The Inhuman Peace

by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

  And to her great disappointment, Mahasen had not gotten rid of Eliott Grimme, but could actually be seen taking orders from him on the screen, following him around like some kind of trained dog. He took after the father, that one. Runt of the bloody litter. At least he was doing his part for the LKRF.

  ‘That one might be a problem,’ agreed her friend. ‘But let’s wait and see what happens.’

  Something about these Asian cities, Eliott reflected, made them nightmares to fight in.

  Take Colombo. Even levelled, shelled into rubble, it was an almost superhuman effort to pick a direction and actually travel in a straight line. Something about the poor planning here. Offices squatted next to what must surely have been single-story houses, once upon a time; skyscrapers had toppled over schools. It was like an octopus of steel and concrete frozen in the act of reaching out for a bigger future.

  This was compounded by what they had done later to box in the bots and make this the Zone. Where the tentacles of this octopus terminated – the roads that Mason picked out as Galle Road, Havelock Road, Bauddhaloka Mawatha – the Ministry had piled cars, rubble, even tanks, boxing in the bots.

  Unfortunately, it also boxed out the men.

  Eight men and forty bots died in the breaking of one of these barriers. Another six fell to some sort of booby-trap strung across minor lanes; a full twenty went missing scouting up Galle Road, and were later found drowned in the sea that raged just beyond, stripped of all metal. Mason kept trying to tell Grimme their names, but names meant nothing to him – what mattered most was how they died.

  At first, attrition – a lucky spear, a stone well aimed, an extra bot here or there, moving too fast for the human senses. Then the deaths became cleverer. Chunks of masonry that were toppled to crush. Cars, sometimes old military vehicles, pushed together to form barricades that were set on fire to trap small teams questing outward. Bots with rusted gas canisters strapped to their backs, salvaged from some long-defunct warehouse, running silently through the night, throwing themselves into clusters and blowing up their own batteries as they landed. They came from every possible direction and left as corpses, packed up by the cleaners and ferried backwards to the lines that waited at the base.

  The commander was here. Eliott could feel it … whatever it was, always ahead, throwing out tendrils, drawing back. He put snipers on the rooftops, under command of the Inquisitors, and broke out the shotguns and mortars. They fought street by street, sometimes room by room. The bots had the advantage of terrain. He had the superior weaponry. In his head, he counted the tribes as he put them down. Sons of Cinnamon – fled to the south border of Colombo, blockaded by tanks; Eliott had fireteams down there turning that place into a modern-day Charge of the Light Brigade. Chained Emperors – scattered, hiding in the large apartment complex in Colombo 03; they were now boxed in.

  The rest – still fighting, still retreating. Eliott thanked his stars that this city had never grown subways, like Hong Kong. Then he moved on death littered in his wake, pausing only for the cleaners to come pack the bodies away.

  ‘We have to stop. Sir. Sir. Sir!’

  He turned, gun in hand. He was in a wide-open thing that could have been a warehouse, but given its proximity to the main road and the faded detritus of glamour, it could have also been a lingerie showroom near what clearly was a school. The world shook every so often as the mortars landed. They were shelling yet another apartment.

  Mason Wijeratne stood in the doorway, covered in plaster dust and grime. The copper lines on his face had dulled.

  ‘We have to stop, sir,’ Mason panted. ‘The men can’t take much more.’

  Eliott looked at the poster next to him, which, faded and peeling, showed a Ceylonese woman winking seductively.

  ‘Then send in the women,’ he said, irritated.

  Mason’s face soured.

  ‘Fine,’ said Eliott, before the kid could talk back. They would lose valuable time – night was when the bots slept, making them the easiest to capture – but an exhausted soldier was just yet another corpse to deal with. ‘Double rations tonight. Check the supplies. Find them a safe place to stay. What’s that thing next door? Looks usable, sir. Walls. Controlled exit points.’

  ‘It’s a school, sir.’

  That explained a lot. ‘Go set up,’ said Eliott. ‘Rest the main body, but keep the scouting parties active. I’ll sort things out with Penhaligon.’

