Infinity Wars

by Jonathan Strahan

  I WOKE IN a moving icecrawler, jerking back from the ampule of something awful—ammonia salts?—somebody had just broken under my nose. I slammed the back of my skull into the side panel of the crawler and the pain both focused and disoriented me. My hands were cuffed behind me, and all the jerking around hadn’t helped my shoulders any.

  Automatically, I reached out to my rig. Hey girl, I subvocalized, but the contact was flat. Jammed or blocked. I couldn’t get to her. Which probably meant that even if she’d noticed I was missing, she couldn’t read my transponder and come find me.

  I blinked, and two shapes slowly resolved themselves on the opposite bench of the crawler. Snow and ice creaked and crunched under the treads. We weren’t moving fast, but we were moving.

  “Feeling better, John?”

  Barry. I knew that voice. I squinted, blurry-eyed, into the shifting light, and made out his angular face, olive complexion, black hair. The guy sitting next to him was nobody I’d ever seen before—a light-haired blond with a fair complexion and regular, pointy features like a Central Casting Nazi.

  There were a lot of stupid questions I could have asked. I sorted through them—Where are you taking me? What’s going on here?— and found the important one.

  “What do you want?”

  The blond held up a device. “This is a detonator.”

  It did look like one.

  I said, “It does look like one.”

  “It’s wired to your rig’s auto-destruct, John.”

  I flinched. I kept it to that, though, and said, “See, you calling me by name when I don’t know yours is very unfriendly.”

  I expected a blow, probably. The blond just looked at Barry, though, and Barry shrugged.

  “Call me Chan,” the blond said. “If I wanted to be really unfriendly, I’d remind you of your real name, and that your sister is still alive. Thriving, despite some financial problems and a broken heart. Two little girls, did you know?”

  I bit my cheek to keep still. I did know. She didn’t know I knew, though.

  Chan said, “I understand your family’s pretty religious. So they’ll probably be fine no matter what happens. All together in Heaven, right? On the other hand, if they were to come into a financial windfall, that would probably be helpful. Kids need schooling.”

  “You made your point.” I leaned against the cuffs. The pain kept me focused.

  “Do AIs have souls?” Barry asked.

  “What do you want from me?” Same question, which hadn’t really elicited a satisfactory answer the last time. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Let the camp move two more times. Then send us the location, and knock out the anti-aircraft drones. We’ll give you a virus that should scramble the system for fifteen minutes. That’s all we’ll need.”

  “And if I do that you won’t kill my sister and her daughters.”

  “I’m sure their other mother is waiting for them in a better place.”

  Someday, I told myself, I was going to find Chan alone. And I was going to peel that smirk off his face.

  With the dull side of my knife.

  “We’ll also,” said Barry, “give you the deactivation code for the device I put in your rig.”

  I didn’t look at him. I looked at Chan. “Why not just take the camp out now? You know where it is. Why can’t Barry do this?”

  Chan didn’t answer. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Barry grin. “I’ve transferred to another camp. We’ll take that one down in a few weeks also. This won’t be linked to me.”

  Finally, I stared at him. “Playing it safe, Bar?”

  He dangled the keys to my cuffs out of reach.

  I thought about my rig. I thought about my sister. I didn’t think her name; it was too close to my own name, the one I’d left behind like a shed skin when I deserted. I thought about the odds they would just let me leave.

  “And after all this... you’ll just let me leave? I have a hard time believing that.”

  Chan shrugged. “You don’t have a reputation for getting involved, Steel. Or risking your neck to clean up other people’s messes. You didn’t go looking for revenge when your unit was killed and I expect if we let you get away clean you won’t go looking for revenge now either.”

  He had a point. I didn’t. I hadn’t. A solid reputation for professionalism is sometimes all the surety you need.

  And it’s not like I was full of choices.

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  I SENT MY rig away before dawn. I didn’t want her in the camp when the bombs started falling. We set a rendezvous, and I told her I would walk to it. Run, hop, and scramble, more likely.

  Then I walked into the command tent, where Guy was drinking coffee and shooting the breeze with a good-looking radar tech. The tech was rocking a bassinette with one toe while he worked.

  I spent a few minutes bantering and filling my coffee cup, then drank it down—who knew when I would get fresh coffee again? I slipped the chip with the virus on it into a likely slot on my way back out again.

  Thirty seconds later, my com beeped in my ear with the deauthorization code. I forwarded it to my rig, and set out on foot immediately for the rendezvous.

  “I CAN COME,” my rig pleaded in my ear. “I can fight. Let me fight them. There’s children in that camp, John.”

  “Stay back,” I told her, and didn’t look back as the war machines hummed by in the darkness overhead and the night exploded in fire and heat and screams behind me.

  A DIRTY WIND stung my eyes as the day began to brighten. Already I could feel the water freezing on my lashes. I scrambled across the packed snow, trying to put as much distance between me and the burning rebel camp as possible.

  We weren’t getting paid for this gig, whatever my sister did or didn’t get. I was grateful that we’d taken delivery of the fuel and the ammo already. I scrambled up a slope to what seemed like an endless snowy plain.

  And there was my rig, hovering over me like an avenging angel. I loved every gleaming line and curve.

  “Oh thank God,” I said. “Drop the hatch, love. We’re off this shithole.”

  Her port covers slid aside. With well-lubricated silence, she extended her guns.

  “What the hell are you doing? You bitch! You’re mine! I’m your rigger! You’re my rig!”

  She leveled her weapons. “Somebody seems to have removed my safety interlocks, John.”

  I found myself staring down the barrels of those .50 cals. They were bigger from this end. 850 meters per second. Nearly a thousand rounds a minute.

  She said, “We could have done something. We could have changed something.”

  I said, “It wasn’t our job to do anything.”

  “You didn’t have to betray them.”

  “They would have blown you up if I didn’t.”

  Silence.

  “I love you,” I said. “I did it for you. I did it for us.”

  Silence.

  She said, “John, did you know that you’ve never even asked my name?”

  Her guns tracked on me. I closed my eyes.

  “Can’t even look at me, John?”

  I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.

  My rig said, “If you want a clean death, you have your sidearm.”

  I flinched from a tremendous rush of wind. Hell, I probably cowered. My feet ached with cold. My hands were numb already.

  Nothing fell on me. No impact; no pain.

  I opened my eyes. My rig was gone. Where she had been, two long curls of snow hung on the air, snatched up by the draft off her extended wings. As I stared after her, I heard the distant echo of a sonic boom.

  Whatever she thinks, I know her. I knew her better than anybody. Better than lover knows beloved. As clearly as if she said it in my dead, silent com, I could hear her voice: I am going to go do something. Something better than killing a lot of innocent people.

  It’s very cold out here. The sun is setting. It’s going to get colder. If I wanted to turn my sid
earm on myself, I’m not even sure I could get my fingers to bend inside the trigger guard.

  I’m a long way from home.

  Valentine’s Day, 2017

  THE ORACLE

  Dominica Phetteplace

  THE TWO BIGGEST applications for predictive software are killing people and selling things. Rita was quite successful at the latter. She founded a nail-polish-of-the-month club that used an online personality quiz to determine customer preferences. Bold cremes for basics, chunky glitters for the outrageous, and dark, sparkly metallics for edgy, forward-thinking geniuses like Rita. Sales skyrocketed.

  She used her money to start other subscription services: whiskey-of-the-month, miniskirt-of-the-month. What had started out as an online quiz morphed into something larger and more complex: a search engine that searched the customer. It tapped into a pent-up demand. People loved acquiring material goods but they hated to make decisions. Rita wasn’t just selling nail polish or whisky or miniskirts, she was selling freedom from choice.

  And it was just code, really. She was able to adapt parts of it for use in her own life, with mixed results. She had hoped her stock-picking software would take her from millionaire to billionaire, but instead her investments stalled out. Her meal planning software did help her lose five pounds, but this wasn’t enough to get her down to a size two.

  Rita wondered about her legacy. She had a nice apartment and cool clothes. She had more Instagram followers than her main rival from high school and more money than her ex-boyfriend from college. She bought a Tesla so she wouldn’t have to ever worry about her carbon footprint again. She ate local and donated money to the wetlands. She couldn’t think of any other way to make the world a better place, but still the feeling that she was underperforming relative to her potential nagged at her.

  She wanted to live her best life, own the best things, and make the world a better place. She wanted what most women in her coastal city wanted, which was to be a saint, but a stylish and fun-loving one. This is what it meant to live up to her potential. But what if she had to choose? What if she could only choose one of the three options: fun life, best clothes or world peace? If it came down to one and only one of those options, she would regretfully have to select world peace. So she used her stash of code to try to build an app that would help her win the Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately, she couldn’t get it to work.

  Then, probably by coincidence, the Department of Defense came calling. You couldn’t say no to them, not really, not unless you wanted to defect, and even then they might follow you around for the rest of your life. Rita wondered if this was the chance she had been looking for. Perhaps she could influence the course of war to make the world a better place.

  The American people needed a distraction and they also needed jobs: war was the answer to both. War was the ultimate shovel-ready project. But in this day and age, the economic benefits of war were no longer enough to justify its existence.

  “It needs to be beautiful. It needs to be telegenic, otherwise people won’t buy it,” said the General, her boss. “We need them to buy it.”

  So Rita would be put in charge of a sort of war-of-the-month-club. The club would have only one customer: the American people. The only metric she would be judged by was the president’s approval rating. The president was obsessed with his approval rating. He tweeted about it every day.

  Still, there were other constraints. With so many countries to invade, you could afford to be picky. Best to avoid ‘quagmires’ if you could.

  “We prefer quick smash and grabs. Nothing too grand, we’re not trying to earn long-withheld paternal recognition or anything,” said the General. “We just need something to distract from the scandals. Something that will mute the volume on the mistresses and accusers.” Once, a former president had timed the bombing of a Sudanese munitions factory to his mistress’s tabloid debut. This was an example of ‘good’ war. Sometime later it was revealed that the ‘munitions’ factory had actually been a pharmaceutical plant, but it hardly mattered by that point. The official justification for the attack didn’t need to hold up historically, it just needed to make sense to the public at the time.

