Jeff Corkern's Stories

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813355555065019242011-10-23T15:51:28.814-07:00Jeff Corkern's StoriesJeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10000834772038520305noreply@blogger.comBlogger51100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-881335555506501924.post-55549625102507215762008-12-21T18:58:00.000-08:002009-01-01T19:18:05.724-08:00AFTER THE AWAKENING <o:p></o:p> <a href="http://www.theninepointfivetheses.blogspot.com/">www.theninepointfivetheses.blogspot.com</a><o:p></o:p> ©All Rights Reserved AFTER THE AWAKENING<o:p></o:p> by Jeffrey A. Corkern Faith is a sloppy way to run a universe.<o:p></o:p> ---Robert A. Heinlein Faith isn't how the universe is run.<o:p></o:p> ---Jeffrey A. Corkern<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> TO STOP THE KILLING<o:p></o:p> I step up next to the Jump Seven and stare out the plane's exit ramp. The African horizon is a dull gray line underneath stars shading to pale in the light of a rising glow. Beyond that horizon, an old world is crumbling to dust, another cleaner one being forged in the fires of the Awakening.<o:p></o:p> “I always hated the killing, Jump,” I say. “Every fucking minute of it.”<o:p></o:p> “This is the end of the killing, Sergeant Soldat,” the Jump Seven says. “The final destruction of evil on planet Earth. Goddamn, I love it. Goddamn, I love being part of it. I wish I could jump with you guys.” <o:p></o:p> "Time to death camp,” I say.<o:p></o:p> It's so close now I can almost taste it. My final fulfillment. I am the tip of the Awakening's spear.<o:p></o:p> "Ten minutes from death camp," the Jump Seven says. I can barely make his voice out over the growling avalanche roar of the Globemaster's jet engines. “Ten minutes from hammerfall.” It’s a night jump. The Globemaster's interior is lit in dim red to preserve our night vision, turning the Jump Seven into a faceless figure crouched at the open rear ramp.<o:p></o:p> We both watch patchy brown carpet squirt out at high speed from the ramp’s end. The old frustration boils up in me again.<o:p></o:p> “Christ, how I hated being forced to stand back and just watch the goddamn killing,” I say. “It was the worst fucking thing in the world.”<o:p></o:p> "You oughta love this mission then, Sergeant."<o:p></o:p> The patchy brown carpet is Sudanese grassland. It looks that way because we’re only two hundred meters up. We have launched into Sudan without notifying a single Sudanese official of anything, without filling out a single piece of paper asking some petty bureaucrat’s pretty-please permission to halt mass murder. The wonder of that is still soaking through me. Another gift of the Awakening, another impossible moral change.<o:p></o:p> "Goddamn right I do, Jump," I say. Deep in the core of my being, killing memories stir, burn like acid.<o:p></o:p> "Now you know why, Sergeant Soldat," the Jump Seven says. "You and every other soldier who's ever been. Now we all know why."<o:p></o:p> “The Awakening happened just in the nick of time,” I say. “You know that, don’t you, Jumpmaster. The killing had gotten so easy.”<o:p></o:p> “So incredibly goddamn easy,” the Jump Seven agrees. “Fission bombs. Fusion bombs. One plane, one bomb, one city. And then the biologicals came along. Poison gas, ricin, anthrax, smallpox. Each new horror easier to make and kill with than the last. One person, one poison, one planet.”<o:p></o:p> “The human race wasn’t going to survive much longer,” I say.<o:p></o:p> “It was all spinning completely out of control,” the Jump Seven says.<o:p></o:p> “You wanna know why I became a soldier, Jump?” I ask. “To do what we're doing now. To stop the killing. All the killing in the world. That's why I became a soldier. That make sense, Jump?"<o:p></o:p> "It does now, Sergeant," the Jump Seven says. "No true soldier ever liked killing. Only psychos like killing."<o:p></o:p> “We were all about to destroy ourselves, wipe ourselves off the planet,” I say. “We didn’t have long to go.”<o:p></o:p> "I knew that," the Jump Seven says. "I think a lot of people knew that, but just didn't say anything."<o:p></o:p> "You could feel it coming in your guts," I say, "in all that hopeless scrambling after security."<o:p></o:p> "But that's done now," the Jump Seven says, and sighs in relief. "It's all good now. All stable now, as Chernov would say."<o:p></o:p> "All stable now," I repeat. "All they had to do was take the cuffs off. Tell me, Jumpmaster. How many of these U. N. peace-keeping missions have you been on that wasn't more fucked-up than not?"<o:p></o:p> "This would be the first," the Jump Seven replies. "We went in handcuffed every damn time, didn't we? Stand aside and let children have their hands cut off by some local warlord's troops. It's not in our 'national interest' to defend the innocent." "Don't stop an evil man from committing mass murder," I say. "He might cut off our oil supply."<o:p></o:p> "Justice is coming," the Jump Seven says. "Justice is coming for those who could've defended the innocent and turned their back. If there is a Hell, the hottest part is reserved for those who could've defended the innocent and refused."<o:p></o:p> "Hell," I say. "You really think there might be a Hell your eternal soul can get tossed into, Jump?"<o:p></o:p> "I don't know," the Jump Seven says. "If it were me in charge, I might have me a little one. For those extra-special assholes."<o:p></o:p> "For the murderers," I say. "In particular the ones who murder millions. The ones who commit genocide. Those are the ones that deserve to do a little screaming in agony."<o:p></o:p> "Yeah."<o:p></o:p> "Or the dumb-bastard politicians that wouldn't let you stop it," I say, "because it wasn't in our 'national interest.' "<o:p></o:p> "Yeah," the Jump Seven says. "Them too."<o:p></o:p> "Life done got real interesting for dumb-bastard politicians since Chernov discovered souls were real," I say.<o:p></o:p> "I'll bet you," the Jump Seven says, "the dumb-bastard politicians who stopped us are so scared of Hell now they can't sleep at night, by God!"<o:p></o:p> "It's still hard to believe they're finally going to let us fight," I say. "I gotta tell you, Jump, I wouldn't be surprised a bit if they called us back right before the jump. That friggin' scientist Chernov and his friggin' soul-detector or not."<o:p></o:p> The Jump Seven raises his hand up and brings it down in a chopping motion, an executioner's gesture of finality.<o:p></o:p> "Not a chance," he says. "That kind of bullshit is done forevermore, Sergeant. This time, we got notified innocent people were being murdered by death squads, and we hauled ass into our Globemaster and launched within the hour. How sweet it is."<o:p></o:p> "Not just the dumb-bastard politicians," I say. "Some of those goddamn scientists should get tossed in the fire, too. The ones that said killing was right. The dumb-bastard politicians listened to those guys."<o:p></o:p> " 'The clash of civilizations' ," the Jump Seven quotes.<o:p></o:p> "That's what they said," I say. "This world worshiped killing because of what those numb-nut geniuses said.”<o:p></o:p> The sudden white of a grin splits the Jump Seven’s face.<o:p></o:p> “Not any more, Sergeant Soldat!” he says with relish. Not a nice grin, that grin. Too many teeth. Demon justice grinning like a skull at the entire world. “If you’re one of the numb-nut geniuses who said that, these days, you are scared absolutely shitless! You just gotta love that!”<o:p></o:p> “Because people really are eternal souls, eternal beings,” I say. I have to say it again, to let the shock and surprise roll over me once more. “We know this because that goddamn Russian scientist Chernov detected the goddamn souls in a goddamn laboratory and somehow that winds up meaning God loves everybody forever.”<o:p></o:p> “The love of God is a law of physics!” the Jump Seven shouts. The skull grin gets wider. “Ain’t that some shit, Sergeant!”<o:p></o:p> Something like relief sweeps over me.<o:p></o:p> “So," I say, "the good guys win in the end."<o:p></o:p> “We win,” the Jump Seven says. “The souls are doing what God designed them to do, stop the killing and guarantee that victory. The killing stops now, Sergeant Soldat. For us, for everybody, for good. The love of God is a law of physics, and the bad guys are going down, never to rise again. Welcome to the Awakening.”<o:p></o:p> The Jump Seven looks up like he’s getting a message from On High. That’s what he does when he’s listening to ARGUS, our combat Artificial Intelligence.<o:p></o:p> The Jump Seven’s head comes back down, and I know play-time is over. He clicks back onto the company channel.<o:p></o:p> “Final confirmation received!” the Jump Seven announces over the company channel. His voice cracks a little from tension. The company is lined up in slack ranks of six in the Globemaster's cargo bay. The news stirs their ranks like a spoon. Determination and a fierce joy charge the cargo bay's atmosphere. Some of the younger soldiers lean their heads back and howl like wolves. “Operation Justice Hammer is a go! Death camp in five! Squad leaders, prepare your sticks for insertion. This is it, ladies! We’re going to war!”<o:p></o:p> A feeling of intense satisfaction, of final savage victory, flashes through me. We're actually going to do it, attack and destroy a place of evil, a Sudanese death camp, purely and simply because it is evil, despite what old rules it might break, despite what tin-pot dictator who happens to control a lot of oil it might piss off. I'm on the verge of doing the most profoundly right thing I've ever done. I'm finally jumping into combat for the right reason.<o:p></o:p> I'm jumping to answer the cry of the innocent, in service to what is now clear is the most powerful force in the Universe.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> #<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> THE HAMMER REVELATION<o:p></o:p> Each broken black blur is a murdered human being.Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, I touch each broken black blur on the recon photo with a pencil point as I count it. I've been tasked with counting the dead bodies left behind after a Janjaweed raid on a Darfur village. From high altitude, burned-out huts look like circular charcoal smears, dead bodies like broken dolls. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty, the toll of random, useless, unjust slaughter goes up, and up, and up. I thank God I can't tell which ones are children, which ones are little girls. Christ have mercy, I can't take the murdered little girls. "Hey, First Sergeant, check out this shit," Sergeant Al-Durabi, one of my platoon sergeants, calls to me. He’s been riveted to the rec-room TV for the last hour. Our company of paratroopers has had little to do except watch TV since the Reagan arrived on station off the Sudanese coast. I look up from the Darfur recon photos, happy to have an excuse not to have to look at pictures of destroyed villages, not to have to count burning bodies lying beside burning huts. Just another routine massacre, that happens all the time in Sudan, that nobody gives a damn about. I hate the feeling of utter helplessness that goes with recon photo assessment, but it's the most the goddamn politicians and bureaucrats will allow us to do. If I cannot act, at least I can document and bear witness.<o:p></o:p> "Watcha got, Sergeant?" I snap the overhead light off and fold the pictures and magnifying equipment away, wondering at the insanity of it all. What's the point of documenting, when we're not going to do anything? Why is a billion-dollar carrier, stuffed with the finest, most advanced war-fighting technology in the world, plus a contingent of Army Rangers, the most elite paratroopers in the world, sent under U. N. aegis to a slow-motion Sudanese massacre perpetrated by rag-tag Sudanese militias and then told to do nothing to defend the innocent? The craziest part is I understand what I'm doing better than the politicians do. I'm documenting the proof for what will inevitably be another international embarrassment for the United States and the other technologically advanced countries of the world. I can already hear another hapless American president standing in front of an audience of mutely accusing African victims making a lame apology for the so-called civilized world's inaction.<o:p></o:p> This whole U. N. mission's a giant cluster-fuck, confused beyond description. It's like nobody really understands what's going on. <o:p></o:p> "Some Russian scientist is claiming to have detected souls in the laboratory," Al-Durabi says. The lights are low in the rec room to make the TV more visible. Al-Durabi's face is a smear of darkness in the nebulous light. Sergeant Al-Durabi is the son of Sudanese immigrants and speaks Arabic and other African languages, which bought him assignment to the Reagan as translator, and he is black, an awe-inspiring black, so intensely black a drop of black paint on his skin is not visible. "Cat souls."<o:p></o:p> "What?" Far overhead, I hear the thump of the Reagan's steam catapult launching yet another worthless recon plane, on its way to take pictures of yet more dead bodies.<o:p></o:p> Al-Durabi waves the remote at the TV and mutes it. It's because he wants to explain it to me personally. Al-Durabi loves techie stuff. He backs the broadcast up and freezes it on what looks like a miniature version of the very first atom bomb hanging from a stick, a gray metal ball hanging on a rod from the ceiling, with thin black plastic wires sprouting out of it in all directions like uncombed hair and vapor clouds forming around it. The metal ball is slick with condensate. A big puddle of water has formed underneath it, a dark stain on a bare concrete floor.<o:p></o:p> "Yeah, they built this gadget out of these chips that can detect very small electromagnetic fields," Al-Durabi says with an air of superiority. "SQUIDs. Superconducting Quantum Interference Detectors. They have to cool them down with liquid helium before they can work. That's why all the water."<o:p></o:p> "If you say so, Al-Durabi."<o:p></o:p> Al-Durabi fancies himself a master of any and all things electronic because he's from San José, California, the fabled Silicon Valley. He's forever crashing the squad's computers.<o:p></o:p> "They built this thing and put cats in the middle of it," Al-Durabi continues, "then put the cats to sleep with an intravenous injection---and picked up these coherent electromagnetic fields, about the size of a cat, going through the SQUIDs right after the cats died. They're claiming what they detected was cat-souls."<o:p></o:p> "Bet the animal-rights groups pitched a bitch."<o:p></o:p> "Nah," Al-Durabi says. "They only used cats with terminal illnesses."<o:p></o:p> "Awful finicky for scientists. The animal-rights groups must be a real power in Russia."<o:p></o:p> "No, that's not why," Al-Durabi says. A confused look crosses his face. "Because it was the moral thing to do. The scientist behind this, some dude named Dmitri Chernov, is saying souls are the physical reason why the concept of 'morality' evolved. That's the word he used, 'evolved.' He's saying morality is actually self-interest, that the Universe isn't stable otherwise. Somehow that was why they only used cats with terminal illnesses."<o:p></o:p> "So if they use cats that aren't terminally sick, the Universe collapses? I gotta tell you, Sergeant, I don't see the connection."<o:p></o:p> "Yeah, well," Al-Durabi admits, "neither do I. Anyway, Chernov's saying they didn't really hurt the cats. All they did was separate the cats' souls from their bodies, and the cats never felt any pain. They're saying the cats are still hanging around somewhere, just disembodied."<o:p></o:p> "Chasing little ghost-mice," I say. "Taking little ghost cat-naps."<o:p></o:p> Al-Durabi shrugs.<o:p></o:p> "Beats me, First Sergeant," he says. "That's just what Chernov is saying."<o:p></o:p> "How does he know for a certain fact they're cat-souls? Sounds to me like he's jumping the gun a little."