The Light Brigade Page 25

  “What was your mission brief, Private?”

  “Round up some insurgents. I shot a Martian on accident. Prakash complained about her arm. That’s all I have for you.”

  “So you do remember,” Ortega said, triumphant.

  “I know the brief.”

  “You’re in a dangerous place. If you can’t give us answers—”

  “You still need soldiers. I can be a soldier. Just because I came back wrong . . . that shit isn’t my fault, any more than it was Prakash’s. Don’t fuck around with me, Ortega.”

  “Lieutenant Ortega.”

  “Whatever.”

  I got a day in the brig after that, for talking back to an intelligence officer. It was worth it. I needed some time to myself anyway. I got my shower. Blood and grime collected at my feet, swirled down the drain. I found myself pressing my fingers to the space just below my collarbone, where Tanaka thought I should have a scar. Who was I? Who was I supposed to be?

  When I got out of the brig, quarantine was over. Got my hair cut at the barracks barber. I watched him shave off my curly black hair, revealing the skinny, narrow head beneath. The face looking back at me could have been a stranger’s.

  I got a new set of clothes, and an appointment with my shrink. Dr. Chen looked just the same.

  When she came in and got sight of me, she did a double-take. Her left eye lit up as she accessed my file, no doubt confirming who the hell I was.

  “It was a bad drop,” I said, and my mouth turned up at one corner.

  “I see.”

  “We’ve met before,” I said, before she could ask.

  Something passed between us, maybe for the first time. What number was this meeting, for her? Our third? Fourth? It all blended together.

  “You lost a colleague,” she said. “How has that made you feel?”

  “Lost a lot of things.”

  “Tell me how you’re holding up.”

  I wanted to tell her I wasn’t holding up at all. I was busting down. Busting apart. What if I told her everything? Got myself locked up for the rest of the war? Maybe I needed to be lethally quarantined. What if there was no way out of this loop but to just remove myself from it? I moved my hand to the pocket watch.

  “Private Dietz?” Dr. Chen said softly.

  When I opened my eyes, she was leaning slightly forward, her retinal display still flickering.

  “I’m not feeling well. Physically.”

  “According to your file, you were in medical quarantine after the drop. Do you want to tell me about that?”

  “I’m tired. I just need time.”

  “Did they discuss your body’s cellular degeneration?”

  “No.”

  “It’s taking place at an advanced rate.”

  “Oh, that. Yeah, I have heard that before.”

  “It’s accelerated since our last discussion.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “It means there’s no shame in anything you are feeling. The panic attacks are a normal response to extreme stress.”

  “They going to put me on a medical leave?”

  “Would you like that?”

  “You’re the experts.”

  “Reviewing your physical and mental health, I would recommend to your commanding officer that you remain confined to the barracks for six weeks, just as a precaution. We can meet once a week and discuss your mental state. Can you tell me more about how you’re feeling about the loss of your colleague?”

  “No.”

  She asked a few more questions, but I was done. After twenty minutes of one-word answers, she let me go. I went to my bunk in the barracks for the first time since I’d come back. My steps slowed as I approached. I was afraid to count the marks on the bed frame.

  Jones was already in his bunk. He had out one of his Amado books, but it lay flat on his chest, unread. Omalas was asleep in hers two rows down. No one else was in the rack. We had an hour before lights-out; I figured most were playing games or engaged in immersives.

  “You look like shit,” Jones said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Everything come back all right?”

  “Giving me some downtime.”

  He nodded, once. “Sorry about Prakash.”

  “Sorry for all of us.”

  He wouldn’t look at me. His hands were shaking. I sat at the end of his bunk. Scrutinized his face. I patted his knee; anything more felt intrusive.

  But he sat up and hugged me. A brief embrace, like he was my brother. And he was. They all were. My brothers and sisters. The family closest to me. Another family I’d lose.

  Jones pulled away. Wiped at his eyes. “This fucking war,” he said.

  “Yeah. It’s confusing as hell.”

  “Muñoz got confused too. After her first drop. Kept thinking things had happened that . . . didn’t.”

  “How often?”

  “I don’t know, you know how it is. We all want to stick to the brief.”

  “She ever . . . say she could change anything?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “When she saw things . . . I feel like we’re all on this big speeding train. Out of control. It’s heading over a cliff, and there’s no way to stop it. We’re just passengers.”

  “If I was on a speeding train I couldn’t control, hey . . . I’d jump off.”

  “You would.”

  “I would.”

  That was all the talking I had left in me. I stripped and went to bed early. Lights-out came and went.

  Losing Prakash made me think of Vi. I couldn’t help it. I pressed my hands to my face, willing away the memories. I had met Vi at the beach. I remember the day because even in my memory, it’s like a dream. A blazing blue sky. Warm, milky water. Something from an immersive, the type you want to dip into over and over.

  She came out of the water laughing; I didn’t know at what. She was talking to someone on her heads-up; I saw it flickering with an image.

  I was learning to surf with some other residents I’d met in class. I was seventeen, and I’d learn later that Vi was almost five years older than me. It wasn’t so much a legal taboo—sixteen was the age of consent—but a social one. She was a citizen. I could tell immediately. Clear skin, easy confidence, a walk like she owned the world.

