James Tarr - Dogsoldiers

He sank into the chair with a sigh, closed his eyes for a few seconds. Even with the window the room was dim, almost cave-like, and pleasantly cool. It wouldn’t take much at all for him to drop off to sleep right there in the chair.

With a little shake of his head he roused himself and bent down to massage his aching calves which were already tightening up. Like he needed another reminder he wasn’t eighteen anymore. Or even twenty-eight. Youth is wasted on the young.

Through the window all he could see was an expanse of the neighboring roof, almost close enough to touch. Angling up to the left, covered in curling brown shingles long overdue to be replaced. The roof lit up suddenly as the setting sun ducked underneath one of the few clouds in the sky. The long shadow of something, perhaps an old TV antenna, ran across the slope out of sight.

A brilliant red flash made him jerk. The cardinal perched on the edge of the roof, atop an especially bad shingle curled up in fine imitation of a potato chip. The small bird was so radiantly, unnaturally red it looked like a prop, a fake, a special effect. It twittered, looked left, right, up, down, then peered past the peeling white window frame into the gloom where he sat motionless.

He held his breath, willed his body to stone, and tried not to blink as the fiery red bird stared into the room. Its tiny beak gleamed in the dying light. Without a sound the bird shot away in a flash of flapping red. A wry smile curled his lips—he’d never been much good at hiding and waiting.

He scooted the old wooden chair forward with a chorus of protesting creaks. The desk was ancient, with only three small drawers, but all he needed was a flat surface.

From his breast pocket he pulled out a dented and scuffed black metal case. Out slid a very dated mini-tablet and its loose battery. He inserted the battery, laid the tablet on the desk, then turned it on. It was the size of a cell phone, but only had Bluetooth and wi-fi connectivity, both of which were very short range—fifty, maybe one hundred feet. He retrieved the Cerulean SatLink6 from a cargo pocket on his thigh, carefully stored inside a plastic sandwich bag, inserted the battery, and turned it on as well. He raised the stubby antenna on the SatLink and waited while the two devices powered up. The tablet gave a tiny beep and the small screen lit up slowly, showing a little discoloration here and there where it had suffered past abuses. He checked the battery display first. He wondered how much longer the battery would hold out. It still took a charge, but who knew how old the thing was, how many times it’d been recharged before it had come into his possession. They had a habit of dying without warning.

The battery in the SatLink6 was newer and seemed to be doing just fine. Unlike the tablet it was built to military specs. He watched the icon spin as the small device searched for a satellite uplink. As it was not connecting to anything locally, just a satellite up in orbit, and a commercial one at that, theoretically it was nearly impossible to track or hack. However, the “theoretically” and “nearly” caveats were always on his mind whenever he powered up his only connection to the outside world. Still, it was much better than working off cell phones. He doubted there was a cell tower within fifty miles that wasn’t being piggybacked by the military. Not that there were many cell towers left in the city, period, except the ones running up the middle of the Blue Zone.

The readout in the corner said he had excellent signal strength, which was why he’d climbed up to this second floor room on protesting legs. Getting any signal at all these days was a major accomplishment. He didn’t know if the problem was the satellites or his aging device. Maybe there was some sort of jamming technology being employed.

He connected the tablet to the SatLink via wi-fi and opened the internet browser. From the first breast pocket he withdrew a palm-sized spiral notebook and a worn pencil. He tore a blank page from it—all the pages were blank—and returned the notebook to the pocket. The sun had left the next-door roof, but there was still enough light for him to write. Beyond the aged shingles the evening sky was navy blue, and with only a handful of clouds to hold it in, the heat of the day was already fading. A perfect summer night.

He checked his watch, then used his thumbs on the small illuminated screen to type in the website address. It was an online forum, based in Canada, but its users came from all over the globe. The users posted about cartoons, comic books, and CGI animated movies. From their posts the users seemed mostly to be young, or at least young at heart, and free from worries like starvation or war.

He navigated his way into the “Classic Cartoons” section and started working his way backward through the threads. Twenty-seven threads in he spotted the one he was looking for, entitled “Theodore is my favorite Chipmunk, Change My Mind, Vol. 23”. There were a total of seven posts including the original one. The thread had been created… he checked the time and date stamp. August seventh, two days previous. He checked that he could see all of the posts in the thread on the first virtual page then cut the uplink, folded down the antenna of the SatLink6 and pulled its battery.

The initial post was short. “My favorit chipmink is Theodore. I like him. Alvin is a jerk.” And there was the same picture of Alvin and The Chipmunks. Most of the responses came shortly thereafter and accused the original poster of being a stupid kid and wasting forum space with his dumb thread yet again. Five posts down was the picture he’d been looking for, a jpeg. After he put away the satellite connector he tapped the jpeg link on the tablet with his finger, and it expanded.

The jpeg was a photo of a small toy car, the car slightly out of focus like a kid had snapped the pic… but in the background, leaning against the wall at floor level, was a small whiteboard, seemingly forgotten, covered in what at first appeared to be nonsense. If he expanded the photo the ten lines of handwritten code were visible, out of focus but legible. Each line contained mostly one- and two-digit numbers, with the odd word added in. At first glance it looked like gibberish, background visual noise in a waste of time thread on a little-known forum frequented by kids and nerds.

The small phone-sized tablet had a small 16 GB onboard memory. Half of that was taken up by various games, none of which he had ever played (battery life was too important). The rest of the tablet’s memory was taken up by thousands of downloaded books. At first he’d been shocked at how many there were, shocked at how little memory was required for the digital version of words on a page. Usually an entire book used fewer megabytes than a photo.