Ron Cuttler was a proper, old-school genius. University at seventeen. First doctorate by twenty-five. Patents millionaire by twenty-seven. Two more doctorates by thirty. And last year, at thirty-three, he had come to work for BRS. The metal beetles - Ball said they were conventionally known as nanoids - weren’t directly his invention, but he had invented two crucial breakthroughs: the method of mass-producing the nanoids and the method of mass-programming them remotely so they could be loaded with instructions.

But it turned out that Cuttler had experienced what sounded like an attack of conscience when it had dawned on him that nanoids couldn’t just be used to cure and heal people, but also, potentially, to kill and control them. Ball swore that BRS was working on ways to prevent the misuse of the nanoids, but Cuttler hadn’t believed them. He had quit. So much, so ho-hum. BRS had gone after Cuttler to turn over the proprietary information about the software that he had developed to control them - gone after him in the courts, that is. And Cuttler had been due to take them to appeal against an initial finding against him. But then he had broken back into the BRS labs at night, inserted the nanoids into himself and disappeared.

‘The police have the case,’ said Ball. ‘And, as you’ve seen, I have the wherewithal to be very… encouraging to the boys in blue when the spirit takes me. But they aren’t making progress. Obviously, they don’t know what’s on the line here and I can’t keep the whip hand on them every second of the day. So I need someone dedicated, professional and motivated. And I need someone who will undergo the procedure. Cuttler has certain important advantages from the procedure that will make staying a step ahead of the police pretty easy for him. It’ll be a lot harder for him to evade someone with your skills - especially once you’ve had the procedure.’

Cuttler had undergone Developed Vetting to get the job at BRS, thanks to their status as a defence contractor. And, somehow, Ball had obtained a copy of his full file from the Security Service. There was a lot of information. They sat in a side office off the surgery room, with the papers spread out on the table. The packet that Ball had produced upstairs was there, too. It contained Butcher’s new identity: Greg Parsons. It was a decent legend, by Butcher’s assessment.

‘Why not one of your pet apes?’ asked Butcher. ‘They look like they know what they’re doing.’

‘They are also our employees,’ said Ball. ‘They lead back to us. You don’t.’

Butcher sighed.

Butcher was screwed and he’d known it from the start. His options were severely limited, given not only the evidence (which he could at least try to fight) but also the fact that there was someone determined to see him go down for whatever had happened in Sudan. Even if he got away with it, his career was toast. Even if he didn’t go to prison, the kind of companies he might work for would go to their contacts in the Det for a reference that would be less than glowing. His career had been going somewhere, but even he had to admit that the somewhere it was going was dull as shit.

'I should mention one other thing,' said Ball, lowering his voice and gently guiding Butcher away from the waiting knot of staff. 'Nathan told me you have trouble with a memory lapse. A bit of... operational amnesia about events in Sudan.'

Butcher didn't deny it.

'Well,' Ball went on, 'Project Dragon could fix that for you. I make no promises, mind you. But if it arose from a brain trauma you suffered, the procedure will fix it. If it arose from an emotional trauma... Well, we don't exactly know, yet. But we have good reason to believe that this, too, can be fixed although we think it will take longer.'

Butcher watched Ball as he spoke. He wasn't qualified as an interrogator. The Det tended to use assets from the Army Legal Services, Special Branch or - at a push - Six when they needed to extract information from a prisoner. But he had watched those experts work more than once and downed a good number of pints with them and their kind here and there. Enough to have picked up a few of the tells. And his gut was telling him that Ball was being straight with him.

What Ball was offering... A new life, a job, a chance to become better, and a way to find out who had stitched him up in the first place. Offers that were too good to be true were, well, too good to be true. But what did he really have to lose? He’d expected to die on foreign soil by now. More than once he’d nearly bought it. Others hadn’t been so lucky. It wasn’t like he had kids who wanted to be proud of daddy. Or a beautiful, doting wife, waiting at home to comfort her injured hero. Life just hadn’t turned out that way for him. He’d always thought “maybe tomorrow”. And now tomorrow had turned up and kicked him firmly in the testicles.

‘Fine,’ said Butcher. ‘Let’s do it.’

*

The chair was as terrifying to lie in as it looked. Butcher stared up at the apparatus on the ceiling that loomed down over him. He felt like Sigourney Weaver in Alien, with the monster in his face, like he could feel its breath on his skin…

One of the medical assistants was shaving his head. He’d not had a classic short crop since Sandhurst. These days, guys in the Det, like the Regiment, tended to favour a shaggy mop. Anything to look less military. Guys in the Regiment generally wouldn’t look less military in a fucking clown suit, but the Det was a different space. They had all sorts.

