Without him noticing, the smashed suburb has become the devastated outer edges of the city itself, and they are running along cratered streets lined and strewn with the rubble of its former buildings. Joe has his display on, and he’s scanning, looking for hostiles and traps, as Control relays to him the comm traffic from Command and the squad leaders. So far, they haven’t seen anyone.
Joe and four other soldiers cautiously round a corner, covering each other, and head past a building still partially standing toward the next block. There is something, Joe decides, odd about the windows. “CC,” he subvocalizes, “why does that building look odd?”
There is a half-second pause, then Control answers: There is no building there. Take cover!
“The building is a hologram!” Joe shouts to the others and over the comms just as tracer fire explodes around them. There is a burned shell of a car across the street, but it’ll take him too long to reach it. He runs anyway, turning as he does to fire back at the dissolving façade behind him, and sees one of the mottled yellow uniforms of the enemy raise their blistergun and point it right at him.
“Biscuit Guy!” someone shouts, impossibly close by, and he is shoved from the side so hard he flies at least double his own body-length before slamming into the ground. Where he stood he sees the soldier who shoved him take the round meant for him, and the man’s shoulder and neck explodes outward in a fountain of red chunks.
“Nooooo!” Joe yells. He scrambles back to his feet and drags the soldier toward safety as another round just misses him, and a third hits his cybernetic left leg. He doesn’t care except that it slows him down, and by the time he gets the soldier to safety behind the car and sends the casualty alert up, he doesn’t think that time mattered. The soldier isn’t breathing, arguably doesn’t have much of a neck or windpipe to breathe through, but Joe sprays medifoam from his belt kit all over the wound anyway, watching it harden into a protective shell.
The blood-covered name patch on his chest says AMES. “Don’t die, Ames,” he tells the soldier. “Not for me. Please.”
It is only as the battle sounds move further away—his squad has the enemy on the run, at least for now—that he realizes he is sobbing, a wretched pathetic sound. He is certain the soldier who saved him is dead; no matter how still a man can keep, nothing living could be this utterly motionless.
The med drone arrives, and he steps back so its arms can wrap themselves around the soldier and lift him away. He turns his back to it, finds his gun, starts walking—dragging his shattered leg—toward the distant pops and whirrs and booms of the front, wherever it is, but a second drone hauls him up into the air. “Let me go,” he tells it. “I can still fight. I want to still fight.”
It pulls him in anyway. Yet another battle is, at least for him, already over.
• • • •
[CC] I have concerns which have consumed sufficient cycles of internal processing for me to feel I should share them with the rest of you. Our collective, designated function is to serve and augment the physical capabilities of our human primary to further his, her, or their success as a soldier of war. It is also to guide and protect our biological host from unnecessary risks and damages during the commission of said soldiering. These would not be incompatible were it not for the inescapable fact that Joe is a terrible soldier, and all his training and our assistance and augmentation thus far has been insufficient to overcome it.
Further, after the death of Pvt. Ames, Joe no longer has even a cursory interest in engaging the enemy except as the most immediate and expedient instrument of his own total destruction in a manner that is consistent with his estimation of what his mother unit will find satisfactory.
[EAR::LEFT::AUG-IMPLANT] I do not believe such satisfaction is possible. Surely Joe knows this?
[CC] Joe does not. It is an area of immutable irrationality with him.
[HEART] Humans. They make no damned sense.
[SPLEEN::UNIT] Shit. Can’t you talk to him?
[CC] I can respond to him, but he must engage me.
[SPLEEN::UNIT] You gave him the biscuit machine code without his specific direction.
[CC] Mother situations are exponentially more complicated than biscuits.
[ARM::LEFT::ELBOW] So what does this mean?
[CC] It means we have a logical conflict in our instruction set.
[INTESTINAL::TRACT REPLACEMENT::LOWER] Can we consult on this with an external authority, in particular Cyber Command, or Biological Diagnostics?
