by Todd McAulty
Sergeant Van de Velde, the short-haired soldier who’d arrested me, showed up after about ninety minutes. She saw me standing over a cranial imager, and her lips got very white. She found the kid who was supposed to be guarding me thirty feet away, helping soldiers unpack a defib unit, and shouted at him for five minutes.
Then she had him move me to another storage room down the hall, where we sat alone for a long time. The kid was bored out of his mind after twenty minutes, and started showing me the news feed on his little handheld. I would have loved to get some real news, but the only thing he subscribed to was sports highlights.
“Hey,” I asked him. “Do you know how the Belgian referendum went?”
“What referendum?” he asked.
“Yesterday’s. A vote on whether or not to dissolve the government and surrender authority to the Arenberg Machine Cabal. I just want to know if Belgium is still free, or if it’s ruled by machines.”
The kid shrugged. “No idea. But probably, the machines. They’re always smarter.” He went back to checking his sports scores.
I tried not to be irritated. The referendum wouldn’t mean much to this kid. Venezuela, like all members of the San Cristobal Coalition, had been ruled by fascist machines for nearly half his life. But for those few of us who didn’t live under a machine dictatorship, the fate of Belgium—and the handful of human-governed countries left on the planet—meant a very great deal.
Ten minutes later Sergei showed up. His smock was smeared with blood. He barely glanced at the kid. “You can reconfigure diagnostic tables?” he asked.
“You getting a system error?”
Sergei shook his head. “No signal from scanner.”
“You’ve set it up wrong,” I said. “Try pairing your scanner with another table. Once it figures out how to pair with one, it should be able to communicate with them all.”
He grabbed my arm. “Come,” he said simply.
“Hey!” said the kid. He followed behind us as Sergei steered me back to the makeshift surgery, protesting the entire way. Eventually Sergei assured him he would take any additional heat from Van de Velde, and put him to work unpacking supplies.
Sergei and I worked together for several hours. The Russian was good at his job. He assessed things quickly and didn’t panic. Other than the corporal, no one died on his tables. He wore no insignia or other signs of rank, but all of the other med techs deferred to him. By the time the kid showed up to collect me, the worst was over, and all of his patients were stable.
“The colonel wants to see you,” the kid said. He stood at the end of the table, holding his rifle.
“The colonel?” I asked. “Colonel Perez?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s good news,” I said. “Help me with this.”
Sergei was yanking fragments of metal out of a soldier’s thigh. I was holding the poor bastard’s leg for him, lifting it just enough to allow him to work. The kid set his rifle down, and helped me get the leg propped up and stable with cushions.
Once I was free I checked the table console. “He’s doing well,” I said. “Blood pressure steady, respiration normal.”
Sergei grunted.
“You good here?” I asked him.
In response, the medic just waved us away. The kid and I withdrew, headed for the exit.
“Don’t forget your rifle,” I told him. The kid blanched, and then ran back to Sergei’s table to grab his weapon.
“Where are you going?” Black Winter asked as we passed him.
“The colonel has asked to see me,” I said.
“That’s what I’m talking about!” Black Winter said supportively. “Go right to the top, and get this shit sorted. Knuckle me.”
He raised his shaky left arm, and I gave him a celebratory fist bump.
“You going to be here when I get back?” I asked.
“Damn well better not be,” he said. “But don’t worry about me. The Force is strong in my family.”
The kid and I continued toward the door. Just before we left I glanced back. The puddle under Black Winter had grown—a lot. He had maybe an hour left, tops, before he overheated and caused irreparable damage to his cognitive core. He had to know that, and he’d still taken the time to wish me well.
“Is anyone taking care of him?” I asked the kid.
“Who? That robot?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know why they dumped it here. Nobody here knows how to service a damn machine. Maybe they’ll get to him tonight.”
“He’ll be dead by tonight.”
“He won’t be the first. Come on.”
I followed him reluctantly. “Who is Colonel Perez?” I asked the kid as we walked. He was holding his rifle across his chest like a real soldier all of a sudden, as if trying to make up for forgetting it.
“He is the commanding officer of the Ejército de Ocupación,” he said proudly.
Commander of the Venezuelan Occupation Force? “Great,” I muttered. “A celebrity.”
The kid marched me up three flights of stairs to the sixth floor. When we got out of the stairwell, we were in a long hall. Not long ago, this floor had been filled with guest rooms. But the Venezuelans had knocked out most of the walls and thrown tarps down, and now it looked like an abandoned construction project, with mattress piles, naked metal framework, and a small number of desks. Broken drywall leaned haphazardly everywhere I looked, open air ducts yawned, and cabling dangled down from countless ceiling tiles. About fifty soldiers were here, clustered around some of the desks or talking in small groups.
Most of them ignored us. The kid walked me down the narrow strip of carpet that had once been the hotel hallway. A woman sitting at a table on our left tried to get his attention, eventually standing up and snapping her fingers at us. When he finally saw her, the kid changed direction and marched us over there.
