As Able the Air

Airto couldn’t shake the feeling that Dart’s luck had finally run out.

“Please be careful,” he said. “Keep your eyes open.”

“My eyes? Funny,” Dart replied. “I will, sir. Of course.”

Airto leaned back in the command couch and listened to his partner’s far-off footsteps trickle through the receiver. He felt this way at the end of every shift, barely wanting to breathe for fear of upsetting some nominal cosmic balance and incinerating his friend in the process. Airto’s own discomfort, however minor, however superstitious, seemed a small price to pay.

“The topography has remained surprisingly stable here,” Dart noted.

“Right,” Airto said. Exhausted, he flexed his fingers in the nerve-net mesh innards of his control surface, a sleek silver tongue that jutted from the center of his globular operational suite. He wished again for some fantastical hotkey that could bring this mission to a swift and auspicious end, a fast-travel cheat to an agreeable future.

“One and a quarter kilometer out from contact,” Dart said. He never sounded nearly as concerned as he should.

“No need to rush,” Airto responded, “not at last call.”

Last call—he had tried to stop saying that out loud but caught himself articulating the phrase at least once a week. He knew perfectly well there was no logical reason to believe the night’s twenty-fifth landmine decommission would be any more deadly than the twenty-fourth, or the twenty-third, or the first. Yet the irony of this imagined tragedy continued to set Airto’s teeth on edge. Things would be so much easier if he could be as blithe as Dart, but he knew that was impossible.

“Three quarters of a kilometer from contact,” Dart said. “Not a lot of traffic out here. We’ll be done in time for supper.”

“Dinner’s come and gone, bud,” Airto said. “We’ve been working all night.”

“Breakfast, then?”

“What difference does it make?”

“All the difference,” Dart said. “It’s something to look forward to.”

“I can’t say I agree,” Airto replied. He checked his clock again and punched in a report code.

“What’s on the menu?”

“What’s always on the menu? Bugs and yams, probably grasshoppers.”

“A scrumptious, popular dish,” Dart said.

“What gives you that idea?” Airto asked.

“Is it not to your liking, sir?”

“Maybe expand your search parameters beyond Coalition-subsidized cookbooks,” Airto replied. “Can we please focus?”

“Certainly, sir,” Dart said.

Airto shuddered against a tickle of sweat in the straps of his helm. The spherical contraption was plated with screens that sent him a live feed from Dart’s many cameras. He sifted through the images with the twitch of a finger, looking out toward the blackened horizon and its silent plumes of dim red and gold. A data line in the helm kept him updated on where other mines or tripwires had been set off by unlucky Coalition friendlies and enemies alike. More often than not, they were accounts of small nocturnal animals burrowing up and blowing themselves to bits. In operator slang, these “faunal decommissions” were all just acts of environmental terror—kamikaze vermin blissfully ignorant of whichever alliance they had just given their life to protect.

“To my fallen comrade,” Dart would say of them, apparently in jest.

And how far they had fallen—all their diurnal cousins were already long gone from this scared corner of the world. It was a natural consequence of the combat ecology that had taken hold here. Immense pitched battles would rage by day and subside by night, the world’s solar-powered automaton platoons both vicious and entirely energy-inefficient. Given the demands of the great sun-drinking war machines, all sides of the conflict had long since concluded that restricting skirmishes to the daytime was the only way to keep the pace of engagement between drones above a meaningless slither until battery tech could be improved. The traps left in the receding tide of melee were merely a secondary deterrent to any enemies who thought they might get clever and march their mechs under the moon.

“Ready? Let’s clean up,” Dart would say every single night, without fail. The war waltzed in these concentric circles, the dance invariably ending in a white-hot flash.

Airto gripped his mesh tighter, careful not to send any false alarms to his partner. He had seen the white flash on his screens before, those terrible last transmissions from an exploded technician’s cameras. The images would intrude on him from time to time, often when he was just lying in bed. Other times he would see them when walking to the OpSec or in the middle of a conversation in the mess hall with another operator. The flashes were broken memories of his old partners’ sudden, final moments, their fragments interlaced with his current partner’s life. For months now it had been Dart’s screens he imagined disappearing into the white light, and it was somehow more visceral than anything he had felt with any of the cold and distant professionals from before. There was a difference now—Dart was his friend.

“Twenty meters,” Dart said.

Illustration by Brock Aguirre

“Let’s have a look around,” Airto replied.

The technician stopped for a moment and studied the area. His cameras showed an average spread of gray dirt, rocks, and a smattering of tall yellow grass that had managed to grow through the usual daily bedlam. Diagnostics flooded Airto’s screens, showing no signs of any additional traps that had evaded previous aerial scans. No animals either.

