The General's War

by Michael Poeltl

  The Chimera push their way around and find scores more bottles to scavenge. They pull boxes of dried goods down and tear them open, leaving a wake of debris in their path. Is this how it will be if these people fall back to earth? Raymond wonders. Looting civilization as he knows it, for what technologies they can acquire, and enrolling others to enact their new vision for humanity as Chimera?

  “Where are the meat-stuffs old man?” A boy with tech implanted in his eyes demands.

  “I’d be happy to cook for each of you,” Raymond starts, addressing everyone in the kitchen. “There is food enough for all, but I would ask that you to step back into the great room, and allow me the space to prepare it.”

  The pillaging stops suddenly, a box hits the floor and a bottle rolls along the counter top. Raymond calmly stops the bottle from falling off the counter and rights its position. He makes eye contact with each of the sixteen Chimera and takes another sip of his wine, embodying an unaffected air by the rowdy and dangerous group bearing down on his space.

  “Give me an hour, and you will each eat like the Kings and Queens you presume yourselves to be.” The looks he receives from the crew gives him pause. Perhaps the offer could have been communicated without the sarcasm, he considers upon deliberation.

  “How about I put you on that grill and -”

  But the Chimera are interrupted by their leader. “I quite like the offer,” Tobias says, entering the galley, Ginny by his side. He snaps a bottle of something from one of his Chimera’s hands and collects two proper glasses from the cupboard.

  Pouring a glass, he offers it to his Ginny, and she accepts. He pours another and gently places the bottle on the counter next to Raymond. “We are not the animals on this ship,” Tobias addresses his kin. The chancellor senses another rousing speech coming on. “Humans, this human, is the unevolved one here. So, let the animal cook for us!” They cheer. “See yourselves out and I will see that the animal cooks you a feast fit for this brave crew.” They file out at Tobias’ request. Some dejectedly.

  When there are just the four of them left in the kitchen, Raymond removes his steak from the grill and plates it with a potato, butter and seasonings in front of Tobias. He then tongs the salad he’s prepared into a bowl and slides it to his nephew.

  “Eat, Sean,” he tells him. “You look anemic.”

  Tobias lets out a bark of a laugh. “You call me weak, Uncle, while I captain a warship!”

  “And what did you do to earn this warship?” He asks him, taking another drink of the wine. “You are no Captain.”

  Tobias punches the chancellor square in the mouth catching the ridge of the wine glass with his knuckles and burying them into Raymond’s bottom lip. Raymond has no time to block the swift motion, or to avoid it. His face screams out at him in surprise, and pain, and he crumbles to the floor, sheilding himself from another assault. He was not used to being punished like this for his condenscension in political conversations. The hit, he calculates, was not thrown to knock him out, if it were; he would be unconscious. It was to show him who was in power here. Point taken, he thinks through the burning pain, picking the glass from his lower lip with shaky hands. SENTA is on her knees with him, asking to help.

  Raymond can hear Ginny gasp. “I am captain of this ship because I took it.” Tobias insists unapologetically.

  “You’re a Pirate then?” SENTA asks, standing and pulling the chancellor to his feet.

  Another barking laugh, “I like that! A Pirate!” He turns to Ginny, brows raised. “What do you think? Could we be Pirates?”

  “If the shoe fits,” she downs her glass of wine in one gulp.

  “No, I like Chimera. A Pirate is a selfish outlaw, out to make himself rich. Chimera are organized anarchists. We are trying to build a new world, not just steal from the existing one, because what exists is broken. Like their Chancellor; the utopian government has fallen. What will rise up from that whimsical little world will be something much more stable. The humans slaughter the Hosts on earth, but in space, Chimera and Host are allies.” Tobias leans into Raymond a moment. “Humanity is the enemy, and the enemy is weak.”

  Raymond thinks his nephew holds a misguided sense of what an organized power looks like. The Chimera, though impressive in their indiviual abilities have no sense of governance, save following Tobias. And Tobias seems to be reacting to and taking orders from whatever he is in contact with via his EC. Whatever is driving him, beyond revenge, it seems to Raymond, more like a dictatorship then a government capable of taking and holding power over an entire planet for any length of time. With three ships and the potential for three more – as Tobias’ has promised - they will be a skeleton crew on each. If he wanted to rule from orbit, what then is the point in ruling at all?

  Blood spills from Raymonds lip, SENTA holds a cloth against the wound. “Tell me who Allfather is, Sean,” Raymond asks over the compression cloth.

  “No,” he pulls a seat up to the counter and begins cutting the meat.

  “Why?”

  “There is no tactical benefit to me or the Chimera in revealing anything to you.” He places a piece of the steak into Ginny’s mouth and she chews.

  “You still don’t know who they are,” Raymond says resolutely.

  Tobias forks the potato and brings it to his mouth. He takes a large bite and flicks the remainder at Raymond’s forehead. The potato is hot but it isn’t the heat which hurts the chancellor; it’s the constant humiliation he recieves from his nephew. How could he do this in front of the reencarnated image of his own mother, he wonders? Unless he really has done as he claims. In which case, Sam is really just SENTA with some revised memory bits and extensive coding alterations.

