, thin metal implement and did something out of sight that Jake queasily suspected involved sticking it into the incision in his neck. He felt the nanites' buzz of activity at the detection of new hardware.
Somewhere close, Kyle was saying, "Well, it's done. Time to find out what it is we're going to have to deal with."
'Thanks a lot for a little faith,' Jake thought at him grumpily. But even as he did, everything was receeding away from him. As if the mess of thought was being replaced by information and logical pathways, his awareness felt like it was being shifted aside, pushed into an isolated corner of his own mind, and hey... Interfacing with the chip hadn't felt remotely like this before...//
Jake sat bolt upright in his cell, barely noticing as the knot he'd been working at snapped and unravelled and every muscle in his body screamed protest about the movement.
What the hell had that bastard Sleet done to him?
***
He paced the cell, trying to work feeling back into his limbs. Every muscle burned from the strain of being pulled taut by electrical jolts. They hadn't exactly been in top shape before. His neck still ached furiously, and now that he could, he raised his hand to it. The contact hurt, but he pressed down over the remembered spot. When he'd finished almost passing out, he did think he'd felt the hard little square of metal underneath the skin. Whatever had hit him - it felt like it had been a truck - had impacted hard enough to break the chip.
And he had to concede that to be the only reason he was here, himself, able to think and feel now. Which left him wondering what had been walking around in his skin for the past month, and what Kyle and Diane had thought of it. Sleet... Sleet must have switched the chips. The test chip hadn't been the Agent Program, just some prototype database they'd thought would pass off as an unthreatening substitute.
Whoever had been walking in his shoes, they'd been sent here, out of the country, entrusted to a real mission. Maybe he'd been the perfect nano-agent, after all... but what the hell was the use of that if it hadn't been him?
Jake snarled a curse into the darkness and tried to pull back together some iota of focus. He wasn't supposed to be out of his ropes, and there'd be men coming back who-knew-when to tie him up and drag him off again. In his current state, they'd succeed. The nanites' connection was improving slowly, but still sporadic. He couldn't rely on them to fight his way out of this. He needed to find another avenue of escape.
He stood in the middle of the cell, and closed his eyes, and breathed. "Come on..." Nano-hearing told him where to concentrate... the rustle of trees and undergrowth, and unfamiliar birdsong; there was an exterior wall. No human voices beyond it that he could detect - but plenty of those elsewhere, behind the other walls.
Opened his eyes to nano-nightvision; narrowed it in on the fabric of the wall that was his barrier to freedom. Focus faded in and out as the nanites struggled to stay with him. Rough plastering, but no signs of cracks or structural weaknesses that could help him out... his hopes sank. No - wait. There had been a window, once upon a time. The change in surface was so subtle ordinary eyes might not have noticed it at all, and never in the dimness.
The window had been neatly blocked in, but the margins of where it had been would still be a line of weakness. He spread his hands against the bricked-in section and pushed, internally pleading with the nanites not to bail out on him now.
Strength didn't come easily or immediately to his call. He pushed anyway. There was a weakness in the wall; this was just plaster and cement he had to contend with, not brick or stone, and he didn't know how much, or little, strength it would take. The walls were thin and badly constructed. Surely it was possible, just possible, that even ordinary strength might exploit the weakness?
The nanites must have given him a split second's boost, because next he knew he was falling against the wall, his sweat-dampened face abrading down the plasterwork, adding more scrapes to the catalogue the nanites had yet to get to work on. Above his head, a section of the cement boundary had crumbled and the brickwork slid outward. Jake shakily reached out to bathe his hand in the beam of daylight filtering through the gap. He gulped heavily, and choked on the dust that was still thick in the air. Hauled himself back up to claw at the intact brickwork around the edges, to scrounge a gap large enough for him to fit through.
Either the nanites kicked in at last or normal fear-invoked adrenaline helped him snap away two protruding bricks, and then he was scrambling up and through, losing more skin to the coarse cement but giving thanks for his scrawny physique to any deity that was listening.
He landed on the other side in the midst of a bush that was all sharp edges and obviously in on the universe's conspiracy against him. Rolled out of it into deep undergrowth and crouched, gasping, trying to get his bearings.
The building he'd been inside backed against foliage as far as he could see. It was almost hidden underneath it. Before he could make any guesses about the best direction in which to head, he heard voices through the re-opened window space and locked door beyond. They were coming back.
