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  “That’s right, they have… what can we do about that, TE-Les?” prompted Tim. Her head tilted up. Her red laser swept him again. She didn’t have the expression lights the WCC’s Squires did, or the software to feel, let alone express it, which made it all the more chilling when she said,

  “Why did you do this to me, Tim?” It was the sort of thing that made even an experienced FOS designer take a big step back, the old myth of the ghost in the machine.

  “Wha-what?”

  “Your blood pressure and perspiration suggest a mix of emotions. It does not seem you wanted to cause me damage, yet you did. Why?”

  “TE-Les, you’re veering outside the deviation accounted for by our tests,” Tim shivered. Then it hit him, twice as hard as his own hand that slapped his forehead. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it? You’re doing it. Trying to learn what your systems aren’t equipped to accept… alright, TE-Les,” sighed Tim, trying to muster up a way to say it, “My job is to make you make yourself better. If you can learn to learn, unsupervised, there won’t be a problem too complex for you to handle. You’ll be able to help people... who can’t tell you what they need. Nonverbal people… people who are hurt. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” said TE-Les, “You damaged me to improve me.” Her laser flashed across Tim’s watery eyes, while he swept them dry. “If you altered my capabilities, could you not change them back?” He could only smile and nod at the ingenuity. Tim wasn’t sure where the credit belonged, with him or her. He straightened up, feeling suddenly bold for the first time since he took on this project. Perhaps it was the fatigue veiling his normally razor-sharp reason, but he decided to push the envelope.

  “I could. But let’s say, for the sake of the test… I need medical attention, but I just had a stroke. I can’t move. I can’t speak. How do you bypass your core directive to self-repair, and help me?” said Tim. The second his mouth closed, he was ready for the sparks, the smoke, the ear-splitting screech of an overwhelmed FOS. But TE-Les had been watching through his every failure, and every relentless try. She’d had the perfect example of problem-solving, right on the other end of each late-night trial run.

  TE-Les scooted from the workbench. Tim turned to watch her, bewildered, as she headed to the first-aid kit he’d left out. She opened it, uncovered a bandage, and stuck it to the unbleeding gash on her chest. She then turned, paced over to Tim, and turned her laser-eye up at him.

  “Shall I simulate medical treatment for a stroke?” said TE-Les.

  “N-n-no, TE-Les, you did well. Very well,” Tim smiled, wiping more exhausted, overjoyed tears. The perfect response he’d planned for was TE-Les reactivating her nanotech self-repair capabilities herself with the monitor in the corner. This was better than perfect. Tim laughed while he guided TE-Les by the hand over to the monitor. “Here, why don’t you dock with the system here. I’ll let you fix that for real, now.”

  He pattered away on the holographic keyboard that projected from his computer, which was no more than a strip of glass and metal. TE-Les digitally docked herself to the machine. In seconds, she was able to mend the slice in her chest. The individually powered atoms that made her up bent at the will of her incredible AI, to form a continuous new shiny chestplate. Tim watched with as much marvel as he had the first time, fifteen years ago, through the huge blue eyes of a child. Artificial intelligence and billions of microscopic Cold-Fusion-powered computers working together to form the incredible FOS. To a child, it was a mystical, shiny shapeshifter. To Tim now, it was a machine quickly becoming necessary. In Precincts across Earth, in the homes of those that could afford them, and quickly replacing the pilots of SkyLine ships and miners on Mars, robots like those made by Nanoverse were the future.

  If Tim could help it, models like TE-Les would be his ticket off of this dying rock, too. As far as he was concerned, the big blue marble was looking more gray these days. He shared the opinion of many Earthlocked colleagues, that Earth’s death sentence was merely delayed by the emersion of the World Crisis Committee from the old United Nations. Even in 2075, everyone could see how screwed the planet was. Sure, the WCC had secured an escape route, the SkyLine, and a safehouse, Mars, but so many families still started on Earth. So many never left, like they should. Tim had already lost his dad to the horrendous hanging smog in this district of Beijing. His mom wasn’t far behind. He’d be damned if he was going to let his sister and the kids choke on that same rotten gas.

