by Neil Clarke
Chatsumon pours a cup of water, lukewarm, and presses it in Rinthira’s hand. “I’ll get you all the armor you want and a squad’s worth of artillery. Except none of that is going to make Ayutthaya safer. There’s no perimeter here to speak of. At a base, human personnel would’ve noticed the intrusion right away.”
Next to the window, a live broadcast plays. It is being recorded through Xiaoqing’s eyes—out of all the AI family, the Jeen eldest is the most powerful, able to manifest and operate nearly everywhere at once. No war correspondent is better. She is relaying an air strike against a small Portuguese town. The Americans, on their own channel, will declare that it is done nobly. That they are liberating the town from Turkish control, restoring it to its rightful citizenry.
Rinthira watches the smoke and the fumes. Listens to the noises, selected and modulated by Xiaoqing: architecture crumpling, ballistic impact, and underneath all that—precisely captured and brought to the fore—a wailing infant. Charred homes and burning schools and slag; what can be freer than blackened ruin no one wants. Corpses too are free, she grants, from worldly concerns and nationality and war: the ultimate liberty.
She drinks deeply; Chatsumon remembers her preference for liquid slightly above room temperature. “The last time I operated, I let Phiksunee target a hospital. Sittipong held her back; he knew that and he let me take the reins. So here we are, one atrocity richer. The next time she might well massacre as many as that air strike.”
“Yes,” Chatsumon says, “I know. I was the one who put you there. All of them need their humans. Phiksunee needs you to be complete, and she was conceptualized from the beginning as a weapon.”
Rinthira pushes at the Natasha arm again. These bodies have been mass-produced. Shock troops, assassins, nothing like the careful works of art that are the marionettes used by Phiksunee and her siblings. If sufficient Natashas are made, the shape of main force will have changed irrevocably. Sitting still is not an option. The war will not pass her by. “You want me back.”
“Someone like you is exactly what we need.”
The feed is ending, fading out to Jeen politicians discussing the strike and its implications. A Turkish general on call, distraught. Angry.
“Natasha has a lot of information,” Rinthira says after a moment. “There are American manufacture yards we don’t know about, links in their supply chains. It could be decisive, altogether. I want you to promise me, Chatsumon, that if I go back you’ll help end this war.”
The colonel nods, curt. But it is a vow, an oath, bound by that twisting thing between them.
“All right.” Rinthira salutes. Sharp and crisp, cadet-proper. “Reporting for duty, Colonel Chatsumon.”
Her commander smiles and returns the salute. “Welcome back, Lieutenant Rinthira.”
About the Author
Benjanun Sriduangkaew writes love letters to strange cities, beautiful bugs, and the future. Her work has appeared in Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Phantasm Japan, The Dark, and year’s bests. She has been shortlisted for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer and her debut novella Scale-Bright has been nominated for the British SF Association Award.
In the Midst of Life
Nick Wolven
1
Field Report #72276
Doug Lam
Lead Site Investigator
South Asian Division
:::ACCESS RESTRICTION: GRADE 3 AND ABOVE:::
:::CONTENTS EDITED FOR RELEVANCE AND CLARITY:::
Division Controller’s Notes: psych flag, legal review recommended, immediate termination recommended
*****transcript begins*****
Well, you bastard, you got your wish.
I know it’s you who reads these reports, Carter, and I know why. Now, listen.
You’ll find the project file attached. It’s got everything you need. Site specs, environmental impact, legal briefing. Not to mention toxin assays, insurance payouts, the “local impact factor” (quite a euphemism, that). Plenty for your lawyers to chew on.
It should be enough. Hell, it is enough. But I know it’ll never satisfy you. Look, I get why you’ve been asking for these spoken reports—these “informal debriefings,” as you people like to call them. A cute little ruse to get me talking off the cuff, guard lowered, saying what’s really been happening out here. And you can sit in your executive suite, poring over these braindumps of mine, waiting for me to become so cocky and foolish as to speak the awful truth.
