by Project Itoh
I sighed. It was a real talent that Williams had, taking the most serious of conversations and pulling the rug out from under them.
“Another one of your fucking Python sketches, I’m guessing.”
“Bingo. How did you guess?” Williams said.
“Only you, Williams, could think of something as dumb as that to say at a time like this.”
Williams shrugged and carried on talking. Clearly nothing I said would have any effect on his mood. But when he spoke, he was serious again. “So, basically, this thing makes people act like lemmings.”
“I suppose that’s one way of putting it,” I said, looking at the forest of containers spread out before us. “The way I understand it, grammatical patterns in words transmit and reproduce themselves like a virus, and once a critical mass is reached, there’s something about the hidden deep structure of the grammar that induces a mass state of chaos, and this leads to people massacring each other.”
Williams lifted his finger toward me. “Here’s one for you, though. You know how lemmings are supposed to mass-migrate to their deaths when there are too many of them in a certain area? Well, apparently that’s just a story, no different from what you were saying back in Prague about Eskimos and their words for snow. An urban legend.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah, apparently the lemming myth originates from a Disney documentary of all places. Crazy shit, huh? There’s this film that shows all these lemmings leaping off a cliff into a river, where they all drown. But apparently it was all staged. The lemmings had to be flown in from Canada and launched off the cliff using a turntable. The producers of the film even had to pay for the lemmings—they bought them from some Inuits, apparently.”
I had to admit this wasn’t quite what I was expecting by way of a response to my confession about John Paul. But when I thought about it, it was the sort of response I should have expected from Williams.
“So all that stuff about lemmings committing mass suicide as an evolutionary mechanism to regulate their numbers to keep their overall population at a sustainable level—”
“Yeah, bullshit, all of it,” Williams said. “Apparently, that’s not how evolution really works. It ain’t all about survival of the species at all costs. It’s the individual that likes to live on, and so it adapts to its environment, and the characteristics that help it adapt become the dominant traits that are passed down to the next generation of the species. Evolution is about what the species can do for the individual, not the other way around. A self-sacrificing instinct isn’t much good from an evolutionary point of view. You hardly ever actually see it in real life.”
I thought about this and what it meant. So the grammar of genocide couldn’t possibly be an evolutionary mechanism. John Paul was either delusional or had simply made up a wild cover story to rationalize his evil actions.
I vocalized my thoughts in an effort to drive away my doubts. “But it wasn’t a very convincing lie that John Paul told me then, was it? If he really had wanted to fool me, he could have come up with something better, surely?”
“Do you think he was trying to cover something up? There was some deeper secret he was trying to hide from you or something?” Williams asked.
No. That wasn’t it, surely. That was the sort of thing that an over-possessive husband would do—kill his wife in a fit of jealous rage when he found her talking to another man and then invent a stupid lie when questioned: aliens came down in a spaceship and forced me to do it. This wasn’t like that at all. John Paul wasn’t trying to plead insanity to claim diminished responsibility.
“Anyhow, that’s all academic now,” Williams said. “What we do know for sure is that the sonofabitch is behind all these murders worldwide, and what we need to do now is take him out once and for all.”
I glanced away from Williams. I realized that I wasn’t particularly interested in capturing or killing John Paul. I was interested in him because wherever he was, Lucia Sukrova would probably be there too.
My target now was Lucia Sukrova.
I wanted to see Lucia again.
I wanted Lucia to tell me that she forgave me.
God was dead. God is dead. So what?
As long as Lucia could grant me absolution.
Of course, I wasn’t about to share my selfish thoughts with Williams, so I kept my head down and carried on pretending to look for our cargo. Fortunately our ID tags started singing, and Williams drove on.
4
Seaweed to passengers. Calling Flying Seaweed to all passengers. Brace yourselves for high-altitude drop. Over.
We were ready when we heard the pilot’s voice come over the loudspeakers in the cargo bay.