<o:p></o:p> "He's asking what the hell else they could be," Al-Durabi says. "His team only sees them when the cats die, and at no other time. They've done the experiment over a hundred times."<o:p></o:p> "He's got a point there, I reckon."<o:p></o:p> "There's a helluva fire-fight going on over precisely that in the scientific community," Al-Durabi says. "A lot of scientists are screaming this Russian is full of shit. And when I say screaming, I really mean screaming, like this Russian shot their mothers."<o:p></o:p> "Some people don't have any real problems," I say. "So what does this prove, other than Russians have a mystic streak a mile wide?"<o:p></o:p> "That people have souls, too? That people don't really die?"<o:p></o:p> The whole world rocks. As if all the mega-quadrillion tons of the entire planet has shuddered back and forth, as if God Himself has roared, shaking the planet after eons of absolute silence. All that mindless murder was still heavy in my mind, clouding it. That statement clears it.<o:p></o:p> "Damn" is all I can say.<o:p></o:p> "Yeah."<o:p></o:p> “This guy Chernov just stirred up a world-class shit-storm," I say. I can feel the planet still vibrating. "He just turned the whole world upside-down. God only knows what happens next."<o:p></o:p> "You called it, First Sergeant," Al-Durabi says. "Everybody's coming down on this poor bastard's head. The scientists aren't the only ones screaming. All the religious types are mixing it up, too."<o:p></o:p> "Everybody's going to get into this one," I say. "Nobody's going to leave this to the so-called experts. What does this result mean, that's the basic question, what does this mean, what effect will it have on the human race, the world."<o:p></o:p> "Yeah," Al-Durabi says. He grins, a split of startlingly white teeth against his coal-black face. He's a typical Ranger. He loves a good fight. "Should be one helluva interesting show."<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> #<o:p></o:p> HAMMER IN THE SKY<o:p></o:p> I nod at the Jump Seven and turn to face rows and rows of black JDAP cages, like gorilla skeletons with moth wings folded on their backs, stretching far back into the Globemaster's interior. We're jumping XLALO, Extreme Low-Altitude Low-Open, in the first combat use of the latest American assault technology, the Joint Directed Attack Parachutists cage. The sight of the gently rattling JDAP cages brings it home to my guts, that I'm about to jump into battle. An adrenaline burst like an electric shock throbs from the small of my back, pounds through my whole being, raises my perceptions of my surroundings to combat alertness. I always get a charge from the adrenal glands in my back just before dropping into combat. I feel the cool air of altitude silken on my skin underneath my shirt, the trickles of sweat tickling their way down my ribs from my armpits. <o:p></o:p> My team is sitting down with their backs against the first line of JDAP cages, staying as rested as possible. We won the honor of being first into combat. I give the signal to stand up---right arm thrust down at a forty-five degree angle, then raised up level to my shoulder. Lined up out of the way along the walls, the embedded reporters bring their cameras around to point at my squad. A jitter of alarm shivers my back as lenses like gun barrels focus on me. I'm about to be exposed to billions, chilling to my soldier's instinct to stay hidden.<o:p></o:p> "Transmit restrictions lifted," ARGUS says. "Broadcast is now unrestricted. Cameras are hot, repeat, cameras are hot. The whole damn world is watching, soldiers." The whole damn world is watching because the whole damn world is like me, still having trouble believing it. They have insisted on watching our first combat jump, the very first combat action of the United Nations Genocide Quick-Reaction Force, in order to witness with their own eyes, live and uncut, the latest flatly impossible moral change wrenched into being by the Awakening.<o:p></o:p> “First stick, rise and mount your cages,” I order. I make the signal for equipment check, holding my hands out in front of me palms up and bringing them to my shoulders. “Stand by for pre-jump inspection.”<o:p></o:p> Corporal Mitsui has been sitting with his tagger in his lap, restlessly loading and reloading Hellfire magazines while he waits for the order to mount his cage. The iron discipline the Japanese are famous for shows in the way he’s in his cage and locked down before I’ve finished speaking. The soul experiments have refined Mitsui, turned him into a samurai sword vibrating with tension, eager for battle. The old samurai beliefs have been vindicated. Mitsui is bushido personified, the warrior way made flesh. Many of the GQRF's volunteers are coming from the Japanese Defense Forces.<o:p></o:p> Since Mitsui’s ready first, I start at the right end of the line. The Jumpmasters will do the official inspection, but my men aren’t jumping until I’ve personally checked their cages and equipment. An embed behind Mitsui’s cage sinks to his knees and angles his camera upward at me from a low perspective, uncomfortably close to an act of worship, certainly an act of envy.<o:p></o:p> Righteous fire is burning Mitsui, nova-fierce, elemental. Steel-hard flame is the glitter of his eyes, the tight, happy, feral grin he gives me when I tug on the lock-bars of his JDAP cage to make certain they’re down and locked. Mitsui is a racehorse at the gate, chomping at the bit to get out and kick some serious bad-guy ass. He reaches into his vest pocket and clicks his channel selector. He screams a challenge to battle over the company channel, a phrase in guttural Japanese I don’t need translated.<o:p></o:p> The answering thunder from the rest of the company dwarfs the noise of the Globemaster’s turbojets, shaking the cargo bay, the same phrase exploding in a dozen languages from volunteer soldiers from all the world’s professional armies. The embeds are right there with us, shouting and stomping their feet. The righteous fire sparks in my chest with the urgent intensity of a match flaring to life, forces me to raise my tagger high in salute to all. Professional soldiers were the first group to accept the Awakening's ultimate meaning. The fear of death was never blinding in us.<o:p></o:p> Corporal Heinrich is next in line. He's a German Überman racial ideal straight out of a Nazi recruiting poster, a six-foot-six blond-haired blue-eyed Aryan with a darkness lying on him. Heinrich has a stern Teutonic face that reminds you of freshly planed white oak, all flat surfaces joined at sharp angles, and yet it is dark, his face, dark and filled with shadows. He fits into his JDAP cage without a cubic centimeter to spare. He went AWOL from his unit in Germany and evaded German MP’s to get to the U. N. in New York to be the very first GQRF volunteer. Nobody in the company has dared to ask him why. We couldn't bear the weight of his answer. He seems not to see me as I check him out, staring out the Globemaster's open ramp with a laser's concentration at some mysterious long-sought goal. I leave him staring into the distance with peace on his shadowed face, peace and possibly a dawning hope of redemption.<o:p></o:p> The Italian Army soldier Tivoli can’t get his tagger into its slot in the cage. He was the last of our squad to join the GQRF. He’s made only the minimum three training jumps in the JDAP cages. He snaps it in and slides himself into position just as I reach him. I check him more closely than the others. JDAP cage wheels properly mounted on the rails that lead to the ramp. Cage bars secure with no wiggle. Cage thruster nozzles clean and unobstructed. Tagger properly in position so it will pop free when the cage disengages. One Hellfire magazine loaded in his tagger and six more mags on his armor vest. Night-vision goggles locked in the up position on his Kevlar helmet and computer systems battery plugged in and turned on.<o:p></o:p> “Tivoli, when we hit the ground, you stay within thirty meters of me at all times," I say. I pull on his tagger again to make sure it's free in its slot. The tagger is a heavy, clumsy weapon, like a cross between an automatic shotgun and a fifty-caliber machine gun. The big metal pancake ten-round Hellfire magazine hangs just in front of the trigger. The magazine has to fit into its cage slot perfectly. If Tivoli doesn't have it right, the magazine will catch on the bars when his JDAP cage disengages and rip his tagger out of his hand, leaving him dropping into combat without a weapon. "I want you where I can keep an eye on you, and that's an order."<o:p></o:p> Tivoli's eyes open wide in protest.<o:p></o:p> "Sergeant Soldat!" he says, shifting in his cage. "You don't have to watch over me like I was the bambino!" The JDAP cage is torture for the Italian. He can't wave his arms around when he talks.<o:p></o:p> "You don't have enough experience," I say.<o:p></o:p> "Experience? This is our first mission!"<o:p></o:p> "You've had the least training of any of us," I say. "The least time with the taggers, the least time in the cages, the least time in virtual."<o:p></o:p> "I can do my job!"<o:p></o:p> "If I didn't think you could, I wouldn't let you make the jump," I say. "Tivoli, you just stay close. There'll be other missions, God have mercy."<o:p></o:p> Tivoli is a professional soldier. He knows when it's time to shut up and follow orders.<o:p></o:p> "In service, Sergeant," he says.<o:p></o:p> “In service, Tivoli,” I say. I put a hand on his shoulder and move on.<o:p></o:p> The squad professor, Corporal Malreaux, is next. He's French and thinks his European historical background gives him an insight into the Awakening we poor, benighted Americans with our mere two-hundred-and-thirty-odd years of history can't possibly have. He's been observing me like a scientist observing a lab rat as I conduct the pre-jump check.<o:p></o:p> "Do you see it?" he asks me. "How crystal-clear it is in your own personal human actions right now? How very, very deeply this new law of physics is informing your actions here, how it has informed history, the evolution of our brain structure, our bodies, the structure of all of Man’s societies, how it is the foundation of the concept of Justice itself?”<o:p></o:p> "I see it, Malreaux," I say as I check his tagger. Malreaux is a philosopher. He loves to talk.<o:p></o:p> The Globemaster hits an air bump. The floor jounces up against my feet with a metallic crash, hard. My knees are driven halfway to my chest and then the floor drops out, leaving me suspended in mid-air. Outside, pre-sunrise winds are stirring and causing turbulence. I clutch wildly at Malreaux's cage to keep from winding up spread-eagled on the floor, thinking how clownish I must look to the TV cameras.<o:p></o:p> "So simple!" Malreaux marvels as I regain my footing. He's lost in contemplation. He hasn't noticed a thing. "So very, very simple! The postulate of sentient existence, so critically necessary for the stability of a sentient-containing Universe! The scientists should've seen it so long ago! Hundreds and hundreds of years ago! So much time wasted, so much time!"<o:p></o:p> "No doubt about that, Malreaux," I reply. "Way I see it, the goddamn scientists failed to do their job until it was almost too late. So now you and me, we’ve got one helluva mess to clean up."<o:p></o:p> "Mon Dieu!" Malreaux exclaims. "The pain! The unnecessary pain!"<o:p></o:p> I raise my eyebrows. Maybe there's something to Malreaux's conceit about his historical background, however annoying and snobbish it might be.<o:p></o:p> "Malreaux," I say, "now the pain stops and the healing begins. Even a rude Frenchman has to acknowledge that."<o:p></o:p> Malreaux gives me the same tight, happy, feral smile Mitsui did. It's burning him too, that righteous fire.<o:p></o:p> "Ouí, even a rude Frenchman," he says, and lapses into silence.<o:p></o:p> "Malreaux, watch your ass down there," I say, and go to Al-Durabi's cage, the last cage I have to inspect.<o:p></o:p> Al-Durabi's doing exactly what I expected him to be doing. He's got his network visor down, playing with his backpack computer's opsystem. He tosses his head to raise his network visor when he hears me rattle his tagger. <o:p></o:p> The righteous fire breaks free in my chest and blazes up in a firestorm. I shove my face against Al-Durabi's cage, our noses only centimeters apart.<o:p></o:p> “Corporal Al-Durabi!” I bellow in Al-Durabi’s face. “What do you want?”“I wanna kick some bad guys’ balls between their teeth, First Sergeant!” he shouts back. “Roger that,” I say. I lean back, relieved from letting some of the fire out. “Just ‘Sergeant’, Corporal.” Al-Durabi still hasn't quite adjusted to our new lower ranks in the GQRF.<o:p></o:p> My JDAP cage stands empty next to Al-Durabi's. I back into it and put my tagger in its slot as the cage bars automatically clamp down on me. I move the tagger back and forth until I'm sure as I can be it will come loose when the cage disengages. When I'm satisfied I toss my head to bring my network visor down and boot up my backpack computer. My network visor flashes a blank blue screen and the boot process starts. I lean back against the bars and try to relax. For a brief period of time, less than a minute, until my BC finishes booting, I have absolutely nothing to do except stand and wait, my last silent, solitary space before battle.<o:p></o:p> And in this last silent, solitary space, these few spare seconds, I am naked and defenseless, and the Awakening reaches into my JDAP cage and touches me. The earthquake shaking I feel is not the vibration of the plane but a roaring cauldron of change, re-forging the world in fire. Change which is taking place on a scale and with a speed unprecedented in history, far beyond the ability of a single human mind to comprehend. Chernov's soul experiments have rocked the entire planet to its foundations, rattled it like dice in a cup. All across the globe worlds are shattering like glass, massive social, economic, and governmental hierarchies hundreds of years old crushed to dust and gone with the wind, going down like tenpins before the Awakening’s juggernaut force as understanding spreads throughout humanity. Just my little piece of it, the GQRF, would have been beyond imagination before Chernov. Now, the GQRF has gone from an idea born out of Chernov's soul experiments to fully fledged fighting force in only three rapid-fire months. After decades of indifference, the politicians and bureaucrats are now falling all over each other to defend the innocent in what can only be described as stark raving panic, a heart-warming sight. Even the dipshit politicians and bureaucrats have seen just how incredibly, spectacularly, their own fat asses were on the front lines and always had been. No lard-assed, forms-shuffling, shit-for-brains chairwarmer is going to put paper over people ever again.<o:p></o:p> It's an irony for the ages, a joke of cosmic proportions. Standing in my cage, I have to laugh quietly to myself. The dearest wish of all humanity, its most impossible fantasy, has been fulfilled beyond its wildest dreams.<o:p></o:p> And humanity's overwhelming reaction is terror, the most supreme terror in all of history.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> #<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> THE JUSTICE HAMMER<o:p></o:p> The Reagan's rec room is filled with a heavy bass crowd rumble like a volcano about to blow its top.<o:p></o:p> "---can't believe everybody's wasting their time on such an obvious fraud, I mean, souls don't make any sense, just totally impossible, unreal---"<o:p></o:p> "---this explains that weird psychic experience I had once---"<o:p></o:p> "---man, it's insane, you reckon it's true people don't really die---"<o:p></o:p> "---assuming it's true, what the hell do we do about it---"<o:p></o:p> The Reagan's rec room is stuffed to the rafters with people, so stuffed it's hot and difficult to breathe, but nobody's complaining. A verbal battle has erupted in the last two weeks, just like I thought, but going a million times further than I ever would've dreamed.