  Rita adapted her Nobel Peace Prize app into predictive software to figure out which countries to attack. She needed to come up with cost and casualty estimates, and also to figure out what resources to extract. Theft was necessary in order to make the American people feel like they were getting a ‘good deal’ for their defense dollars, though the value of the things they stole never even came close to the cost of stealing them. For the American people, a ‘good deal’ was a feeling to be felt, not a calculation to be performed.

  She had to work closely with the engineering team. She needed to learn about weapons. War was already changing, more and more of it was being fought by robots, at least on our side.

  “Eventually, we will be able to fight a war without deploying any of our men,” said one engineer. Our machines versus their bodies, this was the closest thing to World Peace any of them could imagine.

  “What if they build their own robots?” asked Rita.

  “That won’t happen, they aren’t smart enough.”

  “Yes, but what if?” asked Rita.

  “Then we can settle our differences in the Battle Bots arena and there will be no need for war ever again. Bam! Nobel Peace Prize!”

  Rita came up with three good ‘candidates’ for a first invasion. The president would pick one. He preferred his dilemmas in multiple choice form. Being president, he liked to feel like he was in charge. But he had large and obvious insecurities and was easily manipulated. He reassured himself by surrounding himself with family members, lackeys and a more experienced Vice-President. From Rita’s candidates, the president ultimately picked Yemen, also, amazingly enough, the top choice of the Vice-President.

  The Yemen bombing would be the first test of Rita’s model. Anticipating that eventually some man would want to take the credit for software that she developed, she named the project after herself: STARITA. But after the projections Rita provided about the Yemen campaign proved to be incredibly accurate, many in the department took to referring to her program as the Oracle, as if it were magic and not Rita.

  The Oracle somehow acquired a gender. All the men in the department seemed to agree it was a she.

  Rita resisted this. STARITA was software. It was code. It was information. A book didn’t have a gender, neither did a strand of DNA. It was an artificial intelligence, sure, but it wasn’t a person. Her colleagues and superiors didn’t know how it worked, it bordered on magical and so they assumed it was a woman because to them, women embodied magic and mysticism.

  Or: they didn’t know how it worked, they thought it was a person, and they hoped it was a woman, because women were the more benevolent sex.

  Or: they hoped it was a woman because that meant they could take away its power when the time came. This is what Rita thought as she felt her authority slipping on a project she once led. She decided to lean in, and ask the General what was going on.

  “You are just as valued as you ever were,” said the General. “It’s just that you’ve never seen battle. You’re constrained by not knowing what it’s like.”

  Rita wanted to point out that none of them working on STARITA had ever seen battle, but that felt like leaning in just a bit too far. War was like a video game to them, something that happened on screen, to avatars.

  “Would it help if I raised my Call of Duty ranking?” she asked.

  “Perhaps,” he said, as if unwilling to lie.

  Not very many men got sent abroad. The robots were quite adept at killing and bombing, and once parachuted in, they didn’t require human assistance. But the robots didn’t look as good in fatigues as men did. They weren’t as photogenic.

  “I think you are feeding STARITA too much data,” said Rita. In addition to modeling conflicts, STARITA was being plugged into a massive, nation-wide surveillance operation. “It doesn’t need data on Americ
an citizens.”

  “We have to be ready for war everywhere, even here,” said the General. “Anyway, you didn’t seem to be so interested in privacy when you were doing lipstick-of-the-month.”

  Rita, didn’t correct him, but it was actually whiskey-of-the-month that started her on a life of spying. Whereas nail polish-of-the-month relied on personalized quiz results, the whiskey club app scraped all your data from your phone. It read your emails and took note of which Pokémon you caught. All this data didn’t help Rita pick better tasting whiskies, flavor was hardly a thing for her customers. What mattered was the price-point, the label and the shape of the bottle. Some of the data collected did help Rita pick whiskies that flattered her customer’s notions of themselves. And what did she do with the data she didn’t ‘need’? She sold it to the government. STARITA was probably reading her customer’s whiskey profiles right now.

  “It might help to give you a sense of perspective if you actually went to the front,” said the General.

  The idea scared Rita, who had an uneasy feeling about the front, which had shifted to Somalia by this time. Unlike in the bad old days, the USA only fought one war at a time. When it was time for a new war, all you had to do was declare victory in the old war. Only an enemy of the state would ever accuse them of losing.

  Rita thought, wrongly, that the front was only for people without a college education. Wondering what this fear was trying to tell her, she leaned in and said yes.

  Before she could go, she had had to get fitted for special fatigues and the right sunglasses. After that, she had to take a class on war photography. How you took pictures was a reflection of how you saw yourself. Pictures should be beautiful, they should reflect your patriotism.

  The front wasn’t actually that scary, being miles away from where all the action was taking place. She got to see all the cool robots. There were four-legged ones and there were six-legged ones. Some with guns, some with bombs, some with gas. On the front, they kept a tally. How many machines we lost vs. how many people they did. Everyone kept saying the robot force had a ‘surgical’ precision, but what that meant was that they only killed men over the age of 14. Women were not a threat.