Part 3, War and Peace: Chapter 37

Background color
Font
Font size
Line height

***  Author's note: Here we are at the third and final part of No Life to Lose. I can't express how happy I am that we've been able to experience this much of the story together, and I hope you'll continue with me to the end.

From here on, things get more and more intense. As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you've read. And if you're enjoying, please vote, to help others find and enjoy this story as well.

Thank you so much.  ***

Chapter 37

The explanation took five minutes.

James sat in silence for another five afterward, letting August chew through the implications, her jaw slightly unhinged and her eyebrows halfway up her scalp.

It was an incredible accusation, but not unsupported.

August's own scrapbook. The final page had been a three-line paragraph, a bare skeleton of an outline of a profile on Sara the Scythe, containing almost no information. Sara had no relatives, no job, and no past that August had been able to find despite an exhaustive search. Why?

Because Sara had no relatives, no job, and no past.

More than that, shepherding Sara through acquiring her pet had been a showcase for her manifold eccentricities: the stunted empathy, the feats of memory and mathematics, the sitting for hours without moving just because she had been told to. Add her inability to attend any events that didn't take place in the game, and you had something deeply suspicious.

"It's ... so..." August began, trailing off into stumped silence.

"Unbelievable?"

"I mean, I see your point ... sort of. But there's a lot of bloody strange people in the world. Being a savant doesn't make her an AI."

"There's another thing."

Sara's self-professed love for Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Orson Scott Card and Piers Anthony. James had spent a day researching their collected works. All had written extensively of artificial intelligences, alien intelligences, or both, and explored the struggles of human and non-human intelligences to understand one another. Sara had even named her pet after Valentine Michael Smith—Heinlein's human who was raised as a Martian, professed peace and love between races, and was martyred for it.

"And her favorite movie is The Matrix. She likes the Oracle best."

"The Oracle?"

"The literal mother of all artificial intelligences."

***

The next morning, James had back-to-back shifts. By the time he walked through the door of his apartment and wearily kicked his shoes off, it was after 5:30 PM. Looking at the clock triggered the memory of Casey's text, imploring him to join whatever event was taking place in half an hour.

James sank into the couch with a groan. But making Casey happy by attending would cost him nothing. In spite of everything—because of everything—he needed to take hold of those moments and make them count.

He got up and showered, bolted down a frozen dinner and made it online with ten minutes to spare. Casey must have been staring at her phone again, because his pocket was ringing almost before he coalesced.

"Hey."

"You came, you came! Oh man, hurry, it's gonna start!"

"What is?"

"The thing."

"That's not descriptive."

"Like ... I dunno what it is. All we know's it's startin, so we're in Falgarde waitin. Me 'n Kana canceled band practice for this! Come quick!"

"Will do."

Casey provided James generously with imprecise directions, involving a lot of like and sorta and y'know, by the thing. The destination turned out to be Falgarde's town square, to which she managed to direct him without ever once using the words town or square.

"Prez! Over here! Prez!" Casey was surrounded by people he knew, waving her arms wildly to get his attention, grinning so wide it threatened to swallow her face.

Though Casey had never been the leader of the group, she was certainly the magnetic center, gathering people through the sheer power of positive energy.

James raised a hand in greeting and headed over.

***

The Belleville Grand's bar and grill was as good a place as any for an after-event party. A wild profusion of appetizers, jugs of beer and decanters of wine populated every nearby surface. NPC servers hovered, whisking away empty plates and returning with full ones, attentive to every need.

Nevertheless, it became a chore for James just to stay at the table. There was nowhere for him to look. Seeing Donald made him feel guilty. Seeing Sara raised the question of what to do about her. Seeing Kanade was worst of all; their peculiar standoff couldn't continue, but that didn't mean he wanted to tackle it right this second.

That left precious few chances for simple distraction. Julia was a possibility, but she turned out to be a melancholy drunk. The last thing James needed was some maudlin story of growing up as an orphan in London. If she was an orphan. Or even from London. He just didn't want depressing, and depressing was written all over her face.

That left only Casey, who was right next to him. Convenient if he wanted a conversation, which he didn't. Awkward if he wanted to observe her just for the sake of not looking at the others, because the unsubtle angle of view gave him away. Not that Casey was in condition to notice. She was sloshed, swaying in her chair like she was captaining a dinghy on the ocean.

It was strange for a teenager to even be drinking, a peculiarity of Shattered Land which lawmakers had either overlooked or hadn't gotten around to yet. Because the impairment would vanish upon logging out, apparently regulating it was not a pressing issue.

When Casey finally noticed James watching, she raised her glass in inebriated salute and grinned widely, then frowned.

"W's fun, but I's kin'a pissed we din't getta kick more butt," she said, clinging to the far side of understandable. "Y'know?"

"Personally, I'm happy we didn't have to."

Casey looked shocked for a few seconds, processing capacity reduced to pocket calculator mode. "F'got ya dun like fightin. Y'know though, sometimes ya gotta fight. "

That was interesting, coming from the person who had once upon a time told James not to fight if he didn't enjoy it. "Isn't walking away an option?"

"Not al'ys." The rigid set of Casey's jaw boasted utter conviction. "Gotta do what ya gotta. Somebody's gotta fight."

"It's just a game."

"Life ain't a game..." Casey lost her militance, slumping over the table and picking at a seam in the wood.

