The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time)

by Moran, Daniel Keys

  Rebecca and Melissa played volleyball in the sand as often as they could find competition, while Ernest sat under an umbrella and read on his handheld. They usually beat other women, and sometimes played and beat men – though men and boys who had lost to them once had a habit of making themselves scarce. There was such a thing as male ego.

  “I wish Papa liked volleyball,” Melissa said at one point, as they sat in the beach chairs by the volleyball nets, drinking water from their sports bottles, waiting for more competition to arrive. A few windsurfers were busy out in the bay, though there was just barely enough wind to keep their brightly colored sails full. “He wouldn’t quit just because he’d lost a few games.”

  Rebecca smiled at her. “No, Papa is an unusual man. Better than most of them. He just can’t handle the heat.”

  Melissa nodded. She knew that well enough. They went running together in the morning sometimes, when it was cool, all three of them, and Papa’s endurance was at least as good as theirs, perhaps better. “I just wish we could do more things together.”

  Rebecca said simply, “I wish you wouldn’t go.”

  Melissa shook her head without answering.

  “Not this year at least,” Rebecca continued. “I wish we hadn’t let you skip two grades.”

  Melissa shrugged. That, she knew, had mostly been her father’s doing anyway. It hadn’t been important to him – he knew Melissa was bright, knew she was driven, and while none of this appeared to impress him particularly, seemed perfectly content that Melissa should have her way in most matters. If she wanted to study harder material, he was content that she have the chance to. If it meant she would leave home for university (or, as it turned out, the Academy), earlier than she would have otherwise, well, all children left home eventually.

  Of course, from Mama’s perspective, it meant that she was losing Melissa two years too soon. “Mama, I’m going. I’ll perform well. When, in eight or ten years, they offer to make me an Elite” – Melissa had no doubt they would – “I will accept.”

  “You’ll never have children,” Rebecca said very quietly.

  “No,” Melissa agreed, “I won’t.”

  HER SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY came and went, the summer waned, and the day before she went to Academy they went rowing in the morning on the Canal de la Robine, had lunch at the beach, and then had dinner together at home. Her mother cooked Melissa’s favorite dinner, fresh bread with mushroom chicken and artichoke hearts over wild rice, and her father baked a blueberry pie – their respective strengths. Neither was a great cook, but the resulting dinner could not have been improved on in the best restaurant in Paris, for Melissa’s purposes.

  The dinner proceeded pleasantly, and afterward they watched the 100th Anniversary reissue of an old flat classic, Lawrence of Arabia. It was Ernest’s favorite movie, and Melissa had never seen it before. For the reissue the studio had retrofitted the old movie with depth, traceset cues for smell, taste, and touch, plus the usual viewpoint options. Ernest hadn’t bothered asking if anyone else wanted those things; he turned them all off, positioned the flat screen at the front of their holofield, and they watched the movie as it had been produced, a century before. He didn’t even enable the French audio track; all of them spoke English well enough. He did, in a very limited compromise, turn on the French subtitles.

  The movie immediately became one of Melissa’s favorites. It was a product of its time – a movie made in 1962, portraying the last days of World War I. In its three and a half hours only one woman’s face was seen, a nurse in the final scenes. It was not supposed to be a homosexual romance, either – in those days, even in 1962, such things were considered perverse and no one would have made such a movie. It was clear that the story’s – hero was not too strong a word – hero, T.E. Lawrence, was gay, though Melissa was not sure if Lawrence himself was supposed to be aware of it; in those days people often hid such things even from themselves, the social stigma against it was so strong. But it was a love story, regardless; between Lawrence and the young prince, Sherif Ali, who fought together, successfully, to free the Arab tribes from the rule of the Turks.

  When the movie was over, Ernest said, “We must go to bed now, and you should too.” Her parents were coming with her on the train to Marseille, though they would not be permitted to enter the Academy with her; the Academy discouraged parents even remaining in town after dropping their children off, and Ernest and Rebecca would return to Narbonne the same day. “Perhaps you should not mention this movie when you talk with your new friends at Academy,” he went on.

  It seemed an odd piece of advice. “Why?”

  “In some circles it’s thought subversive,” he said. “They’re wrong, they lack imagination to think so. The Unification of our time is not the Turkish Empire of World War I … but some people have argued the connection, and some people take the argument seriously. Twice foolish,” he added. “David Lean” – the film’s director – “and the writers died decades before the Unification War. The movie is based on T.E. Lawrence’s writing from after World War I. They are reading intent where there could not possibly have been any.” He paused. “But be careful anyway. You have been raised in a patriotic household, but where you are going, you will meet patriots who will make us seem suspect and insufficiently proud.”

  Melissa could not imagine such a thing (though it turned out that, as was so often the case, Papa was right.)

  She kissed them both and went to bed. Later that night, something awoke her, some low noise – she lay in bed motionless, wondering what it was – a bird? – before she realized it was, from her parent’s bedroom at the other end of the hallway, with two closed doors between Melissa and her parents, the sound of her mother crying.

