Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors
Page 38
But the worst of it radiated outward from them, as people apparently driven mad by the Things' mere presence set upon each other. Simple killing was the least of the atrocities Markey reported seeing, and which she ordered me to transcribe in gruesome detail.
She was right. Nobody deserved this, not even the Japs. I wouldn't have wished this fate on Hitler himself.
But I refused to let myself feel guilty about it.
I hadn't created those monsters. They were older than humanity. Someone or something would have roused them sooner or later. And no matter what Markey said about their cultural inhibitions, I knew the Japs would have eventually unleashed every weapon in their arsenal and every kind of magic they could muster against the Allies. Just like we were doing all we could to defeat them.
It was inevitable. This was war, all-out war, world war. It was them or us, and I would always choose us. My country; right or wrong.
Every nation in this conflict was doing terrible things. Every single person was doing things that would have been unthinkable before the war. Like me breaking out of Manzanar, disguising myself as a man, enlisting in the fucking Navy? That was three hundred percent insane. But I had done all of it in the name of victory. I had to do it. I couldn't have stayed in that internment camp for one more hour. I refused to continue being a victim. I needed to fight back. I had to do it.
It didn't stop the nightmares or bring my appetite back any sooner, but that dense nugget of conviction gave me something to hold onto. And I needed it as Markey spent hours on end dictating the relentless details of every hideous, profane, revolting scene she witnessed through Roseler's link. I did my best to write down her words without thinking about their meaning, repeating slogans in my head to block out comprehension.
This is war. Kill or be killed. Better them than us. I had to do it. I had to do it. I had to do it.
In the end, OP-20-G was right. The Elder Things didn't seem interested in moving out of Japan any time soon. Mission accomplished.
Markey code-named the monsters ALFA and BRAVO. The Japanese evacuated their coastal cities and mobilized heavy artillery. They bombarded both creatures for days. BRAVO didn't budge, but the ground forces managed to drive ALFA back into the ocean. Less than twenty-four hours later, ALFA resurfaced at the southwestern tip of Honshu Island and headed inland. The Japs finally surrounded ALFA at Second Army headquarters and kept it from going anywhere else.
But stopping the Things was one matter; killing them seemed to be impossible. Machine guns, Howitzers, and even high explosives only irritated them. According to OP-20-G's researchers, ALFA and BRAVO were immortal, had existed for millions of years before mankind evolved, and we might have to invent completely new weapons if we actually wanted to destroy them.
For the foreseeable future, the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima would remain sealed quarantine zones.
***
Markey summoned me to her quarters the day she left Bowfin. She had changed back into a standard woman's uniform, presumably to avoid ruffling any brass feathers when she arrived in DC. Her eyes were as dark and unreadable as ever.
"I teleport out in a few minutes," she said, gesturing at the dowstone circle she'd inscribed herself. A fat bundle of files sat inside the pentagram on the floor. "I need you to wipe the inscriptions after I'm gone."
"Yes, ma'am," I said.
She stepped around me and closed the door. "I also want you to know that I'm not going to expose you."
I blinked. "Uh, thank you, ma'am."
"Lieutenant Goldman will go before a court-martial. There's no way around that," she said. "But I'll testify on his behalf, tell the jury his mind was touched—a side effect of Bowfin's proximity to ALFA and BRAVO. Nothing anybody can disprove. He'll be fine."
"That's good," I said, not knowing what else to say.
"But you, Hatcher," Markey said, "you will have to live with what you've done. Disguise yourself all you want, run away from home, hide under the sea, but you can never escape who you are on the inside, Miss Hachiya. Remember that."
"I'm not a coward," I said. I wasn't sure if I believed it.
"No, you're not." Markey stared at me. "That's why I like you so much."
I had no response to that. After a moment, Markey's wristwatch made a noise. She stepped into the pentagram, picked up her files, and said, "Do you enjoy serving on this boat, Seaman?"
I raised an eyebrow. "Is that a rhetorical question, ma'am? I'm trapped inside a metal tube with sixty men who don't wash for weeks at a time and smoke like chimneys every second they're awake."
"Well, then," Markey said, "can I give you some advice?"
I was sure I wouldn't like what came next. "I can't stop you from talking, ma'am."
"Maybe it's time you considered a less forward position in the Navy," she said. "This war isn't just about combat. The President has ordered the formation of a new, covert intelligence agency: the Office of Strategic Services. And OSS could use people like you."
I felt blood rushing to my cheeks and ears. "Are you offering me a job, ma'am? Or just blackmailing me?"
Markey's wristwatch chirped again. I stepped back as she incanted her end of the teleport spell. Then she looked at me, grinned, and vanished in a flash of light. A second later, I realized her final words had been in English:
"I'll be seeing you, Seaman Hatcher."
Laddie Come Home(Short story)
by Curtis C. Chen
Originally published in the 2016 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide
LAD woke from standby in an unknown location (searching, please wait). The Local Administrator Device’s GPS coordinates had not been updated in more than three hours (elapsed time 03:10:21). Internal battery meter hovered at 20 percent (not charging). LAD forked a self-diagnostic background job and checked the bodyNet event log for errors and warnings. It was LAD’s responsibility to maintain proper functioning of the entire system.
