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4.01.2004


 
ACE



I'm not that naive.


I knew I was being set up; I knew that the supposedly private conversation with the president had been anything but private. They must have known I'd know.

They must have known I'd let myself be manipulated anyway.


I agreed to go back.

I went through their tests, filled out their forms and answered hours of interview questions. I spent five days with biotech specialists and a neurosurgeon, who made absolutely sure that not a single scrap of wire remained in my body.

As if all the scars weren't proof enough of how much had been there and had been taken away.



Wire is more expensive to take out than put in.

No one expects that you'll ever remove it. Some wire degrades, some gets upgraded, some wire is integrated into new systems. When I applied to the Secret Service the first time, my bones and tissues were laced through with miles of wire. It took months to get it all out, dozens of surgeries and procedures. It cost me everything I'd saved, years of pay and bonuses.

Vaughn had been there then, too. We had worked together many times, but back then I barely knew him. We weren't friends, we weren't close. Or at least, that's how I thought it was.

He agreed to stay with me in the faceless apartment where I'd go to recover, flat on my back and vulnerable after each procedure that stripped me further and further back down to human.

Until one day I woke up an average Joe, glad for his blank unreadable features that mercifully registered no pity, no concern or questions.


The last thing I wanted was for someone to look at me, reduced body and all but deaf and blind, and ask me whether or not it was worth it, what I had just done.

I didn't want to ask myself.

I was glad it was contract, glad that he let me pay him.

Those weren't the services of a friend.



The last federal lab tech gave me a hand up from the exam table. He handed me my shirt, watched me pull it on over the lattice of skin and scars.

I waited for him to ask me, my pause standing there both permission and opportunity.

"How did you do it?"

I knew what he meant, although it could have been so many things. How did I make the choice? How did I survive the transition back? How did I adapt to a half-life while my body healed? How did I give up what everyone wants and so few ever have?

How did I do IS work without wire?

"I'm a pilot," I said. He handed me my watch, and I put that on too. It had become its own irony, a worn piece of cheap and outdated technology that I wore because I didn't have a beta feed telling me everything from who had just staged the coup in Liberia to the the time in six different longitudes. "I was a good pilot before wire. I was a better pilot after it."

The lab tech nodded seriously. "They say some of the amplifications stay with you. That you learn them, that the wire becomes redundant."

"I meant," I said, picking up my coat, "that over the years I practiced."

"Oh," he said, and watched me leave, silent after that.



I'd called on Vaughn once before. Now the situation wasn't that different; I was asking him to do what I had no right to, but could ask no one else.

This time I had no delusions of where I stood, and didn't offer to pay him.



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