Foreword to Debriefing Notes
Ted Pyreon claimed candidly, and too easily to be deceptive, to hold no internal dialogue with himself. He might speak to his gear, in low tones. He certainly calculated constantly, having something of a topographical tactical map in his mind, seemingly imprinted through his optic interface, which does pain him since a blow to the head by a thrown maul a decade or more ago. To this auditor, Ted expressed a near disbelief that a person would hold a soliloquy with themselves, let alone conduct a regular internal monologue. He imagined thinking sometimes to the trees—as a collective, usually—the mountains, always as individuals, to the rivers, always as male spirits, to his gear, always female, and to certain heavenly apparitions he refers to as “day stars.”
Debriefing content is primarily represented in action narrative and dialogue, which Ted is able to recall with startling clarity, with the debriefing notes at the end of each action report, limited to the Auditor’s impressions of the conductor’s status.
-Matt Styer, Auditor, Uplink Inc., APM
…
The low hum of the ETV always calmed him, especially since this was how Dave Billy had bought it, cruising along in slow serenity on the way to all-welcoming Eternity, shot through the neck with a Winchester 30/30, in olden style.
“Baby, this is the last roundup, sweet ole you the last piece of predawn hardware. We’re lucky, I suppose…”
The warmth at the base of his skull warned him that he was being watched. He did not know how, or why, but had grown to trust that “eye” in the back of his head.
He had just left a timber stand, the third stand, was in the third meadow, having crossed the third gulch. Baby had eaten up these ten miles quite handily. His right eye pained him as it squinted, wanting the optic. He gave in and mounted the optic, the whir of the telescopic augment syncing with the burning pain branching in three strands from the base of his skull: over top to the eye mount, above the ear to the nose, and again, above the ear down around the teeth, which throbbed, top and bottom on the right side.
He could see Travis a half mile off, in clear outline, setting up in a shooting blind with what looked to be a homemade shotgun.
“Travis, please don’t do me like this!”
“Come on, Baby, let’s go say hey,” and the ETV whined into ground-eating gear.
Above was a day star, something he had always known to be his blessing, God looking out for him. He had never once been bushwhacked under a day star.
Some a-one, and a-two and maybe a-three was watching him other than Travis, some folks he had passed coming out of the last timber stand. The rolls of wire had been neatly stacked all along the line, the fence posts used to stake the wire hillocks in place so that they might form the basis for vine, shrubs, berries, offer refuge to small creatures as Earth healed after man’s 10,000 year attack on its mother. Travis had done nice, reverent work.
Up west, as Travis laid his ambush up east, Ted noted a whackado, a malfunctioning drone, working on an old street light pole which had somehow evaded military removal and had outlived its dead-end road. Fallowers [1] like Travis, had no safe means of taking down such a pole, where, it seems, a dead-end road once came to an end in front of what had been a small repeater station for an extended power grid. It could be seen that Travis had dismantled that small building and the hardware. It may well have been an illegal installation committed by anticollectivist types.
In any case, the moaning of the galvanized steel street light pole was palpable, as the malfunctioning, but not disabled, drone gnawed upon the zinc waterproofing. David Billy had been the first to note this activity and had christened these drones whackado, after his stepmother, who had gone insane from alcohol abuse.
The day star smiled upon him, winked even, up in heaven where she lived, to occasionally bless Ted in times of trial and tribulation.
The pole moaned and groaned in protest of its gnawing by the whackado. [2] The groan was something of a grind and the moan something like wind speeding through a metal culvert, like the one Ted had once hid in outside Evenstan Wyoming when being hunted by ferals.
In the near distance Ted could see the dugout sod house in the base of the south face of that grand, unnamed mountain. Ted looked up to the mountain and nodded, “Boss, be off yer feet soon as convenient for Travis here.”
Seeing Travis within fifty yards to the east, whackado and pole to the west, big Mountain North and knowing Matt was observing from Wonderview Cabin away south, Ted parked Baby, not wanting her shot. He left her on the west side of the mountain seep that smelled so sweet between he and Travis, gave an open hand of friendship to the man behind his Conductor hunting blind and walked easily towards him, his eye burning with pain from the optical.
“Snap yer pic already, Peep Girl,” he sneered to the optic, and she did so.
“Fucking Fed!” yelled Travis as the muzzle of his gun rose and Ted raised his hands, open in peace, saying, above the distant metal groan, “Work’s done, Travis. I’m juz here ta offer ye,”
“Boom,” roared the shot gun and Ted was smashed in the gut with a full ounce of lead and hit in the left shoulder with a slug, like a combination slug/buckshot load and slammed to his back, almost out of air. The blood ran hot down his shoulder as he heard Travis reload and leave the blind with angry stomping tramps, “Fuckstone, ain’t sneaking me with your sub-lethal, foe-friendly dumdum gun!”
Ted, still flat on his back, already had his dumdum drawn, out to the side, facing south as Travis stamped from the east cocking his trigger.
