Perchance to Dream

by Lyssa Chiavari

  Project Babel had caused a momentary disruption in Albionian communications, as none of the savages were able to speak to one another. But they had unexpectedly already been at work on some sort of telepathy tech. It had not only overcome the Sonic Disruption Ray but had now given the brutish Albionians the advantage of telepathic communication!

  And, worst of all, Project Exodus had begun to spread. Hitting the Albionian Highlands instead of its farmlands had been just the beginning of their problems. The lab’s desertification technology did not understand national origins, or national borders, and the drought had spread across the frontier, back into Basland, and toward their own agricultural belt.

  Only the intervention of General Snipes (and the transfer of several fancy computers to important politicians) had saved the lab in the face of so much bad press. Surprisingly, Snipes’ wrinkles had smoothed dramatically in the last year. Bridget assumed he was self-administering age-reversing gene therapy.

  Now she followed the newsfeeds obsessively, noting how the media reported on their research and the military exploits their research enabled. She ordered her staff to spend time each week writing letters to government media under pseudonyms praising the lab and its efforts. She personally had taken to leaking classified documents to journalists, hoping they would see the inherent value of the various lab projects.

  She redoubled her team’s efforts. The lab had recently completed Project Chameleon, an exciting—and game-changing—technology: the MonoSpectrum Camouflage Suit. This would allow Baslandic soldiers to blend seamlessly with their surrounding terrain. Snipes believed it would be the change that tipped the war in Basland’s favor once and for all.

  One of her staff approached, dossier in hand for a new project. She flipped it open: Project Prism, the Polymorphic Fragmentation Discharge.

  It was an audacious program, perhaps the most ambitious they’d ever embarked on.

  ❦

  Lieutenant Hank Hazlet picked through the scrubland of the Baslandic prairie. He was leading a platoon of his thirty fierce Albionian infantrymen nearly a hundred clicks inside the border.

  The platoon’s mission: find and destroy a supply depot built on the outskirts of St. Rupert’s, a village long deserted because of the drought. The depot was guarded by a prominent Baslandic warrior-scientist and a squad of elite troopers.

  Hank adjusted his rifle in his hands. It was smaller than he was used to. Seventeen percent smaller, in fact; the result of the Albionians’ own Lilliputianer device. The planners in Newmarket had targeted the wrong supply depot at the beginning of the mission, hitting the Albionians’ rather than the Baslanders’. Now Hank and his soldiers were issued smaller-than-normal gear.

  Sir! A sergeant approached, tugging at the back of his tight pants. He was communicating using the Thinking Cap, since speaking would have resulted in an incomprehensible string of "blergs" and "gloobs". Recon reports the enemy depot. Two clicks east.

  Move out, replied Hank. He took a sip from his slightly-smaller-than-normal canteen. And remind the men to use their pinkies to fire their rifles.

  The platoon fanned out across the scrub and approached St. Rupert’s. The wind had picked up, throwing up a small dust storm around them.

  The supply depot was visible on the edge of the village, and the men began reporting back a strange presence: ghosts.

  Most Albionians believed in ghosts, especially citizens who—like Hank—were raised in the country, venerated the old ways, and honored their religion. So these reports were troubling.

  Some of the men from the city scoffed. Everyone knew they had scoffed, because they wore neurotransmitters which broadcast their thoughts to all of the other men. The scoff, in fact, was one of the few guttural noises not lost in translation from the Thinking Caps.

  A cacophony of psychic chatter filled the airwaves until Hank silenced his men with a stern mental warning. He then motioned to the ghosts on the left of the perimeter.

  Do ghosts often carry rifles? he asked.

  The men agreed that they did not. Therefore, reasoned one of the older soldiers, the ghosts must actually be Baslanders using some newfangled camouflage technology to lay in ambush.

  Hiding was not the way of warriors like the Albionians. They fought with valor and conviction, for theirs was the good fight. The Baslanders, however, lacked honor. They were sneaky and uncourageous.