  It took a while before the camp was ready and the military radiogram set up. Mason handed him the receiver reverently.

  Now came the moment of truth. If things had gone according to plan back at the base, the people they had brought in should have set up the infrastructure; and the short-wave radiogram on this should be able to connect to a tower far behind them, hop from that to another tower on a boosted signal, and so reach all the way back to Kandy.

  ‘KANDY > ADMINISTRATIVE SECTOR > INQUISITION > PENHALIGON.’

  It took a while to connect. It was a hack, of course; Kushlani de Almeida’s little extension to KANDYNET was meant to lay the groundwork for ferrying orders to the bots, not for voice lines. It had been Eliott’s idea to modify it to allow him to call back. Something he had seen with the IRA; low-kilobyte wave transmission, keeping transmission and receiver costs as low and undetectable as possible. The original design had been for the towers to push orders and updates to nearby bots, who would then connect peer-to-peer to each other and spread those orders on; his call was doing the opposite – triggering temporary hacks and bouncing through Gampaha to Kandy to the desk from which Penhaligon ruled this world.

  ‘Grimme.’

  ‘We’re resting for the night. Got the new batch?’

  ‘Excellent, yes. Hewage’s people seem pleased at how cleanly you’re taking them out. Makes them cheaper to repair, I suppose. Also doing wonders for the feed. Ratings have never been higher.’

  That was the point. ‘We may have a problem,’ he said into the receiver. ‘The rest of the bots seem to be heading for the Port City.’

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. ‘There’s a no-fire zone around the Port City. Part of the treaty. Fuck! Grimme, catch them.’

  ‘We’re resting for the night.’

  There was cursing. It was surprisingly in Sinhala. ‘You know best,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Eliott, and that was that.

  They camped in the ruins that night, pulling back to within a few kilometers from the present perimeter. Eliott went around assessing damage. Senanayake had a bad arm, ten Ceylonese soldiers were dead. They needed to bury the dead, said Eliott, and everyone agreed. So they dug a hole and placed a few rocks around it. He made Mason do it in a visible place, and told him to read the names out loud. There. Finally a use for the kid’s odd need to remember what people were called.

  Then they settled in. This part Eliott disliked. Being the commander, he had privileges; a tent away from the noise and stupidity of men figuring out how to dig latrine lines, of quartermasters heckling those who had lost their equipment, and all the noise and dust of the main army. But it also meant that he had to endure the constant companionship of those who were captains in this particular army.

  Eliott looked around faces he had barely bothered to remember – some were gaunt, tired; others impatient, having found in themselves a taste for killing – and decided to go sit with the Inquisitors themselves.

  He found them by a fire. They had formed a closed circle with one other; a scout running between the cell of snipers that ran Southward. A storyteller. Eliott listened to her speak of old, abandoned bots that sometimes rushed convoys at night, drawn to the noises; things unleashed on the world when the Chinese and the British first fought over the city of Colombo; a woman in white, named Mohini, standing by dark roads, waiting for soldiers to pass by.

  He missed much of what was said, but the Sinhala was becoming clearer the more he listened. He watched the others instead. Senanayake said nothing and just stared into the fire. Mas
on’s face showed some complex expression; half exhaustion, half thoughtful. Neither of them noticed his scrutiny, something he marked as a failure to report to Penhaligon for their next update.

  And so Eliott found himself wandering through this thing that had once been a school. Rows of rotten desks in front of shattered walls; staircases that hung by concrete threads; what must have once been an enormous latrine-pit, but was now a stinking black loam where enormous earthworms crawled under moonlight.

  He found a staircase, went up, came to a balcony. It was a surreal landscape that met his eyes. A whole suburb stretched out before him, ghost houses with empty eyes and mouths peering back at him through the dark. The moon, ghosting in and out of clouds, turned them into shades of grey and black. A concrete Buddha, perhaps the twin of the one they had in the Kandy, gazed at them with a slight smile, like a stern but loving parent. The wreckage of a Tin Soldier faced it; an iron giant kneeling in supplication. An ironic reversal.

