by Paula Guran
The bathroom window was open, just a crack. Enough for her to hear the first handclaps, like gunshots breaking the night, followed by Maddy’s well-conditioned voice bellowing, “Ready? Okay!”
That was the signal. Doing her best to tune out the rest of the squad cheering outside the gym, Bridget fixed her eyes on her reflection. Don’t look away; Amy’s book says you can’t look away. If you looked away, it wouldn’t work.
(“We’ve all played that stupid game,” Kathryn had said before they voted, before the squad agreed to try Amy’s crazy suggestion. “It never works. She never comes.”
“That was before we knew what the rules were,” said Amy.
“What are they?” asked Betsy.
But it was Maddy who answered. Maddy, who’d seen her boyfriend die on the football field; the only Squad Leader in Fighting Pumpkins history to lose a homecoming game and the majority of her squad in a single night. “There aren’t any,” she said, and that was when Bridget had known they were going to go through with Amy’s plan, desperate and strange as it was.)
“Bloody Mary,” whispered Bridget. “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary—” The sound of blaster fire was starting up outside; the aliens were taking the bait, drawn by the irresistible lure of four teenage girls in skimpy pleated skirts cheering their hearts out. It didn’t matter what part of the galaxy you were from. No one could resist a cheerleader.
“BLOODY MARY, SHE’S THE ONE!” screamed the Pumpkins outside the gym. “BLOODY MARY, I KILLED YOUR SON!” Each of them would have a compact on the ground in front of her, but they couldn’t be sure they’d be able to maintain eye contact long enough to call her name the required thirteen times. That was why one of them had to stay behind, and miss the final cheer. Dying sucked. Dying without your squad around you was worse.
“—Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary—” That was six. The blasters were still firing. Betsy wasn’t cheering anymore, and neither was Kathryn. It was just Amy and Maddy outside, cheering their hearts out for the last, and least appreciative, audience they would ever have. Was the mirror getting blurry, or was she just crying again?
(“See, if you hold a candle and look in the mirror while you say her name thirteen times, she’ll come.” Amy had been talking nonsense, but they were taking her seriously because after you’d seen your teammates fried by giant alien squid with ray guns, ray guns, for God’s sake, nonsense didn’t sound so bad. “She’ll scratch your eyes out. That’s the bad part.”
“So what’s the good part?” demanded Maddy.
“If you tell her you’re the one who killed her son, she’ll kill everybody she can get her hands on.”
They’d gotten very quiet after that.)
“Bloody Mary.” Amy wasn’t cheering anymore. It was just Maddy, and the sound of blasters. “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.” That was ten, and Maddy screamed, just once, before the cheering from outside stopped completely. That horrible slithering sound was everywhere, coming from every direction. They were inside the gym. They were inside the gym.
(She was really going to die. No last minute reprieve. No third-act hero. She was going to die with her Fighting Pumpkins cheer pants on, and she wouldn’t even get one of those stupid yearbook memorials, because there was no one left to write it.)
“Bloody Mary.” Eleven. The mirror was definitely getting blurry, and it definitely wasn’t tears. “Bloody Mary.” She could almost see the face behind her own, and oh, God, if she was going to stop, it had to be now, but how could she stop, when she’d heard the squad gunned down, and the slithering just kept getting closer? Alien or evil ghost-witch-woman from inside the mirror?
Bloody Mary might be evil. But this was homecoming weekend, and on the Planet Earth, she by-God had the home team advantage.
“BLOODY MARY!” Bridget shouted, abandoning all pretense of quiet. “BLOODY MARY, I KILLED YOUR SON!”
She only saw Mary for an instant as she lunged out of the mirror, hands hooked into claws and descending toward Bridget’s eyes. Then came the searing pain, and she was falling, candle wax covering her hand in a spray of burning droplets. Her head slammed against the tile floor hard enough that she heard bone cracking.