Man, everybody loved to yell at this kid. He clearly wasn’t cut out to be a soldier. The most productive hours of his day had to be those he spent daydreaming about civilian life. The woman chewed him out for maybe thirty seconds in Spanish, presumably for ignoring her, and then all three of us marched down the carpeted hallway. The kid walked beside me, rifle held stiffly in his arms, looking sullen.
My uncle saw some action with Canadian peacekeeping forces in Ecuador in the late ’50s, and he used to say that no institution was as gifted at self-deception and paralyzing protocol as the military. I witnessed a nice example as we approached the colonel’s makeshift office.
Like the rest of the floor, the colonel’s office used to be a hotel room. The Venezuelans had torn down most of the walls, leaving only a short length of drywall standing, maybe four feet on each side of the door. Two guards stood sentry outside the door, eyes firmly fixed on the wall ten feet across the hall.
Now, the fastest way into the colonel’s office was to step right into it from either side. Instead, the woman marched us right up to the soldiers, where she turned sharply on her heel and came to a stop. She announced us formally. The guard on the right nodded curtly, then turned and knocked. An office 95 percent exposed, and we’re knocking on the damn door. It felt a little surreal, like my time on stage in drama class.
Of course, the colonel made us wait for thirty seconds before responding. I fought the urge to crane my head to the right, peek around the door, and see if he was in.
While we waited, the guard on the left searched me. She was quick and professional about it. After patting me down, she reached under my shirt and pulled out the pouch around my neck containing my passport and ID. She withdrew the slender metal recorder I kept in the pouch.
“¿Un arma?” she asked.
“What?” I said.
“Is that a weapon?” the other guard asked.
“No—of course not. It’s a recording device. I use it to draft correspondence.” Although truthfully, in the last couple of days I’ve used it mostly to write this blog. I load the audio logs into Magic M
emoir, add a bit of narrative color, and bam. Instant combat reporting. As long as you could live with funky American spellings for “colour” and “centre,” anyway.
The other guard poked and twisted the recorder suspiciously, and for a second I thought she would confiscate it—which would be damned inconvenient, since I hadn’t backed it up for several days. But then she just handed it back wordlessly.
“Entren,” called the colonel, and the soldier on the right opened the door. The woman waved me forward crisply, and I stepped into the room. The kid followed, shoving me roughly with his rifle as he entered.
Seriously? I turned around, annoyed. His face was stony, but he dropped his eyes as soon as I looked at him. Mister tough guy.
I turned to the colonel. I wasn’t too surprised to see the man I had assumed was the squad captain this morning. He was about my height, late fifties, with short graying hair and handsome features. He was reclining in his chair, his feet up on a box. He had a small black phone pressed to his ear, and a thin black cable snaked from the phone to a satchel under the desk. He appeared to be listening intently. He spared us no more than a glance, waving us both forward.
The door closed behind us as we made our way into the room. I knew, in fact, that there was no room—no walls, and not even furniture to somehow give the office shape—but the click of that closing door somehow made me feel very differently. Trapped, and alone. Jesus, you’re succumbing to communal insanity, I thought. You’re such a loser.
Most of the furniture had been cleared out, but they’d pulled a desk away from the window and placed it more or less in the center of the wall-less room. It was identical to the desk I had in my hotel room, I noted.
There was a single folding metal chair in front of the desk. I sat in it, feeling like a kid called to the principal’s office. At a school where students were shot, and everyone spoke a foreign language.
The kid stood a few feet behind me. The colonel studiously ignored us. He didn’t say anything into his little black phone, just stared out the window at the rain-soaked Chicago skyline. As the minutes ticked by I grew more and more nervous.
The colonel hung up without a word. He grabbed a tablet on his desk and, still without a glance in my direction, began to write. This went on for several minutes. The only sound in the room was the soft impact of his fingers on glass as he pecked out a message.
The urge to say something was almost overwhelming. To apologize, to confess—anything to break the silence.
I’ve taken part in a lot of tough contract negotiations over the years, and there’s a maxim I find very true during critical moments: the first one to speak loses. People don’t like silence, especially when they’re nervous, and the urge to fill it can be powerful. It takes real fortitude for most people to keep their mouth shut during periods of stress. And opening it too soon is a sure sign of weakness. For all I knew, the colonel was ignoring me deliberately. Keeping me off balance, waiting for me to crack. I’d played the same psychological game myself.
Unfortunately, knowing that didn’t help me much. Sitting there in that small chair, before a broad empty desk—one of the most basic of power symbols—waiting to be judged by a man who literally had the power of life and death over me, was profoundly unnerving. And it was getting worse every minute.
I was in a neat psychological trap. I was sitting here desperately hoping for the colonel to say something. And if this played out the way I now expected it to, when he finally did, it wouldn’t be long before I desperately wished he’d shut up again.
I realized at that moment that I needed to change the dynamic. Immediately. To take control, I needed to have the colonel waiting for me to speak, not the other way around. I needed to begin the conversation as equals.
But how could I do that without saying a word?
I had no idea, but I knew instinctively I wasn’t going to find the answer in a chair.
I stood up.