<o:p></o:p> "This is all horseshit," a sailor in the row in front of me mutters. "I'm a skeptic. This guy Chernov hasn't proved a damn thing. This is all just some wish-fulfillment fantasy at best, and a fraud at worst. This'll all blow over in a week."<o:p></o:p> "Yeah?" the sailor next to him says. "What the hell are you doing here then?"<o:p></o:p> "Hey, I'm willing to listen," the sailor-skeptic says. "I'm open to new ideas. I ain't like these dumbass religious fanatics. That's what being a skeptic is all about."<o:p></o:p> "Souls have always existed!" another voice from nowhere says. "The scientific detection of souls was inevitable! We should've seen this coming!"<o:p></o:p> It's all you can see on the Internet, the TV, newspapers, radio, on board the Reagan. Soldiers and sailors are arguing in the gangways, in the mess halls, in the heads for God's sake, about whether or not it's real or a fraud, about what Chernov's results mean, about the scientific detection of souls and what it all means, to the point where I'm starting to get sick of it.<o:p></o:p> One thing is clear. This guy Chernov has touched a nerve in the world nobody knew was there.<o:p></o:p> A special wide-projection screen has been hung from the ceiling so everybody can see. Because of all the verbal warfare, the scientist who started it has been dragged reluctantly from his lab to explain to everybody what he thinks his results mean. <o:p></o:p> "Y'all shut up," a voice from the back drawls. "I'm about to start the show."<o:p></o:p> Everyone on board without duty is watching this. I have the cold feeling the on-duty people are watching, too. A jihadi could probably ram the Reagan with a rowboat right now if he wanted to.<o:p></o:p> Except I’m certain the jihadis are all glued to a TV, too.<o:p></o:p> The projection screen lights to show three men seated around a circular table.<o:p></o:p> "By the Prophet," Al-Durabi says, "what a wimp."<o:p></o:p> Academician Dmitri Chernov doesn't look like a rebel Russian genius who has yanked the world up by its roots. "Academician" is what the Russians call their top scientists. Dmitri Chernov is the Russian physicist who ramrodded the construction of what he insists is a soul-detector. He is a neat, diminutive man who looks like he would just reach five feet if he stood on tiptoe. He sits an island of stillness in the center of the three, flanked on his right by a man I barely recognize because I've flipped past his televised crusades many times, "The Mighty Reverend Rock," the Reverend Rocky Hooker, and on his left by somebody I don't recognize, a man with bleached Nordic skin and pale blue eyes who has his lips pinched together in an expression of permanent anger.<o:p></o:p> I study the reverend. He has a magnetic aura that draws your attention, the charisma of a man on fire with conviction. He reminds me of a soldier. He has a ruthless, implacable air about him that is almost soldier-like, but not quite. I study him closer to pin it down. Hunter, I realize, the right reverend has the air of a hunter, a hunter of men's souls.<o:p></o:p> The right reverend looks like somebody I might like. He looks like he might be a cast-iron son of a bitch.<o:p></o:p> The pale man glances at Reverend Hooker, and his anger deepens momentarily. It looks like the pale man hates Reverend Hooker for some reason.<o:p></o:p> The moderator, a reporter named James MacNeil, steps into view.<o:p></o:p> "Good evening, gentlemen, and good evening to our television audience, and thank you all for coming to this historic debate," MacNeil says. "Allow me to introduce the people on our panel. To our viewer's far left, the Reverend Rocky Hooker, an international evangelist who also possesses degrees in physics, theology, and human psychology. In the middle, Academician Dmitri Evgenievich Chernov, a Russian galactic astronomer who has made what may be the most revolutionary discovery in all of human history, the meaning of which will be the subject of tonight's debate, and on the right, cell biologist Richard Mocke, who is the creator and proponent of the current most widely scientifically accepted theory of human behavior, that people are controlled by their genes." <o:p></o:p> This startles me. It makes no sense.<o:p></o:p> "What?" I whisper to Al-Durabi. "Why would a cell biologist be expected to be able to explain anything about human behavior?"<o:p></o:p> "I'm thinking these scientists ain't the geniuses they think they are," Al-Durabi says.<o:p></o:p> "Chernov's a galactic astronomer!" the sailor-skeptic exclaims. "Why would he be expected to?"<o:p></o:p> "Because he's got lab results to back it up," Al-Durabi shoots back. "Something Mocke doesn't."<o:p></o:p> "Wouldja all shut the fuck up!" another sailor shouts. "Jesus H. Christ, give it a rest for a minute!"<o:p></o:p> We all shut up, abashed. "So, to start, Academician," MacNeil says, "what made you decide souls might actually exist?"<o:p></o:p> "Conversation I had one evening with other astronomy graduate students when I was in graduate school, many, many years ago," Chernov says. "We had contest.” A bad-boy smile flits across his face as he remembers his youth. "Who could dream up easiest, quickest way to destroy entire Universe."<o:p></o:p> "What?" Mocke exclaims. "That's impossible! You can't destroy the entire Universe!"<o:p></o:p> My soldier-sense tingles.<o:p></o:p> A battle has just started on that stage. The battle of Armageddon. This is the last, final, completely savage battle to the death between two ages-old titanic forces for domination of the Earth, and it isn’t going to stop until one or the other is blasted into oblivion.<o:p></o:p> "Is not impossible," Chernov says. "Is quite easy, in fact. Doctor Mocke, you are cell biologist, not galactic astronomer like I am. Let me assure you destruction of entire Universe is entirely technically feasible. Given sufficient relatively small starting resources, I alone, one man, could do it. This is such extreme threat Universe must take steps to inhibit such action."<o:p></o:p> "Define 'destruction of the entire Universe'," Reverend Hooker says.<o:p></o:p> "At minimum, destruction of Universe's ability to evolve sentient life," Dmitri says. "At maximum, destruction down to quantum level, although I don't know how that could be done.” He smiles again. "I am mathematically challenged experimentalist, not next-to-God theoretician."<o:p></o:p> "Tell me!" Mocke exclaims. "Tell me one way you could do it!"<o:p></o:p> "I will tell you method I came up with in graduate school," Chernov says. "Is very crude, but will work. With one fusion-drive ship, and self-replicating light-sail machines, can be done. I will start with our solar system. I instruct light-sails to replicate themselves and drive fusion ship to high tau, both to drop self-replicating light sails in other systems and to take advantage of time-dilation. When I return to our solar system, I will find trillions of light-sails, with huge total mass. Using their summed gravitational attraction, I order light-sails to maneuver so as to alter Sun's orbit and crash Sun into other suns to create black hole.” He reddens slightly. "Black hole" means something obscene in Russian. "Meanwhile, light-sails are replicating in other systems. I iterate process. Using time-dilation, and exponentially increasing number of light-sails, I can destroy entire galaxies, superclusters of galaxies, and eventually entire Universe itself. Just me alone, just one man, because I understand Universe's basic physical laws."<o:p></o:p> Chernov shrugs.<o:p></o:p> "I'm sure other physicists could dream up faster, more efficient methods," he says, "but this is sufficient to demonstrate threat to Universe is quite real."<o:p></o:p> The entire stage is silent.<o:p></o:p> "Damn," Al-Durabi breathes in my ear, "this dude thinks big."<o:p></o:p> "A sentient race would never do such a thing," Mocke says.<o:p></o:p> "Am not talking about sentient race," Chernov says. "Am talking one lone sentient."<o:p></o:p> "Still," Mocke insists, "it could never happen."<o:p></o:p> "Christ, man, Chernov's right," the sailor-skeptic mutters. "I have to give him that. Any soldier can see the threat potential's real. Give it up. You're only making yourself look dumb."<o:p></o:p> Chernov raises his eyebrows in mild surprise. It's strange to me, too. Mocke's deliberately being stupid. Reverend Hooker tilts his head back and favors Mocke with a long, calculating look, uncannily like a hunter who has sighted fresh prey and is figuring out the best way to make the kill.<o:p></o:p> "World has already seen death cults announce intention to destroy entire world, and actually try to do so," Chernov says. "As historical precedent, I cite Japanese death cult Aum Shinrikyo's repeated attempts to destroy Tokyo in order to start a nuclear war and destroy the Earth. Destruction of entire Universe is only next step up, a difference of scale only."<o:p></o:p> Mocke's idiotic intransigence is stalling the debate. The rec room audience stirs impatiently. MacNeil intervenes.<o:p></o:p> "Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that Academician Chernov is correct, and the threat is real," he says. Perhaps a slight tinge of irritation cracks his professional moderator's neutrality. "So, Academician, what does it mean?"<o:p></o:p> "It means, in sentient-containing Universe, Universe must take steps to protect itself from sentients, or sentients will certainly destroy it," Chernov says. "Current scientific thinking is presence of sentient life in Universe is totally random thing. This cannot possibly be case. For Universe to be stable, sentient life is something that must be designed into Universe from very start of Universe, from Big Bang on."<o:p></o:p> "Now we're getting to why souls have to exist," MacNeil says.<o:p></o:p> "We are," Chernov says, "but I must pause and define sentient life. Sentient life, intelligent life, is thinking and emotion-feeling life, capable of understanding basic physical laws of Universe, and able to manipulate Universe around them using these laws as sentient life-forms' emotions desire. Which makes sentients a threat to Universe, as they can destroy it using their knowledge of basic physical laws."<o:p></o:p> "And so?"<o:p></o:p> "Let me make threat as real as possible," Chernov says, with a glance at Mocke. "At this very moment, right now, by all odds, are trillions and trillions of sentients alive in Universe. What are odds at least one sentient is, right this very second, trying to destroy entire Universe? One hundred per cent, beyond doubt."<o:p></o:p> "You don't know other species of sentients exist!" Mocke says.<o:p></o:p> "No, I don't," Chernov says. "But this goes to why I started searching for souls. For long time, I was absolutely certain human race was only sentient race in entire Universe."<o:p></o:p> "Why?" MacNeil asks.<o:p></o:p> "Because Universe was still there," Chernov says. "Grad-school contest stuck in my mind. For many years, I would look up at sky at night and wonder why Universe was still there, why sentients had not destroyed Universe. Only reason I could come up with was because human race was only sentient race, and reason Universe was still there was because humans had not yet evolved technologically to point we could destroy it. Then results from planet-finding experiments started coming in."<o:p></o:p> "And?" MacNeil asks.<o:p></o:p> "Planets were being found so very easily," Chernov says. "First crude instruments built to find planets found them. So easily only possible conclusion was planets were everywhere, and so Universe had to be filled with sentients. Trillions and trillions of sentients. Was most reasonable hypothesis, and now I had very big problem, because every single one of those sentients was threat to existence of Universe, and Universe had to have some mechanism in place to protect itself from its sentients."<o:p></o:p> "So what does the Universe do to protect itself?" MacNeil asks, before Mocke can say anything. He's not going to let Mocke stall the debate again.<o:p></o:p> "Universe gives sentients eternal existence," Chernov says. "Or, more fundamentally, Universe defines and creates all sentients as eternal souls, not physical bodies."<o:p></o:p> "In order to protect itself," MacNeil says. "How does eternal existence protect the Universe?"<o:p></o:p> The answer seems obvious to me, but it's a question MacNeil has to ask, to make it clear to everybody.<o:p></o:p> "Would you let somebody burn down house while you were in it?" Chernov asks. "Certainly not. In fact, if somebody tried to burn down house with you in it, you would certainly take steps to stop it. You and everybody else in house. Correct?"<o:p></o:p> "Surely," MacNeil says.<o:p></o:p> "So giving sentients eternal existence forces sentients to protect Universe eternally from other sentients," Chernov says, "and sentient-containing Universe goes from being violently unstable to being perfectly stable. Without souls, each new sentient subtracts from stability of Universe. With souls, each new sentient adds to stability of Universe. Is trivial problem, actually."<o:p></o:p> "But that's not all the 'Universe' does with its souls," Reverend Hooker says, so softly I almost can't hear it. "Is it, Dmitri?"<o:p></o:p> "No," Chernov says, "Universe is not finished yet. There is one more thing Universe can do to make itself yet more stable. All souls must be constructed with one fundamental desire built into them, around one fundamental principle."<o:p></o:p> "Dmitri, you keep saying 'Universe gives' and 'Universe creates'," Reverend Hooker says, "and it sounds unbelievably awkward. Why don't you say it the way it makes sense? 'God gives', 'God creates'?"<o:p></o:p> This is a bombshell question, pure dynamite. The air in the rec room charges with lightning. Chernov inhales slowly, looks off into space and takes his time answering. Nobody moves, nobody on the screen, nobody in the rec room. It's eerie, the way everyone is zeroed in on Chernov, even Mocke.<o:p></o:p> "Am not prepared to use word 'God'," he says finally. "Certainly we are skating very close to God with this, if He is truly there. Perhaps one day, when I have had time to consider this matter more fully, I will."<o:p></o:p> "It does not make sense!" Mocke snaps. "It's an unnecessary, unneeded, complicating factor! The existence of God is untestable! Build us a God-detector!” <o:p></o:p> "Not to me!" Reverend Hooker snaps back. "His hand could not be more plain! I beg your pardon, but this is the simpler explanation!"<o:p></o:p> "Professor Mocke is correct," Chernov says. "Existence of God is untestable, therefore unprovable, therefore not science. Perhaps this is why I avoid word. Soul-detector I can build. God-detector I cannot."<o:p></o:p> "It sounds awkward," Reverend Hooker says, "it sounds really, really awkward, and you know it."<o:p></o:p> "It does, and point for you," Chernov says. "But I insist on it, at moment."<o:p></o:p> "Tell you what, Dmitri," Reverend Hooker says, "we're up here to discuss and try to figure out what your laboratory results mean. But your use of the word 'Universe' is, if you'll pardon me, awkward and confusing to everybody except, maybe, other scientists. So, if you don't mind, when you use the word 'Universe', I'm going to use the word 'God', so everybody else watching will understand."<o:p></o:p> "By all means, do so," Chernov says, "certainly you could be right."<o:p></o:p> "So what else does the Universe do with its souls?" MacNeil asks.<o:p></o:p> "Here we get into deeper waters," Chernov says. "We must ask very basic question. Why would sentient want to destroy Universe in first place? What is motivation to do such thing?"<o:p></o:p> "There is no logical reason to do such a thing!" Mocke says.<o:p></o:p> “Oh, but there is,” Reverend Hooker says. “There is a profoundly moral reason for a sentient to destroy the entire Universe.”<o:p></o:p> “Tell me!” Mocke cries. “There is no possible reason, moral or otherwise, for doing such an insane thing!”