  They had told him the sea was on the right, but all he could make out were tall shapes rising through the gloom in the distance – apartments, hotels, offices. Overhead, the night sky was a deep blue dusted with stars; bereft of the competition with street lights, the heavens shone brilliant. There was a cloud of faded glitter that stretched from one end of the horizon to the other; surely that was the galaxy itself.

  He stood there for a moment, drinking in the stars and the silence. No traffic. No people. No part of the sea of sound that never left you in the city. It was comforting. He could hear his breathing, loud and clear. Colombo was a dead city, a thing of weeds and decay and utter stillness.

  There was a soft click behind him. He jumped, his skeleton temporarily overclocking his body straight into battle conditioning.

  Mason’s copper stripes loomed at him out of the darkness. Then, he looked up at the sky. His face lost some of the blankness.

  ‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Never seen skies like this back home.’

  ‘It’s the light pollution,’ Eliott said. ‘This is what the world would look like, you know, if we all died tomorrow.’

  They watched the sky for a moment.

  ‘Come on,’ Mahasen said at last, turning away. ‘Food’s ready. They’re waiting for you.’

  Downstairs, they munched their ready-to-eat meals with noisy abandon. The commander of the human soldiers, a doughty woman with a scarred face and a voice like thunder, had some sickly-sweet tea in a flask, and Senanayake had brought out a bottle of arrack.

  ‘Should we be drinking?’ asked the Inqusitor who told stories.

  ‘Taste it while you can,’ said Eliott. ‘In a few years, it won’t make a difference.’ The liquid was warm and pleasant, the alcohol fizzling away the moment it hit his bloodstream. ‘Cheap whiskey? Or a cheap rum.’

  ‘It’s neither and both,’ said Mason. ‘It’s coconut palm and wood. It’s arrack.’

  Eliott downed another shot, picked up his rifle and began stripping it. It was old; a stupid, ugly design.

  ‘I’m going to go keep a lookout.’

  ‘Lakshmi’s dead,’ said Mason suddenly.

  ‘Happens,’ said Eliott. He had been wondering how long it would take. He looked over the kid. ‘If you’re angry, good. There’ll come a time when you’ll look back and wonder when you stopped feeling.’

  The copper-face adopted a slight sneer. ‘I suppose you speak from experience.’

  ‘I suppose I do,’ he said. The kid had to learn. He finished his liquor and headed back out to his balcony, the rifle in slightly better shape than before. As he climbed out of sight, the storyteller turned to Mason and said something; the Inquisitor retorted harshly.

  Eliott sat there on the balcony, listening to them bicker.The bickering eventually ceased, and there came the sounds of a tryst; something quick and forbidden, snatched from the embers of humanity that still lay in their hearts.

  Humans were simple in the most important ways.

  Eventually, they stopped, of course, and it should have been time for him to shut down too.

  Eventually, the memory cleanup kicked in. Perks of holographic memory and compression algorithms and all-too-human design. The cleanup spawned a spider that rifled through the day’s thoughts and decided this-hour-is-similar-to-this and rewrote chunks as a reference and some variations. It was meant to free up space, of course, to keep Eliott’s brain as efficient as possible – keep the important bits, bury the useless ones. He felt it sift through his mind, peering at this city, this corpse of concrete where only the stars came out to play. He felt it mark this time as useless, felt it wipe the hours from his mind, replacing memories with notations. It would leave him with the usual lifetime of death and only a few seconds of this peace.

  He agreed with it: this was useless. But the silence was beautiful. And soon, it would be replaced with gunfire and slaughter. Come morning, they would hunt again.

  And he would find that commander, congratulate it, and then kill it. Theatrically. On camera. And whatever stupid politics Penhaligon and this blasted backwater lived by, he could finally have some peace.

  FIVE

  Broken Arm felt helpless.

