So It Begins (Defending The Future)

by James Chambers

  The devil stared into the darkest parts of my soul and smiled. It knew the answer. I nodded gravely, “If need be.”

  There was a break in the conversation as we crested the ridge and plunged into the forest beyond, “And that’s merciful?”

  “It is merciful to you, to your family, and to all of the future victims of your tormentor.”

  Brad’s steps stuttered to a stop, “What about mercy for the dead guy?”

  “I am not responsible for him. I am responsible for your mom. I am responsible for your sister. I am responsible for you.”

  Brad frowned, but rushed to catch up both physically and conversationally, “But what if he goes to hell? What if there is no afterlife?”

  “Well, in answer to your first question: If he goes to hell, then that’s what he deserved under God’s Supreme Justice. To the second: If there is no afterlife then what we have right now is all we get, and it’s even more important that we protect the weak from the vicious.”

  We walked in silence for a while. “You used to be a mercenary, right, Dad?”

  “Yes.”

  And then he asked the question that haunts all men: “Are you going to Heaven?”

  The answer, written long ago inside the back of my head, buoyed to the surface like a cork. “I have done things that I’m not proud of, and I’ve asked forgiveness for those things. I guess I was lucky: My mercenary team was one of the good ones . . . We did the best we could, and we fixed a lot more than we broke.”

  “But you killed men.”

  I hated doing it, but I let his question freeze to death in the empty space between us.

  I stopped at the tree line and scanned the meadow beyond, wary of revealing ourselves but just as wary of being late to our hunting spot. Bradley crept up next to me, and followed my example. I decided to cross the open space, but we did it quickly. His breath was becoming ragged but he managed the crouched run as well as I could have expected of any green recruit. Once we reached the relative safety of the woods, I patted him on the shoulder and guided him to a fallen tree. We sat and drank some water from our canteens. We took a few more seconds rest, then we put the frosty little buggers back inside our heavy clothing so they wouldn’t freeze. I motioned him to his feet. Clear as any writing on a wall: the only thing pushing him on was his desire for me to be proud of him. I clapped him on his back. “Not far now.”

  And then he rolled a verbal grenade between my legs, “Will your mercenary crew come to help, Dad?”

  I took my eyes away from the billion deadly possibilities around us and focused in on my son. He wasn’t just frightened. Hell, I was frightened. Bradley had passed terrified, and was numb, his higher mind refusing to consider the future in detail, simply casting from second to second for any hope. “I don’t know, son, but we have to keep moving. Then you can cut sling-load and go.”

  He nodded, stare affixed on the surface of the snow. I patted him on the shoulder, but when he looked up all he saw was my back. It was time to go. We had to go. Time was running out. We crested the next rise on our bellies, weaving though buried treetops that poked out of the frost like bushes. I started to fumble though thick gloves with the pouches at my thigh, but my son was quicker, he handed me a pair of micro/binoculars. They unfolded like a pair of old-fashioned eye glasses, powering on and magnifying the pass above. Somewhere up there was the hunting blind. Somewhere out there was our prey.

  “Dad?”

  I collapsed the m/inocs and handed them back to my son with a flash of smile, “All clear. Almost there.”

  “Dad? Why are we here?” I turned to him, and I realized there was another, deeper question pressing on the inside of his head, a pressure that thumped in time with the seconds of the clock. “Why do we have to be here?”

  The little demon of my old life tapped me on the shoulder and told me I had looked at the boy too long. I scanned the skyline again. Nothing. “It’s because of fear, because of cowardice, but mostly it’s about mercy.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  My eyes strained for any sign of the dawn that should be three hours off. We still had two kilometers to cover, but I realized that this was important, perhaps the most important thing I would ever have to tell my son. I waved him back to motion, checking his straps as he went by. I shifted the straps on my shoulders to spread around the bruises. The demon poked at me playfully, telling me I was old. As if I needed reminding.

