Writers of the Future, Volume 29 (3 page)

War Hero

T
hree days pass before I decide to get saved.

They bump me to the head of the list, of course, and six hours later, I've got a military escort from the colony tram to the facility. Shane is my tech today. He resembles a young Abe Lincoln cut out of pale alabaster, elongated limbs in the classic indigenously Martian look, and a frilly beard hugging his jaw.

He sits in the neighboring control room, hunched over his buglike monitor-spread, and gets to work stimulating my brain. His machine-prompted queries crackle over the intercom. Part friendly handball, part firing squad. My brain on TV, lighting up different branches like a blinking Solstice Tree. My head encased in the neuroreader that's about the same as wearing a cooking colander for a hat.

I flip through a magazine, watching the firework images of the Phobos victory unfold across the smartpaper.

“What are your favorite movies?” Shane asks. “How long did you serve the Resistance?” “How many times have you been offworld?”

Yet every so often comes an indelicate prod. “Do you look in the toilet before flushing?” “Have you ever fantasized sexually about a relative?”

“What's it like to kill a dog?”

I look up from the magazine, anger flashing in my thoughts like a red siren.

The pace of the questions has been winding down, and I
thought
we were just talking to pass the time. So I try to catch his eyes through the glass. “Excuse me?”

The Martian beanpole doesn't return my stare. He hunches in his chair, hugging himself with his freakishly long arms like a Cycladic statue. In another few generations, humans on Earth and Mars will have diverged into different damned species.

“Want me to repeat the question?”

All business, this kid.

I clear my throat, uncrossing and crossing my legs. “It feels…” I swallow a lump. “Ugly. Like
you're
a monster, and not this sixty-pound slavering beast who has just turned your little brother's face to a Halloween mask of red pulp. So you bite down harder on its throat. You hug it fiercely in a death embrace, knowing if it gets free, it will kill you. You think of your brother. Your fear begins to change. It turns to… revenge.”

Shane looks over at me guiltily. “Sorry. Machine says I had to ask. Needed to light Zone 8 back here.” He taps an emerald-green screen.

“I wouldn't mind having that memory erased, Shane.”

“Remove one block and it impacts the structure's integrity.” Canned response, drilled in from his tech training. He sips from his water-bottle straw and swivels around in the chair, straining his giraffe neck to check the upload status. “You saved your brother's life.”

I return to my magazine. Dazzling surface captures of the Phobos base explosion parade at my fingertips.

Shane's voice pierces from the intercom. “In the years since, did you ever have to kill something again?”

“Just the people here,” I say, tapping the magazine.

“Corporal Peznowski. Doctor Javier Daigle. General Chatfield.” Shane throws up his hands. “Worst war criminals since the Nazis.” Head cocks, curious sideways tilt. “How did you ever infiltrate their ranks? The Partisans were famous for being able to sniff out a mole.”

“Is this a machine question, or your own curiosity?”

“Does it matter?”

I swallow hard, not wanting to think of the vast setup the resistance had perpetrated to convince the Partisan ministry of intelligence that I was one of their isolationist, fearmongering, powercrat fanatics… the grotesque mutation of early Martian pride in having a planet of their own, pumped through a filter of jingoism and fundamentalism across Mars's burnt-orange deserts. Or in the illegal torture wards led by sadistic thugs like Peznowski and Chatfield.

But Shane isn't done. Eyes glinting in unabashed interest, he presses, “How did you get that scar on your chin, Mr. Pope?”

I shift awkwardly in my seat. “I was shot. The flechette grazed right through my chin.”

That was only two Martian days ago, high above the planet's war-torn surface in the Partisans' tactical command center on Phobos. I had just set the last of the explosives, wrapped in CAMO mesh so they blended in with the Phobos station weld points. The timer ticking down in red overlay in my vision as I walked the glossy length of the main corridor, dizzy, chest tight. Atlas with the world on his shoulders. Below on the Martian surface, the tide was turning. Resistance fighters had finally captured Olympus, and the Partisans were hemmed in by northern and southern rebels. Their headquarters on Phobos
was clamped shut, no shuttles in or out. Just me and Corporal Peznowski and Partisan generals squawking in the war room while the blue tactical map on the wall updated every few minutes with more bad news from the planet below.

Red countdown to a new year. Eight minutes. Heart broiled in an adrenaline stew, flushing cheeks, sweat squeezing from my pores. It was almost relief when I heard my name shouted from behind.

“Harris!”

I turned to see Corporal Peznowski and four blue-uniformed agents rounding the corner with flechette guns drawn. The first blaze tore inches past my head, one of the pencil-thin projectiles opening my chin like a zipper, before I could throw myself through the nearest double doors. Two-minute dash to the shuttle bay. Surprising and killing a pair of guards there. Charlotte's hackpick in hand, wresting me control of my escape shuttle—a steel-gray Thunderwing bomber loaded with medical supply freight. Shuttle dropping from Phobos to Mars's burnt-orange vista, while the base seemed to cough behind me, flash of light, shockwave, two
hundred and sixteen bodies flung out, debris streaking the bubble-gum planetside sky.

Shane laughs in the glass chamber.

“What's so damned funny?”

He stops right away, looking pained. “Sorry, Mr. Pope. I was just thinking that most people die when they get shot in the head. You just get pissed.” He checks again on the upload status. “Almost done here, war hero. Save complete in seven seconds.”

I'm anxious and tired, suddenly needing to get drunk, get laid and pass out for a month.

“Let me tell you, Shane,” I say, “May you live a long life and never—

I
'm naked in a steel tub filled with warm water and slimy gel. There's a small console on the wall. A glossy black camera eye studies me from the ceiling.

I don't even remember opening my eyes.

