Breach the Hull

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  Those smart bullets were smart. They had memory metal jackets which could act like little tiny fins and ailerons, giving them some ability to correct their course in-flight when diving into the target. Some changed shape as they entered the target, swelling or dilating to change their cross-section. The could slim down their noses right before hitting bullet proof vests, to become armor-penetrating, and flattening their heads when they hit flesh to become dum-dums.

  Mom told me her bridesmaid was shot during the wedding. The girl was standing too near an open window, and maybe her gown gave her a silhouette that some dumb smart bullet thought looked like a target. That was back when people still gathered in churches for weddings and stuff. Back when buildings still had open windows.

  The pixel resolution on these weapons was not the greatest. Forty-nine times out of fifty they could not tell the difference between a school-child and a lamp-post, a passer-by, a shadow on the wall, a fire hydrant. So you’d have to shoot fifty-one bullets to make sure you hit a target.

  Yes, I said a school-child. Target of choice, once the rules of war went away. Why? Well, the point of war is to use violence to terrify the enemy into submission; to break his will to resist. Right? The best place for violence was in a town; that’s where the people are. The best place for terror is in a school; that’s were the people gather all their children.

  All their unarmed, unprotected, beloved, innocent children.

  If you were a soldier, there was no point in looking for other soldiers to shoot at. They were all dressed like civilians, like you were, sitting on park benches, eating submarine sandwiches, or pretending to smoke. Or sitting up a tree thirty miles away; or in a diving suit taking a rest on the bottom of a nearby lake, watching for a targetlock. No point in trying to shoot at soldiers. There were none to find. I know what you’re thinking. What about shooting the leaders? Assassinating the captains and colonels and commissars on the other side? Presidents, Premiers, Prime ministers?

  Listen, honey, I’m running low on memory, so I’ll try to make this quick, but it is complex—everything is tied into everything else. I’m trying to explain what kind of people your folks were, your real folks, and why they made a power- armored suit like this.

  When the nature of war changed the nature of government changed. What is a government, anyway, besides a group of people in the business of winning wars and stopping fights, right? Even before when I was born, politicians had been using computer enhanced imagery to make their images on STV look younger, more com-manding, more handsome, less fat. Whatever. Guys with squeaky voices were given nice baritones. It was fake, but so what? We never minded if a politician did not write his own speeches, did we? Why should we mind what he really looked like, so long as he did his job?

  Well, it was just a small step from cartoon-drawing over real politicians to replacing those politicians entirely with computer-generated talking heads. You see, the world when I was young was not divided into Haves and Have-nots. It was divided into Knowns and Unknowns.

  When the nature of government changed, the nature of citizenship changed. The nature of wealth and power changed.

  Not everyone was trying to shoot the kids, though. Thank God for that. When everything went away, when everything went bad, there were still some people who kept their heads. After my parents were killed, this family of Amish farmers found me, wandering the fields at night, still carrying my Mom’s head. I guess I was out of my mind, a bit. Jeez! How old was I then? Younger than you.

  My other real-time, real-life friend was Mr. Eister. He had taught me how to shoot, what to do during incoming-fire drills, how to check food for foreign substances after saying grace. I remember him as a tall man, tall as a mountain it seemed to me, who always wore an odd, old-fashioned wide-brimmed hat. When I was six, I had insisted the mansion-circuits make such a hat like that for me, which I insisted on wearing all the time, even to bed, even to church (we had churches back then.)

  The only thing which could get me to take that damn hat off, was Mr. Eister himself, when we were suiting up. I remember arguing with him that my helmet was big enough to allow me to wear the hat beneath it, if I scrunched it up a bit. He had explained . . . once . . . that the extra fabric would prevent the helmet cushions from seating properly on my skull. When I hadn’t listened he waited patiently till I suited up, then he struck me in the head with his gun-stock, knocking me from my feet and setting my ears ringing.