  MELISSA DU BOIS’ four years at the Peace Keeping Force Academy in Marseille were without doubt the four best years of Melissa’s life up to that point. At least some of the men were not afraid of her – with the exception of her own father they were the first men she had ever met whom she had not completely intimidated, with her looks, her body, her athleticism, her intellect, her poise and reserve, or by all of those things in short succession.

  Finding men who were not afraid of her was surprisingly pleasant. She was not tempted to sleep with any of them – they were usually upperclassmen and too old for her, and she knew her parents would have disapproved. “Men do not value what comes too easily,” was all Ernest had said on the subject, but Melissa thought it likely he was correct; he had been correct about most of the things he’d bothered to state explicitly, in her life. Melissa was still a virgin at sixteen, and in no hurry to change that.

  But there was no denying the attention was enjoyable.

  MELISSA LEARNED TO speak idiomatic English and passable Chinese. She learned a pragmatic grasp of hand to hand combat, most of which consisted of harming your opponent quickly and savagely and then separating long enough to acquire a weapon. She learned to use every common weapon and how to improvise a startling variety of weapons from common objects. She learned to recognize a bomb, and how to build one.

  She learned elementary psyops – how to interrogate a prisoner, how to survive interrogation if captured. How to gain trust, how to manage distrust.

  She studied Unification Law and PKF regulations. She studied military history and economic history and politics; one fairly technical paper she wrote on the evolution of intergovernmentalism into supranationalism, and how those things flowed directly from the lessons of World War II and became the basis of the European Union and later the Unification, aroused enough comment within the Academy that it was submitted for publication to a well regarded history journal, not long after her eighteenth birthday.

  A common subject, regardless of class, was the problem of Occupied America. Over four decades after the end of the Unification War, the Johnny Rebs were still functioning – not effectively, in the opinion of most of Melissa’s instructors, but still functioning and worse, popular. Stories about the Rebs, movies about the R
ebs, portrayed them as heroes, as patriots – not in a proper sense, not patriotic to the idea of the stable and just society that only the Unification had ever provided to humanity in the entire history of the word; but to abstractions of justice and liberty that were impossible to measure.

  “Make no mistake,” one instructor pointed out at the end of a period of discussion, “by any metric you care to name, Occupied America is a better place to live today – we leave aside the question of New York for the moment – than at any time in the history of the American people. They live longer, they live healthier. Infant mortality has decreased to nearly zero. Hunger is rare and starvation nonexistent. Drug and alcohol addiction is a fraction of the problem it once was. Crime of all sorts – violent crime, murder, rape; nonviolent crime, burglary, embezzlement, theft – are at levels previously unknown in American history.

  “One would think they would be happy … but they are not. And were not, even before the Troubles began in New York. For Wednesday, a paper giving your theory as to why.”

  AT LEAST IN part due to her excellent English, at the age of twenty-one she found herself walking a beat, showing the flag, airing the uniform … in the city of Santa Monica, California, Occupied America.

  California was a state Melissa could only just have found on a map before her arrival in it; she knew not much about it otherwise, for all her studies at Academy concerning Occupied America. Los Angeles she knew something about – the part of it called Hollywood had been the most productive source of filmed entertainment during the twentieth century, and Humphrey Bogart had lived there.

  Santa Monica, it turned out, was a beach town completely surrounded by the city of Los Angeles. It reminded her a little of Narbonne, though it was wealthier and more crowded. The beaches reminded her quite a bit of the beaches at home; she found herself going down to Santa Monica and Venice beaches when off duty and playing volleyball with complete strangers. Her accent was still obviously French, but for the most part the people on the beach didn’t seem to care about that, at least not as much as they cared about her killer spike.

  She spent a year in Santa Monica, teleconferencing with her parents to stay in touch. Her mother got nervous if Melissa didn’t call at least twice a week, despite Melissa’s assurance that she had landed in one of the softest, safest patrol jobs any Peaceforcer on Earth could have dreamed up – but with twice weekly calls, Mama was calm enough, if not noticeably happy. (“Happy is her job,” Papa said once, when Melissa was still small. “You can’t make another person happy. Our job is to love her whether she is happy or sad.”)

  Melissa thought her mother’s worries excessive, but it cost her nothing to check in regularly, to send messages back and forth during the course of the day; though she did get in the habit of blocking personal calls on her earphone while on shift. It was only a little white lie to tell her mother that her C.O. disapproved of personal calls – he did, but he wouldn’t have known unless he’d had cause to review her call records, and it would have taken a disciplinary review before he’d have been permitted to look.

  As it happened, in December of 2068, he had cause to look.

  LATER MELISSA BUILT up an idea of what had happened that day, only three days before Christmas. The last thing she really remembered was sitting in a PKF Armored AeroSmith at the intersection of Wilshire and 15th Street, explaining wearily to her Captain who was on the phone and twenty kilometers away that she’d had no choice but to override the autocomp and fly directly to the UCLA Medical Center of Santa Monica, because the ambulance wouldn’t have gotten Pierre to a doctor in time. He had chunks blown out of his torso so large that his uniform was the principle thing keeping his spinal column from the air.

