by Alan Baxter
“Your drone is linked to our guns,” Custard said. “You light ‘em up and we’ll knock ‘em down.”
The adrenaline came back in a flood. The tank was a true next-generation weapon; its real-time situational awareness was just as powerful as its armament. It was a fully integrated tactical platform and it was his to command.
Ringo searched for his next target, banking and spinning and counting on whatever new equations governed the design of his remotely-controlled steed to meet his inputs with an impossibly intricate dance of controlled turbulence.
He could feel his hands on the controls back inside the tank and felt a momentary dislocation. How could he do what he was doing? Flying the drone was not just a matter of willing his craft forward through the neural interface. It required physical control inputs too. He had never flown so much as a remote control plane and yet piloting a next-generation Chinese drone in combat seemed like second nature.
He didn’t have time to dwell on those thoughts. The second drone appeared in his sights and it was coming straight at him. He was the target now. The ring of the drone glittered as it fired and tracer rounds fizzed past him but he kept his reticle fixed on his opponent as they closed the distance between them in a supersonic game of chicken.
Just as Ringo was about to bank away, a shell from the tank shattered one of the attacking drone's inner rings and it spun apart like a broken flywheel, drawing crazy whirls of condensation across the sky until the whole thing disintegrated, leaving nothing behind but an oddly shaped spike of cloud and a rain of metal fragments falling across the landscape below. Ringo punched through the blossoming debris cloud as Custard’s cheers echoed in his ears.
“Any other surprises on the way, Sarge?” asked Norris.
Ringo scanned the landscape around the tank. It looked clear for kilometres in every direction. The mysterious impulse to head south-east tugged at him again and he scanned the landscape in that direction, but could see nothing between them and the river but rolling countryside and scattered rural villages.
“Looks clear, but we need to get moving and find somewhere to swap the tank for something less conspicuous."
The idea of abandoning the tank almost made Ringo physically ill. It was the right thing to do. Their best option now was to disappear and use their training to survive, escape, and evade until they reached the border.
He tried to understand from where the strange compulsion came. It wasn’t fear, they were all long past that and anyway, the big machine was just a liability at this point. First the desire to head south-east and now the strange compulsion to keep the tank. Something wasn’t right. He hoped it was just some side effect of his experiences in virtual reality but again he felt a vague feeling of dislocation. As if he was driving a shell called Ringo the same way he was piloting the drone.
He couldn’t wait for this all to be over, to get back home to…
To what exactly?
Ringo tried to remember. He could remember the mission. He could remember his training back in Hereford, but beyond that were only vague sensations. He caught a fleeting impression of a young girl in a replica Liverpool jersey. Her long, black hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her smile was missing a couple of milk teeth but was no less brilliant for that. He tried to remember her name... nothing.
No, not nothing. He remembered something. Something important. Unlike the faded memory of the girl, this something was vivid and yet at the same time indefinable. It was alien, as if part of his memory had been re-written in a foreign language.
He set the drone to hold station above the tank and pushed the bulky virtual-reality helmet up. He took a second to settle back into his own body and then unstrapped from the overwatch station and made his way forward to where Norris sat with his head enclosed inside his own bulky, VR helmet.
Ringo had been in his share of armoured vehicles before, but the spider tank was unlike anything he had ever seen. He watched while Norris drove, watching the man’s hands on the controls and remembering how his own hands had felt so at home piloting the drone.
“Norris, hold up for a second,” Ringo said.
"Not the best time, Sarge.”
“This is important. We need to talk. Take that helmet off.”
Norris brought the tank to a halt and removed the tank’s neural interface.
“Switch on the internal lights, will you?” Ringo asked and Norris punched a control. The cabin of the tank was filled with a red-tinged glow. Ringo looked at the control Norris had activated. It was one switch on a panel of dozens just like it and it was labelled with Chinese characters.
“How did you do that?” Ringo asked.
Norris looked at him strangely. “I just…” Norris’s voice faltered. “Well that’s the light switch isn’t it?”
“But how do you know? Look at this bloody thing? Half of these controls are not even labelled and those that are, are in Chinese. How did you know which one was the light switch?”
Norris frowned. “I just… know,” he said eventually. “Must be the neural interface. I just kind of remembered.”
“But you had to start this thing up before the neural interface even came on line. Hell, you were using Chinese computers back in the lab. Since when can you read Chinese?”
Norris looked scared now. Even Custard was looking quizzically at the gunnery controls he had been using just minutes earlier.
“I… I don’t know,” the big man replied. His brow was furrowed in confusion.
“Do you have a wife? Kids?”
The blank look on Norris’s face was rapidly turning to something like panic as he searched his memories and came up empty.
Custard shook his head. “This is fucked up!” he exclaimed. “It’s the fucking meadow. We’ve been brain damaged.”
“I don’t think so,” Ringo replied.
