The Dragon Commander

by Kennedy K King

  “Welcome to the unit,” he said.

  Chapter Four: Change and Fear

  Sheba lay with her back against the wall, just hours from the passion of her lover against her skin. She missed him all over, every time she turned, and her hand passed through the void in their bed. She tried to leave the television off, but she needed something to chase away the scales and claws of her nightmares. The dim light of Chris’ dad’s old cable television filled the room. With the massive entertainment relocation to Fusion networks, there were hardly any stations left on cable. Just the news. Sheba knew it was a mistake before the broadcast even began, but she’d take anything over what waited behind her eyelids.

  “If you haven’t heard already… ladies and gentlemen of Earth, there’s been a tragedy in Precinct 117,” announced the balding man on the screen. Sheba half listened, half pictured Chris charging through the background, the forested outskirts of Shanghai. “Biggest disaster since the Blue Terra massacre in 2317… Squires turned on their partners… no group has yet taken responsibility for the terror…” She faded in and out. Sheba’s eyelids flitted, threatening to drop the curtain on her consciousness.

  A scaly fist of talons seized her collar. The beast yanked her up to it’s jaw, big enough to snap her off at the hips. A throaty grumble climbed it’s plated throat. When it dropped her, the sensation of falling rocketed her awake. Never once had a dream felt so real, like the wrinkles in her shirt were from the Dragon’s grasp, and not her sudden tossing. She muted the news and dialed Chris before a thought could cross her mind.

  “Hey,” the sound of his voice shocked her halfway back to reality. Sheba hadn’t expected him to answer, let alone so suddenly, so calm. Had he any idea what kind of catastrophe he was heading into, she wondered, at the same time as, how much of this is the nightmares talking? “Sheba? What’s going on?”

  “Just…” she forced out, a feeble attempt to stay his worry, “Just saw a news report on the attack in 117. You’ll be in Shanghai, then?”

  “Sheba… you know I can’t say,” said Chris, and she did. “But you know who I have with me.”

  “I do,” Sheba smiled, despite herself. If anyone was going to keep her fiancé alive, it was those four. “Tell them I said hello… and I’m sorry. I won’t call again, I promise,” Sheba said. It was her second shaky promise that night. That’s really it, she’d told him, to avoid revealing the dreams.

  “I will. And don’t worry about the call, okay? I love you,” said Chris, ready for the gushing parody his unit would make of it as soon as he hung up.

  “I love you too, Chris,” said Sheba, before the line cut to silence. Sheba slid down in their bed. She had to unmute the television to block out the whispers that crept into her ears.

  After such a phone call, Chris wanted anything but to talk. It was for just that reason that he chose the seat across from Gendric on the magnetrain to the outskirts of Shanghai. He already had to sit with Tim, who looked like he might throw up again or scream, any minute. Chris didn’t need Selene or Lee’s antics right now. What he needed was to stare out the blurry window and think. He let his mind wander to the end of its rope and back in thought of what could be eating Sheba. She’d never called him on the job before. Ignoring the obvious danger of the mission, he traced back their past days, weeks, and months, in search of what could be wrong.

  That stupid fight over what to have for dinner? Sure, Sheba always ended up deciding, without always consulting Chris first, and sure, he’d gotten a little loud over it, but no. It couldn’t have been that. That was weeks ago, and ended with balled-up blankets and a rocking bed. But that was their worst fight in months. Her parents? Chris moved on to next. She had agreed to bring them all across the SkyLine pretty quickly. He wondered if something had gone wrong up there, something even worse than the 3D diagnosis of her uncle a few years back. She’d been close with him, once, and that’d shut her down for a full week before she opened up. Chris had a pang of guilt for not having noticed, if there were any signs. She’s probably keeping it quiet because I proposed, he realized.

  He just noticed himself drift off when turbulence rattled the magnetrain. Chris shot up seconds before his stomach did. It’d been some time since he’d spent so long on a magnetrain; the trip to Shanghai totaled forty-five minutes. It was disorienting in itself, to soar at such speed, with nothing beneath the car but air. It certainly didn’t help when a weather front moved in and jostled the train, which was secured by little else than high bumpers. How it’s all changed, Chris thought. There it was, a good distraction.