<o:p></o:p> “Because sentients didn’t have souls,” Reverend Hooker says. “That would be enough.”<o:p></o:p> “I have no idea what you’re talking about! Explain yourself!”<o:p></o:p> “Add it up,” Reverend Hooker says. “Add it all up. All the human suffering and misery experienced by the human race in all of its history. Now add up the happiness. Which sum is greater? Millions of times greater?”<o:p></o:p> A vast dark burden of knowledge rises in each of us. Reverend Hooker has reached deep inside us all and dragged something out we didn’t know was there. We feel it, the knowledge of the suffering of the untold billions who came before us, of war and disease and injustice, of the pain of history, a pain so great we don’t want to see it.<o:p></o:p> Chernov feels it too. His face becomes drawn and pinched.<o:p></o:p> "Without souls," Reverend Hooker says, "the Universe's only discernible purpose is to torture all of its sentients, to put them all in pain. Would destroying the Universe then become the moral thing to do?"<o:p></o:p> “Yes,” Chernov says. “Under such circumstances, I would destroy entire Universe without hesitation. Universe would deserve to be destroyed. Universe would be abomination.”<o:p></o:p> You can tell this is one thing that has gotten through to Mocke. He looks uneasy.<o:p></o:p> "You're assuming all sentients can feel emotion,” he says. "How can you possibly know that?"<o:p></o:p> "Because without emotion, without desire, sentient performs no actions at all," Chernov says. "We could program computer with all of Universe's physical laws, put it down in front of freight train, and computer would do nothing, just sit there and be run over, because it has no desire. For actions to be performed, must want things, have desire, emotion."<o:p></o:p> "People do what they do in order to be happy," Reverend Hooker says. "No. I must learn to think in a new way. A soul does what it does in order to be happy."<o:p></o:p> "Allow me to state it in abstract terms," Chernov says. "A soul does what it does in order to achieve happiness by achieving desired emotional state. That is most general form."<o:p></o:p> "An unhappy immortal soul is certainly a threat to the Universe's existence," Reverend Hooker says. "So, Dmitri, what fundamental desire must be installed into every single immortal soul in the Universe?"<o:p></o:p> "To want, to desire that all other sentients in Universe---immortal souls---be happy," Chernov says. "In terms of happiness, sentient cannot be happy unless all other sentients are happy too. That is second absolute necessity for sentient-containing Universe to be stable."<o:p></o:p> "And what do humans call the desire to make somebody else happy?" Reverend Hooker says. "Love. And this was when you decided to build a soul-detector, wasn't it, Dmitri, when you realized the observable effects of souls were obviously present in human action, in human history."<o:p></o:p> "Da," Chernov says. "Society of immortal souls would revolve around everybody being happy, as human society does, and predicted requirement of love for all clearly existed in human race. Souls had to be there, as you say."<o:p></o:p> "What is the rock-bottom of every soul?" Reverend Hooker asks. "This must be made clear, beyond all possible confusion."<o:p></o:p> "In abstract terms," Chernov says, "all souls must want, first before anything else, for all souls, including their own, to be happy. I call this principle 'postulate of sentient existence.' "<o:p></o:p> "Allow me to state the postulate of sentient existence in a much more profound, simpler fashion," Reverend Hooker says. "A fashion human beings are already familiar with and will understand much easier. 'God loves everybody forever.' "<o:p></o:p> "Postulate can be stated that way," Chernov says. “Observable effects are the same.”<o:p></o:p> "What does the scientific detection of souls mean?" Reverend Hooker asks. "That the love of God is a law of physics. As it had to be, as it always had to be."<o:p></o:p> "Emotional states of sentients must be physically interconnected," Chernov says, "which immortality does. Sentient-containing Universe is not stable otherwise."<o:p></o:p> "Sentients who also possess the property of completely free will," Hooker says. "You didn't make that clear, Dmitri."<o:p></o:p> "We can conceive destroying entire Universe," Chernov says, "which can only mean our thoughts, and therefore our actions, are completely without restraint. Our will is free."<o:p></o:p> "All the 'Universe' had to do to make itself safe," Reverend Hooker observes, "was remove our free will, and it would've been safe."<o:p></o:p> "Universe has not chosen to remove threat," Chernov says. "Universe has chosen only to inhibit threat. Is odd thing."<o:p></o:p> "God chose to give us completely free will," Reverend Hooker says, "even at the risk of seeing His creation completely destroyed. He put our completely free will above the safety of His creation, His Universe, as a demonstration of His love and trust in us."<o:p></o:p> Chernov looks pensive at this, but makes no reply.<o:p></o:p> "I must strenuously object," Mocke says. "You both are acting like this issue is settled, and it's not. Your experiments were performed on cats, not on human beings. You have proven nothing when it comes to human beings."<o:p></o:p> "Rigorously speaking, you are correct," Chernov says. "But we have more funds now, and we are already building human-size detector, and already have many human volunteers to die in it.” He makes a dismissive gesture with his hand. "We do human experiments to be rigorous, but surely human souls will be detected. If cats have souls, so must humans. Is trivial."<o:p></o:p> "Even for cats," Mocke says, "in my opinion, and in the opinion of most scientists, you still haven't proved beyond a shadow of a doubt what you observed were the souls of cats."<o:p></o:p> "Oh, please, Professor Mocke," Chernov says, "what else could they be? Especially considering absolute necessity for souls to exist in order for sentient-containing Universe to be stable? Most probable explanation is phenomenon we are detecting is souls."<o:p></o:p> "That raises an interesting question, Academician," MacNeil says, intervening before Mocke can stall the discussion again. "Why did you do your experiments on cats and not people? Cats are not a potential threat to the Universe, surely."<o:p></o:p> "No, no threat to Universe," Chernov says. "Personal experience I had once.” His mouth quirks. "Cat-soul went through my chest."<o:p></o:p> "What?"<o:p></o:p> "I had very sick pet cat once, Glorious Lady Snowflake," Chernov says. "Was dying, but I didn't know that, or rather didn't want to know it. I leave her at vet's office every morning for treatment and take her back to my apartment at night. One morning I leave her. Around noon, I am eating lunch by myself, when ball of energy appears about one meter in front of my chest, dives through my chest here---" He touches his chest just to his left of his heart. "---comes out my back underneath left shoulder blade, continues on for another meter, and disappears. I go back to laboratory and find note telling me vet has called me in my absence. I return call. Vet tells me Glorious Lady Snowflake fell into coma and he has performed mercy killing short while ago to prevent needless suffering."<o:p></o:p> "A ball of energy," Reverend Hooker says. "Describe it."<o:p></o:p> "Am really not able to," Chernov says. "No light, no sound, nothing in any of normal five senses, only somehow I could sense something was there, by some unknown mechanism."<o:p></o:p> "Did this experience have any bearing on your deduction of the existence of souls?" MacNeil asks.<o:p></o:p> "Nyet," Chernov says. "Experience was many years ago, and I had forgotten it until I realized souls had to exist. Then I remembered experience, and knew easiest way to test hypothesis. Was very fortunate."<o:p></o:p> "Very fortunate," Reverend Hooker says dryly. "Very, very, very fortunate indeed. The one person on Earth who could logically deduce the existence of souls also just happens to have sensed a soul directly, personally, through no mechanism he can understand. Could the hand of God be more clear? Do you see it now, Professor Mocke?"<o:p></o:p> "I see nothing here but deliberate self-delusion," Mocke says.<o:p></o:p> "I agree for once," Reverend Hooker says. "I also see nothing here but deliberate self-delusion."<o:p></o:p> "Oooooo," Al-Durabi whispers with glee. "They're gonna be going medieval on each other's ass next."<o:p></o:p> "You have to wonder why cats, or animals in general, would have souls," MacNeil comments.<o:p></o:p> "I have answer for that," Chernov says. "To shape brain, to put empathic structures in place for when intelligent species appears."<o:p></o:p> "Somehow I'm not surprised you would have an idea why, Academician," MacNeil says. "Could you explain further?"<o:p></o:p> "Would be very bad thing, for species to reach sapience with brains shaped only by Darwinian forces," Chernov says. "Universe would be destroyed."<o:p></o:p> "I must disagree with you slightly, Dmitri," Reverend Hooker says. "Purely Darwinian brains would never allow a technological civilization to develop in the first place. Not past a certain level. They'd be too busy killing each other with the weapons technology would give them. When mass killing became possible, that's what would happen, and the civilization, the species, would wipe itself out long before it became a threat to the Universe."<o:p></o:p> "So how would you answer question, Rocky?" Chernov asks. "Why do cats have souls? In abstract cold-blooded science terms, why would animals in general have to have souls?"<o:p></o:p> "Oh, you're correct about the end-goal," Reverend Hooker says. "To shape the future sentient brain, to put empathic structures into place well before sapience is achieved."<o:p></o:p> "I'm not sure I understand how that would work," MacNeil says.<o:p></o:p> "There is a precise evolutionary analogy," Reverend Hooker says. "The shaping of migratory birds by the Earth's magnetic field. Over evolutionary time scales, the presence of the Earth's magnetic field has resulted in structures in migratory birds that can sense this field. The better a migratory bird can sense this field, the greater chance it has of passing on its genes."<o:p></o:p> "That makes no sense," Mocke says. "What's the corresponding physical force that puts the empathic structures into place?"<o:p></o:p> "The love of God," Reverend Hooker says. "The love of God has been present since the Universe's beginning, and must therefore be considered as an evolutionary force, something which has never been done before. What has fooled the scientists is the evolutionary selection pressure has been an internal force, not an external one. But now, it is clear."<o:p></o:p> "Oh?" Mocke says. "You accept the scientific truth of evolution?"<o:p></o:p> "Always," Reverend Hooker says. "All Christians are not creationists, Professor Mocke. I now think creationism has been a disaster for Christians, a time-wasting stumbling block deliberately cast into our path by a malign hand to keep us from discovering what Dmitri here has shown us, the love of God revealed as a physical force in evolution. Convincing humanity to believe in creationism was not the job Jesus charged us with doing."<o:p></o:p> "Give me a precise evolutionary mechanism that will implant empathic structures," Mocke says.<o:p></o:p> "Easily," Reverend Hooker says. "A female animal has a choice of two male animals as mates. Both are about the same as material providers, but one does something different. He does something that makes the female animal happy, because his brain contains a structure that makes it easy for him to empathize, to know what the female animal wants to feel."<o:p></o:p> "He makes her feel happiness, the desire for which comes from her soul," Chernov says. "So she chooses him as mate over less-considerate one, and his brain structure is passed on. Over evolutionary time scale, this would implant empathic structures deep into developing brain."<o:p></o:p> "You're claiming this same emotional process goes on in animals?" Mocke says.<o:p></o:p> "I am," Reverend Hooker says.<o:p></o:p> "Do not animals feel emotion, want to be happy, to be loved?" Chernov asks. "But am not claiming. Have proven! Have already detected cat-souls!"<o:p></o:p> "The only way the brain could be shaped by emotion is for emotion to be exactly like the Earth's magnetic field, external to the physical organism, from the soul," Mocke says, intrigued in spite of himself. "This theory implies the soul is the true source of all emotion, that the brain is no more than a mirror, a reflection of a deeper structure."<o:p></o:p> "Precisely correct, Professor," Chernov says. "Brain is not source of emotion. Soul is, and it has shaped brain to its desires."<o:p></o:p> "Dmitri, this is all well and good," Reverend Hooker says, "but we've wandered from our most important purpose here today."<o:p></o:p> "How is that, Rocky?" Chernov says, "Our purpose is to explain what detection of souls mean, and we're doing that."<o:p></o:p> "What do you think is the primary meaning of the scientific detection of souls, above everything else we've said here today, Dmitri?” Reverend Hooker tilts his head back.<o:p></o:p> Chernov brightens.<o:p></o:p> "Fundamental fear of all human beings, fear of death, is now gone!" he exclaims. "People don't die, and never have! They exist eternally! That is primary meaning, above everything else!"<o:p></o:p> "Wrong," Reverend Hooker says. He shakes his head in emphatic denial. "You could not be more wrong. You don't understand your own results, not yet, Dmitri."<o:p></o:p> "But you do?" Mocke says. "You understand Academician Chernov's results better than he does, better than trained scientists?"<o:p></o:p> "I do."<o:p></o:p> "Well, then, Reverend," Mocke says. "Enlighten us."<o:p></o:p> "By all means," Reverend Hooker says. "Gentlemen, what are the implications of this on future individual human action? How should the man on the street now change his behavior, if at all?"<o:p></o:p> "Man on street should now have as primary motivating force desire to make all human beings happy," Chernov says. He raises a finger for emphasis. "Must always act with consideration for other peoples' feelings."<o:p></o:p> "And if he decides not to do that? If he chooses, of his own free will, even knowing he has an immortal soul, to act childishly, selfishly, without `consideration of other peoples' feelings? Now what?"<o:p></o:p> Chernov looks bewildered.<o:p></o:p> "Will not happen!" he says. "Man on street didn't know scientific truth before! Now he does! He will work to make everybody happy!"<o:p></o:p> A cynical chuckle sweeps through the rec room. Reverend Hooker runs his hand through his hair and gives Chernov a wry look. Even Mocke is surprised. Chernov might be a genius, but he's just marked himself a fuzzy-headed academic who spends most of his time with his head in the clouds. Chernov doesn't know everything.<o:p></o:p> He doesn't know people.<o:p></o:p> "No, Dmitri," Reverend Hooker says, "that won't happen. There's no chance of it."<o:p></o:p> Chernov's mouth drops open in astonishment.<o:p></o:p> "Surely!" he insists. "Is clear now! Is smart thing to do!"<o:p></o:p> "There are a lot of idiots in this world," Reverend Hooker observes. "No, it won't happen. Trust me when I say it won't happen, Dmitri. The Universe is your area of expertise. Human beings are mine."<o:p></o:p> Chernov starts to reply, but Reverend Hooker quiets him with a shushing motion.<o:p></o:p> "If you don't mind, Dmitri, I'd like for Professor Mocke to consider this problem. Professor? Let me make it as immediate and personal as possible. What's the threat of Academician Chernov's results?"<o:p></o:p> "Threat?" Mocke says, raising his eyebrows.<o:p></o:p> "Yes, the threat," Reverend Hooker says. "What kind of threat do immortal souls represent to the man on the street right now?"