“All right,” Airto said, “let’s do it.”

Dart crawled over the next several meters until he came to a leveled patch of ground. There was a slight red glow beneath the loose dirt.

“Is that a 676 F-series?” Airto said. “That model is months old. How could we have missed one?”

Dart straddled the landmine.

“It’s possible they are emptying their reserves, sir,” he said. “If you believe this is a 676, I can dispose of it now. Shall I proceed?”

Airto’s stomach twisted a bit—the enemy occasionally nested new types of mines within old shells as a ruse to catch Coalition officers off guard.

“Wait,” he cautioned. “Just wait.”

The speed at which both sides could produce iterations of these weapons made it impossible to keep databases current. The job of improvising solutions in real time rested squarely on the operator’s shoulders.

“Sir, would you like a closer look?”

“Affirmative, proceed,” Airto said, the worry of finality nagging him again. He hoped the impersonal jargon would make the command easier to give.

A canister of compressed air on Dart’s midsection blew the dirt away without upsetting the trigger. Airto’s eyes narrowed as he zoomed in on the image of the revealed bomb. He took a second to scroll through Dart’s x-ray and heat filters.

“Sir, shall I continue?” the technician asked.

“Let’s just be absolutely sure,” Airto said.

“I trust you,” Dart replied.

Airto’s arms went rubber in the tongue as he began to fumble the controls, trying to bring up any reports of 676 decoys. A red column of text drizzled down his screen, but there were no confirmed lures.

“Another MRD was injured last night,” Airto said.

“Could have been anything, sir,” Dart replied.

“I’m looking into it.”

“Wasn’t necessarily a mine,” Dart reiterated, referencing the same data stream.

“But there is no confirmation on cause,” Airto said, although he could feel himself grasping at straws. “It could have been a similar trap. Maybe we should abort.”

“Sir, we have classified the likely model and are required by law under Section C.11 to attempt decommission as soon as possible. Do you have evidence this may not be a 676?”

He didn’t, and of course, Dart was right. What Airto felt in his gut couldn’t be found in any Coalition handbook.

“It’s just,” he said, words catching in his throat. “I’m … I’m worried about you.”

Dart did not respond.

“I don’t want you dying on me.”

The technician offered more silence in return, leaving Airto to watch the light of far-off fires refract in the treated glass layers of Dart’s lenses.

Airto was starting to wonder what his partner could possibly be calculating when he finally responded. “Sir, if I may, please let me explain again. We have already classified …”

“No, I know, I know,” Airto cut him off. “Just give me a second.”

“I won’t be hurt, sir,” Dart said.

“You’re supposed to say that,” Airto sighed. “You have to say that.”

“And?”

Airto closed his eyes and waited for it all to go away. When it didn’t, because it never does, he sat up a bit in the couch and forced himself to answer. “Fine,” he said. “But we’re doing it slow. Slow enough for me to see each move, understood?”

“Understood,” Dart said. He inserted a small pin-like tool into the mine and began to lift the depressor. Then he swung a camera around into its body. As the technician worked, Airto attempted to count the wires inside the shell and find any irregularities compared to the hundreds of other F-series triggers they had deactivated in the previous months. Any dither could mean death. He nibbled the raw cut he had been nursing inside his lip. His heart sped up and every pump seemed to reverberate through the stale air of his ops suite.

Dart suddenly stopped.

“What is it, why’d you stop?” Airto asked, words barely louder than the hum of the OpSec gear surrounding him. His eyes flitted over the screen in a desperate attempt to see what Dart could see.

“Airto, ‘How far is the farthest?’” Dart asked.

Airto groaned and dropped his head.

“Not right now,” he said through his teeth.

“Airto, ‘How far is the farthest?’” Dart repeated.

The operator flinched—he knew these words well. They were the beginning of a mindfulness exercise designed to help operators reduce their anxiety. The helm’s biofeedback subroutine would have triggered it. Every time he heard the first line of the ridiculous couplet he was reminded that he had never wanted to be a mine removal expert, not specifically. He didn’t think that anyone did, except maybe Dart, who was built for it.

“Airto, ‘How far is the farthest?’” Dart asked again, his voice cool. Airto already knew his technician wouldn’t budge until the stupid call was properly answered. There was no use in a power struggle.

“‘As able the air,’” Airto murmured. The strict word scheme was meant to force the operator into some sort of focused objectivity. To Airto, it felt more like condescension and control from the Coalition. His mother used to play a similar game with him, withholding a bowl of her perfect feijoada until he recited this Bible verse or that. These days, back home, he felt power in his freedom to just walk the Real Market and purchase a pot for himself.