  I took a deep breath and tried to collect everything together, but I just couldn’t. There was so much stupidity, so much fear; there was just no way to lay it out straight for the damn kid. The weight of meter after meter of cold, hard snow added up to minutes of silence. I hate answering questions with silence. It gets to be a habit. Dark things slithered inside me, and the demon slapped them back into the shadows.

  “You see . . .” And that was all I had. We walked farther, higher, up toward the high valley, “Son . . .”

  Anger, cold and primal, began to shake deep inside me. It wasn’t fair. I could handle the dying. Dying was easy. Explaining to my simple, frontier-world son that the Kingdom of God was so. . . “A long time ago, Christians did things, evil things—”

  “Evil?”

  I sighed and set my jaw. “Every couple of centuries, somebody figures that they know the mind of God and go off to enforce His Will.”

  I felt Brad’s eyes accuse the back of my head of heresy, “Imposing God’s Will is wrong?”

  I tried to drain the pus out of my voice and failed, “God’s Will is fine, as long as you think that a human being can comprehend it. I don’t.”

  “But what if our will is God’s Will?”

  “Trust me, Bradley, if God needs His Will imposed, He will find a way to do it without people like us mucking up the works. We strive to live as examples for others to follow, we stand up for what we believe, we defend ourselves and our faith against attack, but we do not force or enforce. Dreadful evil can be done in the name of goodness, son.”

  I heard his steps falter. His voice took on an edge, “How can anything in the name of goodness be evil?”

  “A whole lot of evil is done in the name of somebody’s good. The Romans defended their faith against the Christians by tossing them to lions. Catholics defended their faith against Protestants by pouring boiling water down their throats until they converted. Protestants burned old women they believed had powers granted by the Devil. Christians crusaded against Muslims, and Muslims waged Jihad against everyone. Communists defended the people against the corruption of any religion by shooting, hanging, and torturing anyone who believed in anything other than the holy Marx or the great Lenin—” I glanced back at Bradley. He looked like a prize fighter that had taken one too many blows to the chin. I reached back and steadied him as our path angled uphill. “In each case, every single time, atrocities were committed with full faith that they alone knew the definition of good. It was—”

  Without thought, my hand slipped off of his shoulder and I grabbed the strap of his pack. I heaved him to the snow, following a heartbeat later. My rifle was already up, scanning the tree line and horizon. Bradley floundered, spitting out snow and pushing his hood out of his eyes instead of getting his weapon ready. I swallowed angry words as Brad began to speak, but I silenced him with barbs launched from my eyes. Then, he heard it too.

  A growl filled the sky, rumbling off of the ground and filling up all the empty spaces in Ozmandius. It grew to fill up the entire universe, from the largest valleys to the smallest recesses of my teeth. Everything vibrated like the edge of a knife, everything hurt. Then it was over us, and past us.

  Our prey had missed us.

  I yanked my son onto his feet and pulled him along. We had run out of time for education, and now we could only run. Both of us flipped up our electric respirators. The tiny coils inside heated the air as it came out of the world and passed between our lips, saving our lungs from freezing, but the extra effort needed to breath robbed us of speed. I reached
down deep inside of me and tried to make up for oxygen with pure rage, but Bradley was like an anchor. After only a few minutes of slogging under the painful weight of equipment he was staggering like a drunkard.

  I brought him close and tried my best to speak normally, “A century ago, The Planet of God Project gathered five million faithful Re-vangelicals from planets across known space. They built thousands of colony ships and sent out hundreds of probes. Once they found an inhabitable planet, they all set out at once. Five million colonists, the largest settlement of a planet in history. They began to be fruitful and multiply."

  I stopped for a second and slung around, weapon leading the way. Seconds ticked by like coins dropped into a tomb. I counted three breaths and then lead Bradley on. “In five years, they had cities. In ten years, they had megacities. They set up a theocracy, and modeled their entire society after the rules of the Holy Word.”

