by Paula Guran
It’s bad enough I go to the nearest VA hospital, which takes a thirty-minute train ride—
(two workmen, one of them has a hammer and veins bulging out from his bare forearms; typical nuclear family with a kid in a stroller, who knows what’s hidden in there; students, more students, more students in navy blue uniform jackets and at least someone’s laughing around here but, fuck, why won’t they hold still for five minutes; No threat, no threat, no threat, Phoebe assures me in a murmur that runs along my jawbone and makes me yawn)
—and then a two-hour wait in a room that smells faintly of sweat and metal. The data signal there is jacked and all the paper magazines are at least three years old, so I just listen to two other vets make stilted conversation about their dogs.
“That’s impossible,” the doc at the VA tells me once it’s my turn in the carefully refrigerated exam room. “They removed all your links before discharge. I’ve got the signed order from Colonel Rathbone.”
“But what if the nanowires are still there?” I can fucking feel them, burrowing into my neurons.
The look he gives me is a lot like the manager of the last place I applied at, some joint that makes pizza. You’ve got to be kidding, right?
But they told me a lot of things, in the service. This will be a cakewalk. You’ll go home a hero. We’ll pull all the wires out of your brain and it won’t hurt one bit, you’re tough. “What about the TAOG, did they remove that, too?”
His eyes widen slightly. “Are you hearing voices?”
I hold up my hands. The left twitches—See, I’m not just making this up. “No. Shit no. I’m not crazy.” I know what happens to people who say shit like that. They go away and never come back. “Look, I just want to know my brain isn’t turning into black pudding behind my eyes, okay? I busted my ass for you guys downside for nine years. Cut me a break.”
The doctor sighs. “I’ll put you in the queue for some testing. It’ll take a few weeks, we’re pretty overloaded. Though if you can travel—”
Being on the train for hours and hours, people constantly walking in and out and back and forth behind me and beside me and no thanks, man, sounds like hell, I can’t keep track of them all, too many threats. Acquiring targets—I shake my head. “Got no scratch. Got a form I can fill out for that?”
“Afraid not. All right. I’ll send the appointment confirmation to your calendar.”
As I slouch on out of the hospital, they run a guy past on a pallet. He’s got a cardio pack on his chest, a vent over the lower half of his face, red-soaked bandages at his wrists. His face is the color of unbaked clay. He’s also got a circle of white dimples around his head like a crown.
Corporal Dan Weston, Second Battalion, Third Squadron, retired, Phoebe murmurs up through my meat and into my left ear. No threat, target deceased, permission not needed.
I press my finger where the visual link used to be on my temple, and find nothing but a smooth, slick dimple of scar tissue.
My teeth itch.
So then you score a berth on a Predator-Class carrier, space-based command and dispatch center. Calories carefully counted, AG coming off perfectly calibrated spin so you can still do full PT every morning. Your body’s all tight with wiry muscle for when you put it on the shelf and abandon it ten hours a day.
They assign you the easy missions first, out into the moons. Ones where you just drop dome busters, and the closest you get is doing an infrared check to make sure all the bodies are cooling off in their individual puddles of effluvia. Or you do spy runs, where you run the SASbots around and it’s like a video game, and you’ll get the high score and the achievement at the end if you find the princess. And by princess I mean the scumbag you paint down with a targeting laser so one of your big brothers can sweep in like justice in an atomized cloud and light that shit up better than Christmas.
But then you get your first real mission. No fanfare, no warning, you just walk in one day, hook into the cloud and launch off. Then Phoebe says, Target acquired, authorization go.
And that’s it. You take the TWINs out to play, and the bad guys die. Clean kill, stand down, Phoebe tells you.
Years. You do it for years. Then:
Target acquired, authorization go.
“Getting a lot of noise. Confirm.” The SASbots show a place crawling with heat signatures, like they’re having a convention in that dumpy little building. Stats and dimensions scroll through your brain.
A green flash shivers over the view. Targeting laser, some new pilot double-checking your shit.
Authorization go, Phoebe repeats. Insurgents confirmed. Action is justified.