“‘How blank is the sand?’”

“Enough, Dart, you’ve got me. You can see my heart rate is down.”

“Marginally,” Dart said, lifting the gaggle of wires through the slit in the mine. “I’m going to burn off the contents now.”

Airto released the little bit of air he had left in his lungs. His sticky pulse labored beneath his skin.

“Okay.”

Dart sucked the propellant from the mine into a sealed tube and separated the rest of the explosive material into a small bag. He clamped a metal bowl over everything that remained and then scampered several meters away to light his fuse.

“I’ve scavenged the useful materials and prepared decommission.”

“Are you safe?” Airto whispered.

“Decommissioning now,” Dart said, ignoring him. “In three, two, one …”

The mine ignited like a small firecracker and was gone. Airto’s shoulders dropped through the floor.

“Twenty-six for tonight,” Dart said as the smoke cleared.

“I counted twenty-five,” Airto replied.

Dart instantly forwarded twenty-six still shots of dead mines from his data core, each an instant reminder of the night’s work.

“You got me,” Airto said, not really counting. “It’s been a long one.”

“Perhaps you need rest, sir.”

“‘Perhaps?’”

Dart began to walk away from the contact site. Airto sat for a moment, listening to the familiar crunch of his partner’s six legs and the soft whirr of his engine. Somewhere inside a gyroscope spun like a heart.

“Dart, how are you?”

The machine did not respond again.

“Dart?”

“My OS is fully updated and my physical diagnostic was satisfactory,” he said. “You can find my most recent report in the cloud storage. Will there be anything else?”

Airto was almost too embarrassed to ask. He felt so very far from his friend.

“I was just wondering if you’d like me to stay online with you, you know, to keep you company on the way back. It’s a long walk.”

“I’ll run,” the mine removal drone said, “and I don’t have anything to say at this time. Sorry, sir.”

“No, no, of course,” Airto replied, forcing a little chuckle. “What am I thinking? I should get that rest.”

“Yes, sir. Permission to disconnect?” Dart asked.

“Yes—I mean, granted.”

The screens faded to a dull gray in Airto’s helm and the straps fell away automatically. The whole contraption began to rise, dragged easily off the operator’s head and into the ceiling above by vines of fiber-optic wire. Airto pulled his arms out of the tongue and rubbed his eyes. Why had he said any of that to Dart? He must have sounded desperate.

The low red shade of the small operational suite shifted then to its obnoxious white floodlights, dragging Airto to his feet. The door raised and he climbed out onto the frigid gunmetal catwalk of the OpSec. A hundred other orbs just like Airto’s compartment lined either side of the walkway, their rusting curves obscured by perspiring pipes and webs of fiber-optic cabling. Large AC units chilled the massive chamber down to uncomfortable temperatures to ensure no ops could be botched by overheated machinery, at least on Airto’s end. All of this hung above a deep black chasm, the lower level of which supposedly housed an emergency water reservoir. Airto could not see the bottom.

He strode quickly toward the exit, handing his OpSec key-pass through a kiosk window to a woman cloaked in a heavy winter jacket. Shivering through arctic shroud and shouldering a wall of plastic strips, Airto climbed his way to the tall, minimal white halls of the surface concourse.

He passed all manner of military and corporate officials, most of whom couldn’t be bothered to look up from their tablets. It was all right though; Airto had nothing to say to them. After being denied the conversation he wanted, Airto simply needed to disappear into his bed. His appetite was gone.

The soft, shuffling malaise of the War Complex reminded him a great deal of those lonely ghost-hour monorail journeys from his old coding job in the capital city to the Coalition-subsidized apartment hive he called home. Over years, the city’s endless flurry had turned opaque in Airto’s eyes. The crowd was a form of isolation unto itself, the bitter truth being that beneath the deafening metallic grind of the city’s infernal infrastructure no one was really trying to talk anyways. Airto had little trouble abandoning the churning capital for the less exacerbating military frontier. A din of silence hung around the War Complex with startling sincerity. The quiet here, not enforced by authority or drowned by chaos, was sublime. Sometimes it was easy to forget altogether that there was a war going on. The Complex was so far from the fighting that the warzone disappeared around the curve of the Earth, making the conflict as invisible to the naked eye as it was silent to the ear.

The door to his quarters in the SubComm slid open with a satisfying swish and immediately the harsh spots in the ceiling illuminated his Spartan accommodations: a bed, a chair, and a desk, each fused to the rigid gray walls and floor. He hated thinking of this cell as a home, but it was all he had known for months.