‘You’ll need to be conscious,’ said the doctor. ‘We can give you a local, but at the end of the day we’re drilling a hole into your skull. It’s going to feel strange and it’s going to hurt. The restraints should stop you from being able to move, but all the same - try to remain still.’

There was a blob of wetness on his naked scalp, then a prick.

‘Remind me why I need to be conscious,’ he said.

‘Because I don’t employ an anaesthetist, Butcher,’ said Ball from the other side of the room, opening the door to leave. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’

‘What?’

The doctor shrugged. Then, out of his line of sight, he heard the sound of a drill starting up and, a moment later, the pain began.

*

‘Hi,’ said a voice.

Butcher felt like he was floating. He remembered the pain. He remembered the unspeakable sensation of the nanoids being poured directly into his skull, through the dura mater and into the brain. It had been unpleasant, but not the worst thing that had ever happened to him. Not even in the top five. He remembered sinking into something that felt like sleep, but wasn’t.

And now he was floating in darkness. Not “eyes closed” darkness, but the proper stuff he remembered from a long-ago school trip to the Big Pit in mid-Wales, where they’d gone down into the chilly depths of an abandoned coal mine and turned off their head lamps: the strange sensation in which nothing at all is reaching the back of the eyeball.

‘You’re probably a little disoriented, right now,’ said the voice again. It was an English accent. A little nasal, a bit “public school” but not full-on hooray-Henry - it reminded him of the young public school types from Sandhurst. Decent, earnest chaps - not many girls among them - desperate to not be lumped in with the valiant wankers who joined the Guards regiments.

‘In case you suffered any memory loss on the way here,’ the voice continued, ‘let me just remind you that you have been through the Cuttler Procedure and now have a population of approximately two million nanoids in your bloodstream. They are also in your nervous system and, as we chat, they’ll get into your digestive, respiratory, muscular and endocrine systems. But relax. They won’t do anything yet. They will take a while - between a few hours and a few days - to learn who you are. They need to know what you already do well and what, perhaps, you do badly. They’ll collectively decide - using the algorithms I’ve built into them - on how to appraise you.’

Ah, thought Butcher, this is obviously Cuttler talking. Like a pre-recorded message, I assume.

‘In case you don’t know,’ said the voice, ‘my name is Ron Cuttler and I invented the procedure. Or rather, the real me did. This version of me is a simple AI here to guide you through the tutorial. Eventually, you’ll be able to speak to me and I’ll be able to answer some questions. But for now, you’re stuck with just listening...’

*

An indeterminate amount of time later, Butcher opened his eyes - his real eyes - to find himself still on the table, still restrained, with the medical staff chatting off to one side.

‘A little help?’ he called.

They hurried over, but made no move to remove his restraints.

‘First, some questions,’ said the other assistant. He hadn’t heard the man speak before. ‘Do you remember your name.’

‘Yes,’ said Butcher.

There was a pause.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

‘If you don’t know, then I’m not sure you’re supposed to,’ said Butcher. ‘Better that way.’

‘He knows who he is, Peter,’ snapped the surgeon. ‘Get on with it.’

‘Er… how would you rate the experience of pain you felt in the procedure on a scale of 0, no pain at all, to 10, the worst pain you’ve ever felt.’

‘Seven,’ said Butcher. ‘No, eight to be fair. Due warning, though, I think most people are going to give you a ten on that one. I’m a bit of a statistical outlier, when it comes to pain.’

‘And, um, did you see or hear anything while you were unconscious that you can recall?’

*

‘Before we go on,’ said Ron in the tutorial, ‘you’re probably going to be asked a lot of questions about what you experienced here, when you’re done. The nanoids have already established that you aren’t a BRS employee, so you’re going to get a rather different tutorial than if you were. They get the bare bones. You get the full monty. I would very much appreciate it if you could keep this to yourself. Tell them that you saw a lot of text. You read it but didn’t really understand it. But you’ll let them know when it starts to make sense.’

*

‘I saw, like, walls of text,’ said Butcher. ‘It was like being Alice In Wonderland but instead of Wonderland, I got a Haynes Manual for something incredibly boring. I can kind of remember it, but none of it makes much sense, yet. Why? What did anyone else see who had the procedure?’

‘Um, no one else has had the procedure.’

‘What the fuck!?’ he yelled, yanking at the restraints. ‘Ball said human trials were well advanced! That lying fuck!’