It’s entirely possible the colonel ceased writing and finally noticed me. I couldn’t tell you, because I’d stopped looking at him. I strode around the desk on the right, walking to the window. I stood there with my hands on my hips, looking at the gray skyline.
The one obvious improvement they’d made with their crude construction work was to expose a wide bank of windows, giving a near-panoramic view east toward Lake Michigan. This was the best view I’d yet had of the massive dig on this side of the lake. Soaring metal constructs, most many miles in length, rose out of the steaming water and plunged back into it far offshore, dwarfing the tallest of the city’s great skyscrapers. From this distance they looked like twisted and collapsed scaffolding, built on a nearly planetary scale. Great machines, many larger than the fifty-story hotel I stood in, slowly glided along the constructs, using them like rails. From the center of it all came the hellish red glow where they’d cracked the crust under the lake, creating the first active volcano in the Midwest. A massive plume of steam, the equivalent of over fifteen billion gallons per hour, boiled out of Lake Michigan and into the afternoon sky, forming a hundred-mile-long cloud that, I was told, stretched up into the stratosphere.
In the months I’d been in this country, I’d never met a single person who could tell me definitively what was going on at the center of the dig. It was just one more mystery—and not even the biggest one—in a country that had suffered countless indignities over the past three years.
But there was nothing out the window that could help me. Fascinating as the view was, I tore my eyes away and turned around.
The kid was staring at me, openmouthed. He still stood at attention, his rifle firm against his chest, but he made no attempt to hide his surprise. I ignored him, scanning the room instead.
Now that I had a moment to take stock, I noticed something odd immediately.
It looked like the Venezuelans had set up a communications hub on this floor. That was a surprise—I expected something that vulnerable to be in a hardened site somewhere, probably underground, where it could be shielded from prying ears and targeted jamming. But just across the hall, not fifty feet from me, was a row of high-end Alcatel telecom equipment, sharing rack space with a wireless hub and two very impressive backup power units. With that much hardware they could handle the bandwidth requirements for the entire AGRT—and keep it up for seventy-two hours without external power, easy.
That meant . . . huh. That meant that the cabling hanging down every thirty feet or so had to be . . .
I walked toward the nearest bundle of wires dangling from the ceiling. It meant stepping through the imaginary wall on our left, violating the communal fantasy that the colonel had a private office, but that particular psychological barrier didn’t turn out to be that challenging.
I grabbed the bundle. In the middle, just as I expected, was an encryptor, plugged into the fiber line leading from the communication hub. It was live, and the blue indicator light flashed steadily, showing good throughput.
The Venezuelans were using commercial hardware encryption. That was a step or two down from what I had assumed. It meant they were vulnerable to being hacked—assuming, of course, the hackers guessed right about their hardware, which I suppose was doubtful. Still, it was a pretty big risk.
In my experience, the obvious system flaws are rarely the worst. In all likelihood that wasn’t the case here and, underneath all these surface flaws, the Venezuelans had a top-notch network. Unless . . . I reached into the mess of wires and gripped the encryptor.
Behind me Colonel Perez cleared his throat, but I ignored him. I yanked out the cable connecting it to the comm hub. The friendly blue light immediately turned red. I waited three seconds, and then plugged it back in again.
I heard a chair scrape against the floor. “Mr. Simcoe,” said the colonel.
I couldn’t reply just yet; I was busy counting. The light stayed red, even after I reconnected the cable. One second, two. Three. Four.
A highly responsive network, one that can recover from a data int
erruption in two to three seconds, is capable of detecting virtually any attempt at a data breach. A mid-grade system, one that could sense and repair interruptions in ten seconds or less, still had a response time sufficient to detect and block most breach attempts.
Five seconds. Six. Seven. I heard footsteps behind me as the colonel began to walk around the desk.
An overloaded or underpowered telecom system—say, one that took more than ten seconds to detect and repair a routine network interruption—was almost certainly so filled with internal latency that it would never even notice a competent breach. A system like that could be cracked in a matter of days, maybe hours.
Eight seconds. The light was still red, meaning the network still had not detected and mended the data interruption caused when I’d unplugged the cable. Ten. Twelve.
The footsteps were getting closer. Fourteen seconds. Sixteen. Damn.
A hand gripped my arm just as the red light turned blue again. The system had taken eighteen seconds to recover, give or take.
I dropped the bundle and turned to face the colonel. “Your communications network is garbage,” I said.
The colonel guided me toward the desk. He waved at the chair. “Please,” he said.
I took a seat. “Seriously, you don’t even have a decent data buffer. My niece could hack into your network, and she’s eleven.”
The colonel sat down across from me, a sour look on his face. “We have . . . problems with infrastructure,” he said, almost apologetically.
“I’ll bet. You seem to be a man with a lot of problems. To start with, what the hell was that thing this morning?”
“The machine?” he said, picking up a stylus and twirling it absently.
“Yes, the mech. American Union, am I right?”
“Yes. A Juno-class strike mech, sixty-five tons. A displaced unit originally attached to the Union Eighth Army, based in Kentucky.”