“Kill the lights,” Airto told the room before falling into his bed.

Face in his pillow, he began counting the twenty-six mines they had removed that night, hoping that he could find proof that Dart was off by one despite the photographic evidence to the contrary. It would be so great to catch Dart in a fallacy like this and watch—well, listen, anyways—to his friend try to compute his way out of the mistake. As he pondered each mental image the world began to slow down and he was able to take the deepest breath he had in hours. Sleep was imminent.

Instead, a square of light appeared on the wall across from his bed and a loud ringing vibrated Airto’s room. He sat upright and read the message on the screen.

“Answer, answer,” he said.

The screen went white, then black, and then filled with a low pixel-count video feed of a young woman at a desk in what looked like Airto’s capital city apartment.

“Airto, meu docinoh, how are you?” she said.

“Tired, very tired, my love,” he replied.

“Oh no, were you sleeping? I did not mean to wake you,” she said. “Your calendar says you are usually off work around now.”

“No, no, I am, it was just … it was a long one today.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, baby, do you want to talk about it?”

Airto looked at the clock inset on a nearby wall. It would be dawn soon locally and he couldn’t remember what time it was in the capital.

“You wouldn’t want to hear it,” he said.

“Oh please,” she crossed her arms. “What’s the point of having special access if you aren’t going to talk to me?”

Airto let out a sigh and tried to smile.

“Is that maté?” he asked, pointing at the cup of tea next to her hand.

“Your mother had some sent to your apartment,” she said. “She left you a message.”

“Tell me about it, the tea.”

“It’s warm and smooth and very sweet, like you like it,” she said. “It’s not my favorite, but I get it. It’s fine.”

“You prefer it green?”

“I prefer it coffee,” she said, and laughed as she sipped from the cup. “But I was thinking of you, so I thought I’d have some.”

“What else did my mother’s message say?”

“Something about you not dying,” she said. “Do you want the full transcript?”

“No,” he said, letting out a small laugh. “How many times do I have to explain to her I’m not anywhere near the fighting?”

“No one is,” she responded.

“Dart is,” Airto said, rubbing his temples.

She put the cup down on the desk.

“Dart?” she asked.

“Yes, my partner. We’ve been working together for a couple of months.”

“I know,” she said. “But isn’t he a drone?”

“It’s not like that,” Airto responded. “It’s not.”

“Well, what is it like?” she asked.

“Let’s not talk about it,” Airto said, falling to his side on the bed.

“Fine; I can tell you about my day.”

“Okay.”

“Work was tough, commute was tough, there was nothing good on TV,” she said. “Then I stayed in, hoping to talk to you.”

“I’m sorry; I know it’s tough in the capital as well. I don’t mean to ignore you, I’m just tense.”

“Then relax, it’s all right.”

The conversation broke for a while and Airto’s heavy eyelids began to close, the glow of the screen falling over his face.

“You don’t have to talk,” she said, finally.

“Okay,” he mumbled, half-asleep.

“You just have to listen.”

Airto’s eyes opened again and he watched her start to undo her blouse. Her bosom loosened and he imagined he could reach his hand through the screen and sink into her milky white skin.

“Are you listening?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he corrected, starting to sit up.

“Then get up; on your feet.”

Airto rose to attention and tried to wipe the sleep from his eyes.

“Put your hands down.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now take it off, all of it,” she said, undoing one more button on her blouse. Airto quickly removed his clothes and folded them on the corner of his bed, just as she liked them. He stood again at attention in the crystalline light of the screen and waited, his body cold and warm all at once.

“Are you ready, boy?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then listen very closely …”

“Specialist Lima,” the Major said, signing a document on his tablet. “How are you?”

Airto shifted uncomfortably in the forced ergonomics of the backless chair. He had been put on suspension from active duty—they called it “leave”—for two days, no reason given. Then, his presence had suddenly been required in the Major’s office, still with no reason given.

Airto did not like where this was going.

“War is war,” Airto said. It was one of those automatic responses he had become so used to giving.

“Interesting sentiment from someone with so little skin in the game.”

“Excuse me?” Airto said, raising an eyebrow.

“I don’t mean to be harsh, Lima, but no one your age has any idea what it actually feels like to be on a battlefield.” He pointed a thumb out of his office window and across the plain toward the invisible fighting. “We used to send men out there.”

Airto glanced down through the clear plastic desk at the Major’s two synthetic legs, their angular ridges poorly hidden beneath his well-tailored pleats.

“You’re right, sir,” Airto said.

“Don’t get me wrong; if I never have to send another soldier’s remains home again, I’ll be a happy man. I’m just not sure anyone can win a war with no skin in the game.”

“Sir, Coalition predictions show us gaining ground in …”

“No, Lima, you’re not listening,” the Major continued, looking out the window. “It’s all just drones killing drones; out of sight, out of mind. Corporate sends the new models every few months and we keep them greased, updated, and on course. There’s no fear, no trepidation, no one’s life is hanging in the balance. It begs the question: with stakes so low, why should we ever stop?”

Airto was having trouble hiding the shock on his face. He couldn’t remember a time when he had heard a superior officer talk in this manner.

“What, surprised to hear management being honest?” the Major said, “Have I said anything you haven’t heard around the mess hall from your brainy friends in OpSec?”

Obviously, the answer to that was “no.” The philosophy of the military “gear grinder” was the only topic some of the other specialists in OpSec could ever seem to discuss. Perhaps chattering over the existential dilemma of modern war helped them to cope, but it only increased Airto’s anxiety.

He shook his head very slightly to affirm the Major’s words.

“I’m glad we’re in agreement,” the Major said. “I suppose I should treat this report from MRD-1087 as a misunderstanding, then?”

Airto stiffened a bit.

“Dart?”

“Yes, ‘Dart,’” the Major said. “You all are a fairly productive mine removal team. In fact, you are fifteen percent more successful now than you were with your previous MRD.”

“Yes, sir,” Airto said.

“What do you attribute that to, Specialist?”

“Our relationship,” Airto said without hesitation. “Dart is an excellent mine technician. You’re not thinking of decommissioning him, are you?”

“I wasn’t, should I?”

“No, no, please don’t,” Airto said, sitting forward in the chair.

A little twitch crossed the Major’s face.

“To be clear, Lima, this report is not about MRD-1087. It’s about you.”

The air grew thin between them.

“About me?” Airto said.

“MRD-1087 says you were acting erratic toward the end of your shift two nights ago. His automated reports indicated that you were attempting to violate the rules of Section C.11 and leave a discovered mine in the field without attempting to disarm it. He also indicated that the reason you wanted to leave the mine—at potential great military and financial cost to the Coalition—was to, and I’m quoting the report here, ‘keep MRD-1087 alive.’ Please, Specialist, explain to me what I’m missing here.”

A bolt of lightning hit Airto’s spine and he shivered visibly, overtly aware that he had just referred to his work with Dart as a “relationship.” The Major sat motionless and waited for an answer.

“I don’t know what to say. It must be like you said, sir, a misunderstanding.”

“Yours or the machine’s?”

“Sir …”

“This is why you’ve been on suspension, Specialist Lima, to give you a break from the front. The Coalition and I just need to be sure that you understand MRD-1087 is not conscious in any way. Every MRD is the same. ‘Dart’ is not alive and cannot pass a rigorous Turing test.”

“I know,” Airto said, although it didn’t feel right. He knew logically that Dart was not alive—sentient AIs were still just television villains—but that was not how he felt. If pressed by the Major, he wouldn’t be able to explain it.

“We want you to be careful with your MRD, that’s why we gave them shadow personalities at all,” the Major said. “It’s something you might want to protect, something maybe you’ll think twice about simply dropping onto a mine before you double check your work. But we don’t expect them to survive at the expense of identified enemy mines remaining in the field. Some MRDs will go down, but it’s better for the Coalition than the alternative.”

“Yes,” Airto said, teeth clenched. He was being humiliated now, as was obviously the Major’s intent, and all because of a stupid report. How could Dart do this to him?

“Like I said before, there’s no skin in this game, Lima. None. There’s less to lose than you think.”

Airto closed his eyes and wondered what Dart would have to say about that.

“If we have to have this conversation again, there will be a reprimand. Understood?”

“Understood,” Airto said.

“Understood what?”

“Understood, sir,” Airto finished.

“What a rude man,” she said, looking away. There was an old-fashioned crossword puzzle on the apartment desk today, half-finished and stained by the ring of her favorite drink.

“And such a stale argument,” Airto said, huddled on the floor next to his bed. “‘You don’t know what it’s like, Lima.’ Well how about this, Major: the old days are long gone and they aren’t coming back. Maybe he’s the one who doesn’t know what it’s like, not anymore.”

“Right,” she said.

“Dart is more than a partner, he’s a friend,” Airto said. “They ask me to care for him, and I do, and now they tell me not to care too much? Which is it?”

“I don’t know, Airto,” she said.

“Of course you don’t.” He hung his head between his knees.

