Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (24 page)

That’s what they tell us, anyway. And that our generation is a fickle one, our society selfish and materialistic. We probably all believe that this strip of land is ours by right; no doubt some of us even believe that’s worth fighting for. But I don’t know anyone who believes it strongly enough that when it comes to it, when there’s plasma fire in front of you about to burn open your chest or blow off your face, that instinct won’t kick in and tell you to run the hell away.

I pull on my eye shields as the flashes grow brighter. Did I mention oxygen’s increasing again? That sure makes warfare fun.

So these days, they make it so we can’t run away. We’ve all signed up to this, of course, so they can fulfil treaty requirements that we’re not forced into anything. But once we leap down from these buggies, we’re switched to external command. The command system moves our bodies, not us. No matter how much everything in us is signalling otherwise, even if we consciously try and override it, our bodies are not our own. And so we stay and so we fight.

I turn my head and give weak smiles to Cannan, in front of me, and Joben behind. Our eyes say it’s okay, that we’ll make it through this. It doesn’t matter that the odds are that, if we do, they’ll get us some other time. Both of them have been here a while, and we’re all still alive and intend to stay that way. Survive all eight of these terrifying, ugly years.

That’s the mark everyone’s aiming for. Eight years and our term of service is up and we are free. Eight years and the felons have their records erased and are allowed back into society. Eight years and we get a nice resettlement grant and a desk job at Central Office if we so desire. Eight years and external command falls forever silent. Eight years and I get the life I used to dream of.

But for now there’s only the blue dust, the plasma guns in our hands, and the flashes of fire. The buggy slows as it turns and we leap down, one after another, into the dust, and as soon as our boots hit the ground the command switches over, we’re pulled instantly to standing and we run to make way for others jumping to the ground behind us. The dust coats our eye shields and then falls away, our hands draw our guns as we’re tugged into formation. Our footsteps drum out a continuous rhythm in what I still think of as low gravity; fast and unpausing, over mounds and debris, never stopping, fanning out into a series of lines approaching the front, taking cover between rows of defences built on previous shifts.

We fire and we return fire, make repeated assaults, form new formations. We edge forwards and gain small slivers of territory only to lose them again, try not to look around us and see those who have been felled. Stims are pumped in until I no longer feel awake, only alert. The cooling system in my armour turns my sweat into a layer of cold.

When night falls, the fighting dies down. It’s more force of habit that anything else; it’s not like we couldn’t illuminate the whole battlefield if we chose to. But night is a time for shattered sleep and surprise assaults. Watch shifts are assigned and we fall back to makeshift shelters and dust-dug trenches. I use a wet wipe to try and scrape the worst of the dust from my arms, take off my outer armour and lie tightly squeezed in, in a line of soldiers.

I don’t think I’ll ever like this dust again, I think as I try and force myself to sleep. In childhood it was a welcome cushion from my many falls, my dust-covered clothes and face treated as endearing. In adulthood I learned to appreciate it as a natural feature of the planet, a pre-human beauty, sacred in its own right. But now it is bound with blood and exhaustion, death and burning flesh…

“Induced sleep offered,” comes the voice in my ear.

Accept
, I think back gratefully, and it comes instantly.

There are no attacks that night, though my sleep is disturbed by the anticipation of them. By the time a blue glow has begun to seep through the edges of the shelter, we are pulled to our feet, all armour on, spreading out into formation once again. My muscles ache already and it will be a while before another shift takes over, unless I get injured again.

It’s tempting sometimes.

I couldn’t do it. Emotionally maybe, physically I couldn’t. So I just do what I need to do. I fight.

Our armour has sensors that help us avoid fire, and it’s heavy today. I’m pulled to the left and right, falling down in the dust. I think the same thing has happened when Joben, a metre or two to my right, falls backwards, except he doesn’t get up. I look frantically around for a medic. No one.

Permission to tend wounded
, I think.

“Medic will tend wounded. Keep fighting.” My hand squeezes the trigger and lets out another burst of fire, the plasma bright even through my eye shields.