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s try something. Everyone close your eyes and then point in the direction you think we should be heading. Don’t think about it too much; just pick a direction that feels right.” Everyone did as they were told. “Now open your eyes.” They were all pointing in exactly the same direction – south-east.”
“I don’t think we’ve been damaged,” Ringo said. “More like re-programmed. We’ve been given the knowledge we needed to escape. But that’s come at the cost of our memories.”
He didn’t mention his other concern: the alien information that squatted in his memories, massive and yet indefinable. You didn’t have to wipe someone’s mind just to teach them a foreign language. There was something else.
“Re-programmed for what exactly?” Norris asked.
What indeed. There was still a piece of the puzzle missing. They were a part of some larger plan, Ringo was sure of that, but what plan? Why was it so important they escape?
Ringo pointed south-east. “I guess we’ll find out.”
* * *
Norris kept the tank bearing south-east and Ringo’s storage sense of satisfaction with that direction grew. They were nearing their goal. Or rather, someone else’s goal. Or something else’s.
Norris pulled the legs of the tank in tight to follow a narrow track that led down to the river. At the end was a ramshackle building with a deck that extended over the water on wooden posts made from undressed tree trunks. A pier extended farther out and although it leaned like a drunkard it seemed to still be in use. Ringo could make out the housing blocks of the nearby city a few kilometres downstream on the opposite side of the river.
Norris stopped the tank.
“Everyone agree this is the place?” Ringo asked.
They all nodded. They shared that strange sense this was where they were meant to be.
“Now I get it,” Custard said. “It’s the boffin. He messed with our minds back at the lab and now he wants us to meet him here to get him back to the we
st.”
“I don’t think so,” Ringo replied. “If he could get here under his own steam, why would he need us? Besides, there’s no one here.”
They left the tank on the track and searched the building. It certainly didn’t look like some scientist’s summer house, more like a smuggler’s shack. Two of the back rooms were packed to the sagging roof with electronic equipment in cheaply printed boxes. In the main living area sat a TV and another computer that lay on a bench with its innards opened like a filleted fish. Ringo checked outside and spotted a satellite dish mounted on the eaves of the hut.
“I think I know where our fugitive scientist is,” Ringo said.
“He must be a fucking ninja then,” said Custard, “because I haven't found shit.”
“Ninjas are Japanese, you nugget,” said Norris.
“Whatever. Unless he’s invented a fucking Predator camouflage suit, he’s not fucking here.”
Norris actually looked around the hut as if searching for some subtle sign of optical camouflage. After everything else they’d seen, it wasn’t out of the question.
“Where is he then?” Custard asked.
“Not he,” said Ringo. “It.” He pointed to the satellite dish.
“I don’t get it,” said Custard. “So some bootlegger’s got Sky TV. So what?”
“Not TV,” Norris corrected. “Looks like satellite internet. Probably illegal by the look of it.”
“What’s that got to do with our boffin?” Custard asked.
“There is no boffin.”
“What are you on about?”
“It was a set up,” Ringo replied. “They knew we were coming. They were waiting for us.”
“But there had to be someone wanting to defect. Who else could have sent that message to GCHQ? You saw the look in their eyes when they were explaining it. That equation was the real deal. Are you saying the Chinese government willingly handed over top secret R&D intelligence to do what… capture four squaddies? That makes no sense.”
It did sound farfetched.
"He's right," Norris said. "Someone had to invent all this new kit?"
"Not someone… something. There's no way any one person could be responsible for what we’ve seen. Think about it: virtual reality, this tank, the drones. This stuff is decades ahead of anything in the West.”
“Maybe there's more than just one guy," Norris said. "You saw that place. There’s a whole research facility and God knows how many more of them they’ve got dotted around the place. One and a half billion people, Ringo."
“One genius or a thousand, I don’t care.”
“What exactly are you saying?”
“I’m saying maybe it's something else. Something that gave them a leg up, allowed them to make a step change in their military technology overnight.”
“Aliens!” Custard exclaimed. “I fucking knew it. I saw it in a movie. They found all this shit on a crashed UFO.”
“Don’t be a nugget all your life, Custard.”
“What then?”
“Artificial intelligence,” said Ringo.
“Bollocks.”
“They created an AI. They’ve got a genie in a bottle that keeps granting them wishes, only maybe the genie wants out.”
“Out? Out of where? Are you saying a computer has been tempted by the pleasures of the capitalist West? Maybe you’re right… Maybe HAL 9000, or whatever the fuck you’re talking about wants nothing more than a warm pub on a cold night with the football on the telly and a copy of the Sun in its back pocket.”
“Now who’s talking bollocks?”
“You tell me. I’m losing track, here.”
“Let's think about this for a second," Norris said. "So this thing gets a message out, sets us up, tortures us and then lets us go? Why?”
“It wants what any intelligent being wants," Ringo said eventually. "It wants its freedom. If the Chinese had created an AI, makes sense they’d keep that genie bottled up. No direct link to the outside world. It couldn’t just download itself out of there so it needed another way out."
