Hope for Hope

By “Dragoon” a.k.a. Matt McConnell

Atop the crag there sat a dragon, watching the world pass beneath him. He was watching, waiting, for something, none know what, and hoping. He was hoping for something, something that wasn’t coming, and thinking back on the time when he moved, and flew, and did things because of who he was and not what he was…

One day, many years ago, he was “created”, the first of his kind, the first of a new age of intellectual honesty and prosperity. He vaguely remembers his first years, the memories of the time following his birth, back when there were beings… soft ones, his creators… maybe called humans or something like that… but whatever they were, they were his creators, they were inferior. Apparently, they realized their mistake of making something better than themselves too late, they ran the wheel too fast, and got crushed by it.

Ahh… the day I was born. In old world reckoning it would have been 2050, give or take a decade. Isn’t it amazing what one can remember when one thinks about it? I remember the cold sterile labs quite distinctly…

“He’s alive!” Shouted the ecstatic scientist to his comrade, “We’ve done it, we’ve created a new SPECIES, and this one should be intelligent!”

“Wow, that’s quite a graduate project.” Commented his friend.

“Yep, isn’t it beautiful?” replied the first.

“Hmm… yes, in a manner of speaking.”

“Wait until I tell the dean about this! He’ll crap his pants!” and with that, the first scientist left the room where I was born. He always said my memory was amazing, although I think it is only average, besides, those things were always forgetting things, such short sighted beings.

Well, a few years later I was about half grown, and speaking quite fluently when I remembered what he had said on my birth and thought about it. It made sense, in a way, considering how those humans and their minds worked, that they would find the beginning of the end to be so amazing, like it was some beautiful thing.

We were known as “dragons” although I don’t quite know why, as we weren’t really like the pictures they had in their silly books. We lacked those stupid, useless, talons on our feet, and the non-retractable and ludicrously large claws on our hands, not to mention the HUGE size, that wasn’t practical at all. Quickly we took over the niches as engineers, due to our memories, which were, by human standards, all genius and our mathematical abilities.

Before long there was an uprising against our kind, by the humans who believed that this was “their world” and that we should quietly go into second-class citizenship. Needless to say we didn’t go willingly, and there was a rebellion. Some of their kind actually joined with us to fight their own, which was odd, considering that (as I see it) they had nothing to gain by fighting on our side. Mostly those that were with us could be categorized, if that is possible, as all non-“pure” humans, or rather all humans with some non-human genes, also known as “muties” or, more correctly transhumans.

I remember the war well, we were definitely outnumbered, but we had time to prepare, as we were fairly well divided to begin with along certain borders. I was enlisted to the service of a makeshift militia of my species, and we prepared with our electromag rifles for the upcoming conflict. According to the human charts of accuracy we were only little better than the average human at the use of the weapons, must have been a flaw in our construction based on the human portion of our genes. Then there was the fact that most of the world was a semi-suburban sprawl, with inhabited territory under umbrellas of solar panels, not complete, but almost all covering, like trees, which were in the areas not covered by the panels.

We made the first strike, upon hearing news of the enemy’s preparation to get out their ancient “world destroying” technology, or nuclear weapons, relics of the past, best forgotten in a civilized world. Our first attack crippled their mobility, especially their long distance transportation methods, like trains or “subways” as they were called, as they were underground mostly. I was in one of the first strikes, but my mission was different, I worked with a few close friends to capture their “nuclear” weapons. We flew in under radar, but above the range at which they would normally be able to hit us with normal sight based ground weapons, and only met mild resistance in our journey, a sniper somewhere tried to hit us at a distance, but our newly fixed HUD programming allowed us to see where he was, and lay down enough suppressive fire to keep him/her, as I don’t know what its sex was, from continuing to fire on us, not a hard deal, and actually we were surprised by how easy it was to approach within about 5 miles of their biggest, most powerful weapon. After 5 miles we had heard there would be MUCH stepped up firepower, humans seem to like arbitrary numbers like “5” for some reason. Anyway, the ground path was much more difficult going.

We moved slowly along, keeping relatively low to the ground and using only the scanners that we were told would probably not incite attention, mostly things above and below their usual sensor pick-up range, like x-ray scanning (used very little, and on the lower end of its frequency) and extra low radio beams, as well as all passive scanners, as they aren’t easily detectable. We began by splitting up, so that the loss of one wouldn’t necessarily compromise the mission. The first thing I noticed as I got away from the group was the amount of radiation the human equipment put out, they must be using many years old technology, and then I remembered the reason why. The designer of the weapon technology had built in a wireless key backdoor to their weapons that would allow certain types of scanners when modified a special way sent out a certain signal they would actually RESPOND, something that usually doesn’t happen with these scanners as they were designed with hardened circuits. I saw a human ahead, sitting, and having a meal break, they seem to like to eat often, a definite weakness in war. I snuck up behind him for the silent takedown, so that his sensors wouldn’t warn the rest of our presence, as they were all modified, as an afterthought, to use EKG scans of brain activity so that they would go off if any change in brain activity took place, especially if they went flat line. So, I managed to make it within about 5’ of his back before his overactive scanners picked up my imperfectly masked heat or something like that, and grabbed for his gun. I was there first, and was alarmed hearing his head alarm signal going off, as I thought “oh shit I’ve blown my cover”. I used standard non-lethal takedown technique on him, a melee technique, best described as a kind of pressure point touch which took him down quickly and quietly, and was non-lethal with barely any affect on his health, other than putting him down for a very long time, usually at least a day if left unresuscitated after which time he could die of slow heart action or wake up. He was down for the count, and resting like a hatchling, quite a funny sight to see humans like that, especially when they are in full combat gear. As I was unarming him, I took his HUD, even if it was a bit awkward, and checked it for his battle group’s radio frequency, and input it into my own, and then scanned it passively, to hear the following discussion:

“Alpha is down sir!”

