Infinity Wars

by Jonathan Strahan

  Still: a city. Back to the connected world! He downloaded a map and went to find his hotel, which was somewhere downtown. There was no question of taking another tranche of public transport, so he started to walk, breathing in the warm cocktail of dust and pollution and yes, a lick of salt because he was back by the sea at last.

  Despite its precarious location, the city remained highly populated, and he took his time, ambling and people watching. Halfway to the hotel he came across a street market. The vibrancy of fruit and vegetables in the late afternoon sun drew him like a moth. He felt like he’d spent months under a veil of dust. He got his camera out. Most people used their watches but Nicolas liked the proper kit. He framed the shot carefully; enough light to enhance, but not to dazzle. He examined the resulting image: not bad, but too much lens flare. Two more attempts and he had the shot he wanted.

  He synched his camera to his watch and sent the file, where it joined the litany of images he had sent his ex-wife from parts of the globe she had never visited. Lia never replied to these images, but the app told him she had viewed them, so he kept sending. Temples and shrines. Monuments and palaces. Market stalls and vendors and people in suits and people in camps. Flowers and trash heaps, sometimes together. Women and men, children and animals. He never photographed himself.

  The photographs had been their only contact for almost three years. Always he was tempted to write something, even just a caption, a throwaway line. No words seemed adequate, or all words seemed false. He had tried so hard to be unaccountable. To become insignificant. Still he wondered if you had to be counted by someone, however remote, however estranged. If that was the truth of things.

  The hawker held up a star fruit, offered Nicolas a winning smile. His earbud murmured a translation.

  “Best in the city, ask anyone you like!”

  Language changed but the marketplace was the same the world around. Bustling and haggling and thriving, a great shout of life. He snapped another photo, camera focus on the yellow mangos in the foreground with the blurred smiling face of the hawker behind. He didn’t send this one. Not everything should be given.

  LIA FOUND HER date, Don, sitting at the bar. He was early. She was pleased to discover he was as his profile had suggested: lean, intelligent face, expensively dressed and carrying himself with the easy grace of a confident man. Lia liked him at once.

  She slid into the adjacent seat.

  “Sorry to have kept you waiting.”

  “Not at all. You’re exactly on time. Here, I’ve taken the liberty to order you a drink.’

  There were two glasses of tequila on the counter, as yet untouched. He evidently knew his way around the menu.

  They talked the usual preamble, out of politeness rather than necessity. She felt the flicker of attraction between them, and it was easy to imagine taking him home tonight, but that had been the last few dates and she was ready for something different. He had a way of watching her that made her think he was waiting for the main event. Sure enough, after a time he sat back and regarded her, eyes inquisitive.

  “You don’t mention your occupation in your profile.”

  “Ah. That question.”

  “Is it something godawful?”

  “I guess that depends on how you define the military.”

  “You’re in the military?” Slight rise of inflection, a relaxed curiosity.

  “It gets worse,” she said. “A classified section of it.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I can’t tell you what I do.”

  “Or you’d have to kill me, etcetera.” He took a sip of tequila. “Is that why your VA has a surname rather than a first name? Army culture?”

  “Why, what’s yours called?”

  “Gina.”

  “I never gave it much thought, to be honest.”

  “So how long in the military?”

  “Almost fifteen years.”

  “Uh-huh.” He nodded, processing this. “You’re divorced, aren’t you?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You can always tell.” He smiled. “It’s not a problem.”

  She returned the smile, raised her empty glass.

  “Good. Same again?”

  AT HOME SHE paused in the doorway, taking in the layout of the apartment—unmistakably that of someone single, even in the gloom—the blink of the city through the glass. She lay on the couch fully clothed except for her ridiculous shoes. Her body buzzing with a euphoria which was partially but not entirely induced by the tequila. She didn’t often drink on a week night. A self-imposed rule; she had never had a problem with control. She suspected that had been a deal-breaker with Nicolas although he had not said so explicitly. In fact he had said very little, at the end. Don was irrefutably present, in a way that Nicolas was not. There had always been an—etherealness was too strong a word, a lightness about Nicolas. Or perhaps she was being unfair. Perhaps that was retrospective analysis, a response to his current meanderings. When they met it was a surprise to find he worked in the cutthroat environment of banking. He’d impressed her. And he’d worked so hard to get where he was. The background check had saddened her in a way she didn’t expect, then she put it away and pretended she’d never seen it.

  Admit it, she thought. You still miss him, dreadfully.

  Pointless, maudlin reflection at the end of a good night. She put Nicolas from her mind. Focus on Don. Focus on the present. Hendricks scanned her biometrics and instructed her to drink plenty of water before retiring. In bed she fell asleep at once, a spiral dancing behind her eyelids.