The Flying Seaweed of which the captain spoke was hurtling through the sky, a miracle of engineering and stability. Black and thin, it did indeed from a distance look like its namesake. If there was such a thing as a type of seaweed that was a hundred meters long and fitted with jet engines, that is.
If a satellite was looking down on us now it would have seen a monolith cutting through a forest of clouds. The Flying Seaweed did technically have parts that functioned like wings, but they were so long and streamlined that you’d be hard-pressed to describe them as such.
It would have been impossible to tell just by looking where the belly of this bizarre-looking aerial assault craft was. It would also have been impossible to discern that, instead of its more usual payload of incendiary bombs, it was currently carrying a cargo of Intruder Pods as it flew into the heartland of crater-pockmarked India, using its assortment of precision micro-flaps to help guide its flight.
In the cargo bay, we busied ourselves with preparations for our impending descent. As always, there were a million and one last-minute checks to be performed. The final Pod check was particularly important because if the Pod didn’t activate, then it would effectively end up being hurled from a great height toward the ground and its doom.
Once the Pod checks were complete the medical staff came to insert tubes into our nostrils.
“Hot damn, that’s the stuff! Give it to papa!” Williams shouted, ripping the tubes from his nose as soon as the technicians had given him his dose. “That bromance juice sure does get you going. Clavis, buddy, I sure wish you could be here with me in my Pod right now so that I could show you how much I love you!”
Williams was kidding around even more than usual, and I knew exactly why. He had sensed my unease and was doing what he could to distract me. His buffoonery was supposed to help loosen me up. But it only had the effect of driving my doubts to a meta level. What if Williams was only acting that way because the cooperation hormone injection—what Williams called “bromance juice”— was kicking in? What if this was all a product of artificially engineered mirror neurons designed to make us feel that we all had each others’ backs? I shook my head. Our descent was about to start. I didn’t have time for these childish doubts.
The Combat Medical technicians pulled the apparatus from my nose. Snot poured from my nostril, a reaction to the hormones that had just been pumped into me.
Most of the medical treatment for Special Forces was outsourced to Combat Medical. Our BEAR counselors were also Combat Medical. Like most mature markets in a capitalist society, the military auxiliary service market was outsourced to the nth degree. There were companies that maintained and leased us our weapons, companies that operated our recon satellites, and companies that specialized in intelligence. Even the supply train was broken down into the smallest possible constituent parts: there were separate companies to provide food and water.
The business of war had become entrenched and was now a vital consideration in any analysis of modern warfare. Each individual component was only a small part in the grand scheme of the modern military-industrial complex but at the same time was indispensable. You couldn’t fight a war without weapons. You couldn’t continue a war without food. You wouldn’t know where to start without intelligence. Private military companies became an integral par
t of the system, providing reciprocal services for regular armies and eventually becoming fully integrated into the system themselves. Dystopian visions of PMC behemoths with enough military power to threaten G9 countries became obsolete as PMCs were fully coopted into the system as interdependent suppliers of military services. At the same time, official armies were now dependent on civilian contractors to mobilize.
“Here, your ARs.” Williams passed the nanolayer liquid to me. AR contacts had the potential to fall out during strenuous maneuvers, so during battle it was better to use nanodisplay film. I dabbed my eyelids with cream so that the nanolayer wouldn’t form anywhere other than directly on my eyeballs and then dribbled the liquid into my eyes. The liquid quickly sensed the electric potential in my eyes and formed a thin membrane that would act as my AR display for the duration of the battle. The cream around my eyes insulated the rest of my face, preventing the liquid from setting anywhere it didn’t need to.
“All units check AR efficacy,” I called out, although by now this was no more than a formality—the other soldiers were already turning on their combat datalinks and checking the test patterns showing in their ARs.
“All correct here,” Williams called out. His eyelids were covered in huge globs of the white cream. “And as per usual I’m tripping out on the test pattern.” His eyes were wide open, staring into nowhere in particular, and he was grinning like a spaced-out junkie.
“Dude, you know you don’t need to pop your eyeballs out of their sockets in order to see the test pattern,” I said.
The test pattern had started coming up on my retinal film too. Complex rows of alphanumeric displays were swirling round, finding their benchmark for an alternative reality to be superimposed over the reality before me: a room full of Special Forces soldiers waiting in silent anticipation.
“Yo, panda face,” I said to Williams, “wipe that crap off your eyes.” I chucked him the towel I’d used to wipe off my own insulator cream. Williams tried to think of a comeback but ended up mumbling something lame about how pandas actually had black patches around their eyes and not white.
I ran a final equipment check. The BHI Combat Harness that I was wearing had a multitude of pouches attached, so checking everything bit by bit actually took a fair while.
“Hurry up, boss! We’re all in our coffins already!” Williams heckled, but I wasn’t about to be rushed. I double-checked at my own pace until I was absolutely satisfied that I had missed nothing, and then I joined the others in the coffins—the black Intruder Pods.
The Seaweed’s loadmaster entered and shut the lids on the apertures.
All light disappeared.
The Pods were lifted up. There was a slight tremor and the sound of something slotting into place. I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of the servo moving the Pod along. I realized that the low-frequency waves being generated by the movement were making me feel tense, so I clenched my fists, opened them, and clenched them again. Then there was a stronger vibration, and the Pod stopped moving. I knew I was now fixed into position in the airdrop bay.
There was another mechanical sound, and then I heard the sound of the outside air beating against the walls of the Pod. It sounded like cloth ripping and became louder and louder as the Flying Seaweed opened its belly.
“You’ve got the lead, Jaeger One. Godspeed to you.”
And then I was falling from a great height.
Free-fall, as per usual.
Final guidance mode.
Unlike the time in Eastern Europe, our drogue chutes weren’t due to be activated until the very last minute. Back in Europe we had landed some distance away from our final destination, but this time we were going to land right in the enemy’s lap, and there was no time for foreplay. If we were to open our chutes at the same altitude we did in Europe, we’d be shot to shit by AKs and RPGs before we reached the ground.
Legs sprouted from the bottom of the Pod in order to help absorb the inevitable shock that was going to hit us as a result of leaving the chute opening to the very last minute. Four legs, very muscular—well, they were made out of artificial flesh—emerged to brace me against the Pod’s upcoming near crash landing. From below, it would have looked like a bowlegged giant hurtling down. I’d seen this sort of landing in training before, and I was shocked at how real, how fleshy the whole thing looked.
Just before I was about to hit the ground, the machine guns attached to the thighs (if you could call them that) of the artificial legs started firing to secure the landing area. The recoil from the machine guns set the Pod vibrating. I linked in to the Pod using my AR, and I could sense the ammo being used up at an extraordinary rate. I connected to the external visuals, and I could see three or four freshly bullet-riddled corpses of enemy soldiers near the landing area.
I felt an intense shock run through my body, but the antigravity mechanisms absorbed the worst of it. The next moment the Pod peeled away from me like a banana skin, and part of the Pod detached itself from the main body in order to take the shape of a Pathbreaker Unmanned Aerial Vehicle that would provide me with aerial support.
“Jaeger One touchdown,” I called and ran to take cover in the shadow of the nearest building. The other seven soldiers in my team landed in quick succession after me, and within fifteen seconds of my touchdown, all the Pods had entered self-destruct mode, their electrical parts destroyed by acid and the artificial flesh killed by having its supply of life-giving enzymes cut off.
I stuck my head out of the shadows to quickly confirm that the Pods were all dying properly and that the soldiers that had been shot by the auto-fire on our way down were indeed all dead.
The Pathbreakers that had emerged from the Pods were now in autonomous scouting mode; they were gathering information about the terrain and relaying messages among the team.