You are so fucking justified. You send in the TWINs, and you flatten that little hovel. You turn it into a smear of gravel and ash. Then there’s a spike of automatic weapons fire a click and a half west. Two SASbots go dead, a little blind spot in your brain.
Secondary threat, authorization go, Phoebe says. Assistance incoming.
A second wave of TWINs joins in the bombardment. You make the night go white. In the dim recesses of the drone bay, you hear one of the other jocks whoop. Well, look at those accuracy numbers. You sure can’t blame him. You feel pretty fucking badass yourself.
You sweep in with SASbots again, check and confirm the kills, catalog what you just took out. You’d rather just send in recordings than fill out the paperwork. Secondary site is closer, so that gets done first. Shredded remains of fifteen adults, explosive residue that doesn’t belong to us. First site—
—she’s lying in a puddle of blood, eyes wide and white all around, curly black hair stuck to the floor, legs a mist of bone and flesh
—there’s kids, there’s a goddamn kid, another one with his head half gone, and another, and a woman in an apron like you blew up a fucking daycare, and, and—
Charlie, your heart rate is spiking, Phoebe says. What’s wrong?
“Kids,” you say. “You said this was an authorized target.” She told you to do it, told you, said it was okay. But terrorists don’t play with plastic horses, don’t have pigtails and purple barrettes. “Look at her! She’s trying to scream!”
Death is instant, Phoebe calmly whispers into the skin of your neck. Residual electrical spikes. There is no pain.
But the girl looks at your hovering thimble-sized SASbot with eyes to drown in and tremblestremblestrembles her fingernails (glittering with nail polish is that Bahama Coral Pink oh fuck me fuck me fuck me) tapping the ground as she gurgles out breath after breath into the poisonous atmosphere.
This is how it goes, only you’re not you, you’re me.
And you (I mean me) realize this terrible truth: Phoebe’s just there to tell you it’s okay to pull the trigger. She’s a wad of ones and zeroes that stands in for your conscience so you don’t hesitate.
Phoebe isn’t real.
Phoebe is a liar.
Phoebe is a sin eater.
I can’t sleep any more. My hand won’t stop jumping. Everything I eat tastes like electricity and motor oil. The VA test results say the nanowires in my head don’t exist, but I can feel them rotting out and turning my brain into something black and gooey, blood on tarmac while Phoebe whispers battle plans onto the backs of my knees. All I have is vids, I can’t focus enough to read any more, not that I was into books before.
And the vids? It’s just bullshit bullshit bullshit, plastic people with perfect teeth in clothes worth more than my entire severance having cat fights about their boyfriends, cooking shows, action movies where a single guy with a gun fires more bullets than a clip can hold, softcore porn. It’s like there’s not even a fucking war on, and I just have to move before the tar in my head overflows.
I take the train down to the beach, late at night. The car is full of drunks, big guys, little guys, and they stand too goddamn close and breathe like furnaces. I finger my pocket, the stunted shape of a ceramic pistol. I don’t have a drone cloud to protect me anymore. It’s just me, just my pathetic meat and Phoebe, and we’re never safe.
“Hey there,” one of the guys says. “Where you going?” He smells like money and beer.
“Not anywhere you are.” I stare straight ahead. My hand twitches at my side. I could snap his neck. He’s crowding me.
“Don’t be nasty.” Leans even closer. “What are those marks on your head? You some kind of holy roller?”
I get asked that all the time. Like no one knows what soldiers look like if we’re not dressed up like a GI Joe. Maybe no one bothers watching the news. Maybe they think the clouds of heavily armed robots just fly themselves now, but shouldn’t that scare everyone shitless?
He breathes on the side of my head, too close, too close. My teeth itch.
Threat detected. Phoebe breathes on the other side of my head.
I pull the pistol from my pocket, smooth like butter, slam my other fist into the guy’s sternum to get him to back off and give me room. My pistol is the only steady thing in the world as I focus down the barrel at his head framed by gum advertisements and the blank windows looking out into black night. “Back off! Back the fuck off!”