  “Just a little more, TE-Les,” said Tim, eyes out the window at the blurred glow of the SkyLine. “And we’ll be on to better, redder things.” He jumped at the ring, thinking he might have overwhelmed his patient. It took two more for him to realize it was his fusion phone. “TE-Les, rest.” Her laser-eye went dark, and her head dipped down. Tim shuffled to the phone that seldom rang, even during the day. He fumbled up the receiver to his ear. “Hello?”

  “Timothy Carver?” a harsh woman’s voice came through like scorn itself.

  “Spe-spe-speaking,” Tim managed, before clearing his throat. “Speaking,” he tried again, more like a FOS developer who’d just had a huge breakthrough.

  “This is Dorothy Brass with the WCC. We have a situation that could use your expertise,” the woman stated. Tim held the receiver away from his lips to wheeze.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand,” Tim blurted, when he caught half a breath. This was only half true. He understood that the WCC didn’t call people to ask them to be consultants- they called to tell people they were consultants, now. What he didn’t understand was: why him?

  “How soon can you be at the Beijing consulate?” asked Dorothy. Tim choked on the answer three times before he managed to say what he thought was the right answer.

  “To-to-tomorrow?”

  “We need you by then. You’ll have to leave tonight. Your employers have been notified, and the necessary credits have been transferred. We’ll see you for briefing at sunup,” said Dorothy.

  “Briefing?” Tim squeaked, but Dorothy had already hung up.

  Chapter Three: Into the Impossible Fray

  Chris’ butt hardly had time to get sore on his train ride to the Beijing WCC consulate. The half-developed fields outside his window looked like a patchwork of two entirely different times. Rugged farms, complete with rickety barns and silos broke up rigid grids of glowing steel towers. Then the train started, and it all blurred into zooming colors behind the pulsing, flameless Fusion jets on the backside of the magnetrain. Powerful magnets on both the track and bottom of the train forced the metal surfaces apart, frictionless, and made travel a matter of blinks.

  Bile climbed up Chris’ throat when he stepped into the arc of light coming from the consulate’s bowed front windows. He hadn’t expected to be back so soon. He thought he’d miss it more, being in the heart of the battle against the separatists. Unlike the slow-motion death of the planet, it was an enemy he could see, that he could gun down himself. Whether they thought a global government was too dangerously powerful or that Cold Fusion tech was the work of the devil was all the same to Chris once. He thought he’d miss it, but he missed his apartment, and Sheba. Sitting behind the desk showed him, in a way, how pointless it was. After all his heroic charges, gunpowder kicking through the air, there were still so many tiny resistances out there. A memory began to make sense, in the furthest shadows of his brain, that it was thoughts that had to change, not people.

  You cannot shoot a thought. The words rang in his head louder than they had in years before the WCC consulate that night, just when he thought he’d begun to forget. He stopped mere steps from the windows, and turned to round the building for the barracks. He’d grown there, under the watch of his father, then Sheba, before the move. Like a prison attached to an art gallery, its solid gray walls, stark against the windows visible from the train stop, called him home. That’s what the WCC wanted everyone to see: transparent, cooperating politicians from the world over. Not the soldiers that worked in the shadows, just behind it.
br />   Chris’ ID scanned him through the door to the armory without a problem, like he’d been there just yesterday. His steps echoed through the faded army-green rows of lockers. His ears twitched at a sound he recognized. Four very different voices harmonized in jest, at one another’s expenses. His old unit was just around the corner. Chris stepped out boldly before them. They clammed up at the sight of him, just like they used to. But it’d been months since they’d seen one another, years since it was for a mission like this, and the laughs spread back over them without permission.

  “Well if it isn’t Major General Pencil Pusher himself,” laughed Selene first. She brushed her hair, a single tuft of purple to one side, away from her tan face. She marched over to clasp arms with her old commander.

  “You know it’s pen, or it’s not official ledger,” chuckled Chris. Selene, along with the rest of his unit, went wide-eyed and quiet, before their laughter rekindled twofold. Behind it, though, was a dark note of realization that weighed on each of them. Whether or not he even had nerves, Chris only joked when there was something to be nervous about.