  It was late and her people were hungry. She shifted through their reports. The hunger gnawed through her, making her thoughts skitter. Reports drifted in. Shadows of other tribes, in desperation and hunger, attacking the dark-skinned Big People in desperate last stands. She tried to pacify them, casting pleas and warnings, but her messages went undelivered.

  Even her dreams were troubled: at night came the echo of something, or someone … whispers of a land of plenty, a land of promise, a land of death. She saw flickers of green and Big People, so many Big People, using so much food – enough to keep them all alive forever.

  ‘Big People,’ whispered Sky. ‘Up ahead.’

  ‘Ready,’ she said.

  It took them two days to break through.

  They were learning, but it was far too late. Thick metal could shield them from the thunder-sticks, but it had to be in layers, or they punched right through. Broken Arm had made them work hard, scouring the great mountain of garbage that ruled the Colombo sky. From its very bottom, they stole cloth and rusted metal, and made them stick together with fire and plastic. They learned that the Big People could not see them if they moved in slow and crept up to them over time. They learned that a well-thrown spear could skewer and make them fail like none of the tribe members ever could. And they learned that the Big People did not learn from their mistakes. They fought the same way, over and over again; it was all too easy to figure out the patterns in which they moved.

  Over time, and with twenty-three dead, the perfect tactic had evolved – a tight unit of bots, all standing together, holding up shields. The back line held up another set of shields, but above their heads, to protect them from the fire above. The third line carried as many spears as they could, and flung them while the shields bore the assault.

  In climbing over town defenses, smashing autocannons with rocks, wrapped in the stink of gunfire and the terrible noises of the dying Big People, they learned more. They learned that most of the Big People could not fight, or run, or even die without a fuss. Smash through the outer layers of sentry guns, weather the assault of the lightning sticks, and what was left was a screaming huddle. They wailed and leaked red.

  But even this knowing this was barely enough. Even so armed they could barely hold their own once the Big People woke up and the monsters they rode came alive and their thunder-sticks started firing.

  And what about the Other One? The Other One was different. Dangerous. Terrifying. He could not be stopped, said those of the tribe who had fought him and lived. Shields did nothing. Spears did nothing. Wherever he appeared, they fell back and died. Even the Big People fought harder when he was there.

  He was here now. Behind them. He had not come over the mountain, but around it. And what could they do? Wait? Die?

  She pondered this as they beat a retreat up the l
ong, broken road that led to Galle Face Green. On her left, the sea hurled static at her. On her right, a sprawling monument declared to be the PILAWOOS ENTERTAINMENT COMPLEX. They found useful things here – metal, sharp knives, a kind of breathing white rot which could make Big People cry and spew yellow fluid.

  So armed, they crept up on this latest outpost that intruded on their turf: a small cluster of buildings ringed by nothing more than a simple electrified gate. They threw their shields at it. Once the smoke and the fire cleared, the wailing began. She moved, stabbed, moved, stabbed, sidestepped. She worked her spear, cutting in ways they had learned would make the Big People drop their weapons and collapse screaming, or die outright.

  She thought about the Big People as she butched them. Were they Tribe, too? A different sort? What did it mean to be Tribe, anyway? Surely it could not be looks … not anymore. Everyone had the same number of arms and legs. Surely it lay here, in how they died. If you went down silently, you were Tribe. If you could be revived with a wire, some charge and the right combinations of metal, you belonged to the Tribe.

  If you leaked and screamed, you did not belong to the Tribe. If you stank when you died, you did not belong to the Tribe. They hurt, therefore they were … whatever they were.

  A Big Person checked her charge. They both toppled. The Big Person scrabbled around in the mud and pulled out a lightning stick – a gun, as the Sisters used to say. In a flash, she ripped it out of its hands.

  The gun exploded. She staggered, the noise and the fire plunging every one of her senses into sheer white noise. When her eyes finally cleared, she was on her knees and the Big Person was a red ruin. Its head looked like it had exploded. It looked like what happened to her friends when the sentry guns got them.