I Am Automaton: A Military Science Fiction Novel (11 page)

But he and his men would supposedly be protected. There were the
suits, the guns, and the MRI devices. It all seemed to make sense. Plus, the idea of getting those chicken-shit terrorists hiding in those caves made him salivate. He mused that maybe he wasn’t so different from the ID after all.

The
Navajas had something wicked coming their way. They were in for a rude awakening, and he would be leading the charge.

Just then the monitor of his communicator was flashing. It was a call from home. He accepted.

His father and mother’s faces popped up on the LED screen.

“Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.”

“Hi, Pete.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yes, everything’s fine,” Peter’s father said.

“We talked Carl out of enlisting,” his mother beamed.

“Well, that’s great, Mom.”

“Yes, I’ve managed to get him a job
in the mall at the coffee boutique.”

“And he’s okay with that, Dad?”

“No, you know your brother. But maybe if he can prove himself, corporate will notice and he can move up.”

The notion was ridiculous. The job market was flooded with college graduates who couldn’t find work. He would just get lost in the white noise.

“That’s great, Dad. I’m sure he will. He’s smart, smarter than me.”

His father waved a dismissive hand. “We’re very proud of you, son.”

But his mother was frowning, voting against her husband’s remark with her silence.

“Thanks, Dad.”

He heard Carl’s voice in the background.

“Oh, yes,” his father added. “Carl wants to know if Captain London asked about him.”

“What? Dad, I have to go.”

His father nodded his understanding, and Peter heard Carl’s protests in the background as he terminated the call.

He picked the manual back up and read on about dividing platoons into four squads of ten, using two SWEEPERS (field engineers) with portable Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dubbed MR.UD) and coordinating sixty Insidious Drones.

He imagined sixty of those things lumbering around in all directions as his platoon herded them along. Kluver-Bucy, his ass. He had never heard of such a thing. And where did they get sixty zombies from? Were there more? There had to be.

Peter put down the book, his head spinning, and got ready to go to the mess hall. His stomach was rumbling terribly, and as he got up to leave, he wondered if the ID felt hunger the way he did.

The Rise of Carl

Carl was sitting on his couch reading a book about nanotechnology when his father entered the room. He had his mini tablet laptop on, running a scan, and downloading updates.

He had been online in the middle of a session on Popularity.soc (.soc was reserved for social networking websites), checking to see how many people were looking for him today. It was in the middle of tabulating his “Curiosity Count” and determining his place on the leader boards
, when his computer detected new updates as it did every few minutes.

“Carl, can you pick up your mother. She went to have her hair done, and it should be ‘did’ by now.”

“Yeah, no problem, Dad.”

Carl put his book down on the coffee table and
absent-mindedly turned off the television in the middle of a report on poor air quality due to high ozone concentration and pollen count.

He grabbed his coat out of the closet by the front door and a black umbrella with one broken spoke. He opened the door and ran outside into the driving rain.

He opened the car door and flung himself into the driver’s seat, retracting the umbrella and tossing it on the floor of the passenger side. He activated the ignition with his Mini-com and pulled out of the driveway.

The heavy
raindrops pelted the roof of his car like bullets, nearly drowning out the Christmas songs on the radio.

Now
10 minutes of music every hour on WTHZ FM, your official Christmas music station, WTHZ, Texas, that’s WTHZ, WTHZ FM…

Carl detested Christmas, but it was his father’s car and the stations were preset. It was one of the many inconveniences of sharing one car, but given the economy and their
finances, they had no choice. Besides, his parents got a 10G tax bonus every year that they used only one car.

Carl remembered when his mother used to drive Pete and him to the
mall, but in those days, the mall was a very different kind of place. There used to be stores.

However,
with advances in technology, internet commerce, and the increasingly unnecessary overhead of maintaining storefronts, the stores began to disappear. It began with bookstores. Print on demand replaced costly mass printings. Then clothing followed suit. Then electronics and appliances, and eventually even groceries. Everything was ordered online and shipped to your front door.

At about the same time
, air quality had begun to steadily decline. People no longer looked to venture out of their houses, except for work. Telecommuting had become commonplace for many jobs. The interesting thing about the decline in air quality was that its origin was surprising, ironic even. In the 1980’s, there was a lot of fuss about the ozone layer. In the 1990’s, the environmentalist movement gained momentum.

At the turn of the
millennium, the Democratic Party gave it legitimacy, and policy was drawn to reduce pollution from industry. Green was good, and everyone thought they were doing their part to help the environment. But the world, like anything else, appeared to swing on a great big pendulum.

After decades of pollutants and smog being released into the
environment, the air was significantly clearer. The vegetation subjugated by industry for so long, eventually rebounded, and with a vengeance. There was a steady increase in pollen count from all types of flora to the point that it was saturating the air. There was an epidemic of asthma, allergies, and a plethora of respiratory problems. People were actually choking on their fresh air.

So when commerce went digital, it was no longer necessary to go out and shop.
The economy was adversely affected. The disappearance of storefronts and the automation of exchanges meant fewer and fewer jobs. Fewer and fewer jobs meant less spending, which meant less commerce and fewer and fewer jobs.

Malls had become venues for the only part of commerce that could not be executed on the internet—services. Car mechanics, doctors, hair stylists,
and the DMV, were all now housed in these malls. Carl’s mother had gone for her usual Christmas Eve hair appointment. Her family was due this evening at the homestead, and she wanted to look her best.

