“You know nothing about him!”
“On the contrary, we know everything about him.”
“Do you have any idea what it’s like?" Um Hamza cried.
“What? ”
“War. ”
“I know about war. ”
“No, that’s not what I mean. Not what you’re doing. I mean war. The things you have to do. The choices you have to make. The consequences if you don’t. The fear. ” She wiped her eyes. “You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about. ”
The captain frowned and looked out at the horizon for a long time, as if lost in some terrible memory. Despite all his gear, armor, and the cloud of Wasps ready to make war on his behalf, he looked exhausted beyond his years, even a little fragile. Um Hamza wondered how many times he had had this conversation.
“Just once,” he said softly, still looking to the sunburnt horizon, “I want to find one Syrian who is grateful for what we’ve done for this country. What we’ve sacrificed, the friends we’ve lost. You’ve been at war almost as long as I’ve been alive, and we’ve stopped the cycle. Do you realize how incredible that is?”
“You killed my father and my son.”
“They chose to fight,” the captain said, shrugging. “I don’t get it. I wish someone could explain it to me. How many more decades of war do you want?”
“We want to be free,” said Abu Hamza.
“You are free, as long as you don’t fight. No one dies unless he chooses to. There’s no more strategic bombing, no more ground occupation, no more drone strikes, no more collateral damage. It’s just… awareness. Knowledge. Insurgency is impossible. We’ve freed you from violence, given you the best chance in years for a peaceful new future. I don’t understand why you can’t accept that.”
Peace? she thought, looking at the police chief, who had wandered off and was negotiating some new deal on his expensive imported AR headset. This is peace?
“I am sorry for your loss,” the captain said “This was a needless tragedy. I hope you’ll think long and hard about the choices that lie ahead. You still have one son. I pray to God that you will choose a future of peace, in sha’ Allah.”
The captain put on his helmet and nodded to the police chief that it was time to leave.
“Thank you for the tea,” he said.
§
That night they sat on the patio, drinking coffee and smoking sullenly. Their Wasps hovered above them in the warm orb cast by the porch light. It would have been safer to stay inside, but it was a pleasant night and they refused to be intimidated. There was something thrilling about sitting in front of those watchful eyes, putting their hatred on open display. In a world where resistance was impossible, even talking was an act of courage.
“That police chief,” Fouad said between angry puffs on the nargeelah. “That fucking BMW.”
He was drunk. Um Hamza didn’t know when or how he’d achieved that feat, as he never drank in front of the family, but he’d done a thorough job of it.
“You know him?” Um Hamza asked.
“Yeah, I know him,” Fouad said, the smoke pouring forth from his lips, as if he was trying to excise the very memory of the police chief from his body. “You two haven’t asked the question, but I know you’re dying to. Why the hell is it Fouad that’s sitting here smoking and drinking instead of your father?”
It was true. She had wondered exactly that. Her father had been a simple man, kind and pious and respectable, without a hint of guile. Fouad was the shrewd empire builder who had turned an auto parts supply chain into a profitable arms smuggling network.
“About six months ago, that police chief came by the gas station. The Occupation was sharing all its intel with him. He knew everything. You know why he came by? He wanted a cut. To keep quiet. I told him no.”
Fouad started to laugh, and swung his head from side to side in exaggerated, drunken disbelief.
“Son a bitch knew how to pay me back,” he said. He raised his coffee cup. “Long live the peaceful new Syria.”
§
Um Hamza knocked gently on the boys’ door. When she heard nothing, she turned the knob. She stood in the doorway, the light behind her illuminating the shape of Tariq asleep in one bed and the tangled, empty sheets on the other. She studied the sheets, marveling at them. Exactly as Hamza had left them when he rose from bed yesterday.
She knelt beside her living son. He was so different from his brother. Even with all that had happened, Hamza had a natural sweetness to him, a legacy of his grandfather. He loved God. But Tariq hated, and for him life itself was a war. That manifested itself in everything. The rage. The arguments. He often came home bruised and bloody, and refused to say where he had been or what had happened. At least twice, he had sent other boys to the hospital. He needed violence the way he needed air.
Sleep effaced all that, wound the clock back to a time before the war had damaged him. Amazing that her child still lurked in there, after all that he had suffered. It wasn’t his fault, being the way he was. He was a good boy, a strong boy who in a better life would have gone on to do such great things. But here…
In three years they would receive another birthday card, and another Wasp would find its way into their olive grove. One more node would appear in the Occupation’s vast Syrian intelligence matrix. When that happened, Tariq would die. It might be two days or it might be two years, but the boy who couldn’t help fighting in the streets would most certainly fight the Occupation.
If the Occupation did not end, Tariq would die. But it wouldn’t end. It couldn’t. The least relaxation of control would mean chaos.
She thought back to the captain’s words. The Wasp Keepers had ended almost two decades of war. It was nothing short of a miracle, unprecedented in history. Perfect knowledge. Perfect killing. War that was as intimate as a friend sitting next to you, a friend that would protect you from all harm but would also kill you with a kiss if you let slip any hint of treason.