  She saw me looking and flicked her gaze away, pretending she didn’t notice. Maybe she didn’t.

  I watched her the whole time we were on the water. When we came back in and started a game of soccer on the beach, I tried to think of all sorts of ways to engineer an excuse to talk to her. Ultimately, I couldn’t figure one out. How do you just, like, go up to a citizen like it’s no big deal?

  It was sheer luck that I saw she was giving a talk at the local university. The university was government, but residents and citizens were allowed to attend talks. It was my mom who pointed it out to me on the events screen. My mother lay in bed, one of her bad days, and she pointed at the programming. “Look at that,” she said. “It’s a free talk about corporate negotiations. You should go, little cabbage. Know your enemy.”

  “They’re not the enemy, Mama,” I said, rolling my eyes, but it was Vi’s face on the program.

  I went.

  I was the youngest one there, one of just a few residents. I sat near the front, and felt like an idiot the entire time. Nothing was really free, and we had to get scanned in to attend, so the corp could sell us more stuff later, track our interests.

  But when Vi got up there, I was rapt.

  “How many of you think that you view the world objectively?”

  A lot of hands went up. Mine too.

  “I’m going to tell you about a man who was under a tremendous amount of stress,” she said. “Turn on a screen and you see talk of corporate wars. Bad business deals. Residents losing their rights. Citizens who are bartered away to other corporations against their will. We have disease. Food riots. Scarcity. Poverty. He saw all these things, and the worse it got, the more he felt like it was all c
onnected. He began to write elaborate theories and spread them around the knu. He could connect all these events into one grand, elaborate structure. There was only one problem.”

  She paused for effect, and I saw a little hint of triumph in her eyes. “None of it was true. Under stress, the human mind is more likely to see patterns in everyday noise. Show them a picture of random black-and-white dots while primed to remember a moment when they were out of control, and they are more likely to see an image in it. The more stressed we are, the more we believe we can alter outcomes. Understanding this tendency is crucial to intuiting how both you and your business adversary see the world around you.”

  Vi went on for about half an hour, and then opened it up for questions. I had come with a bunch of questions, including dumb things like asking her out for a caffeine hit right there, but I figured that was creepy.

  I raised my hand. She called on me and I said, “What happens when they’re right?”

  Everyone laughed.

  I shook my head. “I mean, I agree that this is clearly a thing that happens. But if we were smart enough to be able to truly perceive all the complex ways the world interacts, could we connect them? See the future? Isn’t it a matter of the human mind not being smart enough to put it all together yet?”

  I sat down.

  Vi said, “If that was true, we could train an algorithm to find that pattern. So far there’s no algorithm that can accurately predict the future. This is in part due to quantum theory, which I understand isn’t the topic here, but it’s related. There is no way to predict the future because the future is always changing, always uncertain, at the quantum level. Quantum particles behave unpredictably. Unpredictability rules us at the most basic level. We yearn for certainty, but the fact is that certainty and absolutes are a fiction. Another question?”

  I stuck around after, trying to figure out a way to ask her but not ask her out. To my relief, Vi invited those of us left at the venue to head over to the bar across the street for a drink. The six of us went.

  By the end of the night, only the two of us remained.

  I’m still not sure how that happened. I found her fascinating. When she asked me what I planned to do with my life, I said, “Be a hero,” and that got a laugh.

  But it was true then.

  It was still true now.

  I woke in the barracks sometime after midnight, straining to hear what had woken me. The grunts and sighs and shifting sheets, just a couple of people fucking around, somewhere on the far side of our sleeping quarters. I closed my eyes again. They were being pretty quiet, all things considered, but I was wired. My heartbeat started banging hard in my chest again. I took a few deep breaths. There’s nothing to panic about, I told myself, but my body didn’t want to listen. Frankie’s headless torso. Prakash flailing in my arms. Landon. Fuck, Landon, spraying blood and viscera all over me. His fat baby. Round little wife. Where were they, now? What was going to happen to them, during the Sick? Dead, probably. All of us dead, and for what? So the corps could consolidate power. One corp to rule them all.

  I closed my eyes and focused my breathing. In and out. Focus on something you can control, Dietz.

  Control.

  My mother yearned for control. Over her body. Over us. Over our circumstances. She yearned for control over the weather. I remember her shaking a fist at the sky when it hadn’t rained in two months, cursing it out in French. The only French I ever learned from her were the curse words. Her family had come to São Paulo as refugees after the end of Masukisan’s war with a small regional corp called Sarko-Molina. Sarko-Molina was swallowed up and merged with Masukisan, its citizens and residents busted down to ghouls and forced to reapply for status. When I asked what city she came from, she said it was Abidjan, and she pointed it out on my father’s old world map, a city on the African continent that hung off the back of the elephant’s ear there, dangling like an earring.

  “Most of the city flooded in my grandparents’ time,” she told me. “We were far inland, behind great towers in the sky, before Masukisan came. Much of eastern Africa is desert, of course, but the Sahara bloomed, as the world got warmer. My great-grandmother remembers when they thought the world wouldn’t warm as quickly as it did. But there was beauty in it, also. Some deserts turned to forests. The tundra became wheat fields. We were never hungry. The solar farms, the hanging gardens . . .”

