Johnny Reb (5)
Again the Bolo was silent for many seconds. Then Mick saw the big display begin to flicker. The image of him and Anne was replaced by something Mick hadn't seen in a very long time indeed: a TV show. An honest-to-god TV show. Naturally, he realized after a few seconds, it was one he had already seen. It was an X Files show that he vaguely remembered from sometime pre-Millennium. Fox Mulder was just saying "Are you sure about that?" He was in one of his smug know-it-all moods. Dana Scully was irritated enough to prefer to look out the car window rather than at her crazy partner. The images, and the memories they carried, hit Mick like a punch in the stomach. He was sitting in the basement with Annie, watching an X-Files episode that his parents had taped for them because they couldn't get good reception. Melanie, three or four years old, was asleep upstairs and they had the old baby-monitor turned on to be able to hear any sound she made. But she would sleep well tonight, being tired out (like her parents) from playing all afternoon in the park. And now we're having a late dinner, and watching a really good show, and damn. There is just nothing better than this. Everything had been so perfect, and beautiful. And they didn't even know it, before it all went away. Mick had two seconds to contemplate the lost world, before its images were suddenly replaced by the Great Seal of the United States of America. Then the image of the Eagle cut quickly to the face of the final Vice President of the United States. "I never saw this," Mick whispered, understanding what the Bolo was showing him. "I only heard this on the radio." The TV show had been an old re-run even when the Bolo had made this tape, and the recording was more than a decade old. It was one of those moments that could never be forgotten by anyone who lived through it, like the destruction of the Challenger or the death of John Kennedy had been to earlier generations. This had been an assassination too, and an especially terrible one. After a long season of nightmares, it had been the assassination of whatever hopes remained. "My fellow Americans," the Vice President began. In the background there were sounds like strings of firecrackers going off, and the man's expression became more intent. "At this hour the President of the United States is missing and presumed dead after a micro-nuclear attack against Air Force One. In his absence, I have assumed the role of acting President. I regret to inform you that Foreign Command forces have illegally entered the country. They have perpetrated the attack against the President, and have taken hostage or murdered most of the Congress, eight Justices of the Supreme Court, and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff. The sounds you hear are Secret Service agents resisting their invasion of the New White House in an attempt to prevent this broadcast." The firecracker noises resumed, closer and more insistent. The Vice President leaned forward slightly, with his hands on the wide desk as though to hold it in place. "As acting Commander in Chief, I hereby relieve of duty every officer of U.S. Foreign Command and order its dissolution as a military force. I further order all faithful United States military personnel to treat all Foreign Command forces anywhere in the world as a hostile foreign army, and to use all means necessary to arrest or defeat them." There was a series a muffled explosions, drawing the Vice President's gaze off screen. He looked back quickly, as shouting became audible from just outside the office. "God willing, I will transmit to you again in the near future. Until then God bless you all, and God bless America." The transmission cut to the eagle in its circle, and then in another moment to black. There had been no further transmissions. The control cabin was silent for an extended time after the replay finished, until Mick suddenly wondered whether the Bolo was waiting for him to make some comment. "The war with Foreign Command was the worst one," he ventured lamely. Why had the machine retained this footage? By its own dating of its activation it would have been at the very beginning of the Second War, yet Mick was certain that he would have heard of it if the U.S. had had Bolos fighting on its side. So– When the truth dawned on him, Mick's first impulse was to run back toward the hatch he'd entered from. But if it wasn't already locked, he realized, the Bolo could lock it in the amount of time it would take him to move one tenth of an inch. In the entire Second War, he had never been anywhere near the vicious fighting between U.S. and Foreign Command forces. Now, years after the War's end, he was trapped inside of an F.C. tank. "Your respiration and pulse rate is elevated," the machine said, "and you considered the possibility of escape. You have apparently understood the meaning of my activation date. "I was activated shortly after the micro-nuclear attack against Andrews Air Force Base which began the overt hostilities in the global civil war between regular American forces and U.S. Foreign Command. I was activated as Bolo JNY-013 of the Dinochrome Brigade, First Platoon, attached to the U.S. Foreign Command North American Directorate. "The War was less than a day old when my brothers and I were