  “English,” (he always called me that,) “English, a hard-shot shell would conduct a thousand time more foot-pounds of force that that little tap.” He had leaned over me to talk. “The only thing what keeps thy brains from being churned to jam during a fire-fight, lad, is that thy helm here can flex to deflect the shockwave into the exoskeleton anchor-points. Which it cannot do if thee must wear thy hat; remove it.”

  Poor Mr. Eister. Someone posted a bounty on the Amish. Didn’t like their ways, didn’t like their looks, didn’t like their farm carts blocking the road. Who knew why? Who gave a reason? I was in my armor when a flock of bullets dropped out of a clear blue sky and stuck the house, spreading jellied gasoline everywhere. I was cool and safe, surrounded by flames. Peter played jump-and-run music, so I could not hear the sound of my new family sizzling and screaming. I jumped and ran. With the Jack Rabbit toggle thrown, I could jump over a church steeple.

  How could they get away with shooting at us?

  It was the crypto, you see. Encryption. Encryption and digital money. Governments did not bother raising and training armies. You did not need esprit de corps and unit cohesion to win a war any more. Governments just put out bounties over the Net, posted the reward and the bag they wanted on a public board in some neutral country. There was always a neutral country willing to carry the board.

  The posting? Just a public announcement that decryption keys to a certain amount of digital cash would be sent out to anyone who could anonymously post a ‘prediction’ of how many people of a certain nation would be killed on a certain day. There was a third party verification system to confirm the kills, also encrypted both ways.

  You see, with double-encryption, you could actually pay someone the digital cash, or even leave it laying around at a public bulletin board address, but anyone who picked it up could not spend it without unscrambling it. It was worthless and safe.

  Each time someone downloaded a copy of your bag of cash to their personal sta-tion, a new unique key and counter-key would be generated automatically. Let us say a hundred people, or a million, make copies of the scrambled cash. A hundred keys, or a million, are generated. Each personal to the person making the copy.

  You send your counter-key back in to the government hiring you, along with whatever proof you want that you’ve killed the number of people they wanted killed. You sent it in anonymously.

  Once they have your unique counter key, they can publicly post the decryption for your unique key. They can shout the decrypt from the roof-tops; it doesn’t do anyone any good but you. Unique means that you and only you can unscramble your copy of the cash bundle. Everyone else just has a string of garbled ones and zeros, meaning-less and worthless. You have a code which opens a credit line through a numbered Swiss bank account. You never meet your employer; he never meets you. The other party could not even help the police find you even if he wanted to.

  And not just governments. Anyone who wanted anyone killed, for any reason or no reason. Someone posted bounties on black children. Someone else posted bounties on Ku Klux Klansmen. A retaliation? Who knew?

  Someone else posted bounties on Jews. Someone else picked Witches. Someone else picked Christians. Homosexuals. Smokers. Non-smokers. Heterosexuals. Dogowners. A zero-population group posted bounties on anyone. Anyone at all.

  And it did not need to be one person posting the bounty. I contributed a few bucks myself, when I was in school, to have a certain famous entertainer who annoyed me bumped off. It was only a dollar or two; I meant it as a joke. I was drunk. But people kept a
dding to the fund. A dollar here, a gold gram there. After about five years, the bounty on the guy was half a million.

  Now, I am not a murderer. That guy escaped. You see, that entertainer did not look like he looked in the See-vees. His picture was computer-generated. He was rich. He had friends. He was an Unknown.

  Remember what I said about the difference between Knowns and Unknowns? It was the difference between life and death. Unknowns had all their money encrypted, overseas, stored as strings of scrambled numbers. You never met them face to face; you talked over the phone; and the picture and the voice on the phone could be someone, anyone, no one. But it wasn’t them.

  Remember I said governments changed? They were run by Unknowns. Appointed bureaucrats, some of them; others were just campaign finance contributors. And taxes? Well, when everyone can hide their assets, there is no way to collect from them.

