The Light Brigade

by Kameron Hurley

  “Have a seat.” She gestured to the immersive chairs. I pushed up an armrest and sat sideways in the chair. I wanted to stay upright. If I laid back, I feared I’d fall asleep. I took a gulp of the drink, barely hesitating as I got a whiff of the peaty stink of it right before it burned my throat. I winced.

  “Like that?” Andria laughed. “Rubem got me into it. Satisfying. Like drinking the war.”

  I took another swig and closed my eyes. I rolled the swallow around on my tongue. It reminded me of burning Canuck; the smell of Marino’s smoking grill. The loam and salt of Tanaka and I fucking in that field. Taste of our heated MREs covered in ash from the coals. It must have been Andria who was our CO on that mission; that’s why I didn’t recognize Captain V’s voice. How could you long for a time and a place that had been hell on earth? I swallowed the scotch and opened my eyes to find Andria scrutinizing me.

  “You know why I’m here?” I asked.

  “I know coms don’t work so well in the rec room. I figured you’d appreciate that. It’s been a while, Dietz. For you. For me.”

  I turned on the pocket watch and set it on the floor between us. The blue aura of my coms went out. Intelligence was muted.

  Andria stared at the watch like it was a malevolent insect.

  “Where the hell did you get that?” Andria said.

  “From you.”

  Andria dug into her pants and set a nearly identical watch next to the one I’d put there. My version was shabbier, a little scuffed, and still had a bit of Andria’s blood on it.

  “This was my grandmother’s,” she said. “Passed on from her grandmother. How the fuck do you have it?”

  “Does yours take coms out like this one? Have you done that yet?”

  Andria took her original pocket watch and slowly stuffed it back into her pocket. “You did that? How do you have . . .”

  “I need your help. Not just now, but later. Have you heard of the Light Brigade?”

  “What, like . . . the charge of the light brigade?”

  “No.” I didn’t know what that was. “Soldiers who have bad drops. Deployments that happen . . . out of order. When they break apart.”

  “I’ve read your file. Rube told me to, when he heard I got this promotion. He had a feeling.”

  My chest tightened. Could I trust her this early in the war?

  “I don’t want to get grounded. I have to learn how to control these drops. You helped me, ahead of now. That’s how I have that pocket watch. There’s going to come a time, you’ll know it, after a mission they call the final solution, when we all get sick. That’s when I need your help most.”

  Her fingers tapped her glass.

  “You talked to Rube?”

  “No.” I almost added, “He’s dead, how could I?” but didn’t. I could see it in her face, her tone. She was talking and thinking about him like he was still alive. And he was, for now. My head hurt.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I need you to help me finish what we started in the future.”

  I expected her to call in a medic right then.

  “Tell me?”

  I told her—about the drops, about burning Canuck. The Sick. The torture modules.

  “I have to figure out how to beat the torture modules. Can you help? You know how.”

  “Sure, I learned back in mandatory training.”

  “But you didn’t go into intelligence?”

  Andria grimaced. “I don’t torture people.”

  “Aren’t torture modules torture?”

  “Yes, but not with real people. You’re beating an algorithm designed to act like a person. It has rules. Like any program. There are rules.”

  “Like . . . physics.” I searched my memory for my basic physics class. “Basic rules. Conservation of mass? Right?”

  “Mass can’t get created or destroyed, only rearranged. That’s why we don’t generally lose people. They come back wrong. Also, theory of relativity . . . shit gets heavier the faster it moves.”

  “What was the thing about heavy stuff?”

  “I see where you’re going. Heavy objects distort space-time. And if you’re moving at the speed of light—”

  “We’d get heavier.”

  “Sure, but massive star heavy? And wouldn’t all that heavy gravity fuck up stuff like—”

  “The moon?”

  Andria leaned back in her chair. “Huh.” She poured herself another two fingers of whisky. “I’m listening.”

  “I’m just spitballing. I have no idea what I’m talking about.”

  “Yeah, but whatever it is you have no idea about kinda intrigues me. Rubem was saying science shit like this.”

  “So you’re listening because of Rubem? Well, remind me to thank him.” Before he ended up dead.

  “Let’s say I believe you’re living this war out of order,” Andria said. “We’ll say that logistics fucked up, like they did with Rube. Happens all the time. It’s new tech.”

  “And I’m not the only one it’s happened to. That’s how you know I’m not crazy.”

  “You’re the only one to talk about it in detail. Rube clams up about it.”

  I pointed at the pocket watch. “I’m only talking because coms are down. If they were recording this, I’d be grounded. Nobody wants to be grounded. And Jones said people who had bad drops weren’t always just grounded. They disappeared. I wasn’t going to talk about that with anybody.”

  “But you are with me? We haven’t seen each other in . . . a long time.”

  “For you, maybe. It wasn’t that long ago that I last saw you. When I meet you again, in the future, you said I’d talked to you. That I’d somehow convinced you to help me. I have no idea what I said. I’m hoping this is it.”

  “Better turn coms back on, or someone’s going to ask questions. I can only blame the bad reception in this room for so long.”

  I reluctantly took the watch into my hand. “You going to report me?” I said.