No fucking medics here. Do you see a medic? Permission to tend the fucking wounded NOW!

I realise I’m not just thinking but shouting, though I’m not sure anyone can hear me over the din.

“Approved.” The voice sounds resigned, though of course I’m just imagining that. I run, turn him gently, knowing that his armour will protect his neck. His legs are torn and bloody, his face swollen, flesh pulsing through the spaces in his facial armour.

“Okay. Just move with me. We’ll get you out of here.” My mouth is dry.

“It’s almost my anniversary date,” he says, his mouth foaming with saliva, obscuring the words.

“How many years?” I ask, laying him down gently and surveying his injuries. Anything to keep him talking. The smell of singed flesh hits unexpectedly.

“Eight.”

Shiite.
I leap up and look away, biting down hard on my lip, aware that I should be reacting calmly, that I’m not helping, that this isn’t about me…

“Why would you say that? What’s wrong with you? You’ve just doomed yourself. That’s how it always goes.”

“We’re not in the movies,” he rasps. “I’ll be okay.”

Oddly, he is, though it’s many weeks before I hear news. His right leg is unsalvageable, but the prosthetics are good, and though the internal damage is significant it is also survivable. Eight years. He’s out of here. I’m not so lucky. The fire keeps picking us off. Two days after Joben’s injury, they pick off Private Halsew. Her face is black with plasma burns as I see her carted away. She’s less lucky than Joben. And here I want to rest and sob, but my body is forced to move, forced to stay.

And so this is how I try to survive my eight years out here in the dust, bullets and limbs flying in the lowered gravity.

It was in my early teens that the gravity began to decrease. A space station was launched into orbit around the sun, a spinning disk just visible at sunrise, a joint project between humans and Elaayans, deploying technology we had only used once before, and never on a populated planet. From it launched a wormhole into the centre of our world, sucking in molten rock and firing it into the sun. I remember the seismic waves of that era, the feeling of being constantly on edge, never sure if a rumbling was going to grow louder or roll longer, never sure when the next one would strike, dusty and uncertain days.

And I remember the celebrations too, the giant lit-up meter outside the council chambers, its goal—just under ten m/s²—the gravity of Earth, a world none of us were likely to ever see. I remember how people—even respectable people, officials and business people—would leap through the air, testing the new force, whooping in jubilation. For a while, it was comforting; the world seemed alien to them too, never quite doing what they’d expect. As much as they celebrated the change, they also struggled, using too much force or too little. I once saw a man attempt to leap onto a transport, exert too much power and bash his head on the upper doorframe.

I shouldn’t have laughed, but I did. And perhaps it is moments like this that define the future: a fourteen year old girl in a clunky exosuit and a messy ponytail, standing by the side of the road laughing at this world turned upside down.

My delight was shortlived. Though the decreased gravity ultimately made things easier for most, it took me much longer to acclimatise. Even now, now the gravity has adjusted and wormholes formed in several more planets in turn, it suits me less well. The heavy pull on my body grounded me, drawing out and stabilizing my movements. Once the gravity decreased, I may have fallen lighter but I fell more. My carefully and exhaustingly practiced motions needed to be relearned. I felt as if not just society, but the literal physical world had turned on me, slammed doors in front of my face.

Oh sure, there was a fair heap of teenage melodrama amidst my rage, but there was also bitterness and hurt. I was learning just how invisible and insignificant I could be and would continue to be.

In my seventeenth year they melted ice to flood the Sahelan Basin, water gushing into the dust, murky and then settling. We were transported out there to watch from a high vantage point as it flowed, held back behind ropes. We had not seen a body of water like it before, and even in our cynical teens we could not help but be impressed.

But at night it haunted me. I dreamed I had been left on the floor of the basin when the evac sounded, my suit drained of power, scrabbling in the sand trying to stand, and the waves washing over me and over me until I was tugged beneath them, sinking and thrashing and pulled to the bottom.

