Machine Man (serial)

“He came in through the lobby,” said Jason. An escalating number of people were doing things I didn’t understand to body parts I’d only just gained, like mechanics in a pit stop, but Jason’s job seemed to be to talk me through this. “Which I think was something of a surprise to everyone here, because, well, there are several entrances, and a security guard knows them all. Of course, we had people in the lobby. We had snipers on the roof, we had guys in mounted Hummers. We deployed weaponry from the Speculative Military Products people I’m sure isn’t out of prototype. There was a sonics gun in the underground parking lot, the back lawn was sown with EMP mines, and the lobby guys had… well, I guess it was an electroshock cannon. Like a tazer, only firing a couple hundred darts a minute.

“So Carl turns up. And—I don’t know if anyone told you this, but the reason things turned ugly with Carl, it was because he was stealing stuff. He was sneaking parts out of the building. I don’t know what a guy wants with multiple sets of hands, but…” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, one of the things Carl took was a Fiber Shield. And clearly nobody really planned out all the contingencies, because when Carl turned up, he used it, and they shot at him, and that’s what happened.”

He studied my face. “You went to the Fiber Shield presentation, didn’t you? It’s, um, essentially a bomb. It throws out a fog of tiny fiber strips, micro-ribbons. They’re harmless, but they float in the air, millions or billions of them, and their ends are sticky. If someone shoots into that fog, the bullet hits a ribbon and the ribbon sticks to it. It gets unbalanced, pulled off-course. It might go left, right, who knows. The point is it diverts.

“This presentation, they showed how it’s almost impossible to hit a target standing twenty feet behind the fog. They did five or six test shots, and each one missed. Some missed by a lot. It was pretty cool. It’s not really guaranteed protection, you know, like I wouldn’t want to stake my life on it, because the amount of diversion depends on how many ribbons the bullet hits, the angle at each collision, all these random variables. The project leader, that’s Abeline Knudsen, who did that really interesting paper on creating disruptive resonances in inner ear fluid, if you saw that… well, she said, you fire enough bullets, eventually one will go straight. Or straight enough. So, actually thinking about it now, maybe that’s what they told the security guys. If he throws down the Fiber Shield, pour bullets into it.

“So Carl turns up on the front lawn. He sets off that bomb, and everyone opens fire. I’m in the lab, watching on CCTV, and there are guys everywhere, gushing gunfire. And maybe that would have been okay, but the electroshock cannon guys open fire, too, and fill the air with million-volt darts. These darts are a lot lighter than bullets, so they hit the fog and they go everywhere. They’re hitting our own guys, they’re landing on the roof, they’re sparking and starting fires. Then a Hummer takes a hit in the fuel tank and it’s chaos, nothing but smoke and fire and people screaming, and Carl does what he likes.”

155.