Deserts of Fire Read online

  He scratches his chin before concluding. “My advice is that you now say: ‘Yes sir, thank you sir,’ shoot back to your desk, fill out your expense report, and await further instructions. Reflect how we—that’s we—MacDonald, all fall short of God’s Glory.”

  Jason stands a moment, jaw working.

  He bends down to Gay’s wastebasket and takes the driver’s file out.

  “All right, MacDonald. I won’t say I hope you know what’s best because I don’t cotton to false hopes.”

  Jason twists the folder. He considers staying and refuting every ugly word Gay has spewed, but can’t find how. You don’t understand me, he wants to say.

  But, he can’t say that.

  He looks at the folder. “You knew,” he says. “There was no mix-up.”

  “Stuff happens.”

  “That woman was innocent.”

  “Really? An innocent woman. A completely innocent Arab-Canadian woman taken into custody at a US airport, interrogated for months at CIA black sites. Stripped. Waterboarded. Least that’s what her friends, her colleagues, and a few noisy members of the international press think. No one knows, we don’t confirm, but suspicions grow. Her MP starts making rumblings. Would be one heck of a movie, MacDonald. Shame she won’t be able to make it.”

  “I never said anything about her being a moviemaker.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  Jason leaves. Under bright fluorescents that never flicker, he walks down a long long hallway, toward the office of his boss’s boss. He stops, without entering. Maybe someone else. He goes to another hallway. Another man he knows. A smart man. Jason thought he would make a good mentor once. He goes there and again he stops outside the door. He has the file. He can move the special asset to another department, try again. Ba’al is unique. Supernatural. Perhaps an angel. At least extraterrestrial. No, nothing so mundane. Ba’al defies all we know, sent to us, sent to me in these times, to defy a banal world bereft of wonders. The word for that is miracle.

  Jason grips the doorknob, tries to turn it, his guts churning at the same time. They will cut Ba’al up, or they will agree with Gay and box him, or they will weaponize him. Ba’al is not the problem. We are.

  Still there’s nothing else to do.

  Jason, stop.

  Enough.

  I stay his hand. I reach. Even so far apart, we connect. Jason tries again to turn the knob.

  Stop.

  I push. Jason lets his hand fall away.

  In relief.

  I bid Jason go to the airport. He travels the next thirty-six hours retracing his journey back here.

  Jason surprises the guards. They had not expected him, certainly not weeping. The guards rise. Jason says nothing about the DVD player they have already moved back into the hallway. He orders them to let him into my cell.

  They do, and lock the door behind them before going back to their station. The guards stay quiet there, disturbed, alert.

  Jason collapses in the straw, perspiring, exhausted from isolated days traveling alone.

  He looks at me. Defiant. “What are you? A demon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How long have you been alive?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “From the tomb in Abu Ghraib. The tomb you liberated me from. I remember nothing before.”

  “Liberated you? Look around! You’re in a jail cell!”

  “That seems true.”

  “Did you possess me? I wanted so much to believe in you.”

  I say nothing.

  “What are you! I deluded myself we could do some good, if we kept going. We did no good.”

  “You did do good. For me.”

  “No. I’ve wronged you most. I led you down the same bad path as me.”

  “You used me.”

  Jason seemed to sink even further. “I’m sorry,” he says unable to meet my eyes. “You’re right. I did use you.”

  I sit down next to him. “You used me—like you use each other. You made me feel like a person. That is being good to me.”

  “If only,” he says. Then it strikes him. He brightens.

  “Did you say is?”

  “I did.”

  “You’re learning! Still learning from us!”

  “I am.”

  He smiles. With exhaustion, the smile evaporates. He stares up at the flickering lights. “Those are annoying, I’m going to make sure you get a window, a proper window, at the next site—with direct sunlight.”

  “Rest now,” I tell him, and put my hands over his face.

  I have never forced transference; nevertheless, I find, at least in this case, it works. All our cumulative time together has helped.

  Forcing all the others from myself also helps. I release them into the air.

  If God exists, let Him seek His children, so long lost in me, there.

  In Jason’s voice I call the guards. I lay the spent body of the woman called Mohammed on the cleaner mattress, face to the wall. Because of the rapid transference that empty shell remains wet and tender. Maybe the guards will believe I sleep there, maybe not. If it fools them, then Jason and I, one body—one thing, will walk into the sun together.

  However, I might instead confess to the guards what I have done. I still have a second to decide. Because whether we escape, or Mitchell Gay entombs us, throws us down a volcano, or if we’re dissected, dissembled, and scattered, or even if the panicked guards simply shove us into the furnace, doesn’t matter.

  My friend Jason despised the failings of men and feared the rebuke of God. He proved too weak for this world, so he now lies sheltered within me. I am a place where men can’t use him and God will not follow. I have saved him from these monsters.

  Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He also translated the Hugo-winning novel, The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, which is the first translated novel to win that award.

  Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, was published by Saga Press in April 2015. Saga also published a collection of his short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, in March 2016. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

  “In the Loop” was originally published in the anthology War Stories: New Military Science Fiction.

  “in the loop”

  KEN LIU

  When Kyra was nine, her father turned into a monster.

  It didn’t happen overnight. He went to work every morning, like always, and when he came in the door in the evening, Kyra would ask him to play catch with her. That used to be her favorite time of the day. But the yesses came less frequently, and then not at all.

  He’d sit at the table and stare. She’d ask him questions and he wouldn’t answer. He used to always have a funny answer for everything, and she’d repeat his jokes to her friends and think he was the cleverest dad in the whole world.

  She had loved those moments when he’d teach her how to swing a hammer properly, how to measure and saw and chisel. She would tell him that she wanted to be a builder when she grew up, and he’d nod and say that was a good idea. But he stopped taking her to his workshop in the shed to make things together, and there was no explanation.

  Then he started going out in the evenings. At first, Mom would ask him when he’d be back. He’d look at her like she was a stranger before closing the door behind him. By the time he came home, Kyra and her brothers were already in bed, but she would hear shouts and sometimes things breaking.

  Mom began to look at Dad like she was afraid of him, and Kyra tried to help with getting the boys to bed, to make her bed without being asked, to finish her dinner without complaint, to do everything perfectly, hoping
that would make things better, back to the way they used to be. But Dad didn’t seem to pay any attention to her or her brothers.

  Then, one day, he slammed Mom into the wall. Kyra stood there in the kitchen and felt the whole house shake. She didn’t know what to do. He turned around and saw Kyra, and his face scrunched up like he hated her, hated her mother, hated himself most of all. And he fled the house without saying another thing.

  Mom packed a suitcase and took Kyra and her brothers to Grandma’s place that evening, and they stayed there for a month. Kyra thought about calling her father but she didn’t know what she would say. She tried to imagine herself asking the man on the other end of the line what have you done with Daddy?

  A policeman came, looking for her mother. Kyra hid in the hall so she could hear what he was telling her. We don’t think it was a homicide. That was how she found out that her father had died. She didn’t cry then, and wouldn’t cry until much later.

  They moved back to the house, where there was a lot to do: folding up Dad’s uniforms for storage, packing away his regular clothes to give away, cleaning the house so it could be sold, getting ready to move away permanently. She caressed Dad’s medals and badges, shiny and neatly laid out in a box, and that was when she finally cried.

  They found a piece of paper at the bottom of Dad’s dresser drawer.

  “What is it?” she asked Mom.

  Mom read it over. “It’s from your Dad’s commander, at the Army.” Her hands shook. “It shows how many people he had killed.”

  She showed Kyra the number: one thousand two-hundred and fifty-one.

  The number lingered in Kyra’s mind. As if that gave his life meaning. As if that defined him and them.

  Kyra walked quickly, pulling her coat tight against the late fall chill.

  It was her senior year in college, and on-campus recruiting was in full swing. Because Kyra’s school was old and full of red brick buildings named after families that had been wealthy and important even before the founding of this republic, its students were desirable to employers.

  She was on her way back to her apartment from a party hosted by a small quantitative trading company in New York that was generating good buzz on campus. Companies in management consulting, financial services, and Silicon Valley had booked hotel rooms around the school and were hosting parties for prospective interviewees every night, and Kyra, as a comp sci major, found herself in high demand. This was the night when she would need to finalize her list of ranked preferences, and she had to strategize carefully to have a shot at getting one of the interview slots for the most coveted companies in the lottery.

  “Excuse me,” a young man stepped in her way. “Would you sign this petition?”

  She looked at the clipboard held in front of her. Stop the War.

  Technically, America wasn’t at war. There had been no declaration of war by Congress, just the President exercising his office’s inherent authority. But maybe the war had never stopped. America left; America went back; America promised to leave again some time. A decade had passed; people kept on dying far away.

  “I’m sorry,” Kyra said, not looking the boy in the eyes. “I can’t.”

  “Are you for the war?” The boy’s voice was tired, the incredulity almost an act. He was there canvassing for signatures alone in the evening because no one cared. When so few Americans died, the “conflict” didn’t seem real.

  How could she explain to him that she did not believe in the war, did not want to have anything to do with it, and yet, signing the petition the boy held would seem to her tantamount to a betrayal of the memory of her father, would seem a declaration that what he had done was wrong?

  So all she said was, “I’m not into politics.”

  Back in her apartment, Kyra took off her coat and flipped on the TV.

  … the largest protest so far in front of the American Embassy. Protestors are demanding that the US cease the drone strikes, which so far have caused more than three hundred deaths in the country this year, many of whom the protestors claim were innocent civilians. The US Ambassador …

  Kyra turned off the TV. Her mood had been ruined, and she could not focus on the task of ranking her interview preferences. Agitated, she tried to clean the apartment, scrubbing the sink vigorously to drive the images in her mind away.