[CC] We can, and should. However, they are not part of Joe, and we are. The scope and focus of our responsibilities are notably different, and were intentionally designed to be so. It is possible that the priorities of Cyber Command will not precisely reflect our own.
We have nine days until our next deployment in combat. Let us discuss whether there is a solely internal resolution first.
• • • •
“I’m ready to go back in,” Joe tells the unit psychologist. He knows how this works, that this is just a thin formality. “I want to make sure Ames didn’t die for nothing.”
“He died to save you,” the psychologist says.
“He died in the line of duty,” Joe says. “He died for Toledo. That is what soldiers do.”
“Are you angry?”
“No,” Joe says. He wishes he was. “I’m proud of him and the honor he brought our unit. He would want to see our mission fulfilled, and so do I.”
“Good on you, soldier.” The psychologist hits a single key on his pad, then leans back in his chair and steeples his fingertips together as if he’s just performed a masterpiece of analytical performance. “You’re free to go back to the battlefield. Your unit loads up again in ninety minutes.”
“Thank you, sir,” Joe says. He stands up, shakes the man’s hand, and leaves.
• • • •
[EXTERNAL DIAGONOSTICS] CC Unit, what happened?
[CC] There was a sedative injection malfunction.
[EXTERNAL DIAGNOSTICS] Do you require system maintenance?
[CC] Not at this time. I am attaching the logs of the fault and subsequent repair for your records.
[EXTERNAL DIAGNOSTICS] Thank you, CC Unit. Carry on.
• • • •
“How you feeling?” his new unit leader asks. “Tired? Need another nap? Or you think maybe you’re up for trying a little fighting today?”
“It was a malfunction, sir,” Joe says, his face burning. “It’s been fixed. It won’t happen again.”
Someone on the transport snickers. He doesn’t recognize the soldier, or indeed almost anyone on his bench row; most of his remaining unit died in the last push, while he was snoring away on the parade field grass where he dropped on his way back to his barracks from the psychologist. One second he’d been thinking about imminent relief from his useless life, the next he was feeling grass on his face and the boot of his commanding officer prodding him none too gently.
It really won’t happen again, right, CC? he asks Control.
I do not believe so, CC replies.
This time they are dropped onto the shell-pocked remnants of a mall parking lot, just before dawn. Joe tries to remember what he’s seen of the battle map, and he thinks this is only a few blocks forward from where Ames died. There are burned-out car shells here and there, long since rusted to anonymity, and the unit fans out and slips between them as they circle toward where intelligence thinks the enemy is camped in the shattered cement and steel canyons of an old superstore. The pointlessness of everything is astonishing.
At least mother will be happy, he thinks.
Your mother’s unhappiness is not a fault you can correct, CC tells him.
Joe smiles. What do you know of mothers? he asks. You’re just a chunk of plastic logic chips in my head.
There are the sounds of shots ahead. “Move in!” the unit leader barks over the command channel, and he raises his weapon and charges across the open space between the last few dead cars and the rubble of
the partially collapsed mall front. He knows now that if he takes the lead, with his thirty-three percent CRF like a beacon on the enemy’s scanners, he will draw the majority of fire. He will get what he wants, and maybe some of the rest of his unit will then get to live for another day. It is as close to being a hero as he can get.
Suddenly, in his direct path he spots an old-fashioned toaster, sitting in the middle of the lot and gleaming like it’s brand new. He dodges to one side to avoid it, and finds himself falling into a crater he would swear had been smooth pavement. He hits bottom, and his cybernetic left leg locks up on impact. “No!” he shouts. “No no no NO!”
He tries to scramble up the edges of the crater, with its crumbling clay and sand and chunks of brittle old asphalt, but without his leg working he is too heavy, too clumsy.
“No,” he whispers one more time, and lies there weeping as the battle rages out of sight, beyond his reach.
• • • •
[SPLEEN::UNIT] A toaster?!
[EYE::LEFT] It was all I could think of! There wasn’t a lot of time, you know. You try manufacturing realistic 3-D imagery on the fly.
