Sergeant Scrubs’ battalion No. 363 was getting the shit kicked out of them, but no one could hear him squawk for help over at Geriatric Base Southeast Quadrant. The hearing aids belonging to all Command Central personnel automatically shut off whenever the mainframe went down — which it always did when the temperature rose to 110˚.
So, around lunchtime in the summer, the commanders went deaf for 25 minutes. The enemy knew this, and Com Cen knew they knew. But no one had figured out how to reset the system.
That’s why today’s occupation was going so bad. It was always this way at lunch. And battalions prayed not to get midday patrol duty. Or if they did, they hoped to die real quick and not end up in the hospital on the base. The pissed-off docs would just give you cut-rate drugs and let you die slowly if they decided you weren’t worth saving — which was often.
But back in the kitchen, Private Sylvia, aka Grandma Jones, felt the warning network static coming on just as she was trying to heat up the Campbell’s Tomato Soup for the troops. Happily she had backup eardrum implants that ran on plain old triple As. Some nice medical engineer, who was only around 65, gave her that setup last year after she got blown apart by a suicide bomber masquerading as an old garbage man.
She flicked the switch in the lobal cartilage, and the ears kicked in. Jones heard Scrubs screaming loud and clear, and she relayed the stats by electronic Morse to the 100-plussers sitting over in Com Central. The officers — who were napping over cheese and crackers — groggily tapped their nonfunctional hearing aids and sent out the Humvees to pull the guys out.
Jones sighed and shook her heavy head. She was mostly metal at this point with just half of her face and one of her breasts sticking out of a pretty impressive circa 2017 titanium cyborg chassis. This rig had suited her fine in basic training, Skokie, which is where she and her sister ended up after they tried to dodge the draft by slipping through Illinois into one of the Free States.
But the cyborg casing was a pain here out in the southern sector, where the sandstorms tended to blow into the grillwork and fuck up her guidance system. The system controlled her eyesight and right arm, but now it was all crazy, which was making serving soup a real problem.
That’s what happened now, and Jones flung the tomato soup in the direction of Sous-Lieutenant Les Shapiro, who wasn’t paying attention because his new kneecap had busted somehow and had slipped and was bubbling under his right shin. After Jones sprayed him with soup, she gave up and blindly propelled herself to the repairs garage, located in the bomb shelter north of the Rivera/Rice Station.
“Sorry, Les,” she said. But the hearing aids were still down, so he just glared at her.
Hussy, he thought, eying the one breast.
Over at the replacement/repair garage, Scrubs was already sitting on one of those infomercial Bed In A Bag air mattresses, nursing an amputated hand and some other minor injuries. As they sat waiting for the repair robot to service them, Jones could hear the copters.
And planes too, it sounded like.
“More of them incoming,” Jones said to Scrubs.
“WHAT?” said Scrubs, who was not actually deaf. Just super hard of hearing.
“MORE INCOMING,” she shouted.
“I know,” he said, pulling on his earlobes. “I saw the trucks with the walkers and the tankified wheelchairs coming in. A lot of those fucked-up Wal-mart urban assault golf carts too. They list to the left, and the gun mount always falls off.”
Jones nodded her metal head sympathetically.
The robot was using a hair dryer to clean out Jones’ grille, and she was starting to see better. Scrubs was coming into view now, and a fine-looking geezer he was too.
Maybe 88. But he looked 75.
Scrubs sighed. “Most of my guys in the 363 got blown away.”
“Did they?” she said, forgetting he couldn’t hear.
He looked at her expectantly.
“WHAT HAPPENED?” she shouted.
“Ambush,” he said. “What always happens.
“We are fighting everywhere,” he continued, “and they hate us everywhere we go.” He looked at Jones, but she wasn’t listening.
Ambush, Jones chanted to herself. Ambush.
The Alzies had kicked in, and she was elsewhere…
Grandma Jones had loved somebody once. A guy who played bass in Chicago with a band called AMBUSH. Yup, there were many juicy memories stored on the hard drive, which was doing a good job of transferring the stuff over from the meat part of her. The red brain was gradually copying its contents over to the new blue brain, which was firewires and real Bluetooth tech installed deep in the actual cortex. Or what was left of her cortex after the bombing of the school and the church up in Northwest A Sector a few years back.
Which tour of duty was that? She’d forgotten.
But it didn’t matter anyway. She was in the Army for life. The prez would never let her back into NorthAm. She was one of the expendables, and it was report for duty or get force-fed in a gov-sponsored place — a bad place where they did stuff so terrible, you didn’t even want to know what it was.
So the fighters were all seniors now — they could be “hired, and if they expired, no regret was required.”
She’d heard some Pentagon guy on C-Span rap that speech right before she shipped out.
