‘Are they ready?’ the Colonel asked me, his voice amplified by the speaker in his mask.
He was surveying the troops from the platform, and I watched him puff himself up, his hungry gaze observing their long lines, stretching away to the ridgeline, a battleground’s worth of shiny metal, bright flashes of sunlight firing off the chrome. They were flawless and designed to do one thing beautifully: destroy.
‘Perfection’, he gloated, he’d always liked his new toys. ‘Look at them!’ he shouted to me, ‘Not like organics, are they?’ What he meant was, not like those poor troops we’d sent in the early days, with their soft human flesh, so vulnerable to sharp projectiles, easily torn, mangled and exploded into bloody scraps. Today’s soldiers were impervious to most weapons, until the enemy developed upgrades that could penetrate this armour.
‘Yes, sir, and the new weapons are inside the main body this time.’
These improvements were part of the constant escalation game to win the next battle, scoring a small point in a seemingly endless race to a finish line. So far, the race had been underway for two hundred years or so, ever since we had encountered the enemy. You’d think space would be big enough for the two of us and we could find a way to co-exist. But I mustn’t entertain seditious thoughts like that, I was a Captain of the Glorious 8th, after all. There were only two of us here to send off the troops, another efficiency of an android army: simultaneous relay of orders, complete obedience and no misunderstandings. Order given, order carried out, job done. I held the rank of Captain only because of my special skill set, which in my opinion should have brought some benefits over and above my pitiful pay with it, as there’s only a few of us with these talents, but the Colonel thinks of me like a trained monkey, following orders just like the androids, he doesn’t want me to think. He’s very suspicious of ‘thinkers’, which in his book is a close neighbour to ‘traitors’, those people campaigning for peace. Still, if this goes well, it’ll be just me sending the next wave off, which suits me fine, I don’t like people watching me do my thing.
While I waited for the order, I used my handkerchief to wipe the dust off the control’s monitor. Dust was a more insidious enemy than the ones out there, as far as I was concerned, because we lived with it every day and it got everywhere. My underwear already felt sweaty and gritty, and I coughed to clear my lungs, lifting my mask to hawk phlegm onto the hard packed dirt, an action being repeated a billion times a day over the parched planet. Coughing was practically a national sport and had long replaced weather as a topic of conversation, especially since there was only one weather these days: hot enough to fry eggs and no rain for the next millenia. How’s your cough today, Mrs Smith? Oh, terrible, much worse, thank you. How’s yours, Mr Richards? Oh, can’t complain, the odd spot of blood, you know but can’t complain, exercises the stomach at least, haha.
Truth was, it always got worse, like mum, coughing blood after a lifetime of breathing that special class of particulates, PM2.5, that invaded the lungs and rampaged through the body, a microscopic army, attacking a heart already weakened by the constant heat. A standard death, in other words, in any of the arid cities in this splendid age of high-tech, space-age war. Unless you were First Echelon, of course, living in an Ecocity, with cool, elegant, towers, with plants spilling in an abundance over the balconies, all safely sealed behind Plexi, in a climate-controlled paradise for the few, like the Colonel here. I had been inside once, to pick up the Colonel and had been allowed into the atrium, the cool, filtered air a balm on my skin. I had breathed deeply, the strain of sucking dusty air lifted, for a moment. I had been offered water while I waited, ice cubes in a real glass, and had taken the clinking tumbler to a small park in the centre, where toddlers played with their nannies. I had removed my shoes and walked on the grass, the blades softly spiky between my toes, the smell of damp earth beneath them, that spoke to some primordial part of my brain. I walked in circles, pressing my toes into the soil and bent to brush the grass with my hands, a sensation like pins and needles fizzing under my skin, and I had been suddenly sick to my stomach with a yearning for a home I’d never had.
‘What the hell are you doing, Goodall?’ the Colonel had found me there, lost in a sensation none of my family had felt for generations.
Now, I adjusted my mask, pulling the seal tighter, my sweat making the rubber slip and suck. I was lucky, the army paid for new filters, but most people made do with paper masks, which was like trying to hold back the encroaching dunes with your hands.
‘The boffins assure us it will make all the difference, sir’ My voice was especially bright and professional today, in denial of another night spent plagued by the terrors. I had woken in a pool of sweat, panting; I’d been fleeing a burning line of forest, flames leaping from tree to tree. In the dark, mind still marooned in the liminal space between dream and waking, my skin had prickled with the certain knowledge that something had followed me out of the dream and sat just behind me on the bed. Of course, it hadn’t, but I was never wholly convinced it wouldn’t, one night.