  Melissa didn’t really remember much of that day, either before or after that moment. At one point a bullet had clipped the back of her skull, digging a furrow in the bone and causing bleeding just the other side of the bone. She’d been, in fact, closer to dying than her partner, and it had required brain surgery by one of Los Angeles’s best human surgeons to save her.

  Her performance review decided that Melissa had killed four of the Rebs; her partner had only accounted one. The remaining six had been killed by PKF Elite within minutes of their arrival onsite. The citation added to Melissa’s record concluded that she had directly saved the lives of at least twenty of the Reb hostages – all members of a group of Chinese Christian tourists visiting the U.S. for Christmas.

  And they did, Melissa made a point of telling her mother, check her personal phone records before issuing the citation.

  IT TOOK A while for her promotion to come through; it was the summer of 2069 before she made Detective. She was twenty-two years old, and along with her promotion came the invitation PKF both feared and desired: she was invited to apply for the Peace Keeping Force Elite. Others might have hesitated, but Melissa knew of no one as young as she who had ever received an invitation: if she turned it down, she knew the odds of receiving another, ever, were poor.

  ON AUGUST THE fourteenth, 2069, Melissa du Bois and forty-six other members of the United Nations Peace Keeping Force took their seats aboard the Captain Sir Dominic Flandry, a SpaceFarer vehicle that had been retained to take them to the Elite surgery facility at SpaceBase One at L5.

  The cabin in which they were to travel had forty-eight seats. After Melissa and her fellow PKF were seated, there remained one empty seat – the aisle seat next to Melissa. No one seemed to know who it was for, but it was soon apparent that the ship would not be taking off until whoever it was arrived.

  Melissa waited patiently for a few minutes, then took her handheld out to read. She was halfway through a classic her father had recommended, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” and had managed to get lost within it again when a tall young man wearing a well-tailored business suit, carrying a briefcase, was led into the cabin and made his way to the empty seat beside her. He was her age, Melissa guessed, maybe even younger – twenty? Melissa wondered who he was, what gave him the pull to keep their ship grounded until he arrived. She didn’t look directly at him, just studied him from the corner of her eye while continuing to page through her novel.

  He sat down and strapped himself in, put his briefcase in the safety web beneath the seat: he was handsome, blond, and with quite strikingly beautiful blue eyes.

  He turned to her and smiled, and Melissa allowed herself to look up from her handheld. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Trent the thief. Is there anything I can steal for you?”

  19

  “TELL ME ABOUT your day,” Trent suggested, “and I’ll tell you about mine.”

  “I killed a man,” Melissa said.

  Me too, Trent started to say, when he saw that she was serious.

  AS CHIEF OF Security for the Unity, Melissa du Bois was, in theory, not responsible for anything except the security and safety of the ship and the personnel assigned to it.

  “ ‘In theory,’ ” one of Melissa’s instructors had quoted at her once at Academy, “ ‘there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.’ ”

  In practice, every Peaceforcer knew that there was no such thing as “off duty.” You were a Peaceforcer when you got up in the morning, a Peaceforcer throughout the day, a Peaceforcer when you went to bed and while you dreamed. Your duty was without limits, either of time or place.

  Early Friday evening, March 29, 2080, Melissa’s earphone went off while she was having dinner at home, in what had once been the house of the previous Chief of Security for Halfway. Half a dozen holos floated in her office, and she was eating while browsing the readouts. Chief Yovia had volunteered to help Chief Thorvald with the problems with the torch thrust, and Chief Thorvald had received the offer with the complete lack of graciousness Melissa had come to expect of the man. Yovia’s department was proceeding at a good speed; her reports from Yovia showed Monitor going green over the weekend of April 13-14, and, if anything, her private reports from her PKF programmers showed that as a possibly
conservative date.

  Staffing up was expected to begin toward the end of April, and to take most of two months. The first shipments of the Unity’s operational staff were due no more than two weeks following the final greenlights for Monitor and the torches.

  The euphemism – “operational staff” – annoyed Melissa. It referred to Space Force and PKF combat troops. When fully staffed, seventy percent of the personnel aboard the Unity would be Space Force combat troops. Twenty percent would be PKF troops trained for free fall combat in pressurized environments – troops destined to conquer and then patrol the Belt CityStates. And there would be several dozen Elite – almost half of the Elite were already aboard ship, and had been all along, providing security.

  Despite her best efforts, Melissa could not convince herself that the planned Unification of Free Luna and the outer Solar System was wise. Vance knew her feelings – with modern psychometrics it was impossible to hide such things – and she wondered daily why, despite knowing her reservations, he had promoted her into this position. Her loyalty – to the Unification, to Vance personally – could not be doubted. But she thought the coming war a mistake, and nothing she had seen or been told had changed that opinion.

  “I would rather,” Vance had told her, “place my faith in your loyalty and competency, rather than merely in loyalty. Competency arises from the ability to evaluate multiple propositions, to consider options, to think outside the parameters that second rate thinkers would impose upon you. You may think this policy wrong: but that you will execute it to the best of your considerable ability I have no doubt.”