  Tangible assets were different. Governments just seize them. They don’t need a reason. They see a house or car they like, they take it. A piece of property, a publicly traded company. In the early days, they had to plant evidence of drug-dealing, or cig-arette smoking, unauthorized public prayer, or gun ownership or something. Later, they just claimed the right of Eminent Domain and took what they needed.

  How else could they be fed, those governments? How else could they continue? It didn’t bother the Unknowns. They just took out Seizure Insurance and kept most of their assets intangible. The ultra-rich sold or burned their cars after every car trip, and bought new ones before they went out again, just so they would have nothing on the highways to be seized. That was back when we had highways.

  So how do you protect your children, in a time like that, with a civilization going to hell? You cannot negotiate with the assassins because no one knows who they are. Your rulers will not protect you. They are anonymous kelptocrats. The police? Don’t make me laugh; everyone I knew kicked a few bucks into the kill-the-pigs kitty every time they got a traffic ticket, or had another car seized. The army? But there is no army. There will never be another army again.

  A bullet-proof vest is not thick enough to stop a mid-sized smart bullet. And in order to have plate thick enough to shield your little child’s heart and head from the assassins, you must mount it on an articulated exoskeleton.

  I hated the stuff when I was young, and I always used to play with my faceplate open, so I could smell the free summer breeze. Billy Worthemer was the same way. Open faceplate. I talked him into doing it too, so he couldn’t tell on me.

  We were in the courtyard green-area. In a protected zone, with no line-of-sight to any taller buildings.

  I remember seeing the targeting platform that painted us, Billy and me. It was just a motion sensor clipped to the collar of a puppy dog, with the sensitivity turned down so that only a body larger than a dog, but smaller than an adult, would set it off. Billy went over to pet the dog. I raced him to it to be the first one there, and picked up the dog.

  I remember Peter Power Armor saved my life. I was hit in the shoulder by the round, but the shot did not penetrate. But the ricochet caught Billy in the face. He was turning around to say something to me; maybe to ask me to let him have a turn petting the dog.

  I do not remember what happened to his face. I really do not. I remember the whine in my gauntlets when I pulled the innocent little puppy in half. Poor dog. I remember that. I do not remember what Billy looked like. Not at all.

  I should erase that last bit. It has nothing to do with what I was saying. I am trying to tell you what your parents and grandparents were like. Are like. You’re my granddaughter. It took me so long to find you. But I never gave up.

  We are the kind of people who look after our kids. Having power armor for kids seems ridiculous, doesn’t it? These days, it does. In the old days, it did not. Everything you’ve been told about history is a lie. The People’s Jesus did not come back to Earth and marry Mother Gaia, and appoint the First Protector of the Green People. That’s not what happened.

  The society I was raised in, the nightmare, could not last. The Unknowns could not last. They did not even know each other, did they? How could they help each other?

  But what could stop the nightmare? Shut off the Net, you’re saying. Cut the cables, arrest the Providers, take an ax to the mainframes, tear up the ground-lines. Easy enough. But who was going to do it? Not the multinationals; all their money was in the Net. Not the Unknowns; the Net was their universe.

  In a society where everyone is being shot at, shot at any time and at all times, there are only two things you can do. Either you make sure everyone has a gun or you make sure no one has a gun.

  The people West of the Mississippi chose the option number one. The people in the East chose option two.

  The reality behind option two, of course, is that ‘no one has a gun’ actually means, ‘no one but the authorities has a gun.’ And that means, ‘everyone but the authorities shuts up and does what they’re told.’

  The reality behind option one, of course, is that ‘everyone has a gun’ actually means, ‘If you want me to shut up, tough guy, come over here and make me.’ The two systems are incompatible.

  That’s what the Second Civil War was really about; it was not about the Sacred Spotted Owl. And when the war got hot enough, and enough transatlantic cables got sabotaged, the Net went down. The Stock Market, all the stock markets, really, and bank records, personal records, everyone’s identities, known and unknown, just went away.

  The economy just went away.

