Sunspot Jungle

by Bill Campbell

  For a few moments I was confused. My company? But then—no. A company. His company. He was the survivor of a skirmish out at the Belt. None of the others had made it. The official report said ambush, but that had seemed scant even to me. Maybe some of the details had been redacted from his memory and thus what they’d given me, and he didn’t even know anymore. But the body remembered. Maybe more of him remembered than all of the engineers and psychologists were willing to acknowledge.

  I laid more tiles. HOW.

  But he didn’t say anything. Instead, he just stared at the board, then turned it toward me so I saw the question. And he looked at my legs.

  Fair enough. “Shrapnel.” I stretched my arm behind me. “My spine.”

  When he looked in my eyes, he didn’t have to say a word. I saw that he understood. Some things technology couldn’t fix—especially when you didn’t have the means. Sometimes we injured ourselves, or we were injured, and the wounds stuck around. Like memories or the impact of them.

  Rather than standing at the window all night like an effigy, Mark took to staying in my room. Maybe he figured I’d need the help if I somehow flopped out of bed, or probably because he wasn’t simple, he knew I liked the company. Years of sleeping alone, literally in a silent room without even the bodily noises of comrades in other bunks, and the isolation had become pungent. Over the days he and I established our own routine, not discussed because he still didn’t talk beyond random words on the Scrabble board, and even then sometimes he didn’t talk at all and just played the game.

  The doctors said it was still progress. I didn’t tell them about Mark sitting in my bedroom at night, but I did report that he began to bring me books from the office and liked me to read aloud to him. Sometimes he had no sense of timing about it. I’d be working, and he’d just appear next to me and set down a novel on my lap. Classic war novels. The Red Badge of Courage. All Quiet on the Western Front. Half of a Yellow Sun. He wouldn’t go away until I covered at least a chapter. I acted annoyed, but he knew I wasn’t. Whether that was through his ability to read human body language and gauge tone of voice or more likely because he just knew me by now.

  He still hated storms, and we were deep into spring. It was the worst when one night the power went out.

  The neighborhood outside fell to darkness. Inside, only the glow from my comp on its backup provided some illumination. The moon high outside the office window sat obscured by rain clouds.

  Mark darted from the living room, where he often still stood watch, right into the office where I was working. He didn’t trip or crash into anything, and I remembered his eyes had night vision capability. I didn’t need to see his face to understand the plea.

  “It’s okay, the lights’ll come back up soon.” I rolled away from the desk and motioned out of the room. Tried to keep my voice casual even if I could feel the tension dopplering out from his body in the dark. “Let’s go hang out.”

  He loomed near invisible in the shadows. He didn’t even breathe and at least didn’t keen anymore, didn’t feel that level of pain at the upset. But his hand landed on my shoulder and clenched. Only his footfalls made sound as he followed me down the hall to the bedroom, which had become a refuge from all that scared him. A routine of safety.

  I levered myself to the bed to sit, and he climbed on beside me, legs and arms folded. Not quite with his back to the door or window, he never allowed that, but he eased into facing me at an angle at least.

  And this was how we waited out the storm.

  Of course, my mother had a key to my house; she’d insisted after I’d gotten out of the hospital, “just in case” living on my own in my “state” proved too difficult. Maybe I should’ve anticipated her worry. Every time she called she implied that Mark was a ticking bomb, so I just stopped answering her calls. Maybe she was in the neighborhood or maybe she did get in her car to drive a half hour to check if I was alive. Either way, through the storm she arrived, and through the storm Mark heard her before I did.

  We sat in the near-dark, and I was reading to him from the light of my comm. “‘He saw that to be firm soldiers they must go forward. It would be death to stay in the present place …’” And at that exact moment Mark launched off the bed and out the door with the precision of a guided missile.

  I was fumbling for my chair, images in my mind of fang-toothed, angry neighbors storming my front door with pitchforks, when my mother’s shriek penetrated every surface between the foyer and my bedroom.

  “Mark!” Ass in the seat, hands on the wheels. “Mark!” I rolled out to see my mother face down on the floor, arms triangled behind her back, wrists caught in the vise of Mark’s one-handed grip. “Stand down, soldier.”

