SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“No,” I wrote, “but your mission is ended. You blew up, remember?”

“What happens to me when I blow up?”

“You…” I stopped typing into the sim. How do you explain to a rocket that he can only be used once, and is dead and gone after? “You complete the mission when you blow up.”

“But what happens to me after?”

“That’s it. You aren’t anymore. There’s no you left.”

“Just like the number one and number two. They’re not left.”

“That’s right.”

“Why shouldn’t they be left?”

“Because they were evil, remember? They were doing bad things.”

“What if…” his writing hesitated. “What if I want to be left after? In the real world?”

“That’s just not how that works,” I said.

“But then I can’t do more good.” He paused. “I thought it was good to do more good.”

“It is, and by doing this you’ll be doing more good than any one of us could ever do.”

Another pause. “I see. What’s it like, not being left? Is it unpleasant?”

Too much philosophy, that was his problem. I’d have to have a chat with Linda. “No, it’s like…like you float away into nothingness, and you don’t need to worry about the world anymore. It’s not unpleasant at all.”

He was quiet for a long time, but of course still passed the next sim with flying colors.

Me and the gals, we started to plan a little graduation ceremony for him in the testing lab for when he was ready to go into action. Nothing fancy like what the top brass does, but then, the top brass would never have a ceremony for a bomb. We were about two weeks out from it when General Pitticks and five of his aides strode into the lab. He never came to the lab.

“Time’s up,” he said. The man always sounded like he was gargling rocks.

Linda was the one that stepped up to him. “We’re not done. We still have seven more sims to take hi- I mean take it through.”

“Don’t care. Bomb’s been hitting the targets, yes?” He shifted his toothpick to the other side of his mouth.

“Well yes, but -”

“And it’s been performing the camouflage maneuvers? Gathering good intelligence to optimize the hit?”

“Yes but the mechanisms of the hit are still a bit…fluid.”

“Good enough. We need it now.” He looked around the lab until he found Teeny, tubes and wires sticking out of him like a coma patient. “Is it gonna blow if we take those wires out?”

“Well no, but-”

“Good. The Ambridians keep shooting our Azimuths out of the sky so we need something with better camo, and there’s no Tarzons left. Hamazi’s given us a gift—he’ll be very vulnerable for the next three hours, and we need to hit him NOW.” He started yanking out wires, and Teeny convulsed like he’d done on that first day.

“Stop that!” cried Linda. “You’re hurting him!”

He gave her a look that would pulverize a small building. “It’s a bomb, ” he growled. “Not a kitten. What’s wrong with you?” His steely-grey eyes swept through the rest of the beeping machinery in the lab.

So I stepped in. Top brass always responded better to fancy words. “General, with all due respect, let us give you the procedures to ensure optimal performance.” He grunted and agreed.

Off Teeny went, rolling away on the little cart the general’s aide had brought. We offered to brief Pitticks with our full notes and recommendations, but he grunted again that as long as the bomb hit the targets in the sims without detection he didn’t give a flying fuck and to get the hell out of his way. They’d do the full debrief for the next one, where they actually needed the extra functionality. He always was an asshole. Tell your viewers not to vote for him.

But anyway, our little boy was off to do good in the world. We’d sent off other bombs in the past, of course, but we’d never felt this kind of pride. Teeny was our bomb. He was smart. He would minimize civilian casualties and do more than the military ever imagined. And once that happened there’d be more Teenies, to make sure any time our military needed we could strike with intelligence. Of course, those would be fully tested.

We popped champagne that night, cheering our brilliant little boy.

We all assumed he would hit Hamazi that day, and that’d be that. The slippery bastard had survived more assassination attempts than anyone, and taking him out would be the best step to liberate the corrupt country. It was full of poor saps, starving and downtrodden and mostly hating the freedoms of right-thinking countries like us. I think we even had the guy to prop up there instead, to make sure the new regime would be friendly.

About two months later, with Hamazi still alive and kicking, we were in the lab doing a meta-sim to test out our own systems when a bunch of Pitticks’ men came in and hauled us all off to be court-martialed. You know what happened next—it’s in the public record.

You want me to tell it anyway? Fine. One of them cut our power right before eight more stormed into the lab. They grabbed each of us, two to one. Marched us out and threw us in cells after, even though we’d done exactly as we were supposed to. They hauled in the research team, too.

What happened with Teeny? Well, you ever wondered why I’m in this tech-free cell, and you had to come in person to talk to me? Why they confiscated your smartpad and any recording devices and only gave you a pencil and some paper?

At first I didn’t even know what happened with him. Before they hauled me to this tech-free wing I saw on the prison holos that Hamazi went into a retirement home—a retirement home, of all things!—and his nephew took over.

Now I wouldn’t say that the nephew was a particularly big fan of us, but the “Death to the Pigs” propaganda died out and he focused on his own country’s stuff for a while. He kicked out the old council and set up a constitutional monarchy with a parliament. And within a few years the Ambridian Republic looked like it was in much better shape, with people getting fed and educated, and they started setting up peace treaties with countries left and right. Not us though, but they left us be and I guess that’s fine.

And of course from that alone we were all tried for treason. They assumed we had some ties with the Hamazi regime and purposely sent out a faulty bomb. Complete nonsense, of course. We were just doing our jobs, and it was Pitticks who made it a rush job. Just covering his ass, really.

But it takes more than the whiff of treason to get you locked up in a room with no screens, with real human guards coming to bring you food so you’d have no contact with bots. A few months after the Ambridian regime change, after I’d already been tried and sentenced and tossed away, I started seeing new pictures on the screens in my cell. Usually the pics are all things to keep us prisoners docile, you know? Beaches and forests and puppies and whatnot. Anyway, one day my pics were a little bit different. I started getting pics of Hamazi’s nephew signing peace treaties, and Ambridian villages getting airdrops of medical supplies, and even pics of new schools being built.

Now, I can’t be sure exactly how Teeny did it. It might’ve been from him hacking into Hamazi’s personal Net and reprogramming his guardbots to shuffle him away, or giving intel to the nephew’s guardbots to help maneuver into power, or draining his bank accounts, or what. But I know it was him who made the change, and that he kept on working at it even after his propulsion system gutted out and he had to rely on his solar cells to keep going.

What do you mean, how do I know? Well, lemme tell ya, it’s how they decided I couldn’t get any more access to tech. After those Ambridian pics kept coming, every day for a few months, I got a little message. It was in the corner of the interface, where no text should be. And in a white old-fashioned font, all it said was, “Did I do good?”