<o:p></o:p> This is too much for Chernov.<o:p></o:p> "Threat?" he cries with indignation. "Is no threat at all!"<o:p></o:p> "Please, Dmitri," Reverend Hooker says. He says this mildly, but the steel ring of command is in his tone. Chernov shuts up.<o:p></o:p> Mocke looks wary. The interview has taken an unexpected turn. MacNeil quietly pushes himself out of camera view and lets Reverend Hooker and Mocke have center stage. Battle has been joined between these two, and he's going to back up and let the sparks fly.<o:p></o:p> "Don't misunderstand me," Mocke warns. "I still don't accept your premise. I was only considering things theoretically, from your viewpoint."<o:p></o:p> "Fine," Reverend Hooker says. "Spoken like a truly objective scientist. I ask only that you continue doing so for the next few minutes.” His hunter aspect becomes stronger. He leans over and bores in, remorseless as a shark. "Now, what is the answer to my question? What's the threat of eternal existence?"<o:p></o:p> Mocke looks off into the distance as he considers the question.<o:p></o:p> "What kind of threat does eternal existence represent for a sentient," he murmurs to himself.<o:p></o:p> "Let me strike to the heart of this," Reverend Hooker says. "What should an eternal being fear?"<o:p></o:p> "Fear?"<o:p></o:p> "Yes, fear," Reverend Hooker says. "Everything has a price. What's the price of immortality?"<o:p></o:p> Mocke shakes his head.<o:p></o:p> "I can't see as there are any threats at all to an eternal being," he says. "He's eternal. Why should he be afraid of anything?"<o:p></o:p> "Because he can still be hurt," Reverend Hooker says, "he can still feel pain. The only thing that's guaranteed is existence, and the desire to love each other. Nothing else. If our bottom desire is to love each other, why would eternal beings deliberately put another eternal being in pain?"<o:p></o:p> "In pain?" Mocke squeaks.<o:p></o:p> "Yes, in pain," Reverend Hooker says, "which is certainly an action which would make an unhappy soul that threatens the Universe's existence. What could force eternal beings to do it anyway?"<o:p></o:p> A light dawns in Mocke's eyes. For a second, he's a bright kid in school who knows he has the answer when nobody else in the class does.<o:p></o:p> "When it's the least dangerous option," he says. "When the sentient is already threatening the Universe's existence. Then it wouldn't matter. Punishment, you'd have to do it as punishment for threatening the existence of the Universe. For any action by a sentient that threatens the existence of the Universe."<o:p></o:p> "Allow me to put it in my primitive, simple terms," Reverend Hooker says. "For breaking the law. The law of 'God loves everybody forever.' "<o:p></o:p> Mocke raises his shoulders and drops them in a massively contemptuous shrug.<o:p></o:p> "If you wish," he says. "It means nothing to me."<o:p></o:p> "I'll keep it in your terms," Reverend Hooker says. "Would selfish actions threaten the Universe's existence, and why?"<o:p></o:p> "Yes," Mocke says, "because selfish action by definition creates unhappy souls, and unhappy souls are a threat to the Universe's existence."<o:p></o:p> "True or false, Professor. There are a great number of people on this Earth who act selfishly, who hurt people unnecessarily, and who will continue to hurt people unnecessarily, even now."<o:p></o:p> Mocke looks annoyed.<o:p></o:p> "True," he says. "Don't insult my intelligence, Reverend."<o:p></o:p> "Just trying to be rigorous, Professor. So what are the other souls on this Earth going to be forced to do? For their own safety?"<o:p></o:p> "Well, of course," Mocke says, "they will have to stop selfish action from occurring. For their own safety."<o:p></o:p> "It's impossible to forget the victims, isn't it, Professor Mocke? Not if they're eternal beings. It'll certainly backfire on us. How are the victims going to feel?"<o:p></o:p> "Angry. Angry---and unhappy."<o:p></o:p> "What are the other people—--no, pardon me again, eternal souls---going to be forced to do?"<o:p></o:p> "They will be forced to intervene. They must stop any process that is creating unhappy eternal beings."<o:p></o:p> "Tell you what, Professor. Let's construct us a completely theoretical society, a society composed entirely of immortal souls, and try and figure out what a society of immortal souls would be like. Can you go along with that?"<o:p></o:p> "I can," Mocke declares, leaning back. "As a theoretical construct."<o:p></o:p> "Let us further postulate that, although these souls are immortal, they are not necessarily all mature. Many of them, maybe most of them, will be, basically, children, with all the selfish behavior that implies."<o:p></o:p> "So postulated."<o:p></o:p> "In our theoretical society of immortal-but-mostly-childish souls, there will have to be societal mechanisms to deal with the selfish souls. Correct?"<o:p></o:p> "Oh, of course," Mocke says. "You can't allow the creation of unhappy immortal souls----granted that immortal souls exist. To do so would cause severe instability problems. Eventually."<o:p></o:p> "There will have to be at least two mechanisms in our theoretical immortal-soul society to deal with selfish souls, then, a teaching mechanism and a healing mechanism. The healing mechanism will be to heal the souls who have been hurt. It is the teaching mechanism that is the threat. Professor Mocke, what is this teaching mechanism?"<o:p></o:p> Mocke makes the barest detectable jerk. This question is completely out of the blue as far as I'm concerned. I have no clue what the answer is, but it's clear Mocke knows.<o:p></o:p> But he doesn't say anything.<o:p></o:p> Chernov starts squirming in his seat. He's seen something, too.<o:p></o:p> Reverend Hooker doesn't wait.<o:p></o:p> "Correction," he says, "the selfish soul has to be caught and corrected, both as payment for what he's done and so that he stops creating unhappy souls. Right, Professor?"<o:p></o:p> Mocke looks faintly tense. He swallows. Chernov looks like he's about to explode.<o:p></o:p> "There is logic to that," Mocke says. "Given your presumptions----which, I repeat, I do not accept."<o:p></o:p> "The selfish soul has to be caught and corrected," Reverend Hooker says. "This correction is not likely to be pleasant for the selfish soul. In fact, in most cases it will have to involve a great deal of pain to be effective, to get the point across and make it stick. Right, Professor?” He's grinding it in for some reason only he knows. "What might we call this teaching mechanism whereby souls who hurt other souls for selfish reasons are caught and punished?"<o:p></o:p> Chernov can't hold it back any longer.<o:p></o:p> "Justice!" he blurts out. "Is brilliant, Rocky! In precisely same sense as exists absolute standard of temperature in Universe, must exist also absolute standard of justice!"<o:p></o:p> "And what do you know," Reverend Hooker says, "the societal mechanism of justice exists in the real society of humans, just like in our theoretical society of immortal souls. Isn't it amazing, Professor Mocke? Human society is already acting the same way an immortal-soul society would!"<o:p></o:p> "Oh, had to be, Rocky!" Chernov says. "Had to be! Justice is inhibition mechanism!"<o:p></o:p> Reverend Hooker blinks and stares off into space.<o:p></o:p> "This is a very important thing to realize," he says. "What are the effects of the absolute, unconditional love of God on human beings? How would it show in human action, on the societal and personal levels? The concepts of love and justice are the primary observable effects, but there have to be many others."<o:p></o:p> On the left, MacNeil glances off-stage, almost certainly checking a clock. Time is about to run out. This battle had better be over soon.<o:p></o:p> Reverend Hooker looks at Mocke and comes back to Earth. He leans over and gets in Mocke's face again.<o:p></o:p> "So, Professor Mocke, what is the threat of eternal existence?" he asks. "What does an eternal being have to fear that a non-eternal being doesn't?"<o:p></o:p> Mocke's not going to give up without a fight. He rubs the back of his neck.<o:p></o:p> "If your existence can't be terminated," he says, "you can't escape the consequences of your actions."<o:p></o:p> "Quite right," Reverend Hooker says, "over the vast stretch of eternity, whatever you do must inevitably catch up with you. You just can't get away. Not true for a non-eternal being. If you die first, you can escape the consequences of your actions, you can escape justice."<o:p></o:p> Mocke's hands come together on the table and start twisting.<o:p></o:p> "True or false, Professor Mocke," Reverend Hooker says. "An eternal being cannot escape justice."<o:p></o:p> "True."<o:p></o:p> "True or false, Professor Mocke. Not only does the idea of justice already exist in human society, but so also does the idea that it is impossible to escape justice."<o:p></o:p> "True," Mocke says again. His hands look like he's wringing an invisible chicken's neck in slow motion.<o:p></o:p> "True or false, Professor Mocke. Eternal souls make moral behavior---smart behavior. The smarter you are, the more moral you are. Because the smarter you are, the more you understand you can't escape justice."<o:p></o:p> The invisible chicken's neck in Mocke's hands snaps.<o:p></o:p> "True."<o:p></o:p> "Let me bring this down from the theoretical clouds and give it teeth," Reverend Hooker says. "Justice is a hammer. A natural, necessary component of a sentient-containing, soul-containing Universe, which must be completely impossible to escape. Only a fool would think he could escape. And that's the threat of eternal existence, that's what an eternal being must fear. Not death, not dying, but justice."<o:p></o:p> The entire stage goes quiet. So does the rec room. Al-Durabi puts it in soldier terms.<o:p></o:p> "Fuck up the least little bit," he says, his voice loud in the rec room, "screw up one tiny inch, and an Almighty hammer comes down out of the sky and smashes your eternal-being ass flat. Natural as gravity."<o:p></o:p> Nobody in the rec room says a word.<o:p></o:p> Mocke visibly takes control of himself. His hands stop twisting.<o:p></o:p> "I'm certain there are errors of logic in your thinking," he says. "Just give me time, and I'll find them."<o:p></o:p> "Lots of luck," Reverend Hooker says.<o:p></o:p> "Are no errors," Chernov says. "Reverend Hooker is correct."<o:p></o:p> "The mistakes are there," Mocke says. He starts slow-motion-wringing that chicken's neck again. Reverend Hooker glances at this with interest, then back at Mocke. "They must be. There are perfectly sound genetically based Darwinian reasons for the existence of all these concepts that don't involve something so patently ridiculous as immortal souls. Just give me time to find them. All I need is time!"<o:p></o:p> "If all you need is time, then time you shall have," Reverend Hooker says. "Perhaps we can continue this debate again in the near future, after you've had the time to find the mistakes in my thinking?"<o:p></o:p> This response is a shock to Mocke. He looks like he'd like nothing more than to walk away and forget this entire debate ever happened, but this is a challenge he can't turn down without losing face.<o:p></o:p> "As you wish," he says. The battle of Armageddon has not stopped. Just gone into temporary suspension until the next debate.<o:p></o:p> MacNeil steps forward.<o:p></o:p> "Gentlemen," he says quickly, "our time is up. Thank-you-all-for-attending-and-perhaps-we-can-continue-this-at-another-time."<o:p></o:p> The screen blacks out just as MacNeil finishes. The rec-room crowd breaks into a noisy rumble.<o:p></o:p> "So now we know what it means," Al-Durabi says through the noise. "So what's next?"<o:p></o:p> I know the answer to that one.<o:p></o:p> "Human action," I say. "Big-time human action. Everybody smart starts covering their asses. There's going to be one hellacious scramble. Just to start, they're going to take the handcuffs off our mission. I guaran-damn-tee you new orders are being cut for our mission as we speak."<o:p></o:p> "Our mission here," Al-Durabi says in wonder. "In human action. It's all in human action, just like Hooker said. That's why we were here all along, wasn't it, floating off the coast of Africa in this overblown tin can. We were acting like we had souls. Only we didn't know it, and that's why everything felt so goddamn confused and fucked-up. Well, by Allah now it's clear, and now there's going to be some human action!"<o:p></o:p> I can feel it coming. I can feel it coming like a gentle breeze, like the first breath of a storm.<o:p></o:p> "In human action," I say. "There's going to be human action, all right. Human action like you wouldn't believe."<o:p></o:p> A storm that will shatter the world.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> #<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> THE HAMMER RISING<o:p></o:p> My backpack computer is booting up when a worry surfaces.<o:p></o:p> Al-Durabi is fooling around with his BC---instead of concentrating on the mission. Malreaux is doing his philosopher thing---instead of concentrating on the mission. Tivoli is worrying about my opinion of his competence---instead of concentrating on the mission. I don’t know what’s going on in Heinrich’s mind, but I’m pretty certain it’s not the mission. Even Mitsui, the most rock-solid of my soldiers, is shouting slogans---instead of concentrating on the mission.<o:p></o:p> Only minutes away from battle, my squad has lost its focus.<o:p></o:p> I know the cause. The soul experiments. My squad is as caught up in the argument over the soul experiments as everyone else is, and they’ve forgotten we’re tasked with stopping a massacre in progress. I’ve got to push that subject out of their heads and get them tightly focused on the mission. If I don't, we’re all going to go down there and get shot. I reach into my vest pocket and click over to the company channel.<o:p></o:p> “Jump Seven,” I say. “Time to insertion.”<o:p></o:p> “Insertion in three, Sergeant,” the Jump Seven says.<o:p></o:p> “Copy, three minutes,” I reply, and click back to the squad channel. Behind each one of us, a jumpmaster steps forward and starts the official pre-jump check by sliding our JDAP cages on their rails to make sure the wheels are free. A line of embeds shuffle forward to shoot our exit, careful to stay lined up out of the way against the walls.<o:p></o:p> "First stick," I say into my mike as my backpack computer starts hunting for a network to link up to. "Comm check."<o:p></o:p> "Mitsui, five by five."<o:p></o:p> "Heinrich, five by five."<o:p></o:p> "Tivoli, five by five."<o:p></o:p> "Malreaux, five by five."<o:p></o:p> "Al-Durabi, five by five."<o:p></o:p> The network check is next. My BC has found the network. Mitsui, Heinrich, Tivoli, and Malreaux take their places at the bottom of my display as blue straight identity lines with their names underneath, indicating maximum connectivity. In the back of my mind I can hear Malreaux pointing out in his superior fashion how this concept, too, springs from that simple postulate of physics. Al-Durabi’s identity line shows up as a red, flashing X. He's disconnected himself from the network somehow.<o:p></o:p> “Corporal Al-Durabi, goddammit!” I shout. “Clear that fucking link and stop screwing around with your system!”<o:p></o:p> “Yes, Sergeant,” he mutters, chastened. “Rebooting.”<o:p></o:p> “The rest of you, check the network links to your taggers, Hellfire shells, and RFID chips,” I say. “Report any failures.”<o:p></o:p> The mouse button for my BC is on the tagger, two centimeters above the trigger. I move the button and the arrow on my display responds. The tagger is communicating. I pull down the diagnostic menu and execute the routine to check communication to all my Hellfire shells and RFID chips. The link to the shells is wireless and the most likely place for a malfunction. All seventy shells respond to the BC’s queries. The diagnostic routine moves on to the one hundred Radio Frequency Identification chips packed in each Hellfire warhead. They come back minimum ninety-five per cent functional, within warhead specifications. <o:p></o:p> As an afterthought, I ping my camera uplinks. The embeds can’t jump with us, so the world is going to watch the ground action from our tagger and helmet cameras. The ping-times average five milliseconds with zero percent packet loss, optimal.