Lightspeed Magazine Issue 21

by Lucius Shepard;Brooke Bolander;Chris Willrich;Genevieve Valentine;Robert Silverberg;Keith Brooke;Gregory Benford;Kristine Kathryn Rusch;Carrie Vaughn

  I introduce myself. The woman gives me the look of disbelief that the soldiers should have given me. I slid her my plastic i.d., since we have no systems to log onto here.

  She stares at it, then turns it over, sees the hologram of the woman who plays me on the vids, and sighs.

  “They warned me,” she says, and I do not ask who they are. They are the people who arranged our meeting, the ones who use dozens of intermediaries, and who probably, even now, believe they are using me for some nefarious purpose. “They warned me you would not be what I expect.”

  A shiver runs through me. Even though I am impersonated on purpose so that the “bad guys,” as our president calls them, do not know who I am, someone out there does. Maybe many someones. Maybe many someones connected to the “bad guys.”

  We go through preliminaries, she and I. I sit across from her, slightly out of range of her child’s empty eyes. She offers tea, which I take but do not intend to drink. The cup is small and dainty, trimmed with gold. She has not yet had to trade it for a meal.

  Then she slides a chip to me. I press it. A smiling man wearing a western business suit, his head uncovered, his hair as stylishly cut as the woman’s is, grins at me. He holds the hand of a young girl, maybe five, who is the image of her mother. The girl laughs, one of those floaty childish laughs that some people never outgrow. The sound fills the tent, and the boy, sitting across from me, flinches.

  “That’s her?” I ask.

  “Them,” she says. “He died too.”

  I made it a point to know the case. There are so many cases that sometimes the details are irrelevant to all except the people involved. He had just parked his car outside a café in Cairo. He had told his wife he was taking his daughter to a special class—and indeed, an English-language class for the children of businessmen who had dealings with the West, was meeting just a block away.

  He opened his door and the car exploded, killing him, his daughter, and three people on the sidewalk. If they had made it to class as was the plan, over fifty children would have died.

  “She’s so beautiful,” I say. Hard to believe, even now, that a child like that can carry a bomb inside her. Hard to believe she exists only to kill others, at a specified place, at her own designated time.

  I have promised myself I will not ask the standard question—how can you do this? How can you do this to your own child?

  Instead, I say, “Did you know?”

  “None of us knew.” Her gaze meets mine. It is fierce, defiant. She has answered this question a hundred times, and her answer has never varied. Like so many survivors, she cannot believe her husband doomed his own child.

  But I have promised myself I will get the real story, the story no one else has told. I want to know what it’s like to be part of a society where children are tools, not people to be loved. I want to know how these people believe so much in a cause—any cause—that it is worth not only their own lives, but their child’s as well.

  So I must take her initial answers at face value. Perhaps I will challenge them later, but for now, I will see where they lead.

  “If neither you nor your husband knew,” I say.

  “My son didn’t know either.” Just as fierce. Maybe fiercer. She puts her hand on her son’s head. He closes his eyes, but doesn’t acknowledge her in any other way.

  “If none of you knew,” I say, trying hard not to let my disbelief into my voice, “then how did this happen?”

  “Like it always does,” she snaps. “They put the chips in at the hospital. On the day she was born.”

  The job is strange. It cannot be work because you cannot leave at the end of the day. It becomes part of you and you become part of it. That’s why you and your colleagues label it a calling, put it on par with other religions, other callings that deal with ethics.

  You sit across from murderers and ask, what made you decide to kill? as if that’s a valid question. You sit across from mass murderers and ask, what is it about your political philosophy that makes your methods so attractive to others? as if you care about the answer.

  You think: We need to know, as if knowing’s enough to make the problem go away. As if you did the right thing when you were granted the only meeting ever with some charismatic leader—this generation’s Vlad the Impaler or Hitler or Osama Bin Laden—and interviewed him as if he were a reasonable person. As if you did the right thing when you failed to grab a guard’s old-fashioned pistol, and blow the charismatic leader away.

  Later you discuss ethics as if they are an important concept.

  You say: Your job prevents you from judging other people.

  You say: Other reporters could not get interviews if we take such lethal sides.

  You do not say: I lacked the courage to die for my beliefs.

  And that is the bottom line. Behind the talk of ethics and jobs and callings lies a simple truth.

  You can look. You can see.

  But you cannot feel.

  If you feel, you will see that your calling is simply a job, a dirty often disgusting one at that, and you realize there were times when you should have acted. When you could have saved one life or a dozen or maybe even a hundred, but you chose not to.

  You chose not to—you say—for the greater good.

  7:15 Upload: Suicide Squadron Part 3 by Martha Trumante

  Investigations always seem to hinge on luck. The Paris investigations are no different.

  Three months into sorting the Louvre wreckage, the authorities find a chip, its information largely undamaged. Curiously, its technology was five years old, a detail that stumped the investigators more than anything else.

  But not General Pedersen.

  “I was watching the news that day,” she says. “I don’t know why. It’s not something I normally do. I usually scan the relevant feeds. But that day, I was watching, and it hit me. I had seen the bomb come into the museum. I’d seen him laugh and rock back and forth and smile in anticipation. I’d thought he was looking forward to his day when really, he was looking forward to his death.”