‘Calm down,’ ordered the doctor, tapping him on the forehead. ‘Doctor Cuttler had the procedure a month ago. He’s been evading the police ever since. That’s pretty well advanced. We just didn’t get the chance to ask him any questions afterwards. Now, before we take off your restraints, there’s just one last thing to do…’

He lifted into Butcher’s line of sight a small syringe with a thick needle.

‘Fuck me!’ said Butcher, alarmed. ‘You could shoot 22s through that thing!’

‘This will also hurt,’ said the doctor, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice and stuck it into Butcher’s neck. Butcher screamed.

*

‘First let’s talk about your stats,’ said the voice of Ron Cuttler. ‘The nanoids base their work on tens of thousands of individual performance measures - muscle and bone density, blood pressure, synaptic density, electrochemical speed and all kinds of others… Then they simplify what they find for the user by expressing it in six stats.

‘You have three physical stats and three mental stats.

‘The physical stats are Strength, Constitution and Dexterity; the three mental stats are Intelligence, Wisdom and Spirit.

‘The nanoids don’t really know you, yet. So based on the measurements they can take, they make a rough guess on what your stats are when they are injected. As they learn more about how you use what you’ve been given, they’ll adjust them over the first few hours and days. Stats can go down as well as up.

‘The human range in all stats is from one to ten, but most people will sit between four and seven, with exceptional people being above seven. People with stats below four in anything are usually suffering from some kind of long-term injury or disability. A lot of these can be fixed by the nanoids, though, and you’ll see your stats go up over time if you’re one of these people.

‘The full range possible, though, goes up to twenty. With time, training and experience, the nanoids will start to enhance your natural abilities and you may pass the threshold into what constitutes superhuman performance. Don’t expect to be Strength twenty any time soon, though! A lot of these things can only be unlocked if and when nanoids are in widespread use in the population.’

*

Default CON reset to 7

Skill: Pain Resistance 1

Butcher saw the update resting over his vision like subtitles on a foreign film. He blinked it away and turned his eyes to pin the young assistant.

‘Now that, you motherfucker, was a ten,’ he snarled. ‘What the fuck was that?’

‘That was a tracker,’ said the doctor. ‘Mister Ball’s orders were to put it somewhere you couldn’t dig it out, so I’ve lodged it between your trachea and your oesophagus. You’ll probably have some difficulty swallowing for a couple of days until the swelling goes down, but it’s nothing a little paracetamol won’t sort out.’

The other assistant, a woman, was bandaging the wound on his neck as the doctor spoke.

‘I understand you’re feeling quite hostile towards us now, so I’m going to give you a mild tranquilizer before I release your restraints.’

‘Where the fuck was that tranquiliser when you were drilling into my skull?’ Butcher demanded.

‘Ah, well,’ said the doctor apologetically, ‘this time it’s about my well-being. With a bit of luck we won’t see you again. Good luck, though. Doctor Cuttler’s work really is going to change the world for the better. You’ll see.’

Bloody fanatics, thought Butcher as he felt the sedative take effect and his eyelids grew heavy.

*

‘Now let’s talk about skills,’ said faux-Cuttler. ‘Stats alone are a crude measure of what you can do as a person. For example, Strength is about raw muscle mass. It doesn’t tell you how good you are at jumping, or lifting something, or punching an opponent for example. Two people can have equal strength but use it in very different ways. That’s where skills come in.

‘Lots of skills will be invisible to you either from the start or after a while. You don’t need to know, for example, that you have a skill in Walking, unless you are, say, in a wheelchair. Likewise, if you’re already literate, Reading and Writing are going to be invisible skills. If you ever want to see your invisible stats, you can. But expect a very long list.

‘The nanoids will quantify less obvious things as visible skills. A new skill is always level 1 - which is basic competence. If you only ever use your skill at a basic level and it stays at level 1 then eventually it will become an invisible skill. Only skills you use often and at an advanced level of competence will rise to Level 2 and above.

Generally, an expert in some area will be Level 3, with Level 4 indicating someone at the peak of normal human performance in a field. You’ll be unsurprised to hear that the nanoids can take you up to level 10 if you are good enough at something. For example, an Olympic sprinter will be at level 4 at sprinting. Usain Bolt might be at Level 5. Even though he’s retired, he’ll stay at Level 5 as long as he does any sprinting at all, because he’s just that good. His stats, though, would decrease as he gets older or picks up injuries.

‘Point to note, though: if Usain Bolt had nanoids in his system, he would still be working his way to a sub-nine-point-five hundred metres today, with no loss of performance from getting older. Of course, he’d also be banned for performance enhancing drugs. These things show up in your blood, OK?