Panic set in and he crashed off into the undergrowth without a thought - well, with one thought; that the NSA could track him, they had Diane's PDA and satellite surveillance and they had to be looking for him...
He wasn't sure how long he ran or what guided his steps. Maybe he subconsciously followed the faint pulse of technology. But somehow, he finally stumbled into the concealed camp just as if he knew it was there.
The stationed guard he passed stared at him with a freaked look that held, nonetheless, familiarity, though Jake couldn't consciously remember ever seeing the guy before. The man grunted at him in a sort of acknowledgement and called over his shoulder, "Duarte? Guess I owe you that twenty after all."
"The robot's back?" Kyle's voice, even though it came without enthusiasm, had to be the most amazing sound in the world. It preceded the man himself out of the tented-off back of a camouflaged truck. Kyle looked grubby, dishevelled and hardly in the best of moods, but Jake had never been more relieved to see anyone.
"Kyle! Buddy! Am I glad to see you..."
Even as Kyle's expression was changing, Jake's legs embarrassingly chose to give out. Kyle bolted across the short distance between them in time to stop him falling any further than his knees, and the last thing he saw for a while was Kyle's stunned expression as his mentor lowered him to the ground.
"Jake?" His voice was fading out, but Jake registered the astonishment in it. As if he was addressing someone he'd never expected to see again.
NB. There are, like, 2 more of these. Long Jake 2.0 stories, I mean. Written about this time last year. It's sad how long it takes me to get around to editing them.
TITLE: Instinct
AUTHOR: Roseveare, t.l.green@talk21.com
RATING: PG-13
LENGTH: 20,000 words approx
SUMMARY: When Jake screws up badly on a mission, other factions at the NSA take the opportunity to push forward modifications to the Nanite Program.
NOTES: Set after 'Arms and the Girl'. Thanks to kattahj for the beta!
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3
Part 2
Chapter 4
Thought was scattered all over the place. Like the last month's memories were a total wreckage, Jake could remember arguing with Diane over the Agent Project and Deputy Director Sleet's manipulations, but anything after that, it was as though his brain jolted off-track when he tried to access it. He caught the odd image or sensation; a deep-seated gnawing feeling of trapped futility imbued it all.
It didn't take a genius to figure out that something awful had happened. For one thing, everything hurt. For another, he was lying on a damp floor in a dark room, accessorising with about half a mile of very tightly tied rope.
Some mornings, he thought giddily, it just wasn't worth waking up.
The nanites were sluggish and didn't seem to be responding overly well to his commands, which at the moment were composed chiefly of 'some help with this rope, guys?' and 'how about doing something about the pain?' That was the kind of thing that ought to be second nature by now. It felt like something had interfered with communication between the nanites and his brain, but they didn't feel damaged - not like he'd been hit by another EMP or anything like it.
He did have a furious, grinding ache down the right side of his neck and the base of his skull, as though somebody had tried to take his head off with a blunt instrument and come close to success. He groaned at the pain of movement, trying to lie in a fashion that didn't exacerbate it. 'Guys?' he pleaded again to the nanites, but they still weren't on speaking terms with him.
He lay still and just concentrated on trying to breathe until the throbbing in his head and neck subsided.
If he could just remember what had happened to him... Was it Sleet's project? Just because it was the last thing he could remember didn't mean... he had been hit on the head, after all. But he wasn't sure that partial amnesia should feel like this, a jumble as though his brain had been rewritten, and the sure sense of time that told him he'd lost a little over three weeks.
A memory flitted past him and he snatched for it.
//"And, oh look, now you can spout pages and pages from the Good Little Agent's Handbook," Diane said sourly. She pulled the chip away and its directory faded from his brain as it passed out of range. "...And now you can stop it."
Kyle was standing behind her looking sceptical and doing all kinds of interesting things with his eyebrows. Beside him was Lou, her mouth a thin, intense line.
"That was cool," Jake said. "Hey, let's try it again." He reached for the chip. Diane pulled it away, but his hand was in range and a bunch of mission protocols and assessments flooded in through the link. He smirked at Kyle as he repeated them.
"Do we really want to do this?" Kyle said heavily to Lou. "It's possible we may never shut him up."
"I'm sure the novelty will wear off after a week or two... The two of you fancy a trip to Southeast Asia?"
Kyle developed a shell-shocked, panicky 'don't do this to me' expression, wasted on Lou as she smirked with half her mouth, turned, and left the lab.
Jake laughed at his partner, and even Diane ducked her head to hide a smile.//
That was right, Jake thought. They'd tested the Agent Program's database before implanting it and everything had been fine. And the day before that - he reached, and found the memory returned more easily now - they'd uploaded the new interfacing instructions into the nanites' programming, and Diane had followed him around for 24 hours with a scarily psychotic intensity, carrying her PDA like it was an extra limb. But there'd been no apparent change in the stability of the nanites, although he'd kinda got the feeling Diane would have derived some satisfaction from proving Sleet wrong if things had gone awry.
Okay... He tried to level his breathing and organise his thoughts. If the test went well, maybe I can't blame the Agent Program for this. So what the hell happened to me? Did they have EMPs? Tasers...? The nanites interfaced with his brain, too. Maybe a big enough electrical shock would be enough to scatter recent memories and send the nanites dopey for a while.
Unfortunately, he wasn't a scientist, and none of this was helping the immediate problem of getting untied and getting out of here. Presumably Kyle, or some form of back-up, was in the region somewhere...
Shit. Surely he'd remember if they'd been killed, right? If Kyle was dead... that was important, damn it. You didn't just forget things like that, did you?
...Okay, so presumably Kyle, or some other back-up, was around somewhere, because he wasn't going to consider the alternative. If the nanites were working, he could try to find a cellphone or radio nearby to interface with, and get a message out - but the nanites weren't working, so what was the point even thinking it? Oh yeah... except for the part where, without the nanites, what the hell did he have?
Well, he was double-jointed and pretty good at logical problem-solving, so it wouldn't kill him to have a go at the ropes. Genius, he sardonically told himself.
He'd been working at them for a while when he became aware of human voices. Quiet at first, but as he concentrated and could pick out more detail it became clear to him they weren't speaking English. Somehow it didn't surprise him chances had abruptly shot up that he wasn't in the USA - in fact, no, he was sure that he wasn't. The climate felt wrong, and that same certainty that told him he'd lost a little over three weeks was equally as positive in this, too.
The language wasn't Spanish, and it didn't sound Arabic. After that, he'd pretty much exhausted his linguistic knowledge.
It occurred to him that the voices weren't getting louder because the nanites were lending a hand, but because the voices' owners were getting closer. A key grated in a rusty lock, and someone kicked back the door. Light didn't flood in to blind him because it was just as dingy outside as in, and Jake felt somewhat cheated of his rightful cliche. The two men in the door might've had darker skin than he did, and they were wearing a guerrilla-style camoflage and an excess of weapons and ammunition. Without nano-vision, that was all he could discern.
They cut the rope on his ankles and hauled him up between them, then spat curses he didn't recognise when his legs gave way. They dragged him half on his knees a short distance down the corridor and through a door at its end. He blinked gloom-adjusted eyes, abruptly dazzled. White sunlight flooded in through a long, narrow window along the top of one wall, but no outside feature was visible through the glass. He was tossed into the bare room's single chair and a third man, who was maybe an officer but certainly wasn't wearing anything Jake recognised as rank insignia, sneered at him and brandished a set-up of electrical cables fixed to a battery that looked like it'd been torn from a wrecked car.
Wide-eyed, Jake flinched away as sparks blazed between the ends of the cable. The chair fell over backwards, taking him with it, and the two guerrillas laughed as they picked him up and put him back, roughly tearing half the buttons on his shirt as they did. Wait -- that hadn't been accidental.
Shit! He'd seen this done to Kyle - if a more sophisticated version, granted - and it had not looked fun. Moreover, he'd no clue what that kind of voltage would do to him, specifically, and what would happen if they fried the nanites. As far as he understood it, if the nanites stopped working, so did he.
'Guys, come on,' he begged the nanites, pushing for all he was worth to re-establish contact. 'You want to be fried?'
The officer yelled a sentence at him that sounded like maybe it ended with a question mark. Jake bit his lip on any protest confirming he didn't speak their language, since not speaking their language seemed a pretty stellar way of making sure he didn't talk. Kyle hadn't talked... he would have to do this. The officer yelled again, and brought the wires into contact with the bare skin below Jake's torn collar.
The first shock didn't - somehow - drop him dead on the instant. But concerns over whether the voltage would actually kill him did become pretty low on his list of priorities.
***
It hadn't been the electrical shocks.
He was certain of that much as he lay back in his cell, shivering despite the heat. He hadn't had burns before, and he was damn sure he'd have had some memory - if only muscle-memory of the jolt - if he'd been through that already. Certainly his respect for Kyle had shot right up. And his respect for Kyle had been pretty high to start with.
In a way, they'd done him a favour. The experience had added focus. Now he was more angry than confused, and it had left him an overwhelming urge to get the hell out of there now and ask questions later. He didn't care where he was or how he got there so much as the fact that he was leaving. The responsiveness of the nanites had picked up a gear, whether because of the electricity or his increased mental focus he wasn't sure, but clearly despite his fears no lasting damage had been done.
He resumed worrying at the ropes while his tissues sluggishly started trudging the road to nanite-repair and traces of his strength toyed with the idea of returning. In a way it felt like at the beginning, when the nanites' effects came on in fits and starts, not really under his control. Like his brain was having to re-learn them... or they were having to re-learn him.
Memory sparked again, taking him by surprise.
//"This is still stupid." Jake could hear Diane beyond the fuzzy curtain of the anaesthetic. "This is the stupidest thing ever. Look at him--" He heard her palm come into contact with the glass of the observation room, though he couldn't see her; his slit field of vision was full of ceiling and surgeon, and those none too clear. "He's not even properly out. I mean, he's pretty out - they gave him enough of that stuff to drop a horse - but they don't know the nanites' capabilities like I do. Stupid anaesthetist! The least they could do is let me supervise. I'm Jake's doctor. I should be in there..."
Jake wished he had some way to tell her that he knew she was near. But then he supposed sending a message to her cellphone when he was in the middle of being sliced by NSA surgeons would only freak her out, even if he could have mustered the concentration.
Kyle was also there in the observation room adjoining the lab being used for the operation, but he wasn't saying much. Kyle, when he was nervous, clammed up. Kinda the opposite of Diane's reaction to being nervous, in fact. Apparently it was just the two of them. Lou was busy foiling Uncle Sam's enemies, and Sleet it seemed was not a man who felt any compulsion to watch his handiwork in progress.
He couldn't feel them cutting into his neck, but he knew they were doing it.
"Call that an incision?" Diane was jabbering. "I hope they're not gonna waste their time trying to stitch that, 'cause, hah! That? They could slap a band-aid on it and the nanites would deal with it in like - two seconds flat." She giggled, a bit hysterically. "Ooh, look, they so are. Dumbasses."
Jake heard the surgeon - or rather the other guy, who he wasn't sure was a surgeon - say, "Time to switch on," and for some reason it sounded ominous.
But it was a bit late for second thoughts. The guy reached down with a long, thin metal implement and did something out of sight that Jake queasily suspected involved sticking it into the incision in his neck. He felt the nanites' buzz of activity at the detection of new hardware.
Somewhere close, Kyle was saying, "Well, it's done. Time to find out what it is we're going to have to deal with."
'Thanks a lot for a little faith,' Jake thought at him grumpily. But even as he did, everything was receeding away from him. As if the mess of thought was being replaced by information and logical pathways, his awareness felt like it was being shifted aside, pushed into an isolated corner of his own mind, and hey... Interfacing with the chip hadn't felt remotely like this before...//
Jake sat bolt upright in his cell, barely noticing as the knot he'd been working at snapped and unravelled and every muscle in his body screamed protest about the movement.
What the hell had that bastard Sleet done to him?
***
He paced the cell, trying to work feeling back into his limbs. Every muscle burned from the strain of being pulled taut by electrical jolts. They hadn't exactly been in top shape before. His neck still ached furiously, and now that he could, he raised his hand to it. The contact hurt, but he pressed down over the remembered spot. When he'd finished almost passing out, he did think he'd felt the hard little square of metal underneath the skin. Whatever had hit him - it felt like it had been a truck - had impacted hard enough to break the chip.
And he had to concede that to be the only reason he was here, himself, able to think and feel now. Which left him wondering what had been walking around in his skin for the past month, and what Kyle and Diane had thought of it. Sleet... Sleet must have switched the chips. The test chip hadn't been the Agent Program, just some prototype database they'd thought would pass off as an unthreatening substitute.
