“My office,” Andria said.
I followed after her. We didn’t say anything as we walked down the hall. She turned into the old CO’s office. It looked about the same. Maybe there were more scratches on the table. Worn armrests. The only new addition was a large wooden globe in the far corner, about chest height.
She shut the door. Gestured to the chair. “At ease. Just us. Want a drink?”
“Yes.” I sat.
She opened the top of the globe with her left hand, the one that had been rebuilt, revealing a selection of hard liquor. Her curls were twisted back with a hair band, making a little tail at the end. I scrutinized her face. We had joined up at eighteen. We weren’t much older than that, were we? Twenty-one, twenty-two at most? Unless those marks on my bunk were wrong. Shit, could we have been deployed for long periods that I’d lost track of?
“This is going to sound stupid,” I said.
“War is shit. Vodka?”
“I know we’ve talked before.”
“It’s all right.” She pulled something from her pocket and set it on the middle of the table. A pocket watch. The little flicker of my heads-up display went out. “That’s a scrambler,” she said. “We’ve got privacy as long as that’s on.”
“When did you get these?”
“I heard about it from you. Corp owns everything, but we pass stuff around. I asked about it. I know you’ll ask some of the same questions again. It’s all right.”
I’d assumed it was Mars that cut off coms back in Canuck. But this was our tech. Corp tech. What one corp had, most corps had: corporate espionage, buying out contracts on individual assets—it could have been any one of the corps that blinded us. It could have been Teni.
“I didn’t get kicked out, when you all figured I was . . . doing this?”
“The shrink has known from the start. It’s why they’re here. Intel . . . well, they believed what most of the Light Brigade folks like you said, at first. Some remembered stuff, some didn’t.”
“The ones who remembered went missing. They hauled them away.”
“Yeah, early in the war.”
“Not anymore?”
“Not since you told us about the Dark.”
“Did it help?”
“Not really. But . . . some shit went down. You weren’t the only one telling them about it. It helped us figure out that mission we just came back from, which was a shit show. But . . . maybe it’s over? I don’t know. Maybe it just keeps going.”
“How many more are like me?”
“I’ve met three. You, a kid called Rache, and Rubem. You remember Rube?”
“He still alive?”
“No.” She handed me a vodka. She’d filled the glass with it. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and it was already past lunchtime. I tried to gauge how she was feeling about Rubem being dead, but her face was a blank.
“I know what it’s like to lose somebody close.” I drank half the glass in one go and set the rest on the table. The burning in my stomach felt good.
“It’s war,” Andria said. She drained two thirds of hers. Kept the glass in her hand.
The warmth of the vodka began to ease the tightness and anxiety in my body. I opened myself to it, let it take me down, down, away. Liquor made the edges of life bearable.
“I think Muñoz had weird jumps too,” I said. “Jones told me about it later.”
“Muñoz . . . from your first squad.”
“Yeah.”
“Weird that these are all people you knew.”
“You and I just know people in common. I’m sure there are other people. Other teams.”
“I’ve talked to other COs. Most people who have bad drops die. Go mad, coming back. Or come together in the ground, or inside some wall, raving about where they’ve been. And you’re the only one who’s jumping around that’s not only lucid on coming back, but who’s still alive here at what should be the end of the war.”
“You don’t think it’s the end?”
“I haven’t gotten this far by blindly believing the corporate line. Maybe at first . . . you know, we signed up for one another. You, me, Rubem . . . Shit, did you know Garcia and Orville dropped out? Marseille died on her first drop. Timon and I kept in touch until the Dark. He was in Beijing. Poor bastard.”
“We’re it.”
“Yeah. You sign up to fight a war. You keep fighting the war for the people next to you. Not the corp.”
“You said I couldn’t change anything. If that’s true, what’s the point of all this? Breaking apart? Seeing a future you can’t change?”
She shrugged. “I’m not in logistics. Just glad they haven’t disappeared you. Me, Jones, Tanaka . . . took a lot of work to get you this far.”
“Maybe it’d be better if I disappeared.”
She sipped her drink. “You helped wake me up, Dietz. Helped me see what the fuck is going on. And you’re a good soldier.”
I snorted. My hand shook as I drained my glass. “Why did you ask me in here?”
“Because I want to help you beat the torture modules.”
“You’ve done it?”
“Yes. You’re going to hate it.”
“I feel like I’ve been living one.”
“I get that. This thing that’s been unleashed, this . . . virus. You told me that when it hits, the war isn’t over. It’s just the endgame. If that’s true, we’ll have some time. Nobody’s getting sent home.”
“Does anyone ever get sent home?” I asked, thinking of Tanaka. “Anybody get to really leave the war?”
She shook her head. “You wouldn’t tell me.”
22.
Reality is a constructed thing.
Imagine us all standing in a circle, trying to describe an object to one another, and as we agree on its characteristics, the thing at the center of our circle begins to take form. That’s how we create reality. We agree on its rules. Its shape. Different cultures have created different realities just by all agreeing about the thing they described.
The first time I understood that my reality wasn’t the same as someone else’s was when my brother brought home a beige coat. We were residents already. My father had been taken away again, leaving the two of us there with our dying mother. She spent most of her time by then gazing at the world through a morphine haze.
“Where’d you get that coat?” I asked. The fabric was nice, clean.
“Bought it,” Tomás said. He was twelve, shooting up like a broad tree already. He must have been well over eighty kilos, and a hand taller than me. No one guessed he was so young.
“With what? What do you need some ugly brown coat for?”
“It’s green.”
“It’s not.” I picked it up. Shook it at him. “It’s tan.”
“It has a green tint.”
“Are you high on something?”
He snatched the coat away from me. “Fuck you.”
I slapped him.
He was big, but he didn’t slap me back. Just gazed at the floor. My cheeks burned. I felt bad. But it was just the two of us; I was older, I was in charge of him. He needed to respect me.
His eyes filled.
“Sorry,” I said. “You just . . . you shouldn’t talk to people that way.”
He picked up his coat and went to his room and quietly shut the door. I felt like an asshole. What kind of person was I, to treat a kid like that?
I knocked on his door. “Tomás? I’m sorry. I’m a shit.” I opened the door.
He sat on the edge of the bed, the coat in his lap, crying.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” I said.
“I stole it. The coat. I’m sorry.”
“Shit. Did anyone see you?” But that was a dumb question. If anyone had seen him, there’d be corporate security busting down our door. Our ghoul was showing. Teni would punish us severely for it. “They expect us to steal and lie and cheat. We can’t be like that.”
He shook his head. “I just wanted it. It was so nice. I’ve never
seen anything so nice.”
“Papa will come back.” I sat next to him. Put my arm around him. He leaned in to me and sobbed. His hair needed a wash. His shirt had a big tear along the hem that needed to be mended. Residents had some rights, mostly the right to work, but we had little safety net.
Our mother died three days later. They released our father for the funeral. My brother wore his stolen coat, and I stood next to him, holding his hand.
We embraced our father. He had lost more weight. He took the cuff of Tomás’s coat in his fingers and smiled and said, “That’s a lovely green coat.”
I blinked at him. Peered at the coat. Still beige, to me. I slowly pivoted, gazing at the walls of the little mourning room we had been assigned at the crematorium. White roses. Fake gilt on the picture frames. The ubiquitous eyes of the cameras. What else did I see differently from everyone else?
“Papa,” Tomás said, “when are you coming home?”
It was only the three of us in the room. Two corporate security techs waited for my father outside, to escort him back to . . . wherever he was being held.
“Soon,” my father said. “Soon.”
It was one of his many lies.
We never saw him again.
What I learned, as I looked back on those times, was that the lies are what sustained us. The lies kept us going. Gave us hope. Without lies we have to face the truth long before we are ready for it.
Long before we are prepared to fight it.
23.
I hung at the center of the interrogation room. The chains bit into my wrists. Left red welts. My toes just touched the ground. The stone walls were bare; the room looked like something out of a medieval dungeon.
Andria’s avatar stood at the big wooden table in front of me, surveying the surroundings. “You and your grimy medieval settings!” she said. “Why do you always choose these?”
Always? I thought. How would she know? “I don’t know. I was thinking of, like, The Count of Monte Cristo.”
“Shit, you have been spending a lot of time catching up on media, haven’t you?”
“I ran through a game based on it,” I said. I didn’t tell her I’d played paladin. She knew that already.
“Ah shit. Yeah, I remember that.”
“You ready?”
“No. I fucking hate these.”
“Well, I’m here. You concentrate on me. You listen to me. You can’t kill your way out of the modules.”
“How did you beat them?”
“I took control of the narrative.”
Four interrogators in black armor moved through her and into the room. They bore shock sticks, like the last time.
“I turned up the real factor,” she said. “You had it on easy mode.”
“Andria!”
The first hit burned my right leg. Another hit my chest. They went at me fast and furious then. I felt every blow.
“Stop!” I yelled.
“I’m not doing it. It’s your construct.”
I had let her program the safe word that would turn off the program. I already regretted it.
“You’re tougher than a construct,” Andria said. “Listen to my voice. Just my voice. I’m going to move you through this.”
The hits kept coming. I gritted my teeth and stared at their identical faces. Steely, impersonal; they sweated, and their hair was slick. The stink of sweat and damp mildew.
“Andria—”
“None of this is real,” Andria said. She began to move around me. “This reality, more than even the one we see, is a complete fabrication. It exists in your mind. Like pain. Like pleasure. We are all of us just beasts, you know. Reacting to stimuli. That’s all we’re doing here. Pinging those parts of your mind that respond to inputs. You’re complicit in your own torture, here.”
“It comes from outside. It’s made by the software!”
“It’s a trick. It doesn’t work unless you accept it.”
“I don’t accept it! So why are you all still here?”
I thought of my father. Had they done this to him? Put him in a torture module? Or had they done it for real?
“What are you afraid of, Dietz?”
“Nothing.”
“Dietz.”
“Dying. Maybe. I don’t . . . make them stop!”
“You make them stop, paladin. What did I always play?”
“Tank. You always took the hits.”
One of the men hit me across the face. I reeled. The chains bit into my wrists. I drooled. Too much real for me. Too much. I saw Landon blowing apart again. Prakash’s arm. Tanaka tracing my collarbone, asking about a missing scar. My mother eating that bird in three quick bites.
“It’s all real,” I said. “That’s the—”
“You’re made of light,” Andria said. “We’re all made of light, did you know that? We are mostly empty space. They shake those atoms apart when they deploy us. Makes it easier for us to move through the world. We disintegrate and come together again.”
A shock to my kidneys. I screamed. A stick across my face. One of the men yanked at the chain, heaving me completely off the floor. I dangled.
“Where do you want to be?” Andria said.
“São Paulo.”
The construct shifted. Stuttered, like interference. I caught a glimpse of a smoggy yellow sky.
“Home?” Andria said.
Life was simpler in the labor camps, or maybe it just felt that way because I was so young. The whole world seems simple when you’re a kid. Food, shelter, family. Try not to die of some infection, or overheat during the hot, dry summers. Hard, yeah, and short. But you live, you live—you live for that day. No other day. There’s no future.
No future.
I gazed at the ceiling, past my chafed, bleeding wrists. Above me, a jagged tear in the fabric of the construct. Some blip. Programming error. We are all made of atoms. Pieces of us flung around the universe at the will of the corporations.
The hits still rained down. I closed my eyes. Concentrated on Andria’s voice.
“We are all of us just meat,” she said. “You can control what you react to and what you don’t. You can change how you react to pain. Pain is simply a message, a ping on your heads-up. Acknowledge it and move on to the problem. What a lot of people don’t get about these modules is that half the experience relies on you believing in it. The more you believe, the more intense it is. The more real it becomes. People do get lost here. I’ve seen that. But because half of this reality is a reality you construct, you can break it. Break your chains, Dietz.”
I kicked out at my captors, but my feet went right through them. Why? Why did their blows land and mine didn’t?
I am the construct.
I am creating half of this.
I took a deep breath. Focused again on Andria. A single, real thing: her voice.
I lashed out. My foot connected with one of the interrogators. He fell back, nose bloodied.
Not a real nose, I reminded myself. This is my world. My construct.
An alarm sounded.
“What’s that?” I said.
Andria gazed at the ceiling. “Shit. Proximity alarm. End construct. Safe word: Rubem.”
The environment fell away. I gasped. I came to on the reclining seat in the game lounge. An alarm blared.
Andria lay on the seat next to me. She opened her eyes and peeled off her restraints.
Boots sounded in the hall outside. Two other soldiers from my platoon were in the room; Sandoval and a woman I didn’t know yet. They both ran out into the hallway.
Andria’s left eye lit up with something from her display.
“What is it?” I said.
“Report to the parade ground. We’ve got some company from corporate.”
24.
The drop ships arrived just as I got into formation next to Jones. The air was hot and muggy, unbearable if not for our slicks. The whole of Dog Company came out to greet the ships, all three platoons. Our company captain
came out front and inspected our platoons. I knew her immediately: Lieutenant V.
She wasn’t dead. Just promoted. Andria couldn’t have just told me that? But of course, I hadn’t asked. I’d feared the worst when I saw that Andria had taken Lieutenant V’s place.
The drop ships vomited their contents: two dozen black-clad Corporate Intellectual Property enforcers. They scouted the area, eyes flickering as they scanned us. Seemingly satisfied, they got in formation near the lead ship. The front opened and two more suited techs walked out. Behind them . . .
I saw the red boots first. Then the white trousers. The hem of the white coat.
The tall, lean woman wearing them came into full view. I knew her face instantly, though she was older, thinner, just like the rest of us. I had not noticed her eyes, back then. I’d spent a lot of our meeting on the floor while she interrogated my father and then dragged him away. Her eyes were black. Her hair now boasted silvery streaks of gray, as if someone had combed through it with tinsel. She held her hands behind her back. Her gaze scanned the crowd. I turned slightly away; like the BLM agents, she would have facial recognition integrated with her display.
Lieutenant V went to meet her. Held out a hand. The woman didn’t take it. Said something long and windy instead. I could imagine it had something to do with some dusty bit of history that made her feel like she was smarter than the rest of us. Fuck her.
They spoke for a few minutes more, then headed inside. When they were well gone, the platoon COs got word that we were dismissed, and back inside we all went.
What was that display for? Why was this woman coming in to see the troops?
A message pinged in my heads-up display.
Andria, saying, “Company captain wants you and me present in the conference room. Bring your party shoes.”
I started a message back, telling her that was a bad idea. But what did I know? I didn’t even know what had been going on the last nine hundred plus days. Shit.
I left the parade ground and got waved into the CO wing. I raised my hand to knock on the conference door, but Andria was already there. She steered me to the observation room adjacent. Put her fingers to lips. Raised her pocket watch.
The Light Brigade Page 18