‘Now, I’ve included a catalogue of hundreds of possible skills. But this is a learning system. In theory, the nanoids could identify and name a completely new skill or create a hybrid skill. I’m not sure how it would happen. But the system allows for it. Just be aware.

‘I won’t explain in detail how skills work, but it’s basically a priority thing. The nanoids will re-direct themselves to help you do better at something that falls within a skill category.’

*

When he woke up for the second time, his restraints removed, the guard from before was waiting for him.

‘Mister Ball sends his apologies,’ said the man in a South African accent. Butcher thought that figured. ‘He’s left you some things to get you started. I’m to take you to the car.’

Butcher rolled off the operating chair, groggy, brain fuzzed with weirdness and blinked several times to clear something from his eyes that he couldn’t quite get rid of. Then he realized that it was another notification from the nanoids even now flooding his system with what felt like insanity.

STR

CON

DEX

INT

WIS

SPI

5

7

5

6

6

6

So far, the nanoids thought he was above average, which was encouraging. But he could expect those figures to change. Stats can go down as well as up, right Ron?

‘Car?’ he asked, dry-mouthed.

‘We’re loaning you a car, Mister Parsons,’ said the guard, handing Butcher the envelope with his ID documents in them, and then another, smaller envelope.

‘What’s this?’

‘A company phone, ten thousand pounds in used notes and a company credit card,’ said the guard. ‘No spending limit. But, obviously, we’ll see what you spend it on, how much you spend and where you spend it. If we don’t like what we see, we’ll shut it down. If we want an explanation, we’ll call you. Answer the fucking phone, Mister Parsons.’

‘What car?’

‘Guess.’

Vauxhall fucking Insignia.

*

Butcher looked at himself in the mirror in the hotel bedroom. It was nearly midnight when the guard put him in the Vauxhall and watched him leave the BRS compound, waving with all the irony a South African ex-special forces mercenary security guard can muster. Which was a lot of fucking irony. He pulled over down the road, turned off the engine, put on the hazards and pulled out his new phone. No sense getting pulled by the rozzers now for operating a mobile phone whilst in control of a vehicle.

Hotel room at midnight basically meant Travelodge, so he did a quick search, booked himself into the nearest with the company credit card and got on his way. If there was one thing you could say for Travelodge, it was anonymity when you wanted it. Digital check-in and every single one was bloody identical. He didn’t see a single other soul from car park to bed, which suited him. A guy with a bandage on his neck and one on the top of his Belsen-style shaved head was going to draw attention.

He looked like shit.

Bald on the top with a messy beard, dashed with plenty of early salt. Deep-set eyes looked deeper from the effects of whatever the last forty-eight hours had thrown at him. God. Had he really been prepping for a weekend hiking in Snowdonia two days ago? Had he really been training the Sudanese special forces in covert surveillance just one week ago? Two weeks downtime in Hereford was supposed to be compulsory after an op with contact, but he’d talked the boss into letting him call it after a week and hit the hills. His psych eval was clean. No chance of his taking an old sawn off with him up to watch the sun come up one last time. Not his style.

But he’d still lied to his boss. There had been something else in Sudan besides his training mission. He could remember parts of it. He could remember Jon Arnold. There had just been something about that creep that set off his alarm bells when he was introduced to him by the military liaison in the embassy. It wasn’t unusual to find ex-military types working with NGOs all over the place. But Arnold… He’d been vague about what he was doing in Sudan, which was suspicious as hell, but then Butcher would’ve been pretty vague, too, if Arnold had asked. But he hadn’t asked. And that, too, had rung alarm bells. And then the motherfucker had said he was “working with children”. And Butcher couldn’t put his finger on it, but there had just been something about the way he’d say the word “children”. That had been enough to persuade him to wait and tail the guy after the function.

Arnold had caught a taxi away from the embassy district and towards Al-Mohandiseen and, in another of the ubiquitous yellow wrecks, Butcher had followed, feeding the driver dollars as they went. And despite the tight warren of narrow streets, Butcher had stayed on his tail.

But there was a point at which things just got patchy. He could remember a crappy-looking local supermarket. He could remember… a fence? And there was a vague recollection of a roomful of staring faces. Tiny faces, with yellow eyes. And then… Nothing. Nothing until he arrived at the departure game in the airport, on time and with all of his kit.

Whatever had happened to him in Khartoum, the nanoids weren’t doing anything to fix it yet, if they ever would. He needed to accept that the memories after that point just weren’t coming back.