The Colonel looked again at the soldiers, colossal forms, bulky with weaponry, and removed his mask for a moment, showing me a perfect smile of vat grown teeth. ‘Fantastic!’ he said, then replacing his mask, he turned back to face them.
‘Open the Bridge,’ he barked.
‘Yes, sir,’ I turned to the controls, raising my hands with their embedded quantum webbing, showing silvery under the skin, and moved them in the complex mathematical dance that pulled at the underlying universal substrate, severing and reconnecting dark matter, shaping it. The mathematics were perfect, AI generated, but it took humans with a certain gift, to blend the maths with the dexterity of an artist, to open a Bridge point in the right place. There was a high-pitched zzzip, a sudden whiff of ozone and the Bridge appeared, a blinding pinprick of light, opening rapidly, to the size of a small window; nothing unusual for me, just another day at the office.
I readied myself to for a look into Hell, otherwise known as Illion 6, a small, blasted rock of shit somewhere in the Orion cluster. It was supposedly chock full of precious ores, but right now it represented a line in the sand we couldn’t allow the enemy to cross. Like Ortum, that other planet we couldn’t afford to lose, the very same one we had lost a few years ago, abandoning thousands of soldiers and associated civilians there. Call me a cynic, but what else am I supposed to think? No one mentions Ortum now. Ilion 6 is the new Ortum and was called new Eden when we first found it, a paradise of lush virgin vegetation, mostly forest, one that burns now, day and night. No civilians were stationed there to support huge human armies as on Ortum. Now we send metal soldiers, to smash, pulverize and annihilate anything they find. Once the enemy is crushed, mining operations can begin. Meanwhile, everything burns. Looking through the Bridge onto that world is to witness Dante’s Seventh circle of hell, towering flames hundreds of feet high and wide, march across the planet, leaving a scorched, barren earth in their wake, where the armies of two species blast each other’s androids to smithereens. Welcome to War 3.0. No human could survive in a conflagration as hot as a star, or a rain of suffocating ash, that falls in endless amber and grey flakes, shrouding soldiers in minutes.
I breathed in, expecting the usual wash of ashy woodsmoke, to penetrate the mask, but this time there was a blast of fresh air, so sweet, I couldn’t help but inhale it again. Was that lemon?
I leant forward looking through the aperture and saw Illion 6 as it was an age ago, before the war, a landscape of green trees, bending in the wind, beyond which a plain of long grass stretched to a lake, and herds of creatures grazed placidly. At the edge of the lake – I couldn’t be sure, they were so far off – was a small village of a strange looking…people. I breathed in again feeling my lungs inflate with pure air, expanding easily. It smelled even better than the air of the Colonel’s tower, a perfect elixir, the cleanliness of which I associated with Ecocities, and therefore prohibited for the likes of me.
‘Sir, this isn’t…I think this is the wrong destination. Something must have gone wrong with the…I’ll try again’ I moved my hands to break the link.
‘No, let me see’ he barked, pushing past me. I watched his face as he peered at this alien country, an avaricious smile spreading across his face. I checked the monitor, this wasn’t Illion 6, it wasn’t even close.
‘No, leave it. We can try them here first. Call it a training exercise’
‘But, Sir, we aren’t even sure where this is. It’s not Illion 6 and…’
‘I said, leave it, or was that not clear, Captain Goodall? Open the Bridge all the way and send them through’
‘Yes sir’. I turned to the controls, but didn’t move my hands, the dream of burning forests returned, as did the memory of the thing that sat behind me on the bed, the thing that was never there, but was waiting, nevertheless. I looked around at the brown, cracked landscape our soldiers waited on, the same landscape we all lived in, in the gritty-shitty-cities, dust creeping into our homes, our clothing, and our bodies. Mum, who had coughed blood into a tissue, coughing so hard towards the end, I thought her lungs themselves would be expelled, her face red and tear stained with the effort, her wheezing inhalations no match for the dust.
I looked through the Bridge aperture again and I saw birds: real ones, flying in formation. I’d only ever seen drones do that.
‘Captain! What’s the delay?’ the Colonel bellowed at me, and I flinched.
‘Just prepping the dimension range, sir’. My hands flew again, in faux mathematics allowing me time to think and I saw how the impending loss would unfurl before me. These soldiers arriving in a new land, following their orders unquestioningly, obliterating landscapes and people alike until utter capitulation was achieved. No quarter given. I saw the precious greenery erased, another Illion 6, another apocalyptic wasteland, another brown desert left to blow dust in the wind, and I felt my toes prickle with cool grass as I breathed a waft of damp earth.
The creature behind me on the bed leant forward and pushed.
When the Bridge was just wide enough, I jumped.
