The entrance to the passenger terminal was a wide rectangle of blackness. The sliding doors lay ten meters away, in fragments. Windows had been broken, plants and statues scattered; the walls were strangely scarred, as if something mechanically clawed had scaled them. I’d hoped for a sentry, signs of order, evidence of a coherent command structure. This looked more like a gang of looters were waiting in the darkness for someone to wander in.

I thought: Sarah Knight would have done this – for the story alone.

Yeah. And Sarah Knight was dead.

I approached slowly, scanning the ground nervously, wishing I hadn’t told Sisyphus fourteen years before to lose all junk mail from weapons manufacturers looking for technophile journalists to provide free publicity for their glamorous new anti-personnel mines. Then again … there’d probably been no helpful tips in those media releases for avoiding being on the receiving end – short of spending fifty thousand dollars on the matching sweepers.

The interior of the building was pitch black, but the floodlights outside bleached the reef-rock white. I squinted into the maw of the entrance, wishing I had Witness to rejig my retinas. The camera on my right shoulder was virtually weightless, but it still made me feel skewed and misshapen – about as comfortable, centered, and functional as if my genitals had migrated to one kneecap. And – irrationally or not – the invisible nerve taps and RAM had always made me feel shielded, protected. When my own eyes and ears had captured everything for the digital record, I’d been a privileged observer right up to the moment of being disemboweled or blinded. This machine could be brushed off like a speck of dandruff.

I’d never felt so naked in my life.

I stopped ten meters from the empty doorway, arms stretched out and hands raised. I yelled into the darkness: “I’m a journalist! I want to talk!”

I waited. I could still hear the crowds of the city behind me, but the airport exuded silence. I shouted again. And waited. I was almost ready to give up fear for embarrassment; maybe the passenger terminal was abandoned, the mercenaries had set up camp on the farthest corner of the runway, and I was standing here making a fool of myself to no one.

Then I felt a gentle stirring of the humid air, and the blackness of the entrance disgorged a machine.