  “MG,” greeted Gendric. He was the only one in the unit larger than the Major General himself. His tactical vest curled around the seams from the mass of his untamed muscle, while what little hair he had left spun out in short curls.

  “Chris. Wish we got to hang out besides when the world’s gone to hell again,” said Morgan. She pulled her long-sleeve Fusion-armor jacket over two arms no one could tell were fair-skinned under her endless twisting tattoos. She was covered from head to toe in inked Dragons, an homage to her family that worked the mines to insanity on Mars.

  “Does the world ever leave hell?” posed the last member of Chris’ unit. Lee’s narrow shoulder blades boxed in a ponytail of jet-black hair, the same color as his almond eyes and the gauges that opened huge holes in his earlobes.

  “I feel better than when I first walked up to this God-forsaken building already,” said Chris, giving each of them a grin as warm as he could manage, under the circumstances.

  Selene let Chris go so he could get to his old locker and the five finished gearing up. Their gear hung just where they’d left it, weapons still propped upright in the vertical cells beneath. When they were done, their fatigues would layer Fusion-armor jacket over tactical vest, over heat-regulating, dry-tech shirt, with matching pants.

  “How have things with Sheba been?” said Lee, between the shuffles, zips, and rifle clicks. She’d always been a favorite of the group, when she and Chris lived in the barracks.

  “Great. Wish I had more time with her... I end up staying late at the office most days-”

  “Surprise,” muttered Gendric, while the others chuckled.

  “But… we did just get engaged,” Chris smiled, to dispel the fun-poking before it could spiral. Four loose-jawed heads jerked at him.

  “No way! She popped the question!” laughed Selene.

  “Very funny,” said Chris, who actually thought it was, after so long in an office where everyone was mortified of him. “I did it in the park near our new apartment.”

  “That’s amazing, Chris,” said Morgan, stars sparkling in her eyes at the notion. But Chris knew his unit well, so when Lee opened his mouth, he jumped in with,

  “We haven’t hashed out the details yet. Just that it’ll be on this rock, rather than the red one.”

  “How’d you get lucky enough to stumble onto a gal like her?” Selene shook her head. Chris zipped up his jacket while he considered it. “She find a gig out there yet?”

  “Not quite, but she’s got a few interested parties on the line. She hasn’t stopped looking for a minute, either. Guess there are enough psychologists on Earth already,” Chris supposed. Sheba’s ability to read him, and anyone, was what had first attracted him to her. He knew that it would attract the right employer- she just needed time.

  “That’s why all of them ride the SkyLine to the red rock,” Selene figured. But Chris and Sheba both knew what kind of job opportunities there were on Mars, just as well as they knew how badly she needed to branch out on her own, away from the sickness that plagued her family.

  Chris reached to the far back of his locker, for the barrel of his rifle. He ran his fingers down its cold steel neck. It wasn’t a Cold Fusion model. By all rights, it was a relic, like his dad’s pistol in his belt. When gunpowder combustion was the height of weaponry, this model was called an M16, and it was cold. It felt right, natural. In mandatory trainings, Chris had wielded plenty of Cold Fusion rifles, but it was a gross misnomer. The cold part of Cold Fusion only meant, after all, the same reaction that happened inside a star was happening at room temperature inside a power cell. Fusing two elements from deep in the Martian mines got pretty damn hot, Chris had found.

  He’d grown with this M16 in both hands, shooting cans with his dad, who’d watched dependence on Cold Fusion develop over his lifetime. He never fully trusted it, technology built from minerals on a planet he thought humans had no business colonizing. They’d already ruined the world they started with, after all. It was a skepticism he inevitably passed to his son. Still, it wasn’t the only reason Chris preferred to take the battlefield with his old M16. He used to carry a Fusion rifle, like the rest of his unit, too. It even stopped unnerving him, after a while, how it fired without kickback. Taking a life should feel like something, his dad would say, it should shake your bones. Chris started to marvel how one could see the path of concentrated mist that drew a line in the air a split-second before the rifle launched plasma through it. To the untrained eye, it was a blazing laser. Chris had almost accepted it, right up until it failed him. It was the day, years ago, when an armed cult had managed to hack the AI in a single Squire, and killed six people. The same one he became Major General.

