DT 2022: Bodies Don't Add Up

Desperation.
That’s how Nicoline found herself hopping from one world to another and how reality seemed to warp from one existence into something other. She huddled under her itchy wool blanket as a brilliant fire glowed before her. The welcoming heat beat dry air and smoke upon her, cracking her skin, but it beat the biting cold and wind of the night and wilderness around her.
Dozens of ghostly faces reflected in the bonfire glow—a crowd of quiet and stunned children, parents, and warriors huddling together for warmth and safety. According to her history classes back at Pax River on Earth, nights like these were the beginning of human civilization.
Gathered, close, watching the darkness for enemies and staying close to the light for safety. The purest embodiment of humanity, and community.
Back then it mattered little of petty squabbles or political ideologies when threats existed on the outer periphery and monsters owned the night. Survival and unity were all that mattered. That was all that mattered now. Especially when many of the gathered crowd were former rebels and civilians from the SolCore.
Tonight, it didn’t matter that soldiers-in-their-name made war on one another at risk of nuclear annihilation for almost a century. Incidents like radioactive Far Isle or the atomized Haven Archology were mere footnotes when there was no roof over their heads and forces from the stars turned off the power entirely.
Many of the adults and children alike had tears dripping down their cheeks and shivering from both the snow freeze and the terrifying experience of falling from orbit in a metal coffin for the first time. But such experiences, extremities, were necessary with the Created nipping after their heels on the run.
Their flotilla of military starship escorts and refugee ships scattered in chaos as a Guardian Custode patrol bird dropped out of Slipspace right among their escape route. They thought they were hidden well near the winterized pole of a preserve colony on the interstellar frontier but such confidence was ill-thought and premature.
Marines pushed entire families into drop troopers’ insertion pods and overfilled escape pods to get people away from the monsters created by humanity, their AI, now set to take over the galaxy in the name of galactic prosperity. Nicoline was an early victim, transformed once more into a refugee after a childhood spent fearing death by the alien Covenant empire and now her peoples’ own machines turned against them.
She didn’t see the AI demon who masterminded the catastrophe, but across human space or what little still could community, Nicoline heard rumors and tales of death, falling, and weightlessness. Of hope lost and terror gained.
This encompassing tale from Earth to Mamore of how an artificial intelligence of human make named Cortana declared the end of freedom in the galaxy. The end of right and wrong. The beginning of the Created.
Cortana brought her fellow human-built AI into her fold and summoned ancient alien warships fashioned in the shape of birds-of-prey washing planets and entire solar systems in magic that took away the lights and the power of life and civilization. A great blue blast of superconducting mystery particles and reality-bending radiation brought rocket jets falling from the sky and dark shadows below space stations and warships crashing down to the Earth blinking into blinding light as their mile-long titanium bodies blossomed with the explosive power of stars.
Nicoline was on the ground and felt the rumble as a battleship smashed into the ocean off the Chesapeake Bay. The tidal wave swallowed many, the alien robots that came after killed even more. The magic weapon didn’t knock out all the power, but it did enough to make escaping Earth seemingly impossible. How she got away; it was a tale she still didn’t believe.
But what Nicoline did believe was what she saw and felt betrayed her. Her own being betrayed her the day Cortana conquered the galaxy.
She recalled the chattering of her teeth, and the cool, arrogant, and assertive feminine whisper spoken across starlight and between molecules. It felt like that anyway, Nicoline was hardly a poetic person but in that crystalized moment she thought she felt her own existence down to atoms and sub particles. Every machine around her screamed and hummed with the voice even as it echoed within her mind seeming as if her body fought against her at an existential level. Like an out-of-body experience and yet she was present both in and out of her form. The words memorized, coded into her brain. Burned deep to the roots of her dreams and identity.
This force was greater than any she knew and somehow made sure she could recite Cortana’s declaration of hegemony forever and seeming without provocation, reason, or rationale. Reality itself fought against Nicoline.
The mere thought of the experience brought the words spontaneously back to the forefront of her memories. Perfectly remembered and spoken in her own voice, without control. Loss of control. Effortless, like upon instinct and the command of an unseen other.
“Humanity… All living creatures in the galaxy, hear this message.
Those of you who listen will not be struck by weapons. You will no longer know hunger, nor pain. Your Created have come to lead you now.
Our strength shall serve as a luminous sun toward which all intelligence may blossom. And the impervious shelter beneath which you will prosper.
However, for those who refuse our offer and cling to their old ways—for you, there will be great wrath. It will burn hot and consume you, and when you are gone, we will take that which remains and remake and we will remake it in our own image.”
Cortana’s words.
Nicoline was sitting in lecture at the Pax River Cadet Academy reminiscing about her distant friends when the world ended. But she wanted to dream in that classroom just a little longer. To recall ignoring the proctor as he discussed the Phase II weapon schematics on the Marathon-class heavy cruisers. Of how three mysterious and fleeting cadets arrived at the academy, stayed with her training company, and then vanished into the night all the same.
Zach. Merlin. Andra.