  NICOLAS SPENT THE morning exploring. Like so many coastal cities, this place had been abandoned by government funding. The banks and the glitterati had long-since decamped to the mainland, and the city was left to fester where it squatted in the face of the rising seas. In buildings along the waterfront, the lowest floors had been abandoned altogether and were swamped at high tide. People hung on. People were harder to move than institutions. They had affiliations. Call it loyalty, call it stubbornness, catastrophe came and they remained. Like the huge shopping malls he wandered through, once the province of designer retailers, now occupied by cheap stores and squatters. There was an atmosphere about the city, somewhere between careless and carefree; a place that no longer had anything to prove.

  That suited Nicolas fine.

  He’d lived two lives: stasis and motion, accounted and unaccounted. His first had been about money, his second, he hadn’t figured out yet. When he left the bank he had sold everything. House, car, valuables. He undertook the first tour in a matter of months. Speed had been important then: he needed to feel he was accelerating away from the past. Now he was on his second tour, and it was about slowness, eking the maximum out of time. Nothing would pass him by. He was propertyless, but he had means. He could keep going for a hundred years.

  How many villages, towns, cities had he passed through now? He’d lost count. In the four decades he had been alive the world had become increasingly strange and people strange to one another. He had visited cities half-submerged and cities under siege from plagues of frogs or snakes or insects and cities in closed habitats that had once been designed for other planets hostile to life. Rich cities and poor cities. There were always winners, though the winners were even fewer this century than the last.

  Of course, he thought, he couldn’t do this forever. And then, why not? And then he wasn’t sure.

  On the other side of the mall, he refilled his water bottle and watched a sweeper bot making its patient way along the gutter. That was his father’s job when he was growing up. When the bots took the job they took something else from him too, something that was harder to replace than income. Ever since he was small he remembered his father telling him: you can do anything you want. You’re smart. Smarter than me. You can do anything. After the bots his father still said those things, but the mantra was harder to believe. He was ill at the end. Nicolas looked after him and afterwards he did not allow himself
time to mourn, because the only way to honour his father was to prove the mantra right. He worked back-to-back jobs to put himself through the education he’d missed, and then he went into the highest paying profession he could think of because security was an imperative. On his ascent he met his ex-wife, a woman who at first glance seemed so self-assured he was surprised to sense the uncertainty in her smile, as though she hadn’t expected to be singled out. To be noticed. By then he had almost forgotten the feel of poverty and she must have assumed he had always known a privileged life. He might have felt bad keeping things from Lia if she didn’t have secrets too.

  Sometimes she cried out in her sleep, a sharp fearful sound that woke him every time. He would open his eyes, blink in a moment of disorientation. His unease dissipating as he adjusted to the absence of light and made out the shape of his wife under the sheets, her breathing settling as she fell back into deeper sleep. It’s okay, he’d murmur. I’m here. You’re okay. When he asked her about her dreams she said she didn’t dream, she never had. He believed her. That is, he believed she did not remember. But there was something, an intimation of darkness, in that cry.

  This more than anything else told him that what she did every day must be something terrible.

  In the early days they joked about the classified thing. He asked questions, playfully, but with a keen eye to see how she would react. Was it drone strikes? What about interrogation? Do you torture people, darling? He had never asked it so bluntly, but he had come close, and she would always smile and say: you know I can’t tell you anything. As if it really were a joke. Only once she said, There are things… Then she shook her head. No. And he would stand at the counter chopping onions and wondering if his wife could be a state-sanctioned inflictor of pain. He looked for marks on her skin but there was nothing to suggest anything other than life behind a desk.

  What someone did for a living wasn’t everything. But it was a lot. And if you were ignorant of the specifics, essentially you were admitting you were married to two people, one you knew intimately, the other not at all. Which was fine as long as you could accept it.

  At some point Nicolas decided they wouldn’t have children. He thought he would probably be able to withstand finding out who she really was but their theoretical children might not. He didn’t tell Lia his decision, just quietly booked the procedure in case her birth control failed. Anyway, they had a comfortable life and who needed kids to justify their existence?

  That was how his life went, in a whirl of shares and assets and friends over for dinner and holidays in destination locations. On the days he got home after Lia, she massaged his shoulders and ran him baths which they ended up sharing – she liked to look after people, to make them feel good – and in the night sometimes she cried out but did not remember. Until one day he knew he couldn’t put anything more between himself and the not-knowing and he told her he wanted a divorce.

  He’d hurt her, he knew that. And it had broken his heart.

  “MORNING, MAXWELL.”

  The security guard glanced up, glanced away.

  “Morning, sir.”

  They held the elevator for her.

  She was thinking about her conversation with Don. Fifteen years a soldier. Stated so bluntly, her career sounded like the institution it was. It might have been different. A doctorate in mathematics had been beckoning. The agency got their offer in first, and with it came the chance to serve her country. She did her time in intelligence. Quickly proved herself a valuable analyst. She learned things she wished she hadn’t, knowledge she would keep at all costs from the people she loved. Things she could never, ever have told Nicolas, a good person who believed in the goodness of others. He didn’t need to know what it took to preserve that kind of innocence.