It was hatefully, intolerably perfect.
And yet there were no winners, not even the Occupation. The captain had understood that. He was exhausted and embittered by a war that, for all his impressive ability to control, had not delivered victory. The things that mattered most were still beyond their reach.
If they could not win, that meant they could still lose. The thought electrified her. After that revelation, everything fell into place.
She kissed Tariq on the head. Maybe she could yet save his life.
There was one thing she could still do. One choice they could all make. It was the single choice that eluded the Occupation’s control, and that terrified them.
§
The rest of the night passed like a dream. For the first time since childhood, she was free. She went to her husband and gave herself to him, not because he was entitled to it but because she chose to. For a few moments she felt something of what she’d once known with this talented young revolutionary in the Za’atri camp. Afterward, while he slept, she wrote letters. Longhand. Beyond the reach of the Occupation. She left them trifolded on her desk, the names written on the back in elegant Arabic calligraphy.
After that she sat outside beneath her olive tree. It was still, and silent, and the stars wheeled freely in the sky as if there had never been a war and war was something altogether inconceivable. The peace she had always wanted. She recalled memories of Hamza, and of Tariq, and of her husband before the war had changed him. Of her father, leading prayers in the gas station masjid for poor refugees with their battered cars, limping their way northward again after the first lull in the fighting.
She sat beneath the tree until the sky began to lighten in the east, and the first cars appeared down on the highway. Then she rose on stiff joints and brushed herself off. One leg had fallen asleep. She hobbled over to the porch, shaking the leg awake again. She had composed the email to Logan Keesler earlier in the night. She sent it now, then propped the phone up on the railing and started a video recording.
Her Wasp stared down at her, a motionless black smear in the sky. The other family Wasps were perched on the railing, charging in the morning sun. Stupid, mindless things. They knew everything and they knew nothing.
She reached into the folds of her robe and withdrew the cigarette lighter and the can of hairspray. With one flick of her wrist, her Wasp was a burning point of brightness in the sheet of flame.
It hadn’t yet hit the ground when the other Wasps converged on her. She felt the hot pricks of the stingers, and a moment later the olive grove spun sideways.
Non–Standard Deviation
Richard Dansky
COLONEL TALBOT SAID, “SHOW ME,” and so eventually they did. That was the point of having Talbot there, after all: showing him, so he could do something about it. Talbot was the guy who got sent in when things had gone wrong, with a mandate to make chicken salad out of whatever chicken shit was available, and never mind the collateral damage he might inflict in the process. If Colonel Talbot was coming on–site, then you’d fucked up, and the unfucking was not likely to be pleasant. There was a small team assigned to meet with Talbot, a football huddle’s worth of techs and PR specialists and management types, all of whom figured the bigger the crowd, the less likely Talbot was to finger them individually for the project’s challenges. They’d introduced themselves, offered coffee and a tour, and generally tried to ingratiate themselves. It took maybe fifteen minutes for Talbot to shed the PR types, another five for management, and then it was just him and the techs, and he could get to work.
They led him to the immersion chamber, which was down a nondescript hallway painted a disinterested shade of beige.
“Control room?” Talbot asked as they came to a secured door guarded by a keypad. One of the civilian contractors who’d managed to stick, a bearded beanpole in jeans and mildly obscene t–shirt, nodded. “The problem’s not on that end. All the systems are green, we’ve run the diagnostics a dozen times—”
The colonel held up a hand, and the contractor stopped talking, because that’s what smart contractors did at moments like that. “I don’t want to see the control room,” Talbot said. “I want you to strap me in.”
“Sir.” The head of the entourage, a captain whose nametag read ROSALES, stepped in front of the contractor, perhaps protectively. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? We can have one of the staff go in for you, and you can tap into his feed. Much safer that way, and you’ll get a more objective look at the data.”
Talbot looked at her. “Captain. We have a system here that cost nearly half a billion dollars to make and maintain. It was designed to do one thing. It has stopped doing that thing for reasons that no one here—” and he looked from contractor to soldier to contractor, and all of them looked at the floor or the ceiling or something else that wasn’t the colonel, “I can explain. Now, you have two choices. You can strap me in and let me take a look so I can try to figure out what the problem is, or I can stop right here, make one phone call, and turn this whole thing over to the boys at NATICK, who’ll be happy to tear it apart and get you all reassigned.” He looked around again. “I would prefer not to make that phone call.”
“This way, sir.” Rosales was all business. She turned and led the procession, the colonel surrounded by a nattering cloud of contractors who simultaneously tried to prepare him for what he was getting into and undercut the advice the other contractors were giving. Rosales ignored them, as did Talbot, and went down a small corridor that ended at a set of double doors. Above those doors was a sign with clean block lettering that read PROJECT VEER and a logo that looked as if it had been created in the early 1980s. Talbot cocked his head wordlessly. Rosales gave a small shrug to show that it had not been her idea to commemorate a half–billion–dollar project with an eight–bit icon, and punched in an access code on a keypad.
The doors swung wide. Beyond them, fluorescent lights sputtered to life, illuminating an auditorium–sized room with a depressingly low ceiling. Scattered throughout were a series of self–contained pods that looked like nothing so much as portable storage units, albeit ones painted matte black. Thick cables snaked out of each of them, creating a pasta–bowl tangle on the floor before disappearing into vents and panels and other, less describable pieces of equipment.
“This is it?” the colonel asked.
Rosales nodded. “This is the working lab. Twenty pods, though the recommended maximum load is twelve.”
“After that we start losing fidelity on the simulation.” That was from one of the contractors, the short, slightly breathless one who’d provided the intel on the control room before. “We can pack all twenty if we have to, but there’s significant degradation on the terrain and other features, not to mention key aspects of the simulation.”
Talbot nodded. “So you’re saying when you hit sixty percent of spec, the whole thing starts to crap out. That’s fine; we won’t be needing that many. You, however—” he pointed at the contractor, “are going to forward all the logs and data dumps, not just the scrubbed ones you’ve been sending along, and get them to my staff by the time I’m done here. Captain Rosales, assign a couple of your people to make sure this happens and that nobody tries to get cute.”
“Sir.” Rosales snapped off a salute, then picked out a couple of members of the detail. They moved to strategic positions at the tech’s elbows, waiting.
“Now,” said the colonel, “let’s get hands–on here. I’ve got E–ring brass climbing up my ass for answers, and the sooner I have them, the sooner those guys are off all our cases.”
“Technically, they’re getting a fully immersive simul—”
The soldiers Rosales had assigned bundled up the contractor and marched him off in the direction of the hall before he could really get rolling. The door slammed, abruptly cutting off the man’s voice, and there was a moment of relieved silence before Talbot spoke up. “Captain Rosales? In small words, please.”
She took a deep breath and launched the memorized spiel. “Sir. VEER was initially an SBIR initiative intended to be a response to the question of providing cost–effective, highly flexible training for small units likely to be inserted into Fourth Generation warfare scenarios.”
“Which means?”
“Colonel, the project brief was to create a bleeding–edge virtual reality space that could be reprogrammed to represent any battlefield scenario down to granularities of terrain, weather conditions, OPFOR tactics and gear, and just about anything else you could think of. Language, degradation of equipment, all theoretically accounted for.”
The colonel nodded. “And at the low cost of a half a billion?”
“If the pilot program worked, it would have been scaled up. The cost in savings on ammunition alone would have put the project in the black in under a decade.”
“And when you’re dealing with the sort of people who are backing this, a half billion’s chump change anyway,” he muttered sotto voce. “Let’s take a look under the hood, shall we?”
Another one of the contractors—a tall, strongly built woman with nails bitten down to the quick, stepped to the nearest pod and examined the control panel next to the sliding door that served as an entrance. “This one’s warmed up, Colonel. But it’s not much to see from this side.”
“Everything in due time,” he said. “Crack it open.”
“Sir.” She hit a few buttons and the door slid open. Inside was a chair, black leather in the latest ergonomic design. Folded up on the chair was what looked like a flight suit, and sitting on top of that was a nondescript gray helmet.
“That’s it?” For once, Talbot sounded surprised.
The contractor, whose badge read McGill, nodded. “Wearable computing, sir. No plugging in necessary; it’s all wireless. We can jack the user in to a power source if they’re staying under longer than the battery charge, and we stole a couple things from NASA for bodily functions for multi–day ops, but
really, that’s it. The containers are mainly for sensory dep and creating psychological boundaries.”
Talbot nodded. “I see. I’m not going to gain anything by just looking at it. Strap me in.”
“Sir?”
“You heard me. Strap me in. I want to see what’s going wrong from the inside.”
Rosales cleared her throat. “Colonel. As I’m sure you’re aware, there is a significant malfunction inside VEER. The smallest routine they’ve got is for four operators. Going in solo could be hazardous.”
Colonel Talbot looked at her. “Captain, your concern is noted. And now I’m going to put on the fancy pajamas and play the taxpayer–funded video game to find out why it won’t do what it’s supposed to. Worst comes to worst, I’ll have you put in another quarter and go at it again.”
“Colonel, that’s not—”
“Captain, we’re done. Dr. McGill, suit me up.”
The contractors rushed in to prep the colonel, McGill shooting Rosales a quick look of embarrassed sympathy. Too quickly, the colonel was stepping inside the pod and the door was sliding shut. “Everything’s green,” said another one of the techs.
McGill checked the control pad once again.
“Confirmed.” She tapped a few buttons. “Colonel, prepare for insertion in thirty seconds. Just need to give the sim time to generate the terrain.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” came his voice, slightly distorted by a tinny speaker on the panel. “Fire when ready.”
McGill turned to Rosales. “So you haven’t told him what’s really going on in there?”
§
War Stories Page 9