“Go Pumpkins,” Bridget whispered, as the sound of the blasters started up again. A new sound came with it, dentist’s-drill sharp and inhuman. She smiled despite the pain as she realized what it was. The sound of aliens, screaming. “Gimme a ‘B’ . . . ”
Bridget kept cheering in a whisper as she bled to death on the bathroom floor, not caring that there was no one left to hear her. The sound of Bloody Mary laughing and the screams of the aliens stood in well for the roar of the crowd. She died with her cheer pants on, knowing to the last that she’d done what every cheerleader dreams of.
She’d cheered the home team to victory.
Robert Reed writes of a young insurgent in Occupied Toronto who lucks upon a cognitive railgun developed by the enemy Americans. The fourteen-year-old warrior believes she has shaped this astonishing instrument of mayhem into a loyal agent of the insurgency. But the weapon is even more remarkable than she knows, and—like war—it is far more complex than she can imagine.
Prayer
Robert Reed
Fashion matters. In my soul of souls, I know that the dead things you carry on your body are real, real important. Grandma likes to call me a clotheshorse, which sounds like a good thing. For example, I’ve always known that a quality sweater means the world. I prefer soft organic wools woven around Class-C nanofibers—a nice high collar with sleeves riding a little big but with enough stopping power to absorb back-to-back kinetic charges. I want pants that won’t slice when the shrapnel is thick, and since I won’t live past nineteen, probably, I let the world see that this body’s young and fit. (Morbid maybe, but that’s why I think about death only in little doses.) I adore elegant black boots that ignore rain and wandering electrical currents, and everything under my boots and sweater and pants has to feel silky-good against the most important skin in my world. But essential beyond all else is what I wear on my face, which is more makeup than Grandma likes, and tattooed scripture on the forehead, and sparkle-eyes that look nothing but ordinary. In other words, I want people to see an average Christian girl instead of what I am, which is part of the insurgency’s heart inside Occupied Toronto.
To me, guns are just another layer of clothes, and the best day ever lived was the day I got my hands on a barely-used, cognitively damaged Mormon railgun. They don’t make that model anymore, what with its willingness to change sides. And I doubt that there’s ever been a more dangerous gun made by the human species. Shit, the boy grows his own ammo, and he can kill anything for hundreds of miles, and left alone he will invent ways to hide and charge himself on the sly, and all that time he waits waits waits for his master to come back around and hold him again.
I am his master now.
I am Ophelia Hanna Hanks, except within my local cell, where I wear the randomly generated, perfectly suitable name:
Ridiculous.
The gun’s name is Prophet, and until ten seconds ago, he looked like scrap conduit and junk wiring. And while he might be cognitively impaired, Prophet is wickedly loyal to me. Ten days might pass without the two of us being in each other’s reach, but that’s the beauty of our dynamic: I can live normal and look normal, and while the enemy is busy watching everything else, a solitary fourteen-year-old girl slips into an alleyway that’s already been swept fifty times today.
“Good day, Ridiculous.”
“Good day to you, Prophet.”
“And who are we going to drop into Hell today?”
“All of America,” I say, which is what I always say.
Reliable as can be, he warns me, “That’s a rather substantial target, my dear. Perhaps we should reduce our parameters.”
“Okay. New Fucking York.”
Our attack has a timetable, and I have eleven minutes to get into position.
“And the specific tar
get?” he asks.
I have coordinates that are updated every half-second. I could feed one or two important faces into his menu, but I never kill faces. These are the enemy, but if I don’t define things too closely, then I won’t miss any sleep tonight.
Prophet eats the numbers, saying, “As you wish, my dear.”
I’m carrying him, walking fast towards a fire door that will stay unlocked for the next ten seconds. Alarmed by my presence, a skinny rat jumps out of one dumpster, little legs running before it hits the oily bricks.
“Do you know it?” I ask.
The enemy likes to use rats as spies.
Prophet says, “I recognize her, yes. She has a nest and pups inside the wall.”
“Okay,” I say, feeling nervous and good.
The fire door opens when I tug and locks forever once I step into the darkness.