Well, here it is. What you’ve been waiting for, in that gray and shriveled little heart of yours. Grounds for my immediate termination.
I’ll make it sweeter, Carter. I’ll paint the scene. Grab a drink, you son of a bitch. You’re going to want to savor this.
I’m sitting in Belawan, in the spiritless hotel you booked us in, project notes on my laptop screen—acres of notes, Carter, reams of notes, because I’ve been trying for a goddamn week to figure out what just happened here. I’m on the balcony, which isn’t much of a balcony: concrete, like so much of this city, and cracked down the middle in a way that, under normal circumstances, would probably make me fear for my life. It’s a hot night here in northern Sumatra, but who am I kidding, every night is hot. The sun’s gone down somewhere behind me, beyond the black hills and the lost, dead forests, and all that’s left is a pink vision burning in the cloudy haze above the bay. The port, though, the port is always bright: rainbow streets under smoky air.
Yes, the forces of development have been hard at work, here. The big container ships come in, the tea and palm oil go out, and you know as well as I do what happens next. The currents of global capital flow in and do their work.
Capital, Carter. I’ve often wondered, what color is capital? In America, we like to say money is green, but that’s a throwback to the days of paper currency. I think money, pure money, must be the color of glass. Crystalline, like the buildings out here, the hotels and office towers popping up along the banks of the Deli River, south into the urban core of Medan. Shiny new palaces, raised in months from the blasted earth. You can almost forget, on a night like this, when the windows are lit and the bistros are buzzing and the voices of tourists ring through the shopping districts—you can almost forget what was done to make room for them.
I’m getting ahead of myself. What I want you to see, Carter, is me, Doug, your old nemesis from the fifty-seventh floor. Potbellied, gray, not so young as I used to be, with my company-issued laptop, my unbuttoned seersucker shirt. Feet in soiled flip-flops propped on the rusty wreck of what might once have been a Taiwanese space heater. Voice recorder in one hand, whiskey and Coke in the other—the third of the evening, and unlikely to be the last. Looking down at the thin dark trickle of the river cutting through the clutter of vanishing slums.
Let me spell it out. I’m done. D-O-N-E. With how much, exactly, I don’t yet know.
You earned this, buddy. You fought for it. Twenty years, you’ve been dogging my career, waiting for this day. And I’m glad, truly. In a way, you deserve it: every single, strange word of what I’m about to tell you.
2
A man can get sick of air travel, in time.
I mean that literally. Sick. Physically ill. And not this inner-ear stuff HR’s been banging on about.
It’s the height that does it. The remote perspective. There’s a sickness that comes of looking at life from too high up. The way buildings all look the same, so you can hardly judge the relative heights. Not till the sun angles low, evening comes, and darkness leaks out from below their walls. Long black shadows: the footprints of power.
As soon as I landed, Karen grabbed me at the gate, rushed me through the terminal, loaded me on into a corporate copter. Up to the delta, for a look at the site. We followed the river to the Belmera bridge, then veered west, over the Australian zones and the marshes. Quite a patchwork, out that way. The big multinationals are putting up fences, painting their rooftops in grid-based patterns. From above, the land is a sea of corporate logos, rend
ered in pixels a meter square.
We’d be doing four flyovers, Karen said, coming in from each cardinal point. Then a full fly-around at ninety meters. Something to do with the specs on the cameras. I joined her in the cockpit. Green lumps went by below, patches of wetland. Our target was nothing but a blip on the overlay. Karen flipped to a camera feed.
I think you know Karen. Tiny woman, good negotiator, very generous with the company payouts. She did the relocation out of Lagos last year. Cleared nine hundred and fifty-three people out of an area half the size of Yankee stadium. These were families, big ones; they refused to be separated. The shanty town was centered on an old oil yard, row upon row of empty storage tanks. Folks were using propane torches to cut and join the units. Quite a complex. More trace toxins than you could log at a dump site. We had the property pegged for executive villas, ended up scraping it clean to a depth of five meters.
