“We’ve come for Junia Marcus,” Lexi says, “to assist in her time. We saw a storm swing low over the bay, and a two-headed gull led us here. I am Silvius Varis Alexander, freedman of Silvius. I knew Junia’s mother, Salia Marcus, freedwoman of Silvius. I’ve been sent here to assist her daughter for the kindness Salia Marcus once did for me.”
Since we’d had this conversation before, the language was already in the banks of the AI. By this time, most of Hispania was speaking Latin, though this dialect could better be described as Sergo Vulgaris, or common speech. I had a grim memory of speaking for six hours on a spur of rock outside a remote cabin in Antarctica, well after the Thaw, trying to get a young girl out there to speak to us so we could get some kind of idea how to untangle her language and figure out where subject was holed up. She was far more delighted to speak to us the same way people had done from time immemorial, using gestures, exaggerated expressions, and sounds of encouragement and disapproval. Children were often much more accepting of strangers than their parents; children still believed in magic.
The headwoman is leery of us, but Lexi has a way of ingratiating himself. It’s his talent. And I know things are desperate inside the caves. Lexi is the one with the anthropology background; Elba came through via the medical team, and I signed on to be a front line grunt, way back when. Or forward. Funny how shit turns out.
“She is young,” the headwoman says, finally, “it has been difficult. Your prayers are welcome, but men are not permitted within the birthing room.”
Lexi knit his brows. I blink, tapping into my AI to see if I’m remembering something wrong.
“Shit,” Elba says, in our squad patois, “that’s... new. How is that new?”
The AI confirms that the headwoman has never made this assertion before, not in all... I count, finally - four times we have attempted this mission. A wave of vertigo overcomes me.
“It’s a blip,” Lexi says. “A crossroads.”
“Fuck,” I say.
I’ve heard of Crossroads before, read about them plenty, but never encountered one in all our drops. Crossroads are moments in time when your mission is rolling over concurrently with another team’s. As they rewrite the timeline behind you, it writes over all of your prior work; it means your log isn’t going to be much good, because what happened last time technically happened on some other timeline. Listen, time travel’s fucking complicated. I don’t pretend to understand it, and I’m not here to lecture about it. All I know is what I got in training. All I know is the parameters we were working under just got rewritten.
“Grab Lexi’s gear,” Elba says to me. Then, to the headwoman, “The two of us will attend her. Time is of the essence. We have been warned that she is in grave danger.”
There is more back and forth, but the headwoman finally escorts us into the caves, just me and Elba now. I have Lexi’s gear, but that doesn’t give me much confidence. I’m supposed to be here to watch their backs while they do this shit, not that I haven’t gotten myself elbow deep in blood and guts when I needed to, but I didn’t like having one squad member down.
We hear Junia before we see her. She is grunting and panting in the dim light of the headwoman’s lantern, surrounded by four other woman. She does not scream, not yet. Beside her is a gory, deformed fetus, still and silent, half covered in a length of linen.
“Are we too late?” I say, because last time I never made it this far. Lexi took point, and we lost her.
“No,” Elba says, kneeling next to the nearest woman, gently placing a hand on her shoulder, murmuring, asking her to move aside,
“It’s the bleeding,” I say.
“You always say that,” Elba says. “I don’t want to do this one again. Especially if we’re at a Crossroads.”
“Prep the line,” I say. “Lexi was going to.”
Elba sighs, but she does it, can’t help doing it, because she knows as well as I that bleeding to death is how most of these women go. Blood loss, infection, or eclampsia are the top three causes of death for women during and immediately after childbirth. The children, well... there’s a lot more that can go wrong, there. But it’s not as often that we’re here to save the children. Nine times out of ten, we’re here to save the mothers.
It’s the loss of these women, and often, their children, that cost us our future.
Junia is young, maybe fifteen, which makes hemorrhage or obstruction more likely. Like the other women, she has fine black tattoos on her face, and hands covered in ash. I didn’t notice any of that on the headwoman, and I don’t have a memory of those tattoos from the AI. Another new twist, then. The world itself is literally shifting under our feet.
They have pulled her up into what I recognize as a birthing chair; there is blood and shit and piss and afterbirth collecting there, all mopped up with straw and piled over to one side. An older woman comes over and cleans it all away.
Depending on the society, and the time period, complications from childbirth killed roughly one half to one quarter of all women, with ones’ chances of dying that way going up with every birth if one survived the first. I knew from the records that this was the girl’s first birth, and that meant there were more variables. A woman who’d had one successful birth was more likely to have others. New mothers... well, that often ended poorly.
I hold out my arm.
“Not yet,” Elba says, and the wave of vertigo comes over me again. She blinks rapidly. The women around us shimmer, stutter-stop, like a bad projection. Two of them wink out altogether.
Junia wails, now, and the head of the second child begins to crown. Elba coaxes away the older woman. I shield what she’s doing. Elba makes a small cut in Junia’s perineum.
“We need you to push now,” Elba says.
Junia cries, “I have been pushing! I have pushed! What do you think I’m doing here?”
