The Light Brigade

by Kameron Hurley

  S: You gave it to the brass. I just took a peek.

  I: I am an intelligence officer. As you have seen, I do not engage in advanced interrogation techniques. But your continued evasiveness is tempting me.

  S: You asked about doppelgangers. But that’s a bit of a tired old idea, isn’t it? Hardly easy to do with today’s advancements in organics. What do you know about time distortions caused by corporate deployment technology?

  I: Why don’t you tell me?

  S: I want my shoes back.

  I: Answer and I’ll consider it.

  (SILENCE 45 seconds)

  S: I have all the time in the world, Sergeant. Do you?

  (SILENCE 110 seconds)

  I: Go get the shoes.

  (SILENCE: 140 seconds)

  I: Is that better?

  S: Yeah, I’ll need these later.

  I: For all the jogging you’re going to do?

  S: Oh, look at you, feeling feisty. I knew you had a sense of humor. And a keen interest in the past. Did you know Martian POW camps give you access to unrestricted media? I’m sure I mentioned that. The first thing I listened to was War of the Worlds. You know what that is?

  (SILENCE: 7 seconds)

  S: I’m uncertain if that look means yes or no. After a few months of media access, I understood why the corps restricted so much of it. It shows you different ways people have lived. It offers options. Gets you to thinking . . . well, is this really the only way that a society can organize itself? Was the past really a socialist cesspool of want and disease? Were people happy? What sort of problems did they have? You’d be surprised how little what drives us has changed.

  I: If you aren’t a Martian infiltrator, how do you know what you do? Are you a defector? I admit we have seen some of those fools, but they didn’t live long. If that’s the case, why would you defect to Mars?

  S: Why does anyone defect? Some defect for financial or personal freedom, certainly. For enough wealth, people will do anything. Others defect, simply, because they discover the world they believed they lived in proved to be false. There is a province in ShinHana that was once split into the north and the south. The north was geographically isolated, and supported by the old . . . oh, what was it? One of those long-winded acronyms. For seventy, eighty years, this regime controlled everything that people saw and read and heard. It was a small enough country that it was easy to restrict everything, to a far greater extent than any of the corps do now, even with our advanced surveillance and tracking systems. They were raised to believe their tiny spit of land ruled over by some doddering dictator was the center of the world. And you know what? It worked, mostly. For a long time. The war there was entirely a war of propaganda. The rest of the world worked to let the north know that there was another life beyond the one they knew. But there are always people who are more comfortable with what is certain and known than what is just . . . a promise. A what-if. The tipping point comes when you have nothing to lose. When you can’t stand it anymore. If your life is in danger, or your future is grim, then shit, why not defect? There’s nothing to lose. That’s the trouble with regimes that get too cruel. People need to feel like they have free will. They want to believe that nobody else is as free or happy as they are. If they aren’t citizens yet, well, shit, that’s their fault. They aren’t working hard enough. People disappear in the night, and you think, of course they must have done something wrong. Good people are rewarded. Bad people are punished. Many fought hard to get messages into the north, to share their own propaganda, and people defected, certainly. But only the very daring or the very desperate. The rest did not want to believe. This is something we don’t talk about . . . what happens when you are presented with a truth that contradicts everything you believe in? The widespread proliferation of information in the early days of the open knu, back when it was the wild net, should have made truth easier to find. But it turns out most of us don’t want truth. We want stories that back up our existing beliefs. Flood the world enough with information, and I will pick out only those bits that uphold the virtue and rightness of whatever corp I’ve been taught to love.

  I: But you stopped doing that, clearly. What turned you?

  S: Sometimes, to save the world, you have to let it break. You let it break because even as it breaks, there will still be those who believe its demise impossible, even as they watch it disintegrate. Monsters do not die quietly, not the corporations, not the corrupt democracies and kleptocracies before them, and certainly not the monarchies, the feudal lords, the god-emperors, and the oligarchies. Most of those old leaders had to get their heads chopped off to step aside. That’s what moved them, finally.

  I: You advocate violence, then? A terrorist radical.

  S: Don’t tell me every revolution is peaceful. Revolutions rely on the tireless work of faceless masses whose lives mean so little individually that their names weren’t known to their movements even when alive. There is no bloodless revolution, only necessary revolution, when a system becomes so deeply broken you can’t affect change from the inside. When the system itself has become calcified so permanently that change is not possible . . . that is when the knives come out. I used to believe, as others did, that we could work within the existing system, that moderate change was possible. But when you take away the ability of the people to effect change within the rules of the system, those people become desperate. And it is desperate people who overthrow their governments. The corps tell us each individual should reap the profits of “their” hard work. But the reality is the corps made their fortunes on the backs of laborers and soldiers paid just enough to keep them alive. The corps did not labor. Do not labor. The shareholders and upper management sit in their glass towers and drink liquor spiked with our blood. Instead of sharing that wealth with those who broke their backs to attain it, they hoard it like great dragons. Any human power can be changed by human beings. That is a truth, a constant. Humans can’t build power structures that cannot be destroyed. We are the power structure. There was a time when human beings believed they were their governments. They understood they had power over them, because they created them. They did not simply wait around for their governments to give them rights and freedoms. They demanded them. People should not be afraid of the corporations. Corporations should be afraid of the people.