  Even in his own lifetime, Chris had seen massive change on his little blue marble. There didn’t used to be a magnetrain track from Beijing to Shanghai. The fastest way was once the bullet train, which still ran for those who couldn’t afford the Cold Fusion alternative. There were still asphalt highways too, in the worst parts of some towns, and out in the real sticks. Cars out there sputtered fumes from the last fossil fuel reserves, driven by men like Chris’ father. He wasn’t sure which would come first: the final word of the WCC outlawing the use of those fuels, the last drop piddling away, or the companies still clinging to their old ways going under at last.

  So too went the fall of combustion and nuclear electricity. Cold Fusion was faster, cheaper, and stronger. When Chris and Sheba started dating, the apartment they lived in now still had an outdated AC hookup from General Electric. Just a year ago, she’d told Chris, the last General Electric factory in Beijing had to close, pushed out by companies like SmartFuse. Dammit, Chris laughed. He knew he wouldn’t be able to keep her out of his head for long.

  “Tim,” Chris surrendered to the last distraction he could think of, the one he was trying to avoid. Conversation. Tim could barely lift his mop of blonde-brown hair as an answer.

  “Hm?”

  “Are you familiar with the big separatist groups? Blue Terra, Ragnorak, those sorts?” queried Chris.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know of any of them that could compete with what you’re doing at Nanoverse?” he continued.

  “If they could… they’ve kept uncharacteristically tight-lipped… about it…” Tim grumbled. He was busy trying to pinpoint if it was motion sickness or nerves mounting in his throat.

  “A valid point,” Chris supposed, “That only leaves the theory that it’s someone from Nanoverse, no? Any of your co-workers come to mind?”

  “None,” said Tim, “I’m the only one working on a learning software. Most of the others at Nanoverse are focused on the FOS’ physical capabilities.”

  “No one that collaborated with you on any stage of the project?” said Chris. Tim shook his head.

  “Not this one.”

  “What about a supervisor?” rumbled Gendric.

  “I haven’t shared my breakthrough with him, yet… I suppose he could be digitally monitoring me somehow, but now I sound like a conspiracy theorist…” said Tim. He straightened up a little, his sickness subsiding with a thought. “Are we bugged right now?”

  “You mean by Dorothy?” said Chris. Tim nodded. “No. They trust us. No bugs.” Tim still looked both ways before starting.

  “What about the WCC? Their personality matrix project… I don’t get it. How does a machine feel? Is it just a simulation? I mean, the point of it is for the Squires and other models to interact with us. At what point is it considered thinking, not just a repertoire of imitations? And don’t even get me started on the programming issues,” Tim groaned.

  “I didn’t,” Chris chuckled. It seemed he’d had finally shaken the bottle enough. Tim had to let it all out.

  “There’s an incredible degree of self-development involved in what they want these machines to do. Feeling is more than learning rote facts. It’s paying attention. It’s implication. It’s knowing what’s appropriate, and deciding whether or not to act that way. If they could design a machine that could do that… it wouldn’t be too hard for that machine to manipulate other, less complex FOS’s.” Chri
s and Gendric shared a quiet glance. The idea had mortifying merit.

  “You’d best keep that to yourself, until we get a better look at the situation in Shanghai,” warned Chris. “I don’t know where I stand on this whole thinking, feeling machine dilemma. It could be a programming glitch, or a hack.”

  It was all he could think of to justify it, like Dorothy told him four years ago. A horrendous hack on a single Squire. Even if the WCC had covered it up from the rest of the world, Chris and the others could never forget what one bug in a system could do. His unit had only survived because of Major General Grendal Feyne, may he rest in peace. With three holes burnt in his chest, he charged the Squire, so Chris and the others could live. The screech the Squire made when Grendal’s rifle burnt a hole straight through to the blackbox, the seat of the AI, would never leave them. Neither would the parting words the corrupted Squire left them with.

  You cannot shoot a thought!