  “I remember what they called your father.”

  “I do too.”

  “You signed up to fight this war, even with what they did to him.”

  “I believed it was the right thing to do.”

  “I never told you how my aunt died, did I?”

  “One of the two you lived with?”

  “Yeah. They looked after us, after my parents died. And one of my aunts fought in the corporate wars. Fought for Teni, too. Good soldier. Good woman. She’s the reason I wanted to go into the service at all. I was already a citizen. I could have done anything. But something happened to her in the service. I didn’t know what until earlier this year. All I heard was she died. They gave us all these great benefits. Sent her ashes home wrapped in a flag. Neat and tidy. I got drunk with a sergeant major on leave, and she remembers my aunt. She tells me she spoke up for my aunt when my aunt was court-martialed. It’s the reason my aunt wasn’t dishonorably discharged. The sergeant major was the reason we got some happy story about her and got to keep our benefits and citizenship.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She saw something she shouldn’t have. That’s all the sergeant major would say. I wonder, though, about all the shit going down in the Corporate Corps, especially the last few years. I wonder just how far they’ll go to beat the other corps, to consolidate us. It’s been moving that way for a long time.”

  I let out my breath. I didn’t realize I’d been holding it. I raised the watch. “Ready?”

  She nodded.

  I pressed the switch, and the blinking light flickered at the corner of my left eye again. I put the watch away.

  “I’m happy to help you work the torture modules,” Andria said. “But you look like shit. Take another couple days. Work on your meditation. Then we’ll head down to the immersive cave and talk about volition. I heard you’re grounded for six weeks. That should give us some time unless the platoon is called out on an extended mission.”

  “Thank you, sir.” I stood.
/>   “And Dietz?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Wait to be dismissed next time.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, and saluted. I backed out of the room. When I got into the hall, I realized my hands were shaking. When was the last time I tried to change anything in my life instead of just reacting to it?

  I hadn’t even tried to change for Vi.

  More the fool, me.

  31.

  I rolled into my first immersive with Andria a few days later during free time. I wasn’t looking forward to it. All I had to go on was Andria’s future insistence that this would work. The Andria I sat next to on the reclining immersive seat parallel with mine didn’t seem as confident in what the fuck we were doing as Future Andria, but I suppose I should have expected that. The thing is, when you’re doing something you know is a little bit nuts, you really want to have somebody on your side reassuring you that it’s not really nuts, and this is fine, really fine. And she wasn’t quite there yet.

  As I slipped into the immersive experience, I tried to blot out my memories of the future. I wanted to believe Andria was doing this for me, but she was doing it for Rubem. Rubem, who would be dead by the next time we talked. And I never even asked her about it then, never said, “How did he die?” The dead were all blurring together, muddled as the events I was experiencing. Follow orders. Follow the brief. Jump, jump. Do as you’re told. No time for anything else.

  Vi used to tell me about this experiment, the Milgram Experiment, where some college professor got ordinary people to administer electric shocks to students until they believed the students were dead. He did it by telling them that he would take all responsibility for what happened, and that if they didn’t administer the death-dealing shocks, the experiment was ruined.

  That’s the easy way to live, and the way the Corporate Corps wanted it.

  It wasn’t until I opened my eyes and stepped into the immersive experience with Andria that I remembered that study. Ordinary people would do anything for authority figures, as long as they could be insulated from the blame. But they would do anything for the people they loved, too. Even if it meant disobeying orders. Why didn’t anyone do an experiment like that?

  The immersive bloomed around us. A dingy, brick-lined torture chamber. This was the first time, chronologically, that Andria had seen it.

  “How very medieval,” she said.

  I hung at the center of the room, bound in chains attached to the ceiling. At the edges of the darkness, I sensed the hulking forms of the guards, the torturers, the interrogators, waiting to seethe inside and end this.

  Andria picked up a whip lying on the big wooden table in front of me. It was, by far, the most innocuous of the weapons laid out on the counter.

  “Something you want to tell me, Dietz?” she said, waggling the whip.

  “It’s the default setting.”

  She shrugged. Threw the whip back. “Oh well. So tell me about what you’re experiencing.”

  “Everything fucking hurts.” I hadn’t put on the settings. Andria had, again. That scared the fuck out of me. The torturers could do anything they wanted, until I used the safe word that triggered the program to shut down. It occurred to me that this time I might know the word, though, if she reused them.

  “Why does it hurt?”

  “I don’t get that question.”

  “You understand you’re in a simulation. You know it’s fake. You’re in control. So, why does everything hurt?”

  “Because my brain says so. It says that—”

  “What’s the purpose of your brain?”

  “To interpret . . . stimuli.”

  “So what is this?”

  “Stimuli . . . but listen, what’s the difference, then, between this and the real world, if they’re both just processing stimuli?”

  “Exactly.” The torturers came in dressed all in black, a mix of faces and skin tones and hair textures and crisp uniforms. I didn’t want them to look like Martians, whatever it was we had been told Martians looked like—tall and thin, tending toward the pale, clear skin, squinty eyes, snub noses. I knew the enemy was not a tone or a texture, but a system.