A retired major in her apartment complex hanged himself when the official notice came through.
He got away. Semper fi, he wrote on the floor in his own blood.
The AARP protested the national recruitment of NorthAmmers over the age of 65.
But the feds firebombed the headquarters, took the bodies of the leaders, and stuck them in a room where they could power the mainframes of the offshore Gerry Command Centers. But sometimes they — or who they were — would pierce through the network all of a sudden.
Saying things like How I miss the children today, Miranda. Or Remember how well I could swim, Lan? And You were sure a looker, Carlos.
It was spooky — the old folks speaking through the hard drives like ghosts. But the system always reset, and then you’d think you dreamed it — those longings that had been transplanted into Pentium but that hid in the machine and refused to die.
What was I thinking about? wondered Jones, and then it came to her.
Scrubs reminded her of that beautiful Chicago man: He had gorgeous, enhanced, polarized blue eyes like the guy did, and his first name was Matthew, like the Chicago bass man’s was. But Chicago Matthew had a Karate-Krav fusion black belt, and he had fought his way out of recruitment. Jones even heard Chicago Matthew had managed to emigrate from NorthAm and was growing centenarian and yet handsome somewhere like Switzerland or Ghana — someplace nice — with goats in the mountains or else giraffes on a veldt — she couldn’t remember which, but it sounded great.
The Bluetooth pulled her back to the present.
“So, Scrubs,” she said, “what are you going to do?”
His hearing must have kicked back in, because he answered right away.
“I don’t know,” he said. And then his eyes squeezed together. “I don’t know how much longer I can take this,” he said.
“Oh, no you don’t,” she said, grabbing his arm with her right pincer. “You try to off yourself, and that’s AWOL and they punish you for that and take something vital away. It’s that organ-removal punishment mandate — who the hell came up with that?”
Scrubs shrugged.
“Search me,” he said. “What happened to the land of Lincoln?”
“Gone the way of Lincoln Logs,” Jones said tartly, patting him with the side of her armature. “An old toy hidden in someone’s basement, if they haven’t requisitioned it for recycled wood.”
He looked at her and smiled and was about to say, “Hey, you’re funny.” But the sirens went off, and the intranet intercom started at them, and they had to go back to work. Scrubs got a new Nu-Flesh™ mechanical hand, which was no great shakes but worked better than that thing from Sears they tried to foist on him last month.
On her way back to the kitchen, Jones looked up, and, with her cleaned-up vision, she could see that the plane wasn’t carrying Geris. This was a windowless cargo plane with this month’s crop of child Nons.
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There were no windows in the plane. No dollars for comfort, but she could smell the air change. It was hot. She shifted in the straps that held her tight to the other kid and the kid next to that. There were about 500 of them hanging and strapped in bags with airholes so they could be packed in as tight as possible and no one smothered. Mostly. Life was like this when you were a Non. She was one just like her mother and father and like all their family. That is to say, a non-person living in what was left of the stadium after the water came in.
But still, she thought, shifting in her bag, I AM a person.
I matter, she’d always said to herself over and over again, even as the other kids said “Shut up, shut up, you — you’re nothing — stupid,” and there was no food or water, and so when the Army came through the aisles of the stade, looking for kids to work, she signed up. They took 12ers and under for the Underprivileged Children’s Educational Overseas Development Program. This was a nice way of saying child labor, although she heard that had been outlawed. But there was nothing to do with these kids, these poor kids, these kids of color, and/or like her, a tainted kid.
She had the HIV and Hep C, and she didn’t have long to live, because they weren’t going to spend the money on her to keep her alive. So she signed up with the other poor kids for the UCEODP. They’d have an hour of school and hour of computer if the computer was working, and the rest of the time they’d spend “Interning Army.” That meant doing the shit work even a private wouldn’t do.
Her name was just E. E for everyone; E for exceptional. E for excelsior and eagle and evergreen.
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My God, thought Grandma Jones as she saw the cutters coming through, getting ready to saw the kids out of the mesh in the belly of the plane.
I guess I need to make me some alphabet soup for the children.
And in her mind, the letter r rose. R for a bunch of words, she thought, that mean I won’t take this shit. Ideas formed, but she was old, and they couldn’t hang together to form the syntax.
She forgot what she was doing and decanted the mushroom soup.
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was back out with a detachment to recover the fallen of the 363. The old soldiers groaned into action, and their wheelchairs rolled slowly through crooked streets.
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E got hauled out of the plane, and the bag tore open. She fell. A real ugly lady, or some robot that had been a lady once, caught her in gritty, pitted, metallic arms.
“There, there,” said Grandma Jones. And, despite her being mostly machine, in the red-meat part of her, love bloomed.
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