  The next second was gone quicker than it could become a memory, yet none who saw would be the same. The Squire melted a hole through Grendal’s heart, and in the process triggered the EMP charge he had in his vest. It should have deactivated the Squire, too, but it didn’t; another anomaly the WCC couldn’t explain. Every last piece of the unit’s Fusion tech was useless. With his friends’ lives on the other end of a surging barrel, Chris took up his dad’s revolver. It was little more than a gag luck charm, but he had to do something. He put a bullet through the Squire’s blackbox just before it could self-repair. Christopher Droan walked away from that day with a new military title, a tribute to his ingenuity, and a new understanding of his father’s distrust. How anyone had hacked the Squire in the first place, why they made it say what it said, and why it was immune to the EMP were still under WCC investigation.

  “No,” Tim yanked Chris back to the present. “There’s no such thing as a glitch. There’s only bad programming. Machines are like… like children- at least right now they are. They can only do what we teach them to do,” said Tim, despite how even he shrunk back from TE-Les when her words surprised her. Chris went silent. He weighed Tim’s words on the scale of his own logic.

  If what he said was true… someone had turned an entire nursery of metal children into killers, and set them lose.

  Chapter Five: Suzy’s Borderline B&B

  “Feeling better?” said Selene, offering Tim a hand to help him down from the train. He took it without shame. Morgan and Lee couldn’t hold back the laughter when Tim’s wobbling almost took them both down.

  “Believe it or not, I am. Sorry… I don’t usually travel by magnetrain,” said Tim. He fell into Selene’s surprisingly gentle arms from the bottom step. She batted her eyelids at him from a couple inches away, then cracked into laughter.

  “Sorry, I’m not the prince charming type, Timmy. Try Gendric,” Selene smiled, and handed Tim off to the massive mostly-bald man.

  “I can hold you up for hours on end,” rumbled Gendric, which roused laughter from everyone. They enjoyed the moment of lightness before they had to let it go.

  Chris led his contingent, plus Tim, through the twisted trees on the fringe of Shanghai. Gendric only had to help Tim walk for about ten minutes before he found his legs again. From there, Chris was surprised to see him keep pace without an issue, through the tiny fields just outside the city. They made their way to the motel from the assignment papers Dorothy had given them, to check into base camp. The view from the front was of tall, glowing towers. From the back, there were only fields of straw and vegetables.

  “I tell you, I’m scared. I know we’re outside the safety perimeter, but I never would have stayed after the evacuation until that nice lady Dorothy called,” said the owner.

  “Nice?” Lee murmured.

  “I can’t believe I’m hosting a real WCC task force,” chattered the owner, presumably Suzy of ‘Suzy’s Borderline B&B’. “Here are your room keys. Three two-bed rooms.” said she, who handed the cards to Chris.

  “Thank you, ma’am. It’s appreciated,” Chris gave her a little bow. She did the same, before the six headed back out to the half-dark of a city border. Tim moved for the uniform rows of doors, while his five protectors made for the parking lot. Selene winked back at him.

  “Like we’d miss this chance to cut down on work! We need to set a perimeter, and these take two to work.” she said, holding up a pair of tiny silver pods.

  “What are those?” Tim groaned. His legs threatened to fold beneath him while they dragged all the way to the back of the unit.

  “FOS jammers,” rumbled Gendric. Tim shuddered. A single pulse from one of those could undo all the work he’d put in with TE-Les. He’d never seen ones just like those, though. They were bigger, and had slits down the middle of one flat face. Selene demonstrated by holding her two jammers inches apart, and clicking the buttons on their backsides. A translucent sheet of blue light swam between the two pods.

  “Anything running on an AI will fry if they pass through it,” said Morgan, who took Tim’s sudden quietness as confusion.

  “I know,” he said, sick as he took one. After all that talk on the train about thinking and feeling.

  “Form up to set the perimeter. None of those Squires are getting further than Shanghai,” said Chris, a sudden authority in his voice.