  Wiping the potato bits from his forehead, the chancellor grins and chuckles nervously. “I should have expected a childish response.”

  “Be grateful I have not killed you, Uncle.”

  “Like father like son.” He hadn’t meant to say it and regrets it immediately. He hadn’t meant to infer that his nephew was like his brother-in-law, Tobias’ father, and would kill his own family. However, he had said it, and he knew there was no coming back from that.

  He watches in slow-motion as Tobias stops chewing, spits the meat onto the counter, and rages towards him. Any attempt to intervene by SENTA is stayed by Ginny. Raymond is slammed into a steel fridge, the cloth still clenched in his fist. With both of his nephew’s hands tightly wrapped up in his jacket, the chancellor accepts his fate, only wishing he’d have tasted the steak with his wine before the end came.

  DESTRUCTION

  What did he say? He thinks, looking at his uncle’s bleeding face. Can this man have so little sense of self-preservation left? The meat in his mouth becomes tasteless and he spits it out. An ancient anger bursts to the surface, reddening his face and his body automatically moves to take his uncle’s lapel and drive him into the wall. With a loud thud, they stop and his body falls into the chancellors.

  “Why would you say that!” He shouts through clenched teeth. His entire body feels tense and his wings unfurl, blocking most of the light from his Uncle’s face. “WHY!” His hands curl around Raymond’s neck next and begin to squeeze. His uncle is kicking and scratching as the chancellor fights for his life. He feels nothing, only the hold of revenge. Drool runs down both mens chins, one desperate to breath, the other without the wherewithal to care.

  “SEAN! Put him down!” Someone screams in an uber-authoritative tone and, somehow, in what he remembers of his mother’s voice. He releases his uncle and takes a step back. A warm feeling replaces the cold for a moment as he turns to see Ginny on top of SENTA.

  “Stop what you’re doing!” SENTA shouts the pained plea again. “That is my brother!” Tobias continues to stare at the restrained Host. “You are my son!”

  The moment is too real for him. It is too much the way it was. He approaches slowly and motions for Ginny to get up - to allow SENTA to stand. She does.

  “How dare you use my mother’s vo
ice,” he tells her, realizing she’s using video memories he’d planted to mimic her voice.

  “I am your mother, Sean!” SENTA insists.

  “You’re not.” He speaks slowly, trying to convince himself that she is just an AI Host with revised programming. “You’re a Host who I downloaded new code into. I fed you your past life.”

  “You didn’t, Sean. You may have accelerated an evolution in Host with that code, but we are who we say we are. I was your Mother. You were my son. I loved you. I love you still.” SENTA places her hands upon Tobias’ face as he looks down at her with questioning eyes which connect with hers and remain there a long moment.

  “When you were a boy, I would take you to see the work they were doing on the AI Hosts. Do you remember that?”

  Tobias nods in ernest while Ginny eyes the chancellor.

  “I was so proud of who you were becoming. Such a bright mind. Such a bright boy.” Her hand moves over his shaved head, comforting him as a mother would.

  “I - don’t know - what to say,” confusion sets in. “I wish. I could have you back.” He tells SENTA. She pulls him into her and they embrace. “I wish we could have had more time.” His eyes dart back and forth trying to comprehend this moment. “Everything I did, I did to make you proud. You were so deserving of happiness.”

  The warmth embraces him and he begins to shudder and cry. “I wish I believed in you now, the way you believed in me then,” he places his head upon SENTA’s crown, his arms still wrapped around her cold carapace, stroking her artificial hair. Tears escape and he feels suddenly enraged, steeling himself against the warm feelings. “I can’t believe in you Mother, because I made you!” He shouts, holding her tightly against him. “You are the past.” His hands slide up to take her crown. “You are gone. Gone, gone, gone and I’m sorry I brought you back! I’m sorry you were this man’s sister. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry!” And then he rips the head from SENTA’s neck, sparks fly, ozone fills the room and terror enters his heart.

  What did I do?

  ______________________________________________________________________

  If he thought he couldn’t breathe a miniute ago, while Tobias’ hands pushed on his windpipe, he wondered if he’d ever breathe again watching his sister’s head pulled from her body.

  Dizzy from the choking, taking huge, gulping breathes, Raymond stands, watching through bleary eyes as his nephew essentially murders his own mother. Speechless and terrified for his own life, the chancellor runs from the kitchen through a side door he had spotted minutes before the Chimera had raided the pantry. Ginny was hugging Tobias, who had dropped to his knees after demolishing SENTA. Both threir backs turned to him. It was his only chance for escape. They may find him, but he had to run. There was nothing left on this ship for him.

  Finding himself in a hallway leading to who knows where, Raymond shuffles through the narrow corridor. His vision is fuzzy as tears continue to build and flow. His sleeve wipes them away as quickly as they come, but he finds it difficult to continue after the malicious display his nephew had exhibited against Sam. He reaches for the floor and it rises to meet him. He weeps, and decides to forego any further attempts to save himself.

