Will McIntosh - Defenders

“Pierre.”

Lila groaned inwardly. Pierre was a walking neurosis. Lila wasn’t sure if defenders were capable of developing PTSD, but something had to account for how far from the defender norm Pierre was when it came to being tightly wound.

Pierre was waiting outside the delivery room (as they referred to it when no defenders were present). “How many?” he asked as they approached.

“Eight hundred,” Lila replied.

“Eight hundred exactly?”

“Eight hundred exactly.” Eight hundred more defenders, with their dead souls and sociopathic narcissism. With the advances in genetic engineering made between the end of the Luyten War and the beginning of the Defender Ascension (as the defenders had named it), Lila could have engineered them to be so much more stable, if they’d let her. But no. The new defenders couldn’t be in any way superior to the existing ones.

Lila and Minka followed Pierre down concrete stairs to the parade floor, where the new defenders were lined up, ready for review.

She should kill herself. Blow her brains out, or jump from a bridge. More of these monsters only added suffering to the world. If she wasn’t such a coward, if she didn’t love Kai and Errol so much, she would remove herself from the equation. They would get someone else to oversee production at this facility, but that rationalization was wearing thin for her. Lately she felt so disgusting most of the time. Most humans who learned what she did for a living shared her contempt for herself.

Other officers tended to strut around during a review, making it more a ceremonial show than a true inspection, but Pierre looked the new defenders up and down as if expecting some to be missing fingers, or major organs.

Lila waited by the door for more than an hour before Pierre finally nodded his approval. “Brothers,” he called, “welcome to the world.”

Lila and Minka stood aside as the new defenders paraded past, five at a time, up the stairs to join the hellish world they’d all created together.

Lila dropped her purse on the kitchen counter and headed for her room. She had twenty minutes to get ready to go with Erik to this thing, whatever it was.

“Lila?” Erik called from his room. “Is that you? Come here, please.”

“Coming.” She always felt uneasy, being alone in the house with Erik. It made her feel too much like his wife.

He was lying on the bed, wearing what looked like a giant pair of boxer shorts, his artificial legs on the bed beside him.

He looked less than imposing lying there, his stumped flesh-and-bone legs ending just below the knee, the last few inches of his legs deeply notched to accept the bionic appendages, his friction sores salved.

“Can you help me with these?”

“Sure.”

She clamped and locked his limbs into place as gently as she could, trying not to aggravate the open sores. The fit was never perfect, and friction was inevitable. The arms weren’t as bad.

October 8, 2047. Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada.

She hated the cold. Absolutely despised it. She’d turned down a postdoc at UMass in favor of LSU solely because it was warm in Louisiana and cold in Massachusetts. That she might live out the rest of her life in the northernmost outpost on Earth was a biting irony.

As she did at the start of every information-gathering session on the Internet, she checked her sister’s Facebook page. There was nothing new. Richelle was still working on a construction project for the defenders in Sarasota, Florida, building a government office facility, working right alongside Luyten. As always, Dominique had to resist the urge to leave an anonymous message that only Richelle would understand, to let her know Dominique was still alive. She’d never actually do it, of course. If by some wild chance the defender intelligentsia checked her account that day and realized what the message was, they could trace the computer’s IP address, and ultimately discover that the computer in question was issued to CFS Alert, the northernmost continually inhabited outpost in the world, one of those out-of-the-way locales they hadn’t bothered to formally conquer. Dominique wondered why they couldn’t have fled to some out-of-the-way Polynesian island. There were plenty of those the defenders hadn’t bothered to conquer, either.

With her daily check on Richelle out of the way, Dominique got to work, starting with a check of the New York Times . Most of it was fluff now, stories of pets finding their way home from a thousand miles away, coverage of construction projects, details of the planned changeover in the NFL from human players to defenders. Very little helpful information. No one put anything helpful in writing; the president and his people assumed significant communication was happening the old-fashioned way: face-to-face. That left the good people hiding out at CFS Alert frustratingly uninformed.

Dominique wasn’t sure what good it would do them to be informed. There were fewer than fifty people at CFS Alert. They had no weapons to speak of, no army to command. The war was over. They’d lost. Still, they were one of the last vestiges of free human leadership, of legitimate human authority, and they had zero information.

Dominique lifted her hot cocoa, blew on it, took a sip. It was powdered and not very good, but how much was she going to miss it when it was gone? They would deplete their food stores by spring, by which time they’d have to know how to live off the land. Dominique shuddered at the thought of dried seal blubber for breakfast. They should fly south and surrender. Only they couldn’t, because they’d be executed for fleeing, and for being important and powerful people. No, what they needed was a way to communicate with people in the larger world that didn’t give away their existence, let alone their location.

There was a rap on her door.

“Come in!” she shouted, to be heard over the howling wind outside.

Forrest squeezed inside and closed the door, gasping from the morning cold. “That’ll wake you up in a hurry.”

“That’s why I’m still in here,” Dominique said, suddenly feeling energized. Forrest did that to her, and it was time and then some that one of them crossed that invisible line and overtly acknowledged the obvious attraction between them. Dominique wondered if they were both taking it slow because it was fun to be in this early, flirtatious stage. It was a breath of warm spring air in an otherwise barren, stifling existence. Maybe they should just go on like this. Only Dominique was tired of sleeping alone; Forrest’s warm body would be so much better than her army-issue electric blanket.

“Does that mean you’re not going to breakfast?” Forrest asked.

Dominique made a show of struggling to her feet. “No, I’m coming. I just want there to be a tunnel between the barracks and the cafeteria. I don’t want to see any more snow .”

“I can fix that. Come on.”

Dominique pulled on her coat, hat, and gloves. Grinning, Forrest took a scarf off her coat hook and blindfolded her with it. Laughing, Dominique let Forrest take her hand and lead her outside.

The wind bit her skin, immediately unpleasant.

“Did you see they’re demolishing Disney World?” Dominique asked as they walked.

“I did.”

“I mean, Disney World. The Taj Mahal was one thing, but Disney World ? Mickey’s home?”

“The bastards.”

“The problem is, they’re not playful. It made sense at the time—if you’re designing killing machines, you don’t want them to be playful, but now that they run everything, it’s a problem…” She stopped short, pulled off the scarf as a flash of insight struck her. It just dropped into her mind, the way some of the best ideas arrived. “Holy shit. I think I’ve got it.”