  “Get him off me, Tawn! Get this crazy fu—”

  “Shut up, Mom!” I stopped close enough to touch Mark’s arm. Beneath his sleeve felt like iron. I kept my voice quiet because I couldn’t see his eyes in the dark: “It’s okay. It’s my mother. It’s okay.” I repeated it until he let her go and stepped back near to the wall. Becoming motionless.

  “Mom.”

  “He’s crazy! What did I tell you!”

  “Mom, tone it down.” I didn’t offer to help her up. She wouldn’t have accepted it.

  She propelled herself to her feet in a pitch and yaw. “Look what he did to my wrists!” She stuck her hands toward me. In the cracks of lightning and illumination, I saw vague shadows. Maybe bruises.

  “You’re all right, you’re fine. Come sit down. You should’ve rung the doorbell, he thought you were breaking in.”

  “I have a key!”

  “I told you to call ahead.”

  “My own son!”

  I went to Mark and held his sleeve. “Come over here, man.” My mother wasn’t listening; she could stand by the door and bleat until it passed.

  Mark followed me to the living room where I hoped he would sit, but instead he went to the window, his post, and stared out. He didn’t have to breathe and he didn’t say a word, but I knew the entire ruckus unnerved him. There was no other word for it. It reverbed through my body.

  “Is that what he does all day?” my mother demanded behind me.

  “Can you at least lower your voice? You aren’t helping.”

  “I’m not helping!”

  “MOM.”

  We both stopped. Mark had turned around, now with his back to the window. His body blotted out what light came in from the street, creating a vacuum in my vision. So he could face us dead on. It was like the stare of a sarcophagus.

  My mother turned her back to him. “I’m worried for you, Tawn.”

  “You don’t have to be.”

  “This isn’t normal. Look at him!”

  “He’s fine. We’re fine. We—”

  But she wasn’t listening. She began to walk around, feeling her way through the dark toward the office. Or my bedroom. It was so sudden when the lights flickered on and held that I had to blink spots from my vision. And in those moments Mark disappeared.

  After her.

  “Mark!”

  I couldn’t roll fast enough. I recognized his mode. Full protection, decisive defense. What he’d been built for. I wanted to hold him back, but this was his nature. He wasn’t the one unnerved, he wasn’t the one concerned for himself. It was my voice he heard, that his programming responded to. My voice and its irritation and tension and impatience.

  In the seconds it took me to get from the living room to my bedroom where my mother had gone, I saw it ahead of me. In the span of his back and the straightness of his spine. In the precise way he seized my mother before she could set hands on my possessions. He spun her around.

  She struck him. Reflex or intent, I didn’t know. Of course, it didn’t affect him at all, didn’t even bruise him. He didn’t flinch.

  Instead, he dragged her to my window, opened it, and pitched her out.

  Luckily, my house was a bungalow.

  She said she’d wanted to pack me a bag and take me away from an
y danger. That if she did that for me I couldn’t protest and would’ve been forced to go with her and ditch this mad idea of taking care of a military model. She had never understood that we wanted to take care of ourselves.

  She didn’t understand—when the VA engineers came to take him away—that he was my company and I was his.

  In the hospital they ran more tests on him. It was procedure because she’d filed a complaint. I gave my own statement: that he’d felt I was threatened, that he’d only been defending me, that my mother was crazy in her own right (I reworded that part a little). She’d disregarded my words and his existence. If I restricted her access to me or she learned to interact better, there would be no more problems.

  And yes, I wanted him home again. He belonged there—where I could read to him, where we could play games, and where he might one day be able to speak to me. He’d made a place beside me and at my window. He’d learned my routines and created ones of his own. He wanted to know all the books on my shelves. He liked walking in the sun.

  He protected me. I wouldn’t strip that from him.

  They let me see him once while he was in the hospital. He lay on a stiff bed with transparent monitoring tape stuck to his temples. Little dots of glowing blue and red on the tape winked at me while his dark eyes stared blinkless, asking no questions.