<o:p></o:p> “Online, Sergeant,” Al-Durabi says. “Tagger, shells, and chips good to go.” His red X goes blue and straight. The squad is linked up and ready for combat.<o:p></o:p> "Sergeant Soldat to ARGUS," I say. “Request map and tango last-known database update.”<o:p></o:p> “Updating,” ARGUS says. A green install bar lengthens across my display, disappears. The latest topographic map of the battlefield, integrated from radar, satellite and overflight scans is now in the squad’s BCs, plus the latest information on where the tangos, the bad guys, are located. “Last-known update complete.”<o:p></o:p> "Two minutes to jump," I say, and start the re-focusing project. "Let’s review the mission again, troops, so I can be certain everybody’s got it straight. One-hour launch-on-warning is not enough time to get it all straight in your head.” I pull the battlefield map down on everyone's display. The death camp is a small, shallow valley ringed by rolling hills covered with short green grass and scrub. I move the pointer to the center of the valley where a fenced-in area has been outlined in violet. "Sudan has a history of violence between the Muslim north and the largely Christian and animist south, which culminated in a twenty-year civil war that killed more than two million people. I must emphasize this conflict has nothing to do with the Darfur conflict, which is a race war, Arab versus black. This war is primarily based on religion, Christian versus Muslim. An upcoming referendum on independence for southern Sudan, part of a peace treaty negotiated in 2003, has resulted in violence from a variety of Christian and Muslim splinter militias, with military support for both sides coming from warring factions within the government. We’re tasked with stopping a massacre that started approximately twenty-four hours ago at the border between north and south. Local friendlies are being rounded up by death-squads and held in this corral complex in the center of this valley. When the corrals get full, the friendlies are executed and the bodies dumped in this mass grave.” I move the pointer to a black area on the valley's far north end. "The latest satphotos show them placing a layer of dirt over the bodies with a bulldozer and filling up the corral complex again. They've gone through one cycle already.” I pause for effect, to draw them to a fine point. “They’re killing innocent people down there! We are by-God going to put a stop to it!”<o:p></o:p> "Sergeant," Malreaux says. That unnecessary pain he mentioned is in his voice. He is a man who empathizes. "They're killing people already? I must ask. Why are we so late?"<o:p></o:p> "We didn't find out about it in time," I said. "Only way we know now is they got ratted out. Six hours ago, some high-up in the Sudanese government, we don’t know who, placed a cell phone call from their capital buildings in Khartoum to our offices in New York."<o:p></o:p> "We need better monitoring," Malreaux says. Now I know for certain my squad has lost its edge. Time for a touch of the whip.<o:p></o:p> "We do, and we'll certainly get it, but this is neither the time nor the place," I say with crackling anger. "Dammit, Malreaux, get focused on the immediate task, or you're going to get killed down there and not be a damn bit of good to the friendlies still alive!”<o:p></o:p> "Yes, Sergeant," Malreaux says unhappily.<o:p></o:p> That's enough of the whip. I move to the tactical situation.<o:p></o:p> ”We have three primary advantages," I say. I overlay the tango locations. Red dots sprinkle over the map. A time stamp appears, also in red. These tango locations are five minutes old. They're coming from an American Global Hawk loitering over the valley at five thousand feet. The Americans have put every military resource they have at the GQRF's disposal. Along with the Russians, the Japanese, the Europeans, the British, the Australians, and the Tongans, for all I know. The finest, most refined military war-fighting systems produced by the most technologically advanced countries on the planet have been forged into a justice hammer poised over this little valley. I almost feel sorry for the poor dumb bastards this justice hammer's about to come down on. Almost.<o:p></o:p> "One,” I say, “we will know where they are at all times, whereas they won't have a clue where we are. Two, we're outnumbered three to one, but we have vastly superior standoff attack technology. We don't have to be in line-of-sight to tag them, but they have to be in line-of-sight to shoot us. Three, they don't know we're coming. They're sleeping out in the open. Intel says they’re a straight amateur death-squad militia, AKs and machetes only, no armor or heavy weapons. There is no observed defensive perimeter. The company is dropping in an assault ring around the valley hills, surrounding the tangos out of their sight.” I indicate the bottom of a low hill at the valley's southern end. "This is our specific drop zone. We're going to hit our DZ out of their sight, sweep up over this hill and tag them while they're still asleep. The rules of engagement are anything moving in the open is a probable tango. Tag it!"<o:p></o:p> Launch racks under the Globemaster make a sound like Godzilla spitting rocks, over and over.<o:p></o:p> "There go the Sleeper units," I say. "We're about to jump. Any questions?"<o:p></o:p> Nothing.<o:p></o:p> "Remember, shoot and scoot!" I say. "You can see a tagger launch for kilometers at night! Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving!"<o:p></o:p> "Hoo-ah!" Al-Durabi shouts. "Let's kick some bad-guy asses!"<o:p></o:p> They’ve got their focus back. I raise my thumb at the Jump Seven. My headset clicks as he switches to our channel. The jumpmasters behind us report in.<o:p></o:p> “Jumpmaster One! First man ready!”<o:p></o:p> “Jumpmaster Two! Second man ready!”<o:p></o:p> “Jumpmaster Three! Third man ready!”<o:p></o:p> “Jumpmaster Four! Fourth man ready!”<o:p></o:p> “Jumpmaster Five! Fifth man ready!”<o:p></o:p> "Jumpmaster Six! Sixth man ready!"<o:p></o:p> “Jump Seven, first stick reports blue and straight," I say. "Begin rollout at your discretion."<o:p></o:p> “Rollout in twenty,” the Jump Seven says, and embed cameras rotate to follow us as the jumpmasters trundle us in our cages down the launch rails to the edge of the ramp. Wind vortexes like mini-tornadoes, formed by air curling over the bay’s open edges, come bursting over the ramp and ram our cages one after the other, threatening to twist them off the rails. The jumpmasters have to wrestle with our cages to keep them in position. There's nothing we can do to assist. We’re clamped stiff and helpless in full-body metal straitjackets on the edge of a two-hundred-meter cliff, about to be pushed over it into a ferocious hurricane. Staring over the cliff’s edge gives me a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. This is the first combat use of the JDAP cages. I wonder if the damn things are going to work in combat conditions or not. If they pick now to show some hidden design flaw, we'll be turned into strawberry jelly smeared over grass and innocent people will continue to be slaughtered.<o:p></o:p> ARGUS speaks to us in its combat voice, a distillation of every drill sergeant there has ever been.<o:p></o:p> “Rollout first stick in five seconds, on my mark,” it growls. I feel my jumpmaster plant his right boot on the back of my cage. “Five. Four. Three. Two. One. First stick, in service.”<o:p></o:p> A quick shove from behind, and we're kicked out of the plane into the hurricane fury howling across the world.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> #<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> IN HUMAN ACTION<o:p></o:p> The love of God is a law of physics.<o:p></o:p> Our mission isn't confused anymore.<o:p></o:p> The roar of God is loud on the Reagan's flight deck. It's a bee-swarm of helicopters and soldiers loud enough to make the flight deck shake. It must be sounding loud in our prisoners' ears. The forced, smartest-thing-to-do intervention to keep eternal beings happy has begun.<o:p></o:p> But it’s an odd thing. It doesn’t feel like being forced.<o:p></o:p> It feels like being set free.<o:p></o:p> Our Janjaweed prisoners are in total shock. The surprise on their faces as they offload the Pave Hawk helicopters and shuffle across the Reagan's deck in their white plastic handcuffs is something to see. This is our little contribution to the hellacious scramble, to the tsunami of smashing change that started rolling over the world after Chernov gave his TV interview and showed anybody with half a brain the Almighty hammer poised over his sweet precious eternal-being ass.<o:p></o:p> "Where the hell are they gonna put'em, First Sergeant?" Al-Durabi wonders as he safes his rifle. A round clinks to the deck. He scoops it up.<o:p></o:p> "They'll find a place," I say. Watching these killers getting carried off to jail is satisfying something in me I thought would never be satisfied. There is a lightness growing in me that is beyond words.<o:p></o:p> It's not just me. Morale on board the Reagan is through the roof. There is an undercurrent of energy, of joyous release and explosive exhilaration, running through everybody on board, beyond anything I've ever seen. I've seen soldiers coming back from combat happy, grinning like loons. "Gitmo for right now, maybe."<o:p></o:p> "Wait'll they find out they're going to do life at hard labor and turn big rocks into little ones for the rest of their natural lives," Al-Durabi says. "Then they'll be pissed."<o:p></o:p> "Life's a bitch," I say, "then you go to jail. May all their rocks be boulders harder than diamond."<o:p></o:p> "Nobody gave a rat's ass they were running around killing people before," Al-Durabi says. "Now right out of nowhere everybody cares. It don't make no sense. Somebody changed the rules and forgot to send them a memo."<o:p></o:p> "Too goddamn bad," I say. "Should've thought about that before they decided to try being genocidal murderers for a living."<o:p></o:p> "Welcome to the Awakening."<o:p></o:p> "Yeah."<o:p></o:p> The hellacious scramble has a name now. It's "the Awakening.” Nobody knows who first called it that. It just appeared on the Internet somewhere and swept across the world in hours.<o:p></o:p> "How do you feel, First Sergeant?" Al-Durabi asks. "Inside. Way down deep."<o:p></o:p> "I feel," I say with emphasis, "pretty goddamn good. Better than I've felt in my entire life."<o:p></o:p> "Because you've done it," Al-Durabi says, "you've satisfied that little twist of yours. You've stopped the killing."<o:p></o:p> "You got that exactly right, Sergeant Al-Durabi," I say. "How do you feel?” This is the first combat action he's ever seen.<o:p></o:p> "I could've been shot dead," Al-Durabi says. "I could've been chopped in half with a machete or blown to bloody chunks with an RPG."<o:p></o:p> "So how do you feel, Sergeant? Inside. Way down deep."<o:p></o:p> "I feel," Al-Durabi says with emphasis, "pretty goddamn good. Better than I've felt in my entire life."<o:p></o:p> "We kept innocent people from being murdered, from being shot down like dogs just because of the color of their skin."<o:p></o:p> "We did."<o:p></o:p> "So now what do you want, Sergeant?"<o:p></o:p> "I want," Al-Durabi says, "to do it again."<o:p></o:p> Something huge and unseen ambushes me from above, reaches deep inside me and tears something I can't name out, tosses it raw and bleeding onto the flight deck. A vast hollow is left in the center of my chest. It hurts. It really hurts.<o:p></o:p> Al-Durabi wraps his arms around his chest, and I know he's been ambushed, too.<o:p></o:p> "I have done," Al-Durabi says, "the most perfectly right thing I have ever done, and I feel it."<o:p></o:p> He swallows and blinks, trying to cope with this unexpected attack.<o:p></o:p> "This is it," he says. "This is what it feels like to have a soul."<o:p></o:p> For a moment, neither of us says a word or moves a muscle. We just stand there caught in shimmering tension while the nameless things ripped out of both of us lay on the flight deck and bleed.<o:p></o:p> "How very, very deep it goes, how much it affects our actions," Al-Durabi whispers. His voice shakes. "It is what we are, what we truly are, what we have been all along."<o:p></o:p> Al-Durabi straightens up, swallows and takes a breath.<o:p></o:p> "Who knew justice was an absolute?" he asks. This breaks the spell. He's taken refuge by retreating into abstract analysis of human behavior. "We all thought it was relative, and it held us back."<o:p></o:p> "What a waste, Sergeant, what a frigging waste," I say, not really understanding, just stumbling for words, for a path away from this. I'm happy to play along, to get away from whatever that thing bleeding on the deck is. "This all could've been figured out a long time ago."<o:p></o:p> This is the newest game on planet Earth. Reverend Hooker started it and everybody is playing. Show the effect of the absolute, unconditional love of God on human beings. Analyze specific human behaviors and show how they always contained the implicit assumption of eternal existence and the love of God.<o:p></o:p> "It could've been,” Al-Durabi says. "To deduce the basic laws of particle behavior, we observe the action of particles in motion. To deduce the basic laws of electrodynamic behavior, we observe the actions of charged particles. To deduce the basic laws of human behavior, all the scientists had to do was exactly the same thing. Observe the actions of humans."<o:p></o:p> "There's something strange about that," I say. "Something that's different. But I can't quite put my finger on it."<o:p></o:p> "I can," Al-Durabi says. "I know what it is that's a different idea. That people---sentients, souls---are fundamental components of the Universe, just like electrons and protons are fundamental components. That the appearance of the human race is not a random, accidental thing in the Universe. Sentients are something that had to be built into the Universe's structure, from its very beginning."<o:p></o:p> "How much pain it has caused, not knowing any of this," I say, feel the tug of that nameless, bleeding thing again, and instantly regret my words. I am on the edge of being torn open once more.<o:p></o:p> To my vast relief, I see Colonel Hendricks, our company commander, picking his way through helicopters towards us. He's got his PDA in his hand.<o:p></o:p> "Make you a bet, First Sergeant," Al-Durabi says, watching him come. "More human action. More human action that contains the intrinsic assumption of eternal souls, of eternal existence, and the love of Allah."<o:p></o:p> "No bet," I say.<o:p></o:p> "First Sergeant Soldat," Colonel Hendricks says, reaching us, "we just got word. The United Nations is forming an anti-genocide army."<o:p></o:p> "Really, sir?" I ask, with a glance at Al-Durabi, who looks triumphant. "The United Nations? Whose idea was that?"<o:p></o:p> "The Federal Republic," Colonel Hendricks says, "of Germany."<o:p></o:p> "Oh," I say. "They paying for it? An entire army? You're looking at tens of millions."<o:p></o:p> "The Germans proposed the idea to the General Assembly and it got adopted unanimously," Colonel Hendrick says. "The U. N. posted a note on their Website asking for donations to fund it. It's up to one hundred million and still shooting up."<o:p></o:p> "What's money anymore?"<o:p></o:p> "Moral obligation," Colonel Hendricks says. "A quick-reaction force is being created from professional soldier volunteers from all the world's armies, whose purpose will be to intervene militarily when genocides are about to happen. When the shit blows up, this force is going to be the first one into the fire. Knowing you, I'm giving you first crack. Want in?"