We converged on the building that we had identified as our target and slipped inside before the enemy had the chance to raise the alarm. Children with AKs charged us, and our guns cut through their little bodies like hot knives through butter. Outside was the sound of the covering fire and the chainsaw-like buzzing of the giant upside-down salad bowls we called Pathbreakers, and inside was the sound of screaming children.
We quickly killed all the children encamped in the lobby. Aiming for the leg or shoulder was simply not an option on a mission like this—it was shoot to kill from the get-go. Had we been facing adults, who had somewhat more predictable attack patterns, it might have been a different story. But children, children were fearless, and they never knew when to give up, and that made them unpredictable and dangerous.
The building was overflowing with children. The Praetorian Guard. Boys and girls of all shapes and sizes and ages kept coming at us, and we kept taking them down, one tiny shadow and one headshot at a time. Williams and I pushed our way down what once would have been a hotel corridor and started ascending a flight of stairs.
If this had been a battle between equals, of one modern army against another, the best strategy would have been to shoot to maim rather than shoot to kill. A severely wounded soldier didn’t just mean one enemy taken out of action, it could mean up to three, as two of his comrades would be tied up getting him to a place of safety. But on this battlefield, life was cheap, too cheap, and there was no culture of stopping to rescue an injured comrade. It just wasn’t done. As such, the optimal strategy changed: the safest course of action was to make sure that every single enemy combatant that you faced was instantly and one hundred percent dead. The leaders of these sorts of paramilitary groups would often supply their child troops with copious quantities of mind-numbing drugs to keep them revved up, obedient, and focused on battle. It became the children’s only way of temporary relief from their harsh lives. And when a drug-addled kid was charging at you with an AK rifle, shooting off a limb or two was simply not going to cut it. Even a fatal shot to the chest or guts might give them time to fire off a final salvo or two in your direction.
That was why we always had to ta
ke them down first time. As I was calmly advancing and killing every child in my way, it occurred to me that Williams and I were effectively drugged up in the same way by our own superiors. We had subjected ourselves to nanomachine sensory-masking treatment. If Williams or I were to take a shot right now, we wouldn’t feel any pain, we would only know about it.
So if the enemy wanted to stop us, they’d have to fire a lethal shot too.
I shuddered. If, for argument’s sake, Williams and I had to turn on each other, the only possible outcome would be that one or the other of us would have to die. We would keep firing at each other until a deathblow had been dealt. We were no different from the children in front of us.
My ARs flared up: armored vehicles and trucks from all around the town were converging on the building we were in. Having said that, their leaders were in here too, so it was not as if the vehicles outside could start blasting at us. They could have the biggest cannons in the world, but they’d still have to leave them behind and come in here on foot if they wanted to get us without harming their bosses.
The enemy redoubled its useless efforts to try and stop us from advancing, screaming like angry angels as they charged. Most of the boys’ voices had not yet broken, so it was impossible to tell just from the screams whether a particular voice belonged to a boy or a girl. A young girl, naked, breasts not yet formed, emerged through one of the doors. She had probably been servicing one of her commanders. She held an AK rifle to her skinny flank and started firing randomly in our direction. I calmly took aim at her naked torso and fired. Her flat chest split open and she collapsed. I stuck my head around the door frame to the room she had jumped out of. A man who looked like he could have been a commander was struggling to do up his pants. I shot him dead too.
At that moment I was in a perfect state. What I mean by perfect is that I could kill children without the slightest bit of hesitation. Anyone who thinks I’m stating the obvious—they were shooting at me, for God’s sake!—is seriously underestimating the power of both human morality and emotion. You never knew when either of those things was likely to spark up at the most inopportune moment and influence your judgment. Even highly trained soldiers. Of course, even in a normal state of mind I’d be able to kill children without compunction if my life depended on it. Most of the time. But you could never quite say one hundred percent. Not if you’d been brought up as a normal citizen in America.
