Future on Fire

by Orson Scott Card

  “Find a sack,” the tomato-faced D.I. said, and the shuffling of the men toward the beds suggested a mass game of musical chairs. The pattern of instant response to command was already becoming obvious. When the bionic D.I. said shit, the instant response was to squat and strain.

  How the hell did I get into this, Derek asked himself, stashing his gear on the wooden locker box beneath the bunk, and easing down onto the mattress. A curious, disproportionate sense of security accrued from the simple feel of the moderately resilient mattress. Why do young men fight the wars started by old men? he wondered; how is it that patriotism is so exploited, why should I be a warrior, anyway?

  “Chow in half an hour,” the D.I. barked, and left, his stride rapid and powerful and sure, his body a deadly strong device. Derek watched the disappearing figure with a mixture of admiration and scorn. No mere human could control men so totally, he thought. Half bones and flesh, blood and tendons, half circuit-paks and nuclear cubes. He almost said it aloud: Suppose one of his circuits failed? Would he be like a puppet with cut strings? Derek lay supine on the bunk and closed his eyes, relishing the absence of visual cues. He felt the keel of his spinal cord settle into the mattress; the arches of his ribbed bone-box became the crests of hills, his extremities were peninsulas, his genital stalk a detumescent sprig, and his head a quiescent cognition terminal. Deep inside his vestibular nests, the eternal equilibratory fluid now lay ninety degrees from verticality, and it gave him to know both the comfort as well as the ventral vulnerability of supinity. Across the squad bay, a thick Bronx accent curled out its street-smart denotations, and was answered by a whanging, colloquial Southern drawl. A mulatto-looking Italian boy was reviving the 1860s U.S. Civil War with a jingle-jawed Kentucky plowboy. A wrist-wrestling match formed up, and the Kentuckian took the Bronxite easily, the plowboy’s small biceps belying the strength of his wrists and hands. He allowed that milking cows was what had made him so strong. The lunch was a rush of lines, rattling metal trays, steak and potatoes and milk and cake, and what every young man came to believe in for the rest of his life: something called saltpeter, put in all the food, to keep you from getting penile erections. Derek’s first day in warrior training passed in a frantic blur of diffuse and, for him, aimless actions.

  Next morning the reveille bugle blew at 5:45 A.M., and the men bounded from their beds. Most wore towels around their waists (nudity was not explicitly disallowed, but turned out to be rare among the young warrior-striplings) as they shuffled to the shower room, and then stood before the line of mirrors to shave and brush their teeth. A radio blared syrupy commercials and unobtrusive music, and Derek thought how soft and easy the deejay’s life must be. Up and down the line of men, there were ancient shaving mugs and brushes, pressurized foam in cans, fat white worms of cream in tubes, the raucous buzzing of electric shavers, tooth brushing sounds, hawking, spitting, snorting, a conglomerate of mass toilet sounds, all amplified in the resonant concrete room. Then back to the squad bay to pull on the stiff denim uniforms, and out into the early sunrise to muster into ragged ranks.

  The bionic D.I. strode from his billet across from the barracks. He was dressed in light-colored khaki, soft-looking, an often-laundered look, a “salty” look that was the mark of his tenure. Bionic shit, Derek thought, mannequin, waxwood figurine, plastic monster, breeding fault, curiosity; and yet the charismatic force the D.I. exuded was ineluctable. The voice barked and rolled, and the men came to attention in a kind of reversed collapsing movement, like old movies played backward. The platoon of men shuffled off toward the mess hall, where they were again rushed past the sullen-angry messboys, who filled their trays with scrambled eggs, thick bacon, grits, fried potatoes, bread, and butter. On the tables were metal jars of milk and coffee. The men set about the business of eating with vigor and speed, fueling their young bodies, swelling their intestines, inducing rhythmic peristalsis, elevating blood-sugar levels; and the feeling of satiety was good and right and best and natural. The mess hall was filled with several hundred men, and the sounds were metallic and clicking, sloshing and swishing, babbling and murmuring, and yet serious and subdued.

  At least we are not harassed when we eat, Derek thought, and then he saw the D.I. patrolling the aisles. I wonder if he eats, he thought, and the thought was a mental smirk. I bet he puts fuel-paks in his gut instead. I bet he eats iron and zinc and lithium and silicon grease. That means he doesn’t shit, either. He probably has some kind of exhaust port, some spring-loaded valve he had to take out and clean with an air hose every month. The D.I. moved close to Derek, and there was the all but imperceptible whir of tungsten helices in ambergris fulcra-paks. Machine, Derek thought.

