Infinity Wars

by Jonathan Strahan

  ET is under interrogation. A part of Asante wonders what it’s saying about him, but he can’t really bring himself to care.

  He can’t believe they’re gone.

  No Control

  “SERGEANT ASANTE.” MAJOR Rossiter shakes her head. “We had such hopes for you.”

  Acosta. Garin. Tiwana.

  “Nothing to say?”

  So very much. But all that comes out is the same old lie: “They were just… children…”

  “Perhaps we can carve that on the gravestones of your squadmates.”

  “But who—”

  “We don’t know. We’d suspect Realists, if the tech itself wasn’t completely antithetical to everything they stand for. If it wasn’t way past their abilities.”

  “They were barely even clothed. It was like a nest…”

  “More like a hive, Sergeant.”

  Digits on the same hand…

  “Not like you,” she says, as if reading his mind. “ZeroS networking is quite—inefficient, when you think about it. Multiple minds in multiple heads, independently acting on the same information and coming to the same conclusion. Needless duplication of effort.”

  “And these…”

  “Multiple heads. One mind.”

  “We jammed the freqs. Even if they were networked—”

  “We don’t think they work like that. Best guess is—bioradio, you could call it. Like a quantum-entangled corpus callosum.” She snorts. “Of course, at this point they could say it was elves and I’d have to take their word for it.”

  Caçador, Asante remembers. They’ve learned a lot from one small stolen corpse.

  “Why use children?” he whispers.

  “Oh, Kodjo.” Asante blinks at the lapse; Rossiter doesn’t seem to notice. “Using children is the last thing they want to do. Why do you think they’ve been stashed in the middle of the ocean, or down some Arctic mineshaft? We’re not talking about implants. This is genetic, they were born. They have to be protected, hidden away until they grow up and… ripen.”

  “Protected? By abandoning them in a nuclear waste site?”

  “Abandoning them, yes. Completely defenseless. As you saw.” When he says nothing, she continues: “It’s actually a perfect spot. No neighbors. Lots of waste heat to keep you warm, run your greenhouses, mask your heatprint. No supply lines for some nosy satellite to notice. No telltale EM. From what we can tell there weren’t even any adults on the premises, they just… lived off the land, so to speak. Not even any weapons of their own, or at least they didn’t use any. Used bears, of all things. Used your own guns against you. Maybe they’re minimalists, value improvisation.” She sacc’s something onto her pad. “Maybe they just want to keep us guessing.”

  “Children.” He can’t seem to stop saying it.

  “For now. Wait ’til they hit puberty.” Rossiter sighs. “We bombed the site, of course. Slagged the entrance. If any of ours were trapped down there, they wouldn’t be getting out. Then again we’re not talking about us, are we? We’re talking about a single distributed organism with God-knows-how-many times the computational mass of a normal human brain. I’d be very surprised if it couldn’t anticipate and counter anything we planned. Still. We do what we can.”

  Neither speaks for a few moments.

  “And I’m sorry, Sergeant,” she says finally. “I’m so sorry it’s come to this. We do what we’ve always done. Feed you stories so you won’t be compromised, so you won’t compromise us when someone catches you and starts poking your amygdala. But the switch was for your protection. We don’t know who we’re up against. We don’t know how many hives are out there, what stage of gestation any of them have reached, how many may have already… matured. All we know is that a handful of unarmed children can slaughter our most elite forces at will, and we are so very unready for the world to know that.

  “But you know, Sergeant. You dropped out of the game—which may well have cost us the mission—and now you know things that are way above your clearance.

  “Tell me. If our positions were reversed, what would you do?”

  Asante closes his eyes. We should be dead. Every one of these moments is a gift. When he opens them again Rossiter’s watching, impassive as ever.

  “I should’ve died up there. I should have died off Takoradi two years ago.”

  The Major snorts. “Don’t be melodramatic, Sergeant. We’re not going to execute you.”

  “I… what?”

  “We’re not even going to court-martial you.”

  “Why the hell not?” And at her raised eyebrow: “Sir. You said it yourself: unauthorized drop-out. Middle of a combat situation.”

  “We’re not entirely certain that was your decision.”

  “It felt like my decision.”

  “It always does though, doesn’t it?” Rossiter pushes back in her chair. “We didn’t create your evil twin,Sergeant. We didn’t even put it in control. We just got you out of the way, so it could do what it always does without interference.

  “Only now, it apparently… wants you back.”

  This takes a moment to sink in. “What?”

  “Frontoparietal logs suggest your zombie took a certain… initiative. Decided to quit.”

  “In combat? That would be suicide!”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  He looks away.

  “No? Don’t like that hypothesis? Well, here’s another: it surrendered. Moore got you out, after all, which was statistically unlikely the way things were going. Maybe dropping out was a white flag, and the hive took pity and let you go so you could… I don’t know, spread the word: don’t fuck with us.

  “Or maybe it decided the hive deserved to win, and switched sides. Maybe it was… conscientiously objecting. Maybe it decided it never enlisted in the first place.”

  Asante decides he doesn’t like the sound of the Major’s laugh.

  “You must have asked it,” he says.

  “A dozen different ways. Zombies might be analytically brilliant but they’re terrible at self-reflection. They can tell you exactly what they did but not necessarily why.”

  “When did you ever care about motive?” His tone verges on insubordination; he’s too empty to care. “Just… tell it to stay in control. It has to obey you, right? That orbitofrontal thing. The compliance mod.”

  “Absolutely. But it wasn’t your twin who dropped out. It was you, when it unleashed the mandala.”

  “So order it not to show me the mandala.”

  “We’d love to. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell us what it looks like?”

  It’s Asante’s turn to laugh. He sucks at it.

  “I didn’t think so. Not that it matters. At this point we can’t trust you either—again, not entirely your fault. Given the degree to which conscious and unconscious processes are interconnected, it may have been premature to try and separate them so completely, right off the bat.” She winces, as if in sympathy. “I can’t imagine it’s much fun for you either, being cooped up in that skull with nothing to do.”

  “Maddox said there was no way around it.”

  “That was true. When he said it.” Eyes downcast now, saccing the omnipresent ’pad. “We weren’t planning on field-testing the new mod just yet, but with Kalmus and now you—I don’t see much choice but to advance implementation by a couple of months.”

  He’s never felt more dead inside. Even when he was.

  “Haven’t you stuck enough pins in us?” By which he means me, of course. By process of elimination.

  For a moment, the Major almost seems sympathetic.

  “Yes, Kodjo. Just one last modification. I don’t think you’ll even mind this one’because next time you wake up, you’ll be a free man. Your tour will be over.”

  “Really.”

  “Really.”

  Asante looks down. Frowns.

  “What is it, Sergeant?”

  “Nothing,” he says. And regards his steady, unwavering left hand with
distant wonder.

  Lazarus

  RENATA BAERMANN COMES back screaming. She’s staring at the ceiling, pinned under something—the freezer, that’s it. Big industrial thing. She was in the kitchen when the bombs hit. It must have fallen.

  She thinks it’s crushed her legs.

  The fighting seems to be over. She hears no small-arms fire, no whistle of incoming ordnance. The air’s still filled with screams but they’re just gulls, come to feast in the aftermath. She’s lucky she was inside; those vicious little air rats would have pecked her eyes out by now if she’d been—

  —Blackness—

  ¡Joder! Where am I? Oh, right. Bleeding out at the bottom of the Americas, after…

  She doesn’t know. Maybe this was payback for the annexation of Tierra del Fuego. Or maybe it’s the Lifeguards, wreaking vengeance on all those who’d skip town after trampling the world to mud and shit. This is a staging area, after all: a place where human refuse congregates until the pressure builds once again, and another bolus gets shat across the Drake Passage to the land of milk and honey and melting glaciers. The sphincter of the Americas.

  She wonders when she got so cynical. Not very seemly for a humanitarian.

  She coughs. Tastes blood.

  Footsteps crunch on the gravel outside, quick, confident, not the shell-shocked stumble you’d expect from anyone who’s just experienced apocalypse. She fumbles for her gun: a cheap microwave thing, barely boils water but it helps level the field when a fifty kg woman has to lay down the law to a man with twice the mass and ten times the entitlement issues. Better than nothing.

  Or it would be, if it was still in its holster. If it hadn’t somehow skidded up against a table leg a meter and a half to her left. She stretches for it, screams again; feels like she’s just torn herself in half as the kitchen door slams open and she—

  —blacks out—

  —and comes back with the gun miraculously in her hand, her finger pumping madly against the stud, mosquito buzz-snap filling her ears and—

  —she’s wracked, coughing blood, too weak keep firing even if the man in the WestHem uniform hadn’t just taken her gun away.

  He looks down at her from a great height. His voice echoes from the bottom of a well. He doesn’t seem to be speaking to her: “Behind the mess hall—”

  —English—

  “—fatal injuries, maybe fifteen minutes left in her and she’s still fighting—”

  When she wakes up again the pain’s gone and her vision’s blurry. The man has changed from white to black. Or maybe it’s a different man. Hard to tell through all these floaters.

  “Renata Baermann.” His voice sounds strangely… unused, somehow. As if he were trying it out for the first time.

  There’s something else about him. She squints, forces her eyes to focus. The lines of his uniform resolve in small painful increments. No insignia. She moves her gaze to his face.

  “Coño,” she manages at last. Her voice is barely a whisper. She sounds like a ghost. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

  “Renata Baermann,” he says again. “Have I got a deal for you.”

  (Profound thanks to Jordan Blanch, Jason Knowlton, Leona Ludderodt, and Steve Perry for their patience and expertise – PW.)

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Eleanor Arnason (eleanorarnason.blogspot.com) published her first story in 1973. Since then she has published six novels, two chapbooks and more than thirty short stories. Her novel A Woman of the Iron People won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Mythopoeic Society Award. Novel Ring of Swords won a Minnesota Book Award. Her short story “Dapple” won the Spectrum Award. Other short stories have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Sidewise and World Fantasy Awards. Eleanor would really like to win one of these. Eleanor’s most recent books are collections Big Mama Stories, Hidden Folk, and Philip K. Dick Award nominee Hwarhath Stories: Transgressive Tales of Aliens. Her favorite spoon is a sterling silver spoon given to her mother on her mother’s first Christmas and dated December 25, 1909.

  Elizabeth Bear (matociquala.livejournal.com) was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award winning author of 26 novels and over a hundred short stories. Her dog lives in Massachusetts; her partner, writer Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. She spends a lot of time on planes. Her most recent book is science fiction novel Karen Memory.

  Indrapramit Das (indradas.com) is an Indian author from Kolkata, West Bengal. His debut novel The Devourers was shortlisted for the 2015 Crawford Award and the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ SF/F/Horror. His fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction and Tor.com, and has been anthologized in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and elsewhere. He is an Octavia E. Butler scholar and a grateful graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and received his M.F.A. from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He has worn many hats, including editor, dog hotel night shift attendant, TV background performer, minor film critic, occasional illustrator, environmental news writer, pretend-patient for med school students, and video game tester. He divides his time between India and North America, when possible.

  Aliette de Bodard (aliettedebodard.com) lives in Paris where she works as a System Engineer. In her spare time she writes fantasy and science fiction: her short stories have appeared in many venues, and garnered her a Locus Award, two Nebula Awards and two British Science Fiction Association Awards. Her domestic space opera based on Vietnamese culture, On a Red Station, Drifting, is available both in print and ebook. Her novel The House of Shattered Wings, set in a devastated Belle Epoque Paris ruled by Fallen angels, came out in 2015 and won the BSFA the following year. Sequel The House of Binding Thorns is out now.

