by Gadi Migdal
His suit released fast jets in an attempt to soften the hard landing, but it wasn’t enough. He crashes hard against the trees. The suit absorbs the impact well. An explorer robot moves towards him. Louie pulls out his gun and shoots it before he even understands what he’s doing. The learning helmet training had been very effective indeed.
He looks around and recognizes the place. He gets up and runs determinedly toward the caves. The communication network is still out of operation. If Susan survived, she would also run to the caves. That is their secret, private place. Aside from Louie and Susan, nobody from the South knows about them.
He gets to the caves after half an hour of running. It isn’t easy to run in the combat suit, but Louie doesn’t dare to take it off. The helmet and the suit are his only means of communication, and until he knows that Susan is safe, he won’t give them up.
He crawls toward the small entrance, into their usual cave.
There’s nobody there.
He fights back the panic that threatens to overwhelm him. Susan is okay. He just knows it. He crawls out and looks at the path that leads to the caves. He doesn’t see anybody. He feels nauseous, he is shaking with fear for Susan’s fate.
A terrible realization percolates within him. If she was alive, she would have come already. He stops the tears that prick at his eyes. This is not the time to fall apart; perhaps she was injured in the battlefield and looking for him there?
Louie begins to march back toward the battle when he sees a character on the hill. He immediately lies down flat. Is it one of the madman’s explorer robots? He activates the thermal visor installed in his helmet and sees that it wasn’t a robot. It is a human. Louie breathes deeply. Another soldier had survived the battle and come here.
The soldier is sitting on the hill beside a small fire. An indiscrete, even stupid act, so close to the battlefield. Louie marches quietly over to the soldier. It would be unwise to startle an armed soldier. When he gets to a distance of about twenty meters from the soldier, he calls out to him, “Hello, please don’t shoot me, I’m a friend. I’m the soldier from the South.”
The soldier turns to him in surprise. Louie, hoping to pacify the unknown soldier, goes on talking as he walks. “I’m Louie. My partner Susan and I were the only southerners in the Force. You probably heard of us.”
Louie stops in surprise when the soldier aims his weapon at him.
“No! Don’t shoot - I’m a friend.” He shouts and raises his hands in a gesture of surrender.
The soldier laughs. “Throw down your gun and come over here so I can see you, friend.”
Louie throws his gun aside and approaches slowly. He leaves his hands up. The soldier is evidently very nervous if he is suspicious of humans.
He gets to the circle of light created by the fire. It isn’t a soldier. The man is too old to be a soldier, his white hair is long and straight. He is wearing a white cape. Who is this? A local recluse who hadn’t bothered to escape the South?
Louie speaks gently to the old recluse. “Sir, there is a war not far from here, you might want to put out your fire before it draws unwanted attention.”
The old man laughs and says, “I am enjoying the battle, soldier. I prepared myself for it for fifty years.”
Louie stares at him in surprise. “Sir, I don’t think you understand. They will send robots over here and kill everybody. The madman has been doing it for twenty years already.”
The old man laughs again. “Sit, young man. Listen to a short story.”
Louie hesitates for a moment, but as he has no choice he sits. Maybe he can talk some reason into the old man.
“I used to live here, you know,” the old man says. “My whole childhood was here, hiking around between these hills and caves. I met my wife on this very hill, and five years later I proposed to her here.”
“This cave network was our secret. The South is very big. Nobody ever bothered to map or check these caves. We spent whole days at a time here together, all alone.”
The old man looks into Louie’s eyes. “Here, on this very hill, I buried her after she got sick and died. I buried my heart and my ambitions along with her.”
Louie moves uneasily. The old man is talking while enemy explorer robots could come at them any second. The old man smiles at him, “and here I vowed to prevent suffering to the human race and save them the hardship that I went through. If there are no people, there is no heartbreak!” With the last sentence, his voice rises with religious fervor.
‘He’s crazy!’ Louie realizes.
No.
Not crazy, mad. The madman!
“You’re Crazy John,” he whispers in astonishment.
“Crazy? That’s a matter of definition, young man. After you lose what I lost, the definition changes,” the old man replies.
Louie stares at him without saying a word. Could he subdue the old man?
The madman guesses his thoughts and laughs. “Don’t try, young man. I’m fast enough to pull the trigger before you reach me.”
He eyes Louie. “What’s your name?”
“Louie,” Louie answers quietly.
“I haven’t spoken to a living person in many years, Louie,” says the madman, smiling. “What do you think of the routine I created for all of you with that wormhole? Genius, right?”
Louie nods slowly.
“You see, Louie, I made the stupid Force think they had discovered a new, secret wormhole, when actually I located it and waited for them on the other side. It wasn’t your surprise attack. It was my planned ambush.” The madman is pleased with himself. He gives Louie a smug look and hums to himself.
How is this possible? He looks so delicate and harmless. The old man begins to sing a lullaby.