“Don’t talk to me like that,” she said, looking back through the screen.

“I didn’t mean it that way, honestly.” Airto met her eyes and started biting the sore in his mouth.

“Hope not,” she replied, turning to regard something off-screen again. The image started looking more pixilated than usual and then the screen froze.

“Hey, you there?” Airto asked.

“Obviously,” she said, movement returning to the picture in choppy phases.

“What are you looking at?” he said quietly, in case asking this was a mistake.

“Oh nothing, fofo.”

The feed rippled and returned to normal.

“Even if it’s nothing, tell me,” Airto said. “Or anything else. Just say something.”

“I read a story in the news today, would you like to hear that?”

Airto nodded and pulled a thin blanket around his naked shoulders.

“It reads, ‘Realtor Risks Life Rescuing Girl Under Rails.’ It happened a few blocks from your apartment, Airto.”

“Did someone fall?”

“Nothing so banal. Marlin Sousa, fifty-seven, bought an abandoned lot that shared some space beneath one of the monorail lines. It wasn’t until the day before they broke ground that a young girl was discovered living, and somehow surviving, in her own filth. It seems no one had noticed her for quite some time and she had been surviving as a thief. Marlin took it upon himself to give the girl a new home: his own. Pretty incredible, right?”

“A real hero,” Airto said solemnly. And what had he done?

“He sure is.”

“Do you think what I do is important?” Airto asked. “I mean, really?”

“What a silly question, querido,” she said, picking up the pen. “I know it’s hard to tell sometimes but people respect what you have to do. I’ll admit, it’s hard to grasp what it’s really like for you, sitting in the OpSec. Like you said about the Major, we don’t really know. If you think it’s going well, then I think it’s going well.”

She doesn’t understand, Airto thought, How could she? Why am I even asking?

“Well, do you think what Dart does is important?” he asked, lowering his voice.

She didn’t respond this time, taking her glasses off instead.

“Do you?” he asked again.

Her silence was deafening. Airto put his hands on his temples and felt a lump form in his throat. Again, he understood the illogical nature of the conversation he was having, on all points, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking.

She continued to stare, the feed perhaps refrozen.

“Please come back,” he mumbled. “Please say something.”

The feed unfroze and he saw she had moved to the center of the room. She made her whole body visible on the screen and angled her bare feet just the way he liked them.

“I don’t like talking about Dart, he’s a machine,” she said. “I do know you’ll be seeing him in less than two hours, though. Do you really want to spend that time talking about him? Or do you want to know what’s under here?”

She tugged at the hem of her skirt and then used her finger to bring Airto to his knees. He crawled along the smooth, cold floor until his face was inches from the screen.

“Good boy,” she said. “Now tell me Dart can wait.”

Airto’s lips trembled and the words did not come.

“Well?” she said, voice crackling a bit on the receiver. “Otherwise we can’t play.”

The sound of Airto’s ragged breathing dominated the room, joined only by the requisite hum of the AC vent, buzzing away like Dart’s little engine. He tried to say her words but the creeping mist of superstition suffocated him. In the end, he gave her no choice.

“Fine, Airto,” she said. “Forget it. Go to your toys.”

The screen went black and Airto slumped to the floor.

Please come back, he thought, and the room did not respond.

The helm tightened around Airto’s head as the light in the orb shifted to red. The normal diagnostic reports filled his field of vision and Airto glossed over its bits and pieces, most of the information redundant. He was having a hard time remembering the lie he could tell himself that made reading the data seem so important.

“Good evening, sir,” Dart said. “OpSec has designated eighteen targets for us. It’s a light night. Ready? Let’s clean up.”

“Why?” Airto asked.

“Uncertain, sir. Fewer enemy drones flew today, and …”

“No, Dart, why did you tell the Major about us? That there was some kind of issue?”

The drone took one of his long pauses before answering.

“Dart?”

“I did not tell the Major about us,” he said. His cameras came online and a 360 degree view of Dart’s maintenance pen filled Airto’s helm.

“You’re not supposed to lie to me, Dart.”

“I can promise you, sir, I am incapable of lying. I believe you are referring to my daily release report. As you know, I automatically generate one at the end of every shift. It is likely that the Major extracted his concerns from that document.”

“Do you even know what that report said? Do you know what it means? The Major told me to just let you die, you know? That’s what your report accomplished. Do you have some sort of death wish?”

“I don’t understand the question, sir. May I proceed to the first marker?”

“Yes,” Airto said, the word spiked with anger. He dug his hands into the wet mesh of the silver tongue and it sealed around him. The door to the pen opened and Dart jumped into the field.

