We were full of light.
“I’m tired of taking care of living things,” my CO told me once outside the mess hall, right before that operation. “There’s so goddamn many of you. I can’t even go home and take care of my dog at night without getting angry at it. Too much fucking responsibility.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“For what? It’s not your fault. The war’s not your fault. Not my fault either.” But she said the last part differently, like she didn’t quite believe it.
And I wondered if she was right to doubt it, because it was our fault, wasn’t it? We fought this war willingly. We gave our bodies to it, even if we’re only here because of the lies the corporations told us. What if there was a war and nobody came? What if the corporations voted for a war and nobody fought it? You can only let so many people starve. You can only throw so many people in jail. You can only have so many executions for insubordination to the latest CEO or Board of Directors.
We are the weapon.
We fired on one another as we broke apart, and created an explosion so massive it obliterated half the northern hemisphere.
Everything the aliens made grow again, we turned back into dust.
We were the weapon. We were the light.
That was when it changed, for me. It’s like, you think you’re brave, so you carry out your orders. You do it even if you know what the outcome is going to be. You do it because you always wanted to be a hero—you wanted to be on the side of the light. It’s not until you destroy everything good in the world that you realize you’re not a hero . . . you’re just another villain for the empire.
There weren’t many of us left to see what we did, and maybe it was better that way. It was all over the networks, the destruction of half a continent. They didn’t say how we did it. They didn’t say we shot each other up to do it, or say how many of our people died in the explosion, their essential elements broken apart. And right beside these pictures of this barren, smoking wasteland were pictures of our own people cheering in our dingy little cities built on the bones of our ancestors. We had scorched the fucking earth, but everyone cheered because we’d gotten back at those aliens, those liars, those betrayers.
I saw those images and I knew what I had to do. Because I still wanted to be a hero. I still had a chance. But it meant giving up everything I believed in. Betraying everyone I cared about. Being everything I’m supposed to hate.
I know what I need to do because I’ve seen it.
A white rose on a black table.
Heaps of bodies lying on the field like hay.
I know where I need to go. I know what’s next.
The CO gave us leave, those of us who were left. I spent mine looking up the city from my vision, the one I saw in transit. There are a lot of cities by water, but none of ours have brilliant green fields like that. All of our shining cities are surrounded by gritty labor camps.
I didn’t realize how much they lied to us on the networks until I saw the alien cities. Until I killed the aliens myself. They had made a beautiful world from our shit, and we hated them for it, because they were free. No one owned them.
Betrayers, they said, on the networks. Liars.
They had made the land grow things again, but that was all they were supposed to do. They weren’t supposed to be free because no one is free, and they weren’t supposed to be able to defend themselves because no one can. When we found out they could fight back, when we found out about the organic kites that could take out a drone with a single shattering note, or the EMPs that disabled our networks the first time one of our armies rolled by to see what they were doing, the corporate media started building the narrative—the aliens were liars standing in the way of corporate freedom of commerce.
And then San Paulo.
In San Paulo, the aliens had retaliated. They had turned everyone into light.
A whole city had disappeared.
What nobody said is that San Paulo was where the corporations kept a lot of their most profitable labor camps. My cousin was there, so far in debt to the corps that she couldn’t get out. I joined the Light Brigade so that wouldn’t be my fate, too. The corps take care of you, as long as you give them everything.
Maybe the aliens did those people a favor. Now that I’d been light, I started thinking that maybe they didn’t die after all. Maybe they just went somewhere else. Maybe the aliens found out what we were, too, and tried to save us from ourselves, the way I was now trying to save them.
The San Paulo Blink showed the corporations what was possible. And they used the tech to fight back.
The aliens gave us the light.
Eight million corporate slaves, gone in a blink.
And our response: half a continent scorched of all life.
Maybe the light was our downfall. Or maybe we’d been falling the whole time.
After a couple days’ leave, after I located the coordinates of where the city in my vision used to be, I asked to go out on the next offensive. The city I’d seen in my vision had been one of the first we destroyed in the early days of the war, after we tried to invade and they retaliated. In the archives, I saw the city the same way I had in my vision: heaps of our bodies on the green grass fields all around the city.
In the here-and-now, we were still looking for rogue aliens, trying to find out what had happened to all of them, but I already knew. I wasn’t there to help them clean up. I was there because I wanted to jump with them.
I could blink forward. And now I knew I could blink back.
My CO gave me a look when I made the request, like she was trying to figure out if I was crazy. She told me that if I could pass the psych eval, she’d approve my next drop. I asked her if she ever gave her dog away, because it was too much responsibility.
“My dog’s dead,” she said.
“That makes it easier,” I said.
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t. But I guess you can’t save everything.”
No, I thought, you have to choose.
I almost turned back, then, but I was too committed. Escalation of commitment.
The shrink asked me a lot of questions, but I knew the ones that mattered.
“So do you still think you can travel in time, when you become light?” she asked.
I laughed. “I haven’t had any of that déjà vu since the last drop. Those aliens are dead. It’s over.”
I passed my evaluation.
I prepared for the drop. Closed my eyes. Held on to my sense of self while everyone else broke up around me. I pictured the city in my head, the place I wanted to go back to.
We broke apart.
And I saw it—I saw the alien city of my vision, again surrounded by brilliant green fields. The shining spires. The inland sea. It wasn’t the city we had scorched when we became the weapons—though it was just as surely obliterated in the here-and-now as that city was. This was the capital. The center of everything. Those spires were their ships, grounded forever at the foot of the gleaming sea. I had arrived before our first offensive on this city, before the fields were full of the bodies of our people. Before we knew the aliens could fight back.
I came down into my own body, trying to yank myself together, but it was like trying to put together a bucket full of puzzle pieces as somebody poured it out around you.
There were no bodies yet. I had time.