“You made it,” says my gun.
“I was praying,” I report.
He laughs, and I laugh too. But I keep my voice down, stairs needing to be climbed and only one of us doing the work.
She found me after a battle. She believes that I am a little bit stupid. I was damaged in the fight and she imprinted my devotions to her, and then using proxy tools and stolen wetware, she gave me the cognitive functions to be a loyal agent to the insurgency.
I am an astonishing instrument of mayhem, and naturally her superiors thought about claiming me for themselves.
But they didn’t.
If I had the freedom to speak, I would mention this oddity to my Ridiculous. “Why would they leave such a prize with little you?”
“Because I found you first,” she would say.
“War isn’t a schoolyard game,” I’d remind her.
“But I made you mine,” she might reply. “And my bosses know that I’m a good soldier, and you like me, and stop being a turd.”
No, we have one another because her bosses are adults. They are grown souls who have survived seven years of occupation, and that kind of achievement doesn’t bless the dumb or the lucky. Looking at me, they see too much of a blessing, and nobody else dares to trust me well enough to hold me.
I know all of this, which seems curious.
I might say all of this, except I never do.
And even though my mind was supposedly mangled, I still remember being crafted and calibrated in Utah, hence my surname. But I am no Mormon. Indeed, I’m a rather agnostic soul when it comes to my interpretations of Jesus and His influence in the New World. And while there are all-Mormon units in the U.S. military, I began my service with Protestants—Baptists and Missouri Synods mostly. They were bright clean happy believers who had recently arrived at Fort Joshua out on Lake Ontario. Half of that unit had already served a tour in Alberta, guarding the tar pits from little acts of sabotage. Keeping the Keystones safe is a critical but relatively simple duty. There aren’t many people to watch, just robots and one another. The prairie was depopulated ten years ago, which wasn’t an easy or cheap process; American farmers still haven’t brought the ground back to full production, and that’s one reason why the Toronto rations are staying small.
But patrolling the corn was easy work compared to sitting inside Fort Joshua, millions of displaced and hungry people staring at your walls.
Americans call this Missionary Work.
Inside their own quarters, alone except for their weapons and the Almighty, soldiers try to convince one another that the natives are beginning to love them. Despite a thousand lessons to the contrary, Canada is still that baby brother to the north, big and foolish but congenial in his heart, or at least capable of learning manners after the loving sibling delivers enough beat-downs.
What I know today—what every one of my memories tells me—is that the American soldiers were grossly unprepared. Compared to other units and other duties, I would even go so far as to propose that the distant generals were aware of their limitations yet sent the troops across the lake regardless, full of religion and love for each other and the fervent conviction that the United States was the empire that the world had always deserved.
Canada is luckier than most. That can’t be debated without being deeply, madly stupid. Heat waves are killing the tropics. Acid has tortured the seas. The wealth of the previous centuries has been erased by disasters of weather and war and other inevitable surprises. But the worst of these sorrows haven’t occurred in the Greater United States, and if they had half a mind, Canadians would be thrilled with the mild winters and long brilliant summers and the supportive grip of their big wise master.
My soldiers’ first recon duty was simple: Walk past the shops along Queen.
Like scared warriors everywhere, they put on every piece of armor and every sensor and wired back-ups that would pierce the insurgent’s jamming. And that should have been good enough. But by plan or by accident, some native let loose a few molecules of VX gas—just enough to trigger one of the biohazard alarms. Then one of my brother-guns was leveled at a crowd of innocents, two dozen dead before the bloody rain stopped flying.
That’s when the firefight really began.
Kinetic guns and homemade bombs struck the missionaries from every side. I was held tight by my owner—a sergeant with commendations for his successful defense of a leaky pipeline—but he didn’t fire me once. His time was spent yelling for an orderly retreat, pleading with his youngsters to find sure targets before they hit the buildings with hypersonic rounds. But despite those good smart words, the patrol got itself trapped. There was a genuine chance that one of them might die, and that’s what those devout men encased in body armor and faith decided to pray: Clasping hands, they opened channels to the Almighty, begging for thunder to be sent down on the infidels.
The Almighty is what used to be called the Internet—an American child reclaimed totally back in 2027.
A long stretch of shops and old buildings was struck from the sky.
That’s what American soldiers do when the situation gets dicey. They pray, and the locals die by the hundreds, and the biggest oddity of that peculiar day was how the usual precise orbital weaponry lost its way, and half of my young men were wounded or killed in the onslaught while a tiny shaped charge tossed me a hundred meters down the road.
There, I was discovered in the rubble by a young girl.
As deeply unlikely as that seems.
I don’t want the roof. I don’t need my eyes to shoot. An abandoned apartment on the top floor is waiting for me, and in particular, its dirty old bathroom. As a rule, I like bathrooms. They’re the strongest part of any building, what with pipes running through the walls and floor. Two weeks ago, somebody I’ll never know sealed the tube’s drain and cracked the faucet just enough for a slow drip, and now the water sits near the brim. Water is essential for long shots. With four minutes to spare, I deploy Prophet’s long legs, tipping him just enough toward the southeast, and then I sink him halfway into the bath, asking, “How’s that feel?”
“Cold,” he jokes.
We have three and a half minutes to talk.
I tell him, “Thank you.”
His barrel stretches to full length, its tip just short of the moldy plaster ceiling. “Thank you for what?” he says.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Then I laugh, and he sort of laughs.
I say, “I’m not religious. At least, I don’t want to be.”
“What are you telling me, Ridiculous?”
“I guess . . . I don’t know. Forget it.”
And he says, “I will do my very best.”
Under the water, down where the breech sits, ammunition is moving. Scrap metal and scrap nanofibers have been woven into four bullets. Street fights require hundreds and thousands of tiny bullets, but each of these rounds is bigger than most carrots and shaped the same general way. Each one carries a brain and microrockets and eyes. Prophet is programming them with the latest coordinates while running every last-second test. Any little problem with a bullet can mean an ugly shot, or
even worse, an explosion that rips away the top couple floors of this building.
At two minutes, I ask, “Are we set?”
“You’re standing too close,” he says.
“If I don’t move, will you fire anyway?”
“Of course.”
“Good,” I say.
At ninety-five seconds, ten assaults are launched across southern Ontario. The biggest and nearest is fixated on Fort Joshua—homemade cruise missiles and lesser railguns aimed at that artificial island squatting in our beautiful lake. The assaults are meant to be loud and unexpected, and because every soldier thinks his story is important, plenty of voices suddenly beg with the Almighty, wanting His godly hand.
The nearby battle sounds like a sudden spring wind.
“I’m backing out of here,” I say.
“Please do,” he says.
At sixty-one seconds, most of the available American resources are glancing at each of these distractions, and a brigade of AIs is studying past tendencies and elaborate models of insurgency capabilities, coming to the conclusion that these events have no credible value toward the war’s successful execution.
Something else is looming, plainly.
“God’s will,” says the nonbeliever.
“What isn’t?” says the Mormon gun.
At seventeen seconds, two kilometers of the Keystone John pipeline erupt in a line of smoky flame, microbombs inside the heated tar doing their best to stop the flow of poisons to the south.
The Almighty doesn’t need prayer to guide His mighty hand. This must be the main attack, and every resource is pulled to the west, making ready to deal with even greater hazards.
I shut the bathroom door and run for the hallway.
Prophet empties his breech, the first carrot already moving many times faster than the speed of sound as it blasts through the roof. Its three buddies are directly behind it, and the enormous release of stored energy turns the bathwater to steam, and with the first shot the iron tub is yanked free of the floor while the second and third shots kick the tub and the last of its water down into the bathroom directly downstairs. The final shot is going into the wrong part of the sky, but that’s also part of the plan. I’m not supposed to be amazed by how many factors can be juggled at once, but they are juggled and I am amazed, running down the stairs to recover my good friend.