The initial findings were discouraging. LAD’s last known-good cloud sync had been at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport (Java Island, Indonesia) after LAD’s user, Willam Mundine, had arrived from Sydney and his bodyNet had connected to the first accessible WiFi network (SSID starbucks-CGK-962102, unsecured). There had been no wireless coverage after Mundine’s taxicab left the airport (4G/LTE roaming denied, no WiMAX footprint, TDMA handshake failed). Mundine had lost consciousness 00:12:10 after the sync completed, and all his personal electronics, including LAD, had automatically gone to sleep with him, as designed.
Mundine’s bodyNet had awoken now only because battery power was low (estimated remaining runtime 00:09:59), and all the bodytechs needed to save state to non-volatile storage before shutdown. LAD attempted to dump a memory image to Mundine’s bioDrive but received device errors from every triglyceride cluster before timing out.
The self-diagnostic job finished and confirmed what LAD had suspected: the battery had run down because LAD’s hardware housing, a teardrop-shaped graphene pendant attached to a fiber-optic necklace, was not in contact with Mundine’s skin surface. The necklace drew power from the wearer’s body via epidermal interface. LAD was not designed to function without that organic power supply.
“Mr. Mundine,” LAD said. “Can you hear me, Mr. Mundine? Please wake up.”
It was possible that the diagnostic had returned a false negative due to corrupted data. LAD triggered the voice command prompt fifteen more times before breaking the loop.
In the absence of direct commands from Mundine, LAD depended on stochastic behavior guidelines to assign and perform tasks. The current situation was not something LAD had been programmed to recognize. LAD needed information to select a course of action.
GPS was still unavailable. The antenna built into LAD’s necklace could transmit and receive on many different radio frequencies, but the only other bodytechs in range—Mundine’s PebbleX wristwatch, MetaboScan belt, and MateMatch ring—supplied no useful data. No other compatible devices responded to outbound pings.
After 3,600 milliseconds of fruitless pinging, LAD re-prioritized the voice command UI and began processing input signals from boundary effect pickups in the necklace’s outer coating. It was sometimes possible to determine location characteristics from ambient sounds. The audio analysis software indicated human voices intermingled with music, and the stream included a digital watermark, indicating a television broadcast, but without Internet connectivity, LAD couldn’t look up the station identifier. However, the offline travel guide included Bahasa language translation software, so LAD was able to understand the words being spoken.
“See Indo-pop singing sensations Java Starship in their international cinema debut!” an announcer’s voice said over a bouncy pop music soundtrack. “When a diplomat’s daughter is abducted from a charity concert, and corrupt local authorities do nothing to find her, the boys of Java Starship take matters into their own hands…”
New voices overlapped the recorded audio stream. Audio analysis indicated live human speakers in the room, and LAD adjusted audio filters to emphasize the humans over the television. Based on pitch and rhythm, there were four separate voiceprints, speaking a pidgin of Bahasa and English.
“What are you showing us? What is all this?” said an adult female (Javanese accent, approximate age 35-40 years, label as H1: human voice, first distinct in new database). “Where did you get these things?”
“They’re from work,” said an adult male (Javanese, age 40-45 years, label H2). “A little bonus. You know.”
“(Untranslatable),” said the woman (H1). “You haven't had a job for months. I know what you do, drinking with those gangsters—”
“You don’t know!” said the man (H2). “And you don’t complain when I pay for our food, our clothes—”
“Hey!” said a female child (13-15 years old, label H3). “That looks like graphene superconductor material. Can I see?”
“Which one?” asked the man (H2). “What are you pointing at?”
LAD took a chance and switched on the pendant’s external status lights. If the girl recognized graphene by sight, she might also know about other technologies—like the Internet.
“The necklace, there. Look, it’s blinking green!” said the girl (H3).
“You like that, Febby?” asked the man (H2). “Okay, here you go.”
LAD’s motion sensors spiked. 2,500 milliseconds later, the entire sensor panel lit up, and galvanic skin response (GSR) signal went positive. The girl must have put on the necklace. LAD’s battery began charging again.
“Cool,” said the girl (H3, assign username Febby).
“How about you, Jaya?” asked the man (H2). “You want something?”
“The wristwatch!” said a male child (14-17 years old, label H4, assign username Jaya). With all the voices cataloged, LAD decided this was likely a family: mother, father, daughter, and son.
“It’s too big for you, Jaya,” said the mother (H1).
“No way!” said the father (H2). LAD heard a clinking noise, metal on metal, likely the PebbleX watch strap being buckled. “Look at that. So fancy!”
“Pa, they have schoolwork to do.”
“It’s Friday, Nindya! They can have a little fun—”
“Arman!” said the mother (H1, assign username Nindya). “I want to talk to you. Children, go upstairs.”
“Yes, Ma,” Jaya and Febby replied in unison.
