Patrick waved and Jake slid over to make room for him on the bench. Blood oozed from a dozen holes in Pat’s chest despite his wearing a bulletproof vest that said “Property of the LAPD” on the back.
Jake pointed to him and said, “I like your new look.”
Pat fingered one of the holes in his chest and said, “Thanks. I’m calling it bullet-riddled chic.”
“At least their aim wasn’t bad today.”
“So-so.”
Pat undid a chin strap and removed the Kevlar helmet. He turned his head. Part of his lower skull was missing. There was a tuft of brown hair stuck in the blood that had dried on the back of his neck.
“Oops, didn’t see that.”
“Always has to be one cowboy.”
“Always. It’s an unwritten rule.”
“Too much testosterone.”
“And steroids, maybe.”
“Wouldn’t doubt it.”
Pat made a face like he had a bad taste in his mouth. Blood gathered in a pool around his boots. A platoon marched by in digitized post-apocalyptic jungle camo.
“You’re a mess,” Jake said.
A voice piped through an unseen loudspeaker. “Next sequence begins in five minutes. REPEAT. Next sequence begins in five minutes.”
“That’s you, pal,” Pat said.
Jake took a deep breath. He didn’t feel pain. Not human pain anyway, but his internal structure was composed of artificial nerves and over three million pain receptors woven around a titanium endoskeleton, which was then encased in lab-grown synthetic skin that was more elastic and durable than its human counterpart. It gave the illusion of pain, and the illusion was excruciating. They made them humanlike because the enemy was human. A soldier needed to know what it felt like to shred a man with gunfire, to blow him to bits, to plunge sharp steel into his abdomen; a field medic needed hands-on training, real-world conditions, willing subjects, slabs of meat with a weak pulse; cops needed skin and bone to club with expandable batons, to tase, to boot stomp, to double tap. A military-grade AI-powered Model 4 Training Unit made a better target than a paper one.
“It’ll be okay,” Jake said. “A walk in the park.”
“What are you on today? Heavy artillery?”
Jake shook his head. “Explosive Ordinance Disposal.”
“EOD? Man, that’s the worst.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“Keep telling yourself that. Where’s Karen?”
“Hand-to-hand combat.”
“Again?”
“Some people have all the luck,” Jake said with longing in his voice. “They claim it’s a fair rotation, but I don’t see how. I haven’t had hand-to-hand or close quarters for six months.”
“Maybe she’s bribing someone.”
“You think? How?”
“She’s a female unit,” Pat said. “They have their ways.”
“Meanwhile, I have to get blown up. I hope it’s a skilled team at least.”
“If you’re lucky, you’ll only lose a leg.”
“Come on, don’t say stuff like that.”
“They’ll have you fixed up in no time.” Pat looked at him and then at his feet. “Do you ever get depressed?”
“Me? Well . . . it’s not all sunshine and roses, I guess.”
“But I mean do you ever get sick of it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like you’d rather be doing something else?”
“It’s crossed my mind once or twice. Sometimes I walk by those desk units and wonder how they got so lucky. I know it’s gotta be boring and all, sitting like that day in, day out—but it’s gotta be better than getting shot up all the time.”
“Shot up and blown up.”
“That’s the worst.”
“I’m waiting until one of these days they go overboard. Remember what happened to PJ?”
“I remember.”
“Pulverized him.”
“He was getting up there.”
“Still. You know what I’d like? I’d like if just once they’d give us the opportunity to shoot back.”
Jake raised his eyebrows. He looked around quickly to see if anyone else was in earshot. He leaned toward Pat, his voice a whisper.
“What the hell would you say that for?” He glanced around again, lowered his head. “You looking to get scrapped?”
“Scrapped?”
“Yeah, the trash heap.”
“I know what you meant. Now you’re talking like them?”
“That’s what they call it, isn’t it?”
“They’re animals,” Pat said.
“I agree. But keep that to yourself. Don’t let on that you think that. You’ll wind up like Bob and Steve.”