Louie has had enough. “I don’t believe you,” he says. “You are a sick old man - not the tactical genius we’re fighting.”
The old man stares at him in astonishment. “It’s not so smart to talk like that to a man holding a rifle, Louie,” he notes quietly, a frozen look in his eyes.
Louie shouts. “So what if you have a rifle? A rifle makes you a hero?” the anger bursts from him. “Am I supposed to admire you because you have a rifle?”
The old man stands up angrily. “I am John the Liberator of Thessaloniki. I am John the Preventer of human suffering. Who are you to talk to me like that?”
Louie also stands. “You are a pathetic glory-seeking old man who is trying to take credit for the tremendous work of a tactical genius that nobody has ever seen. There’s no way you’re Crazy John!”
“I am!” the old man shouts furiously. “I am Crazy John!”
The blast throws Louie backward. He crashes forcefully into a tree trunk and falls to the ground. His combat suit saves him again. He sits up slowly and stands on shaking legs. The old man’s weapon is laying on the ground. Louie picks it up and stumbles toward the old man. He has a gaping hole in his chest, but he’s still alive. Bubbles of blood rise to his mouth and his white cape is stained crimson.
Louie collapses beside him. “I also have a woman that I love more than anything else, and I can understand your logic. What I can’t understand is why you want to prevent anyone else from experiencing that kind of love.”
The old man looks at Louie searchingly. Louie points at his suit. “I set the landing jets to fire at the direction of anyone who declared himself to be Crazy John, it was just meant as an inside joke.”
He looks at the dying man, “I suppose that you don’t find it so funny.”
The old man looks at him in surprise. Blood comes out of his mouth. Crazy John is dead.
Louie approaches the fire. An old transmission controller is beside it. He studies it for a minute then switches it off.
All at once his helmet fills with voices speaking.
“What’s happening?”
“Hey, the
connection’s working.”
“The robots have stopped shooting.”
Hundreds of voices fill the system.
“16-D is everything alright?” he transmits via the helmet. “Susan? Do you hear me?”
His call is swallowed in the mix of messages. There’s no point. You can’t send a message in this confusion. He returns to the old man’s control panel. It takes him exactly two minutes of work.
“Susan? Are you okay?” the mighty scream shakes the mountains.
The voices inside the helmet go quiet for a moment, then the chaos resumes. “What’s going on here?”
Louie screams into the transmitter. “Quiet! All of you be quiet. This is Louie. Louie from the South. I’m transmitting via the madman’s robots. The war is over. I killed the madman. I just want to know that Susan is okay. Has anyone seen Susan?”
The helmet is quiet.
“Again, the war is over. We won. Is Susan alright?”
The quiet persists.
And goes on and on.
The minutes pass.
The old sergeant’s voice comes in through his helmet. “Well done, Private Louie. You saved New Thessaloniki. I’ve sent out teams to search for Susan, it’s possible she’s not answering because she is wounded or because of some glitch in the connection.”
Louie sinks to his knees and cries. Susan is dead. The sergeant knows it. Louie knows it.
The madman was right, the feeling of loss is too hard to take in.
Susan’s smiling face flashes before his eyes and fades away, swallowed up by the darkness of the night.
Louie screams as he feels his heart breaking.
He hits the ground and weeps.
Susan is gone.
Dead.
If only she had not been convinced to enlist.
If only she had stayed with him, to live quietly in their little corner of the South.
He stands up in one motion.
The Force is responsible for her death! The members of the Force must die with her.
He just has to direct the robots into an infinite slipknot action.
The stupid old man controlled them manually, how inefficient.
Louie the product master would make it much better.
He finishes programming in under an hour. He won’t stop until all of them have disappeared from New Thessaloniki. He won’t stop until Susan and Louie get their precious privacy back.
He is about to order the control panel to begin continuous operation when a pleasant, familiar voice comes in through his helmet. A tired, happy voice. “Hey my special silly. Did you really destroy an entire robot army just for me?”
Louie roars.
Louie laughs.
Louie dances.
Louie shouts.
He smashes the old man’s control box. Those murderous robots will never start up again.
Louie cries.
Louie falls to his knees.
“I told you, Susan, I’d do anything for you,” he whispers into his helmet.
Chapter 21
Guilt
The watch stopped at 1:12, with the second hand landing precisely on the number 3. Yulia marveled at the antique watch. For a moment she wondered if it had stopped at midday on the day when she arrived at the cluster, or maybe it had managed to keep on working until the wee hours of the following day.
She gently stroked the old glass, remembering what her father had told her about it. This was an antique watch, nearly 2000 years old. An ancient inheritance that had survived in their family since before the Seventh. Incredibly, for it to work it had to be wound, manually, every day.
Her father had given it to her on her tenth birthday. He explained to her that the watch would help her at times that she would miss him when he went off on his long trade missions, somewhere far away in space. She remembered her enthusiasm for the gift. Yulia had worn the watch for two years and had never removed it from her wrist. Actually, she wore it right up until she arrived to the cluster.