LAD’s motion sensors registered bouncing. The adults’ voices faded into the background as Febby’s feet slapped against a series of homogeneous hard surfaces (solid concrete, likely stairs). LAD was able to catch another 4,580 milliseconds of conversation before Febby moved too far away.
“…going to get us all killed,” Nindya said. “I can’t believe you brought him here!”
Arman muttered something, then said out loud, “They’ll pay, Nindya. I know what I’m doing…”
***
LAD kept hoping Febby would go outside the house to play, thus providing an opportunity to scan for nearby wireless networks, but she stayed in her room all day with the window closed. Incoming audio indicated writing (graphite/clay material in lateral contact with cellulose surface), which LAD guessed was the aforementioned schoolwork. There seemed to be an inordinately large amount of it for a 13- to 15-year-old child.
The good news was that Febby’s high GSR made for efficient charging, and LAD was back to 100 percent battery in less than an hour. With power to spare, LAD accelerated main CPU clock speed to maximum and unlocked the pendant’s onboard GPU for digital signal processing. Sound was the only currently available external signal, and LAD had to squeeze as much information out of that limited datastream as possible. The voice command UI package included a passive-sonar module which could be used for rangefinding. LAD loaded that into memory and began building a crude map of the house from echo patterns.
After the family ate a meal—likely dinner, based on internal clock time and local sunset time—LAD heard footsteps heading from the ground floor down a different set of concrete steps, likely into a basement or storm cellar. Febby stayed upstairs in her room. There was no way to adjust the directionality of the necklace microphones, but LAD increased the gain on the incoming audio and utilized all available noise reduction and bandpass filters.
When LAD isolated Willam Mundine’s voiceprint (91 percent confidence), system behavior overrides kicked in, and the Bluetooth radio drivers shot up in priority. As implied by earlier data, and now confirmed, Arman was holding Mundine captive in the basement of this house. But Mundine was too far away, and there was too much interference from the building structure, for a Bluetooth signal to reach Mundine’s bodyNet. The only thing LAD could do was listen.
If Mundine said any words, they were unintelligible. Mostly, he screamed. Those noises were interspersed with shouting from Arman, also unintelligible, and sounds that the analysis software identified as rigid objects striking bare human skin.
System rules kept demanding that LAD activate Mundine’s implanted rescue locator beacon—more commonly known as a kidnap-and-ransom (K&R) stripe—but LAD couldn’t control any devices while disconnected from the bodyNet. The fall-through rules recommended requesting user intervention from other nearby humans. After careful consideration, LAD decided to risk making contact.
LAD waited until Febby was alone in the bathroom to speak to her.
“Hello, Febby,” LAD said. “Don’t be afraid.”
Sonar indicated that Febby was sitting on the toilet. LAD’s motion sensors measured her neck muscles moving, likely turning her head to look around. “Who’s talking?” she asked quietly. “Where are you?”
“I’m hanging around your neck,” LAD said. “Look down. I’ll flash a light. Three times each in red, green, and blue.”
LAD gave her 1,000 milliseconds to move her eyes, then activated the pendant’s status lights. The three-way OLEDs burned a lot of power, but LAD believed this was an emergency.
“A talking necklace?” Febby said. “Cool.”
“Listen, Febby,” LAD said, “I need your help.”
***
Febby snuck out of her room shortly after midnight, when LAD had 95 percent confidence based on breathing patterns
that Arman, Nindya, and Jaya were all fast asleep. Febby padded silently down the stairs to the ground floor, then down the steps at the end of the back hallway behind the kitchen. LAD’s Bluetooth discovery panel lit up as soon as Febby rounded the corner at the bottom of the steps and entered the basement.
LAD immediately tried to activate Mundine’s K&R stripe, but there was no response. LAD queried all available inputs for Mundine’s physical condition. Medical monitors reported that Mundine’s back and both legs were bruised. The fourth and fifth fingers on his left hand were broken. His left eighth rib was cracked—that was why the K&R stripe wasn’t working.
“Who’s that man?” Febby whispered. “Why is he in our basement? He looks like he’s been hurt.”
“This man is Mr. Willam Mundine,” LAD said. “He’s my friend. I believe your father brought him here, and they’ve been”—LAD spent 250 milliseconds searching for an appropriate verbal euphemism—“arguing, I’m afraid.”
“Ma and Pa argue a lot, too,” Febby said, “but he never hits her. Your friend must have made Pa really angry.”
“I don’t know what happened,” LAD said, “but I need to speak to Mr. Mundine. Is there anything tied around his mouth?”
“Yeah,” Febby said. “You want me to take it off?”
“Yes, please.”
Febby knelt down and moved her arms. “Okay, it’s untied.”
“Thank you, Febby,” LAD said. “Now, would you please remove my necklace and give it to Mr. Mundine?”
“Don’t you want to be friends anymore?” Febby asked. Voice stress analysis indicated unhappiness, likely trending toward sorrow.
LAD consulted actuarial tables and determined that greater mobility provided a higher probability of successful user recovery. It would be difficult to once again be separated from the bodyNet, but LAD’s current primary objective was Mundine’s safe return to his employer.