  Another growl came and went, making the falling snow shimmer as we hit the ground. Not only the air, but the frozen layers of frost beneath us, trembled in sympathy. The entire planet was shivering. I picked Brad up and we took off at a run again, fresh fear washing over us and giving us energy. We crested the pass with all thoughts on speed and none on stealth. Thankfully, the concrete hunting blind waited for us there, squat and brutal and beautiful.

  It guarded the top of the pass, looking down into the valley along a corridor of broken trees made by thousands of heavy, clawed feet. We dove inside and Bradley collapsed, gasping as he pulled off his respirator. Tears squeezed from his eyes as I dumped my pack and turned on the bunker’s heater. He heard me cutting off the frozen straps to my pack and fixed me with a look of sad longing.

  “Dad…?” His voice was delicate as lace spun of glass and sugar, unable to bear the weight of more than that word.

  “Stay calm, Brad.” I took a deep breath. Even after all this time, my hands began assembling polycarbonate bits, a laminate metal base, and the separate power supply units with sure movements. I glanced up at my boy, but his shallow breathing, rolling eyes, and sweaty skin showed just how close to the edge of control he was. I cleared my throat, “Anyway, twenty years after settlement, the children that had been birthed first became adults. Then they began to rebel.”

  I leaned over and motioned for Bradley’s pack. He shuffled it off as metallic parts continued to click together. “They challenged everything: society, law, propriety. Most young people do it at one point or another, but the Re-vangelicals had made sure that society, law, and propriety were all also the police, the judiciary, and God. Rebelling against God was unthinkable to the Re-vangelicals. They destroyed the art their children had created, erased the words they had written, brought down everything they had built and then exiled them into space.”

  The hand was timid and fluttering, but it held a part I needed. I took it from my son and smiled at him. “Thank you. Then they wondered why their children had betrayed them so. They began to censor all entertainment and expression, locking down on anything that might distract from the glory of God. But still children grew, and still some rebelled. The Re-vangelicals tried everything to stamp out the seed of doubt from their offspring, and then one of them happened upon what they called the Great Heresy.”

  Brad came forward and moved some parts aside, helping me lift the heavy device onto the tripod. It snapped into the groove perfectly. I continued working on the front aperture as Brad assembled the power source like we had practiced. “They realized that, while all people on their planet were obeying the words of God, their mechanical laborers, computers, and robotic servants obeyed the computerized words of man. It was an abomination, an arrogance in the eyes of the Re-vangelicals. They passed laws, ripped out the safety programming of every computer system and replaced them with directives based on the Word of God.”

  My son froze, his eyes affixing me with a stricken expression. I nodded sadly. “It took approximately twenty-three minutes for the programming to go out over their quantum net. Ten seconds later, the Inquisition began. Twenty-seven days later, there were no survivors of The Planet of God Project.”

  Brad went back to working, wiping his eyes furiously, “Why?”

  “Because the Word of God only works in conjunction with mercy and humility. Robots have neither. They may look like people, act like people, even talk like people, but they are not people. If you give them a directive to save immortal souls through intervention, they cannot disobey. It took them only seconds to run the logic path: One, robots have no souls and thus cannot commit sin; Two, humans do and can; Three, saving an immortal soul is the only important function of life; Four; suffering, confession, and acceptance is the only path toward God.”

  I locked the last part into place and began shuffling out of my cold gear and into my dusty, dented armor suit. “Since they could not sin, they could do anything to cleanse men, all men, all Man, and ensure that everyone they touched attained paradise.”

  My son locked the power conduit to the base plate. “They want to kill us all.”

  I shook my head. “That’s the point, Bradley. In the mind of one of the Inquisitors, they’d be doing you a favor by ensuring your place in Heaven. The Re-vangelicals believed they knew the mind of God, and unleashed the supreme evil of extinction on the universe. Even that extinction thinks it is doing good, all because nobody had enough humility to question, or mercy to stay their hand.” I jumped up and down, settling the armor. I was going to be damned cold, but better cold than dead. I shut off the heater and flipped a massive switch, lowering wide shutters on the firing ports for the bunker. “Now you have to go. Tell Mom and Sis I love them.”