  And when that happened, the civilization’s ability to feed the population of the world was cut roughly in half.

  And the old-fashioned methods of warfare came back. We had soldiers again. I am not saying whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. They are brave, the soldiers these days; they wear uniforms, they do not hide and slink and sneak like soldiers from my day.

  I am not brave. I am not like the soldiers of today. I am one of the old men of the days. My mission was to rescue you. I did it our way.

  I was telling you about Peter Power Armor. I was telling you that I knew Mrs. Hechler would not know what it was. She had not lived through my grandfather’s time, when fathers took their boys out into the woods to shoot squirrels. Or my father’s time, when school uniforms were all woven with bulletproof material. My time I’ve told you about, the time of the Unknowns. The time of your mother (my daughter.) Her time was even worse; the time of the Diebacks.

  Industrial collapse. No more computers, no more smart-bullets. War is more like the old days; men in uniforms who can see each other through the grass, in the trenches, shooting. The bullets aren’t smart enough to pick their own targets any more. The nature of war turned back.

  Your generation is so lucky. You don’t know anything. Lucky, stupid, stupid, lucky fools.

  A woman of Mrs. Hechler’s generation would not believe any children’s toy could be armed.

  But Mrs. Hechler knew it was a machine, and machines of any kind were rare these days, and she knew the Correct Thought. “Ethne! Get away from that Satan-metal thing! Green Jesus and Mother Earth hate machines! Don’t touch it!”

  I said, “Darling Ethne; this is your magic fairy-tale knight-in-shining-armor, come to rescue you. Its yours, yours, all yours, your very own.”

  “Shut up!” Mrs. Hechler said to me.

  I shrugged, putting my hands behind my back. “Oh, come now, you foul-smelling sack of lumpish fat. I am not the one who cannot control a seven-year -old girl. You signed the authorization saying we could explore this deserted old house to see if there was anything we could loot or sell for the communal kitchen. I’m not the one who will catch hell from the District Helpfulness Manager.”

  That directed her attention back to the child. ‘Ethne Cornwall Delaplace! Ward of the State 142! Come here right now! Let go of that thing! It belongs to everyone!”

  I said, “You are a princess, raised by trolls, who hate that you come from a high and noble lineage. This gentle knight
-errant shall rescue you and take you to a free land across the Mississippi to the West. On your very life, do not let go!”

  “Ethne! Come here! Don’t make me call for Jerry downstairs!”

  I said, “Free, Ethne. Freedom. No more equalization injections because you are smarter than other kids. Freedom.”

  Ethne smiled at me, looking very beautiful to me for the first time since I met her, just like her mother when she was a little girl.

  And she said, “Please, sir. I want to be smart again, like I used to. I want to be free.” And that was when I fell in love with her.

  I think the mention of the F word did it.

  Mrs. Hechler strode forward, huge and ponderous in her wrath. Mrs. Hechler grabbed Ethne by the arm. It was a good grab, swift as a snake, the kind of grip guards should learn to use on prisoners. And I am sure it hurt, because Ethne screamed.

  I pointed the handset at the scene, opened the lens, and said carefully into the mic: “Child under attack.”

  It was amazing how surprised Mrs. Hechler looked when she fell. I had underestimated how loud the shot of the tranquilizer dart would be. I had not expected Jerry, who had been waiting outside, to come up shooting.

  Jerry was not licensed as a cop, just as security. A baby-sitter. Regulations said he was not allowed to be armed with anything but a stunner. That hand-cannon he held was no stunner; it was shooting through walls, brick and plaster. Made a hell of a noise. Just like the old days, eh?

  I had also underestimated how clever the power-armor’s neural net had been programmed. It practically opened up in half and scooped Ethne into itself. Jerry really never stood a chance. It was very noisy and very bloody; not the sort of thing a child should see.

  It is too bad you are unconscious. Peter sedated you because you were screaming and putting your hands in front of his gun barrels. I am recording this all through the hand-set into the suit playback for you to hear when you wake up.