Fuck.

But now he had a few million nanoscopic robots throughout his body, silently judging his every move and decision and rewarding him with feedback on his performance. Frankly, it reminded him of how some of his friends had described marriage, but perhaps that was too cynical. It all sounded like a game, to him. You put effort in here, you get results out there. It was a lot like hitting the gym with a view to getting a better bench-press weight, or like training for the next belt in karate - something he hadn’t done for ten years, admittedly, but he remembered the principles. The sensei watches and awards you a new belt. But, in this case, it’s not just a reward that acknowledges that you’re better. The reward actually makes you better. If the nanoids think you ought to be stronger, they just make you stronger. If they think you ought to be smarter, they just make you smarter.

They could also fix stuff that was wrong with you, he thought. It was that claim by Ball that had decided him, in the end. There was something wrong with his brain that meant he was haunted by the gaps and, now, it looked like somewhere in those gaps he had killed at least two men. If the nanoids could explain why, it would be worth dangling on Ball’s hook for however long it took to track down Cuttler.

It all made a weird kind of sense. Except for that Spirit stat. What the fuck was that all about?

*

‘Spirit is the sixth stat and the hardest to explain,’ Cuttler’s ghost had told him. ‘If you know anything about chaotic systems, you’ll have heard of emergent properties. If not, well, when a system is sufficiently complex, but governed by well-defined rules, sometimes patterns will emerge that couldn’t have been predicted by simply studying those rules. Some people think that human intelligence is an emergent property. I don’t know about that, so much, but Spirit is an emergent property of the system.

‘To be honest, I tried to get rid of it. But everything I did to remove it just made the whole thing worse, so I just accepted it and made it into a stat. It can help to think of it as a measure of how much the nanoids like you. That’s completely wrong, of course. But it’s the simplest possible explanation. Basically, Spirit is a measure of how well you can do things that the system wasn’t designed to let you do. You’ll probably not have much use of it, if ever. But it can come into play in certain skills and classes.

*

Even playing back the conversation in his memory, it made no more sense to Butcher. Emergent properties he knew about. He’d read ‘Godel, Escher, Bach’ way back, before Sandhurst, even. It had taken three readings over six years to understand it and, by that time, he was in the Det.

But what was it supposed to mean in this case? The nanoids were programmed to make humans superhuman. Super-strong. Super-fast. Super-smart. What else could they do?

*

‘If you want to know more about a stat or a skill or a class, say “set-tings”,’ said the Cuttlerbot. ‘You can say it out loud or sub-vocalize it. Once the nanoids get used to you, you should be able to do it in your head, nice and clearly. But you need to emphasize the “tings” bit. Otherwise they’d pop up every time you say “settings”, which would be annoying if you were planning a wedding!’

Cuttlerbot laughed at his joke. Butcher only got it about two seconds later, by which point the moment had passed. And it hadn’t been funny to begin with.

‘Then you can highlight the thing you want to know more about and you’ll get the text version. If you don’t want to read the text, you can also opt to have my voice explaining it.’

Yeah, Butcher had thought. That’s never going to happen.

*

‘Set-tings,’ he said to his reflection, sitting down on the end of the bed. He glanced at SPI and it illuminated. After a second he got the visual equivalent of a pop-up.

SPI (Spirit) is a measure of the degree of synergy established between the user and the nanoids. The higher the SPI, the quicker nanoids will identify new skills and upgrade skills being used at a higher level. A normal SPI is in the range of 4 to 6. If your SPI is below 4, speak to your administrator for a system review. If your SPI is above 10, speak to your administrator to unlock permissions for special skills.

That, at least, gave him some idea of why he would want a higher SPI: to be able to increase his other stats and skills faster. He didn’t know what “special skills” were going to look like, but he didn’t see himself getting SPI higher than 10 any time soon and, in any case, didn’t have an administrator to talk to. Just had to hope it didn’t drop below 4!

He glanced again at his haggard face, as if something might have changed.

‘What the fuck is that?’ he asked himself as he stared. He waved a hand over his head but couldn’t feel anything. But it was obviously over his head in the mirror. A little yellow symbol, like a broken square or… a pair of empty square brackets. It didn’t seem to hurt or mean anything obvious. He’d have another look at the settings in the morning.

‘Everything looks better with eight hours of sleep inside you,’ he said out loud. Colour Sergeant Berriman, Commissioning Course of 2012. He could hear it like it was yesterday. Time to get his head down. Tomorrow, he could make plans.