The This, page 19
They were coming to kill him.
They were coming to kill him.
Adan asked his feed what he should do, but it did not respond. He fired again, but the whomp gun was not a precision weapon and the advancing enemy only seemed to throng more thickly. He looked around for comrades, but everybody was spread-eagled, or curled up, prone, or supine, or otherwise disconnected.
It occurred to him that he would die. It occurred to him that he would die, here and now, and it seemed … just crazy-insane. I mean wtf? They were going to kill him. But he’d never done anyone any harm! He was a regular, ordinary guy. Why did they want to kill him? Weren’t there enough bad people in the world to pick on?
He tried firing his gun a few more times, and blew up another tree, and knocked down one of the battlebots. But they were closer and closer now, and he decamped. He ran, retreating to another dune. But the effort gave him a stitch. Sharp pain in his side. Adan looked down, and it wasn’t a stitch. A number of needles had gone through the gaps in his body armour where the panels were tied together – a bunch of them, piercing his gut and his kidney, for all he knew, who even knew where the kidney was, and he was sure to die, sure to die, and it hurt real bad, so he dropped his gun and sat down.
The grumbling sky was attack jets circling. Ours, or theirs. Who could tell?
But here, like locusts, came a flock of harddrones, sweeping overhead, and they were definitely ours, so Adan felt his spirit rise. But then they all glitched out, all at once, and rained down onto the beach and the sea like hail. All of them – simultaneously.
They surely weren’t supposed to go out like that.
A spatter of noise and the light was twice as bright everywhere, and then it dialled itself back to normal. The sudden brightness flung shadows in weird stretchy bulges, and then there was a much louder, more sustained rumble and particles began clattering down onto Adan’s helmet. Ashes. Lots of ashes.
Then a thought entered his head that shook him up bad. He was going to die without ever seeing Elegy again. That seemed monstrous somehow, more than unfair: a violation. He was a human being. And here, stalking towards him, was the rest of the world embodied as violence, everything else, everything that got in the way of him just being him. Why couldn’t they leave him alone? And then there flashed into Adan’s mind a memory of that time, back home, back when he had a home, of Gee glitching out. His friends’ faces, or his mother’s, taking over her natural beauty. He’d never got that sorted, it had just, sort-of, gone away. Healed itself. And then he thought, no: there’d been that odd episode when a stranger had called him, and this stranger’s face had taken over Elegy, and had told him …
Wait.
There were tingles running up and down Adan’s scalp. The pain in his side withdrew to the corner of his perception. What had that stranger said?
A moment like this. On the island. When your friends have all been killed and the porcupine spikes. The spikes in your gut. What was he supposed to say? He was supposed to say something. Stand up, the stranger had said. Sing out: weave a circle round me something.
‘Weave a circle,’ he croaked.
Speaking caused pain to radiate sharply, stabbingly, from his pierced side. But, the hell. He gathered himself, got his bulk up on its hind legs like a bear, and was immediately confronted with four HMθ battlebots, and their weapons swivelling straight on him, and he bellowed Weave a circle round me, and the whole of eternity dangled
dangled
—all possibility, and the annihilation of all possibility, just waiting for these implacable enemies, and their implacable group-mind singular purpose, to kill him.
He took a breath, and only then realised that he had been holding his breath.
The battlebots were motionless. He took another breath. And here came another drone swarm, and this time they were not knocked out of the sky. He looked to the right, and then the whole scene was drenched and cleansed in a piquant light and Adan was on his back. Knocked down like a ninepin, gasping and stinging all over.
A shuttle retrieved him ten minutes later. Half an hour after that he was back at the base, in the surgical hospital. He was suffering from mild burns from the bombardment that destroyed the motionless HMθ battlebots, and also from the four needles that had pierced his abdomen. Then the doctors also operated to remove tiny pieces of Tuss that had, it seemed, become embedded in his face and neck.