I mentioned them to a classmate once, laughing at myself even as I didn’t find it funny. And that was how I found myself in an upper floor room, technically a bedroom of someone’s apartment but not furnished as such; rather, there was a bench around three walls and cushions on the floor. I, using a chair again at this point, took up a position in one corner, jutting out awkwardly into the room, trying not to block out too much seating. Exposed, out of place.

Someone pulled up a projection. It was a familiar sight—not this particular clip, which I hadn’t seen before—but the type of action it showed was one which had permeated our lives. This time, though, everyone in the room watched intently, their faces pained and serious, as crafts swept across a planet’s surface, releasing algae and nitrogen bundles which dropped like bombs onto the rocky surface.

“Harapana, third planet in the Karlwe system just two weeks ago,” said a tall woman rising from a cushion, her dark hair branching out in the artificial light as if by static. “Far from slowing, the pace of terraforming is increasing dramatically. The terms of the latest treaty mean humans are allowed to get away with… basically whatever the fuck we want provided we don’t make the planet uninhabitable for either of the other two known sentient species. Note the word
make
. If it’s already uninhabitable, we have free rein.”

The image of the shuttle, now extinguished, remained unshakeably in my head as she spoke. Something had been woken in me, the ability to see through the propaganda to a growing destruction. Later, as brownies were passed around, she came up to me. “I’m Lu,” she said, extending her hand. I missed, ending up grasping her sleeve. I knew instantly we’d become friends.

For two years, neglecting my studies, I worked on semi-underground anti-terraforming campaigns. Behind the scenes stuff: publicity and propaganda, logistics, organising supplies for groups in other areas and on other planets. Images of unspoilt planets filled me with an emotional intensity like I had never before known, and the absolutes, the enormities—how many billions of years it had been left alone, how completely it was gone forever—overwhelmed me.

We achieved minor victories; slight changes in protocols, designation of reserve areas. But the terraforming continued regardless, one uninhabited planet after another slowly turned into approximations of a world we’d never see. When we spoke about it, it was a moral question, a belief that each planet had almost an intrinsic right to be left alone. But for me there was something else. I wanted there to be worlds different to this one, worlds that might be more welcoming.

It was in the early hours of morning when I heard Lu and Kass—a stalwart of the movement who we not entirely jokingly referred to as our resident scientist—talking outside, in hushed but forceful tones. I’d been working through the night in our makeshift offices, my fingers greasy with the food I used to keep myself awake. The conversation I heard changed everything.

I heard snatches, knowing I shouldn’t be listening but unable to help myself. “We have to do this. What we’re doing from the outside just isn’t working. We need to be on the inside.”

“It’s eight years… eight years of war,” Lu responded.

“Well someone’s got to do it… it’s our only chance.”

“Let’s say you did. Let’s say this isn’t completely fucking stupid. They’d suspect you straight away. Or are you planning to get yourself sent to prison as well?”

“I could do it,” I said, forcing my voice not to shake. They both swung round. “They’d believe me if I volunteered.”

Kass reacted instantly, his hand flying to my shoulder. I stumbled. “No. You can’t do that.”

I raised my hand, adrenalin hitting, not yet understanding the enormity of my proposal. “You said someone’s got to. Well I’m the obvious choice. My motivations would make sense. I don’t need citizenship or exoneration, but those aren’t the only things they’re offering. You get internal command. They don’t remove the system when you’re discharged, just hand it over to you. Most people, it increases their physical capacity a little, they slow less as they age, but for me… it would give me a typical level of motor control. Make me normal, is what I’ll say. Now
that
would convince them.”

The authorities, when it came to it, did actually need some convincing, but they were also short of soldiers. Something about how they all kept dying. So I handed myself over to them under the observation of an appointed lawyer. In surgery I was numbed but awake so I could test the command. Recovery time in the accelerated chamber was six weeks. I had no right to change my mind. In those weeks I wondered how much I really believed in what I was doing, but I had to believe in something.

My custom armour was pre-fitted, deep purple to correspond with my rank. It made me feel unexpectedly vulnerable. I was sent to training and then to war, on a narrow strip of land two nations had been fighting over, on and off, since before I was born.