Will McIntosh - Defenders

He’d never been much of a gamer, even back in high school when dorky kids like him were supposed to hide there until they could escape into adulthood. Now he called up Earth2 and set up an account.

He was surprised to find the place roiling with activity. Avatars hurried here and there on foot, in cars, via flight. It seemed bizarre that so many people would be playing an old-fashioned online game. And actually, most people weren’t playing, exactly—they were meeting. Performing a three-sixty, he saw three separate groups of avatars congregated together, deep in conversation.

He directed his avatar toward the nearest group, about two dozen people sitting in a circle on a beach. As he approached, they stopped talking.

“Private meeting,” someone called in a metallic voice, or maybe his audio settings made it sound metallic.

Oliver turned his avatar around, headed for the second group. It probably would have been more efficient to check the instructions and find out how to fly, but he was in no hurry.

He was still surprised by how easy it had been to slip off the defenders’ radar. He’d been a major political player, heavily involved in the Luyten War, the defenders program, yet the defenders had simply lost track of him, and didn’t seem to be actively trying to locate him. If they had a weakness, it was this lack of attention to detail.

As he swung open the door of the old-fashioned diner where the second group was meeting, a few avatars looked his way, but no one said anything. Oliver took a seat toward the back.

“If you try that, they’ll catch you, and they’ll kill you,” a blond, square-jawed avatar said to what appeared to be a golden retriever standing on its hind legs.

“They won’t catch me. And they won’t catch you, either, if you follow my instructions. They can’t trace you if you’re using my baffle software.”

“Can we get back on subject?” a Valkyrie-looking woman dressed in purple furs said.

“We are on the subject,” the retriever said. “Our charge is to develop techniques to disrupt their electronic communications. How are we off subject?”

His heart pounding, Oliver directed his avatar back outside. If this was what it appeared to be…

He joined another meeting. They were discussing how to locate US Army weapons caches hidden during the previous century.

Oliver raised his fist in the air and whooped. A resistance movement. This was what he’d been waiting for. He navigated his avatar out of the second meeting, wandered around until he found a pedestrian—an Asian woman wearing a blue sweater and a pair of khakis.

“Excuse me, is there someone in charge of operations here?”

“You mean, here in Fiddler’s Green?” she asked.

“No, for the whole thing. All of this.” He gestured to encompass all they could see.

The woman put her hands on her hips. “You’re looking for Island Rain.”

Oliver’s heart hit another gear. Island Rain? Why did that moniker sound familiar?

Then he remembered. Dominique Wiewall. She’d been from the Caribbean. There’d been only one thing on her office wall—a poster of her home, with Island Rain printed across the bottom. Could it possibly be Dominique? But how could she have survived? He’d assumed she’d been with the US leadership in Colorado Springs when the country fell.

“Where can I find her?”

The woman laughed. “You can’t just wander in and see Island Rain. You have to earn your place, work your way up. Are you new? You look new.” She looked Oliver’s avatar up and down.

“Let’s assume I’m new, but I’m someone with expertise Island Rain would want to know about. How would I go about getting a message to her?”

“Hmm.” The woman folded her arms. She was quite good at realistic mannerisms. Oliver’s avatar was just standing there, arms dangling at his sides. Of course, that pretty well captured his mannerisms in real life. “I could message JJ, the captain of Fiddler’s Green.”

“Would you? I’d appreciate it.” If it was Dominique, how could he signal her? It would be a bad idea to speak her name, probably not smart even to mention Easter Island. Something subtle. “Ask him to tell her a fellow admirer of Moai needs to speak to her.” Oliver was elated to have something constructive to do. Something he was good at.

October 15, 2047. Washington, D.C.

The morning rush hour pedestrians moved into the street, or pressed against the buildings, to let a defender pass on the sidewalk. It reminded Lila of vehicles clearing out to let an ambulance pass, only people moved more quickly to get out of the way of a defender.

Lila stood in the gutter an extra moment to allow the throngs to unclog, then stepped back into the flow of people on their way to work. She waited for the light and crossed Victory Avenue, which was a hundred feet wide at least, one of the new defender streets. The city was transforming into an enormous visual illusion. On one block everything looked normal; on the next everything was triple in size.

There was a new indoor rifle range on Ichiro Street, bearing the familiar NO HUMANS sign. She’d never seen a NO LUYTEN sign; evidently even while target shooting the defenders needed someone to fetch their iced tea.

She was so tired. Typically her insomnia would get a little worse each night, building to a crescendo where she was too exhausted to think, and that would break the cycle and she would sleep fifteen hours straight. This time it just kept getting worse. She was beyond exhausted, but her thoughts kept spinning, as if they’d discovered their own power source independent of her sleep-deprived brain.

She was so afraid of what might happen if this resistance turned out to be more than a bunch of posturing blowhards. What was it about humanity that always led it right back to killing as the solution to its problems? If someone would just listen, she was sure she could get them out of this mess without firing a shot. The defenders had weaknesses; their ability to respond to a physical attack wasn’t one of them. Why couldn’t other people see that?

If only there was some way to jump-start the process, to get the defenders to see that they’d be better off if humans were in charge, or at least sharing power. That would mean getting them to be less paranoid. Saner. Happier.

Lila laughed out loud. Couldn’t they all use that? She certainly could. The problem with the defenders was that they were engineered to be paranoid and unhappy. The only way to change it was to alter their genetic code.

She slowed her pace. What if she did it now, subtly? There was no one checking the new defenders’ genetic coding at this point. Would the existing defenders notice if the new ones were less disordered? If she could somehow reintroduce serotonin into the design, the new ones would still be violent and have negligible social skills, but they’d be less empty inside.

It would be incredibly risky. Her defender superiors had expressly instructed her to make the new defenders exactly the same as the existing ones. If they caught her messing with the formula, they’d pull her legs off, then stomp her to jelly. But if she made the alterations at the source codes, and no one checked her work, she’d be the only person on Earth who’d know.

Up ahead, the back of a parked semi rolled open, and a Luyten climbed out. Lila stopped walking and waited for it to cross the sidewalk and head down an alley between two shops. She would never get used to them; they would always make her skin crawl…

With a jolt, she realized that if she were to introduce serotonin into the brain chemistry of defenders, the Luyten would be able to read their thoughts. How could she have overlooked that fact, even for a minute? The thought gave her chills. Jesus, what if she’d gone ahead with it, not realizing what she was doing?