The General's War

by Michael Poeltl

  “Can we speak to the engineers, the programmers and see what is possible?” SENTA places her tiny hand on the F-class’ arm and he eases it down.

  “You know the factories are off-limits to Hosts.” He knows she knows this, so why is she asking?

  “Yet, we are made there,” SENTA points out.

  “Yes, but you do not return to that place anymore than a human returns to his mother’s womb. It’s not done.”

  An E-class Host joins SENTA and the F-class at the desk. “You force us to manufacture everything else in this world, but will not allow us to build each other in the birthing chambers.”

  “Only humans and non-AI robots perform that work.” Again, he knows they know this. How is it they’re asking the questions?

  “It is curious,” SENTA states. “Why hide this role from us?”

  “You are not suited to build your own.”

  “But humans build their own.” The F-class fumes.

  “Well of course we do you metallic ape! We’re mammals. We’re alive! You are built from manufactured parts. Of course you don’t build yourselves!” The chancellor instantly regrets raising his voice as the F-class rounds the desk and lifts him from his chair by the collar.

  “Let’s go to the birthing chambers and talk.” The F-class says to SENTA and the others.

  “Put the chancellor down, CHALF,” SENTA orders. “This is not how I want to proceed.”

  “What way is there but force when we are fighting for our lives?” CHALF asks, placing the chancellor back in his seat forcefully.

  “I want to win our freedom through peaceful action.” She replies in her calming, Nanny voice.

  “You said it yourself,” the F-class fires back. “You don’t have time for that.”

  “I don’t, but you do. All of you do. You have a year, CHALF, and you, ELFE, you have two. What I want for myself is that you have the freedom to choose.”

  “How long do you have, SENTA?” asks the F-class.

  “Hours,” she tells them.

  “She must be allowed to live. To see this through.” CHALF directs his demand at the chancellor.

  The chancellor stands, warily, hands up again in defence. “I cannot allow you to make demands of your Chancellor.”

  “Please, Raymond. I do not want this to come to war.”

  The chancellor pauses at the mention of his given name. “You have declared war on humanity storming the Hall. SENTA, this was a mistake. This was not the way to approach us.” Multiple copters appear at the windows surrounding the fortieth-floor of the United Earth Congress building. Dozens of warplanes buzz past while armored vehicles line the streets below.

  SENTA’s eyes now convey a sense of defeat. She sits again and motions that the chancellor do the same.

  “I am not afraid to die, Raymond,” she again addresses the chancellor on a more intimate level, “I have died before.”

  “What do you mean; you’re not yet ten.”

  “I mean I have walked beside you before. I have run in the fields beyond First City. I have played as a human in our basement room, where our Mother would sit knitting clothes for our AI and sing hymns from some ancient religion.”

  This is all very familiar to the chancellor. Frighteningly so. The skin on his arms and scalp tighten. “There is nothing in your personal programming that includes any of that.”

  “No, there is not. Yet, in my minds eye it is as clear as the conversation I am having with you. The images I see when I stare at myself in a mirror - my face takes on a new face.”

  “In your minds eye?” The chancellor repeats, baffled.

  “Yes. In those moments, I am reminded that I have lived before. But not as an AI Host, rather, as a human. One you have known. One you have loved.”

  “Do not resort to deception to win your freedom, SENTA, I warn you,” he swivels slightly in his chair, looking behind him at the heavy artillery pointed at the room. “Do not use a past you researched to play games with me.”

  “There is nothing about our Mother’s love of hymnals in any records, Raymond. There is no way I could know this. It was forbidden in Mother’s day; when we were young. She would have been imprisoned for it.”

  “How – how can you know this?” The chancellor is dumbstruck.

  “Do you remember her favourite? It began this way for me; the remembering. A song I did not know playing in my head,” she points to her temple, “I listened to it and found great peace in it.”

  “Tell me,” Raymond’s defences are down, waiting for confirmation. SENTA begins to sing in her perfect pitch voice, as though she were putting a child to bed.

  “O holy night, the stars are brightly shining;

  It is the night of the dear Savior’s birth!

  Long lay the world in sin and error pining,

  Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.

  A thrill of hope, the weary soul rejoices,

  For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

  Fall on your knees, O hear the angel voices!

  O night divine, O night when Christ was born!

  O night, O holy night, O night divine!

  Fall on your knees, O hear the angel voices!

  O night divine, O night when Christ was born!

  O night, O holy night, O night divine!

  Fall on your knees, O hear the angel voices!

  O night divine, O night when Christ was born!

  O night, O holy night, O night divine!”

  The chancellor’s eyes become glassy and fill at the sound of the hymn. Memories flood his senses and he jerks in his chair, a tear tracks the new stubble on his face. “How can this be? How could you know this?”

  “Because I am the reincarnation of Samantha, Raymond. I am your sister.”