<o:p></o:p> "You goddamn betcha, sir," I say.<o:p></o:p> "You'll have to take a demotion and a pay cut," Colonel Hendricks says.<o:p></o:p> "I don't care, sir," I say. "Sign my ass up."<o:p></o:p> "Great," Colonel Hendricks says. He punches buttons on his PDA. "Done. You are now on indeterminate liaison to the United Nations. You will be a squad leader in the United Nations Genocide Quick-Reaction Force, hereinafter referred to as the GQRF."<o:p></o:p> "Son of a bitch," I say. "That's it?"<o:p></o:p> "That's it," Colonel Hendricks says. "Your orders are cut. Report for advanced JDAP paratrooper training in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. A company of GQRF soldiers is going to train there. You will train for one month, then you will return to Sudan, and you will kick ass."<o:p></o:p> "International troops?" I say. "The politicians aren't screaming about international troops inside our borders?"<o:p></o:p> "Not a peep," Colonel Hendricks says. "They can't give us money fast enough. Too afraid of burning in Hell forever, is my guess."<o:p></o:p> "There is no Hell, sir," Al-Durabi says. "At least, not one you get thrown into forever."<o:p></o:p> "You couldn't prove that by these guys," Colonel Hendricks says, amusement on his face. "You should see the fear in their eyes, Sergeant. These guys are scared shitless. They can feel the fire and smell their asses cooking!” He chuckles. "These guys are some motivated sons of bitches!"<o:p></o:p> "Hell isn't consistent with 'Allah loves everybody forever', sir," Al-Durabi protests. "It can't work like that. Allah wouldn't create souls and then set up a system that guarantees ninety-nine plus percent winds up burning in Hell forever. Or even one."<o:p></o:p> “Sure,” Colonel Hendricks says. “But you think I’m going to explain that to these guys? When they know God has got’em by the balls and will start swinging at the slightest excuse? Sergeant Al-Durabi, these politicians have seen the light!” He folds his hands in a prayerful pose and looks skyward. "It's a miracle, praise the Lord!"<o:p></o:p> "I bet the right-wing nutcases are screaming their heads off," I say.<o:p></o:p> "Yeah, they're pissing and moaning about Yew-En black-helicopter invasion fleets all over the Internet," Colonel Hendricks says, "but nobody's listening to them. Nobody with any brains, anyway."<o:p></o:p> "Me too," Al-Durabi interjects, "me too, Colonel, sir. This is the end-game of history, and by the Prophet I will be a part of it!"<o:p></o:p> "Same deal, Sergeant," Colonel Hendricks says. "A demotion and a pay cut."<o:p></o:p> "Do it, sir."<o:p></o:p> "As you wish, Sergeant Al-Durabi," Colonel Hendricks says. He punches more buttons on his PDA. "You're in."<o:p></o:p> The deep roar of multiple helicopter turbines firing up pierces the air. Warm jet blast reeking of kerosene washes over us. The rotors on the departing choppers start turning. The next rescue mission is about to depart.<o:p></o:p> We're done safing our weapons. Colonel Hendrick bows his head against the jet blast and heads for the stairs to below-decks. Al-Durabi and I follow along behind in single file.<o:p></o:p> Al-Durabi touches my arm.<o:p></o:p> "First Sergeant!" he shouts. "Observe human action!” He points to a Pave Hawk sitting close to the edge of the flight deck. A team of medics is unloading a Janjaweed prisoner on a stretcher.<o:p></o:p> "Watch the prisoner!" Al-Durabi shouts. "I've seen this before!"<o:p></o:p> The medics pull the Janjaweed out and carry him to the edge of the flight deck to triage him. He's strapped into his stretcher and can't move. He's bleeding all over the place, but it doesn't look serious. <o:p></o:p> The Janjaweed looks around, spots the flight deck edge and goes berserk, totally apeshit. He fights his straps like a madman, heaving and bucking so the medics nearly drop him. He gets a strap in his mouth and tries to chew through it.<o:p></o:p> "He thinks they’re going to throw him over!" Al-Durabi shouts.<o:p></o:p> They hauled his ass all the way back here just to throw him over? This guy ain't too bright, I think.<o:p></o:p> The medics set the jerking Janjaweed down. Disgustedly, a female medic yanks the saliva-slick strap out of his mouth. The medics break open their medical kits. They start pulling bandages back and tending to his wounds. The Janjaweed, panting, stops struggling. The confusion, the wonderment, on the Janjaweed's face as he watches the medics work on him is something to see.<o:p></o:p> The bad guys are the confused ones now. The good guys are not.<o:p></o:p> That's the way it's supposed to be.<o:p></o:p> "Allah loves everybody forever!" Al-Durabi shouts over the turbine roar. "Absolute, unconditional love! And it's all in human action, and always was!"<o:p></o:p> Yeah, Al-Durabi's right. I shoulder my rifle and we continue following Colonel Hendricks below-decks.<o:p></o:p> All in human action, all in human action, and all right under our noses all along.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> #<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> HAMMERFALL<o:p></o:p> We hurtle toward the Earth like rocks. Wind force mashes the skin on my face flat. The faster we drop, the harder we are to shoot, but God, it’s scary to see the ground coming up at us so fast. The metal moth wings on my JDAP cage slide out with hisses of compressed air, and the GPS guidance system takes over. The indicated rate-of-descent on my network visor reaches one hundred kilometers per hour within three seconds. The sound of the Globemaster’s turbojets fade behind us, to be replaced by wind whistling through our cage bars. The cage shifts as the wings make small movements, adjusting my flight path.<o:p></o:p> The battle plan goes to shit right off the bat. Tracers reach for us from the top of our target hill, three delicate phosphorous-red fountains of death wandering around the sky. The enemy is not sound asleep in blissful ignorance. The enemy is wide-awake and waiting for us.<o:p></o:p> "ARGUS, the DZ is hot, repeat, the DZ is hot!" I shout. I pull down the battlefield map and move our DZ one hundred meters further south. My cage bucks as drag flaps deploy on the wings, sending my cage sliding backwards in the air. I check left and right to make certain the rest of my squad’s still with me. They’re where they ought to be, falling alongside me in a perfect horizontal plane. The one-second bell bongs in my ear. Our JDAP cages are about to disengage. I clench my fist around my tagger.<o:p></o:p> The JDAP cage bars clang open as the thrusters go off with a blast like shotguns and yank the cage off my back. My training kicks in, crossing my arms across my chest with the tagger cradled underneath. Grassland rushes up at me like a brown velvet hammer while my chute unfolds from my back. My display shows I’m one hundred meters up falling at one-hundred-fifty kilometers an hour. Drag snatches at my shoulders and pulls my body straight in the air when my chute reaches full extension. I rock back and catch a glimpse of the chute streaming above me like a collapsed balloon. A burst of Semtex micro-charges blows it open at exactly the correct millisecond to jerk me up short bare meters from the grassland floor. I rotate my body ninety degrees left to my direction of travel and go limp. My feet make contact and I disperse the energy of landing along my right side in a tumbling fall. The rest of my stick comes down around me like falling leaves. The JDAP system has done its job.<o:p></o:p> “ARGUS, we’re on the ground,” I say.<o:p></o:p> "Roger," ARGUS says. "Continuous tango-tracking initiated. Twenty-seven tangos targeted in your sector, Sergeant."<o:p></o:p> I unsnap the release latches on my chute harness and let the wind carry it all away. The death-squads are too close to worry with it.<o:p></o:p> "Stay down and prone!” I order. I bring my night-vision goggles down over my network visor. The landscape lights up as if illuminated by a bright green moon. A purple fisherman’s net appears to fall down over the hill as ARGUS overlays the visible landscape with a transparent virtual location grid. Ruby-red squares sprinkle over the net as ARGUS updates tango locations. I count three tangos on the hill in front of us, the ones shooting the sky. “Check your immediate area for tangos! Anybody hurt? Tivoli, you got your tagger?”<o:p></o:p> “Yes, Sergeant, I have my tagger,” Tivoli says.<o:p></o:p> The tangos on the hill continue to rake the sky with random fire.<o:p></o:p> “I don’t think they saw us,” I say. “Contacts! Who’s got contacts in their immediate area?”<o:p></o:p> Silence. I don’t wait. My landing short has created a gap in the assault ring. I've got to close that gap before the bad guys realize it's there and try to escape through it.<o:p></o:p> “Get up, but stay low!” I say. “Mitsui on my right fifty meters, Heinrich right twenty-five, Tivoli, left twenty-five, Malreaux, left fifty, Al-Durabi, cover our six! Watch those assholes on the hill!” I keep my voice down. Sound travels a long way in pre-dawn quiet. <o:p></o:p> My squad spreads out into a skirmish line as I keep an eye on the tangos on the hill. They keep firing random bursts into the air. I’m getting really bad vibes from that. Somehow they know paratroopers are dropping in, and I wonder how they know. We can't tag them from where we are. They're outside the one-hundred-fifty meter range of the Hellfire shells.<o:p></o:p> “All right, stay low and don’t let them see you!" I order. "Squad, advance.”<o:p></o:p> The terrain consists of grass and scrub bushes. We advance crouching, using the bushes for cover. My senses are on high alert, like the computers, drinking in and processing all the data the night has to offer. I hear the grass swishing underneath my jump boots, feel the soft crunch as I step. It’s not looking good in the valley behind the transparent virtual hill. Red squares are moving around in a disciplined fashion. They arrange themselves so quickly into a circular defensive perimeter I realize with a sinking feeling we've been suckered. Somebody has ratted us out, too. The Awakening's meaning requires intelligence to see.<o:p></o:p> The situation goes from bad to worse.<o:p></o:p> "Warning, warning, tangos emerging from camouflage in central valley area and dispersing radially outward," ARGUS says. "Estimate one to two hundred additional tangos."<o:p></o:p> The bad guys are trying a quick-reaction ambush of their own. The virtual grid chooses this precise moment to start flickering. Red squares apparently jump from place to place. ARGUS is lagging. There are so many tangos moving and so much location data coming in it's having trouble keeping up.<o:p></o:p> When we’re fifty meters from the bottom of the hill, the three red squares on top suddenly disappear and re-appear twenty meters down the hill. The tangos are headed towards my squad. Maybe they’ve heard something, maybe they’ve just decided to come hunting, I don’t know. I check the range. One-hundred-twenty meters. Time for an ambush.<o:p></o:p> The ARGUS system detects the threat. The icons flash and “Danger close!” sounds in my ear. I take a nanosecond's pleasure in having beaten ARGUS to it.<o:p></o:p> “Squad, freeze,” I whisper into my mike. I seat my tagger on my hip. “Mitsui, Heinrich, and me. Select your target.”<o:p></o:p> I move my mouse arrow over a red square and click. The square turns yellow, indicating the shell has acquired the tango. A yellow ownership arrow stretches from my ID line to the tango. Identical ownership arrows stretch to the other two tangos, one from Heinrich’s ID line, one from Mitsui’s.<o:p></o:p> “On my order, fire and shift right ten meters,” I say. I look left for a quick check on Tivoli. He's doing the smart thing, moving left away from my launch point.<o:p></o:p> “Fire!” I order, and the Awakening comes to Sudan in triple rockets of fire and lightning that rip the night open. A colossal feeling I don’t have time to analyze wells up in me as the rockets fly away.<o:p></o:p> I haul ass right as fast as I can and throw myself prone, sliding to a stop behind a bush. I twist around and look back. Bullets are splatting into the footprints I left behind and puffing up dirt. On my visor, the Hellfire rockets home in and signal explosion with red-star icons. Distant booms like exploding fireworks echo from the hill.<o:p></o:p> I listen for the screaming. It comes in on cue right behind the fireworks, the sound of people in inhuman torment, slicing through the quiet like a razor.<o:p></o:p> “Welcome to Hell, you murdering bastards,” Al-Durabi says. The chemical agonants coating the RFID chips shot into the tangos' skin have triggered the surrounding nerves into thinking they’re on fire. Right now, the poor damned fools on that hill feel like they’re being branded with a white-hot iron, like they've been dropped right straight into Hell itself. Their red-star icons turn to flashing "CI" icons, combat-ineffective. The screaming stops and the CI icons disappear seconds later. Sleeper units have homed on the activated RFID chips and put the tangos into coma.<o:p></o:p> “Three tangos owned,” I say. ARGUS shows the rest of the hill clear. “Move up and take the hill.”<o:p></o:p> Mitsui is already at the hill’s base on the right. Two ownership arrows stretch from his identity line. Mitsui's a wild man, always pushing the envelope. I bite back the order to halt and let him go. The hill is clear, and we need to close the gap. Instead I trot to catch up with him.<o:p></o:p> “Sergeant-san!” Mitsui sings out. He’s in his element. “Targets acquired! Permission to fire at will!”<o:p></o:p> The virtual display shows tangos advancing in a line up the other side of the hill. ARGUS flashes one for me. It's my suggested target unless I encounter a greater threat. It's doing the same thing for the rest of the squad.<o:p></o:p> “Permission granted,” I say. “Light’em up, Mitsui.”<o:p></o:p> Mitsui fires twice, meter-long tongues of fire illuminating lush green grass around him, goes down behind a bush and squirms away through tall grass while bullets chip twigs from the bush. Mitsui rolls over, plants the butt of his tagger in the dirt and fires again. This terrain is perfect for the little Japanese. He's working it like a pro.<o:p></o:p> "Sergeant-san," Mitsui says. "I will take the far targets. Please to take the close ones."<o:p></o:p> He disappears around the hill crawling and firing. The easiest thing to do is cover his ass like he requested. I select the target ARGUS has suggested and fire. The missile arcs over the hill and out of my sight. I don't wait to confirm the tag but fire on another target ARGUS picks out for me.<o:p></o:p> Again that odd feeling. Squeezing the trigger is nothing, nothing at all. The entire squad opens up around me, filling the night with multiple flame blasts and the acrid smell of solid-rocket propellant. Booms and strobe-light lightning flashes like a miniature thunderstorm come from the hills around the valley as other teams fire their taggers. It's almost like playing a video game. My squad and I fire and fire at the targets ARGUS designates on our network visors without ever coming within visual of whomever we're launching rockets at. My display is so clogged with ownership arrows I can't tell who's tagging which target.<o:p></o:p> The enemy pulls another nasty surprise. The bottom of the hill's other side develops a cloud of red squares like an outbreak of measles.<o:p></o:p> "Sergeant Soldat, tangos emerging from camouflage your sector!" ARGUS says. "Estimate fifty tangos!” The cloud of red merges with the existing tangos and flows up the hill as one group. They're trying a massed suicide charge to overwhelm us. I hear the static sound of their AK's firing at empty air.<o:p></o:p> "Sergeant!" ARGUS cries in its situation-critical voice. "We are unable to reinforce your squad!"<o:p></o:p> It's grassland. No hard cover that will stop a bullet, and we're too close to the enemy to run. We'll only get shot in the back. We're going to have to stand and fight, take the tagger assault system to the redline.