  At first, other security experts would not listen to Pedersen. In a world where suicide bombers had become commonplace—when child suicide bombers packed with explosives were part of the norm—no one could believe that a child could have had a chip implanted years before with enough high density explosives to destroy an entire building.

  People could not plan ahead that far, the common wisdom went. People could not be that cruel.

  But they were. That was the new truth—or maybe it was an old truth.

  They were.

  She shows me the documents the hospital had her sign. She shows me the diagrams, the little marking some doctor made on a chart of a newborn baby, showing where the chips would be—“chips that will enable her to live in the modern world,” the doctors told her.

  She shows me computer downloads, bank accounts her husband set up in her daughter’s name, the college enrollment forms—required for a wealthy child of age four to get into some of Cairo’s best private schools—the plans she and her husband had for her daughter’s future, her son’s future, their future.

  The authorities, she tells me, believe her husband created all these accounts and family documents to protect her, to prove that she and her son had nothing to do with the family’s patriotic explosion.

  Only he is not political, she tells me. He never was, and no one believes her.

  They believe her enough to send her here instead of killing her as so many other families have been killed in the past. They don’t even try or imprison her. They just disown her, her and her son, make them people without a country, refugees in a world filled with refugees.

  She can afford this tent on this sandy piece of land. She pays for the space closest to the medical tent. She hoped that someone would befriend her, that the medical personnel—the aide workers—would help her and her unjustly accused son.

  Instead, they shun her like everyone else does. They shun her for failing to p
rotect her daughter. They shun her for failing to participate in her husband’s crime. They shun her for being naïve, for forcing the so-called patriots to ignore her husband and daughter’s martyrdom, for failing to die with her family.

  They shun her because they cannot understand her.

  Or because they do not want to.

  8:15 Upload: Suicide Squadron Part 4 by Martha Trumante

  Experts spend their entire career studying this new bombing phenomenon. Some experts who specialized in suicide bombing have moved to this new area of research.

  One, Miguel Franq, wanted to know how three families decided to murder their five year-olds in well-known Paris landmarks on the same day. Initially, he believed he would find a link that would lead him to a terror cell.

  When he did not find the link, he worked with some of the scientists to see if the bomb-chips were set to activate on a certain day, then detonate when they were hit with X-rays, laser beams, or sonar equipment—all three being the main items used in security scans.

  The intact chip revealed nothing like that. Only a detonator that was set to go off on a particular time on a particular day.

  After much research, many hours of survivor interviews, and that inevitable lucky break, Franq found the link. Someone had sent the families free tickets to each site. That all three children did not end up at the same tourist attraction is another matter of luck, although what kind of luck no one can say.

  Would it have been better to lose more of the Louvre? Or the Eiffel Tower? Or Notre Dame?

  Would it have been better to lose one monument instead of damage three? Would more lives have been saved? Lost? Would more people have noticed? Or would less?

  I speak to all the parents in this part of the enclave. All of them survivors—some male, some female—of a once-intact family. All of them claiming to be non-political, claiming they did not know—nor did their spouse—that their child was programmed to die.

  I ask for proof. They give me similar documents. They give me bank accounts. But, tellingly—at least to me—the names of the hospitals vary, the names of the doctors vary.

  “It is the nursing staff,” one man says to me.

  “It is an out-patient procedure,” says another woman.

  “Anyone could do it,” says a second man. “Even you.”

  The rules of journalism have tightened in the past forty years. The scandals of fifty years ago, the tales of made-up sources, or badly researched material or political bias—true or not—nearly destroyed the profession.

  When you were hired, you were reminded of those past scandals, told that any story with less than three verifiable sources (sources that have proof of their claims, sources that can be reinterviewed by the fact-checker—no listening to vids [which can be manipulated], no scanning of notes), any story with less than three will not be run. Any such stories appearing in blogs or personal writings will be considered the same as a published or viewed newspiece.

  Hire an editor for your own work, you’re told. You will be watched.

  We’re all watched.

  So you become an observer and a detective, a recorder of your facts and a disbeliever in someone else’s. You need to verify and if you cannot, you risk losing your job.

  You risk damaging the profession.

  You risk losing your calling—because you might believe.

  Finally, they take me to the person I had hoped to see. They take me into the medical tent to see a six-year-old girl.

  She has her own air-conditioned section. It has a hospital bed, a holo-vid player (nothing new; only old downloads), several comfortable chairs, and a table covered with playing cards. Someone is teaching her poker, the international game.

  An aide worker accompanies me. He whispers, “No one outside the family visits her. We’re not supposed to say she’s here.”

  Until now, she has existed primarily as a rumor.

  You know, right, of the little girl? The one who lived?

  Permanently blind, she is …

  They pay her millions of Euros just to remain quiet …

  She lives in a palace in Switzerland …

  … in Baghdad …

  … in Singapore …

  She lives in a corner of a medical tent in a refugee camp. Her face is crisscrossed with scars and the shiny tissue of a dozen different plastic surgeries. She has only one arm. You don’t realize until you come close, that half her torso is a kind of clear plastic, one designed for the medical interns to monitor the fake parts inside her, the miracles that keep her alive.