Karen is who they send in when things get, shall we say, delicate. I watched her face as we came to the site. Not that Karen’s the type to reveal her emotions. But you can always tell when someone hasn’t been sleeping, or when she’s been wearing the same clothes for a week.
“Tough clearance?” I tried to catch her eye. I’ve learned, Carter, that when you do a site investigation, the first thing you investigate is your own people.
“Well,” Karen took the controls, “we’ll get to that.”
She punched in a flight program. After the automatic flybys, we dipped in for our sightseeing run. The site specs are all on file, but to sum: it’s old marsh property, reclaimed about thirty years ago. Standard pylon-and-platform job. The Indonesian government laid the first foundations. When they fell apart, a company called Especia came in and tooled around with tent-style storage. After the price crash, the deed got passed around a few small Chinese players, one of whom raised the main construction. They did the usual awful job, left the building half-finished, then sold to a speculator during the boom.
And that’s all she wrote, until about three months ago, when our folks bought the plot at sky-high prices. It’s a connective acquisition, knits together our coastal holdings. Blocks the Chinese from accessing the bay, plus gives us a nice belt of free trade around the oil barons. Our initial plan was to install high-speed transit, the usual mix of stop-off shops. Depending, of course, on the engineer’s report.
And on getting the damn site cleared.
Karen circled in a tight radius. The site didn’t have much in the way of construction. Just one big tower, taller than it ought to be, steel and composite on a bot-built frame. Finished up to the tenth floor, sheathed to the fortieth, nothing but girders and nets above that. There were already cracks where the composite had strained. It’s not meant to be structural, but they’re supposed to tweak the mix for flexibility. This was seriously cut-rate construction.
“How many are there?” I asked.
Karen told the copter to go in close, making a tight pass around the building’s northwest corner. I saw boards in the windows, dirty and unpainted, squares of plywood from the nearby tree plantations. People will use anything they can scavenge out here, but it’s weird not to see transparent windows. Usually on a site like this, there are a million signs of life. Clotheslines on the balconies, towels hung out to dry, rain catchers and aerials all over the structure. This place was a box. Sealed tight.
Karen’s eyes were vague with sleep deprivation.
“How many?” I said again. “How many people inside?” She stared.
“Inside?” It took her at least ten seconds to answer. “Maybe five, nine hundred. Projected.”
“Projected? Not estimated? Nobody’s run a count?”
She had this way of looking at me, Carter. Hard to explain. Like the questions I was asking, perfectly natural questions, were all thunderingly beside the point.
“We tried a count,” Karen said. “The first two teams did full evaluations. When I came in, I sent my own survey crew.”
“But nobody has the numbers? Five to nine hundred, that’s quite a spread.”
That look again. “Yeah. It is.”
We were banking around the corner, tilting into the turn. I leaned over to scan the ground. It was mostly barren concrete, bleak as hell, but I glimpsed a ring of debris, strewn around the building’s foundation. Bales of stuff, big jugs, cardboard packages. Those fat bright drums the NGOs pass out. Like a storm had flooded through some relief agency’s warehouse, depositing the contents here.
“What’s all that—?” I began.
Karen was smacking the console, glaring through the windscreen, cursing like we used to curse when we were kids.
“Shit! Piss on me! Knew this would happen.”
A change of course. We were heading for the edge of the platform. A bunch of mobile units sat grouped in one corner, trucks and company cars, plus those human-chauffeured limos the political folks still drive. They had a little tent set up as a command center, wires running all over the ground. A former soldier stood out front, head-to-toe in body armor, striking the usual badass poses.
“Well,” I said, “what’s all this?” Meaning it rhetorically, but Karen was too tired for nuance.
“What do you think?” She ran a scan for landing sites. “It’s the fucking cavalry.”
Here’s the first big shocker for you, Carter. The first great big reveal.