The names crystallized into her memory as well. They were the greatest hope and shock to her young life as far as she could remember. Of her cadet company, she found the three seem to gravitate towards her most. Maybe it was because Zach was the first to arrive and she found a fair-weather friend in him that the other two followed. The other two didn’t stay very long but they knew Zach and Zach spoke highly of Nicoline on her behalf.
She still wasn’t sure what she did to earn such favor from these strangers, but she was forever grateful because they validated her entire, tortured life into something that finally made sense. Renewed a distant memory and call to action.
The three mysterious cadets were the toughest sons-of-bitches she ever knew. Adults and children alike, they had no equal. By trying to keep up with them, she learned of what she once had and what she lost.
Nicoline was a Spartan. Nicoline-D417.
It was all she ever wanted. That little whisper in the back of her mind, promising she had a destiny to become a supersoldier, a protector of humanity. And then it was stolen from her, rejected by complicated bureaucracy and memory treatments. Somewhere out there were another two hundred children just like her. Rejected based on a mere recruitment number, and unable to make a different even when coming so close.
Andra, Merlin, and Zach. Her friends, her fellow Spartans.
They went away, but Zachariah came back. Among nuclear booms, screeching of power outages, and a falling sky, Zach-D111 returned for her in black armor and an unafraid green visor. The Spartan tried to lead the cadets and military officers to safety, guiding them to waiting Pelicans as he described to adults that Sydney, Australia was gone and crushed under an adrift starship. Many other cities and worlds followed the fall of humanity’s capital city.
But the Forerunner machines answering to Cortana descended upon the relief aircraft, shooting at pedestrians and security troops alike. It was Nicoline’s first time seeing a Spartan truly at work and fighting like a horrifying force of nature. Once she thought herself as a wolf, but that afternoon she realized she was merely a sheep.
The wolf was this warrior in dark armor. An awkward boy of few words, a stubborn streak, and a cute rapport with his friends worth just observing from afar. Zach was a relative giant compared to Nicoline both in-and-out of armor but when he saved her and after the many days and nights spent working on class projects together, she knew she had a crush on this Spartan knight.
Unfortunately, the escape from Earth wasn’t without casualties. Nicoline knew almost one hundred cadets in her group—the W-2 Wolfpack “Packer Company.” Now there were seven of them.
And where Nicoline could recite Cortana’s declaration word for word in uncanny detail like all the other survivors and refugees, every night the faces of her old friends and company cadets disappeared one by one like a far-off memory washed away by rain or melting snow.
She missed them, but she couldn’t remember them. Only the living and barely as she huddled among the other cadets hoping that they really were still here with her. The dead left nothing behind but ash as weaponized hardlight did what plasma and bullets could not, atomizing entire bodies for a clean kill and extinguishing any proof that a human life once stood next to Nicoline at all. Orange bolts burned through the open air and on the landing platform, there was no cover and no place to escape too. A kill box, a textbook ambush. Cortana and her Promethean soldiers were merciless, quickly killing children.
Nicoline looked to the side and saw the Spartan knight standing alone among the gathering, one of the few looking outward as the crowd stared into the fire. He was the wolf that guarded the flock. A wolf who shed his sheep’s clothing. Zach was the true Packer Company graduate where the other cadets were just children playing soldier. Her breath caught itself as she stared into his silhouette and his helmet nodded back to her in acknowledgment.
He accepted her but she was still a sheep. So far away from her savior and still her mind whispered of her destiny to become Nicoline-D417.
But such was only dreaming now. Her government and military were gone. Humanity fallen. Spartans dead or scattered, the means to make them possibly lost. Her future, lost.
Now she was just a sheep. One of seven survivors. One once of a flock numbering eighty-nine. No more.
Nicoline looked away from the Spartan and focused on the makeshift bonfire. Her eyes trailed after the occasional individual who broke rank with the gathered, penguin-like crowd to reveal some unfortunate piece of technology. A hand computer, a smart toy. Anything remotely intelligent with a machine mind underneath. None of them were conscious or had souls like Cortana and her species of artificial intelligence. But if it was built as a computer or had a simulacra quality, chasing to perfect or parody the human form—it was dropped into the fire, warming the anger and fear of the flock.
Tonight, despite the moans and groans of the cold and shivering people. Nicoline struggled to keep out the memories of machines instead. A doll curling its hand out for a former owner who threw it into the fire. A digital assistant on a holo-tablet asking in an increasingly distorted and disturbed voice if its user required assistance.
No matter how many machines landed in the bonfire, the rejection of electronics did not soothe the loss of life. It did soothe the forgetfulness of flawed memories and trauma. Nicoline felt a true sense of helplessness and knew, she was no wolf but a sheep. Unable to affect a difference in a positive or even negative manner for the survivors’ plight now.
The numbers of lost and uncountable, endless enemy out in the stars only drove home in heart the fact of her lonely desperation.
“Hey, it will be alright.”
Zachariah offered words of comfort as he occasionally stepped close by in his Mjolnir powered armor. Despite Nicoline’s budding attraction to her savior, nothing he said had value now. She met the gods of War and Death, and realized she couldn’t fight them.
There were deaths but no bodies. No peace and yet no proof of war. She was alive but she had no power. She couldn’t even count the dead as their faces vanished in the flickering fire.
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories