Chapter 21: Critical Mass — Part 6

“What’d you do?” Shadow asked.

“Having a body gives one an incredible edge — I’d never imagined it before. Ferret and myself had become one in body, mind, and soul. Ferret wanted to run, to get away, but I wanted to get the murderer. I knew what I had to do, and I knew that Ferret would just have to live with it. A city must protect its young, and so long as the man lived, the threat to other children still existed. Our personalities were still merging, so there was a conflict as to appropriate action. In the end my sense of duty merged with his sense of rightness, and we overcame our mutual fears. By the time I’d walked to the police department in sector 700A, there was no telling me from Ferret, there was no separation of persona. Neither of us existed separately. I and my servant, I and my savior, were one.

“Despite all the suffering our memories brought us, there were so many good experiences that I’d never imagined having. I could see and touch and smell things and sense them directly, or tune out the analog and relate to them digitally. Using my abilities proved critical to my capturing the man in question. I followed the Forensics Officer in the lunchroom, and he just about feinted. He ran from me, and I followed him until I had him cornered in the back of the lunchroom. Police would try to get in my way, but my control of city resources kept them on their bellies, dodging lasers and gunshots. Everything from janitorial drones to video-spheres were reprogrammed to keep the police unarmed and at a distance. To them, the entire city had turned on them, and they couldn’t figure out why. They couldn’t even disable me through manual means, since I was no longer a part of the city as a whole. They tried several times to cut power, but I diverted power from other parts of the city faster than they could act. All the while, I started working over the bad cop.

“I sprayed him with specially programmed nanoscopic robots. I said to him, ‘You will suffer. It will be slow going. I promise you it will be painful. In seventeen hours precisely, you will be dead. And nobody here can stop it.’ Police tried to detain me, but how do you detain a boy with the power of a city behind him? For seventeen hours, I took pleasure in watching him die. In that time I did for the first time many things that humans take for granted. I made him follow me to the bathroom; I ate while I watched him. He begged me for a trial, he begged me for a prison sentence. I made him suffer like you could never imagine suffering. For the last six hours, he begged me to kill him.

“In the end, I did grant him his death, but it did not come easy, and it did not come fast. I let the police know why he died, bringing up the data related records of the child deaths. The police tried to rationalize with me. They started talking about justice and trials and prison and punishment — as if I could have faith in their system of order when one of their own was the criminal. When I started to leave the room, they fired on me from all sides, but by that point a phased shield protected me from the worst of their arsenal. Believe me, they did try to use the worst. They exhausted every possible potential at stopping me, often injuring their own in the process. As the program controlling the Hub, I had never had the capacity to kill, or to feel actual human emotions. Nor did I have the capacity to be raped and murdered. Strange how one mitigates the other, really.”

Ferret began to cry openly. “When he died, I learned my first human lesson.”

Shadow held him tightly. “What was that?”

“I didn’t feel better.”

Shadow kept quiet. She didn’t want to imagine what kind of damage the nanos did to the cop. Nanos could have gone into the cells and triggered all kinds of cancerous conditions. They could tear nerve endings apart, leave gaping holes in the skin, drill through bone, and dissect every cell in the brain with individual attention. Then they could rebuild and repair all the damaged tissues, restoring the body atom by atom. They could have built him up and torn him down a thousand times over in seventeen hours. She did not dare upset Ferret with her own opinion, given his current emotional state.