Mechanical

by Bruno Flexer

  "Sir, how long have you been piloting the Serpent?" Tom asked.

  "More than four months, Lieutenant," the captain responded.

  "How was it walking on your own two legs, then?"

  "They are my own legs, Lieutenant!"

  "You know, when they let your real body out of the Serpent."

  "I haven't been out of my Serpent since I started piloting it."

  That statement was made so flatly and matter-of-factly that it made Tom pause in surprise.

  "You haven't been out?"

  "No, Lieutenant. There's too much work and too much at stake. They check my body regularly, in addition to the Serpent's monitoring. I'll leave the Serpent when I have the time, when the mission's over."

  Tom thought for a moment on how to phrase his next question.

  "Do you feel it changed you, Captain?" Tom finally asked.

  "Changed me, Lieutenant?"

  Tom squirmed a little under the captain's steady gaze. "You know, Sir. Do you feel different?"

  "Different, Lieutenant?"

  "Well, you know, Sir. You don't seem to get angry. Nor have I ever heard you tell a joke. Even Ramirez has cracked a joke or two. Not funny ones, mind you."

  Captain Emerson's returned his gaze to the lecturer.

  "Listen, Lieutenant. This is the greatest crisis the United States of America has ever known. Millions of American citizens are living under enemy rule, an enemy we don't know and don't understand. For the first time, we have a chance of striking back against this enemy using the Serpent project. I follow my orders, Lieutenant. I try to learn all I can and be the best soldier and Serpent pilot I can. I suggest you do the same."

  "Yes, sir," Tom said and shut up. He's got nothing but orders in his mind. No doubt that was why he was chosen to lead the Serpents, Tom thought sourly.

  He moved away from the captain as soon as he could, when they got a brief pause between lessons.

  "How are you doing, Lieutenant Ramirez?" Tom asked the lieutenant, who ignored him completely.

  "Do you find the Serpent effective, Lieutenant?" Tom asked again.

  The viper-shaped head of Ramirez's Serpent slowly turned towards Tom's Serpent and it seemed as if its black faceplate was even blacker now.

  "Fuck off, pencil pusher," Ramirez said and turned his head away.

  "Attention!" Captain Emerson called, and the Serpents stood at attention. The general entered the hall, marched briskly forward, and came to stand in front of the Serpents, a fearless child craning up his head to see monsters from the worst nightmares imaginable: black, spiked monsters with the heads of snakes, horned and spiny, clawed and slender—a terrible travesty of the human body.

  "At ease, soldiers. I've received reports about your progress from Captain Emerson. There's still a lot of work to be done. I hope you do better on the following exercises out on the training range. Keep in mind that you must survive the third and final exercise tomorrow night."

  The general stopped for a moment, giving Tom the chance to regard him closely. The general seemed tired, close to exhaustion, even though only a few hours had passed since they'd last seen him.

  "I'll now give you all the intelligence we have on the enemy. It's not nearly enough, so I suggest you pay close attention to what little we do know. At precisely four o'clock Eastern Time, three years and four months ago, the attack started. There was no warning, no demands for ransom and no threats. At four o'clock, the enemy started taking over the minds of everyone in the twelve targeted cities. You've no doubt seen this before, but it's worth seeing again."

  The general pressed a button on a remote he was holding, and the projector in the hall started running. It was a silent black and white video from a security camera on 47th Street in New York. There was a clock display running and at 04:02 a group of six young adults moving down the street stopped walking. They jerked a few times, shaking, their limbs moving wildly, one lying down, another crouching while a woman just stood on her toes, stretching to her full height for no reason at all.

  Behind them, a heavy trash truck crashed into the side of a building but none of the six people turned to see what happened. Two cars moved down the street. One stopped in the middle of the street, its wheels revolving wildly and fuming, probably the driver somehow pressing the gas and brake pedals at the same time with both feet. The other car just started going in circles, even driving over the sidewalk once.

  It took thirty or forty seconds for the young adults to relax, straighten up and just stand there. Both cars stopped and the drivers, a man and a woman, stepped out of the cars, accompanied in the case of the woman by the two passengers that rode in her car. All of the people just stood there, doing nothing, hands limp at their sides, heads lifted, vacant expressions on their faces and their backs slightly bent forward.

  Then, all of them started moving purposefully, walking brusquely away, including the drivers who just abandoned their cars with their engines still running.

  The video ended there and the general turned back to his four giant machine listeners.

  "The first six hours were complete mayhem. We lost touch with everyone in the twelve cities, everyone. No phone calls, no cellular, nothing. People outside the twelve cities understood something was wrong but no one knew what. Forces started moving in, first of all police officers from outlying regions. No one ever came back."

  The general looked a little grayer than he had just a few moments ago.

  "We did not know what was going on. We had no clue. Some thought it was a natural disaster, others thought a terrorist attack. During the following hours the scale of this disaster became clear. Twelve major American cities and more than twenty million people were missing. Some thought the United States was under attack by an enemy country but whom? We lost New York City, Detroit, Dallas, Atlanta and eight more cities."

