TRANSCENDENCE

by Christopher McKitterick

Fury 1: Hardman Nadir

A voice screamed in Hardman Nadir’s head, waking him where the thunder of battle couldn’t. Bombs meant nothing to him anymore; but voices . . . that was different.

"Piece of shit, Nadir, what the hell you doing?" The Boss’ 3VRD stood behind Nadir’s closed eyelids as if Nadir’s eyes were open and the sky were red as blood. Not even sleep was free of invasion.

"Firefight?" Nadir asked in voice-only. He didn’t go to the effort to project his own 3VRD to Boss Jhishra.

 ""‘Firefight?’" the 3VRD howled, yet its face remained calm and wise-looking. Layers of brass and colored ribbons coated the tan uniform. Behind the boss pulsed the pale red of blood coursing through Nadir’s vessels.

Jhishra growled. "Are you deaf?"

Nadir listened carefully and, indeed, a firefight was in progress. Bombs concussed the ground beneath him, jangling his joints. Falling sand peppered the exposed skin on his arms and face and neck. The unit’s electromagnetic matter-accelerator rifles—EMMAs for short—were busily chopping up the enemy, each crack-thup the measure of a man’s pain.

Years prior, Nadir had learned how to keep himself from going insane during a bombardment. The Marshall Islands had taught him that, among other things. In the time between then and now, he had also learned how to forget the past.

With eyes closed, Nadir listened carefully to gauge the weapons setting his men were using. Most of them were going full-auto at ten cycles per second, so their targets had to be either lightly armored or at long range. An EMMA at that setting fired—each second—ten aerodynamic 2.2mm dielectric-ceramic rounds at a velocity of 1100 meters per second.

"You still sleeping, you piece of shit?" Jhishra screamed. Yet the heroic figure appeared calm and collected.

Nadir paid no attention to his boss. He had more important things on his mind. By now, he had learned to ignore the man, who had grown more and more hysterical as this four-month operation progressed. Nadir couldn’t respect a commander who lost control even though his unit was still better than ninety percent survived.

"Nik at eleven o’clock!" one of the men called to another.

The ditch he lay in, an old bomb-crater, sounded as if it were engulfed in a storm. Every second, hundreds of electric cracks sounded simultaneously with thups as projectiles left the plastic barrels. Crack-thup like rain, like a downpour. Occasionally, Nadir discerned nearby explosions. Enemy mortars.

That got his attention. He opened his eyes and sat up, hands automatically grabbing the EMMA rifle he cradled as he slept. The world flickered as it always did when he first opened his eyes in the morning; he couldn’t remember a time when it hadn’t, so he had long ago stopped questioning if something had gone wrong with his headcard. He had long ago stopped questioning anything; Nadir, second-in-command of this outfit, merely survived, and he tried to forge that survival into a poetry of idyllic heroism, as portrayed in the shows and educational feed he’d loved in his youth.

Standing, his shoulders level with the ground, sub-boss Nadir looked out across the Libyan desert. It shone brilliantly in the orange horizontal rays of sunrise, sparkling like a trillion shattered glass bottles. Twisted and blackened armor littered an otherwise flawless vista, tufted here and there with scrub brush or patches of thorn, rippled with tiny dunes as if it were a sea crystallized in motion. The colors looked more vivid than they had in his civilian life, enhanced as in a dream, and the edges of his vision were hazy. Nadir had long ago forgotten that once the world hadn’t looked quite so Technicolor. To question one’s perception was to question one’s sanity. So he merely saw what he saw and thought nothing of it.

Enemy troops cowered behind the wreckage, now and then thrusting out their weapons to let off a wild round. An occasional thump warned of incoming mortars. Ten kilometers away, a fortress was silhouetted against the broad disc of the rising sun.

Nadir sighed and uplinked to the EarthCo satellite that provided his unit with tactical data. But instead of using it in the prescribed way—necessary tactical info was obvious here—he took advantage of it to splice in his war music. Gentle strings and mellow brass soothed his mind as the monopera subscription surged within him. Now in its third week, the monopera had run longer than any he had subscribed to before, never ceasing, constantly mutating as fresh musicians and singers joined the show or previous ones tired and left. This time a powerful male tenor sang the simple chorus:

I’m alive,

I’m alive;

I’m the setting sun.

I am ev’ryone.