  But their technology had made them overconfident. They were camouflaged yet still plainly visible in the blowing dust of the storm, like a chameleon on a shower tile betrayed by the water running over it. Now even the blindest old crone could have seen them and knocked them down with a well-aimed cudgel. The Baslanders were not simply cowards. They were fools as well.

  Cut them down where they stand, ordered Hank.

  ❦

  News of the massacre at St. Rupert’s was an embarrassment for the lab. The media, and by extension the lab’s political opponents, used the event to call into doubt the relevance of “fancy gadgets” in modern warfare, in particular the MonoSpectrum Camouflage Suit.

  Who was to know, Bridget wondered, that camouflage technology could be too effective? That it would be so effective that it would lead users to believe that they were actually invisible? She blamed a news reporter who had obtained some of the early leaked development documents and scoffingly referred to the tech as “ghost suits.” It seemed a simple enough lesson to add to the tech training, but the fact was that Basland was running out of soldiers to train.

  News that the Albionians had been using miniature weapons—perhaps a cost-saving measure—made the loss doubly embarrassing.

  General Snipes arrived at Bridget’s office. He had put on weight. No longer wiry, he now carried muscle that puckered the back of this uniform jacket and stretched the collar of his starched shirt. Bridget had the sense that he was training for something. Perhaps a new career as a pit fighter or a Hexagon goalie. However, Bridget wondered if the youthenizing gene therapy had ever been previously tested.

  “We need two more volunteers from your team,” he said bluntly. “Prism has cost us another intern, and the military will not provide any more for the human trials.”

  Bridget had been ready for this request. In fact, as she’d reviewed the newsfeeds and evaluated her staff on their public relations work, she had begun to see a pattern forming. Several of her interns were not taking their duties seriously. They were not writing to journalists. They weren’t telling friends and family about the virtue of the scientists’ monumental battle against the enemy. Nor were they informing strangers on the monorail that the lab was developing the tech that would tip the scales for Basland. Instead, the interns were behaving like children. They were messaging one another rather than recruiting younger siblings to join the war effort. They were gossiping in the lab and chattering like squirrels at one another’s jokes. They were even going on dates without prior lab approval.

  But she knew. She tapped the phone of each new arrival recruited from the high schools. She tracked their activities and kept a log.

  And now, when General Snipes needed volunteers for the human trials of Project Prism, Bridget Bellweather knew exactly who to commission.

  Ultimately, it was good for the lab to weed out the weak and unreliable. And it was good for Basland to advance rationality and science. It was good for the military to move one more step closer to victory over the savages of East Albion.

  ❦

  Lieutenant Hazlet looked over the village of St. Rupert’s. With the depot destroyed and its garrison annihilated, Hank felt his lust for vengeance roused rather than sated.

  His platoon was on the edge of the prairie. Behind them stretched the vast wasteland of drought, but before them stretched the fertile agricultural heartland of Basland.

  He called forward Sergeant Crumb, who generally remained at the back of the unit, for he was carrying East Albion’s newest non-combat-tested technology: the Geomorphic Sinkhole Suffoser.

  Crumb, thoug
ht Hank. We’ll unleash the Devil's Maw here. The men had taken to calling the device the Devil's Maw, because the sinkhole was not simply a hole. It was a living, biological, non-sentient hole. It was a hole that ate men.

  Here, sir? replied Sergeant Crumb. His confusion was evident. I thought we were waiting until the Baslanders sent their reserve soldiers to meet us.

  That’s just it, thought Hank. We’ll lure them here.

  How’s that, sir?

  With the Psych Plants.

  Oh. Of course, sir.

  Crumb was also carrying an experimental highly-volatile aerosol known as Iterated Psychotropic FloraSpray. All of the control condition results indicated a high level of likelihood that the substance would alter plant-life, causing it to exude a hallucinogenic field. The men called the theoretical results Psych Plants.