‘We gotta get these fragments out, Trooper,’ said the doctor, leaning over him. ‘Your own immune system would reject them, alien DNA so far as it’s concerned, and there would be an allergic reaction, swelling, complications. Just hold still.’
Alien DNA, thought Adan.
‘He was my friend, ma’am,’ he told the doctor.
She was concentrating real hard, he could see.
‘I am sorry, son. There. There, you’re good to go.’
:7:
While he was recuperating in an otherwise entirely empty ward, a lieutenant colonel came to see him.
‘You understand that you were the only survivor of the attack on Wallalei?’
Adan hadn’t known the name.
‘Well,’ said the officer briskly, ‘the HMθ deployed much more sophisticated electronic countermeasures than we anticipated. We sent four flights of drones in and the first three just fell out of the sky – all at once. Just dropped like birds in winter. They’re supposed to be hardened against any and all cyberattack. We don’t know why the first three waves failed. But what we really don’t know is why the fourth succeeded.’
‘I don’t know, ma’am.’
‘You didn’t see anything?’
‘It was a blur, ma’am. The shuttle dropped and we rushed out, and then it was all hell …’ What was the phrase? He thought, and it came back to him. ‘All hell broke loose. I got a few shots off, but then everybody was dead.’
‘Trooper, surveillance footage shows you taking shelter behind this prominence.’
She showed him a screen, and on it was a swooping-down video – the whole island swelling to fill the screen and then the beach, with its scattered bodies and body parts, and there was the shuttle tipped on its side with its roof ripped open and smoking and … here was Adan, moving twitchily among a heap of corpses. It was very weird seeing the scene again from this exterior perspective. Very weird. The HMθ droids were much more numerous, and much closer, than he had realised.
‘You stand up,’ said the lieutenant colonel. ‘And that’s when they all seize up. All of them. Is that just serendipitous?
‘I don’t know, ma’am.’
‘You don’t know if it’s merely serendipitous?’
‘I don’t know what serendipitous means.’
‘Coincidence, soldier. Was it just a coincidence that their whole system locked down when you stood up like this?’
‘I don’t know, ma’am.’
‘You don’t know why those droids locked down at that particular time? Or you don’t know what coincidence means?’
‘I don’t know why those droids locked down at that particular time, ma’am.’
‘Very good, Trooper.’
After she had gone, Adan got to thinking that all his friends were dead. They’d all died in a matter of moments, and he alone had survived. That was sad. Should he cry? He thought about it in a more or less distant way for a while. He was not a clever man, but he understood that tears need to come naturally to the eyes as the leaves do to the trees, or they had better not come at all. He slept.
Three days later he was discharged, and reassigned to a new unit. He was nervous at meeting the new people, and a couple of them made fun of him, some, but after a couple of days they had all bonded. They were the remnants of four previously existing squads, all of which had gone into battle against the HMθ at various locations, and all of which had been bested. The casualty rate of Adan’s group was the highest, but everyone in the new squad had lost friends.
‘What I want to know,’ said Roj, who was the loudest and heartiest of the new group, ‘is – why they sending flesh and blood to fight those machines? Why they not sending in their own machines?’
‘You think our machines stand any chance against those hive mind machines?’ said a woman named Skot. ‘They’re techno wizards.’
‘You’re missing the point,’ said Coffee, whose real name was Chaz Joffe but who was universally called by this other name on account of his colour and his fondness for the drink. ‘You know what those HMθ droids are? They are expensive. You know what we are? We are cheap. That’s the height and breadth and depth of it.’
‘Truth,’ said Roj, sombre.
‘How did you survive, Fats?’ Tristis asked Adan.
‘They just all glitched out,’ he told them. ‘I stood up and said they should weave around me, and they stopped.’
Everybody stared at him. Then they decided, collectively, that this was one of those random, meaningless things that people sometimes said, especially if they were post-combat and shaken up and such.
Tristis said: ‘Maybe you the real wizard, yeah?’ and everybody laughed.
And then Roj said: ‘You think you can repeat that trick when we next go into combat?’ and everybody laughed again.
And then it settled again.