You’re me"

 "A mortar impacted forty meters to his left, blasting a shallow crater out of the sand and casting shrapnel all around. Nadir bumped the subscription to audio-only as he tipped his helmet toward the spreading cone of flesh-tearing metal; the mortar that had pierced Jhishra’s forearm in their first battle had been packed with rusty engine parts. Nadir couldn’t suppress a grin at remembering the boss’ endless string of curses following his injury. But memory was outlawed in war. He concentrated on the sounds around him, identifying each weapon on both sides.

Nadir wrapped the EMMA’s strap around his forearm. A bit of shrapnel clinked against the hi-carbon matrix of his helmet and ricocheted away. One of his fingers automatically set his weapon to the same rate the others were using, the familiar action requiring no conscious effort.

Satisfied the danger was past, Nadir planted the rifle’s butt firmly against his shoulder and sighted through the weapon’s enhanced optics to where he last saw one of the enemy. He overlaid the sight’s image atop his real-world view and zoomed in, laying the crosshair over the spot where he calculated the soldier’s head would reappear.

He sang along with the music, quiet and low, to steady his aim. His reason for singing was not pleasure, and he was not good at it. The words were a mantra, the sweet music a wave that buoyed his spirit and freed the important parts of his consciousness from this place.

A rash of lead spouted from an enemy gun near his target, but Nadir never wavered. Because the shooter was only using the fire as a shield, the bullets impacted in a haphazard sweep far from the trench and ceased as he slipped back behind the barricade. Even so, half the men in Nadir’s unit ducked behind the sandy bank and ceased firing. Nadir held as still as his breathing allowed.

"You hide, you die," he said to the crouching EarthCo warriors on their secure all-unit channel. "Your decision, soldiers. Fight and die or hide and die. Which will it be? Either way, ends the same."

"You’re crazy, subbs," one of the men said, laughing. It was his friend Paolo, who began to rise even as he spoke.

"Crazy," Nadir repeated. "So. Watch this."

Sure enough, the target reappeared while the EarthCo warriors paused their assault.

Crack-thup, Nadir’s EMMA sang at ten cycles per second, a pleasant counterpoint to the orchestra in his head. He felt almost no recoil, only a slight tremor from the accelerator coils and a surge from the magazine. A single half-second burst, as he preferred. Economical and professional. The lyrics faded into a swell of thousands of drums.

The shadowed face of his target shattered to a cloud of red even before the rest of the body jolted backward. Nadir’s right eye—his aiming eye—twitched a few times.

"Target chose to fight and die," he said. He shifted his rifle to the next target, the one that had just fired so randomly. It hid behind the hulk of a downed Sotoi Guntai helicopter, remains from the African Confrontation of ’88.

An enemy soldier’s head poked around the oxidized-grey fuselage just for a moment, not even looking toward where it fired, and pulled off another burst of gunpowder-launched lead. Nadir released his own half-second pulse and watched just long enough to verify that the target was eliminated. The twitching in his eye returned, slightly more sustained; this response wearied him.

"Clean!" Paolo said admiringly near Nadir’s elbow, now taking aim himself and letting fly some of his own ceramics.

A few minutes later, seven enemies sprawled beside their chosen gravesites, staining the pure sand. Nadir climbed out of the crater, sand sliding into the tops of his unlaced boots. His leather vest, beneath the outer bulletproof one, clinked with his trophies of war: fourteen assorted medals. He wore them always and everywhere. They gave him comfort on the low days. They were his outward proof that what he was doing was right and good.

"Casualties of note?" Nadir asked, transmitting to the whole unit.

"No, sir!" he heard, repeated manifold.

"We’ve done ’em all, Boss," Nadir said, feeding only to Jhishra. "Call the troops out and let’s lay some tags in a hurry. Got a raid planned today, don’t we?"

If he didn’t comm the unit’s supposed leader to urge him to do his job, they’d likely sit in sheltered areas all day. Jhishra had lost his nerve with his first injury. Nadir was always careful to hide his disgust, always careful to urge his boss forward.

"Move out!" Jhishra ordered, his 3VRD raising an arm and pointing heroically. "Fucking now!"

Eighteen young men and women—most were not even twenty, so they were only franchised citizens because they’d signed up for military duty—surged from the ditch, howling their personalized battle cries across all bandwidths in which they could transmit. Any EarthCo citizen within a kilometer would pick up the signal. And, since all EarthCo warriors also had an NKK bandwidth wired-in to accept surrenders and transmit ultimatums, enemies within that range would also receive. But wary of revealing their position, they didn’t send through the unit’s truck-mounted server; they transmitted via satellite.