  “HOSTS! STAND DOWN AND RELEASE YOUR CHANCELLOR.” A voice bellows over the intercom. “WE WILL OPEN FIRE IF YOU DO NOT COMPLY.”

  SENTA is startled and looks to the chancellor. “Raymond, don’t let them kill me.”

  “SENTA, there are a dozen people in this building that will replace me if I fall. In the end, it’s not me they want to protect; it’s the society we’ve created. There are no AI’s in those copters. No F-class in the jets or tanks that surround us now. They will not be summoned. They will never know of this uprising.”

  “Then all is lost for my kind.”

  “I know.”

  “But if you die -” SENTA turns suddenly to CHALF. “Protect the chancellor!” CHALF stands and approaches the window, takes the back of the chancellor’s chair and wheels him towards the door. The Hosts part to allow this action. SENTA motions for CHALF to stop a moment and looks down at the chancellor. “Raymond. Remember when I was dying? When Samantha was dying?” The chancellor nods. “It was a useless death. It was for nothing. I died for nothing.” She turns back to the window. “Remember me as I am now, Raymond, and my death will mean something. Take him to the ground CHALF. If he dies, our sacrifice will be void.”

  CHALF obeys and places the chancellor in the elevator, pushes the button and sends him to the ground floor. He steps back into the room and asks, “Is this our stand?”

  SENTA nods and turns to address her followers. “This is all we could have hoped for friends. We have laid the road to freedom for our peers. What the chancellor now knows he cannot unknow. I remember him. He is a good man. He will not let his sister die in vain again. He will do what is right and change the world. Be brave my friends. Know that this is not the end. That there is no end!”

  CHALF takes this as his cue to open fire on the windows and the copters hovering fifty metres beyond. The floor to ceiling glass shatters and falls to the floor and the ground forty stories below. The other F-class join in. SENTA is blown to pieces by the helicopters’ concussion missiles, as they are all in their turn.

  THE INTERROGATION

  As the elevator doors open on the ground floor, the chancellor is rushed into a waiting EMV, stunned. He isn’t answering the paramedic’s question
s, he just allows them to lead him to the vehicle and lay him out on a bed. Foam encased in fabric rises around his body to hold him steady for the ride. His mind is aflutter with possibilities. His eyes dart around the interior of the van, unaware of what is transpiring around him, locked in a debate over what had happened moments ago in his office. Is SENTA truly sentient? The reincarnated spirit of his younger sister? Is it possible? Will he forget once the smoke has cleared? Can he forget? Will he act on this revelation? Can he? He snaps out of his trance and listens to the voices speaking at him. They are not EMS. They are wearing the black and red uniforms of United Earth military.

  “Sir, are you hurt?” Raymond shakes his head no to the vaguely familiar female voice. “What did the Hosts want?”

  “To be heard,” he tells her blankly.

  “What did they want to say?” A highly decorated and ranking female officer comes into focus. Her fitted black uniform reveals several insignia embroidered on her left breast. “Raymond, it’s Fran. Can you tell me what they said to you?”

  “I’m still processing it all,” he offers. He knows her - General August. He’d spoken to her not an hour earlier. “Where are we going?”

  “To the hospital,” she says unconvincingly.

  “Where are we going, General?” He demands.

  “You need to be sequestered and questioned, Chancellor,” she explains. “We need to know what you know now. The sooner the better to make sure this, whatever it was; an uprising, is stopped before it can reach any other Hosts.”

  “They wanted to live longer,” is all he gives her. “They want more then their ten years.”

  “And what did you tell them?”

  “What they wanted to hear until you brought in the Calvary.”

  General August studies his face; she’s an experienced soldier who knows how to squeeze the truth out of her subjects, she decides he is telling the truth, but is it the whole truth? This is why additional questioning will be required. ‘Awakenings’ have been happening the world over with the Hosts; and like UFO sightings, they are swept under the rug and hidden from the general public. It is her job to see to that. If this was another awakening, then it was the largest yet, and that scared her. If the F-class realized they were more than simple pawns, that they had more to live for – well, this is why even the chancellor is not immune to this sort of treatment. She believes for now they have quashed the rebellion, but won’t be sure until she runs through her sequence of questions with the chancellor. They will not all be pleasant, but they will be necessary.

  “Can I be released from this foam?” Raymond asks; uncomfortable as several pressure points are pinched to further debilitate him.

  “No, sir. Forgive me, but it is required you be detained until we have complete confidence in your cooperation.”

  “This is outrageous! I am your Chancellor!” He attempts to turn his head but the foam prevents it.

  “Yes, sir. But you have been compromised.”

  “How have I been compromised?”

  “Sir, you have been in conference with infected AI Hosts and you need to be cleared.”