  "Commercial and civilian aviation was affected as well. Planes headed to the airports of the twelve cities either crashed or were never heard off again. A few managed to get away and land elsewhere. One Boeing airplane just circled New York City for three hours before its fuel ran out and it crashed. They tried contacting it from New Jersey but there was no response from the pilots the whole three hours it just circled."

  The general now shook his head. "Some thought we must wait and see what's going, try to understand who and what did it but the pressure on the president and the military was tremendous. The American people wanted something done. So, something was done. Military forces were mobilized and sent into the cities. Their orders were to take and secure the cities, advancing from street to street, house to house if that became necessary."

  "So, less than a week after the war started, whole companies were sent in, escorted by armored tank battalions and helicopter gunships. Reconnaissance drones flew in advance, trying to locate enemy targets. They found nothing, just ordinary citizens apparently going about their business. We lost them then, every soldier, armored personnel carrier and tank that went inside the cities. More than seventy thousand soldiers were lost along with five hundred armored vehicles and dozens of helicopters."

  The general clicked his remote again. "This is what we got from one of our drones. The drones continued working through all of this. The enemy can only interfere with human minds, not electronics."

  Tom saw a black-and-white video that was, according to the writing on the screen, from a predator drone. The drone's camera had followed a long column of M1A2 main battle tanks that had been slowly advancing along West Jackson Boulevard in Chicago. Tom could clearly see heavily armed troopers spread out, escorting the tanks at a distance, moving carefully down the boulevard, their assault rifles and machine guns ready to fire. Whole squads covered each other in textbook formation, ready for the enemy to come at them from the two- and three-story red-brick houses on either side.

  Tom knew what would come next. He had seen videos of things like this from the quarantine zones. It affected the dismounted troops first. The soldiers started jerking,
their arms and legs moving without control, spasms running up the soldiers' bodies. Some troops fell down, twitching on the ground. Others just stood in place, legs and hands flying all over the place. A very few moved, jumping or running, and crashing into one other or just moving randomly about.

  The tanks were not spared. One tank fired, its one-hundred-twenty-millimeter smooth-bore gun belching smoke and fire, creating a great fireball four hundred yards down the street. Most tanks stopped moving, but the few that didn't stop created most of the mayhem.

  One tank crashed into a second, actually climbing over it, leaving its turret a flaming wreck, and then continued to crash into yet another tank. Another tank was moving back and forth, smashing the tank in front of it, and then backing away to hit the tank behind it before crashing into the tank in front again. Another tank swerved wildly away and sped on into a building, raising a cloud of dust as it smashed in its windowed façade, continuing on to create chaos inside, visible as occasional plumes of dust coming out of the structure.

  The aerial forces were also not spared. The drone's camera followed a smoking trail across the sky that led to a fireball lighting up what looked like a school building, flames sprouting out of dozens of windows. One Apache gunship landed on its side on the street, its rotating blades cutting sharp, deep furrows in the street. The drone's camera managed to pick up two more smoke contrails in the sky belonging to less fortunate aircraft.

  The drone returned its attention to the ground soldiers on the boulevard. Most of the soldiers now stood stock still, their heads raised, their hands limp at their sides, and their rifles and weapons discarded at their feet. Even though his body was asleep inside the Serpent, and its temperature was perfectly regulated, Tom felt a chill eat into him. The hundreds of soldiers just stood there, looking up at the sky, all their faces turned to the east, towards the center of the city, their backs bent and their shoulders sloped.

  Then, as one, the soldiers just started walking. They headed into the city while securing their rifles, removing magazines and removing helmets. A similar exodus emerged from the armored vehicles on the roads. Tanks, armored personnel carriers and Hummers were just forgotten where they had stopped, in several cases engines left running while their crews just walking into the city.

  The general turned off the projector and faced the Serpents again. Now, a sliver of anger filled the old warrior's eyes. Who is he angry at? thought Tom.

  "After this fiasco, attempts to take the twelve cities by force were put on hold. Our military forces have positioned cordons around the cities, and quarantine zones have been established. No one was allowed in or out, though several thousand people slipped by our soldiers and entered the cities anyway. Peace factions always think that if they could just talk to the enemy, see things from the enemy’s point of view, everything will be all right. No one ever came back."

  The general pulled over a chair and sat down heavily. "You all know what this did to our country. The cities taken were among the most important financial and commercial centers of the United States. The damage to our economy and infrastructure is enormous. We are barely hanging on as it is."

  The general paused for a few seconds. "We tried to understand who had done this to us and how. Guesses involved hallucinogenic gas, viruses, mind-affecting spores, or even wild magnetic fields. We tried using drones and unmanned vehicles to sample the air, the ground, everything. No one discovered anything. A drone sent a week after the attack on Chicago discovered that all the military hardware was gone. They took our weapons, our tanks and jeeps and were no doubt preparing to use them against us."

  The general now got up and faced his audience, raising his head to look straight into the black, expressionless faces.

  "We still had no idea who or what had attacked us, but we were determined that the attackers would take no more American soil. The forces surrounding the cities had strict orders to shoot at anyone and anything leaving the cities. There were endless discussions about what to do next. Some said our only option was to bomb the cities back into the stone age but there were still more than twenty million Americans in them. Twenty million hostages."

  "Whoever took those cities was not dumb. Two weeks after they took the cities, they started shooting down our drones, using the guns and missiles our forces had brought with them in our botched attacks. So we were reduced to using high-altitude satellite scans and images. We looked and scanned and tried piecing together whatever we knew."

  "Life in the cities continued. People went about their business, and we really couldn't see any patterns in movement or anything else. If we would have found a pattern, we might have been able to do something, maybe even pinpoint the locations of the attackers. As it was, two months after the attacks, nobody knew who attacked us. Some people still thought it was a terrorist organization. Others thought it was some separatist crazies who stumbled on a new kind of weapon. A few thought it was an enemy country who had attacked us, and now used the United States' isolation to reap benefits in the international arena, although as far as we could see, everybody only stood to lose."

  The general sighed. "A few even thought it was aliens. At this stage, we were desperate enough to check with NASA and go over all information we had from all our radars and sensors focused on outer space. We detected nothing: no landing or meteors or anything from space. Now, three years after the attack, we still know nothing about who attacked us. We fight the enemy raids, we hold the quarantine and nothing more."

  Tom was taken aback, actually moving back a step. He glanced at his fellow Serpents. Ramirez stood stock still, Sergeant Jebadiah was still at attention, and Captain Emerson betrayed no emotion, as usual.

  "But General, we took back Detroit!"

  The general sighed again and sat back down. "Yes Lieutenant, we did. Satellite scans showed a heavy concentration of our own soldiers around the Detroit Renaissance Center. We monitored things closely for a week before we were sure. The enemy was protecting the main building in the center, the round hotel, concentrating its forces and its acquired hardware around it, fortifying all the access roads and pathways into the building and placing anti-aircraft missiles on the roof. So, we attacked the building using long-range motored bombs and Maverick missiles. We poured more than a hundred tons of high explosives into that building, planning the attack points as accurately as possible to ensure that that building only collapsed and didn't take any other buildings with it when it went."

  The general stiffened his back. "The attack went on smoothly. We used about twenty F16 and four B1 bombers and the building just collapsed in on itself. Then, volunteers approached the city carefully. They were attacked by people the enemy had controlled, but the minds of our troops were unaffected. We did not know if this was some sort of plan, so we poured in our forces slowly and carefully, ready to try to pull out everyone the moment our soldiers started acting strangely, but nothing happened."

  "It took three weeks of intense house-to-house fighting to take back the city. We lost the 4th Infantry Division and a lot of hardware, but we took back the city. No soldier has been taken by the enemy in Detroit ever since. Whatever controlled and took over the minds of three million people was destroyed by the bombing of the Detroit Renaissance Center Hotel. And we still know next to nothing about whom or what the enemy is. We thought—"

  "How is that? Did you go through the wreckage of the building? Did you debrief the people of the city?"

  The general did not seem to mind being interrupted by Tom. "We did both things, Lieutenant. We also analyzed the air, the water, the radiation levels and everything else we could in the city. The wreckage of the building revealed nothing that might have had some connection to the enemy. Just a lot of dead people, soldiers and our own military hardware remains. In addition, every analysis we did revealed nothing out of the ordinary."

  "And the people?"

  "We did learn one thing from the people. Their minds returned to normal after a few weeks, but at first they resi
sted. The soldiers who had been taken over at first fought our forces, and even a good percentage of normal citizens waged improvised guerilla warfare against our soldiers. Hundreds of captured soldiers and more than two thousands of the liberated soldiers and citizens died this way."

  "The conditioning or mind control or whatever it was started wearing off a few weeks after the bombing. We questioned everybody we could. None of them would say anything except one thing. They remembered that when the conquest began, new thoughts entered their minds, overruling everything else they had thought or felt before. For them, we became the enemy and they had to fight us. There was no choice for them in the matter. During their daily lives, they were instructed on a general basis on how to live and cooperate to survive in the city of Detroit while it was being besieged by us."

  The general stood again to face the Serpents. "They had no idea who or what did that to them. Medical tests revealed nothing out of the ordinary. In short, we learnt little from them, and we haven't been able to repeat the process with the other eleven cities. We could not see a pattern to what and where to bomb."

  "However, in time we learnt something new. The enemy's power is expanding. We saw that in Dallas and in other cities. On three separate incidents, soldiers on watch outside the quarantine zone were taken by the enemy, just as if they had entered the cities. We lost four battalions this way and one mechanized company. We think New York City is next, and we've already expanded the quarantine zone and moved all the soldiers back. But if this continues, pretty soon there won't be any free United States to fall back to."

  The general breathed in deeply.

  "But now, with the Serpents, we have a new weapon. I have to be frank with you men. Right now, we don't have a contingency plan. You're the one and only plan and hope we have."

  Chapter 8

  Day Two, Fort Belvoir, Virginia

  "They always let us out only at night, did you notice that?" Tom whispered to Ramirez. Tom waited a moment, but the Marine Corps lieutenant just stood his ground. The four Serpents were assembled in the training grounds outside the hangar, waiting.