  I: You’re a communist then.

  S: Let’s say I’m old enough not to be dazzled by Ayn Rand.

  I: Truth is a point of view.

  S: So says every great tyrant. You mistake the interpretation of a truth with the truth itself. There is still objective truth. The truth that the sun comes up in the east. The truth of gravity, which keeps us tethered to this spinning ball of space stuff. Those are truths. The rest is made up.

  I: Was it the pursuit of truth that made you defect?

  S: The more I lived, the more I understood that I was ill-informed about the world. I had grown up with a story of how things were. And . . . the world was not that way. As a POW, I gobbled up all sorts of other stories. I learned about piecing together evidence. About paradoxes and loops. About mathematical equations and what each society considered an acceptable amount of force. They enjoyed giving me genre shows. They considered those least powerful, least political. But those taught me other things. My favorite detectives, Sam Spade and Columbo . . . the rogue detective in Despiadado. That endless series about the Barnaby family, and Saga Norén. Ah, Saga! Gallium Martinez. Sasha Oriphant, from the early show Evecom made. Ortega, from Detective Muerto. That was an early Teni one, back when we were called Teniente Azul, after the arms dealer. The world was a much more complicated place before the corporate consolidation. So many different countries. Different rules. Difficult to keep track. But many did believe in rightness. Objective truth. The rule of law. They were all fantasies, the same way our media is fantastic; full of hopes and wishes and stories about the world we strive for, not the world we live in.

  I: So you defected because you wanted to watch a lot of bad media?
Is that what you’re saying?

  S: What do you believe in, Sergeant? Do you believe in TenisanaCom?

  I: TenisanaCom has always been fair to those who are worthy.

  S: But you did not always side with TenisanaCom, or Evecom before it. You worked for Teni, before the consolidation. I was there, Sergeant. Were you always with Evecom, a secret agent rolled up into its citizen schools until you could engineer the merger with Tene-Silvia, or was there a moment you turned and sided with another corp? I wonder, often, if you were in this from the beginning. If you knew the end as I did.

  I: We are free to barter citizenship.

  S: You were bartered?

  I: My contract was up for renegotiation.

  S: A euphemism if I ever heard one.

  I: Not at all. I’m a skilled citizen.

  S: Then you made a choice. To give up what was known and head into the unknown. Why did you do that, Sergeant? Was it because the known had become so terrifying?

  I: Money and opportunity. Isn’t it always thus? Is that what Mars offered you? Money and opportunity?

  S: No. Mars offered me rest, Sergeant. Rest from a very long war. An infinite loop of despair. Defecting also offered me a chance to know the truth.

  I: The truth?

  S: About the war. About myself. You get a lot of time to think about things when you’re in a cell.

  I: And what truth did you learn there?

  S: That the war with Mars is a lie. That the only idiots on that rock are a few thousand free Martians staying low until you destroy one another. The rest are just corporate civilians caught in a war that started between the corporations on Mars, and then came here.

  I: You’re here to spread misinformation?

  S: That’s your job. I just answer questions.

  I: Why Saint Petersburg?

  S: You are so obsessed with that stupid question. I already told you. I went there because you were there, and I needed you to get me here.

  I: And where is here? You have no idea where we’re holding you. That’s by design.

  S: On the contrary. I know exactly where you’re holding me, because I’ve been here before.

  I: Riddles and nonsense.

  S: Not at all. Time displacement, remember?

  I: That’s a theory only. It’s not been proven.

  S: I’m disappointed. You’re in intelligence. You should understand what’s happening.

  I: Enlighten me.

  S: We’re in a basement on Robben Island. And I’m about to liberate myself.

  I: You’re a mad little grunt, aren’t you?

  S: I’ve never been saner in my life.

  I: End interview.

  (END RECORDING #4)

  28.

  Some of us came back together.

  Some of us didn’t.

  Prakash lay in front of me, flopping like a fish. Blood bubbled from her mouth, frothing.

  I threw off my helmet and crawled over to her. The others were still coming together; not everyone saw her. Maybe I was looking for her, because I knew, always knew, this moment was coming.

  Her hand jutted out of her chest, the arm mangled to shoot through her. I knew it was possible to get put back together wrong. They went through it in training. I’d seen it happen to other people. But knowing it would happen and then finally seeing it happen to someone on my squad was something else.

  I pulled Prakash into my arms. Her eyes were already distant, the far-off look of someone retreating into death.

  “Don’t, hey,” I said, like it made a difference. I took off her helmet and put my hand to her face. I wanted to touch her one last time, before this all went full circle.

  But the medics took her away from me. Another medic grabbed me by the shoulder and started walking me through the protocol.

  “Show me your digits!” she said.

  I held up my hands.

  “Name and rank,” she said, and I choked on my words because I had no idea what my rank was at this moment in time.

  “Sorry. I’m a little confused.”

  She shone a light into my eyes. I blinked rapidly, trying to figure out where I was in the order of things.

