By Bayne MacGregor
I know a dirty little secret.
I was in the last war you know, the futile one. I was there amongst the last who would stand up and die for freedom. I was one of those idealistic fools who railed against the police state and the total loss of privacy. I flew in the cold crisp night through waves of steel and metal pierced skies. I was one of the unlucky ones who lived to see the world that came to pass. Even capture, interrogation and public execution would have been better than to see the zombification of mankind. I was shot down in the first wave, that’s the only way I figure that I survived, the one that hit me was too busy dogfighting to come after me when I ejected. Only a handful of us ever made it to the ground, all the others perforated by the need to leave no witnesses or heroes.
I can still picture the moments before launch, all proud and grim, trying to be professional and desperate. Singing our song about Orwell and piggies as we hurtled into the heavens to do or die for democracy. The stink of moulded rubber and rarefied air in my sinuses as gravity, centrifugal force and my pressurised suit fought for control of the blood flow to my brain. We were fools of course, one symbolic stab at the monolith. Sure some of us spoke about David and Goliath but we all new it was too late. Still we dared hope that we could spark something of, catalyse the masses. Something like that anyway.
I still have the scars from the shards and shrapnel that cut across my back that moment of horrid rebirth as I was blasted from my metal and glass cocoon into the uncaring sunrise. The force did something to my ankles, they never have stopped aching since. Maybe some of us would have had some sort of a chance but we were too much of a threat. Or maybe we were just an opportunity for them to test their latest little toys. We were going up against the state of the military art but we were innovative, we thought we were prepared for that. We had punched through much of what we had expected to face, we thought we were home and hosed. Then the new machines unveiled themselves and I fell slowly to earth as the dance of death went on about me.
I came down hard in the edge of the surf, the dawning sun turned the foam a morbid pink, the sea was fittingly coloured like blood as I struggled free of my seat and staggered onto the beach. I stared at the sky for some time, it did not occur to me to wonder why I was not picked up the instant I fell to earth. I was too possessed by the evil beauty of the gentle orange-blue sky blossoming with fire and debris as swallow shaped forms darted amongst my friends reducing each to lifeless matter with cruel calculation. By some wonderful irony somehow someone managed to injure a shibboleth, the metal forked crescent swooping down amidst a trail of dissipating gasses to fling itself to earth as if to strike at the wellspring of life in revenge for our audacity at her defence. The swooping form plummeted straight down towards the ocean, curving at the last in some vain attempt to fulfil it’s former intentions, denying it’s injury. It screamed over the water, force spewing fountains into the air in honour of it’s wake. Till, momentum no longer holding it aloft it tried to merge with the beach ahead of me and failed. I advanced upon this colossal sky-whale corpse, it’s twisted titanium ribs exposed to the sky, it’s lifeblood spilling explosively upon the ground. I climbed suicidal upon the metal carcass. I strove to see the ghost in the machine.
If only I could have taken the information to someone, got it out to the masses without interdiction. It may
have made all the struggle to survive worthwhile. All the fighting and hiding, the lying and cheating, the
man I murdered for his bar-code identity. We had known of the advances in remote warfare, of the early robot spyplanes like darkstar and predator. It made awful sense for war to be fought with machines. You removed the pilot’s moral tepid view to kill and all those crying mothers and funerals that stung the ballot box like an africanised honey bee. Of course it the political expedience made it inevitable that the purely mechanical mode of warfare would take over. Then of course a rival got it too and the usual race was on. They all needed a pilot that was remorseless, uncaring. With speed of decision and a knowledge of nothing beyond it’s function and orders.
And so it was that I crept upon the back of the aluminium skinned bird to it’s cranial portion to view this
murderous abacus that had swept a tide of fire across our noble sacrifice. But the pink fluid gushing out like
a severed artery was not the semi-conductor coolant I expected for it was warm and smelled of salt. And
the twisted and buckled mechanics access hatch I forced open did not open up on boards of silicon, webs of
optic fibres and blinking led’s.
The dirty secret was exposed.
In horror I recoiled, screaming in abject repulsion I turned and ran down the shattered wing and over the
yellowing sand. I ran and ran and have never stopped running. We should have known they had no conscience, they had done wretched things before. Yet nothing could describe that whole betrayal that clutched my heart with talons of madness when I looked down on the thing inside that cracked glass compartment. Supported by sponge like buttresses, impaled by thousands of wires and cables, floating in it’s synthetic fluids, it’s form remained hideously and instantaneously recognisable. It’s entire existence had been inside that glass bubble, fed on simulators and combat training. A futile, monstrous, repugnant existence. I will never, can never, should never blot out that crime from my eyes.
That wretched, disembodied, human, brain.