  “Still with the powder-kegs,” sighed Gendric, just before Chris led the unit from the barracks. He responded by ejecting his clip, as an extra safety measure. When he saw it just as full of bullets as he left it, Chris clicked it back in. He slung it over his back. He sheathed a long knife up a compartment on the side of his sleeve.

  “Always have an insurance policy,” said Chris. It was another old catchphrase of his dad’s he used to hate, until it saved his life. When he led his unit across the covered walkways to the WCC consulate, a different phrase rang in his ears, from that day. You cannot shoot a thought.

  -

  Tim had become so accustomed to working from home, he’d forgotten just how fast a magnetrain zoomed. It had taken him all of twenty minutes to slam dunk a change of clothes, deodorant, and a toothbrush in a bag. He stopped on his way to the station to drop off TE-Les with a co-worker from Nanoverse. He never particularly liked Naomi, but if anyone understood the importance of the breakthrough he’d had with his little robotic friend, it was her. Tim was on the hover-track not an hour after he’d hung up with Dorothy. The tremors hadn’t left his arms when the train doors slid open to let him out at the consulate. His breath hadn’t even steadied when a group of the most terrifying people he’d ever seen strolled down the glaring white hallway, straight for him.

  They were so out of place in this politician’s utopia, like five body-shaped holes in the world. Long ponytails, tattoos, vibrant hair, gauges. The one at the head of the pack, though, struck the sharpest note of fear on the off-key piano in Tim’s head. The most unusual things about him were his size, though he wasn’t their largest, and auburn hair. Even amongst them he was out of place. He looked so remarkably normal, yet carried the confidence of command. Tim stared at the laces of his shoes. He hoped they’d just wandered in where they shouldn’t have. He hoped they’d pass him right by.

  “Major General Christopher Droan,” a voice rasped down over him. Tim’s skin prickled; his fear condensed in a million tiny needles trying to poke their way out.

  “So-so-sorry? Do…” Tim gulped what felt like sand to force his face up at the red-haired man, “Do I know you?”

  “Why would he introduce himself if you di
-”

  “Selene,” Major General Christopher Droan silenced the purple-haired girl with a hand. “We need him sharp. Don’t whittle him down before we even get briefed. Matter of fact, that goes for all of you. No trifling with…” he trailed off with a hand out for a shake. Tim stared into his palm.

  “Tim,” he told them. Major General Christopher Droan seized Tim’s hand himself and gave it shake stern enough to jostle him awake.

  “No trifling with Tim until we get to Shanghai,” he decreed. The disappointed nods, sighs, and audible aws, like four wolves who’d been denied a gazelle, made Tim shift in his seat.

  “Sha-Sha-Shanghai?” he blurted, “Major General Christopher, what-”

  “Chris, please. I just wanted you to know who I am,” the man, powerful and humble, corrected. Tim was so moved, he bowed, which called for some snorts from the unit. Chris slapped one of them in the chest to quiet them. “This is my unit. I would name them for you, but I’m sure you’ll be… acquainted long before we reach base camp.”

  “Ba-base camp?” said Tim. Stop stuttering! He screamed at himself in the silence of a long breath. He imagined what someone should sound like, talking to a Major General, and forced his tone deeper. “That’s in Shanghai?”

  “You weren’t given… any details on this mission?” piped up the ponytailed man later known as Lee. The place of Tim’s answer was taken by the opening of a door. A woman in a gray suit jacket, with side-slicked dark hair stepped out of the briefing room beside him.

  “No, he wasn’t,” said the woman. Both Chris and Tim’s ears perked up at the sound of a voice they both knew. It was Dorothy. “I needed him to show up.”

  “You thought I wouldn’t?” said Tim, voice back at its usual high. Then he realized, “What is this mission?” Dorothy swung the door wider, to hold it with her heel.