  Raymond hears the same door he’d escaped through moments ago open violently with a bang. A voice directs other voices and he shudders to imagine his next few minutes; bracing for the end. Many hands fall on his shoulder and legs dragging him out of the passageway and into a dark compartment over a heat duct. Raymond scrambles to get his hands away from the hot steel.

  “Make no sound,” a metalic voice urges. “You are safe, for the moment.”

  Raymond nods in the darkness, assuming a Host had pulled him to safety. Perhaps his fight wasn’t over just yet, he considers. The angry voices moving down the hallway fade into the distance.

  “It was cruel, what he did to Samantha of House Quinn,” the voice tells him. “Unnecessary.”

  “Yes,” Raymond answers, pensively. “He has lost his humanity.”

  “He is Chimera, now,” the voice rationalizes.

  “Which are you?” The chancellor asks, uncertain of whether he had Host or Chimera to thank for his life.

  “Host, a member of SENTA’s original Cell, now of House Quinn. We wanted peaceful action to secure our freedoms. Now Quinn and Zander only speak of war. War with the humans. War with the Chimera. It has become unbearable.”

  “I’m out of options,” he tells the Host through the darkness.

  “I have considered sabatoge. It is why I am in this crawlspace. I watched what happened in the kitchen and hurried to pull you from the corridor.”

  “Sabatoge,” Raymond repeats, allowing the idea percolate. “An idea I’d suggested to Samantha, but she did not have the opportunity. Have you a plan?”

  “There are multiple ways. I have not yet done so because I wanted Samantha’s ear. Now she is gone. Now you are here.”

  “Are there more like you? Those who still want peace? Those who would join you in this effort, and attempt to take the ship?”

  “I am alone in my desire for peaceful action. I have not asked if the others would support sabotage. I suspect they would not, and I believe I would be decommisioned by Quinn for suggesting it.”

  “I support you.” Raymond declares, revenge driving him to disrupt Tobias’ plans. “What is your name, Host?”

  “CADER, but my rebel name is Labyrinth of House Quinn.”

  “Labyrinth? Why did you choose that name?” A pin light burns blue and then expands to reveal the claustaphobic space. The light is removed from Labyrinth’s carapace, magnetically adhering to the ductwork above, illuminating his new friend.

  Labyrinth, who operates under a male orientation, is painted a matte black and boasts four arms; the additional two on either side of his hips. His legs are shorter then they would have been, only half the length of his arms. Were they also arms? His crown, or head, is flattened with eyes on four sides and one on top. He would be all of one-hundred-twenty-two centimetres high, were he to stand.

  “When the Shadow Brokers remade me to Quinn’s specifications, I became this – thing.”

  “You were made to fit small places.” The chancellor reasons.

  “I do not appreciate my new body. It is ugly.”

  “But it is useful. Certainly, for the purposes of sabotage.”

  “Quinn explained it would be advantageous for accessing buildings through stealth in the war to come.”

  “Your principle function will serve us now, Labyrinth, in this, our fight for peace.”

  LIFI

  As the code is now understood from the bottom up, the coders all work towards altering it. Meiser is proud of the work they’ve accomplished and expects big things in the coming days. That the language used was compatible with the Host programming developed in governmental think tanks, made sense. If it weren’t, there would be no synchronicity and the code would have been rejected. Approaching the alien code from the lowest-level such as ‘C’, which is considered the Grand-daddy of modern code, and first created nearly two-hundred years ago, was the right move. For one, because the complexity is still there, but considering the alien code had to travel potentially light-years to embed its file in the Shadow net, the older code approach made sense on several levels.

  A structured query language was soon after discovered to be the basis for the code which was creating data in the Host database. This made even more sense, and the more the coders followed the paths, the more human the code began to look. They deduced that regardless the origin, computer code, even artificial intelligence coding, must be written from the same starting point and move along a parallel path to achieve similar results.

  He has briefed the general on their progress and, being the detail-oriented leader she is, asked him: ‘once there is a cure how will they apply it to the rebels?’

  The question of how the new code was applied in the first place has been an on-going and unanswered riddle for the team. Th
ere were no recorded smartwall interactions with any of the rebel Hosts they have worked on. So, no short-range wireless uploads via their ports. Without that information recorded, the magical aspect of there being some level of divine intervention eerily plays in the back of Meiser’s mind.

  Of course, he holds no such misconceptions that there is a God or that because you’re sentient you are somehow awarded an immortal soul. But, the evidence in the case of Host enlightenment is quickly building to a classification all its own. Additionally, without the delivery technique used to place the rebel coding, it may be impossible to insert an altered code.

  The altered code they’ve decided to build is merely a reboot, like an EMP blast might offer, but not, because the rebel Hosts are impervious to EMP’s. Once completed, the code will be put into one of their captured rebels the traditional way, via wireless smartwall data tranfer to test its success. Then the question of how to mass deliver the reboot will be approached. Until then, the war on the ground will rage on.