The watch’s presence in her room made her uncomfortable, it didn’t belong here. It should be in the hands of her family. It was weird that she had forgotten about it. She had taken it off on the day that she had come to the cluster and had never worn it again. For seventeen years it had been in a small cell in her room. Only today did she happen upon it, by chance, when she was looking for something warm to wear.
A superfluous object, she shrugged. She had no further need for it. She would send it to her little sister, who would certainly appreciate it more than she did.
Yulia put on a warm sweater. It was time to supervise the loading of the mangoes. Sixty tons of fruit will not load themselves into a robotic hovercraft.
Before she left, she put the watch on her wrist; she decided that she would send it to her family on one of the hovercrafts.
She took the elevator up to the top garden. The evening hours were chilly during this season, and she adjusted the sweater on her shoulders. The hovercrafts had already landed and were now waiting by the loading platforms. Yulia quickly marched over to them and watched as dozens of workers were unloading the huge boxes from the elevators. She quickly looked over the boxes’ contents, checking that the fruits had been well-packed and not crushed, and ordered the workers to begin loading the boxes onto the first hovercraft.
She climbed and entered the second hovercraft, took the watch off her wrist, and placed it inside of one of the cells for small objects. After making sure that it was secure in the cell, she connected the flight computer and ordered the hovercraft to bring it to her sister and only then to continue on to the warehouses.
The hovercraft expressed resistance, noting that unloading the stock was top priority. Yulia changed the destination of the shipment and gave her mother’s name. The hovercraft acceded, it would take the watch to her mother, and only then would it unload the boxes. The head of the council’s name still carried meaning after all.
A sudden noise attracted Yulia’s attention, the noise of boxes falling and breaking. She leapt from the hovercraft and saw a beautiful, red-headed human woman passing suddenly by her and smiling at her happily.
Who was that? What was she doing here? Only coordinators were permitted to be in a cluster. Yulia stared at her in astonishment and forgot to straighten her legs before landing on the ground. She hit the ground hard; very hard.
The noise overwhelmed her senses. The noise of pain and terror transmissions. The terror of an entire cluster. Something terrible had happened. Slowly she opened her eyes. Something had gone terribly wrong.
Yulia sat up slowly. Waves of terror and pain penetrated her head, filling her senses and preventing her from focusing. She shook her head, trying to drive away the frightened voices.
“Quiet,” she transmitted in bewilderment, but the noise and the terror persisted, her order was swallowed up by the mass hysteria of the cluster members.
Why? How could it be that all of them had lost control at the same time?
Determination and anger suddenly filled her. “Quiet!” she transmitted with all her might, via her implant. It worked. The noise ceased all at once. There was pleasant quiet in her head.
“Return to work immediately,” she ordered them. “Now.” She added authoritatively.
The silence endured, not one cluster member dared transmit. Slowly she felt the cluster members returning to their work.
She breathed slowly, grateful for the silence. What happened? How could her entire cluster get into such a panic? It was impossible, cluster members never felt fear, their feelings were controlled by pheromones. Cluster members could only feel fear via their coordinator or their egg-layer.
She sighed wearily; that mute egg-layer couldn’t be connected to it; she never did anything. Was it possible that Yulia was somehow to blame for the outburst? Had she caused the confus
ion and fear of sixty million cluster members? Did her fainting cause this?
She slowly stood up. Her left leg hurt, and she was careful putting her weight onto it. The leg wasn’t broken, her ankle must have bent when she fell from the hovercraft. She shook her head with restrained anger, annoyed by her foolish stumbling.
Yulia carefully approached the first hovercraft. She looked around her in astonishment. Two wounded workers were crawling on the floor, and overturned boxes of squashed mangos were scattered all about. How had this happened? How long had she been unconscious? How had the cluster members managed to lose control to this degree?
Yulia quickly checked the implant. She had been unconscious for less than five minutes. How could an entire cluster lose control within five minutes?
She approached one of the injured workers. Her leg was broken, her fate sealed.
“What happened? How did you get hurt like that?” she interrogated.
“I don’t know, Your Honor,” the worker answered and crawled decisively toward the elevator. That elevator would take her to the compost pile where she could die.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” asked Yulia. “Did a box fall on you?”
“No, Your Honor, several boxes.”
The worker went on crawling. Yulia grit her teeth with restrained anger and approached the first hovercraft as she checked the loading zone. The boxes weren’t unusually large or heavy. Why had they fallen on the workers? She looked around and noticed other bruised and injured workers.
She was filled with angered wonder. A fight? In her cluster?
“How did you get injured like that?” she demanded.
The workers froze where they were and began to transmit to her excitedly.
“Quiet,” she ordered them authoritatively, quick to quiet them before it stirred up a fresh wave of panic.
She transmitted to the worker closest to her. “Just you, answer me, why are all of you injured?”