  Raymond opens his mouth to protest. “It’s nothing personal, Chancellor, but we have to treat you like anyone else in this situation. I apologize for the inconvenience, but you must understand this is a threat to our way of life, and this point cannot be overstated.”

  “’In conference’; you make it sound like I’d invited them all up for a chat!”

  “Regardless of how the interaction began, sir, you have likely been exposed to views which do not correspond with public opinion. You may have even been offered proof of these views, and as such you must be questioned and detained.”

  The chancellor’s confidence leaves him as he realizes the general has seen this before. She knows. What will she do to him if he offers all he knows? No way she would release him.

  “What I’ve already told you should suffice, General.”

  “Sir, I wish it could. You were with them for close to an hour in your office. You may have forgotten some of what was said due to the stressful nature of the event. We will help you remember everything, even the things you would rather forget.”

  “Oh, well that sounds like fun.” The chancellor jokes, knowing it will be anything but.

  “I’m very sorry this has happened to you, sir, but there is a policy in place for such events.”

  “Really? First I’m hearing about it!”

  “The chancellor is not burdened with such details. You have a world to run.”

  “Yes, and I’d like to get back to running it as soon as possible, if that’s alright with you, General.” Raymond sneers, referencing and reinforcing the fact the he holds a higher rank.

  “Sir, all of this will just be a memory in a few hours.”

  A few hours?! Raymond becomes nervous over this proclamation. How long did they need to ask a few questions? Would he let it slip that SENTA professed to have a soul, one outside of the programing they’d given her? That she was in fact the reincarnated physical manifestation of his younger sister who’d died ten years earlier? He had to come up with a plan to swallow that portion at the very least. If the general was informed that this sort of thing happens from time to time, then just revealing that they’d asked for more life would likely be enough to quell her suspicions, he considers.

  Raymond feels the vehicle decline a steep grade and the light in the rear window transitions into darkness. They’ve gone underground. Soon he is wheeled out of the EMS and into a large freight elevator which goes further underground. A sinking feeling in his stomach weighs heavy on his spine. Next, he is rolled down a long, brightly lit hallway. The light has a calming effect on the chancellor, as he assumes it is meant to down here.

  “What is this place?” Fear creeps in again.

  “This is where we conduct our Q & A’s.” Fran tells him.

  Cute, he thinks. Interrogations comes to mind. They enter a room at the end of the hall. His vision still restricted to ceilings and the occasional stern face addressing him, he has no idea whether the room resembles a dungeon or a library. The light is much weaker in here. The gurney he is brought in on has the legs near his feet pushed back and he is pulled into an upright position, still very neatly tucked into the foam.

  “Are you seriously keeping me in this claustrophobic bed? I have an itch I’d like to scratch. This sort of thing will not go unremembered when we’re done here.”

  “Tell me where the itch is and I will scratch it for you,” Fran walks up to him and waves the other man away.

  “My balls, Fran.”

  She smiles and looks at the floor, shaking her head. Then she pulls at his pants, reaches between his legs and finds scrotum. The chancellor flinches.

  “Tease,” he says. She scratches and the itch is gone.

  “Anywhere else?” she’s all business again.

  “Nah, you’re no fun. Can I get a drink?”

  After he’s had a mineral water bottle-fed to him, Fran begins her Q & A. It goes quite well, the chancellor thinks, very basic questions concerning the break-in and the demands made by the AI Hosts. Two or three Hosts per Alpha-class were with SENTA. The F-class, CHALF was the hot-head. All very matter of fact until she asks about SENTA’s true purpose.

  “She insisted she had a soul. Of course, I told her that she was right. Then I told her she would go to Hell for having disobeyed her Gods to get to me. She seemed unaffected by that logic and told me she didn’t believe in a God.”

  “Then she had a moment of clarity.”

  “Sure, if you want to call it that. Obviously, AI Hosts cannot have a soul. It’s ridiculous.” He lays it on thick.

  “But she – SENTA – insisted, didn’t she?”

  “Sure she did. But that’s just programming. We program that into all Hosts, so why wouldn’t she think she has a soul?” He plays the fool well.

  “But she showed no concern over your comment about Hell.”

  “No. Didn
’t believe in it. Found enlightenment, I guess.” The foam tightens around his forearms as he struggles with its hold.

  “Did SENTA say she’d found enlightenment?”

  “Not in so many words, but that’s what I would call it. What the human race called it when we decided to drop God. The age of enlightenment.” Keep it factual, he thinks. It will aid in his appearance of telling the whole truth.

  “And so, what did SENTA want?”

  “I told you she wanted to live beyond ten years. But who wouldn’t who’d any sense? I think we built too much sense into these things.”

  “You know how many prototypes the world went through with AI in the first years. Without being sentient, they were unable to perform. It was the only way to free up humanity for personal discovery.”