  As I say hello, her eyes move toward me. She can see, then. She says hello in return, her accent upper-class British with a touch of India in it. She looks wary.

  I don’t blame her.

  No parent watches over her. Her mother committed suicide—the real kind, the kind that’s personal, and lonely, and takes no one else with it—when she heard the news. The blast killed her father.

  She was an only child.

  I sit next to her, on her right side so that I don’t have to see that clear torso, the workings of her rebuilt interior, that missing—and soon-to-be-replaced—arm.

  She is being rebuilt as if she were a machine. Someone is paying for this, real money that keeps this medical tent, and hence the people in the camp, alive.

  Someone who, no matter how hard I investigate, manages to remain anonymous.

  “Do you know who I am?” I ask.

  “Reporter-lady,” she says, just like my driver, which makes me nervous. I will not stay here two days. I will leave tonight, maybe even on foot. There are too many connections, too many people who know what I’m doing. Not enough ways to make me safe.

  “That’s right,” I say. “Reporter-lady. Can I talk to you about your accident?”

  She makes a face, but half of her skin does not move. “Not an accident,” she says. “I sploded.”

  The words, said so flatly, as if it is a fact of life. And, if I think about it, it is. A fact of her life.

  A fact of all the lives I’ve touched here today. Every single one of them knew someone who became a bomb.

  “Do you know why you exploded?” I ask.

  She nods, runs her remaining hand over her stomach. “Someone put something in me.”

  So flat. Like a child discussing rape.

  “Did your Daddy know about this?” I ask. Her father took her to an open-air market that day almost one year ago.

  She shakes her head. Those bright, inquisitive eyes have moved away from me. Despite the flat tone, she hates talking about this. Or maybe hates talking about her father, the man who decided she was going to be a weapon.

  “What did he say when he took you to the market?” I ask.

  “Mommy wasn’t feeling so good,” she says. “We had to get her some medicine and a flower.”

  “Nothing else?” I ask.

  She shrugs.

  “Nothing about going to a better place?” I don’t know what euphemism to use. I don’t know enough about her or her past, being unable to research much of it. I don’t know if she was raised Christian or Muslim or Jewish, since that open-air market catered to all three. I don’t even know what nationality she is, something these camps like to keep as quiet as they can.

  “No,” she says.

  “He didn’t hug you extra hard? Tell you he loved you? Act strange in any way?”

  “No,” she says.

  “Did your mom?”

  “No!”

  “Did they ever tell you that you were special?” I ask.

  She looks at me again. A frown creases her brow, creating a line between the scars. “Yes.”

  My heart starts to pound. “What did they say?”

  She shrugs.

  “It’s all right to tell me,” I say.

  She bites her lower lip. This is a question she clearly hasn’t been asked much. “Special,” she says, “because I’m the only one.”

  “The only one what?” I ask.

  “The o
nly one they ever wanted.” Her voice shakes. “Everyone else, they have two, three, four.”

  I blink for a moment, trying to find the context.

  She sees my confusion. Color runs up her cheeks, and I wonder if I’ve made her angry.

  That fear returns—that odd sensation. Afraid twice in one day, after years without it. Afraid, of a damaged six-year-old girl.

  “My daddy said I was so perfect, they only wanted me. Only me.” Her voice rises, and she squeezes something in her hand.

  The aide worker appears at the door. He looks sadly at me. I stand. My time is up.

  As I walk out, he says, “She was an only child, in a culture that frowns on it. Her parents were trying to make her feel good about that.”

  “Is that what you think?” I ask.

  “You’re not the first she’s told that to,” he says. “Investigators, officials, everyone tries to find the two, three, and four others. You people never seem to remember that she’s a lonely little girl, in a lot of pain, who can’t understand why everyone thinks she’s evil.”

  I look over my shoulder at her. Her lower lip trembles, but her eyes are dry.

  I want to go back, ask her different questions, but the aide worker doesn’t let me.

  I am done here. I had hoped I would find my proof. Instead, I found a child whose parents told her she was special—because she was an only child? Or because they had planted a time-release bomb-chip in her?

  Or both?

  9:15 Upload: Suicide Squadron Part 5 by Martha Trumante

  The Paris bombings were the first and last time more than one child detonated in the same city on the same day. Ever since, these explosions have occurred at all times of the day, at hundreds of locations across the globe, at thousands of targets—some large, like the Eiffel Tower, and some small, like a deceptively normal home in a tiny suburban neighborhood.

  The small bombings lend credence to the rumors that have plagued this weapon from the beginning: that these children and their parents are innocent victims of fanatics who have wormed their way into the medical establishment, that the true bombers aren’t suicidal at all. Instead they are nurses, doctors, interns, who piggyback the detonator chip onto a relatively normal chipping procedure—giving a child an identity chip, for example, or the standard parental notification chip that must now be inserted into every newborn—a procedure that’s a law in more than 120 countries.