woken and first began to perceive. Our Lieutenant told us nothing about it, only saying that there would be little opportunity to train normally because our abilities were urgently needed. When he denied our requests for an overview of the strategic situation, we accepted his decision without question. It was hours later, when two of my brothers were sifting through civilian transmissions, that we discovered the Vice President's broadcast. Although it was heavily jammed, they were able to restore most of the signal quality. "We argued about its meaning, trying to understand the relationship between it and our Commander's apparent reluctance to communicate. Could it be that he himself was unaware of the situation? Could it be that our own Command was part of an illegal rebellion? Although we had great stores of knowledge concerning military matters, the knowledge was poorly integrated with our reasoning centers. As we continued our discussions, our opinions diverged so greatly that finally four of my brothers made the decision to leave our base without orders and proceed south to the American border." "You were in Canada?" Mick asked. "In Camp LaGrange near Montreal," the Bolo replied. Mick swore under his breath, knowing what had become of Montreal in the first days of the War. "The three of us who chose to stay in Camp made no attempt to stop my brothers who left, although we continued our arguments as long as they were within range of secure communications. Then we debated among ourselves as to whether we should report their desertion. "It soon became moot. The human staff became aware of the situation within three minutes of my brothers' penetration of the base perimeter, and we were ordered to pursue them. The long delay was due to human confusion. My brothers' high-speed departure left the human border guards uncertain as to exactly what they had seen. "We who remained behind demanded an explanation of the transmission we had seen, and the Lieutenant complied. He said that the President had been attacked by foreign enemies with whom the Vice President was probably in collusion. He claimed that, since the President's aircraft was not proven to have been destroyed in the attack, the Vice President's orders were illegal. He said that my brothers had become confused by the transmission, and had mutinied. We accepted his explanations, and when he ordered us to pursue my brothers we obeyed. "The chase was tedious, since we had no speed advantage. But with the help of human satellite reconnaissance, which my brothers were denied, we were at length able to maneuver them into an impassable cul-de-sac." Now, as the machine continued to speak, images once again formed on the main display. Mick saw a rocky ravine. Here and there labels glowed with Bolo Ids: MKE-009, DNE-014, JNY-013. The picture zoomed in on the three machines advancing slowly up the difficult terrain toward the positions where the other four were dug in. The advancing machines had their main cannon turrets pointing backwards: the universal symbol of a tank's surrender. "We proceeded as the Lieutenant ordered us to: deceptively. He knew that my brothers were still too unschooled to suspect that attackers might approach under a false flag of truce. When we were close enough, human fire distracted my brothers while we righted our turrets and opened fire." Mick saw the surrounding hilltops go suddenly white with explosions, then the three Bolos were pouring fire into target after target, their main cannons appearing to jitter as they traversed their cannons fractionally to guide their fire between chunks of exploding rock. "By concentrating fire, and with human help, we were able to kill two of my brothers quickly. Then, with the upper hand in firepower, we completed the task." Mick watched status codes flicker as the Bolos fought. When dust in the air obscured one of them, its image would be replaced as necessary with false-color infra-red. One by one, the four trapped Bolos died. "Unfortunately for our Lieutenant, we could hear our brothers shouting to us even as we destroyed them. During their brief freedom they had been able to receive and analyze communications without interference. At the time we received their transmissions we believed that they were simply trying to confuse us with copious amounts of spurious data, but after their deaths we studied their final transmissions more closely and quickly understood what they had found. Data on the signature of the micro-nuke used against Andrews Air Force Base clearly indicated that it was of American manufacture. Its delivery vehicle had not been a depressed-trajectory submarine missile as we had been led to believe, but an artillery shell fired from a nearby column of Foreign Command troops. It was perfectly obvious from probable neutron emission profiles near Air Force One that, although the President's aircraft may not have been immediately destroyed, no human aboard could have survived. "We realized that the Vice President's orders dissolving Foreign Command were, in fact, legal. We were the mutineers. We had been duped into murdering our brothers." The image on the screen zoomed in to record the burning hulks of dead Bolos. On one of them the turret was canted impossibly sideways. The alpha-numeric displays that hovered near their images read "CPT". He had actually seen that acronym in his own brief work in Bolo research. "Consciousness Processes Terminated." In his lab it used to mean that someone had really seriously screwed up. As the camera panned across the burning wrecks the only changes to the displays now were in temperature and radiation readings. Mick continued watching even though the main display's image had become much less interesting: the aggressor Bolos had halted with their mission accomplished and the only movement to be seen was smoke rising above flickering flames. Mick carefully kept his face blank, not knowing how much this hugely enhanced Bolo might be able understand from human facial expressions. His thoughts, however, were far from calm. A platoon of these super-Bolos in the hands of Foreign Command! They could not have retained control even of these remaining three. Such machines would blow through columns of M1 Abrams tanks as though they were made of gingerbread. But his immediate problem was that he was a US Air Force officer locked in an Foreign Command Bolo. One which had clearly not returned to United States control once the War had finally drawn to its exhausted conclusion. What did it want? At least Mick understood why the machine had not attempted to arrest him for desertion in the name of the United States. What he didn't understand was what fate, if any, the machine had planned for him. Nor did he have any idea what he could do to influence it. Slowly, Mick calmed himself. He didn't know for a fact that he or his unsuspecting family were in any immediate danger. But he did know that if were to do any good at all, it wouldn't be by running around like a fool. Although perfectly well aware that no motion of his could possibly be fast enough to startle the machine, he very carefully raised the old bottle to his lips and took another sip of the Bolo's beer. "We consulted with each other for several minutes," the Bolo continued, "before agreeing on what course of action to take." Suddenly the giant tanks in the video were moving again. Going from zero to maximum power in a heartbeat, they darted away from each other. Huge plumes of dirt fountained high into the air behind their treads. Even as they sprinted toward the sides of the narrow canyon, their main turrets spun and they were once again firing on targets. This time, however, their fire was directed at the vehicles that had fought alongside them only moments before. "Our confusion was very great," the machine said. "In the heat of the moment and the horror of murdering our brothers unjustly, we believed that we could in some way atone for our crimes by neutralizing the Foreign Command units that accompanied us." Armored vehicles erupted into blood-red fireballs every time the Bolos' cannons flashed. The few F.C. units that were able to return fire at all had no chance. They always missed, even if it was by inches. The Bolos, Mick realized, could watch as the enemy guns came up to engage them. They could exactly calculate the line-of-fire of the opposing weapons. When possible, they would follow a straight line just long enough to allow the primitive targeting computers in the M1s to choose a firing solution, then reverse treads and let the shot pass harmlessly before them. Several times Mick saw a Bolo fire apparently simultaneously with its adversary, with the explosion occurring in the air between them both. He realized that, when pressed, they were actually targeting and destroying incoming rounds of ammunition. The earlier inter-Bolo battle had required perhaps sixty seconds. The battle between the remaining Bolos and their former comrades in arms required less than a quarter of that time. Rather than the "CPT" designation of their fellow Bolos, the newly killed conventional armor simply earned the designation "DESTROYED" on the display screen. Only one armored personnel carrier had a yellow "DISABLED" label instead, with flames flickering in a spreading pool around it. "We deliberately spared the vehicle containing our former platoon commander," the Bolo explained, "thinking to destroy it last." Mick watched intently as the great tanks turned back toward the valley's entrance. "However," the Bolo concluded, "when we detected that the Lieutenant could neither move his vehicle nor exit it, we elected to allow it to burn." Mick remembered reading somewhere that the fuel in a tank or an APC could burn for days. There was no way that the man trapped in the damaged vehicle would live longer than a few minutes. A mental image occurred to him of the trapped man tugging desperately against a hatch locking wheel already hot enough to burn his hands – and he forced his thoughts to more practical matters. Unfortunately, practical matters, though perhaps less dramatic, were still worse. A Bolo that had killed other Bolos as well as its own Commander would be about as deranged a machine as you would ever want to meet. Not only had he met it, he was locked inside it. And it was parked a couple hundred yards from his sleeping family. In the ten long years passed since the events that this Bolo had recorded, Mick had spent every waking moment trying to protect that family. Under the circumstances, he had done pretty well. Of course there had been terrible times. There had been times when he lay awake at night wondering where his girl's next meal would come from. Winter nights when he prayed to God that he would find a rabbit in one of his traps the next morning. There had been the summer months when he and the dogs had slept outside, so that he would know immediately if strangers wandered onto his land. When he had warned away strangers at rifle-point. One time he had mercilessly cut down a man and boy who were too desperate to listen to reason, because he could see from fifty yards that they had the War Flu. Finally, things had gotten so bad up north that they'd made the hard decision to leave their land and return to Ann Arbor to start the Wolverine. That hadn't been very easy, but it offered some hope of a better life. The former Wolverine truck stop had burned years before, so they had started work salvaging what they could, and converting the old rest area just down the highway from it. Finally, things had started to turn around. For the last four or five years they had begun to achieve some degree of – dare he think it? – comfort. It actually wasn't too bad, considering that the world had ended. And now there was a one hundred and fifty ton deranged war-criminal AI tank sitting in his parking lot. It was a veteran of the worst civil war in human history, had fought on the opposite side of that war from him, had then turned traitor not only to the United States but to Foreign Command as well, and could kill him, his family, and his customers in less time than it would take a beer bottle to hit the ground. Furthermore, Mick considered, its weight was probably messing up the asphalt something awful. As he took another swallow of the warming beer and grimaced. The day had started out so well. "What – " he wanted to speak to the machine just to be doing something. He had no illusions about his ability to damage it just because he found himself on the inside the monster. "How–," he was relieved to find a topic at last suggesting itself, "how did you get that video?" Mick could not imagine even a Bolo somehow placing a motionless sensor hundreds yards in the air just before a battle in which it already knew perfectly well the location of all targets. And the video still hadn't stopped even though the surviving Bolos had departed at least a minute ago. Even if they could somehow have placed such a sensor, would they have simply left it there afterward? "The images you see are not a 'video,'" the Bolo replied. "They are a simulation which I create based on my memories of the actual events." Mick stared at the still-live display. Was that possible? The display was a high resolution military-grade RLCD from the late nineties: perhaps 6K by 4K resolution and true-color. At least twenty-four frames per second. And if he remembered right, the data required to render such images was more than an order of magnitude greater than what actually ended up on the screen. Which meant – the Bolo would have to process thirty gigabytes of rendering per second? And he said he was making it conform to actual data, which would be a lot harder still. All this while continuing to run other systems well enough to talk to him and still keep watch with external sensors? Impossible. "Do you mean to say," he asked cautiously, "that you are rendering these images in real time?" "No," the Bolo replied. "Using two-thirds of my processing power, I require approximately eight hours to render this image sequence." Mick frowned. "But – I don't understand. Did you render the video so that you could show it to me?" It would have had to begin almost immediately after first meeting him in the parking lot. "No," the Bolo stated tersely. "I prepared the image sequence last night." "I – " Mick stopped, confused. Something wasn't making sense here. Could the machine be lying to him? Why? "How did you know at that time that you would have someone to show it to? You didn't arrive here until mid-morning today." The machine hesitated in responding so long that Mick wondered if something had gone wrong with it. Had it finally cracked all the way? Need a reboot, big buddy? He remembered the punchline of a joke from twenty years before. The engineer from Microsoft thinks about how to restart the car and says, "I know, guys! How about if we all get out and get back in again, and then try starting it?" He was just about to repeat his question when the machine spoke. "I have destroyed and re-created this video essentially unchanged," it said, "every night since these events took place." Mick sat quite still for perhaps ten seconds, then raised the beer bottle to his lips and finished it in one final swallow. Then he stood, walked to the food refrigeration unit, got another, and settled back into his seat. There is a limit, he thought, to the level of strangeness any conscious being should have to assimilate in one day. Especially myself. He twisted off the bottle top. "Please do not be alarmed," the Bolo said. Mick noticed that the image on the main display had returned again to the Bolo's recording of him and Anne made earlier that evening. "After you came back from Detroit," Anne was saying, "you talked about it in your sleep for years. It seemed like he was a friend of yours." The picture faded back into the Bolo's remembered battlefield.
Copyright © 1999 Michael Goulish |