  I touched his arm. His skin felt cold. Human warmth didn’t course through his veins. He didn’t even have veins. None of it mattered. “Mark. Hey man, don’t worry.”

  His head tilted, eyes met mine.

  I gripped his hand. After a moment his fingers curled around mine, just as strong. Even stronger. I said, “The storm’s gone, and you’re coming home.”

  The children were walking on their way to school when we pulled up to the drive. It was a warm day, the kind where you wore light open jackets and began to roll up your sleeves in anticipation of summer. With the car windows down, we heard their voices all the way to the school, to the yard. They sounded as colorful as their clothes and seemed to carouse right through the leaves to where we sat.

  He hadn’t said a word on the ride, only looked out the window. The parents passing behind on the sidewalk noticed us there; I spied the glances on the rearcam of the car. A couple of them paused as if debating whether to approach, to ask why we were just sitting in my own driveway doing nothing.

  But they didn’t approach, and I looked at Mark’s profile. “You know … people are going to be like my mother. Like the neighbors. That’s just the way it is until they get used to us.” Not just him, but us.

  I’d learned not to expect conversation, but he did make contact in his own way. No Scrabble board lay between us, but he turned his hands palm up and open. He looked at me.

  What answer could I give him? That people were afraid or lazy or just plain ignorant? Who could we blame? The government, the military, the doctors, and engineers?

  We were both on probation. Mark, so he wouldn’t injure somebody. And me, so I wouldn’t let him.

  “Where do you think this will lead?” my mother had asked. “You rehabilitate him or whatever they want to call it, and then what?”

  Somehow it was impossible for her to understand. “Then he’ll choose,” was all I’d said.

  Maybe one day he’d discover what had happened to his unit. Maybe I would help him. Or maybe we’d leave it alone because some memories were best left in the dark.

  Before we went inside the house, I caught his attention again, touched his shoulder. “The doctors say you’re capable of speaking but you just choose not to. Sometimes that happens with people—”

  “I am people,” he said. His voice was lighter than I thought it would be, if hoarse from disuse. He was looking back out the window again. The sidewalk stretched clear now. “I am a person,” he said to the scene in the window frame.

  They had created him to task but with the capacity for emotion. He was perfectly vulnerable, just enough, even for war.

  He slid from the car to head into the house, and eventually I followed him, calling the chair from the back of the car to lever myself into it. I rolled up the ramp to the front door where Mark stood, holding it open for me even though he didn’t have to.

  It was just the human thing to do.

  How To Piss Off a Failed Super Soldier

  John Chu

  Raindrops shattered against Aitch the way bullets were supposed to but never did. Water splashed with his every step. The bags of rice slumped against his shoulders like freshly dead bodies. Protein bars jostled inside the disintegrating paper bag clutched to his chest. He was not quiet as he jogged home with his groceries. Today’s assassin, undoubtedly hiding in the blind alley just ahead, would hear him before he’d hear their heart beat. Because no one had tried to kill him yet today, each time he neared an alley, he simply assumed someone would be there to try. This time he was right.

  A woman, braced against a dumpster, leveled a weapon at Aitch. He made her as a Drip, an agent working for DRP, right away. The government agency was always testing their latest technologies on him. Long, thin, and silver, the weapon emitted an ultrasonic hum when she triggered it.

  Aitch dropped the protein bars and pitched his bags of rice into the line of fire. A bright flash and the smell of toasted rice filled the air. He leapt through the cloud of rice ash toward the Drip. His clothes ignited from the sheer speed. Smoke trailed behind him. Smoldering jeans and T-shirt branded his skin. Rice ash swirled away in all directions.

  He landed, scattering gravel, which flew in a spray that pinged dents into the dumpster. Pain shuddered up his legs. The sudden stop broke his ankles and ripped the ligaments and tendons from his calves and thighs. As he buckled to the ground, he ripped the weapon out of the Drip’s hands.

  Jay emerged from the dumpster’s shadow. He tapped the woman’s neck. She collapsed.