  Brad shivered in the river of cold air, “Dad, what happens to you?”

  “This bunker was made to stand up to a Megaderm stampede during the hunts. Those things are fifty tons of fur and tusks,” I wanted to smile and pal around with him, comfort him, lie to him. He deserved better. I used the autohammer to spike the tripod to the floor and then sat on the minimal ass-tray the sadistic designer called a seat. I grasped the firing yolk and the crouched gun tensed. It swung back and forth, casing the valley and looking for heat, for light, for shape. It purred like a cat as gears whined like sharpening claws. “It should be some protection.”

  “You aren’t going to make it, are you, Dad?”

  I got up off of the low slung turret and hugged my boy closely. “This isn’t about survival. It’s about buying my family time.”

  “Will your mercenary crew come to help, Dad?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll try to hold out as long as I can.” I took a deep, shuddering breath and clamped down on the wobbling within my throat. “Your sister is very young, so it’s up to you to remember me to her. It will be your job to protect her.”

  He nodded, tears and snot running freely down his face. “I will. I promise.”

  “Then get back to the crawler. Drive it back to the emergency bunker and stay with your mother and sister. Take it slow.” He dove into my chest and bounced off the hard, armored plates. He hugged me so fiercely, but I couldn’t feel it at all. There was a sad thought there, somewhere, but I didn’t go digging for it. I had plenty already.

  I pulled him away. He stood there; bathing in what he thought was cowardice. I sighed and smiled sadly. “You are too young for this. I’m proud of you for realizing that. Now go, son. I have to get ready.”

  “I love you, Dad.”

  “I love you too, son.”

  And then he was gone.

  The next few minutes were empty, indeed. I started up the radio. “Eight to Base. Eight in position. Over.”

  A crackling voice came back to me like the narrator of all my nightmares. “Roger, Eight. Stay sharp, Mr. Prophet. Trouble at Ten and Four. Standard protocol, no surprises. Over.”

  “Roger. Staying on position. No contact yet. Over. ”

  “Roger. Out.”

  I grabbed a bag of mine grenades and exited into the cutting wind. One by one I pulled the pins and
heaved them in high arcs. I had no idea if the cold would diffuse them. I had no idea if the snow would absorb them and keep them from detonating with full force. I couldn’t say if they would do enough damage. Hope was a kissing cousin to panic. I had to find a place inside myself that only remembered from second to second, it had to forget the past, forget the future. The minutes washed around me, unnoticed and uncounted. They had to be. Otherwise I would be hoping my son was still running, still escaping, getting far enough, fast enough.

  Please be fast enough.

  I went back into the bunker, sat down, and breathed deeply. Their ships were massive, boxy, and clumsy. The only flat piece of ground large enough for them to land on up here was in the valley below, and now I had it blocked.

  They wouldn’t just destroy the bunker. That’s not how they worked. They’d announce themselves; they’d approach slowly, loudly. They would use fear. They fed on fear. Fear is weakness and weakness eases Conversion. They needed living people. That was their mission.

  They had no other purpose.

  I grabbed my old, dented helmet. I took off my warm hat, cap, and muffs and slipped the icy metal mask on like an old friend. I felt the Warrior inside of me wake up, the demons milling about in the back of my head and giving me advice. I patched the helmet comm into the militia frequency and sat back on the turret, relishing the power and precision of the war machine.

  Another roar began, louder than any of the others. It descended upon me like a judgment. Snow leapt from the exposed tops of trees and vibrated into a mist of microscopic crystals. Billions of unique snowflakes were rendered into carbon copy shards that spiraled into the sky on columns of sound. Down in the valley, lights flared and cyclones of snow became pillars of salt. The engines sounded like God screaming in pain. The helmet shielded my ears directly, but the sound reached into my very bones and traveled up to my ears in painful waves. Only once the lights winked out and the snow began to steam into thick fog did my ears stop ringing.

  I tried to call out, “Eight to Base: Contact. Over.”