As they ran across the hundred meters of loose sand, they all drew tag-pistols, each wanting to be the first to fire a tiny transmitter into a corpse, therefore earning points which the server counted and fed to Headquarters. It didn’t matter who had made the kill, because EMMA rounds were so tiny and fast that no eye could follow and no one could be sure which shot did the job. Best to tally with tags.

Nadir ran, for show, but he had no need of increasing his tally. Let the kids claim tags, he thought. He’d get his quota on the raid. Raids always earned big scores. Already, Nadir had earned 330 points in his eight-year career, almost all of those in the past two years. He claimed just enough to maintain his rank of Sub-boss, only a few more than his best warrior. He had no idea how Jhishra maintained the rank of Boss, since he was never to be seen during a battle or tagging.

The soldiers hooted and stomped, some shoving others, some even getting into fistfights over whose tag sank first. Silly kids. The server didn’t care who won the argument; it counted only the first tag sunk into a mark. After that, the mark would emit a subtle electrical signal and any further tagging would be of no effect—like the effect a sperm has on an ovum: Tiny actions change everything.

Nadir tapped the graphite toe of his boot against each of the marks, checking to make sure they were indeed eliminated. As he kicked one, its face seemed to shift to that of a young boy’s, not even adolescent, then back to its former hard, mustachioed countenance. Nadir blinked a few times, clearing the image, and felt his eye resume twitching. Fucking psych warfare; the NKK soldiers used it all the time. This time he knew he was in for an extended episode of spasms in that damned eyelid.

Memory flooded back, against his will. A month prior—Was it a month?—he couldn’t remember anymore, didn’t keep track of days. What did a day matter? A month before this day and west of here, the unit had come upon a band of nine NKK regulars. The enemy marched through the desert in perfect formation, not hindered in the least by the sucking sand. The NKK group was a gun unit, each carrying a section of a very large anti-armor gun; its long cables coiled around a shiny silver accelerator-tube, borne on the shoulders of four men. They also wore rifles. All at once, the NKK soldiers noticed Nadir’s unit. They immediately threw down their gun components and unslung their rifles. Moving awkwardly fast, Nadir had yanked his rifle’s power cable in such a way that it emitted a blast of static. His commcard—tuned in to the rifle and feeding back and forth as the components ran a quick diagnostic, unshielded to this particular bandwidth—flickered. It came back online right away.

But during that moment, that fragment of a second during which his card had nearly crashed, Nadir saw something that was to haunt him during weak times when he was undistracted by combat or unable to shut off his mind. He saw a question mark in the sand: eight old men and women, dark-skinned and wrapped in white rags. They bore sacks of grain on their shoulders. They stood, facing the EarthCo warriors, mute and still. EMMA bullets sang and whined through the air, and suddenly they were an NKK gun unit, in the course of being minced by Nadir’s men.

Nadir had grown enraged that NKK would use such sick electronic warfare. NKK had fed a particularly questionable program to their enemy, a program designed to slow Nadir’s men just that needed few seconds. Nadir’s card, temporarily unshielded, had let in the edited images.

Nadir cursed himself lightly under his breath. Why did such thoughts arise at the most inappropriate times? He released a half-second burst into the mark’s chest he stood over, to make sure the soldier was dead. The soldier. He squeezed his eyes shut to quell the twitching.

"We tallied nine, subbs," Paolo reported to Nadir, his young but weathered face beaming. The boy always spoke intheflesh to Nadir when close enough, but Jhishra would have none of that behavior, so Nadir knew Paolo used his poorly animated 3VRD when he spoke to the boss. The distraction was much needed.

"Tagged and go!" Jhishra shouted, sprinting around a ruptured tank whose treads were now only black powder scattered in a long umbra. The whole area stank of burnt rubber and roasted meat. Jhishra raced stumblingly to the head truck, climbed into the sloped cabin with the Net operator, and promptly set six mesh wheels spinning, spraying a cloud of sand in their wake. The truck’s fission reactor silently fed a great surge of power to the whining motor set in each wheel hub. A pair of independently mounted EMMA-B cannons swiveled atop the bullet-shaped vehicle, scanning the theater for potential targets, their almost-sentient optics uplinked to satellite and taking feedback from each of the ten man-mounted cameras that still functioned. Not a piece of armor in the world could survive long against that.