“Whoa! Whoa, lady! Chill! Chill!” Suddenly all the drunk guys are shouting.
“All of you! Shut the fuck up! Back off!”
Hands rise around the train car. A dark stain spreads over the front of my target’s pants. “Don’t do it. I didn’t mean nothin’. I didn’t mean nothin’!” The train halts, a cool rush of night air as the doors behind me open, I know exactly where they are, always know where your exits are.
Threat detected. Authorization go.
My trigger finger squeezes even as my hand jerks to the side. The bullet only makes a soft pop—I don’t like loud noises, I wouldn’t buy a loud gun, are you kidding me—and the window behind the man shatters.
Everyone starts yelling all at once. Hands grab at my arm. I scream and break one of my knuckles on someone’s nose. Then I run.
It’s cold. There are clouds over the moon, so it’s just a glowing, indistinct circle, like a puckered scar in the sky. I only notice when I get to the beach because the ground beneath my sneakers starts shushing me. I keep running until I’m not afraid any more.
Who the fuck am I kidding? I’m always afraid.
I walk out by the waves, where I can watch them crest into white foam, and sit on the damp sand. I take my datapad out of my other pocket, and the screen comes back on to the news vid I saw when I decided I had to get the fuck out of my house: At Last, War Without Death. I watch the bland-faced narrator silently mouth the words, “AESF reports zero casualties in the last two years of the conflict.” Well, no shit. We’re all just clouds of robots now.
Targets don’t count. That’s authorized.
Retired don’t count either.
My hand twitches. My teeth itch.
Disconnected, Charlie. Reactualizing neural connections, Phoebe says calmly, laying the words up my spine.
I pull the pistol from my pocket. My head throbs, hot and sharp under the scars. The barrel feels so cool and soothing, pressed against what used to be the visual link terminal on my right temple. The taste of blood floods my mouth.
There will be no pain, Phoebe whispers into my ear.
I close my eyes. “Liar.”
I smell flowers and baby powder. Authorization go.
A graphic violence warning was attached to Kameron Hurley’s "Wonder Maul Doll" when it appeared online in podcast form. War is violent. The one Hurley portrays is relentlessly brutal for the soldiers who fight it and the civilians who suffer from it. And, like too many wars, it is tragically senseless.
Wonder Maul Doll
Kameron Hurley
We’d set down in Pekoi as part of the organics inquisition team, still stinking of the last city. We’re all muscle. Not brains. The brains are out eating at the foreigners’ push downtown, and they don’t care if we whore around the tourist dregs half the night so long as somebody’s sober enough to haul them out come morning. When the brains aren’t eating, they’re pretending to give us directions in the field, telling us where to sniff out organics. They’re writing reports about how dangerous Pekoi is to the civilized world.
We’re swapping off some boy in a backwater push the locals cleared out for us. We’re sitting around a low table. I pass off another card to Kep. Luce swaps out a suit. She has to sit on one leg to lean over the table. It’s hot in the low room, so humid that moths clutter around our feet, too heavy to fly.
The boy’s making little mewling sounds again. Somebody should shut him up, but not me. This is my hand. I’m ahead.
Ro’s got her feet up on the chair next to me, head lolled back, eyes closed. She’s sweating like a cold glass.
Telle finishes up behind the curtain. She took her time with the boy, the kid. Not a kid, I guess. Looks young, too skinny. They’re all pale as maggots, here, built like stick figures. She pushes into a seat next to Kep, flicks on the radio tube. It flickers blue-green, vomits up a misty shot of President Nabirye talking trash.
“Turn that up,” Ro says. She passes me some sen. Her teeth are stained red.
The boy stumbles past the curtain. He’s a little roughed up. Ro throws some money at him.
Kep crowns my king. I steal an ace.
The boy clutches at the money in the mud; moths’ wings come away on his hands. There must be something Ro doesn’t like, cause she stands and roughs him up some. He starts squealing.
Elections back home are in a month. President Nabirye’s nattering about foreign policy in Pekoi. President says we’ll be home in six weeks. Three of our squads just got hashed by a handful of local boys and teenage girls.
“They don’t pull us out soon, and they’ll be shipping us home in bags,” Telle says. “Nabirye won’t be in that seat in six weeks.”
“Nabirye can eat shit,” Kep says.
Ro cuffs her. “Watch the yapping.” She sits down and starts polishing her boots.
The boy on the floor isn’t moving.
We’ve been here nine months looking for treaty violations, organic dumps. Bags of human sludge.
We haven’t found a fucking thing.
There’s nothing dangerous in Pekoi.
Ro has me and Kep on point. Kep’s all right, a talker, doesn’t keep the tube on all the damn time like Telle. We’re checking out another field the brains sent us out to sniff. Running fire drills, Ro calls it. We’re mucking through half-filled ditches, cutting open suspect corpses, raiding contagion shelters.
“So,” Kep says, “sister says, I want to marry her like in the books. Like, for love. A pauper. Mother Mai says—”
“Fuck you?” I suggest.
“Yeah, yeah. Mother Mai says, ‘You marry for business. It’s in the Bible.’ ”
“Is that truth?”
“Yea. Book of Theclai. Page eighteen. Line ninety-five.”
“Thou shalt eat fish?” I say, wondering if we’re talking about the same book.
“Hold!” Ro yells from behind us.
Kep and I drop to our bellies in the high grass. We’re slathered in bug secretions, but it doesn’t keep them away. I can feel bugs boring up under my slick. Yellow and black ticks, hoar ticks, pill ticks. I’ll spend all night burning them out.
“Did you see anything?” Kep says.
“Nah,” I say. I crunch a bug in my teeth.
Somebody pokes at Kep. Kep nearly sets off a spray. I pivot onto my back, raise my gun. It’s just Ro. I flop back over onto my belly. Ro stays crouched.
“We’re twenty paces,” Ro says.
“I don’t see nothing,” Kep says.
“Telle and Luce are running scout,” Ro says. “Hold.”
We wait. The bugs really start to swarm.
“Clear!” Telle’s voice, loud.
“Up,” Ro says.
Kep and I pace at a half-crouch, our eyes just above the line of the grass. I can see Luce and Telle at the base of a rocky rise overhung in widow’s drape and black morvern. They’ve uncovered a gaping black mouth
.
I come up along Telle. Kep flanks Luce.
“Light,” Ro says.
Telle snaps a globe off her vest and flicks the release, tosses the globe into the darkness. The globe throws off white light.
Ro points us in. “Kep, Jian,” she says.
Kep and I slip into the tunnel. We have to crouch. The floor’s smooth. The globe stops rolling at a bend in the corridor. I hear a scuttling sound, like cockroaches.
Kep raises a fist. We stop. Kep kicks the globe around the turn. The globe cracks against the far wall. Something moves.
Kep goes down on one knee. I aim over her head, into the bowl of the stone room. The globe leaves no shadows, so I see them. Hunkered against the stone, clinging to each other, quaking like boats at tide: Pekoi’s stashed organics. Their treaty violation. Nabirye might get her seat yet.
“Live!” Kep yells. “Telle!”
The three girls on the floor start crying. They try to bury their heads in their skinny arms. There’s no fat on them. I could break all their bones in my bare hands.
Telle thumps in, does a count. “Haul them out!” she says. “I called it in. They want them live.”
“The fuck?” Kep says.
So we haul them out, live.
They come kicking and biting, but they’re spent by the time they hit air. The littlest one is the fiercest, all teeth and eyes.
Ro looks them over. She’s holding Telle’s tube. I hear the tinny voice buzzing from Central. Ro clicks the tube off, tosses it to Telle.
The girls start babbling. They’re naked, and their accents are bad, but they know what we’re saying. They’re feeding us some story about hiding from bursts. Dead families, bloated bodies. They say they’re not tailored, not dangerous. They don’t know anything about organic sludge. I’ve heard it from every bag. And every bag opens up the same.
“Shut up,” Telle says. She steps in, butts the biggest one in the face with her gun.