  As she had grown older, Kyra had read and seen every interview with other drone operators who suffered from PTSD. In the faces of those men, she had searched for traces of her father.

  I sat in an air-conditioned office and controlled the drone with a joystick while watching on a monitor what the drone camera saw. If a man was suspected of being the enemy, I had to make a decision and pull the trigger and then zoom in and watch as the man’s body parts flew around the screen, as the rest of him bled out, until his body cooled down and disappeared from the infrared camera.

  Kyra turned on the faucet and held her hands under the hot water, as if she could wash off the memory of her father coming home every evening: silent, sullen, gradually turning into a stranger.

  Every time, you wonder: Did I kill the right person? Was the sack on that man’s back filled with bombs or just some hunks of meat? Were those three men trying to set up an ambush or were they just tired and taking a break behind those rocks by the road? You kill a hundred people, a thousand people, and sometimes you find out afterwards that you were wrong, but not always.

  “You were a hero,” Kyra said. She wiped her face with her wet hands. The water was hot against her face and she could pretend it was all just water.

  No. You don’t understand. It’s different from shooting at someone when they’re also shooting at you, trying to kill you. You don’t feel brave pushing a button to kill people who are not in uniform, who look like they’re going for a visit with a friend, when you’re sitting thousands of miles away, watching them through a camera. It’s not like a video game. And yet it also is. You don’t feel like a hero.

  “I miss you. I wish I could have understood.”

  Every day, after you’re done with killing, you get up from your chair and walk out of the office building and go home. Along the way you hear the birds chittering overhead and see teenagers walking by, giggling or moping, self-absorbed in their safe cocoons, and then you open the door to your home. Your spouse wants to tell you about her annoying boss and your children are waiting for you to help them with their homework, and you can’t tell them a thing you’ve done.

  I think either you become crazy or you already were.

  She did not want him to be defined by the number on that piece of paper her mother kept hidden at the bottom of the box in the attic.

  “They counted wrong, Dad,” Kyra said. “They missed one death.”

  Kyra walked down the hall dejectedly. She was done with her last interview of the day—a hot Silicon Valley startup. She had been nervous, distracted, and flubbed the brainteaser. It had been a long day and she didn’t get much sleep the night before.

  She was almost at the elevator when she noticed an interview schedule posted on the door of the suite next to the elevator for a company named AWS Systems. It hadn’t been completely filled. A few of the slots on the bottom were blank; that generally meant an undesirable company.

  She took a closer look at the recruiting poster. They did something related to robotics. There were some shots of office buildings on a landscaped, modern campus. Bullet points listed competitive salary and benefits. Not flashy, but it seemed attractive enough. Why weren’t people interested?

  Then she saw it: “Candidates need to pass screening for security clearance.” That would knock out many of her classmates who weren’t US citizens. And it likely meant government contracts. Defense, probably. She shuddered. Her family had had enough of war.

  She was about to walk away when her eyes fell on the last bullet point on the poster: “Relieve the effects of PTSD on our heroes.”

  She wrote her name on one of the blank lines and sat down on the bench outsi
de the door to wait.

  “You have impressive credentials,” the man said, “the best I’ve seen all day, actually. I already know we’ll want to talk to you some more. Do you have any questions?”

  This was what Kyra had been waiting for all along. “You’re building robotic systems to replace human controlled drones, aren’t you? For the war.”

  The recruiter smiled. “You think we’re Cyberdyne Systems?”

  Kyra didn’t laugh. “My father was a drone operator.”

  The man became serious. “I can’t reveal any classified information. So we have to speak only in hypotheticals. Hypothetically, there may be advantages to using autonomous robotic systems over human-operated machines.”

  “Like what? It can’t be about safety. The drone operators are perfectly safe back here. You think machines will fight better?”

  “No, we’re not interested in making ruthless killer robots. But we shouldn’t make people do the jobs that should be done by machines.”

  Kyra’s heart beat faster. “Tell me more.”

  “There are many reasons why a machine makes a better soldier than a human. A human operator has to make decisions based on very limited information: just what he can see from a video feed, sometimes alongside intelligence reports. Deciding whether to shoot when all you have to go on is the view from a shaking camera and confusing, contradictory intel is not the kind of thinking humans excel at. There’s too much room for error. An operator might hesitate too long and endanger an innocent, or he might be too quick on the trigger and violate the rules of engagement. Decisions by different operators would be based on hunches and emotions and at odds with each other. It’s inconsistent and inefficient. Machines can do better.”

  Worst of all, Kyra thought, a human can be broken by the experience of having to decide.

  “If we take these decisions away from people, make it so that individuals are out of the decision-making loop, the result should be less collateral damage and a more humane, more civilized form of warfare.”