  “How’s the chow, hero boy?” the D.I. asked Derek, the voice interrogatory and cruel, yet with a sliver of sincerity coming through. Derek swallowed a piece of thick bacon. It tasted full and salty and complex, a genuine blastula of compressed fat.

  “Good,” he answered, looking up at the aminoplast mouth, the absolute symmetry of the nasal ports, the steady look of the steely bright visual agates.

  “You don’t have a worry in the world, boy,” the D.I. said, beginning to walk away, “the government’s going to feed you like a king.”

  It was the man’s bionic status that offended him, Derek realized. I am organic, he said to himself, I am colloidal, humanoid, alive, vestibular, aware aware aware, and he is machinated, quasi-organic, para-android, a windup tin soldier. Derek could not escape the now diffuse strategems of how he might set about dysfunctioning the D.I.

  A long, hot, compacted month passed. The men learned close-order drill, the manual of arms, the saber manual, the anatomy and physiology of weapons, dirty fighting, ancient bayonet combat, judo, karate, and even medieval Scottish wrestling. They marched; they ran obstacle courses; climbed hemp ropes thick as billy clubs, dove through blind holes in walls (there was a mudhole on the other side of the wall); they crawfished, supine, beneath barbed-wire screens while machine-gun bullets whistled just above them; jumped from platforms into water topped by blazing oil; boxed each other with gloves and with padded staff; they feinted and dodged, crouched and sprang, struck and parried, rolled and lunged, galloped and stalked; crawled, inched, skewered, and insinuated their young bodies in so many ways that Derek felt he knew every way to fight a man hand to hand. He knew the trick of breaking a jaw, crushing a windpipe, eye gouging, testicle ramming, and hitting always below the belt. He knew how to bite and spit and twist and wrench, and began to wonder if being a warrior meant anything other than hand-to-hand combat. Then came the introduction to the history of weapons.

  The men fired the ancient .22—caliber rifle, the 1906 rifle, the World War II Garand; the carbine; Browning automatic rifle; air-cooled and water-jacketed machine guns; the heavy, bucking, inaccurate .45—caliber pistol; and the infamous, torquing Thompson submachine gun. Then came the M—12 series, the M—16, M—18, and M—24, each one deadlier in the sense of the number of projectiles it could spit per unit of time. They fired the recoilless rifle, the mercilessly recoiling grenade launcher, the stovepipe bazooka, and the fat stovepipe mortars. They were getting into the laser weapons now, and the D.I. had harassed Derek more than the other men. Derek did not have bad blood feelings for the D.I., but he came increasingly to see him as a personal challenge. Here was a smart machine to outwit.

  One fiercely baking August day, Derek saw a rheostat knob flush on the D.I.’s belly, as the instructor led the platoon in a grueling calisthenics session. Ah, there’s his switch, Derek thought, there’s his power knob. I wonder if he turned it off at night. I wonder if he has to plug into a recharger while he sleeps—if he sleeps. Men are the masters of their machines, he thought, and the thought of dysfunctioning the D.I. grew stronger in him. Again, it wasn’t out of hate, it was rather to show that humans outrank bionics. Machines work for people, he concluded immediately, they may not oppress us, they respond to us. They pump and they churn, they reciprocate their pistons and turbine-spin their
fluted blades, and at our specific whims. It is the routine option of the man to control his machine.

  That night Derek did a reckless thing. He crept from his bunk in the dark, circled the barracks to avoid the sentry placed on fire-watch duty, and climbed an asbestos-wrapped pipe to peer into the D.I.’s quarters. The room looked like a machine shop and a spare-parts storehouse for electronic hardware. The D.I. was stripped. Derek had never seen him naked before. He clung to the large, warm pipe outside the window, his bare feet hurting, thrust against a thick plastic collar that held the pipe to the wall. The D.I.’s back was to him, a broad back, but one sectioned like the thorax of an insect. Exoskeletal dung beetle, Derek thought; roach, scarab, segmented lobster. The D.I.’s deltoids shone like geodesic epaulets, the trapezius muscles were like gussets on an aircraft fuselage, and the lats like retracted wings on ancient delta-shaped jet planes. A plasticized corset encircled the waist, and the pelvic girdle was that of a store-window mannequin. Polystyrene training pants, Derek thought, Pampers for a machine. A complex network of external tendon-prostheses connected the waistline to the rear of the knees. He’s a damned puppet, Derek said softly, and the D.I.’s torso began to swivel, like a turntable in an antique railroad roundhouse.

  It was so rare a sight that Derek’s breathing stopped. The torso swiveled ninety degrees starboard, and the D.I.’s arm moved to lubricate two grease nipples on the pelvic edge, exposed like drainage nodules in a garbage-disposal sump. A small square of epithelium had been removed from the side of his face, and where teeth and jawbone should have been showing through, there was microcircuitry. One muscular arm hung slack, like a girder being lifted into place by its end, and the other seemed curiously alive, the movements rapid, certain, perfectly synchronized. The calves were crosshatched with bindings that appeared to be embedded in the mass of the leg.

  Derek saw the room as alien. It had no prettifiers in it; no furniture, no plants, no pictures, no books, no stereo, records, rugs, ashtrays, dishes, no signs of food, no papers, pencils, pets, or lamps. He lives in a spare-parts room, Derek thought; he has to stay garaged in a maintenance shack. No toilet or sink, no tub or shower, no stove or refrigerator, no bread, grapes, wine, peanuts, or molasses. He began to feel sorry for the D.I. The torso swiveled back to its normal position, and the other flaccid arm came alive, reaching for a snaking conduit that led along the gritty floor and into the shadows. The D.I.’s head had not moved at all, and his feet remained in place, like those of a statue on its base.

  Then the head turned, smoothly, like a signal-seeking radar dish, and the pair of faceted eyes looked up, directly at Derek. The facial expression was curiously slack, like a person who has had a stroke, and then it turned very human and leering. The aminoplast mouth moved, and Derek heard a voice inside his head, as if a microcassette had been implanted in his inner ear. The voice said, GET IN HERE, HERO BOY.

  It was all Derek could do to prevent his body from going to jelly. He clung to the pipe and forced his body to respond, descending carefully, his breath now coming in dysrhythmic snorts. The tone of the voice had been commanding, and yet matter-of-fact, a quiet, casual order. There was no anger or indignation in it, neither was it colorlessly robotic. Derek imagined he had heard a fleeting nuance of camaraderie in the command, as if he was now privy to some secret. He felt the spongy turf beneath his bare feet, and the grass whispered there, quickly dampening the completely vascular podiatric pads, so sensitively keyed into his vestibular pods. The only sound he heard was the soft hiss of the wrapped steam lines, and then the call of a bobwhite, far off.

  “What are you, some kind of fucking voyeur?” the D.I. said, as Derek entered the room and closed the door. The word sounded too soft, an affectedly onomatopoetic sound. For that matter, the word fucking was too fleshy a sound for a nonflesh bionic D.I. to use.

  “I was damnably curious about you, I’ll have to admit,” Derek said. “I’ll take whatever’s coming to me.” He did not feel fearful. Certain kinds of men can induce fear, but no bione could. The D.I. quickly replaced the missing part of his face, and dressed quickly in pants and shirt. He doesn’t have to put on his clothes, Derek thought, but then the uniform presented an authoritarian set.

  “We can’t have plebes climbing up steam pipes and doing Peeping Tom numbers,” the D.I. said, moving toward him. “Stand at attention.” Derek liked to snap his heels together in this stance, the valid impact-clack of thick leather shoes, but now the movement felt silly and hurt his bare heels. Beneath his feet, the floor (deck, shithead!) felt like a gritty hatch on a rusting Lebanese freighter. The strange metallic room sang soft electronic soprano songs, and somewhere along one wall (bulkhead, you shithead!), a relay closed and opened in rhythmic tickings. The D.I. walked behind Derek. “Eyes front,” he said, again softly authoritarian. “You’re a fair strapping young buck.” The voice came from behind, the umbilical conduit moving to compensate for the change in position, and then the D.I. moved back to face Derek. “You figure you can whip my ass?” The voice was not nearly so baiting in its effect as it would have been coming from another man.

  “No, sir,” Derek said, his voice too loud in the resonant room. A hollow steel pole support column nearby rang with the volume of his reply.

  “What kind of trouble are you looking for, sneaking around like a second-story man in the middle of the night? Stand at ease.”

  “I’m curious about you. I never saw a superhuman person before.” The flexible conduit was attached to the D.I.’s umbilical plug, like a high-pressure fuel line. He’s getting recharged, Derek thought to himself.

  “You looking for some way to get at me?”

  “I don’t see any way, sir. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

  “You resent biones?”

  “I guess I resent your invincibility.”

  “That’s what makes me a D.I., Plebe. My job is to make you invincible. You buy that?”

  “I guess any man wants to be invincible.”

  “You volunteer or get conscripted?”

  “Conscripted.”

  “Where you from, hero boy?”

  “Old Orleans.”

  “You got any bionics in you?”

  “Some plastic knee cartilage.”

  “How much of a bione you figure I am?”

  “You look like a 90—percenter to me.”

  “Ninety-seven,” the D.I. said. “You have your original memory banks? You had any erasures?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then listen good. I was hit by a commuter cab when I was ten tiers old. The impact jellied my brain. My guardians bartered my body to the Gladiator Service in exchange for lifelong pensions. I got a modified George Patton persona implant, and a set of kinesthetic paks that make me strong as a gorilla. I can squat with 2,000 pounds, bench-press 1,000, reverse-curl 250, and do the hundred-yard dash in five flat. I can fire offhand bull’s-eyes at 1,000 yards.”

  “Christ,” Derek muttered, unbelieving.

  “I can field-strip an ’06 in forty-seven seconds, and categorize tactical philosophies from Genghis Khan through Rommel and Rickover and Haig. My data banks recapitulate the history of warfare.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Derek asked, with some growing feeling of empathy. “Why not just discipline me and get on with it?”

  “I am validating my dominance,” the D.I. said. “If you have any doubts about it, put them aside. As for discipline, you don’t know the half of it, hero boy. You’ve got too much self-actualization in you to make much of a gladiator. What you need is a good shot of hypothalamic amperage.” The D.I. moved toward a cabinet, and Derek had an old memory-trace of a dentist reaching into the sterile tray for the huge Novocaine syringe. His first instinct was to run, and then he saw the hatchet. It was rusty and lay on a lathe-bed, as if unused for tiers. The conduit that connected the D.I.’s umbilicus to the recesses beneath the metal credenza lay like a fat snake sleeping in the sun. The conduit rotated easily in the abdominal socke
t as the D.I. reached into the cabinet. He palmed a small phaser and turned toward Derek.

  No machine is going to zap me, Derek thought, and in one fluid motion, born of reflex-level survival instinct, he snatched the hatchet from the lathe and swung it in both hands at the fat snake-conduit on the metal floor (deck, shithead!). The old blade bit into resilient rubber, fiber, polyester web, and then into the bright pure metallic strands carrying the recharging current. The floor rang with the impact of the blow, and a burst of blue sparks spat up in Derek’s face, taking away half his eyebrow. A shock electrified his body, rattling every rib. The dry wooden handle of the hatchet had saved him from a serious shock. The shock served as a reflex-arc stimulus for repeated blows, and he screamed ancient karate cries as the fourth blow severed the conduit. The sparks flashed orange and amber, then died in an acrid little plume of smoke. The D.I. stood, like a Colossus of Rhodes statue, as if his feet were bolted to the floor. His head began to turn very slowly, and it rotated a full 180 degrees, and looked at Derek. The face looked out at him, and the shoulder blade surrogates were where the pectorals should have been. The sight of the dorsol torso and the ventral head horrified Derek. Very slowly, the D.I. began to sink to his knees, like a massive steel puppet being lowered by taut cables.

  “A stupid move, hero boy.” the voice was pitched lower, the cadence slowed. “Destruction of government property, umbilical assault, trespass, military maladaptive behaviors. Your organic ass is going straight to the brig.” The D.I.’s arms began to draw up, so that the forearms were extraordinarily parallel to the upper arms, far more so than possible in humans. Across the room a bank of oscillographic screens flashed bright red bars, and the bell-shaped Gaussian tracings there decremented to gentle excurvatures, and then flattened into horizontal lines.

  “I’m going on nonverbal.” The voice was even lower, slower, and softer. “Your vestibular ass is mud, hero boy.” The D.I.’s calves drew up behind his thighs, again in the bizarre mechanical sense of absolute parallelism, and Derek marveled and disbelieved what he saw: the torso was sinking to the floor, and the thighs retracting into it. The torso cylinder was encasing the extremity-pistons. Then came the supreme horror. The head itself began to lower down into the thoracic cavity. At the cervical base, annealed stitch-patterns parted and closed, like flexible sliding doors, like irising ports, and the head disappeared into the thorax.