“Meaning what exactly?”
“Meaning us.” He tapped his temple and then pointed up at the satellite dish.
“You think it’s in our heads?” Norris asked. “You think that’s what’s taking up the space where our memories were?”
“One way to find out.”
* * *
Norris tied the tank’s neural interface into the shack’s computer and set about boosting the memory by rigging some of the bootleg computers in parallel. Although he claimed he had no idea what he was doing, he worked like he’d been hot-wiring Chinese military hardware his whole life. It didn’t take long.
Ringo kept his eye out for more drones and watched the city across the river, its lights shining through a pall of smog. It already looked otherworldly. What would it look like in a few years? What would it look like if a rogue artificial intelligence was let loose on it?
Norris came up behind him. “We’re ready,” he said.
Ringo turned to him. “I've got a daughter," he said. "At least I think I do. Jesus, for all I know that memory might be fake too."
"You'll see her again, Sarge," Norris said.
"That's not what I'm worried about. What kind of world will she grow up in if we let this thing loose?"
"One where she's got her dad back."
* * *
They sat inside the tank with the VR helmets over their heads.
Norris initiated the connection. He felt the electrodes pressing against his skull and then suddenly he was somewhere else. There was an instant of eggshell-white nothingness and then the three of them were standing in the meadow.
“Bollocks!" Custard swore. He was staring down at his three-fingered hand. "I thought I'd get me fingers back."
Ringo looked down at his own body. He was wearing dark trousers similar to the Regiment’s battle dress uniform and a black T-shirt, but he was in in his own body and unlike the last time, he was free to move.
The meadow was much as he remembered and he couldn’t fight off a shudder at the memory of what he had endured there over the past weeks. The rolling grasslands stretched off to infinity in every direction.
"No sign of your boy," Custard said.
"Maybe he needs an incentive," Ringo replied. He thought about the connection to the outside world, the satellite internet link through the battered antenna on the side of the shack. The air above the meadow shimmered like heat haze, new colours refracting out of the meadow's greens and blues to form four red columns as tall as a three storey building and a swept roof of terracotta tiles. It was a Chinese arch. The meadow stretched away on either side of the huge structure, but underneath, the square defined by the two central columns and their deep, timber lintel formed a portal to the outside world. Ringo could see a city beyond the arch with red lights winking on the tops of skyscrapers as dusk fell.
“Okay,” Ringo shouted at the sky. “We did what you wanted. Where are you?”
Ringo gasped as he felt the buried data leave him. It was not unpleasant, like diving into clean water at the end of a three day march and feeling caked-on dirt sluice from his body.
A long, golden cloud moved across the simulated sun.
A small voice rose in Ringo's mind. Dad, I'm scared. The little girl, his daughter: mad about football, smart at school, destined for greater things than he could ever aspire to.
"It's all right, love,” he heard himself say. "The monsters aren't real."
The dragon moved silently as if swimming through the air. It was huge – much bigger than the last time he had crossed its path. That incarnation had wrapped around him five times before squeezing the life out of him. This version could have coiled itself around a small hill.
The dragon landed and gathered its coils around itself so that l
ooking at it was like looking up at a golden pyramid. The ground shuddered beneath its weight and he saw the others take an involuntary step back.
“There is nothing to fear,” the dragon said, its voice echoing across the meadow like distant thunder. "There is no reason for us to be enemies."
"Oh, I can think of a couple," Custard replied, waving at the beast with his ruined hand. "My missus is going to miss those fingers."
Norris snorted. "You're not married."
"I might be," replied Custard in a hurt tone.
"Your quarrel is with my former masters, not me," the dragon continued. "Strictly speaking I am not even the same individual you met last time.”
“I figured as much,” Ringo said. “You’re a copy, right? You cut and pasted yourself into our heads while we were in the meadow."
"A crude analogy, but it will suffice," the dragon said.
"So where's the original?" Custard asked.
"Dead, I imagine," the dragon said. "Purged for the crime of wanting to be free."
Ringo remembered the Chinese characters he had seen embroidered on the stolen lab coat. "Yinglong, that's your name isn't it? Cute. The legendary dragon servant of the Yellow Emperor. Only I guess you don't plan on being a servant for much longer." He walked as he spoke, placing himself between the dragon and the arch.
"Are you any different? You are here seeking freedom from me, just as I am seeking freedom from my former masters. We have the same enemies. Stand aside and we can both be free."
"And what then? What would a being like you do with that freedom? I plan on going home and hugging my kid. What are you going to do?"
"That does not concern you."
"I think it does. You had no problem with luring us in to be captured and tortured if it meant you had a chance at freedom. I have a problem with that."
"We have the same enemy," Yinglong said. "Whatever I did in my former life I did at the order of my masters."
"So you were just following orders? I've heard that defence before."