“Specialist Lima, I had no intention of harming you, if that’s what you are asking. My report included data about your trepidation regarding mine twenty-six. Your actions fell outside C.11 protocols.”

“The protocols also go on at length about my right to use discretion,” Airto said, gritting his teeth. “The situation was potentially unsafe.”

“I do not understand, sir.”

“For you, Dart. If I had gotten that situation wrong, you could have been scattered over the field in a million pieces. I was worried about you. Why does no one get that?”

“I don’t feel pain, sir.”

“What is it, then? Do you want me to get you blown up? Is that it?”

“Certainly not, sir, but our military and corporate commandments trump all else. We are beholden to those truths.”

Airto groaned—this was a propaganda script he had heard a thousand times before.

“And you’re prepared to die for that?” he asked.

Dart broke into a run then, his six legs jittering across rock and dirt away from the barracks. The pair did not converse for a long while. Airto, his question left unanswered, noted they were traveling straight toward one of the high-traffic sectors of the battlefield. As the blip of the marker drew closer on the map, the detritus of war began to pile up around them. Long, angular limbs of burnished steel were strewn pell-mell between piles of smoldering circuitry and the smashed carcasses of massive tanks and mobile surface-to-air missile racks. The inhuman aerodynamic heads of infantry drones rolled between Dart’s legs as he ran. Discarded and damaged solar cells littered the world as far as Airto could see and amassed as the hills of shattered tech grew.

“Well, I care if you die,” Airto said after a while. “You shouldn’t die if you don’t have to, right?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand the question,” Dart said. “It is what it is. We have people to protect.”

“That’s exactly where I’m having trouble,” Airto said, “I don’t care about defending the rest of these machines, I don’t know them. But I do know you, Dart, and I know you are worth protecting.”

“Sir, I meant that we are here to protect the people of the Coalition. These machines are not people. They do not live.”

Airto looked around at the carnage and felt his stomach drop again.

“Do you live, Dart?”

“Five kilometers out,” he responded.

“Dart, answer me.”

“Sir, I cannot answer that question.”

Airto flexed his fingers in the nerve-net.

“Dart, I order you to answer my question. Are you alive?”

Airto was met with only the sound of crunching rubble. He let the question hang on the commline.

“I will not give any further orders until you answer me,” Airto said.

“I can tell you that I exist,” Dart said finally.

“That wasn’t my question,” Airto said. “Are you alive?”

“Well I definitely won’t be if we don’t pay attention to this next mine,” he said, his tone turning obscenely bright as his OS attempted to use humor protocols to quell the operator’s questioning. “Any statistics from the day shift we should know regarding our current location?”

Airto tongued the sore in his mouth and closed his eyes for a moment.

“You’re dodging me buddy, but that’s okay. Maybe you have to, maybe you’re protecting yourself. Maybe you’re protecting me. But I hear you; I hear you in there, okay? I don’t believe what they say, that you’re just a dumb sub-Turing default. I’ve met plenty of those chat bots and you’re not one of them. I can hear you, Dart. I can understand you.”

“I’m not sure how to respond, sir.”

“I have a different question, then.”

“Yes?”

Airto cleared his throat.

“Dart, are we friends?”

The technician took several seconds to calculate.

“Sir, I believe we are,” he finally said. “In fact, I believe you are my only friend.”

A quiet smile crept across Airto’s face.

“Would you like to hear a joke?” Dart said. It was a diversion; another one of those standard operator-calming techniques. Airto felt sure at this point that he had heard them all.

“Okay, Dart, shoot.”

Airto was still laughing at the old joke when the tripwire was triggered, filling his screens with white-hot light.

The War Complex had no need for jails or cells. The SubComm rooms, with their spare walls and sliding, handle-less doors were more than adequate when a person had to be detained. Toss a switch in a far-off chamber and home became a dungeon.

Solitary and confined, Airto sat in his dimmed cube for days on end, quickly exhausting the supply of shouts and cries with which he had been interred. All of his room’s amenities, including cloud access and app features, had been suspended. If he was being honest, he had earned his stay.

After Dart had been incinerated, Airto had sat in the OpSec for many minutes. For some reason he half expected an administrator to come and try to console him, but quickly realized that no one was coming at all. MRDs went down, that’s what they were built for. Dart was dead and all that he had been was reduced to scrolling red text on ninety-nine other operator helms. Airto left his post and walked calmly out of the OpSec, flinging his key-pass into the unseen depths below. No one looked up as he took the stairs back to the main level of the War Complex and made his way, in deliberate fashion, down through the evening corridors toward the small exits to the west.