  One day she was approached by one of the black-ops brigade. It was shortly after she met Nicolas, at a time when she’d begun to doubt she’d ever meet anyone. Doubt whether she deserved to meet anyone. They had a question. Would she be interested in something more developmental?

  Ten years later, here she was.

  THE METEOROLOGISTS HAD picked up a new disturbance. They had the reports ready in the incident room. She scanned the briefing with her coffee, the first sip on the verge of scalding. She checked the status of any military operations in the area, open or covert. This was an ideal scenario, out of the way from major shipping and air lanes.

  The storm—if it became a storm—was worth masking, but as usual she made herself stand for a minute, facing the map, before making the request for sign off. In this way, the decision became part of her. She hated those agents who tried to shirk responsibility: if you couldn’t own your actions, you shouldn’t be in this line of work.

  The green light came through within minutes. She gathered her team.

  “Okay everyone, we’ve got the all clear. Phase one, make this clean.”

  Over to the hackers. Psychologically, this was the worst part of the operation. Mathematics she understood, but cyber warfare was an ever-evolving science, impenetrable to those on the outside. She could only observe as the hackers got to work. Inevitably, they were dubbed the borgs of the unit. There was always a particular quiet at the start of the hack as the borgs sunk into a trance-like state. Their main target was foreign satellites, scrambling any enemy detection of the weather system, feeding them with false information, but after that local communications became paramount. The shipping forecast could blow their cover, or a lone fishing vessel caught in the path of advancing winds. The borgs worked frenziedly. They had a tail to cover their tracks, although sometimes they would lay down breadcrumb trails to some rogue faction or nation state, tantalizing ghosts to muddy the political waters when the shit hit the fan.

  After a while someone said, “We’ve got them.”

  “Good. Keep monitoring.”

  The atmosphere relaxed slightly, although this was only the beginning. For the next forty-eight hours, the hackers would work in shifts as the foreign satellites fought back and the meteorologists tracked the storm across the ocean, laying down a black hole of communications along its pathway. There came a point when masking was no longer possible, but by then the damage would have been done and vital preparation time lost. That was when phase two kicked in: bombarding the region with a sea of fake news to create mass hysteria.

  This was the weather race, or as the liberals liked to dub it, the storm wars. They had been behind at first—still were on the materials front. Too many deniers littering politics, a belief that experts were disposable. But soon enough denial had become an impossibility.

  Humanity had waged war on the planet. After centuries of pouring toxins down its throat, a carbon neutral economy had come too late. Now the planet was fighting back. The contents of its armory were truly awe-inspiring. Earth, having spent the previous ten thousand years as a rather dull haven, had morphed into a malevolent chameleon. You could not help but admire the force of the planet’s fury, even as you quaked in your wind-and-rainproofed bunker. And just when you thought the planet had exhausted its repertoire for destruction, some new horror would emerge. The meteorologists had invented new scales of measurement; superstorm was an obsolete term.

  In the Anthropocene world, survival had replaced progress, and survival was dependent upon infrastructural resilience. Buildings, power grids, servers, the integrity of the cloud. Scientists, running tests on the resistance and flexibility of the supersteels and nanoskins, were the new soldiers. Get the science. If necessary steal the science or even the scientists. Get the patents and monetize the fuck out of it. That was how you climbed to the top of the new world order in the Anthropocene.

  Her country was far from immune, both from the planet, and from the hackers on the other side. Five years ago, a counter attack had left the east coast mercilessly under-prepared. You could argue that everything since then had been about revenge, but that would be an emotional argument. The entire farce was akin to entering a boxing ring. Whatever the outcome, you knew you
would come out damaged, but ultimately the winner was the one left standing.

  That’s pragmatism, Nicolas, she told him silently. The only way to guarantee there’s any future at all. But Nicolas didn’t answer, just regarded her quietly and the doubt was there as it always was.

  HOURS PASSED. HER team kept their vigil. The borgs switched shifts. A strange feeling, watching the birth of a typhoon on screen. As the satellite images refreshed, wisps of white began to merge and densify. A foreshadow of the shape to come, outstretched arms gathering ever greater swathes of cloud as the storm moved across the ocean, anchored by the bold dot of its eye. A shape replicated endlessly in nature from seashells to flower heads to distant galaxies. The beauty of its fractal pattern was irrefutable. Odd to think that such artistry could wreck so much wanton destruction, but wasn’t that the eternal lesson of nature?

  One of her team beckoned her over.

  “Look, sir. I think we’ve got a tandem.”

  “So we have.”

  They watched, mesmerised. A second typhoon was emerging in the wake of the first. Less of a rarity than it used to be with so much energy bouncing around the atmosphere.

  An alert from Hendricks announced she had mail. The first was Don, asking if she wanted to join him for dinner that evening. She shot a message back: In the middle of something. Give me a couple of days? The response was prompt: This an international woman of mystery thing? She replied: Something like that.

  The other was from Nicolas. She glanced at the photograph, was about to tell Hendricks to archive it, then paused.

  “Hendricks, can you run a location check on that?”

  “Processing now.”

  “Thanks.”