Sandra Lloyd-Lewis
June 2024
‘Are they ready?’ the Colonel asked me, his voice amplified by the speaker in his mask.
He was surveying the troops from the platform, and I watched him puff himself up, his hungry gaze observing their long lines, stretching away to the ridgeline, a battleground’s worth of shiny metal, bright flashes of sunlight firing off the chrome. They were flawless and designed to do one thing beautifully: destroy.
‘Perfection’, he gloated, he’d always liked his new toys. ‘Look at them!’ he shouted to me, ‘Not like organics, are they?’ What he meant was, not like those poor troops we’d sent in the early days, with their soft human flesh, so vulnerable to sharp projectiles, easily torn, mangled and exploded into bloody scraps. Today’s soldiers were impervious to most weapons, until the enemy developed upgrades that could penetrate this armour.
‘Yes, sir, and the new weapons are inside the main body this time.’
These improvements were part of the constant escalation game to win the next battle, scoring a small point in a seemingly endless race to a finish line. So far, the race had been underway for two hundred years or so, ever since we had encountered the enemy. You’d think space would be big enough for the two of us and we could find a way to co-exist. But I mustn’t entertain seditious thoughts like that, I was a Captain of the Glorious 8th, after all. There were only two of us here to send off the troops, another efficiency of an android army: simultaneous relay of orders, complete obedience and no misunderstandings. Order given, order carried out, job done. I held the rank of Captain only because of my special skill set, which in my opinion should have brought some benefits over and above my pitiful pay with it, as there’s only a few of us with these talents, but the Colonel thinks of me like a trained monkey, following orders just like the androids, he doesn’t want me to think. He’s very suspicious of ‘thinkers’, which in his book is a close neighbour to ‘traitors’, those people campaigning for peace. Still, if this goes well, it’ll be just me sending the next wave off, which suits me fine, I don’t like people watching me do my thing.
While I waited for the order, I used my handkerchief to wipe the dust off the control’s monitor. Dust was a more insidious enemy than the ones out there, as far as I was concerned, because we lived with it every day and it got everywhere. My underwear already felt sweaty and gritty, and I coughed to clear my lungs, lifting my mask to hawk phlegm onto the hard packed dirt, an action being repeated a billion times a day over the parched planet. Coughing was practically a national sport and had long replaced weather as a topic of conversation, especially since there was only one weather these days: hot enough to fry eggs and no rain for the next millenia. How’s your cough today, Mrs Smith? Oh, terrible, much worse, thank you. How’s yours, Mr Richards? Oh, can’t complain, the odd spot of blood, you know but can’t complain, exercises the stomach at least, haha.
Truth was, it always got worse, like mum, coughing blood after a lifetime of breathing that special class of particulates, PM2.5, that invaded the lungs and rampaged through the body, a microscopic army, attacking a heart already weakened by the constant heat. A standard death, in other words, in any of the arid cities in this splendid age of high-tech, space-age war. Unless you were First Echelon, of course, living in an Ecocity, with cool, elegant, towers, with plants spilling in an abundance over the balconies, all safely sealed behind Plexi, in a climate-controlled paradise for the few, like the Colonel here. I had been inside once, to pick up the Colonel and had been allowed into the atrium, the cool, filtered air a balm on my skin. I had breathed deeply, the strain of sucking dusty air lifted, for a moment. I had been offered water while I waited, ice cubes in a real glass, and had taken the clinking tumbler to a small park in the centre, where toddlers played with their nannies. I had removed my shoes and walked on the grass, the blades softly spiky between my toes, the smell of damp earth beneath them, that spoke to some primordial part of my brain. I walked in circles, pressing my toes into the soil and bent to brush the grass with my hands, a sensation like pins and needles fizzing under my skin, and I had been suddenly sick to my stomach with a yearning for a home I’d never had.
‘What the hell are you doing, Goodall?’ the Colonel had found me there, lost in a sensation none of my family had felt for generations.
Now, I adjusted my mask, pulling the seal tighter, my sweat making the rubber slip and suck. I was lucky, the army paid for new filters, but most people made do with paper masks, which was like trying to hold back the encroaching dunes with your hands.
‘The boffins assure us it will make all the difference, sir’ My voice was especially bright and professional today, in denial of another night spent plagued by the terrors. I had woken in a pool of sweat, panting; I’d been fleeing a burning line of forest, flames leaping from tree to tree. In the dark, mind still marooned in the liminal space between dream and waking, my skin had prickled with the certain knowledge that something had followed me out of the dream and sat just behind me on the bed. Of course, it hadn’t, but I was never wholly convinced it wouldn’t, one night.
