I had a dream the night before you told me. We were climbing a sloped road and it was winter. Wolves paced behind us but they just followed our tracks. At the top of the hill lay bodies in black open bags. We walked right by them and entered a bar; the Olympics were on TV and everyone looked at us with vague suspicion. I tried to order nachos and eventually you had to flag down the waitress and repeat it three times. For some reason we were lodged into a table with three other men, all older, who stared at us with the blank looks of the lobotomized. They were locals and we weren’t.
We ate our nachos and left the bar. The wolves were gone. More bodies had collected on the hill. At the bottom of the hill, at the side of the road, a child was digging ditches. I asked you if you recognized any of the dead and you said no.
The dead lined up outside our door.
They wouldn’t let us in.
We couldn’t go home.
So I started to zip up the body bags and you churned the dirt and snow together with a shovel until it looked like cake mix.
The world was quiet and the air didn’t bite. In any other dream it might have been peaceful.
The next morning you told me you were going back to space.
I yelled at you for two hours.
§
The things we say when we’re trying not to hurt.
You have a death wish.
You’re an adrenalin junkie.
You just want to kill people.
It hasn’t even been a year, you can’t give it a year?
You stood there with your hands open like you wanted to take all of my words, like you were inviting them.
So I threw them at you like knives.
And you bled. The red ran down your body and pooled at your feet, stained the floors, threw in spatter behind your head to be analyzed later by an evidence unit.
How many lives do you think you have?
Why don’t you go to therapy?
Who’s the guilty one here?
“I’m not built for anything else.” While you began to pack.
I’m not built for anything else either.
I’ve modified myself for you. I had my organs ripped out and replaced, programmed to your genetic code. I was brought down by the side of the road. I can’t scour out the scratches, can’t bang out the dents. I’m running on my last fuel cell and you’re just running.
“Better to get out now.”
Why?
“Better to only waste a year on me.”
So now it’s for my own good. Unilateral decisions for my own good.
It got down to begging. I’ve become one of those. Because in the dream I was zipping up body bags and you’re going back to war. You’re going too far and I don’t want to write any more letters.
I don’t want your cousin to call me in the middle of the night.
The things we say when we’re trying not to hurt.
I love you and I don’t want you to leave.
I don’t think I said that first part.
I won’t wait for you.
“Good.”
And you walked on out.
§
Do you ever want to take it back? That last word?
I lied too, you know.
I’m still waiting.
Two years waiting and Anna says no news is good news. We’ve been whittled to pat assurances.
You’ve been gone for longer than we were together. In the scale of that I wonder some days why I’m holding on.
Between the anger and the missing is some truth I have yet to grasp.
I won’t call it love.
§
Let’s say you show up at the garage again and yank me out from beneath a car.
Let’s say we make a scene and it’s like fighting but it’s not.
Let’s say neither of us apologize because we’re just so happy you’re alive.
Let’s say it lasts.
Let’s say you aren’t dead already, or missing, and the war will end.
Let’s say it ends and you come home for good. There are no more fronts to fight, no more rebels to put down.
Let’s run through this one more time. I’ll give you five scenarios, the only rule is you can’t lie.
The only rule is you can’t die.
Confirm or deny.
Let me tell you a story about a soldier I met in the snow.
Let me show you all the parts of him that make up the whole of me.
§
Dear Tuvi.
I’m sick of feeling this way.
You’re a bastard.
Love, Jake.
§
The truth is life happens anyway. I have conversations with it too and I’m yelling at it just as much. You’re not allowed to carry on. The air isn’t allowed to move into my lungs. The world isn’t allowed to spin. I’m not allowed to win more races. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. I don’t want to drink to victory. I can’t see Anna anymore. Your niece and nephew miss you. Your uncle still brings his car by. Everyone keeps asking about you.
It’s worse when they stop asking.
It’s worse when the news says the war is over and our boys and girls are coming home.
Everyone is lying.
If there’s a way for you to stay in deep space, you will.
If I’d only known that first night how far the cold ran.
But who am I kidding?
§
The news shows the footage of the ships blinking in, like stars. Spontaneously birthed.
One, two, five, nine, fifteen.
Popping in like God is sticking pins into the night sky.
Almost three years you’ve been gone.
I can’t do the math.
The theory of relativity states that the further out you are, the harder it is to forget you.
§
Do you know you left one of your T–shirts in my drawer? Actually two.
I’m sorry but you don’t get them back.
§
When she told me you were at the VA hospital I nearly crashed trying to get to you.
The theory of relativity states that the second you’re in my orbit again, I forget the past three years.
Time contracts right back to that moment. When you left me. Do you want to take it back?
My footsteps on the hospital floors.
Take it back, take it back, take it back.
I’ll wait for you.
I’m not angry anymore.
I was selfish and scared.
I’m not brave.
I touched your spine and the scars on your skull. I was afraid with all the lives you’d lived up, there wouldn’t be one left for me.
They put you to lie on a flat bed.
They’re growing your insides.
They’ve printed out your skin.
They’re giving you a new eye.
Your body seems transparent in the light of so many lasers and the glue they use to hold you together.
I imagine you turning to look at me. You see me through the doors.
You see right through me.
Here to give me a new paint job, Jake?
Let me get my hands into you. Let me meld this bone to that, drive this rivet in, attach an extra plating for heat resistance. Heart resistance. I can make you run again. I’ve designed you something new. You’ll be stronger, faster, and happier. I’ll scour out all the things you’ve seen, I’ll burn the bad dreams until they’re winter blue.
Just let me touch you.
I don’t care if you’re cold.
I don’t care where you’ve been.
This is what I’m good at.
I’m good with you.
§
They say not to expect the same you.
I’m not the same, so we’re even.
Distance and time flayed us both alive.
§
I promise you soba noodles done just the way you like. A little spicy, served with chopsticks. Open your eyes. It’s be
en a long sleep. You won’t remember, maybe, but that won’t stop my dreams.
We don’t have to leave the covers when it’s a snowy Sunday morning. Later in the afternoon I’ll pack your coat with ice. We’ll chase each other down the block and cheat the rules. I’ll teach you how to ride in bad weather and you’ll dent every piece of machinery I own. The fluid in me can manufacture you. Let’s pretend we grew up together. Let’s be born anew. Say the scientific names of the stars because romance isn’t as sweet as reality. Give me an idea of what it’s like to lose gravity. I’ll be the thing you fall back to.
Everyone is waiting.
We’ve got more places to go. I’ve mapped the route. We’ll pass through every season and stop at the beach and all the seas. You’ll get salt in your eyes and I’ll allow myself to cry. We’ll have a picture perfect ending that’s all about horizons. There are more colors in a sunrise than there are stars in the sky. Let me show you.
I’m waiting.
Then we’ll awaken and figure this out.
You don’t have to know right now.
There’s no more war to run back to. Just this one inside of you.
Here, that’s my fingertip.
I know you can feel that. I see you move.
Even if you return to space, this time I’ll follow you.
Here, tell me a story. Tell me there will be no more killing. Tell me there will be no more enemies.
Tell me a story and begin it with I love you.
War 3.01
Keith Brooke
FRIDAY NIGHT WAS GOING TO be just how Friday nights usually were. A few pints of Guinness, although it’s never as good as it is back home in Donaghmede. A kebab from the Istanbul, heavy on the chili sauce. Maybe one or two JDs at the Talbot to finish. It was pretty much a sure thing he’d end up scuttered and wake up sometime Saturday with a head–splitting, sandpaper–throated hangover. That was the plan, as far as planning went. It was Friday night, after all, and he’d just been paid two days ago.
Town was more relaxed than it had been for months. People were out again, allowing themselves to get back to some kind of normal. The latest round of bioterror threats had put a damper on that for a time, but now they’d faded away without anything much new to be scared of. Time for a few drinks, some food, people’s guards starting to drop at last. It was almost a party atmosphere on the streets, and it was as if Kevin could feel the weight lifting. He hadn’t realised how oppressive it had all been, how much it had affected everything.
The downside was that the squaddies were out too. That always added an extra dimension for a young Irish migrant worker in a garrison town. Weedy, shorter than average, Kevin O’Farrell was easy game for skinhead soldiers pushing him about “for the craic,” as they would say. That kind of shit’s okay as long as everyone’s having a laugh, right?
He headed up Queen Street, fists in his hoody’s kangaroo–pouch pocket, sticking to the far side of the road from the squaddies’ pub, The Union. The chip shop next to the pub spamyelled him, sent taste–centre endorphins kicking down to his belly, making him hungry when he was not. Special deals for our regulars, Kevin. He Xed it.
The Union burned amber on his meSphere, a threatening glow layered over the real by his enhanced–reality lenses. It was a squaddie pub and it knew from his meSphere profile that he was a Mick. There was an app for that. There always was. Fuck ’em all and back, eh?
There were three of the gobshites outside, sucking on cigarettes held in meaty–clawed hands. Pressed dark–blue jeans, heavy black boots with a mean shine, white polo shirts, tattoos of union flags and barbed wire. StreetThreat flagged the situation as level 8: squaddies, booze, a vulnerable ethnic who’s fair game because he’s young and male.
Kevin kept his head down.
HeadKutz spamyelled his meSphere: half–price weekday haircuts, and, for a moment before he Xed that too, his vision was overlaid with head and shoulders of how he might look with a buzz, a flick, a sweeparound, rather than the shaggy urchin mop he had now. Even as he blocked HeadKutz, he had to smile at the real–time wizardry that had taken CCTV stills of him and realityShopped him almost beyond recognition.
Bad move, that. Walking past a squaddie pub, smiling.
Just as Kevin had layers of apps in his ’sphere feeding his enhanced perception of the world all around, so too did they. They’d be standing there with their lagers and their cigarettes and their testosterone, and they’d see Kevin: flagged up as a Mick, coming here and taking English jobs. And smiling about it.
They weren’t all like that, of course, and Kevin was smart enough to know as much: he’d never make the mistake of lumping them all together the way some of them did to everyone else. But the ones that did… their realities were enhanced, their meSpheres knew what they liked and what they believed, and they filtered out the irrelevant noise. Everything was enhanced, and that included prejudices.
Kevin knew how it worked. He knew all about the fuzzy quantum mathematics that helped meSphere apps anticipate the illogical logic of human thought. Just because someone likes A and they also like B, it doesn’t mean they like A and B together. The brain doesn’t follow that kind of logic. Except when it does. Search engine developers had known for years that algorithms based on quantum logic could uncover meanings and patterns in data far more efficiently than classical algorithms. Quantum reasoning was a far better model for how the brain worked out those hidden meanings than any other approach. Apply these algorithms to the meSphere and you got a reality enhanced with prompts and ads and buddy–links you could almost have chosen for yourself, only better.
And so those three squaddies—with their fags and their beer and their apps that picked out Kevin and said he was the kind of scruffy gobshite that was bringing this country down—turned as one, like programmed automata. One raised a fist with a ciggie sticking out between first and second finger; another started to make some kind of gesture that involved a finger and the side of his head and lowering forward like a caveman.
Kevin kept walking.
He wanted to run, but if he did and they were serious he knew they would catch him easily.
He locced Ziggy and Emily and Matt via the meSphere. The three of them were in the Lion’s Head on High Street. A couple of minutes’ walk if he could just keep going and the gimps at The Union would forget about him. He pinged his friends, let them know he was on his way.
He risked a glance across and was accosted by HeadKutz again, something in his profile flagging him as a prime target for a cut–price haircut. Maybe he should. No reason why a backroom search–logic geek had to look like one.
But the three gobshites…
Two were staring at each other, and the other one of them peered up as if he could see the stars through the glare of the street lights and it was the first time he’d ever seen them.
And there was nothing.
The Union wasn’t amber, flagged as no–go. StreetThreat didn’t hang 8s over the three thugs. It was gone. All of it was gone.
That was when the war started. And that was when it ended.
§
The meSphere kicked back in with a pixelated staccato of screen–flicker. It stablised, and then a message flashed up, a semi–transparent pop–up overlaying everything.
There was a war, it read. You lost. Life will go on as normal, but with less extravagance and with the utmost respect for those who believe. We will not relent in pursuing the enemy. We control the meSphere. We won. In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. We are the Brethren of the Jihad. We are your humble servants.
Kevin’s head pinged with messages and alerts. Friends and family loccing him.
Ziggy: You get that bro? What the fuck? It for real ya think?
Sandeep, uber–geek on the search–illogic team: Hey Kev. Dig the profiles! They bucket–testing the shit outta this war.
Even his kid brother Eoin, back in Dublin: They shitting us or what? We just lost World War fricking Three?
“Stand down? What do they mean, stand down?” grunted one of the squaddies, the one with a ginger buzz–cut and cartoon–square features. “We’s not even fucking stood up.”
Kevin forgot himself and stood there staring at the three.
One of the other squaddies shrugged. “How we supposed to know?” he said. “We only got orders, init?”
They saw Kevin staring, but somehow they didn’t look threatening any more. They looked confused, diminished. “You know what’s happening, do you?” Kevin asked.
Ginger buzz–cut looked across at him, then let loose with a stream of violent abuse.
Kevin backed off and hurried away.
All around him, the meSphere stuttered its overlay. Restaurants spamyelled him, then fell quiet. His headspace was quiet, and then there was an abrupt flurry of pings and messages. Then quiet again.
Another pop–up appeared, empty, then vanished.
He felt dizzy, disoriented.
He had to stop, and lean against a wall. It felt like there was a war in his head, even though he knew that the war had already happened. It had started, it had finished. It was all over, lost.
But still, his head was bombarded with spamyells and visual static. Noise that meant nothing, or might have meant everything if only he could understand. His head kept reeling and he felt sick.
He concentrated on breathing. A simple thing, yet so hard.
Breathing.
He messaged Emily and Ziggy, and Ziggy sent back, Hey bro. Ya getting the news?
He blinked up a feed, but it was sporadic, frequently interrupted and washed over with random noise. What he could pick up was being doctored, realityShopped like those HeadKutz photos. The BBC stream had a new overlay in a language he didn’t recognise. It used Latin characters but not in a way he was used to. Indonesian, Phillipino… he wasn’t sure.
War Stories Page 35