<o:p></o:p> “Al-Durabi!” I order. I'm going to have to leave our rear exposed. It's going to take all we have to stop this attack. “Drop our six and join the line. Squad, weapons free, fire at will. Spread out and advance up the hill. Tag these bastards before they come over the top!”<o:p></o:p> The cloud of red surges up the hill.<o:p></o:p> "Here they come!" I shout to my squad. "Maintain firing discipline! Select your targets!” To lead the way, I select a target and launch a rocket. "Put these stupid bastards down!"<o:p></o:p> My squad and I meld into a machine, hosing tangos swiftly and efficiently, lost in the combat-eternity confusion of heavy fighting. Our tagger launches merge into a single continuous rolling artillery barrage. The idiots charging up the hill's other side don't have the slightest chance. We pour Hellfire onto the enemy, nailing bad guys up, down, and sideways, lining them up and knocking them down like ducks in a shooting gallery.<o:p></o:p> We drop every single charging tango before they're halfway up the hill.<o:p></o:p> And that's it. We're out of tangos.<o:p></o:p> My mind returns to normal as the firing stops. The quiet is sudden and electric, leavened by far-off screaming. My ears are ringing from tagger shots. We're three-quarters of the way up the hill. We've cleared our assigned sector and ARGUS is no longer suggesting targets for my squad, although firing continues from the other hills. I trip over something soft and look down to see one of the first tangos we tagged, unconscious with a Sleeper unit sitting on his chest like a robot gargoyle.<o:p></o:p> On my virtual display, the other side of the hill is coated with unmoving “CI” icons. A sense of triumph swells in my chest. Al-Durabi speaks for the entire squad.<o:p></o:p> “Fuck with us, baby,” he says, “and get your eternal-being ass smashed flat before you can blink.”<o:p></o:p> “Hooah, Al-Durabi,” I say.<o:p></o:p> My display shows Mitsui's on the other side, at the bottom of the hill facing the valley, continuing to push the envelope, maneuvering and firing at anything within range. I decide to leave him there to cover our flank.<o:p></o:p> "Secure this hill," I order. The sun is coming up, which through NVG makes it look like the air is filling with pearly green fog. I pause and turn my night vision gain down. The fog effect decreases. "Reload and spread out around the crown of the hill facing the valley. Don’t get on top of the hill.” My magazine’s almost empty. I eject it and load in a fresh one.<o:p></o:p> I never see the machete.<o:p></o:p> Night-vision goggles have the fault of washing out fine detail. It’s worse when the light intensity is increasing. What I take as a patch of dead grass springs up in front of me and what feels like a steel rod hits me out of nowhere square across my chest armor. I'm flat on my back before I realize something’s wrong. The tango looms over me, so close I hear his robes rustle as he raises his machete in both hands and takes aim at my head for another shot. Bright green sunlight runs quicksilver down the upraised blade.<o:p></o:p> "Sergeant!" Tivoli shouts. "Get away!"<o:p></o:p> I scuttle away on my back sideways like a panicked crab and Tivoli fires. This close, the tagger shell sounds like a bomb going off. I cringe, expecting to feel RFID chips piercing my flesh and setting me on fire.<o:p></o:p> The tango arches his back, opens his mouth wide to expose bad teeth and screams like an air-raid siren. Tivoli has fired his shell to go off behind the tango. The tango drops to the ground and rolls around screaming and clawing at his back. A Sleeper unit lands next to his head and burps anesthetic-loaded ice needles at the distended carotid arteries in his neck. The tango goes from epileptic spasms to instant rag-doll. The Sleeper folds its wings and goes into monitoring mode to keep the tango safe. I get up knowing I've been putting too much faith in technology.<o:p></o:p> "Tivoli," I say, panting. A thin ruby-red line of laser light winks over the grass around me, Tivoli checking out the area with his tagger’s manual target-acquisition subsystem. The doped-up tango's chest heaves once, and he starts snoring like a rusty buzzsaw. "Thanks."<o:p></o:p> "In service, Sergeant," Tivoli replies. He snaps the laser off with satisfaction.<o:p></o:p> "Sergeant!” It's Heinrich, standing on the hilltop beautifully silhouetted against the rising sun. He’s a target visible for kilometers. To help the enemy see him, he’s waving his tagger over his head like a madman. "They're setting up to kill the friendlies in the corral complex!"<o:p></o:p> "What? Get off the top of the hill before you get shot, goddammit!”<o:p></o:p> "Up here, Sergeant! Raus!”<o:p></o:p> “Heinrich, I’m coming! But get off the top of this goddamn hill!”<o:p></o:p> I double-time around the crown of the hill and find Heinrich waiting for me. He points at the valley’s center. The valley is studded with Sleeper units standing like vultures over unmoving forms. The haunted German is practically jumping up and down with frustration.<o:p></o:p> “They’ve got a technical, Sergeant! A truck with a fifty!”<o:p></o:p> I’m calling up the latest photos of the valley center.<o:p></o:p> “Heinrich, I don’t see anything.”<o:p></o:p> “Sergeant, turn that shit off and look with your own eyes!”<o:p></o:p> I flip the NVG and network visor up and take a look. The rising sun is in my eyes, making it difficult to see very far. Then I see it about two hundred meters away, a decrepit truck painted the same vivid green as the grass, when the tango raises the loading arm on the fifty-caliber mounted in the back.<o:p></o:p> “He’s loading the weapon, Sergeant!”<o:p></o:p> The fifty’s barrel is pointed in the direction of the corral complex. He’s fifteen seconds at most away from firing.<o:p></o:p> “Fuck! Tivoli, Heinrich, with me! Go-go-go!”<o:p></o:p> We go crashing down the hill and sprint like madmen toward the valley center, jumping over bodies and Sleeper units. The grass whips at our feet and slows us down. Tivoli’s faster than Heinrich and me. He gradually leaves us behind, legs pumping so fast his feet are a blur. I run flat-out watching for the fifty’s barrel to move.<o:p></o:p> The fifty’s barrel swings up to point directly at the corrals.<o:p></o:p> "Down and fire!" I gasp.<o:p></o:p> The three of us come to a sliding stop and collapse on our knees as the tango pulls the loading lever back to chamber the first round. He’s letting the lever go when we bring our taggers up. I don’t know what the distance is, but it’s going to have to be enough. There’s no time to let our BC’s acquire him. We're going to have to use manual mode. I'm turning my targeting laser on when the tango leans over and squints down the fifty's sights. I scope the tango up, put the laser dot on his back, and squeeze the trigger. Our taggers all fire simultaneously. The combined roar batters my ears. It's like standing in the mouth of an erupting volcano.<o:p></o:p> We're watching the rockets home in when two tangos pop up from behind the truck’s engine. They level AK-47's at us just as our shells detonate behind the gunner's back. My spine turns to ice.<o:p></o:p> "Hit the dirt!" I shout, and go prone in the grass knowing it won't be enough. We have to acquire before we can fire, and there's no time. We are helpless and exposed before the other two tangos. I roll over in what I know will be a vain effort to avoid getting shot.<o:p></o:p> I hear the screams as the shells go off. Somebody has ambushed the other two tangos. I bring my network visor down. Ownership arrows are coming in from off-screen. No bullets hit us.<o:p></o:p> “Cease fire, cease fire!” ARGUS says. “All tangos are down, repeat, all tangos are down. Assault teams, secure your sectors.”<o:p></o:p> I hear a click over my headset.<o:p></o:p> “Bit of a sticky wicket that one was, ay, mates?” says a cheerful female English voice on our squad channel. “Sergeant Clarke ‘ere. Saw you lot running, saw the bugger on the fifty, saw the other two setting up to ambush you, figured you had the fifty, so I had me squad mates take out the other two.”<o:p></o:p> “Very quick thinking,” I say. “Saved our asses. A gold star on your paycheck, Sergeant.”<o:p></o:p> “In service, mate,” Sergeant Clarke says, and clicks out.<o:p></o:p> "Sweet María, Mother of God," Tivoli says, breathing in huge gulps. "When those tangos came up from behind the engine, I was sure we were dead.” There's not the slightest trace of fear in his voice.<o:p></o:p> "Not today, Tivoli," I say.<o:p></o:p> I'm becoming a connoisseur of screaming. I can pick out the one we tagged with three shells. He sounds like a man being flayed alive. Thrashing sounds are coming from the truck. I raise my head and look. So does Tivoli. We catch glimpses of the tango doing unbelievable flips in the truck bed, like a fish on dry ground.<o:p></o:p> “Ouch,” Tivoli says. “That’s gotta sting. I hope the Sleepers have as much trouble seeing him as we did."<o:p></o:p> “The fifty didn’t fire, the fifty didn't fire,” Heinrich says in monumental relief. “We tagged him in time.”<o:p></o:p> I roll over and rise dripping sweat and grass. <o:p></o:p> “Squad, stay alert,” I say. I raise my network visor and look around. After my experience on the hill, I don't have quite the trust in ARGUS I once did. “Check your areas manually to make sure they’re clear. Keep your taggers ready. You might still get killed here today.”<o:p></o:p> I check the time as Heinrich and Tivoli rise up and stretch out the tension of battle. Start to finish, this combat eternity lasted all of thirty minutes. Heat from the risen sun touches my face like a breath from a fire. In an hour, this valley will be an oven.<o:p></o:p> "Sergeant," Heinrich says. "Permission to check on the friendlies. Maybe these assholes did something to them during the battle. They might need medics. We have to help them, Sergeant. It's what eternal beings are supposed to do."<o:p></o:p> "Sure," I say. "Permission granted. Hell, I'll go with you.” Heinrich takes off like a shot. "Tivoli, help them secure the hill."<o:p></o:p> "Yes, Sergeant," Tivoli says. He trudges off to the hill. I reach into my vest pocket and click over to the command channel.<o:p></o:p> "Sergeant Soldat to Colonel Smythe," I say. Colonel Smythe is our Australian company commander.<o:p></o:p> "Colonel Smythe 'ere. Be quick about it, mite, I'm busy."<o:p></o:p> "Colonel," I say. "Corporal Klaus Heinrich of First Squad spotted a technical in time to prevent a massacre. Request he be given the honor of raising our victory flag, sir."<o:p></o:p> "Taken under advisement, Sergeant," Colonel Smythe says. <o:p></o:p> "Colonel, sir?" I ask. "Casualties? KIA's?"<o:p></o:p> Colonel Smythe exhales, a long, slow, relieved sigh. On my back, a very painful, very weary burden of killing I've been carrying for a time beyond memory loosens.<o:p></o:p> "No KIA's, Sergeant," he says. "On either side. Nothing the docs can't fix. In service."<o:p></o:p> "In service, sir," I reply, and click back to the squad channel. A feeling hits me like a cotton sledgehammer, that odd sensation I felt in combat magnified a thousand-fold. Now, I have time to analyze it.<o:p></o:p> Relief.<o:p></o:p> I haven't killed anybody. Wasn’t even trying to kill anybody.<o:p></o:p> My knees weaken. I stumble and nearly go to the ground as a sense of liberation grows. I haven't killed anybody.<o:p></o:p> I haven't killed anybody, I haven't killed anybody! I breathe deep the pure air of freedom. I’m not going to walk away from this one with more killing on my back, not going to be haunted in my dreams at night by the faces of men I killed here today. None of us are. There is a lightness in my step as I go after Heinrich.<o:p></o:p> This time, this time, there is no blood on my hands.<o:p></o:p> Heinrich is staring through a barbed-wire fence as tall as he is. Coils of razor wire are strung along the top of the fence. I stop beside Heinrich. The death squad separated their victims by sex. The corral is filled with dozens of African women of all ages, clumped together in a rainbow mound of brightly colored full-length dresses as far away from Heinrich as they can get, staring at him in wide-eyed fright. Battered women, with lumpy faces, black eyes, split lips, torn dresses. Comprehension hits me a blow to my stomach, driving the air from my lungs.<o:p></o:p> This death camp is also a rape camp.<o:p></o:p> Seeing females deliberately hurt is a severe psychic shock to me, a quirk of my personality. I can’t stand it. It makes me sick to my stomach, weakens me. I have to grab the fence to steady myself. The young women have taken the worst of it. One young girl's eyes are swollen to mere slits. A very deep part of me flails around in impotent rage. The assault of innocent women is a gross violation of every code I have ever lived by.<o:p></o:p> "Sergeant," Heinrich says. His pain is a knife in his voice. "They're afraid of me!"<o:p></o:p> "Heinrich," I gasp through a daze. I swallow. It's hard to talk. "We’re wearing body armor, helmets, network antennas, network visors, night-vision goggles, and carrying these ugly weapons. These women are primitives. To them, we look like a pair of insect demons. Take your helmet off."<o:p></o:p> I sling my tagger on my back, take my helmet off, and try to clip it to my belt. My fingers feel thick, and I nearly drop it. I have to do it one slow step at a time. Heinrich clips his helmet to his belt and looks back at the women in hope. He blinks in the raw African sunlight and looks shockingly young.<o:p></o:p> Seeing our faces is reassuring. A few of the bolder ones take a tentative step or two out of the crowd. I cast about in my mind for some way to let them know it's over, it's all over, and nobody’s going to hurt them any more. I raise my empty hands in a ridiculously clumsy effort to show we mean them no harm. The wind brings the smell of blood and filth. A miasma of evil hangs in the air, stifling, almost overpowering. It's difficult for me to think through the haze in my mind and the pain in my guts.<o:p></o:p> But Heinrich comes through for us both. The barbed wire is stapled to metal posts. Heinrich squats and wraps his hands around a post. In his huge hands, the post looks like a toothpick. He plucks the post out of the ground and backs up. The barbed wire pulls away from the remaining posts with a twanging of metal staples. Heinrich moves like an unstoppable force of Nature. I have to back up to avoid having barbed wire dragged across my face. When Heinrich has destroyed the entire fence section, he raises the post high, throws it to the ground and stomps on it.<o:p></o:p> A wailing of thanksgiving goes up from the women to tear the heart out of your chest. They rush out of the corral heedless of the barbed wire on the ground. I realize the women don’t know we’re here to rescue them. They likely haven't even heard about the Awakening. They have no idea why we're here or where we come from.<o:p></o:p> Heinrich stands in front of the women pouring out of the corral, a look on his face like a lost child. He stretches his empty hands out to the women like he’s pleading for forgiveness.<o:p></o:p> “My hands are clean!” he blurts out, his voice rough. Tears are running down his face. “My hands are clean!” Despite their pain, the women respond to him as if he were a hurt child of their own. They surround him in swirls of thick multi-colored cloth, touching his hands, reaching up to touch his face, trying to express with simple human acts their gratitude for Heinrich’s setting them free. Heinrich raises his hands high and displays his clean hands to the crowd. “Never again!” In an act of profound rejection, he reaches out over their heads and folds his snow-white hands around their charcoal-black ones as gently as if they were flowers, making a human contact, making a human connection, with as many as he can, until there’s no doubt who’s been saved.<o:p></o:p> <span style=""&g