  Aitch shot her to test the weapon. She disappeared in a quiet puff. Then he shrugged and shot Jay. His younger brother merely glowed for an instant, then looked cross at him. It’d been worth a try.

  Jay pulled the weapon out of Aitch’s grip, crushed it, then tossed it into the dumpster along with any hope Aitch had for escape. The idea that DRP’s latest ultimate weapon might distract Jay long enough for Aitch to crawl away and hide until morning seemed silly in retrospect. The symbionts that made Aitch too strong for his own good would have fixed him up by then, though.

  “She had no idea you were behind her, did she … No, how could she have?” Aitch was calm. He’d always figured that Jay would eventually do to him what DRP couldn’t. “A normal younger brother would have just called me.”

  “And a normal older brother would pick up when I do. It shouldn’t have to be a production to keep you in one spot long enough to talk to you.”

  Rain-soaked, Jay’s clothes were plastered to his skin. He had the look and air of an especially broad, muscular chorus boy cast in a Bob Fosse musical. Unlike any dancer, though, Jay had once juggled motorcycles on a dare. Mom had fixed all of Aitch’s flaws when she’d engineered Jay. Aitch couldn’t look at him without seeing the lean, tall, and elegant being he, himself, should have been. The sight of Jay hurt more than his own broken legs.

  “I’m ready, brother.” Aitch flattened himself against the gravel. The rain struck him like rusty nails. “Just kill me quickly.”

  “That’s not why I’m here.” Jay crouched next to Aitch. “Mom’s dying—”

  “Too bad her favorite child isn’t a promising internist who can also do whatever he wants to any living being he touches. Oh, wait …”

  Jay looked cross again. “I have my limits, brother.”

  “Kill me now and you can fulfill a dying woman’s wish.” Aitch mimed a knife stabbing his chest again and again.

  “She’s never actually wanted you dead.” Jay caught Aitch’s fist. “And now she just wants to say goodbye.”

  Aitch’s legs wrenched back into place. New skin covered his body. Rain now slid harmlessly off him. Aitch stood,
then nearly doubled over in pain. His hunger pangs were worse than ever. For whatever reason, his symbionts had kicked into overdrive.

  “And what I want, of course—” Aitch forced himself back up “—is for her final edicts to rule the rest of my life.”

  The symbionts in Aitch’s head turned even vague suggestions from anyone he loved into unyielding commands. It didn’t matter whether they were family or the Drips who’d raised him. His mother had designed those symbionts and infected Aitch herself when he was still an infant. Jay had long ordered Aitch to be himself, but she never had. Aitch had autonomy around Jay. Around her, he was helpless.

  “No, what you want is no more broken bones, no more torn muscles when you exert yourself. Mom and I have worked out how to make your symbionts give you a body that even you won’t be strong enough to break. No more Drips hunting you down. Why would they bother?”

  Although Aitch thought he was already no more a danger to society than anyone else, DRP obviously thought differently. If he were ordinary, though, too weak to break his own body like Jay said, even DRP would see that he was no danger to anyone. They wouldn’t bother testing their latest technologies on him because he’d be too easy to kill. Grudgingly, he had to admit Jay was right again. Jay was never wrong about anything.

  “So I have to visit Mom to get—”

  “Oh, no. I made that fix to your symbionts while I fixed your legs.” Jay’s face settled into its customary smile. “They’ll have reworked your body by the time we reach Maryland.”

  “Why am I going to Maryland?”

  “We’re visiting a DRP archive on the way to Mom’s hospital. I need you to cover me while I liberate Mom’s research.”

  “But I destroyed it all.” As a child, Aitch had made sure DRP could never create anyone like him again. By then, though, Mom had already engineered Jay. Not only had Mom gotten Jay right, she’d kept infecting him a secret. Not even Aitch realized at first.

  “No, you destroyed millions of dollars of equipment that officially never existed. The government then buried all record of their failed super-soldier research project, including Mom’s notes. For now, what you need is food.” He patted Aitch’s back. “Come on, I have clothes in the car, and a diner is just a short jog away. My treat. We need to talk about what the symbionts are doing to your head. Mom and I think we have a fix for that, too.”