Future Weapons of War

The younger man glared over at him again, but his father was gently wiping down the counter.

“No. sir, I’m afraid I don’t. I never thought much of them.” The man looked up and stared at him with those moist brown eyes of his. “And what I did think was something you couldn’t print. They can do a lot of good but I always thought there was something wrong about the millions of the richest and brightest in this country, holing up in front of a screen and staring at nothing else, while their neighborhoods crumbled around them. Seems they didn’t care about the streets or jobs or anything else, so long as they could get in front of that screen. It was almost like an addiction. What was on the screen, the blogs, the stories, the games, seemed more real than anything else. But no one ever asked me, and look what happened. So there you go. Sir.”

The President nodded. “Well, thanks again for lunch,” and he started to walk back to the Oval Office, carrying his lunch in his hands.

Out in the corridors again—what was that phrase, corridors of power?—but there wasn’t much power here, just antiques and paintings and old furniture. By the doorway out to the garden the Marine guard was no longer there—probably out to lunch or taking a leak or something—but the three women were still in their office, and as he went by he looked in for a quick second. They were moving in odd fashion, eating with one hand and tapping at the keyboard with the other, and they didn’t even look up at him as he paused in the doorway. Strange.

Back in the Oval Office, he put the plate down on his desk and then got a glass of water from the adjoining bathroom. He ate the turkey sandwich in silence—it was quite good—and the water tasted better than he thought, washing it down. He looked out the window. Smoke was getting thicker.

He checked the clock. Twelve-fifty. That’s it. If the phone didn’t ring or if someone didn’t come by by one o’clock, then he was going to press the panic button by his desk, and the hell with the Post and the consequences.

He went to use the bathroom, and after washing his face and hands, he went back into the office, checked the clock, and stopped.

Voices. Outside.

He smiled. Finally!

He went through the door and into the outer offices, and a group of men were approaching, soldiers it looked like, and he stopped, hand on the doorknob. It must be more serious than he thought.

The soldiers came closer and one saw him and said something to another soldier, and they stopped, staring at him, and the President suddenly felt quite uneasy.

For the soldiers were heavily armed, were wearing unfamiliar uniforms, and they were all Chinese.

An older soldier stepped from the crowd, walking towards him, and the squad followed. The older one looked like an officer, with bright insignia and a holstered sidearm. One of the soldiers had a radio on his back and was talking into a handset. This wasn’t right, not at all, and then—

The Boss key quit, and it started to come back, like a little stream, trickling faster and faster, until it became a flood, overflowing the banks with water, overflowing the mind with information, with memories, my God, the memories. Sprat. Spratly Islands. Out in the South China Sea, a God-forsaken bunch of rocks that were claimed by Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and China, and the rocks weren’t worth shit except they were over rich deposits of oil, natural gas and other minerals. The Chinese started building a base there and started sinking fishermen that approached, claiming it was Chinese territorial waters, and Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and The New York Times and Washington Post started screaming bloody murder, and then…

“Mister President?” the Chinese officer asked, his English quite good, only slightly accented.

“Yes?” he said.

Then the pressures started, to do something, anything, and an election year was coming up and this was a good chance to show that no sir, he didn’t tailor everything for the polls or public opinion, and a naval task force— the aircraft carrier Nimitz and a half-dozen destroyers and cruisers—were sent to the Spratly Islands to show the flag. There were a bunch of scenarios about what might happen—everything from cat- and-mouse games with the task force, to an odd missile or two lobbed into Taiwanese waters, or maybe some dissidents from Hong Kong being shot in the back of the skulls in response to the approach of the task force—but no one had predicted what had actually happened.

The Chinese officer nodded. “That is good, sir. May we see you in your office?”

He couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Obliteration. That’s what happened. Two Long March missiles fired from Lop Nor and within ten minutes, the task force had been vaporized. The Nimitz and her aircraft and her sister ships and thousands of good men and women, turned into radioactive dust and water vapor. Then Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and The New York Times and Washington Post started screaming again, about losing all those lives and risking a nuclear war over a miserable pile of rocks, and his State Department and others tried to talk to the Chinese, tried to get some sort of agreement, some sort of armistice or arrangement, but the Chinese weren’t talking. They were doing. And the last news stories he had read had all said the same thing: the long wait was over. After hundreds of years of humiliation, the Middle Kingdom was re-taking its place in the world.

The President was now back in the Oval Office. He couldn’t remember walking inside. The Chinese officer spoke softly to his men and they trooped inside and then he said, “This is nothing personal, you realize.”

A lot of questions were bouncing around in his head and were fighting to come clear, but all he could do was nod to the officer. And remember.

A day after the task force disappeared, the computers across the country started failing from types of viruses and bugs that had never been seen before. There was a cabinet meeting with Corcoran and the others, and the general had been waving around that cable, a fiber optic cable. “We’re in a war, a looking glass war,” he had shouted, “and we’re losing!” Then, late at night, in his darkened office and staring at the computer screen, he had found a new game on the White House system. A computer game that involved colors and shapes and manipulating them just so, a game that seemed to suck him right in, and before he knew it, the morning sun was shining through the Oval Office windows.

And all the rest of the day, through meetings after meetings, all he could think about was returning to his screen and seeing which new level he could reach. And from the distant looks of his cabinet officers and others, he knew, in that little last part of him that was aware of what was going on, that so many others were now firmly within that hypnotic grasp.

“Excuse me,” he said to the officer.

“Yes?” the officer replied.

“Do any of you know anything about computers?”

The officer rattled off something to his troops and they laughed, and then he spoke to him and said, “A little. What is the problem?”

He gestured to his desk. “I can’t get mine to work. The screen’s blank.”

Another incomprehensible statement to his troops, and one of the soldiers sat at the keyboard, while another went down on his hands and knees underneath the desk, the desk that had once belonged to Johnson, and after a moment or two of adjustments and typing by the soldiers, the screen snapped into focus.

There! He smiled widely and scurried around to his desk, and the soldiers went away and he sat down and he knew there was so much to do, so many questions to ask, but the program was right there on his screen, ready for his fingers to caress the keys and manipulate the shapes, and he couldn’t wait.

Could not wait at all. He could not remember such desire, such hunger, such thirst…

The officer said something sharp again, and the soldiers backed away from the ornate desk. The President triggered the game program and looked over at the officer and asked, “What did you say right then? Why did they move back?”

The officer moved around, his hand at his side. “I told them to give you room. And I told them not to look at your screen.”

More questions, much more needed to be asked, but on his screen those wonderful moving and hypnotic shapes returned, the colors of green and magenta quite bright, and he had to get into the game, it had been so long, and he was just touching the keyboard when he dimly heard a sound, like a purse or pouch being snapped open.

And as the President of the United States tried to move up to the next level to the game, he ignored the