Following the command from the Super, the sparrow stalled for just a second, before injecting into the subject the solution in the ampule, whatever it was. The Flyer then fetched the landed drone. Lovingly, he clipped it into its case.

  He checked the evacuated tube, but found only a sticky label residue on its surface. The label had ripped off. He couldn’t remember what he had loaded the last time it had emptied. Just now, he had failed to engage exogenous control after the Super hit the subject, but his sloppy job had worked.

  “Look, look, look,” a short, skinny enforcer edged towards the subject.

  He approached from the side, extending a finger to slyly, tentatively, poke Cooper in the cheek. No response.

  He badgered the Flyer, “Look, something’s taking effect. What did you do to him? Did you kill him?”

  “What was in that tube? Is he going to die? Like drop dead in front of us?” another enforcer asked anxiously.

  “What do we do, if he does? That’s not in the manual. Do we leave him here and leave the area? Other parties will find the body. Or should we take him with us, and close the case as a cardiac during the capture?” his preferred option.

  “Not the capture, but the chase,” the skinny enforcer corrected, “He dropped dead while evading enforcement, due to physical exertion. He did it all alone. Except for running into the body, we played zero part. That drone strike is the main problem. Will it show up in the tests?”

  “Well, um…” the Flyer couldn’t provide the answers, because he didn’t know.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  There existed a chance that the subject would drop dead from the unlabeled…dislabeled…injection, supposing it had been toxic. There existed another chance that the agent or a metabolite would appear in a chemical assay. The Flyer shuddered with dread. If only he knew what the agent was or whether it could leave a trace post-mortem.

  “Shut that down,” the Super snapped, “Nobody is going to drop dead.”

  “Don’t you remember anything from your training? A corrective circuit may not use lethal injection for any reason. We don’t do that here, we hang people. No compound in the catalog is toxic. The most they could do…” he stopped.

  The others perked up, “Mostly, they might put him to sleep, maybe mess him up for a matter of…days…” he equivocated.

  Cooper swayed as the effects manifested. When the drowsiness came over him, his hearing sharpened rather than blunted. Conclusively, the surround sound had silenced. As his brain conceded control, every other noise spiked louder.

  With a slow, heavy droop of the eyelids, then head, then body, Cooper swayed into the large, looming Mover, whose role it was to physically assault him for any attempt at noncompliance or catch and sling him over a shoulder in lighter circumstances. The Gofer beamed a cheeky grin, snagged his precious gear, and led the way out of the webwork.

  Cooper didn’t succumb completely to the unknown bioactive factor. He couldn’t keep his eyes open, but his mind spun slow and dumb. It built a chain of reasoning nearing a clear conclusion, but he couldn’t think it through in the pharmacological smog.

  Applying valid causality, Cooper reasoned that since the surround sound had shut down so fast after the sparrow shot him, some chemical he had metabolized must have shut down that very sound. In a flinch, it had killed the source inside him, so the source had died inside, so the sound hadn’t surrounded.

  All this time, it had hidden out of sight, behind his eyes, in his brain, and his…he quit thinking the whole thing through. He sneaked beneath a brain sheet. Cooper was simple but smart. Even lacking the facts, he neared the troubling truth, as if he had never disbelieved it all along.