Nadir and Paolo ran to their own car, a two-man open-bodied tub on wide mesh wheels. Physical action was good; Nadir began to smile. The car’s lightweight hicarb shell gleamed a pockmarked yellow in the rising sun. On command from Nadir, the car began rolling even as he and his partner landed in their web seats.

"I haven’t yet wished you all good morning," Nadir began, settling himself in against rough acceleration.

"Ah, fuck that, subbs," an anonymous soldier complained. Nadir ignored the kid.

"Die well today, if today you must die," his interactive 3VRD told them. Electric motors screamed the car faster and faster across the low dunes, rattling the ammo boxes in back. Dry air rushed through his dust-clogged nostrils and down his throat, but he didn’t cough. It was cleansing and smelled only of dust and dry grasses, not destroyed humans and their artifacts.

"With joy, I grieve for your certain death in service to our great nation," he told them. "This hour, this day, this action, the next few decades, we will all die—"

"Why the fuck do you always do this?" Jhishra growled.

"Yeah, today was startin’ so good."

"—so I offer you my pleasant grief," Nadir continued, oblivious to the insults. "Peace, and don’t forget you’re alive right now."

The car reached maximum speed—114 kph, according to feed from the little computer that ran the vehicle. Nadir frowned; that was slower than last action, which was slower than the last, and so on. When they first landed near Algiers, all the cars maxed at 150. Everything dies, some slowly, some in a rush. Entropy is as holy as anything else in this godforsaken universe, but that doesn’t mean you’re not supposed to fight it.

"Why do you say that every morning?" Paolo asked.

Nadir turned to look at the boy’s pinched face, wind whipping his sandy hair. He was tossed like a puppet as they lurched across uneven terrain. Though the motors screamed and wind howled over the sharply raked windscreen, he could clearly hear Paolo who was seated against his shoulder. This was a basic infantry-transport car, built of a one-piece shell with wheel/motor units linked via a simple suspension bolted to the shell. A dim-witted computer controlled direction, speed, obstacle avoidance, and so on. Spaciousness wasn’t one of its designers’ concerns. So Nadir was able to respond intheflesh despite noise.

"Does it bother you?" he asked.

"Ah, hell, subbs! How couldn’t it?"

"No one escapes death," Nadir said. "No one. Our marks, they were alive only minutes ago. Remember Sogold? She was alive until zone gamma. No one escapes it, though some delay the inevitable. Some fear death so much they encase themselves in padded tombs and step so cautiously through life that their feet never touch the hard stone of its surface, their lungs never fill with its sizzling air."

The car lurched left to avoid a half-buried bunker whose gun slit had been ripped wide open. Gleaming fragments of metal lay scattered outward from the exploded side. Paolo nearly fell across Nadir’s lap before regaining balance, holding himself in place with both strong fists wrapped around dashboard wimp-handles.

"You’ve got to live," Nadir continued when Paolo looked back at him. "The moment you were born, you began to die. It’s in the genes, warrior. As surely as I’ll die when my blood drains from my cooling corpse, a man hiding from death in his penthouse apartment will also die. Maybe he’ll last a few more decades, but who gives a shit for decades if they’re hollow? I’d rather live a few blazing years overflowing with life than a lifetime of half empty . . . existence." He spat. "That’d be like drowning, breathing emptiness in lungs accustomed to and needful of vital air. I came here to escape that fate. Didn’t you?"

He looked forward, watched the scattered band of cars and the command truck weave a pattern of tracks like strands of DNA across the desert sands. "

Nadir looked back at the boy. He opened an all-unit bandwidth and asked, "What’s life?"

"Death!" shouted a Polish girl, her 3VRD barely flickering.

"You’re starting to learn," Nadir said with a smile. "Life is survival against the forces of death. Death is an ocean all around us, water carving through rock, finding its way into everything. Life as we know it is like a dance across the seaside cliffs, a dance of killing. You kill, you live. You hide, you drown.

"Live, soldiers!" he said across the channel. "Make your grief the glorious grief of the condemned, the executioner, whose eyes are wide open and full of the blaze of life at the moment before death.

"Live, so you can see eternity!"

A number of indistinct 3VRDs appeared overlaid one atop another in Nadir’s vision, cheering and howling like wild animals. Paolo’s eyes glittered with uncomprehending admiration, then turned away to watch the target fortress approach. Slanting sunlight set the cool sand afire.

This boy is alive, Nadir told himself, feeling a hard smile crease his face. He noticed the eye tic was gone.

He sang.

"I’m alive,

I’m alive;

I’m the burning sun.

I am ev’ryone.

You’re me."