Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (25 page)

We’re transported back, eventually, only external command keeping our grip tight enough to hold us on the buggies, a mess of exhaustion and blood and singed dust. I’ve lost track, now, of how many times I’ve been to the front. Our armour is supposed to be a microsystem, temperature and humidity controlled, but each time my skin is red and raw, my breasts aching from the compression, my feet swollen and painful.

I sleep fitfully, uninduced. I wonder, again, how I can stick out my eight years but I really, literally have no choice. After a spate of suicides, they added a script that senses self-destructive actions, kicks in external command.

It’s all quite ironic really. I spent most of my life being told how I needed to
foster my independence
. The first major choice I made, going against everything I had been taught and requiring me to lie to my family, involved sacrificing it.

I find I’m sobbing, near silently. Though everyone has the option of turning on white noise in their ears—and they usually do—I still feel self-conscious in this crowded bunkroom.
External command
, I think,
paralyse tear ducts
.

I wonder how closely they monitor this type of thing, and how many people have to use functions like that. Whether I’m unusually weak, or if everyone thinks the same.

I stare at the plastic slats of the bunk above me, just able to make out their lines in the dimmed light. There’s a rustling in my field of hearing and then a voice crackles through. Not the one I’m used to.

“Merie. Merie are you there? Stay quiet. I can’t talk long.”

Unwisely, I sit bolt upright. Someone a couple of bunks away stirs in response to the sound, but thankfully returns to sleep. I lie back down, carefully.
Kass?

“We don’t have long. Things have escalated. They’ve caught infiltrators on Baltica and Zagros. Explosion in New Chicago. Two dead. Terraforming shuttles destroyed. They say we did it.”

Did we?

“Awaiting confirmation. But we’re all in danger. Many governments are taking activists into custody. If we lose our leaders, we lose the battle. And Lu…”

What about Lu?
Panic is coursing through my veins. I’m not offered a tranq. Kass must have overridden the systems.

“Lu’s missing. We have to act now. Risks are high but we have no choice.”

It’s odd, because I’m being told the cause I believe in above all else is about to be crushed. That friends are missing or in prison. That I’m facing life imprisonment, if they stick to the law—and worse if they don’t. And then my first thought is that there will be no more six years. I won’t return to the front.

If they lock me away, I don’t think I’ll try and seek redemption out here. Not that they’d let me.

“Merie are you listening to me? You’re not our only infiltrator. Cannan was recruited in prison… there was a risk of… we needed to increase the odds someone would make it through.”

I feel a dull pain in my chest. I’d have made the same calculation, but it hurts knowing it was made about me.

“We need an army behind us. Merie, you need to take control of external command.”

My external command remains off. I’m aware of it even when in monitoring mode, and after two years it feels uncomfortably silent.

Today is, I tell myself, a death or freedom day. A change the universe or be forgotten day. It feels more like a I got fuck all sleep and really need a break right now type of day.

But these things are sent to try us, as my grandmother would say, or choices have consequences, to quote one of the posters in the mess hall. I dress quietly, leave the room. I don’t have a plan.

There are few guards around the complex. We can be roused from our beds and at full combat capacity in seconds should an attack come from outside, and external command can sense if we’re anywhere we shouldn’t and control us. It’s a while down the glass corridor before I come to a guard.

“Nightmares,” I say. “I don’t want sleep, just to be alone for a bit.” I’m taking a risk; it’ll be sheer luck as to whether I receive empathy or get told to harden the fuck up. A soldier’s own experience can push them either way. But tonight, I’m lucky.

I take a right at the end of the corridor and then break into a run. I hope my guess about which bunkroom Cannan’s in is correct.

“Heading back to bed,” I say to the next guard I come across. They’ll have changed shifts half an hour ago so we won’t know from sight which room I’m in. At lease I hope not.

I wake Cannan with a hand over her mouth, pushing three fingers into her arm, hoping she understands because I can’t take the risk of waking anyone. Three fingers for the three tyrannies, of terran sea, terran land and terran sky.

