by Adam Roberts
It is.
‘Oh, you are a good shot,’ I remember saying to Fodior.
That’s the last thing I remember.
I can be more precise: the next memory I have is of being in the clinic’s bed. I remember the ancient, or timeless, feel of clean cotton sheets. I was sitting up, or rather leaning back against the 45-degree angle of the raised section of the bed. I remember looking down at my hands and arms and noting that they were both in plastic elbow-length gloves, and that these gloves were taped around my arms so that they wouldn’t slip off. I thought about this, and decided that it was because I had suffered burns. When I held my arms up I could see that both hands were fists wrapped in some sort of dressing that was, in turn, filled with some sort of gel. I could wiggle the fingers a little bit, but I couldn’t unclench my fists. I pressed one bound-up fist against my face and so discovered that my head was mostly covered over by two large plasters, one on each cheek.
I wasn’t alarmed. I wasn’t even particularly worried. Nor was I in pain. I remember thinking that it was possible the analgesics that must have been responsible for this latter state might also be responsible for the former. I sat for a while and looked at the door of my room, and the stippled pane of glass in it, like the glass you get in bathroom windows, like a 3D glass relief of a choppy sea. Like pewter, beaten and formed. I looked at the door handle. Then I looked at the two empty coat hooks on the back of the door. The walls on either side of the door were plain white.
So here I was. I thought back to what I remembered last, and it was hunkering down with Fodior and Makouk, looking down Maidenhead’s pedestrianized high street. I could remember Fodior being there. I think Makouk was there too. I can’t actually visualise him being there, but something about the memory made me think he had been.
This means that I cannot give you, as personal testimony, my account of how the Battle of Maidenhead ended, or how the war as a whole ended. I know what I have read, and what I have seen, and what the web tells me; but of course you know that as well as I do. Within a few hours of my last memory we had taken Maidenhead, and we pushed east fluently and without difficulty into Slough. To the south we strode through Bracknell, and over the heathland down there, again without much difficulty. By noon of the next day we had completed this double movement and linked up, or swarmed together, at Staines. The whole thing happened almost too easily. The British Army, having suffered unexpectedly heavy casualties, was compelled to pull back before us, despite outnumbering us considerably. Three days of fighting and we won wherever we went. On the morning of the fourth day the English agreed to a ceasefire, and pulled all their people away to the south.
So that’s anything up to four days during which I was conscious and active but of which I have no memories at all. Negotiations were restarted at Newcastle, and the Scots and the English sat down to talk things out. And now everything had changed. After the London surge His Majesty’s Government had believed that they had knocked the NMA over, and had been preparing to impose their will upon the Scots. But we had come back in as strong as ever, and killed many of His Majesty’s soldiers, and caused further billions of euros of damage to His Majesty’s home counties. It was evident that we could continue doing that for as long as the Scots were denied their independence.
By that point I, personally, was down and out, of course. But there’s one more thing, to fill in the blank, and it’s a strange thing for me to watch. It is obviously from near the end of the war, and I am still hale and active. A journalist interviewed four of us: myself, and Makouk, and a woman I think was called Strauss, and a man I don’t recognize. I’ve watched the footage several times, you won’t be surprised to hear. At first I thought watching it might jog my memory, but it hasn’t done that. I’m not even sure where we are, during the interview. I mean: we’re standing at the bar of a coffee shop - in Staines, according to the newsroom scroll at the bottom of the screen, but that could be wrong. These coffee shops are all cloned from town to town, so it could just as easily be Slough, or even Maidenhead. If it is Staines, then I fought through four days of health, and then got wounded and retroactively lost all of those four days’ memories. It doesn’t make sense to me that it would happen that way. Also, if that’s what happened then I was simply fantastically unlucky; since I must have been taken out in one of the very last engagements of the war. It seems to me more likely that I was wounded in Slough, and more likely still that I was wounded in Maidenhead. But I’ve no idea how I was wounded, or what happened, except that it clearly involved me in getting some nasty burns - and nothing I can find, online, in the enormous amount of coverage of the war, helps me identify it. So I’m not in a position to say.
The interview, at any rate, is with four relaxed and happy troopers, so it must have taken place after we had won the battle of Maidenhead, at the very least. That might mean that I received my wound on the road to Slough, or in Slough town, or maybe later. It is hard to comprehend the extent to which severe physical trauma can retroactively wipe elements of your mind, particularly since my memory of the fighting in Maidenhead - and especially of the approach to Maidenhead, through the fragrant green by the river - is so very vivid. But the later memories aren’t there. And there am I, standing onscreen. You can see the brace on my right wrist.
And the journo is asking: ‘Where are you from?’
‘Croydon,’ says Makouk.
‘London town,’ I say; and although I can’t remember saying it I can tell that I’m putting on a Dire Straits voice.
‘You’re English,’ says the journo, out of shot, ‘yet you’re fighting for the Scots?’
‘Fighting for our NMA,’ says the woman, who may or may not be called Strauss. She rather looks like Strauss, except thinner. But then she turns her head, and I think to myself: no, she looks completely unlike Strauss. I think to myself: it must be someone else. But TV isn’t like real life. ‘It so happens that our NMA has been contracted by the Scottish Government, and that’s all.’
‘What people in the south-east have got to realize,’ says the man whose name I don’t know, ‘is that it’s nothing personal. Three of us are from here. It’s not like we have anything against the south-east, personally.’
‘If His Majesty’s Government hadn’t walked away from the negotiations at Newcastle . . .’ says Fodior.
But the journo isn’t interested in this. ‘Why are you fighting though?’ she pressed.
‘Why?’
‘You’re not Scots Nationalists?’
‘Jesus no,’ said maybe-Strauss. And I laugh at this. I can’t remember why I laughed. Something about it must have struck me as funny, but I’ve no idea what.
‘Why risk your life for the Scots?’
‘That’s our job,’ says Fodior.
‘Isn’t it a pretty risky job?’
‘Are you going to ask the English soldiers this same question? ’ I put in, with a goofy grin on my face. Why was I so grinny? I don’t know. A little hyper. ‘Do they get that same questions we get?’
This last bit is me repeating myself, and anyway the man whose name I can’t remember talks over me. ‘I’m looking forward to getting paid,’ he says.
‘Pay, sure,’ agreed the woman.
‘See,’ I say, and I’m talking to my comrades, not to the journo, ‘I can see her point as far as that goes. We’ll get paid, but not much more than, you know, an oil-rig worker. You know?’
‘We’ll get way more than an oil-rig worker,’ objects Fodior.
‘Basic pay—’
‘Why calculate it from basic pay?’
Maybe-Strauss explains to the journalist: ‘We get a bonus for winning. It’s a sum of money. But my friend is right - we don’t fight for the money. There are easier and less risky ways of making money.’
‘So why do you fight?’ asks the journo.
‘Because I’m a soldier,’ I say. ‘This is where I belong.’
‘War is where you belong?’
‘This NMA is where I
belong.’
‘You’ll have to excuse my friend,’ says Fodior, putting his arm about me. ‘He is a sentimentalist.’
‘I’m a democrat!’ I say. ‘One of the true democrats! Few enough of us left. Not since the Athenian state in the fifth century before—’
‘Professional army,’ Fodior cuts across me, apropos of I’m not sure what.
But the journo can’t let it go. ‘But if you want to be soldiers,’ she presses, waving the microphone in the air in front of the camera as if uncertain which of the four of us would be best to answer. ‘Why not join the real army?’
Three of us answer simultaneously: ‘This is a real army!’ ‘The idea!’
‘Fight as slaves instead of free?’
There’s a pause, and then maybe-Strauss has the final word. ‘You ask most of the people in this NMA and you’ll find they served terms in regular armies. But in that sort of, uh, of organization you discover you don’t own yourself. You belong to the people higher up the chain, and because they might, you know, throw your lives away at any moment they can’t ever respect you. You can’t ever have respect in that sort of chain of, chain of.’
‘Hierarchy,’ I put in.
‘Sure, that’s. Yeah. In an NMA, though it’s different, because—’
That’s where the interview ends, cut off like that. I suppose whichever news network put it out didn’t want to be accused of broadcasting NMA recruitment propaganda.
I can’t tell you how peculiar it is to watch yourself on screen as a stranger. It is like eavesdropping on somebody else’s memory of you.
That interview happened at some point in between me fighting along the pedestrianized high street at Maidenhead, and me waking up in the clinic, scorched and ill. And after this latter occurrence there was you, Colonel, and your West Texas drawl. After this latter, everything else that followed. I have to go on with my narrative, I know; and you’re keen to learn everything you can about these giants, that stride over the countryside and make wasteland where before there was plenty. You plan to use me to fight them. You’ve spent real energy working me round to a position where I will no longer feel like a traitor for turning against my kind. I’ve liaised with your software team. I’ve been prepped by your counter-NMA specialists. The only thing I would say is: I have become what you wanted to become, and I am content; but you misunderstand the ground. If Simic were still alive I wouldn’t be getting ready to board a plane to Strasbourg. Simic is no longer available to me as an individual. There is only one way I can keep him alive, and that is by doing what I plan to do.
You must have sat down to talk with me on half a dozen different occasions. I appreciate the investment of time. Your time is precious, I know. Here’s what I remember of the last. It was after I had that day meeting the software team - the people working on that sly AI worm that you hope to load me with, in your ongoing war. I shuffled about using two sticks to walk, and panting and puffing like a grampus, whilst people smiled and nodded and explained things.
Donaghy and I have a friend in common. Did I tell you that? I met Donaghy’s friend in the middle of battle. He’s a specialist in spontaneous AI generation of consciousness and I met him as the bullets went back and forth over the great Pong screen of the sky, remarkable though that sounds.
‘You’re doing a great thing,’ you said to me
‘My motives for taking this virus to the NMAs,’ I told you, ‘are more selfish than you can imagine.’
You looked benignly at me, and very obviously did not probe further. Then you cleared your throat very ostentatiously. ‘The thing about war,’ you said, ‘is that it has been the most fantastically expensive business. It’s been that way for centuries. Centuries! And that’s a good thing.’
‘Why is that a good thing?’
‘Because it has priced war out of the reach of many of the people who would like to have made war, and so made war less common than it would otherwise have been. It is really as simple as that.’
‘More expensive wars are more destructive, though.’
‘Maybe. But it evens out. Really, it does. And in particular more recently. It used to be the standard thing that a nation would recoup financial losses made by fighting a war by simply grabbing the wealth of the defeated side. That’s not the way it works any more. You’re not allowed to do that any more. If anything, the victor ends up spending more money on the defeated nation than the war itself cost - look at the US after World War Two. Or Iraq. We got some oil out of Iraq, but it came nowhere near covering the amount of money we spent. I’ll tell you what that means: that means that nowadays it takes an awful lot to get a nation to go to war. In four out of five possible situations war is simply too costly an option. Follow that trajectory along, and it wouldn’t be long before war was too expensive for anybody.’
‘What a utopian you are,’ I observed.
‘Man, the opposite. What’s the opposite of a utopian?’
‘A politician?’
‘You know the word I mean. I’m a pessimist. Is it nontopian? I can’t remember the word. But that’s what I am. You know why? Because you came along, and you made war affordable again. More bang for the buck, more victories with smaller forces. Every tinpot country can get in the game now. Two worst things to happen to people over the last hundred years: the dissemination of the AK-47 because it’s both really reliable and usable, and really cheap. And NMAs, the same thing on a meta scale.’
‘Small nations were picking fights with big nations long before we came along.’
‘You’re going to cite Vietnam? Go on, cite Vietnam.’
‘Well, since you mention it.’
‘Vietnam had Chinese backing. It wouldn’t have managed the hardware otherwise. And it paid a price in a different way; its leaders just frittered away its soldiers. No other general, and certainly not the US, could afford to waste manpower like that. It’s all cost, you see. It’s all price.’
‘So you’re saying that by democratizing the military process we’ve made war more likely?’
‘Oh, much, much.’
‘Free market, though,’ I said. ‘We undercut you. That’s the way the market works.’
You looked at me with an unreadable expression. ‘I sometimes get the impression,’ he said, ‘that you say these things deliberately to rile me. Haven’t we gone beyond that, in our relationship?’
‘Relationship,’ I said. It hurt my face to smile, but I couldn’t stop myself. ‘So you don’t believe in free markets?’
‘Free markets, sure. Democracy, sure. But these things ain’t absolute values, no sir. These things aren’t wealth.’
And this, I confess, intrigued me: ‘What’s wealth?’
‘The only wealth is life,’ you said, with an almost pious expression. Only a soldier can deliver that line with the proper force and gravity.
‘Well, OK,’ I said, and I wasn’t trying to smile any more.
‘This thing has come along and is striding over the landscapes of the world, and smashing the joint up. Smashing it up, here, means killing lots of people who oughtn’t be killed. It means breaking houses and churches and factories. Lots of beautiful heritage in Europe, yeah? It means destroying it. You and I, my friend. You and I can do something about it. Yes?’
‘Oh,’ I said, doing my Omar impression once again. ‘Indeed.’ The last person to whom I had said that word, with that particular inflection, had been Simic. War gives, and war takes away. Take a vote. How mad and bad and sad it was, you see. But sweet. You see.
I thought about saying to you: are you sure you trust your development team? Are you quite sure Donaghy is on your side? But I didn’t, in part because you had launched into a sort of lecture. You itemized the rash of NMAs that had sprung up in the wake of Pantegral’s successes in southern England. Now, Pantegral’s had been an impressively coordinated campaign, though I say so myself; and the people of Scotland were grateful for their independence (except for those that weren’t), although it amounted to muc
h less than it might have done, what with the indelible ties of trade and investment and culture and so on that kept Scotland chained to the rest of the UK. And it is true that the individual soldiers of Pantegral were paid off with a victory bonus that was much more than most of them could have earned in any other job. But the people joining the large numbers of NMAs in Continental Europe - the Croatian NMA, the Swedish NMA, the Ukrainian NMA, the Irish NMA, the Italian NMA, the Catalan NMA, the two Polish NMAs, the three Russian NMAs - these people were not joining up for the money, or for the austere pleasures of putting in place effective military strategy. Three quarters of them were young men. Most were not even particularly committed to the ideologies of democracy. Most were joining up because doing so gave them the chance to smash shit up, and to ensure that nobody fucked with them. They joined a democratic NMA, rather than a regular army, or a traditional gang, football tribe or mafia, because recent history had shown that democratic NMAs are simply much better at smashing shit up than other organizations.