They had three weeks of training, settling in, getting used to functioning as a new unit. Then they were sent – by regular shuttle, rather than the more expensive high-insert trajectory – to police an urban disturbance in a lakeside city.
‘They flew us to the middle of the Pacific in thirty minutes,’ complained Roj, ‘but it takes them three hours to schlep us to Chicago.’
Good joke. Roll on snare drum.
Adan wasn’t sure exactly what the beef was, in the city, but it had brought large crowds out onto the streets, and his squad was part of a large military contingent to contain civic disturbance. There were fliers zipping about everywhere, but Adan’s cordon was military-grade and none got through. The one part he found difficult was seeing many people out and about with their Phenes. Some were couples holding hands or hugging; others were clearly part of the larger protest, which made Adan wonder if the protest had something to do with Phene rights, or maybe anti-Phene feeling. He didn’t care about politics, or anything like that, but he found his heart beating faster and felt a clench in his throat as though he was about to cry at the memory of Elegy. His beloved!
Multiple sirens from hurrying ambulances, not quite in sync, like the hooting of geese.
A slug the size of a house floated down – a dispersal dirigible, spraying stinkjuice down onto the crowd. People scattered, ran, some screamed; that stuff bonded with your skin and made you smell like a skunk for weeks. A few protestors braved it (a Phene could be programmed to ignore stink, of course) or else wrapped themselves in gelcloaks and started throwing objects. Shots were fired. But it didn’t matter to Adan, because his unit was being pulled back as a second dirigible came buzzing in overhead.
They were removed to a temporary barracks made out of a warehouse, but kept on alert. Finally they were stood down and shuttle-flown back to proper barracks.
‘What was that about, though?’ Tristis wanted to know.
‘There’s legislation pending,’ said Coffee. ‘Phenes.’
‘What kind of legislation?’ Adan wanted to know.
‘Some people reckon there are too many Phenes,’ said Coffee. ‘There’s a scare that the HMθ will be able to hack them, turn them against us – fifth column, you know?’
‘That’s crazy,’ said Adan.
But the fear was twisting in his gut now.
Make Elegy illegal? They couldn’t. Surely they wouldn’t. She wouldn’t hurt a fly.
It preyed on his mind. It bothered his dreams. He did what any soldier would do: he went to his sergeant.
‘Sarge, can I ask you something?’
This wasn’t his old personal development sergeant. Adan had no idea what had happened to her. This was the squad’s first sergeant, a tall man, young enough that his baldness must have been a fashion choice.
‘Trooper Vergara.’
‘Some of the folk in the squad,’ he said, ‘were saying that the government might be fixing to make Pheno-women illegal. Is that true?’
The sergeant looked down upon Adan from a position that combined physical with intellectual superiority.
‘You don’t follow the news much, then, Trooper?’
‘No, Sarge.’
‘You got to register your Phene. That’s all. They got to have a software regulator uploaded, and a certificate of registration. There’s some concern … Adan, is it?’
‘That’s me, Sarge.’
‘There’s some concern that the enemy might be able to infiltrate the software on which they run. They are all interconnected, after all – it’s a network, after all. That’s what Phene means, I think? Phone? It’s an etymological variant of the word “phone”.’
Adan wasn’t sure what to say to this, so he said nothing. But the sergeant was on a riff now.
‘Though I remember reading a piece that said Phene was short for Phenotype, because elements of human DNA are included in the coding that acts genetically on the plastic and silicate raw materials that constitute the …’ He stopped. ‘You’re not much of a reader?’
‘Sir, no, sir,’ said Adan.
‘Don’t “sir” me, I’m not an officer.’
‘Sorry, Sarge.’
‘Look – you’ve got a Phene at home, yes? Is that your concern?’
‘Yes, Sarge.’
‘You’ll be fine. Get in touch with someone – your parents, maybe?’ Adan shook his head, so the first sergeant adjusted his expression to show a modicum of concern. ‘Dead, Trooper?’