She carefully eases herself out of bed, fully clothed, and pulls me into one of the adjoining washrooms. We whisper amongst rows of sinks and showers, and I can only hope no one’s listening in.

“I’ve been waiting for you. What are we doing?”

“Kass says we need to take control of external command, send troops to support them.”

“And how do we do that?”

My mouth is dry. I’m thinking on my feet, blood pressure building up in my face until it’s burning. “I think we’d have to localise it first. I don’t think other bases can be controlled from here, so it would be best to shut it off entirely. If we need to, we can use the soldiers to take over other bases and bring them under our control.”

“Before they told me tonight,” she whispers, “I never would have picked you as one of us.”

I ignore her. “I’ve no idea how the whole thing works though. I didn’t expect to even have to think about this until… well, six years from now.” I can almost see those six years melting away in front of me.

“I’ve done a bit of research. We’ll go for the long-range antenna first. Let’s get out of here.”

Cannan takes a bar from her trousers and levers the window from the wall. She’s much more prepared than I am; I’m in hastily thrown on clothes and only half awake. We drop ourselves down into dust, run crouched to the antenna.

Cannan takes a pair of wire cutters from her other leg. I frown at the wires leading up the skeletal transmission column. Point at two. Part knowledge, mostly instinct. This isn’t a bomb, I tell myself, but that’s not enough to quell the panic. Nothing happens. She looks at me and I shrug. I suppose we just won’t know if it has been successful until the end.

I hear noise behind us, swing round. Private Brinshe has followed us from the bunkroom.

In a second Cannan is holding a gun to his throat. He’s a weedy kid, in his twenties but looks barely eighteen, a refugee from a failed planet, citizenshipless with nowhere to go. We joined as part of the same cohort, trained together. Cannan’s still not taking any chances.

“It’s real easy,” I hear her saying. “We’re gonna stop the terraforming and you’re gonna shut up and die. Actually dead people are pretty quiet so I suppose it’s the same thing.”

I stifle a laugh. I’m not sure how much of Cannan’s style is an act, but the absurdity is pretty close to funny right now. Or would be, if our lives weren’t hanging in the balance.

“You’re… anti-terraforming. What about her?”

Cannan raises her eyebrows in despair. Brinshe looks at me in shock. “You… did this to infiltrate? I thought you were doing it so you could walk.”

I laugh, bitterly, the ground feeling illogically unstable beneath me. “You think my life was so terrible that I’d spend eight years getting shot at just to make it a little easier.”

“I… no… I…”

I smile, more kindly that I feel. “Oh whatever. It wouldn’t have worked hadn’t so many people thought like you. That I was just this tragic girl who would do anything for a miracle cure, and no one even considering that I might have beliefs or goals, that I would die for something other than myself. And for the record my life was pretty great, difficult, sure, but…”

I’m getting teary. Longing for a life I left behind, a life which so many people thought wasn’t even worth living. I’m too generous to articulate to Brinshe what I know he believes. That he saw my journey not as one to gain a better quality of technology, but one of salvation.

“Are you going to help me or not?” I say, swallowing my pain. I ignore the fact that Cannan’s giving him no choice. I need him truly on side.

His face is empty. Stunned by all his perceptions of me falling apart, perhaps, or more likely realising the danger we’re in. Recognition shows eventually, though uneasily. “Ok. Don’t see much other chance of me getting out of this. What do I do?”

We move to the command centre. There won’t be many guards here, because external command knows who should and should not be here. Cannan says that when Kass switched hers off he gave her a reactivate key and a false identity. It won’t last long, she says, maybe five minutes, before they figure it out. And she can’t be certain if it will work.

I watch as the glass walls slide open before her. For all that this is a hastily constructed base on a constantly changing border, they’ve put some effort into this. I move hastily, barely waiting until Cannan’s false identity has overridden the security of the system to start dragging at the screen, trying to work out how this all fits together… and how I can change it.

The noise comes before I realise it, and then it’s all upon us. A guard is approaching, weapon drawn, Cannan spins and then she falls. He’s approaching, I know it’s over, and then he falls, burning flesh blocking up the air. Brinshe stands still as if frozen, his weapon still drawn.

