Will McIntosh - Defenders

As they walked in silence, Kai occasionally looked at Oliver, still half expecting him to say something, to ask Kai questions the way his father used to. He wasn’t at all like Kai’s real father, who’d laughed and goofed around and played jokes on Kai. Most of the time Oliver didn’t say much. It was strange to eat dinner mostly in silence, but it felt good to have dinner to eat, and a table, and someone taking care of him. Kai had had a nightmare the night before, where he woke up to find his bed had been moved outside, into the woods, while he slept. When he woke for real, in his own room, he’d felt such relief.

There were three defenders, actually. They were standing in the shadow of the Vietnam War Memorial, accepting food eagerly from kids and adults alike, their assault rifles leaned up against the memorial. They ate fiercely, the way they fought, showing no preference for any particular food, and no pleasure in eating it. The people feeding them were clearly enjoying themselves, though.

Kai held up his loaf until a defender plucked it away with two clawed fingers. He felt a thrill as the defender ate it like it was nothing. It felt good to do his part.

When the defenders had eaten their fill, they retrieved their weapons and left without a word. They weren’t much for conversation, didn’t say please or thank you, but as they trotted off to rejoin their company Kai and Oliver joined in when the humans applauded, shouting out lyrics from the defenders’ song the band Hot Button had just released. Kai loved the song, played it all the time.

As they headed out of the park, Kai looked up at Oliver, who seemed lost in thought, as usual.

“Do you like football?” Kai asked.

“Sure.”

“Maybe when the war is over and the NFL starts back up, we could go to a game?”

“Okay. I’d like that.”

Oliver sounded a little hesitant, like he wasn’t sure he’d like it but was willing to give it a try.

“What team do you like?” Kai asked. When Oliver hesitated, Kai added, “I like the Broncos.”

“Me, too,” Oliver said.

Kai suspected Oliver didn’t know a touchdown from a ground-rule double, but he appreciated that Oliver was willing to lie to make Kai feel like they had something in common. It was a good sign. He was a good guy. Maybe one day it would feel natural to call him Dad.

August 23, 2030. Washington, D.C.

Oliver watched a cardinal perched in a tree outside his office window. He wondered what birds thought, when they were flying around in deep woods and came upon a Luyten. Were they at all surprised? Did they sense the Luyten were something different that didn’t belong?

“Dr. Bowen?”

It was Carlotta Marcosi, carrying a screen. “You said you wanted to see the fMRI. Is now a good time?”

“Sure. Yes.”

Marcosi set the screen on his desk. Oliver studied the fMRI video, trying to make sense of it. Brain activity was not his area, but he could read an fMRI well enough to know Five’s brain activity was beyond bizarre.

“I don’t understand what I’m seeing,” Oliver finally said. “Do you?”

“Not really, no,” Carlotta Marcosi said. Her hand was trembling as she pointed out regions of Five’s brain. Apparently she was nervous about making this presentation to Oliver, who was, from her perspective, the big boss.

“We’re struggling to link brain structures to functions. We do know there’s a lot of repetition in the structures.” Marcosi pointed to structures that looked like jagged mountain peaks, repeating again and again in Five’s brain. “There’s very little overlap in the pattern of chemical and electrical activity among these structures at any one time, though, so they’re carrying out independent functions.”

“Hmm.” It boggled his mind, how complex their brains were. It would be so much easier if Five were willing to talk to him, although Oliver couldn’t blame Five for not wanting to divulge information about how the Luyten brain functioned. They were, after all, studying Luyten physiology because of the potential to gain military advantage. Still, Oliver couldn’t understand Five’s recent boycott on any communication whatsoever. Oliver had grown so used to hearing that voice in his head that he missed it, in a masochistic way.

Not everything about the Luyten brain was foreign. They shared some neurotransmitter systems with humans, including serotonin, which had been the key to developing the defenders. But the Luyten brain also possessed dozens of mysterious neurotransmitter systems the human brain didn’t.

When Marcosi finished briefing him, Oliver went to Operations for an update on the campaign. Now that it was often good news, Oliver was addicted to hearing the latest on the various campaigns being carried out by the defenders.

The news was always after the fact. The war was primarily taking place in Luyten-controlled territory, so surveillance of defender activity was strictly prohibited, because human knowledge of defender troop movement hindered defender effectiveness. Once a territory was under defender control, they alerted their human counterparts, often requesting that human forces hold captured territory. The defenders didn’t have sufficient numbers to leave behind troops to hold territory after they captured it.

Oliver slipped into Operations and watched over shoulders as technicians updated three-dimensional maps. He worried that they might get tired of Oliver hanging around, although he wasn’t the only one. There were usually two or three voyeurs from other departments hanging around Operations at any given time.

Suzanne Ramos, one of the technicians he’d gotten to know a bit, noticed Oliver and smiled. “Hey, the starfish whisperer.”

Oliver had a thing for Suzanne, but she’d never know it. He was utterly incapable of flirting, and usually didn’t know when a woman was flirting with him. He never would have known Vanessa was interested, if his late sister hadn’t told him.

“Hi, Suzanne. What’s the latest? In—” He stepped closer and examined the topography she was working on. “Southwest Africa?”

Suzanne leaned back in her chair. She was petite, her eyes bright. “There’s no defender presence there yet. We’re trying to assess what sort of Luyten presence there is. I still miss high-def satellite imagery; we’re working with these little butterfly cameras that give you grainy images, plus the Luyten have a habit of routinely frying them to ash.”

“What about in our backyard? Any progress since yesterday?”

“I-95 is clear from here to Baltimore. There’s a lot of activity between Wilmington and Philly. We’re guessing the defenders are trying to create a supply corridor from D.C. to New York.”

Oliver couldn’t help grinning. “That’s just wonderful. It’s hard to imagine, being able to walk from here to New York.”

Suzanne leaned her head back until she was looking at Oliver upside down. “Even if there were no starfish, it’s hard to imagine being able to walk from D.C. to New York.”

“True,” he said, wishing he had a witty comeback. One would come to him tonight, while he was watching a video or something.

“Here,” Suzanne said, calling up a map of the area, divided into a green and red grid. Green squares indicated defender- or human-controlled territory; red squares, Luytencontrolled. There was still an awful lot of red—to the west, between D.C. and Richmond, covering the entire Delaware peninsula—but the green area was growing.

Large-scale battles between the Luyten and defenders were rare. Soon after the bloody battles to defend the production facilities, the Luyten went back to their net configuration—three Luyten defending territories of five to ten square miles. After retaking most of the strategically important facilities from the Luyten, such as power plants, factories, and mines, the defenders were now forced to locate and kill millions of Luyten, three at a time. Meanwhile, the Luyten had resumed their early strategy of sabotage and raids on vulnerable human populations.