My half-spoken reply to Shane is still on my tongue, but he's nowhere to be found. It's like having a stage backdrop whisked away and a new background springing from unseen theatrical compartments. Knowledge floods into me, recognition springing from old brochures. I'm in a regeneration pod, where new bodies are grown for mental downloads.

Which means I died at some point following my last save.

My contract states that if I flatline on Mars, I'm to be regenerated at Bradbury station, and this was
not
Bradbury. Commercial clinics are bright and welcoming and filled with flowers and ferns, as if you've been resurrected in a Buddhist paradise. Partisan clinics are antiseptic and cold, eschewing comfort for the military necessity of getting you back on your feet as soon as possible.

This room is neither. It looks bolted together by cheap screws and spit. A place built out of rawest necessity; four walls, a ceiling, and optional towels. The camera peers down at me like a dark crystal ball. I try not to move, letting myself float in the thick water.

And this is
not
my body.

My thoughts spin into a whirlwind of panic. When I had talked with Shane I was six-foot-one, one hundred eighty-five pounds, leanly muscled. My new shell is stunningly at odds with that. Shorter, skinnier, darker. Arms and pubic region covered in light-blond hair. My new hand moves clumsily for the wall console and the screen flashes to life at the slightest, dripping touch.

The first thing I see is the Vector Nanonics LifeTree logo emblazoned beside the keyboard. Not very helpful in betraying my location. All the best upload tech is manufactured by Vector. Scumbags have a virtual monopoly on the trade.

The logo clears and I see an inbox with two unread messages. The first is from me, recorded on December 13, 2274, a date which puts it three weeks past my save with Shane. But the second entry is from Doctor Traci Cucinella, recorded April 6, 2315! What the hell?

I select the first entry. A strange face appears onscreen.

My initial impression is that this is a burnt, deformed old man who has somehow left me a message under my own login. His face is horrifically blistered, dirtied and ruined. Behind him is a dim, nondescript room.

“Hello, Harris,” he says through a choking wheeze, as if part of his throat has collapsed. I swallow the lump in my own.

“I'm recording this with the few minutes we have left. You will remember that your last upload followed the explosion on Phobos. Without their tactical center, the Partisans were finished. The Resistance achieved total victory four days later. A few pockets of stubborn holdouts in the west, a lot of groups suicided rather than surrender.”

It takes until that moment for me to realize who the burnt man is. There's no use denying it.

I stare into the blistered face and recognize my own.

The monitor-me sighs in difficulty, glassy-eyed and dazed. “They must have had a contingency plan to poison the well in the event of defeat. An orbital stealth platform we never knew about bombarded the planetary surface with three hundred nukes.”

My stomach drops. The fledgling colonies of Mars, with all the innocence of scattered college campuses, now laid to waste?

“I was in my apartment when the first bombs hit. The explosion threw me out into the hallway like a doll. I remember crawling through rubble, trying to find the staircase. Some of the residents and I punched our way through the floor and got to the basement, where we were able to send a message to the outside. I have no idea if Charlotte survived. I reached Traci, and I'm recording this message on her bandwidth.”

The eyes find mine—hideous funhouse mirror reflection. It makes for a queasy math in my head: one soul across 41 years, two bodies and divergent lines of consciousness in an unfolding fractal pattern like diamond gloss.

“Harris,” yesteryear's self tells me, “I've been mortally irradiated, and we can't reach any of the labs for treatment. When you get this…” A sad smile forms on his melted face. “Good luck.” A pause. “I slept with Charlotte the night before the bombs fell. Neither one of us seemed to regret it in the morning. Traci will regen you as soon as possible.”

The message ends.

I hit the next message, from Traci, recorded 41 years later.

ILLUSTRATION BY JON ENO

M
y finger is a hummingbird kiss on the monitor. Traci's message stirs.

“Harris,” she says, and I suck in a panicked breath at how she looks. My God! She is old and gray, enough to account for the passage of 41 years with only the most limited longevity treatments. Her myostatin blockers appear to be cranked too high, giving her a famished appearance.

Or maybe it wasn't blockers at all. What the hell had happened in the space of a single sentence?

“I can just imagine how confused you're going to be when you hear this,” she says. “We tried to bring you back right away. But the bombardment was cruelly calculated, Harris. A second wave, much weaker and more scattered, hit a few hours after the first. It destroyed our facilities. I took the save files and fled. It's taken this long to get our equipment up and working again. We had to cannibalize several labs, and then trade with other survivors for equipment. You can't…”

Tears leak from her eyes.

“Things have been difficult, Harris. I lost Charlie…he was murdered a few weeks ago in New Haven.”

So bring him back,
I think hotly.
The way you brought me.

Traci's eyes lock onto mine with prescient intensity. “The only city on Mars which still has a working Regen facility is the one you're just waking up to. New Haven. And it's not the way you remember it.”

My memory hunts down a map of Mars. New Haven is a shuttle port city seventy miles south of Cydonia. It's where, after detonating Phobos station, I had landed in my stolen shuttle and enjoyed my first victory meal of Pad Thai noodles in the mall rotunda while my guards kept cheering crowds at bay.

Traci wipes her eyes with a harsh, angry motion.

“We hacked you straight into the Regen list, making the system believe you were an approved regeneration in Peznowski's circle. You've probably noticed by now that you are in a different body. Even the doctors at the clinic won't know who you really are.”

Peznowski? My fists clench at the name.

“He's alive,” Traci says onscreen. “And he's on the governing board of New Haven. Calls himself Deputy Mayor Matthew Bayne. Has a whole new body, new voice, but our AI pat-match scoured his speeches and gave a ninety-one percent match with Peznowski's cadence, word choice, and style. Peznowski is back from the dead and practically in charge of the town you're in.”