There is a woman at her left, a sister or cousin, who murmurs something in her ear, and together they breathe through the next set of contractions. Attending births the way we do feels obscene, often. We have appeared during a time of crisis, an intensely personal time, and often we come between a woman and her family. It’s not their fault, what lies ahead. If we could leave well enough alone –
The child’s head comes free; I see the cord wrapped around the throat, and I firm my jaw. Elba cuts again, and I wince. I have seen this enough that I should not care, but there is something intimately gory about birth that cannot be matched on a battle field. It’s this knowledge that we are at the crux of life, where everything begins and ends. On a battlefield, all that happens are endings.
Elba pulls the child free. He looks obscenely large, mostly due to the size of the head. She sets him on Junia’s belly. The cousin ties and cuts the cord. They want the placenta, but that’s not come yet. The placenta is when the bleeding will start, because it’s going to tear; that’s what the AI tells me, but how much has been altered since then?
The cousin is untangling the baby from the cord. She turns him upside down. Junia is exhausted, covered in sweat. She sags in the birthing chair, says, “Is he all right?”
I glance at Elba. The placenta is coming. I hold out my arm. She pulls the tubing from her pack and sets the line.
“What are you doing?” Junia says as Elba taps into her arm.
“You’re going to bleed,” Elba says. “I need to replace what you lose. It’s all right. We are friends of your mother’s.”
The cousin and the midwife – the only two women left in here after that last shimmer – are still attending the child, but the cousin turns as Junia flails.
“You’ll die if we don’t do this,” Elba says firmly. “Do you want to die here?”
“Save my baby,” Junia says.
I glance at Elba, but she does not meet my look. I know in that moment that we are no longer here for the baby. It’s strange, to see reports overwritten, to have our objective change in the space of a breath.
“W
e need to save you first,” Elba says. “Please be still. Do this for your own mother, a freedwoman. Would she want you to die this way?”
Junia gazes over at the child. The midwife has cleared his airways, and is massaging his chest. Elba sets the line in Junia’s arm.
I’m a universal donor, which is another reason I was put on this squad. They want a blood type like mine on hand. I guess you can be both, you know – the muscle and healer.
But as the blood leaves my body and enters Junia’s, and the bleeding begins, and Elba starts her work to still it, I, too, find myself gazing at the dead child. It would not have been difficult to save him. We have tubing we can snake down his throat; we have the gear to perform effective CPR. The AI tells me our mission has changed. I don’t know who it was some other squad saved that meant we were supposed to leave this child to die, but it bothers me. Who are we, to decide to lives and who dies?
I close my eyes, and I think of the future.
When it’s over, Elba and I pack up our things. They wrap the dead child in clean linen and the wailing begins. Elba has stopped the bleeding, and given Junia targeted antibiotics. She is stable. The AI indicates our mission is complete.
The headwoman leads us outside. Her lantern is different; made of paper instead of clay. As we step into the light, I see tents spread out all across the beach. The air feels different, too. The tents don’t look Roman at all. If I had to guess, I’d say they were Mongolian. But who’s to say, this far back? I hesitantly tap into the AI, and it tells me that yes, we are still at the same coordinates. The historical context, however, has changed. This is no longer Hispania, but Vestia, a newly independent country recently held by Persia. I had not noticed the change in language, but I suspect that was overwritten as well, as the world changed.
Lexi is sitting outside at the entrance to another cave, smoking a pipe and laughing uproariously with three women. He stands when he sees us. His clothes are different – a longer tunic, boots instead of sandals. I glance down and see I’m dressed the same.
“It’s been remarkable out here,” he says. “I’ve never witnessed a Crossroads event.”
“Let’s get back to the beach for extraction,” I say.
He seems confused at my lack of excitement. I’m tired. I palm an energy pack from the gear bag to help get my blood sugar back up.
Lexi asks for the details as we go back. Elba delivers them. I’m quiet. Finally, as we come within sight of the sea, he says, “Why does this one bother you, Asa?”
I shake my head.
“C’mon,” Lexi says. “I’ve seen you elbow deep in blood and afterbirth, untangling babies from malformed cords, cutting open dead women only to find dead babies inside, and spend an hour bringing those babies back. None of that shit bothered you.”
“Maybe it’s catching up with me.”
“Not likely,” Lexi says, “if it was going to catch up with you, it would’ve been a long time ago.”
“How long you think we’ve been doing this?” I ask.
“Time is relative out here.”
It’s true. We can’t trust age. Each time we corporealize, we are made anew, copies of copies of copies. Those copies age only for the minutes, hours, or days we make landfall. Then they are simply reconstituted elsewhere, elsewhen.
“It all feels so arbitrary,” I say, gazing out at the wine-dark sea. “Who lives, who dies. We could save everyone, from every period. But we don’t. The Crossroads… we can see the consequences, if not with what we’ve done, then with what someone else has done just before us.”
“Don’t tell me you have a moral dilemma,” Elba says. She washes her hands in the sea, using the sand to scrub herself clean up to her elbows. “Everyone wants an easy answer, when it comes to morality.”