  If the threat of turning Basland’s food supply into a stockpile of hallucinogens didn’t lure out the reserve troops, Hank didn’t know what would.

  A diabolical plan, sir, said Crumb. Of course he’d been able to hear everything Hank had just been thinking.

  Thank you, Sergeant. We’ll unleash the Psych Plants here, and the Baslanders will have no choice but to deploy their reserves. And then we crush them, and end this war once and for all.

  Crumb seemed pleased by the thought.

  For King and Country! Hank thought strongly to the rest of his platoon, attempting to ignore the discomfort of his small pants riding up his backside.

  For King and Country! agreed the men, knowing full well about his pants.

  ❦

  Project Androidicus was the lab’s most secret project. So secret, in fact, that Bridget had never even officially heard of it. She had seen the project’s name partially redacted from a PA-989 program funding form, and she’d caught a glimpse of it in the header of a TOP TOP TOP SECRET document on General Snipes’ desk once during a review session. But none of that was official.

  So it was to her surprise that she was informed that the lab would need to close down Project Prism and devote all of its remaining resources to Androidicus. After assigning so many volunteers to the human trials for the Polymorphic Fragmentation Ray, these new orders left her sputtering and gibbering in frustration, like the target of a Babel blast.

  Hadn’t Prism been the project that would, finally, end the war? They had suffered through the deprivations of the energy shortage, had watched dozens of teenaged intern volunteers march to almost certain death in the testing lab; and for what? For the project to be mothballed like all the others?

  She swiveled in her office chair to the nearest terminal and pulled up the testing user interface. The little cursor blinked provocatively. She keyed in a secret override code. The override would only last a minute, but she was familiar enough with the controls for Prism that she’d be able to fire off one actual salvo before she was locked out.

  She typed quickly in search of a target. “St. Rupert’s” appeared. That was the village the Albionians had overrun. The one with the supply depot. The site of the “Ghost Suit Massacre” that had nearly ended all funding for the laboratory.

  She scanned the terrain from the geosynced satellite in orbit over the town. Nothing out of the ordinary…

  Then she spotted it. A hole. A great, rough, circular crater on the edge of the village. And, in its center, a mouth. A multi-fanged wriggling maw, flexing and pulsing. Until now, she had been certain that she could never be shocked at the depths of savagery that the Albionians would plum for a victory. But in viewing this latest abomination, her stomach turned sour. What had the Albionians created?

  She no longer felt the slightest qualm. She centered the Fragmentation Ray on the hole, to destroy the horror, but the host satellite’s lateral arrays were not locked. The crosshairs drifted slightly as the satellite orbited. She’d forgotten to fix the array boosters from the test settings, and now it was too late.

  She adjusted the crosshairs one more time, attempted to take the drift into account, and pressed the key to fire the weapon.

  Then the terminal locked her out.

  ❦

  Lieutenant Hazlet had deployed his troops in a semicircle behind the Devil's Maw awaiting the arrival of the Baslandic troops.

  Sergeant! he telepathically called to Crumb, who hurried over. Hurrying over was unnecessary now that they could communicate wordlessly over short distances, but reporting-in hadn’t completely died out as a tradition. What’s the status of the—

  A beam of multicolored light burst down from directly overhead. Hank was reminded, for a moment, of the religious stories his nana had told him in their village: of angels descending from heaven. Of rainbow bridges and the voice of God.

  Then Sergeant Crumb disintegrated into a thousand fragments. Hank winced. Even with all the combat training, he disliked being covered in viscera and carnage. But Sergeant Crumb’s fragments were not bloody or gory; instead, he burst into a thousand fragments of light, dissipating back toward the heavens whence the ray had come.

  The Thinking Caps erupted with activity as all of the witnesses processed their immediate, unconscious reactions to the attack. What a fearsome enemy they faced! Many shrank back in terror.