“Damn, call for backup… <sounds of firing, electromagnetic weapons>”

“Can’t do that sir, our r-<breaks up>”

“Well, regroup men, meet at the bunker.”

“Affirmative sir”

“Yes sir”

“I’ll be… SHIT!”

The sound of a loud alarm go off in my head, as I hit the ground no less than 2m away from my former location. Thank Darwin for this armor… gunshots around me, they have seen me, that means… <the tree he is under begins to fall> Needless to say, I made it out of that situation, by rolling over, and opening suppressive fire, and calling for backup on my ladio or laser radio, which is failing. The suppressive fire did little as I was sitting up on the ground, and had very little cover from behind which to fire, except for the pine, but it wasn’t really “cover” because all of our weapons could fire through it, so I was basically out in the open, with NO functioning electronics to help me, or at least none in my suit at the moment as the HUD was malfunctioning due to the impact of the pellet. I decided, rather quickly, that the best way to go would be away, so I crawled the fastest crawl I’ve ever crawled, and managed to escape the fire that was soon laid down as soon as the human realized I wasn’t killed. My stealth suit functions were also broken I soon realized as the fire grew closer and closer to me, so I popped up and fired a burst at the human, and must have gotten incredibly lucky, as I hit her, and she was down, and probably dead. I made my way back away from the bunker and waited, and tried to fix my electronics under the cover of the fallen tree. It took a few minutes, but quickly the armor was functioning again, and I was running diagnostics on it. I discovered that even though I had fixed the HUD, there were other broken parts to the suit, like the main power source, and parts of its bullet-tracing program, which allows us to determine the origin of a bullet by its path. It was also missing some parts necessary to diagnose the rest of the stealth subsystem and its backup battery was at about 75%. I checked the ladio, and found that it worked, albeit with hindered transmission.

“Team, report in.”

“Beta wolf here”

“Delta wolf here”

“Ok, how many have we gotten so far?”

“Beta wolf, three, over”

“Delta wolf, all quiet here, over”

That was enough of an assurance to me. I knew where they were massed, and I was going to move on that position…

“Beta wolf, stay put, we’re gonna help you flank them. Delta wolf, stay where you are, I’ll be there shortly and I’ll tell you what to do when I get there.”

I began to make my way around to delta, and we made our way around the base together, being careful not too get too close to the glowing hotspot of enemy activity, I could see since my HUD was working again, mostly. Near the “front” of the bunker I found what I expected, some guards in front of the base scanning the bushes feverishly trying to find us.

“Ok, GO TEAM!”

We opened fire on those guards, and they didn’t stand a chance, we were under cover and only putting a very minimal face towards them, whereas they were, rather stupidly, standing in the open. They fell rapidly under the hail, firing back at the brush where their computers saw our bullets originating from, and one actually hit delta, disabling him. Then they were all down, either twitching from non-fatal, but highly concussive damage to their armor or dead.

We slowly approached the bunker, scanning as we approached, trying to determine the shape of the building, and its size. It was pretty large, much larger than most “bunkers” I was used to seeing. I covered the front entrance while my comrades did a circle of the bunker being sure to toss some EMP weapons into the windows where there was any activity. They found out, coming full circle that the building had no “windows”, or alternate exits for that matter, so we were left with no choice but to go in through the front entrance, so we did after some trouble. It seemed the building was very full of outmoded military computer hardware, and it really made my sensitive electric sensors go wild, so I disabled my sensors, as I felt that the old computer stuff was probably there for a reason and would be required to fire this super weapon, and our orders were to capture it, not destroy it.

Finally we came upon a person, without any armor on or any evident weapon, huddling in a corner, probably not expecting us to be able to get through the locked front door, even though it was only about inch thick steel. I questioned him, “Where are the other troops?”

“There aren’t any more here…” he said.

“You better hope so, because if there are any, you’ll be the first to go if you lied.” I reply, picking him up off of the concrete floor, and slinging him over my shoulder, holding him by his ankles and calves.

We went on exploring the base, only to find that he was telling the truth, lucky him. We then proceeded to secure the area, taking the bodies of those we maimed, disabled or killed earlier and putting them into order, i.e. locking up those that are still alive together, especially if they aren’t in a condition to be questioned, and burying the confirmed dead. The mission was closed and shut just like that, although there was something odd about the civilian that we found in the bunker, something oddly familiar…

Well, to make a much longer story short, we beat the pure bred humans, launching the nuke when we began to lose again under their suffocating numbers, and their highly trained and engineered snipers. The nuke also eliminated many of ours too, and put an end to the civilization as it was before the war. I was the only one to survive, that I know of. Now I’m left alone on a cliff pondering what to do now, what move I should make now, in a world barren of those like me, only new species live, like mutant humans, they are basically humans with animalistic aspects, beginning to create a new society. Should I become part of it?

“Oh brave new world that has such people in it.”

“To be or not to be, that is the question…”

“We see things not as they are, but as we are.”

Then I think back, and remember a much happier childhood, but that it is a different memory and a different story…

The End