  Nancy Kress (www.nancykress.com) is the author of twenty-seven novels, three books on writing, four short story collections, and over a hundred works of short fiction. Her work has won six Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Most recent works are novella Yesterday’s Kin and The Best of Nancy Kress. Coming up is a new novel, Tomorrow’s Kin. In addition to writing, Kress often teaches at various venues around the country and abroad; in 2008 she was the Picador visiting lecturer at the University of Leipzig. Kress lives in Seattle with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead, and Cosette, the world’s most spoiled toy poodle.

  Rich Larson (richwlarson.tumblr.com) was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in Spain, and now writes from Ottawa, Canada. His short work has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Award, featured on io9.com, and appears in numerous Year’s Best anthologies as well as in magazines such as Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed and Apex. He was one of the most prolific authors of short science fiction in 2015 and 2016.

  David D. Levine (www.daviddlevine.com) is the author of novels Arabella of Mars and Arabella and the Battle of Venus and over fifty SF and fantasy stories. His story “Tk’Tk’Tk’” won the Hugo, and he has been shortlisted for awards including the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, and Sturgeon. Stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Tor.com, numerous Year’s Best anthologies, and his award-winning collection Space Magic.

  Garth Nix (www.garthnix.com) was born in 1963 in Melbourne, Australia. A full-time writer since 2001, he has worked as a literary agent, marketing consultant, book editor, book publicist, book sales representative, bookseller, and as a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve. His books include the award-winning young adult fantasy novels Sabriel, Lirael Abhorsen, Clariel and Goldenhand; the dystopian novel Shade’s Children; the space opera A Confusion of Princes; and a Regency romance with magic, Newt’s Emerald. His fantasy novels for children include The Ragwitch; the six books of T
he Seventh Tower sequence; The Keys to the Kingdom series; Frogkisser!; and the Troubletwisters series and Spirit Animals: Blood Ties (with Sean Williams). Garth’s next book, Have Sword, Will Travel (with Sean Williams), is due out in late 2017. He lives in a Sydney beach suburb with his wife and two children.

  An (pronounce it “On”) Owomoyela (an.owomoyela.net) is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and a handful of Year’s Bests. An’s interests range from pulsars and Cepheid variables to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in-between.

  Dominica Phetteplace (www.dominicaphetteplace.com) is a math tutor who lives in Berkeley, California. Her work has appeared in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and F&SF. She has won a Pushcart Prize.

  E. J. Swift (ejswift.co.uk) is the author of the Osiris Project trilogy (Osiris, Cataveiro and Tamaruq), a speculative fiction series set in a world radically altered by climate change. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award (“The Spiders of Stockholm”) and the BSFA award for short fiction (“Saga’s Children”), and has appeared in a variety of publications from Solaris, Salt Publishing, NewCon Press and Jurassic London. Swift also contributed to Strata—an interactive digital project by Penguin Random House. Her latest novel, Paris Adrift, will be published by Solaris in 2018.

  Genevieve Valentine’s (www.genevievevalentine.com) first novel, Mechanique, won the Crawford Award and was nominated for the Nebula the same year. Her second, The Girls of the Kingfisher Club, appeared in 2014 to acclaim, and was followed by science fiction novels Persona and Icon. Valentine’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy, Apex, and others, and in the anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Teeth, After, and more. Her story “Light on the Water” was a 2009 World Fantasy Award nominee, and “Things to Know about Being Dead” was a 2012 Shirley Jackson Award nominee; several stories have been reprinted in Best of the Year anthologies. Her nonfiction and reviews have appeared at NPR.org, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Weird Tales, Tor.com, and Fantasy Magazine, and she is a co-author of Geek Wisdom (Quirk Books). She has also been known to write Catwoman and Xena: Warrior Princess comics! Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable.