HUSH

by Craig Robert Saunders

  Sure they could.

  *

  24.

  To Ashok

  Ashok Dockyard

  Earth Orbit

  2312 A.D.

  Ashok wasn’t the largest of the three dockyards in existence but as the third to be built it incorporated huge improvements on Skywell and Hibaku. Windward had yet to be more than the kernel of an idea, a tiny dream dwarfed by the immensity of the Company’s schedule of expansion and schemes for the future. In the unspoken but evident race between AIN Corp and the Company to achieve pre-eminence over the other, Ashok was seen to give AIN a lead in a war only now beginning.

  2312 was merely the opening to the first true salvos, a prologue and a precise of all which had come until then. The reality of war was already felt down on Earth, where those enhanced humans were being horded – ‘Augs’, they were called. Those Augs who could be bought, or sold, or signed away, had already become slaves. They were redesigned as the first decade of the 24th century passed. A shift, gradual, but clear enough. Augs were no longer machine parts serving only the will of the host, because the Company were preparing and AIN Corp were too slow, hampered by the very humanity they would fight to protect. Human parts – organics – were salvaged and stripped of will and humanity and caged inside metal.

  The Company began to develop beings which could not be considered as Augs, nor mechs because they were not robotic but cybernetic organisms. Something different. At some point, non-people.

  These were the things which came before the perfection of the Titan.

  If Titans were the progenitors of those mythical Gods of Ancient Greece, then the experiments which came before – what were they? What abominations could birth the fathers and mothers of the Gods themselves?

  Perhaps it was from Ananke they were birthed. Ananke, the primordial Goddess of inevitability but necessity, too. Was it her, a being of the void itself, who was the mother of the first organic slaves, those who belonged not to the human, but the machine, and that machine in turn to the Company.

  Inevitability and necessity.

  The mother of slaves who were always destined to be born, who needed to be born.

  *

  25.

  The First and Last

  Ashok Dockyard

  2312 A.D.

  People as property did not sit well with Chand, but AIN Corp supplied Goliaths, and supported the Aug cause in those quiet days before war began to raise its voice. He wasn’t proud of his work, especially...but if given a choice between AIN or the Company?

  AIN. Every time.

  Chand certainly had no passions, but his position wasn’t a matter of passion, but logic. If the Company could lay claim to tech which staved of death, or upgraded life, then humanity was gone. Because a line which became uneven was no longer a line, no more a boundary than a fence with holes along its length. As far as the Company concerned itself with morality at all, humanity wasn’t entitled to life or liberty. Humanity was only a hurdle in the way of profit.

  The idea that progress should outstrip human kindness, or human potential, was anathema to Chand, a man who could not understand anger, and thus not hate, nor competition, nor subjugation.

  In maintaining no passions, Chand had found something akin to peace.

  While war spread its dark wings over the blue-green globe below Ashok, Chand walked the long halls and translucent tunnels and was content enough to do so. Duty was dull, usually. Of course it was. Anyone would see a shuttle hours before it approached. There was no sneaking up on a orbital dock. Ashok boasted onboard AI, defensive systems as advanced as anything on Earth, and Sentinel Class ships with weapons powerful enough to destroy another with a single strike.

  Richard Chand often walked his allotted route with a man called Chan. Shorter, like him, though Chan was Chinese. He liked Chan.

  ‘Are you going to join?’

  ‘The war?’ Chan laughed and shook his head.

  ‘Of course the war,’ said Chand. ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘Never took you for an idealist. Thought you more a pragmatist.’

  ‘Isn’t that what it is? The war?’

  ‘It’s not even a war, Chand.’

  ‘Just because AIN haven’t called it a war...you know it is. We’re building more Goliaths each day...and the Company aren’t idle, are they?’

  ‘Bull, Chand. It’s bull, all of it. No. I’m staying right here, in space, with the woman from hospitality with the long finger.’

  ‘More important things than how deep a finger can reach, isn’t there?’

  ‘Can’t think of any right...’

  ‘Chan...they’re making humans nothing more than ordered code. Overwriting minds? That isn’t important?’

  Sometimes Chand and Chan played backgammon or Go, if the night was quiet and no one was around. Others read on datapads, or wore headsets with timers so they didn’t get lost on endless bright highways blinding them to the beauty all around.

  ‘I don’t know. Fuck. I want to get fingered, look into space, get blown, get away from the kids, fuck. I miss my dog, that’s it. I don’t care. Maybe, humans need some thing to hate. So, we hate Augs, leave each other the fuck alone...’

  Some thing, thought Chand. He’d never liked that turn of phrase.

  Chan shrugged.

  ‘Come on. One circuit, go back, drink a glass of chai. Enough.’

  Chan wasn’t a bad person. If you were going to share a walk in space, he was easy company, and easier than some of the other guards aboard the dockyard. At least he had more to say for himself than most liners or the younger men taking X-S, or X-L, or Gene, so their games and music lasted longer, or sounded better.

  Chand didn’t listen to music, didn’t bother with heighteners or stims, and never played on pads, or liners, or bits.

  The skywalks were Chand’s favourite. Earth, space. All of it. Glass above, so that he could see. Spokes, and the station an odd, misshapen wheel. It wouldn’t roll on the ground, but space wasn’t ground. It was a playground, a place where small kids could imagine anything. Any shape.

  Chand liked his job. He hadn’t been shot at a single time. Perhaps he had become slower, but he was certainly content. Happiness was a rare, once in a lifetime thing, he figured. An important present to be cherished, and he’d already opened his. Contentment was just fine.

  He only ever returned to Earth when he had to.

  Maybe the pace of life in space made a man slow, overly thoughtful. Maybe the stars blinded him just as much as the games people played in darkened headsets.

  Ahead, two colleagues stepped through an airlock. Chand didn’t know them, but the station was huge, and Earth-based AIN Corp guards were common enough on Ashok.

  ‘Hey,’ said Chand. ‘First time?’

  The new guys were close enough so no one had to shout.

  ‘Yeah,’ said one. ‘Always a first time, right?’

  Chand hesitated when the man pulled his gun. Because he was content. He’d almost forgotten he wasn’t on Ashok to stare at stars. He raised his own weapon, his arm moving so slowly.

  It was Chan who fired, though. The bullet travelled all the way through Richard Chand from right to left, one side of his rib cage to the other, severing heart from valve and with sufficient power the projectile continued on to tear away most of Richard Chand’s left forearm. The arm held together by a shred of skin.

  Chand didn’t see his torn arm or the weapon fall from his grip.

  His body armour was thinner than a soldiers might have been, to allow greater mobility and it was light, because didn’t need to be anything other. They were in space. It was safe.

  Chand did see the men with the guns closing on him. He saw Chan look down. Chan was smiling. It was that sight he took with him when his eyes closed. The man with whom he played Go smiled while Chand’s breath laboured through blood and his brain starved.

  I’m glad he’s happy, thought Chand.

  Calm is easier beside the heavy drip of a water
fall than beneath the solitary drip of rainwater inside a dank, miserable cell. Calm is easy when you’re dead. Zen, even. Balance, or a return to the void, or to chaos.

  That was the last time he died, and he was content enough.

  *

  26.

  Rebirth

  Earth

  2313 A.D.

  Perhaps Chan was right. Perhaps humanity needed enmity, a nemesis, to drive progress. Love, compassion...did these things aid any great leaps forward, any advancement of the cause of humankind?

  No.

  Even in times of plenty and in times of peace, it was competition, and the expression of competition. It was greed, and the extension of greed’s desperate hands which drove progress.

  Had augmentation ever served altruism? Maybe. Prosthetics, longer life, rehabilitation and prevention of genetic defects, the ability to live fuller, less restrictive lives. Maybe. Life, taken beyond the borders and span of genetics and evolution alone.

  How long before cybernetics, genetic engineering, mechanics, robotics, artificial intelligence, evolved personalities, were somehow turned back to use in service of man’s baser nature?

  Not long.

  Active enhancements became the norm, rather than reactive. Greater speed, twitch-response, durability. Sub-dermal plating, musculoskeletal implants, then, later, modular powered servos, metallic endoskeletons, thermal exoskins. Soldiers, melded and merged and the body upgraded. Ocular implants, neural pain blockers, endorphine secretion, adrenal pumps...

  How long before that, too, was not enough?

  *

  When he woke from death, that youth from Vietnam’s streets was not Chand, and he was not Jin. For a time, he was merely a Titan, unnamed, a thing still within the womb of Ananke, perhaps, with form but no name, and thus no identity, but soon to be born of pure purpose.

  It wasn’t waking, though, and nor was it exactly birth. No. A Titan did not sleep, nor drink, nor eat. He was activated. Better than a robot enhanced with AI, or personality and individuality? No. Better than a human with modular augmentations – adrenal systems, or musculoskeletal enhancements? No.

  Not better than anything.

  Something new. A rare, nascent race, even.

  The Aug War had begun. Forays fought across the globe while Chand had been removed and content in space turned to battles, and campaigns.

  He was activated in the very first year of the war which was to remould the Earth.

  During that year he was inactive and unaware. Just a thing under construction. A sleeper perhaps less than 1% alive. After activation, maybe even less.

  His CPU was mostly organic brain matter. Inside was no more than that portion of his human brain and some spinal cord – all which remained of his human, organic form. Outside, and throughout, he was servos, complex machines, experimental nano-tech able to maintain his core function almost for eternity. Impervious to most harm, capable of repairing his outer shell should he sustain sufficient damage to deem it necessary and unless his outer shell and systems should be damaged beyond such remarkable ability to heal, a Titan’s organic components would continual regenerate. At some point that which remained would have been entirely replaced and renewed. His very DNA might evolve, or mutate, until the organic matter inside would be unrecognisable as anything related to Richard Chand, or unrelated to anything human at all.

  Activated, not born, but with purpose. That purpose was not complex, no matter the nature of the creature he had become. He was created, constructed, designed, built for that reason only; to kill, and to not be killed.

  A Titan’s weapons and defence systems were far more advanced than any other tool in human history. Its intelligence was enhanced, it boasted vision on all spectrums, information retrieval capabilities and long range scanners comparable to those aboard Deimos Class Warcraft boosted by internal databases linked to anything within range.

  But the price? Nothing was free, and Chand’s remains were chained, but more. He was denied even the basic human dignity of death. Self-determination, decisions outside of how to achieve his purpose as defined by his masters, the Company. He was nothing. The memory of a body, a terrible revenant caged inside metal and circuitry, polymers, ceramics, silicon, titanium, palladium. A slave which cost the Company far more than a hundred Goliath units ever cost AIN Corp.

  Denied even the peace of his last, contented memory – his gladness at the smile of his killer he remembered from the moment of dying.

  Now...he was a weapon of war. Purposed, drilled, ingrained, coded.

  To kill, and to not be killed.

  Even had he wished death, parameters build into his organic brain prevented him for circumventing that most basic of commands. He could not stand in the path of a nuclear detonation, nor drown himself in lava in the heart of a world broken soil and sea by a war which brought utter annihilation as close to Earth as it had ever been.

  A Titan walked through fire only when his parameters allowed it. Bullets, missiles, Goliath munitions, aircraft, drone strikes, laser, plasma, explosion, electrical discharge, EMP, even radiation...there was very little that could harm him even though he wished it. His chains allowed him the freedom to wish to scream, to die, or to fight against the Company’s awful aims. But that was it – cursed with awareness of unending horror, and nothing more. His body was his cage, and it was hell.

  On activation, Chand might have retained a sense that he was human, still. He did not, because a man should be able to scream. He, the nameless Titan, could not, therefore he reasoned he was not a man.

  *

  27.

  Indochina Falls

  Indochinese Peninsula, North, to Himalaya State.

  Earth

  2330-32 A.D.

  Jin was among the worst mankind could do, and the most complete being of war ever to walk the Earth, and he and his kin warred toward the bulk of AIN’s forces in the name of a Company they had no choice but to obey.

  He stood beside slave brothers and sisters on battlefields once cities, deep beneath the canopy of ancient jungles and in torrid rivers. He and his kind strode through valleys and over mountains, took stock of their work in destroyed towns and on roads and bridges without number.

  In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, he was given the Titan name of Coeus - the Questioning, the Curious.

  He pondered not his purpose – that was set hard as his exoskin – but meaning itself.

  His brothers and sisters joked with him and jibed at him, their programming in perfect synchronisation. Some questioned, some explored the boundaries of what a Titan could or could not do, and some would never be satisfied with their power, or comfortable within their cages.

  ‘You’re an idiot, Coeus, and probably think you’re human, but you’re not. You’re nothing now,’ said his sister Mnemosyne. ‘A ghost, thinking ghost thoughts.’

  ‘A ghost is a memory of soul,’ said Coeus as he killed over three hundred men in less than half a minute, and near as many machines. His sister switched comms away from him, a Titan’s equivalent of turning her back.

  Rubble and fire from drone strikes killed or destroyed thousands of augmented Company soldiers each day. It seemed every huge stride Coeus took during the Indochina campaign was on uneven ground. Bodies and body parts littered city streets. Broken vehicles and warriors who had once looked like vehicles lay in pieces. The Titans stepped over them, and on, north.

  By mid 2330, the Company had torn aside AIN’s resistance all the way to southern Thailand. Battle became harder, and slower, and the death toll rose faster, but was still yet to peak. Coastal cities were gone, never to return because the coastline itself was forever changed. Orbital strikes from military satellites and the deployment of small yield nuclear weapons caused a greater shift the landscape in decades than the entire planet could manage in millennia.

  Sick experiments became commonplace, like in many other wars – the torture of flesh justified in the name of victory. Organics were merged with metal to become things wh
ich paid no mind to what a man might look like. Thinking heads were attached to attack bikes, or missiles, with nothing at the end but death and no choice but to guide. What must such creatures have thought, and felt, or were their thoughts overwritten so completely the horror of their lives and deaths were no more than bits and lines in stunted visuals?

  Bodies wielding arms almost entirely weapons, heads and torso’s encased in protective shells atop fat wheels to bounce over buildings became common sights, roving behind or ahead of the unstoppable Titan line.

  Across Myanmar’s Irrawaddy River AIN deployed Hangol tanks, fifty metres long and fully encased in reflective plates hard enough to take Titan munitions and stagger the giants, but not heavy enough, or mobile enough, to win. Artillery fire filled the air with shrapnel and earth from exploding smart fragments, or from missiles with smaller missiles inside. Jin lost six of his kind in the battle to cross the river while the Hangol tanks drove their legs into the ground to stabilise and unleash might to match the Titan’s weapons, if not their defensive capabilities. Airstrikes sent mist from the burning river into the air and the Titans stormed the tanks, using fist and strength to up-end the vehicles while Aug soldiers poured to the northern side.

  The Hangols and their operators and the forces they met at the Irrawaddy were mighty, but they could never win.

  With the tanks gone the Company drove harder toward AIN Corp’s bastion in the Himalayan territories – underground, away from the air, mountain rock with a maze of tunnels narrow enough to keep out their Titan foes.

  Land from the southern tip of a country once known as Vietnam, and on, over Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar belonged to the Company.

  National Armies fought wars on every continent, in every longitude and latitude of Earth, but the Indochinese Peninsula was where the war was won, and lost.