I know we like to say the nationals are dead. They blew up their currencies, sold all their land, now they just take bribes and service debts. They write laws, we pay them to bend the laws, then we move in and do our thing. Simple, right?
But it isn’t. Not on the ground. The local governments are eager to have us, true. Eager to have our money, eager to have our buildings. Problem is, they get a little too eager, know what I mean? In urban areas, the government types can be . . . aggressive.
Soon as I saw the big Chrysler AT by the tent, I knew the city police were here. The chiefs go in for those army trucks: makes ‘em feel all big and tall. Inside the tent, we found quite a party. Not only Medan police, but a local suit, representing whatever was left of the government. Which accounted, no doubt, for the merc out front. Plus the contractor. Plus our biggest prospective tenant, a Chinese-French guy who represented a hotel consortium. Off in a corner, I saw Colm Kellans from our own team.
You know how I feel about Colm.
The contractor was the one doing the talking. “Hey, whatever you guys want to do, it’s not my dollar. You’re paying for my time. You make the schedule.”
That’s the best rendition I can give of what he said. You know how it is with translation software.
Anyway, it had an effect. Grim silence. Every human in that tent represented a complex system of international capital flows. And every moment we spent gabbing was a pile of money lost.
Karen introduced me. Right away, they got back to business, speaking as if there had been no interruption. The police chief stood up, waving his hands.
“This should be our job. We have legal authority. Let us go in and we’ll do the job for you. Tomorrow, when you come back, the building will be clear.”
Again, my rendition. What he actually said was a lot less friendly. It got the point across, though.
“Sure,” Colm answered. “We know how you’ll do the job, chief. Billy sticks and tear gas. Breaking legs and cracking heads. When you guys say ‘clear,’ you neglect to mention the blood we’ll have to wipe off the floors.”
“Now, hold on.” This was Karen, doing her negotiator thing. “There’s got to be some way—”
They ignored her. The police chief came back at Colm. “You don’t like our methods? What are your methods? What are your people planning to do about this problem?”
Colm, he did that ex-marine thing. Stood up, real slow. Totally silent. Stretching his neck, taking his time. Looking at his fists, like it had just sort of occurred to him, hey, he used to kill people with those things. You can take the man out of the U.S. army, but you can never take the U.S. army
out of the man.
“Sonics,” Colm said. “High and low. Like we did with those condos in Rio de Janeiro.” He had a picture of the tower on the tent wall, projected from his phone. He punched at the image, showing how it would work.
“Look. You got these boards in the windows, tenth floor on up. We can get a drone fleet with adapted canons, punch ‘em in with gel-bag rounds. Hit the top corners to knock out the nails. A second fleet of quadcopters will then fly up with the wave generators. If we get a shot through a single window on each side, that’ll be enough to build the resonance pattern. We hit them with the maximum nonlethal dose. Start at the top and work our way down. We can flush the whole building in a couple of hours.”
“Except,” the chief pointed out, “for the bottom ten floors.”
I was still trying to catch up with the proceedings. But I knew the chief was right. The bottom floors of the building had glass windows, painted black. We could punch ‘em in with the gel-guns, of course. But if this was the kind of situation I thought it was, the last thing we wanted to do was to fill the building with flying shards of glass.
Colm gave the chief that old commando look, like pissant developing-country cops should know not to mess with a Western ex-army dude. “It’s a flush,” he said, giving each word this fierce emphasis. “We’re flushing these people. If we clear thirty floors, that’ll drive out the rest. Believe me. If there are as many people in there as we think, it won’t take much to start a rush for the exits.”
“People will be trampled,” said the police chief. “You’ll have a stampede.”
“My friend, that’s the entire point.”
I noticed that the contractor was shaking his head. “What’s the matter?” I asked him.
“Forget it,” he said, or something to that effect. “Subsonics, hypersonics, whatever. You don’t want to use any acoustic weapons in here. Can’t happen.