Carl pulled into the parking lot, and his Space Finder function popped up as a holograph on his windshield. He hated driving out to the mall on Christmas Eve because of the
crowds, and there was never enough parking. A vacant space icon flashed red. He made it to the spot and pulled in as another spot poacher was coming down the row.

The man in the blue car glared at him as he passed, and Carl thumbed his nose at him. The man’s expression was humorless.

He turned off the ignition, grabbed his broken umbrella, braced himself for the deluge, and flung himself out of the car. He hastily made his way up the aisle as his face was spattered with rain. The umbrella offered little respite. As he crossed over onto the wide sidewalk in front of the mall, a car stopped short of hitting him.

“Why don’t you be more
careful?”

The man just glared at him over the steering wheel. He was a scruffy-looking man with an olive complexion and dark eyes. He looked foreign, Mediterranean perhaps. For a
moment, they stared each other down in the driving rain. At this point, Carl’s umbrella was serving no purpose whatsoever as he stood there in the pouring rain looking rather stern and rather ridiculous.

At
last, the man in the blue car pulled around Carl and drove off in search of another parking spot.

“Some people have no sense of humor,” Carl muttered to no one in particular.

He stepped onto the wide patio area in front of the entrance to the mall, looked up, and saw his mother exiting the hair salon through the glass doors of the mall entrance. He waved to her, but she didn’t see him. He walked toward the front doors, tossing his lame umbrella into a garbage bin on the way. As he entered through the glass doors, the high-powered blowers did a good job of drying him as he passed through.

He strode
past the gaudy fountain by the entrance where a mother was changing her infant’s diaper on a bench, and he put himself in his mother’s line of sight. It took only a moment for her to see him, and then another to recognize him. They met in front of a doctor’s office.

“So, your father saw it fit to send you out in this rain.”

“I wasn’t doing anything anyway, Mom. Your hair looks great.”

She coifed her hair gently in the hood of her coat. “Yeah, well not when the rain gets through with it.”

“Why didn’t you cancel the appointment?”

“Carl, do you have any idea how difficult it is to get an appointment this time of year between Christmas and New Year’s? Besides
…”

“I know. It’s tradition.”

“You know I always get my hair done for Christmas Eve.”

At that
moment, Carl felt bad for his mother. She used to manage a whole team of employees, and now all she had to manage was her Christmas Eve hair appointment. “Well, you look great.”

He glanced over her shoulder at the army recruitment center. Every mall in America had one. His mother’s expression soured when she detected his not so furtive glance.

“Don’t even think about it, Carl.”

“What, Mom? Think about what?”

“I saw you look over at that army recruitment station.”

“I just looked…”

“I thought we discussed this.”

“We did. You forbade me from even thinking about enlisting.”

“And yet here you are thinking about it, right in front of me no less.”

“Listen…” Passersby were looking at the escalating conversation. Carl took a moment to maintain the conversational volume of his voice while conveying his annoyance. “Do we have to discuss this here?”

She paused, looking him up and down, sizing him up. After a moment, she had apparently decided that the mall was not the time or place to have this discussion. Some of her friends might be there and overhear them. “No, I suppose we don’t. Let’s just leave.”

“I’ll pull the car up so you won’t have far to go in the rain. But first
, I just have to use the restroom.”

“Oh, okay,” she huffed
, “I’ll wait by the fountain.” She stomped off to stand by the water fountain.

“Okay,” he muttered behind her.

Carl stalked over to the men’s room and relieved his almost bursting bladder. As he washed his hands, he appraised himself in the mirror. He knew he was going to hear more about the army recruitment center in the car. It was going to be a long ride home.

He detested unemployment and living with his parents. He felt so helpless. It was humiliating, even if the vast majority of his cohort
was in the very same position. Here he stood, a grown intelligent man, and he was afraid of his mommy. Afraid to be a man and choose his own destiny, even if it was in the army.

He left the restroom and walked towards the water fountain. His mother stood there glaring at the glass doors to the parking lot. As he approached
her, he was not sure if she was still annoyed with him or if she was annoyed at the rain for threatening her newly done hair.

“I’m going to get the car and pull around.”

She only glared in response.

He stepped through the glass doors and into the deluge, but his face was hot from the exchange with his mother and his own humiliation
, so he didn’t feel the drops assaulting his face.

He looked down at his Mini-com and activated the Car-search function. It began to beep and flash arrows directing him to his father’s car.
He stepped into the parking lot and briskly walked down his aisle. He flung the door open to his car and jumped into the driver’s seat.

He turned on the car and blasted the heat. The Christmas station immediately began to blare, but this time Carl turned it off. Enough noise for one day. He looked behind him and backed out into the aisle. A woman in another car quickly took his place. Carl wondered if the woman would jump into his grave so quickly.

He pulled up to the front of the mall and stopped off to the side. He was looking in and saw his mother looking down at her Mini-com. He honked the horn, but to no avail.

In the parking lot behind
him, some impatient jerk was revving his engine. Boy did Carl hate Christmas.

His mother looked up and saw him. She waved.

But Carl heard tires screech and an engine gunning. He turned around in time to see a car careening right towards the front of the mall…