§
My dream starts off fuzzy. The communications beam takes an eternity to connect with the factory ship, a hollow asteroid containing its own gravity drive, antimatter production, and butterfly manufacturing lines. At first my wetware can’t find a local amplifier; once it does, there’s intense acceleration when the satellite cracks open an aperture to another universe–where the speed of light is infinitely greater than in ours—but then I can’t find a receiver signal. There should be one; there always is. The factory ship is supposed to beacon its receiver aperture location in a coded pulse, but when I query my own equipment to see if the problem is me the wetware responds with nonsense—a garbled mess that gives me a headache. Soon, though, the receiver signal arrives and the mother ship transmits a star map showing my new location, deep within Siph–controlled territory. The revelation almost pulls me from sleep. I don’t remember running an operation here during the war, which means this is new, a real dream that has an ending I’ve never seen, and there’s no choice except to settle in for the nightmare that’s about to come.
The butterflies are ready. Antimatter has been loaded into their bellies and my system has to pause for a few seconds because there are millions of them crowding my mind, more than I’ve ever controlled at once—more than I’ve ever seen assembled. A last–minute query runs through my wetware, which responds in less than a second: I’m controlling enough antimatter to wipe half a planetary population.
§
Dad’s face is white. He says goodbye and shuts off the com unit, which had woken us both up, and through the window I watch sunlight turn the sky pink. “That was Greg Simmons from downtown,” he says. “He works for the local security forces, and all hell’s breaking loose; a small Siph fleet is on its way here.”
“Why’d he call us?” I ask.
“He knows you came home.” Dad’s voice cracks and the sound of his panic hits my stomach like a cold spike. “He said you might want to think about hiding until we figure out what they want. Just in case they’re coming for you. They’ve been locking down human systems and looking all over the place for something—something that has to do with those antimatter drones you flew.”
§
I can’t feel my mouth. Terror makes my fingers feel as though they’ve inflated to the point of immobility and it muffles the words from people on the road to the point where they’re impossible to understand. Everyone recognizes me. Many of them hadn’t been born when I left for the war but it doesn’t matter, since they see my bald head with its ports and linkages and the military tattoos over each temple to show blood type, serial number and name; it’s obvious what I am. Some move to the other side of the street. Dad had warned me that it would be like this and had begged me to take his skimmer, to head in the opposite direction and into the country, so to make him happy I drove out of his sight and then turned onto a side road, looping back into town before parking.
Towns change when you leave for a long time, but everything has changed wrong. The Catholic Church is on the wrong side of the street and near it is the bakery where I worked as a teenager; it’s the wrong color. This is another town and the pre–war Nick no longer exists because so much of his grey matter is gone, carbon replaced with silicon and ceramics, so much so that my heat and cold tolerances are narrower and the nerve endings more sensitive, which results in constant headaches and a never–ending supply of painkillers to beat them back. Someone yells across the street wait, repeating it three times before I glance and notice a girl waving at me. She looks familiar. The girl wears a black jumpsuit, its fabric covered in complex Siph codes in orange that resemble intertwined shapes and swirls that only creatures with faceted eyes can read. Stay there! I mean something to her. She waits for a break in traffic and I watch her jog across the street.
The girl catches her breath. “I didn’t think I’d catch up. It’s lucky I found you at all. We never knew that you had made it back until this morning.”
“Do I know you?” I ask. She’s my age, and although she has hair, bits of service tattoos still show from underneath.
“I’m Jennifer Vallaincourt; we went to school together and got conscripted at the same time.” I must have been staring because she points to her temples. “The Siph want the tattoos to stay. So they can tell the difference between our ex–soldiers and civilians.” Then she plucks at her uniform and her smile disappears to be replaced by a far–off look and a red face. “I’m part of the transition team. We have to be ready to help carry out any changes they want once the Siph decide to take over this place, but we haven’t heard anything yet.”
“Then you don’t know?”
She shakes her head. “Know what?”
“A Siph fleet is on the way. Here. Now.”
Jennifer grabs my wrist and pulls me along the sidewalk; the crowds that had been there minutes before are gone, but pale faces peer out from behind privacy glass, their features blurred. Buildings flash by. Doors hum shut and Jennifer pounds on several and she presses the call buttons, but none of them open for us and my mouth goes dry so that now fear trips the targeting system to show movement and distances. A data pattern outlines Jennifer. My wetware recognizes her jumpsuit markings as Siph and I have to suppress the alarms but my thoughts aren’t fast enough to keep the system from stimulating my adrenal glands and everything begins to move in slow motion.
She drags me through a door before its steel lip can slide all the way shut and the motor whines when I push, forcing the slab to stay open for one second longer. Someone yells to get out. But Jennifer flashes a badge and then leads me to a booth, where she sits across from me and smiles.
“It’s a bar. Not a great one but they’ve been open all night and we’re lucky they were slow to lock up.”