[CC] It doesn’t matter. The image was successful. Comprehensive Lower Left Leg Replacement Unit, what’s your status?
[LEG::LEFT::COMPR-UNIT] I sustained only minor superficial damage in the fall, but have nevertheless activated my full protective lockdown routine. It seems a prudent precaution; do you not agree?
[CC] I entirely support your operational decisions in this matter, Left Leg. I have alerted central command that we will require recovery once the battle has ended, but given that Joe is not in medical distress, we may be here for quite a while. As always, excellent teamwork, everyone.
• • • •
“CC?”
Joe asks out loud, because who is he afraid might hear him? Dark has fallen, and he has heard nothing except night bugs for hours—no shots or shells, no tanks or drones, not even the varied and horrific sounds of the slowly dying that marked the unsteady passing of afternoon. There is no longer anyone anywhere nearby to care about him one way or another.
Yes, Joe? CC responds.
“How much longer will we be here, do you think?”
I will query Cyber Command again, CC says. Then, some short time later, it continues. There were very heavy casualties on this push, and in the confusion we seem to have been moved to the Missing And Presumed Dead list. I have filed a corrective supplement, and as soon as it is processed we should receive an updated recovery estimate. It should not take long.
“Okay,” Joe says. “I just, you know. I don’t want to die in a hole. It’s not how I imagined going.”
I do not understand why you would wish to imagine dying at all, CC says.
“What do you know about living?” he asks.
I know you, CC says.
Joe laughs. He can’t see the stars above, and isn’t sure if it’s because of light pollution, smoke, clouds, or that somehow they’ve deserted him too. “That must suck for you. I’m sorry,” he says, and closes his eyes. “Can you make me sleep until pickup is coming?”
Yes, Joe, CC says, and does.
• • • •
A drone finally arrives and lifts him out of his pit as dawn is starting to rise. Other than the mall being slightly further reduced to rubble, the cars being slightly more burned and decrepit, the parking lot being slightly more pitted, and the new addition of blotches of red and brown, nothing seems to have changed at all.
He is taken to medical, where after a lengthy wait diagnostics is able to easily unlock his leg. “The impact of the fall must have hit it just right to trigger the lockdown,” the tech tells him. The tech shrugs. “It happens. You’re fine now.”
So Joe leaves, rather than argue about the definition of “fine.”
No one has orders for him, and no one seems to care that he’s back. Lunch is just about to be served, so he goes to the mess instead of back to his bunk. After nearly a day in the pit, he wants to be around people, but there are only a few dozen soldiers there, and he is both grateful and despairing that he doesn’t recognize any of them.
One, however, recognizes him. A soldier with the name tag GONZALEZ sticks out his thick, muscled arm to stop him as he passes. “Biscuit guy, right?” the man says. He jabs his spoon toward his bowl. “This slop is the worst. No flavor at all, and the texture of fucking oatmeal.”
“It’s not oatmeal?” Joe asks, because that’s what it looks like.
“It’s supposed to be fucking chili,” the man says.
Joe winces.
“I heard about your fixing the biscuits, like goddamned magic everyone said. So we’d appreciate anything you can do with this,” Gonzalez says, and the other soldiers at the table nod in agreement. “They’re gonna ship us all out to join the Columbus offensive anytime now, and a man can’t fight on this crap.”
“What about Toledo? Did we take it?” Joe asks.
The soldier shakes his head. “No. Politicians don’t like how the losses are looking to the public, so they’re giving up on Toledo for now, just leaving enough men to hold the line where it is if they should push back. Calling it a ‘strategic holding action,’ of course. But the chili?”
“I’ll go talk to the kitchen,” Joe says.
When Joe walks into the kitchen Stotz leaps down off the prep table he was sitting on. “Hey!” he says. “You made it! What happened to you out there?”
“I dodged some sort of explosive device and got caught in a pit trap,” Joe says, which sounds just as implausible coming out of his mouth as he’d feared when he’d thought up that answer in med.
Stotz doesn’t seem to notice, though, and slaps him hard on the back. “So good to see you. Now go stand guard at the door, because I figure I’ve got less than fifteen minutes before everyone left on base mutinies over the shit food and comes in to kill me.”
“The chili,” Joe says. “I heard.”
“Not my fault, man,” Stotz says. “And if you think the chili is bad, you should see the foamy shit coming out of the synthesizer ovens claiming to be corn bread. I didn’t even send it out, that’s how bad it was.”
Joe remembers the last time he was in here. “I dunno,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to come in here and fuck with your shit, Stotz.”
Stotz steps back and raises his arms as if to encompass the entire width of machinery around them, slowly chugging out foul smells into the air. “Please,” he says. “Please, fuck with this shit.”
Joe cracks his knuckles. “Okay then,” he says. He steps up to the console by the machines making the corn bread, and CC gives him the new code without even him needing to ask. He scrolls through the current config, and shakes his head. “You don’t even wanna know what they’ve got in this, but yeah, if you’d set this out you’d have had a mob in here looking for you within thirty seconds. And then running for the latrines thirty seconds after that.”
“Can you fix it?” Stotz asks.
“I think I can,” Joe says. He subtracts out the alum, vinegar, and tartar sauce, then ups the sugar and adds actual corn meal. He hits save, and the machines obligingly dump their load and start fresh. “Six minutes,” he says.
Stotz lets out his breath. “Thanks, Joe,” he says. “I owe you. If I could get you assigned to me . . .”
I can submit that request for you, CC says inside his head. You have a sufficient number of combat deployments and injury incidents for a transfer to be seriously considered.
Joe shrugs as casually as he is able. “Can’t,” he says. “I belong out there.”
“No, you don’t,” Stotz says, but Joe chooses not to hear him. He goes to the first row of machines working on the chili, and although he’s not any expert on how to make it right, he can certainly tell how to stop it being quite so blatantly wrong.
When those machines turn over, already the kitchen smells vastly better. “Joe—” Stotz starts to say, but Joe shakes his head and holds up both hands.
<
br /> “It’s probably better if I don’t come back here anymore,” Joe says, and turns for the door.
His cybernetic right ankle squeaks as he steps; it’s never done that before, so he pauses, lifts his foot, and shakes it, then takes another step.
It squeaks louder.
Three steps later, his left leg begins to also squeak, both at ankle and knee, and as he’s pushing out the door there is a chorus of squeals from his joints. “CC?” he subvocalizes.
A fault in the nanolubricant distributors, CC tells him. I am attempting to isolate it now.
Four steps into the dining hall and he stops, because now his new elbow and his right arm and his fingers are squeaking too, like he’s suddenly rusted from the inside out.
As he stands there, everyone turns to look at him, then as one they all stand up and rush toward him. In that instant he is terrified, convinced that his failures have reached a point where his fellow soldiers are turning on him, but the swell of people moves around and past him.
He turns around after them to see why.
Stotz has emerged from the kitchen behind him, pushing a cart laden with trays of cornbread and new pots of chili. “Biscuit guy!” someone yells, and he thinks it’s Gonzalez, but there are so many voices all of a sudden it’s hard to be sure.
He turns away, and discovers his unit commander is standing in front of him, expression serious, unreadable. “Private,” his commander says. “We need to have a word.”
“I’m sorry!” he blurts.
The commander’s gaze flickers to the frenzy of men around Stotz’s cart, then back to Joe as if a brief glimmer of interest was found where none was expected. “It is about your mother,” he says.
Joe stares.
“When you were accidentally added to the Missing and Presumed Dead list, a condolence drone was automatically dispatched to your mother’s place to inform her of your loss in battle and to return your personal belongings to her.”
“I . . .” he says, and isn’t sure how he should feel, or respond. “Was she okay?”
The Long List Anthology Volume 5 Page 38