‘My father is, Sarge. My mother is … gone, I guess.’
‘Well, I’m sorry. But you must have family, or friends, who can register your Phene as pending, until you get a furlough and get the chance to take it to the iPhene place and have it seen to?’
There was no point getting further into the nitty and the gritty.
‘Thank you, Sarge,’ said Adan, and saluted, and left.
No leave was scheduled, though, for months. A fortnight of more intensive training, and then Adan’s squad was sent on a new mission. This time he rode the high-trajectory shuttle un-hung-over, and all his senses were heightened, and he felt a mortal terror to intensify his physical discomfort. What if he died? Elegy, powered down, gathering dust, locked in the cupboard until the money he’d paid ran out and she was … what? Chucked out onto a rubbish heap? Recycled? Sold off to some leering man who would fuck her in unspeakable ways, any ways at all being unspeakable unless it was Adan performing those actions? It was more than Trooper Adan Vergara could stand, in point of fact, actually, thank you very much, and no, no mistake, no sir, no madam. And this terror pricked and intensified the adrenalised excitement of going into battle, as the shuttle shook and rattled on its precipitous descent, and the whomp gun bounced in his lap like a prosthetic cock. Blood, which is life, gushed through the sluiceways of his body. He had never felt more intensely alive, and it was not an experience he enjoyed.
Then, with a clattering jolt, they were down, and they exited the shuttle to anticlimax. The enemy were not there, so the squads joined the other troops in hurrying away from the landing site and establishing a beachhead.
Not that they were on a beach. This was a cold, foresty sort of land, the vista softened by mist, and a moist chill in every breath. Adan went where his helmet feed told him to go, took up a series of positions and covered his comrades. Here was a peak, from which he could look down a long shallow valley, and no sign of the enemy. Mist a cataract in the world’s lens.
‘The knife blade loses its edge,’ said Tristis, dropping into position beside him.
‘What?’
‘Soft, yeah?’
But he didn’t know what she meant. And here was Roj, running between the bushes and more falling against a big boulder than taking up position.
‘No show,’ he panted. ‘There’s supposed to be a big underground Hive-Mind base hereabouts, but the word is they evacuated it when they knew we were coming.’
‘Cowards!’ said Tristis, laughingly.
‘I guess we’ve turned the corner where fighting these thetas goes.’
Adan’s feed told him to hold position. Presumably Roj and Tristis were hearing the same thing. There was a river at the bottom of the valley. It was audible, a continual gush of white noise, although it was itself invisible among the blackleaf trees and the white haze. Supply craft hurtled low overhead. Wasp-drones flew back and forth.
‘They’ve all gone,’ said Roj.
But the god of irony tipped back his smirking head at this point and laughed aloud, for as soon as Roj uttered these words a charred oval appeared on his backpack, and then another on his thigh, at the point where it curved round into his ass. Roj started screaming and then somebody coughed, really near Adan, and coughed again, and there was nobody there. Adan actually looked round to see who was coughing, but of course nobody was coughing. Two holes gaped in Roj’s torso, right through his pack and body armour, and sizzling blood gushed out. He fell over to the side.
He wasn’t screaming now.
There must have been some transition period, but that wasn’t how it registered to Adan. The next thing he knew everybody was running, and the HMθ were attacking with a combination of heat-ray ordnance and knucklebone-sized superpenetrators. Drones swept overhead like autumn leaves blown by the mistral, and as dead. They hit the turf with dull sounds, they splashed into the river. Bangs and cracks, and then a mighty flash of light, and the fog spooled off in pearl-white fleeces overhead. Adan aimed his gun, but couldn’t see a target. Spun on his heel. Aimed again. Nothing. Tristis was running hard for better cover, so she at least had identified from where the attack was coming. Why hadn’t Adan? Tristis ran, long legs flicking out and down, right, left, right, left, and then there was no right leg for her to put down and she sprawled face first into the wet grass. Adan lifted his whomp gun and fired anyway, just to get a shot off, into the misty vastness of the forest.
