War Stories

by Andrew Liptak

  Kyra thought about the sobbing parents, about the dead child, about the dead children. She thought about the eighty–percent figure Dr. Stober had quoted. She thought about the number on her father’s scorecard, and the parents and children and siblings behind those numbers. She thought about her father coming home.

  She got up to leave.

  “You must remember,” said Dr. Stober from behind her, “You’re not responsible.”

  She said nothing.

  §

  It was rush hour when Kyra got off the bus to walk home. The streets were filled with cars and the sidewalks with people. Restaurants were filling up quickly; waitresses flirted with customers; men and women stood in front of display windows to gawk at the wares.

  She was certain that most of them were bored with coverage of the war. No one was coming home in body bags any more. The war was clean. This was the point of living in a civilized country, wasn’t it? So that one did not have to think about wars. So that somebody else, something else, would.

  She strode past the waitress who smiled at her, past the diners who did not know her name, into the throng of pedestrians on the sidewalk, laughing, listening to music, arguing and shouting, oblivious to the monster who was walking in their midst, ignorant of the machines thousands of miles away deciding who to kill next.

  Ghost Girl

  Rich Larson

  IGUO HAD ANOTHER REPORT ON his news feed about a ghost girl living in the dump outside Bujumbura, so he put two Cokes in a hydrobag and hailed a taxi outside the offices. It was cool season now and the sky was rusty red. The weather probes were saying dust storm, dust storm, remember to shut the windows. Iguo put his head back against the concrete wall and wondered how a ghost girl living by herself was not yet dismembered and smuggled out to Tanzania. Maybe some entrepreneur was cutting her hair to sell to fishermen. Maybe she was very lucky.

  The graffitied hump of the taxi bullied its way through bicycles and bleating sheep. Iguo slung the hydrobag over his shoulder and pulled out his policense. This was not an emergency, not strictly, but Iguo did not pay for transit if it could be free. The taxi rumbled to a stop and when the door opened, it bisected a caricature of President Dantani shitting on a rebel flag. He climbed inside and switched off the icy blast air conditioning.

  “Bujumbura junkyard,” Iguo said, pressing his policense against the touchscreen.

  “Calculating,” said the taxi.

  §

  The junkyard was a plastic mountain. Whatever wire fence had once marked its boundaries was long since buried. Bony goats wandered up and down the face, chewing on circuits. Scavengers with rakes and battered scanners stumped around the bottom, searching for useable parts or gold conductors. Iguo had the taxi stop well away, before it gutted a tire on some hidden piece of razor wire or trash. It didn’t want to wait, but he used the policense again and it reluctantly hunkered down.

  There was a scavenger with no nose and no tag sitting in the sand. Stubble was white on his dark skull. A cigarette dangled from his lips. Iguo squatted across from him.

  “Mwiriwe, Grandfather.”

  “Mwiriwe, Policeman. My shit, all legal.” He waved off a fly. “You ask anyone.”

  “I’m looking for the ghost girl,” Iguo said. “She lives here, yeah?”

  The scavenger massaged his knobby calves. “Oh, yes.”

  “How long here?”

  “Aye, two weeks, three weeks since she show up. Her and her imfizi.” He spat into the sand. “She’s a little witch, like they say. She’s got the thing following her all around.”

  Iguo squinted up the crest of the junk pile. “How does she survive?” he asked. He saw the scampering silhouettes of children and wondered if one was her.

  The scavenger shrugged. “She finds good stuff. Me, I buy some. And nobody trouble her, or that damn imfizi take them to pieces.” He tapped the orange ember of his cigarette, eyed the hydrobag on Iguo’s shoulder. “You here to decommission it? You look soldier.”

  “I’m here for the girl,” Iguo said.

  “Witch,” the scavenger corrected. “You say it’s genes, but it’s witch. I know. I see her.”

  “Goodnight, Grandfather.” Iguo straightened up. He had speakaloud pamphlets in the taxi, ones that explained albino genetics in cheerful Kirundi and then French, ones he did not distribute as often as he was supposed to, but Iguo knew that by the time a man is old his mind is as hard as a stone.

  §

  He found the ghost girl rooting through electric cabling, feet agile on the shifting junk. Her sundress was shabby yellow and stained with gasoline. Her hands and feet were callused. Still, she was tagged: her tribal showed up Hutu and she was inoculated against na–virus. Not born in the street, then.

  “Anything good?” Iguo asked.

  She turned around and blinked rheumy pink eyes at him. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Iguo. I work for the government.” He unslung the hydrobag and took out the first bottle. “You want a fanta?”

  “Yes.” The girl rubbed her pale cheek. “Yes, I wanna.”

  “Here.” Iguo opened the chilly Coke between his molars. Clack. Hiss. He held it out. “What’s your name?”

  “Belise.” The ghost girl wound the cable carefully around herself, eyes on the sweating bottle. “Set it down, back up some,” she suggested. “I’ll get it.”

  “You don’t need to be afraid of me,” Iguo said, wedging the drink in a nook of bent rebar. “I’m here to take you somewhere safe. Here, here isn’t safe for you.” He scooted back. “Belise, do you know what an albino hunter is?”

  “It’s safe,” Belise said, patting a piece of rusty armor. “My baba is here.” She clambered down to get the Coke and all at once something very large burrowed out from the junk pile. Motors whirred as it unfolded to its feet, shedding scrap metal. The robot was sized like a gorilla and skinned like a tank. The sensory suite glittered red at him. Iguo hadn’t seen an imfizi drone in many years and the sight jolted him.

  “Shit,” Iguo said, as Belise skipped back up the pile, bottle cradled in her grimy hands. He realized the old man had been talking sense.

  “My baba,” the ghost girl said proudly. “My daddy is very strong.” She swigged from the Coke and grinned at him.

  §

  Iguo had retreated to the bottom to re–evaluate things. Clouds were still building crenellations in the sky, and now wind whistled in and out of the junk. He skyped the offices for a list of active combat drones, but of course it was classified, and the official line was still that they had all been smelted. He sat and drank his own Coke and watched Belise step nimbly across a car chassis while the drone lumbered behind her, puffing smoke.

  There had been many of them, once. Iguo knew. He remembered seeing them stalk across open ground sponging up rebel fire like terrible gods while the flesh troops circled and sweated, lying in this ditch and then another, so fragile. He remembered the potent mix of envy and disdain they all felt for the piloting jackmen, cocooned safe in neural webbing a mile away.

  He remembered best when one of the imfizi was hacked, taken over by some rebel with a signal cobbled together from a smartphone and a neural jack. People said later that it had been Rufykiri himself, the Razor, the hacker who sloughed off government security like snakeskin, but nobody really knew. Iguo remembered mostly because that day was when half of his unit was suddenly gone in an eruption of blood and marrow. Iguo did not trust drones.

  “You see, now.” The old scavenger was back. He ran a dirty nail around the hollow of his nose. “Nobody troubles her. That thing, deadly. She has it bewitched.”

  “It’s malfunctioning,” Iguo said. “Not all of them came back for decommissioning. Crude AIs, they get confused. Running an escort protocol or something like that.” He narrowed his eyes. “Not witchcraft.”

  “Lucky malfunction for her,” the old man said. “Lucky, lucky. Else she would be chopped up, yeah? For eurocash, not francs. Much money for a ghost.” He
smiled. “A rocket could do in that imfizi. Or an EMP. You have one?”

  “I will chop you up, Grandfather—” Iguo took a long pull at his drink, “—if you talk any more of muti. You live in a new time.”

  “What, you don’t want to be rich?” The scavenger hacked up a laugh.

  “Not for killing children,” Iguo said.

  “Ah, but you were in the war.”

  Iguo stood up.

  “You were in the war,” the old man repeated. “You sowed the na–virus and burned the villages and used the big knife on the deserters. Didn’t you? Weren’t you in the war?”

  Iguo wanted his fingers around the scavenger’s piped neck until the esophagus buckled, so he took his Coke and walked back up to try again with the ghost girl.

  §

  The drone had been repairing itself, he could see it now. Swatches of hardfoam and crudely–welded panels covered its chassis. Spare cables hung like dead plants from its shoulders. It was hunched very still, only swiveling one camera to track Iguo’s approach. Belise was sitting between its feet.

  “Dunna come any closer,” she said. “He might get mad at you.” Her brows shot up. “Is that fanta for me as well?”

  “No,” Iguo said. He considered it. “Too much sugar is bad for you. You won’t grow.”

  The imfizi shifted slightly and Iguo took a step back.

  Belise laughed. “My baba used to say that.”

  “My mother used to say it,” Iguo said. “When I chewed too much sugarcane.” He watched the drone uneasily. It was hard to tell where it was looking. “Did you have a mama?” he asked her.

  “I don’t remember,” Belise said. She rubbed at her nose, smeared snot on her dress.

  “And your baba?”

  “He’s here.” Belise slapped the metal trunk behind her. “With me.”

  “The imfizi keeps you safe, yes? Like a father.” Iguo maneuvered a rubber tire to sit on. Some of the scavengers down below were using a brazier for tea and the wind carried its bitter smoke. “But maybe it will not always be that way,” he said. “Drones are not so much like you and me, Belise. They can break.”

  “They can fix,” Belise said, pointing to the patched carapace.

  Iguo remembered much simpler jobs, where the men and women were frightened for their lives and wanted so badly to be tagged, to go to the safehouse, for the government to help them.

  “If the drone decides its mission is over, it might leave,” Iguo said. “Or it might paint you.”

  “Paint me?”

  “Paint you a target,” Iguo said. “So it can kill you.”

  Belise shook her small white head, serene. “No, that won’t happen. He’s my baba.”

  Iguo sipped until his drink was gone. “I’ll take you to a place with so much food,” he said. “No more scrap–hunting. Nice beds and nice food. And other children.”

  “I’ll stay.” Belise pointed and Iguo followed her finger. “Take those two. You can have them go with you. I don’t like them.”

  Two small boys rummaging in the junk, insect–thin arms. One had a hernia peeking out from under his torn shirt. They cast nervous looks up every so often, for the leviathan drone and the albino girl and now for the policeman.

  “They don’t need my help,” Iguo said. “My job is to help you. Many people would try to kill you. Cut off your limbs. The government is trying to make you safe.”

  “Why?”

  Iguo rubbed his forehead. “Because albino–killings are very publicized. President Dantani is forging new Western relations, and the killings reflect badly, badly, badly on our country. And now that the war is over, and there are no more rebels to hunt, people who know only how to murder are finding the muti market.”

  “Oh.”

  “And the government cares for the good of all its people,” Iguo added. He looked at the empty glass bottle between his palms, then hurled it off into the growing dusk. The shatter noise came faint. Belise had followed the trajectory, lips pursed. Now she looked up.

  “Not what my baba said.” She paused. “About the government. He said other things.”

  “Your baba is dead, Belise.”

  Belise nodded, and for a moment Iguo thought they were making progress. “He died with the bleeding,” she said. “With the sickness. But he told me not to worry, because he had a plan. He made his soul go softly into the imfizi.” She smiled upward, and the pity in Iguo’s gut sharpened into something else. He stared at the array of red sensors, the scattered spider eyes.

  “Your daddy, Belise.” Iguo put a finger up to his temple and twisted. “Was he a jackman?”

  Belise winced. She stared at the ground. When she looked up, her raw pink eyes were defiant. “He was a rebel,” she said.

  §

  Back in the birdshit–caked taxi, there was a memo on misuse of government funds. Iguo tugged it off the screen and punched in his address instead. Through the window, he saw scavengers taking in their equipment. Some were pitching nylon tents around the brazier. The old noseless man was tearing open a package of disposable phones, but he looked up when the ignition rumbled. He waved.

  Iguo’s fingers buzzed as he typed the word into Google: softcopy. A slew of articles in English and German fluttered up. He struggled through half a paragraph before switching over to a translation service. Iguo was not a hacker, but he’d heard the term used. Always between jackmen, usually in a hot argument.

  The taxi began to rattle over loose–packed gravel, and Iguo had it read aloud to him. Softcopy, a theoretical transfer of human consciousness into an artificial brain. Ramifications for artificial intelligence. Softcopy claim in NKorea revealed to be a hoax. Increased use of neural webbing has led to new questions. Evolution of the human mind.

  The taxi sent him an exposé on corruption in the Burundi police forces as a kicker, but Iguo hardly registered it as he swung himself out of the vehicle. He scanned himself through the door in the jagged–glass–topped wall, scattered the pigeons on his apartment’s stoop. The stairs went by three at a time, and then he was in front of his work tablet, working the policense like a bludgeon.

  He pulled up reports from three years ago. Death reports. The list was long, long, long. He scrolled through it and they came to him in flashes, so many Jonathans and then so many Josephs, good Christian names for godless rebels, and then he found him: Joseph Rufykiri, the Razor. Responsible for the longest sustained information attack of the war, for the interception of encrypted troop movements, for the malicious reprogramming of military drones, farm equipment, wind turbines, and once a vibrator belonging to the general’s wife.

  He was dead by na–virus, but survived by an albino daughter. Iguo stared at the data and only half–believed it, but half was enough. He found a rumpled rain jacket under the bed and threw it on, and into the deepest pocket he dropped his old service handgun. Useless, unless he put it right up to the drone’s gut, right where the armor had fallen away.

  Iguo thought of the blood spray and his comrades jerking and falling like cut puppets as the hacked drone spun its barrels. He thought of Joseph Rufykiri between blood–soaked sheets, whispering to his daughter that he had a plan and that she did not have to worry.

  He had to know, so Iguo stepped back out under the swelling sky and hailed a new taxi, one with less graffiti, as it began to storm.

  §

  The dust felt like flying shrapnel by the time Iguo struggled out of the taxi, wrapped up to the eyes. It battered and bit his fingers. The sky was dark and its rusty clouds were surging now, attacking. It looked like the scavengers had packed away and found shelter elsewhere, or else their tents had been torn off like great black scabs. Iguo hurried to where the junk pile could provide some shelter.

  On his way a scavenger fled past, stumbling, and then Iguo saw the blurry shape of a jeep up ahead through the sand. Something besides the storm was happening. He crouched against the wheel–well and checked his gun where the dust couldn’t reach it. He checked it again.
He breathed in, out, and craned his head around the edge of the vehicle.

  Three muti hunters, swathed in combat black with scarves wrapped tight against the storm. Iguo counted three small–caliber guns but could hear nothing now over the howl of the dust. They ducked and swayed on their feet, and the imfizi drone clanked and churned and tried to track them as the grit assaulted its many joints. Bullets had cratered its front, and bled coolant was being sucked off into the wind. Belise was nowhere to be seen.

  The drone was long since dry of ammunition, and the hunter was caught off–guard when it lunged, quicker than Iguo had ever seen a drone move, and pinioned him to the ground. The other two rounded on it, firing in rhythm. The imfizi buckled and twitched with the impacts, but then reared up with the hunter’s leg still mashed in its pincer. Reared higher. Higher. Blood spouted as the man tore silently in half.

  The other hunters reversed now, moving clumsily in the wind, and one hauled a grenade from his back and lobbed. For a moment, Iguo thought it was a dud, but then a whine shivered in his teeth and the hair on his neck stood up on end and he realized it was an EMP. The drone shuddered once, twice. Froze. The hunters converged.

  Something clutched onto Iguo’s calf. He looked down, and of course it was Belise, her translucent hands kneading his ankle, and she was crying something but Iguo could not read lips. He shook her off. He steadied himself. He ducked around the side of the vehicle, and fired twice.

  The first hunter dropped, swinging on his heel, punched through the skull and nicked in the shoulder. Iguo had not forgotten where to put the bullets.