  Andria picked up a jagged black knife on the table. She cut each of their throats cleanly. The torturers dropped like flies; far more quickly and quietly than any human person did in real life unless they had a blood clot or an aneurysm. An uncle of mine—a man I called my uncle—had once died of an aneurysm. He had been running along a popular pedestrian pathway, and then simply dropped dead, like a marionette whose strings were cut. It was an astonishing thing, to watch someone who was there one moment, and gone the next.

  The bodies of the torturers bled out and faded from the module.

  “There you go,” Andria said.

  “You aren’t coded like me.”

  “On the contrary. I’m dialed in to this simulation with the same constraints you are.”

  I closed my eyes and focused my attention, the way I had the last time she and I had done this, in the future. I heard the second wave of torturers head in.

  As their boots approached, I felt Andria move. I opened my eyes to find her face peering into mine. The cold blade she held kissed my neck.

  “What will you do?” Andria said.

  Behind her, the torturers came in, garbed in their black.

  I met Andria’s gaze. I reached.

  The chain around my right wrist warped and melted away. I yanked the blade from Andria’s hand and lashed out at the nearest assailant. Plunged the knife into his neck. Then the next. The next.

  They threw themselves at me, one after another, wielding their buzzing batons. Their hits landed. Pain. But pain was just a message, a firing in my neurons. This pain did not exist outside my head. It was confined.

  As the last woman fell, I found my breathing was still even. I had not broken a sweat. Of course not.

  This isn’t real, I thought. That’s the understanding one had to have. The realization that made it possible.

  “Very good,” Andria said. She pointed to my left wrist, still bound by a chain. “Fatal flaw there, though.”

  I jerked at the chain. It remained fast.

  “Goddammit,” I said.

  You win some, you lose some.

  32.

  Three weeks into my grounding, the platoon got called on a mission to eastern Africa, Masukisan territory. That left me in the barracks with the support staff and a few other soldiers from the wider company who were out on medical leave like me, either for physical or mental reasons.

  It was not an especially memorable time. I marked the days on my bunk. I saw the shrink. We discussed my bullshit feelings about nothing. I talked about my own boredom, my weariness of the war. She wanted to talk endlessly about the Martian I had shot on my last mission, but that Martian was the least of the horrors in my brain, now. When I woke during these stretches, it was from nightmares of vomiting blood onto my boots on Mars, and running, always running, after Muñoz across the rusty Martian dust; she always stayed just ahead of me, laughing, looking back.

  I didn’t tell the shrink about those nightmares.

  When my six weeks were officially up, my platoon still wasn’t back from their last deployment. Those of us left in the barracks weren’t given any updates. Information was, as ever, at a premium. I got put on guard duty around the barracks, and started attending classes to work on my specialist promotion. Most of this was the shrink’s idea. She didn’t like me spending so much time in torture immersives. I suppose it doesn’t look good, being on some mental health leave and volunteering to get virtually tortured. But I had heard about aversion therapy for PTSD; some of the other soldiers talked about it, and I surfaced that idea in one of our discussions. Maybe it was good for me to face the things that I had experienced in a controlled environment. Let my body burn off the anxiety.

  By the time my platoon got back, I’d been awarded my specialist promotion, proving that I did, in fact, have more than two brain cells to
rub together. I wanted to message the DI and tell him, then wondered if he was dead. That would be fitting, wouldn’t it?

  When my platoon got out of quarantine, I counted fifty-six additional marks on my bunk. It continued to be the only way to keep track of days, as I had no access to a calendar. Duty lists and company-wide events were communicated through a countdown clock, and never more than seven days in advance, as if knowing too far out about a holiday or a parade march would result in a mass revolt.

  Jones was the first one I saw come back from quarantine. He walked with a limp. He did not look at me as he slid into his bunk.

  “Alive,” I said.

  “Did you know that even blood can burn?”

  “I didn’t,” I said, and left it at that.

  We had lost Herrera on that drop. I learned later that he had corporealized inside of a big dirt pit and died before they could get logistics to route him out again. That left us down not one, but two people, counting Prakash.

  The brass rotated in the new girl the next day, and when I saw her name pop in on my heads-up, I wasn’t surprised. I knew exactly whose squad she would be assigned to.

  Ratzesberger.

  On this, our first chronological meeting, I was struck with how young she looked. I had no idea how old I was by this point, but she seemed years younger, sixteen if a day.

  “They recruiting kids now?” I grumbled.

  She straightened her spine and said, “I’m seventeen! Advanced classes can sign up at—”

  “Fresh meat.” Marino sat on the trunk at the end of his bunk, cleaning his gun. “They just keep getting younger and younger.”

  “How long was your mandatory training?” I said.

  “Three weeks,” she said, defiant.

  “Holy Mother,” Omalas muttered, and crossed herself.

  “They sure are squeezing you through,” I said. “It was six weeks when I did it.”

  “Well,” Ratzesberger said, proudly, “it’s a different war now. Very serious.”

  Marino belched and grunted, “I give her one drop.”

  “Don’t be a dick, Marino,” I said.

  “I can’t die yet,” Ratzesberger said, “I just got to the front! You can’t die the minute you get here!”