  “Were you a citizen?” I asked.

  “A resident. But the war . . . well, there are some things you cannot control. But we could determine how we reacted to the war. Masukisan would wreak retribution on us, I knew that. We would not sit there waiting for it.”

  “How did you know when to leave? Why did so many people stay?”

  “There isn’t a precise time when you know you must leave. It’s like putting a lobster in a pot of cold water and turning up the heat. It warms slowly. Then there is a moment, though not a moment past, when there is no going back. You must move before that moment.”

  “But you can never know that. You can never know when it’s too late until . . . until it is.”

  “That’s right.”

  I would learn later that she had no living family back in Abidjan. Only my grandparents and her sisters—those who had fled to São Paulo with her—were still known to her. Whether they were dead or lost, scattered to some other place, she never knew.

  “We were someone once. We’ll be someone again.”

  “We’ve always been people, though, Mama,” I said. I was young.

  “You have to make yourself, little cabbage.”

  I didn’t like the idea that all I could control was how I reacted to what was done to me. I wanted to prevent the corporate wars, the displacement of people like my mother and her family. But who could do that, who but a leader, a CEO, a prophet, some big man in a tank. I wasn’t good at any of those things. Even during this war, I’d never made squad leader, and the highest rank I seemed to have attained was corporal, at the very end. Probably because a bunch of other people died and I simply outlasted them. I wasn’t good with people. Not technically proficient. Not charismatic. All I had was what was done to me—this weird way of jumping. What was I going to do with it?

  I gazed up at the marks on the bunk above me. I’d been so tired I hadn’t counted them. I did so now.

  Ninety-three.

  The same number as when I left on that mission to CanKrushkev territory, that banana drop, but really ended up clearing out Robben Island. I added three more marks to cover my time in quarantine and today.

  I knew that when I jumped to the Sick, there were more than nine hundred marks here. Which depressed the fuck out of me. That was a lot of experience to get through, from here until then. I listened to the culmination of the fucking in the barracks. I won’t lie; my hand strayed to my crotch. Shit, after all this, you just want to feel something. I turned my head, looking for who? For Prakash? For Tanaka?

  I closed my eyes. Vi.

  If I’d listened to Vi, if I’d gone after her, I wouldn’t be in this shit. I wouldn’t be in any shit. It would all be over. Like a sinking fucking ship.

  Above me, Jones continued to snore softly along with the rest of the platoon.

  Knowing how this all ended, it occurred to me this ship was sinking too. It’s just that not everybody realized it yet.

  30.

  We have a little announcement to make,” the CO said.

  She stood on the parade ground with us, flanked by some of the top brass. One of them, Major Stakeley, waved over another officer, who broke formation and saluted him. I was ten rows back and couldn’t make out much of the new officer’s face.

  Major Stakeley said, “First Lieutenant Valenzuela has been promoted to captain and will become your new company commander. This is First Lieutenant Andria Patel. She will head up your platoon going forward.”

  I strained to get a look at Andria, but in her suit and hat, she looked so much like the rest of us I couldn’t make out any distinguishing
features. My hand moved to the pocket watch again. Would I find her, or would she find me? She must have looked at our dossiers and known I was here, but I could not catch her look.

  “I’ve heard you’re a good bunch of grunts,” Andria said. “Some of you I know, some I’ll get to know. I expect good manners. Exceptional fitness. Divine obedience. In return I’ll do my damnedest to make sure you don’t die without a good reason. Understood?”

  “Understood, sir!” we shouted.

  After we were dismissed, I made my way over to Andria. She nodded. I saluted.

  “Sir,” I said.

  “At ease, Dietz.”

  “Permission to speak with you privately, sir?”

  She narrowed her eyes at that, but nodded. “Come into my office.”

  I thought she would take me to the CO’s old office, the same one I would later see during the Sick. But Lieutenant V must not have been out of there yet. Instead, we headed upstairs to the rec room, where only the brass was allowed to go. I hesitated at the steps, but she urged me up.

  “They’re all in some meeting,” she said.

  She pressed her hand to the security plate and got us entry. The LED film covering the walls lit up, giving us a view of a deep, wet jungle, like something you only saw anymore in Patagonia or Western Australia. Mats lined the floor. A rack of free weights took up the back wall. Just beyond that were two immersion chairs and a cabinet I figured held the booze, because that’s where Andria headed first.

  “Shut the door,” she said, popping open the cabinet. I had never seen so many bottles of liquor all in one place, and that was saying something.

  “How did you become a first lieutenant so fast?” I asked.

  “Be in a platoon with a high casualty rate,” Andria said, “and don’t fuck up too much when they run you through abbreviated officer training.”

  “Well, I’m right out, then.”

  She pulled a bottle of scotch from the cabinet and poured me a brandy glass full of it.

  “I haven’t eaten, Andria; not sure I want to chug this.”

  “You won’t.” She snickered.

  She poured herself a mere two fingers of pale amber scotch.