  If Prakash was . . . we had just come from the banana fields. Where I had shot the Martian girl. Early in the war. My heart fluttered frantically, like it was trying to come out of my chest.

  I wanted to throw up. I buckled over, but nothing came up. I couldn’t breathe. My body sagged, suddenly weak, and I broke out in a cold sweat.

  “What’s happening?” I said. “What’s—”

  The medic called for a stretcher. I started hyperventilating. I clawed at the collar of my slick, tore it loose.

  Two more medics hustled over. Gave me oxygen. Threw me on a stretcher. I shook so badly I thought I’d shake right out of my body. I pressed my hand over my heart, willing it to stay still. I kept trying to work out what was happening; it was like I had left my body, like I was looking down at some unreasonable thing happening to someone else.

  I saw Jones staring at me; Jones, who was going to defect, in the end, and I didn’t blame him, not at all, though the look on his face now . . . he still had something, this early in the war. Some feeling of rightness and duty to the corp that had yet to be broken. Omalas watched me go too; Marino was presumably already halfway back to the drop that would take us to quarantine, no doubt thinking about a beer and a fuck. Blackness ate at the corners of my vision, and I closed my eyes then, fearful that I would pass out.

  In medical quarantine, they hooked me to a line and ran some tests. They gave me something that cooled the edges of reality. After half an hour or so, I felt like I was ready to float away.

  The doctor came in, a tall woman with a beak of a nose and bushy orange eyebrows that were at odds with her stark white hair. I hadn’t met her before, not that I remembered anyway.

  “Private Dietz. Are you feeling better?”

  “Yeah.” My voice sounded far away.

  “It looks like you had a panic attack. It’s very common, after a drop.”

  “Prakash,” I said. “Did she die?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t comment on that.”

  “Who can? Is she dead or not?”

  “She’s being treated. That’s all I can tell you. I’m sorry. As for you, we’ll keep you for observation for another two hours, then release you to quarantine. I’m going to have your company medic administer a powerful sleeping aid for you the next few nights. You were badly dehydrated, and you’re underweight. I expect your CO will also have something to say about your hair.”

  I touched my scalp. My hair had grown out at the end of the war with nobody to keep track of it. How long had I been there, after the Sick? A long time. Months, at least. Maybe a year?

  “Intelligence is coming, too, aren’t they?” I said.

  “That’s not my department,” she said, “but based on your condition, that’s likely.”

  She left. I zoned out, my tumbling train of thought castrated by the drugs.

  When was the last time I slept?

  I fought it as long as I could. Some part of me was afraid I’d wake up in another time, that everything would be different again, that this was the drop they found out I really was Mad Dietz, just like my father, and I’d be the next one they disappeared.

  29.

  The soft blue walls of the intelligence debriefing room comforted me. After seeing how chaotic things were at the end, all I wanted to do was eat and sleep. Talk seemed counterproductive. Lieutenant Ortega was back, which I also found soothing and familiar.

  She sat across from me, alone this time, though I knew there were other people guarding the door, and probably some watching us on camera. I would expect no less.

  They hadn’t even let me have a shower yet. My hair was greasy and long. My stomach rumbled so loudly I thought Ortega could hear it.

  She swiped open a display on the table and turned two snaps around so I could see them side by side.

  The
first snap showed me in formation, no doubt right before the last drop. The banana run. I had a fleshy, sunburned face; a shaved head. The second snap was me in the hospital bed. I didn’t remember anyone taking it, but there are cameras everywhere. In this one, I’m much thinner, my hair’s a messy tangle, and I have that faraway, blank look I’ve seen on so many other soldiers who have seen too much shit.

  “Can you explain this?” She tapped the photo of me in formation. “We took this right before you dropped. We prefer to have these on file for occurrences like this, when people come back . . . different.” She tapped the second snap. “This is you now.”

  I peered at the faces. They could be two different people.

  “Private Dietz? Tell us what happened during your last drop.”

  I rubbed my finger on the projection of my new, thinner face. “Sometimes we come back wrong. Like Prakash.”

  “These differences can’t be explained by the deployment technology.”

  “What happened to Prakash?”

  “We all know the risks of deployment,” Ortega said. “She had to be lethally quarantined—put into stasis to halt any further damage.”

  “You going to lethally quarantine me, too? Put me on ice until you figure out what to do with me?” Prakash wasn’t dead, though, not yet. That was something.

  “Do we need to?” Ortega leaned toward me.

  “I don’t know what happened.” Something caught in my throat. All the lying catching up to me, maybe. I couldn’t even look at her.

  “That’s the story you’ll stick to?”

  “Ask your logistics people what happened. Then maybe you can start giving me answers, instead of the other way around. I’m the one bleeding and shitting for the fucking corp. You owe me.”

  “The corp owes you nothing.”

  “Then I don’t owe them anything, either.”

  “That’s not what your contract says.”

  I folded my arms. “I want a shower and a hot meal. I haven’t had either in a while. You still consider us human at all? Or are we just ghouls to you? My parents died to get me residency and it means shit, doesn’t it? We’re all just a means to an end.”