The Colonel looked again at the soldiers, colossal forms, bulky with weaponry, and removed his mask for a moment, showing me a perfect smile of vat grown teeth. ‘Fantastic!’ he said, then replacing his mask, he turned back to face them.
‘Open the Bridge,’ he barked.
‘Yes, sir,’ I turned to the controls, raising my hands with their embedded quantum webbing, showing silvery under the skin, and moved them in the complex mathematical dance that pulled at the underlying universal substrate, severing and reconnecting dark matter, shaping it. The mathematics were perfect, AI generated, but it took humans with a certain gift, to blend the maths with the dexterity of an artist, to open a Bridge point in the right place. There was a high-pitched zzzip, a sudden whiff of ozone and the Bridge appeared, a blinding pinprick of light, opening rapidly, to the size of a small window; nothing unusual for me, just another day at the office.
I readied myself to for a look into Hell, otherwise known as Illion 6, a small, blasted rock of shit somewhere in the Orion cluster. It was supposedly chock full of precious ores, but right now it represented a line in the sand we couldn’t allow the enemy to cross. Like Ortum, that other planet we couldn’t afford to lose, the very same one we had lost a few years ago, abandoning thousands of soldiers and associated civilians there. Call me a cynic, but what else am I supposed to think? No one mentions Ortum now. Ilion 6 is the new Ortum and was called new Eden when we first found it, a paradise of lush virgin vegetation, mostly forest, one that burns now, day and night. No civilians were stationed there to support huge human armies as on Ortum. Now we send metal soldiers, to smash, pulverize and annihilate anything they find. Once the enemy is crushed, mining operations can begin. Meanwhile, everything burns. Looking through the Bridge onto that world is to witness Dante’s Seventh circle of hell, towering flames hundreds of feet high and wide, march across the planet, leaving a scorched, barren earth in their wake, where the armies of two species blast each other’s androids to smithereens. Welcome to War 3.0. No human could survive in a conflagration as hot as a star, or a rain of suffocating ash, that falls in endless amber and grey flakes, shrouding soldiers in minutes.
I breathed in, expecting the usual wash of ashy woodsmoke, to penetrate the mask, but this time there was a blast of fresh air, so sweet, I couldn’t help but inhale it again. Was that lemon?
I leant forward looking through the aperture and saw Illion 6 as it was an age ago, before the war, a landscape of green trees, bending in the wind, beyond which a plain of long grass stretched to a lake, and herds of creatures grazed placidly. At the edge of the lake – I couldn’t be sure, they were so far off – was a small village of a strange looking…people. I breathed in again feeling my lungs inflate with pure air, expanding easily. It smelled even better than the air of the Colonel’s tower, a perfect elixir, the cleanliness of which I associated with Ecocities, and therefore prohibited for the likes of me.
‘Sir, this isn’t…I think this is the wrong destination. Something must have gone wrong with the…I’ll try again’ I moved my hands to break the link.
‘No, let me see’ he barked, pushing past me. I watched his face as he peered at this alien country, an avaricious smile spreading across his face. I checked the monitor, this wasn’t Illion 6, it wasn’t even close.
‘No, leave it. We can try them here first. Call it a training exercise’
‘But, Sir, we aren’t even sure where this is. It’s not Illion 6 and…’
‘I said, leave it, or was that not clear, Captain Goodall? Open the Bridge all the way and send them through’
‘Yes sir’. I turned to the controls, but didn’t move my hands, the dream of burning forests returned, as did the memory of the thing that sat behind me on the bed, the thing that was never there, but was waiting, nevertheless. I looked around at the brown, cracked landscape our soldiers waited on, the same landscape we all lived in, in the gritty-shitty-cities, dust creeping into our homes, our clothing, and our bodies. Mum, who had coughed blood into a tissue, coughing so hard towards the end, I thought her lungs themselves would be expelled, her face red and tear stained with the effort, her wheezing inhalations no match for the dust.
I looked through the Bridge aperture again and I saw birds: real ones, flying in formation. I’d only ever seen drones do that.
‘Captain! What’s the delay?’ the Colonel bellowed at me, and I flinched.
‘Just prepping the dimension range, sir’. My hands flew again, in faux mathematics allowing me time to think and I saw how the impending loss would unfurl before me. These soldiers arriving in a new land, following their orders unquestioningly, obliterating landscapes and people alike until utter capitulation was achieved. No quarter given. I saw the precious greenery erased, another Illion 6, another apocalyptic wasteland, another brown desert left to blow dust in the wind, and I felt my toes prickle with cool grass as I breathed a waft of damp earth.
The creature behind me on the bed leant forward and pushed.
When the Bridge was just wide enough, I jumped.
Sandra Lloyd-Lewis
June 2024
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