Whoever had been walking in his shoes, they'd been sent here, out of the country, entrusted to a real mission. Maybe he'd been the perfect nano-agent, after all... but what the hell was the use of that if it hadn't been him?
Jake snarled a curse into the darkness and tried to pull back together some iota of focus. He wasn't supposed to be out of his ropes, and there'd be men coming back who-knew-when to tie him up and drag him off again. In his current state, they'd succeed. The nanites' connection was improving slowly, but still sporadic. He couldn't rely on them to fight his way out of this. He needed to find another avenue of escape.
He stood in the middle of the cell, and closed his eyes, and breathed. "Come on..." Nano-hearing told him where to concentrate... the rustle of trees and undergrowth, and unfamiliar birdsong; there was an exterior wall. No human voices beyond it that he could detect - but plenty of those elsewhere, behind the other walls.
Opened his eyes to nano-nightvision; narrowed it in on the fabric of the wall that was his barrier to freedom. Focus faded in and out as the nanites struggled to stay with him. Rough plastering, but no signs of cracks or structural weaknesses that could help him out... his hopes sank. No - wait. There had been a window, once upon a time. The change in surface was so subtle ordinary eyes might not have noticed it at all, and never in the dimness.
The window had been neatly blocked in, but the margins of where it had been would still be a line of weakness. He spread his hands against the bricked-in section and pushed, internally pleading with the nanites not to bail out on him now.
Strength didn't come easily or immediately to his call. He pushed anyway. There was a weakness in the wall; this was just plaster and cement he had to contend with, not brick or stone, and he didn't know how much, or little, strength it would take. The walls were thin and badly constructed. Surely it was possible, just possible, that even ordinary strength might exploit the weakness?
The nanites must have given him a split second's boost, because next he knew he was falling against the wall, his sweat-dampened face abrading down the plasterwork, adding more scrapes to the catalogue the nanites had yet to get to work on. Above his head, a section of the cement boundary had crumbled and the brickwork slid outward. Jake shakily reached out to bathe his hand in the beam of daylight filtering through the gap. He gulped heavily, and choked on the dust that was still thick in the air. Hauled himself back up to claw at the intact brickwork around the edges, to scrounge a gap large enough for him to fit through.
Either the nanites kicked in at last or normal fear-invoked adrenaline helped him snap away two protruding bricks, and then he was scrambling up and through, losing more skin to the coarse cement but giving thanks for his scrawny physique to any deity that was listening.
He landed on the other side in the midst of a bush that was all sharp edges and obviously in on the universe's conspiracy against him. Rolled out of it into deep undergrowth and crouched, gasping, trying to get his bearings.
The building he'd been inside backed against foliage as far as he could see. It was almost hidden underneath it. Before he could make any guesses about the best direction in which to head, he heard voices through the re-opened window space and locked door beyond. They were coming back.
Panic set in and he crashed off into the undergrowth without a thought - well, with one thought; that the NSA could track him, they had Diane's PDA and satellite surveillance and they had to be looking for him...
He wasn't sure how long he ran or what guided his steps. Maybe he subconsciously followed the faint pulse of technology. But somehow, he finally stumbled into the concealed camp just as if he knew it was there.
The stationed guard he passed stared at him with a freaked look that held, nonetheless, familiarity, though Jake couldn't consciously remember ever seeing the guy before. The man grunted at him in a sort of acknowledgement and called over his shoulder, "Duarte? Guess I owe you that twenty after all."
"The robot's back?" Kyle's voice, even though it came without enthusiasm, had to be the most amazing sound in the world. It preceded the man himself out of the tented-off back of a camouflaged truck. Kyle looked grubby, dishevelled and hardly in the best of moods, but Jake had never been more relieved to see anyone.
"Kyle! Buddy! Am I glad to see you..."
Even as Kyle's expression was changing, Jake's legs embarrassingly chose to give out. Kyle bolted across the short distance between them in time to stop him falling any further than his knees, and the last thing he saw for a while was Kyle's stunned expression as his mentor lowered him to the ground.
"Jake?" His voice was fading out, but Jake registered the astonishment in it. As if he was addressing someone he'd never expected to see again.
NB. There are, like, 2 more of these. Long Jake 2.0 stories, I mean. Written about this time last year. It's sad how long it takes me to get around to editing them.