“I know, Trav, ain’ hardly fair.”
Ted shot the dumdum south, with a dull compressed air thud, and the deploying smart slug spread its reflective tail, gathered the imprint of Travis Branch from Ted’s optic, which burned Ted’s brain like hell. In the eagle seat, so to speak, from his back, Ted had the dour duty of seeing the world through the dumdum head—dumb no longer—and guiding it in remotely through the optical link.
“Fuck me running!” yelled Travis, who sounded to be about 45 to 50 years old.
Travis turned to shoot the whirring dumdum with his really well made bootleg firing iron, and Ted whispered to Peep Girl, “U to the six,” and as Travis fired the dumdum dropped, circled around behind him at an accelerating speed and slammed him in the spine, above L-5.
“Uhh!” groaned Travis, and Ted made it his business to rise despite the blood and pain and administer last rites.
Taking the optic out and walking to Travis, through a near swoon, Ted was soon on one knee next to the man with a snapped spine, “Hey Travis, I’m here for you, name’s Ted. On behalf of Uplink and Ilion Dawn…”
Travis spat in his face. Through the dripping saliva Ted continued, “I thank you for your service. I was to offer you Uplift of marooner. But, seeing as you are crippled, ye seem ta be on Uplift course.”
“Fuck you, Fed!”
“Name’s Ted, Sir.”
“Fuck you, Ted the Fed!”
“Baby Girl!” called, Ted and the ETV powered up and rolled to his side.
Travis looked at the ETV in a kind of horror, “Really, you assholes built an ETV around Jeep Gladiator tires?”
One of the Kevlar saddle bags opened and a spider drone hopped out, its little radar dish head activated for command.
Ted continued his duty, “Travis Branch, on behalf of Earth, Uplink and Ilion Dawn, Pyreon offers Uplift to the destination of your choice.”
“What the fuck?!” shouted Travis.
“Travis, what will be your chosen benediction?”
“Fuck you!”
“Elysium?”
“Eat a dick!”
“Nirvana?”
“Are you fucking kidding me, you retarded meat stick!”
“Oblivion?”
“You aren’t joking, are you?”
“Heaven?”
“Bullshit—this is bullshit!!”
“Paradise?”
“Do I still get seventy three virgins to fuck? No, don’t answer that, you moron. No!”
“Valhalla, it is—my favorite choice, actually,” smiled Ted tenderly, honestly. As he deployed his Uplift key, tilted Travis’ head so he faced the patiently waiting drone, and turned the key in his Uplink port at the base of his skull, he prayed, “AllFather who dwells above the Tree of Life.”
As this occurred, Travis, who was quite alive, and now in full paralysis, beyond all physical pain, had his eyes locked in red beams that emitted from the base of the drone, which squatted and reformed into the image of a Viking long house, crowned with a mead horn. From this effigy shrine clashed in a chorus of brassy tones ash spear hafts and oaken shields, and in the foreground of an iron ax head and sword steel, as a deep voice boomed:
“Travis Branch,
fought well.
Travis Branch,
bought the hero’s reprieve from Hel.”
A Raven cawed
“As death birds fly,
wolves streak the sky,
a hero is called home,
to Odin’s hallowed hall,
to fight and die by day,
to revive and feast by night—
Welcome home, Hero!”
Crows called in a great murder, and the miniature mead hall shown crimson as the twin beams from it cast a nimbus about Travis, outlining him in a crucible of fire.
Ted kept the sacred seven count as the benediction transformed the effigy and he who was called home.
The mead-hall effigy turned to bronze and the recumbent form of Travis was cast in a silvered carbon, in the image of a slain warrior, with Travis’ features, but with braided beard and hair, conical helmet and a belted suit of mail, boots laced high on his still feet.
Above the still image of Travis, Ted, saluted the fallen form, then looked up to the day star that suddenly blinked out, his weather-beaten hand to his sadly-beating heart.
The weapon was retrieved, the blind left to the wind and the sod lodge to the marooners, Ted silently riding between the watchers in the woods, whose eyes made the eye in the back of his own head burn, the cursed silicon augmented eye too.
…
Debriefing
Ted seemed sad and outwardly reflective as I extracted the slug from his left shoulder, stitched him up, bandaged him and conducted the debriefing, which has been reconstructed according to the recording then made. Ted converses in an oddly—even disturbingly—lineal fashion, omitting no detail later recalled, almost as if he has done so much of this work that his mechanical recall is timestamped into his subconscious, which I must imagine is a harrowing place to visit when one sleeps. I do not envy Ted his dream life.
-M. Styer
…
Notes
-1. Fallower is a term denoting a volunteer temporary marooner on earth tasked with minimizing traces of man’s destructive progress.
-2. Malfunctioning drones seem to maintain powers of self repair through ingesting zinc, used to coat steel against rust. It is not known how long their solar chargers will be able to maintain their ravenously mechanical lives.