I skimmed into the city, past crowds of startled onlookers. I still wasn’t fully corporeal, but I was getting there. I needed a few more minutes. I needed to tell them. Just as I was able to draw air into my lungs, I felt my body vibrating again. It wanted so badly to come back apart and go where the people in charge had sent it.
I held it together.
I yelled, “They’re sending us. We’re weapons. We’re going to scorch the whole continent.”
They all stared blankly at me, like I was some dumb beast, and I wondered if they understood Spanish. I tried again in English, but that was as many languages as I knew.
When I didn’t say anything else, the crowds dispersed and the people went on their way.
But one of them came up behind me, and I recognized her. It was the bag lady from the restaurant. She put her hand on my arm and squeezed, but it went right through me. I was coming apart again.
“It’s you who brings the light,” she said. “We won’t be here when it comes. You can do what you need to do now without fear for us.”
I broke apart.
Saw nothing. A wall of blackness.
Then, another city.
But not the one my CO had sent me to. Someplace else. I was skipping out of control. I was losing it.
I knew this city because I had grown up here, before it became a work camp. I was eight years old now, staring into the lights of San Paulo. The ocean wasn’t as close as it is now, but I could smell the sea on the wind.
I knew this place, and this day.
My cousin was with me, young and alive, laughing at some joke.
I wanted her to be safe forever. I wanted us all to be safe.
I stared up at the sky. Mars was up there, full of socialists.
But they hadn’t lied to us after all, had they?
It was my lie. My betrayal.
I held out my hand to my cousin. “Have you ever wanted to become the light? Go anywhere you want? Be anyone you want?”
“It’s impossible to be anyone you want,” she said, and I was sad, then, for how soon the corporations took away our dreams.
“Hold my hand tight,” I said. “There’s going to be a war soon. There’s going to be a war, but no one will come.”
That’s why the aliens weren’t in the city when we arrived with our weapons.
It was because of me. My betrayal.
And so was this.
I blinked.
I was high above the city now, still in San Paulo, but the sea was higher, the sprawl was even greater, and I could see the work camps circling the city one after another after another.
Eight million people.
What if there was a war and nobody came?
I broke apart over San Paulo.
I was a massive wave of energy, disrupting the bodies around me, transforming everything my altered atoms touched.
We became eight million points of light.
I broke them all apart, and brought them with me.
You can’t save them all. But I could save San Paulo. I could take us all . . . someplace else, to some other time, where there was no war, and the corporations answered to us, and freedom wasn’t just a sound bite from a press release.
This is not the end. There are other worlds. Other stars. Maybe we’ll do better out there. Maybe when they have a war here again, no one will come.
Maybe they will be full of light.
THE IMPROBABLE WAR
THE WALL WAS MADE from the faces of the dead.
If First Officer Khiv turned from it quickly, she could glimpse her probable future: her face on the wall. The wall had started as a war memorial. With the advent of technology that captured the soul, it had become something else. Now it was a massive probability engine, the souls of the dead merging into one sentient consciousness. Seeing the promise of her future reflected here told Khiv time was short.
Four million soldiers in gleaming obsidian suits stood on the wall. Khiv climbed after them, pressing her boots into the worn moues of writhing faces, and took her place beside them while the engine that was the wall heaved beneath her.
“How will we fight?” the generals had asked when their old enemies had risen up from the north. “We have given up hierarchies, and hate, and war. Going to war will destroy all we’ve built on the ashes of the corporations that once drove our governments. We will again become slaves to war.”
It was Khiv who told them, after she trained her country’s first army in a century.
“We will fight them with the love of our dead.”
Now the enemy swelled before them on the other side of the wall, their soldiers enhanced with spidery metal suits, commanding nanotech swarms that made the air sharp and hot as her people’s memory of war.
As the enemy prepared to strike, Khiv gave the order. Four million soldiers threw themselves from the wall.
“Love drives the engine,” Khiv had told the generals. “The love the dead have for us.”
The wall heaved, its sentient engine whirring, calculating. The souls within did what they had to preserve the peace they had died for.
The bodies of both armies exploded like stars.
Not a likely eventuality. But within the realm of probability.
Scholars would argue which side the wall took when it obliterated the armies. Some said it chose neither. It chose the future where those its gibbering souls loved would survive.
And in that future, there were no soldiers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KAMERON HURLEY is an award-winning author and copywriter. She has a bachelor’s degree in historical studies from the University of Alaska and a master’s in history from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, specializing in the history of South African resistance movements. She is also a graduate of Clarion West.
Hurley is the author of The Light Brigade, The Stars Are Legion, and the Worldbreaker Saga, which is comprised of the novels The Mirror Empire, Empire Ascendant, and The Broken Heavens. Her first series, The God’s War Trilogy—which includes the books God’s War, Infidel, and Rapture—earned her the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer and the Golden Tentacle Kitschy Award for Best Debut Novel. It was followed by a collection of stories, Apocalypse Nyx. Hurley is the author of the essay collection The Geek Feminist Revolution, which contains her essay on the history of women in conflict “We Have Always Fought,” which was the first article ever to win a Hugo Award.
Hurley’s short fiction has appeared in magazines such as Popular Science, Lightspeed, Vice Magazine’s Terraform, and Amazing Stories as well as anthologies such as The Lowest Heaven, and Year’s Best SF . She has won two Hugo Awards, a British Science Fiction Award, and a Locus Award, and has been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke and the Nebula Awards. Her work has also been included on the Tiptree Award Honor List and been nominated for the Gemmell Morningstar Award.
In addition to her writing, Hurley has been a Stollee guest lecturer at Buena Vista University, a LITA President’s Program speaker, and taught copywriting at the School of Advertising Art. Hurley currently lives in Ohio, where she’s cultivating an urban homestead.
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