  Hank felt their morale slip away moment-by-moment. He had not led them to glorious victory against Baslandic reserve troops but instead to certain defeat against a faceless rainbow enemy that attacked from the sky! They knew that another attack was imminent, and that it would surely drive them back across the border, to the wastes of East Albion.

  Do not fear! Hank cried telepathically. Our fight continues on. For we have another weapon. One that the Baslanders cannot defeat. The TITAN SUIT!

  He remembered the schematic he had seen so many years before, in that lab in Newmarket. He remembered the power of its mechanized arms and the heavy steel of its thick torso. The bristling radar array and the stout grenade launcher.

  The men in his troop were silenced as they watched his mental images. They stood in awe as he imagined himself climbing into the Titan Suit and marching into Highdam. They cheered when he broadcasted a single high-powered neurotransmission back to the command HQ and requested—no, ordered—that the prototype suit be airdropped to their location.

  And, to his amazement, HQ agreed. It had been a very, very long time since any field commander had requested a prototype from East Albion’s military lab.

  ❦

  Bridget rose from her desk, certain that security was en route to arrest her. She decided to meet them halfway. She removed her lab coat and put on her uniform jacket. She holstered her pistol. She hadn’t fired it in ten years, but she might as well look the part if she were to be paraded before the cameras.

  But, to her surprise, no one arrived.

  She let herself out into the hall and looked back and forth. Empty. Now that she thought about it, she remembered the last of the security detail being volunteered to fill in the ranks of the reserve force that was now being deployed to St. Rupert’s to face down the Albionian incursion.

  Her footsteps echoed on the hallway floor. She made her way to General Snipes’ office, but he was gone, too.

  The file was still there, though: Project Androidicus.

  She glanced around, to make sure she was alone, and flipped it open.

  Androidicus was a fully integrated combat suit. It stood ten meters tall and was armed with a howitzer, a mortar, and a bazooka. It used the technology from Exodus to arm a hyperlethal flamethrower.

  It used the technology from Tesla to power its sophisticated neuronetwork.

  And it used reverse-engineered technology from Babel to interface seamlessly with the operator, who was connected into Androidicus as its brain.

  The most amazing innovation, however, was that on its back it carried its own self-contained nuclear fusion unit; a battery containing enough energy to power several small cities—or, if mishandled, destroy them.

  She focused on the specs. The development of such a compact nuclear battery would h
ave required absurd amounts of power. It explained the mothballing of Tesla and Prism, and it was all for this one amazing super-mech. Brownouts and poor monorail service were a small price to pay for such an achievement.

  Androidicus, Bridget realized, was going to end the war.

  Then she heard a cough. She leapt about a foot in the air, coming to rest where she could now see the other side of the desk. There, on the ground, in his flight suit, was old General Snipes. The suit was a reinforced poly armor, and the general was struggling weakly to right himself, like a long, tanned turtle stuck on its back.

  “Help me up,” he said, reaching up to her. “I fell.”

  “What are you doing down there?”

  “Trying to get up.” He sounded like an old, tired man.

  “What are you doing down there in that flight suit?”

  “I’m flying it out of here,” he said.

  “It?”

  “The project.”

  “Androidicus?” she said.

  He nodded. “It’s my destiny,” he said. She noticed he was gasping for breath.

  She thought of his exercise regimen. The gene therapy. The youthenizing tech. The old man had been trying to get in shape for this moment.

  Then she thought of her failed projects. She had been developing technology for him while he built this fancy mech suit for one last glorious mission. All her work for the lab. All her work for Basland!

  She deserved to fly Androidicus.

  “Sorry, sir,” she said. “It’s my destiny now. Get out of the suit.”

  He clearly did not understand. “What?” he asked.

  “Get. Out.” She unholstered her pistol and leveled it at him. “Of. The. Suit.”

  Now he understood. She helped him unlock and remove the helmet, then the poly armor. She tied up his hands and shoved him into his General-sized closet.

  Then she pulled the suit on, yanked the helmet over her head, and followed the coordinates in the folder to the Androidicus docking station.