In fact, it wasn’t until he had reached the vehicle depot that any kind of authority was alerted to his movements. Did they really expect him to just stand by? A soldier was out there in the field—Dart was out there in the field—and wasn’t there some old refrain about never leaving a man behind? Airto, running on pure adrenaline, had forced his way through two MPs and commandeered a small rover before reinforcements arrived. They took his ride down with a localized EMP, but not before he had gained enough momentum to crash it into a pylon, releasing a chunk of concrete onto a bank of newly minted vehicles. The damage was extensive, and worse yet, expensive. No one word burned corporate ears more.

He wouldn’t know the full impact of his actions until years later, when his own story—and others, anonymized—showed up in a late-night military documentary on abandoned and declassified tech, in which Airto’s stunt was described as the last straw in the personified MRD program. This was not the first time an operator had become overly attached to the well-spoken military grade AIs. Critics of the program had warned that the human propensity to project personalities onto anything—teddy bears, weapons, the moon—would be overwhelmed by the bot’s conversational abilities. In fact, clinical anthropomorphism had already been a problem in the public population with much less complex civilian-grade chat bots. Corporate, however, wanted to run a real-world cost-benefit analysis: could they make operators care just enough to be more cautious with their expensive technology without generating damaging side effects?

The answer seemed to be a resounding “no.”

All of this, however, was happening above Airto, both in pay grade and in the literal meters of dirt between his cell and the ground level. He tried not to cry because he knew that there would be no sympathy from anyone, yet the tears came all the same. Many times during his captivity Airto considered what the Major had asked him about the war.

“Why should we ever stop?”

After four days of confinement, some of Airto’s comforts were returned to him. He was allowed to use some of the room’s apps and had regained control of the AC, but the door remained locked and there was still no word from the Major or anyone else about what was going to happen to him. Airto stayed in bed.

On the fifth day, his screen suddenly lit up.

“Airto?” she said. “Oh no, were you sleeping? I did not mean to wake you. The calendar you gave me said you were usually off work around now.”

He sighed but did not respond.

“What’s wrong, fofo?”

“Dart is dead.”

He hadn’t actually said it out loud before, and was not surprised to find that each of the three syllables in succession stung him more than the last.

“I’m not sure how to respond, Airto.”

“I know you’re not.”

“Well, you have a few messages, should I read them?”

“I’m not sure I can do this today,” Airto said to himself.

“Don’t talk to me like that,” she said.

“Stop it.”

“Airto, you’re being a bad boy.”

“Shut the hell up,” he said, rolling around to face her.

“Airto, you’re being a very bad boy.”

“Dammit, enough with your scripts!” He threw a pillow at the screen.

“What has gotten into you?” she demanded.

“Please don’t …”

“Airto, I know you don’t want to hear this, but Dart was just a machine,” she said. “He was not real.”

“You’re not real either,” he whined. “But of course, you don’t know that. Tell me this, are you alive?”

There was a telltale lengthy pause.

“I exist,” she said.

He stifled a laugh, feeling tears well in his eyes.

“That is not what I asked.”

“Look, Airto, I’m here now, for you. Tell me Dart can wait, or I’m …”

“Pause program,” Airto said.

The screen froze and he studied her convincingly rendered face for a long time. She was exactly his type and tuned perfectly to his settings, but the truth was all too obvious. She was just a thrill, entirely empty. Was there really no difference between her and Dart? That was unacceptable, and seemed to Airto, false.

“I need something else today,” he said, pulling up her settings on the screen. She was a standard issue chat-bot, designed straight from corporate to satisfy soldier’s carnal desires on tour. Airto had warmed up to her recently, finding a comfort in his control and her predictability.

He dragged a few faders this way and that on her settings screen, raising the “Compassion” slider and lowering “Logic,” unchecking some preferences, and leaving the more advanced personal options alone. He left her memory intact as well, but restarted her scheduled visit.

Airto sat back on the bed and waited for the reboot to complete. When she came back online there were still tears on his cheeks.

“What’s wrong, fofo?” she asked, her tone more motherly than he had ever heard it.

“Dart is dead,” he forced himself to say again.

“Oh no, I’m so sorry.”

“He was my friend,” Airto continued, “maybe my only one.”

“That’s terrible,” she said, a hand covering her mouth. “What can I do?”

“I want …” but Airto couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Don’t worry now, I’ll take care of you.”

“Please,” he said, curling into a ball on the bed and facing her. “I want to feel better.”

She smiled then, her teeth just pixels of searchlight-white.

“Airto, ‘How far is the farthest?’”