Kanade glanced up from her conspicuous withdrawal. She had probably come to the same realization James just had: there was a person in Casey's life who didn't have the option of backing down from a fight.

"Hey, let's sing." Kanade stood, walking over to the bar and calling out to the head waiter, a slickly dressed NPC who bent his ear to listen. Nodding, he pressed a few switches beneath the bar, causing a massive screen to descend from the ceiling and hang in the air.

The ambient noise level rose as the tables all around buzzed with speculation. The enormous screen added to the din, blaring something from a random news channel as the head waiter scrambled to get it switched over to karaoke.

Then Kanade said, "Wait, turn it up," even though it was already too loud, and then she added, "don't change the channel."

"—ow, live from our satellite cam over Islamabad. The situation is bedlam. A faction of the military is camped out in front of Pakistan's governmental offices. A few tanks are visible, and that dark column we believe to be comprised of the army's regular infantry. The Prime Minister has been captured and the President reportedly executed. The UN peacekeeping forces working to calm the unrest have been cut off from reinforcement. It remains unclear what their condition is and what orders they may be acting under."

"Pakistan?" Casey said, drunkenness miraculously receding. "This is Pakistan?" Her eyes were glued to the screen.

"I've just been told that Don Rivers in the studio has correspondent and retired colonel Harry McAbee on the line. Colonel McAbee is an expert on international military intervention. Don?"

The view switched to a generic news studio with a blandly good-looking anchor behind the desk. "Thank you, Connie. Colonel, hello. To casual observers, this coup in Pakistan sprang out of nowhere. Can you tell us what brought this on and what's going to be done in regards to our peacekeeping troops?"

After a noticeable time delay, a gravelly voice responded between crackles of static and noise. "Don, the situation is unusual in that even the experts—myself included—were taken basically by surprise. There has been civil unrest in Pakistan for some time, due mainly to economic factors and clashes between religious factions. But there was no glaring indicator that unrest was migrating into the military to the extent of generating a coup. It feels as if some outside force is moving events here in the country.

"As for our troops on the ground, White House policy and the UN mandate in these situations has been neutrality. But troop mobility is limited with rebel forces controlling the major highways. It will be difficult to get help in without resorting to military action."

"Colonel, if neutrality is declared, what would the likely insurgent response be?"

"The faction usurping control is anti-American, and for that matter, anti-foreign interest. One of the biggest motivators for their current action is the intent to force UN troops out of the country."

"Will the insurgents then facilitate American withdrawal?"

There was a long pause during which the only noise was the pops and clicks of eight thousand miles worth of static on the line. "I find it more likely, Don, that the insurgents will claim that by simply being on their soil, we are committing an act of war. This is a fight or flight scenario in which flight is not an option."

"Thank you, Colonel. This has been Don Rivers in the studio."

Just one of those situations that cropped up every so often in the news, everyone pinned to their couches for a few days of breaking updates before moving on to the next celebrity scandal.

Except those for whom the conflict had personal relevance.

James looked at Casey.

She was staring at the screen, but her eyes were blank. Her hands lay limp and open on the table. Without combat gauntlets, her slender fingers and wrists looked small and uncertain.

Now was the perfect time for some trite superficiality like I'm sure your brother will be fine. Casey was just the naive, optimistic girl to smile and nod in agreement, almost believing it, even with that ghostly pale face. But a gentle lie wouldn't come.

Casey was the one who spoke, not to anyone in particular, just to the air. "See." Her open palms clenched into fists on the table, so tight that her knuckles burned whiter than her face. "Sometimes ya gotta fight."

***

James lay awake on the couch deep into the night.

Pakistan felt personal. The look on Casey's face had been enough to drive home that he was wrapped up in something that might be related. In the worst case where UCC was involved ... it wasn't just affecting the other side of the planet anymore.

It sounded like pure paranoia, even alone in the middle of the night. Maybe in trying to save August from herself, he had instead become her—chasing shadows and nothing, almost deranged, unwilling to let go.

So be it. James could expend a little more of his existence on a pursuit most would call pointless. That would be nothing new.

He had no life to lose.

***

James took Friday off work. There was an itch in his brain, pieces of the puzzle knitting together outside conscious reach. He needed to bring those pieces to light.

When he called August, however, it went to voicemail.

After three hours on the internet finding nothing and rehashing the same thoughts until they seeped out his ears, James called August again. This time it rang through, but she didn't answer. He stared at the phone with creeping dissatisfaction.

Another hour of research went by in an uneasy crawl. He was hungry, but there was a rock in his gut. Instead of getting up and foraging in the fridge, he leaned back into his chair and closed his eyes.

Breathe in peace, breathe out everything.

As a child, James had often been too contemplative and easily worried. His mother had helped him develop techniques and mind games as instruments of relaxation. Many James had outgrown over the years, but the simple act of thinking of nothing, bringing in pure air and expelling all his concerns, had never left him.

His phone rang.

"Sorry sorry," August said, as soon as he clicked on. "Forgot I had my phone off, and when I turned it back on, the ringer was set to bloody silent."

"It's fine."

"Anywho, we dug up a few juicy bits. You've got to see it."

"What do you mean, we?"

"Could you come over? There's someone wants to meet you."

You are reading the story above: TeenFic.Net