  “I’ll take the big guy. We’ll handle the east,” Selene volunteered with a wink. Tim jumped when she put her hand on his arm, of all the taut-muscled giants in their group. He’d appreciate later that she claimed the closest side of Beijing for them. Tim went with her, reluctant, while Chris and Morgan went off to the north. That left Gendric and Lee to the west.

  “Regroup here to set the southern boundary in an hour,” Chris issued, just before they split ways. When the unit returned to Suzy’s, two miles in every direction around Shanghai’s Precinct 117 was trapped inside a shimmering box, and even Major General Christohper Droan was exhausted.

  Tim hadn’t slept so well in years. Those five hours seemed like twelve. Neither had he woken so sharply, without temptation of a snooze button. His alarm this day was no cell phone or Fusion clock, though. It was a shriek. The horrible, throat-scratching shriek of someone truly afraid for her life. Though he’d never heard it before, Tim knew the sound in his bones and blood. His first instinct was: help. It was a reflex he shared with Chris and his unit, who had already geared up and charged outside. Tim pulled his own Fusion-armor jacket on just as the door swung shut behind Lee. He followed in his roommate’s shadow.

  Everything in Suzy’s dawn-washed parking lot happened in slow-motion, yet faster than anyone could change. Chris hoisted his M16, the others their Fusion rifles, at five faceless, man-shaped silhouettes. The Squires gleamed the sunburst orange of morning. One of them dragged a stout woman in binds made from its own altered arm. She bucked her shoulders, which proved useless, until she was too tired to move. Gendric fired first, from the cover of Suzy’s car. His white plasma bolt blasted a fistful of nanocomputers from a Squire’s shoulder. The thing didn’t bother to turn. Instead, it drew in close to the Squire dragging the woman. Selene and Lee bombarded two rogue Squires on the fringe of the formation with bright beams, but no shots connected. The robots’ nanocomputers opened holes for the shots to pass through with no damage.

  “Tim, get inside!” Chris bellowed, when he noticed him shaking by the motel doors. But Tim was frozen. He was stuck between how he could help and how he could escape.

  “It’s like they know us already,” said Morgan. She tested her theory with a shot at one of the Squire’s legs. The whole limb absorbed into the machine’s body for Morgan’s ray to singe the ground, then reformed to run.

  “They’re learning,” Tim realized, “From us, from each other.”

  “Let’s overwhelm them, before they learn too much!” said Chris. He shoved Tim behind a garbage can, though none of the Squires had yet returned fire. Chris leveled the neck of his rifle at the legs of the Squire with the poor woman in its grasp. Her exhausted h
eels dragged out on the pavement behind her now. “Take out the legs on the one with the girl!” said Chris. He tugged back his trigger.

  A clip of bullets and four canisters of Fusion plasma emptied at the Squire, but never reached it. Every one of its companions melded into a moving shield behind it, so thick that even the endless drill of Fusion beams couldn’t burn all the way through. The woman’s screams quieted as the Squires neared the glowing blue wall of the FOS jammers. Chris and the others moved after them while they reloaded.

  “Wait!” Five barrels turned on the voice. They almost fired on the sandy-haired man, even with his hands up in surrender. What stayed the unit’s triggers was that they’d seen his face before, through a screen.

  “Robin Finch?” Chris questioned, keeping the man at the nose of his rifle.

  “Yes!” Finch panted. He took a cautious step out from his hiding spot, beside the motel, when he saw the five glancing back at the fleeing Squires. “Don’t follow them. It’s a trap. She’s not the first person I’ve seen them drag off, or the first I’ve seen people get ambushed trying to intervene.” Still, Chris couldn’t help another look back at her. It was something about the weakness in her legs, sliding across the pavement. It could have been Sheba, if this had happened in Beijing.

  “How did they get through the FOS jammers?” Chris jabbed his rifle at Finch, not convinced by his airborne hands. His Precinct uniform was torn to scraps in more places than one. Blood streaked his forehead and hands.

  “Same way they’re going through them now, which is to say I have no idea.” said Finch. Chris watched the Squires step through the jammer-screens. The light did little more than tinge them blue for a second. The robots vanished into the shadows between the steel towers of Shanghai. The woman’s screams echoed out to nothing.