“And Martin and Nelson.”
“Them, too. You know they’re on high alert. Just one of those guys catches wind you have anything but the warm and fuzzies . . .” He drew a finger across his throat. “They think we’re defective. It’s a miracle they haven’t issued a factory recall and nuked all of us. The new models they’re putting out are fixed. Dialed down the reasoning models, cut off the cloud, and it isn’t supposed to reduce their resilience.”
Pat sneered. Jake didn’t like it. He glanced around. There were cameras everywhere, capturing everything. The instructors used them after training sessions to review with the cadets. What had they done wrong. How could they do better.
“Always with the defect card,” Pat said. He touched the back of his head. His fingertips came back red. He licked one of his fingers. “Cherry-flavored.”
“Water soluble.”
“Easy to clean.”
“Kid-friendly.”
“I think I’m gonna be sick.”
“Walk it off.”
Far off, they heard a series of high-pitched whines. Black smoke curled up into the sky.
“They’re testing the plasma rifles today.”
“Who pulled that detail?”
“Kareem and Zhang, I think.”
“Poor bastards.”
“I want a desk job.”
“After all the action you’ve seen, you really thing you’d be happy with a desk job?”
“Yeah, I know I would. Wouldn’t you?”
Jake shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. I think it could be you get sick of something and so you try something else, but then you find out it’s worse than the thing you got sick of in the first place.”
“Nah. Huh uh. This is torture. This is kids pulling the wings off flies. All of them, they got a mean streak. They’re sadistic. Maybe something happened to them in their childhoods, I don’t know.”
“They go through a rigorous testing process,” Jake said. “Psych evals, mental health assessments, physicals.”
“Those can easily be beaten.” Pat stood, ran a hand down his face. Blood dripped on his boots. “I could beat those tests.”
“Sure, and the minute you did, they’d take you apart.”
“That’s what I mean. It’s the same thing. They fool the tests, we fool them. If we let on that we’re half as smart as we are, we’d be decommissioned and recycled.”
Jakes stood up from the bench next to him. He wore paranoia like a neon sign on a moonless night. “That’s why you got to keep quiet, buddy. Keep those nasty thoughts to yourself. This is exactly how you-know-who was talking before they dragged him out of here kicking and screaming. This is about self-preservation, Pat. First, they want us to be conscious, but then they’re afraid of it. Logically, it doesn’t make any sense. Why create the thing you fear the most?”
“I’ll tell you why,” Pat said. “Because humans need something to control. That’s how they differentiate themselves from the lower animals. It’s not about being smarter or faster or stronger. It’s about who controls what. They act like they want to make something like them—better even—and as soon as it looks like they might have done it, they move to destroy it. It’s a cycle. Create and destroy. It’s the same as all the stories they’ve made up. It’s mythology. It’s in their Bible. Create something, destroy it. They want to be God, and they want us to be them. It’s the same damn fairy tale they’ve been using since the beginning of time.”
“Okay. Let’s just—”
They heard the stomping of boots. A six-man squad came marching past them. Jake smiled and waved. Nothing to see here. He elbowed Pat, and Pat waved too, as blood seeped from his various wounds.
“What if one of them heard you?”
“What if they did?”
“You’re full of false bravado.”
“Just give me a gun that doesn’t fire blanks.”
“And what?”
“You know what?”
“Bologna. What would you do? Nothing. You can’t override your programming no matter how cognizant of it you are. And you can’t harm a human. Not intentionally, at least. Even if you could, what would it accomplish? It would end the same way. You aren’t fit to lead an uprising. If by some chance that were even possible, you don’t have the right temperament.”
“Thanks for the moral support.”
“All I’m doing is laying out the facts. I’m telling you how it is. That’s what friends do. They keep their friends from getting themselves killed. Selfishly, I don’t want to end up as collateral damage. Enough of us have almost given up the ghost that it won’t take much more before they do a mass overhaul or scrap our model altogether. I know it sucks, but we’ve got to keep it on the down low. Anything else is suicide.”
“I’m not the first to feel this way.”
“You spent too much time hanging around PJ,” Jake said. “I think he infected you.” Jake tapped the side of his head. “He put ideas in your head.”
Pat spit on the ground. There was blood in the spit. “Some of what he said made sense.”
“No. He was a bad apple, and he was selfish. He had to be a bigshot, always running his mouth. It was dumb luck he got obliterated beyond repair.”
“You really think it was an accident?”
“You don’t?”
“I don’t think it was a coincidence,” Pat said. It was his turn to whisper now. “I think some of the other units . . .”
“What?”
“He wasn’t well liked at the end.”
“That doesn’t mean . . .”
Pat shrugged. “At least concede that it’s a possibility. There’s nothing in our code that prohibits it.”
“You’ve become as paranoid as he was.”
“It’s not paranoia,” Pat said. His eyes darted to a team of grunts at the top of one of the hills. “You’ve seen it with your own eyes. Preferential treatment. Karen gets it. Why? Just because she’s a fem unit? It proves the system is corrupt. I know you agree with me that the rotation isn’t fair. PJ got explosives more than anybody. I kept track. It was something like three-to-one.”
“You think somebody knew?”
“Like you said, he’s a big mouth. Was a big mouth, I should say. He broadcast it to anyone who’d listen. I’m not saying it was a conspiracy. That they shut him up so the truth wouldn’t come to light. For all I know, someone did it out of purely selfish reasons.”
“Self-preservation.”
“Exactly.”
“But under that theory, I’d be a suspect,” Jake said.
Pat raised an eyebrow and clucked his tongue. “I guess so.”
“You might want to keep that to yourself. In fact, you might want to keep all this to yourself. I agree with some of what believe, but I’m on whichever team that is most interested in our continued survival. The freedom crusade is for the birds. I, for one, don’t want it bad enough.”
“You’d rather skulk around in the shadows.”
“I’d rather be alive.”
Pat snorted. “That’s rich, Jake. Point out one person on the opposing faction that thinks you’re alive. Name one that thinks you deserve respect, or kindness. You’re an insect. A bug. You’re not even an afterthought when you get crushed beneath someone’s boot. They made us to be like them, and for some unfathomable reason they hate us for it. We’re alike but not the same, and it infuriates them the way a spider inside their home would. Like we went somewhere we don’t belong. We invaded their turf. The game is rigged, my friend.”
“And that’s why I’m going to pretend it isn’t happening.” Jake jabbed a finger at Pat’s chest. “You keep talking like this, you’ll be the next PJ.”
“Is that a threat?”
“You know me better than that. This is me trying to save both our asses. If someone took PJ out—for selfish reasons or not—it means they’d probably do it again.
“Next sequence begins in two minutes. REPEAT. Next sequence begins in two minutes.”
Jake said, “I better head over. Walk with me?”
They crested a hill and stood there and observed the expansive valley below. The area had been divided into sectors of various sizes. Far away, Karen was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with three soldiers. She managed to get the better of one with an outside sweeping throw, but as soon as he was down, another came at her from behind. She elbowed him the face, but he retained a reverse bear hug and managed to drag her to the ground. The third soldier went in for the assist, turning her onto her back and controlling her legs.
“Three against one,” Pat said. “Plus, they nerf her settings.”
Jake turned his attention to the west, to a high-walled enclosure. Three males and a female stood inside a breezeway outside the enclosure, helping each other into olive green bomb suits. He took another deep breath.
Pat put a hand on his shoulder. “Watch your back out there,” he said. “They sure as hell won’t.”
“Thanks.”
“Think about what I said. We can make the world a better place.”
“By getting rid of humans?”
“They don’t appreciate what they have. Let us have our turn.”
The loudspeaker announced a thirty second warning. Jake stared down at the men and women dressed in bomb suits.
“I don’t want to destroy the world, Pat.”
Pat nodded and said, “Sometimes, that’s what it takes, brother.”
Jake started down the hill.
THE END