“Who are we to decide who lives and who dies?” Lexi says. “Yeah, I get that.”
“Who is every soldier, to decide that?” Elba says. “Soldiers have decided who lives and who dies forever. So have women like Junia, often. If that child lived, who’s to say they wouldn’t have sacrificed it to some god? The first one came out the way it did… they could have seen that as a bad sign. Humans have always decided who lives and who dies. “
“Now it’s an algorithm,” I say.
“Algorithms are made by people,” Elba says. “It’s the great moral dilemma. This is human, this is a life, this isn’t. Reality is every culture has struggled with that since humans started fucking. Foreigners aren’t people, slaves aren’t people. Women aren’t people. Most of us were considered somebody’s property, same as goats or dogs, right up until the new world, right? And even then, you get people squabbling about who’s really equal, who really deserves access to a doctor, or life-saving drugs, or food, or transit. Who deserves it, they ask. What they’re really asking when they say it is, who’s really human? Who deserves to be treated as human? Who has worked hard enough, scarified enough, gotten lucky, enough, to be treated like a human? “
“I just worry we’re fucking it up,” I say.
“Can’t think about that,” Lexi says.
I know that for a long time, in a lot of places, women were property, and so were the people they birthed. In other places, like this one, women’s bodies are collectively owned. It’s moral, here, for Junia to keep a pregnancy or end it based on what the community needs. And I get that moral order. I get it, when you’re just twelve people taking caring of each other, surviving because of each other, out here at the edge of everything. Morals change as the needs of society change. Individual freedoms are a luxury of the modern age, of a collective dedication to providing people with the ability to exercise those freedoms. Here I am, becoming a fucking philosopher. That’s what this work gets you. Too much thinking.
“Morality is made up,” Elba says. “We’re making it up as we go along. There is no right answer, no infallible, logical truth when it comes to morality. Do the right thing in this moment. That’s all we have hope for. “
“She’s right,” Lexi says. “No easy answers. No future. I knew there was no best way, no perfect future. Every utopia is someone else’s dystopia. I worry too, though. You ever wonder that somebody else will get the tech while we’re gone, maybe they already have, somebody who wants a different kind of future? You worry that just making this thing, assuming we’re benevolent… then finding out somebody wants something else, something worse?”
I stare out at the muddy horizon where it meets the sea. There’s a big black storm out there, all lit up from beneath by the rising sun. The sky is a bloody wound, beautiful. “All the time,” I say. “I worry sometimes that it’s already happened. When was the last time we were back? We could be getting orders from anybody. I get that.”
“We have to keep going,” Elba says softly. “If we don’t create the future we’re from by re-engineering the past, we don’t exist. Unification never happens. Billions die. The Earth becomes a carbon-soaked sponge. We never see the stars. The sun eventually consumes all record of us. I’m a soldier first. I’ve always known I had a hand in who lives, who dies. This is no different.”
I track the fingers of the sun. The sun looks brighter, this far back in time. The moon would too, at night, because every year the moon moves about an inch and a half further from the Earth. Go back far enough, and the moon is like a massive godly face in the sky, looming over everything. No wonder we worshipped it.
“I have to believe in our future,” Elba says. “I have to believe that as long as you and me and Lexi haven’t shuddered out of existence, there’s still a chance that future is being made out ahead of us. That’s all you can do, sometimes. Believe in the future.”
“If it was easy, everyone would do it,” Lexi says.
And then time stops.
There’s no transition between one time and the next, not that we’re ever aware of.
I wonder, often, if we are brought in to debrief, if anyone at all is left out there in our future to debri
ef. This deep into the operation I feel we are completely controlled by the algorithm.
Consciousness.
A spark.
A noise.
I breathe out as my body corporealizes around me. My vision blurs. Flashing colors. A dizzying blur of red. The smell of burning forests.
“Coordinates,” I ask, before I can see, because Lexi’s AI always comes online first.
Every birth is a battlefield, a war between the life that exists and the life coming into being. Sometimes they fight to a standstill. Other times, they fight to the death. I’ve seen it every which way you can imagine, because they only call on us for the difficult births, of course, the ones that kill or change those involved so much that they alter the course of history. No one has seen more blood and death that we have. We are spared the happy births, the uncomplicated deliveries, though I have been around some of those, too, and they are just as dramatic. Because you don’t know what’s going to happen, even in our future, during any given delivery. We don’t have wars anymore, but we have births, and that’s enough fighting and dying for me. There’s still blood and shit and sweat and sobbing, but at the end of it you have two flushing, contented people enjoying life together. That’s our goal anyway – together.
I wonder how we can get there, from here.
And so we carry on, saving the lives of the women and children who will ensure the existence of our own timeline, of our own lives. We are the citizens of some other time, midwifing our way to that future.
END
Corpse Soldier
Everything started here:
A broad plain of yellow grass, the stalks crushed and smeared with blood, and the sounds of dying men – yes, all men – sobbing and praying to the rusty pink sky. The high grass hid their forms and faces. They were bodiless voices, as if ghosts already, rising above the field like ashes to heaven.
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