“Why was everyone staring at me?” I ask. “Out there.”
“They’re afraid—of the Black Butterfly.” Jennifer whispers it and without thinking I send a signal to amplify her voice.
“What about them?”
“Not them. You. You’re the Black Butterfly and the drone craft are you. After what happened at Listman, everyone knows the Siph have been looking for the one who did it and nobody wants to be close when they arrive.”
“There were lots of us,” I say. “My training class had about a thousand others and when we deployed there were at least a hundred in my group, more than that at Listman. I never learned their names but we all loaded into capsules at the same time; I saw them before we launched. So how can I be the only Black Butterfly?”
Jennifer shakes her head. “That’s not how it happened.”
“How would you know?”
“I was a program engineer on the team that put together the targeting systems for your wetware. Everyone who deployed with you is dead. Gone. We loaded those other capsules with troops who failed the testing phase but who volunteered to accept wetware beacons that produced an emissions pattern like yours. Only they had none of the punch. Those guys didn’t even know about the butterflies.”
My head goes empty, light. None of her claims seem possible but Jennifer’s voice has a soft quality that makes me believe and why would she lie? “They were used as decoys—to protect me.”
“Yeah. Volunteers for the cause. Do you remember me?” she asks. “I mean… at all?”
“No. I’m Nick, by the way.”
Jennifer shakes her head and her expression makes me want to run because she frowns, and both shoulders square off to combine with the set of her jaw. “This would have been easier if someone had told us you were coming—to give us some time. Your name isn’t Nick; as soon as you were accepted into the program we scrubbed part of your memory deck so the Siph wouldn’t find any trace of Earth in the event of capture. Your father too, just in case he was a talker.”
Now the fear returns, colored with an anger that makes me grab the table, my knuckles going pale. If she sees me getting angry, Jennifer doesn’t show it.
“You’re James McLaughlin. You and you
r father moved from Earth after your mom died, and I had a huge crush on you all the way through school until the war started. They took you for combat. Me for science. I thought you were gone. Then one day I heard about a promising candidate for the antigravity drone program, someone whose synapse function and test scores had blown all our neuroscientists away. You. And there were other candidates from our school on the list. Adam Hermann, Scott Tomasi…”
The names refer to piles of dust. Jennifer’s voice fades as I consider the implications and the knot in my gut gets worse with each minute and tears drip from both eyes but there’s no point in wiping them. Half my head is a foreign object—an invader that my own race put there; soon it will inhibit my tear ducts. While she goes on I ping the bar’s network to look up the names Tomasi and Hermann and the results come back with video clips of children on Leviticus, just like she says, and in one of them I see myself. I’m taller than the others even at that age, but the boy is a stranger to me because who could be so happy in the face of what was coming and the boy must have been a fool because Jennifer is telling me that he died and was replaced by a facsimile named Nick. James McLaughlin doesn’t exist now. The pictures bring back memories of a sort, echoes in my grey matter that resemble old men muttering oh yeah, I remember Adam Hermann because he had the courage to ask Jennifer to be his girlfriend and so I had to watch him get her first kiss and first everything else under the pseudo–pines down on Hawthorne Drive. Her family was rich. Rich enough to have a real dog sent in from Earth, a German Shepherd that almost killed me one day when I walked into her house without knocking. Is that the Adam Hermann you wanted? But she just keeps talking like I care, oblivious to the fact that each word is like an anti–proton that detonates inside my skull, littering it with craters and smoke along with the corpses of people I used to know but can’t remember, people who are long dead from the war. Jennifer thinks she’s helping; I can tell by the way she smiles that she means well but now I know my dad was right and I need to get out into the country, away from her and everything else.
“It’s time to go, Jennifer. I don’t feel good.”
She takes my hand and leans forward. “Don’t go. Stay here for a while, Jimmy, and talk. You and I are the only ones left from the old group.”
“I can’t. Sorry.” But when I stand her face goes blank. Jennifer reaches into a pocket and pulls a black rod from it, a stun wand that she whips across the table. My wetware flicks into combat mode. The wand sparks against the wall, missing my forehead. Everything is slow now and Jennifer isn’t a warrior so she can’t see that she’s off balance and within less than a second her arm breaks in three places when I slam it against the table, making her scream. The door is just a few meters away. But before I can do anything else it opens and military police stream through, joining a separate group of police that swarms from the back—where they must have been waiting the whole time.
Jennifer cradles her arm and backs away. “The Siph want you. I’m sorry it went this way, Jimmy, but we had no idea you’d show up when you did. Our job is to keep everything going and we’ve already lost contact with three human systems now that they’re closing in; we’re just buying time. I’ll let your father know so he can come visit.”
“Visit me where?”
“A holding cell. At the spaceport in Fontaine—three hours by flitter. The Siph fleet should get here tomorrow afternoon and then you’re to be transferred to one of their shuttles for execution.”
§
My dreams flicker in and out of focus and it feels good to slip into the program and let the wetware cradle me in logic. We’re looking for something. There’s a network of communications channels all around and its beams crisscross to surround me in a web woven by psychotic spiders. Then one pops up that’s different from the rest, its communications encrypted in layers that we begin to pick apart with algorithms, one after another until I’m nestled within military communications traffic that consists of message after message regarding someone named James McLaughlin.
The name awakens a few extra synapses. But before I can dig further, the wetware’s logic master drags us onto something else, a data stream that links with our planetary defense network, and the complexity washes away the name James and replaces it with a sense of hopelessness as status readouts course through. An untouched fleet is docked here at Leviticus. But most of the ships have already been mothballed and are dormant despite being ready for a war that’s already lost, leaving a skeleton fleet that the Siph authorized so the local defense force can fight piracy. It’s better than nothing; we dive into its comms network to begin the sequence for taking over the biggest ship, a large cruiser, to arm its weapons and target the incoming fleet. I’m about to own it when the data streams disappear.
§
A rifle butt slams into my skull and someone laughs in a high–pitched way that sounds as if he’s insane—part laugh, part scream. The sound is piercing. My hands are up, trying to block the next blow and when this one cracks into my forearm it snaps one of the bones and I realize the laughter and screams are coming from me, and now the pain from my arm is almost unbearable and I curl into a ball and pray for the beating to end, grateful when someone yells stop it!
“He was trying to break into our defense network,” another person says—a man who sounds out of breath and must have been the one hitting me. “Our techs couldn’t handle it and he almost took over the entire fleet.”
“Sedate him. I’m getting the doc.”
There’s minor damage to some of the wetware–gray matter linkages but already my system repairs them and the injection someone gives me will help because it’s a strong sedative and provides chemicals that my system can scavenge for its maintenance. But now there’s a renewed sense of terror: the man’s words—that I was trying to break into the defensive network—register, and what he says can’t be possible because it was a dream. But part of me is beginning to fear that I can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy anymore, and then I want to scream because just before blacking out I decide maybe the difference is negligible.
§
“It couldn’t have been my wetware; those were all just dreams.” But the words sound too much like I’m pleading, so when Jennifer shakes her head it doesn’t surprise me.
Her arm is in a sling; I didn’t mean to hurt her. As with mine, though, microbots have healed much of the broken bone and she doesn’t show signs of pain. “I know you really believe that,” she says, “but we had operational scans of your electromagnetic activity, specifically of your cranial area. We did it when you were awake and asleep.”
“So?”
“So your wetware is only marginally active when you’re awake. Storage and query processing work fine, and even lower defensive protocols, but you’re not reaching any of the higher functions like comms or drone operations. At night it’s a different story. We think that once you’re asleep your conscious self isn’t there to control things and so your wetware activates and goes back to war, using your brain for as much processing control as it needs; that’s why you see it as a dream.”
The thought makes my skin crawl—that my system takes over in my sleep, turning me into a kind of zombie. “That’s impossible. They fried my drone and antigravity control systems when I mustered out because after Listman Command didn’t want me active; they didn’t want the technology captured. And I spent a year getting home just because they needed me to take a long route to scrub my exit and make sure the Siph couldn’t track it. Everything went smoothly.”
“Jimmy—”
“It’s Nick, goddammit!” My shout surprises her and the guards raise their carbines, pointing them at my head.
“What is this all about?” Dad sits next to me. He seems ten years older than he did yesterday because his voice shakes and the conference room chair swallows him in synthetic fabric, which is easy because he’s gotten so small and thin. I remember when he was young. There are pictures in his study of a man whose combat
suit fails to hide the fact that he’s huge, with muscles that almost don’t fit into the ceramic carapace and that once threw me across the base pool when I was six. I move to grab his wrist—just to touch him because the guilt feels like a pressure on my chest, makes it hard to breathe—but I can’t; they’ve hand–cuffed me to my chair.
“It’s complicated, Mr. McLaughlin,” says Jennifer. She sighs, and at first I think that I’ll have to explain it, but then Jennifer tells him about the early program and that because of Listman I’m being handed over. The story is one that I know. Still, to hear it from her in a clinical way—detached and sterile—makes me realize that for her and others the war isn’t real; it’s a series of events to be discussed in boardrooms and academic think tanks, where death can be dissected using statistics and AI–modeling and where the worst consequences are the inconvenience of the occasional all–nighter or heartburn from drinking too much coffee, and for a moment I feel nauseous. But then the words stop mattering; Jennifer and the war are irrelevant. Dad stares into space and he begins to cry and it’s easy to imagine what he thinks, that his son is gone and instead they’ve replaced him not with a monster but a machine, someone whose name isn’t even Nick and whose silicon and ceramics has changed him into the new angel of death. A weapon. A criminal who needs to be chained to a chair and handed over to the Siph for all that he’s done, and then dad looks at me and I almost start crying too.
War Stories Page 31