They’ll know within seconds, now he’s dead. I can’t do anything but keep frantically going—I’m part way there, and then the whole system falls into place. Paralyse. Everyone on the base motionless.

I finally breathe.

I’m there, and the power awaiting me seems surreal. Merie Tanner, the kid people dismissed because she “couldn’t even control her own body”, now with the ability to move armies. A puppet master, of sorts, thousands of bodies at my command, moving exactly how I command. If only they could see me now. Perhaps they
will
see me now.

Perhaps I’d make a good evil genius, cackling away at my controls. The image provides a brief moment of levity amidst the smell of burned flesh. And then I’m back to being me, me in circumstances I would never have thought possible.

I turn, finally, make eye contact with Brinshe and he lowers his weapon slowly.

“You’re going to turn them against the government,” he says. It’s not really a question. I hesitate. I think that’s what Kass has planned; to send them all back to the capital. But I’m not sure I can force anyone to fight my war. Not after what I’ve seen.

I look at the screen, find what I’m looking for. The news projection splutters then comes to life, a blond woman reading the latest updates.

…will not give in to terrorists. In a move to show that the pace of terraforming is unhindered, the Interplanetary Authority has named the tenth planet to benefit from gravitational reduction as Zagros. Yesterday scientific development centres outside the Zagros city of New Chicago were rocked by explosions believed to have been carried out by anti-terraforming extremists. In a statement, IPA Convenor Jameel Elangue praised the Zagrosian authorities for their quick response and apprehension of suspects and said he hoped the gravitational adjustment would send a message to the people of Zagros that they will not be abandoned or disadvantaged by…

I switch it off. Another image. The ring of the station hanging in space, somewhere between us and the sun which I can see the first glow of through the glass roof. I turn to look at Brinshe.

“They’re already against the government,” I say.

My voice sounds shaky as I project it to every immobilised soldier on the base. “The International… the International Government and the IPA have thought for too long that everything is theirs. That our lives are theirs to put on the battleground. That our bodies are theirs to control. That every planet is theirs to mold in the likeness of a faraway world. It’s time to stand up. I will do no harm to any of you, but I call for volunteers to undertake a mission against a power that has gone too far. There are risks, but there is also hope.”

There is silence. My heart is beating furiously and every part of me aches.

Just silence.

Perhaps we’ve lost.

And then symbols flicker up in projection and I hear the unmistakable sound of boots clinking against the corridors, see, finally, the volunteers arrive.

I use the systems to track the nearest shuttle, do a quick assessment of skills. Three with piloting ability is luckier than I could imagine, even though most of the control will be done from the ground. We take a buggy the few miles to a shuttle, leaving behind a base in wakeful sleep, and I laugh as the dust blows up into my face—an anxious laugh born of sleep deprivation, but a laugh nonetheless.

As the shuttle takes off, I breathe. “Kass, are you there? Kass, respond please, respond.”

I think Kass’s response was along the lines of “what the fuck have you done?” He was waiting on troops to back them up in the city, but instead, invisible to the naked eye, there were flashes in the sky two days later. A station left disarmed and empty, a waste of metal floating above us.

“I couldn’t send them to another war,” I said later. “I couldn’t.” He said he understood, but he may just have been saying that, because what good would an argument do now.

Gravity adjustments were halted, perhaps forever. The IPA would have a hard time convincing the races responsible for much of the technology to work with us again, given how irresponsible humans had been with it this time. Opinion turned more in favour of us than it did against us. Bowing to popular pressure, new treaties were negotiated. A partial victory in a long, long war.

But for those of us at the heart of the whole episode, we’re still terrorists. There’s no safe place for us here.

I walk slowly to my shuttle, sit cramped between two others. It’ll be a long trip and I know only our first port of call and not my final destination. In my luggage are parts that will replace elements of my internal command system as they wear out. It’s useful for now, worth maintaining. But as the bars come down to hold us in place for take-off, I’m dreaming of a world where I won’t even want it, that somewhere amidst the millions of undiscovered, untouched worlds, there’s one I was born for.