Richard Lovett: Phantom Sense

Meanwhile, I had to move. There’d been no shooting for several minutes, and my squad clearly hadn’t won. The Ladenites had to be on their way.

My first job was to reconnoiter. As bugs recharged, I sent them up-gully, looking for branchings. If I could get far enough before the gully got too steep or narrow, I’d be back in the land of boulders and just might be able to keep out of sight. Box myself in and I was dead.

For sixteen hours, I played cat and mouse. Several times, I had clear shots, but didn’t dare take them. With the Sense, I could keep ahead, but it was sixteen hours of hyper-vigilance. Sixteen hours of trying to ignore the increasing stiffness of my shoulder. Sixteen hours of being the hunted, rather than the hunter.

When rescue came, I was nearly too tired to care. So tired it took me a moment to react when a fly not mine landed on my arm. So tired I could barely make my eyes focus to see the tiny chip behind its head. So tired, I didn’t realize I was safe, not even when the other team’s CI-MEMS operator approached, accompanied by none other than a miraculously ambulatory Captain Thomas.

Captain Thomas and his team circled up-valley and around, as we should have the night before. Three hours later, I heard gunfire, saw the star-bright pinpricks of muzzle flashes. Soon after, they were back with me, taking less than an hour to cross the distance over which I’d played a day-long game of life-and-death hide-and-seek: the confidence of those who’d gotten close enough for their CI-MEMS operator to be sure he’d found everything they were looking for.

They brought two more survivors. One was a grunt who’d managed to find his way to a boulder field from which he could dodge to safety, rock-to-rock.

The other was Jerret.

I hoped like hell I’d never be like him.

There’s a way it should be when the woman you love comes up unexpectedly behind you. First is the jolt—the realization someone’s there. Then the recognition: a turn, a kiss, pulling each other close and wishing you need never, ever let go.

And while I’d long been faking the surprise, the rest—the never wanting to let go… that had been as real on our twentieth anniversary as our first. It was just that Sense had replaced surprise, data had replaced intuition. Nor was the ravine the only time I’d nearly died: it was merely the most protracted.

Too many emotions all at once. Too little knowledge. When that happens you fall back on training. No, you fall back on survival.

If I’d had a weapon, I might have killed her.

I have no idea what I thought I was lashing out at. I had too little Sense to know anything other than where she was. I certainly didn’t see a petite woman. More like a hulking enemy.

Getting out of a recliner is normally a clumsy process. But in panic mode it’s easy: convulse your hamstrings to push the footrest down, then use the momentum to launch your body forward. That last bit of Sense, or perhaps memory, told me where I’d left the beer can. Energized now by fear and adrenaline, I had plenty of power to lift and hurl it, hearing but not fully processing the yelp as it struck her square on the jaw.

With the hulking menace now off guard, I cut back, hard—hard enough to hear my foot pop as I pivoted back toward the threat. A fracture of the fifth metatarsal, I’d later learn, but at the time I barely felt it. Instead, I drove a punch into the soft, unprepared belly, followed by a forearm across the exposed throat, driving her backward into the oak-paneled wall.

And then, finally, I realized where I was. Who this had to be. What I was doing.

I dropped my arm. “Oh my God.” An oath? A prayer? Who knows.

Denise didn’t care.

“You bastard,” she said.

I stepped back. Groped for words but found none, even as she headed for the stairs—out of my life.

“It wasn’t as though I didn’t have plenty of chances to actually have an affair,” she said.

I woke screaming. But this time, I wasn’t me. I was him, just as I’d seen him on the battlefield that day, with the wild-eyed stare of someone who’d never be the same.

He’d been a bad enough sight physically. Blood and dirt staining his face and uniform a muddy red-brown dusted in white, like an earthquake victim pulled from the rubble. A dirty kerchief wrapped a hand where, I later learned, two fingers were broken. More bandage, fresh gauze this time, supplied by his rescuers, peeked from beneath his helmet, streaked crimson where a wound still oozed.

He had no idea what had hit him. Whatever it was had knocked him out long enough for his swarm to lose direction, wander off, vanish. Long enough that when he woke, he was totally cut off. Long enough he was no longer the Jerret he’d been.

Something similar happens when you sleep, but then, you park your insects in standby mode. It’s as automatic as closing your eyes. But in combat you have every resource extended, recalling them only by conscious choice. Had my headfirst dive concussed me rather than dislocated my shoulder, I could easily have been Jerret. Now, at least once a week, I dream I am.

The psychs say gradual withdrawal is best. Maybe. But when I wake screaming… the end result appears exactly the same.

“I got a surprise today,” Cora told the mirror cam. She was vidblogging from her bathroom, where she’d hooked a camera to the mirror, talking while applying her makeup. I’d been startled the first time she did that, but so long as she was adequately dressed, I suppose the bathroom’s as good a place as any.

The camera was mounted above her head, rounding the curves of her face by foreshortening her image ever so slightly. If she stood in just the right place, it also caught her reflection in a mirror on the door behind, producing a vanishing-infinity effect as Cora fronts and Cora backs disappeared into the distance. It was like seeing her through an endless corridor: the type of thing people describe in near-death experiences, except that in those, there’s supposed to be a light at the end. Here, there were only ever-more-distant Coras, receding forever.

“I was in the mall, shopping for a new dress. This one in fact.” She stepped out of sight, then back, holding a black, scoop-necked gown. She’d always had good taste.

“Isn’t it cute? Anyway, as I came out of Allemontes I was sure I saw Jerret heading for the escalator. I ran over, but by the time I got there, he was gone. Maybe it was just someone who looked like him.”

She paused.

“And Daddy… I know you’re listening. I’m not stupid, you know. You didn’t hack onto this; I let you. You want to know about me… ?” She drew back, hands on hips. “Well, this is me. I grew up. I get to choose who I date. You were never there . And when you were there, there was nothing I could do to make you stay. Always another mission. Always off nearly getting killed. You don’t think I couldn’t tell?”

Tears beaded and she blinked. Blinked again. “Nothing I could do would make you stay. Do you remember me asking about that as a little girl? You just said you had no choice. Well even then I knew that was BS. Everyone has a choice. You chose to be elsewhere.

“Did you know, my sophomore year in high school, all those A’s were for you? I thought maybe if I was good enough you’d stay. Silly me. Soccer too. Mom told me you’d been this super-athlete before you went in the Army—sorry, Corps , whatever that was. Why didn’t you ever tell us anything? Anyway, the soccer didn’t matter, either. Even making all-conference wasn’t good enough. All you wanted was your damn adrenaline rush or whatever it was you got out of almost being killed all the time. Nothing I did was ever going to be more important. Nothing was ever going to be good enough.”