Sally noticed her staring, looked over at the guys, and smiled. “Cute. You should go over and talk to them. Maybe they were out where you were.”
“Nah. Drone jockeys.”
“How can you tell?”
Amanda gestured towards the t–shirt, but not enough so the guy might notice. “ ‘Boots On Ground? Ass In Chair! Telebombing Mother Fuckers.’ ”
“Shit. What are they even doing here? Like they’re really soldiers or something.”
“They are, officially. They get medals and everything.”
“Yeah, I know, but… shit.” The next round arrived and Sally raised her glass. “Here’s to real combat, girlfriend. Here’s to actual fucking risk.”
Amanda raised her glass, drank, and excused herself to hit the head. On the inside of the stall someone had scrawled, BJ4F. It seemed familiar but she couldn’t quite place it. Blow Jobs for Free? How generous.
When she came back they finished their beers and Sally asked if she wanted to go to another place she knew about that was quieter. Amanda begged off and when Sally left Amanda went over and started talking to the two guys at the table, who really were cute. Turned out the guy wearing the t–shirt was the boyfriend of the other guy, who was the actual drone pilot. The t–shirt guy was an accountant or something. They were nice and it wasn’t too bad talking with them about nothing in particular but when they started technobabbling about the war and the drone pilot started getting all superior about how trying to jaunt bombs to targets didn’t work, how any explosive device moved with the transporter showed up at its target scrambled and useless, she lost interest and went home. The next night she came back and met a guy who had been Boots on Ground and had even been in Bravo Company just like her, although they’d been in different platoons. They went back to his place and fucked, and it was okay, but the fact that he had seen combat didn’t really make any difference. Neither did the fact that he had a robot left leg. She said she’d call him but they both knew she wouldn’t.
The next morning she was in the kitchen with Larry and Gramma Rosie. Ernie had already left for work and Neal hadn’t skyped in yet. Gramma Rosie made morning talk as she prepared breakfast: how’d you sleep (fine), did you have a good time last night (yes, which wasn’t completely a lie), did you see the news, what is Congress thinking trying to push another impeachment so soon after the last one (how should I know, and what difference does it make). But then when they were seated she started trying to talk to Amanda about what her plans were.
“I know you haven’t been back all that long, dear, but your fathers and I both believe you need to start thinking about what you want to do next.”
“You mean get a job? I told you I was setting aside part of my pay to help out.”
“I know, and that’s wonderful, it’ll really help. But that’s not going to last much longer, and—oh, what am I saying, it’s not anything to do with money. You don’t need to worry about that. Go back to school if you want.”
“I’m thinking about it,” Amanda lied.
“I’m sure you are, sweetheart. But don’t you need to make some plans? I’m glad you’ve got some friends to hang out with, and God knows you deserve some time to yourself, but—we just worry, is all. We just want what’s best for you.”
“They’re afraid you have PTS,” Larry said without looking up from his eggs or his screen.
Gramma Rosie glared at him, caught herself, and said, “Larry, that’s not true. Amanda is just fine. I’m sure she doesn’t have post–traumatic stress disorder.”
“It’s not a disorder,” Amanda said. “They haven’t called it that in years.”
“That’s what I told them,” Larry said. “I told them if you had PTS you’d be seeing things and shooting at them, right?”
The mandatory session before she left the islands: During a traumatic event, your higher brain functions are subordinated to the amygdala, the part of your brain that controls emotional responses and memories. When you remember those events, the brain wants to recreate the same processes that controlled your response to the original event. That’s what flashbacks are: your brain wanting your body to crank up the adrenaline and cortisol, to try to survive all over again. But even if you’re not reaching for your weapon when you hear a balloon pop, you can still be at risk. Some of our scientists think the trauma can actually shrink the amygdala, which also shrinks your emotional responses. That’s when we start looking at depression…
“Right. I’m fine. Don’t worry.” So far she’d managed to put off the mandatory check–in at her local veterans’ center.
“Of course you are, dear,” her grandmother resumed. “But you fathers and I still—”
“Why do they call it jaunting?”
Larry put down his fork and looked up from his screen. It took a few seconds for Amanda to answer, she was so struck by his eyes, how deeply brown they were, almost red. Had she forgotten that? Had she never noticed?
“What?”
“The transport. Why do they call it jaunting?”
“It’s from that sci–fi movie. That’s what they called transport in the book.”
“Did they use it for troops?”
“They used it for all kinds of things.” Amanda had seen The Stars My Destination like everyone else and then read the novel while she was deployed. There was more down time than people realized. She had read a lot.
“How was it?”
“It was okay.”
“Maybe you should watch it, Larry, and then you and your sister could talk about it.”
Larry tapped his screen three times. “Got it.”
Gramma Rosie smiled. A bonding moment between her grandchildren seemed to have taken her mind off her granddaughter’s future. Amanda was genuinely glad, if it made her grandmother feel better. Gramma Rosie had always been there, and when Amanda was in second grade and her dads needed some time to work things out, Gramma Rosie had been pretty much the only one there. Amanda loved her grandmother and wanted her to be happy, wanted to please her, but what she wanted now more than anything else was for everyone to just stop talking. The three of them cleared the table and Amanda headed upstairs. Out of the corner of her eye she caught the news crawl on the living room screen, the words BLIND JAUNT FOR FREEDOM, and she remembered. That was what BJ4F scratched inside the stall had meant.
When she got up to her room she checked online and yes, there it was. She had heard rumors when she was deployed, but it looked like since she’d gotten back the whole thing was starting to get noticed. Some people were calling it a fad. Others were calling it an epidemic. Veterans who had gotten to the war and back by jaunting were breaking into the control booths after hours, setting random coordinates, and running onto the platforms just in time to jaunt wherever the coordinates sent them. Some wound up just down the street. Others wound up in another country. A few found themselves a hundred feet above a thousand miles of ocean, and some found themselves inside a wall. Some even found themselves back on the front lines. But the ones who survived and chose to talk about it described how they’d felt before in terms that Amanda immediately recognized, and they all said afterwards they felt better. Some of the contractor firms were starting to post guards at the control booths.
Amanda read some more and decided the whole thing was crazy. Things weren’t that bad. Not for her. They just weren’t. She switched the screen to a book and closed her eyes. The book’s voice made her drowsy. She slept through lunch. Over dinner Ernie tried to have the same conversation with her that Gramma Rosie had tried to have over breakfast, but it didn’t last very long and he wound up kissing her on the forehead and saying, “Just let us know when you’re ready,” without telling her what it was exactly that she was supposed to be ready for.
And then a couple of weeks later Amanda was out walking around town when she got lost. Not lost like she couldn’t locate her destination, because she didn’t have one. She was walking down Pickett Street towards Main, and when she turned the co
rner at Carter’s Drug Store, she realized she didn’t know where she was. She knew she had just turned onto Main Street and was walking past Carter’s. She knew Gramma Rosie kept her prescriptions there even though Wal–Mart was a lot cheaper because Carter’s was where she had bought her comic books when she was a kid, she knew it was where Larry had had his first summer job. But if the leader of the New People’s Army himself had at that moment put a gun to her head and asked her the name of the town she was in, or even what day of the week it was, he would have had to pull the trigger. Everything outside her was like a screen with the contrast turned way too high, and everything inside her felt almost like it did just before she jaunted. She dropped to her knees and stayed there until a girl about Larry’s age came by and helped her up. She said she was okay and walked away before the girl could start asking her anything. After a couple of blocks everything came back and she made her way home.
That evening down the post she told Sally what happened. She kept running into Sally and had decided she was okay.
“I told you that jaunting wasn’t right,” Sally said.
“It never bothered me before.”
“It’s a delayed reaction.”
“Don’t you fucking dare say I have post traumatic anything.”
“I’d say dematerializing and popping up halfway around the world is pretty goddamn traumatic, wouldn’t you?”
“That’s not what it was.”
“Then what was it? I saw a post yesterday that said jaunting actually shrinks part of your brain, flattens you out—”
“Bullshit.”
“—makes anything that fucked you up in combat even worse.”
The mandatory session: …you may have heard that some preliminary studies have indicated that the jaunting process may affect the limbic system. At this point there is no conclusive evidence that this is the case…
“There’s no evidence for that.”
Sally looked triumphant. “There you go. If someone says there’s no evidence for it, that means someone else thinks there is.”
“Look, I just got dizzy, okay? I shouldn’t have skipped lunch.”
Sally lost her triumphant look. Now she looked more like Gramma Rosie over breakfast. “Okay, whatever you say. But if it happens again, let someone know, all right?”
Amanda promised that she would. They had another round and Sally again brought up going someplace quieter, and this time Amanda said okay. By the end of the evening they were back at Sally’s place, but when it didn’t work and Sally started crying Amanda just walked out.
A week later, Amanda went with Ernie and Gramma Rosie to see Larry’s summer league baseball game. Neal skyped in from South Bend. It was the closest thing to a family outing they had had since she had gotten back. She didn’t tell any of them about what had happened outside of Carter’s, and she certainly didn’t tell them it had happened two more times since then.
The sun beat down as hot as it ever had in Mindanao, but she liked the flat perfect grass and the flawless lines of the diamond, and she liked watching the players. They weren’t scattered. Orderly. They were exactly where they were supposed to be. Larry looked perfectly at ease in center field, and when he came to bat she cheered as loudly as anyone. He struck out, walked, was left on first when the next batter flied out, hit a single that drove in a run, struck out one last time. It all made perfect sense, even the fact that the other team won.
On the drive back she was unaware of anything anyone said. None of the streets seemed to have names, and when they got home she wasn’t sure where she was.
That night she lay in her bed in her room that was still technically just as she had left it and still actually felt so empty. She lay in her bed and stared at the blank ceiling and tried to understand what had happened, where it had all come from. The killing field where the bodies in the mud were so rotted away they didn’t look like bodies, they didn’t even smell. The house call where the parents were silent and the little girl wouldn’t stop screaming as they tore the place apart before Lt. Jeppson declared that it was the wrong fucking house. The guy sleeping beside her waking up screaming with a leech on his tongue—but that hadn’t happened, that had been in one of the books she had read. It all should have meant something, but it didn’t. Knowing the New People’s Army had put those bodies in the field didn’t make her want to be there. Watching the lieutenant drag the screaming girl’s father outside and throw him on the ground and act like he was going to shoot him didn’t make her want to leave. It didn’t mean anything then, and it didn’t mean anything now, and she didn’t want it to. Not her dads, not the vets down the post. Not the guy from Bravo Company. Not Sally. Certainly not Sally. Gramma Rosie? Larry? She didn’t want any of it to mean anything, but she wanted to feel something, she wanted to be somewhere. So she went downstairs and got in her dads’ car and drove to the platform where she had popped back home and, feeling no surprise at all that it was completely unguarded, went in and set the controls just as the net instructions had said. “Here’s to actual fucking risk,” she declared to no one in particular and ran as fast as she could for the platform that was as perfect as the baseball diamond, as brown as her brother’s eyes.
Black Butterflies
T.C. McCarthy
I HAVE THE DREAM AGAIN—the one where I guide thousands of butterflies through the clouds and into the city. Gravity is three times Earth standard. My butterflies are jet black with filmy, thin wings joined to narrow cores that hold their anti–gravity drives. The wings aren’t really wings but a kind of antennae that monitors gravity waves to guide acceleration. They flutter, though. Just like a butterfly’s.
The craft also carry a passenger—a robotic burrower that contains a tiny package of antimatter, one that will explode with enough force to crack through a juvenile Siph’s carapace and liquefy its brain matter. This point is important: its brain case is a Siph’s only weak spot, the only way to put one down. The butterflies land all over what looks like a mud dome a hundred kilometers across, and my vision switches to the burrowers’ views as they start drilling through and down, eager to reach targets. When they do, the screaming will start.
§
“Does it still hurt?” dad asks. He’s old now, his hair wispy and white across his head.
I lie. “No. Not so much. It’s getting less sensitive every day.” Then I reach up and touch the link ports at the back of my skull and realize again that I don’t want to do what he’s asking because it reinforces an already growing suspicion—that having half my grey matter replaced by silicon did something. That it changed me. But dad holds his back now, in pain, and he pants while leaning against the ag–terminal as our bots wait in a row that stretches to the horizon.
“I’m still not used to the new tech,” he says. “I can’t afford the damned eye implants and it’s getting hard for me to see the screens. If you can just code them to cover the fields, it’ll save me a lot of time. And we have about thirty that are down for maintenance; maybe you can look at them once we finish here.”
“What happened to all your help?” For some reason, the question hasn’t occurred to me until now. “All the guys that came in from Earth before I left.”
“Dead. Conscription teams came years ago and took everyone older than eighteen and younger than forty. For all I know they could have even been with you throughout the war; I lost track of everyone. All the children left and so few of you came back after the battle at Listman.”
Where the Black Butterflies lost the war—for everyone. Dad doesn’t have to say it, but I know it’s his next thought, maybe the reason why I have the dreams every night and why they seem so real. Before going into that mental spiral, I grab the terminal cord and slam it into the socket at the rear of my head, kicking my wetware into high gear so that sparks shoot across my field of vision—sparks that aren’t real, just tiny dots of light that form as an artifact of power–up. Dad disappears. Now thousands of views of the field clamor for attention and threat
en to overload my system with infrared and radar data as the bots wait to begin their sweeps. A few alarms are beeping because there are pests that dad missed the last time he combed the fields; half the crop is dying, eaten. Barely having to think, I tell the fake part of my brain what we’re doing. Then my thoughts rush forward at light speed with instantaneous decisions, logic that pulls me along in a trip that makes me feel part pilot, part lightning, sliding across the fields with an army of ag bots. After a while my cells need something. The warning for hunger is distant and annoying, an intermittent nudge that feels like a low vibration accompanied by a sensation that hours have passed, but the bots have so much work to do; many of them drop offline, broken. Part of me wants to cry because it’s proof that once I’m gone, dad will need help, since much of the farm is already beyond repair. So breaking for lunch would hurt him; I shut off the energy warnings and the system bends my legs to lower me to the dirt, then onto my back—to prevent damage in case I pass out.
By the time I finish, it’s dark. Dad is on the ground next to me and the terminal’s glow makes his face look dark gray so that he seems dead until I shake him awake and it takes him a second to blink in recognition.
“Thanks, Nick,” he says. “That would have taken me days.”
“I didn’t know things had gotten in such bad shape.”
“During the war it was hard to get repair materials and fertilizers—anything that went into building ships and weapons. There were seasons that I couldn’t even spray.” Then he stands and helps me up, which makes me feel guilty since he’s so frail. “Come on; it’s time for bed anyway—after we eat.”
“I’m not hungry and don’t feel much like sleeping these days, dad.”
Dad holds my hand and it scares me; it’s something he hasn’t done since I was three years old. “Whatever happened out there, Nick, it’s okay,” he says, “You’re home now,” but I don’t have the courage to tell him that soon they will come. For me. Siph have a shared and eternal memory and the Black Butterflies are branded into it, along with the brainwave pattern of their controllers, and Siph warriors never get tired of hunting.
War Stories Page 30